Gordon Dickson - Time Storm

I looked once more around the living room of the house, ready to leave now. The woman spoke quickly, as if she could read my mind.

“Why don’t you ask her to come in?”

“Ask her in?” I said. “If she comes in, the leopard has to come in, too.”

She grew a little pale at that and held the young child closer to her side. But then she tossed her head back.

“Is he dangerous?” she asked. “The leopard?”

“Not if the two of you stay well back from him,” I said. “But if he comes in here, he’s got to pass by those dogs of yours, and I can’t imagine that happening.”

“I can,” she said, flatly. “They’ll obey orders.”

She walked with her daughter to the door, which was standing open, and through it. I followed her.

“Come on in!” she called to the girl and Sunday. Of course the girl neither moved nor answered, any more than Sunday did.

“It’s all right,” I told the girl. “You and Sunday come in.” I turned to the woman. “And you’d better control those dogs.”

The girl had already started toward the house; but Sunday held back. Seeing he would not come, she turned back to him. I had to go out to both of them.

“Come on,” I said. I took a fistful of the loose skin at the scruff of Sunday’s neck and led him with me toward the house. He came; a little reluctantly, but he came. The dogs tied nearest to his path shrank back from him as we approached, but those farther off whined and crawled forward to the limit of their tethers, white-toothed and panting.

“Down!” said the woman from the doorstep, and, hearing her, if I’d been a dog I would not have delayed doing what she said. The soft soprano now had a knife-edge to it. It lifted and cut. It carried clearly without her seeming to have to raise the volume. “All of you-down! Quiet!” The dogs followed the girl and Sunday with eyes and wet breath; but they neither got to their feet nor raised a clamor.

We all went back inside the house and the woman shut the door behind us. One lone bark sounded from the yard as the door closed. The woman opened it again and looked out. There was silence. She closed the door once more and this time the silence continued.

“Hello,” she said to the girl. “I’m Marie Walcott, and this is my daughter, Wendy.”

The girl—my girl—said nothing. Her face had a look that made it appear merely as if she did not understand, but which I knew well enough to recognize as an expression of stubbornness.

“She doesn’t talk,” I told the woman. “I mean, she can talk, but she doesn’t like to—part of the shock she went through, I suppose. But she hears and understands you, all right.”

The girl stepped to my side, at that, then went around me and knelt down on the other side of Sunday, putting an arm around the leopard’s neck.

“Poor thing,” said the woman, watching her. The expression on the girl’s face did not change. The woman looked back at me. “What are you going to do now?”

“We’ll move on,” I said. “I told you that. And I’m taking this rifle of yours. I’ll leave you my .22 rifle—I’ll drop it about five hundred yards out, so we’ll be well gone by the time you get to it. It’s a lighter gun and it’ll suit you better in any use you’ve got for a rifle. The dogs are your real protection, and I’m leaving you those, alive. But try to track us down with them, and I’ll shoot every one of them that Sunday doesn’t tear up.”

“I wouldn’t come after you that way,” said the woman. “Where are you going anyway?”

“Into the futuremost segment of time-changed country I can find,” I said. “Somewhere there must be somebody who’ll understand what’s happened to the world.”

“What makes you so sure there’s anyone like that?”

“All right,” I said, “if there isn’t we’re still going to be looking-for the best piece of time to stay with, or some way of living with the time changes, themselves. I’ve been running away from the mistwalls; but now I’m going through any one I meet, so I can find out what’s on the other side.”

She looked out her window toward the two mistwalls overshadowing her dogs and her home.

“What is on the other side out there?” she asked.

“You wouldn’t like it,” I said. “What’s farther in?” I pointed through the back of the house toward the forest that crowded close upon her place.

“I don’t know,” she said. “There used to be a town of fifty thousand people—Gregory, Illinois—about ten miles down the road, there. But there’s not even any road, now. I don’t know.”

I looked closely at her.

“You haven’t moved from this place since the time storms first started?”

“That’s right.” She looked somber. “Wendy and I sat here and prayed, after the first time change came close. At first we prayed for Tim—for my husband to come back. But now for some time we’ve just prayed that the mistwalls will leave us alone.”

“Two of them are right on top of you,” I said. “Didn’t you think of getting away from them?”

“To what?” she said, shrugging. “I’ve got half a year’s supply of food in the basement here—had to, since we live out of town. If they move over us, then it’s over, all at once. Meanwhile, we’re safer here than someplace else. I ran a boarding kennel, so I had the dogs, here, to guard me. And there was—or we thought there was—always the chance my husband....”

She shrugged again and stopped talking.

“All right,” I hefted both rifles and turned toward the door. “Come on, Sunday, Girl. As for you, Mrs. Walcott, wait fifteen minutes and then follow us out. You’ll find the .22 leaning against a tree, a little way into the woods, there.”

I opened the door. The woman’s voice spoke from behind me to the dogs, commandingly.

“Quiet! Down!” Then her tone changed. “We could go with you.”

I turned around. My first, unthinking reaction was that she was joking. I saw she was not. Then, suddenly, I saw and understood a great many other things.

I had been assuming, without really looking at her, that she was housewifely middle-aged. She was wearing slacks and a man’s shirt, and of course she had on no makeup. Her hair was cut short —rather clumsily cut short; and there were dark circles of weariness under her eyes. By contrast with the girl, the only human member of the opposite sex I had seen since the first time storm, at first glance, Marie Walcott had looked maturely-fleshed and unremarkable. Now, suddenly I realized that she was probably no older than I. In fact, given the conditions of civilization once more she would have been damned attractive. She was full grown, someone my own age, with the body of a woman rather than that of a half-grown girl, with a sane adult mind and capability of speech. Suddenly I remembered that it had been a long time since I and any woman....

I noticed all this in a moment; and in the same moment, I realized that she had wanted me to notice—had set out to make me notice. It changed the whole picture.

“Go with us?” I said, more to myself than to her.

“We’d all be safer, in one large group,” she said. “You could use another grown-up. And of course, there’s the dogs.”

She was right about the dogs. A pack like that, properly trained, could really be valuable.

“There’s your daughter,” I said. “She’s too young to be making long marches every day.”

“I’ve got a cart the dogs can pull her in—also, we’d be running into roads, and some kind of transportation sooner or later, don’t you think? Meanwhile, I... we’d both feel better with a man around.”

She was giving me all the practical reasons why our teaming up would work, and I was countering with all the practical arguments against it; and we both knew that we were talking around the one real reason I should or should not add her to my party, which was that I was male and she was female.