A Question of Time

Chapter 7

Bill Burdon, leaping recklessly downhill along a barely perceptible trail, intent upon pursuing into darkness what had appeared to him as two striding figures, managed to stay creditably close to his quarry, the rearmost of those figures, for the first sixty yards or so. At the start Bill had confidently expected to be able to gain ground, but this hope proved embarrassingly futile.

Summoning up his best authoritative sergeant's voice, he cried for his quarry to stop.

But if his command to halt had any effect at all, it was the very opposite of what had been intended. The single speeding form still visible ahead of Bill did not look back, but seemed to accelerate. Now Bill was definitely losing ground.

Some twenty seconds into the pursuit, that pacing figure reached the level of the lowering mist and vanished completely. Bill could still hear brush crackling and rocks sliding under his quarry's feet; a few moments later he plunged into the fog himself, and was forced to reduce his own speed, as even the ground immediately ahead of him became almost invisible.

Bill flicked on his flashlight. The beam set a small volume of fog aglow, and revealed something of the slanted earth just before his feet, but was of no help to him in locating his quarry.

And now the sounds of the other's passage had faded completely away.

Bill slowed to a fast walk. Examining the ground carefully with the help of his flashlight, he was able to identify and follow a faintly visible path, winding downhill among rocks, blackbrush, and prickly pear. Here and there traces of snow persisted from the last fall, evidently several days ago. Looking for individual tracks, of course, trying to find anything like a footprint on a surface composed almost entirely of hard rock, would have been foolish, especially in darkness.

For a few more minutes he continued down this trail, pausing several times to listen for movement in the darkness ahead. He disliked having to use the flashlight at all, but there hadn't been any real choice.

At last, when even with the light he could no longer convince himself he had a trail to follow, Bill came to a halt. He snapped off the flash.

Whoever he had been chasing might very well have managed to get away, he decided, but he wasn't quite ready to give up. Again he started downslope, moving more slowly and cautiously now, alert for any sound or spark of light in the murky depths ahead.

Whatever human presence had vanished in that direction was remaining neatly concealed, or else was by now so far ahead that Bill might as well give up. As far as he could tell, he might be entirely alone on the whole damned canyon wall. Again he regretted not having been able to get a good look in daylight at the lay of the land. Well, he hadn't had the chance to look around, and that was that.

His little two-way radio was buzzing in his jacket pocket.

Sighing, Bill pulled out the device. Speaking into it in a low voice, he tried to make contact with home base but, for the moment, failed.

Stuffing the useless device back into his pocket, he dejectedly reversed course and started back uphill—only to come to a halt before he had climbed ten yards, his way blocked by a mass of boulders. Now it seemed that he was going to have trouble even finding the trail, or faint imitation of a trail, on which he had just come down.

That he should have become confused was, in the circumstances, easy enough to understand. But he didn't consider that that gave him an excuse for doing so. Well, as long as he kept climbing, whether on a trail or not, he had to be going in at least approximately the right direction.

Detouring around the immediate obstruction, Bill ascended patiently, one step after another. But soon he got into difficulties again. Sidestepping again, he climbed some more—only to come to a halt, looking warily about him and turning on his light. Now, in a place where he seemed to remember a steep but smoothly rising slope, a minor precipice dropped off. His light revealed the tips of tall pine trees, yards below his boots.

Mentally rerunning the brief sequence of his headlong pursuit downhill, Bill couldn't convince himself that it had lasted more than a couple of minutes. And now, only now, he became aware that something else was wrong. The lights of Canyon Village ought to be bright and fairly close above him. He could see no lights at all up there.

Frowning and muttering to himself, he began to use his flashlight steadily. The beam was thoroughly spoiling whatever night vision he might have left, but he'd given up the chase now anyway. Right now he'd have to be content with finding his way home.

He was now making his way along what seemed to be a kind of minor ridge, gradually getting higher. Following this spine up until it ran into a more sharply ascending mass of rock, Bill resigned himself to finding his way through completely unfamiliar territory. His hopes were raised when he encountered what appeared to be another faint trail, and followed it uphill for a short distance. But again, suddenly, there was no more trail.

By now Bill had climbed enough to be once more well above the depth where the fog still held sway. But somehow his surroundings were not in the least familiar. That dark mass above him, discouragingly remote, making a sharp line of demarcation against the stars, naturally had to be the rim. But, incredibly, this rim still bore no sign of the clustered lights of Grand Canyon Village.

Were they suffering some kind of power failure up there? What next?

Sighing, Bill doggedly resumed his effort to get up the hill down which he had so briskly run. All right, it wasn't quite the same hill. He could no longer even find that one. For some reason, this slope was vastly, incredibly different. Now barriers of rock loomed where he could swear none had existed only a few minutes earlier.

Soon he came to a halt again, this time swearing under his breath. Unfamiliar terrain or not, he couldn't have gotten lost as stupidly as this. He never had, not since he was six years old. It would have made him angry had anyone even suspected that he was capable of such a failure.

And again he climbed.

Having gained a little altitude, and, as he thought, perhaps surmounted some interfering wrinkle in the landscape, he tried his two-way radio once more. Again the device brought him at first only a little noise—and then, at last, the noise was followed by a half-familiar voice.

