The Complete Serials

by Clifford D. Simak

  At the Trading Post Rand attempts to persuade Blaine to return to Fishhook with him through the teleport-transport system which is used to supply the posts. Blaine refuses. Rand, he knows, will attempt no violence, for he is unsure of what Blaine can do, Blaine knows there is a trap somewhere and is on watch for it.

  After Rand leaves, the factor of the post brings Blaine a robe to cover himself for the night. The robe turns out to be a strange alien being which is used as traps by a race on a far planet. The robe closes on Blaine and the factor is ready to lift him into the machine which will take him back to Fishhook. Out of the information which he possesses in the mind of the Pinkness, Blaine digs out the command which will force the robe to let go,

  Blaine fights with the factor, knocks him out, He drags the man to safety, then sets fire to the post, sealing the way to Fishhook.

  Now, he figures, is a good time to have a talk with Finn.

  Part 4

  A GROUP of people were standing on the hotel steps, looking at the fire, which roared into the nighttime sky just two blocks away. They paid Blaine no notice. There was no sign of police.

  “Some more reefer business,” said one man to another.

  The other nodded. “You wonder how their minds work,” he said.

  “They’ll go and trade there in the daytime, then sneak back and burn the place at night.”

  “I swear to God,” said the first man, “I don’t see why Fishhook puts up with it.”

  “Fishhook doesn’t care,” die other told him. “I spent five years in Fishhook. I tell you, the place is weird.”

  Newsmen, Blaine told himself. A hotel crammed full of newsmen come to cover what Finn would say tomorrow. He looked at the man who had spent five years in Fishhook, but he did not recognize him.

  Blaine went up the steps and into the empty lobby. He jammed his fists into his jacket pockets so that no one could spot the bruised and bloody knuckles.

  The hotel was an old one and its lobby furnishings, he judged, had not been changed for years. The place was faded and old-fashioned and it had the faint, sour smell of many people who had lived short hours beneath its roof.

  A few people sat here and there, reading papers or simply sitting and staring into space, with the bored look of waiting imprinted on their faces.

  Blaine glanced at the clock above the desk and it was 11:30.

  He went on past the desk, heading for the elevator and the stairs beyond.

  “Shep!”

  Blaine spun around.

  A man had heaved himself out of a huge leather chair and was lumbering across the lobby toward him.

  Blaine waited until the man came up and all the time there were little insect feet running on his spine.

  The man stuck out his hand.

  Blaine took his right hand from his pocket and showed it to him.

  “Fell down,” he said. “Stumbled in the dark.”

  The man looked at the hand. “You better get that washed up,” he said. “That’s what I intend to do.”

  “You know me, don’t you?” the man demanded. “Bob Collins. Met you a couple of times in Fishhook. Down at the Red Ghost bar.”

  “Yes, of course,” Blaine said, uncomfortably. “I know you now. You slipped my mind at first. How are you?”

  “Getting along all right. Sore that they pulled me out of Fishhook, but you get all sorts of breaks, mostly lousy, in this newspaper racket.”

  “You’re out here to cover Finn.” Collins nodded. “How about yourself?”

  “I’m going up to see him.”

  “You’ll be lucky if you get to see him. He’s up in 210. Got a big tough bruiser sitting just outside his door.”

  “I think he’ll see me.”

  Collins cocked his head. “Heard you took it on the lam. Just grapevine stuff.”

  “You had it right,” said Blaine. “You don’t look so good,” said Collins. “Don’t be offended, but I got an extra buck or two—”

  Blaine laughed.

  “A drink, perhaps.”

  “No. I must hurry and see Finn.”

  “You with him?”

  “Well, not exactly—”

  “Look, Shep, we were good pals back there in Fishhook. Can you give me what you know? Anything at all. Do a good job on this one, they might send me back to Fishhook. There’s nothing I want worse.” Blaine shook his head.

