Gordon Dickson - Time Storm

Unless, that is, there was some way of bringing the time changes to a halt....

Now, that was a new thought. It exploded in me silently, one night as I lay there on my back, looking up through the bars of my cage at the unfamiliar star-patterns, while the raft rocked gently under me. I lay there, turning it over and over in my head, examining it. That relentless part of my mind had fastened on the idea the second it emerged, like the jaws of a boa constrictor on part of a prey the snake intended to swallow, and now I knew I could never let it go, until I had succeeded with it, or proved its impossibility.

Ten mornings later we saw land, and by noon it was obvious we would reach it the same day. I was ready to blow kisses at it from the first second it had appeared like a dark smudge on the horizon. Try as the girl and I might, we could not keep the three of us properly fed with the small underraft waterlife; and I had lived with a sharp-toothed fear that we would have grown too weak to try escaping by the time our chance for it came. Our goal was a curving bay with a wide beach shelving gently down to it, some hills hazy in the background, and one or two large rocks or small rocky islands just beyond the mouth of the bay.

Shortly after noon the lizards lined up along the side of the raft facing the shark fin and began to roll up the vegetable-like leaves I had seen and throw these small green balls at the shark. Where the balls of vegetable matter touched the water, a milky stain spread immediately and was still spreading, like the blossoming of some underwater flower, as the motion of the raft left the spot behind us. As the lizards continued to pelt the water around the fin with the balls of green stuff, a milky rime gradually gathered around the base of the fin itself.

Suddenly the fin moved, changed angle in the water and moved off rapidly until it was lost from sight. Looking back along the wake of the raft, I saw the shapes of small fish come to the surface belly-up through the whitened water where the green stuff had fallen.

So we half-drifted, half-steered at last into the bay without our overside companion. In the bay the water was as calm as a lake on a still day, and startlingly clear. I could look down at a sandy, plant-and-shell strewn bottom, finally, that must have been fifty feet below, although it looked much shallower.

I was able to estimate its true depth because the full extent of the growth on the underside of the raft was now visible; and it stretched down almost as far, if not as far, as the trees that were our “sail” stretched up from the deck of the raft. A good two hundred yards or more from the beach we grounded, the lowest extensions of the growth under our raft touching against the bottom of the bay and stopping us from going further inshore.

The lizards immediately began diving for what seemed to be some sort of large shellfish. The shells were a good foot in length, and when I picked up one of the first that was brought on board, I was startled by the heaviness of it. The whole thing must have weighed twenty pounds.

In the sun and the air, the shells soon opened of their own accord; and the lizards scooped the interior creatures out and swallowed them more or less whole.

So did the girl, Sunday and myself. They were delicious; and we would have stuffed ourselves if I had not stopped, and made the girl stop feeding herself as well as Sunday, for fear of intestinal upset in all of us after such a period of semi-starvation.

But beyond a few mild stomach cramps an hour or so later, I had no bad effects, and the girl and Sunday did not even seem to have that. So, I left them to eat or not as they wished; and during the next few days, we ate our persistent hunger out of existence through steady snacking on the shellfish.

We were free to do this around the clock, because Sunday, the girl and I had been let out of our cages some time before we came to anchor, so to speak; and since then, none of the lizards had bothered to put us back in. As my hunger diminished, I began to think less of that and more about escaping. I could stand on the edge of the raft and look at the sand of the beach. Only a couple of hundred yards away, as I said; but it might as well have been a couple of hundred miles away. There was no way to get ashore except to swim there. And even if the girl could, and Sunday would make it through the water with me, any one of the amphibious-looking lizard-people could probably let us get nine-tenths of the way to the beach and still reach us in time to bring us back before we could wade ashore. They shot through the clear underwater like green rockets. But there had to be a way. It was bad enough to have to figure out a way of escaping by myself. The headache would come in bringing the girl and Sunday safely with me. But I could not leave them behind. Neither one was able to survive alone. It had to be the three of us, together.

I was standing looking down into the water at them, even envying them in a way, when something like a swiftly-moving dark shadow suddenly intruded on the scene; and all at once lizards were literally leaping out of the water back on to the surface of the raft. All but one. Down in the transparent depths, that one was being swallowed. Either our original shark, or one just like it, had joined us; and once more we had a deadly companion alongside.

The lizards stood on the deck and stared down at the shark. I did not blame them. In the beautifully clear water the huge sea predator loomed like a nuclear submarine. It was patrolling the water about the raft now, in short runs and turns back and forth, as if impatient for another victim.

I looked at the still-large pile of green vegetation on the raft. But none of the lizards made a move toward it, and after a second I realized why. Clearly the stuff, in water, was a potent poison. They could safely throw it overside when they were moving before a breeze, away from the place where the poison would linger. But here in this bay, once the water was poisoned, they would not be able to return soon to their diving for shellfish.

I waited. The shark stayed. The lizards waited. I fumed. The shark’s presence was one more obstacle in the way of escape for the girl, Sunday and myself. At the same time I was amazed at the apparent helplessness of the lizards. I had assumed without thinking that they would have some kind of plan to deal with a situation of this sort. But apparently not—unless their technique was to simply wait out the shark, sit on the raft until it got tired and went away.

However, if it was the same shark—or even of the same breed and temperament as the shark that had dogged the raft earlier—it was not likely to leave in any reasonable length of time. The fin that had followed us earlier had been with us for days on, end.

The eerie part of the whole business was that there was no visible sign of an attempt at consultation among the lizards. From the beginning they had shown no indication of having a spoken language; and I had not been able to make out any other method of signs or signalling they might be using between themselves. But I had always assumed that in some way, if they had to, they could communicate with each other. Now it seemed they could not even do that. A handful of them stood and watched the shark for a while; but eventually, all of them went back to acting as if they were still out at sea, resting on the logs, hunting between them in the growth under the raft in search of small marine life to eat, and so on. The only sign that there was anything at all unusual about the situation was the fact that still none of them came to put us back in our cages.

Night came with no change. A day after that followed with the shark still waiting and the lizards still all on the raft. Around noon of the third day, however, something new began to happen.