Gordon R. Dickson (16 page)

In the same moment that I saw the
flicker of movement, the man with the gun, at which the movement had been
directed, saw it too. Evidently the dog had gotten too far inside our fields of
vision to move without being noticed.

"Tek—" shouted the man.
"The dogs! Look!" The young leader jerked his eyes from Marie and
swept them around the semicircle of half-crouching canines. At the same time
the others started to jerk their guns up. But I had already taken advantage of
the fact that their attention was off me to sweep up the rifle off the raft
into my own hands.

"Hold it!" I shouted.

I had the rifle to my shoulder,
aimed at Tek's belt. The dogs were ready.

"Hold it—just like he
says!" barked Tek—if that was the young leader's full name. He himself
stood perfectly still.

His men froze.

"That's better," he said,
in a calmer voice. He looked once more at Marie and me and smiled; but I could
see a little shininess of sweat on his face. A 30.06 slug through the
intestines is not a happy prospect; and I was close enough so that even if I
was a poor shot, I shouldn't miss. "That's much better. You don't want to
waste any of these good dogs, now do you, ma'am? We'll just back out of here
and let you folks go your own way, since that's what you seem to want. If we
can't be friends"—and he was smiling at Marie alone, now—"then that's
just how it'll have to be. Sorry, though. It'd have been nice to know you. Now,
we'll just start backing up...."

And he did start backing up. His men
imitated him. The dogs immediately followed, step for step, as if invisible
threads connected each of them to the man on which the dog focused.

"Hold!" said Marie. The
dogs stopped; and the men kept backing, each holding his rifle now in one hand,
down by his side and out of the way. I kept my own rifle steady at my shoulder.

The men reached the edge of the
trees and slipped back into their shadow, all but Tek, who stopped briefly.

"Keep going," said Marie.

"Sure. See you sometime,"
called Tek.

"Only if we don't see you
first!" answered Marie, grimly.

Tek waved. He paused for a second
and looked directly at me. He made a little gesture like tipping a non-existent
hat.

"You're a lucky man!" he
called to me. "Don't anyone ever tell you you're not!"

There was no sneer in his voice. There
did not have to be. His message was clear enough. I was negligible—it was Marie
and her dogs who were driving him off. For a second I flared into a rage— and
for a second I almost charged out of the water after him, to call him a liar to
his face—then that answer-seeking reflex in the back of my mind pounced on his
clear intent like Sunday pouncing on a scuttling fieldmouse. He was trying to
get me to charge after him in just that fashion. The dogs were not dangerous
from a distance without my rifle covering them from behind. If I got out in
front they could shoot me, then kill the dogs safely from a distance they had
now regained between themselves and the canines.

So I did not rush out, after all.
Instead, I laughed. I laughed loudly, hoping he would hear me—but he was
already gone into the shadows of the trees, and I could not tell if he was
still within earshot or not.

I came out of the water then, but
slowly, and handed the rifle to Marie.

"Watch the woods," I said.

I turned back to haul the raft, safely,
far enough out of the water so that the river current could not pull it away
until we had unloaded it. Then I took the rifle back from Marie while she
rubbed some life back into my body and toweled herself dry. Meanwhile, there
had been no further sign of Tek and his men. Marie posted a couple of dogs at
the very edge of the woods, on watch; and we turned to unloading the raft.

Once we were unloaded, I built a
fire to warm us up. It was only after the fire was going well and Marie had
some soup heating on its flames, that I thought to look back across the river
to see if the girl and Sunday had witnessed our encounter with Tek and his men.
But a glance showed me that we had drifted so far down river in our crossing,
that the beach where I had left girl and leopard was now around the bend of the
further shoreline, out of sight.

I turned back to the soup, grateful
for its filling heat, but feeling a little empty inside all the same.

After I dressed, I scouted with
Marie and a few of the dogs to see if the neighborhood was really clear of Tek
and his companeros. We found that the woods into which they had gone was
actually only a narrow fringe of trees, perhaps a couple of hundred yards in
width, paralleling the river. The woods were clear of human life and beyond
them rose a small slope to a sort of shallow river bluff, from which we could
see over a fairly wide, open, grassy area. There was no sign of Tek and company
there, either, and no sign of mistwalls, or anything else, moving. We went back
and made camp by the river, where we had landed. Marie and I both figured we
deserved a little holiday.

The next day we pushed on east, with
me scouting well ahead. A few of the dogs were beginning to take to me,
finally—perhaps the water had washed off enough of Sunday's smell to make me
socially acceptable to them—and there were a couple I could trust to obey a few
simple commands. Marie drilled them with me; and they responded well. One was a
bitch—a sort of large cocker spaniel mix and the more intelligent of the two.
The other was a lean, nervous, German shepherd type, male and looking
half-starved. The bitch was called Merry and the German shepherd was Cox. They
would heel, stand, guard and scout for me in a circle, at a sweep of my arm—and
that was pretty good, considering our limited acquaintance.

So, they and I got along pretty
well, moving perhaps four hundred yards or so in front of Marie, Wendy and the
rest. I was off by myself, as I liked it; but travelling with two dogs was not
like travelling with Sunday. They would obey commands; Sunday almost never
had—except by accident. They travelled at my pace; I had been used to
travelling more or less at Sunday's. They were deadly weapons I could control.
Sunday had been almost uncontrollable and absolutely unpredictable.

But there was one great point of
difference that outweighed all their virtues. The crazy cat had loved me—loved
me for myself alone. It was a love induced by accident and the time change
effect, but nonetheless it was there. And I—I had gotten used to it. Merry and
Cox could have been as cheerfully working for Tek at this moment, if Marie had
drilled them into obeying him instead of me.

