Gordon Dickson - Time Storm

The business of getting the gun was simple enough. The handguns and most of the rifles were still kept in the motorhome where I lived with the girl, Marie and little Wendy. I helped myself to a Snubnose .32 revolver the morning after I had concocted my scheme and tucked it inside my shirt into the waistband of my slacks. The shirt was loose enough so that it hid any outlines that might have shown through. Then I went about my daily business of leaving the others as soon as I had eaten breakfast and going off to sit among the rocks of the hillside about half a mile from camp.

I had been tempted to go even farther than usual from the camp —far enough so that the sound of my shot could not be heard. But, now that I had made up my mind to kill the Old Man, I was afraid of doing anything out of the ordinary that might make him suspicious. Therefore, I went to my usual place and sat down in the morning sunlight. Shortly I spotted him, squatting less than thirty yards off in a patch of shadow.

I sat where I was, ostensibly ignoring him. After a little while, I made an excuse to glance in his direction and saw that he was a good deal closer than before—perhaps half the distance. It was curious, but I had never been able to actually catch him in the process of moving. Whenever I looked, he was always seated and still, as if he had been there for several hours.

The morning wore on. He came close—but close was still not close enough. He was less than fifteen feet from me at last and would come no closer, but he was off to my left side behind me, so that I would have to turn about to face him and pull the gun at the same time—two movements that, I was sure, would startle him into leaping for protection behind one of the large boulders that were all around us.

That particular day ended with nothing happening. I sat. He sat. The only difference from the many days we had spent, together but apart, before was that for the first time, my mind was not concentrated on my inner fog, but on stealthily observing him and calculating the possibility of luring him within certain range of my weapon.

However, he did not cooperate. The next day, it was the same thing. The next day, again the same. I finally realized that he was either too wary or too diffident to approach me except from an oblique angle. I would have to resign myself to waiting until he came almost close enough to be touched, or otherwise put himself in some other completely vulnerable position.

I consoled myself with the fact that all I needed was patience. He would be bound to come close eventually, since every day he inched a little nearer. In fact, it took him nearly three weeks before he did come near enough to provide the target I wanted; and in those three weeks, something strange began to happen to me. I found myself actually enjoying the situation we were both in. I was still trapped in my own miseries like a fly in a forest of flypaper, but at the moment, I was navigating between the sticky strands under the impetus of the excitement of the hunt. I was reminded one day of a poem I had not thought of for years, or read since I was a boy, by Rudyard Kipling and called “The Ballad Of Boh Da Thon.” It was about a bandit who had been chased by an English army unit weeks on end, and it had a pair of lines that applied nicely to the Old Man and me:

And sure if pursuit in possession ends, the Boh and his trackers were best of friends....

For the first time I found myself beginning to like the Old Man, if for no other reason than that he was giving me something to want.

However, the day finally came in which—glancing out of the corners of my eyes—I felt, rather than saw, him squatting almost within the reach of one of my arms and certainly within the reach of one of his.

There was no way I could miss with the revolver or he could dodge, at this distance. But, strangely enough, now that I had him exactly where I wanted him, I was more than ever fearful of frightening him off, of missing him somehow. I was as shy as a kid on his first date. I wanted to turn and look at him; but it took all my will to do so. For a long time I could not manage to turn my head towards him at all. Then, as the sun began to climb higher in the sky, I began to swivel my head on my neck so slowly that it felt like the movement a stone statue might make over centuries. When the sun was directly over our heads, I was still not looking squarely at him, although now I was conscious of his dark shape as a sort of cloud, or presence, at the corner of my left eye.

All this time I had been sliding my hand gradually in between the two lowest buttons of my shirt. I slid it in until my cold fingers lay flat on the warm skin of my belly, and the tips of those same fingers touched the hard curve of the polished butt of the revolver.

It was now noon, lunchtime; but I was afraid of breaking the spell. So I continued to sit without going back to camp, and the Old Man continued to sit, and the sun moved on while the slow, agonizing, almost involuntary turning of my neck continued. I was like someone under a spell or curse. I began to be afraid that the day would end, and I would have not turned enough to catch his eyes with my own, to hold his attention for the seconds I would need to draw the gun and shoot him. Strangely, in this moment, I had finally lost all connection with my reason for killing him. It was simply something to which I was committed, as a tightrope walker might be committed to cross a narrow wire stretched from one cliff to another.

Then—I don’t know why—but there was an abrupt snapping of the tension. Suddenly, I was free to turn my head as swiftly as I wanted.

I turned and looked directly at him.

It was a shock. I had completely forgotten that I had never looked closely into his features before. The black-haired anthropoid face, with something of the immutable sadness of the gorilla, looked back at me. It looked back at me from as close a distance as the features of some human companion might face me across a table in a restaurant. But the Old Man’s face was all black fur, red nostrils, yellow teeth and yellower eyes—eyes as yellow as Sunday’s had been.

For a moment, those eyes froze me. They placed a new paralysis upon my soul, one that, for a moment, I did not believe I could throw off. Then, with a fierce effort, I told myself that this was not Sunday or anything like him; and I felt my hand reaching automatically for the revolver.

My fingers closed upon the butt. I pulled it loose from the pressure of the waistband of my pants—and all the time I was looking directly into his face, which did not alter its expression, but gazed steadily back at me.

It was a moment outside of time. We were caught together in a tableau, flies in amber both of us, frozen and incapable of move-merit—except for that gun-hand of mine which continued to move with a life of its own, closing about the gun butt and lifting it to clear the muzzle toward the face before me. There was something inevitable about its movements. I could have felt no more trapped by circumstances if I had been tied down in the path of a juggernaut.

In a second it would have been over—but in that second, the Old Man reached out and placed a hand on both my shirt and the hand holding the gun, arresting my movement.

The pressure of his hand was a calm, almost a gentle touch. I could feel the unexerted strength behind his fingers; but he was not gripping my hand, merely laying his own on top of it, just as, once, I might have stopped some business guest reaching for the check of a lunch to which I had just taken him. It was not the kind of touch that could have checked me from continuing to draw the gun and shoot him if I had decided to. But somehow, I was stopped.

For the first time I looked directly into—deeply into—those eyes of his.