[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Galaxy Science Fiction April 1951.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Adventure is relative to one's previous
experience. Sometimes, in fact, you can't
even be sure you're having or not having one!
To be given paid-up leisure and find yourself unable to create is
unpleasant for any artist. To be stranded in a cluster of desert
cabins with a dozen lonely people in the same predicament only makes
it worse. So Tom Dorset was understandably irked with himself and the
Tosker-Brown Vacation Fellowships as he climbed with the sun into the
valley of red stones. He accepted the chafing of his camera strap
against his shoulder as the nagging of conscience. He agreed with the
disparaging hisses of the grains of sand rutched by his sneakers, and
he wished that the occasional breezes, which faintly echoed the same
criticisms, could blow him into a friendlier, less jealous age.
He had no way of knowing that just as there are winds that blow through
space, so there are winds that blow through time. Such winds may be
strong or weak. The strong ones are rare and seldom blow for short
distances, or more of us would know about them. What they pick up is
almost always whirled far into the future or past.
This has happened to people. There was Ambrose Bierce, who walked
out of America and existence, and there are thousands of others who
have disappeared without a trace, though many of these may not have
been caught up by time tornadoes and I do not know if a time gale blew
across the deck of the _Marie Celeste_.
Sometimes a time wind is playful, snatching up an object, sporting
with it for a season and then returning it unharmed to its original
place. Sometimes we may be blown about by whimsical time winds without
realizing it. Memory, for example, is a tiny time breeze, so weak that
it can ripple only the mind.
A very few time winds are like the monsoon, blowing at fixed intervals,
first in one direction, then the other. Such a time wind blows near a
balancing rock in a valley of red stones in the American Southwest.
Every morning at ten o'clock, it blows a hundred years into the future;
every afternoon at two, it blows a hundred years into the past.
Quite a number of people have unwittingly seen time winds in operation.
There are misty spots on the sea's horizon and wavery patches over
desert sands. There are mirages and will o' the wisps and ice blinks.
And there are dust devils, such as Tom Dorset walked into near the
balancing rock.
It seemed to him no more than a spiteful upgust of sand, against which
he closed his eyes until the warm granules stopped peppering the lids.
He opened them to see the balancing rock had silently fallen and lay a
quarter buried--no, that couldn't be, he told himself instantly. He had
been preoccupied; he must have passed the balancing rock and held its
image in his mind.
* * * * *
Despite this rationalization he was quite shaken. The strap of his
camera slipped slowly down his arm without his feeling it. And
just then there stepped around the giant bobbin of the rock an
extraordinarily pretty girl with hair the same pinkish copper color.
She was barefoot and wearing a pale blue playsuit rather like a Grecian
tunic. But most important, as she stood there toeing his rough shadow
in the sand, there was a complete naturalness about her, an absence of
sharp edges, as if her personality had weathered without aging, just
as the valley seemed to have taken another step toward eternity in the
space of an instant.
She must have assumed something of the same gentleness in him, for
her faint surprise faded and she asked him, as easily as if he were a
friend of five years' standing, "Tell now, do you think a woman can
love just one man? All her life? And a man just one woman?"
Tom Dorset made a dazed sound.
His mind searched wildly.
"I do," she said, looking at him as calmly as at a mountain. "I think
a man and woman can be each other's world, like Tristan and Isolde or
Frederic and Catherine. Those old authors were wise. I don't see why on
earth a girl has to spread her love around, no matter how enriching the
experiences may be."
"You know, I agree with you," Tom said, thinking he'd caught her
idea--it was impossible not to catch her casualness. "I think there's
something cheap about the way everybody's supposed to run after sex
these days."
"I don't mean that exactly. Tenderness is beautiful, but--" She pouted.
"A big family can be vastly crushing. I wanted to declare today a
holiday, but they outvoted me. Jock said it didn't chime with our mood
cycles. But I was angry with them, so I put on my clothes--"
"Put on--?"
"To make it a holiday," she explained bafflingly. "And I walked here
for a tantrum." She stepped out of Tom's shadow and hopped back. "Ow,
the sand's getting hot," she said, rubbing the grains from the pale and
uncramped toes.
"You go barefoot a lot?" Tom guessed.
"No, mostly digitals," she replied and took something shimmering from
a pocket at her hip and drew it on her foot. It was a high-ankled,
transparent moccasin with five separate toes. She zipped it shut with
the speed of a card trick, then similarly gloved the other foot. Again
the metal-edged slit down the front seemed to close itself.
"I'm behind on the fashions," Tom said, curious. They were walking side
by side now, the way she'd come and he'd been going. "How does that
zipper work?"
"Magnetic. They're on all my clothes. Very simple." She parted her
tunic to the waist, then let it zip together.
"Clever," Tom remarked with a gulp. There seemed no limits to this
girl's naturalness.
"I see you're a button man," she said. "You actually believe it's
possible for a man and woman to love just each other?"
* * * * *
His chuckle was bitter. He was thinking of Elinore Murphy at
Tosker-Brown and a bit about cold-faced Miss Tosker herself. "I
sometimes wonder if it's possible for anyone to love anyone."
"You haven't met the right girls," she said.
"Girl," he corrected.
She grinned at him. "You'll make me think you really are a monogamist.
What group do you come from?"
"Let's not talk about that," he requested. He was willing to forego
knowing how she'd guessed he was from an art group, if he could be
spared talking about the Vacation Fellowships and those nervous little
cabins.
"My group's very nice on the whole," the girl said, "but at times they
can be nefandously exasperating. Jock's the worst, quietly guiding the
rest of us like an analyst. How I loathe that man! But Larry's almost
as bad, with his shame-faced bumptiousness, as if we'd all sneaked off
on a joyride to Venus. And there's Jokichi at the opposite extreme,
forever scared he won't distribute his affection equally, dividing it
up into mean little packets like candy for jealous children who would
scream if they got one chewy less. And then there's Sasha and Ernest--"
"Who are you talking about?" Tom asked.
"My husbands." She shook her head dolefully. "To find five more
difficult men would be positively Martian."
Tom's mind backtracked frantically, searching all conversations at
Tosker-Brown for gossip about cultists in the neighborhood. It found
nothing and embarked on a wider search. There were the Mormons (was
that the word that had sounded like Martian?) but it wasn't the Mormon
husbands who were plural. And then there was Oneida (weren't husbands
and wives both plural there?) but that was 19th century New England.
"Five husbands?" he repeated. She nodded. He went on, "Do you mean to
say five men have got you alone somewhere up here?"
"To be sure not," she replied. "There are my kwives."
"Kwives?"
"Co-wives," she said more slowly. "They can be fascinerously
exasperating, too."
* * * * *