Time is the Simplest Thing

THIRTY-ONE

The storm sneaked in. There was no warning of it except for the gradual graying of the day. At noon the slow-moving clouds blotted out the sun and by three o’clock the sky was closed in, horizon to horizon, by a fleecy grayness that seemed less cloud than the curdling of the sky itself.

Blaine bent to his paddle, driving furiously to eat up the miles. It had been years since he had used a paddle, years since he had done anything approaching strenuous labor. His arms became stiff and numb, and his shoulders ached, and across the upper back a steel band had settled down and was tightening with every stroke he took. His hands seemed one vast blister.

But he did not slow his strokes nor the power behind them, for every minute counted. When he got to Pierre, he knew, he might be unable to locate immediately the group of parries who had worked with Stone, and even if he found them they might refuse to help him. They might want to confirm his identity, they might want to check his story, they might quite rightly suspect him as a spy for Finn. If Harriet were there, she could vouch for him, although he was not sure what her status with the group might be nor what her word was worth. Nor was he even sure that she would be there.

But it was a last, long chance. It was the final hope he had and he could not shirk it. He must get to Pierre, he must find the group, he must make them understand the urgency of the situation.

For if he failed, it spelled the end of Hamilton and of all the other Hamiltons that might be in the world. And it meant as well the end for the other parries who were not in the Hamiltons, but who lived out precarious, careful lives in the midst of normal neighbors.

Not all of them, of course, would die. But all, or nearly all, would be scattered to the winds, to hide in whatever social and economic nooks and crannies they might be able to devise. It would mean that the parries would lose on a world-wide basis whatever tacit accommodations or imperfect understandings they had been able to establish with their normal neighbors. It would mean another generation of slowly coming back, of regaining, item after painful item, what they would have lost. It would mean, perhaps, another fifty years to ride out the storm of rage, to await the growth of another generation’s tolerance.

And in the long picture that stretched ahead, Blaine could see no sign of help — of either sympathy or assistance. For Fishhook, the one place that could help, simply would not care. He had gained at least that much understanding of the situation from his contact with Kirby Rand.

The thought left the taste of bitter ashes in his mind, for it took away the last comfort that he had in all the world — the memory of his days in Fishhook. He had loved Fishhook; he had fought against his fleeing from it; he had regretted that he’d left it; at times he’d wondered if he should not have stayed. But now he knew that he had stayed too long, that perhaps he never should have joined it — for his place was here, out here in the bitter world of the other parries. In them, he realized, lay the hope of developing paranormal kinetics to their full capacity.

They were the misfits of the world, the outcasts, for they deviated from the norm of humanity as established through all of history. Yet it was this very deviation which made them the hope of all mankind. Ordinary human beings — the kind of human beings who had brought the race this far — were not enough today. The ordinary humans had pushed the culture forward as far as they could push it. It had served its purpose; it had brought the ordinary human as far as he could go. Now the race evolved. Now new abilities had awoke and grown — exactly as the creatures of the Earth had evolved and specialized and then evolved again from that first moment when the first feeble spark of life had come into being in the seething chemical bath of a new and madcap planet.

Twisted brains, the normal people called them; magic people, dwellers of the darkness — and could anyone say no to this? For each people set its standards for each generation and these standards and these norms were not set by any universal rule, by no all-encompassing yardstick, but by what amounted to majority agreement, with the choice arrived at through all the prejudice and bias, all the faulty thinking and the unstable logic to which all intelligence is prone.

And he, himself, he wondered — how did he fit into all of this? For his mind, perhaps, was twisted more than most. He was not even human.

He thought of Hamilton and of Anita Andrews and his heart cried out to both — but could he demand of any town, of any woman, that he become a part of either?

He bent to the paddle, trying to blot out the thinking that bedeviled him, trying to smother the rat race of questions that were twisting in his brain.

The wind, which had been a gentle breeze no more than an hour before, had shifted and settled somewhat west of north and had taken on an edge. The surface of the river was rippled with the driving wind and on the long, straight stretches of water there was hint of whitecaps.

The sky came down, pressing on the Earth, a hazy sky that stretched from bluff to bluff, roofing in the river and shutting out the sun so that birds flew with uneasy twitterings in the willows, puzzled at the early fall of night.

Blaine remembered the old priest, sitting in the boat and sniffing the sky. There was weather making, he had said; he could smell the edge of it.

But weather could not stop him, Blaine thought fiercely, digging at the water frantically with the paddle. There was nothing that could stop him. No force on Earth could stop him; he couldn’t let it stop him.

