Gordon R. Dickson (10 page)

Suddenly, as the shark passed, one
of the lizard figures leaped into the water upon its back... and all at once
the air was full of lizards taking to the water, I ran to the side of the raft
and looked out—and down. The shark was already at the bottom of the bay, moving
rapidly away from the raft. But the lizards were all over him, like
green-scaled dogs clinging to a bull. Their heavy jaws were tearing chunks out
of the shark's incredibly tough hide; and a filmy cloud of blood was spreading
through the underwater. Not merely shark's blood, either. I saw the huge
selachian catch a lizard in its jaws and literally divide him in half.

Then the whole struggle moved away
out of my sight, headed toward the open sea, as the shark evidently followed
its reflex to go for deeper water.

For some moments I simply stood,
staring—then the implications of the situation exploded on me. I ran to the
girl and grabbed her by the arm.

"Come on," I said.
"Come on, now's our chance! We can get ashore now, while they're all
gone."

She did not answer. She only stared
at me. I looked over at Sunday.

"Come, Sunday!"

He came. The girl came also. She did
not hang back; but on the other hand, she only let {ne pull her toward the
shoreside of the raft, which was its forward end.

"We've got to swim for the
beach!" I shouted at her. "If you can't swim, hang on to me. You
understand?"

I roared the last two words at her
as if she was deaf; but she only stared back at me. She was not hindering, but
neither was she helping. The cold thought came through me that, once more, I
was being put in a concerned situation. Why didn't I go off and leave her—her and
the leopard both, if it came to that? The important thing was that I live, not
that I save other people's lives.

But, you know, I could not. Somehow,
to go ashore by myself and leave both of them here was unthinkable. But she
would have to do something more than just stand there, not making an active
effort to get ashore. I tried to tell her this; but it was at once like talking
to someone who was deaf and someone who had given up thinking.

I was reaching the desperation
point. I was about to throw her bodily into the water when the first of the
lizards started coming back aboard the raft, and our chance to escape was past.

I gave up and turned back to watch
them climb out of the water onto the logs. Those who had been hurt were the
first to return. They crawled back up into the sunlight, one by one, and
dropped down, to lie as still as if each of them had been knocked on the head.

Lizards kept coming back over the
next half hour or so. The last dozen or so to come aboard had been very badly
bitten by the shark. Three of these later died, and the surviving lizards
simply pushed the bodies overside. The tide took them out in the late
afternoon, and in the morning they were gone. There would be plenty of
scavengers waiting for them.

The lizards did not go immediately
back to their shell-fishing when day broke the following morning. They had
evidently won their battle with the large shark—though my guess was that it had
cost them at least a dozen of their number. But they seemed exhausted by the
effort; and as the sun rose, the clear water of the bay showed itself to be
full of small sharks, not more than two or three feet long but dashing around
madly as if still excited by the gore and torn meat of the day before. Sunday,
the girl and I were still uncaged; and I began to hope that, possibly, this
would become the permanent state of affairs. If so, I appreciated it; although
of course, I could always have cut myself out of my woven cage with my
pocketknife and then freed the girl and Sunday.

I could not decide what was keeping
the smaller sharks around us. There was nothing for them to feed on that I
could see. Then that night the first storm I had ever known to ruffle that sea
blew up, a heavy, tropical rainstorm type of atmospheric explosion; and I found
out why they were still with us.

The wind began in the afternoon, and
the sky piled up with white clouds which crowded together and darkened until we
had an early twilight. Then the breeze died and the water beneath us became
viscid and heavy. The raft rocked, rubbing on the floor of the bay with its
undergrowth, swayed by a swell that came in on us from far out on the airless
water, even though we felt no wind where we were.

Then lightning and thunder began to
flicker and growl—high up in the clouds above us, but also far out, over the
open water. A new, cold breeze sprang up, blowing shoreward, strengthening as
the daylight faded; and the sound and activity of the storm grew, approaching
us and coming lower, closer toward the surface of the sea. As the last of the
sun's illumination went, leaving us in a pitch darkness, the storm broke over
us with its full power; and we clung in darkness to the now heavily pitching
and rolling raft.

I had found a place to wedge myself
among the trees of our "sail," with one arm around the girl and the
other holding on to Sunday. The girl trembled and shivered as the cold
rainwater poured down on us; but the leopard took it stoically, pressing close
to me but never moving. Around us, also wedged in among the trees, were some of
the lizards. Where the rest of them were, I had no idea. It was impossible to
see someone in the total darkness unless they were right beside you. In the
total darkness, vision came only in brief glimpses, every few seconds or so,
when there would be a crack of thunder and a vivid lightning flash that lit up
the whole surface of the raft, streaming with the rain and plunging like a
tethered horse as the black waves all around us tried to drive us up on the
beach, and the raft's undergrowth, grounded on the sand below, resisted.

The lightning flashes were like
explosions in the mind. After the sudden brilliance of each was gone, the scene
it revealed would linger for a second on the retina and in the mind before
fading out. I got wild glimpses of the struggling raft—and wilder glimpses of
the waters of the bay, not merely their surface but their depths, as sometimes
the raft heeled over to hold us in a position staring almost directly down into
the heaving sea.

The water was alive with marine life
of all kinds, visible in the lightning flashes, dashing about in a frenzy. I
had wondered what had brought all the small sharks into the bay after the fight
with the big shark was over. Now I suddenly saw why. Like a great waterlogged
mass bumping and rolling along the very floor of the bay, impelled by the storm
and by the fly-like swarm of smaller fish tearing at its carcass, the huge
shark, now dead, was with us again.

