Time Storm

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.

It was growth that had run wild, a veritable nightmare jungle of straight and twisted, vine-like limbs, some of them almost half as thick as the logs of the raft itself. The roots grew everywhere but in towards the pool area itself, until about fifteen feet down or so, they curved in and came together in a mat, like the bottom of an underwater nest. I assumed the lizards kept the pool area clear underwater by biting off the new suckers emerging from the logs, as they did in the clean areas topside. Plainly, even something the size of the shark companioning this raft could not get at us through that tangle below.

So, the pool was safe territory after all. Not only that, it occurred to me now, but the heavy mass of vegetation underneath must act as a sort of keel for the raft. I pulled my head back up out of water and looked around in the air.

The girl was still in the pool. Sunday was still out of it and licking his fur, undisturbed. The two lizards who had turned us out of our cages had wandered off and become indistinguishable from their companions. I wondered what would happen if I got out of the pool myself. I did so—the girl imitating my action a second later—and found that nothing happened. The lizards ignored us.

I was startled suddenly to feel a hand slip into mine. I turned and it was the girl. She had never done anything like that before.

“What is it?” I asked.

She paid no attention to the words. She was already leading me toward the back of the raft. I followed along, puzzled, until a nagging sense of familiarity about our actions sprang an answer out of my hazy memory of those earlier brief returns to consciousness. She was leading me—the two of us completely ignored by the lizards—to the back edge of the raft; and the back edge was what was available to us by way of sanitary conveniences on this voyage. Apparently, while I had been out of my head, she had acquired the responsibility of leading me back there to relieve myself, after each periodic dip in the pool.

When this memory emerged, I put on the brakes. She and I had been living under pretty close conditions from the moment we had met. But now that my wits were back in my skull, I preferred at least the illusion of privacy in matters of elimination. After tugging at me vainly for a while, she gave up and went on by herself. I turned back to the pool.

Sunday was nearly-dry now, and once more on good terms with the world. When I got back to the pool edge, he got up from where he was lying and wound around my legs, purring. I patted his head and sat down on the logs to think. After an unsuccessful— because I wouldn’t let him—attempt to crawl into my lap, he gave up, lay down beside me and compromised by dropping his head on my knee. The head of a full-grown leopard is not a light matter; but better the head than all of him. I stroked his fur to keep him where he was; and he closed his eyes, rumbling in sheer bliss at my giving him this much attention.

After a little while the girl came back, and I went off to the back of the raft by myself, warning her sternly to stay where she was, when she once more tried to accompany me. She looked worried, but stayed. When I came back, she was lying down with her arm flung across Sunday’s back and was back to her customary pattern of acting as if I did not even exist.

I sat down on the other side of Sunday, to keep him quiet, and tried to think. I had not gotten very far, however, when a couple of the lizards showed up. The girl rose meekly and crawled back into her cage. I took the hint and went back into mine. Sunday, of course, showed no signs of being so obliging; but the lizards handled him efficiently enough. They dropped a sort of clumsy twig net over him, twisted him up in it, and put net and all in his cage. Left alone there, Sunday struggled and squirmed until he was free; and a little later a lizard, passing, reached casually in through the bars of the cage, whisked the loose net out and carried it off.

So, there I was, back in the cage—and it was only then that I realized that I was hungry and thirsty. Above all, thirsty. I tried yelling to attract the attention of the lizards, but they ignored me. I even tried calling to the girl for advice and help; but she was back to being as unresponsive as the lizards. In the end, tired out, I went to sleep.

I woke about sunset to the sound of my cage being opened again. Before I knew it, I was being dumped in the pool once more. This time, I got a taste of the water into which I had been thrown. It was not ocean-salty—it had a faint taste that could be a touch of brackishness, but it was clearly sweet enough for human consumption. If this was the Nebraska sea, it was open to the ocean at its lower end. But as I remembered reading, it had been very shallow; and like the Baltic in my time, this far north, in-flowing rivers and underground springs could have diluted it to nearly fresh-water condition. I climbed out of the pool and went to the side edge of the raft to drink, just to avoid any contamination there might be in the pool. I could not remember water tasting quite so good.

I lay on the logs of the raft with my belly full until the liquid began to disperse to the rest of my dehydrated body, then got up and went looking for something to eat. A quick tour of the raft turned up coconuts, which I had no way of opening, some green leafy stuff which might or might not be an edible vegetable, and a stack of bananas—most of which were still green.

I helped myself to the ripest I could find, half expecting the lizards to stop me. But they paid no attention. When I had taken care of my appetite, I thought of the girl and took some back to her.

She gave me one quick glance and looked away. But she took the bananas and ate them. After she had finished, she got up and went a little way away from me and lay down on her side, apparently sticking her arm right through the solid surface of the raft.

I went over to her and saw that she had found a place where two adjoining logs gapped apart; and her arm was now reaching down through the gap into the water and the tangle of growth below.

Something about her position as she lay there struck an odd note of familiarity. I straightened up and looked around the raft. Sure enough, the lizards who were lying down were nearly all in just the position she had taken. Apparently, they too had found holes in the raft.

I wondered what sort of a game she and they were playing. I even asked her—but of course I got no answer. Then, just a few seconds later she sat up, withdrawing her arm and held out her closed fist to me. When she opened it up, there was a small fish in the palm of her hand—hardly bigger than the average goldfish in a home fishbowl.

