Gordon R. Dickson (19 page)

"Hold it!" he shouted, before
I could say anything more. "Hold it—I'm with you!"

To my astonishment, he threw his
rifle toward Marie and walked unarmed up to us and turned around to face his
former crew. He grinned at Marie and nodded pleasantly to me.

"Just give the orders," he
said to me. "I won't pick up my gun unless you say so."

There had been a moment of frozen
disbelief on the part of his men when he had switched sides. But now there was
a general outcry from them.

"Tek!"

"Tek, you bastard—what are you
doing to us?"

"Tek, damn it!"

"Tek…"

"Sorry," he said,
shrugging his shoulders and smiling at them. "I can tell when I've run
into a better team, that's all. If you're bright, you'll come over on their
side, too. If you're not, don't blame me."

Three of the five of them began to
argue with him all at once. He said nothing, though, and gradually their voices
died down. One of the two men who had not tried to argue him out of it finally
spoke. He was a narrow-bodied, balding man in his late thirties or early
forties, with a sharp, hard face.

"That was all pretty quick and
easy," he said. "Almost like it was planned, the quick way he went
over to them. Come on, the rest of you. Let's clear out and leave Tek with
them, if that's what he wants."

The men shifted uneasily. I looked
at Tek, but he was staring off at the horizon, ignoring the whole matter with
an indifference as sublime as Sunday's could be on occasion. But the other man
who had not argued with Tek now spoke up.

"Sure, Garney," he said.
"Let's all go off and let you run things instead of Tek—is that it? I'm
sticking with him. Come on, everybody."

He walked across to us and laid his
rifle down beside Tek's. But I noticed he laid it down carefully. It was a bolt
action, and he had the bolt uppermost; and when he stepped back from it, he was
only a couple of feet away from a quick grab to regain it.

Slowly, one by one, the others came
over. All except the man called Garney, who had suggested they leave Tek
behind. When at last they were all standing with us, leaving Garney alone, Tek
took his eyes off the horizon slowly and gazed at him.

"Well," he said, gently.
"So long then, Garney. Maybe you better head off in a different direction
from where we're going."

"All right, Tek," said
Garney, "that's all right. I wouldn't want to have anything more to do
with any of you."

He backed up a few steps, watching
us. Then, evidently deciding that it was simply not practical to back the long
distance it would take to get him out of our rifles' range, he turned his back
and walked swiftly away. He went off, up over the lip of the hollow and
disappeared.

Tek's men who had joined us moved to
pick up their rifles.

"Leave them lay!" said
Tek.

They stopped, staring at him; and he
nodded in my direction. "Leave them, until the chief here tells us what to
do."

I became suddenly conscious of the
fact that they were all staring at me; and that I was still lying sprawled out
on Sunday, trying to control him with one hand, while I clung to the Uzi and
attempted to keep it pointed, with the other. Sunday had quieted down somewhat
by this time; so I scrambled to my feet, cuffed him lightly when he tried to
recommence his greetings to me and faced Tek with his men.

"All right," I said.
"Let's talk about this. I don't remember hanging out any sign asking for
volunteers."

Tek shrugged.

"All I can do is try," he
said.

"Marc!" said Marie,
sharply. She looked at me for a second as if she was going to say something
then and there, then closed her mouth and crossed the little distance between
us. This time, I was glad to see, she made it a point to approach me on the
opposite side from Sunday. She came up to me and took hold of my arm,
whispering in my ear.

"Marc, are you crazy?" she
demanded. "Isn't it better to have these men as friends, instead of
enemies?"

I was about to answer sharply, when
I thought better of it. I nodded to Tek.

"Ask him how he'd answer
that," I said out loud. "Go ahead."

Something like a dark shadow seemed
to pass across Marie's face; and she looked at me oddly. But she stepped back
from me without a word and turned to face Tek.

"I asked Marc if it wasn't
better to have you as friends instead of enemies," she said, loudly and
clearly. "He said to ask you how you'd answer that."

"Sure," said Tek, "if
I was him, I'd want to know how you'd know you could trust us."

She stared at him. He smiled back.

"You see, now," he said,
"I'm not trying to put anything over on anybody. I volunteered to join you
all on my own. It's up to chief there—what did you say his name was? Marc? It's
up to Marc."

"And up to me, too!" said
Marie, sharply.

"And you, too, of course,
ma'am," said Tek. "But—no offense to you and your dogs—but I'd worry
a bit more about Marc, here, if it came right down to picking one of you over
the other to have trouble with. Him, his pet leopard, and his friend
there."

He nodded to Bill Gault. I had
almost forgotten Bill. Now, I called him over and introduced him to Marie,
Wendy, and the girl, while still keeping a cautious eye on Tek and the others.
All the time, the back of my mind was working. The truth of the matter was, if
Bill and I were to dig into this business of the time storm seriously, we would
need troops to take the ordinary work and fighting off our hands. Plus the fact
that we might well be adventuring through a mistwall into a situation where a
number of people with guns were needed.

Also, something Tek had just said
had sparked off a notion in the back of my mind. While listing the things that
might worry him about having me for an enemy, Tek had specified Sunday as one
of them. I had grown so used to Sunday that I had almost forgotten how
unnatural it was to other people to see a full grown leopard tagging after me
like a kitten. The tendency was for the watchers to assume I had a lot more
control over him than I actually did—as well as to assume that he was a great
deal brighter and more responsive than his cat brain would ordinarily allow.
There was a bluff I could run.

