Gordon R. Dickson (52 page)

"I don't know," I said.

Then I noticed that around the
corners of the drawn shades of the windows, the gleam of full daylight was
showing.

31

We put up the shades; and the
sunlight, which looked no different than any sunlight we had ever known, poured
in. But outside the windows, all we could see was the same inner courtyard that
held Sunday. Overhead, it was a half-cloudy day with thick white cloud masses
and clear blue alternating.

We went down the corridors and out
into the parking area. Below us, the empty village of the Experimentals and the
town were unchanged; but beyond a short distance of plain that surrounded
these, high grasses now began. The stalks looked to be six feet tall at least
and stretched to the horizon like an endless field of oversize wheat. The road
was gone. What now was on the other side of the mountain behind us, we could
not, of course, see.

Down in the town, there was still no
one stirring. This was not surprising, since many of them might not yet have
realized that the move had been made. There had been no sound, no feeling of
physical movement when it had happened. It was difficult even for me to realize
that this was the far future I had talked about.

"Shall I go tell them,
below?" Doc asked.

"Go ahead," I said.

He hopped into one of the jeeps and
drove off. I stood where I was with Ellen beside me, and the others, including
Porniarsk, not far off. A moment later, we could see Doc's jeep emerge beyond
the trees and drive in among the buildings of the town, stopping here and there
while he jumped out and went inside.

Each time he came out again, he was
followed by people from inside a building. Soon the streets were swarming, and
the figures below were starting to stream back up the slope toward us. Half an
hour later, there was an impromptu celebration underway on the landing area.

It struck me, caught up in it as I
was, that I had had more shocks, and more large gatherings recently than in any
time since before the time storm. Nonetheless, this last one—this arrival
party, as it was named almost immediately—vibrated with something neither the
welcome home blast, nor the information session had possessed. There was a
relaxed feeling of peace about this occasion that I had not noticed before. It
was a warm, almost a cozy, feeling. Moving about among my fellow time
travellers, picking up patterns, I finally zeroed in on the reason for it.
There was something held in common by all the people now around me that I had
not thought to look for in them, before we made the move.

In a sense, those who had come with
us were the adventurers among our community, the true pioneers. Those
particular words all rang a little off-note, applied to the situation we were
in. But what I mean is that, to an individual, those who had come forward with
me were men, women, and even children who did not want to be any further back
down the line of history than they had to be. In all of them, there was an urge
to be at the very front of the wave, up where the race as a whole was breaking
new ground.

Realizing this, something new and
unsuspected in me warmed to them. It was a corner of myself that I had not even
realized existed before. It was, in fact, the part of me that felt just the way
they did. Even if I had known before we started that what we would all find up
here would be the hour of Armageddon and the final end for our kind, I at least
would have wanted to go anyway, to be part of even that, while it lasted, in
preference to living out my life in any previous time, no matter how
comfortable.

Now, here I was with perhaps a
hundred and eighty people who felt the same way I did. Under the most unlikely
set of conditions that could be imagined, I had unconsciously put together my
own special tribe. I was so elated with this discovery that I had to talk about
it with someone. Ellen was busy helping organize the food and drink aspect of
the gathering, so I went looking for Bill.

I found him also busy. He had set up
a table with some sheets of paper and was asking everybody to sign up so that
we could have a complete and correct list of who had actually come through with
us, since there were people at the last moment who had changed their minds
either for or against the move. The sign-up table, however, was essentially
self-operating, now that word of it was being passed through the crowd, and I
managed to pull him aside.

We walked off a little way from the
rest, and I told him my discovery about the pioneer element in those who had
come and my pleasure in it.

"I can't get over striking gold
like that," I said. "Stop and think how small the whole North
American population was after we got the mistwalls halted. And out of that
small population we've gathered nearly two hundred people who really belong up
here, thousands of years ahead in time."

"That's true, of course,"
he said.

His handsome, small face had been
tanned by several years of outdoor weather, and the same amount of time seemed
to have thickened and matured even the bones of it, so that he now looked more
competent and mature. I realized that it was with him as it had been with
Marie. Just as I had not really looked at her for a long time, so I had not
really looked at him either; and he had been changing under my nose.

"... it shouldn't be such a
surprise, though," he was going on to say, even as I was noting the
changes in him. "Stop to think that the ones who gathered around us in the
first place were survivor types. You had to be a survivor type to stay alive
while the mistwalls were moving. Even if you were one of the few who were lucky
enough to stay put and have no mistwalls come near you, contact with the
survivor types around you afterwards either made you like them in a hurry, or
buried you."

"My point, though," I
checked and glanced around to make sure that none of the others were close
enough to overhear me discussing them in this clinical fashion, "my point
is that these people are a lot more than simple survivors."

"Right," said Bill, his
brown face serious. "Look what happened, though. After the time storm, our
group began to attract a particular type of people—those who had heard of us
and thought they'd like to be associated with us. The ones we attracted were
the ones who saw the same sort of things in us they saw in themselves. So they
came—but they didn't all stay. Those who didn't fit went off again. The
community was a sort of automatic self-filter for a common type. Then, when it
came down to a question of who wanted to make the jump forward in time or not,
that decision shook out the last of the chaff."

