But it was stretching out now to the point where I began to worry that it would carry me to the north and past the city, without letting me catch sight of it. Certainly, by this time we had gone far enough to intersect some other roads heading south and into the metropolitan area. But we had crossed no other road. For that matter, we had come across nothing else that indicated a city nearby, no railroad tracks, no isolated houses, no fences, no suburban developments in the bulldozer stage of construction.... I was uneasy.
Laying out the road map on the hood of the car, I traced our route to the superhighway, traced the superhighway to what I believed to be the exit by which we had come down off it, and along the road that exit tied into—headed west. The road was there; but according to the map, less than a dozen miles farther on, it ran through a small town called Leeder; and we had come twenty miles without seeing as much as a road sign.
I went through the whole thing twice more, checked the compass and traced out our route, and checked the odometer on the panel to see how far we’d come since leaving the superhighway— and the results came out the same. We had to be bypassing Omaha to the north.
I got back in the truck and started travelling again, driving slowly. I told myself I’d give myself another five miles without a crossroad before turning back. I drove them, and then another five. But I saw no crossroad. Nothing. Only the narrow, neglected-looking strip of asphalt which looked as if it might continue unchanged around to the Pacific Ocean.
I stopped the panel again, got out and walked off the road to check the surface of the ground to the south. I walked back and forth and stamped a few times. The surface was sandy, but hard— easily solid enough to bear the weight of the panel truck; and the vegetation was scattered enough so that there would be no trouble driving through it. Up until now I had been very careful not to get off the roads, for fear of a breakdown of the truck which would strand us a distance from any hope of easily finding another vehicle. On foot we would be at the mercy of the first moving time storm wall that came toward us.
But we were so close now—we were just a few miles away from getting back to normal life. I could see Swannee in my mind’s eye so clearly that she was almost like a mirage superimposed on the semidesert landscape around us. She had to be there, waiting for me. Something inside me- was still positive, beyond all argument, that Omaha had survived; and that along with it Swannee had survived in the sanity of a portion of the world as it had been before the time storm. In fact my mind had toyed a number of times with the idea that since Omaha, like Hawaii, had survived, it might mean there might be many other enclaves of safety; and the fact that there were such enclaves would mean there was a way of beating the time storm, by applying to all other places the special conditions or whatever unusual elements had kept these enclaves protected.
In those enclaves she and I could still lead the reasonable and normal life we could have had before the time storm hit; and somehow I felt sure that the experience of the time storm would have straightened her out on what had gone wrong between us before. Time would have brought her to the realization that it was simply an old reflex on my part that had made me act like someone literally in love with her. Also, she would know how tough life could be outside the enclaves like the one she now lived in—or even there, for that matter. She would have a new appreciation of what I could do for her, in the way of taking care of her. In fact, the more I thought, the more confident I was that by this time she would be ready to indulge these little emotional lapses of mine. All I had to do was find her and things would go well.
—But that was something to think about when there was time to think about it. The big question now was—should I take the panel cross-country, south, away from the road, to find a highway or street that would bring me to the city?
There was really no argument about it. I got Sunday and the girl back into the panel—they had followed me outside and wandered after me as I stamped on the ground to make sure it would not bog down the panel—then we got back in the truck, turned off the asphalt and headed due south by the compass.
It was not bad driving at all. I had to slow down to about five to ten miles an hour; and I kept the panel in second gear, occasionally having to shift down to low on the hills, but generally finding it easy going. It was all up and down, a roller coaster-type of going for about nine-tenths of a mile; and then suddenly we came up over a rise and looked down on a lakeshore.
It was just a strip of whitish-brown, sandy beach. But the shallow, rather stagnant-looking water beyond the beach stretched out as far as I could see and out of sight right and left as well. Evidently the time storm had moved this whole area into the northwest of the metropolitan area, pretty well blocking off access from that direction. The problem for me now was—which way would be the shortest way round the lake? Right or left?
It was a toss-up. I squinted in both directions but for some reason, just while I had been standing there, a haze of some sort seemed to have moved in, so that I could not see far out on the water in any direction. Finally I chose to go to the right, because I thought I saw a little darkness through the haze upon the sun-glare off the water and sand in that direction. I turned the nose of the truck and we got going.
The beach was almost as good as a paved road to drive on. It was flat and firm. Apparently, the water adjoining it began to shelve more sharply as we went along, for it lost its stagnant, shallow appearance and began to develop quite a respectable surf. There was an onshore wind blowing; but it helped the heat and the humidity only a little. We kept driving.
As I watched the miles add up on the truck’s odometer, I began gradually to regret not trying in the other direction. Clearly, I had picked the long way around this body of water, because looking ahead I could still see no end to it. When the small, clicking figures of the odometer rolled up past the twelve mile mark, I braked the truck to a halt, turned around and headed back.
As I said, the beach was good driving. I pushed our speed up to about forty, and it was not long before we were back at the point where we had first come across the lake. I kept pounding along; and shortly I made out something up ahead. The dazzle of sunlight from the water seemed to have gotten in my eyes so that I could not make out exactly what it was—something like a handkerchief-sized island with a tree, or a large raft with a diving tower out in the water, just a little way from the beach. But there were the black silhouettes of two-legged figures on the sand there. I could stop to get some directions, and we could still be pulling into Swannee’s driveway in time for dinner.
The dazzle-effect on my eyes got worse as the panel got close to the figures; and the glitter of sunlight through the windshield was not helping. I blinked, and blinked again. I should have thought to pick up some dark glasses and keep them in the glove compartment of the panel for situations like this—but I just had not expected to run into water-glare like this. I must have been no more than thirty or forty feet from the figures by the time I finally braked the panel to a stop and jumped out of it on to the sand, blinking to get the windshield-glitter out of the way between us— and I still could not see them clearly. There were at least half a dozen of them on the beach, and I saw more out on the raft or whatever it was.
I started toward them.
“Hey!” I said. “I’m lost. Can you put me on the road to Omaha? I want to get to Byerly Park, there.”
The figures did not answer. I was within a few steps of them now. I stopped, closed my eyes and shook my head violently. Then I opened my eyes again.
For the first time I saw them clearly. They had two legs apiece all right; but that was the only thing people-like about them. As far as I could see, they wore no clothes; and I could have sworn they were covered with greenish-gold scales. Heavy, lizard-like features with unblinking dark eyes stared directly into my face.