Time Is the Simplest Thing (5 page)

“You don't mean you're leaving—just like that?” said Blaine. “My judgment, I can assure you,
is
very often bad.”
But you? Why are you doing this? What do you get out of it? (Perplexed, angry person holding empty sack.)

Love you. (Board fence with interlocked hearts carved all over it.)

Lie
. (
Bar of soap energetically washing out a mouth
.)

“Don't tell them, Shep,” said Harriet. “It would break Charline's heart.”
I'm a newspaperman (woman) and I'm working on a story and you are part of it
.

One thing you forgot. Fishhook may be waiting at the mouth of the canyon road
.

Shep, don't worry. I've got it all doped out. We'll fool them yet
.

“All right, then,” said Blaine. “I won't say a word. Be seeing you around.”
And thanks
.

She opened the door and was gone, and he could hear the sound of her walking across the patio and clicking down the stairs.

He slowly turned around toward the crowded rooms and as he stepped through the door, the blast of conversation hit him in the face—the jumbled sound of many people talking simultaneously, not caring particularly what they said, not trying to make sense, but simply jabbering for the sake of jabber, seeking for the equivalent of conformity in this sea of noise.

So Harriet was a telly and it was something he would never have suspected. Although, if you were a news hen and you had the talent, it would make only common sense to keep it under cover.

Closemouthed women, he thought, and wondered how any woman could have managed to keep so quiet about it. Although Harriet, he reminded himself, was more newsman than she was woman. You could put her up there with the best of the scribblers.

He stopped at the bar and got a Scotch and ice and stood idly for a moment, sipping at it. He must not appear to hurry, he must never seem to be heading anywhere, and yet he couldn't afford to let himself be sucked into one of the conversational eddies—there wasn't time for that.

He could drop into the dimensino room for a minute or two, but there was danger in that. One got identified with what was going on too quickly. One lost one's sense of time; one lost everything but the situation which dimensino created. And it often was disturbing and confusing to drop into the middle of it.

It would not be, he decided, a very good idea.

He exchanged brief greetings with a couple of acquaintances; he suffered a backslapping reunion with a slightly inebriated gentleman he'd seen no longer than ten days before; he was forced to listen to two off-color stories; he went through a mild flirting routine with a simpering dowager who came charging out of ambush.

And all the time he moved steadily toward the door that led down to the kitchen.

Finally he arrived.

He stepped through the doorway and went casually down the stairs.

The place was empty, a cold, metallic place with the gleam of chrome and the shine of high utility. A clock with a sweep second hand hung upon one wall and its whirring sound hung heavy in the room.

Blaine placed his glass, still half full of Scotch, on the nearest table, and there, six strides away, across the gleaming floor, was the outside door.

He took the first two steps and as he started on the third a silent shout of warning sounded in his brain and he spun around.

Freddy Bates stood beside the huge refrigerator, one hand jammed deep into a jacket pocket.

“Shep,” said Freddy Bates, “if I were you, I wouldn't try it. Fishhook has the place tied up. You haven't got a chance.”

SIX

Blaine stood frozen for a second while wonder hammered at him. And it was surprise and bafflement, rather than either fear or anger, that held him frozen there. Surprise that, of all people, it should be Freddy Bates. Freddy, no longer the aimless man-about-town, the inconsequential mystery man in a town that was full of such as he, but an agent of Fishhook and, apparently, a very able one.

And another thing—that Kirby Rand had known and had allowed him to walk out of the office and go down the elevator. But grabbing for a phone as soon as he had reached the corridor to put Freddy on the job.

It had been clever, Blaine admitted to himself—much more clever than he himself had been. There had never been a moment that he had suspected Rand felt anything was wrong, and Freddy, when he picked him up, had been his normal, ineffectual self.

Anger soaked slowly into him, to replace the wonder. Anger that he had been taken in, that he had been trapped by such a jerk as Freddy.

