Gordon R. Dickson (13 page)

We all went back inside the house
and the woman shut the door behind us. One lone bark sounded from the yard as
the door closed. The woman opened it again and looked out. There was silence.
She closed the door once more and this time the silence continued.

"Hello," she said to the
girl. "I'm Marie Walcott, and this is my daughter, Wendy."

The girl—my girl—said nothing. Her
face had a look that made it appear merely as if she did not understand, but
which I knew well enough to recognize as an expression of stubbornness.

"She doesn't talk," I told
the woman. "I mean, she can talk, but she doesn't like to—part of the
shock she went through, I suppose. But she hears and understands you, all
right."

The girl stepped to my side, at
that, then went around me and knelt down on the other side of Sunday, putting
an arm around the leopard's neck.

"Poor thing," said the
woman, watching her. The expression on the girl's face did not change. The
woman looked back at me. "What are you going to do now?"

"We'll move on," I said.
"I told you that. And I'm taking this rifle of yours. I'll leave you my
.22 rifle—I'll drop it about five hundred yards out, so we'll be well gone by
the time you get to it. It's a lighter gun and it'll suit you better in any use
you've got for a rifle. The dogs are your real protection, and I'm leaving you
those, alive. But try to track us down with them, and I'll shoot every one of
them that Sunday doesn't tear up."

"I wouldn't come after you that
way," said the woman. "Where are you going anyway?"

"Into the futuremost segment of
time-changed country I can find," I said. "Somewhere there must be
somebody who'll understand what's happened to the world."

"What makes you so sure there's
anyone like that?"

"All right," I said,
"if there isn't we're still going to be looking-for the best piece of time
to stay with, or some way of living with the time changes, themselves. I've
been running away from the mistwalls; but now I'm going through any one I meet,
so I can find out what's on the other side."

She looked out her window toward the
two mistwalls overshadowing her dogs and her home.

"What is on the other side out
there?" she asked.

"You wouldn't like it," I
said. "What's farther in?" I pointed through the back of the house
toward the forest that crowded close upon her place.

"I don't know," she said.
"There used to be a town of fifty thousand people—Gregory, Illinois—about
ten miles down the road, there. But there's not even any road, now. I don't
know."

I looked closely at her.

"You haven't moved from this
place since the time storms first started?"

"That's right." She looked
somber. "Wendy and I sat here and prayed, after the first time change came
close. At first we prayed for Tim—for my husband to come back. But now for some
time we've just prayed that the mistwalls will leave us alone."

"Two of them are right on top
of you," I said. "Didn't you think of getting away from them?"

"To what?" she said,
shrugging. "I've got half a year's supply of food in the basement here—had
to, since we live out of town. If they move over us, then it's over, all at
once. Meanwhile, we're safer here than someplace else. I ran a boarding kennel,
so I had the dogs, here, to guard me. And there was—or we thought there
was—always the chance my husband...."

She shrugged again and stopped
talking.

"All right," I hefted both
rifles and turned toward the door. "Come on, Sunday, Girl. As for you,
Mrs. Walcott, wait fifteen minutes and then follow us out. You'll find the .22
leaning against a tree, a little way into the woods, there."

I opened the door. The woman's voice
spoke from behind me to the dogs, commandingly.

"Quiet! Down!" Then her
tone changed. "We could go with you."

I turned around. My first,
unthinking reaction was that she was joking. I saw she was not. Then, suddenly,
I saw and understood a great many other things.

I had been assuming, without really
looking at her, that she was housewifely middle-aged. She was wearing slacks
and a man's shirt, and of course she had on no makeup. Her hair was cut short
—rather clumsily cut short; and there were dark circles of weariness under her
eyes. By contrast with the girl, the only human member of the opposite sex I
had seen since the first time storm, at first glance, Marie Walcott had looked
maturely-fleshed and unremarkable. Now, suddenly I realized that she was
probably no older than I. In fact, given the conditions of civilization once
more she would have been damned attractive. She was full grown, someone my own
age, with the body of a woman rather than that of a half-grown girl, with a
sane adult mind and capability of speech. Suddenly I remembered that it had
been a long time since I and any woman....

I noticed all this in a moment; and
in the same moment, I realized that she had wanted me to notice—had set out to
make me notice. It changed the whole picture.

"Go with us?" I said, more
to myself than to her.

"We'd all be safer, in one
large group," she said. "You could use another grown-up. And of
course, there's the dogs."

She was right about the dogs. A pack
like that, properly trained, could really be valuable.

"There's your daughter," I
said. "She's too young to be making long marches every day."

"I've got a cart the dogs can
pull her in—also, we'd be running into roads, and some kind of transportation
sooner or later, don't you think? Meanwhile, I... we'd both feel better with a
man around."

She was giving me all the practical
reasons why our teaming up would work, and I was countering with all the
practical arguments against it; and we both knew that we were talking around
the one real reason I should or should not add her to my party, which was that
I was male and she was female.

"Why don't you think it
over?" she said. "Stay here overnight and think about it. Maybe we
can talk about it some more, later on."

"All right," I said.
"We'll stay until tomorrow." I glanced out the window.

"I'd better camp off by the
edge of the trees, there," I said. "Sunday isn't going to take to
your dogs just like that—or they to him."

"Sunday?" said the woman.
"Is that what you call him? I think you heard me say my name. I'm Marie
Walcott and this is Wendy."

"I'm Marc Despard," I
said.

