Time is the Simplest Thing

by Clifford Simak

  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 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 heard 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 he’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 forgot 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 comes 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. You know I can’t. . . .”

  “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.”

  He waited, wondering just how smart he was to wait. In the half-dark, 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 this 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, stern 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 someday 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 sniveling 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.”

  They 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 off 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.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  The moon rode high above the knobby bluffs that hemmed 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 close 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 up his mouth, then had closed it like a 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 had run, heading toward the east, toward 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 there 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.

  He thrust the catalog of thoughts back into his mind, but they would not stay there. They kept creeping out to plague him.

  It was ridiculous. Harriet was no spy. She was a topnotch news hen and a damn good pal to have and she was capable and cool and hard. She could be, Blaine admitted to himself, a good spy if she only wanted to — but it was alien to her nature. There was no subterfuge in her.

  The bluff broke into a steep ravine that went plunging down toward the river and on the lip of it was a small clump of twisted trees.

  Blaine walked around to the lower side of the clump and sat down on the ground.

  Below him the river surged along, the blackness of its waters flecked with silver, and the frost of the river valley blacker than the river, while the bluffs marched up on either side like silver, humpbacked ghosts.

  The owl had fallen silent, but the murmur of the river had grown louder now and if one listened closely he could hear the gurgle of the water as it swept around the sand bars and forced its liquid way through the tree that had toppled from the bank and hung there, its roots still anchored, its topknot in the water.

  This would not, thought Blaine, be a bad place to stop the night. He’d have no quilt or blanket, but the trees would shelter him and hide him. And he’d be safer than he’d been anyplace this day.

  He crawled back into the thicket that grew underneath the trees and rooted out a nest. There was a stone or two to move, there was a broken branch to be pushed out of the way. Feeling in the darkness, he scraped a pile of leaves together and it was not until he’d done all this that he thought of rattlesnakes. Although, he told himself, the season was a bit too late for many rattlesnakes.

  He curled himself into a ball atop the pile of leaves and it was not as comfortable as he had hoped it might be. But it was passable and he’d spend not too many hours here. The sun would soon be up.

  He lay quietly in the dark, and the happenings of the day began their remorseless march across his screen of consciousness — a mental summing up that he tried to put a stop to, but with no success.