He nodded to Bill Gault. I had almost forgotten Bill. Now, I called him over and introduced him to Marie, Wendy, and the girl, while still keeping a cautious eye on Tek and the others. All the time, the back of my mind was working. The truth of the matter was, if Bill and I were to dig into this business of the time storm seriously, we would need troops to take the ordinary work and fighting off our hands. Plus the fact that we might well be adventuring through a mistwall into a situation where a number of people with guns were needed.
Also, something Tek had just said had sparked off a notion in the back of my mind. While listing the things that might worry him about having me for an enemy, Tek had specified Sunday as one of them. I had grown so used to Sunday that I had almost forgotten how unnatural it was to other people to see a full grown leopard tagging after me like a kitten. The tendency was for the watchers to assume I had a lot more control over him than I actually did—as well as to assume that he was a great deal brighter and more responsive than his cat brain would ordinarily allow. There was a bluff I could run.
“All right,” I said, “I’ll tell you what we can do. We can take all of you on a probation, and see how you’ll do. Leave your guns piled where they are; and if any of you have to go someplace away from the camp, where you might run into trouble, one or two of the dogs can go with you. Meanwhile, I’ll set the leopard to watch you. He may not be able to tell me what you talk about; but if any of you make any move that looks as if you mean to hurt one of us, he can tear you apart before you’ll know what hit you.”
I looked them over.
“Well?” I said. “How about it? Want to join us on those terms?”
They looked at me hesitantly—all but Tek. Then they looked at Tek.
“Marc—” began Marie, and then checked herself.
“What?” I looked at her.
“Nothing,” she said. I looked back at the men.
“How about it?”
“Speaking, just for myself, of course,” said Tek, “I think that’s fine—real fine. I’ve got no intentions of being anything but a good friend to you all anyway, so your leopard doesn’t worry me a bit. But that’s just me. The others are going to make their deals with you on their own.”
“All right,” I said. “Suppose the seven of you find a place to sit down together over there about ten yards away from your guns and the rest of us. I’ve got some things to do.”
Tek led off agreeably. He sat down, and the rest followed.
I turned my attention to the girl, who was now getting to her feet. She had been holding her rifle grimly aimed at Marie, all the while, but now she lowered it.
“Are you all right?” I asked her. “You haven’t been hurt or anything? Have you been getting enough to eat?”
She looked at me with a very strange expression. For a moment I swore she was going to answer me. But habit took over. She turned without a word and walked away from me to where Sunday was, a few steps away, and began petting him, with her back to me.
“I take it that means ‘yes’!” I called after her. She did not reply, of course. The voice of Marie spoke in low, but tight, tones in my ear.
“Marc, she’s not staying, she or that leopard, either.”
I turned to stare at her. She looked ready to fight.
“Of course they’re staying,” I said.
“Then I’m leaving, with Wendy and the dogs.”
“And Tek and his men right behind you,” I said. I had not meant to put it that bluntly; but I was just about out of patience. “Go ahead.”
She glared at me fiercely for a moment, then turned and went to Wendy. But she made no move to begin a departure.
I looked around for Bill Gault, saw him standing waiting a little distance away and beckoned him over to me. He came and I led him off out of low-voiced earshot of the rest.
“I didn’t mean to lead you into a touchy situation like this,” I said. “You can go back to your installation, if you feel like it, and I won’t blame you.”
“No,” he said. “You were right. I couldn’t really learn anything more, shut up there. The only way to study the situation is to look at as many of the discontinuities as I can find. We ought to keep on the move and, every time we get near one, have a look at it.”
“Good,” I told him. “By the way, you never did tell me what your field is. Were you a research scientist, a lab man, or what?”
“Well, no,” he said. “I do have a degree in physics... but actually, I was just technical editor for the installation.”
He gazed at me uncomfortably.
“Technical editor!” I said.
“That’s right.”
“Well, what the hell can you do, then?” I demanded. I was about at the end of my temper, anyway; and this last disappointment threatened to cut me loose. I had taken it for granted he was some sort of scientific expert, at least.
“I can do a lot!” Bill said, swiftly. “I can observe, make tests and record—and I know something about physics, as I said. Also, I’ve been up to my eyebrows in everything we worked on at the installation for the five years I’ve been there. I’m not helpless.”
“All right,” I answered. “But you’re going to have to show me.
He did. During the two weeks that followed, my opinion of him, starting from the sub-basement level of that moment, went steadily up. He had brought with him in his backpack some remarkably small, but durable instruments to measure temperature, air pressure, wind velocity and humidity, plus a few less common things like electrostatic levels and magnetic flows. He also designed a number of long rods for pushing these into and through a mistwall, while we stood safely outside.
This is not to say we did not enter the walls. In the final essential, it was necessary to go through them. As we moved across country in the days following the addition of Tek and his men to our group—to say nothing of Bill himself, and the rejoining of the girl and Sunday—we ran into at least one, and sometimes more, mistwalls a day. We would make all the tests on them that Bill could think of; but once he had the results noted down, it was a matter of he and I going through them, that is, unless it were a moving mistwall we were investigating, in which case we spotted them early through binoculars and moved to outflank and see behind them.
We did not go into them as blindly as I had gone into earlier ones. Among other designs of Bill’s were rod or rope devices to be thrown through the mistwall and dragged back, to give us an idea of the ground situation and atmosphere beyond. The third time we used them, what we learned kept us from walking off a cliff on the far side of the mistwall, before we would have had a chance to open our eyes. But, in the end, in almost every instance, we still had to go through personally.
We found a number of different situations, from raw desert to empty city, on the far sides of these walls; and we profited from what we found. Fourteen days after our group had come to its full size, we were riding in a sort of motorcade, all of us, including the dogs. Our vehicles consisted of a couple of brand new motor homes for sleeping and living quarters, preceded by a couple of jeep carryalls and followed by a pickup truck, all three smaller vehicles with four-wheel drive, carrying the armed members of the party while we were on the move. With wheels under us, outflanking the moving mistwalls became not only easier, but more certain.
There were four of us who carried weapons to start with— myself, Marie, Bill, and also the girl. She had become attached to that .22 of hers. In fact, she refused to give it up, and when I had her fire it for me, I found that she had not merely kept it in good condition, she was developing into a good shot. At short to medium range in rough country, a light gun like a .22 could be as effective as an elephant gun, in every way but impact, if the person shooting it was accurate enough; and I was glad to have her able to use it.