Gordon Dickson: Time Storm

According to the needle on the speedometer, we were doing nearly a hundred and ten—which was nonsense. Eighty-five miles an hour was more like the absolute top speed of the panel truck. As it was, we swayed and bounced along the empty road as if five more miles an hour would have sent us flying off it.

I could now see the far end of the mistwall. It was still a good two or three miles away; and the wall itself was only a few hundred yards off and closing swiftly. I may have prayed a little bit at this point, in spite of being completely irreligious. I seem to remember that I did. In the weeks since the whole business of the time changes started, I had not been this close to being caught since that first day in the cabin northwest of Duluth, when I had, in fact, been caught without knowing what hit me. I had thought then it was another heart attack, come to carry me off for good this time; and the bitterness of being chopped down before I was thirty and after I had spent nearly two years putting myself into the best possible physical shape, had been like a dry, ugly taste in my throat just before the change line reached me and knocked me out.

I remember still thinking that it was a heart attack, even after I came to. I had gone on thinking that way, even after I found the squirrel that was still in shock from it; the way Sunday had been later, when I found him. For several days afterwards, with the squirrel tagging along behind me like some miniature dog until I either exhausted it or lost it, I did not begin to realize the size of what had happened. It was only later that I began to understand, when I came to where Duluth should have been and found virgin forest where a couple of hundred thousand people had lived, and later yet, as I moved south, and stumbled across the log cabin with the bearded man in cord-wrapped leather leggings.

The bearded man had nearly finished me. It took me almost three minutes too long after I met him to realize that he did not understand that the rifle in my hand was a weapon. It was only when I stepped back and picked up the hunting bow, that he pulled his fancy quick-draw trick with the axe he had been using to chop wood when I stepped into his clearing. I never saw anything like it and I hope I never see it again, unless I’m on the side of the man with the axe. It was a sort of scimitar-bladed tool with a wide, curving forward edge; and he had hung it on his shoulder, blade-forward, in what I took to be a reassuring gesture, when I first tried to speak to him. Then he came toward me, speaking some kind of Scandinavian-sounding gibberish in a friendly voice, the axe hung on his shoulder as if he had forgotten it was there.

It was when I began to get worried about the steady way he was coming on and warned him back with the rifle, that I recognized suddenly that, apparently, as far as he was concerned, I was carrying nothing more than a club. For a second I was merely paralyzed by the enormity of that insight. Then, before I could bring myself to shoot him after all in self-defense, I had the idea of trying to pick up the bow with my free hand. As an idea, it was a good one —but the minute he saw the bow in my hand he acted; and to this day, I’m not sure exactly how he did it.

He reached back at belt-level and jerked forward on the handle-end of the axe. It came off his shoulder—spinning, back, around, under his arm, up in the air and over, and came down, incredibly, with the end of its handle into his fist and the blade edge forward.

Then he threw it.

I saw it come whirling toward me, ducked instinctively and ran. I heard it thunk into a tree somewhere behind me; but by then I was into the cover of the woods, and he did not follow.

Five days later I was where the twin cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul had been—and they looked as if they had been abandoned for a hundred years after a bombing raid that had nearly leveled them. But I found the panel truck there, and it started when I turned its key. There was gas in the filling station pumps, though I had to rig up a little kerosene generator I liberated from a sporting goods store, in order to pump some of it into the tank of the truck, and I headed south along U.S. 35W. Then came Sunday. Then came the girl....

I was almost to the far end of the mistwall now, although to the left of the road the haze was less than a hundred yards from the roadway; and little stinging sprays of everything from dust to fine gravel were beginning to pepper the left side of the panel, including my own head and shoulder where the window on that side was not rolled up. But I had no time to roll it up now. I kept pushing the gas pedal through the floor, and suddenly we whipped past the end of the wall of mist, and I could see open country clear to the summer horizon.

Sweating, I eased back on the gas, let the truck roll to a stop, and half-turned it across the road so I could look behind us.

Back where we had been, seconds before, the mist had already crossed the road and was moving on into the fields that had been on the road’s far side. They were ceasing to be there as it passed— as the road itself had already ceased to be, and the farm land on the near side of the road. Where the grain had rippled in the wind, there was now wild, grassy hillside—open country sparsely interspersed with a few clumps of trees, rising to a bluff, a crown of land, less than a quarter of a mile off, looking so close I could reach out and touch it. There was not a breath of wind stirring.

I put the panel back in gear again and drove off. After a while the road swung in a gentle curve toward a small town that looked as normal as apple pie, as if no mistwall had ever passed through it. It could be, of course. My heart began to pound a little with hope of running into someone sane I could talk with, about everything that had happened since that apparent heart attack of mine in the cabin.

But when I drove into Main Street of the town, between the buildings, there was no one in sight; and the whole place seemed deserted. Hope evaporated into caution. Then I saw what seemed to be a barricade across the street up ahead; and a single figure crouched behind it with what looked like a rocket launcher on his shoulder. He was peering over the barricade away from me; although he must have heard the sound of the motor coming up the street behind him.

I pulled the truck into an alley between two stores and stopped it.

“Stay here and stay quiet,” I told the girl and Sunday.

I took the carbine from beside my driver’s seat and got out. Holding it ready, just in case, I went up behind the man crouched at the barricade. Up this close I could see easily over the barricade —and sure enough, there was another mistwall, less than a mile away, but unmoving. For the first time since I had come into the silent town, I became conscious of a steady sound.

It came from somewhere up ahead, beyond the point where the straight white concrete highway vanished into the unmoving haze of the mistwall—a small buzzing sound. Like the sound of a fly in an enclosed box on a hot July day such as this one was.

“Get down,” said the man with the rocket launcher.

I pulled my head below the top line of the makeshift barricade-furniture, rolls of carpeting, cans of paint—that barred the empty street between the gritty sidewalks and the unbroken store windows in the red brick sides of the Main Street building. Driving in from the northwest, I had thought at first that this small town was still living. Then, when I got closer, I guessed it was one of those places, untouched but abandoned, such as I had run into further north. And so it was, in fact; except for the man, his homemade barricade, and the rocket launcher.

The buzzing grew louder. I looked behind me, back down Main Street. I could just make out the brown, left front fender of the panel truck showing at the mouth of the alley into which I had backed it. There was no sound or movement from inside it. The two of them in there would be obeying my orders, lying still on the blankets in the van section, the leopard probably purring a little in its rough, throaty way and cleaning the fur of a forepaw with its tongue, while the girl held to the animal for comfort and companionship, in spite of the heat.