Gordon R. Dickson (5 page)

I had puzzled about him, and the
squirrel, a number of times since. The closest I had come to satisfying my
search for what had made them react as they had, was that being caught by a
time change jarred anything living right back to its infancy. After I first
came to in the cabin—well, I had generally avoided thinking about that. For one
thing I had a job to clean myself up. But I do remember that first, terrible
feeling of helplessness and abandonment—like a very young child lost in a woods
from which he knows he can never find his way out. If someone had turned up
then to hold my hand, I might have reacted just like the squirrel or the
leopard.

Then there had been our
meeting—Sunday's and mine—with the girl. That had been a different kettle of
fish. For one thing, evidently she had passed the point of initial recovery
from being caught in a time change; but equally evidently, the experience—or
something just before the experience—had hit her a great deal more severely
than my experience with the time change had done.

But about this time, the stars
started to swim slowly in a circular dance, and I fell asleep.

I woke with the sun in my eyes,
feeling hot and itchy all over. It was a bright cloudless day, at least a
couple of hours old, since dawn; evidently the tree had shaded me from the
sun's waking me earlier.

Sunday lay curled within the open
entrance to the tent; but he was all alone. The girl was gone.

6

My first reaction, out of that old,
false, early training of mine, was to worry. Then common sense returned. It
would only be a relief, as far as I was concerned, to have her gone; with her
fits of withdrawal and her pestering Sunday until he, in turn, became a bother.

Damn it,
I thought,
let her go.

But then it occurred to me that
something might have happened to her. It was open country all around us here,
except for a screen of young popple, beyond which there was a small creek. I
went down through the popple and looked across the creek, up over a swelling
expanse of meadow lifting to a near horizon maybe three hundred yards off.
There was nothing to be seen. I went down to look at the creek itself, the
edges of which were muddy and marshy, and found her footprints in soft earth,
going toward the water. A little further, one of her shoes was stuck in the mud
and abandoned.

The creek was shallow—no more than
knee deep for someone her size. I waded across, picked up the shoe, located her
tracks in the mud on the far side and saw them joined by two other sets of
footprints. Bare feet, larger than hers. I began to feel cold and hot inside at
the same time.

I went back to the tent, strapped on
the belt with the holstered revolver and took the carbine. The carbine held
thirteen shells and it was semi-automatic. My first thought was of following
the tracks up the hill; and then I realized that this would be more likely to
alert whoever the other two people had been than if I drove. If they saw me
coming in the panel, they might figure I'd given up the girl and left her. If
they saw me coming on foot, particularly with Sunday, they wouldn't have much
choice but to think I was chasing her down.

I packed the gear. It would be hard
to replace, maybe; and there was no guarantee we'd be coming back this way
again. Then I got into the panel, letting Sunday up on the seat beside me for
once, but making him lie down out of sight from outside. I pulled out on the
highway and headed up the road parallel to the way I had last seen the
footprints going.

We did not have far to go. Just up
and over the rise that belonged to the meadow across the creek, I saw a trailer
camp with some sort of large building up in front of all the trailers. No one
had cut the grass in the camp for a long time, but there were figures moving
about the trailers. I drove up to the building in front. There were a couple of
dusty gas pumps there, and a cheer-fy-grinning, skinny, little old man in
coveralls too big for him came out of the building as I stopped.

"Hi," he said, coming up
within about four feet of Sunday's side of the car and squinting across through
the open window at me. "Want some gas?"

"No thanks," I said.
"I'm looking for a girl. A girl about fourteen, fifteen years old with
dark hair and doesn't talk. Have you seen—"

"Nope!" he chirped.
"Want some gas?"

Gas was something you had to
scrounge for these days. I was suddenly very interested in him.

"Yes," I said. "I
think I'll have some gas. And..."

I let my voice trail off into
silence. He came closer, cocking his left ear at me.

"What'd y'say?" He stuck
his head in the window and came face to face with Sunday, only inches between
them. He stopped, perfectly still.

"That's right," I said.
"Don't move or make a sound, now. And don't try to run. The leopard can
catch you before you can take three steps." He didn't know that Sunday
would never have understood in a million years any command I might have given
to chase someone.

I jerked my thumb at the back of the
panel. Sunday understood that. He turned and leaped into the back, out of the
right hand seat in one flowing movement. The old man's eyes followed him. I
slid over into the right hand seat.

"Now," I said, "turn
around. Give me room to open the door."

He did. I opened the door on that
side of the panel a crack. The baggy coverall on his back was only inches away.
Vertically in the center of the back, about belt level, was a tear or cut about
eight inches long. I reached in through it and closed my hand on pretty much
what I expected. A handgun—a five-chamber .22 revolver-stuck in a belt around
his waist under the coveralls.

"All right," I said,
picking up the carbine and getting out of the panel behind him. "Walk
straight ahead of me. Act ordinary and don't try to run. The leopard will be
with me; and if I don't get you, he will. Now, where's the girl? Keep your
voice down when you answer."

"Bub-bu-bu—," the old man
stammered. Sounds, nothing understandable. Plainly, as his repeated offer of
gas had shown, whoever lived in this camp had chosen one of their less bright
citizens to stand out front and make the place look harmless.

"Come on, Sunday," I said.

The leopard came. We followed the
old man across the drive, past the pumps. The large building looked not only
closed, but abandoned. Darkness was behind its windows, and spider webs hung
over the cracked white paint of its door frame. I poked the old man with the
carbine muzzle, directing him around the right end of the building and back
into the camp. I was expecting to be jumped or fired at, at any second. But
nothing happened. When I got around the end of the building, I saw why. They
were all at the party.

