Gordon R. Dickson (53 page)

It was a strenuous time. In addition
to coping with the fact that here we would have to supply our own necessities,
there was evidence that the climate in this future time and area would have
colder winters than we had endured, back where we had been. Possibly, much
colder winters. There was a good deal of work to be done to insulate buildings
and expand the capacity of their heating units, whether fireplaces or stoves.

With the move, we had lost the small
river from which we had powered our electric generator. Bill had said he could
get some windmill structures built in a few weeks to give us at least
intermittent current; but this depended on having the hands available to do the
work. More immediate was the need for firewood. Right now the only wood
available was on our section of a mountain that had come forward in time with
us. One hard winter would deforest this completely. It was almost an imperative
that we arrange somehow to bring fuel from the forested area sixty miles to our
east, or move the community to it; and we had too big a stake in fixed property
here to make that move in one short summer.

The result was that everybody worked
time and overtime, including me. In a way, this was something I was grateful
for; because it kept my mind off the fact that no one had contacted us. Doc had
by now flown as far as the east coast and for some hundreds of miles north of
what had once been the Canadian border. He had seen absolutely no sign of
civilization. Everywhere, there was only wilderness visible from the muskeg
conifer forest of the north, through the now-distorted pattern of the Great
Lakes, down to the flat country north of the former Mexican border. A cold
worry had begun to nibble at me that possibly Earth at this time was completely
uninhabited and forgotten; and if that was so, how in my lifetime was I ever to
contact time storm fighters who were light-years—possibly hundreds to millions
of light-years—away?

So I was grateful for the hard work,
in one way. In another way, it kept me from coming to grips with a second
worry, one that was like acid eating away deep within me. With Marie's leaving,
something in her had come out into the open that I had never suspected she
felt. Now, I was aware of it in Ellen as well. Ellen was still there during the
days; she was there beside me at night; but I could sense now that not all of
her was there. Some part of her was being withheld from me. There was a wall
between us, as there had been between Marie and myself, although I had never
realized it.

I wanted to talk to her about it;
but there was no time. In the morning we only had time to rise, dress, eat, and
run. During the day there was no rest, no pause in which to talk. At night,
there was only time for another meal, and sleep would threaten to claim us
before we had finished refueling the weary, empty engines of our bodies. We
fell into bed, opened our eyes—it seemed—a moment later; and another day's
cycle was already rushing us inexorably onward.

But there had to be a break
sometime. It came at the end of the fifth week, when the first of Bill's
windmills began to power the generator, and a trickle of electricity came to
make our lighting fixtures glow faintly against the ceilings and walls behind
them. It was as good an excuse as any to give people a breather, and I declared
a night and a day off.

For all the wonders of artificial
light refound, there was little celebrating that first evening. All that most
of us wanted to do was to sleep; and sleep we did, until late the next day.
Then, in the noon sunlight, we gradually came out of our sleeping quarters to
sit or move around slowly in the sun, either doing nothing at all, or turning
our attention at last to something that had long gone neglected, that we now
had time to check, clean, mend, or build.

It was the second of these
activities that concerned me. When I woke, Ellen was already up and out of the
summer palace. I got up, drank a couple of cups of black coffee and went
looking for her.

I found her hanging out a wash on
the upsloping hillside that lay on the opposite side of the summer palace from
that which held the landing area. Coming around the corner and seeing her from
a distance, I woke to the fact that she had necessarily taken over all of
Marie's household obligations in addition to her own. I had been so used to
having both of them around and being selfishly immersed in my own problems,
that it had never occurred to me that Ellen would now be doing double duty in
addition to her outside work with the rest of the community. Nor had it ever
occurred to me to help either her or Marie before. I came around a corner of
the building and saw her from a little distance. I stopped, and for a moment I
simply watched her, for she had not yet seen me. Then I went forward, picked up
a pair of my own jeans from the basket and joined her in hanging up the rest of
the wet stuff.

We worked side by side in silence.

"Look," I said, when we
were done. "Why don't you sit down for a moment? I'll take the basket in,
bring out a card table and some chairs and fix us a lunch. You just sit still.
How about it?"

She looked at me. I had never been
able to read the deep thoughts behind her face, and I could not now. But I
noticed again, as I had come to notice since Marie had left, how Ellen had also
changed with the years in between. She was still young—what had I figured out
once, that she could not be any older than Doc and was perhaps even younger?
But there was nothing of a girl left about her now; not even the ghost, it
seemed, of she whom I had picked up in the panel truck long since. The Ellen I
looked at now was a mature woman and another person entirely.

"All right," she said.

She sat down on the grass of the
hillside, took off the scarf she had tied around her head and shook her hair
out. She was wearing some old, autumn-brown slacks and a dark green shirt, open
at the throat. Her neck rose in one straight column from the spread collar of
the shirt, and under her dark hair, now loose about her head and shoulders, her
eyes were blue-green and brilliant.

I took the basket and went into the
house. I rummaged around the kitchen, trying to remember what she had shown a
liking for, in the way of food. I had become a halfway decent cook in my years
alone in the north woods before the time storm hit; but there was not much
available here in the way of foodstuffs. We were all living off stored goods
until fall, when the crops of our recent planting would hopefully be in.

