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that bad sent most of them out hunting among the lower rocks, in the direction
of the peak.
But now they had beard him. Lost somewhere in the gestalt of the monad group
of which he and I were a part-Porniarsk had been right in his use of that
word, for the group, myself and this place were all integrated into a whole
now-the Old Man's mind was triumphant He knew that he had called in time, that
his people bad beard and were coming.
I whirled around and stared back into the roundhouse through the open door,
though I already knew what I would see. Inside, all the figures were
motionless and aflent There was not even a chest-movement of breathing to be
seen in any of them, for they were caught in a timeless moment--the moment in
which we had contacted the storm and I had paused to examine the pattern of
its forces. Even Porniarsk was frozen into immobility with his tentacle-tip
touching his activation square on the monitor console. The square itself
glowed now, with a soft, pink light.
I was stiU unconnected and mobile. Bttt the Old Man's people would be here in
twenty minutes; and all our weapons were down at the camp.
I watched my body turn and ran for the nearest jeep, leap into it, start it,
turn it, and get it going down the slope toward camp. I had the advantage of a
vehicle, but the distance was twice as much, down to camp, than ft was up the
slope the experimentab were climbing, and twice as far back up again. The jeep
bounced and slid down die shallower slope on this side of the peak, ®MA®ng and
slewing around the larger bouldera in the way. My body drove it; but my mind
could not stay with it, because I had already seen enough of die present
moment's pattern to locate the upcoming pressure point I searched foTi That
pressure point would be coming into existence in no more time than it would
take the villagers to dimb to the roundhouse, possibly, even in less time. I
had that long only to study all the force fines involved and make sure that my
one chance to produce a state of balance was taken exactly on the mark.
It was not the pattern of forces in die time storm itself I studied; but the
image of this pattern in the philosophical jnriverse during that fractional,
timeless moment when I had first tapped the abilities of our full
monad-gestalL That image was like a three-dimensional picture taken by a
camera with a shutter speed beyond imagination. Already, of course, the
configuration of the forces in the storm had developed, through a whole series
of changes, into totally different patterns, and they were continuing to
change. But with the gestatt and the device to back me up, I could study the
configuration that had been and cnlcnlatfi how the later patterns would be at
any other moment in the future.
In any such pattern-past, present, or future-the time storm forces of any
given area had to have the potential of developing into a further state of
dynamic balance. The potential alone, however, was not good enough. To begin
with, the forces had to be very.close to balance, within a very small
tolerance indeed; otherwise, the relatively feeble strength of my gestaft
would not be able to push them into balance.
But first, the imbalances to be corrected must be understood in detail.
Balance was an ideal state; and the chances of it occurring naturally were as
small as the total time storm itself was large. The only reason it was barely
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possible to achieve ft artificially lay in a characteristic of the time storm
itself; the storm's tendency to break up progressively into smaller and
smaller patterns and for these to break up in turn, and so on. This was the
same characteristic that Pomiarsk had mentioned as presenting the greatest
danger of the storm if it was not fought and opposed. The continuing
disintegration would continue to produce smaller and smaller temporal
anomalies until, at last, any single atomic particle would be existing at a
different temporal moment than its neighbor. But in this case, it offered an
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