She held it out to me with her head averted; but clearly she was offering it to me. When I did not take it, she looked back at me with something like a flash of anger on her face and threw the fish away. It landed on the-raft surface only inches from Sunday. The leopard stretched out his neck to reach it and eagerly licked it up.

The girl had gone back to her fishing. But whatever she caught next, she put in her own mouth. Later on, she made a number of trips to feed Sunday with what she caught. Full of curiosity, I went looking for another gap in the logs, lay down and put my eye to it.

In the shadow under the raft I could at first see nothing. But as my vision adjusted, I looked into the tangle of growth there and saw a veritable aquarium of small marine life. So this was how the lizards provisioned themselves. It was like carrying a game farm along with you on your travels. The small fish and squid-like creatures I saw through the gap in the logs did not look all that appetizing to me, at first glance. But after my third day on bananas, I found myself eating them along with the girl and the lizards—eating them, and what’s more, enjoying them. Protein hunger can be a remarkably powerful conditioning force.

Meanwhile—on the days that immediately followed—I was trying to puzzle out a great many things, including why we had been brought along on the raft. The most obvious answer that came to me was the one I liked least—that, like the bananas and the coconuts, we three represented a potential exotic addition to the ordinary lizard diet, a sort of special treat to be eaten later.

I also toyed with the thought that we had been picked up as slaves, or as curiosities to be used or traded off at some later time. But this was hard to believe. The lizards were clearly an extremely primitive people, if they were a true people at all, and not some sort of ant-like society operating on instinct rather than intelligence. They had shown no sign of having a spoken language; and so far I had not seen any of them using even stone tools to make or do anything. The extent of their technology seemed to be the weaving of the nets and cages, the gathering of things like coconuts (and the three of us) and the building of this raft; if, indeed, this raft had been deliberately built, rather than being just grown to order, or chewed loose from some larger mass of vegetation of which it originally had been a part.

No, I was forgetting the steering oar. The next time I was let out of my cage, I went back to the stern of the raft to look at it. What I found was on a par with the rest of the raft. The oar was not so much an oar as a thinner tree trunk of the same variety as those which made up the logs of the raft. It had no true blade. It was bare trunk down to the point where it entered the water, and from there on, it was mop-like with a brush of untrimmed growth. It was pivoted in a notch between two logs of the raft, tied in place there with a great bundle of the same flexible vine or plant with which the lizards had made the net they used to restrain Sunday. This tie broke several times a day, but each time, it was patiently rewrapped and reknotted by the nearby lizards.

Whatever their cultural level—in fact, whether they had a culture or not—they had clearly collected the three of us for their own purposes, not for ours. It struck me that the sooner we got away from them, the better.

But here on a raft in the middle of an unknown body of water, getting away was something easier to imagine than do. For one thing, we would have to wait until we touched land again; and there was no telling when that would be. Or was there? I puzzled over the question.

It was hard to believe that the lizards could be trying to follow any specific route with their clumsy sail of trees and their mop-ended steering oar. At best, I told myself, they could only impose a slight angle on the path of their drift before the wind. But, when I thought about this some more, it occurred to me that the wind had been blowing continually from the stern of the raft with about the same strength since I had gotten my senses back. We were, of course, still in the, temperate latitudes of what had been the North American continent, well above the zone of any trade winds. But, what if here on this body of water, current climatic conditions made for seasonal winds blowing in a certain direction? Say, for example, winds that blew east in the summer and west in the winter, from generally the same quarters of the compass? Judging by the sun, we were now headed generally east. With a continuous directional breeze like that to rely on, even the crude rig of this raft could follow a roughly regular route depending only on the season of the year.

That evening I marked on one of the logs the angle of the sunset on the horizon to the longitudinal axis of the raft, by cutting marks in one of the logs under my cage with my pocketknife. It set almost due astern of us, but a little to the north. The next morning I again marked the angle of the sunrise—again, a little to the north of our long axis. A check of the angle of the steering oar confirmed this. The three lizards holding it had it angled to guide the raft slightly to the north from a true east-west line. It was not until then that I thought of checking the stars.

So I did, as soon as they came out that evening; but they were absolutely unfamiliar. I could not recognize a single constellation. Not that I was very knowledgeable about astronomy; but like most people, I was normally able to pick out the Little and the Big Dippers and find the pole star from the Big Dipper. Such a difference in the patterns of the heavens I saw could only be strong evidence that a time change had moved this part of the world a long way from the present I had known—either far into the future or far into the past.

If so... a new thought kindled in an odd back corner of my mind.

If it was indeed the Permian period, or a future one like it, through which this raft was now sailing, then one thing was highly likely. We were almost surely moving along roughly parallel to the northern shore of the inland sea since the beach where we had first run into the lizards had to be that same northern shore; and it now seemed probable we had been holding a steady northeasterly course ever since. I had seen a geology textbook map of the Great Nebraska Sea once, years ago. It had showed the land area of the southern and middle states depressed, and that part of the continent drowned, so that the Gulf of Mexico, in effect, filled most of the lower middle region of North America. That meant, almost certainly, we should be running in to land again before long. We were not, as I had originally feared, off on some endless voyage to nowhere, as we were perfectly capable of being, while an endless supply of food swam underneath us and water all around us that was drinkable.

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.