Gordon Dickson - Time Storm

Whatever their cultural level—in fact, whether they had a culture or not—they had clearly collected the three of us for their own purposes, not for ours. It struck me that the sooner we got away from them, the better.

But here on a raft in the middle of an unknown body of water, getting away was something easier to imagine than do. For one thing, we would have to wait until we touched land again; and there was no telling when that would be. Or was there? I puzzled over the question.

It was hard to believe that the lizards could be trying to follow any specific route with their clumsy sail of trees and their mop-ended steering oar. At best, I told myself, they could only impose a slight angle on the path of their drift before the wind. But, when I thought about this some more, it occurred to me that the wind had been blowing continually from the stern of the raft with about the same strength since I had gotten my senses back. We were, of course, still in the, temperate latitudes of what had been the North American continent, well above the zone of any trade winds. But, what if here on this body of water, current climatic conditions made for seasonal winds blowing in a certain direction? Say, for example, winds that blew east in the summer and west in the winter, from generally the same quarters of the compass? Judging by the sun, we were now headed generally east. With a continuous directional breeze like that to rely on, even the crude rig of this raft could follow a roughly regular route depending only on the season of the year.

That evening I marked on one of the logs the angle of the sunset on the horizon to the longitudinal axis of the raft, by cutting marks in one of the logs under my cage with my pocketknife. It set almost due astern of us, but a little to the north. The next morning I again marked the angle of the sunrise—again, a little to the north of our long axis. A check of the angle of the steering oar confirmed this. The three lizards holding it had it angled to guide the raft slightly to the north from a true east-west line. It was not until then that I thought of checking the stars.

So I did, as soon as they came out that evening; but they were absolutely unfamiliar. I could not recognize a single constellation. Not that I was very knowledgeable about astronomy; but like most people, I was normally able to pick out the Little and the Big Dippers and find the pole star from the Big Dipper. Such a difference in the patterns of the heavens I saw could only be strong evidence that a time change had moved this part of the world a long way from the present I had known—either far into the future or far into the past.

If so... a new thought kindled in an odd back corner of my mind.

If it was indeed the Permian period, or a future one like it, through which this raft was now sailing, then one thing was highly likely. We were almost surely moving along roughly parallel to the northern shore of the inland sea since the beach where we had first run into the lizards had to be that same northern shore; and it now seemed probable we had been holding a steady northeasterly course ever since. I had seen a geology textbook map of the Great Nebraska Sea once, years ago. It had showed the land area of the southern and middle states depressed, and that part of the continent drowned, so that the Gulf of Mexico, in effect, filled most of the lower middle region of North America. That meant, almost certainly, we should be running in to land again before long. We were not, as I had originally feared, off on some endless voyage to nowhere, as we were perfectly capable of being, while an endless supply of food swam underneath us and water all around us that was drinkable.

The prospect of coming to land again before too long meant we ought to at least get a chance to escape. I cheered up at the thought and, with immediate anxieties out of the way, remembered the rest of what was still heavy in my mind.

The insane belief I had had in the survival of Swannee was, of course, still with me, like the mistwall of a time change line in the back of my thought.

But the rest of my brain recognized it for the illusion it was. Evidently, while I had been out of my head, what was left had been coming to terms with this matter. I was now ready to admit that there had been something more than a lingering knee-jerk reflex of the affection response operating in me. The plain truth of the matter was that I had flipped over Swannee. Not only had I flipped, but I had done it after I married her, not before; and the thing that had driven her off was the fact that I had tried to change the rules of the game after the game was started. I had let myself go with the idea that I loved Swannee; and made up in my mind a completely imaginary image of her as someone who was lovable. Of course she wasn’t. She was an ordinary self-seeking human being like all the rest of us, and when she acted like one and took off to escape my trying to make her into something she was not, I literally set out to work myself to death, and almost succeeded with the heart attack.

I suppose, in a way, I had never really let go of Swannee—even then. So that when the time storm hit, the one thing I could not accept was that it could have touched her in any way.

But I now had met, and survived, the fact of her death. The madness, of course, was still back there in the recesses of my mind, and still virulent; but it was dying, and time would kill it off entirely. Just as time had healed my first sense of loss when she had gotten married. Now that it was dying, locked in my wooden cage most of the time and going nowhere, I had plenty of leisure to begin looking more sanely at the world around me. Out of that look came a couple of recognitions I had been refusing to make earlier. One was that we would have to work hard to survive on this raft. Sunday and the girl were not only thin, as I had noticed, but getting thinner. Sunday himself required the equivalent of four pounds of meat a day to keep him alive. I needed about two thousand calories, or nearly half that amount; and the girl, because she was not yet at her full growth, probably the same. We two, of course, could make use of carbohydrates—like the bananas—as well, as long as those lasted. But getting Sunday the equivalent of four pounds of protein daily through the cracks between the logs of the raft was impossible; even with both the girl and I doing our best—which we did as soon as I realized what the situation was. The lizard-people showed no interest at all in providing food for us. We would need to reach land soon if we wanted to live.

The second recognition was that only a few people, relatively, had escaped the time change. A few people and a few animals. Apparently the changes had been like great rakes that swept away most of the population, but here and there let an individual like me, the girl, or Sunday, slip through their tines. Either that, or some of us simply were natural survivors—statistical immunes.

Whether the greater number of the population of my time had been carried off to some other continuum, or destroyed by the suddenly changed conditions, there was no telling. But one fact was becoming more apparent day by day—there was no reasonable hope of their ever coming back. The moving finger writes...

I, and the girl, and Sunday, along with a relative handful of others, possibly including these lizard-people, were stuck with making what we could out of the world as it now was. What we had at the present, of course, was chaos, with the time lines still moving and different times coming into existence behind each of them. But maybe if I was right about some of us being statistical immunes, we would learn eventually to live with the lines, passing from zone to zone and becoming a new civilization which took constant time changes for granted.