Time is the Simplest Thing

TWENTY-EIGHT

He woke cramped and cold and confused, not remembering where he was. For the branches intertwined above him and were like nothing he’d ever seen before. He lay with his body aching from rough ground and the cold, staring at the branches, and slowly the knowledge soaked into him — who he was and where.

And why.

And the thought of Halloween.

He sat bolt upright and bumped his head upon the branches.

For now there was more than just the thought of Halloween.

There was the plot of Halloween!

He sat cold and frozen, while the fury and the fear raged inside of him.

It was diabolic and so simple — it was the very kind of gambit a man like Lambert Finn would plan.

It was something that could not be allowed to happen. For if it did, a new onslaught of public animosity would be roused against the parries and once the fierce reaction had worn off, there’d be new restrictive laws. Although the laws might not be needed, for it might set off a pogrom that would wipe out thousands of the parries. Such a plan of Halloween would result in a storm of public outrage such as the world had seldom known.

There was just one chance, he knew. He had to get to Hamilton, for it was the nearest place where he could find some help. Surely the folks of Hamilton would help him, for Hamilton was a parry village that lived by suffrance alone. If a thing like this should happen, then Hamilton would die.

And Halloween, unless he had lost count, was the day after tomorrow. No, that was wrong, for this was tomorrow. Starting now, there were just two days to stop it.

He crawled out of the thicket and saw that the sun was no more than a handsbreadth above the eastern hills. There was a sharp, clean tang in the morning air, and the sloping bluff ran smooth, with the blond of sun-cured grass, down to the brown flood of the river. He shivered in the chill and beat his hands together to try to get them warm.

Hamilton would be north along the river, for The Plainsman motel had been on the road that ran north from Belmont, and Hamilton, from there, had been only a mile or two away.

He went angling down the slope, and the movement of his body drove away the chill. The climbing sun seemed to gather strength and there was more warmth in it.

He reached a sand bar that ran out into the river and walked out on it. The water was brown with sand and clay and it rumbled angrily as it swirled around the sand bar’s end.

Blaine walked to the edge of the bar and squatted down. He put down cupped hands and dipped, and the trapped water came up roiled with sand. He raised the cupped hands to his face and drank and the water had a dark brown taste — the taste of silted clay and of ancient vegetation. When he closed his mouth, his teeth gritted on the sand.

But it was water. It was wet. He dipped and drank again, the water running through his fingers, no matter how tightly pressed together, leaving little for his throat.

He squatted in the stillness and sensed the loneliness and peace, as if this moment might be no later than the next day after the world had first been made — as if the earth lay new and clean and there’d been as yet no time to build up the historic backlog of worry and of greed and of all the other things which plagued the race of Man.

A splash broke the silence and he rose swiftly to his feet. There was nothing to be seen, either on the shore or on the river itself or the willow island which lay just beyond the sand bar. An animal, he thought. A mink or muskrat, an otter or a beaver, or perhaps a fish.

The splash came again, and a boat nosed around the island and came toward the bar. In its stern sat a man muffled in a cloak, swinging the paddle with an awkwardness that was embarrassing to watch. The bow was raised out of the water by the weight of the man and the canted outboard motor fastened to the stern.

The boat came lumbering around and there was something hauntingly familiar in the man who swung the paddle. Somewhere, sometime, Blaine knew, he had met this man; somehow their lives had touched.

He walked out into the shallows and grabbed the bow as the craft drew close and dragged it onto the sand.

“God be with you,” said the boatman. “And how are you this morning?”

“Father Flanagan!” cried Blaine.

The old priest grinned, a very human, almost sunny grin.

“You,” Blaine told him, “are very far from home.”

“I go,” said Father Flanagan, “where the good Lord sends me.”

He reached forward and patted the seat in front of him. “Why don’t you come and sit awhile?” he invited. “God forgive me, but I’m all beat up and weary.”

Blaine pulled the boat up harder on the sand and got into it. He took the seat the priest had patted and held out his hand. Father Flanagan took it in both his arthritis-crippled but very gentle paws.

“It’s good to see you, Father.”

“And I,” the Father told him, “am covered with confusion. For I must confess that I’ve been following you.”

“It would seem to me,” Blaine said, half amused, half frightened, “that a man of your persuasion might find better things to do.”

The priest put Blaine’s hand away, not forgetting to give it a placid pat.

“Ah, my son,” he said, “but that is it. There can be, for me, no better occupation than keeping on your trail.”

“I’m sorry, Father. I don’t quite understand.”

