Gordon Dickson - Time Storm

It was Sunday—I almost said, “of course”—who brought me back. Apparently, he had been sticking to me like a paid attendant all through this three week period. I would guess he had sensed enough of the fact that a major part of my mind was missing, to make him worried. Most of the time I must have paid him no attention. But during my brief flashes of awareness of those about me, I remember being annoyed by the fact that I was literally tripping over him every time I turned around.

In this instance, I was momentarily partway back in my full senses, and I had deliberately left the others, gone off out of sight and sound of the others to find a place where I could sit on a rock and be alone for a bit. Sunday had followed me; and he pushed himself on me, after I was seated, almost crawling into my lap. I shouted at him to go away; and in exasperation, when he paid no attention, I cuffed at him with my open hand.

It was not a hard blow. I had never hit Sunday hard; but sometimes, swinging at him was the only way to get across the idea that I was serious about what I wanted. Still, as I struck at him, that little part of my mind that was back, apart from the pattern, was beginning to feel a twinge of guilt for hitting him. Only, abruptly, that guilt was lost in a much deeper feeling of shock, and suddenly, I was stone-cold sober, free of the web-pattern for the first time in three weeks.

Because I missed him. My hand swung through nothing but empty air, and I almost fell off the stone.

Sunday had dodged—and that was all wrong. I don’t mean wrong, physically, of course. Naturally, his cat reflexes made my human ones look silly. If he had wished, at any time in all the while we had been together, he could have seen to it that no finger of mine ever came close to him. But he never had. He had never dodged before. It was one of the effects of the time storm upon him. When I would lose my temper and slap him, he only closed his eyes, flattened his ears, and crouched down like a kitten before an annoyed mama leopard.

But this time, he had dodged. And he sat now, just out of arms’ length, gazing at me with an expression that, for the first time in our months of being together, I could not read.

“Sunday?” I said wonderingly.

He came to me then, with a bound, pushing against me, licking at my hands and face and purring like a motorboat. Just as he evidently had known I was gone, now he knew I was back. Indeed, indeed I was back—and it was wonderful from my point of view as well. I hugged the old son of a bitch and came close to crying over him, in return.

It was at this moment that a shadow fell across us both; and I looked up to see the girl. Where she had come from—whether she had been standing off at a distance, watching Sunday and me—I don’t know. But there she was; and the look on her face was like the look now on Sunday’s. I almost reached out my arms to her also, as naturally and instinctively as I was hugging and punching Sunday; but just as I was about to do so, the back of my mind said, “Hold it! What’re you doing? She’s no crazy leopard!” And I hesitated.

It was only a second’s hesitation, but apparently it was enough. The look went out of her face, and the next thing I knew, she was gone. For a wild moment I thought of going after her; then I told myself there was no point in it until she got over whatever had made her leave.

Her going like that had left me with an empty place inside me and just above my belt buckle, though. I sat where I was, fondling Sunday until I felt normal again, then got to my feet; and the two of us headed back toward the others, who were at a noon camp just over a rise to our left. I joined them; and nobody seemed to notice anything different about me.

However, beginning at once, and through the three days that followed, I quickly began to discover differences in them. It dawned on me that those in my inner circle of people had been as aware of my abnormal mental state as had Sunday and the girl and had gone on pretending to everybody else that I was perfectly normal, for reasons of their own.

The reason in Marie’s case was obvious. As the consort of the leader of our little band, she had a self-interest in seeing that I was not deposed for reasons of mental incompetence. Tek, apparently, liked the position of follower for some strong reason of his own. I got the impression that he was waiting for something, and the time was not yet ripe for whatever it was. Bill volunteered his reason.

“Thank God you’re all right again,” he said to me, the first time we were off together out of earshot of the others, on an advance patrol in the pickup. “If you’d gone on that way, with your mind a thousand miles off most of the time, for another week, this outfit would have fallen apart.”

“Oh, I don’t think so,” I said. “Tek and Marie would probably have worked out some kind of agreement to keep the tribe together.”

He looked at me, I thought, a little oddly.

“Even if they had,” he said, “that’d be as bad as falling apart. We’re not out here just to survive. We’re out here to find out what makes the temporal discontinuities operate. With you not in charge, any hope of that’d be lost.”

“Not necessarily,” I said.

“Necessarily: I can’t control them, and you’re the only other intelligent person here.” He was serious.

“Don’t underestimate Tek,” I said.

“He’s smart,” said Bill grimly. “He’s not intelligent. He can’t appreciate the value of going after knowledge for its own sake. If he ever tries to take over from you, I’ll kill him. I told him so.”

I stared at Bill. Evidently, he meant what he had said.

“There’s no danger,” I said. “Anyway, you’d better wait until I call for help, before you go thinking of killing anyone. We don’t want anybody shot by mistake.”

“All right,” said Bill. Exactly as if he was agreeing not to pass the salt at breakfast until I asked for it.

“Good,” I said. “Now everything’s just the way it has been. Let’s forget it.”

Only it wasn’t—just the way it had been, I mean. For one thing, Marie had gone away from me in a manner that’s hard to describe. She acted no differently than she ever had, but it was almost as if she had given up hope that there could be anything more than an alliance of convenience between us. Put that way, it doesn’t sound like anything too important. But it left me feeling guilty in spite of the fact that I was fully convinced that I owed her nothing; and, in addition, I was helpless to do anything to mend the situation.

Tek had also changed. He was as much at my orders as ever, but I found him taking charge of the other men whenever there was a vacuum of command, quite as if I had appointed him my lieutenant. And finally, there was the girl....

For one thing, she had evidently acquired a name while my mind was off on the web. It sounded like “Elly” when the others used it; but Marie, when I asked her, told me that it was actually Ellen and that Tek had given it to the girl. Well, at least, that made more sense. It was unlikely she had suddenly remembered her name, when she had gone this long time without remembering anything else. But when I asked Tek what made him think he could name her, he denied he had.

“I had to call her something,” he said. “I asked her what she wanted for a name, and that’s the one she picked for herself.”

Ellen was a pretty enough name in its own way; I wondered where she had gotten it. But “Elly,” or however they might have spelled its contraction, was ugly, I thought. I could not bring myself to use it. As far as I was concerned she was still “the girl”; but I was plainly a minority of one in that.

Tek was paying a good deal of attention to her, and she was spending most of her time in his company. For no particular reason, I found I didn’t approve of that either. She had developed more than I had noticed—I now noticed—since those first days when the only things that looked human on her were a shirt and jeans. She wore dresses now that, possibly with Marie’s help, had been altered to fit her; and her hair was always clean, tied in a ponytail at the back of her head. She was even starting to develop a few curves.