Gordon R. Dickson (7 page)

Omaha was gone. Gone completely.
Swannee was gone. Like so many other things, she had been taken away forever. I
had lost her for good, just as I had lost my mother...

The sun, which had been high
overhead, seemed to swing halfway around the sky before my eyes and turn blood
red. The water seemed to go black as ink and swirl up all around me and the
watching lizard-humans. My mind felt as if it was cracking wide open; and
everything spun about me like liquid going down a drain, sucking water and
beach and all, including me, away down into some place that was ugly and
frightening.

It was the end of the world. I had
been intending to survive anything for Swannee's sake; but all the time she had
already been gone. She and Omaha had probably been lost in the first moment
after the time storm hit. From then on, there had only been the illusion of her
in my sick mind. I had been as insane as Samuelson, after all. The crazy cat,
the idiot girl and I—we had been three loonies together. I had flattered myself
that the mistwalls were all outside me; but now I could feel them breaching the
walls of my skull, moving inside me, wiping clean and destroying everything
over which they passed. I had a faint and distant impression of hearing myself
howling like a chained dog; and of strong hands holding me. But this, too,
swiftly faded away, into a complete and utter nothingness....

7

The world was rocking gently
underneath me. No... it was not the world, it was the raft rocking.

Waking, I began to remember that
there had been moments of clarity before this. But they had been seldom. Most
of the time I had been in a world in which I had found Swannee—but a changed
Swannee—after all; and we had settled down in an Omaha untouched by the time
storm. But, slowly, that world had begun to wear thin; and more and more often
there had been moments when I was not in Omaha but here, seeing the raft and
the rest of it from my present position. Now, there was no doubt which world I
lived in.

So I was back for good. I could feel
that; along with a grim, aching hunger in my belly. For the first time I began
to wonder where the raft was going, and to worry about Sunday and the girl.

I looked around, identifying things
from the hazy periods earlier. It was a beautiful, clear day at sea, or at
whatever equivalent of a sea it was upon which we were afloat. A few inches
from my nose were saplings, tree branches or what-have-you, that had been woven
into a sort of cage about me. Beyond the cage, there was a little distance—perhaps
ten feet—of open log surface to an edge of the raft, studded with the
ever-sprouting twigs that tried to grow from the raft logs, though these had
been neatly and recently bitten off for this day. Beyond the logs was the
restlessly heaving surface of the gray-blue water, stretching away to the curve
of the horizon.

I rolled over and looked out in the
opposite direction, through another cage-side of loosely woven withes, at the
rest of the raft.

It was about a hundred or so feet in
length. At one end was a stand of—I had to call them "trees" for want
of any better name— their thick-leaved, almost furry-looking tops taking
advantage of whatever breeze was blowing to push the raft along before it.
Around their base grew the carefully cultivated stand of shoots from which my
cage, and just about everything else the lizard-people seemed to make with
their hands, had been constructed.

Behind the trees and the shoots were
a couple of other cages holding the girl and Sunday, plus a pile of shells and
stones that apparently had some value for the lizards. They looked all right.
They were both perhaps a little thinner; but they seemed lively enough; and, in
fact, the girl was looking brighter and more in charge of herself than I could
ever remember seeing her. From her cage on back, except for piles of assorted
rubble and junk—everything from sand itself to what looked like a heap of
furs—were the various members of the crew. I found myself calling them a crew
for lack of a better term. For all I knew, most of them may have been
passengers. Or perhaps they were all members of one family; there was no way of
telling.

But in any case, there were thirty
or forty of them, most simply lying on their bellies or sides, absolutely still
in the sunlight, but with dark eyes open and heads up, not as if they were
sleeping. The few on their feet were moving about aimlessly. There were only
four who seemed to have any occupation. One was an individual who was working
his way down the far side of the raft on all fours, delicately biting off the
newly sprouted twigs from the logs of the raft as he went, and three others at
the rear of the raft. These three were holding the heavy shaft of a great
steering oar, which evidently gave the raft what little directional purpose it
could have while floating before the wind.

In the very center of the raft, back
about twenty feet from my cage, was a roughly square hole in the logs, exposing
a sort of small interior swimming pool of the same water that was all around
us. For several minutes, I stared at the hole, puzzled. The sight of it
triggered off a nagging feeling in the back of my mind, as of something that
ought to be remembered, but which, annoyingly, refused to surface from the
unconscious. Something half-recalled from one or more moments of earlier
temporary return to rationality. As I watched, one of the recumbent
lizard-people got up, walked over to the pool and stepped into it. He splashed
down out of sight and stayed invisible for what must have been at least four or
five minutes before his head bobbed to the surface momentarily, and then he
disappeared again.

There were several more splashes. A
few of the others had joined him in the pool. I watched the water there for a
while, but the lizard-people stayed mainly below the surface. After about
fifteen minutes or so, one of them climbed back out and lay down on the bare
logs once more, scales wet and glistening in the sun.

From my earlier brief moments of
sanity, I remembered seeing a lot of this swimming pool activity,, but without
speculating about it. Now that my mind was back in my head for good, the old
reflex in me to gnaw away at answers I did not have went to work. The most
obvious reason for their continual plunges was to keep the outside of their
bodies reasonably damp. They had the look of a water-living race; either one
which had evolved in the sea, or whatever we were on, or humans who had
returned to an aquatic environment. If it was the latter, then it could be that
this part of the earth had been moved very far into the past or future indeed,
either far enough back to find the great Nebraska sea—that shallow ocean that
had occupied the interior of the North American continent in the Permian
period, or far enough into the future to find a time when that sea had been
geologically recreated.