"This is the house," Maria was saying, speaking very distinctly in an evident effort to make herself understood at all costs. "Bill, is that you? Come in."

Pressing a key, Bill reluctantly described his problems. He told Maria it looked like he was going to have to sit tight until daylight.

"Sit tight, then," said her small, distorted voice, sounding relieved. "Anything you need?"

He told her that there was not, but he couldn't be sure that he was getting through. All he got back was some more static.

Switching off, he stuck the radio back into his jacket pocket. Partially unzipping the jacket, still muttering and swearing, he told himself that at least the air was notably warmer down here than up on the rim. Maybe his chase had lasted longer than he'd thought. Hell, that must be the explanation. Though that didn't explain why he could no longer see even a glow from the Village lights…

Despite what he'd told Maria, he kept trying. Making very slow progress uphill, Bill at last admitted to himself (in some embarrassment, not lessened by being so far private) that it looked like he was going to have to wait until morning to find his way back to the Tyrrell House and the hotel.

Admitting that he seemed to be lost was bad, but not as bad as stepping over a cliff would be. For a little while he sat on a comfortably placed ledge, and thought. Then for a longer time he stalked around in a safely explored little space, waving his arms, and with half his mind considered building a fire. But really, the air wasn't that cold, not any longer, and there was very little wind. Alternating periods of movement and resting, Bill even got a little sleep, sitting on one rock and leaning against another, hoping any rattlesnakes in the area would keep their distance.

Something roused him from an uncomfortable doze. Rubbing his stiff neck, he got to his feet. The stars were fading, which meant that dawn was coming at last. Stretching, moving about a little to keep warm, he watched the process. The eastern sky was now remotely gray, instead of nothing but a mass of sheer dull darkness. Then, forming itself by indefinable gradations, there appeared a broad line of pale light, following the almost flat horizon for a long way. Now, all around Bill, vast shapes of land, vaster extensions of sheer airy space, were beginning to take form out of mist and darkness…

Dawn brought lighter grayness and then the beginnings of color in the sky, as you might see the sky almost anywhere on earth. But here the land being drawn gradually into existence by the dawn did not look like any known earthly territory. Bill pondered the remoteness of a butte, slowly turning redder and redder, even as the crimson faded from the sky. Was that particular upthrusting of the earth, surely shaped like no other portion of the planet, half a mile away, or a mile? Or perhaps two miles, or five?

Moment by moment the complexity of the scene before Bill became clearer, and at the same time more incredible. He had seen pictures of the Canyon, of course, everybody had. But no picture, no model, could show this, or come close to showing it. This was genesis. The creation of the world.

At last, reluctantly, he forced his thoughts back to business. In all this scenery there was no sign of the people he had been pursuing last night—or of anyone else.

For all the indications that this view showed to the contrary, he, Bill, might well be the last person—or the first—on the planet.

Awesome sights surrounded him, towering, grandly colored rock formations. He knew the Canyon was roughly ten miles across at this point, a broken, inhospitable, magnificent land, barely fringed here and there with vegetation, carved up into countless side canyons, looking utterly impossible to cross on foot, even though he knew that there were trails.

The river, which Bill had more or less expected to become visible far below with daylight, remained concealed within the deepest part of the gorge. The upper edges of that final abyss, Bill estimated, lay at least a thousand feet below the ledge from which he was observing. At that depth a broad bench of land, studded with what looked like sagebrush, declined slowly to the lip of the ultimate split in the earth. Again, all heights and distances were hard to judge.

Bill climbed again, for half an hour, and paused to look around him. As far as he could tell from any shifting of the more distant portions of the scenery during his climb, he might not have changed his position at all.

Bill resumed climbing, then stopped, staring downward at a broad shelf of land, dotted with vegetation, that stretched perhaps a thousand feet below him. He had the distinct impression that he had just seen an elephant down there—had at least seen something, with an elephant-style trunk, stripping or at least tugging at a tree-limb. He had rubbed his eyes and questioned his own sanity when he saw the thing again, or another creature very like the first. This time he watched the dark peculiar shape for several seconds, until it moved out of sight behind a fold of land.

He moved on.

Presently he got a look, a good enough look to really shake him up, at another creature, almost on his own level. The single-humped camel calmly returned his gaze, and moved along.

It was then, trying to remember what might have happened to drive him mad, and having unconsciously given up the idea or hope of meeting anyone, he topped a small ridge and found himself looking at a girl who was sitting in front of a small modern tent with her back to him, gazing out over the depths.

Beside the girl was a small fire, and it was plain that she had established a kind of camp. On the other side of her was a small cave, big enough to shelter one person in a pinch, whose entrance the fire guarded.

The girl was dressed much as any well-to-do young camper might be dressed in the world to which Bill was trying to return. Both her jacket and her scarf fitted the description of clothing worn by Cathy Brainard. The wind toyed with her dark hair as she sat facing out over the Canyon, and something in her pose suggested to Bill that she was, or recently had been, weeping.

Bill let one of his boots scrape on rock, and the girl's head whirled round. Blue-gray eyes under dark brows, filled with—anger? Fear? Shock?—confronted Bill.

He said: "It's all right, Cathy. Your friends have found you."