Gordon R. Dickson (3 page)

It was clear he did not want to talk
about it. But I could guess some of what he had lost from the house. It had
been lived in by more than one adult, and several children. There were a
woman's overshoes in the front closet, toys in a box in one corner of the
living room, and three bicycles in good condition in the garage.

"What did you do for a
living?" he asked me after a moment.

"I was retired," I said.

He frowned over that, too. So I told
him about myself. The time storm had done nothing in my case to leave me with
things I did not want to talk about, except for the matter of Swannee, down in
Omaha; and somehow I was perfectly comforted and sure that she and that city
had come through the time storm changes unharmed, though I had heard no radio
broadcasts from there.

"I started investing in the
stock market when I was nineteen," I said, "before I was even out of
college. I struck it lucky." Luck, of course, had nothing to do with it;
but I had found I could not tell people that. Because the word
"stocks" was involved, it had to be luck, not hard research and
harder-headed decision-making, that had made money for me. "Then I used
what I had to take over a company that made trailers and snowmobiles; and that
did all right. I'd be there yet, but I had a heart attack."

Samuelson's eyebrows went up.

"A heart attack?" he said.
"You're pretty young for something like that."

"I was damned young," I
said. "I was twenty-four."

I discovered suddenly that I had
been wrong about not having things I did not want to talk about. I did not want
to tell him about my heart attack. He looked too much like a man who'd never
had a sick day in his life.

"Anyway," I said, "my
doctor told me to take it easy and lose weight. That was two years ago. So I
sold out, set up a trust to support me, and bought a place up in the woods of
northern Minnesota, beyond Ely—if you know that state. I got back in shape, and
I've been fine ever since; until the time storm hit three weeks ago."

"Yes," he said.

The food was ready, so I helped him
carry it into the dining room and we all ate there; even Sunday, curled up in a
corner. I had thought Samuelson might object to my bringing the leopard into
his house, but he had not.

Afterwards, we sat on his screened
porch at the front of the house, with the thick leaves of the sugar maple in
the yard screening us from the western sun. It was after six by my watch, but
now in midsummer, there was at least another three hours of light left.
Samuelson had some homemade white wine which was not bad. It was not very good
either, but the town was apparently a dry town; and of course, he had not left
it since he had first come back here and found his people gone.

"How about the girl?" he
asked me, when he first poured the wine into water glasses.

"Why not?" I said.
"We may be all dead—her included—tomorrow, if the wrong sort of time
change catches us."

So he gave her a glass. But she only
took a small sip, then put it down on the floor of the porch by her chair.
After a bit, while Samuelson and I talked, she got out of the chair itself and
sat down on the floor where she could put an arm around Sunday, who was lying
there, dozing. Outside of raising a lazy eyebrow when he felt the weight of her
arm, the leopard paid no attention. It was amazing what he would stand from
her, sometimes.

"What is it?" Samuelson
asked me, after we'd been talking for a while about how things used to be.
"I mean—where did it come from?"

He was talking about the time storm.

"I don't know," I said.
"I'll bet nobody does. But I've got a theory."

"What's that?" He was
looking at me closely in the shadow of the porch. A little evening breeze
stirred the lilac bushes into scraping their upper branches against the side of
the house.

"I think it's just what we're
calling it," I said. "A storm. Some sort of storm in space that the
whole world ran into, the same way you could be out driving in your car and run
into a thunderstorm. Only in this case, instead of wind and rain, thunder and
lightning, we get these time changes, like ripples moving across the surface of
the world, with everything getting moved either forward or back in time.
Wherever a change passes over them."

"How about here?" he
asked. "The town's just where it was before. Only the people...

He trailed off.

"How do you know?" I said.
"Maybe the area right around here was moved forward just a year, say, or
even a month. That wouldn't be enough to make any change in the buildings and
streets you could notice, but it might have been beyond the point where everybody
living here, for some reason, decided to get out."

"Why?"

"Those buzzers, as you call
them," I said. "Seeing one of them come at the town would be pretty
good reason to me to get out, if I was someone living here."

He shook his head.

"Not everybody," he said.
"Not without leaving some kind of message."

I gave up. If he did not want
reasonable explanations, there was no point in my forcing it on him.

"Tell me," he said, after
we had sat there without talking for a while, "do you think God had
something to do with it?"

So that was his hang-up. That was
why he stayed here, day after day, defending a town with no people in it. That
was why he had carefully adapted the well in the basement to the new conditions
and set up a wood stove so that he could give a regular meal at a moment's
notice to a complete family, if they should return unexpectedly, showing up at
the front door, tired and hungry. I wanted to tell him neither God nor human
had ever changed things much for me; but now that I knew what his question
meant to him, I could not do it. All at once I felt the pain in him—and I found
myself suddenly angry that someone I did not even know should be able to export
his troubles to me, like that. It was true I had lost nothing, not like him. Still....

"Who can tell?" I said,
standing up. "We'd better be going."

He stood up also, quickly. Before he
was on his feet, Sunday was on his, and that brought the girl scrambling
upright.

"You could stay here
overnight," he said.

I shook my head.

"You don't want to drive in the
dark," he went on.

"No," I said. "But
I'd like to get some miles under our belt before quitting for the day. I'm
anxious to get to my wife."

