Time is the Simplest Thing

ELEVEN

There was less of dusk and more of light and there was a quietness that was unimaginable.

There was no grass.

There were no trees.

There were no men, nor any sign of men.

The courthouse lawn, or what had been the lawn, stretched naked down to the asphalt street. There was no grass upon the lawn. It was soil and pebble. Not dried-out grass or killed-out grass, but not any grass at all. As if there had never been such a thing as grass. As if grass never had existed.

With the rope still trailing from his neck, Blaine slowly pivoted to look in all directions. And in all directions it was the self-same scene. The courthouse still stood starkly against the last light of the day. The street was still and empty, with cars parked at the curb. The store fronts lined the street, their windows staring blindly.

There was one tree — lone and dead — standing at the corner beside the barber shop.

And no men anywhere. No birds or song of birds. No dogs. No cats. Nor an insect humming. Perhaps, thought Blaine, not even a bacteria or a microbe.

Cautiously, almost as if afraid by doing so he might break the spell, Blaine put up his hands and loosened the rope. He slipped it over his head and tossed it to the ground. He massaged his neck carefully with one hand, for the neck still stung. There were little prickles in it, where tiny pieces of the fiber had broken off and still stuck in the skin.

He took a tentative step and found that he could walk, although his body still was sore from the casual beating it had taken. He walked out into the street and stood in the middle of it and looked up and down its length. It was deserted so far as he could see.

The sun had set, and dark was not far off and that meant, he told himself, that he had come back just a little time.

And stood astounded, frozen in the middle of the street, that he should have known.

For he did know! Without a doubt he knew exactly what he had accomplished. Although, he thought, he must have done it without a conscious effort, almost instinctively, a sort of conditioned reflex action to escape the danger.

It was something that he had no way of knowing how to do, that a short minute earlier he would have sworn would be impossible that he do. It was something that no human had ever done before, that no human would have ever dreamed of trying.

For he had moved through time. He had gone into the past a half an hour or so.

He stood in the street, attempting to recall how he might have done it, but all he could remember was the mounting terror that had come rolling, wave on wave, to drown him. There was one answer only: He had done it as a matter of deep-seated knowledge which he had not been aware of having and had accomplished it only as a final, desperate, instinctive effort — as one might, without thinking, throw up an arm to ward off an unexpected blow.

As a human it would have been beyond his capability, but it would not, undoubtedly, have been impossible for the alien mind. As a human being he did not have the instinct, did not have even the beginning of the necessary know-how. It was an ability even outside the pale of paranormal action. There was no question of it: the only way he could have snapped himself through time was by the agency and through the courtesy of the alien mind.

But the alien mind, it seemed, had left him; it was no longer with him. He hunted it and called it, and there was no trace and there was no answer.

He turned to face the north and began to walk, keeping to the center of the street, marching through this ghost town of the past.

The graveyard of the past, he thought. No life anywhere. Just the dead, bare stone and brick, the lifeless clay and wood.

And where had gone the life?

Why must the past be dead?

And what had happened to that mind the alien on the distant star had exchanged with him?

He sought for it again and he could not find it, but he did find traces of it; he found the spoor of it, tiny, muddy footprints that went across his brain; he found bits and pieces that it had left behind — strange, chaotic memories and straws of exotic, disconnected information that floated like flecks of jetsam in a frothy tide.

He did not find it, but he found the answer to its going — the instinctive answer that suddenly was there. The mind had not gone and left him. It had, rather, finally, become a part of him. In the forge of fright and terror, in the chemistry of danger, there had been a psychologic factor that had welded the two of them together.

And yet he still was human. Therefore, he told himself, the answer must be false. But it kept on persisting. There was no reason to it and there was no logic — for if he had two minds, if he were half human and half alien, there would be a difference. A difference he would notice.

The business part of the street had dwindled to shabby residences, and up ahead of him he could see where the village ended — this village which half an hour ago (or a half an hour ahead?) had been most intent upon the killing of him.

He halted for a moment and looked back and he could see the courthouse cupola and remembered that he’d left everything he owned back there, locked in the sheriff’s desk. He hesitated a moment, wondering if he should go back. It was a terrible thing to be without a dollar to his name, with all his pockets empty.

If he went back, he thought, he could steal a car. If there were none with the keys left in the lock, he could short-circuit the ignition. He should have thought of it before, he told himself. The cars were standing there, waiting to be taken.

He turned and started back. He took two steps, then wheeled about again.

He didn’t dare to go back. For he was safely out. There was nothing that could persuade him — money or car or anything — to go back into the village.

The light was waning and he headed northward, settling down to rolling up some distance — not running, but walking fast, with long, loose strides that ate up the very road.

He passed out of the village and came into the country and here there was an even greater loneliness, an even greater barrenness. A few dead cottonwoods lined the stream that ran down the valley, and ghostly fence posts stood in ragged rows — but the land was naked, without a weed, without a blade of grass. And the wind had a crying in it as it swept across the wasteland.

The darkness deepened and the moon came up, a blotch-faced mirror with the silver cracked and blackened, to cast a pallid light upon the arid stretch of earth.