"Marc, I'm pleased to meet
you." She held out her hand and I took it. It was a strange feeling to
shake hands after the last few weeks. Her hand was small but firm, and there
were calluses at the base of her fingers. "Are you French?"

I laughed. "The name's
French-Canadian."

She let go of my hand and looked at
the girl.

"I didn't hear..."

"She's never told me her name,"
I said. I looked at the girl. "How about it? Do you want to tell us
now?"

The girl was absolutely silent. I
shrugged.

"I've just been calling her
'Girl,'" I said. "I guess you'll have to do the same."

"Maybe," Marie smiled at
her, "she'll tell us her name—later on, when she feels like it."

The girl stood without a word.

"Don't count on it," I
said to Marie.

10

I had rigged a backpack-style tent
for the girl and myself from some of the canvas in the boatdock before we left
the deserted lakeshore house. I set this up at the edge of the trees, upwind of
the dogs. Sunday had already begun ignoring the dog pack; and Marie rode herd
on them through the afternoon, commanding them to be quiet any time they
started to get worked up about Sunday or the rest of us. Once the camp was
made, I left the girl with Sunday and went to the house alone.

Marie took me around and introduced
me individually to each of the dogs. I spoke to each and petted each one
briefly while Marie stood sternly over them to make sure that they behaved.
Occasionally I got a brief tail movement by the way of acknowledgment but most
of them merely rolled their eyes up at me and only endured both my touch and my
voice. I guessed that I smelled too much-of cat for any of them to be really
comfortable; and I mentioned this to Marie. But she shrugged it off.

"They'll get used to you,"
she said. The tone of her voice indicated that they had better.

She left me then, to get dinner
ready. I spent a little time trying to make friends with her daughter. But
Wendy was a quiet, shy child who—like the dogs—evidently found me too strange
and potentially frightening to warm up to, on short acquaintance. She was
obviously relieved when I left her at last and went back to camp.

Sunday was there, tied to the trunk
of a large tree with a length of our heaviest rope, ending in a loop around his
neck. He was lying down and, to my surprise, did not seem to mind being
restricted this way. Since he was not objecting and it was convenient to have
him anchored so, I left him the way he was. The girl must have tied him up so
that she could wander off by herself, because she was nowhere to be seen.

She had not returned by the time
Marie stuck her head out her door to call us to dinner. I waited a little
while, but she still had not come back when Marie called a second time; and I
decided not to worry about her. There was no counting on her, anyway. Sunday
was still not objecting to being tied up—which was ideal from my point of view.
He had dozed off kittenishly lying on his back with his paws in the air, as if
there was no dog within a thousand miles. I got up and left; and all he did was
open his eyes sleepily to look after me.

The good smell of cooking reached me
before I opened the door and surrounded me as soon as I came in. Marie had
produced a ham—it had to have been a canned one—heated and glazed it, and
filled out the meal with what must have been home-grown tomatoes, potatoes and
a salad made with some greens I didn't identify, but which, with a cheese
dressing, tasted magnificent.

"She didn't come with
you?" Marie asked, as she sat down at the table with Wendy and me.

"She's gone off somewhere.
Sunday's tied up," I said.

She nodded, evidently reassured. She
did not know that Sunday was capable of chewing through any rope that tied him
in no seconds flat, if the notion occurred to him. But he was not likely to
wander off; and he had sense enough not to start trouble with the dogs, but to
pick his way among them, if he got the urge to free himself and join me in the
house.

It was a marvelous dinner. Marie had
gotten rid of the slacks and shirt. She was wearing a soft, yellow dress that
went well with the color of her blond hair, which—while still short—was
smoothed out somehow and looked less as if it had undergone home barbering. She
had used a touch of lipstick too, and possibly a hint of other makeup. The
total result was enough to bring back the past in a way that the scotch and
sodas I had made in the lake-front home never had.

I had been regretting all afternoon
that I had not had the sense to bring at least one bottle from the liquor stock
of the lakeshore home. But as it turned out, Marie had her own supply. She had
not produced any wine with the meal; but afterwards she came up with a bottle
of rum, after everything was over and Wendy had gone off to bed. It was not
great rum, but it went well with the coffee.

We sat on the couch in her living
room and talked, about our situations—and a lot else. Under the influence of
the rum, I remember telling her more about myself than I had intended to ever
tell anyone. But in the warmth and privacy of the living room, I was lulled
into a sense of security. I knew very well that Marie was only out after her
own advantage. I knew what was going on with both of us; but I did not give a
damn. In fact, I remember thinking that I deserved something like this, after
wet-nursing an insane leopard and a wild girl all these weeks. Somewhere along
there with the rum and the coffee, I put my arm around Marie; and only a little
later we turned the lights out.

I don't know how late it was. It was
certainly sometime after midnight when I left the house. Marie followed me
naked to the door in the darkness to put her head out and hiss the dogs into
silence when they roused on seeing me. I gave her a last kiss and went across
the dark ground under a young moon to the camp.

Sunday was curled up under the tree
to which he had been tied; and there was a lump on the ground beside him that
was the girl, come back. The groundsheet out of our tent was a black pool under
them on the semi-moonlighted ground; and some of our blankets were spread over
both of them.

I shrugged, drunkenly. If the girl
wanted to lie out there and get soaked through with the morning dew, that was
up to her. I crawled into the tent and wrapped myself as well as I could in the
remaining blankets. I was either not quite asleep and hallucinating, or else I
was already asleep and dreamed the whole thing; but it seemed to me that just
before I dropped into a deep well of unconsciousness, Sunday raised his head
and looked me right in the eye, speaking to me.