Gordon Dickson - Time Storm

I was more concerned about her dogs; and I was not about to drop the one weapon that could defend me against them. In fact— the situation framed itself in my mind and produced its own inescapable conclusion—if she turned the dogs loose on me, I was going to shoot her first. They were dogs of all sizes, but the least of them must have gone at least forty pounds, which is heavy enough to be a potential man-killer. I could shoot three-quarters of them, and there would still be enough left to pull me down and finish me off. Nor did I think she would be able to pull them off in time to save my life, once she had set them on me.

“Listen!” I called to her. “I’m just here by accident—”

“I said put down your gun!” she cried. Her rifle went off, and a bullet whistled wide of me into the mistwall beside me.

“Quit that!” I said, raising the .22. “Or I’ll have to start shooting back.”

She hesitated—or if it wasn’t hesitation, at least she did not pull her trigger again. Perhaps the first shot had been more accidental than otherwise. I kept talking.

“Look,” I told her over the noise of the dogs. “I don’t want to bother you. I just happened to stumble on your place here, and I’ll be glad to be on my way again. Why would I want to be any trouble to you anyway? You’re armed, you’ve got your dogs; and I’m all alone. Now, why don’t we just both point our rifles to the ground and talk for a moment—”

Her gaze, which had been focused on me, shifted suddenly. Her rifle barrel changed its aim slightly.

“Alone?” she shouted back. “Do you call that alone?”

I turned to look; and sure enough, her question was a good one. If there was one thing I could count on—if there was one damn thing under the sun that I could absolutely be sure of with Sunday and the girl—it was that they would do exactly what I had told them not to. Somehow they had worked up the courage to come through the mistwall on their own, and now they were standing right behind me.

Of course, this changed the situation entirely. The woman had three times as much target, now. She might not hit me, but her chances of hitting one of our group was tripled. I felt a touch of something not far from panic. Add to what was happening the fact that with Sunday in view and scent, the dogs were now really going crazy; while Sunday’s own back was beginning to arch like the stave of a drawn bow. He did not like dogs.

But for all that, he would not leave me to face them alone. He pressed close against my leg and snarled softly in his throat, watching the dogs. It was magnificently touching and, at the same time, monumentally exasperating to know that the crazy cat would stay beside me, even if I tried to drive him back with a club.

I looked again at the woman—just in time. She had grown arm-tired of holding the rifle to her shoulder and was moving now to untie the nearest dogs. There was no time for me to debate the ethics of the situation. I put a shot from my own rifle into the dirt between her and the animal she was approaching. She froze.

“Don’t try letting any of them go!” I called to her. “I don’t want to hurt you; but I’m not going to let us be chewed up by your animals. Step back now and put your own gun down.”

She backed up, but without letting go of her rifle. I put another shot from the .22 into the frame of the doorway behind her. She checked, hesitated, and let the gun slip from her hands to the earth at her feet.

“All right!” I said. “Now, I’m not going to hurt you, but I’ve got to make sure you’re not going to hurt us. Stay where you are and don’t move.”

She stood still. I turned to the girl.

“Hold, Sunday!” I said. “Stay right where you are, both of you. This time, I mean it!”

I went forward, holding the .22. The dogs had their tethers stretched taut, trying to reach me, so that it was possible for me to see where I needed to walk to stay out of reach of each one of them as I went through their pack. I came up to the woman, bent and picked up her gun. It was a 30.06, a good, clean, hunting rifle. With that in my hands, I felt more secure.

I knew what I had to do, then—and that was shoot the dogs while they were all still safely tied up. But when I raised her rifle I found I could not do it. It was not just that the woman would be vulnerable without them once I had taken her rifle and gone on. It was also the matter that I was still too civilized. I could not get over thinking of them as pets, instead of as the four-legged killers she had turned them into. I twisted about to face the woman.

“Look,” I said. “I’m going to have to kill your dogs to make sure they won’t hurt us, unless you can think of some way to fix things so I can trust them not to attack us.”

She sighed and shivered at the same time. It was as if all the strength in her had suddenly run out.

“I can do it,” she said, in a dead voice. She looked away from me, to the dogs. “Quiet! Down—all of you. Down! Be quiet!”

They obeyed, to my astonishment. Their barking and snarling fell gradually into silence. They stared at the woman, licking their muzzles, and lay down one by one until they were all on the ground and silent, watching.

“That’s pretty good,” I said to the woman.

“I used to run an obedience school,” she answered in the same dead voice. “You don’t have to worry. You can go now.”

“Sorry,” I said. “But I don’t know what else you have in the way of guns or dogs inside that house of yours. Let’s go inside. You first.”

She stiffened.

“No!”

“Calm down, damn it!” I said. “I just want to look around.”

She was still stiff.

“Just a minute,” she said. She turned her head and called back through the open doorway into the dark interior behind her. “Wendy, come out here.”

“My daughter,” she said, harshly.

We waited, and after a second, a blonde-haired little girl of early grade school age came out and pressed herself up against the woman, who put her arm around the child.

“It’s all right,” the woman said, “we’re just going to show this man our house.”

She turned then, and with one arm still around her daughter, led the way inside. I followed, carrying both rifles. There was not a great deal to see inside. A time change line had cut the house very nearly in half. A portion of the living room, all of the kitchen and bathroom, plus one bedroom and a half, remained. The bright sun coming in the uncurtained windows of the rooms that were still whole made the spartan existence that the two of them had been living here all very clear and plain. I went over the rooms carefully, but there were no other guns and only some kitchen knives that might have possibilities as weapons.

The woman said nothing all the time I was looking around. She stood by the living room window and glanced out from time to time. I thought she was checking on the dogs, because they stayed quiet. But I was wrong.

“Is that your wife out there?” she asked at last.

“Wife?” I said.

For a second, the question made no sense at all. I looked out the window where she was looking and saw only Sunday and the girl. Then, of course, I understood.

“No!” I said. “She’s just a kid. I picked her up after she’d just been through a time change; and it mixed her up pretty badly. She’s not right yet, for that matter. I—”

I broke off. I had been about to go on and tell her about my previous conviction that Swannee had escaped the time changes, and a lot more that was purely personal. But it was none of her business. For that matter, the girl was none of her business, either. The fact of the matter was, I had long since drifted into ignoring any sexual quality in the girl; if I had ever paid any attention to that, in the first place. My mind had been full of my own personal problems. But I could hardly try to explain that to this woman without confusing the matter more than I would clear it up. I was a little surprised at the strength of the sudden urge in me to talk about it; then I realized that she was the first rational, adult human I had met since the beginning of the time storms. But it was still none of her business.