  “Look, Shep, there are all sorts of rumors. There was a truck went off the road down by the river. There was something in that truck, something that was terribly important to Finn. He leaked it to the press. He’d have a sensational announcement to the press. He had something he wanted us to see. There’s a rumor it’s a star machine. Tell me, Shep, could it be a star machine? No one knows for sure.”

  “I don’t know a thing.”

  Collins moved closer, his voice dropping to a husky whisper. “This is big, Shep. If Finn can nail it down. He thinks he has hold of something that will blow the parries—every single parry, the whole concept of PK—clear out of the water. You know lie’s worked for that for years. In a rather hateful way, of course, but he has worked for it for years. He’s preached hate up and down the land. He’s a first-class rabble rouser. He needs just this one to cinch his case. Give him a good one now and the entire world tips to him. Give him that clincher and the world will shut its eyes to the way he did it. They’ll be out howling, out after parry blood.”

  “You forget that I’m a parry.”

  “So was Lambert Finn—at one time.”

  “There’s too much hate,” Blaine said wearily. “There are too many derogatory labels. The reformers call the paranormal people parries and the parries call the reformers reefers. And you don’t give a damn. You don’t care which way it goes. You wouldn’t go out and hunt someone to his death. But you’ll write about it. You’ll spread the blood across the page. And you don’t care where it may come from, just so it is blood.”

  “For the love of God, Shep—”

  “So I will give you something. You can say that Finn hasn’t anything to show, not a word to say. You can say that he is scared. You can say he stubbed his toe—”

  “Shep, you’re kidding me!”

  “He won’t dare show you what he’s got.”

  “What is it that he’s got?”

  “Something that, if he showed it, would make him out a fool. I tell you, he won’t dare to show it. Tomorrow morning Lambert Finn will be the most frightened man the world has ever known.”

  “I can’t write that.”

  “Tomorrow noon,” Blaine told him, “everyone will be writing it. If you start right now, you can catch the last morning editions. You’ll scoop the world—if you’ve got the guts to do it.”

  “You’re giving me straight dope. You’re—”

  “Make up your mind,” said Blaine. “It’s true, every word of it. It is up to you. Now I’ve got to get along.”

  Collins hesitated. “Thanks, Shep,” he said. “Thanks an awful lot.”

  Blaine left him standing there, went past the elevator and turned up the stairs.

  He came to the second floor and there, at the end of the left-hand corridor a man sat in a chair tilted back against the wall.

  Blaine paced purposefully down the corridor. As he came closer, the guard tilted forward in his chair and came to his feet.

  He put his hand out against Blaine’s chest.

  “Just a minute, mister.”

  “It’s urgent I see Finn.”

  “He ain’t seeing no one, mister.”

  “You’ll give him a message?”

  “Not at this hour, I won’t.”

  “Tell him I’m from Stone.”

  “But Stone—”

  “Just tell him I’m from Stone.”

  The man stood undecided. Then he let his arm drop.

  “You wait right here,” he said. “I’ll go in and ask him. Don’t try no funny stuff.”

  “That’s all right. I’ll wait.”

&nbs
p; He waited, wondering just how smart he was to wait. In the halfdark, rancid corridor he felt the ancient doubt. Maybe, he told himself, he should simply turn around and walk rapidly away.

  The man came out.

  “Stand still,” he commanded. “I’ve got to run you down.”

  Expert hands went over Blaine, seeking knife or gun.

  The man nodded, satisfied. “You’re clean,” he said. “You can go on in. I’ll be right outside the door.”

  “I understand,” Blaine told him.

  The guard opened the door and Blaine went through it.

  The room was furnished as a living room. Beyond it was a bedroom.

  There was a desk across the room and a man stood behind the desk. He was clad in funeral black with a white scarf at his throat and he was tall. His face was long and bony and made one think of a winter-gaunted horse, but there was a hard, stem purpose to him that was somehow frightening.

  Blaine walked steadily forward until he reached the desk.

  “You are Finn,” he said.

