When I looked back through a chink in the barricade, there was something already visible in the road. It had evidently just appeared out of the haze, for it was coming very fast. Its sound was the buzzing sound I had heard earlier, now growing rapidly louder as the object raced toward us, seeming to swell in size, like a balloon being inflated against the white backdrop of the haze, as it came.
It came so fast that there was only, time to get a glimpse of it. It was yellow and black in color, like a wasp; a small gadget with an amazing resemblance to a late-model compact car, but half the size of such a car, charging at us down the ruler-straight section of highway like some outsize wind-up toy.
I jerked up my rifle; but at the same time the rocket launcher went off beside me with a flat clap of sound. The rocket was slow enough so that we could see it like a black speck, curving through the air to meet the gadget coming at us. They met and there was an explosion. The gadget hopped up off the road shedding parts which flew toward us, whacking into the far side of the barricade like shrapnel. For a full minute after it quit moving, there was no sound to be heard. Then the whistling of birds and the trilling of crickets took up again.
I looked over at the rocket launcher.
“Good,” I said to the man. “Where did you get that launcher, anyway?”
“Somebody must have stolen it from a National Guard outfit,” he said. “Or brought it back from overseas. I found it with a bunch of knives and guns and other things, in a storeroom behind the town police office.”
He was as tall as I was, a tight-shouldered, narrow-bodied man with a deep tan on his forearms, and on his quiet, bony face. Maybe a little older than I; possibly in his late thirties. I studied him, trying to estimate how hard it would be to kill him if I had to. I could see him watching, doubtless with the same thought in mind.
It was the way things were, now. There was no shortage of food or drink, or anything material you could want. But neither was there any law, anymore—at least, none I’d been able to find in the last three weeks.
4
To break the staring match, I deliberately looked away to the gadget, lying still now beyond the barricades, and nodded at it.
“I’d like to have a look at it close up,” I said. “Is it safe?”
“Sure.” He got to his feet, laying down the rocket launcher. I saw, however, he had a heavy revolver—possibly a thirty-eight or forty-four—in a holster on the hip away from me; and a deer rifle carbine like mine was lying against the barricade. He picked it up in his left hand.
“Come on,” he said. “They only show up one at a time; on a staggered schedule, seven to ten hours apart.”
I looked down the road. There were no other wrecked shapes in black and yellow in sight along it.
“You’re sure?” I said. “How many have you seen?”
He laughed, making a dry sound in his throat like an old man.
“They’re never quite stopped,” he said. “Like this one. It’s harmless, now, but not really done for. Later it’ll crawl back, or get pulled back behind the mist over there—you’ll see. Come on.”
He climbed over the barricade and I followed him. When we got to the gadget, it looked more than ever like an overlarge toy car—except that where the windows should be, there was a flat yellow surface; and instead of four ordinary-sized wheels with tires, the lower halves of something like sixteen or eighteen small metal disks showed through the panel sealing the underbody. The rocket had torn a large hole in the gadget’s side.
“Listen,” said the man, stooping over the hole. I came close and listened myself. There was a faint buzzing still going on down there someplace inside it.
“Who sends these things?” I said. “Or what sends them?”
He shrugged.
“By the way,” I said, “I’m Marc Despard.” I held out my hand.
He hesitated.
“Raymond Samuelson,” he said.
I saw his hand jerk forward a little, then back again. Outside of that, he ignored my offered hand; and I let it drop. I guessed that he might not want to shake hands with a man he might later have to try to kill; and I judged that anyone who worried about a nicety like that was not likely to shoot me in the back, at least, unless he had to. At the same time, there was no point in asking for trouble by letting any misunderstandings arise.
“I’m just on my way through to Omaha,” I said. “My wife’s there, if she’s still all right. But I’m not going to drive right across that time change line out there if I’ve got a choice.” I nodded at the haze from which the gadget had come. “Have you got any other roads leading south or east from the town?”
“Yes,” he said. He was frowning. “Did you say your wife was there?”
“Yes,” I answered. For the life of me, I had meant to say “ex-wife,” but my tongue had slipped; and it was not worth straightening the matter out now for someone like Samuelson. “Look,” he said, “you don’t have to go right away. Stop and have dinner.”
Stop and have dinner. Something about my mentioning a wife had triggered off a hospitality reflex in him. The familiar, homely words he spoke seemed as strange and out of place, here between the empty town and the haze that barred the landscape to our right, as the wrecked gadget at our feet.
“All right,” I said.
We went back, over the barricade and down to the panel truck. I called to the leopard and the girl to come out, and introduced them to Samuelson. His eyes widened at the sight of the leopard; but they opened even more at the sight of the girl behind the big cat.
“I call the leopard ‘Sunday’,” I said. “The girl’s never told me her name.”
I put out my hand and Sunday stepped forward, flattening his ears and rubbing his head up under my palm with a sound that was like a whimper of pleasure.
“I came across him just after a time change had swept the area where he was,” I said. “He was still in shock when I first touched him; and now I’ve got his soul in pawn, or something like that. You’ve seen how animals act, if you get them right after a change, before they come all the way back to being themselves?”
Samuelson shook his head. He was looking at me now with some distrust and suspicion.
“That’s too bad,” I said. “Maybe you’ll take my word for it, then. He’s perfectly safe as long as I’m around.”
I petted Sunday. Samuelson looked at the girl.
“Hello,” he said, smiling at her. But she simply stared back without answering. She would do anything I set her to doing, but I had never been able to make her seem conscious of herself. The straight, dark hair hanging down around her shoulders always had a wild look; and even the shirt and jeans she was wearing looked as if they did not belong on her.
They were the best of available choices, though. I had put her into a dress once, shortly after I had found her; and the effect had been pitiful. She had looked like a caricature of a young girl in that dress.
“She doesn’t talk,” I said. “I came across her a couple of days after I found the leopard, about two hundred miles south. The leopard was about where the Minneapolis-St. Paul area used to be. It could have come from a zoo. The girl was just wandering along the road. No telling where she came from.”
“Poor kid,” said Samuelson. He evidently meant it; and I began to think it even more unlikely that he would shoot me in the back.
We went to his house, one block off Main Street, for dinner.
“What about the—whatever-you-call-them?” I asked. “What if one comes while you aren’t there to stop it?”