Time is the Simplest Thing

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.

Relentlessly, the endless reels ran on, snatches and impressions of a day that had been full, and charged with the unrealism of all post-mortem mental reviews.

If he could only stop them somehow, if he could think of something else.

And there was something else — the mind of Lambert Finn. Gingerly he dug down into it and it hit him in the face, a cold, unrelenting tangle of hate and fear and plotting that writhed like a pail of worms. And in the center of the mass, stark horror — the horror of that other planet which had turned its human viewer into a screaming maniac who had come surging up out of his star machine with drooling mouth and staring eyes and fingers hooked like claws.

It was repulsive and obscene. It was bleak and raw. It was everything that was the opposite of humanity. It gibbered and it squawled and howled. It leered with an alien death’s-head. There was nothing clear or clean; there was no detail, but an overriding sense of abysmal evil.

Blaine jerked away with a scream exploding in his brain, and the scream wiped out the central core of horror.

But there was another thought — an incongruous, fleeting thought.

The thought of Halloween.

Blaine grabbed tight hold of it, fighting to keep the core of alien horror from being added to the footage of the endless film.

Halloween — the soft October night with the thin layers of leaf smoke floating in the street, lighted by the street lamps or the great full moon which hung just above the naked tree tops, larger than one ever had remembered it, as if it might have drawn a little closer to the Earth to spy on all the fun. The high, shrill, childish voices rang along the street and there was the continual patter of little racing feet as the goblin bands made their merry round, shrieking with delight or calling back and forth. The lights above the doors were all turned on in genial invitation to the trick-or-treaters, and the shrouded figures came and went, clutching bags which bulged the bigger and the heavier as the evening passed.

Blaine could remember it in detail — almost as if it were only yesterday and he was a happy child running in the town. But it was, in actuality, he thought, very long ago.

It was before the terror had grown foul and thick — when the magic still was a fading fad and there still was fun in it and Halloween was happy. And parents had no fear of their children being out at night.

Today such a Halloween would be unthinkable. Now Halloween was a time for the double-barring of the doors, of the tight-stuffed chimney, of the extra-potent hex sign nailed above the lintel.

It was too bad, he thought. It had been such a lot of fun. There had been that night he and Charlie Jones had rigged up the tick-tack beside Old Man Chandler’s window and the old man had come roaring out in simulated anger with a shotgun in his hand and they had got out of there so fast they’d fell into the ditch back of the Lewis house.

And there had been that other time — and that other time — hanging to it hard so he could think of nothing else.