  “Lambert Finn,” said the man in a hollow voice, the tone of an accomplished orator who never can quite stop being an orator even when at rest.

  Blaine brought his hands out of his pockets and rested his knuckles on the desk. He saw Finn looking at the blood and dirt.

  “Your name,” said Finn, “is Shepherd Blaine and I know all about you.”

  “Including that some day I intend to kill you?”

  “Including that,” said Finn. “Or at least a suspicion of it.”

  “But not tonight,” said Blaine, “because I want to see your face tomorrow. I want to see if you can take it as well as dish it out.”

  “And that’s why you came to see me? That’s what you have to tell me?”

  “It’s a funny thing,” Blaine told him, “but at this particular moment, I can think of no other reason. I actually can’t tell why I bothered to come up.”

  “To make a bargain, maybe.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that. There’s nothing that I want that you can give me.”

  “Perhaps not, Mr. Blaine, but you have something that I want. Something for which I’d pay most handsomely.”

  Blaine stared at him, not answering.

  “You were in on the deal with the star machine,” said Finn. “You could provide the aims and motives. You could connect up the pieces. You could tell the story. It would be good evidence.”

  Blaine chuckled at him. “You had me once,” he said. “You let me get away.”

  “It was that snivelling doctor,” Finn said ferociously. “He was concerned there would be a rumpus and his hospital would somehow get bad publicity.”

  “You should pick your people better, Finn.”

  Finn growled. “You haven’t answered me.”

  “About the deal, you mean. It would come high. It would come awfully high.”

  “I am prepared to pay,” said Finn. “And you need the money. You are running naked with Fishhook at your heels.”

  “Just an hour ago,” Blaine told him, “Fishhook had me trussed up for the kill.”

  “So you got away,” Finn said, nodding. “Maybe the next time, too. And the time after that as well. But Fishhook never quits. As the situation stands, you haven’t got a chance.”

  “Me especially, you mean? Or just anyone? How about yourself?”

  “You especially,” said Finn. “You know a Harriet Quimby?”

  “Very well,” said Blaine.

  “She,” Finn said, levelly, “is a Fishhook spy.”

  “You’re staring mad!” yelled Blaine.

  “Stop and think of it,” said Finn. “I think you will agree.”

  Blaine and Finn stood looking at one another across the space of desk and the silence was a live thing, a third presence in the room.

  The red thought rose up inside Blaine’s brain: Why not kill him now?

  For the killing would come easy. He was an easy man to hate. Not on principle alone, but personally, clear down to his guts.

  All one had to do was think of the hate that rode throughout the land. All one had to do was close one’s eyes and see the slowly turning body, half masked by the leaves; the deserted camp with the propped-up quilts for shelters and the fish for dinner laid out in the pan; the flame-scarred chimney stark against the sky.

  He half lifted his hands from the table, then put them down again.

  Then he did a thing quite involuntarily, without thinking of it, without a second’s planning or an instant’s thought. And even as he did it, he knew it was not he who did it, but the other one, the lurker in the skull.

  For he could not have done it. He could not have thought of doing it. No human being could.

  Blaine said, very calmly: “I trade with you my mind.”

  XVII

  The moon rode high above the knobby bluffs that hummed in the river valley and down in the valley a dismal owl was hooting and chuckling to himself in between the hoots. The chuckling of the owl carried clearly in the sharp night air that held the hint of frost.

  Blaine halted at the edge of the clump of scraggly cedars that hugged the ground like gnarled and bent old men, and stood tense and listening. But there was nothing except the chuckling of the owl and the faint sound of the stubborn leaves still clinging to a cottonwood downhill from him, and another sound so faint that one wondered if one really heard it—the remote and faery murmur which was the voice of the mighty river flowing stolidly below the face of the moonlit bluffs.

  Blaine lowered himself and squatted dose against the ground, huddling against the tumbled darkness of the cowering cedars and told himself again that there was no follower, that no one hunted him. Not Fishhook, for with the burning of the Post the way to Fishhook was temporarily closed. And not Lambert Finn. Right at this moment, Finn would be the last to hunt him.

