Gordon R. Dickson (6 page)

The palms and the big
scraggly-limbed trees signalled that we were into a different time-changed
territory than we had been earlier. Now that I stopped to notice it, for some
time there had been a different kind of dampness to the air than that which
comes from midwestern, mid-summer humidity. The softness of the atmosphere was
more like that of a seacoast; and the few white clouds that moved overhead
seemed to hang low and opulent in the sky, the way they do in Florida, instead
of being high and distant like piled up castles, as they are in temperate zone
mid-continental skies during the warm months.

It was a hint, I thought, to be on
our guard against strange company. As far as I had been able to determine, it
was only everything below the animal level that got changed by the time storms
when they passed. I had begun to add up some evidence in what I saw to reach
the conclusion that much of what I came across was several hundred, if not
several thousand, years forward from my own original time. There was some
evidence of extensive storm damage and geological change, followed by
considered reforestation in a majority of the landscapes I moved through. There
must have been massive loss of life in most areas at the same time or another,
which accounted for the scarcity of most warm-blooded creatures, except for
birds. Certainly topography and vegetation changed when a time line passed; and
I had noticed fish in lakes that had not been lakes before the time change. But
just where on the scale of life the dividing line was drawn, I had no idea. It
would pay to be watchful. If, for example, snakes were below the dividing line,
then we might suddenly encounter poisonous varieties in latitudes or areas
where such varieties had never existed before.

I spent part of the lunch hour
trying to get the girl to talk; but she was back at being voiceless again. I
kept chattering to her, though, partly out of stubbornness and partly out of
the idea that if she had loosened up once, she could again; and the more I
tried to wear down the barrier between us, possibly, the sooner she would.

When we were done with lunch, we
buried the tin cans and the paper. The girl and I ate a lot of canned stuff,
which made meals easy; and I had fallen into the habit of feeding Sunday on
canned dog food or any other meat that could be found. He also hunted
occasionally as we went along. But he would never go very far from me to do it,
and this restricted what he could catch. We buried our trash just in case
someone or something might find the remains and take a notion to trail us. We
got back in the panel truck and headed once more down the superhighway.

But it was exactly as if stopping to
eat lunch had changed our luck. Within five miles the superhighway
disappeared—cut off by some past time storm line. It ended in a neat lip of
concrete hanging thirty feet in the air with nothing in the shape of a road
below or beyond it but sandy hills, covered with cactus and scraggly trees. I
had to backtrack two miles to find an exit ramp that led down on to a road that
appeared to keep going off at an angle as far as I could see. It was asphalt,
like most of the roads we had been travelling earlier, but it was not in as
good shape as the ones that had led us through Samuelson's small town and past
the trailer camp. It was narrower, high-crowned, and weedy along the edges. I
hesitated because, although the road angled exactly in the direction I wanted to
go, there was something about it that filled me with uneasiness. I simply did
not like the look of it. Here and there sand had blown across it, a smudge of
gold on black—but not to any depth that would slow down the panel truck. Still,
I slowed on my own and cruised at no more than thirty miles an hour, keeping my
eyes open.

The road seemed to run on without
end, which did nothing to allay that uneasiness of mine. There was something
about it that was unfamiliar—not of any recognizable time—in spite of the fact
that it looked like a backwoods road anywhere. The sandy hill-scapes following
us on either side were alien, too, as if they had been transported from a
desert somewhere and set down here. Also, it was getting hotter and the
humidity was worse.

I stopped the panel, finally, to do
a more precise job of estimating our position on the map than I could do while
driving. According to the compass I had mounted on the instrument panel on our
vehicle, the asphalt road had been running almost exactly due west; and the
outskirts of Omaha should be less than twenty miles southwest of us.

As long as we had been on the
superhighway, I had not worried; because a road like that, obviously belonging
to our original twentieth century time, had to be headed toward the nearest
large city—which had to be Omaha. Just as on the asphalt road at first I had
not worried either, because it headed so nearly in the direction I wanted to
go.

But it was stretching out now to the
point where I began to worry that it would carry me to the north and past the
city, without letting me catch sight of it. Certainly, by this time we had gone
far enough to intersect some other roads heading south and into the
metropolitan area. But we had crossed no other road. For that matter, we had
come across nothing else that indicated a city nearby, no railroad tracks, no
isolated houses, no fences, no suburban developments in the bulldozer stage of
construction.... I was uneasy.

Laying out the road map on the hood
of the car, I traced our route to the superhighway, traced the superhighway to
what I believed to be the exit by which we had come down off it, and along the
road that exit tied into—headed west. The road was there; but according to the
map, less than a dozen miles farther on, it ran through a small town called
Leeder; and we had come twenty miles without seeing as much as a road sign.

I went through the whole thing twice
more, checked the compass and traced out our route, and checked the odometer on
the panel to see how far we'd come since leaving the superhighway— and the
results came out the same. We had to be bypassing Omaha to the north.

I got back in the truck and started
travelling again, driving slowly. I told myself I'd give myself another five
miles without a crossroad before turning back. I drove them, and then another
five. But I saw no crossroad. Nothing. Only the narrow, neglected-looking strip
of asphalt which looked as if it might continue unchanged around to the Pacific
Ocean.

I stopped the panel again, got out
and walked off the road to check the surface of the ground to the south. I
walked back and forth and stamped a few times. The surface was sandy, but hard—
easily solid enough to bear the weight of the panel truck; and the vegetation
was scattered enough so that there would be no trouble driving through it. Up
until now I had been very careful not to get off the roads, for fear of a
breakdown of the truck which would strand us a distance from any hope of easily
finding another vehicle. On foot we would be at the mercy of the first moving
time storm wall that came toward us.

