Time is the Simplest Thing

TWELVE

He woke before morning light, when the birds first began to chirp, and made his way up the hill to the garden patch just below the house. He got three ears of corn, he dug into a hill of potatoes, he dug up a butcher plant and noted with some satisfaction that it had four steaks upon it.

Back in the grove of cottonwoods, he searched through his pockets until he found the book of matches the sheriff had let him keep of all the stuff he had. He flipped back the cover and saw there were three matches left.

Regarding the three matches gravely, he thought of that day long ago when he had to pass a Boy Scout test by the lighting of a fire with a single match. Was he that good now? he wondered, chuckling at the thought.

He found a dead tree trunk and dug into the heart of it to get punk that was powder-dry. He selected dead, dry twigs. He rustled up some bigger wood, still paying close attention to its dryness, for the fire must be as smokeless as it was possible to make it. There was every reason he should not advertise his presence.

On the road above him the first car of the day went past, and far off a cow was bellowing.

The fire started on the second match, and he nursed it carefully, building it bit by bit with the adding of more twigs and finally larger twigs until there came a time when he could put on some of the bigger wood. The fire burned clear and smokeless, and he sat down beside it to wait for it to burn into a bed of coals.

The sun was not yet up; but the light in the east was growing brighter and there was a coolness on the land. Below him the creek ran chattering across its bed of pebbles.

Blaine drew in a deep breath of the morning air and it tasted good.

He was still alive and in the land of other people and he had food to put into his belly — but what did he do next? He had no money — he had nothing but a single match and the clothes he stood in. And he had a mind that would betray him — a mind, the old crone had said, that would bounce back at you. He would be a sitting duck for any peeper, any spotter, that should chance across him.

He could hide by day and walk by night, for it would be safe to be abroad at night when others kept inside. He could raid orchards and gardens for his food. He could keep alive and make a few miles every night, but it would be slow going.

There must, he told himself, be some other way.

He put more wood on the fire and it still burned bright without any smoke. He went down to the stream and lay flat upon his belly and drank from the singing water.

Had he been mistaken, he asked himself, to run away from Fishhook? No matter what had awaited him in Fishhook, the situation in which he now found himself probably was worse. For he was a fugitive now from everyone; there was no one he could trust.

He lay staring down into the stream bed, looking at the pebbles — looking at one pebble, a red one that gleamed like polished ruby. He took the pebble into his mind and he saw what it was made of and the structure of its crystals and he knew where it had come from and he could trace its wanderings through millenia.

Then he tossed it from his mind and took in another pebble, a shiny bit of quartz -

There was something wrong here!

This was something he’d never done before!

And yet he had been doing it as if it were a commonplace performance and nothing at which one should even wonder.

He pushed his body up and hunkered by the stream, his human sense aghast, but still not entirely startled — for he was still himself, no matter what he was.

He sought the alienness again and it wasn’t there; it did not reveal itself, but he knew that it was there. It still was there, he knew, with its grab bag of senseless memories, with its cockeyed abilities, with its crazy logic and its topsy-turvy values.

In his mind’s eye he saw a strange parade of purple geometric figures lurching across a desert of pure gold, with a blood-red sun hanging in a sulfur sky and nothing else in sight. And in the fleetness of that moment he knew the location of the place and the meaning of it and the coordinates of a fantastic cosmographic system that could get him there. Then it all was gone — the figures and the knowledge.

He got slowly to his feet and went back to the fire and by this time there was a bed of coals. He found a stick and scratched out a hollow in the coals and put in the potatoes and the corn, still wrapped in its husks, and used the stick to scratch the coals back across the hollow. Breaking a green branch off a sapling, he used it as a fork to broil one of the steaks.

Squatted beside the fire, with the warmth of it upon his face and hands, he felt a smug contentment that seemed strangely out of place — the contentment of a man who had reduced his needs to the strictly basic — and with the contentment came a full-bodied confidence that was just as out of place. It seemed almost as if he could look ahead and see that everything would be all right. But it was not prescience. There were hunchers who had prescience or who seemed to have it, but he was not one of them. It was rather as if he could sense ahead of him the pattern of all rightness, but with no specific detail, with no idea of the future’s shape, nor of its direction. An assurance only, something that was akin to plain, old-fashioned hunch, a feeling for the future — but nothing more than that.

