Time Is the Simplest Thing (9 page)

“Even to the heart of another sun?”

“Not the machine. It would be destroyed. I imagine that the mind could. But it's not been done. So far as I know, that is.”

“And your feelings? What do you think?”

“I observe,” said Blaine. “That is what I go for.”

“You do not get the feeling that you're lord of all creation? You do not have the thought that Man holds all the universe in the hollow of his hand?”

“If it's the sin of pride and vanity you're thinking of, no, never. You sometimes get a thrill at knowing where you are. You're often filled with wonder, but more often you are puzzled. You are reminded, again and yet again, of how insignificant you are. And there are times when you forget that you are human. You're just a blob of life—brother to everything that ever existed or ever will exist.”

“And you think of God?”

“No,” said Blaine. “I can't say I ever do.”

“That is too bad,” said Father Flanagan. “It is rather frightening. To be out there alone.…”

“Father, at the very start I made it plain to you that I was not inclined to be a religious sort of man—not in the accepted sense, that is. And I played square with you.”

“So you did,” said Father Flanagan.

“And if your next question is going to be: Could a religious man go out to the stars and still retain his faith; could he go out and come back full of faith; would traveling to the stars take away something of the true belief he held? Then I'd have to ask you to define your terms.”

“My terms?” asked Father Flanagan, amazed.

“Yes, faith, for one thing. What do you mean by faith? Is faith enough for Man? Should he be satisfied with faith alone? Is there no way of finding out the truth? Is the attitude of faith, of believing in something for which there can be no more than philosophic proof, the true mark of a Christian? Or should the Church long since—”

Father Flanagan raised a hand. “My son!” he said. “My son!”

“Forget it, Father. I should not have said it.”

They sat for a moment, regarding one another; neither understanding. As if we were two aliens, thought Blaine. With viewpoints that did not come within a million miles of coinciding, and yet they both were men.

“I am truly sorry, Father.”

“No need to be. You said it. There are others who believe it, or think it, but would never say it. You at least are honest.”

He reached out and patted Blaine slowly on the arm.

“You are a telepath?” he asked.

“And a teleporter. But limited. Very limited.”

“And that is all?”

“I don't know. I've never dug around.”

“You mean you may have other abilities you are not aware of?”

“Look, Father, in PK you have a certain mental capacity. First, you are the simple things, the easy things—the telepath, the teleport, the huncher. You go on from there—or there are some who do. You grow. Some stop growing after a time and others keep on growing. Each of these abilities is not a separate ability; the abilities themselves are simply manifestations of a wholeness of the mind. They are, lumped together, the mind working as it always should have worked, even from the very first, if it had had its chance.”

“And it is not evil?”

“Certainly. Wrongly used, it's evil. And it was wrongly used by a lot of people, a lot of amateurs who never took the time to understand or to analyze the power they had. But Man has misused his hands, as well. He killed, he stole—”

“And you are not a warlock?”

Blaine wanted to laugh—the laugh was rising in him—but he could not laugh. There was too much terror for a man to laugh.

“No, Father, I swear to you. I am not a warlock. Nor a werewolf. Nor a—”

The old man raised his hand and stopped him.

“Now, we're even,” he declared. “I, too, said something I should not have said.”

He rose stiffly from the bunk and held out his hand, the fingers twisted by arthritis or whatever it was that might be wrong with them.

“Thank you,” he said. “God help you.”

“And you'll be here tonight?”

“Tonight?”

“When the people of this town come to take me out and hang me? Or do they burn them at the stake?”

The old man's face twisted in revulsion. “You must not think such things. Surely not in this—”

“They burned down the Trading Post. They would have killed the factor.”

“That was wrong,” said Father Flanagan. “I told them that it was. For I am certain members of my parish participated. Not that they were alone in it, for there were many others. But they should have known better. I have worked for years among them against this very sort of thing.”

Blaine put out his hand and grasped the hand of Father Flanagan. The crippled fingers closed with a warm, hard grip.

“The sheriff is a good man,” said the priest. “He will do his best. I will talk to some of them myself.”

“Thank you, Father.”

“My son, are you afraid to die?”

“I don't know. I have often thought I wouldn't be. I'll have to wait and see.”

“You must have faith.”

“Perhaps I will. If ever I can find it. You'll say a prayer for me?”

“God watch over you. I'll pray away the blessed afternoon.”

TEN

Blaine stood at the window and watched them gather in the dusk—not quickly, but slowly; not boisterously, but quietly, almost nonchalantly, as if they might be coming into town for a program at the schoolhouse or a meeting of the grange or some other normal and entirely routine function.

He could hear the sheriff stirring quietly about in the office across the corridor and he wondered if the sheriff knew—although assuredly he did, for he had lived in this town long enough to know what it was apt to do.

Blaine stood at the window and reached up and grasped the metal bars, and out beyond the bars, somewhere in the unkempt trees on the courthouse lawn, a bird was singing his last song of evening before cuddling on a branch and going fast asleep.

And as he stood there watching, the Pinkness crept out of its corner and floated in his mind, expanding until it filled his mind.

I have come to be with you
, it seemed to say. I
am done with hiding. I know about you now. I have explored every nook and cranny of you and I know the kind of thing you are. And through you, the kind of world you're in—and the kind of world I'm in, for it is my world now
.

No more foolishness?
asked that part of the strange duality that continued to be Blaine.

No more foolishness
, said the other.
No more screaming, no more running, no more trying to get out
.

Except there was no death. There was no such thing as death, for the ending of a life was inexplicable. It simply could not happen, although dimly, far back in memory, there seemed there had been others it might have happened to
.

