Gordon R. Dickson (23 page)

In this instance, I was momentarily
partway back in my full senses, and I had deliberately left the others, gone
off out of sight and sound of the others to find a place where I could sit on a
rock and be alone for a bit. Sunday had followed me; and he pushed himself on
me, after I was seated, almost crawling into my lap. I shouted at him to go
away; and in exasperation, when he paid no attention, I cuffed at him with my
open hand.

It was not a hard blow. I had never
hit Sunday hard; but sometimes, swinging at him was the only way to get across
the idea that I was serious about what I wanted. Still, as I struck at him,
that little part of my mind that was back, apart from the pattern, was
beginning to feel a twinge of guilt for hitting him. Only, abruptly, that guilt
was lost in a much deeper feeling of shock, and suddenly, I was stone-cold
sober, free of the web-pattern for the first time in three weeks.

Because I missed him. My hand swung
through nothing but empty air, and I almost fell off the stone.

Sunday had dodged—and that was all
wrong. I don't mean wrong, physically, of course. Naturally, his cat reflexes
made my human ones look silly. If he had wished, at any time in all the while
we had been together, he could have seen to it that no finger of mine ever came
close to him. But he never had. He had never dodged before. It was one of the
effects of the time storm upon him. When I would lose my temper and slap him,
he only closed his eyes, flattened his ears, and crouched down like a kitten
before an annoyed mama leopard.

But this time, he had dodged. And he
sat now, just out of arms' length, gazing at me with an expression that, for
the first time in our months of being together, I could not read.

"Sunday?" I said
wonderingly.

He came to me then, with a bound,
pushing against me, licking at my hands and face and purring like a motorboat.
Just as he evidently had known I was gone, now he knew I was back. Indeed,
indeed I was back—and it was wonderful from my point of view as well. I hugged
the old son of a bitch and came close to crying over him, in return.

It was at this moment that a shadow
fell across us both; and I looked up to see the girl. Where she had come
from—whether she had been standing off at a distance, watching Sunday and me—I
don't know. But there she was; and the look on her face was like the look now
on Sunday's. I almost reached out my arms to her also, as naturally and
instinctively as I was hugging and punching Sunday; but just as I was about to
do so, the back of my mind said,
"Hold it! What're you doing? She's no
crazy leopard!"
And I hesitated.

It was only a second's hesitation,
but apparently it was enough. The look went out of her face, and the next thing
I knew, she was gone. For a wild moment I thought of going after her; then I
told myself there was no point in it until she got over whatever had made her
leave.

Her going like that had left me with
an empty place inside me and just above my belt buckle, though. I sat where I
was, fondling Sunday until I felt normal again, then got to my feet; and the
two of us headed back toward the others, who were at a noon camp just over a
rise to our left. I joined them; and nobody seemed to notice anything different
about me.

However, beginning at once, and
through the three days that followed, I quickly began to discover differences
in them. It dawned on me that those in my inner circle of people had been as
aware of my abnormal mental state as had Sunday and the girl and had gone on
pretending to everybody else that I was perfectly normal, for reasons of their
own.

The reason in Marie's case was
obvious. As the consort of the leader of our little band, she had a
self-interest in seeing that I was not deposed for reasons of mental
incompetence. Tek, apparently, liked the position of follower for some strong
reason of his own. I got the impression that he was waiting for something, and
the time was not yet ripe for whatever it was. Bill volunteered
his
reason.

"Thank God you're all right
again," he said to me, the first time we were off together out of earshot
of the others, on an advance patrol in the pickup. "If you'd gone on that
way, with your mind a thousand miles off most of the time, for another week,
this outfit would have fallen apart."

"Oh, I don't think so," I
said. "Tek and Marie would probably have worked out some kind of agreement
to keep the tribe together."

He looked at me, I thought, a little
oddly.

"Even if they had," he
said, "that'd be as bad as falling apart. We're not out here just to
survive. We're out here to find out what makes the temporal discontinuities
operate. With you not in charge, any hope of that'd be lost."

"Not necessarily," I said.

"Necessarily: I can't control
them, and you're the only other intelligent person here." He was serious.

"Don't underestimate Tek,"
I said.

"He's smart," said Bill
grimly. "He's not intelligent. He can't appreciate the value of going
after knowledge for its own sake. If he ever tries to take over from you, I'll
kill him. I told him so."

I stared at Bill. Evidently, he
meant what he had said.

"There's no danger," I
said. "Anyway, you'd better wait until I call for help, before you go
thinking of killing anyone. We don't want anybody shot by mistake."

"All right," said Bill.
Exactly as if he was agreeing not to pass the salt at breakfast until I asked
for it.

"Good," I said. "Now
everything's just the way it has been. Let's forget it."

Only it wasn't—just the way it had
been, I mean. For one thing, Marie had gone away from me in a manner that's
hard to describe. She acted no differently than she ever had, but it was almost
as if she had given up hope that there could be anything more than an alliance
of convenience between us. Put that way, it doesn't sound like anything too
important. But it left me feeling guilty in spite of the fact that I was fully
convinced that I owed her nothing; and, in addition, I was helpless to do
anything to mend the situation.

Tek had also changed. He was as much
at my orders as ever, but I found him taking charge of the other men whenever
there was a vacuum of command, quite as if I had appointed him my lieutenant.
And finally, there was the girl....

For one thing, she had evidently
acquired a name while my mind was off on the web. It sounded like
"Elly" when the others used it; but Marie, when I asked her, told me
that it was actually Ellen and that Tek had given it to the girl. Well, at
least, that made more sense. It was unlikely she had suddenly remembered her
name, when she had gone this long time without remembering anything else. But
when I asked Tek what made him think he could name her, he denied he had.

