Time is the Simplest Thing

THREE

He crawled upward from the well of darkness into which he had been plunged, groping his way with a blind persistence that was almost driven instinct. And he knew where he was — he was sure he knew — but he could not grasp the knowledge. He had been in this well before, many times before, and it was familiar to him, but there was a strangeness now that had never been before.

It was himself, he knew, in which the strangeness lay — almost as if he were another, as if he were only half himself, and the other half of him were tenanted by an unknown being that was backed against a wall and spat in overriding fear and mewled in loneliness.

He clawed his way upward from the well, and his mind fought in frantic urgency against the mewling strangeness in him even as he sensed that it was no use to fight, that the strangeness was a thing that had come to live with him and be a part of him so long as he existed.

He rested for a moment from the climbing and tried to sort out himself, but he was too many things and in too many places and it was utterly confusing. He was a human being (whatever that might be) and he was a scurrying machine and he was an alien Pinkness sprawling on a bright blue floor and he was a mindlessness that fell through aeons of screaming time which finally figured out, when one nailed down the mathematics of it, to the fraction of a second.

He crawled out of the well, and the blackness went away and there was soft light. He was lying flat upon his back and he finally was home and he felt the old, old thankfulness that he’d made it once again.

And finally he knew.

He was Shepherd Blaine and he was an explorer for Fishhook, and he went far out in space to nose out stranger stars. He went out many light years and at times he found certain things of some significance and other times he didn’t. But this time he had found a thing, and a part of it had come back home with him.

He sought for it and found it in the corner of his mind, rolled tight against its fear, and he tried to comfort it even as he feared it. For it was a terrible thing, he told himself, to be caught inside an alien mind. And, on the other hand, it was a lousy deal to have a thing like this trapped inside his mind.

It’s tough on both of us, he said, talking to himself and to this other thing which was a part of him.

He lay there quietly — wherever he was lying — and tried to put himself in order. He had gone out some thirty hours before — not he, himself, of course, for his body had stayed here — but his mind had gone out, and with it the little scurrying machine, to this unguessed planet that spun an unknown sun.

The planet had been no different than a lot of other planets, just a howling wilderness, and that was what a lot of them turned out to be when you came stumbling down upon them. This time a howling wilderness of sand although it could just as well have been a jungle or a desert of ice or a bare and naked place of nothing but primeval rock.

For almost thirty hours he had roamed the sand and there had been nothing there. Then suddenly he had come upon the great blue room with the Pinkness sprawling in it, and when he had come home the Pinkness, or a shadow of the Pinkness, had come back with him.

It crawled out from where it had been hiding, and he felt the touch of it again, the knowing and the feeling and the knowledge. His blood crawled like icy slush gurgling in his veins, and he went rigid with the musty smell and the slimy feel of alienness, and he could have shouted in pure terror, but he did not shout. He lay there, quite unstirring, and the Pinkness scurried back to its nook once more and lay there tightly curled.

Blaine opened his eyes and saw that the lid of the place in which he lay had been tilted back, and the glare of brightness that was a hooded light bulb was stabbing down at him.

He took inventory of his body and it was all right. There was no reason for it not to be all right, for it had lain here and rested for all of thirty hours.

He stirred and raised himself so that he sat up, and there were faces, staring at him, faces swimming in the light.

“A tough one?” asked one face.

“They all are tough,” said Blaine.

He climbed from the coffinlike machine and shivered, for he suddenly was cold.

“Here’s your jacket, sir,” one of the faces said, a face that surmounted a white smock.

She held it for him, and he shrugged into it.

She handed him a glass, and he took a sip of it and knew that it was milk. He should have known it would be. As soon as anyone got back they gave him a glass of milk. With something in it, maybe? He had never thought to ask. It was just one of the many little things that spelled out Fishhook to him and to all the others like him. Fishhook, in its century or more, had managed to accumulate an entire host of moldy traditions, all of them fuddy-duddy in varying degrees.

It was coming back — familiar now as he stood there sipping at his glass of milk — the great operations room with its rows of glistening star machines, some of which were closed while the rest stood open. And in the closed ones lay others like himself, their bodies left behind and their minds far out in space.

“What time is it?” he asked.

“Nine P.M.,” said a man who held a clipboard in his hand. The alienness was creeping in his mind again, and the words were there once more: Hi, pal. I trade with you my mind!

And now, in the light of human reason, it was crazier than hell. A form of greeting more than likely. A sort of shaking hands. A shaking of the minds. And when one thought of it, a lot more sensible than the shaking of the hands.

The girl reached out and touched him on the arm. “Finish up your milk,” she said.

If it were a mind-shake, it was a lasting one, for the mind was staying on. He could feel it now, an alien dirtiness, lurking just below the level of his consciousness.

“The machine got back O.K.?” he asked.

The man with the clipboard nodded. “Not a bit of trouble. We sent down the tapes.”

Half an hour, Blaine thought calmly, and was surprised that he could be so calm. Half an hour was all he had, for that was the length of time required to process the tapes. They always, he knew, ran through the exploratory tapes as soon as they came in.

