Free Gordon R. Dickson by Time Storm

shallow; and like the Baltic in my time,
this far north, in-flowing rivers and underground springs could have diluted it
to nearly fresh-water condition. I climbed out of the pool and went to the side
edge of the raft to drink, just to avoid any contamination there might be in
the pool. I could not remember water tasting quite so good.
    I lay on the logs of the raft with
my belly full until the liquid began to disperse to the rest of my dehydrated
body, then got up and went looking for something to eat. A quick tour of the
raft turned up coconuts, which I had no way of opening, some green leafy stuff
which might or might not be an edible vegetable, and a stack of bananas—most of
which were still green.
    I helped myself to the ripest I
could find, half expecting the lizards to stop me. But they paid no attention.
When I had taken care of my appetite, I thought of the girl and took some back
to her.
    She gave me one quick glance and
looked away. But she took the bananas and ate them. After she had finished, she
got up and went a little way away from me and lay down on her side, apparently
sticking her arm right through the solid surface of the raft.
    I went over to her and saw that she
had found a place where two adjoining logs gapped apart; and her arm was now
reaching down through the gap into the water and the tangle of growth below.
    Something about her position as she
lay there struck an odd note of familiarity. I straightened up and looked
around the raft. Sure enough, the lizards who were lying down were nearly all
in just the position she had taken. Apparently, they too had found holes in the
raft.
    I wondered what sort of a game she
and they were playing. I even asked her—but of course I got no answer. Then,
just a few seconds later she sat up, withdrawing her arm and held out her
closed fist to me. When she opened it up, there was a small fish in the palm of
her hand—hardly bigger than the average goldfish in a home fishbowl.
    She held it out to me with her head
averted; but clearly she was offering it to me. When I did not take it, she
looked back at me with something like a flash of anger on her face and threw
the fish away. It landed on the-raft surface only inches from Sunday. The
leopard stretched out his neck to reach it and eagerly licked it up.
    The girl had gone back to her
fishing. But whatever she caught next, she put in her own mouth. Later on, she
made a number of trips to feed Sunday with what she caught. Full of curiosity,
I went looking for another gap in the logs, lay down and put my eye to it.
    In the shadow under the raft I could
at first see nothing. But as my vision adjusted, I looked into the tangle of
growth there and saw a veritable aquarium of small marine life. So this was how
the lizards provisioned themselves. It was like carrying a game farm along with
you on your travels. The small fish and squid-like creatures I saw through the
gap in the logs did not look all that appetizing to me, at first glance. But
after my third day on bananas, I found myself eating them along with the girl
and the lizards—eating them, and what's more, enjoying them. Protein hunger can
be a remarkably powerful conditioning force.
    Meanwhile—on the days that
immediately followed—I was trying to puzzle out a great many things, including
why we had been brought along on the raft. The most obvious answer that came to
me was the one I liked least—that, like the bananas and the coconuts, we three
represented a potential exotic addition to the ordinary lizard diet, a sort of
special treat to be eaten later.
    I also toyed with the thought that
we had been picked up as slaves, or as curiosities to be used or traded off at
some later time. But this was hard to believe. The lizards were clearly an
extremely primitive people, if they were a true people at all, and not some
sort of ant-like society operating on instinct rather than intelligence. They
had shown no sign of having a spoken language; and so far I had