I winced inside; though I was
careful to make sure no sign of it showed on my face. He had labelled Marie
with a tag I neither agreed with, nor would have wanted to hear applied to her
even if I had agreed with it. At the same time, I had to admit he had laid out
a good argument. I said as much.

"Time will tell, of
course," he answered. "I'll say one thing, though." He turned
and met my eyes directly with his. "I've never felt happier in my life
than when I realized that it was a settled thing, an unchangeable thing, that I
was coming forward like this."

"Well," I said, a little
lamely. "I'm glad."

"I think even if Bettijean
hadn't wanted to come along, I still wouldn't have hesitated."

I opened my mouth to ask who
Bettijean was, and then closed it again. One more thing had evidently been
going on under my nose without my noticing. I would ask Ellen later.

"I'd better get back to the
others," I said.

After the celebration had begun to
settle down a bit, I got up on my customary jeep-rostrum to tell them what we
would be doing in the next few days. I said that we would start setting up the
community again, here. Meanwhile, Doc would be flying surveys to locate other human
settlements in this future world. He would, in fact, fly a spiral course out of
this area; and the navigating equipment of the plane could be used to map the
ground he covered, in the sense that it would store up information about it,
which could later be recalled on the view screen of the control panel.

"How soon do you think we'll
find other people?" some male voice I did not recognize, somewhere toward
the back of the crowd, asked.

"I can't make any
guesses," I said. "Actually, if I was betting, I'd bet they'd find us
first."

There was a silence; and I suddenly
realized they were waiting for me to expand on that.

"This is the future," I
said. "Porniarsk and I found evidence that up here they may be doing
something about the time storm. If that's the case, they have to be pretty
competent technologically. I'm assuming that sooner or later, and probably
sooner, the fact that we're here will register on whatever sort of sensing
equipment they've got. For one thing, if they're aware of the time storm, they're
going to know that a chunk of their real estate suddenly got exchanged by the
time storm forces for a chunk from the past."

There were a lot more questions
after that, some serious, some not so, covering everything from what future
humans would look like to whether we should post guards—against animals, if not
humans—until we learned that this was unnecessary. I turned that suggestion
over to Doc, who thought it was a good idea. The session ended with Bill
climbing into the jeep and making himself somewhat unpopular by saying that he
wanted to start tomorrow morning getting a complete inventory of everything we
had left after those leaving had taken what they wanted; and he wanted
everybody to cooperate by listing their own possessions.

I broke away from the gathering
before it finally ended and got together with Porniarsk in the lab. The view we
had in the tank was essentially the same as the one that had been in it before
our move. The difference was that now it was real rather than extrapolated; and
there were minor corrections in its display because of that.

"Try it now," I said to
Porniarsk. "See if we can extrapolate forward from here, now that it's the
present."

He worked with the equipment for
perhaps twenty minutes.

"No," he said. "It's
still hesitating over inconsistencies."

"Then we've landed in the right
place—or time, I mean," I said. "To tell the truth, I've been a
little worried. Between you and me, I half-expected the people from this time
to be waiting for us when we appeared."

"You were assuming that our
activity of time forces would at once attract their attention? I would have
thought so, too."

"And that they'd have means of
getting here the moment they saw it," I said. "If they don't, how can
they be advanced enough to do anything about the time storm generally?"

"I don't know," said
Porniarsk. "But I think there are too many unknowns here for either of us
to speculate."

"I hope you're right."

"About that, I believe I am.
Beyond that, it's anyone's guess."

"All right," I said.
"But if no one shows up within twenty-four hours, I'm going to begin to
worry."

No one did show up in the next
forty-eight hours. Nor within the forty-eight hours after that, nor in the week
that followed. Meanwhile, Doc was coming back from his daily mapping flights
and reporting no sign of other human existence. No habitations, no movement. We
were evidently at the far eastern end of a mid-continental area of plains
uniformly covered by the tall grass, like central North America in the time of
the buffalo; though there were none of the bison breed to be seen now.

However, both the grasslands and the
hardwood forest that began about sixty miles west of where our chunk of
territory had landed were aswarm with other game. Deer, elk, wolf, bear, moose...
and the whole category of familiar smaller wildlife. The hardwood forest gave
evidence of stretching to the east coast and had been in existence long enough
to kill off most of the undergrowth beneath it, so that it had a tidily unreal
look about it, like a movie set for a Robin Hood epic. Doc had landed in an
open section of it and reported great-trunked oaks and elms with level, mossy
ground beneath them, so that there was a cathedral look to the sunlight
streaming down between the lofty limbs overhead.

I kept to myself my concern over the
fact we were not being approached by the other intelligences of this future
time. Our community was digging in, literally. Just as we had arrived here in
daylight when we had left our former time period at night, so we had also arrived
here in the spring; although it had been fall where we had left. A fair amount
of planted crops had been lost behind us; and even without Bill's urging, a
number of our people were eager to get seeds in the ground in this place. There
would be no stores of pre-time storm goods to plunder for additional food and
supplies in the time where we were now.

So the first week became the second,
and the second the third, with no sign of other intelligent life to be found on
the continent around us and no futuristic visitors. Gradually we began to
adjust to the fact that we might, indeed, be completely alone on this planet of
the future; and the life of our own community began to take up most of our
attention.