Gordon R. Dickson (8 page)

It was growth that had run wild, a
veritable nightmare jungle of straight and twisted, vine-like limbs, some of
them almost half as thick as the logs of the raft itself. The roots grew
everywhere but in towards the pool area itself, until about fifteen feet down
or so, they curved in and came together in a mat, like the bottom of an
underwater nest. I assumed the lizards kept the pool area clear underwater by
biting off the new suckers emerging from the logs, as they did in the clean
areas topside. Plainly, even something the size of the shark companioning this
raft could not get at us through that tangle below.

So, the pool was safe territory
after all. Not only that, it occurred to me now, but the heavy mass of
vegetation underneath must act as a sort of keel for the raft. I pulled my head
back up out of water and looked around in the air.

The girl was still in the pool.
Sunday was still out of it and licking his fur, undisturbed. The two lizards who
had turned us out of our cages had wandered off and become indistinguishable
from their companions. I wondered what would happen if I got out of the pool
myself. I did so—the girl imitating my action a second later—and found that
nothing happened. The lizards ignored us.

I was startled suddenly to feel a
hand slip into mine. I turned and it was the girl. She had never done anything
like that before.

"What is it?" I asked.

She paid no attention to the words.
She was already leading me toward the back of the raft. I followed along,
puzzled, until a nagging sense of familiarity about our actions sprang an
answer out of my hazy memory of those earlier brief returns to consciousness.
She was leading me—the two of us completely ignored by the lizards—to the back
edge of the raft; and the back edge was what was available to us by way of
sanitary conveniences on this voyage. Apparently, while I had been out of my
head, she had acquired the responsibility of leading me back there to relieve
myself, after each periodic dip in the pool.

When this memory emerged, I put on
the brakes. She and I had been living under pretty close conditions from the
moment we had met. But now that my wits were back in my skull, I preferred at
least the illusion of privacy in matters of elimination. After tugging at me
vainly for a while, she gave up and went on by herself. I turned back to the
pool.

Sunday was nearly-dry now, and once
more on good terms with the world. When I got back to the pool edge, he got up
from where he was lying and wound around my legs, purring. I patted his head
and sat down on the logs to think. After an unsuccessful— because I wouldn't
let him—attempt to crawl into my lap, he gave up, lay down beside me and
compromised by dropping his head on my knee. The head of a full-grown leopard
is not a light matter; but better the head than all of him. I stroked his fur
to keep him where he was; and he closed his eyes, rumbling in sheer bliss at my
giving him this much attention.

After a little while the girl came
back, and I went off to the back of the raft by myself, warning her sternly to
stay where she was, when she once more tried to accompany me. She looked
worried, but stayed. When I came back, she was lying down with her arm flung
across Sunday's back and was back to her customary pattern of acting as if I
did not even exist.

I sat down on the other side of
Sunday, to keep him quiet, and tried to think. I had not gotten very far,
however, when a couple of the lizards showed up. The girl rose meekly and
crawled back into her cage. I took the hint and went back into mine. Sunday, of
course, showed no signs of being so obliging; but the lizards handled him
efficiently enough. They dropped a sort of clumsy twig net over him, twisted
him up in it, and put net and all in his cage. Left alone there, Sunday
struggled and squirmed until he was free; and a little later a lizard, passing,
reached casually in through the bars of the cage, whisked the loose net out and
carried it off.

So, there I was, back in the
cage—and it was only then that I realized that I was hungry and thirsty. Above
all, thirsty. I tried yelling to attract the attention of the lizards, but they
ignored me. I even tried calling to the girl for advice and help; but she was
back to being as unresponsive as the lizards. In the end, tired out, I went to
sleep.

I woke about sunset to the sound of
my cage being opened again. Before I knew it, I was being dumped in the pool
once more. This time, I got a taste of the water into which I had been thrown.
It was not ocean-salty—it had a faint taste that could be a touch of
brackishness, but it was clearly sweet enough for human consumption. If this
was the Nebraska sea, it was open to the ocean at its lower end. But as I
remembered reading, it had been very shallow; and like the Baltic in my time,
this far north, in-flowing rivers and underground springs could have diluted it
to nearly fresh-water condition. I climbed out of the pool and went to the side
edge of the raft to drink, just to avoid any contamination there might be in
the pool. I could not remember water tasting quite so good.

I lay on the logs of the raft with
my belly full until the liquid began to disperse to the rest of my dehydrated
body, then got up and went looking for something to eat. A quick tour of the
raft turned up coconuts, which I had no way of opening, some green leafy stuff
which might or might not be an edible vegetable, and a stack of bananas—most of
which were still green.

I helped myself to the ripest I
could find, half expecting the lizards to stop me. But they paid no attention.
When I had taken care of my appetite, I thought of the girl and took some back
to her.

She gave me one quick glance and
looked away. But she took the bananas and ate them. After she had finished, she
got up and went a little way away from me and lay down on her side, apparently
sticking her arm right through the solid surface of the raft.

I went over to her and saw that she
had found a place where two adjoining logs gapped apart; and her arm was now
reaching down through the gap into the water and the tangle of growth below.

Something about her position as she
lay there struck an odd note of familiarity. I straightened up and looked
around the raft. Sure enough, the lizards who were lying down were nearly all
in just the position she had taken. Apparently, they too had found holes in the
raft.

I wondered what sort of a game she
and they were playing. I even asked her—but of course I got no answer. Then,
just a few seconds later she sat up, withdrawing her arm and held out her
closed fist to me. When she opened it up, there was a small fish in the palm of
her hand—hardly bigger than the average goldfish in a home fishbowl.

