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it."
There was something wrong in the atmosphere around the summer palace. I could
feel it, but I could not take the time to pin it down. I set the rest of the
community to packing up, ready to get out, and with Porniarsk, got down to the
choosing of an optimum target nanosecond on the day before the soldiers were
due to arrive. We wanted a time when the pattern of storm forces concerned
with our small area would be as close as possible to the conformation I was
going to try to force them into with the monad. My original idea had been to
deal with as small an area as possible-probably only the lab itself and
everything inside it But as the situation developed, it turned out that the
difference between restructuring the forces dealing with just the lab and
those dealing with an area including the summer palace, mountain section and
enough of the plain to contain the town and a couple of square miles outside
it, was essentially no difference at all, in terms of the size of the forces
to be dealt with.
This put a new complexion on things. It was the first good news I could
remember finding in a long tune. Now I could take along everybody, if they
wanted to go. I was tied to the work in the tab, but I sent Doc out to teH the
rest of the community that as things had turned out, they didn't need to run
and hide from the soldiers unless they wanted to. Those who wanted to come
along with the monad and myself into the future could simply stick around.
Having sent the word out I got back to work. Matters, for once, seemed to be
an going in the right direction. The more I pinned down the force-changes to
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be made, the more possible they looked. Even setting aside the fact that I was
much more pattern-experienced and more devdoped and mature than I had been
when I had balanced the forces in the immediate area of the planet, what I now
looked at was a much simpler job.
This, in spite of the fact.that we would be moving an unguessable distance of
time into the future. There was no way to measure how far, but thousands of
years anyway in terms of the old temporal yardsticks we had used before the
time storm. The reason for this was that, even taking in the area including
the town, I was dealing with a very small patch of space compared to that
which enclosed the immediate neighborhood of the Earth. What it amounted to
was that I would be making a much larger temporal change-but in a very, very
much tinier area than I had Hie time before. It was as if I multiplied by a
factor of a few thousand, but then divided the result by millions.
So, matters in the lab progressed well; but nothing goes with complete
smoothness. It was a good thing that Porniarsk and I were, if anything, ahead
of our schedule for charting all the parameters of the shift as I had laid it
out; because I found myself called away from the lab to deal with the human
side of the move.
Without realizing it, I had hit everyone in the community harder than I had
planned when I had sent out word with Doc that those who wanted to come with
me could do so. Living with the time storm as I had been afl this time, I had
forgotten that only those who had been with me at the time of the balancing of
forces originally would have any idea of what to expect from involving
themselves hi what I planned to do. Nor did they look on going far into the
future as calmly as I did.
Accordingly, they were seething with questions that needed some kind of
answers if they were to come up with their individual decisions. I found I had
to call a meeting of the community as a whole to explain matters and answer
those questions. We were* too many to crowd into even the largest quonset hut,
so thejneeting was held outside on the landing area, with a public address
system rigged by Bill for the occasion, with extra microphones on long cords,
so that everybody could hear the questions as well as the answers.
I began by explaining the mechanism of the time storm as well as I understood
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