Time is the Simplest Thing

by Clifford Simak

  “And you,” she warned, “be careful.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  The shed was larger than it had appeared to be when seen from the highway. It was surrounded by a high, rank growth of dead, dried weeds that rustled with stealthy sound in the slightest movement of the air. It was built of the corrugated metal sheets which had been much in use for buildings of this sort before the introduction some three-score years before of the putty-plastic from Aldebaran VII. Occasional windows, begrimed with dirt and ancient spider webs, broke the smooth expanse of metal. Two great upward-folding doors filled almost the entire front exposure.

  To the east lay the dark outline of the town, silhouetted against the faint flush in the sky which told of a moon about to rise.

  Cautiously, Blaine made a circuit of the building, looking for a way that might allow him to get in. He found nothing that was easy. The two folding doors were locked. There were a few sheets of metal that had loosened at the bottom, but the material was too heavy to allow one to bend it upward and thus create a rathole for a man to sneak inside.

  There was, he realized, only one way to get in.

  He went to the corner of the building nearest to the road and stood listening. Except for the harsh whispering of the weeds there was nothing to be heard. The highway was deserted and, he knew, most likely would remain so. There was no sign of light — no lamp, no glitter through a distant window. It was as if he and the shed stood in a world where there was no life at all.

  He stared for a time at the willow thicket by the road, but there was no glint, no shine, nothing to indicate that a car was hidden there.

  He stepped quickly from the corner and moved along the wall of metal until he came to a window. He took off his tattered jacket and wrapped it about his fist and forearm.

  Then he struck a blow, and the window shattered. He struck other blows to remove the glass that was still hanging in the frame. Carefully he picked out the remaining splinters that would slash a man trying to crawl in.

  Then he went back to the corner and stood there for a moment. The night still was motionless and silent.

  Back at the window, he crawled into the shed, let himself down carefully, felt the floor beneath his feet. He took the flashlight from his pocket and turned it on. He swept a swath of light across the empty cavern of the shed’s interior.

  And there, close to the door, was the battered, broken truck which had found its rest at last, and the gleaming star machine that it had carried.

  Walking as softly as he could, Blaine moved across the floor and stood beside the machine, shining his light upon it. And it was something that he knew well, it was a machine that back in Fishhook he had known intimately. There was a strange beauty in it, he told himself as he stood and looked at it, almost as if one could see, reflected in its surface, the far reaches of the universe to which it could help a man to go.

  But it was old — one of the older models that Fishhook had replaced some ten years or so ago, and there was little doubt, he knew that it had somehow come from Fishhook. There must be many of the older models such as this stacked away in some almost forgotten storehouse, stored there more than likely because it was easier to store them than it was to break them up. For something such as this must either be stored under lock and key or it must be broken up, for they could not be simply thrown away. In this machine lay the key to Fishhook’s monopoly and there must be no possibility that one of them should fall into any other hands.

  But one of them had fallen into other hands and here it lay tonight, mute evidence of one of the smartest, slickest bits of intrigue to which Fishhook, intrigue-ridden as it was, had ever been unwitting party.

  Blaine tried to imagine how Stone had ever managed, and thinking of it, his admiration for the man rose a notch or two. It had taken money, surely, and it had taken trusted agents and it had required a plan of operation which would countenance no slip-up.

  He wondered vaguely, as he stood there, how much Harriet might have had to do with it. Certainly, he told himself, she had had no qualms, in the process of smuggling him from Fishhook, of getting out herself. She was, he thought, just the kind of woman who could engineer a thing like this — self-possessed and calm and with a sure and certain knowledge of all those inner workings which made Fishhook keep on ticking. And with a mind that operated with the fine precision of a good Swiss watch.

  Stone had had great hopes of this machine and now the hopes were gone. Now Stone was dead and the star machine lay here in this abandoned shed, a showpiece bit of evidence for a man so filled with hate that he would destroy paranormal kinetics, root and branch and leaf.

  And Finn could make much of this machine, for while it might be called machine, it was not the kind of machine to which the human mind for centuries has become accustomed. It had no moving parts and it had no function that was discernible. It was designed to work upon nothing more material than the human mind and senses. It worked with symbolism rather than with energy — and yet it worked. Just as a rosary in the hands of the devout had worked for centuries before there had ever been a thought of such a thing as a paranormal human.

  If the hope were gone, thought Blaine, then the machine could not remain. If he owed Stone nothing else, he owed him that much at least. He owed him, he reminded himself, some slight repayment for that night he’d phoned.

  There was a way — there was a way, he knew, if out of the frothing sea of alien knowledge which surged inside of him he could only pull it forth.

  He sought for it and found it and in the finding of it he touched on other knowledge, all neatly docketed and primly pigeonholed, as if some filing clerk had been busily at work within his cluttered mind.

  He stood weak and trembling at the discovery of this pigeonholing, for he had not known, had had no inkling that it was going on. But it was the human way, he told himself — it was an evidence of human rebellion against the piecemeal disorderliness of the mass of data which had been dumped into his mind by the creature on that distant planet.