“We'll just walk outside,” said Freddy, “like the friends we are, and I'll take you back to have a talk with Rand. No fuss, no fight, but very gentlemanly. We would not want to do anything—either one of us—to cause Charline embarrassment.”

“No,” said Blaine. “No, of course, we wouldn't.”

His mind was racing, seeking for a way, looking for an out, anything at all that would get him out of this. For he was not going back. No matter what might happen, he wasn't going back with Freddy.

He felt the Pinkness stir as if it were coming out.

“No!” yelled Blaine. “No!”

But it was too late. The Pinkness had crawled out and it filled his brain, and he was still himself but someone else as well. He was two things at once and it was most confusing and something strange had happened.

The room became as still as death except for the groaning of the clock upon the wall. And that was strange, as well, for until this very moment, the clock had done no groaning; it had whirred but never groaned.

Blaine took a swift step forward, and Freddy didn't move. He stayed standing there, with the hand thrust in the pocket.

And another step and still Freddy barely stirred. His eyes stayed stiff and staring and he didn't blink. But his face began to twist, a slow and tortured twist, and the hand in the pocket moved, but so deliberately that one only was aware of a sort of stirring, as if the arm and hand and the thing the hand clutched in the pocket were waking from deep sleep.

And yet another step and Blaine was almost on him, with his fist moving like a piston. Freddy's mouth dropped slowly open, as if the jaw hinge might be rusty, and his eyelids came creeping down in the caricature of a blink.

Then the fist exploded on his jaw. Blaine hit where he was aiming and he hit with everything he had, his torso twisting to follow through the blow. Even as he hit and the pain of contact slashed across his knuckles and tingled in his wrist, he knew it was all wrong. For Freddy had scarcely moved, had not even tried to defend himself.

Freddy was falling, but not as one should fall. He was falling slowly, deliberately, as a tree will topple when the final cut is made. In slow motion, he crumpled toward the floor and as he fell his hand finally cleared the pocket and there was a gun in it. The gun slipped from his flaccid fingers and beat him to the floor.

Blaine bent to scoop it up and he had it in his hand before Freddy hit the floor and he stood there, with the gun in hand, watching Freddy finally strike the floor—not actually striking it, but just sort of settling down on it and relaxing in slow motion on its surface.

The clock still groaned upon the wall, and Blaine swung around to look at it and saw that the second hand was barely crawling across the numbered face. Crawling where it should have galloped, and groaning when it should have whirred, and the clock, Blaine told himself, had gone crazy, too.

There was something wrong with time. The creeping second hand and Freddy's slow reaction was evidence of that.

Time had been slowed down.

And that was impossible.

Time did not slow down; time was a universal constant. But if time, somehow, had slowed down, why had not he been a party to it?

Unless—

Of course, unless time had stayed the way it was and he had been speeded up, had moved so fast that Freddy had not had the time to act, had been unable to defend himself, could under no circumstances have gotten the gun out of his pocket.

Blaine held his fist out in front of him and looked at the gun. It was a squat and ugly thing and it had a deadly bluntness.

Freddy had not been fooling, nor was Fishhook fooling. You do not pack a gun in a little game all filled with lightness and politeness. You do not pack a gun unless you're prepared to use it. And Freddy—there was no doubt of that—had been prepared to use it.

Blaine swung back toward Freddy and he was still upon the floor and he seemed to be most restful. It would be quite a little while before Freddy would be coming round.

Blaine dropped the gun into his pocket and turned toward the door and as he did so he glanced up at the clock and the second hand had barely moved from where he'd seen it last.

He reached the door and opened it and took one last glance back into the room. The room still was bright with chrome, still stark in its utility, and the one untidy thing within it was Freddy sprawled upon the floor.

Blaine stepped out of the door and moved along the flagstone walk that led to the long stone stairway that went slanting down across the great cliff face.

A man was lounging at the head of the stairs and he began to straighten slowly as Blaine raced down the walk toward him.

