Time Storm

4

To break the staring match, I deliberately looked away to the gadget, lying still now beyond the barricades, and nodded at it.

“I’d like to have a look at it close up,” I said. “Is it safe?”

“Sure.” He got to his feet, laying down the rocket launcher. I saw, however, he had a heavy revolver—possibly a thirty-eight or forty-four—in a holster on the hip away from me; and a deer rifle carbine like mine was lying against the barricade. He picked it up in his left hand.

“Come on,” he said. “They only show up one at a time; on a staggered schedule, seven to ten hours apart.”

I looked down the road. There were no other wrecked shapes in black and yellow in sight along it.

“You’re sure?” I said. “How many have you seen?”

He laughed, making a dry sound in his throat like an old man.

“They’re never quite stopped,” he said. “Like this one. It’s harmless, now, but not really done for. Later it’ll crawl back, or get pulled back behind the mist over there—you’ll see. Come on.”

He climbed over the barricade and I followed him. When we got to the gadget, it looked more than ever like an overlarge toy car—except that where the windows should be, there was a flat yellow surface; and instead of four ordinary-sized wheels with tires, the lower halves of something like sixteen or eighteen small metal disks showed through the panel sealing the underbody. The rocket had torn a large hole in the gadget’s side.

“Listen,” said the man, stooping over the hole. I came close and listened myself. There was a faint buzzing still going on down there someplace inside it.

“Who sends these things?” I said. “Or what sends them?”

He shrugged.

“By the way,” I said, “I’m Marc Despard.” I held out my hand.

He hesitated.

“Raymond Samuelson,” he said.

I saw his hand jerk forward a little, then back again. Outside of that, he ignored my offered hand; and I let it drop. I guessed that he might not want to shake hands with a man he might later have to try to kill; and I judged that anyone who worried about a nicety like that was not likely to shoot me in the back, at least, unless he had to. At the same time, there was no point in asking for trouble by letting any misunderstandings arise.

“I’m just on my way through to Omaha,” I said. “My wife’s there, if she’s still all right. But I’m not going to drive right across that time change line out there if I’ve got a choice.” I nodded at the haze from which the gadget had come. “Have you got any other roads leading south or east from the town?”

“Yes,” he said. He was frowning. “Did you say your wife was there?”

“Yes,” I answered. For the life of me, I had meant to say “ex-wife,” but my tongue had slipped; and it was not worth straightening the matter out now for someone like Samuelson. “Look,” he said, “you don’t have to go right away. Stop and have dinner.”

Stop and have dinner. Something about my mentioning a wife had triggered off a hospitality reflex in him. The familiar, homely words he spoke seemed as strange and out of place, here between the empty town and the haze that barred the landscape to our right, as the wrecked gadget at our feet.

“All right,” I said.

We went back, over the barricade and down to the panel truck. I called to the leopard and the girl to come out, and introduced them to Samuelson. His eyes widened at the sight of the leopard; but they opened even more at the sight of the girl behind the big cat.

“I call the leopard ‘Sunday’,” I said. “The girl’s never told me her name.”

I put out my hand and Sunday stepped forward, flattening his ears and rubbing his head up under my palm with a sound that was like a whimper of pleasure.

“I came across him just after a time change had swept the area where he was,” I said. “He was still in shock when I first touched him; and now I’ve got his soul in pawn, or something like that. You’ve seen how animals act, if you get them right after a change, before they come all the way back to being themselves?”

Samuelson shook his head. He was looking at me now with some distrust and suspicion.

“That’s too bad,” I said. “Maybe you’ll take my word for it, then. He’s perfectly safe as long as I’m around.”

I petted Sunday. Samuelson looked at the girl.

“Hello,” he said, smiling at her. But she simply stared back without answering. She would do anything I set her to doing, but I had never been able to make her seem conscious of herself. The straight, dark hair hanging down around her shoulders always had a wild look; and even the shirt and jeans she was wearing looked as if they did not belong on her.

