Free Gordon R. Dickson by Time Storm Page A

not seen any of
them using even stone tools to make or do anything. The extent of their
technology seemed to be the weaving of the nets and cages, the gathering of
things like coconuts (and the three of us) and the building of this raft; if,
indeed, this raft had been deliberately built, rather than being just grown to
order, or chewed loose from some larger mass of vegetation of which it
originally had been a part.
    No, I was forgetting the steering
oar. The next time I was let out of my cage, I went back to the stern of the
raft to look at it. What I found was on a par with the rest of the raft. The
oar was not so much an oar as a thinner tree trunk of the same variety as those
which made up the logs of the raft. It had no true blade. It was bare trunk
down to the point where it entered the water, and from there on, it was
mop-like with a brush of untrimmed growth. It was pivoted in a notch between
two logs of the raft, tied in place there with a great bundle of the same
flexible vine or plant with which the lizards had made the net they used to
restrain Sunday. This tie broke several times a day, but each time, it was
patiently rewrapped and reknotted by the nearby lizards.
    Whatever their cultural level—in
fact, whether they had a culture or not—they had clearly collected the three of
us for their own purposes, not for ours. It struck me that the sooner we got
away from them, the better.
    But here on a raft in the middle of
an unknown body of water, getting away was something easier to imagine than do.
For one thing, we would have to wait until we touched land again; and there was
no telling when that would be. Or was there? I puzzled over the question.
    It was hard to believe that the
lizards could be trying to follow any specific route with their clumsy sail of
trees and their mop-ended steering oar. At best, I told myself, they could only
impose a slight angle on the path of their drift before the wind. But, when I
thought about this some more, it occurred to me that the wind had been blowing
continually from the stern of the raft with about the same strength since I had
gotten my senses back. We were, of course, still in the, temperate latitudes of
what had been the North American continent, well above the zone of any trade
winds. But, what if here on this body of water, current climatic conditions
made for seasonal winds blowing in a certain direction? Say, for example, winds
that blew east in the summer and west in the winter, from generally the same
quarters of the compass? Judging by the sun, we were now headed generally east.
With a continuous directional breeze like that to rely on, even the crude rig
of this raft could follow a roughly regular route depending only on the season
of the year.
    That evening I marked on one of the
logs the angle of the sunset on the horizon to the longitudinal axis of the
raft, by cutting marks in one of the logs under my cage with my pocketknife. It
set almost due astern of us, but a little to the north. The next morning I
again marked the angle of the sunrise—again, a little to the north of our long
axis. A check of the angle of the steering oar confirmed this. The three
lizards holding it had it angled to guide the raft slightly to the north from a
true east-west line. It was not until then that I thought of checking the
stars.
    So I did, as soon as they came out
that evening; but they were absolutely unfamiliar. I could not recognize a
single constellation. Not that I was very knowledgeable about astronomy; but
like most people, I was normally able to pick out the Little and the Big
Dippers and find the pole star from the Big Dipper. Such a difference in the
patterns of the heavens I saw could only be strong evidence that a time change
had moved this part of the world a long way from the present I had known—either
far into the future or far into the past.
    If so... a new thought kindled in an
odd back corner of my mind.
    If it was indeed the Permian period,
or a future