So I put thoughts of Sunday out of
my mind—I had not dared to think of the girl from the first. Now I allowed myself
the thought that it was lucky she was on the far side of the river, and Tek
with his men, on this. Hopefully she would run into some decent people on her
side. People being naturally spread out over the spectrum of human character as
they were, she had as good a chance of finding good people as she had of
finding bad ones. I put her out of my mind, too. No man—and no girl—could have
the world just the way they wanted it, always.

By noon of the second day after we
had crossed the river, we moved out of the relatively open area beyond the
river bluff on this side and began to come on rolling country covered by what
was obviously farmland, scattered with deserted-looking farmhouses. The change
was gradual enough so that it was impossible for us to tell whether the change
from open country to cultivated earth was natural or the result of a time
change. But in any case, the appearance of the area did not jibe exactly with
Tek's words about only a "couple of empty towns" on this side of the
river. We passed by the deserted-looking farmhouses at a healthy distance; and
at no time did the dogs give any kind of alarm.

So three days of travel went by
quietly with no sign of Tek and his group, or any other humans, and no sign of
trouble. Then, on the morning of the fourth day we spotted a mistwall standing
off to our right, and I changed our line of march to angle toward it.

12

Marie objected to the whole idea.
Her own instinct was to head away from the mistwall; and I could not blame her.

"All right," I said, turning
away. "You go on. I should catch up to you in a couple of days. If not,
you'd better not wait for me."

I took perhaps a half a dozen steps
away from her before she made a sound; and then I heard her behind me.

"What can I do?
What can I
do?"

It was an aching, tearing sort of
cry. I turned around and saw her, her eyes squeezed shut, her face white, her
fists clenched at her sides, and all her body rigid. I went back to her.

Suddenly, I understood how it was
with her. From her point of view, she had contributed to our partnership
everything she had to contribute. She had abandoned what little security she
still had left, following the time storm, to go with me—more for Wendy's sake,
I suspected, than for her own. She had been adjustable, faithful and hardworking,
a good partner by day and night. She had trusted her dogs, herself—and even her
daughter—to me. And still, here on some reasonless whim, as it seemed to her, I
was going to risk everything on a chance that could just as easily be avoided.

I put my arms around her and tried
to get her to soften up; but she was as rigid as ever the girl had been in one
of her states of shock. But I simply stood there and kept holding her, as I had
kept holding the girl in those instances, and after a while, I thought I felt
some yielding in her. She shuddered and began to cry, in great, inward,
throaty, tearing sobs that were almost tearless.

However, after a while, even these
began to quiet down; and I began to talk, quietly, into her ear while I held
her.

"Listen to me," I said.
"There only were three things I might not have gone along with you on; and
now that Sunday and the girl are gone, there's only one. But that's something
I've been stuck with all my life. Now that I've taken on the question of figuring
out the time storm, I don't have any choice. I've got to go through any
mistwalls I find and see what's on the other side of them—I've got to, you
understand? There's no choice for me when I come to something like this. There
never has been."

"I know you don't love
me," she said into my chest. "I never asked for that. But where will
we go if you don't come back? What will we do?"

"You'll do just fine," I
said. "All you have to do is sit down for half an hour and wait, while I
step through the mistwall and take a look at what's beyond it before I come
back out."

"All!" she said.

"That's right. All," I
told her. "You'll have to take my word for it; but with most of the
mistwalls I've seen, the two sides of them were pretty much the same, front and
back. The odds are against anything being there that's either very good or very
bad. If it's bad, I'll duck back right away. If it's good, it could mean a new,
safe future for all of us. You ought to be pushing me to go and look, not
holding me back!"

"Oh, you'll do what you want,"
she said and pulled away from me. But evidently it was settled; we set off for
the mistwall.

At the point where we came up to it,
the mistwall crossed a little hollow crowned by trees on both sides, so that
there was a sort of natural trough some sixty yards wide and perhaps a hundred
long leading to it. I had picked this point as one where Marie, Wendy and the
dogs could stay more or less hidden from anyone observing from the higher level
of land surrounding them. We had spotted the mistwall early, and we reached the
trough, or hollow, perhaps an hour before noon. The mistwall itself was
completely unmoving—now that I thought of it, I had never seen a motionless
mistwall begin to travel, or a moving one stop. It could be that there were two
different varieties of time lines involved... now that was a new thought.

I got everyone down in the hollow
and climbed back out to the surrounding level to make sure they were invisible
from anyone looking across the outside plain. They were, and using the binoculars
reassured me that there was no sign of movement between the clumps of trees on
the plain itself. They should be perfectly safe for an hour or so while I was
on the other side of the mistwall— certainly they would be safe for the time it
would take me to go, turn around and. come back, if I found something on the
other side I did not like.

Going back down into the hollow, I
found myself trying to remember if I had ever seen anyone or anything alive
moving voluntarily through one of the mistwalls. But I could remember none.

Marie held me tightly for a long
moment before she would let me leave them for the mistwall itself—and even
Wendy clung to me. The little girl had been getting over her shyness where I
was concerned, these last few days since the girl and Sunday had been gone. I
felt a sudden touch of discomfort at the realization that I had not reacted to
the small overtures the child had been making in my direction. It came to me
suddenly and heavily that it was some obscure connection between her presence
and the absence of the other two, the girl and Sunday, that had kept me cool to
her. Now, suddenly, I felt guilty. It was not Wendy's fault that things were
happening as they were.