"I had to call her something,"
he said. "I asked her what she wanted for a name, and that's the one she
picked for herself."

Ellen was a pretty enough name in
its own way; I wondered where she had gotten it. But "Elly," or
however they might have spelled its contraction, was ugly, I thought. I could
not bring myself to use it. As far as I was concerned she was still "the
girl"; but I was plainly a minority of one in that.

Tek was paying a good deal of
attention to her, and she was spending most of her time in his company. For no particular
reason, I found I didn't approve of that either. She had developed more than I
had noticed—I now noticed—since those first days when the only things that
looked human on her were a shirt and jeans. She wore dresses now that, possibly
with Marie's help, had been altered to fit her; and her hair was always clean,
tied in a ponytail at the back of her head. She was even starting to develop a
few curves.

All this was to her credit, of
course. She was as sparing with words as ever, but the change in her made her
seem a good deal older; and possibly that was what had attracted Tek's interest
in her. As I say, I found that I didn't approve—although there seemed no
specific reason I could nail down for going to him and telling him to leave her
alone.

In the first place, even if he
agreed, I knew her better than to think
she
would leave him alone,
particularly if I was the one who ordered it. In the second place, I had been
ready to abandon her behind me on the bank of that river, so who was I to
assume any responsibility for her? Finally, what did I have against Tek,
anyway? Since he had been with us, he had been a model of propriety and
obedience to orders; and she was only somebody born yesterday. So why make it
any of my business?

I still didn't like it. I was stuck
with the irrational feeling that he was nowhere near good enough for her.
Unfortunately, I couldn't even get her alone to tell her so. I had been wrong
about thinking she would get over what had put her off when I had hesitated in
reacting to her, back on the rock where Sunday had returned me to my complete
self. As far as she seemed to be concerned, I was invisible and inaudible.

To hell with her, I thought, and put
my mind to deciding what our tribe should aim for next. We had evidently been travelling
with no goal at all, being kept moving by my half-minded, but compulsive,
determination. The evening of the day I made up my mind to put the whole
question of the girl and Tek out of my mind for good, I waited until after
dinner and then got Porniarsk and Bill together. •

"Come along with me in one of
the jeeps," I said. "It's time we had some discussion about this
whole business of the time storms. I want to talk to the two of you,
alone."

"No," said Porniarsk.
"You want to talk to me, alone."

Bill looked startled and then bleak.
He was not much at giving away his feelings through his expressions, but I had
learned to read him fairly well by this time; and what I now read was that
Porniarsk's words were like a slap in the face to him.

"Sorry, Porniarsk," I
said. "I'm the one who decides how many of us are going to talk, and
when."

"No," said Bill. "You
talk to him alone. It may be important."

He turned around and walked off.

I opened my mouth to call him back
and then closed it again. Inside that boy-sized body and behind that innocent
face was the identity of a mature and intelligent man; and he had just shown
himself capable of thinking in larger terms than I, in my reaction against
Porniarsk's words.

I turned to look at the alien. It
was still early evening and the whole landscape around us was softened and
gentled by the pinkening light. Amidst all that softness, the bony-plated,
uncouth form of Porniarsk looked like a miniature dinosaur out of a brutal and
prehistoric age. Porniarsk said nothing now, merely stood looking at me and
waiting. There was no way I could guess whether he had understood my reaction
and Bill's and was simply unconcerned with our human feelings, or whether he
had understood neither of us at all.

I had been pretty well ignoring
Porniarsk during the last few weeks of my involvement with The Dream; and in
fact, there seemed little to be learned from him unless he chose to inform us.
His speech by this time was as human as that of the rest of us; but the
thoughts behind his words, when he did speak, remained indecipherable. He moved
from one statement to another by a logic mostly invisible to our human
thinking.

And yet—he was not without some kind
of emotion, even some kind of warmth. There was no more sentiment to be read in
the tones of his voice, or in his actions, than in those of a robot; but he
seemed... likeable. I don't know what other word to use. He seemed to radiate a
sort of warmth that we all, including the men we had acquired along with Tek,
felt and responded to. Even the animals seemed to feel it. I had seen how
Sunday had taken to him at first sight. The dogs also, in their rare free
moments when they were not under command or tied up, would seek him out,
wagging their tails and sniffing him all over each time as if this was a first
meeting, before ending by licking at his armor-plated hide. Porniarsk paid them
no more attention than he did Sunday or one of us humans when he was not
exchanging specific information on some point or other. He seemed not to need to
eat. Whenever he had no place in particular to move to, he would fold up and
drop into a lying position with a clatter like that of a dumped load of bricks.
But whether he ever slept in this position, I had never been able to find out.
Certainly, I had never caught him with his eyes closed.

So—Porniarsk was a conundrum. He
usually left us no choice but to accept him pretty much as he was. And now,
with Bill having walked off, I found myself about to do just that, one more
time.

"All right, Porniarsk," I
said. "It's you and me then. Come on."

I climbed into the jeep beside which
we had been standing as we talked. Porniarsk made one of the astounding leaps
he seemed to be capable of with only a slight flexing of his post-like legs,
and crashed down into the seat beside me, on his haunches. The jeep rocked
sideways on its springs—I had estimated before this that if Porniarsk weighed
an ounce, he must weigh well over three hundred pounds—but recovered. I started
the vehicle up and we drove off.

I did not go more than a few hundred
yards, just enough to put us out of earshot of the rest of the camp. Then I
killed the motor and turned to Porniarsk. It was an odd feeling to find myself
almost nose to nose with that massive, bulldog-like head. For the first time I noticed
his eyes were not just brown in color, but so deep a brown as to be almost
black. This close, I could see their pupils contract and expand in cat-fashion,
while we talked.