Gordon R. Dickson (34 page)

I blew gently into her ear to wake
her up and get her to turn toward me. She came to, but not satisfactorily.

"Not tonight," she
murmured sleepily, and pulled the blanket up to where it almost covered her
head.

Annoyed, I left the motorhome and
went out to look for Ellen. I found her after some search, in a sleeping bag at
the foot of a tree, with her rifle leaning up against it in arm's reach. The rebuff
from Marie had taken some of the rosy glow off my feelings. I poked the
sleeping bag and her eyes opened.

"What are you doing out
here?" I said.

"Sleeping," she said.
"Goodnight."

She closed her eyes and pulled her
head down into the sleeping bag.

Angry, and not a little hurt, I
wandered off. Was this all the two of them cared for me after all? Here I was
back to normalcy and neither one seemed to give a damn. It was almost as if
they had preferred me as the mindless near-idiot I had been for the past
eighteen months.

I went back into the motorhome,
opened the cupboards that held our bottled goods and took out a bottle of sour
mash bourbon. I made myself a solitary campfire off into the woods, at the edge
of the clearing holding the motorhome and the half-finished shape of the summer
palace, and set out to get myself drunk by way of solitary celebration. But it
did not work. I got thickheaded without feeling any better and finally gave up,
going back to the motorhome and falling into my own lonely bunk without
bothering to do much more than take off my boots.

If that was all they cared for how
it had been with me this past year and a half, I thought resentfully as I
dropped off.

It was not until late the next
morning, when I woke up to a dry mouth, a headache and the sunlight streaming
through the windows of the motorhome, that it occurred to me to think how it
might have been for them too. If I had been essentially without a woman all
that time, they had been essentially without a man. Or had they? That was a
question I found I really didn't want to consider, although I made a mental
note to find the answer sometime later. (I never did find out as a matter of
fact.) I got up, washed, shaved, changed clothes and went out.

Not only had they forsaken my bed,
there was no sign of any breakfast made for me. Not that I was incapable of
cooking for myself, but I had gotten used to having the spoon all but put in my
mouth, and I felt the transition to the present state of neglect to be
unnecessarily harsh and abrupt. However, the motorhome refrigerator, run from
the standby oil generator outside it, had cold juice, eggs and canned sausage.
I made myself a pretty decent meal, scrupulously washed up after myself—just to
rub their noses in the fact that I could be independent too—and went outside to
see what was going on.

There was no one around outside the
summer palace, not the girl or Marie—not even Wendy. Now that I began to think
of it, I had a vague impression from the past months that Wendy was ceasing to
be the timid little creature she had been when I first saw her and was
beginning to develop into a lively young girl, busy every hour of the day all
over the place.

I went into the summer palace,
prowled through its rooms and discovered Bill busily at work at a large
draftsman's table in the same room that had the map on the wall. Besides those
two items, the room had three large filing cabinets, a regular desk covered
with papers, and one wall entirely in bookcases.

"Hello," I said to Bill.

He glanced at me over the top of
whatever it was he was drawing, put down his pen and ruler and got off the high
stool he had been sitting on. We shook hands with awkward formality.

"How are you?" he asked.

"Fine," I said. "Just
fine."

I glanced around the room.

"You've all been pretty
busy," I said.

"Oh well," answered Bill,
"there's always a lot to do."

"And you've been doing most of
it, I'd guess," I said.

"Oh, no," he shook his
head, "I couldn't have carried most of the responsibility here if I'd
wanted to. Actually, all I've been doing is handling the instruction, the
maintenance and supply, and things like that. Marie and Ellen have been doing
most of the everyday work of running things. Marie's a natural manager, and
Ellen-"

He paused.

"Go on," I said,
interested. "You're about to say that Ellen is-"

"Well, I was going to say—sort
of a natural general," he said awkwardly. "Maybe I ought to say, a
natural war leader. She's been the one who's been making sure that all our
people know how to use their guns and that none of our neighbors think they can
walk in here and help themselves to anything we've got."

"Neighbors? What
neighbors?" I asked.

"Well," he said, "to
the north and northwest of us it's the Ryans, and the TvLostChord. To the west,
it's Wallinstadt. South and moving around to the east, it's Billy Projec and
his tribe. Not that we've anything really to worry about, even if they all took
it into their heads to combine against us."

He shot me a quick glance.

"We've now got over six hundred
people," he said.

"Six hundred people!"

I was rocked back on my heels. I had
vaguely gathered during the last year and a half that the numbers of my small
community were growing; but I had guessed that, at the most, we would have
somewhere between thirty and fifty people. Six hundred under these conditions
was a small nation.

"Where did they all come
from?" I asked.

"Some of them knew about us
back when the mistwalls were still operating," said Bill. "Or they
heard about us from others they ran into. We were a pretty good-sized party—and
a well-equipped party—to be moving around back then. After the time changes
stopped locally, they began gradually to drift in, either out of curiosity or
because they'd always wanted to join us."

He waved a hand at the filing
cabinets.

"I've got each one down on the
census rolls," he said. "In fact, if you'd like, you can read each
one's life history up to the time they've joined us. About nine months ago, I
made everybody fill out a complete file on themselves; and now we make every
new person do that before we accept them here. I've got not only the facts of
the life, but blood type, medical history, occupational skills and everything
else that might be useful information for us."