I led the leopard and the girl out
to the panel, which I had driven over and now stood in his driveway. I opened
the door on the driver's side, and the other two got in, crawling back into the
body. I waited until they were settled, then got in myself and was about to
back out, when Samuelson, who had gone in the house instead of following us to
the truck, came out again, almost shyly, with a pair of large paper grocery
sacks. He pushed them in through the open window at my left.

"Here," he said.
"There's some food you could use. I put in a bottle of the wine,
too."

"Thanks." I put the two
sacks on the empty front seat beside me. He looked past me, back into the body
of the van, where the girl and the leopard were already curled up, ready for
sleep.

"I've got everything, you
know," he said. "Everything you could want. There's nothing she could
use—clothes, or anything?"

"Sunday's the only thing she
wants," I said. "As long as she's got him, there's nothing else she
cares about."

"Well, goodby then," he
said.

"So long."

I backed out into the street and
drove off. In the sideview mirror I could see him walk into the street himself
so that he could look after us and wave. I turned a corner two blocks down and
the houses shut him from view.

He had given me a filling station
map earlier, with a route marked in pencil, that led me to the south edge of
the city and out at last on a two-lane asphalt road rising and dipping over the
land, with open, farmer's fields on either side. The fields had all been
planted that spring; and as I drove along I was surrounded by acres of corn and
wheat and peas no one would ever harvest or use. The sky-high wall of haze that
was the time change line, holding its position just outside of Samuelson's
town, now to the left and behind us, grew smaller as I drove the van away from
there.

In a car we were pretty safe,
according to what I had learned so far. These time lines were like lengths of
rod, rolling across the landscape; but as I say, I had yet to encounter any
that seemed to travel at more than thirty miles an hour. It was not hard to get
away from them as long as you could stick to a road.

I had been keeping my eyes open for
something in the way of an all-terrain vehicle, but with adequate speed.
Something like a Land Rover that could make good time on the roads but could
also cut across open country, if necessary. But so far I had not found anything.

I became aware that the engine of
the van was roaring furiously under the hood. I was belting us along the empty
asphalt road at nearly seventy miles an hour. There was no need for anything
like that. It was both safer and easier on the gas consumption to travel at
about forty or forty-five; and now and then gas was not easily available, just
when the tank ran low. It was true I had four spare five-gallon cans-full,
lashed to the luggage carrier on the van's roof. But that was for real
emergencies.

Besides, none of the three of us had
anything that urgent to run to—or away from. I throttled down to forty miles an
hour, wondering how I had let my speed creep up in the first place.

Then, of course, I realized why. I
had been letting Samuelson's feelings get to me. Why should I cry for him? He
was as crazy from the loss of his family as the girl was—or Sunday. But he had
really wanted us to stay the night, in that large house of his from which his
family had disappeared; and it would have been a kindness to him if we had
stayed. Only, I could not take the chance. Sometime in the night he might
change suddenly from the man who was desperate for company to a man who thought
that I, or all of us, had something to do with whatever it was that had taken
his people away from him.

I could not trust his momentary
sanity. Samuelson had talked for a while like a sane man; but he was still
someone sitting in a deserted town, shooting rockets full of high explosives at
out-size toys that attacked at regular intervals. No one in that position could
be completely sane. Besides, insanity was part of things, now. Sunday was the
definitive example. I could have cut the leopard's throat, and he would have
licked my hand as I was doing it. The girl was in no better mental condition.
Samuelson, like them, was caught in this cosmic joke that had overtaken the
world we knew—so he was insane too, by definition. There was no other
possibility.

Which of course, I thought,
following the idea to its logical conclusion, as I drove into the increasing
twilight, meant that I had to be insane, too. The idea was almost laughable. I
felt perfectly sane. But just as I had not trusted Samuelson, if I were him, or
anyone else looking at me from the outside as I drove across the country with a
leopard and a speechless girl for companions, I would not trust myself. I would
have been afraid that there could be a madness in me too, that would overtake
me sometime, suddenly and without warning. Of course, that was all nonsense. I
put the ridiculous thought out of my head.

5

When the red flush of the sunset
above the horizon to our right began to grow narrow and dark, and stars were
clearly visible in the clear sky to the east, I pulled the van off the road
into a comfortable spot under some cottonwood trees growing down in a little
dip between two hills and set up camp. It was so warm that I had the tent flaps
tied all the way back. I lay there looking out at the stars, seeming to move
deeper and deeper in the night sky, becoming more and more important and making
the earth under me feel more like a chip of matter lost in the universe.

But I could not sleep. That had
happened to me a lot, lately. I wanted to get up and go sit outside the tent by
myself, with my back to the trunk of one of the cottonwoods. But if I did,
Sunday would get up and come out with me; and then the girl would get up and
follow Sunday. It was a chain reaction. A tag-end of a line from my previous
two years of steady reading, during my hermitlike existence above Ely, came
back to me.
Privatum commodum publico cedit—
"private advantage
yields to public." I decided to lie there and tough it out.

What I had to tough out was the
replaying in my head of all the things that had happened. I had almost
forgotten, until now, my last summer in high school when I started teaching
myself to read Latin because I had just learned how powerfully it underlays all
our English language. Underlays and outdoes.
"How long, O Cataline,
will you abuse our patience?"
Good, but not in the same ballgame with
the thunder of old Cicero's original:
"Quo usque, Catilina, abutere
patienta nostra?"