Gordon Dickson - Time Storm

It could not have died at the time the lizards abandoned their fight with it, or its skeleton would have been stripped clean long before this. It must have survived, weakly fighting off the smaller members of its own species who were ready to devour it while it still lived, until just a few hours past, when loss of blood and strength had finally let it down into death.

Now, like a dead man returned to the scene of the crime, it was back with us, courtesy of the storm and the onshore wind. A freak of that wind and storm was bringing it back, not merely into the bay, but right up against the roots of our raft itself. Clinging to the tree-trunks on either side of me, looking down into the water with each flash of lightning, I was less than fifty feet or so in a straight line from where what was left of the carcass was being torn apart—now, by larger sharks and other fish up to fifteen or twenty feet long, still small compared to the sea corpse, but big enough from my point of view. I fretted over their presence. Even if another chance to escape should come, with all the lizards off the raft, we could not hope to make the swim ashore in safety, through those swarming shark jaws.

Then, suddenly, there was a lightning flash and the underwater scavengers were all gone. The half-eaten body of the large shark lay rolling to the sea-disturbance and the tearing it had just been getting by its devourers, but now it was alone on the floor of the bay. I blinked and waited for the next flash. I could not believe what I saw.

With the next flash came enlightenment; and with it, an end to shark carcass, raft, lizards, and everything. The next glare showed the shark overshadowed by a shape twice its size—a dark body, like an underwater cloud. And it also showed, out of the water and white against the black of the waves, a gray-white tentacle as thick as a cable used to tie up a superliner. The tentacle was out of the water. It stood erect in the air, like a telephone pole, twenty feet above the deck at the far end of the raft. A moment later the raft shuddered, as if to the blow of an unthinkably huge axe, and the end where we were began to rise in the air.

Another flash of lightning showed the great tentacle now gripping the whole far end of the raft and pulling it over, down into the waves.

There was no more time for waiting, nor any time to talk the two of them into coming with me. I yelled in Sunday’s ear to come, pulled the girl after me, and jumped for the water. Its choking wetness closed over my head; but I came up still holding on to the girl, and taking a sight on the beach with the next flash, began to swim ashore.

I do not remember how I made it. It seemed I swam forever holding up the girl. But eventually the wet blackness that enclosed us threw us forward into a blackness that had no substance, and a split second later we slammed against hard, level sand. Even with most of the breath knocked out of me, I had the sense to crawl as much farther up the beach as I could, dragging the girl. Then I collapsed. I let myself drop on the beach, one hand still holding an arm of the girl. The damp, grainy surface beneath me went soft as a mattress and I fell into sudden, deep sleep.

I woke to daylight and warming air. The girl was only a few feet away. So was Sunday.

In the bay there was no sign of any raft, or anything, for that matter. We were as alone as if we had been lost in the desert for weeks. I lay there, slowly letting our new situation become real to me.

We were free again, but without food, weapons, or transportation. In addition, I felt as if I had been drawn through a whole series of knotholes, one after another. By contrast, the girl and Sunday looked as rested and cheerful as if the storm and all the rest of it had never happened. Well, their reactions were nothing to be surprised at, I told myself, grumpily. I was twice the age of the girl or nearly so and probably five times the age of Sunday. It didn’t matter. By God, the three of us had made it!

The minute I tried to sit up, they noticed me. In a second they were all over me. Sunday gave one large leap to land beside me and started to rub himself up against my chest, knocking me flat. The girl reached me a split-second later and picked me up.

“Stop that,” she scolded Sunday, out loud, in actual and unexpected words. I was sitting up again now, but her arms were still around me, her head against my chest; and I got the strange impression that she was hugging me. This sort of response by the two of them made me feel absurdly warm inside; but when I tried to pat the girl on the head, she broke away at once, scrambling to her feet, turning her back and walking off a few steps. Sunday, purring loudly, was doing his best to knock me down again; but I was braced for him.

I leaned heavily on his back with one arm and pulled myself creakily to my feet. Seen from the shore, the place we had ended up had much less of the California look than the beach where we had first run into the lizards. Back from the stretch of open sand were some kind of pine-needle trees with a northerly look and a tree like a willow, with fairly thick-standing grass in the open spaces.

I patted Sunday on the head and spoke to the girl’s back.

“We’d better look around,” I said, hoarsely.

I led the way and the other two followed. Behind the immediate fringe of trees there was a small bluff. We went up to the top of that and looked out at what seemed to be a stretch of midcontinental prairie spottily overgrown with clumps of trees. There were not quite enough trees to call it a forest and an almost total lack of undergrowth. In the open patches it was mainly high grass, green and brown, with just an occasional, scattered, lone sapling or bush.

Nowhere in sight was there any sign of civilization.

I stood on the top of the bluff and did some pondering. I did not like the semi-arid look of the country before me. We were on foot now, and we could survive without food for a few days, if necessary; but what I was looking at did not have the appearance of being either lake or river country, and drinking water was a constant need. Add to that the fact that we were now completely unarmed except for my pocketknife; and it might not be just wild animals we would have to worry about encountering out there.

In the end, I decided against leaving the only drinking water in view, which was the lake. We went east along the beach, the route in which the lizard raft had been headed anyway, for three days, living off shellfish and whatever small creatures we could find in the sand or shallow water just offshore. Our diet of small things from the underside of the raft had done my sensibilities a world of good in that area of diet. I could now eat anything that didn’t look as if it would poison me—and eat it raw at that. The girl was equally open-minded, I noticed; and as for Sunday, he had never had a problem about the looks of his food to begin with.

The third day we hit the jackpot—well, a jackpot of sorts. It must have been somebody’s lakeshore home, on a lake that had now become part of the inland sea. There were no people in sight around it, and no other lakeshore houses or cabins nearby. But this place must have cost someone a good deal of money. It had a large house, with attached garage and a separate pole barn—that is, a type of barn-size building, made of metal roof and siding that were literally hung on wooden posts the thickness of telephone poles, set in the earth. It also had a dock and a boat. A road that was dirt, but well-graded and well-kept, led from the house and the lake away into the country beyond the beach. The country here was treed thickly enough to be honestly called forested.

The home looked as if it had been abandoned less than a week before. Some of the food in the refrigerator still looked edible; and the food in the large, chest-type freezer in the double garage would probably have been edible if the electric power had stayed on. We must have crossed a former mistwall line, some way back; because this was the kind of trick the time storm played. A few miles off, we had been several geologic ages in the past, here we were only in yesterday. Tomorrow we might be in any future time, I supposed. As it was, I trusted none of it. But there was a wealth of canned goods on shelves—also bottled goods. It gave me a peculiar feeling to mix myself a scotch and soda—even an iceless scotch and soda— and sit sipping it in the overstuffed chair of a carpeted living room.