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sort of sensing equipment they've got For one thing, if they're aware of the
time storm, they're going to know that a chunk of their real estate suddenly
got exchanged by the time storm forces for a chunk from the past"
There were a lot more questions after that, some serious, some not so,
covering everything from what future humans would look like to whether we
should post guards- against annuals, if not humans-until we learned that this
was unnecessary. I turned that suggestion over to Doc, who thought it was a
good idea. The session ended with Bill climbing into the jeep and making
himself somewhat unpopular by saying that he wanted to start tomorrow morning
getting a complete inventory of everything we had left after those leaving had
taken what they wanted; and he wanted everybody to cooperate by listing their
own possessions.
I broke away from the gathering before it finally ended and got together with
Poroiarsk in the lab. The view we had in the tank was essentially the same as
the one that had been hi it before our move. The difference was that now it
was real rather than extrapolated; and there were minor corrections in its
display because of that.
"Try it now," I said to Porniarsk. "See if we can extrapolate forward from
here, now that ifs the present."
He worked with the equipment for perhaps twenty minutes.
"No," he said. 'It's still hesitating over inconsistencies.**
"Then we've landed in the right place-or time, I mean," I said. "To tell the
truth, Fve been a little worried. Between you and me, I half-expected the
people from this time to be waiting for us when we appeared."
"You were assuming that our activity of time forces would at once attract
their attention? I would have thought so, too."
"And that they'd have means of getting here the moment they saw it," I said.
"If they don't, how can they be advanced enough to do anything about the tune
storm generally?"
"I don't know," said Porniarsk. "But I think there are too many unknowns here
for either of us to speculate.** "I hope you're right" "About that, I believe
I am. Beyond that, it's anyone's
"AH right," I said. "But if no one shows up within twenty-four hours, I'm
going to begin to worry."
No one did show up in the next forty-eight hours. Nor within the forty-eight
hours after that, nor in the week that followed. Meanwhile, Doc was coming
back front his daily mapping nights and reporting no sign of other human
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existance. No habitations, no movement. We were evidently at the far eastern
end of a mid-continental area of plains uniformly covered by the tall grass,
like central North America in the time of the buffalo; though there were none
of the bison breed to be seen now.
However, both the grasslands-and the hardwood forest that began about sixty
miles west of where our chunk of territory had landed, were aswarm with other
game. Deer, elk, wolf, bear, moose... and the whole category of familiar
smaller wildlife. The hardwood forest gave evidence of stretching to the east
coast and had been in existence long enough to kin off most of the undergrowth
beneath it, so that it had a tidily unreal look about it, nice a movie set for
a Robin Hood epic. Doc had landed in an open section of it and reported
great-trunked oaks and elms with level, mossy ground beneath them, so that
there was a cathedral look to the sunlight streaming down between the lofty
limbs overhead.
I kept to myself my concern over the fact we were not being approached by the
other intelligences of this future time. Our community was digging in,
literally. Just as we had arrived here in daylight when we had left our former
time period at night, so we had also arrived here in the spring; although it
had been fall where we had left A fair amount of planted crops had been lost
behind us; and even without Bill's urging, a number of our people were eager
to get seeds in the ground in this place. There would be no stores of pre-time
storm goods to plunder for additional food and supplies in the time where we
were now.
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