Blaine left the window and went back to sit down on the bunk and he was remembering now. But the memories were dim and they came from far away and from very long ago and one could not be sure at once if they were truly memories or if they were no more than quaint imagining.

For there were many planets and many different peoples and a host of strange ideas and there were jumbled bits of cosmic information that lay all helter-skelter like a pile of ten billion heaped-up jackstraws.

“How are you feeling?” asked the sheriff, who had come so quietly across the corridor that Blaine had not heard him coming.

Blaine jerked up his head. “Why, all right, I suppose. I have just been watching your friends out across the street.”

The sheriff chuckled thinly. “No need to fear,” he said. “They haven't got the guts to even cross the street. If they do, I'll go out and talk with them.”

“Even if they know that I am Fishhook?”

“That's one thing,” the sheriff said, “that they wouldn't know.”

“You told the priest.”

“That's different,” said the sheriff. “I had to tell the father.”

“And he would tell no one?”

“Why should he?” asked the sheriff.

And there was no answer; it was one of those questions which could not be answered.

“And you sent a message.”

“But not to Fishhook. To a friend who'll send it on to Fishhook.”

“It was wasted effort,” Blaine told him. “You should not have bothered. Fishhook knows where I am.”

For they'd have hounders on the trail by now; they would have picked up the trail many hours ago. There had been but one chance for him to have escaped—to have traveled rapidly and very much alone.

They might be in this very town tonight, he thought, and a surge of hope flowed through him. For Fishhook would scarcely let a posse do him in.

Blaine got up from the bunk and crossed over to the window.

“You better get out there now,” he told the sheriff. “They're already across the street.”

For they had to hurry, naturally. They must get what they had to do done quickly before the fall of deeper night. When darkness fell in all obscurity, they must be snug inside their homes, with the doors double-locked and barred, with the shutters fastened, with the drapes drawn tight, with the hex signs bravely hanging at every opening. For then, and only then, would they be safe from the hideous forces that prowled the outer darkness, from banshee and werewolf, from vampire, goblin, sprite.

He heard the sheriff turning and going back across the corridor, back into the office. Metal scraped as a gun was taken from a rack, and there was a hollow clicking as the sheriff broke the breech and fed shells into the barrels.

The mob moved like a dark and flowing blanket and it came in utter silence aside from the shuffling of its feet.

Blaine watched it, fascinated, as if it were a thing that stood apart from him, as if it were a circumstance which concerned him not at all. And that was strange, he told himself, knowing it was strange, for the mob was coming for him.

But it made no difference, for there was no death. Death was something that made no sense at all and nothing to be thought of. It was a foolish wastefulness and not to be tolerated.

And who was it that said that?

For he knew that there was death—that there must be death if there were evolution, that death was one of the mechanisms that biologically spelled progress and advancement for evolutionary species.

You
, he said to the thing within his mind—a thing that was a thing no longer, but was a part of him—
it is your idea. Death is something that you can't accept
.

But something that in all truth must surely be accepted. For it was an actuality, it was an ever-presence, it was something that everything must live with through the shortness of its life.

There was death and it was close—much too close for comfort or denial. It was in the mumble of the mob just outside the building, the mob that now had passed from sight and quit its shuffling, that even now was massed outside the courthouse entrance, arguing with the sheriff. For the sheriff's booming voice came clearly through the outer door, calling upon those outside to break up and go back to their homes.

“All that this will get you,” yelled the sheriff, “is a belly full of shot.”

But they yelled back at him, and the sheriff yelled again and it went back and forth for quite a little while. Blaine stood at the inner bars and waited, and fear seeped into him, slowly at first, then faster, like an evil tide racing through his blood.

Then the sheriff was coming through the door and there were three men with him—angry men and frightened, but so purposeful and grim their fright was covered up.

The sheriff came across the office and into the corridor, with the shotgun hanging limply from his hand. The other three strode close upon his heels.

The sheriff stopped just outside the bars and looked at Blaine, trying to conceal the sheepishness he wore.

“I am sorry, Blaine,” he said, “but I just can't do it. These folks are friends of mine. I was raised with a lot of them. I can't bear to shoot them down.”

“Of course you can't,” said Blaine, “you yellow-bellied coward.”

“Give me them keys,” snarled one of the three. “Let's get him out of here.”

“They're hanging on the nail beside the door,” the sheriff said.

He glanced at Blaine.

“There's nothing I can do,” he said.

“You can go off and shoot yourself,” said Blaine. “I'd highly recommend it.”

The man came with the key, and the sheriff stepped aside. The key rattled in the lock.

Blaine said to the man opening the door. “There is one thing I want understood. I walk out of here alone.”

“Huh!” said the man.

“I said I want to walk alone. I will not be dragged.”

“You'll come the way we want you,” growled the man.

“It's a small thing,” the sheriff urged. “It wouldn't hurt to let him.”

The man swung the cell door open. “All right, come on,” he said.

Blaine stepped out into the corridor, and the three men closed in, one on either side of him, the other one behind. They did not raise a hand to touch him. The man with the keys flung them to the floor. They made a clashing sound that filled the corridor, that set Blaine's teeth on edge.

It was happening, thought Blaine. Incredible as it seemed, it was happening to him.

“Get on, you stinking parry,” said the man behind him and punched him in the back.

“You wanted to walk,” said another. “Leave us see you walk.”

Blaine walked, steadily and straight, concentrating on each step to make sure he did not stumble. For he must not stumble; he must do nothing to disgrace himself.

Hope still lived, he told himself. There still was a chance that someone from Fishhook might be out there, set to snatch him from them. Or that Harriet had gotten help and was coming back or was already here. Although that, he told himself, was quite unlikely. She'd not had time enough and she could not have known the urgency involved.