The light from one of the upstairs windows shone across the face of the straightening man, and Blaine saw the lines of outraged surprise, as if they were sculptured lines in a graven face.

“Sorry, pal,” said Blaine.

He shot his arm out, stiff from the shoulder, with the palm spread flat and caught the graven face.

The man reeled backward slowly, step by cautious step, tilting farther and farther backward with each step. In another little while he'd fall flat upon his back.

Blaine didn't wait to see. He went running down the stairs. Beyond the dark lines of parked vehicles stood a single car, with its taillights gleaming and its motor humming softly.

It was Harriet's car, Blaine told himself, but it was headed the wrong way—not down the road toward the canyon's mouth, but into the canyon's maw. And that was wrong, he knew, because the road pinched out a mile or two beyond.

He reached the bottom of the steps and threaded his way among the cars out into the road.

Harriet sat waiting in the car, and he walked around it and opened the door. He slid into the seat.

Weariness hit him, a terrible, bone-aching weariness, as if he had been runnings, as if he'd run too far. He sank into the seat and looked at his hands lying in his lap and saw that they were trembling.

Harriet turned to look at him. “It didn't take you long,” she said.

“I got a break,” said Blaine. “I hurried.”

She put the car in gear and it floated up the road, its airjets thrumming and the canyon walls picking up the thrumming to fling it back and forth.

“I hope,” said Blaine, “you know where you are going. The road ends up here a ways.”

“Don't worry, Shep. I know.”

He was too tired to argue. He was all beaten out.

And he had a right to be, he told himself, for he had been moving ten times (or a hundred times?) faster than he should, than the human body ever had been intended to. He had been using energy at a terrific rate—his heart had beat the faster, his lungs had worked the harder, and his muscles had gone sliding back and forth at an astounding rate.

He lay quietly, his mind agape at what had happened, and wondering, too, what had made it happen. Although the wonder was a formalized and an academic wonder, for he knew what it was.

The Pinkness had faded out of him, and he went hunting it and found it, snug inside its den.

Thanks
, he said to it.

Although it seemed a little funny that he should be thanking it, for it was a part of him—it was inside his skull, it sheltered in his brain. And yet not a part of him, not yet a part of him. But a skulker no longer, a fugitive no more.

The car went fleeing up the canyon, and the air was fresh and cool, as if it had been new-washed in some clear mountain stream, and the smell of pine came down between the walls like the smell of a faint and delicate perfume.

Perhaps, he told himself, it had been with no thought of helping him that the thing inside his brain had acted as it did. Rather it might have been an almost automatic reflex action for the preservation of itself. But no matter what it was, it had saved him as surely as itself. For the two of them were one. No longer could either of them act independently of the other. They were bound together by the legerdemain of that sprawling Pinkness on that other planet, by the double of the thing that had come to live with him—for the thing within his mind was a shadow of its other self five thousand light years distant.

“Have trouble?” Harriet asked.

“I met up with Freddy.”

“Freddy Bates, you mean.”

“He's the one and only Freddy.”

“The little nincompoop.”

“Your little nincompoop,” said Blaine, “was packing a gun and he had blood within his eyes.”

“You don't mean—”

“Harriet,” said Blaine, “this is liable to get rough. Why don't you let me out—”

“Not on your life,” said Harriet. “I've never had so much fun in all my life.”

“You aren't going anywhere. You haven't much road left.”

“Shep, you may not think it to look at me, but I'm the intellectual type. I do a lot of reading and I like history best of all. Bloody battle history. Especially if there are a lot of campaign maps to follow.”

“So?”

“So I've found out one thing. It is always a good idea to have a line of retreat laid out.”

“But not up this road.”

“Up this road,” she said.

He turned his head and watched her profile and she didn't look the part—not the hard-boiled newspaper gal that she really was. No chatter column writer nor a sob sister nor a society hen, but one of the dozen or so top-notch reporters spelling out the big picture of Fishhook for one of the biggest newspapers in North America.