The steak was sizzling and he could smell the potato baking and he grinned at steak and baked potato as a breakfast menu. Although it was all right. There was nothing at the moment that was not all right.

He remembered Dalton slumped spineless in the chair, with the clenched cigar and the brush-pile hair, raging at the butcher plant as another outrage committed upon the businessman by the maliciousness of Fishhook. And he tried to recall from what planet of which sun the butcher plant had come and the name, it seemed to him, should be at his command, although he could not put it on his tongue.

The butcher plant, he thought, and how many other things? What would be the total score if all of Fishhook’s contributions should be totaled up?

There were the drugs, for one thing, an entire new pharmacopoeia brought from other stars to alleviate and to cure the ills of Man. And as a result of this, all of Man’s old bugaboos, all of his old killers, were being held at bay. Given another generation — given, at the most, two more generations — and the entire concept of illness would be wiped off the human slate. The human race would then emerge as a people healthful both in body and in mind.

There were new fabrics and new metals and many different foodstuffs. There were new architectural ideas and materials; there were new perfumes, unfamiliar literatures, alien principles in art. And there was dimensino, an entertainment medium that had replaced all the standard human entertainment — the movies, radio and TV.

For in dimensino you did not merely see and hear; you participated. You became a part of the portrayed situation. You identified yourself with one of the characters, or with more than one of them, and you lived out the action and emotion. For a time you ceased to be yourself; you became the person of your choice in the drama dimensino created.

Almost every home had its dimensino room, rigged with the apparatus which picked up the weird, alien impulses that made you someone else — that lifted you out of the commonplace, out of the humdrum rut of your ordinary life and sent you off on wild adventure or on strange assignments or pitched you headlong into exotic places and fantastic situations.

And all of these, the food, the fabrics, the dimensino, were monopolies of Fishhook.

For all of these, thought Blaine, Fishhook had gained the hatred of the people — the hatred of not understanding, of being left outside, of being helped as no other single agency had ever helped the human race.

The steak was done, and Blaine propped the greenwood stick against a bush while he dug into the coals to hook out the potatoes and the corn.

He sat beside the fire and ate as the sun came up and the breeze died down and the world, on the threshold of another day, appeared to hold its breath. The first sunlight came through the grove of cottonwoods and turned some of the leaves into golden coins, and the brook grew hushed as the daytime sounds took up — the bawling of the cattle on the hill above, the hum of cars passing on the road, the distant drone of a cruising plane far up in the sky.

On the road, down by the bridge, a closed panel truck pulled up and stopped. The driver got out and lifted the hood and crawled halfway under it. Then he crawled out again and went back to the cab. Inside of it he hunted until he found what he was looking for, then got out again. He placed a kit of tools on the fender and unwrapped it, and the clinking of the tools as he unwrapped them came clearly up the hill.

It was an ancient truck — gas engine and with wheels, but it had some jet assistance. There were not many such vehicles left, except, perhaps, in junk yards.

An independent operator, Blaine told himself. Getting along the best he could, competing with the big truck lines by cutting down his rates and keeping down his overhead in any way he could.

The truck’s original paint had faded and peeled off in places, but painted over this, in sharp, fresh color, were complicated hex signs, guaranteed, no doubt, to fend off the evil of the world.

The truck, Blaine saw, had an Illinois license.

The driver got his tools laid out, then crawled back beneath the hood. The sound of hammering and the screech of stubborn, rusty bolts floated up the hill.

Blaine finished off his breakfast. There were two steaks left and two potatoes and by now the coals were growing black. He stirred up the coals and put on more wood, speared the two steaks on the stick and broiled them carefully.

The pounding and the screeching kept on beneath the hood. A couple of times the man crept out and rested, then went back to work.

When the steaks were finished, Blaine put the two potatoes in his pocket and went marching down the hill, carrying the two steaks on their stick as another man might take a banner into battle.

At the sound of his footsteps crunching on the road, the driver came out from beneath the hood and turned around to face him.

“Good morning,” said Blaine, being as happy as he could. “I saw you down here while I was getting breakfast.”

The driver regarded him with considerable suspicion.

“I had some food left over,” Blaine told him, “so I cooked it up for you. Although, perhaps, you’ve eaten.”