They were the best of available choices, though. I had put her into a dress once, shortly after I had found her; and the effect had been pitiful. She had looked like a caricature of a young girl in that dress.

“She doesn’t talk,” I said. “I came across her a couple of days after I found the leopard, about two hundred miles south. The leopard was about where the Minneapolis-St. Paul area used to be. It could have come from a zoo. The girl was just wandering along the road. No telling where she came from.”

“Poor kid,” said Samuelson. He evidently meant it; and I began to think it even more unlikely that he would shoot me in the back.

We went to his house, one block off Main Street, for dinner.

“What about the—whatever-you-call-them?” I asked. “What if one comes while you aren’t there to stop it?”

“The buzzers,” he said. “No, like I told you, they don’t run on schedule, but after one’s come by, it’s at least six and a half hours before the next one. It’s my guess there’s some kind of automatic factory behind the mist there, that takes that long to make a new one.”

Samuelson’s house turned out to be one of those tall, ornate, late-nineteenth century homes you still see in small towns. Two stories and an attic with a wide screen porch in front and lilac bushes growing all along one side of it. The rooms inside were small, dark and high-ceilinged, with too much furniture for their floorspace. He had rigged a gas motor and a water tank to the well in his basement that had formerly been run by an electric pump; and he had found an old, black, wood-burning stove to block up in one corner of this spacious kitchen. The furniture was clean of dust and in order.

He gave us the closest thing to a normal meal that I’d eaten—or the girl had, undoubtedly —since the time storm first hit Earth. I knew it had affected all the Earth, by this time; not just the little part west of the Great Lakes in North America, where I was. I carried a good all-bands portable radio along and, once in a while, picked up a fragment of a broadcast from somewhere. The continuity—or discontinuity—lines dividing the time areas usually blocked off radio. But sometimes things came through. Hawaii, evidently, was unique in hardly having been touched, and I’d occasionally heard bits of shortwave from as far away as Greece. Not that I listened much. There was nothing I could do for the people broadcasting, any more than there was anything they could do for me.

I told Samuelson about this while he was fixing dinner; and he said he had run into the same thing with both the shortwave and long-wave radios he had set up. We agreed that the storm was not over.

“We’ve only had the one time change here in Saulsburg, though,” he said. “Every so often, I’ll see a line of change moving across country off on the horizon, or standing still for a while out there; but so far, none’s come this way.”

“Where did all the people go, that were in this place?” I asked.

His face changed, all at once.

“I don’t know,” he said. Then he bent over the biscuit dough he was making, so that this face was hidden away from me. “I had to drive over to Peppard—that’s the next town. I drove and drove and couldn’t find it. I began to think I was sick or crazy, so I turned the car around and drove home. When I got back here, it was like you see it now.”

It was clear he did not want to talk about it. But I could guess some of what he had lost from the house. It had been lived in by more than one adult, and several children. There were a woman’s overshoes in the front closet, toys in a box in one corner of the living room, and three bicycles in good condition in the garage.

“What did you do for a living?” he asked me after a moment.

“I was retired,” I said.

He frowned over that, too. So I told him about myself. The time storm had done nothing in my case to leave me with things I did not want to talk about, except for the matter of Swannee, down in Omaha; and somehow I was perfectly comforted and sure that she and that city had come through the time storm changes unharmed, though I had heard no radio broadcasts from there.

“I started investing in the stock market when I was nineteen,” I said, “before I was even out of college. I struck it lucky.” Luck, of course, had nothing to do with it; but I had found I could not tell people that. Because the word “stocks” was involved, it had to be luck, not hard research and harder-headed decision-making, that had made money for me. “Then I used what I had to take over a company that made trailers and snowmobiles; and that did all right. I’d be there yet, but I had a heart attack.”

Samuelson’s eyebrows went up.

“A heart attack?” he said. “You’re pretty young for something like that.”

“I was damned young,” I said. “I was twenty-four.”

