Gordon Dickson - Time Storm

“... it shouldn’t be such a surprise, though,” he was going on to say, even as I was noting the changes in him. “Stop to think that the ones who gathered around us in the first place were survivor types. You had to be a survivor type to stay alive while the mistwalls were moving. Even if you were one of the few who were lucky enough to stay put and have no mistwalls come near you, contact with the survivor types around you afterwards either made you like them in a hurry, or buried you.”

“My point, though,” I checked and glanced around to make sure that none of the others were close enough to overhear me discussing them in this clinical fashion, “my point is that these people are a lot more than simple survivors.”

“Right,” said Bill, his brown face serious. “Look what happened, though. After the time storm, our group began to attract a particular type of people—those who had heard of us and thought they’d like to be associated with us. The ones we attracted were the ones who saw the same sort of things in us they saw in themselves. So they came—but they didn’t all stay. Those who didn’t fit went off again. The community was a sort of automatic self-filter for a common type. Then, when it came down to a question of who wanted to make the jump forward in time or not, that decision shook out the last of the chaff.”

I winced inside; though I was careful to make sure no sign of it showed on my face. He had labelled Marie with a tag I neither agreed with, nor would have wanted to hear applied to her even if I had agreed with it. At the same time, I had to admit he had laid out a good argument. I said as much.

“Time will tell, of course,” he answered. “I’ll say one thing, though.” He turned and met my eyes directly with his. “I’ve never felt happier in my life than when I realized that it was a settled thing, an unchangeable thing, that I was coming forward like this.”

“Well,” I said, a little lamely. “I’m glad.”

“I think even if Bettijean hadn’t wanted to come along, I still wouldn’t have hesitated.”

I opened my mouth to ask who Bettijean was, and then closed it again. One more thing had evidently been going on under my nose without my noticing. I would ask Ellen later.

“I’d better get back to the others,” I said.

After the celebration had begun to settle down a bit, I got up on my customary jeep-rostrum to tell them what we would be doing in the next few days. I said that we would start setting up the community again, here. Meanwhile, Doc would be flying surveys to locate other human settlements in this future world. He would, in fact, fly a spiral course out of this area; and the navigating equipment of the plane could be used to map the ground he covered, in the sense that it would store up information about it, which could later be recalled on the view screen of the control panel.

“How soon do you think we’ll find other people?” some male voice I did not recognize, somewhere toward the back of the crowd, asked.

“I can’t make any guesses,” I said. “Actually, if I was betting, I’d bet they’d find us first.”

There was a silence; and I suddenly realized they were waiting for me to expand on that.

“This is the future,” I said. “Porniarsk and I found evidence that up here they may be doing something about the time storm. If that’s the case, they have to be pretty competent technologically. I’m assuming that sooner or later, and probably sooner, the fact that we’re here will register on whatever sort of sensing equipment they’ve got. For one thing, if they’re aware of the time storm, they’re going to know that a chunk of their real estate suddenly got exchanged by the time storm forces for a chunk from the past.”

There were a lot more questions after that, some serious, some not so, covering everything from what future humans would look like to whether we should post guards—against animals, if not humans—until we learned that this was unnecessary. I turned that suggestion over to Doc, who thought it was a good idea. The session ended with Bill climbing into the jeep and making himself somewhat unpopular by saying that he wanted to start tomorrow morning getting a complete inventory of everything we had left after those leaving had taken what they wanted; and he wanted everybody to cooperate by listing their own possessions.

I broke away from the gathering before it finally ended and got together with Porniarsk in the lab. The view we had in the tank was essentially the same as the one that had been in it before our move. The difference was that now it was real rather than extrapolated; and there were minor corrections in its display because of that.

“Try it now,” I said to Porniarsk. “See if we can extrapolate forward from here, now that it’s the present.”

He worked with the equipment for perhaps twenty minutes.

“No,” he said. “It’s still hesitating over inconsistencies.”

“Then we’ve landed in the right place—or time, I mean,” I said. “To tell the truth, I’ve been a little worried. Between you and me, I half-expected the people from this time to be waiting for us when we appeared.”

“You were assuming that our activity of time forces would at once attract their attention? I would have thought so, too.”

“And that they’d have means of getting here the moment they saw it,” I said. “If they don’t, how can they be advanced enough to do anything about the time storm generally?”

“I don’t know,” said Porniarsk. “But I think there are too many unknowns here for either of us to speculate.”

“I hope you’re right.”

“About that, I believe I am. Beyond that, it’s anyone’s guess.”

“All right,” I said. “But if no one shows up within twenty-four hours, I’m going to begin to worry.”

No one did show up in the next forty-eight hours. Nor within the forty-eight hours after that, nor in the week that followed. Meanwhile, Doc was coming back from his daily mapping flights and reporting no sign of other human existence. No habitations, no movement. We were evidently at the far eastern end of a mid-continental area of plains uniformly covered by the tall grass, like central North America in the time of the buffalo; though there were none of the bison breed to be seen now.

However, both the grasslands and the hardwood forest that began about sixty miles west of where our chunk of territory had landed were aswarm with other game. Deer, elk, wolf, bear, moose... and the whole category of familiar smaller wildlife. The hardwood forest gave evidence of stretching to the east coast and had been in existence long enough to kill off most of the undergrowth beneath it, so that it had a tidily unreal look about it, like a movie set for a Robin Hood epic. Doc had landed in an open section of it and reported great-trunked oaks and elms with level, mossy ground beneath them, so that there was a cathedral look to the sunlight streaming down between the lofty limbs overhead.

I kept to myself my concern over the fact we were not being approached by the other intelligences of this future time. Our community was digging in, literally. Just as we had arrived here in daylight when we had left our former time period at night, so we had also arrived here in the spring; although it had been fall where we had left. A fair amount of planted crops had been lost behind us; and even without Bill’s urging, a number of our people were eager to get seeds in the ground in this place. There would be no stores of pre-time storm goods to plunder for additional food and supplies in the time where we were now.

So the first week became the second, and the second the third, with no sign of other intelligent life to be found on the continent around us and no futuristic visitors. Gradually we began to adjust to the fact that we might, indeed, be completely alone on this planet of the future; and the life of our own community began to take up most of our attention.