  Blaine squatted there, remembering, without a trace of pity in him, the look that had come into Finn’s eyes when he’d traded minds with him—the glassy stare of terror at this impertinent defilement, at this deliberate befoulment of the mighty preacher and great prophet who had cloaked his hate with a mantle that was not quite religion, but as close to it as Finn had dared to push it.

  “What have you done!” he’d cried in cold and stony horror. “What have you done to me!”

  For he had felt the biting chill of alienness and the great inhumanity and he’d tasted of the hatred that came from Blaine himself.

  “Thing!” Blaine had told him. “You’re nothing but a thing! You’re no longer Finn. You’re only partly human. You are a part of me and a part of something that I found five thousand light years out. And I hope you choke on it.”

  Finn had opened his mouth, then had closed it liked trap.

  “Now I must leave,” Blaine had said to him, “and just so there’s no misunderstanding, perhaps you should come along. With an arm about my shoulder as if we were long-lost brothers. You’ll talk to me like a valued and an ancient friend, for if you fail to do this, I’ll manage to make it known exactly what you are.”

  Finn had hesitated.

  “Exactly what you are,” said Blaine again. “With all of those reporters hearing every word I say.”

  That had been enough for Finn—more than enough for him.

  For here was a man, thought Blaine, who could not afford to be attainted with any magic mumbo jumbo even if it worked. Here was the strait-laced, ruthless, stone-jawed reformer who thought of himself as the guardian of the moral values of the entire human race and there must be no hint of scandal, no whisper of suspicion.

  So the two of them had gone down the corridor and down the stairs and across the lobby, arm in arm, and talking, with the reporters watching them as they walked along.

  They’d gone down into the street, with the burning Post still red against the sky, and had walked along the sidewalk, as if they moved aside for some final word.

  Then Blaine had slipped into an alley and ran, heading toward the east, tow
ard the river bluffs.

  And here he was, he thought, on the lam again, and without a single plan—just running once again. Although, in between his runnings, he’d struck a blow or two—he’d stopped Finn in his tracks. He’d robbed him of his horrible example of the perfidy of the parries and of the danger in them; he had diluted a mind that never again, no matter what Finn did, could be as narrow and as egomaniac as it had been before.

  He squatted listening and the night was empty except for the river and the owl and the leaves on the cottonwood.

  He came slowly to his feet and as he did there was another sound, a howling that had the sound of teeth in it, and for an instant he stood paralyzed and cold. Out of the centuries the sound struck a chord of involuntary fear—out of the caves and beyond the caves to that other day when man had lived in terror of the night.

  It was a dog, he told himself, or perhaps a prairie wolf. For here were no werewolves. He knew there were no werewolves.

  And yet there was an instinct he barely could fight down—the instinct to run, madly and without reason, seeking for a shelter, for any kind of shelter, against the slavering danger that loped across the moonlight.

  He stood, tensed, waiting for the howl again, but it did not come again. His body loosened up, knotted muscle and tangled nerve, and he was almost himself again.

  He would have run, he realized, if he had believed, if he’d even half-believed. It was an easy thing—first to believe and then to run. And that was what made men like Finn so dangerous. They were working on a human instinct that lay just beneath the skin—the instinct of fear, and after fear, of hate.

  He left the clump of cedar and walked carefully along the bluff. The footing, he had learned, was tricky in the moonlight. There were rocks, half-hidden, that rolled beneath the foot, shadow-hidden holes and humps that were ankle-traps.

  He thought again of the one thing that bothered him—that had bothered him ever since that moment he had talked with Finn.

  Harriet Quimby, Finn had said, was a Fishhook spy.

  And that was wrong, of course, for it had been Harriet who had helped him escape from Fishhook.

  And yet—she had been with him in that town where he had been nearly hanged. She had been with him while Stone was being killed. She had been with him when he’d gone into the highway shed and there been trapped by Rand.