It could not have died at the time
the lizards abandoned their fight with it, or its skeleton would have been
stripped clean long before this. It must have survived, weakly fighting off the
smaller members of its own species who were ready to devour it while it still
lived, until just a few hours past, when loss of blood and strength had finally
let it down into death.

Now, like a dead man returned to the
scene of the crime, it was back with us, courtesy of the storm and the onshore
wind. A freak of that wind and storm was bringing it back, not merely into the
bay, but right up against the roots of our raft itself. Clinging to the
tree-trunks on either side of me, looking down into the water with each flash
of lightning, I was less than fifty feet or so in a straight line from where
what was left of the carcass was being torn apart—now, by larger sharks and
other fish up to fifteen or twenty feet long, still small compared to the sea
corpse, but big enough from my point of view. I fretted over their presence.
Even if another chance to escape should come, with all the lizards off the
raft, we could not hope to make the swim ashore in safety, through those
swarming shark jaws.

Then, suddenly, there was a
lightning flash and the underwater scavengers were all gone. The half-eaten
body of the large shark lay rolling to the sea-disturbance and the tearing it
had just been getting by its devourers, but now it was alone on the floor of
the bay. I blinked and waited for the next flash. I could not believe what I
saw.

With the next flash came
enlightenment; and with it, an end to shark carcass, raft, lizards, and everything.
The next glare showed the shark overshadowed by a shape twice its size—a dark
body, like an underwater cloud. And it also showed, out of the water and white
against the black of the waves, a gray-white tentacle as thick as a cable used
to tie up a superliner. The tentacle was out of the water. It stood erect in
the air, like a telephone pole, twenty feet above the deck at the far end of
the raft. A moment later the raft shuddered, as if to the blow of an
unthinkably huge axe, and the end where we were began to rise in the air.

Another flash of lightning showed
the great tentacle now gripping the whole far end of the raft and pulling it
over, down into the waves.

There was no more time for waiting,
nor any time to talk the two of them into coming with me. I yelled in Sunday's
ear to come, pulled the girl after me, and jumped for the water. Its choking
wetness closed over my head; but I came up still holding on to the girl, and
taking a sight on the beach with the next flash, began to swim ashore.

I do not remember how I made it. It
seemed I swam forever holding up the girl. But eventually the wet blackness
that enclosed us threw us forward into a blackness that had no substance, and a
split second later we slammed against hard, level sand. Even with most of the
breath knocked out of me, I had the sense to crawl as much farther up the beach
as I could, dragging the girl. Then I collapsed. I let myself drop on the
beach, one hand still holding an arm of the girl. The damp, grainy surface
beneath me went soft as a mattress and I fell into sudden, deep sleep.

I woke to daylight and warming air.
The girl was only a few feet away. So was Sunday.

In the bay there was no sign of any
raft, or anything, for that matter. We were as alone as if we had been lost in
the desert for weeks. I lay there, slowly letting our new situation become real
to me.

We were free again, but without
food, weapons, or transportation. In addition, I felt as if I had been drawn
through a whole series of knotholes, one after another. By contrast, the girl
and Sunday looked as rested and cheerful as if the storm and all the rest of it
had never happened. Well, their reactions were nothing to be surprised at, I
told myself, grumpily. I was twice the age of the girl or nearly so and
probably five times the age of Sunday. It didn't matter. By God, the three of
us had made it!

The minute I tried to sit up, they
noticed me. In a second they were all over me. Sunday gave one large leap to
land beside me and started to rub himself up against my chest, knocking me
flat. The girl reached me a split-second later and picked me up.

"Stop that," she scolded
Sunday, out loud, in actual and unexpected words. I was sitting up again now,
but her arms were still around me, her head against my chest; and I got the
strange impression that she was hugging me. This sort of response by the two of
them made me feel absurdly warm inside; but when I tried to pat the girl on the
head, she broke away at once, scrambling to her feet, turning her back and
walking off a few steps. Sunday, purring loudly, was doing his best to knock me
down again; but I was braced for him.

I leaned heavily on his back with
one arm and pulled myself creakily to my feet. Seen from the shore, the place
we had ended up had much less of the California look than the beach where we
had first run into the lizards. Back from the stretch of open sand were some
kind of pine-needle trees with a northerly look and a tree like a willow, with
fairly thick-standing grass in the open spaces.

I patted Sunday on the head and
spoke to the girl's back.

"We'd better look around,"
I said, hoarsely.

I led the way and the other two
followed. Behind the immediate fringe of trees there was a small bluff. We went
up to the top of that and looked out at what seemed to be a stretch of midcontinental
prairie spottily overgrown with clumps of trees. There were not quite enough
trees to call it a forest and an almost total lack of undergrowth. In the open
patches it was mainly high grass, green and brown, with just an occasional,
scattered, lone sapling or bush.

Nowhere in sight was there any sign
of civilization.

I stood on the top of the bluff and
did some pondering. I did not like the semi-arid look of the country before me.
We were on foot now, and we could survive without food for a few days, if
necessary; but what I was looking at did not have the appearance of being
either lake or river country, and drinking water was a constant need. Add to
that the fact that we were now completely unarmed except for my pocketknife;
and it might not be just wild animals we would have to worry about encountering
out there.

In the end, I decided against
leaving the only drinking water in view, which was the lake. We went east along
the beach, the route in which the lizard raft had been headed anyway, for three
days, living off shellfish and whatever small creatures we could find in the
sand or shallow water just offshore. Our diet of small things from the
underside of the raft had done my sensibilities a world of good in that area of
diet. I could now eat anything that didn't look as if it would poison me—and
eat it raw at that. The girl was equally open-minded, I noticed; and as for
Sunday, he had never had a problem about the looks of his food to begin with.