Time is the Simplest Thing

THIRTEEN

Northeastward out of the southwest they traveled, driving day and night — but not driving all the time; driving, more than likely, not more than half the time. For the truck was no better than a rolling junk heap. They fought with the balky engine, they battled with the old and wornout tires, they nursed the shaky chassis — and they made some mileage, but not so very much.

The roads were bad, as all roads now were bad. Dead for many years was the old concept of smooth, hard-surfaced, almost polished highways, for they were no longer needed. The traffic in this day was made up almost entirely of cars and trucks that were half planes; there was no need of good roads for vehicles which in their operation never touched the ground.

The old highway surfacing was broken and full of chuck-holes. It was rough on tires, and the tires were not too good. Nor were new ones, even if Riley had been able to afford them, easy to obtain. The demand for tires of the type used by his battered truck had dropped to almost nothing, and it was only by the greatest luck that they could be found.

There also was another ever-present worry — the finding of gasoline to put into the tank. For there were no service stations; there had been no service stations for almost fifty years. There was no need of service stations when highway traffic moved on atomic power. So, at each town they hunted for a farm service store or a co-operative tank farm to obtain their fuel, for the bulk of farm machinery still used gasoline.

They slept as they could, snatching catnaps whenever the chance came up. They ate on the run, usually out of a paper bag of sandwiches or of doughnuts, with coffee in an old tin pail they carried.

Thus the two of them found their way along the ancient highways, used now by the modern traffic only because the engineering of those highways had been good, only because they represented the easiest, shortest distances between two points.

“I never should have took this job,” said Riley, “but there was good pay in it and I don’t mind telling you that I need the money.”

“You’ll probably make out all right on it,” Blaine reassured him. “You may be a few days late, but we’ll get through all right.”

“If I have any truck left.”

“You didn’t,” Blaine pointed out, “have very much to start with.”

Riley mopped his face with a faded handkerchief that at one time had been turkey red.

“It’s not only the truck and all the work,” he said. “It’s the wear and tear on a man himself.”

For Riley was a frightened man — and the fright, Blaine saw, went down to the bone and core of him.

It was not, Blaine told himself, watching the man, the simple emotional mechanics of a man frightened by the horrific menagerie of mischief and of evil from which, because he had believed in it for his entire life, he could conjure up with no effort whatsoever the terrible fantasies of an age gone past. It was something more than that; it was more immediate than latent nighttime fears.

To Blaine the man was an oddity, a human specimen out of some medieval museum; a man who feared the dark and the imagined forms with which he peopled it; a man who placed reliance in a painted hex sign and in a shotgun loaded with a charge of silver buckshot. He had heard of men like this but had never met one. If there had been any such as this among the people that he met in Fishhook, they had kept it closely hidden behind a sophisticated mask.

But if Riley was a curiosity to Blaine, Blaine was likewise one to him.

“You are not afraid?” he’d ask.

Blaine would shake his head.

“You do not believe these things?”

“To me,” Blaine would tell him, “they have always seemed just a little foolish.”

Riley would protest: “They are not foolish, friend. I can assure you that. I’ve known too many people; I’ve heard too many tales that I know are true. There was an old man when I was a boy back in Indiana. He was found tangled in a fence with his throat ripped out. And there were tracks around the body and the smell of sulfur.”

If it were not this particular story, then it was another, just as gruesome, just as starkly mystic, just as ancient-dark.

And what could one do with that? Blaine wondered. Where would one find an answer? For the belief — the will to believe — was engrained deeply in the human fiber. Not entirely, either, in the matrix of the present situation, but in the blood and bone of Man clear back to the caves. There was in the soul of Man a certain deadly fascination with all things that were macabre. The situation as it stood had been grasped willingly, almost eagerly, by men for whom the world had become a rather tame and vapid place with no terror in it beyond the brute force terror of atomic weapons and the dread uncertainty of unstable men in power.

It had all begun quite innocently as the people grabbed at the new principles of PK for their entertainment and their enjoyment. Almost overnight the fact of mental power had become a fad that had overwhelmed the world. Night clubs had changed their names, there had been startling fashion trends, new teen-age cants had risen, TV had gone overboard with its horror films, and the presses had poured out billions of volumes dealing with the supernatural. There had been new cults, and older cults had flourished. The ouija board came back after two centuries of hiding in the mists of an earlier age which had played with ghosts for kicks but had given up when it had found that you could not play with the spirit world. You either believed in it or you didn’t and there was no middle ground.

There had been quacks and there had been earnest men, considerably deluded, who had made names and fortunes from the fad. Manufacturers had turned out carload after carload of novelties and equipment for the pursuance of this new fad, or new hobby, or new study or religion — the specific term would apply in direct proportion to the seriousness with which each individual might consider it.

It all had been wrong, of course — for paranormal kinetics was not supernatural. Nor was it macabre, nor did it deal with ghost or devil or any of the other of the hordes of forgotten things which came charging happily out of the Middle Ages. It was, instead, a new dimension to Man’s abilities — but the enamored people, agog at this new toy, had adopted it wholeheartedly in all misinterpretation.

As they always did, they had overdone it. They had played so hard at their misinterpretation that they had forgotten, despite warning after warning, that it was misinterpretation. They finally had come to believe in all the weirdness and all the fantasy; they finally regarded it as the gospel truth. Where there had been fun there now were leering fauns; where there had been gags there now were goblins and ghosts.