I discovered suddenly that I had been wrong about not having things I did not want to talk about. I did not want to tell him about my heart attack. He looked too much like a man who’d never had a sick day in his life.

“Anyway,” I said, “my doctor told me to take it easy and lose weight. That was two years ago. So I sold out, set up a trust to support me, and bought a place up in the woods of northern Minnesota, beyond Ely—if you know that state. I got back in shape, and I’ve been fine ever since; until the time storm hit three weeks ago.”

“Yes,” he said.

The food was ready, so I helped him carry it into the dining room and we all ate there; even Sunday, curled up in a corner. I had thought Samuelson might object to my bringing the leopard into his house, but he had not.

Afterwards, we sat on his screened porch at the front of the house, with the thick leaves of the sugar maple in the yard screening us from the western sun. It was after six by my watch, but now in midsummer, there was at least another three hours of light left. Samuelson had some homemade white wine which was not bad. It was not very good either, but the town was apparently a dry town; and of course, he had not left it since he had first come back here and found his people gone.

“How about the girl?” he asked me, when he first poured the wine into water glasses.

“Why not?” I said. “We may be all dead—her included—tomorrow, if the wrong sort of time change catches us.”

So he gave her a glass. But she only took a small sip, then put it down on the floor of the porch by her chair. After a bit, while Samuelson and I talked, she got out of the chair itself and sat down on the floor where she could put an arm around Sunday, who was lying there, dozing. Outside of raising a lazy eyebrow when he felt the weight of her arm, the leopard paid no attention. It was amazing what he would stand from her, sometimes.

“What is it?” Samuelson asked me, after we’d been talking for a while about how things used to be. “I mean—where did it come from?”

He was talking about the time storm.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ll bet nobody does. But I’ve got a theory.”

“What’s that?” He was looking at me closely in the shadow of the porch. A little evening breeze stirred the lilac bushes into scraping their upper branches against the side of the house.

“I think it’s just what we’re calling it,” I said. “A storm. Some sort of storm in space that the whole world ran into, the same way you could be out driving in your car and run into a thunderstorm. Only in this case, instead of wind and rain, thunder and lightning, we get these time changes, like ripples moving across the surface of the world, with everything getting moved either forward or back in time. Wherever a change passes over them.”

“How about here?” he asked. “The town’s just where it was before. Only the people...

He trailed off.

“How do you know?” I said. “Maybe the area right around here was moved forward just a year, say, or even a month. That wouldn’t be enough to make any change in the buildings and streets you could notice, but it might have been beyond the point where everybody living here, for some reason, decided to get out.”

“Why?”

“Those buzzers, as you call them,” I said. “Seeing one of them come at the town would be pretty good reason to me to get out, if I was someone living here.”

He shook his head.

“Not everybody,” he said. “Not without leaving some kind of message.”

I gave up. If he did not want reasonable explanations, there was no point in my forcing it on him.

“Tell me,” he said, after we had sat there without talking for a while, “do you think God had something to do with it?”

So that was his hang-up. That was why he stayed here, day after day, defending a town with no people in it. That was why he had carefully adapted the well in the basement to the new conditions and set up a wood stove so that he could give a regular meal at a moment’s notice to a complete family, if they should return unexpectedly, showing up at the front door, tired and hungry. I wanted to tell him neither God nor human had ever changed things much for me; but now that I knew what his question meant to him, I could not do it. All at once I felt the pain in him—and I found myself suddenly angry that someone I did not even know should be able to export his troubles to me, like that. It was true I had lost nothing, not like him. Still....

“Who can tell?” I said, standing up. “We’d better be going.”

He stood up also, quickly. Before he was on his feet, Sunday was on his, and that brought the girl scrambling upright.

“You could stay here overnight,” he said.

I shook my head.

“You don’t want to drive in the dark,” he went on.

“No,” I said. “But I’d like to get some miles under our belt before quitting for the day. I’m anxious to get to my wife.”

