Gordon R. Dickson

SUMMARY:
Accompanied by a leopard and a nearly autistic young woman, Marc Despard sets out to locate his wife, who, along with the rest of humanity, was swept away by a time storm. Reprint. AB. PW.

Time
Storm

by

Gordon
Dickson

St. martin's press New York Copyright
© 1977 by Gordon R. Dickson All rights reserved For information, write: St.
Martin's Press 175 Fifth Avenue New York, N.Y. 10010 Manufactured in the United
States of America
DEDICATION: TO THE LIBRARIANS
During
the 1930's and 1940's anyone writing science fiction did so almost exclusively
for magazines. Then in the early 1950's the magazine market began to die and
paperback books took over. But the paperback books were on the stand one week
and gone the next. By the time an author's newest book came out his older books
had disappeared.

As a result, during these later
years, when the magazines were mostly gone and the paperback books were coming
and going, there were only a few of us who could afford to be full-time writers
of science fiction; and the fact that this was possible at all was only because
libraries continued to be the only real market for hardcover science fiction.
The libraries alone bought science fiction books on a regular basis, shelved
them, and made them continuously available to readers; and in this way
libraries kept both science fiction and those of us who wrote it, alive.

To librarians everywhere, therefore,
this book—the youngest of my literary children to see the light of day—is
dedicated.

1

The leopard—I called him Sunday,
after the day I found him— almost never became annoyed with the girl, for all
her hanging on to him. But he was only a wild animal, after all, and there were
limits to his patience.

What had moved me to pick up first
him, then her, was something I asked myself often without getting a good
answer. They were nothing but encumbrances and no concern of mine. My only
concern was getting to Omaha and Swannee. Beyond that point there was no need
for me to think. But... I don't know. Somehow out of the terrible feeling of
emptiness that I kept waking up to in the mornings, I had gotten a notion that
in a world where nearly all the people and animals had vanished, they would be
living creatures I could talk to. "Talk to," however, had turned out
to be the working phrase; because certainly neither of them were able to talk
back. Crazy cat and speechless girl and with them, myself, who before had
always had the good sense never to need anybody, dragging them both along with
me across a landscape as mixed up and insane as they were. But, of course,
without me they would have been helpless.

This time, the trouble erupted just
as I pushed the panel truck over a rise in late summer wheat country, which I
figured had once been cornland, a little below the one-time northern border of Iowa.
All the warning I heard was a sort of combination meow-snarl. Not a top-pitch,
ready-to-fight sound, but a plain signal that Sunday had had enough of being
treated like a stuffed animal and wanted the girl to leave him alone. I braked
the panel sharply to a stop on the side of the empty, two-lane asphalt road and
scrambled over the seat backs into the body of the truck.

"Cat!" I raved at him.
"What the hell's got into you now?"

But of course, having said his piece
and already gotten her to let him go, Sunday was now feeling just fine. He lay
there, completely self-possessed, cleaning the fur on the back of his right
forepaw with his tongue. Only, the girl was huddled up into a tight little ball
that looked as if it never intended to come unwound again; and that made me
lose my temper.

I cuffed Sunday; and he cringed,
putting his head down as I crawled over him to get to the girl. A second later
I felt his rough tongue rasping on my left ankle in a plea for forgiveness—for
what he did not even understand. And that made me angry all over again, because
illogically, now, I was the one who felt guilty. He was literally insane where
I was concerned. I knew it, and yet I had taken advantage of that to knock him
around, knowing I was quite safe in doing so when otherwise he could have had
my throat out in two seconds as easy as yawning.

But I was only human myself, I told
myself; and here I had the girl to unwind again. She was still in her ball,
completely unyielding, all elbows and rigid muscle when I put my hands on her.
I had told myself I had no real feeling for her, any more than I had for
Sunday. But somehow, for some reason I had never understood, it always damn
near broke my heart when she went like that. My younger sister had had moments
of withdrawal something like that —before she grew out of them. I had guessed
this girl to be no more than fifteen or sixteen at the most, and she had not
said a word since the day I found her wandering by the road. But she had taken
to Sunday from the moment I had led her back to the truck and she first laid
eyes on him. Now, it was as if he was the only living thing in the world for
her; and when he snarled at her like that, it seemed to hit her like being
rejected by everyone who had ever loved her, all at once.

I had been through a number of
crises like this one with her before—though the others had not been so
obviously Sunday's fault —and I knew that there was nothing much to be done
with her until she began to relax. So I sat down and wrapped my arms around
her, cuddling her as close as her rigidness would allow, and began to try to
talk her out of it. The sound of my voice seemed to help, although at that time
she would never show any kind of direct response to it, except to follow
orders.

So, there I sat, on the mattresses
and blankets in the back of the panel truck, with my arms around her narrow
body that was more sharp bones than anything else, talking to her and telling
her over and over again that Sunday wasn't mad at her; he was just a crazy cat,
and she should pay no attention when he snarled, except to leave him alone for
a while. After a while I got tired of repeating the same words and tried
singing to her—any song that I could remember. I was aware it was no great
performance. I may have believed at that time that I was hell on wheels at a
number of things, but I knew singing was not one of them. I had a voice to
scare bullfrogs. However, that had never seemed to matter with the girl. It was
keeping up the human noise and holding her that helped. Meanwhile, all the time
this was going on, Sunday had crept up as close to us as he could and had his
forepaws around my left ankle, his forehead butted against my knee.

So, after a while, illogically, I
reached down and patted his head, which he took as forgiveness. I was a
complete fool for both of them, in some ways. Shortly after that, the girl
began to stir. The stiffness went out of her. Her arms and legs extended
themselves; and without a word to me she pulled away, crawled off and put her
arms around Sunday. He suffered it, even licking at her face with his tongue. I
unkinked my own cramped muscles and went back up front to the driver's seat of
the truck.

