Gordon R. Dickson by Time Storm Page A

blinking to get the windshield-glitter out
of the way between us— and I still could not see them clearly. There were at
least half a dozen of them on the beach, and I saw more out on the raft or
whatever it was.
    I started toward them.
    "Hey!" I said. "I'm
lost. Can you put me on the road to Omaha? I want to get to Byerly Park,
there."
    The figures did not answer. I was
within a few steps of them now. I stopped, closed my eyes and shook my head violently.
Then I opened my eyes again.
    For the first time I saw them
clearly. They had two legs apiece all right; but that was the only thing
people-like about them. As far as I could see, they wore no clothes; and I
could have sworn they were covered with greenish-gold scales. Heavy,
lizard-like features with unblinking dark eyes stared directly into my face.
    I stared back at them. Then I turned
and looked out at the raft and beyond. All around were the beach and the
water—nothing more. And finally, finally, the truth came crashing in on me.
    There was too much water. There was
no way Omaha could still exist out there beyond the waves. I had been wrong all
the time. I had been fooling myself, hugging to my mind an impossible hope, as
if it was the fixed center of the universe.
    Omaha was gone. Gone completely.
Swannee was gone. Like so many other things, she had been taken away forever. I
had lost her for good, just as I had lost my mother...
    The sun, which had been high
overhead, seemed to swing halfway around the sky before my eyes and turn blood
red. The water seemed to go black as ink and swirl up all around me and the
watching lizard-humans. My mind felt as if it was cracking wide open; and
everything spun about me like liquid going down a drain, sucking water and
beach and all, including me, away down into some place that was ugly and
frightening.
    It was the end of the world. I had
been intending to survive anything for Swannee's sake; but all the time she had
already been gone. She and Omaha had probably been lost in the first moment
after the time storm hit. From then on, there had only been the illusion of her
in my sick mind. I had been as insane as Samuelson, after all. The crazy cat,
the idiot girl and I—we had been three loonies together. I had flattered myself
that the mistwalls were all outside me; but now I could feel them breaching the
walls of my skull, moving inside me, wiping clean and destroying everything
over which they passed. I had a faint and distant impression of hearing myself
howling like a chained dog; and of strong hands holding me. But this, too,
swiftly faded away, into a complete and utter nothingness....
     
    7
     
    The world was rocking gently
underneath me. No... it was not the world, it was the raft rocking.
    Waking, I began to remember that
there had been moments of clarity before this. But they had been seldom. Most
of the time I had been in a world in which I had found Swannee—but a changed
Swannee—after all; and we had settled down in an Omaha untouched by the time
storm. But, slowly, that world had begun to wear thin; and more and more often
there had been moments when I was not in Omaha but here, seeing the raft and
the rest of it from my present position. Now, there was no doubt which world I
lived in.
    So I was back for good. I could feel
that; along with a grim, aching hunger in my belly. For the first time I began
to wonder where the raft was going, and to worry about Sunday and the girl.
    I looked around, identifying things
from the hazy periods earlier. It was a beautiful, clear day at sea, or at
whatever equivalent of a sea it was upon which we were afloat. A few inches
from my nose were saplings, tree branches or what-have-you, that had been woven
into a sort of cage about me. Beyond the cage, there was a little distance—perhaps
ten feet—of open log surface to an edge of the raft, studded with the
ever-sprouting twigs that tried to grow from the raft logs, though these had
been neatly and recently bitten off for