"All right," I said,
"I'll tell you what we can do. We can take all of you on a probation, and
see how you'll do. Leave your guns piled where they are; and if any of you have
to go someplace away from the camp, where you might run into trouble, one or
two of the dogs can go with you. Meanwhile, I'll set the leopard to watch you.
He may not be able to tell me what you talk about; but if any of you make any
move that looks as if you mean to hurt one of us, he can tear you apart before
you'll know what hit you."

I looked them over.

"Well?" I said. "How
about it? Want to join us on those terms?"

They looked at me hesitantly—all but
Tek. Then they looked at Tek.

"Marc—" began Marie, and
then checked herself.

"What?" I looked at her.

"Nothing," she said. I
looked back at the men.

"How about it?"

"Speaking, just for myself, of
course," said Tek, "I think that's fine—real fine. I've got no
intentions of being anything but a good friend to you all anyway, so your
leopard doesn't worry me a bit. But that's just me. The others are going to
make their deals with you on their own."

"All right," I said.
"Suppose the seven of you find a place to sit down together over there
about ten yards away from your guns and the rest of us. I've got some things to
do."

Tek led off agreeably. He sat down,
and the rest followed.

I turned my attention to the girl,
who was now getting to her feet. She had been holding her rifle grimly aimed at
Marie, all the while, but now she lowered it.

"Are you all right?" I
asked her. "You haven't been hurt or anything? Have you been getting
enough to eat?"

She looked at me with a very strange
expression. For a moment I swore she was going to answer me. But habit took
over. She turned without a word and walked away from me to where Sunday was, a
few steps away, and began petting him, with her back to me.

"I take it that means
'yes'!" I called after her. She did not reply, of course. The voice of
Marie spoke in low, but tight, tones in my ear.

"Marc, she's not staying, she
or that leopard, either."

I turned to stare at her. She looked
ready to fight.

"Of course they're
staying," I said.

"Then I'm leaving, with Wendy
and the dogs."

"And Tek and his men right
behind you," I said. I had not meant to put it that bluntly; but I was
just about out of patience. "Go ahead."

She glared at me fiercely for a
moment, then turned and went to Wendy. But she made no move to begin a
departure.

I looked around for Bill Gault, saw
him standing waiting a little distance away and beckoned him over to me. He
came and I led him off out of low-voiced earshot of the rest.

"I didn't mean to lead you into
a touchy situation like this," I said. "You can go back to your
installation, if you feel like it, and I won't blame you."

"No," he said. "You
were right. I couldn't really learn anything more, shut up there. The only way
to study the situation is to look at as many of the discontinuities as I can
find. We ought to keep on the move and, every time we get near one, have a look
at it."

"Good," I told him.
"By the way, you never did tell me what your field is. Were you a research
scientist, a lab man, or what?"

"Well, no," he said.
"I do have a degree in physics... but actually, I was just technical
editor for the installation."

He gazed at me uncomfortably.

"Technical editor!" I
said.

"That's right."

"Well, what the hell can you
do, then?" I demanded. I was about at the end of my temper, anyway; and
this last disappointment threatened to cut me loose. I had taken it for granted
he was some sort of scientific expert, at least.

"I can do a lot!" Bill
said, swiftly. "I can observe, make tests and record—and I know something
about physics, as I said. Also, I've been up to my eyebrows in everything we
worked on at the installation for the five years I've been there. I'm not
helpless."

"All right," I answered.
"But you're going to have to show me.

He did. During the two weeks that
followed, my opinion of him, starting from the sub-basement level of that
moment, went steadily up. He had brought with him in his backpack some
remarkably small, but durable instruments to measure temperature, air pressure,
wind velocity and humidity, plus a few less common things like electrostatic
levels and magnetic flows. He also designed a number of long rods for pushing
these into and through a mistwall, while we stood safely outside.

This is not to say we did not enter
the walls. In the final essential, it was necessary to go through them. As we
moved across country in the days following the addition of Tek and his men to
our group—to say nothing of Bill himself, and the rejoining of the girl and
Sunday—we ran into at least one, and sometimes more, mistwalls a day. We would
make all the tests on them that Bill could think of; but once he had the
results noted down, it was a matter of he and I going through them, that is,
unless it were a moving mistwall we were investigating, in which case we
spotted them early through binoculars and moved to outflank and see behind
them.

We did not go into them as blindly
as I had gone into earlier ones. Among other designs of Bill's were rod or rope
devices to be thrown through the mistwall and dragged back, to give us an idea
of the ground situation and atmosphere beyond. The third time we used them,
what we learned kept us from walking off a cliff on the far side of the
mistwall, before we would have had a chance to open our eyes. But, in the end,
in almost every instance, we still had to go through personally.

We found a number of different
situations, from raw desert to empty city, on the far sides of these walls; and
we profited from what we found. Fourteen days after our group had come to its
full size, we were riding in a sort of motorcade, all of us, including the
dogs. Our vehicles consisted of a couple of brand new motor homes for sleeping
and living quarters, preceded by a couple of jeep carryalls and followed by a
pickup truck, all three smaller vehicles with four-wheel drive, carrying the
armed members of the party while we were on the move. With wheels under us,
outflanking the moving mistwalls became not only easier, but more certain.

There were four of us who carried
weapons to start with— myself, Marie, Bill, and also the girl. She had become
attached to that .22 of hers. In fact, she refused to give it up, and when I
had her fire it for me, I found that she had not merely kept it in good
condition, she was developing into a good shot. At short to medium range in
rough country, a light gun like a .22 could be as effective as an elephant gun,
in every way but impact, if the person shooting it was accurate enough; and I
was glad to have her able to use it.