Time is the Simplest Thing

TEN

Blaine stood at the window and watched them gather in the dusk — not quickly, but slowly; not boisterously, but quietly, almost nonchalantly, as if they might be coming into town for a program at the schoolhouse or a meeting of the grange or some other normal and entirely routine function.

He could hear the sheriff stirring quietly about in the office across the corridor and he wondered if the sheriff knew — although assuredly he did, for he had lived in this town long enough to know what it was apt to do.

Blaine stood at the window and reached up and grasped the metal bars, and out beyond the bars, somewhere in the unkempt trees on the courthouse lawn, a bird was singing his last song of evening before cuddling on a branch and going fast asleep.

And as he stood there watching, the Pinkness crept out of its corner and floated in his mind, expanding until it filled his mind.

I have come to be with you, it seemed to say. I am done with hiding. I know about you now. I have explored every nook and cranny of you and I know the kind of thing you are. And through you, the kind of world you’re in — and the kind of world I’m in, for it is my world now.

No more foolishness? asked that part of the strange duality that continued to be Blaine.

No more foolishness, said the other. No more screaming, no more running, no more trying to get out.

Except there was no death. There was no such thing as death; for the ending of a life was inexplicable. It simply could not happen, although dimly, far back in memory, there seemed there had been others it might have happened to.

Blaine left the window and went back to sit down on the bunk and he was remembering now. But the memories were dim and they came from far away and from very long ago and one could not be sure at once if they were truly memories or if they were no more than quaint imagining.

For there were many planets and many different peoples and a host of strange ideas and there were jumbled bits of cosmic information that lay all helter-skelter like a pile of ten billion heaped-up jackstraws.

“How are you feeling?” asked the sheriff, who had come so quietly across the corridor that Blaine had not heard him coming.

Blaine jerked up his head. “Why, all right, I suppose. I have just been watching your friends out across the street.”

The sheriff chuckled thinly. “No need to fear,” he said. “They haven’t got the guts to even cross the street. If they do, I’ll go out and talk with them.”

“Even if they know that I am Fishhook?”

“That’s one thing,” the sheriff said, “that they wouldn’t know.”

“You told the priest.”

“That’s different,” said the sheriff. “I had to tell the father.”

“And he would tell no one?”

“Why should he?” asked the sheriff.

And there was no answer; it was one of those questions which could not be answered.

“And you sent a message.”

“But not to Fishhook. To a friend who’ll send it on to Fishhook.”

“It was wasted effort,” Blaine told him. “You should not have bothered. Fishhook knows where I am.”

For they’d have hounders on the trail by now; they would have picked up the trail many hours ago. There had been but one chance for him to have escaped — to have traveled rapidly and very much alone.

They might be in this very town tonight, he thought, and a surge of hope flowed through him. For Fishhook would scarcely let a posse do him in.

Blaine got up from the bunk and crossed over to the window.

“You better get out there now,” he told the sheriff. “They’re already across the street.”

For they had to hurry, naturally. They must get what they had to do done quickly before the fall of deeper night. When darkness fell in all obscurity, they must be snug inside their homes, with the doors double-locked and barred, with the shutters fastened, with the drapes drawn tight, with the hex signs bravely hanging at every opening. For then, and only then, would they be safe from the hideous forces that prowled the outer darkness, from banshee and werewolf, from vampire, goblin, sprite.

He heard the sheriff turning and going back across the corridor, back into the office. Metal scraped as a gun was taken from a rack, and there was a hollow clicking as the sheriff broke the breech and fed shells into the barrels.

The mob moved like a dark and flowing blanket and it came in utter silence aside from the shuffling of its feet.

Blaine watched it, fascinated, as if it were a thing that stood apart from him, as if it were a circumstance which concerned him not at all. And that was strange, he told himself, knowing it was strange, for the mob was coming for him.

But it made no difference, for there was no death. Death was something that made no sense at all and nothing to be thought of. It was a foolish wastefulness and not to be tolerated.

And who was it that said that?

For he knew that there was death — that there must be death if there were evolution, that death was one of the mechanisms that biologically spelled progress and advancement for evolutionary species.

You, he said to the thing within his mind — a thing that was a thing no longer, but was a part of him — it is your idea. Death is something that you can’t accept.