Father Flanagan leaned forward, capping each of his knees with a crippled fist.

“It is important,” he said, “that you understand. You will listen carefully. You will not get angry. You’ll let me have my time.”

“Most certainly,” said Blaine.

“You have heard, perhaps,” said Father Flanagan, “that Holy Mother Church is inflexible and rigid, that she clings to old custom and to ancient thought, that she changes slowly if she changes at all. That the Church is stern and dogmatized and—”

“I’ve heard all that,” said Blaine.

“But it is not true. The Church is modern and it changes. If it had been opposed to change, God save us, it would not have endured in all its greatness and its glory. It is not swayed by the winds of public utterance, it can stand against the groundswell of changing human mores. But it does adapt, although it does so slowly. But that slowness is because it must be very sure.”

“Father, you can’t mean—”

“But I do. I asked you, if you will remember, if you were a warlock and you thought it very funny. . . .”

“Of course I did.”

“It was a basic question,” said Father Flanagan, “a much too simple question, purposely made simple so it could be answered with a yes or no.”

“I’ll answer once again, then. I am not a warlock.”

The old priest sighed. “You persist,” he complained, “in making the telling of what I have to tell you very difficult.”

“Go ahead,” said Blaine. “I’ll restrain myself.”

“The Church must know,” said Father Flanagan, “whether parakinetics is a true human ability or if it may be magic. One day, perhaps many years from now, it must make a ruling. It must take a stand as it historically has taken positions on all moral values through the centuries. It is no secret that a committee of theologians have had the matter under study. . . .”

“And you?” asked Blaine.

“I am only one of many who has been assigned an investigatory role. We simply gather evidence which in due time will come under the scrutiny of the theologians.”

“And I am part of your evidence.”

Father Flanagan nodded solemnly.

“There’s one thing I fall to understand,” said Blaine, “and that is why your faith should have any doubts at all. You have your miracles, completely documented. And what, I ask you, are miracles if they don’t involve PK? Somewhere in the universe human power and divine power must link. Here may be your bridge.”

“You really believe this, son?”

“I’m not a religico. . . .”

“I know you’re not. You told me you were not. But answer me: Is this what you believe?”

“I rather think it is.”

“I do not know,” said Father Flanagan, “if I can quite agree with you. The idea has the smell of heresy. But that’s neither here nor there. The point is that there’s a certain strangeness in you, a strangeness I’ve not found in any of the others.”

“I’m half alien,” Blaine told him bitterly. “No other man has ever been given that distinction. You talk not only with me, but with a being not remotely human — a being that sits on a planet five thousand light years distant. He has lived a million years or more: He’ll live another million or maybe more than that. He sends out his mind to visit other planets and he is a very lonely being for all his visiting. Time is no mystery to him. I doubt there’s very much that is. And all he knows I know and can put to better use than he — when I get the time, if I ever get the time, to get it all dug out and labeled and stacked along the shelves inside my brain.”

The priest drew his breath in slowly. “I thought it might be something of that sort.”

“So do your job,” said Blaine. “Get out the holy water. Sprinkle me with it and I’ll go up in a puff of dirty smoke.”

“You mistake me,” said Father Flanagan. “You mistake my purpose. And my attitude. If there is no evil in the power that sent you to the stars, then there can be no more than incidental evil in what you may absorb there.”

One crippled hand reached out and grasped Blaine’s arm in a crushing grip which one would have sworn was not within its strength.

“You have a great power,” said the priest, “and great knowledge. You have an obligation to use it for the glory of God and the good of all mankind. I, a feeble voice, charge you with that burden and that responsibility. It is not often that such a load is put upon one man. You must not waste it, son. You must not use it wrongly. Nor can you simply let it lie on fallow ground, it was given to you — perhaps by the intervention of some divine power neither of us can understand for a purpose neither of us know. Such things, I am certain, do not come about by pure happenstance.”

“The finger of God,” said Blaine, meaning to jest, but not quite able to make a proper jest, sorry that he’d said it as soon as the words were out.

“The finger of God,” said Father Flanagan, “laid upon your heart.”

“I did not ask for it,” said Blaine. “If anyone had asked me, I would have told them no.”

“Tell me about it,” said Father Flanagan. “From the very start. As a favor to me.”

“In return for a favor of your own.”

“And what is that?” asked Father Flanagan.

“You say you followed me. How could you follow me?”

“Why, bless your soul,” said Father Flanagan. “I thought you might have guessed. You see, I am one of you. I’m a quite efficient hounder.”