Read Online Gordon R. Dickson by Time Storm - Free Book Online

shallow ocean that
had occupied the interior of the North American continent in the Permian
period, or far enough into the future to find a time when that sea had been
geologically recreated.
    A shift that far forward would have
given time for humans to devolve and make a genetic shift to the form of these
who had captured us. I studied them.
    I had not really looked closely at
them before, but now that I did so, I could see clearly that there were,
indeed, two sexes aboard, and that the females had a mammalian breast
development—although this was barely perceptible.
    The genitals of both sexes were all
but hidden in a heavy horizontal fold of skin descending from the lower belly
into the crotch; but what I could see of these external organs was also
mammalian, even human-like, in appearance. So it looked strongly as if a far
futureward development of this area under the time storm influence was a good
guess.
    Outside of the slight bodily
differences, the sex of the individual creatures around us seemed to make
little difference in the ordinary conduct of their daily lives. I saw no signs
of sexual response between individuals—no sign even of sexual awareness.
Perhaps they had a season for such things, and this was not it.
    They were clearly used to spending a
good share of their time in water; and that perhaps explained their periodic
dunkings in the raft pool. It could be that they were like dolphins who needed
to be wetted down if they were out of water for any length of time.
    It seemed strange to me, though,
that they should go to the trouble of cutting a hole in the center of their
raft, rather than just dunking themselves over one of the edges, if that was
their reason for getting in the water. I was mulling this strangeness over,
when something I had been looking at suddenly registered on me as an entirely
different object from what I had taken it to be.
    Everybody has had the experience of
looking right at an object and taking it for something entirely different from
what it really is —until abruptly, the mind clicks over and recognizes its true
nature. I had been staring absently at a sort of vertical plane projecting from
the water alongside the raft and perhaps half a dozen feet off from the edge,
and more or less half-wondering what usefulness it had, when the object
suddenly took on its true character, and my heart gave an unusually heavy
thump.
    I had been allowing the plane's
apparent lack of motion relative to the raft to deceive me into thinking it was
a surface of wood, a part of the raft itself. Abruptly, I recognized what it
really was—I had seen enough of the same things charter-fishing on my vacations
to South America, back when I still owned Snowman, Inc. What I was watching was
a shark's fin, keeping pace with the raft. There was no mistaking that
particular shape for the fin of a sailfish, a tarpon, or any other sea denizen.
It was the dorsal of a shark-but what a shark!
    If the fin was in proportion to the
body beneath it, that body must be half as long as this raft.
    Now that I saw it clearly for what
it was, I could not imagine what had led me to mistake it for a plane of wood.
But now my mind had clicked over and would not click back. If monsters like
that were about in these waters, no wonder the lizard-people wanted to do their
swimming inboard.
    On the other hand, it was odd...
once one or more of them were in the water, the shark should be able to get at
them as easily underneath the raft as alongside it. Unless there was some
reason it would not go under the raft after them. Or did the lizard-people
figure that by the time the shark started under the raft, they would have time
to get back out of the pool and back up on top of the logs of which it was
built? Now, that was a good theory. On the other hand, I had seen no evidence
of unusual haste in those getting out of the pool.
    Was it possible that in the water
the lizard-people could out-swim the shark? That did not seem likely,