Gordon R. Dickson (26 page)

"Help me back to the
pickup," she said.

My head was whirling with that crazy
announcement of hers. I stared down at her bandaged leg.

"What happened to you?" I
said, automatically.

"I got hit by a rock, that's
all. It scraped the skin off and bled a little, so I wrapped it up; but it's
only a bruise."

"Try putting your weight on
it." Something automatic in me was doing the talking. "Maybe it's
broken."

"It's not broken. I already
tried." She took hold of my arm with both her hands. "It just hurts
to walk on it. Help me."

I put an arm around her, and she
hopped back down the slope on one leg, by my side, until we reached the cab of
the pickup, and I helped her up on to the seat. I was operating on reflex. I
could not believe what she had said; particularly, just now, when I had just
realized how important she was to me. It was the way I had found myself feeling
about Waite, multiplied something like a million times. But there were things
demanding decisions from me.

Richie and Alan were still in the
back of the truck with the body of Waite. I looked at them. Somebody had to
take the pickup back through the mistwall with the girl and Waite. Richie was
the unhurt one, but his eyes still did not look right.

"How badly are you hurt?"
I asked Alan.

"Hurt?" he said. "I
didn't get hurt."

"You could fool me," I
said dryly. He didn't seem to get it. "Your head! How bad's the damage to
your head?"

"My head?"

He put up a hand and brought it down
covered with blood. His face whitened.

"What is it?" he said.
"How bad...." His bloody hand was fluttering up toward the head
wound, wanting to touch it, but afraid of what it might feel.

"That's what I want to
know," I said.

I climbed into the cab and bent over
him, gingerly parting the hair over the bloody scalp. It was such a mess I
couldn't see anything.

"Feel anything?" I asked,
probing with my fingertips.

"No... no...
yes!"
he yelped.

I pulled my hands away.

"How bad did that feel?" I
asked him. He looked embarrassed.

"Not too bad—I guess," he
said. "But I felt it, where you touched it."

"All right," I told him.
"Hang on, because I'm going to have to touch it some more."

I probed around with my fingers,
wishing I'd had the sense to bring bandages and water with us. He said nothing
to indicate that I was giving him any important amount of pain; and all my
fingers could find was a swelling and a relatively small cut.

"It's really not bad at
all," he said sheepishly, when I'd finished. "I think I just got hit
by a rock, come to think of it."

"All right," I said. My
own hands were a mess now. I wiped them as best I could on the levis I was
wearing. "Looks like a bump and a scratch, only. It just put out a lot of
blood. If you're up to it, I want you to stay."

"I can stay," he said.

"All right, then. Richie!"

Richie looked at me slowly as if I
was someone calling him from a distance.

"Richie! I want you to drive
the pickup back through the mistwall. You're to take the girl and Waite back,
then pick up some bandages, some antibiotics and a jerry can of drinking water
and bring it back to us. Understand me?"

"Yeah...." said Richie,
thickly.

"Come on, then," I said.

I climbed out of the box of the
pickup and he came after me. I saw him into the cab and behind the wheel.

"He'll take you back to the
camp," I told the girl and closed the door on the driver's side before she
could answer—assuming, that is, that she had intended to answer. The pickup's
motor, which had been idling all this time, growled into gear. Richie swung it
about and drove out of sight into the mistwall, headed back.

I looked around. Bill was standing
about twenty yards ahead of me. Beside him was Porniarsk, who must have
followed us through the mistwall at some time when I wasn't looking. They
seemed to be talking together, looking down into the village, the machine
pistol hanging by its strap, carelessly, from Bill's right arm. It was
incautious of him to be so relaxed, I thought. We had driven off one attack,
but there was no way of knowing we might not have another at any minute.

I went toward them. As I did, I had
to detour around the body of one of the attackers, who had apparently been
trying to rush the pickup. It lay face-down, the apelike features hidden, and it
reminded me of Waite, somehow. For a moment I wondered if there were others
among its fellows that were feeling the impact of this one's death, as I had
felt that of Waite. My mind—it was not quite under control right then, my
mind—skittered off to think of the girl again. Of Ellen—I must remember to
think of her as Ellen from now on.

It was so strange. She was small and
skinny and cantankerous. How could I love her like this? Where did it come
from, what I was feeling? Somehow, when I wasn't paying any attention, she had
grown inside me, and now, she took up all the available space there. Another
thought came by, blown on the wandering breeze of my not-quite-in-control mind.
What about Marie? I couldn't just kick her out. But maybe there was no need for
worry. All Marie had ever seemed to want was the protection inherent in our
partnership. It might be she would be completely satisfied with the name of
consort alone. After all, there were no laws now, no reason that I couldn't
apparently have two wives instead of one. No one but us three need know Marie
was a wife in name only... of course, the girl would have to agree....

I stopped thinking, having reached
Bill and Porniarsk. They were still looking down at the village. I looked down,
too, and, to my surprise, saw it populated and busy. Black, furry, apelike
figures were visible all through its streets and moving in and out of the
dome-shaped houses. Most, in fact, seemed to be busy with whatever objects they
had under the porch-like roofs before the entrances of their buildings. But a
fair number were visible simply sitting in the dust, singly or in pairs, doing
nothing; and a small group were in transit from one spot to another.

They were within easy rifle shot of
where we stood, and the three of us must have been plainly visible to them; but
they paid us no attention whatsoever.

"What the hell?" I said.
"Is that the same tribe that hit us just now?"

"Yes," said Bill.