She held it out to me with her head
averted; but clearly she was offering it to me. When I did not take it, she
looked back at me with something like a flash of anger on her face and threw
the fish away. It landed on the-raft surface only inches from Sunday. The
leopard stretched out his neck to reach it and eagerly licked it up.

The girl had gone back to her
fishing. But whatever she caught next, she put in her own mouth. Later on, she
made a number of trips to feed Sunday with what she caught. Full of curiosity,
I went looking for another gap in the logs, lay down and put my eye to it.

In the shadow under the raft I could
at first see nothing. But as my vision adjusted, I looked into the tangle of
growth there and saw a veritable aquarium of small marine life. So this was how
the lizards provisioned themselves. It was like carrying a game farm along with
you on your travels. The small fish and squid-like creatures I saw through the
gap in the logs did not look all that appetizing to me, at first glance. But
after my third day on bananas, I found myself eating them along with the girl
and the lizards—eating them, and what's more, enjoying them. Protein hunger can
be a remarkably powerful conditioning force.

Meanwhile—on the days that
immediately followed—I was trying to puzzle out a great many things, including
why we had been brought along on the raft. The most obvious answer that came to
me was the one I liked least—that, like the bananas and the coconuts, we three
represented a potential exotic addition to the ordinary lizard diet, a sort of
special treat to be eaten later.

I also toyed with the thought that
we had been picked up as slaves, or as curiosities to be used or traded off at
some later time. But this was hard to believe. The lizards were clearly an
extremely primitive people, if they were a true people at all, and not some
sort of ant-like society operating on instinct rather than intelligence. They
had shown no sign of having a spoken language; and so far I had not seen any of
them using even stone tools to make or do anything. The extent of their
technology seemed to be the weaving of the nets and cages, the gathering of
things like coconuts (and the three of us) and the building of this raft; if,
indeed, this raft had been deliberately built, rather than being just grown to
order, or chewed loose from some larger mass of vegetation of which it
originally had been a part.

No, I was forgetting the steering
oar. The next time I was let out of my cage, I went back to the stern of the
raft to look at it. What I found was on a par with the rest of the raft. The
oar was not so much an oar as a thinner tree trunk of the same variety as those
which made up the logs of the raft. It had no true blade. It was bare trunk
down to the point where it entered the water, and from there on, it was
mop-like with a brush of untrimmed growth. It was pivoted in a notch between
two logs of the raft, tied in place there with a great bundle of the same
flexible vine or plant with which the lizards had made the net they used to
restrain Sunday. This tie broke several times a day, but each time, it was
patiently rewrapped and reknotted by the nearby lizards.

Whatever their cultural level—in
fact, whether they had a culture or not—they had clearly collected the three of
us for their own purposes, not for ours. It struck me that the sooner we got
away from them, the better.

But here on a raft in the middle of
an unknown body of water, getting away was something easier to imagine than do.
For one thing, we would have to wait until we touched land again; and there was
no telling when that would be. Or was there? I puzzled over the question.

It was hard to believe that the
lizards could be trying to follow any specific route with their clumsy sail of
trees and their mop-ended steering oar. At best, I told myself, they could only
impose a slight angle on the path of their drift before the wind. But, when I
thought about this some more, it occurred to me that the wind had been blowing
continually from the stern of the raft with about the same strength since I had
gotten my senses back. We were, of course, still in the, temperate latitudes of
what had been the North American continent, well above the zone of any trade
winds. But, what if here on this body of water, current climatic conditions
made for seasonal winds blowing in a certain direction? Say, for example, winds
that blew east in the summer and west in the winter, from generally the same
quarters of the compass? Judging by the sun, we were now headed generally east.
With a continuous directional breeze like that to rely on, even the crude rig
of this raft could follow a roughly regular route depending only on the season
of the year.

That evening I marked on one of the
logs the angle of the sunset on the horizon to the longitudinal axis of the
raft, by cutting marks in one of the logs under my cage with my pocketknife. It
set almost due astern of us, but a little to the north. The next morning I
again marked the angle of the sunrise—again, a little to the north of our long
axis. A check of the angle of the steering oar confirmed this. The three
lizards holding it had it angled to guide the raft slightly to the north from a
true east-west line. It was not until then that I thought of checking the
stars.

So I did, as soon as they came out
that evening; but they were absolutely unfamiliar. I could not recognize a
single constellation. Not that I was very knowledgeable about astronomy; but
like most people, I was normally able to pick out the Little and the Big
Dippers and find the pole star from the Big Dipper. Such a difference in the
patterns of the heavens I saw could only be strong evidence that a time change
had moved this part of the world a long way from the present I had known—either
far into the future or far into the past.

If so... a new thought kindled in an
odd back corner of my mind.

If it was indeed the Permian period,
or a future one like it, through which this raft was now sailing, then one
thing was highly likely. We were almost surely moving along roughly parallel to
the northern shore of the inland sea since the beach where we had first run
into the lizards had to be that same northern shore; and it now seemed probable
we had been holding a steady northeasterly course ever since. I had seen a
geology textbook map of the Great Nebraska Sea once, years ago. It had showed
the land area of the southern and middle states depressed, and that part of the
continent drowned, so that the Gulf of Mexico, in effect, filled most of the
lower middle region of North America. That meant, almost certainly, we should
be running in to land again before long. We were not, as I had originally
feared, off on some endless voyage to nowhere, as we were perfectly capable of
being, while an endless supply of food swam underneath us and water all around
us that was drinkable.