Gordon R. Dickson (12 page)
Authors: Time Storm
Tags: #Fiction - Science Fiction, #Sociology, #Social Science, #Space and time, #Fiction, #Science Fiction, #Science Fiction - General, #General, #General & Literary Fiction, #Modern fiction, #Time travel
I turned back at last to look at the
girl and Sunday. If I went through the wall and never returned, what would
happen to them? I told myself that I owed them nothing, and something inside me
called me a liar. At the same time, the thought of any responsibility I might
have toward either of them had about as much deterrent effect on the hunger
that was eating me up as a cup of water tossed on a burning building. I had no
real choice. I had to go through that wall if I-and they-died for it. I turned
back to the leopard and the girl, both of whom were still sitting in the car.
"Stay here!" I said.
"You understand me? Stay right here. Don't take as much as one step after
me.
Stay where you are!"
They both stared at me silently. One
of the girl's hands twitched —that was all. I turned and walked away from them,
toward the mistwall, until I had to squint my eyes against the flying dust of
it. Just before I reached the actual mist of the wall, I turned and looked
back. The girl still sat with Sunday beside her, both watching me. Neither had
moved a muscle.
I turned back again, closed my eyes
to the sting of the dust, and walked blindly forward.
But the hard part was not the dust.
The hard part was that it was like walking into an emotional tornado. It was
bad. It was very bad. But, somehow, it was not as bad as I remembered it from
the first time, outside cabin. Maybe this was because my first time through had
left me with a sort of immunity; as if I had been inoculated against the
effects I felt. Maybe it was easier because I now had some idea what to expect
and was braced for it. Basically, I felt as if my soul had been ripped out of
my being. I felt naked, sick and frightened. But, you know, it was not the kind
of fear I feared—if that statement makes any sense to you. I stayed on my feet
and came out the other side, walking.
I was suddenly assaulted by the
clamor of dogs barking not far in front of me. I opened my eyes and saw
them—more than a dozen of them, all tied to short leashes, but all barking,
snarling and leaping against their tethers to get at me. They were tied to
leashes anchored to thick stakes driven into the earth, in front of a slice of
a house about fifty yards away, a house sitting on a chunk of a lawn in the
interior angle of the two mistwalls. Behind the house was forest, and the house
itself was a two-story frame building that looked as if it would be at home
surrounded by a mid-western farmyard. As I looked, the door opened, and a woman
came out with a rifle already at her shoulder, pointed at me.
"Drop your gun." Her voice
was a low, carrying soprano, soft but positive.
"Wait a minute," I told
her. "How about talking about this?"
I had no intention of dropping my
gun. She was standing behind the dogs, in the open, with no rest or other
support for her rifle, but with the weapon up and aimed. If I had to shoot her
to live myself, I would. At that distance, unless she was a natural
marks-woman, holding her gun steady enough to hit me would not be easy. Even
from where I stood, I could see the end of the barrel waver slightly in the
sunlight.
I was more concerned about her dogs;
and I was not about to drop the one weapon that could defend me against them.
In fact— the situation framed itself in my mind and produced its own
inescapable conclusion—if she turned the dogs loose on me, I was going to shoot
her first. They were dogs of all sizes, but the least of them must have gone at
least forty pounds, which is heavy enough to be a potential man-killer. I could
shoot three-quarters of them, and there would still be enough left to pull me
down and finish me off. Nor did I think she would be able to pull them off in
time to save my life, once she had set them on me.
"Listen!" I called to her.
"I'm just here by accident—"
"I said put down your
gun!" she cried. Her rifle went off, and a bullet whistled wide of me into
the mistwall beside me.
"Quit that!" I said,
raising the .22. "Or I'll have to start shooting back."
She hesitated—or if it wasn't
hesitation, at least she did not pull her trigger again. Perhaps the first shot
had been more accidental than otherwise. I kept talking.
"Look," I told her over
the noise of the dogs. "I don't want to bother you. I just happened to
stumble on your place here, and I'll be glad to be on my way again. Why would I
want to be any trouble to you anyway? You're armed, you've got your dogs; and
I'm all alone. Now, why don't we just both point our rifles to the ground and
talk for a moment—"
Her gaze, which had been focused on
me, shifted suddenly. Her rifle barrel changed its aim slightly.
"Alone?" she shouted back.
"Do you call that alone?"
I turned to look; and sure enough,
her question was a good one. If there was one thing I could count on—if there
was one damn thing under the sun that I could absolutely be sure of with Sunday
and the girl—it was that they would do exactly what I had told them not to.
Somehow they had worked up the courage to come through the mistwall on their
own, and now they were standing right behind me.
Of course, this changed the
situation entirely. The woman had three times as much target, now. She might
not hit me, but her chances of hitting one of our group was tripled. I felt a
touch of something not far from panic. Add to what was happening the fact that
with Sunday in view and scent, the dogs were now really going crazy; while
Sunday's own back was beginning to arch like the stave of a drawn bow. He did
not like dogs.
But for all that, he would not leave
me to face them alone. He pressed close against my leg and snarled softly in
his throat, watching the dogs. It was magnificently touching and, at the same
time, monumentally exasperating to know that the crazy cat would stay beside
me, even if I tried to drive him back with a club.
I looked again at the woman—just in
time. She had grown arm-tired of holding the rifle to her shoulder and was
moving now to untie the nearest dogs. There was no time for me to debate the
ethics of the situation. I put a shot from my own rifle into the dirt between
her and the animal she was approaching. She froze.
"Don't try letting any of them
go!" I called to her. "I don't want to hurt you; but I'm not going to
let us be chewed up by your animals. Step back now and put your own gun
down."
