Gordon Dickson - Time Storm

I did not get a good look at it. It was very big, either an unusually large man or woman all bundled up in loose furs, or something else. Even its face was furry, or hidden by a beard. But it came around the corner of the building and lifted one arm. There was a wink of light from the end of the arm; and the dog furthest in front of us—leading the rest of us by perhaps fifteen feet —leaped into the air with a howl that broke off abruptly as it fell back on its side in the grass, to lie there still.

I dove to the ground, pulling Marie down with me; and something sizzled over our heads as we lay there. A second later, there were sounds like rifle shots from the town and the singing of bullets over our heads.

“Back!” I said to Marie. “Crawl! Back to the woods!”

We turned and went on our bellies. The shots continued, and once or twice I heard the sizzle overhead again; but nothing touched us. It seemed a long, long crawl. We were almost back when we came across the second dog we had taken with us, a lean German shepherd-type that had been named Buster, lying dead. In his case, it was a bullet from behind that had gone in at the back of his head and taken off half of his lower jaw when it came out. Flies were already buzzing around the corpse.

We crawled on, Marie and I, until the shadows of the trees were about us. Even then, we continued on hands and knees a little further before we risked standing up. Then we turned and went back to join the girl and Wendy for a look at the town.

But there was nothing to see. The fur-covered figure was no longer in sight; and the shooting had stopped.

“What was it?” said Marie. She was shaking and her voice was tight.

“I don’t know,” I said. I turned to the girl. “Did you get a look at it through the binoculars?”

The girl nodded.

“Was it a man or a woman?”

The girl shook her head.

“Why won’t you talk?” Marie suddenly screamed at her.

“Easy,” I said to Marie. “Easy.” I spoke to the girl again. “Not a man or a woman either? You mean you couldn’t tell?”

The girl nodded.

“You could tell?”

She nodded again.

“You could tell if it wasn’t a man or a woman?” I said. “What was it then?”

“I don’t know,” said the girl, unexpectedly. “A thing.”

She turned and walked off. I went after her, but she would not even stand still to be questioned, let alone answer, after that. Defeated, I went back to Marie.

“Maybe something out of the future that wandered through its own mistwall into Gregory, here,” I said to her. “Anyway, whatever it is, it doesn’t seem to want to come after us—just seems to want us to leave it alone. I think we’d better go around this town. What’s the next one up the line called? And how far is it?”

“Elton,” said Marie. “And it’s about five miles.”

“That’s where we’ll head, then,” I told her.

We stayed within the cover of the woods and made a circuit of Gregory. By the time we were around the town, the afternoon was fairly well advanced; but we pushed on, hoping to reach Elton. We never did, though. After nearly three more hours of travelling without a sight of a road or a town, we came to bluffs overlooking a river. A big river; easily a quarter of a mile across.

There was obviously no going farther that day. We set up camp on the bluff, and in the morning I went down to the river’s edge to take a look at the situation.

The water was fresh and cold. The edge where I stood was overgrown with willows and seemed to drop off deeply; but a little farther downstream the river made a bend, and there was a sandy beach and shallow water. I explored that far, accompanied by Sunday and the girl. The current of the water seemed to slow, going around the curve, and there was plenty of driftwood on the beach to make into a raft. I went back to Marie on the bluff. She was making coffee and she gave me a cup.

“So you want to cross the river,” she said; after I had told her what it was like, there.

I shrugged.

“We don’t have to,” I answered. “We can go upriver, or downriver, and we may even run into a bridge, somewhere, crossing it. But summer isn’t going to last forever; and the more I think about it, the more it seems to me that we ought to keep heading due east. It’s our best chance to find some large civilized group that’s survived the time storms.”

So it was settled—more or less. I did some planning, out loud, with Marie and the girl listening. The dogs could swim, of course. So could Sunday and we adults—or, rather, we two adults and the one near-adult, who was the girl. Wendy, the equipment and the supplies could be rafted over. Reducing the raft load to Wendy and our possessions meant we would need only a relatively small raft. Luckily we had a hammer and even some nails along, although, actually, I had decided to save the nails and chain the logs of the raft together with the dog chains, for maximum safety.

As I mentioned earlier, I had been looking forward to the evening—and Marie. However, it developed that Wendy was either coming down sick with something, or upset by the travel; Marie gave me to understand that, as far as that night went, she would be tied up with family matters. So as not to waste time, I took advantage of the long twilight to go down on the beach and make a start gathering the logs for the raft, then chopping them to length with Marie’s axe.

Sunday and the girl went down there with me; and as things turned out, I built a fire and went on working by that, even after the sunset left us; so that we ended up making a separate camp down there. Just before I turned in for the night, something occurred to me.

“You know,” I said to the girl, looking across the fire to where she sat with Sunday, “we left that raft of the lizards in one hell of a hurry, that night. I remember pulling you through the water; but I don’t really remember how well you can swim—or even if you can really swim. Can you? Do you think you can make it across the river?”

I expected a nod or a shake of the head at the most. But to my surprise, she answered in words.

“I’m not going.”

I stared at her.

“What do you mean-you’re not going?” I exploded. “Do you think you can stay here on this side of the river, alone? Get that thought out of your mind. You’re going.”

She shook her head, looking not at me, but at the fire.

I sat, staring at her, too angry for words. Then I took hold of my anger with both hands, figuratively speaking, and tried to talk calmly.

“Look,” I said, as reasonably as I knew how. “We’ve been together for some time, you and I and Sunday. But nothing lasts forever. You must have known that sooner or later we were going to be meeting other people and joining them, or they’d be joining us....

I went on talking, calmly and persuasively, using all the arguments I had used to myself the day before, and doing, I thought, a good job of it. It was only common sense I was telling her; and I pointed this out to the girl. Aside from her youth and sex, any single person stood a much reduced chance of survival. What would she do with herself? Practical matters aside, Sunday would miss her. For that matter I would miss her, myself....

I was talking away quite earnestly, and even beginning to think that I was getting through to her, when she got up suddenly and walked away out of the circle of firelight, leaving me in mid-sentence.

I stared after her into the darkness. Something cold came in out of the night and sat down on my chest. For the first time, it occurred to me that she could actually be meaning to do what she had just said she would.

An hour after sunrise, Marie, Wendy, our equipment, supplies, dogs and all were down on the beach watching me finish off the raft. Watching and helping, as much as they could. It was Marie who brought up the subject of the girl.