I shook my head. His mind and mine
were two different constructs. The last thing I would have thought about with a
group that size would be getting into their former occupations and blood-types.
It had probably been the first thing that Bill had thought of. He had an
orderly brain.

"You don't need me," I
said. "From what I can see you've all been doing fine on your own."

Now he shook his head.

"All we've been doing is
keeping the machinery running, idling, waiting for you to do something with
it," he said. "Do you want to look around at things?"

"Yes," I said.

He led me out of the room and down a
corridor of the summer palace that I had not been in before—or if I had, I
didn't remember having been through it—and out another door. A jeep and a
station wagon were parked there. He got in behind the wheel of the jeep and I
climbed in beside him.

"Porniarsk's got his working
area back here behind the summer palace," Bill said as he started up the
motor of the jeep and backed it away from the building, to swing it around to
head down the hillside. "But I thought we'd end up with him. Let me show
you the rest of it first."

We drove down through the belt of
trees into the lower area where the village of the experimentals had stood. I
had not been down here since we had halted the effects of the time storm, and
what I saw was startling. The village of the experimentals was still there;
although it was now enclosed in cyclone fencing and the gates wide enough to
drive a truck through were standing ajar. Sprawling out on the open space
beyond and slightly downhill from the village was what could only be described
as a town—a new town of everything from prefab houses to tents.

"Eventually," Bill spoke
in my ear over the noise of the motor as we negotiated the now clearly marked,
if unsurfaced, road downward from the tree belt, "we'll set up some
uniform construction. For the present, however, we've been giving anyone who's
accepted here a free hand, provided their housing and their habits conform with
our sanitary regulations and local laws."

"Who enforces our local
laws?" I asked, bemused.

"Everybody belongs to the
militia, and everybody who belongs to the militia pulls police duty on a
regular rotation," said Bill. "That's Ellen's department. You should
ask her about it. She's on top of it all the time; and she makes it work
without a hitch. From what I can gather, we've got a much more organized
community here than they have almost anyplace else in the world. Of course, the
people who are here badly want to be here. They all think that you're going to
go on pulling miracles out of your hat and that they'll end up, either on top
of things, or with all the luxuries of former civilization back again."

"All that, just because we
managed to stop the time storm?" I said.

"It's a function of the
situation," Bill said, with his precise pronunciation of each word.
"Think of it this way. You're the sorcerer. Porniarsk's your demon
assistant."

"You're my Grand Vizier,
Ellen's General of the Armies and Marie's the Number One Queen—is that
it?" I asked.

Bill laughed.

"Yup," he said.

24

By this time we were almost down
level with the gates of the experimentals' village.

"How come you've got them
penned up?" I said.

"They're not penned," Bill
answered. "That fence is there for their own protection, in case some of
our newcomers don't have the sense to leave them alone. Or in case there's a
sudden surprise attack on us from somewhere. They can lock their gates and have
a certain amount of protection until we drive the attackers off. They seem to
understand that perfectly well."

He looked at me briefly.

"I think the Old Man can
communicate with them all right," he said. "Anyway, things have gone
pretty smoothly with all of them since we stopped the effects of the time
storm."

There were a few of the
experimentals out in front of their buildings; and these watched us solemnly as
we passed, but made no move either to come toward us or to retreat inside. The
jeep roared on and we drove down what seemed to be a sort of center street
between the heterogeneous buildings of the human community. Eight or nine young
children were flying kites in a clearing half-surrounded by trees, just beyond
the village. The picture they made was so normal and so pre-time storm that it
jolted me.

"Where did all the kids come
from?" I asked.

"Some of the people coming in
had them," Bill said, braking the jeep to a halt before one large Quonset
hut. "And we've had several babies born here during the past year. Of
course, those are too young to play yet. Still, the proportion of children to
adults isn't that large. I don't think we've got more than twenty of
them."

I shaded my eyes and tried to make
out a familiar figure among the darting young bodies.

"Is that Wendy out there?"
I said.

"I don't think so," said
Bill without turning around. "She's probably out with the dogs somewhere.
She handles them now most of the time, instead of Marie; and they've gotten so
that they follow her wherever she goes. Generally, Marie thinks it's a good
thing; and I agree. The dogs are good protection for her. This is our
government building here. Come on in."

He got out of the jeep. I followed
him and we went up three wooden steps and in the front door of the Quonset. It
was like stepping into any busy office. Behind a low barrier of wooden fencing,
there were five desks at which three men and two women were sitting, typing or
engaged in other paperwork. File cabinets occupied one wall and there was a
large copying machine in a corner.

"Where are you getting the
power to run all this?" I asked Bill. For the typewriters were all
electric, and the copier looked as if it had to require at least a 220 volt
line.

"We put in a much larger gas
generator," said Bill, leading me through a gate in the wooden fence.
"Before fall, we ought to finish a dam on the river and have a
waterpowered generator that'll take care of all our needs for the next five
years."

He led me into a corridor with two
doors on each side and opened the first one on the right briefly.

"Supplies," he said.

I looked in. It was, as he had said,
a supply room. Most of the supplies were clerical; but I saw some stacks of
blankets and other material for household living. A chained and locked gunrack
against the far wall of the room held rifles, and there was a rack of handguns
below it, also chained and locked. I shut the door again and turned open the
door across the way.