Gordon R. Dickson (2 page)

I put the panel back in gear again
and drove off. After a while the road swung in a gentle curve toward a small
town that looked as normal as apple pie, as if no mistwall had ever passed
through it. It could be, of course. My heart began to pound a little with hope
of running into someone sane I could talk with, about everything that had
happened since that apparent heart attack of mine in the cabin.

But when I drove into Main Street of
the town, between the buildings, there was no one in sight; and the whole place
seemed deserted. Hope evaporated into caution. Then I saw what seemed to be a
barricade across the street up ahead; and a single figure crouched behind it
with what looked like a rocket launcher on his shoulder. He was peering over
the barricade away from me; although he must have heard the sound of the motor
coming up the street behind him.

I pulled the truck into an alley
between two stores and stopped it.

"Stay here and stay
quiet," I told the girl and Sunday.

I took the carbine from beside my
driver's seat and got out. Holding it ready, just in case, I went up behind the
man crouched at the barricade. Up this close I could see easily over the
barricade —and sure enough, there was another mistwall, less than a mile away,
but unmoving. For the first time since I had come into the silent town, I
became conscious of a steady sound.

3

It came from somewhere up ahead,
beyond the point where the straight white concrete highway vanished into the
unmoving haze of the mistwall—a small buzzing sound. Like the sound of a fly in
an enclosed box on a hot July day such as this one was.

"Get down," said the man
with the rocket launcher.

I pulled my head below the top line
of the makeshift barricade-furniture, rolls of carpeting, cans of paint—that
barred the empty street between the gritty sidewalks and the unbroken store
windows in the red brick sides of the Main Street building. Driving in from the
northwest, I had thought at first that this small town was still living. Then,
when I got closer, I guessed it was one of those places, untouched but
abandoned, such as I had run into further north. And so it was, in fact; except
for the man, his homemade barricade, and the rocket launcher.

The buzzing grew louder. I looked
behind me, back down Main Street. I could just make out the brown, left front
fender of the panel truck showing at the mouth of the alley into which I had
backed it. There was no sound or movement from inside it. The two of them in
there would be obeying my orders, lying still on the blankets in the van
section, the leopard probably purring a little in its rough, throaty way and
cleaning the fur of a forepaw with its tongue, while the girl held to the
animal for comfort and companionship, in spite of the heat.

When I looked back through a chink
in the barricade, there was something already visible in the road. It had
evidently just appeared out of the haze, for it was coming very fast. Its sound
was the buzzing sound I had heard earlier, now growing rapidly louder as the
object raced toward us, seeming to swell in size, like a balloon being inflated
against the white backdrop of the haze, as it came.

It came so fast that there was only,
time to get a glimpse of it. It was yellow and black in color, like a wasp; a
small gadget with an amazing resemblance to a late-model compact car, but half
the size of such a car, charging at us down the ruler-straight section of
highway like some outsize wind-up toy.

I jerked up my rifle; but at the
same time the rocket launcher went off beside me with a flat clap of sound. The
rocket was slow enough so that we could see it like a black speck, curving
through the air to meet the gadget coming at us. They met and there was an
explosion. The gadget hopped up off the road shedding parts which flew toward
us, whacking into the far side of the barricade like shrapnel. For a full
minute after it quit moving, there was no sound to be heard. Then the whistling
of birds and the trilling of crickets took up again.

I looked over at the rocket
launcher.

"Good," I said to the man.
"Where did you get that launcher, anyway?"

"Somebody must have stolen it
from a National Guard outfit," he said. "Or brought it back from
overseas. I found it with a bunch of knives and guns and other things, in a
storeroom behind the town police office."

He was as tall as I was, a
tight-shouldered, narrow-bodied man with a deep tan on his forearms, and on his
quiet, bony face. Maybe a little older than I; possibly in his late thirties. I
studied him, trying to estimate how hard it would be to kill him if I had to. I
could see him watching, doubtless with the same thought in mind.

It was the way things were, now.
There was no shortage of food or drink, or anything material you could want.
But neither was there any law, anymore—at least, none I'd been able to find in
the last three weeks.

4

To break the staring match, I
deliberately looked away to the gadget, lying still now beyond the barricades,
and nodded at it.

"I'd like to have a look at it
close up," I said. "Is it safe?"

"Sure." He got to his
feet, laying down the rocket launcher. I saw, however, he had a heavy
revolver—possibly a thirty-eight or forty-four—in a holster on the hip away
from me; and a deer rifle carbine like mine was lying against the barricade. He
picked it up in his left hand.

"Come on," he said.
"They only show up one at a time; on a staggered schedule, seven to ten
hours apart."

I looked down the road. There were
no other wrecked shapes in black and yellow in sight along it.

"You're sure?" I said.
"How many have you seen?"

He laughed, making a dry sound in
his throat like an old man.

"They're never quite
stopped," he said. "Like this one. It's harmless, now, but not really
done for. Later it'll crawl back, or get pulled back behind the mist over
there—you'll see. Come on."

He climbed over the barricade and I
followed him. When we got to the gadget, it looked more than ever like an
overlarge toy car—except that where the windows should be, there was a flat
yellow surface; and instead of four ordinary-sized wheels with tires, the lower
halves of something like sixteen or eighteen small metal disks showed through
the panel sealing the underbody. The rocket had torn a large hole in the
gadget's side.

"Listen," said the man,
stooping over the hole. I came close and listened myself. There was a faint
buzzing still going on down there someplace inside it.

