Time Is the Simplest Thing (10 page)

He marched with steady stride across the sheriff's office and down the hall to the outer door, the three men who were with him pressing close against him.

Someone was holding the outer door, with a gesture of mock politeness, so he could pass through.

He hesitated for an instant, terror sweeping over him. For if he passed that door, if he stood upon the steps outside, if he faced the waiting mob, then all hope was gone.

“Go on, you filthy bastard,” growled the man behind him. “They are waiting out there for you.”

The man put a hand behind his shoulder blades and shoved. Blaine staggered for a step or two, then was walking straight again.

And now he was across the doorway, now he faced the crowd!

An animal sound came boiling up from it—a sound of intermingled hate and terror, like the howling of a pack of wolves on a bloody trail, like the snarling of the tiger that is tired of waiting, with something in it, too, of the whimper of the cornered animal, hunted to its death.

And these, thought Blaine, with a queer detached corner of him mind,
were
the hunted animals—the people on the run. Here was the terror and the hate and envy of the uninitiate, here the frustration of those who had been left out, here the intolerance and the smuggery of those who refused to understand, the rear guard of an old order holding the narrow pass against the outflankers of the future.

They would kill him as they had killed others, as they would kill many more, but their fate was already settled, the battle already had been won.

Someone pushed him from behind and he went skidding down the smooth stone steps. He slipped and fell and rolled, and the mob closed in upon him. There were many hands upon him, there were fingers grinding into muscles, there was the hot foul breath and the odor of their mouths blowing in his face.

The many hands jerked him to his feet and pushed him back and forth. Someone punched him in the belly and another slapped him hard across the face and out of the bull-roaring of the crowd came one bellowing voice: “Go on, you stinking parry, teleport yourself! That's all you have to do. Just teleport yourself.”

And that was most fitting mockery—for there were very few indeed who could teleport themselves. There were the levitators who could move themselves through the air like birds, and there were many others, like Blaine, who could teleport small objects, and others, also like Blaine, who could teleport their minds over many light years, but with the help of weird machines. But the true self-teleport, who could snap his body from one location to another in the fraction of an instant, was extremely hard to come by.

The crowd took up the mocking chant: “Teleport yourself! Teleport! Teleport! Teleport yourself, you dirty, stinking parry!” Laughing all the time at their cleverness, smirking all the time at the indignity thus heaped upon their victim. And never for a moment ceasing to use hands and feet upon him.

There was a warmness running down his chin, and one lip felt puffed and swollen, and there was a saltiness in his mouth. His belly ached and his ribs were sore, and the feet and fists still kept punching in.

Then another bellowing voice roared above the din: “Cut that out! Leave the man alone!”

The crowd fell back, but they still ringed him in, and Blaine, standing in the center of the human circle, looked around it and in the last faint light of dusk saw the rat eyes gleaming, and flaked saliva on the lips, sensed the hate that rose and rolled toward him like a body smell.

The circle parted and two men came through—one a small and fussy man who might have been a bookkeeper or a clerk, and the other a massive bruiser with a face that looked as if it were a place where chickens scratched in their search for grubs and worms. The big man had a rope coiled on one arm and from his hand he dangled one end of the rope fashioned very neatly into a hangman's noose.

The two of them stopped in front of Blaine, and the small man turned slightly to face one segment of the circle.

“Gents,” he said, in a voice that any funeral director would have been proud to own, “we must conduct ourselves with a certain decency and dignity. We have nothing personal against this man, only against the system and the abomination of which he is a part.”

“You tell 'em, Buster!” yelled an enthusiastic voice from the fringes of the crowd.

The man with the funeral director's voice held up a hand for silence.

“It is a sad and solemn duty,” he said unctuously, “that we must perform, but it is a duty. Let us proceed with it in a seemly fashion.”

“Yeah,” yelled the enthusiast, “let us get it done with. Let's hang the dirty bastard!”

The big man came close to Blaine and lifted up the noose. He dropped it almost gently over Blaine's head so that it rested on his shoulders. Then he slowly tightened it until it was snug about the neck.

The rope was new and prickly and it burned like a red-hot iron, and the numbness that had settled into Blaine's body ran out of him like water and left him standing cold and empty and naked before all eternity.

All the time, even while it had been happening, he had clung subconsciously to the firm conviction that it could not happen—that he couldn't die this way; that it could and did happen to many other people, but not to Shepherd Blaine.

And now death was only minutes distant; the instrument of death already put in place. These men—these men he did not know, these men he'd never know—were about to take his life.

He tried to lift his hands to snatch the rope away, but his arms would not stir from where they hung limply from his shoulders. He gulped, for there already was the sense of slow, painful strangulation.

And they hadn't even begun to hang him yet!

The coldness of his empty self grew colder with the chill of overwhelming fear—fear that took him in its fist and held him stiff and rigid while it froze him solid. The blood, it seemed, stopped running in his veins and he seemed to have no body and the ice piled up and up inside his brain until he thought his skull would burst.

And from some far nether region of that brain came the fleeting realization that he no longer was a man, but mere frightened animal. Too cold, still too proud to whimper, too frozen in his terror to move a single muscle—only kept from screaming because his frozen tongue and throat could no longer function.

But if he could not scream aloud, he screamed inside himself. And the scream built up and up, a mounting tension that could find no way to effect release. And he knew that if no release were found in another instant he would blow apart from the sheer pressure of the tension.

There was a split second—not of blackout, but of unawareness—then he stood alone and he was cold no longer.

He stood on the crumbling brick of the ancient walk that led up to the courthouse entrance, and the rope was still about his neck, but there was no one in the courthouse square.

He was all alone in an empty town!