God knows, they might have been
normal people once. But what I saw now were somewhere between starving savages
and starving animals. They were mostly late adolescents, rib-skinny every one
of them, male and female alike barefoot below the ragged cuff-edges of the
jeans they wore and naked above the waistband. Every one of them, as well, was
striped and marked with black paint on face and body. They were gathered, maybe
thirty or forty of them, in an open space before the rows of trailers began. It
might have been a stretch of show lawn, or a volleyball court, once. At the end
of it, tied to a sort of X of planks set upright and surrounded by burnable
trash, paper and bits of wood, was the girl.

Whether she had come there
willingly, I do not know. It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that she
had finally despaired of ever having Sunday love her; and when she met those
two other pairs of feet by the creek, she had gone off of her own free will
with them. But she was terrified now. Her eyes were enormous, and her mouth was
stretched wide in a scream that she could not bring forth.

I poked the old man with the gun
muzzle and walked in among them. I saw no weapons; but it stood to reason they
must have something more than the revolver that had been hidden on the old man.
The back of my neck prickled; but on the spur of the moment the best thing I
could think of was to put a bold front on it, and maybe we could just all walk
out of here—the girl, Sunday and I—with no trouble.

They said not a word, they did not
move as I walked through them. And then, when I was less than a dozen feet from
the girl, she finally got that scream out of her.

"Look out!"

For a part of a second I was so
stunned to hear her utter something understandable that I only stared. Then it
registered on me that she was looking over my shoulder at something behind me.
I spun around, dropping on one knee instinctively and bringing up the carbine
to my shoulder.

There were two of them, lying on the
roof of the house with either rifles or shotguns—I had no time to decide which.
They were just like the others, except for their firearms. The girl's shriek must
have startled them as much as it had me, because they were simply lying there,
staring down at me with their weapons forgotten.

But it was not them I had to worry
about, anyway, because—I have no idea from where—the crowd I had just passed
had since produced bows and arrows; perhaps a bow for every five or six of
them, so that half a dozen of them were already fitting arrows to their strings
as I turned. I started firing.

I shot the two on the roof first,
without thinking—which was pure foolishness, the reflex of a man brought up to
think of firearms as deadly, but of arrows as playthings—because the two on the
roof did not even have their guns aimed, and by the time I'd fired at them a
couple of arrows had already whistled by me. They were target arrows, lacking
barbed hunting heads, but nonetheless deadly for that. The rest of the ones
being aimed would certainly not all have missed me—if it had not been for
Sunday.

There was nothing of the
Lassie-dog-to-the-rescue about Sunday. The situation was entirely beyond his
understanding; and if the two on the roof or the bow-wielders had shot me
quickly and quietly enough; probably he would merely have sniffed sadly at me
as I lay on the ground and wondered why I had stopped moving. But the girl had
screamed—and I must suddenly have reeked of the body chemicals released by fear
and fury—so Sunday operated by instinct.

If I was frightened, he was
frightened, too. And in wild animals, as in man himself once he is broken down
to it, fear and fury are the same thing. Sunday attacked the only fear-making
cause in view—the group of archers and their friends before us; and they found
themselves suddenly facing a wild, snarling, pinwheel-of-knives that was a
hundred and forty pound member of the cat family gone berserk.

They ran from him. Of course they
ran. All but three or four that were too badly clawed or bitten to get away. I
had plenty of time and freedom to get the girl untied from the planks and start
to lead her out of the clearing. By that time Sunday was off in one corner of
the open space, daintily toying, with one hooked claw, at a bleeding, moaning
figure that was trying to crawl away from him. It was a little sickening; but
so was what they had planned for the girl. I called the leopard. He came—if
reluctantly—and followed us back to the truck. We got out of there.

Half a mile down the highway I had
to pull over to the shoulder and stop the car, again. Sunday was still prickly
from the adrenaline of the battle. He wanted to lie in the back of the panel
all alone and lick his fur. The girl, rebuffed by him, was suddenly sick. I
helped her out of the car and held her head until it was over. Then I got her
back into the front seat of the car, curled up there with a blanket over her.

"They were going to EAT
me," she whispered, when I covered her up.

It was the second time she had
spoken, and all in one day. I looked at her, but her eyes were squeezed shut. I
could not tell if she had been talking to me, or only to herself. I got the
panel moving again and let her sleep. That evening when we camped, I tried
talking to her myself. But she had gone back to being dumb. She would neither
speak nor look at me. Foolishly, I even found myself feeling disappointed —even
a little hurt at that. But of course that was just the wrong-headed early
training at work in me again. I had been feeling good over the fact that she
was coming out of her mental prison—as if that really mattered, one way or
another.

The next day we headed south by west
again. It was a bright, hot day, and I was feeling good. We had gotten off the
asphalt on to a stretch of superhighway, and there was no one to be seen—not
even anything on the road as inconsequential as an abandoned car. We were
making good time; and Samuelson had helped me to fix myself on the map. We were
close enough to the location of Omaha that, barring unforeseen delays along the
road, we would reach it by sunset. When noon came, I picked a ramp and pulled
off the freeway—just to be on the safe side in case someone unfriendly should
be cruising it about the time we were having lunch —and found a patch of shade
under some large, scraggly-limbed trees I could not identify.

We had hardly glimpsed the mistwall
of a time change all morning—and the few we had seen had been far off, so far
off that in the bright daylight it was impossible to tell whether they were
standing still or moving. But obviously one had passed by where we were some
time, since the storms started. About four hundred yards from the exit ramp of
the highway the cross road ended abruptly in a clump of tall mop-headed palms,
the kind you find lining the street boulevards in Los Angeles.