I led the leopard and the girl out to the panel, which I had driven over and now stood in his driveway. I opened the door on the driver’s side, and the other two got in, crawling back into the body. I waited until they were settled, then got in myself and was about to back out, when Samuelson, who had gone in the house instead of following us to the truck, came out again, almost shyly, with a pair of large paper grocery sacks. He pushed them in through the open window at my left.

“Here,” he said. “There’s some food you could use. I put in a bottle of the wine, too.”

“Thanks.” I put the two sacks on the empty front seat beside me. He looked past me, back into the body of the van, where the girl and the leopard were already curled up, ready for sleep.

“I’ve got everything, you know,” he said. “Everything you could want. There’s nothing she could use—clothes, or anything?”

“Sunday’s the only thing she wants,” I said. “As long as she’s got him, there’s nothing else she cares about.”

“Well, goodby then,” he said.

“So long.”

I backed out into the street and drove off. In the sideview mirror I could see him walk into the street himself so that he could look after us and wave. I turned a corner two blocks down and the houses shut him from view.

He had given me a filling station map earlier, with a route marked in pencil, that led me to the south edge of the city and out at last on a two-lane asphalt road rising and dipping over the land, with open, farmer’s fields on either side. The fields had all been planted that spring; and as I drove along I was surrounded by acres of corn and wheat and peas no one would ever harvest or use. The sky-high wall of haze that was the time change line, holding its position just outside of Samuelson’s town, now to the left and behind us, grew smaller as I drove the van away from there.

In a car we were pretty safe, according to what I had learned so far. These time lines were like lengths of rod, rolling across the landscape; but as I say, I had yet to encounter any that seemed to travel at more than thirty miles an hour. It was not hard to get away from them as long as you could stick to a road.

I had been keeping my eyes open for something in the way of an all-terrain vehicle, but with adequate speed. Something like a Land Rover that could make good time on the roads but could also cut across open country, if necessary. But so far I had not found anything.

I became aware that the engine of the van was roaring furiously under the hood. I was belting us along the empty asphalt road at nearly seventy miles an hour. There was no need for anything like that. It was both safer and easier on the gas consumption to travel at about forty or forty-five; and now and then gas was not easily available, just when the tank ran low. It was true I had four spare five-gallon cans-full, lashed to the luggage carrier on the van’s roof. But that was for real emergencies.

Besides, none of the three of us had anything that urgent to run to—or away from. I throttled down to forty miles an hour, wondering how I had let my speed creep up in the first place.

Then, of course, I realized why. I had been letting Samuelson’s feelings get to me. Why should I cry for him? He was as crazy from the loss of his family as the girl was—or Sunday. But he had really wanted us to stay the night, in that large house of his from which his family had disappeared; and it would have been a kindness to him if we had stayed. Only, I could not take the chance. Sometime in the night he might change suddenly from the man who was desperate for company to a man who thought that I, or all of us, had something to do with whatever it was that had taken his people away from him.

I could not trust his momentary sanity. Samuelson had talked for a while like a sane man; but he was still someone sitting in a deserted town, shooting rockets full of high explosives at out-size toys that attacked at regular intervals. No one in that position could be completely sane. Besides, insanity was part of things, now. Sunday was the definitive example. I could have cut the leopard’s throat, and he would have licked my hand as I was doing it. The girl was in no better mental condition. Samuelson, like them, was caught in this cosmic joke that had overtaken the world we knew—so he was insane too, by definition. There was no other possibility.

Which of course, I thought, following the idea to its logical conclusion, as I drove into the increasing twilight, meant that I had to be insane, too. The idea was almost laughable. I felt perfectly sane. But just as I had not trusted Samuelson, if I were him, or anyone else looking at me from the outside as I drove across the country with a leopard and a speechless girl for companions, I would not trust myself. I would have been afraid that there could be a madness in me too, that would overtake me sometime, suddenly and without warning. Of course, that was all nonsense. I put the ridiculous thought out of my head.