But something that in all truth must surely be accepted. For it was an actuality, it was an ever-presence, it was something that everything must live with through the shortness of its life.

There was death and it was close — much too close for comfort or denial. It was in the mumble of the mob just outside the building, the mob that now had passed from sight and quit its shuffling, that even now was massed outside the courthouse entrance, arguing with the sheriff. For the sheriff’s booming voice came clearly through the outer door, calling upon those outside to break up and go back to their homes.

“All that this will get you,” yelled the sheriff, “is a belly full of shot.”

But they yelled back at him, and the sheriff yelled again and it went back and forth for quite a little while. Blaine stood at the inner bars and waited, and fear seeped into him, slowly at first, then faster, like an evil tide racing through his blood.

Then the sheriff was coming through the door and there were three men with him — angry men and frightened, but so purposeful and grim their fright was covered up.

The sheriff came across the office and into the corridor, with the shotgun hanging limply from his hand. The other three strode close upon his heels.

The sheriff stopped just outside the bars and looked at Blaine, trying to conceal the sheepishness he wore.

“I am sorry, Blaine,” he said, “but I just can’t do it. These folks are friends of mine. I was raised with a lot of them. I can’t bear to shoot them down.”

“Of course you can’t,” said Blaine, “you yellow-bellied coward.”

“Give me them keys,” snarled one of the three. “Let’s get him out of here.”

“They’re hanging on the nail beside the door,” the sheriff said.

He glanced at Blaine.

“There’s nothing I can do,” he said.

“You can go off and shoot yourself,” said Blaine. “I’d highly recommend it.”

The man came with the key, and the sheriff stepped aside. The key rattled in the lock.

Blaine said to the man opening the door. “There is one thing I want understood. I walk out of here alone.”

“Huh!” said the man.

“I said I want to walk alone. I will not be dragged.”

“You’ll come the way we want you,” growled the man.

“It’s a small thing,” the sheriff urged. “It couldn’t hurt to let him.”

The man swung the cell door open. “All right, come on,” he said.

Blaine stepped out into the corridor, and the three men closed in, one on either side of him, the other one behind. They did not raise a hand to touch him. The man with the keys flung them to the floor. They made a clashing sound that filled the corridor, that set Blaine’s teeth on edge.

It was happening, thought Blaine. Incredible as it seemed, it was happening to him.

“Get on, you stinking parry,” said the man behind him and punched him in the back.

“You wanted to walk,” said another. “Leave us see you walk.”

Blaine walked, steadily and straight, concentrating on each step to make sure he did not stumble. For he must not stumble; he must do nothing to disgrace himself.

Hope still lived, he told himself. There still was a chance that someone from Fishhook might be out there, set to snatch him from them. Or that Harriet had gotten help and was coming back or was already here. Although that, he told himself, was quite unlikely. She’d not had time enough and she could not have known the urgency involved.

He marched with steady stride across the sheriff’s office and down the hall to the outer door, the three men who were with him pressing close against him.

Someone was holding the outer door, with a gesture of mock politeness, so he could pass through.

He hesitated for an instant, terror sweeping over him. For if he passed that door, if he stood upon the steps outside, if he faced the waiting mob, then all hope was gone.

“Go on, you filthy bastard,” growled the man behind him. “They are waiting out there for you.”

The man put a hand behind his shoulder blades and shoved. Blaine staggered for a step or two, then was walking straight again.

And now he was across the doorway, now he faced the crowd!

An animal sound came boiling up from it — a sound of intermingled hate and terror, like the howling of a pack of wolves on a bloody trail, like the snarling of the tiger that is tired of waiting, with something in it, too, of the whimper of the cornered animal, hunted to its death.

And these, thought Blaine, with a queer detached corner of his mind, were the hunted animals — the people on the run. Here was the terror and the hate and envy of the uninitiate, here the frustration of those who had been left out, here the intolerance and the smuggery of those who refused to understand, the rear guard of an old order holding the narrow pass against the outflankers of the future.

They would kill him as they had killed others, as they would kill many more, but their fate was already settled, the battle already had been won.

Someone pushed him from behind and he went skidding down the smooth stone steps. He slipped and fell and rolled, and the mob closed in upon him. There were many hands upon him, there were fingers grinding into muscles, there was the hot foul breath and the odor of their mouths blowing in his face.