  The creature still was with him, or the essence of the creature, and he hunted for it among the pigeonholes, but it was not there; there was no sign of it as such, but there was something else; there was something very wrong.

  Startled, he went scrambling on the trail of wrongness and he caught and held it, muzzling it with a nose of horror — for it was simply this: His mind no longer was an entirely human mind. And in the edge of terror was the terrible wonder of how he still retained enough pure humanity to know this was the case.

  He put out his hand in a blind and groping way and caught a corner of the star machine and held tightly onto it.

  It all spelled out, he suspected, to the simple fact that he remained human, or mostly human, on the surface, while beneath that surface was a fusion of two individuals, of the knowledge and perhaps the ethics and the motives of two different forms of life. And that made sense when one thought of it, for the Pinkness had not changed, it had stayed its sprawling, slobby self; there had been no trace of human in it, although inside of it was a certain portion of humanity and God knew what else besides.

  He released the grip he had upon the star machine and ran his hand against the glasslike smoothness of its metal structure.

  There was a way — if he could only do it. He had the knowledge now, but did he have the technique?

  Time, the Pinkness had told him — time is the simplest thing there is. But still, Blaine told himself, not as easily handled as the creature had made out.

  He stood there thinking, and the thing that he must do became very clear indeed.

  The past was a worthless path to follow, for the machine was in the past already. It had left a long and nebulous trail clear across the past.

  But the future was a different matter. If it could be moved into the future, this present moment and all succeeding present moments would then become its past and all that would remain would be the ghostly track of it — and a laughter and a mocking and a thing of magi
c which would make no proper subject for a rabble-rousing sermon by a man named Lambert Finn.

  And more than that, thought Blaine, it would, more than likely, scare the hell right out of him.

  He reached out with his mind to encircle the machine and it was no use. His mind would open up and reach, but there was a lack of stretch in it and he could not take in all of the machine. So he rested and then he tried again.

  There was a strangeness and an alienness in the shed he had not noticed, and there was an unknown menace in the scraping of the weeds outside the broken window, and the air held a sharpness and a tang that raised bristles on his neck. It was most confusing, for suddenly it seemed that he had lost all rapport with this world in which he found himself and that nothing, not the earth he stood on nor the air he breathed or even the body that he wore was anything he’d ever known before and there was a horror in this lack of familiarity, in this shift from the known which he no longer could remember into this unknown for which he had no focal points. But it would be all right, it all would come aright if he could move this strange artifact he held within his mind, for it had been for this purpose that he had been called forth from the darkness and the warmness and the snug security and if he got the job done he could go back again, back to his memories of other days and his slow assimilation of new data and the miser-satisfaction of counting up the new facts, one by one, as he piled them in neat stacks.

  The artifact, for all its strangeness, was an easy thing to handle. Its roots did not run back too far and the coordinates were falling very satisfactorily into place and he almost had it made. But he must not hurry despite his screaming need to hurry; he must somewhere snare some patience. So he waited for the co-ordinates to go clicking into place and he made exact and unhurried measurement of the temporal strain and he gave the thing a twitch at just the right degree of twist and it was exactly where he had wanted it.

  Then he dived back home again, back into the dark and warmness, and Blaine stood shorn of all but his human self in a place of foggy nothingness.

  There was nothing there — nothing but himself and the star machine. He reached out his hand and touched the star machine and it was very solid. It was, so far as he could see, the only solid thing there was.

  For the fog itself, if fog were what it was, had an unreal quality, as if it were striving to camouflage its very fact of being.

  Blaine stood quietly, afraid to move — afraid that any movement might plunge him into some pit of black foreverness.

  For this, he realized, was the future, it was a place without a single feature of the space-time matrix that he knew. It was a place where nothing yet had happened — an utter emptiness. There was neither light nor dark; there was nothing here but emptiness. There had never been anything in this place, nor was anything ever intended to occupy this place — until this very moment when he and his machine had been thrust upon it, intruders who have overstepped their time.

  He let his breath out slowly and breathed in again — and there was nothing to breathe in!

  Blackness rushed in upon him, and the throbbing of his heartbeat was loud within his head, and he reached out desperately to grab at something — at anything — in this place where there was not a thing to grab.

  Even as he did, the alienness came back, a startled, frightened alienness, and a hodgepodge of queer symbolic figures, which even in his agony of mind, he took to be some outré mathematics, went flooding through his brain.

  There was air again to breathe and there was solid floor beneath his feet and he smelled the mustiness of the inside of the highway shed.

  He was back home again and so was the alienness, for it was gone from him. Back, he told himself, to the darkness and the warmth inside his very brain.

  He stood erect and mentally checked himself and he was all right. He opened his eyes slowly, for they somehow had been closed, and there was only darkness until he remembered the flashlight still clutched in his hand. And yet not as dark as it had been before. Now light from a newly risen moon poured through the broken window.