It would all be there; all the data would be down, telling all the story. There would be no question of it, no doubt of what had happened. And before they read it, he must be out of reach.

He looked around the room and once again he felt the satisfaction and the thrill and pride that he had felt, years ago, when he’d first been brought into this room. For here was the heartthrob of Fishhook itself; here was the reaching out, here the dipping into distant places.

It would be hard to leave, he knew; hard to turn his back upon, for much of him was here.

But there was no question of it — he simply had to go.

He finished up the milk and handed the waiting girl the glass. He turned toward the door.

“Just a minute,” said the man, holding out the clipboard. “You forgot to sign out, sir.”

Grumbling, Blaine pulled the pencil from beneath the clip and signed. It was a lot of foolishness, but you went through the motions. You signed in and you signed out and you kept your mouth tight shut, and all of Fishhook acted as if the place would fall into a heap of dust if you missed a single lick.

He handed back the board.

“Excuse me, Mr. Blaine, but you failed to note when you would return for evaluation.”

“Make it nine tomorrow morning,” Blaine told him curtly. They could put down anything they wished, for he wasn’t coming back. He had thirty minutes left — less than thirty minutes now — and he needed all of it.

For the memory of that night of three years ago was becoming sharper with every passing second. He could remember, not the words alone, but the very tone of them. When Godfrey Stone had phoned that night there had been a sound of sobbing in his breath, as if he had been running, and there had been a sense of panic.

“Good night, everyone,” said Blaine.

He went out into the corridor and closed the door behind him, and the place was empty. The flanking doors were closed, although lights burned in some of them. The corridor was deserted and everything was quiet. But even in the quietness and the emptiness there was still a sense of massive vitality, as if all of Fishhook might have stood on watch. As if all the mighty complex never slept at all — all the laboratories and experimental stations, all the factories and the universities, all the planning boards and the vast libraries and repositories and all the rest of it never closed an eye.

He stood for a moment, considering. And it all was simple. He could walk out of here and there was not a thing to stop him. He could get his car out of the parking lot just five blocks away and head northward for the border. But it was, he told himself, too simple and direct. It was too obvious. It was just the thing that Fishhook would figure him to do.

And there was something else — the nagging thought, the clinging, monstrous doubt: Did he really need to run?

Five men in the three years since Godfrey Stone — and was that evidence?

He went striding down the corridor, and his mind was busy sorting out the doubts, but even as he sorted he knew there was no room for doubts. Whatever doubt might rise, he knew that he was right. But the rightness was an intellectual rightness and the doubt emotional.

He admitted to himself that it all boiled down to a single factor: He did not want to flee from Fishhook. He liked being here; he liked the work he did; he didn’t want to leave.

But he had fought that out with himself many months ago. He’d reached decision then. When the time came, he would go. No matter how much he might want to stay, he’d drop everything and run.

For Godfrey Stone had known and in his desperate fleeing he had taken out the time to make one desperate call — not a call for help, but a cry of warning.

“Shep,” he had said, sobbing out the words as if he had been running. “Shep, listen to me and don’t interrupt. If you ever should go alien, take it on the lam. Don’t wait around a minute. Just take it on the lam.”

And then the receiver had crashed down and that was all there was.

Blaine remembered how he’d stood there, with the phone still in his fist.

“Yes, Godfrey,” he had said into the silence at the other end. “Yes, Godfrey, I’ll remember. Thank you and good luck.”

And there’d not been word again. He had never heard from Godfrey Stone again.

If you ever should turn alien, Godfrey Stone had said. And now he had turned alien, for he could feel the alienness, like a lurking second self crouched inside his brain. And that had been the manner in which he had turned alien. But what about the others? Certainly not all of them had met a Pinkness, five thousand light years distant. How many other ways might a man turn alien?

Fishhook would know that he was alien. There was no way to stop them knowing. They’d know when they processed the tapes. Then they’d have him in and turn a peeper on him — for while the tapes might say that he was alien, they could not tell in what manner or to what extent he might have turned an alien. The peeper would talk very friendly to him, even sympathetically, and all the time he would be rooting out the alien in his mind — rooting it out of hiding to find out what it was.

He reached the elevator and was punching at the button when a door just down the hall came open.

“Oh, Shep, I see it’s you,” said the man standing in the door. “I heard you going down the hall. I wondered who it was.”

Blaine swung around. “I just got back,” he said.

“Why don’t you come in for a while?” Kirby Rand invited. “I was getting ready to open up a bottle.”

There was no time to hesitate, Blaine knew. He either went in and had a drink or two or he gave a curt refusal. And if there were a curt refusal, Rand would become suspicious. For suspicion was Rand’s business. He was section chief of Fishhook security.

“Thanks,” said Blaine, as unruffled as he could. “For a short one only. There’s a girl. I shouldn’t keep her waiting.”

And that, he told himself, would block any well-intentioned invitation to take him out to dinner or to go out and see a show.