Then I saw it, to the left of the highway.
It was a line of sky-high mist or dust-haze, less than a couple of hundred
yards away, rolling down on us at an angle.

There was no time for checking on
the two back there to see if they were braced for a racing start. I jammed the
key over, got the motor started, and slammed the panel into motion down the
narrow asphalt lane between the brown-yellow of the standing wheat, now gently
wind-rippled by the breeze that always preceded a mistwall, until the
plant-tops wavered into varying shades of gold.

2

No mistwall I had seen, with the
time change line its presence always signalled, had ever moved faster than
about thirty miles an hour. That meant that unless this one was an exception,
theoretically, any car in good working order on a decent road should have no
trouble outrunning it. The difficulty arose, however, when—as now—the mistwall
was not simply coming up behind us, but moving at an angle flanking the road. I
would have to drive over half the length of the wall or more—and some mistwalls
were up to ten miles long—to get out of its path before it caught us, along
with everything else in its way. I held the pedal of the accelerator to the
floor and sweated.

According to the needle on the
speedometer, we were doing nearly a hundred and ten—which was nonsense.
Eighty-five miles an hour was more like the absolute top speed of the panel
truck. As it was, we swayed and bounced along the empty road as if five more
miles an hour would have sent us flying off it.

I could now see the far end of the
mistwall. It was still a good two or three miles away; and the wall itself was
only a few hundred yards off and closing swiftly. I may have prayed a little
bit at this point, in spite of being completely irreligious. I seem to remember
that I did. In the weeks since the whole business of the time changes started,
I had not been this close to being caught since that first day in the cabin
northwest of Duluth, when I had, in fact, been caught without knowing what hit
me. I had thought then it was another heart attack, come to carry me off for
good this time; and the bitterness of being chopped down before I was thirty
and after I had spent nearly two years putting myself into the best possible
physical shape, had been like a dry, ugly taste in my throat just before the
change line reached me and knocked me out.

I remember still thinking that it
was a heart attack, even after I came to. I had gone on thinking that way, even
after I found the squirrel that was still in shock from it; the way Sunday had
been later, when I found him. For several days afterwards, with the squirrel
tagging along behind me like some miniature dog until I either exhausted it or
lost it, I did not begin to realize the size of what had happened. It was only
later that I began to understand, when I came to where Duluth should have been
and found virgin forest where a couple of hundred thousand people had lived,
and later yet, as I moved south, and stumbled across the log cabin with the
bearded man in cord-wrapped leather leggings.

The bearded man had nearly finished
me. It took me almost three minutes too long after I met him to realize that he
did not understand that the rifle in my hand was a weapon. It was only when I
stepped back and picked up the hunting bow, that he pulled his fancy quick-draw
trick with the axe he had been using to chop wood when I stepped into his
clearing. I never saw anything like it and I hope I never see it again, unless
I'm on the side of the man with the axe. It was a sort of scimitar-bladed tool
with a wide, curving forward edge; and he had hung it on his shoulder,
blade-forward, in what I took to be a reassuring gesture, when I first tried to
speak to him. Then he came toward me, speaking some kind of
Scandinavian-sounding gibberish in a friendly voice, the axe hung on his
shoulder as if he had forgotten it was there.

It was when I began to get worried
about the steady way he was coming on and warned him back with the rifle, that
I recognized suddenly that, apparently, as far as he was concerned, I was
carrying nothing more than a club. For a second I was merely paralyzed by the
enormity of that insight. Then, before I could bring myself to shoot him after
all in self-defense, I had the idea of trying to pick up the bow with my free
hand. As an idea, it was a good one —but the minute he saw the bow in my hand
he acted; and to this day, I'm not sure exactly how he did it.

He reached back at belt-level and
jerked forward on the handle-end of the axe. It came off his shoulder—spinning,
back, around, under his arm, up in the air and over, and came down, incredibly,
with the end of its handle into his fist and the blade edge forward.

Then he threw it.

I saw it come whirling toward me,
ducked instinctively and ran. I heard it thunk into a tree somewhere behind me;
but by then I was into the cover of the woods, and he did not follow.

Five days later I was where the twin
cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul had been—and they looked as if they had been
abandoned for a hundred years after a bombing raid that had nearly leveled
them. But I found the panel truck there, and it started when I turned its key.
There was gas in the filling station pumps, though I had to rig up a little
kerosene generator I liberated from a sporting goods store, in order to pump
some of it into the tank of the truck, and I headed south along U.S. 35W. Then
came Sunday. Then came the girl....

I was almost to the far end of the
mistwall now, although to the left of the road the haze was less than a hundred
yards from the roadway; and little stinging sprays of everything from dust to
fine gravel were beginning to pepper the left side of the panel, including my
own head and shoulder where the window on that side was not rolled up. But I
had no time to roll it up now. I kept pushing the gas pedal through the floor,
and suddenly we whipped past the end of the wall of mist, and I could see open
country clear to the summer horizon.

Sweating, I eased back on the gas,
let the truck roll to a stop, and half-turned it across the road so I could
look behind us.

Back where we had been, seconds
before, the mist had already crossed the road and was moving on into the fields
that had been on the road's far side. They were ceasing to be there as it
passed— as the road itself had already ceased to be, and the farm land on the
near side of the road. Where the grain had rippled in the wind, there was now
wild, grassy hillside—open country sparsely interspersed with a few clumps of
trees, rising to a bluff, a crown of land, less than a quarter of a mile off,
looking so close I could reach out and touch it. There was not a breath of wind
stirring.