ELEVEN

There was less of dusk and more of light and there was a quietness that was unimaginable.

There was no grass.

There were no trees.

There were no men, nor any sign of men.

The courthouse lawn, or what had been the lawn, stretched naked down to the asphalt street. There was no grass upon the lawn. It was soil and pebble. Not dried-out grass or killed-out grass, but not any grass at all. As if there had never been such a thing as grass. As if grass never had existed.

With the rope still trailing from his neck, Blaine slowly pivoted to look in all directions. And in all directions it was the self-same scene. The courthouse still stood starkly against the last light of the day. The street was still and empty, with cars parked at the curb. The store fronts lined the street, their windows staring blindly.

There was one tree—lone and dead—standing at the corner beside the barber shop.

And no men anywhere. No birds or song of birds. No dogs. No cats. Nor an insect humming. Perhaps, thought Blaine, not even a bacteria or a microbe.

Cautiously, almost as if afraid by doing so he might break the spell, Blaine put up his hands and loosened the rope. He slipped it over his head and tossed it to the ground. He massaged his neck carefully with one hand, for the neck still stung. There were little prickles in it, where tiny pieces of the fiber had broken off and still stuck in the skin.

He took a tentative step and found that he could walk, although his body still was sore from the casual beating it had taken. He walked out into the street and stood in the middle of it and looked up and down its length. It was deserted so far as he could see.

The sun had set, and dark was not far off and that meant, he told himself, that he had come back just a little time.

And stood astounded, frozen in the middle of the street, that he should have known.

For he did know! Without a doubt he knew exactly what he had accomplished. Although, he thought, he must have done it without a conscious effort, almost instinctively, a sort of conditioned reflex action to escape the danger.

It was something that he had no way of knowing how to do, that a short minute earlier he would have sworn would be impossible that he do. It was something that no human had ever done before, that no human would have ever dreamed of trying.

For he had moved through time. He had gone into the past a half an hour or so.

He stood in the street, attempting to recall how he might have done it, but all he could remember was the mounting terror that had come rolling, wave on wave, to drown him. There was one answer only: He had done it as a matter of deep-seated knowledge which he had not been aware of having and had accomplished it only as a final, desperate, instinctive effort—as one might, without thinking, throw up an arm to ward off an unexpected blow.

As a human it would have been beyond his capability, but it would not, undoubtedly, have been impossible for the alien mind. As a human being he did not have the instinct, did not have even the beginning of the necessary know-how. It was an ability even outside the pale of paranormal action. There was no question of it: the only way he could have snapped himself through time was by the agency and through the courtesy of the alien mind.

But the alien mind, it seemed, had left him; it was no longer with him. He hunted it and called it, and there was no trace and there was no answer.

He turned to face the north and began to walk, keeping to the center of the street, marching through this ghost town of the past.

The graveyard of the past, he thought. No life anywhere. Just the dead, bare stone and brick, the lifeless clay and wood.

And where had gone the life?

Why must the past be dead?

And what had happened to that mind the alien on the distant star had exchanged with him?

He sought for it again and he could not find it, but he did find traces of it; he found the spoor of it, tiny, muddy footprints that went across his brain; he found bits and pieces that it had left behind—strange, chaotic memories and straws of exotic, disconnected information that floated like flecks of jetsam in a frothy tide.

He did not find it, but he found the answer to its going—the instinctive answer that suddenly was there. The mind had not gone and left him. It had, rather, finally, become a part of him. In the forge of fright and terror, in the chemistry of danger, there had been a psychologic factor that had welded the two of them together.

And yet he still was human. Therefore, he told himself, the answer must be false. But it kept on persisting. There was no reason to it and there was no logic—for if he had two minds, if he were half human and half alien, there would be a difference. A difference he would notice.

The business part of the street had dwindled to shabby residences, and up ahead of him he could see where the village ended—this village which half an hour ago (or a half an hour ahead?) had been most intent upon the killing of him.

He halted for a moment and looked back and he could see the courthouse cupola and remembered that he'd left everything he owned back there, locked in the sheriff's desk. He hesitated a moment, wondering if he should go back. It was a terrible thing to be without a dollar to his name, with all his pockets empty.

If he went back, he thought, he could steal a car. If there were none with the keys left in the lock, he could short-circuit the ignition. He should have thought of it before, he told himself. The cars were standing there, waiting to be taken.

He turned and started back. He took two steps, then wheeled about again.

He didn't dare to go back. For he was safely out. There was nothing that could persuade him—money or car or anything—to go back into the village.

The light was waning and he headed northward, settling down to rolling up some distance—not running, but walking fast, with long, loose strides that ate up the very road.

He passed out of the village and came into the country and here there was an even greater loneliness, an even greater barrenness. A few dead cottonwoods lined the stream that ran down the valley, and ghostly fence posts stood in ragged rows—but the land was naked, without a weed, without a blade of grass. And the wind had a crying in it as it swept across the wasteland.

The darkness deepened and the moon came up, a blotch-faced mirror with the silver cracked and blackened, to cast a pallid light upon the arid stretch of earth.

He reached a rough plank bridge that crossed the tiny stream and stopped to rest a second and glance back along his trail. Nothing moved; there was nothing following. The village was some miles behind, and up on the hill above the stream stood the ramshackle bones of some forgotten farm—a barn, what looked like a hog pen, several dilapidated outhouses and the house itself.

Blaine stood and sucked the air into his lungs, and it seemed to him that the very air itself was dead. It had no sparkle in it. There was no smell in it and hardly any taste.

He reached out a hand to rest it on the bridge, and his hand went through the plank. It reached the plank and went into the plank and through it and there was nothing there. There wasn't any plank; there wasn't any bridge.