When I opened the door of this last piece of furniture, however, I found it filled with shelves full of all kinds of fresh earthly fruits and vegetables. There were fruit juices in transparent vessels, milk, and a pitcher of black liquid that turned out to be hot coffee; although what was keeping its temperature up was a mystery. There were no meat or eggs; and although I looked around carefully, I could not find a stove or any means of cooking any of the other foodstuffs. Well, at least the coffee was hot. I found a small empty vessel to pour it into and settled down to eat.
It was an interesting meal. There were no shocks, but some surprises. For one thing, the already-sliced loaf of bread I discovered turned out to be hot. Not toasted. Hot, like the coffee. The glass of what I had assumed was orange juice turned out to be slightly fizzy, as if it had been carbonated. There was no sugar and the honey tasted as if it had been spiked with vodka.
I finished up and went back into the other room. Obsidian was still asleep and Porniarsk was still at work.
“Have you eaten?” I asked Porniarsk. I knew he did eat; although Porniarsk and nutrition were something of a puzzle; because apparently he could go for weeks at a time without food. He had told me once that his bodily fueling system was almost as much a mystery to him as it was to the rest of us; since that was an area of information in which Porniarsk, the original Porniarsk, had no interest whatsoever. Apparently our Porniarsk, at least, had some way of getting a great deal more energy out of the sustenance he took in than we humans did. I had played with the picture of a small stainless steel fission engine under the thick armor plating of his body—although he had assured us he was pure animal protein in all respects.
“No,” he said now. “There’s no need. I’m greatly interested in this equipment.”
“It looks like we built up quite a velocity while I was asleep,” I said. “Where are we now?”
“That’s the fascination of this,” he said, nodding heavily at the control console. “Apparently, as Obsidian said, our trip’s completely under automatic control. But this console, since he showed me how to operate it, has been furnishing me with information on our movements as we make them. Right now we’re something like three million years in the past, and consequently, far displaced from your solar system—”
“Displaced?” I said. But even as I said it, even as he began to explain, my mind was jumping ahead to that explanation.
“Why, yes. Obsidian and his community,” said Porniarsk, “have evidently done a superb job of, first, balancing the large areas of time forces; and second, an equally excellent job of charting specific force lines in between the balanced areas. In fact, I’m inclined to think that the process of balancing was designed to leave just the network of working force lines that remain. The result has been that, although they can’t actually cross space at more than light speeds, by using the force lines they can jump distances equivalent to some hundreds or even thousands of light years, and arrive at their destination in a matter of hours, or even days. Watch the present stellar arrangement.”
He touched the console in front of him with a tentacle tip. Another picture window appeared, showing the starscape beyond. My memory for patterns now was too good to be deceived. This was a different view again of the galaxy than the one I had seen in the other room on waking up.
“We should be coming up on another transfer, momentarily…” said Porniarsk. “There!”
The starview abruptly changed, without jar, without sound, and so instantaneously that I did not even have the sensation of having blinked at the scene.
“We’ve gone down the ladder in time in order to make large shifts through space,” said Porniarsk. “In the smaller node of forces on Earth, the time jumps were also much smaller and the physical displacement was minor. Here, of course, when we take a large step forward or backward in time, the surrounding stars and other solid bodies move around us. What’s that phrase I once learned from Marie about Mahomet not being able to go to the mountain, therefore, the mountain must come to him? Obsidian’s people have learned to use the time storm to bring their mountains to them, instead of themselves making the journey to the mountains-”
He glanced at me. Porniarsk could not be said to have the most readable facial and body expressions in the universe; but I knew that hang of his tentacles well enough by now to tell when he was being apologetic.
“—I mean, of course,” he said, “to refer to the stars and other solid bodies of the universe as ‘mountains’.”
“I’d guessed you did,” I said.
“I’m afraid I’m sometimes a little pedantic,” he said. “So was Porniarsk himself, of course. It’s a failing that often goes with an enquiring mind.”
“Don’t let it bother you where I’m concerned,” I said. “One of my worst habits is telling other people what the situation is, at great length.”
“That’s true, of course,” he answered, with gentle unconcern for my feelings. “Nonetheless, two wrongs do not—I believe our host is waking up.”
He had creaked his head to one side as he spoke, to gaze at Obsidian, who now opened his eyes and sat up cross-legged on his cushion, all in one motion, apparently fully alert in the flicker of an eyelash.
“Are you rested, Marc?” he asked. “I finally had to take a nap, myself. Apparently Porniarsk needs very little sleep.”
“Damn little,” I said.
“We’ll have a little more than four days more before we reach our destination,” said Obsidian. “I’m looking forward to doing a lot more talking with you, Marc. I gather you’ve already come to a better understanding of the present time.”
“I think so,” I said. “Tell me if I’m wrong, but as I see it, all the intelligent races in the galaxy have joined together to fight for survival. Animate organisms against the inanimate forces that otherwise might kill you all off.”
“That’s a lot of it,” Obsidian said. “We’re concerned with survival first, because if life doesn’t survive, everything else becomes academic. So the first job is to control the environment, right enough. But beyond survival, we’re primarily interested in growth, in where life goes from here.”
“All right. But—” I checked myself. “Wait a minute. I ought to give you a chance to get all the way awake before I tie you up in a discussion like this.”
“But I am awake,” said Obsidian, frowning a little.
“Oh. All right,” I said, “in that case, suppose you start filling me in on the history of everything. How did this brotherhood of civilized entities start? What got it going?”
“As a matter of fact,” he answered, “what began the getting together of races that later became the present civilized community was what you call—excuse me, I’ll just use your word for it from now on—the time storm, itself. This was paradoxical; because it was the time storm that threatened the survival of all life, and here it made real civilization possible....”
With that, he was underway with a flood of information almost before I had time to find myself a seat on a nearby cushion. In the next four days, while his house, so to speak, flitted through space from time force line to time force line, and Porniarsk watched that process fascinatedly with the control console, Obsidian drew me a picture of some forty-odd thousand years of known history—on the time scale of our galaxy—and an unknown amount of time before that in which life was nearly destroyed by the time storm, but in which the foundation of a universal community was discovered and erected.
“The process was instinctive enough,” he said. “We tried to adapt to an environment that included the time storm and, in the process, learned to manipulate that environment, including the time storm, as far as we could. Right now the time storm makes possible a number of things we couldn’t have unless it existed. At the same time, by existing, it continues to threaten to kill us. So, we’re doing our best to control it. Note, we no longer want to wipe it out; we want to keep it, but under our domination.”