But we were so close now—we were
just a few miles away from getting back to normal life. I could see Swannee in
my mind's eye so clearly that she was almost like a mirage superimposed on the
semidesert landscape around us. She had to be there, waiting for me. Something
inside me- was still positive, beyond all argument, that Omaha had survived;
and that along with it Swannee had survived in the sanity of a portion of the
world as it had been before the time storm. In fact my mind had toyed a number
of times with the idea that since Omaha, like Hawaii, had survived, it might
mean there might be many other enclaves of safety; and the fact that there were
such enclaves would mean there was a way of beating the time storm, by applying
to all other places the special conditions or whatever unusual elements had
kept these enclaves protected.

In those enclaves she and I could
still lead the reasonable and normal life we could have had before the time
storm hit; and somehow I felt sure that the experience of the time storm would
have straightened her out on what had gone wrong between us before. Time would
have brought her to the realization that it was simply an old reflex on my part
that had made me act like someone literally in love with her. Also, she would
know how tough life could be outside the enclaves like the one she now lived
in—or even there, for that matter. She would have a new appreciation of what I
could do for her, in the way of taking care of her. In fact, the more I
thought, the more confident I was that by this time she would be ready to
indulge these little emotional lapses of mine. All I had to do was find her and
things would go well.

—But that was something to think
about when there was time to think about it. The big question now was—should I
take the panel cross-country, south, away from the road, to find a highway or
street that would bring me to the city?

There was really no argument about
it. I got Sunday and the girl back into the panel—they had followed me outside
and wandered after me as I stamped on the ground to make sure it would not bog
down the panel—then we got back in the truck, turned off the asphalt and headed
due south by the compass.

It was not bad driving at all. I had
to slow down to about five to ten miles an hour; and I kept the panel in second
gear, occasionally having to shift down to low on the hills, but generally
finding it easy going. It was all up and down, a roller coaster-type of going
for about nine-tenths of a mile; and then suddenly we came up over a rise and
looked down on a lakeshore.

It was just a strip of
whitish-brown, sandy beach. But the shallow, rather stagnant-looking water
beyond the beach stretched out as far as I could see and out of sight right and
left as well. Evidently the time storm had moved this whole area into the
northwest of the metropolitan area, pretty well blocking off access from that
direction. The problem for me now was—which way would be the shortest way round
the lake? Right or left?

It was a toss-up. I squinted in both
directions but for some reason, just while I had been standing there, a haze of
some sort seemed to have moved in, so that I could not see far out on the water
in any direction. Finally I chose to go to the right, because I thought I saw a
little darkness through the haze upon the sun-glare off the water and sand in
that direction. I turned the nose of the truck and we got going.

The beach was almost as good as a
paved road to drive on. It was flat and firm. Apparently, the water adjoining
it began to shelve more sharply as we went along, for it lost its stagnant,
shallow appearance and began to develop quite a respectable surf. There was an
onshore wind blowing; but it helped the heat and the humidity only a little. We
kept driving.

As I watched the miles add up on the
truck's odometer, I began gradually to regret not trying in the other
direction. Clearly, I had picked the long way around this body of water,
because looking ahead I could still see no end to it. When the small, clicking
figures of the odometer rolled up past the twelve mile mark, I braked the truck
to a halt, turned around and headed back.

As I said, the beach was good
driving. I pushed our speed up to about forty, and it was not long before we
were back at the point where we had first come across the lake. I kept pounding
along; and shortly I made out something up ahead. The dazzle of sunlight from
the water seemed to have gotten in my eyes so that I could not make out exactly
what it was—something like a handkerchief-sized island with a tree, or a large
raft with a diving tower out in the water, just a little way from the beach.
But there were the black silhouettes of two-legged figures on the sand there. I
could stop to get some directions, and we could still be pulling into Swannee's
driveway in time for dinner.

The dazzle-effect on my eyes got
worse as the panel got close to the figures; and the glitter of sunlight
through the windshield was not helping. I blinked, and blinked again. I should
have thought to pick up some dark glasses and keep them in the glove
compartment of the panel for situations like this—but I just had not expected
to run into water-glare like this. I must have been no more than thirty or
forty feet from the figures by the time I finally braked the panel to a stop
and jumped out of it on to the sand, blinking to get the windshield-glitter out
of the way between us— and I still could not see them clearly. There were at
least half a dozen of them on the beach, and I saw more out on the raft or
whatever it was.

I started toward them.

"Hey!" I said. "I'm
lost. Can you put me on the road to Omaha? I want to get to Byerly Park,
there."

The figures did not answer. I was
within a few steps of them now. I stopped, closed my eyes and shook my head violently.
Then I opened my eyes again.

For the first time I saw them
clearly. They had two legs apiece all right; but that was the only thing
people-like about them. As far as I could see, they wore no clothes; and I
could have sworn they were covered with greenish-gold scales. Heavy,
lizard-like features with unblinking dark eyes stared directly into my face.

I stared back at them. Then I turned
and looked out at the raft and beyond. All around were the beach and the
water—nothing more. And finally, finally, the truth came crashing in on me.

There was too much water. There was
no way Omaha could still exist out there beyond the waves. I had been wrong all
the time. I had been fooling myself, hugging to my mind an impossible hope, as
if it was the fixed center of the universe.