I looked at him and waited for him
to go on, but he nodded at Porniarsk instead.

"Let him tell you."

Porniarsk creaked his head around to
look sideways and up at me.

"They're experimental
animals," Porniarsk said, "from a time less than a hundred years
ahead of that you were in originally when the time storm reached you."

"You knew about them?" The
thought of Waite made my throat tight. "You knew about them waiting to
kill us, and you didn't warn us?"

"I knew only they were
experimental animals," said Porniarsk. "Apparently part of their
conditioning is to attack. But if the attack fails, they go back to other
activities."

"It could be..." said Bill
slowly and thoughtfully, "it could be their attack reflex was established
to be used against animals, instead of the people of the time that set them up
here; and they just didn't recognize us as belonging to the people level, as
they'd been trained to recognize it."

"It's possible," said
Porniarsk. "And then, if they attacked and failed, they might be
conditioned to stop attacking, as a fail-safe reflex."

"That's damned cool of the both
of you," I said, my throat free again. "Waite's dead and you're
holding a parlor discussion on the reasons."

Bill looked at me, concerned.

"All right, all right," I
said. "Forget I said that. I'm still a little shook up from all this. So,
they're experimental animals down there, are they?"

"Yes," said Porniarsk,
"experimental animals, created by genetic engineering to test certain
patterns of behavior. Up there on the height behind their community is the
laboratory building from which they were observed and studied. The equipment in
that structure that was designed for working with this problem is equipment
that, with some changes and improvements, may be able to aid in controlling the
effects of the time storm, locally."

Bill was staring straight at me. His
face was calm, but I could hear the excitement under the level note he tried to
speak in.

"Let's take a look, Marc."

"All right," I said.
"As soon as the pickup comes back, we'll go get a jeep and try that long
slope on the right of the peak."

17

The only vehicle-possible route to
the peak led down through the main street of the village. When Alan got back
with a jeep, we left him there; and Porniarsk, Bill and I drove down the slope
and in between the buildings. We had perhaps twenty feet to spare on either
side of us as we went through the village, for the central street —if you could
call it that—was twice the width of the other lanes between buildings. The
furry faces we passed did not bother to look at us, with a single exception. A
slightly grizzled, large, and obviously male individual—none of them wore
anything but a sort of Sam Browne belt, to which were clipped the sheaths that
held their knives and some things which looked like small hand tools-sat in
front of one building and stared from under thick tufts of hair where his brows
should be, his long fingers playing with the knife he held on his knees. But he
made no threatening moves, with the knife or anything else.

"Look at that old man,"
said Bill, pointing with the muzzle of his machine pistol at the watcher.

"I see him," I said.
"What do you want me to do about him?"

"Nothing, I'd suggest,"
said Porniarsk. My question had not really called for an answer, but perhaps he
had not understood that. "That one's the Alpha Prime of the males'
community. The name 'Old Man' fits him very well. As Alpha Prime, his reflexes,
or conditioning, dictate a somewhat different pattern of action for him alone.
But I don't think he or the others will act inimically again, unless you
deliberately trigger some antagonistic reaction."

"What are they all doing?"
Bill asked.

I looked in the direction he was
staring. There were a number of porches along the left side of the street, each
with one or two of the experimentals under them. I picked out one who was
operating what was clearly a spinning wheel. Another was cutting up a large
sheet of the leathery material their harnesses were made out of, plainly
engaged in constructing Sam Browne belts. But the rest were working with
machines I did not recognize and either getting no visible results, or results
that made no sense to me. One, in particular, was typing away energetically at
a sort of double keyboard, with no noticeable effect, except for a small red
tab that the machine spat out at odd intervals into a wire basket. The worker paid
no attention to the tabs he was accumulating, seeming to be completely wound up
in the typing process itself.

"They're self-supporting, after
a fashion," said Porniarsk. "Some of what they do provides them with
what they need to live. Other specific activities are merely for study
purposes—for the studies of the people who put them here."

"Where are those people?"
I asked. "Can we get in touch with them?"

"No." Porniarsk swiveled
his neck once more to look at me from the seat beside me. "They are not here."

"Where did they go?"

"They no longer exist,"
said Porniarsk. "No more than all the people you knew before your first
experience with the time storm. Yoij and Bill and the rest of you here,
including these experimental creatures, are the ones who have gone
places."

I took my attention off the street
for a second to stare at him.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean you, and those with
you, are people the time storm has moved, rather than eliminated,"
Porniarsk answered. "I'm sorry, that can't be explained properly to you
yet, by someone like me, not until you understand more fully what has been
involved and is involved in the temporal displacements. Remember, I told you
that this disturbance began roughly half a billion years in your past?"

I remembered. But it had only been a
figure to me at the time. Who can imagine a time-span of half a billion years?

"Yes," I said.

"It also began several million
years in your future," said Porniarsk. "Perhaps it might help you to
think, provisionally, of the time storm as a wave-front intersecting the linear
time you know—the time you imagine stretching from past to future—at an angle,
so that your past, present and future are all affected at once by the same
action."

"Why didn't you tell us this
before?" demanded Bill.

"Unfortunately, the image I
just gave you isn't really a true one," said Porniarsk. "You forget
the matter of scale. If the time storm is like a wave-front on a beach, we and
our worlds are less than individual atoms in the grains of sand that make up
that beach. What we experience as local effects appear as phenomena having very
little resemblance to the true picture of the wave-front as a whole. I only
mention this because it's now become important for Marc to be able to imagine
something of the forces at work here."