“The buzzers,” he said. “No, like I told you, they don’t run on schedule, but after one’s come by, it’s at least six and a half hours before the next one. It’s my guess there’s some kind of automatic factory behind the mist there, that takes that long to make a new one.”
Samuelson’s house turned out to be one of those tall, ornate, late-nineteenth century homes you still see in small towns. Two stories and an attic with a wide screen porch in front and lilac bushes growing all along one side of it. The rooms inside were small, dark and high-ceilinged, with too much furniture for their floorspace. He had rigged a gas motor and a water tank to the well in his basement that had formerly been run by an electric pump; and he had found an old, black, wood-burning stove to block up in one corner of this spacious kitchen. The furniture was clean of dust and in order.
He gave us the closest thing to a normal meal that I’d eaten—or the girl had, undoubtedly —since the time storm first hit Earth. I knew it had affected all the Earth, by this time; not just the little part west of the Great Lakes in North America, where I was. I carried a good all-bands portable radio along and, once in a while, picked up a fragment of a broadcast from somewhere. The continuity—or discontinuity—lines dividing the time areas usually blocked off radio. But sometimes things came through. Hawaii, evidently, was unique in hardly having been touched, and I’d occasionally heard bits of shortwave from as far away as Greece. Not that I listened much. There was nothing I could do for the people broadcasting, any more than there was anything they could do for me.
I told Samuelson about this while he was fixing dinner; and he said he had run into the same thing with both the shortwave and long-wave radios he had set up. We agreed that the storm was not over.
“We’ve only had the one time change here in Saulsburg, though,” he said. “Every so often, I’ll see a line of change moving across country off on the horizon, or standing still for a while out there; but so far, none’s come this way.”
“Where did all the people go, that were in this place?” I asked.
His face changed, all at once.
“I don’t know,” he said. Then he bent over the biscuit dough he was making, so that this face was hidden away from me. “I had to drive over to Peppard—that’s the next town. I drove and drove and couldn’t find it. I began to think I was sick or crazy, so I turned the car around and drove home. When I got back here, it was like you see it now.”
It was clear he did not want to talk about it. But I could guess some of what he had lost from the house. It had been lived in by more than one adult, and several children. There were a woman’s overshoes in the front closet, toys in a box in one corner of the living room, and three bicycles in good condition in the garage.
“What did you do for a living?” he asked me after a moment.
“I was retired,” I said.
He frowned over that, too. So I told him about myself. The time storm had done nothing in my case to leave me with things I did not want to talk about, except for the matter of Swannee, down in Omaha; and somehow I was perfectly comforted and sure that she and that city had come through the time storm changes unharmed, though I had heard no radio broadcasts from there.
“I started investing in the stock market when I was nineteen,” I said, “before I was even out of college. I struck it lucky.” Luck, of course, had nothing to do with it; but I had found I could not tell people that. Because the word “stocks” was involved, it had to be luck, not hard research and harder-headed decision-making, that had made money for me. “Then I used what I had to take over a company that made trailers and snowmobiles; and that did all right. I’d be there yet, but I had a heart attack.”
Samuelson’s eyebrows went up.
“A heart attack?” he said. “You’re pretty young for something like that.”
“I was damned young,” I said. “I was twenty-four.”
I discovered suddenly that I had been wrong about not having things I did not want to talk about. I did not want to tell him about my heart attack. He looked too much like a man who’d never had a sick day in his life.
“Anyway,” I said, “my doctor told me to take it easy and lose weight. That was two years ago. So I sold out, set up a trust to support me, and bought a place up in the woods of northern Minnesota, beyond Ely—if you know that state. I got back in shape, and I’ve been fine ever since; until the time storm hit three weeks ago.”
“Yes,” he said.
The food was ready, so I helped him carry it into the dining room and we all ate there; even Sunday, curled up in a corner. I had thought Samuelson might object to my bringing the leopard into his house, but he had not.
Afterwards, we sat on his screened porch at the front of the house, with the thick leaves of the sugar maple in the yard screening us from the western sun. It was after six by my watch, but now in midsummer, there was at least another three hours of light left. Samuelson had some homemade white wine which was not bad. It was not very good either, but the town was apparently a dry town; and of course, he had not left it since he had first come back here and found his people gone.
“How about the girl?” he asked me, when he first poured the wine into water glasses.
“Why not?” I said. “We may be all dead—her included—tomorrow, if the wrong sort of time change catches us.”
So he gave her a glass. But she only took a small sip, then put it down on the floor of the porch by her chair. After a bit, while Samuelson and I talked, she got out of the chair itself and sat down on the floor where she could put an arm around Sunday, who was lying there, dozing. Outside of raising a lazy eyebrow when he felt the weight of her arm, the leopard paid no attention. It was amazing what he would stand from her, sometimes.
“What is it?” Samuelson asked me, after we’d been talking for a while about how things used to be. “I mean—where did it come from?”
He was talking about the time storm.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ll bet nobody does. But I’ve got a theory.”
“What’s that?” He was looking at me closely in the shadow of the porch. A little evening breeze stirred the lilac bushes into scraping their upper branches against the side of the house.
“I think it’s just what we’re calling it,” I said. “A storm. Some sort of storm in space that the whole world ran into, the same way you could be out driving in your car and run into a thunderstorm. Only in this case, instead of wind and rain, thunder and lightning, we get these time changes, like ripples moving across the surface of the world, with everything getting moved either forward or back in time. Wherever a change passes over them.”
“How about here?” he asked. “The town’s just where it was before. Only the people...
He trailed off.
“How do you know?” I said. “Maybe the area right around here was moved forward just a year, say, or even a month. That wouldn’t be enough to make any change in the buildings and streets you could notice, but it might have been beyond the point where everybody living here, for some reason, decided to get out.”
“Why?”
“Those buzzers, as you call them,” I said. “Seeing one of them come at the town would be pretty good reason to me to get out, if I was someone living here.”
He shook his head.
“Not everybody,” he said. “Not without leaving some kind of message.”
I gave up. If he did not want reasonable explanations, there was no point in my forcing it on him.
“Tell me,” he said, after we had sat there without talking for a while, “do you think God had something to do with it?”
So that was his hang-up. That was why he stayed here, day after day, defending a town with no people in it. That was why he had carefully adapted the well in the basement to the new conditions and set up a wood stove so that he could give a regular meal at a moment’s notice to a complete family, if they should return unexpectedly, showing up at the front door, tired and hungry. I wanted to tell him neither God nor human had ever changed things much for me; but now that I knew what his question meant to him, I could not do it. All at once I felt the pain in him—and I found myself suddenly angry that someone I did not even know should be able to export his troubles to me, like that. It was true I had lost nothing, not like him. Still....