He felt himself sliding prone to the cave floor and fought to drive
himself erect. But his will to fight was thin and the rock was comfortable.
So comfortable, he thought, that he could afford a moment’s rest before
forcing himself erect. And the funny thing about it was that the cave floor
had turned to mud and water and the sun was shining and he seemed warm
again.
He rose with a start and he saw that he was standing in a wide expanse
of water no deeper than his ankles, black ooze underfoot.
There was no cave and no hill in which the cave might be. There was
simply this vast sheet of water and behind him, less than thirty feet away,
the muddy beach of a tiny island — a muddy, rocky island, with smears of
sickly green clinging to the rocks.
He was in another time, he knew, but not in another place. Always when
he slipped through time he came to rest on exactly the same spot upon the
surface of the earth that he had occupied when the change had come.
And standing there he wondered once again, as he had many times before,
what strange mechanism operated to shift him bodily in space so that when he
was transported to a time other than his own he did not find himself buried
under, say, twenty feet of rock or soil or suspended twenty feet above the
surface.
But now, he knew, was no time to think or wonder. By a strange quirk of
circumstance he was no longer in the cave and it made good sense to get away
from where he was as swiftly as he could. For if he stayed standing where he
was he might snap back unexpectedly to his present and find himself still
huddled in the cave.
He turned clumsily about, his feet tangling in the muddy bottom, and
lunged towards the shore. The going was hard but he made it and went up the
slimy stretch of muddy beach until he could reach the tumbled rocks and
could sit and rest.
His breathing was difficult. He gulped great lungfuls and the air had a
strange taste to it, not like normal air.
He sat on the rock, gasping for breath, and gazed out across the sheet
of water shining in the high, warm sun. Far out he caught sight of a long,
humping swell and watched it coming in. When it reached the shore it washed
up the muddy incline almost to his feet. Far out on the glassy surface
another swell was forming.
The sheet of water was greater, he realized, than he had first imagined.
This was also the first time in his wanderings through the past that he had
ever come upon any large body of water. Always before he had emerged on dry
land whose general contours had been recognizable — and there had always
been the river flowing through the hills.
Here nothing was recognizable. This was a totally different place and
there could be no question that he had been projected farther back in time
than ever before — back to the day of some great epicontinental sea, back
to a time, perhaps, when the atmosphere had far less oxygen than it would
have in later eons. More than likely, he thought, he was very close in time
to that boundary line where life for a creature such as he would be
impossible. Here there apparently was sufficient oxygen, although a man must
pump more air into his lungs than he would normally. Go back a few million
years and the oxygen might fall to the point where it would be insufficient.
Go a little farther back and find no free oxygen at all.
Watching the beach, he saw the little things skittering back and forth,
seeking refuge in spume-whitened piles of drift or popping into tiny
burrows. He put his hand down on the rock on which he sat and scrubbed
gently at a patch of green. It slid off the rock and clung to his flesh,
smearing his palm with a slimy gelatinous mess that felt disgusting and
unclean.
Here, then, was the first of life to dwell upon the land — scarcely
creatures as yet, still clinging to the edge of water, afraid and unequipped
to wander too far from the side of that wet and gentle mother which, from
the first beginning, had nurtured life. Even the plants still clung close to
the sea, existing, perhaps, only upon rocky surfaces so close to the beach
that occasional spray could reach them.
Daniels found that now he did not have to gasp quite so much for breath.
Plowing through the mud up to the rock had been exhausting work in an
oxygen-poor atmosphere. But sitting quietly on the rocks, he could get along
all right.
Now that the blood had stopped pounding in his head he became aware of
silence. He heard one sound only, the soft lapping of the water against the
muddy beach, a lonely effect that seemed to emphasize rather than break the
silence.
Never before in his life, he realized, had he heard so little sound.
Back in the other worlds he had known there had been not one noise, but
many, even on the quietest days. But here there was nothing to make a sound
— no trees, no animals, no insects, no birds — just the water running to
the far horizon and the bright sun in the sky.
For the first time in many months he knew again that sense of
out-of-placeness, of not belonging, the feeling of being where he was not
wanted and had no right to be, an intruder in a world that was out of
bounds, not for him alone but for anything that was more complex or more
sophisticated than the little skitterers on the beach.
He sat beneath the alien sun, surrounded by the alien water, watching
the little things that in eons yet to come would give rise to such creatures
as himself, and tried to feel some sort of kinship to the skitterers. But he
could feel no kinship.
And suddenly in this place of one-sound-only there came a throbbing,
faint but clear and presently louder, pressing down against the water,
beating at the little island — a sound out of the sky.
Daniels leaped to his feet and looked up and the ship was there,
plummeting down toward him. But not a ship of solid form, it seemed —
rather a distorted thing, as if many planes of light (if there could be such
things as planes of light) had been slapped together in a haphazard sort of
way.
A throbbing came from it that set the atmosphere to howling and the
planes of light kept changing shape or changing places, so that the ship,
from one moment to the next, never looked the same.
It had been dropping fast to start with but now it was slowing down as
it continued to fall, ponderously and with massive deliberation, straight
toward the island.
Daniels found himself crouching, unable to jerk his eyes and senses away
from this mass of light and thunder that came out of the sky.
The sea and mud and rock, even in the full light of the sun, were
flickering with the flashing that came from the shifting of the planes of
light. Watching it through eyes squinted against the flashes, Daniels saw
that if the ship were to drop to the surface it would not drop upon the
island, as he first had feared, but a hundred feet or so offshore.
Not more than fifty feet above the water the great ship stopped and
hovered and a bright thing came from it. The object hit the water with a
splash but did not go under, coming to rest upon the shallow, muddy bottom
of the sea, with a bit less than half of it above the surface. It was a
sphere, a bright and shiny globe against which the water lapped, and even
with the thunder of the ship beating at his ears, Daniels imagined he could
hear the water lapping at the sphere.
Then a voice spoke above this empty world, above the throbbing of the
ship, the imagined lapping sound of water, a sad, judicial voice — although
it could not have been a voice, for any voice would have been too puny to be
heard. But the words were there and there was no doubt of what they said:
_Thus, according to the verdict and the sentence, you are here deported
and abandoned upon this barren planet, where it is most devoutly hoped you
will find the time and opportunity to contemplate your sins and especially
the sin of_ (and here were words and concepts Daniels could not understand,
hearing them only as a blur of sound — but the sound of them, or something