Gordon R. Dickson by Time Storm Page B

this day. Beyond the logs was the
restlessly heaving surface of the gray-blue water, stretching away to the curve
of the horizon.
    I rolled over and looked out in the
opposite direction, through another cage-side of loosely woven withes, at the
rest of the raft.
    It was about a hundred or so feet in
length. At one end was a stand of—I had to call them "trees" for want
of any better name— their thick-leaved, almost furry-looking tops taking
advantage of whatever breeze was blowing to push the raft along before it.
Around their base grew the carefully cultivated stand of shoots from which my
cage, and just about everything else the lizard-people seemed to make with
their hands, had been constructed.
    Behind the trees and the shoots were
a couple of other cages holding the girl and Sunday, plus a pile of shells and
stones that apparently had some value for the lizards. They looked all right.
They were both perhaps a little thinner; but they seemed lively enough; and, in
fact, the girl was looking brighter and more in charge of herself than I could
ever remember seeing her. From her cage on back, except for piles of assorted
rubble and junk—everything from sand itself to what looked like a heap of
furs—were the various members of the crew. I found myself calling them a crew
for lack of a better term. For all I knew, most of them may have been
passengers. Or perhaps they were all members of one family; there was no way of
telling.
    But in any case, there were thirty
or forty of them, most simply lying on their bellies or sides, absolutely still
in the sunlight, but with dark eyes open and heads up, not as if they were
sleeping. The few on their feet were moving about aimlessly. There were only
four who seemed to have any occupation. One was an individual who was working
his way down the far side of the raft on all fours, delicately biting off the
newly sprouted twigs from the logs of the raft as he went, and three others at
the rear of the raft. These three were holding the heavy shaft of a great
steering oar, which evidently gave the raft what little directional purpose it
could have while floating before the wind.
    In the very center of the raft, back
about twenty feet from my cage, was a roughly square hole in the logs, exposing
a sort of small interior swimming pool of the same water that was all around
us. For several minutes, I stared at the hole, puzzled. The sight of it
triggered off a nagging feeling in the back of my mind, as of something that
ought to be remembered, but which, annoyingly, refused to surface from the
unconscious. Something half-recalled from one or more moments of earlier
temporary return to rationality. As I watched, one of the recumbent
lizard-people got up, walked over to the pool and stepped into it. He splashed
down out of sight and stayed invisible for what must have been at least four or
five minutes before his head bobbed to the surface momentarily, and then he
disappeared again.
    There were several more splashes. A
few of the others had joined him in the pool. I watched the water there for a
while, but the lizard-people stayed mainly below the surface. After about
fifteen minutes or so, one of them climbed back out and lay down on the bare
logs once more, scales wet and glistening in the sun.
    From my earlier brief moments of
sanity, I remembered seeing a lot of this swimming pool activity,, but without
speculating about it. Now that my mind was back in my head for good, the old
reflex in me to gnaw away at answers I did not have went to work. The most
obvious reason for their continual plunges was to keep the outside of their
bodies reasonably damp. They had the look of a water-living race; either one
which had evolved in the sea, or whatever we were on, or humans who had
returned to an aquatic environment. If it was the latter, then it could be that
this part of the earth had been moved very far into the past or future indeed,
either far enough back to find the great Nebraska sea—that