Gordon R. Dickson (11 page)

The third day we hit the jackpot—well,
a jackpot of sorts. It must have been somebody's lakeshore home, on a lake that
had now become part of the inland sea. There were no people in sight around it,
and no other lakeshore houses or cabins nearby. But this place must have cost
someone a good deal of money. It had a large house, with attached garage and a
separate pole barn—that is, a type of barn-size building, made of metal roof
and siding that were literally hung on wooden posts the thickness of telephone
poles, set in the earth. It also had a dock and a boat. A road that was dirt,
but well-graded and well-kept, led from the house and the lake away into the
country beyond the beach. The country here was treed thickly enough to be
honestly called forested.

The home looked as if it had been abandoned
less than a week before. Some of the food in the refrigerator still looked
edible; and the food in the large, chest-type freezer in the double garage
would probably have been edible if the electric power had stayed on. We must
have crossed a former mistwall line, some way back; because this was the kind
of trick the time storm played. A few miles off, we had been several geologic
ages in the past, here we were only in yesterday. Tomorrow we might be in any
future time, I supposed. As it was, I trusted none of it. But there was a
wealth of canned goods on shelves—also bottled goods. It gave me a peculiar
feeling to mix myself a scotch and soda—even an iceless scotch and soda— and
sit sipping it in the overstuffed chair of a carpeted living room.

The only drawback to the place was
that it had neither of the two things we needed most—Weapons and transport—a
car or truck in which we could travel.

I searched the place from dock to
driveway. There was not even a canoe in the boathouse. There was, in the pole
barn, a 1931 all-black Model A Ford roadster somebody had been restoring; but
it was not in driveable condition, nor were there parts lying around that could
be put in to make it driveable. It held only the block of a motor, with the
head off and the cylinders, crankshaft and oil pan missing. There were a couple
of bicycles in the garage, a battered girl's single-speed, and a man-size
three-speed Raleigh, which had been kept in only slightly better condition.

In one end of the pole barn,
however, was a gasoline-driven electric generator, in beautiful condition under
its protective coat of grease, and a good deal of wood and metal-working
tools-power and otherwise—also in fine condition. I got the generator cleaned
up and going; although after about fifteen minutes I shut it off again. The
three of us were used to doing without the luxury of electric lights and
appliances; and there was, I judged after measuring it with a stick, only ten
or fifteen gallons of gas left in a drum by the generator. I did not yet know
exactly what I would use the gas for, but it was too useful a material to be
wasted. Later, I found some empty pop bottles with screwtops and filled them
with the gas, then tied rags around their necks, so that they could be turned
into Molotov cocktails in a hurry. That gave us one kind of weapon.

Meanwhile, the girl and Sunday were
settling in. There were two bedrooms with closets holding women's clothes, and
the girl, for the first time, began to show some interest in what she wore. She
still stuck to shirt and jeans, generally, but I caught her a couple of times
trying on things when I came into the house unexpectedly from outside.

Sunday liked the carpets. He slept
and ate. We all ate—and gained back some of the weight we had lost on the raft.

I was determined that we would not
stir from where we were without some means of protecting ourselves. I had two
ideas about weapons I might be able to make. I had rejected the thought of a
bow and arrows. I was a mediocre-to-poor archer; and no bowyer at all. Making a
really effective bow was beyond me. Other alternatives were, first a homemade, muzzle
loading gun using a length of metal water pipe wrapped with wire, if I could
find any, and using match heads for the explosive element. In short—a zip gun.
Second, a crossbow using a leaf from one of the springs of the Model A. There
was enough gas to let me run the generator and get the wood and metal-working
power tools operating in the pole barn.