A shift that far forward would have
given time for humans to devolve and make a genetic shift to the form of these
who had captured us. I studied them.

I had not really looked closely at
them before, but now that I did so, I could see clearly that there were,
indeed, two sexes aboard, and that the females had a mammalian breast
development—although this was barely perceptible.

The genitals of both sexes were all
but hidden in a heavy horizontal fold of skin descending from the lower belly
into the crotch; but what I could see of these external organs was also
mammalian, even human-like, in appearance. So it looked strongly as if a far
futureward development of this area under the time storm influence was a good
guess.

Outside of the slight bodily
differences, the sex of the individual creatures around us seemed to make
little difference in the ordinary conduct of their daily lives. I saw no signs
of sexual response between individuals—no sign even of sexual awareness.
Perhaps they had a season for such things, and this was not it.

They were clearly used to spending a
good share of their time in water; and that perhaps explained their periodic
dunkings in the raft pool. It could be that they were like dolphins who needed
to be wetted down if they were out of water for any length of time.

It seemed strange to me, though,
that they should go to the trouble of cutting a hole in the center of their
raft, rather than just dunking themselves over one of the edges, if that was
their reason for getting in the water. I was mulling this strangeness over,
when something I had been looking at suddenly registered on me as an entirely
different object from what I had taken it to be.

Everybody has had the experience of
looking right at an object and taking it for something entirely different from
what it really is —until abruptly, the mind clicks over and recognizes its true
nature. I had been staring absently at a sort of vertical plane projecting from
the water alongside the raft and perhaps half a dozen feet off from the edge,
and more or less half-wondering what usefulness it had, when the object
suddenly took on its true character, and my heart gave an unusually heavy
thump.

I had been allowing the plane's
apparent lack of motion relative to the raft to deceive me into thinking it was
a surface of wood, a part of the raft itself. Abruptly, I recognized what it
really was—I had seen enough of the same things charter-fishing on my vacations
to South America, back when I still owned Snowman, Inc. What I was watching was
a shark's fin, keeping pace with the raft. There was no mistaking that
particular shape for the fin of a sailfish, a tarpon, or any other sea denizen.
It was the dorsal of a shark-but what a shark!

If the fin was in proportion to the
body beneath it, that body must be half as long as this raft.

Now that I saw it clearly for what
it was, I could not imagine what had led me to mistake it for a plane of wood.
But now my mind had clicked over and would not click back. If monsters like
that were about in these waters, no wonder the lizard-people wanted to do their
swimming inboard.

On the other hand, it was odd...
once one or more of them were in the water, the shark should be able to get at
them as easily underneath the raft as alongside it. Unless there was some
reason it would not go under the raft after them. Or did the lizard-people
figure that by the time the shark started under the raft, they would have time
to get back out of the pool and back up on top of the logs of which it was
built? Now, that was a good theory. On the other hand, I had seen no evidence
of unusual haste in those getting out of the pool.

Was it possible that in the water
the lizard-people could out-swim the shark? That did not seem likely, although
obviously, our captors were at home in the water, and obviously, they were
built for swimming. They were thick-bodied and thick-limbed, their elbows and
knees bent slightly so that they stood in a perpetual crouch; and both their
hands and feet were webbed to near the ends of their fingers and toes. They
looked to be very powerful, physically, compared to a human, and those teeth of
theirs were almost shark-standard in themselves; although none of them were
much more than five feet tall. But in relation to a shark that size, the strength
of any one of them would not be worth considering.

I was puzzling about these things,
when a change came in the schedule. One of the lizard people approached the
cage holding the girl and opened up some sort of trapdoor in one end of it. The
girl crept out, as if she had been through this before and knew the procedure,
and, without hesitation, got up, walked to the pool, and jumped in. She stayed
there, holding onto an edge.

The same lizard who had let her out
was joined by another, and the two of them went over to the cage of Sunday, who
snarled as they approached. They paid no attention to him but lifted up his
cage easily between them—evidently I had been right about their
strength—carried it to the edge of the pool and opened its end.

Sunday, however, showed none of the
girl's willingness to leave his cage for the water. But evidently the lizards
had encountered this problem before. After a moment's wait, one of them got
down into the pool, reached up with a scaly arm, and pulled cage and Sunday
under the surface with him.

For a moment there was no sign of
leopard, cage, or lizard. Then the head of Sunday broke water in the exact
center of the pool, snorting, and swimming strongly. He swam directly to the
edge of the pool by the girl, crawled out, and sat down in the sun to lick
himself dry, looking as furious as only a wet cat can look. The lizard rose
behind him, towing an empty cage and climbed out on the other side.

The two made no immediate attempt to
recage him, and I was still watching him when a sudden squeaking sound behind
me made me turn my head to look. A door in the far end of my own cage was being
lifted. I turned around and crawled out. A lizard-man was standing facing me,
and I caught a sickish, if faint, reek of fish-smell from him before I turned
and went toward the pool. But at the edge I stopped, looking once more to my
right where the shark fin was still on patrol.

My escort picked me up and dropped
me in the water. I came up sputtering, and grabbed hold of the edge to haul
myself out. Then I saw the girl, still hanging on to a log, in the water near
me, watching. Evidently, she considered it safe enough where we were.

I turned and tried to look down
through the water; but the shadow of the trees at the front of the raft was on
it and made it too dark to see. I took a breath, stuck my head under the water
and looked about. Then I saw why the shark was nothing to worry about when you
were in the pool. The underside of the raft was a tangle of tree-growth; either
roots or saplings of the same sort I could see growing upwards from the top of
the logs.