Time Is the Simplest Thing (8 page)

And that meant, Blaine realized, that he carried in his mind the equivalent of a flashing warning light for anyone with the ability to see. There'd be nowhere he'd be safe. There'd be no place he could hide. He'd ring a loud and angry bell for any peeper or any spotter or any hounder that came within his range.

He'd not been that way before. He was quite certain of it. Someone would have mentioned it or it would have been on his psych report.

You
, he said to the hider in his mind,
come out of there!

It wagged its tail. It wriggled like a happy dog. It did not come out.

Blaine went back to the bunk and sat down on the edge of it.

Harriet would be back with some sort of help. Or maybe the sheriff would let him go before then, as soon as it was safe. Although the sheriff didn't have to, for the sheriff had good grounds to hold him—the possession of the gun.

Buster
, he said to his boon companion,
it may be up to you again. We may need another trick
.

For the thing inside his mind had come up with a trick before—a very trick in time. Or metabolism? There was no way of knowing which, whether he had moved faster than was customary or whether time had been slowed down for everyone but him.

And when he got away, what then?

Up to South Dakota, as Harriet had said?

He might as well, he told himself, for he had no other plans. There had been no time in which he could make any plans. It had been a bare, bald matter of getting out of Fishhook's clutches. Years ago, he told himself, he should have laid his plans, but it had seemed a far thing then. It had seemed a circumstance that could never happen to him. So here he was, stuck inside a jail cell in a little town of which he did not even know the name, with no more than fifteen dollars and that locked in the sheriff's desk.

He sat and listened to a gasoline car come stuttering down the street, and somewhere a bird was chirping. And he was in a jam, he admitted to himself—he was in an awful jam.

The men were waiting out there, sitting on the steps, trying very hard not to seem to watch the courthouse, and he did not like the looks of it.

The door in the sheriff's office opened and banged again, and there was the sound of feet moving on the floor. Voices came indistinctly, and Blaine didn't try to listen. What was the use of listening? What was the use of anything?

Then the sheriff's deliberate tread moved across the office and out into the corridor. Blaine looked up as the sheriff stopped just outside his cell.

“Blaine,” the sheriff said, “the Father's here to see you.”

“What father?”

“The priest, you heathen. The pastor of this parish.”

“I can't understand,” said Blaine, “why he'd be interested.”

“You're a human being, aren't you?” said the sheriff. “You have got a soul.”

“I will not deny it.”

The sheriff regarded him with a stern and puzzled look. “Why didn't you tell me that you were from Fishhook?”

Blaine shrugged. “What difference would it make?”

“Good God, man,” the sheriff said, “if the folks in this town knew you were from Fishhook, they'd be in to string you up. They might let just a simple parry slip through their fingers, but not a man from Fishhook. They burned down the Trading Post three years ago last month, and the factor got out of town just ahead of them.”

“And what would you do about it,” Blaine demanded, “if they decided I needed stringing up?”

The sheriff scratched his head. “Well, naturally, I'd do the best I could.”

“Thanks a lot,” said Blaine. “I suppose you contacted Fishhook.”

“I told them to come and get you. Take you off my hands.”

“That's a pal,” said Blaine.

The sheriff proceeded to get sore.

“Why did you come blundering into this town?” he demanded, with quite a lot of heat. “This is a quiet, peaceable, decent place until folks like you show up.”

“We were hungry,” said Blaine, “and we stopped to get some breakfast.”

“You stuck your head into a noose,” the sheriff told him, sternly. “I hope to God I can get you out of it.”

He started to turn away and then turned back.

“I'll send the Father in,” he said.

NINE

The priest came into the cell and stood for a moment, blinking in the dimness.

Blaine stood and said to him: “I am glad you came. The best I can offer you is a seat here on the bunk.”

“It's all right,” said the priest. “I thank you. I am Father Flanagan and I hope I'm not intruding.”

“Not in the least,” said Blaine. “I am glad to see you.”

Father Flanagan eased himself to a seat upon the bunk, groaning a little with the effort. He was an aged man who ran to corpulence, with a kindly face and withered hands that looked as if they might be crippled by arthritis.

“Sit down, my son,” he said. “I hope I don't disturb you. I warn you at the outset that I'm a horrible busybody. It would come, I would suspect, from being the shepherd to a group of people who are largely children, irrespective of their years. Is there anything you would like to talk about?”

“Anything at all,” said Blaine, “except possibly religion.”

“You are not a religious man, my son?”

“Not particularly,” said Blaine. “Whenever I consider it, I tend to become confused.”

The old man shook his head. “These are ungodly days. There are many like you. It is a worry to me. To Holy Mother Church as well. We have fallen on hard times of the spirit, with many of the people more concerned with fear of evil than contemplation of the good. There is talk of werewolf and incubus and devil, and a hundred years ago all fear of such had been washed out of our minds.”

He turned his body ponderously and sat sidewise the better to face Blaine.

“The sheriff tells me,” he said, “that you come from Fishhook.”

“There is no use,” said Blaine, “of my denying it.”

“I have never talked with anyone from Fishhook,” the old priest said, mumbling just a little, as if he might be talking to himself rather than to Blaine. “I have only heard of Fishhook, and some of the stories I have heard of it are incredible and wild. There was a factor here for a time before the people burned the Post, but I never went to see him. The people would not have understood.”

“From what happened here this morning,” Blaine agreed, “I rather doubt they would have.”

“They say you are a paranormal.…”

“Parry is the word,” Blaine told him. “No need to dress it up.”

“And you are really one?”

“Father, I am at a loss to understand your interest.”

“Just academic,” said Father Flanagan. “I can assure you, purely academic. Something that is of interest to me personally. You are as safe with me as if you were in confessional.”