So the reaction had set in, the inevitable reaction of fanatical reformers, accompanied by the grim, horse-faced cruelty and blindness that goes with all fanatical reform. Now a grim and frightened people hunted down, as a holy mission, their paranormal neighbors.

There were a lot of these, but they were in hiding now or in masquerade. There had always been a lot of them through all the human ages, but mostly unsuspecting, never dreaming that they had powers within themselves fit to reach the stars. They were the people who had been just a little queer, a bit discombobulated and had been regarded tolerantly as harmless by their neighbors. There had been a few, of course, who had been in part effective, but even in their effectiveness they had not believed, or believing, they had used their strange powers poorly, for they could not understand them. And in the later years, when they might have understood it, none of them had dared, for the tribal god of science had called it all damn foolishness.

But when the stubborn men in Mexico had demonstrated that it was not all damn foolishness, then the people dared. Those who had the abilities then felt free to use them, and developed them by use. Others who never suspected that they had them found to their surprise they did and they used them, too. In some cases the abilities were used to good and solid purpose, but in other cases they were wrongly used or used for shallow purpose. And there were those, as well, who practiced this new-found art of theirs for unworthy ends, and a very few, perhaps, who used it in all evil.

Now the good gray moralists and the pulpit-pounding, crag-browed, black-attired reformers were out to quash PK for the evil it had done. They used the psychology of fear; they played upon the natural superstitions; they used the rope and brand and the quick shot in the night and they spread a fear across the land that one could smell in the very air — a thick, foul scent that clogged the nostrils and brought water to the eyes.

“You are lucky,” Riley said to Blaine. “Not fearing them, you may be safe from them. A dog will bite a man who is afraid of it, but lick the hand of one who is not afraid.”

“The answer’s easy, then,” Blaine told him… “Do not be afraid.”

But it was impossible advice to a man like Riley.

Night after night he sat on the right-hand seat as Blaine drove through the darkness, shivering in terror like a spooky hound, grasping the gun loaded with its silver buckshot.

There were alarms and frights — the swoop of owl, the running of a fox across the road, an imagined roadside shadow, all became an evil out of some darker night, while the howling of coyotes became the wailing of a banshee, hunting for a victim.

But there was more than imagined terror. There was the shadow shaped like a man, but a man no longer, twisting and turning in a lazy dance from a high branch above the thicket; there was the blackened ruins of the roadside farm, with the smoke-streaked chimney standing like an accusing finger pointing up to heaven; there was the smoke from the tiny campfire that Blaine stumbled on as he followed up a creek hunting down a spring while Riley wrestled with the balky spark plugs. Blaine had been moving quietly, and they had heard him just too late to vanish before he caught sight of them, fleeing like wraiths up the timbered slopes of the looming mountain spur.

He had stepped into the tiny, tramped-down circle of the camp site, with its small cooking fire and the skillet on its side, with four half-cooked trout lying in the trampled grass, with the wadded blankets and the comforter that had served as beds, with the rudely built brush shelter as refuge from the rain.

He had knelt beside the fire and righted the skillet. He had picked up the fish and brushed the twigs and grass off them and replaced them in the pan.

And he had thought to call out to the hiders, to try to reassure them, but he knew that it was useless, for they were past all trust.

They were hunted animals. Hunted animals in this great United States which for years had valued freedom, which in its later years had stood as a forthright champion before the entire world for the rights of man.

He had knelt there, torn by an anger and a pity, and he felt the smarting of his eyes. He bunched up his fists and rubbed at his eyes, and the moist knuckles smeared streaks of dirt across his face.

He had stayed there for a while, but finally he had risen and gone down the creek again, forgetting that he had hunted for a spring, which no doubt had been only a few feet from the camp.

When he got back to the truck, he did not mention what he’d found to Riley.

They drove across the deserts and labored across the mountains and finally came to the great high plains where the wind came knifing down without a hill to stop it, without a tree to break it, a naked stretch of land that lay flat and hard to a far horizon.

Blaine rode in the seat alongside Riley, slouched and relaxed against the jolting of the truck. The sun beat down, and the wind was dry, and off to the north dust devils rose and spun above a dried-up river bed.

Riley drove hunched tight against the wheel, with his arms braced against the chuckholes and the ruts. His face was tense and at times a nervous tic twitched the muscles of his cheek.

Even in the daytime, Blaine thought, the man is still afraid, still runs his endless race with darkness.

Had it to do, he wondered, with the cargo in the truck? Not once had Riley said what he was hauling, not once had he inspected it. There was a heavy padlock on the rear door of the rig, and the padlock clanged and jangled as the truck lumbered on the road.

There had been a time or two when Blaine had been on the verge of asking, but there had been a certain reticence that had prevented it. Not anything, perhaps, that Riley had said or done or any way he’d acted, but, rather, his studied casualness in all these areas.

And after all, Blaine told himself, it was none of his affair. He did not care what might be in the truck. His only interest was in the truck itself; with every turn of a wheel it was carrying him where he had to go.

Riley said: “If we get a good run tonight, we’ll reach the river in the morning.”

“The Missouri?”

Riley nodded. “If we don’t break down again. If we make good time.”

But that night they met the witches.