In the end, I chose the crossbow,
not because it was simpler, but because I couldn't find any wire; and I had a
vision of the water pipe blowing up in my face. I found a dry chunk of firewood
that looked to me to be maple or oak, sawed it roughly to shape and then worked
it on the lathe to an approximation of a stock and frame for the crossbow. I
cut a slot across the frame, sank the leaf spring (the smallest of the leaf
springs) into it crosswise and did as good a job of gluing it there as I could.
Modern glues were miracle-workers, given half a chance. I glued a separate,
notched bar of hard wood along the top of the frame for the cord of the
crossbow, and set up a lever-crank to allow me to tighten the bow cord, notch
by notch.

I had more trouble making the short,
heavy arrows—quarrels— for the thing than I did putting together the crossbow
itself. It was not easy to make a straight shaft from a raw chunk of wood, I
discovered.

But the day came when I had both
crossbow and quarrels. Both had been tested. There was no lack of power in the
crossbow. The problem was with my quarrels. Their shafts broke too easily when
they hit something hard. But, they would do on any flesh and blood target. The
morning came when we mounted the two bikes, the girl and I—happily she had
evidently ridden a bicycle before, and the skill came back to her quickly—and
wearing backpacks, we started off down the empty road, away from the lake, with
Sunday footing it alongside us.

The weather was pleasant, with the
temperature in the high sixties, Fahrenheit, and the sky was lightly spotted
with occasional clouds. As we got away from the water the humidity began to
fall off sharply, until the day was almost like one in early autumn up near the
Canadian border. We made good time, considering—considering Sunday, that was.
Dogs are generally content to trot steadily alongside the bikers they belong
to; but Sunday had a cat's dislike of regimentation. Sunday preferred that the
girl and I travel at the equivalent of a
slow walk, so that he could make short side excursions, or even take a
quick nap and still catch up with us. When we did stop finally, to give him a
break, he lay down heavily on top of the girl's bike and would not be moved
until I hauled him clear by sheer muscle-strength and a good grip on the scruff
of his neck.

In the end we compromised with him,
riding along at hardly more than a walking speed. As a result, it was not
surprising that I got more and more involved in my own thoughts.

The road we were on had yet to lead
past any sign of civilization. But, of course, we were not covering ground at
any great speed. Eventually our route must bring us to someplace where we could
get the weapons and wheels I wanted. Then, once more mobile and protected, as
it were, I meant to do a little investigating along the thought I had come to,
lying on the lizard raft, nights. If the world was going to be as full of
potential threats, as we had just seen it, it was high time we set actively
about the business of learning the best ways to survive in it....

We hit no signs of civilization that
day, but late afternoon, we crossed a creek hardly larger than a trickle,
running through a culvert under the road. In this open territory it looked as
though it probably contained clean water; but I boiled it to make sure, and we
set up camp for the night by it.

Midway through the next morning on
the road, we rode past a chunk of a suburb. I mean exactly that—a chunk. It was
some two hundred yards off our asphalt highway, a roughly triangular piece of
real estate with lawns, garages, streets and tract houses looking as if it had
been sliced off at random and dropped down here in the middle of nowhere.

There were no people about it any
more than there had been people about the lakeshore home. But these buildings
were not in the untouched condition of the house by the lake. The area looked,
in fact, as if a tornado had passed through it, a tornado, or else something
with the size of a dinosaur and a destructive urge to match. There was not one
building that was whole and weather-tight, and some were all but flattened.

Nonetheless, they represented a
treasure trove for us. I went through all the houses and turned up a sixteen
gauge shotgun and a carbine-type .22 rifle. There were no shells for the
shotgun and only one box of shorts for the .22. But the odds on picking up ammunition
for these two common caliber firearms were good enough to count on. The
suburb-chunk also contained eight cars. Five of these had been made useless by
whatever had smashed the buildings. Of the remaining three, all were more than
a few years old, and one would not start at all. That left me with a choice
between a two-door Pontiac hardtop in relatively good shape and a Volvo
four-door sedan that was pretty well beaten up.

