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

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