Free Gordon R. Dickson by Time Storm Page B

one like it, through which this raft was now sailing, then one
thing was highly likely. We were almost surely moving along roughly parallel to
the northern shore of the inland sea since the beach where we had first run
into the lizards had to be that same northern shore; and it now seemed probable
we had been holding a steady northeasterly course ever since. I had seen a
geology textbook map of the Great Nebraska Sea once, years ago. It had showed
the land area of the southern and middle states depressed, and that part of the
continent drowned, so that the Gulf of Mexico, in effect, filled most of the
lower middle region of North America. That meant, almost certainly, we should
be running in to land again before long. We were not, as I had originally
feared, off on some endless voyage to nowhere, as we were perfectly capable of
being, while an endless supply of food swam underneath us and water all around
us that was drinkable.
    The prospect of coming to land again
before too long meant we ought to at least get a chance to escape. I cheered up
at the thought and, with immediate anxieties out of the way, remembered the
rest of what was still heavy in my mind.
    The insane belief I had had in the
survival of Swannee was, of course, still with me, like the mistwall of a time
change line in the back of my thought.
    But the rest of my brain recognized
it for the illusion it was. Evidently, while I had been out of my head, what
was left had been coming to terms with this matter. I was now ready to admit
that there had been something more than a lingering knee-jerk reflex of the
affection response operating in me. The plain truth of the matter was that I
had flipped over Swannee. Not only had I flipped, but I had done it after I
married her, not before; and the thing that had driven her off was the fact
that I had tried to change the rules of the game after the game was started. I
had let myself go with the idea that I loved Swannee; and made up in my mind a
completely imaginary image of her as someone who was lovable. Of course she
wasn't. She was an ordinary self-seeking human being like all the rest of us,
and when she acted like one and took off to escape my trying to make her into
something she was not, I literally set out to work myself to death, and almost succeeded
with the heart attack.
    I suppose, in a way, I had never
really let go of Swannee—even then. So that when the time storm hit, the one
thing I could not accept was that it could have touched her in any way.
    But I now had met, and survived, the
fact of her death. The madness, of course, was still back there in the recesses
of my mind, and still virulent; but it was dying, and time would kill it off
entirely. Just as time had healed my first sense of loss when she had gotten
married. Now that it was dying, locked in my wooden cage most of the time and
going nowhere, I had plenty of leisure to begin looking more sanely at the
world around me. Out of that look came a couple of recognitions I had been
refusing to make earlier. One was that we would have to work hard to survive on
this raft. Sunday and the girl were not only thin, as I had noticed, but
getting thinner. Sunday himself required the equivalent of four pounds of meat
a day to keep him alive. I needed about two thousand calories, or nearly half that
amount; and the girl, because she was not yet at her full growth, probably the
same. We two, of course, could make use of carbohydrates—like the bananas—as
well, as long as those lasted. But getting Sunday the equivalent of four pounds
of protein daily through the cracks between the logs of the raft was
impossible; even with both the girl and I doing our best—which we did as soon
as I realized what the situation was. The lizard-people showed no interest at
all in providing food for us. We would need to reach land soon if we wanted to
live.
    The second recognition was that only
a few people, relatively, had escaped the time change. A few people and a