Gordon Dickson - Time Storm

It was a strenuous time. In addition to coping with the fact that here we would have to supply our own necessities, there was evidence that the climate in this future time and area would have colder winters than we had endured, back where we had been. Possibly, much colder winters. There was a good deal of work to be done to insulate buildings and expand the capacity of their heating units, whether fireplaces or stoves.

With the move, we had lost the small river from which we had powered our electric generator. Bill had said he could get some windmill structures built in a few weeks to give us at least intermittent current; but this depended on having the hands available to do the work. More immediate was the need for firewood. Right now the only wood available was on our section of a mountain that had come forward in time with us. One hard winter would deforest this completely. It was almost an imperative that we arrange somehow to bring fuel from the forested area sixty miles to our east, or move the community to it; and we had too big a stake in fixed property here to make that move in one short summer.

The result was that everybody worked time and overtime, including me. In a way, this was something I was grateful for; because it kept my mind off the fact that no one had contacted us. Doc had by now flown as far as the east coast and for some hundreds of miles north of what had once been the Canadian border. He had seen absolutely no sign of civilization. Everywhere, there was only wilderness visible from the muskeg conifer forest of the north, through the now-distorted pattern of the Great Lakes, down to the flat country north of the former Mexican border. A cold worry had begun to nibble at me that possibly Earth at this time was completely uninhabited and forgotten; and if that was so, how in my lifetime was I ever to contact time storm fighters who were light-years—possibly hundreds to millions of light-years—away?

So I was grateful for the hard work, in one way. In another way, it kept me from coming to grips with a second worry, one that was like acid eating away deep within me. With Marie’s leaving, something in her had come out into the open that I had never suspected she felt. Now, I was aware of it in Ellen as well. Ellen was still there during the days; she was there beside me at night; but I could sense now that not all of her was there. Some part of her was being withheld from me. There was a wall between us, as there had been between Marie and myself, although I had never realized it.

I wanted to talk to her about it; but there was no time. In the morning we only had time to rise, dress, eat, and run. During the day there was no rest, no pause in which to talk. At night, there was only time for another meal, and sleep would threaten to claim us before we had finished refueling the weary, empty engines of our bodies. We fell into bed, opened our eyes—it seemed—a moment later; and another day’s cycle was already rushing us inexorably onward.

But there had to be a break sometime. It came at the end of the fifth week, when the first of Bill’s windmills began to power the generator, and a trickle of electricity came to make our lighting fixtures glow faintly against the ceilings and walls behind them. It was as good an excuse as any to give people a breather, and I declared a night and a day off.

For all the wonders of artificial light refound, there was little celebrating that first evening. All that most of us wanted to do was to sleep; and sleep we did, until late the next day. Then, in the noon sunlight, we gradually came out of our sleeping quarters to sit or move around slowly in the sun, either doing nothing at all, or turning our attention at last to something that had long gone neglected, that we now had time to check, clean, mend, or build.

It was the second of these activities that concerned me. When I woke, Ellen was already up and out of the summer palace. I got up, drank a couple of cups of black coffee and went looking for her.

I found her hanging out a wash on the upsloping hillside that lay on the opposite side of the summer palace from that which held the landing area. Coming around the corner and seeing her from a distance, I woke to the fact that she had necessarily taken over all of Marie’s household obligations in addition to her own. I had been so used to having both of them around and being selfishly immersed in my own problems, that it had never occurred to me that Ellen would now be doing double duty in addition to her outside work with the rest of the community. Nor had it ever occurred to me to help either her or Marie before. I came around a corner of the building and saw her from a little distance. I stopped, and for a moment I simply watched her, for she had not yet seen me. Then I went forward, picked up a pair of my own jeans from the basket and joined her in hanging up the rest of the wet stuff.

We worked side by side in silence.

“Look,” I said, when we were done. “Why don’t you sit down for a moment? I’ll take the basket in, bring out a card table and some chairs and fix us a lunch. You just sit still. How about it?”

She looked at me. I had never been able to read the deep thoughts behind her face, and I could not now. But I noticed again, as I had come to notice since Marie had left, how Ellen had also changed with the years in between. She was still young—what had I figured out once, that she could not be any older than Doc and was perhaps even younger? But there was nothing of a girl left about her now; not even the ghost, it seemed, of she whom I had picked up in the panel truck long since. The Ellen I looked at now was a mature woman and another person entirely.

“All right,” she said.

She sat down on the grass of the hillside, took off the scarf she had tied around her head and shook her hair out. She was wearing some old, autumn-brown slacks and a dark green shirt, open at the throat. Her neck rose in one straight column from the spread collar of the shirt, and under her dark hair, now loose about her head and shoulders, her eyes were blue-green and brilliant.

I took the basket and went into the house. I rummaged around the kitchen, trying to remember what she had shown a liking for, in the way of food. I had become a halfway decent cook in my years alone in the north woods before the time storm hit; but there was not much available here in the way of foodstuffs. We were all living off stored goods until fall, when the crops of our recent planting would hopefully be in.

I finally found a small canned ham, and with this, some canned new potatoes, and three of the highly valuable eggs from our community’s small flock of chickens, managed to make a sort of ham and potato salad, moistened with a spur-of-the-moment, homemade mayonnaise I whipped up from the yolk of one of the eggs and the corn oil we had in fair quantity. I also hunted around the palace and found a bottle of Liebfraumilch that was not overage. There was no way to cool it, lacking electricity for our refrigerator; but salad and wine, once I had the card table and chairs set up outside with a tablecloth of sorts on it, looked reasonably festive.

“That’s good,” said Ellen, about the salad, as we ate; and I warmed clear through.

“Glad to hear you say so,” I told her. “Do you realize I really don’t know that much about what you like to eat?”

“I like everything,” she said.

“That’s good. Because it’ll be a long time before we have anything like what we were used to before,” I said; and I went on about what we could expect in the way of diet that winter, even if the crops went well.

I was talking around and about, trying to get her to give me some sort of conversational lead from which I could get onto the topic I wanted to bring up. She said nothing, however, to help. Nonetheless, with the relaxation of the food and wine in me, I finally began to drift on the tide of my own words into the area I wanted.