Gordon Dickson - Time Storm

I had never blamed Swannee a bit for what had happened. It must have been as irritating to her as it would have been to me to have someone hanging on to her the way I ended up doing. The way I had decided to get married in the first place was that I had gotten tired of living in the penthouse apartment. I wanted a real house, and found one. An architecturally modern, rambling building with five bedrooms, on about twenty acres of land with its own small lake. And of course, once I had decided to have a house, I realized what I really needed was a wife to go along with it. And I looked around a bit and married Swannee. She was not as beautiful as my mother, but she was close to it. Tall, with a superb body and a sort of golden-custard colored hair, very fine, that she wore long and which floated around her shoulders like a cloud.

By education she had been headed for being a lawyer; but her instincts for work were not all that strong. In spite of the fact that she had done well academically in law school, she had never taken her bar exams and was, in fact, working as a sort of ornamental legal assistant to a firm of corporation attorneys down in St. Paul. I think she was glad to give up the pretense of going to the office every day and simply take over as my wife. She was, in fact, ideal from my standpoint. I had no illusions about her. I had buried those with the memories of my mother years before. So I had not asked her to be anymore than she was; ornamental, good in bed, and able to do the relatively easy job of managing this home of mine. I think, in fact, we had an ideal marriage—until I spoiled it.

As I said, occasionally I would become absent-minded and respond as if other people really mattered to me. Apparently I made the mistake of doing this with Swannee; because little by little she drifted off from me, began disappearing on short trips almost as my mother had done, and then one day she told me she wanted a divorce and left.

I was disappointed, but of course, not much more than that; and I decided that trying to have an ordinary, live-in wife had been a mistake in the first place. I now had all my time to devote to work, and for the next year I did just that. Right up to the moment of my first heart attack.

At twenty-four. God damn it, no one should have to have a heart attack after only twenty-four years in this world! But again there was my rat-reflex mind chewing away at that problem, too, until it broke through to a way out. I cashed in and set up a living trust to support me in style forever, if necessary; and I went up to the cabin to live and make myself healthy again.

Two years of that—and then the blackout, the squirrel, the trek south, the man with the axe... and Sunday.

I had almost shot Sunday in the first second I saw him, before I realized that he was in the same sort of trance the squirrel had been in. We ran into each other about twenty miles or so south of the Twin Cities, in an area where they had started to put together a really good modern zoo—one in which the animals wandered about almost without restriction; and the people visiting were moved through wire tunnels and cages to see the creatures in something like their natural wild, free states.

But there was no zoo left when I got there; only half-timbered country. A time-change line had moved through, taking out about three miles of highway. The ground was rough, but dry and open. I coaxed the panel truck across it in low gear, picking as level a route as I could and doing all right, until I got one rear wheel down into a hole and had to jack it up to get traction again.

I needed something firm to rest the jack base on. I walked into a little patch of woods nearby looking for a piece of fallen tree limb the right size, and literally stumbled over a leopard.

He was crouched low on the ground, head twisted a little sideways and looking up as if cringing from something large that was about to attack him. Like the squirrel, he was unmoving in that position when I walked into him—the time storm that had taken out the road and caught him as well, must have passed only minutes previously. When I stubbed my toe on his soft flank, he came out of his trance and looked at me. I jumped back and jerked up the rifle I had had the sense to carry with me.

But he stepped forward and rubbed along the side of my upper leg, purring, so much like an overgrown household pussycat that I could not have brought myself to shoot him, even if I had had the sense to do so. He was a large young male, weighing a hundred and forty pounds when I later managed to coax him onto a bathroom scale in an abandoned hardware store. He rubbed by me, turned and came back to slide up along my other side, licking at my hands where they held the rifle. And from then on, like it or not, I had Sunday.

I had puzzled about him, and the squirrel, a number of times since. The closest I had come to satisfying my search for what had made them react as they had, was that being caught by a time change jarred anything living right back to its infancy. After I first came to in the cabin—well, I had generally avoided thinking about that. For one thing I had a job to clean myself up. But I do remember that first, terrible feeling of helplessness and abandonment—like a very young child lost in a woods from which he knows he can never find his way out. If someone had turned up then to hold my hand, I might have reacted just like the squirrel or the leopard.

Then there had been our meeting—Sunday’s and mine—with the girl. That had been a different kettle of fish. For one thing, evidently she had passed the point of initial recovery from being caught in a time change; but equally evidently, the experience—or something just before the experience—had hit her a great deal more severely than my experience with the time change had done.

But about this time, the stars started to swim slowly in a circular dance, and I fell asleep.

I woke with the sun in my eyes, feeling hot and itchy all over. It was a bright cloudless day, at least a couple of hours old, since dawn; evidently the tree had shaded me from the sun’s waking me earlier.

Sunday lay curled within the open entrance to the tent; but he was all alone. The girl was gone.

My first reaction, out of that old, false, early training of mine, was to worry. Then common sense returned. It would only be a relief, as far as I was concerned, to have her gone; with her fits of withdrawal and her pestering Sunday until he, in turn, became a bother.

Damn it, I thought, let her go.

But then it occurred to me that something might have happened to her. It was open country all around us here, except for a screen of young popple, beyond which there was a small creek. I went down through the popple and looked across the creek, up over a swelling expanse of meadow lifting to a near horizon maybe three hundred yards off. There was nothing to be seen. I went down to look at the creek itself, the edges of which were muddy and marshy, and found her footprints in soft earth, going toward the water. A little further, one of her shoes was stuck in the mud and abandoned.

The creek was shallow—no more than knee deep for someone her size. I waded across, picked up the shoe, located her tracks in the mud on the far side and saw them joined by two other sets of footprints. Bare feet, larger than hers. I began to feel cold and hot inside at the same time.

I went back to the tent, strapped on the belt with the holstered revolver and took the carbine. The carbine held thirteen shells and it was semi-automatic. My first thought was of following the tracks up the hill; and then I realized that this would be more likely to alert whoever the other two people had been than if I drove. If they saw me coming in the panel, they might figure I’d given up the girl and left her. If they saw me coming on foot, particularly with Sunday, they wouldn’t have much choice but to think I was chasing her down.