Gordon Dickson - Time Storm

They were clearly used to spending a good share of their time in water; and that perhaps explained their periodic dunkings in the raft pool. It could be that they were like dolphins who needed to be wetted down if they were out of water for any length of time.

It seemed strange to me, though, that they should go to the trouble of cutting a hole in the center of their raft, rather than just dunking themselves over one of the edges, if that was their reason for getting in the water. I was mulling this strangeness over, when something I had been looking at suddenly registered on me as an entirely different object from what I had taken it to be.

Everybody has had the experience of looking right at an object and taking it for something entirely different from what it really is —until abruptly, the mind clicks over and recognizes its true nature. I had been staring absently at a sort of vertical plane projecting from the water alongside the raft and perhaps half a dozen feet off from the edge, and more or less half-wondering what usefulness it had, when the object suddenly took on its true character, and my heart gave an unusually heavy thump.

I had been allowing the plane’s apparent lack of motion relative to the raft to deceive me into thinking it was a surface of wood, a part of the raft itself. Abruptly, I recognized what it really was—I had seen enough of the same things charter-fishing on my vacations to South America, back when I still owned Snowman, Inc. What I was watching was a shark’s fin, keeping pace with the raft. There was no mistaking that particular shape for the fin of a sailfish, a tarpon, or any other sea denizen. It was the dorsal of a shark-but what a shark!

If the fin was in proportion to the body beneath it, that body must be half as long as this raft.

Now that I saw it clearly for what it was, I could not imagine what had led me to mistake it for a plane of wood. But now my mind had clicked over and would not click back. If monsters like that were about in these waters, no wonder the lizard-people wanted to do their swimming inboard.

On the other hand, it was odd... once one or more of them were in the water, the shark should be able to get at them as easily underneath the raft as alongside it. Unless there was some reason it would not go under the raft after them. Or did the lizard-people figure that by the time the shark started under the raft, they would have time to get back out of the pool and back up on top of the logs of which it was built? Now, that was a good theory. On the other hand, I had seen no evidence of unusual haste in those getting out of the pool.

Was it possible that in the water the lizard-people could out-swim the shark? That did not seem likely, although obviously, our captors were at home in the water, and obviously, they were built for swimming. They were thick-bodied and thick-limbed, their elbows and knees bent slightly so that they stood in a perpetual crouch; and both their hands and feet were webbed to near the ends of their fingers and toes. They looked to be very powerful, physically, compared to a human, and those teeth of theirs were almost shark-standard in themselves; although none of them were much more than five feet tall. But in relation to a shark that size, the strength of any one of them would not be worth considering.

I was puzzling about these things, when a change came in the schedule. One of the lizard people approached the cage holding the girl and opened up some sort of trapdoor in one end of it. The girl crept out, as if she had been through this before and knew the procedure, and, without hesitation, got up, walked to the pool, and jumped in. She stayed there, holding onto an edge.

The same lizard who had let her out was joined by another, and the two of them went over to the cage of Sunday, who snarled as they approached. They paid no attention to him but lifted up his cage easily between them—evidently I had been right about their strength—carried it to the edge of the pool and opened its end.

Sunday, however, showed none of the girl’s willingness to leave his cage for the water. But evidently the lizards had encountered this problem before. After a moment’s wait, one of them got down into the pool, reached up with a scaly arm, and pulled cage and Sunday under the surface with him.

For a moment there was no sign of leopard, cage, or lizard. Then the head of Sunday broke water in the exact center of the pool, snorting, and swimming strongly. He swam directly to the edge of the pool by the girl, crawled out, and sat down in the sun to lick himself dry, looking as furious as only a wet cat can look. The lizard rose behind him, towing an empty cage and climbed out on the other side.

The two made no immediate attempt to recage him, and I was still watching him when a sudden squeaking sound behind me made me turn my head to look. A door in the far end of my own cage was being lifted. I turned around and crawled out. A lizard-man was standing facing me, and I caught a sickish, if faint, reek of fish-smell from him before I turned and went toward the pool. But at the edge I stopped, looking once more to my right where the shark fin was still on patrol.

My escort picked me up and dropped me in the water. I came up sputtering, and grabbed hold of the edge to haul myself out. Then I saw the girl, still hanging on to a log, in the water near me, watching. Evidently, she considered it safe enough where we were.

I turned and tried to look down through the water; but the shadow of the trees at the front of the raft was on it and made it too dark to see. I took a breath, stuck my head under the water and looked about. Then I saw why the shark was nothing to worry about when you were in the pool. The underside of the raft was a tangle of tree-growth; either roots or saplings of the same sort I could see growing upwards from the top of the logs.

It was growth that had run wild, a veritable nightmare jungle of straight and twisted, vine-like limbs, some of them almost half as thick as the logs of the raft itself. The roots grew everywhere but in towards the pool area itself, until about fifteen feet down or so, they curved in and came together in a mat, like the bottom of an underwater nest. I assumed the lizards kept the pool area clear underwater by biting off the new suckers emerging from the logs, as they did in the clean areas topside. Plainly, even something the size of the shark companioning this raft could not get at us through that tangle below.

So, the pool was safe territory after all. Not only that, it occurred to me now, but the heavy mass of vegetation underneath must act as a sort of keel for the raft. I pulled my head back up out of water and looked around in the air.

The girl was still in the pool. Sunday was still out of it and licking his fur, undisturbed. The two lizards who had turned us out of our cages had wandered off and become indistinguishable from their companions. I wondered what would happen if I got out of the pool myself. I did so—the girl imitating my action a second later—and found that nothing happened. The lizards ignored us.

I was startled suddenly to feel a hand slip into mine. I turned and it was the girl. She had never done anything like that before.

“What is it?” I asked.

She paid no attention to the words. She was already leading me toward the back of the raft. I followed along, puzzled, until a nagging sense of familiarity about our actions sprang an answer out of my hazy memory of those earlier brief returns to consciousness. She was leading me—the two of us completely ignored by the lizards—to the back edge of the raft; and the back edge was what was available to us by way of sanitary conveniences on this voyage. Apparently, while I had been out of my head, she had acquired the responsibility of leading me back there to relieve myself, after each periodic dip in the pool.