Gordon R. Dickson (9 page)

The prospect of coming to land again
before too long meant we ought to at least get a chance to escape. I cheered up
at the thought and, with immediate anxieties out of the way, remembered the
rest of what was still heavy in my mind.

The insane belief I had had in the
survival of Swannee was, of course, still with me, like the mistwall of a time
change line in the back of my thought.

But the rest of my brain recognized
it for the illusion it was. Evidently, while I had been out of my head, what
was left had been coming to terms with this matter. I was now ready to admit
that there had been something more than a lingering knee-jerk reflex of the
affection response operating in me. The plain truth of the matter was that I
had flipped over Swannee. Not only had I flipped, but I had done it after I
married her, not before; and the thing that had driven her off was the fact
that I had tried to change the rules of the game after the game was started. I
had let myself go with the idea that I loved Swannee; and made up in my mind a
completely imaginary image of her as someone who was lovable. Of course she
wasn't. She was an ordinary self-seeking human being like all the rest of us,
and when she acted like one and took off to escape my trying to make her into
something she was not, I literally set out to work myself to death, and almost succeeded
with the heart attack.

I suppose, in a way, I had never
really let go of Swannee—even then. So that when the time storm hit, the one
thing I could not accept was that it could have touched her in any way.

But I now had met, and survived, the
fact of her death. The madness, of course, was still back there in the recesses
of my mind, and still virulent; but it was dying, and time would kill it off
entirely. Just as time had healed my first sense of loss when she had gotten
married. Now that it was dying, locked in my wooden cage most of the time and
going nowhere, I had plenty of leisure to begin looking more sanely at the
world around me. Out of that look came a couple of recognitions I had been
refusing to make earlier. One was that we would have to work hard to survive on
this raft. Sunday and the girl were not only thin, as I had noticed, but
getting thinner. Sunday himself required the equivalent of four pounds of meat
a day to keep him alive. I needed about two thousand calories, or nearly half that
amount; and the girl, because she was not yet at her full growth, probably the
same. We two, of course, could make use of carbohydrates—like the bananas—as
well, as long as those lasted. But getting Sunday the equivalent of four pounds
of protein daily through the cracks between the logs of the raft was
impossible; even with both the girl and I doing our best—which we did as soon
as I realized what the situation was. The lizard-people showed no interest at
all in providing food for us. We would need to reach land soon if we wanted to
live.

The second recognition was that only
a few people, relatively, had escaped the time change. A few people and a few
animals. Apparently the changes had been like great rakes that swept away most
of the population, but here and there let an individual like me, the girl, or
Sunday, slip through their tines. Either that, or some of us simply were
natural survivors—statistical immunes.

Whether the greater number of the
population of my time had been carried off to some other continuum, or
destroyed by the suddenly changed conditions, there was no telling. But one
fact was becoming more apparent day by day—there was no reasonable hope of
their ever coming back.
The moving finger writes...

I, and the girl, and Sunday, along
with a relative handful of others, possibly including these lizard-people, were
stuck with making what we could out of the world as it now was. What we had at
the present, of course, was chaos, with the time lines still moving and
different times coming into existence behind each of them. But maybe if I was
right about some of us being statistical immunes, we would learn eventually to
live with the lines, passing from zone to zone and becoming a new civilization
which took constant time changes for granted.

Unless, that is, there was some way
of bringing the time changes to a halt....

Now, that was a new thought. It
exploded in me silently, one night as I lay there on my back, looking up
through the bars of my cage at the unfamiliar star-patterns, while the raft
rocked gently under me. I lay there, turning it over and over in my head,
examining it. That relentless part of my mind had fastened on the idea the
second it emerged, like the jaws of a boa constrictor on part of a prey the
snake intended to swallow, and now I knew I could never let it go, until I had
succeeded with it, or proved its impossibility.

8

Ten mornings later we saw land, and
by noon it was obvious we would reach it the same day. I was ready to blow
kisses at it from the first second it had appeared like a dark smudge on the
horizon. Try as the girl and I might, we could not keep the three of us
properly fed with the small underraft waterlife; and I had lived with a
sharp-toothed fear that we would have grown too weak to try escaping by the time
our chance for it came. Our goal was a curving bay with a wide beach shelving
gently down to it, some hills hazy in the background, and one or two large
rocks or small rocky islands just beyond the mouth of the bay.

Shortly after noon the lizards lined
up along the side of the raft facing the shark fin and began to roll up the
vegetable-like leaves I had seen and throw these small green balls at the
shark. Where the balls of vegetable matter touched the water, a milky stain
spread immediately and was still spreading, like the blossoming of some
underwater flower, as the motion of the raft left the spot behind us. As the
lizards continued to pelt the water around the fin with the balls of green
stuff, a milky rime gradually gathered around the base of the fin itself.

Suddenly the fin moved, changed
angle in the water and moved off rapidly until it was lost from sight. Looking
back along the wake of the raft, I saw the shapes of small fish come to the
surface belly-up through the whitened water where the green stuff had fallen.

So we half-drifted, half-steered at
last into the bay without our overside companion. In the bay the water was as
calm as a lake on a still day, and startlingly clear. I could look down at a
sandy, plant-and-shell strewn bottom, finally, that must have been fifty feet
below, although it looked much shallower.