“There was a day,” said Blaine, “when science was deeply suspect as the hidden foes of all religious truth. We have the same thing here.”

“But the people,” said Father Flanagan, “are afraid again. They close and bar their doors. They do not go out of night. They have hex signs—hex signs, mind you, instead of the blessed crucifix—hanging on their gates and the gables of their houses. They whisper of things which have been dead and dust since the Middle Ages. They tremble in the smoky chimney corners of their minds. They have lost much of their ancient faith. They go through all the rituals, of course, but I see it in their faces, I sense it in their talk, I glimpse it in their minds. They have lost the simple art of faith.”

“No, Father, I don't think they have. They're just very troubled people.”

“The entire world is troubled,” said Father Flanagan.

And that was right, Blaine told himself—the entire world was troubled. For it had lost a cultural hero and had not been able to acquire another for all that it had tried. It had lost an anchor which had held it against the winds of illogic and unreason and it was now adrift upon an ocean for which there was no chart.

At one time science had served as the cultural hero. It had logic and reason and an ultimate precision that probed down into the atom and out to the farther edge of space. It spawned gadgets by the millions for the comfort of its worshipers and it placed the hand and eye of Man upon the entire universe, by proxy. It was something you could trust in, for it was the sum of human wisdom among many other things.

But principally it was translated into machines and machine technology, for science was an abstract, but machines were something that anyone could see.

Then there came the day when Man, for all his wondrous machines, for all his famed technology, had been driven back from space, had been whipped howling from the heavens back to the den of Earth. And that day the cultural god of science had shone a bit less brightly, had died a little in the people's minds.

And that other day, when Man had gone to the stars without the benefit of machines, the worship of technology had died for good and all. Machines and technology and science itself still existed, still were in daily use, still were of vast importance, but they no longer formed a cult.

For while Fishhook used machines, they were not machines as such—not machines that could be accepted by the common mass of mankind. For they had no pistons and no wheels, no gears, no shafts, no levers, not a single button—they had nothing of the component parts of a commonplace machine. They were strange and alien and they had no common touch.

So Man had lost his cultural hero and since his nature was so fashioned that he must have some abstract hero-worship, because he must always have an ideal and a goal, a vacuum was created that screamed aloud for filling.

Paranormal kinetics, for all its strangeness, for all its alien concept, filled the bill exactly. For here, finally, were all the crackpot cults completely justified; here, at last, was the promise of ultimate wish-fulfillment; here was something exotic enough, or that could be made exotic, to satisfy the depth of human emotion such as a mere machine never had been able.

Here, so help us God, was magic!

So the world went off on a magic jag.

The pendulum had swung too far, as always, and now was swinging back, and the horror of intolerance had been loosed upon the land.

So Man once again was without a cultural hero, but had acquired instead a neosuperstition that went howling through the dark of a second Middle Ages.

“I have puzzled much upon the matter,” said Father Flanagan. “It is something which naturally must concern even so unworthy a servant of the Church as I. For whatever may concern the souls and the minds of men is of interest to the Church and to the Holy Father. It has been the historic position of Rome that we must so concern ourselves.”

Blaine bowed slightly in recognition of the sincerity of the man, but there was a fleck of bitterness in his voice when he answered: “So you've come to study me. You are here to question me.”

There was sadness in the old priest's voice. “I prayed you would not see it in this light. I have failed, I see. I came to you as to someone who could help me and, through me, the Church. For, my son, the Church at times needs help. It is not too proud to say so, for all that it has been charged, through all its history, with excessive pride. You are a man, an intelligent man, who is a part of this thing which serves to puzzle us. I thought that you might help me.”

Blaine sat silent, and the priest sat looking at him, a humble man who sought a favor, and yet with a sense of inner strength one could not help but feel.

“I would not mind,” said Blaine. “Not that I think for a moment it would do any good. You're a part of what is in this town.”

“Not so, my son. We neither sanction nor condemn. We do not have facts enough.”

“I'll tell you about myself,” said Blaine, “if that is what you want to know. I am a traveler. My job is to go out to the stars. I climb into a machine—well, not exactly a machine, rather it's a symbolic contrivance that helps me free my mind, that possibly even gives my mind a kick in the right direction. And it helps with the navigation—Look, Father, this is hard to say in simple, common terms. It sounds like gibberish.”

“I am following you with no difficulty.”

“Well, this navigation. That's another funny thing. There are factors involved that there is no way to put one's tongue to them. In science it would be mathematics, but it's not actually mathematics. It's a way of getting there, of knowing where you're going.”

“Magic?”

“Hell, no—pardon me, Father. No, it isn't magic. Once you understand it, once you get the feel of it, it is clear and simple and it becomes a part of you. It is as natural as breathing and as easy as falling off a log. I would imagine—”

“I would think,” said Father Flanagan, “that it is unnecessary to go into the mechanics of it. Could you tell me how it feels to be on another star?”

“Why,” Blaine told him, “no different than sitting here with you. At first—the first few times, that is—you feel obscenely naked, with just your mind and not your body.…”

“And your mind wanders all about?”

“Well, no. It could, of course, but it doesn't. Usually you stuff yourself inside the machine you took along with you.”

“Machine?”

“A monitoring contraption. It picks up all the data, gets it down on tape. You get the entire picture. Not just what you see yourself—although it's not actually seeing; it's sensing—but you get it all, everything that can possibly be caught. In theory, and largely in practice, the machine picks up the data, and the mind is there for interpretation only.”

“And what do you see?”

Blaine laughed. “Father, that would take longer than either of us have.”

“Nothing like on Earth?”

“Not often, for there are not too many Earth-like planets. Proportionately, that is. There are, in fact, quite a lot in number. But we're not limited to Earth-like planets. We can go anywhere it is possible for the machine to function, and the way those machines are engineered, that means almost anywhere.…”