Gordon Dickson - Time Storm

When this memory emerged, I put on the brakes. She and I had been living under pretty close conditions from the moment we had met. But now that my wits were back in my skull, I preferred at least the illusion of privacy in matters of elimination. After tugging at me vainly for a while, she gave up and went on by herself. I turned back to the pool.

Sunday was nearly-dry now, and once more on good terms with the world. When I got back to the pool edge, he got up from where he was lying and wound around my legs, purring. I patted his head and sat down on the logs to think. After an unsuccessful— because I wouldn’t let him—attempt to crawl into my lap, he gave up, lay down beside me and compromised by dropping his head on my knee. The head of a full-grown leopard is not a light matter; but better the head than all of him. I stroked his fur to keep him where he was; and he closed his eyes, rumbling in sheer bliss at my giving him this much attention.

After a little while the girl came back, and I went off to the back of the raft by myself, warning her sternly to stay where she was, when she once more tried to accompany me. She looked worried, but stayed. When I came back, she was lying down with her arm flung across Sunday’s back and was back to her customary pattern of acting as if I did not even exist.

I sat down on the other side of Sunday, to keep him quiet, and tried to think. I had not gotten very far, however, when a couple of the lizards showed up. The girl rose meekly and crawled back into her cage. I took the hint and went back into mine. Sunday, of course, showed no signs of being so obliging; but the lizards handled him efficiently enough. They dropped a sort of clumsy twig net over him, twisted him up in it, and put net and all in his cage. Left alone there, Sunday struggled and squirmed until he was free; and a little later a lizard, passing, reached casually in through the bars of the cage, whisked the loose net out and carried it off.

So, there I was, back in the cage—and it was only then that I realized that I was hungry and thirsty. Above all, thirsty. I tried yelling to attract the attention of the lizards, but they ignored me. I even tried calling to the girl for advice and help; but she was back to being as unresponsive as the lizards. In the end, tired out, I went to sleep.

I woke about sunset to the sound of my cage being opened again. Before I knew it, I was being dumped in the pool once more. This time, I got a taste of the water into which I had been thrown. It was not ocean-salty—it had a faint taste that could be a touch of brackishness, but it was clearly sweet enough for human consumption. If this was the Nebraska sea, it was open to the ocean at its lower end. But as I remembered reading, it had been very shallow; and like the Baltic in my time, this far north, in-flowing rivers and underground springs could have diluted it to nearly fresh-water condition. I climbed out of the pool and went to the side edge of the raft to drink, just to avoid any contamination there might be in the pool. I could not remember water tasting quite so good.

I lay on the logs of the raft with my belly full until the liquid began to disperse to the rest of my dehydrated body, then got up and went looking for something to eat. A quick tour of the raft turned up coconuts, which I had no way of opening, some green leafy stuff which might or might not be an edible vegetable, and a stack of bananas—most of which were still green.

I helped myself to the ripest I could find, half expecting the lizards to stop me. But they paid no attention. When I had taken care of my appetite, I thought of the girl and took some back to her.

She gave me one quick glance and looked away. But she took the bananas and ate them. After she had finished, she got up and went a little way away from me and lay down on her side, apparently sticking her arm right through the solid surface of the raft.

I went over to her and saw that she had found a place where two adjoining logs gapped apart; and her arm was now reaching down through the gap into the water and the tangle of growth below.

Something about her position as she lay there struck an odd note of familiarity. I straightened up and looked around the raft. Sure enough, the lizards who were lying down were nearly all in just the position she had taken. Apparently, they too had found holes in the raft.

I wondered what sort of a game she and they were playing. I even asked her—but of course I got no answer. Then, just a few seconds later she sat up, withdrawing her arm and held out her closed fist to me. When she opened it up, there was a small fish in the palm of her hand—hardly bigger than the average goldfish in a home fishbowl.

She held it out to me with her head averted; but clearly she was offering it to me. When I did not take it, she looked back at me with something like a flash of anger on her face and threw the fish away. It landed on the-raft surface only inches from Sunday. The leopard stretched out his neck to reach it and eagerly licked it up.

The girl had gone back to her fishing. But whatever she caught next, she put in her own mouth. Later on, she made a number of trips to feed Sunday with what she caught. Full of curiosity, I went looking for another gap in the logs, lay down and put my eye to it.

In the shadow under the raft I could at first see nothing. But as my vision adjusted, I looked into the tangle of growth there and saw a veritable aquarium of small marine life. So this was how the lizards provisioned themselves. It was like carrying a game farm along with you on your travels. The small fish and squid-like creatures I saw through the gap in the logs did not look all that appetizing to me, at first glance. But after my third day on bananas, I found myself eating them along with the girl and the lizards—eating them, and what’s more, enjoying them. Protein hunger can be a remarkably powerful conditioning force.

Meanwhile—on the days that immediately followed—I was trying to puzzle out a great many things, including why we had been brought along on the raft. The most obvious answer that came to me was the one I liked least—that, like the bananas and the coconuts, we three represented a potential exotic addition to the ordinary lizard diet, a sort of special treat to be eaten later.

I also toyed with the thought that we had been picked up as slaves, or as curiosities to be used or traded off at some later time. But this was hard to believe. The lizards were clearly an extremely primitive people, if they were a true people at all, and not some sort of ant-like society operating on instinct rather than intelligence. They had shown no sign of having a spoken language; and so far I had not seen any of them using even stone tools to make or do anything. The extent of their technology seemed to be the weaving of the nets and cages, the gathering of things like coconuts (and the three of us) and the building of this raft; if, indeed, this raft had been deliberately built, rather than being just grown to order, or chewed loose from some larger mass of vegetation of which it originally had been a part.

No, I was forgetting the steering oar. The next time I was let out of my cage, I went back to the stern of the raft to look at it. What I found was on a par with the rest of the raft. The oar was not so much an oar as a thinner tree trunk of the same variety as those which made up the logs of the raft. It had no true blade. It was bare trunk down to the point where it entered the water, and from there on, it was mop-like with a brush of untrimmed growth. It was pivoted in a notch between two logs of the raft, tied in place there with a great bundle of the same flexible vine or plant with which the lizards had made the net they used to restrain Sunday. This tie broke several times a day, but each time, it was patiently rewrapped and reknotted by the nearby lizards.