“Who can tell?” I said, standing up. “We’d better be going.”
He stood up also, quickly. Before he was on his feet, Sunday was on his, and that brought the girl scrambling upright.
“You could stay here overnight,” he said.
I shook my head.
“You don’t want to drive in the dark,” he went on.
“No,” I said. “But I’d like to get some miles under our belt before quitting for the day. I’m anxious to get to my wife.”
I led the leopard and the girl out to the panel, which I had driven over and now stood in his driveway. I opened the door on the driver’s side, and the other two got in, crawling back into the body. I waited until they were settled, then got in myself and was about to back out, when Samuelson, who had gone in the house instead of following us to the truck, came out again, almost shyly, with a pair of large paper grocery sacks. He pushed them in through the open window at my left.
“Here,” he said. “There’s some food you could use. I put in a bottle of the wine, too.”
“Thanks.” I put the two sacks on the empty front seat beside me. He looked past me, back into the body of the van, where the girl and the leopard were already curled up, ready for sleep.
“I’ve got everything, you know,” he said. “Everything you could want. There’s nothing she could use—clothes, or anything?”
“Sunday’s the only thing she wants,” I said. “As long as she’s got him, there’s nothing else she cares about.”
“Well, goodby then,” he said.
“So long.”
I backed out into the street and drove off. In the sideview mirror I could see him walk into the street himself so that he could look after us and wave. I turned a corner two blocks down and the houses shut him from view.
He had given me a filling station map earlier, with a route marked in pencil, that led me to the south edge of the city and out at last on a two-lane asphalt road rising and dipping over the land, with open, farmer’s fields on either side. The fields had all been planted that spring; and as I drove along I was surrounded by acres of corn and wheat and peas no one would ever harvest or use. The sky-high wall of haze that was the time change line, holding its position just outside of Samuelson’s town, now to the left and behind us, grew smaller as I drove the van away from there.
In a car we were pretty safe, according to what I had learned so far. These time lines were like lengths of rod, rolling across the landscape; but as I say, I had yet to encounter any that seemed to travel at more than thirty miles an hour. It was not hard to get away from them as long as you could stick to a road.
I had been keeping my eyes open for something in the way of an all-terrain vehicle, but with adequate speed. Something like a Land Rover that could make good time on the roads but could also cut across open country, if necessary. But so far I had not found anything.
I became aware that the engine of the van was roaring furiously under the hood. I was belting us along the empty asphalt road at nearly seventy miles an hour. There was no need for anything like that. It was both safer and easier on the gas consumption to travel at about forty or forty-five; and now and then gas was not easily available, just when the tank ran low. It was true I had four spare five-gallon cans-full, lashed to the luggage carrier on the van’s roof. But that was for real emergencies.
Besides, none of the three of us had anything that urgent to run to—or away from. I throttled down to forty miles an hour, wondering how I had let my speed creep up in the first place.
Then, of course, I realized why. I had been letting Samuelson’s feelings get to me. Why should I cry for him? He was as crazy from the loss of his family as the girl was—or Sunday. But he had really wanted us to stay the night, in that large house of his from which his family had disappeared; and it would have been a kindness to him if we had stayed. Only, I could not take the chance. Sometime in the night he might change suddenly from the man who was desperate for company to a man who thought that I, or all of us, had something to do with whatever it was that had taken his people away from him.
I could not trust his momentary sanity. Samuelson had talked for a while like a sane man; but he was still someone sitting in a deserted town, shooting rockets full of high explosives at out-size toys that attacked at regular intervals. No one in that position could be completely sane. Besides, insanity was part of things, now. Sunday was the definitive example. I could have cut the leopard’s throat, and he would have licked my hand as I was doing it. The girl was in no better mental condition. Samuelson, like them, was caught in this cosmic joke that had overtaken the world we knew—so he was insane too, by definition. There was no other possibility.
Which of course, I thought, following the idea to its logical conclusion, as I drove into the increasing twilight, meant that I had to be insane, too. The idea was almost laughable. I felt perfectly sane. But just as I had not trusted Samuelson, if I were him, or anyone else looking at me from the outside as I drove across the country with a leopard and a speechless girl for companions, I would not trust myself. I would have been afraid that there could be a madness in me too, that would overtake me sometime, suddenly and without warning. Of course, that was all nonsense. I put the ridiculous thought out of my head.
5
When the red flush of the sunset above the horizon to our right began to grow narrow and dark, and stars were clearly visible in the clear sky to the east, I pulled the van off the road into a comfortable spot under some cottonwood trees growing down in a little dip between two hills and set up camp. It was so warm that I had the tent flaps tied all the way back. I lay there looking out at the stars, seeming to move deeper and deeper in the night sky, becoming more and more important and making the earth under me feel more like a chip of matter lost in the universe.
But I could not sleep. That had happened to me a lot, lately. I wanted to get up and go sit outside the tent by myself, with my back to the trunk of one of the cottonwoods. But if I did, Sunday would get up and come out with me; and then the girl would get up and follow Sunday. It was a chain reaction. A tag-end of a line from my previous two years of steady reading, during my hermitlike existence above Ely, came back to me. Privatum commodum publico cedit—“private advantage yields to public.” I decided to lie there and tough it out.
What I had to tough out was the replaying in my head of all the things that had happened. I had almost forgotten, until now, my last summer in high school when I started teaching myself to read Latin because I had just learned how powerfully it underlays all our English language. Underlays and outdoes. “How long, O Cataline, will you abuse our patience?” Good, but not in the same ballgame with the thunder of old Cicero’s originaclass="underline" “Quo usque, Catilina, abutere patienta nostra?”
After the sweep of the first time change that I thought was my second heart attack come to take me for good this time—after I had found I was not dead, or even hurt—there had been the squirrel, frozen in shock. The little grey body had been relaxed in my hands when I picked it up; the small forepaws had clung to my fingers. It had followed me after that for at least the first three days, when I finally decided to walk south from my cabin and reach a city called Ely, that turned out to be no longer there. I had not understood then that what I had done to the squirrel was what later I was to do to Sunday—be with it when it came out of shock, making it totally dependent on me.... Then, a week or so later, there had been the log cabin and the man in leggings, the transplanted Viking or whoever, who I thought was just anyone cutting firewood with his shirt off, until he saw me, hooked the axe over his shoulder as if holstering it, and started walking toward me... .