The many hands jerked him to his feet and pushed him back and forth. Someone punched him in the belly and another slapped him hard across the face and out of the bull-roaring of the crowd came one bellowing voice: “Go on, you stinking parry, teleport yourself! That’s all you have to do. Just teleport yourself.”

And that was most fitting mockery — for there were very few indeed who could teleport themselves. There were the levitators who could move themselves through the air like birds, and there were many others, like Blaine, who could teleport small objects, and others, also like Blaine, who could teleport their minds over many light years, but with the help of weird machines. But the true self-teleport, who could snap his body from one location to another in the fraction of an instant, was extremely hard to come by.

The crowd took up the mocking chant: “Teleport yourself! Teleport! Teleport! Teleport yourself, you dirty, stinking parry!” Laughing all the time at their cleverness, smirking all the time at the indignity thus heaped upon their victim. And never for a moment ceasing to use hands and feet upon him.

There was a warmness running down his chin, and one lip felt puffed and swollen, and there was a saltiness in his mouth. His belly ached and his ribs were sore, and the feet and fists still kept punching in.

Then another bellowing voice roared above the din: “Cut that out! Leave the man alone!”

The crowd fell back, but they still ringed him in, and Blaine, standing in the center of the human circle, looked around it and in the last faint light of dusk saw the rat eyes gleaming, and flaked saliva on the lips, sensed the hate that rose and rolled toward him like a body smell.

The circle parted and two men came through — one a small and fussy man who might have been a bookkeeper or a clerk, and the other a massive bruiser with a face that looked as if it were a place where chickens scratched in their search for grubs and worms. The big man had a rope coiled on one arm and from his hand he dangled one end of the rope fashioned very neatly into a hangman’s noose.

The two of them stopped in front of Blaine, and the small man turned slightly to face one segment of the circle.

“Gents,” he said, in a voice that any funeral director would have been proud to own, “we must conduct ourselves with a certain decency and dignity. We have nothing personal against this man, only against the system and the abomination of which he is a part.”

“You tell ’em, Buster!” yelled an enthusiastic voice from the fringes of the crowd.

The man with the funeral director’s voice held up a hand for silence.

“It is a sad and solemn duty,” he said unctuously, “that we must perform, but it is a duty. Let us proceed with it in a seemly fashion.”

“Yeah,” yelled the enthusiast, “let us get it done with. Let’s hang the dirty bastard!”

The big man came close to Blaine and lifted up the noose. He dropped it almost gently over Blaine’s head so that it rested on his shoulders. Then he slowly tightened it until it was snug about the neck.

The rope was new and prickly and it burned like a red-hot iron, and the numbness that had settled into Blaine’s body ran out of him like water and left him standing cold and empty and naked before all eternity.

All the time, even while it had been happening, he had clung subconsciously to the firm conviction that it could not happen — that he couldn’t die this way; that it could and did happen to many other people, but not to Shepherd Blaine.

And now death was only minutes distant; the instrument of death already put in place. These men — these men he did not know, these men he’d never know — were about to take his life.

He tried to lift his hands to snatch the rope away, but his arms would not stir from where they hung limply from his shoulders. He gulped, for there already was the sense of slow, painful strangulation.

And they hadn’t even begun to hang him yet!

The coldness of his empty self grew colder with the chill of overwhelming fear — fear that took him in its fist and held him stiff and rigid while it froze him solid. The blood, it seemed, stopped running in his veins and he seemed to have no body and the ice piled up and up inside his brain until he thought his skull would burst.

And from some far nether region of that brain came the fleeting realization that he no longer was a man, but mere frightened animal. Too cold, still too proud to whimper, too frozen in his terror to move a single muscle — only kept from screaming because his frozen tongue and throat could no longer function.

But if he could not scream aloud, he screamed inside himself. And the scream built up and up, a mounting tension that could find no way to effect release. And he knew that if no release were found in another instant he would blow apart from the sheer pressure of the tension.

There was a split second — not of blackout, but of unawareness — then he stood alone and he was cold no longer.

He stood on the crumbling brick of the ancient walk that led up to the courthouse entrance, and the rope was still about his neck, but there was no one in the courthouse square.

He was all alone in an empty town!