  He lifted the flashlight and shoved the contact button, and the light sprang out and the machine was there before him, but strange and unsubstantial — the ghost of a machine, the trail that it had left behind it when it had moved into the future.

  He lifted his free arm and used his jacket sleeve to wipe his forehead dry. For it was over now. He had done what he had come to do. He’d struck the blow for Stone; he’d stopped Finn in his tracks.

  There was here no object lesson; there was no longer any text for Finn to preach upon. There was, instead, a mocking jeer from the very magic that Finn had fought for years.

  Behind him he sensed a movement and he swung around so hurriedly that his fingers loosened on the flashlight and it fell upon the floor and rolled.

  Out of the darkness a voice spoke.

  “Shep,” it said, with full heartiness, “that was very neatly done.”

  Blaine froze and hopelessness flooded in.

  For this was the end, he knew. He had come as far as he was going to. He had finally run his race.

  He knew that hearty voice. He never could forget it.

  The man standing in the darkness of the shed was his old friend, Kirby Rand!

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Rand was a blacker blob in the darkness as he stepped forward and picked the flashlight off the floor. He pivoted to turn the light full upon the star machine and in the flood of brightness tiny little dust motes could be seen dancing in the heart of the machine.

  “Yes,” said Rand, “very neatly done. I don’t know how you did it and I don’t know why you did it, but you most certainly have taken care of it.”

  He turned the flashlight off and for a moment they stood silent in the darkness, relieved by the streaks of moonlight that came through the windows.

  Then Rand said: “I suppose you know that Fishhook owes you a vote of thanks for this.”

  “Come off of it,” Blaine told him, roughly. “You know very well it was not done for Fishhook.”

  “Nevertheless,” said Kirby, “it happens that in this particular area our interests coincide. We could not let this machine stay lost. We could not allow it to remain in improper hands. You understand, of course.”

  “Perfectly,” said Blaine.

  Rand sighed. “I had expected trouble and if there is anything Fishhook doesn’t want, it’s trouble. Particularly when that trouble is out in the hinterlands.”

  “There’s not been any trouble,” Blaine told him, “that needs to worry Fishhook.”

  “I am glad to hear it. And you, Shep? How are you getting on?”

  “Not too badly, Kirby.”

  “That is nice,” said Kirby. “That is very nice. It makes me feel so good. And now, I would imagine, we should get out of here.”

  He led the way across the floor back to the broken window and stood aside.

  “You first,” he said to Blaine, “and I’ll be right behind you. I would ask, as one friend to another, that you not try to run away.”

  “No need to fear,” Blaine told him dryly, then climbed quickly through the window.

  He could run, of course, he told himself, but that would be extremely foolish, for there was no doubt Rand would have a gun and he would be quite efficient with it, even in the moonlight. And more than that, if there were any shooting, Harriet might come running to be of what help she could and if she got involved in this, then he’d be truly friendless. Otherwise, he told himself, almost prayerfully, Harriet would stay hidden in the willow clump. She would see what happened and in just a little while she’d have an angle figured out.

  Harriet was, he told himself, the only hope he had.

  He dropped out of the window and stood to one side for Rand to clamber through.

  Rand hit the ground and turned toward him, just a bit too quickly, too much like a hunter, then he relaxed and chuckled.

  “It was a slick trick, Shep,” he said. “Efficiently engine
ered. Someday you’ll have to tell me exactly how you did it. To steal a star machine is not an easy thing.”

  Blaine gulped down his astonishment, and hoped the moonlight hid the look he knew must be upon his face.

  Rand reached out a hand and took him companionably by the elbow.

  “The car’s down here,” he said. “Right down by the road.”

  They walked together across the patch of rustling weeds, and the land lay different now, no longer dark and fearsome, but a place of painted magic stretched out in the moonlight. To their right lay the town, a mass of darkened houses that looked more like mounds than houses, with the faint tracery of nude trees standing up like ragged paintbrushes reared against the eastern sky. To the west and north lay the silver prairie land, flat and featureless and made immense by its very lack of features.

  And just down the road was the clump of willows.

  Blaine shot a quick glance at the clump and there were only willows. There was no glint of moonlight bouncing off metal. He walked a pace or two, then took another look and this time, he knew, there could be no mistake. There was no car in that clump of willows. Harriet was gone.

  Good girl, he thought. She had a lot of sense. She’d probably gotten out of there as soon as Rand showed up. She’d figure, more than likely, that the one way she’d be most valuable would be to make a getaway against another day.

  “I don’t suppose,” said Rand, “that you have a place to stay.”

  “No,” said Blaine, “I haven’t.”

  “Bad town,” Rand told him. “They take this witchcraft-werewolf business seriously indeed. Cops stopped me twice. Warned me under cover. Told me very sternly it was for my own protection.”

  “They’re all wrought up,” said Blaine. “Lambert Finn is here.”

  “Oh, yes,” Rand said carelessly. “An old friend of ours.”

  “Not of mine. I never met the man.”

  “A charming soul,” said Rand. “A very charming one.”

  Blaine said: “I know very little of him. Just what I have heard.”