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universes would break wide open; it would be mutual annihilation of
both-annihilation hi no-time.
"You see now," said Dragger, "why we didn't think it was possible for you to
do this work. In fact, if you hadn't been able to make the conceptual jump
that set you free to survey the situation, like this, there'd have been no
point in even considering it"
"Made the jump? Just a minute," I said. "This isn't something I've done all on
my own. I must be getting some technological assistance to let my point of
view go wheeling through infinite distances, like this."
"Of course you are," said Dragger. "But the only person who could make it
possible for your mind to endure such assistance was you, yourself. You're
strong enough to endure the sense of dislocation involved. We didn't think you
were. I didn't think you were. I was wrong."
Tve got work I want to do," I said. "That helps."
"A great deal, evidently. At any rate, Marc, you're one of a select group now.
Less than a millionth of one percent of all our people have the talent to do
this work and endure the conditions under which it's done. Are you surprised
we doubted that you could? An individual has to be born with the talent to be
a temporal engineer. Evidently, you were born with it-mttlenia before there
was such work."
**I didn't know about this,** I said. "That's true enough. But there were
other things that called for the same kind of abilities."
I was thinking of the stock market, of that part of me which could never rest
until it had tracked down what it searched for; also, of that other part of me
that had immediately recognized, hi the time storm, an opponent waiting for
me....
My mind boggled suddenly and strangely, and shied away from finishing that
particular thought Puzzled, I would have come back to it; but Dragger was
talking to me again.
"Are you listening to me, Marc?"
"I'm listening,*" I said. I returned my fuA attention to the moment, and our
conversation, with an effort. "Something bothers me, though. If it's pure
technology at work, why is it talent's needed at all? Why is it only a few can
do this? There must be more than a few who can endure the conditions, as you
say."
"There are," she answered. "And that's why you've got one more strength you
have to demonstrate. We need people with a special talent because when we move
stars, and more than stars, we make gross changes in the time storm forces. We
don't have any technological device quick enough to safely measure and assess
the effect of those changes on the stresses by which we control the flow of
energy from the tachyon universe. If the pressure against which we're exerting
our energy flow changes suddenly, the flow can increase, the lens may dilate,
and you must have guessed what can happen then, before any adjustment can be
made."
"You mean the lens tearing open," I said.
"That's right. Only minds able to read the pattern of the time storm forces,
directly, can see danger coming fast enough to correct for it We who are
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temporal engineers have to direct our stream of extra-universal energy and, at
the same time, make sure that it doesn't get out of our control."
She stopped speaking. Eyeless, I hung in space, watching the great darkness
that was the engine, the dyson sphere enclosing S Doradus. My imagination
pictured the unbelievable holocaust within that shell of collapsed matter and
the Klein bottle forces, that made the core of a star millions of times the
mass of our sun into a tiny rent in the fabric of a universe. I had thought I
was equal to any dimensions that might exist in the battle I wanted to join;
but the dimensions here were beyond imagination. I was less than a speck of
dust to that stellar nucleus; and in turn, it was infinitesimal, to the point
of nonexistence, compared to the two great opposed masses of energy between
which it formed a bridge and a connection.
And I was going to share in the control of that bridge?
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