I chose the Volvo, however. Not only
for its extra carrying capacity, but because the gas mileage should be better.
There was no filling station among the homes in the suburb, but I drained the
gas tanks of all the other cars that proved to have anything in them; and when
we started out in the Volvo, we had a full tank plus another fifteen gallons in
cans tied on to a makeshift rack on top of the trunk. Also, I had found two
three-speed bikes in good shape. They were tied to the top of the car.

The suburb had a fine, four-lane
concrete road leading out of it, but that ended about two hundred yards from
the last of the smashed houses. I drove the Volvo, bumping and bucking across a
lumpy open field, to get it back on our familiar asphalt and turned left into
the direction in which we had been originally headed. We kept going; and about
an hour later, I spotted a mistwall to our right. It was angled toward the road
we were on, looking as if it crossed the asphalt somewhere up ahead of us.

9

My heart jumped when I saw it; but
after watching it closely for a little while, I calmed down. Clearly, the wall
was standing still. We continued on up along the road, with its vertical, white
face getting closer and closer, until finally we were far enough along to see
where it ended. It did indeed cut across the road at last, about a quarter mile
ahead of where we were; but it only continued beyond that point of intersection
for about a hundred yards. By going off the asphalt to the left just a short
distance, we could get around the end of the cloud-high curtain. Not only could
we bypass it safely; but after going a little further, we would be able to get
where we could see what was behind it, without ever having to set foot in what
might be dangerous territory. I kept us moving.

We stopped finally and left the
road, a good fifty or a hundred feet short of the point where it was
intersected by the mistwall. Up this close to the wall, we could see it seeming
to reach clear out of sight above us; and we could feel the peculiar breeze and
the dust that always eddied from it, like the peppering of a fine spray on our
face and hands. We struck off into the trees and brush to the left of the road,
with the car in low gear and moving along level with the face of the wall.

It did not take long to reach the
end of it. I kept on a little further, however, not wanting to turn the corner
until I could see behind it. But though we kept going further and further, we
still did not seem to quite clear the end. Finally, I saw why. We were not
going to be able to see behind that mistwall after all. Here at what I had thought
was its point of termination, it had either bent to the right and continued, or
run into another mistwall going off at an angle in that direction.

At first, all I felt was
disappointment that I was not going to get a look behind it. Then it occurred
to me that perhaps the reason neither mistwall nor mistwall section had been
moving had been because each had butted up against the other; and the two time
change lines coming together had somehow created an unusual state or condition
that had halted them both.

The moment that I thought it, I was
hungry to see what was behind the intersection of those two mistwalls. Ever
since, lying on the lizard raft, I had come up with the idea that perhaps those
of us who were still here on the earth might be individually immune to the time
changes, I had been playing with the idea of not avoiding the next mistwall we
met, but deliberately walking into it, to see if I could get through and
survive. Now I had a double reason to try going through the one before me. It was
not merely to find out if I could get through with nothing worse than the
unconsciousness I had experienced the first time, but to discover if there was
something special or strange about the situation where one time change line ran
into another. I stopped the Volvo.

I got out and looked at the wall. I
also looked forward along the other angle of the second, or continued, mistwall
to see where the road emerged once more from it, only about a couple of hundred
yards away. It occurred to me that all I had to do was get back on the road and
keep going, and the three of us would continue to stay safe, united, and happy.
Or, I could turn and go through the mistwall; and I might, just might, learn
something—that is, if I made it through all right.

I stood there. And the longer I
stood, the stronger grew the desire in me to try going through the wall. It was
exactly the way it had always been, from my earliest childhood, when my mind
fastened on to a question and would not let it go without finding the answer.
The phenomenon was like every time since I'd first let that relentless mental
machinery in my head get its teeth into a problem. I remembered perfectly the
terrible feeling I had felt during the initial seconds of that first time
change, when I had thought I was having another heart attack. I remembered the
miserable, helpless, empty sensation all through me after I had come to. I
remembered every bit and part that had been bad about it; and still... still...
as I stood there the wanting to go through that wall and find out what I did
not know was like a sharp, sweet taste on my lips and a hunger that used me up
inside like fire.