“No, I haven’t,” said the driver, with a show of interest. “I intended to in the town just down the road, but it was still closed tight.”

“Well, then,” said Blaine and handed him the stick with the two steaks impaled upon it.

The man took the stick and held it as if he feared that it might bite him. Blaine dug in his pockets and pulled out the two potatoes.

“There was some corn,” he said, “but I ate it all. There were only three ears of it.”

“You mean you’re giving this to me?”

“Certainly,” said Blaine. “Although you can throw it back into my face if that’s the way you feel.”

The man grinned uneasily. “I sure could use it,” he declared. “The next town is thirty miles and with this,” he gestured at the truck, “I don’t know when I’ll get there.”

“There isn’t any salt,” said Blaine, “but it’s not so bad without it.”

“Well,” said the man, “since you’ve been so kind . . .”

“Sit down,” said Blaine, “and eat. What’s the matter with the engine?”

“I’m not sure. Could be the carburetor.”

Blaine took off his jacket and folded it. He laid it neatly on the fender. He rolled up his sleeves.

The man found a seat on a rock beside the road and began to eat.

Blaine picked up a wrench and climbed up on the fender.

“Say,” said the man, “where did you get this stuff?”

“Up on the hill,” said Blaine. “The farmer had a lot of it.”

“You mean you stole it?”

“Well, what would you do if you were out of work and had no money and were trying to get home?”

“Whereabouts is home?”

“Up in South Dakota.”

The man took a big bite of steak, and his mouth became so full he could talk no longer.

Blaine ducked underneath the hood and saw that the driver had all but one bolt loose on the carburetor mounting. He put the wrench on it, and the bolt screeched metallic protest.

“Damn thing rusted tight,” said the driver, watching Blaine.

Blaine finally freed the bolt and lifted out the carburetor. He walked over with it and sat down beside the eating man.

“Rig’s about ready to fall apart,” the driver said. “Wasn’t much to start with. Been having trouble with it all the way. My schedule’s shot to hell.”

Blaine found a smaller wrench that fitted the bolts on the carburetor assembly and began to wrestle with the threads.

“Tried driving at night,” said the man, “but not for me. Not after that first time. Too risky!”

“See something?”

“If it hadn’t been for those signs I painted on the truck, I would have been a goner. I have a shotgun with me, but it doesn’t do no good. Can’t drive and handle a gun at the self-same time.”

“Probaby wouldn’t do you any good even if you could.”

“I tell you, mister,” said the driver. “I am set for them. I have a pocket full of shells loaded up with silver shot.”

“Expensive, isn’t it?”

“Sure. But you have to be prepared.”

“Yeah,” said Blaine. “I suppose you do.”

“It’s getting worse,” declared the man, “every blessed year. There is this preacher up north.”

“I hear there are a lot of preachers.”

“Yes, a lot of them. But all they do is talk. This one, he is all set to get some action on it.”

“There she is,” said Blaine, loosening the last bolt. He broke open the carburetor and looked at it.

“There it is,” he said.

The man bent over and looked where Blaine was pointing.

“Damned if it ain’t,” he said.

“Have it fixed and back in place in another fifteen minutes. You got an oil can we can squirt these threads.”

The driver got up and wiped his hands on the seat of his trousers. “I’ll look it up,” he said.

He started for the truck, then turned back. He held out his hand. “My name is Buck,” he said. “Buck Riley.”

“Blaine. You can call me Shep.”

They shook.

Riley stood undecided, shuffling his feet.

“You say you’re heading for Dakota.”

Blaine nodded.

“I’m damn near out of my mind,” said Riley. “I need someone to help me.”

“Anything I can do to help?” asked Blaine.

“Would you drive at night?”

“Hell, yes,” said Blaine.

“You could drive and I could have the shotgun ready.”

“You’ll need to get some sleep.”

“We’ll manage that, the both of us, somehow or other. We have to keep this wagon rolling. I’ve lost too much time for comfort.”

“You’re going South Dakota way?”

Riley nodded. “You’ll go with me, then?”

“Glad to,” said Blaine. “It beats walking any time.”

“There’ll be some money in it for you. Not much . . .”

“Forget about the money. I just want the ride.”