He heard the elevator coming up, but he walked away from it. There was nothing he could do. It was a dirty break, but there was no help for it.

As he walked through the door, Rand thumped him on the shoulder in round good fellowship.

“Good trip?” he asked.

“Not a bit of trouble.”

“How far out?”

“About five thousand.”

Rand wagged his head. “I guess that’s a foolish one to ask,” he said. “They all are far out now. We’ve just about finished off all the near-by ones. Another hundred years from now, we’ll be going out ten thousand.”

“It makes no difference,” Blaine told him. “Once you get going, you are there. Distance seems to be no factor. Maybe when we get way out we may pick up a lag. Halfway across the galaxy. But I doubt it even then.”

“The theoretical boys think not,” said Rand.

He walked across the office to the massive desk and picked up the bottle that was standing there. He broke the seal and spun the cap.

“You know, Shep,” he said, “this is a fantastic business we are in. We tend to take it in our stride and it becomes at times a bit humdrum to us. But the fantasy is there.”

“Just because it came so late to us,” said Blaine. “Just because we passed up the ability so long. It was in us all the time and we never used it. Because it wasn’t practical. Because it was fantastic. Because we couldn’t quite believe it. The ancients grabbed the edge of it, but they didn’t understand it. They thought that it was magic.”

“That’s what a lot of folks still think,” said Rand.

He rustled up two glasses and got ice out of the wall refrigerator. He poured out generous helpings.

“Drink up,” he said, handing Blaine a glass.

Rand lowered himself into the chair behind the desk.

“Sit down,” he said to Blaine. “You aren’t in that much of a rush. And you lose something in the drinking when you stay standing up.”

Blaine sat down.

Rand put his feet up on the desk, settled back in comfort.

No more than twenty minutes left!

And sitting there, with the glass clutched in his hand, in that second of silence before Rand should speak again, it seemed to Blaine once more that he could hear the throbbing of the huge thing that was Fishhook, as if it were one great sentient being lying here against the nighttime mother earth of northern Mexico, as if it had heart and lungs and many throbbing veins and it was this throbbing which he heard.

Across the desk Rand crinkled his face into a gracious mask of geniality.

“You guys have all the fun,” he said. “I sometimes envy you.”

“It’s a job,” Blaine told him carelessly.

“You went out five thousand years today. You got something out of it.”

“I suppose there was some satisfaction,” Blaine admitted. “The intellectual thrill of knowing where you were. Actually, it was better than the usual run. I think I rustled up some life.”

“Tell me,” said Rand.

“Not a thing to tell. I found this thing when time was running out. I didn’t have a chance to do anything at all before I was jerked back home. You’ve got to do something about that, Kirby. It can get damn embarrassing.”

Rand shook his head. “I’m afraid that’s out,” he said.

“You should give us some discretion,” Blaine insisted. “The time limit should not be so arbitrary. You keep a man out the total length of time — the entire thirty hours — when there is no earthly reason for him staying on. Then you yank him back when he’s on the very verge of something.”

Rand grinned at him.

“Don’t tell me you can’t do it,” said Blaine. “Don’t pretend that it’s impossible. Fishhook has cords of scientists, stacked up in solid rows—”

“Oh, I suppose it’s possible,” Rand told him. “We just like to keep control.”

“Afraid of someone staying?”

“That’s possible,” said Rand.

“What for?” demanded Blaine. “You’re not a man out there. You’re nothing but a human mind caged in a smart machine.”

“We like it as it is,” said Rand. “After all, you guys are valuable. We must take safety measures. What if you got into a jam five thousand years from home? What if something happened and you were unable to exercise control? We would lose you then. But this way it’s automatic. When we send you out, we know you’re coming back.”

“You value us too highly,” Blaine told him dryly.

“Not at all,” said Rand. “Do you realize how much we have invested in you? Do you realize how many men we sift through before we find one that we can use? One who is both a telepath and a rather special kind of teleporter, one who has the mental balance to stand up to the impact of some of the things he finds out there, and, finally, one who is capable of loyalty to Fishhook.”

“You buy the loyalty,” said Blaine. “There is no one of us who ever claimed he was underpaid.”

“That,” Rand told him, “is not what I am talking about and you know it isn’t.”

And you, Blaine asked inaudibly — what are the qualifications for security? Peeping could be one of them — the ability to look into another’s mind — but there’d never been any evidence in all the years he had known Rand that the man actually was a peeper. If he were a peeper, then why should he use men in his department whose sole purpose consisted of their ability to peep?

“I can’t see what all this has to do,” said Blaine, “with not giving us some time control. We could—”

“And I don’t see why you should fret yourself,” Rand countered. “You’ll be going back to your precious planet. You can pick up where you left off.”

“Of course, I’m going back. I found it, didn’t I? That sort of makes it mine.”

He finished off the drink, put the glass down on the desk.

“Well, I’m off,” he said. “Thank you for the drink.”

“Of course,” said Rand. “Wouldn’t think of keeping you. You’ll be back tomorrow?”

“Nine o’clock,” said Blaine.