Free Mists of Dawn by Chad Oliver

it, although afterward he never remembered how. He came back momentarily to his senses and found himself standing on the bank of the rushing stream, with the dark shadows of the mountains all around him. He heard nothing but the rustle of the water, but he took no chances. It would be folly to stop now, with victory almost in his grasp.
    If he could just hold out—
    Which way to go? Mark debated a moment, and decided that his pursuers would expect him to go upstream, into the mountains, away from the plains that had almost trapped him. So Mark went downstream. He stepped into the icy water without even feeling it and fumbled his way across the slippery stream bed. If there were any holes ahead of him, invisible in the moonlight, it would be too bad. But as long as he stayed in the stream they could not follow his trail. Mark’s exhausted mind gave out, but his body kept on.
    While the moon sailed serenely through the night sky and the stars marched through the heavens, Mark Nye splashed grimly onward through the icy water of the mountain stream. He struggled on for what seemed to be miles, until the stream ran bubbling out into the plains. Mark dragged himself out of the water and headed east again, away from the Neanderthal caverns and away from the space-time machine that he had little hope of ever seeing again.
    The ground was wet and marshy around him, but Mark was unaware of it. He put one foot mechanically ahead of the other and plodded on, his shoes making sucking noises in the soft earth. His pace had slowed to a virtual crawl, and he knew that he had to find some place in which to rest.
    He kept on until he could go no farther and then cut back into the mountain foothills. He looked around him dazedly. There were a few pines, but nothing that offered any hope of concealment. He was just on the verge of collapsing where he was and taking a chance when he noticed an outcropping of rock on a little ledge above him to the east. He crawled up to it, hand over hand, unable to stay on his feet. He pulled himself over the outcropping and found a slight depression in the rock wall, surrounded by large and formidable boulders. He dragged his body inside, where he was at least sheltered from the cold wind.
    It was not the best possible place, but he could go no farther. He was wet and numb with cold, but he knew that he did not dare to build a fire, even if he had had the strength to do it, which he hadn’t. He took out his .45 and wiped it as dry as he could on his torn shirt, and then returned it to its holster. Gasping for breath, his chest aflame with pain, he thought briefly of climbing out to get some snow he saw. He could eat the snow and thus quench his thirst a little—
    But his body refused to move. It had served him well, but it was spent. Mark heard his heart beating with a rapid, exhausted flutter and he could not even move his hand.
    He was hopelessly cut off from the space-time machine. He was ill and unutterably tired, without food or water. He did not even have the satisfaction of knowing that he had eluded the Neanderthals; they might be right behind him, and he was too weak even to pull the trigger of his .45. Mark looked at the cold moon, now fading in the east. From the plains that stretched below him, he heard the trumpeting cry of some animal that he could not even imagine. For the first time, he became aware of the enormity of the thing that had happened to him. He was only a boy, after all, and he was tired and hungry and terribly alone. A line from a poem he had once read whispered through his mind in the dawn of time . . .
    I, a stranger and afraid— In a world I never made …
    Mark coughed brokenly as sleep washed over him like a warm and comforting sea. He was a long, long way, and a long, long time, from home.

Chapter 8 Flames of Morning

    Mark slept the dreamless sleep of complete exhaus tion and when he awoke he could not believe that he was alive. He must have died during that night o f