"Who sends these things?"
I said. "Or what sends them?"

He shrugged.

"By the way," I said,
"I'm Marc Despard." I held out my hand.

He hesitated.

"Raymond Samuelson," he
said.

I saw his hand jerk forward a
little, then back again. Outside of that, he ignored my offered hand; and I let
it drop. I guessed that he might not want to shake hands with a man he might
later have to try to kill; and I judged that anyone who worried about a nicety
like that was not likely to shoot me in the back, at least, unless he had to.
At the same time, there was no point in asking for trouble by letting any
misunderstandings arise.

"I'm just on my way through to
Omaha," I said. "My wife's there, if she's still all right. But I'm
not going to drive right across that time change line out there if I've got a
choice." I nodded at the haze from which the gadget had come. "Have
you got any other roads leading south or east from the town?"

"Yes," he said. He was
frowning. "Did you say your wife was there?"

"Yes," I answered. For the
life of me, I had meant to say "ex-wife," but my tongue had slipped;
and it was not worth straightening the matter out now for someone like
Samuelson. "Look," he said, "you don't have to go right away.
Stop and have dinner."

Stop and have dinner.
Something about my mentioning a
wife had triggered off a hospitality reflex in him. The familiar, homely words
he spoke seemed as strange and out of place, here between the empty town and
the haze that barred the landscape to our right, as the wrecked gadget at our
feet.

"All right," I said.

We went back, over the barricade and
down to the panel truck. I called to the leopard and the girl to come out, and
introduced them to Samuelson. His eyes widened at the sight of the leopard; but
they opened even more at the sight of the girl behind the big cat.

"I call the leopard
'Sunday'," I said. "The girl's never told me her name."

I put out my hand and Sunday stepped
forward, flattening his ears and rubbing his head up under my palm with a sound
that was like a whimper of pleasure.

"I came across him just after a
time change had swept the area where he was," I said. "He was still
in shock when I first touched him; and now I've got his soul in pawn, or
something like that. You've seen how animals act, if you get them right after a
change, before they come all the way back to being themselves?"

Samuelson shook his head. He was
looking at me now with some distrust and suspicion.

"That's too bad," I said.
"Maybe you'll take my word for it, then. He's perfectly safe as long as
I'm around."

I petted Sunday. Samuelson looked at
the girl.

"Hello," he said, smiling
at her. But she simply stared back without answering. She would do anything I
set her to doing, but I had never been able to make her seem conscious of
herself. The straight, dark hair hanging down around her shoulders always had a
wild look; and even the shirt and jeans she was wearing looked as if they did
not belong on her.

They were the best of available
choices, though. I had put her into a dress once, shortly after I had found
her; and the effect had been pitiful. She had looked like a caricature of a
young girl in that dress.

"She doesn't talk," I said.
"I came across her a couple of days after I found the leopard, about two
hundred miles south. The leopard was about where the Minneapolis-St. Paul area
used to be. It could have come from a zoo. The girl was just wandering along
the road. No telling where she came from."

"Poor kid," said
Samuelson. He evidently meant it; and I began to think it even more unlikely
that he would shoot me in the back.

We went to his house, one block off
Main Street, for dinner.

"What about
the—whatever-you-call-them?" I asked. "What if one comes while you
aren't there to stop it?"

"The buzzers," he said.
"No, like I told you, they don't run on schedule, but after one's come by,
it's at least six and a half hours before the next one. It's my guess there's
some kind of automatic factory behind the mist there, that takes that long to
make a new one."

Samuelson's house turned out to be
one of those tall, ornate, late-nineteenth century homes you still see in small
towns. Two stories and an attic with a wide screen porch in front and lilac
bushes growing all along one side of it. The rooms inside were small, dark and
high-ceilinged, with too much furniture for their floorspace. He had rigged a
gas motor and a water tank to the well in his basement that had formerly been
run by an electric pump; and he had found an old, black, wood-burning stove to
block up in one corner of this spacious kitchen. The furniture was clean of
dust and in order.

He gave us the closest thing to a
normal meal that I'd eaten—or the girl had, undoubtedly —since the time storm
first hit Earth. I knew it had affected all the Earth, by this time; not just
the little part west of the Great Lakes in North America, where I was. I
carried a good all-bands portable radio along and, once in a while, picked up a
fragment of a broadcast from somewhere. The continuity—or discontinuity—lines
dividing the time areas usually blocked off radio. But sometimes things came
through. Hawaii, evidently, was unique in hardly having been touched, and I'd
occasionally heard bits of shortwave from as far away as Greece. Not that I
listened much. There was nothing I could do for the people broadcasting, any
more than there was anything they could do for me.

I told Samuelson about this while he
was fixing dinner; and he said he had run into the same thing with both the
shortwave and long-wave radios he had set up. We agreed that the storm was not
over.

"We've only had the one time
change here in Saulsburg, though," he said. "Every so often, I'll see
a line of change moving across country off on the horizon, or standing still
for a while out there; but so far, none's come this way."

"Where did all the people go,
that were in this place?" I asked.

His face changed, all at once.

"I don't know," he said.
Then he bent over the biscuit dough he was making, so that this face was hidden
away from me. "I had to drive over to Peppard—that's the next town. I
drove and drove and couldn't find it. I began to think I was sick or crazy, so
I turned the car around and drove home. When I got back here, it was like you
see it now."