I finally found a small canned ham,
and with this, some canned new potatoes, and three of the highly valuable eggs
from our community's small flock of chickens, managed to make a sort of ham and
potato salad, moistened with a spur-of-the-moment, homemade mayonnaise I
whipped up from the yolk of one of the eggs and the corn oil we had in fair
quantity. I also hunted around the palace and found a bottle of Liebfraumilch that
was not overage. There was no way to cool it, lacking electricity for our
refrigerator; but salad and wine, once I had the card table and chairs set up
outside with a tablecloth of sorts on it, looked reasonably festive.

"That's good," said Ellen,
about the salad, as we ate; and I warmed clear through.

"Glad to hear you say so,"
I told her. "Do you realize I really don't know that much about what you
like to eat?"

"I like everything," she
said.

"That's good. Because it'll be
a long time before we have anything like what we were used to before," I
said; and I went on about what we could expect in the way of diet that winter,
even if the crops went well.

I was talking around and about,
trying to get her to give me some sort of conversational lead from which I
could get onto the topic I wanted to bring up. She said nothing, however, to
help. Nonetheless, with the relaxation of the food and wine in me, I finally
began to drift on the tide of my own words into the area I wanted.

"There's two chances that might
help protect Marie and the others," I said. "One's that when Paula's
soldiers arrived and found the country changed where we'd been, they figured
I'd magicked everybody safely forever beyond their reach, and Paula bought that
idea when they told her—"

"Do you really think she
would?"

I hesitated.

"No," I said. "If she
was completely normal, mentally, I'd think she might. But part of her mind is
never going to rest, where I'm concerned; and sooner or later, word is going to
reach her of people who've met and recognized some of our people who stayed
behind. Then her hunt'll be on again. All we can really hope for is a
delay."

"What's the other chance?"

"That's the long one. If I ever
do get into contact with the time storm fighters here and get to work with them,
maybe I can learn some way to go back and make Marie and the rest permanently
safe from Paula—maybe by shifting Paula herself to a different time."

Ellen said nothing. There was a
little silence between us; and a fly that had discovered the empty wine bottle
circled it, droning.

"God help her!" I said;
and the words broke out of me, all of a sudden. "God help them all!"

"It was her decision,"
said Ellen.

"I know," I said.
"But I-"

I looked at her.

"How much did Paula have to do
with her going?" I asked.

"Not much," said Ellen.

"You both knew how I reacted
to—to Paula. Believe me, I didn't even know it myself. I didn't even realize it
until after I caught on to what she actually was, headwise, and then I knew I
had to get out of there."

"Paula wasn't that important to
Marie."

"You say that? If it hadn't
been for Paula and how I felt about her, we'd still have Marie and Wendy with
us."

"I don't think so," Ellen
said.

"How can you say you don't
think so? Marie never talked about leaving before."

"Not to you. She did to me,
lots of times."

I stared at Ellen.

"She did? Why?"

"She told you why, when she
left. Marc," Ellen said, "you don't listen. That's one of the reasons
she went."

"Of course I listen!"

She said nothing.

"Ellen, I loved Marie!" I
said. "Why wouldn't I listen to someone I loved? I loved Marie—and I love
you!"

"No." Ellen got up from
the table, picked up the empty plates and silver and started in toward the
house. "You don't, Marc. You don't love anyone."

"Will you come back here!"
I shouted after her. She stopped and turned. "For once will you come back
and say more than three words in a row? For Christ's sake, come and sit down
and talk to me! There's something here, in the air between us. I can feel it. I
bump into it every time I turn around. And you
^'
re telling me that
there was something like that between Marie and me and I didn't know about it.
Come back and tell me what it was. Come back and
talk
to me, damn
it!"

She stood facing me, holding the
dishes.

"It wouldn't do any good."

"Why not?"

She did not answer.

"Do you love me?" I said.

"Of course. So did Marie."

"She loved me and she wanted to
leave me? I didn't love her and I want to keep her? What kind of sense does
that make? If you loved me the way you say you do, you'd explain it to me, so I
could do something about it, about me, or whatever was necessary."

"No," she said.
"You've got things the wrong way around. I love you without your doing
anything."

"All right, then!"

"But you're asking me to
change. Talk doesn't come easily to me. You know that. If I have to talk before
you can love me, then you don't love me. You wanted Marie to change, too, but
she couldn't. I can, but I won't. It's up to you, Marc, not me."

I stared at her; but before I could
say anything more, a stranger walked around the corner of the summer palace and
came up to us. He was a startling figure, a good four inches taller than I was,
completely bald, and wearing only a sort of kilt of white cloth around his
waist. Even his feet were bare. His features looked something like those of an Eskimo's
but his skin was brown-dark, and the muscles stood out like cords under the
skin. He looked as if he had spent his lifetime exercising, not with barbells,
but on the parallel rings and other gymnastic equipment. He came up to me.

"Marc Despard?" he said.
He had no accent that I could put my finger on, but the timbre of his voice was
somehow different from that of any other human voice I'd heard. "My name's
Obsidian. Sorry we took so long to come forward and meet you, but we had to
study you for a while, first"

32

He was offering his hand in ordinary
fashion. I took it and shook it automatically. I had been expecting him, or at
least someone like him; but the delay had been long enough, and he had appeared
so suddenly that he had managed to knock me off balance with his appearance, in
spite of all my expectations. I found myself going through the social routine...
my wife, Ellen."