She backed up, but without letting
go of her rifle. I put another shot from the .22 into the frame of the doorway
behind her. She checked, hesitated, and let the gun slip from her hands to the
earth at her feet.
"All right!" I said.
"Now, I'm not going to hurt you, but I've got to make sure you're not
going to hurt us. Stay where you are and don't move."
She stood still. I turned to the
girl.
"Hold, Sunday!" I said.
"Stay right where you are, both of you. This time, I mean it!"
I went forward, holding the .22. The
dogs had their tethers stretched taut, trying to reach me, so that it was
possible for me to see where I needed to walk to stay out of reach of each one
of them as I went through their pack. I came up to the woman, bent and picked
up her gun. It was a 30.06, a good, clean, hunting rifle. With that in my
hands, I felt more secure.
I knew what I had to do, then—and
that was shoot the dogs while they were all still safely tied up. But when I
raised her rifle I found I could not do it. It was not just that the woman
would be vulnerable without them once I had taken her rifle and gone on. It was
also the matter that I was still too civilized. I could not get over thinking
of them as pets, instead of as the four-legged killers she had turned them
into. I twisted about to face the woman.
"Look," I said. "I'm
going to have to kill your dogs to make sure they won't hurt us, unless you can
think of some way to fix things so I can trust them not to attack us."
She sighed and shivered at the same
time. It was as if all the strength in her had suddenly run out.
"I can do it," she said,
in a dead voice. She looked away from me, to the dogs. "Quiet! Down—all of
you.
Down!
Be quiet!"
They obeyed, to my astonishment.
Their barking and snarling fell gradually into silence. They stared at the
woman, licking their muzzles, and lay down one by one until they were all on
the ground and silent, watching.
"That's pretty good," I
said to the woman.
"I used to run an obedience
school," she answered in the same dead voice. "You don't have to
worry. You can go now."
"Sorry," I said. "But
I don't know what else you have in the way of guns or dogs inside that house of
yours. Let's go inside. You first."
She stiffened.
"No!"
"Calm down, damn it!" I
said. "I just want to look around."
She was still stiff.
"Just a minute," she said.
She turned her head and called back through the open doorway into the dark
interior behind her. "Wendy, come out here."
"My daughter," she said,
harshly.
We waited, and after a second, a
blonde-haired little girl of early grade school age came out and pressed
herself up against the woman, who put her arm around the child.
"It's all right," the
woman said, "we're just going to show this man our house."
She turned then, and with one arm
still around her daughter, led the way inside. I followed, carrying both
rifles. There was not a great deal to see inside. A time change line had cut
the house very nearly in half. A portion of the living room, all of the kitchen
and bathroom, plus one bedroom and a half, remained. The bright sun coming in
the uncurtained windows of the rooms that were still whole made the spartan
existence that the two of them had been living here all very clear and plain. I
went over the rooms carefully, but there were no other guns and only some
kitchen knives that might have possibilities as weapons.
The woman said nothing all the time
I was looking around. She stood by the living room window and glanced out from
time to time. I thought she was checking on the dogs, because they stayed
quiet. But I was wrong.
"Is that your wife out
there?" she asked at last.
"Wife?" I said.
For a second, the question made no
sense at all. I looked out the window where she was looking and saw only Sunday
and the girl. Then, of course, I understood.
"No!" I said. "She's
just a kid. I picked her up after she'd just been through a time change; and it
mixed her up pretty badly. She's not right yet, for that matter. I—"
I broke off. I had been about to go
on and tell her about my previous conviction that Swannee had escaped the time
changes, and a lot more that was purely personal. But it was none of her
business. For that matter, the girl was none of her business, either. The fact
of the matter was, I had long since drifted into ignoring any sexual quality in
the girl; if I had ever paid any attention to that, in the first place. My mind
had been full of my own personal problems. But I could hardly try to explain
that to this woman without confusing the matter more than I would clear it up.
I was a little surprised at the strength of the sudden urge in me to talk about
it; then I realized that she was the first rational, adult human I had met
since the beginning of the time storms. But it was still none of her business.
I looked once more around the living
room of the house, ready to leave now. The woman spoke quickly, as if she could
read my mind.
"Why don't you ask her to come
in?"
"Ask her in?" I said.
"If she comes in, the leopard has to come in, too."
She grew a little pale at that and
held the young child closer to her side. But then she tossed her head back.
"Is he dangerous?" she
asked. "The leopard?"
"Not if the two of you stay
well back from him," I said. "But if he comes in here, he's got to
pass by those dogs of yours, and I can't imagine that happening."
"I can," she said, flatly.
"They'll obey orders."
She walked with her daughter to the
door, which was standing open, and through it. I followed her.
"Come on in!" she called
to the girl and Sunday. Of course the girl neither moved nor answered, any more
than Sunday did.
"It's all right," I told
the girl. "You and Sunday come in." I turned to the woman. "And
you'd better control those dogs."
The girl had already started toward
the house; but Sunday held back. Seeing he would not come, she turned back to
him. I had to go out to both of them.
"Come on," I said. I took
a fistful of the loose skin at the scruff of Sunday's neck and led him with me
toward the house. He came; a little reluctantly, but he came. The dogs tied
nearest to his path shrank back from him as we approached, but those farther
off whined and crawled forward to the limit of their tethers, white-toothed and
panting.
"Down!" said the woman
from the doorstep, and, hearing her, if I'd been a dog I would not have delayed
doing what she said. The soft soprano now had a knife-edge to it. It lifted and
cut. It carried clearly without her seeming to have to raise the volume.
"All of you-down!
Quiet!"
The dogs followed the girl and
Sunday with eyes and wet breath; but they neither got to their feet nor raised
a clamor.