I was able to estimate its true
depth because the full extent of the growth on the underside of the raft was
now visible; and it stretched down almost as far, if not as far, as the trees
that were our "sail" stretched up from the deck of the raft. A good
two hundred yards or more from the beach we grounded, the lowest extensions of
the growth under our raft touching against the bottom of the bay and stopping
us from going further inshore.

The lizards immediately began diving
for what seemed to be some sort of large shellfish. The shells were a good foot
in length, and when I picked up one of the first that was brought on board, I
was startled by the heaviness of it. The whole thing must have weighed twenty
pounds.

In the sun and the air, the shells
soon opened of their own accord; and the lizards scooped the interior creatures
out and swallowed them more or less whole.

So did the girl, Sunday and myself.
They were delicious; and we would have stuffed ourselves if I had not stopped,
and made the girl stop feeding herself as well as Sunday, for fear of
intestinal upset in all of us after such a period of semi-starvation.

But beyond a few mild stomach cramps
an hour or so later, I had no bad effects, and the girl and Sunday did not even
seem to have that. So, I left them to eat or not as they wished; and during the
next few days, we ate our persistent hunger out of existence through steady
snacking on the shellfish.

We were free to do this around the
clock, because Sunday, the girl and I had been let out of our cages some time
before we came to anchor, so to speak; and since then, none of the lizards had
bothered to put us back in. As my hunger diminished, I began to think less of
that and more about escaping. I could stand on the edge of the raft and look at
the sand of the beach. Only a couple of hundred yards away, as I said; but it
might as well have been a couple of hundred miles away. There was no way to get
ashore except to swim there. And even if the girl could, and Sunday would make
it through the water with me, any one of the amphibious-looking lizard-people
could probably let us get nine-tenths of the way to the beach and still reach
us in time to bring us back before we could wade ashore. They shot through the
clear underwater like green rockets. But there had to be a way. It was bad
enough to have to figure out a way of escaping by myself. The headache would
come in bringing the girl and Sunday safely with me. But I could not leave them
behind. Neither one was able to survive alone. It had to be the three of us,
together.

I was standing looking down into the
water at them, even envying them in a way, when something like a swiftly-moving
dark shadow suddenly intruded on the scene; and all at once lizards were
literally leaping out of the water back on to the surface of the raft. All but
one. Down in the transparent depths, that one was being swallowed. Either our
original shark, or one just like it, had joined us; and once more we had a
deadly companion alongside.

The lizards stood on the deck and
stared down at the shark. I did not blame them. In the beautifully clear water
the huge sea predator loomed like a nuclear submarine. It was patrolling the
water about the raft now, in short runs and turns back and forth, as if
impatient for another victim.

I looked at the still-large pile of
green vegetation on the raft. But none of the lizards made a move toward it,
and after a second I realized why. Clearly the stuff, in water, was a potent
poison. They could safely throw it overside when they were moving before a
breeze, away from the place where the poison would linger. But here in this
bay, once the water was poisoned, they would not be able to return soon to
their diving for shellfish.

I waited. The shark stayed. The
lizards waited. I fumed. The shark's presence was one more obstacle in the way
of escape for the girl, Sunday and myself. At the same time I was amazed at the
apparent helplessness of the lizards. I had assumed without thinking that they
would have some kind of plan to deal with a situation of this sort. But
apparently not—unless their technique was to simply wait out the shark, sit on
the raft until it got tired and went away.

However, if it was the same shark—or
even of the same breed and temperament as the shark that had dogged the raft
earlier—it
was not
likely to leave in any reasonable length of time. The fin that had followed us
earlier had been with us for days on, end.

The eerie part of the whole business
was that there was no visible sign of an attempt at consultation among the
lizards. From the beginning they had shown no indication of having a spoken
language; and I had not been able to make out any other method of signs or
signalling they might be using between themselves. But I had always assumed
that in some way, if they had to, they could communicate with each other. Now
it seemed they could not even do that. A handful of them stood and watched the
shark for a while; but eventually, all of them went back to acting as if they
were still out at sea, resting on the logs, hunting between them in the growth
under the raft in search of small marine life to eat, and so on. The only sign
that there was anything at all unusual about the situation was the fact that
still none of them came to put us back in our cages.

Night came with no change. A day
after that followed with the shark still waiting and the lizards still all on
the raft. Around noon of the third day, however, something new began to happen.

Just before the sun was full
overhead, one of the lizards lying near the edge of the raft, beyond which the
shark was presently patrolling, got to his feet. He stood facing down at the
shark in the water, and then he began to bounce as he stood, not moving his
feet, but bending his knees slightly so that he bobbed up and down like someone
on a diving board getting ready to dive.

Once started, he continued the
bobbing steadily and with a sort of reflexive monotony of pace. The other
lizards seemed to be paying no attention to him; but after perhaps half an
hour, when I looked back over at where he was, after having my attention
elsewhere for a while, I saw that another of the lizards, about ten feet from
him, was now also on his feet and bobbing. The two of them matched their rhythms
precisely, rising and falling together as if the same invisible spring was
actuating them both.

An hour later, there were four of
them on their feet and bobbing. Gradually, more and more of the others joined
them in silent, continuous movement—until by mid-afternoon all the lizards on
the ship were performing the same soundless, feet-in-place dance.

The shark, meanwhile, either having
seen them on the edge of the raft, or—what is more likely—having been attracted
by the vibrations of their movements through the logs and the water, was now
patrolling in very short runs back and forth, almost within touching distance,
it seemed, of the raft edge.