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

although
obviously, our captors were at home in the water, and obviously, they were
built for swimming. They were thick-bodied and thick-limbed, their elbows and
knees bent slightly so that they stood in a perpetual crouch; and both their
hands and feet were webbed to near the ends of their fingers and toes. They
looked to be very powerful, physically, compared to a human, and those teeth of
theirs were almost shark-standard in themselves; although none of them were
much more than five feet tall. But in relation to a shark that size, the strength
of any one of them would not be worth considering.
    I was puzzling about these things,
when a change came in the schedule. One of the lizard people approached the
cage holding the girl and opened up some sort of trapdoor in one end of it. The
girl crept out, as if she had been through this before and knew the procedure,
and, without hesitation, got up, walked to the pool, and jumped in. She stayed
there, holding onto an edge.
    The same lizard who had let her out
was joined by another, and the two of them went over to the cage of Sunday, who
snarled as they approached. They paid no attention to him but lifted up his
cage easily between them—evidently I had been right about their
strength—carried it to the edge of the pool and opened its end.
    Sunday, however, showed none of the
girl's willingness to leave his cage for the water. But evidently the lizards
had encountered this problem before. After a moment's wait, one of them got
down into the pool, reached up with a scaly arm, and pulled cage and Sunday
under the surface with him.
    For a moment there was no sign of
leopard, cage, or lizard. Then the head of Sunday broke water in the exact
center of the pool, snorting, and swimming strongly. He swam directly to the
edge of the pool by the girl, crawled out, and sat down in the sun to lick
himself dry, looking as furious as only a wet cat can look. The lizard rose
behind him, towing an empty cage and climbed out on the other side.
    The two made no immediate attempt to
recage him, and I was still watching him when a sudden squeaking sound behind
me made me turn my head to look. A door in the far end of my own cage was being
lifted. I turned around and crawled out. A lizard-man was standing facing me,
and I caught a sickish, if faint, reek of fish-smell from him before I turned
and went toward the pool. But at the edge I stopped, looking once more to my
right where the shark fin was still on patrol.
    My escort picked me up and dropped
me in the water. I came up sputtering, and grabbed hold of the edge to haul
myself out. Then I saw the girl, still hanging on to a log, in the water near
me, watching. Evidently, she considered it safe enough where we were.
    I turned and tried to look down
through the water; but the shadow of the trees at the front of the raft was on
it and made it too dark to see. I took a breath, stuck my head under the water
and looked about. Then I saw why the shark was nothing to worry about when you
were in the pool. The underside of the raft was a tangle of tree-growth; either
roots or saplings of the same sort I could see growing upwards from the top of
the logs.
    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