He reached a rough plank bridge that crossed the tiny stream and stopped to rest a second and glance back along his trail. Nothing moved; there was nothing following. The village was some miles behind, and up on the hill above the stream stood the ramshackle bones of some forgotten farm — a barn, what looked like a hog pen, several dilapidated outhouses and the house itself.

Blaine stood and sucked the air into his lungs, and it seemed to him that the very air itself was dead. It had no sparkle in it. There was no smell in it and hardly any taste.

He reached out a hand to rest it on the bridge, and his hand went through the plank. It reached the plank and went into the plank and through it and there was nothing there. There wasn’t any plank; there wasn’t any bridge.

He tried again. For, he told himself, he might have missed it, he might have reached out for it and fallen short of it and only imagined his hand going through the plank. Moonlight, he reminded himself, is tricky stuff to see by.

So this time he was very careful.

His hand still went through the plank.

He backed away from the bridge for a step or two, for it suddenly had become a thing — not of menace, perhaps — but a thing of which one must be very careful. It was nothing to depend on. It was a fantasy and delusion; it was a ghost that stood spraddled on the road. If he had walked out on it, he told himself, or tried to walk upon it, he would have been tumbled down into the stream bed.

And the dead trees and the fence posts — were they delusions, too?

He stood stock-still as the thought came to him: Was it all delusion? For an illogical moment he did not dare to stir, scarcely dared to breathe, for any disturbance he might make might send this frail and unreal place crashing down into the dust of dreary nothingness.

But the ground was solid underneath his feet, or it seemed quite solid. He pressed one foot hard against it, and the ground still held. Cautiously he lowered himself to his knees and felt the ground with spread-out hand, kneading his fingers against it as if to test its consistency, running his fingers through the dust down to the hardness of the earth.

This was foolishness, he told himself, angry with himself — for he had walked this road and it had not shattered beneath the impact of his footsteps; it had held up beneath him.

But even so this was a place where one could not be sure; this was a place where there seemed to be no rules. Or at least a place where you were forced to figure out the rules, like: Roads are real, but bridges aren’t.

Although it wasn’t that, at all. It was something else. It would all basically have to do with the fact there was no life within this world.

This was the past and it was the dead past; there were only corpses in it — and perhaps not even corpses, but the shadows of those corpses. For the dead trees and, the fence posts and the bridges and the buildings on the hill all would classify as shadows. There was no life here; the life was up ahead. Life must occupy but a single point in time, and as time moved forward, life moved with it. And so was gone, thought Blaine, any dream that Man might have ever held of visiting the past and living in the action and the thought and viewpoint of men who’d long been dust. For the living past did not exist, nor did the human past except in the records of the past. The present was the only valid point for life — life kept moving on, keeping pace with the present, and once it had passed, all traces of it or its existences were carefully erased.

There were certain basic things, perhaps — the very earth, itself — which existed through every point in time, holding a sort of limited eternity to provide a solid matrix. And the dead — the dead and fabricated — stayed in the past as ghosts. The fence posts and the wire strung on them, the dead trees, the farm buildings and the bridge were shadows of the present persisting in the past. Persisting, perhaps, reluctantly, because since they had no life they could not move along. They were bound in time and stretched through time and they were long, long shadows.

He was, he realized with a shock, the only living thing existing in this moment on this earth. He and nothing else.

He rose from his knees and dusted off his hands. He stood looking at the bridge, and in the brightness of the moonlight there seemed nothing wrong with it. And yet he knew the wrongness of it.

Trapped, he thought. If he did not know how to get out of here, then surely he was trapped — and he did not know.

There was nothing in all of human experience which gave him any chance or any hope to know.

He stood silent in the road, wondering how human he could be, how much humanity there still might be left to him. And if he were not entirely human, if there still were alienness, then he had a chance.

He felt human, he told himself — yet how was he to judge? For he still would be himself if he were entirely alien. Human, half human, or not human in the slightest, he still would be himself. He’d scarcely know the difference. There was no other outside point from which he could stand and judge himself with anything like objectivity.

He (or whatever he might be) had known in a time of terror and of panic how to slip into the past, and it stood to reason that, knowing that, he likewise should know how to slide back into the present, or what had been his present — back to that point in time, whatever one might call it, where life was possible.

But the hard, cold fact was there: He had no idea of how it might be done!

He looked about him, at the antiseptic coldness of the moonlight-painted land, and a shudder started at the core of him. He tried to stop the shudder, for he recognized it as the prelude to unreasoned terror, but the shudder would not stop.

He gritted mental teeth, and the shudder kept on growing and suddenly he knew — with one corner of his mind, he knew.

Then there was the sound of wind blowing in the cotton-woods — and there’d been no cottonwoods before. Something, too, had happened to the shudder, for it was there no longer. He was himself again.

There were insects fiddling stridently somewhere in the grass and bushes, and there were flecks of light moving in the night to betray the lightning bug. And through the shuttered window of the house up on the hill came thin, strangled shafts of light.

He turned off the road and walked down into the stream bed, stepped through the foot-deep water and up the other bank among the cottonwoods.

He was back again, back where he’d started from. He’d come from past to present and he’d done it by himself. For a fleeting moment, at the very end of it, he had caught the method, but it had slipped from him again and he did not know it now.

But that did not matter. He was safely home.