He felt the first wet sting of snow upon his face and up ahead the river was disappearing in a great, gray curtain that came sweeping downstream toward him. He could hear distinctly the hissing of the snow as it struck the water and behind it the hungry moaning of the wind, as if some great animal were running on a track, moaning in the fear that it would not catch the thing that ran ahead.

Shore was no more than a hundred yards away, and Blaine knew that he must get there and travel the rest of the way on foot. For even in his desperate need of speed, in his frantic fight with time, he realized that he could not continue on the river.

He twisted the paddle hard to head the canoe for shore and even as he did the wind struck and the snow closed in and his world contracted to an area only a few feet in diameter. There was only snow and the running waves that fled beneath the wind, tossing the canoe in a crazy dance. The shore was gone and the bluffs above it. There was nothing but the water and the wind and snow.

The canoe bucked wildly, spinning, and Blaine in an instant lost all sense of direction. In the ticking of a single second he was lost upon the river, with not the least idea of where the shore might lie. He lifted the paddle and laid it across the thwarts, hanging tightly, trying to keep the craft trim as it tossed and yawed.

The wind had a sharpness and a chill it had not had before and it struck his sweaty body like an icy knife. The snow clotted on his eyebrows, and streams of water came trickling down his face as it lodged in his hair and melted.

The canoe danced wildly, running with the waves, and Blaine hung grimly on, lost, not knowing what to do, overwhelmed by this assault that came roaring down the river.

Suddenly a snow-shrouded clump of willows loomed out of the grayness just ahead of him, not more than twenty feet away, and the canoe was bearing straight toward it.

Blaine only had time to get set for the crash, crouched above the seat, legs flexed, hands gripping the rails.

The canoe tore into the willows with a screeching sound that was muffled by the wind and caught up and hurled away. The craft hit and drove on into the willow screen, then hung up and slowly tipped, spilling Blaine out into the water.

Struggling blindly, coughing and sputtering, he gained his feet on the soft and slippery bottom, hanging tight to the willows to keep himself erect.

The canoe, he saw, was useless. A hidden snag had caught its bottom and had ripped a long and jagged tear across the canvas. It was filling with water and slowly going down.

Slipping, half-falling, Blaine fought his way through the willow screen to solid ground. And it was not until he left the water that he realized the water had been warm. The wind, striking through the wetness of his clothes, was like a million icy needles.

Blaine stood shivering, staring at the tangled clump of willows that thrashed wildly in the gale.

He must find a protected spot, he knew. He must start a fire. Otherwise, he’d not last out the night. He brought his wrist close up before his face, and the watch said that it was only four o’clock.

He had, perhaps, another hour of light and in that hour he must find some shelter from the storm and cold.

He staggered off, following the shore — and suddenly it struck him that he could not start a fire. For he had no matches, or he didn’t think he had, and even if he did they would be soaked and useless. Although, more than likely, he could dry them, so he stopped to look. He searched frantically through all his sopping pockets. And he had no matches.

He plunged on. If he could find snug shelter, he might be able to survive even with no fire. A hole beneath the roots of a tipped-over tree, perhaps, or a hollow tree into which he could squeeze himself — any confined space where he’d be sheltered from the wind, where his body’s heat might have a chance to partially dry out his clothing and be held in to warm him.

There were no trees. There was nothing but the everlasting willows, whipping like demented things in the gusty wind.

He stumbled on, slipping and falling, tripping over unseen chunks of driftwood left stranded by high water. He was covered with mud from his many falls, his clothes were freezing stiff, and still he blundered on. He had to keep on moving; he must find a place in which to hide; if he stood still, if he failed to move, he would freeze to death.

He stumbled again and pulled himself to his knees and there, at the water’s edge, jammed in among the willows, floated a swamped canoe, rocking heavily in the storm-driven wash of water.

A canoe!

He wiped his face with a muddy hand to try to clear his vision.

It was the same canoe, for there would be no other!

It was the canoe he’d left to beat his way along the shore.

And here he was, back at it again!

He fought with his muddled brain to find an answer — and there was an answer, the only answer that was possible.

He was trapped on a tiny willow island!

There was nothing here but willows. There were no honest trees, tipped-over, hollow, or in any other wise. He had no matches, and even if he had, there was no fuel except the scattered driftwood and not too much of that.

His trousers were like boards, frozen stiff and crackling as he bent his knees. Every minute, it seemed to him, the temperature was dropping — although there was no way to know; he was too cold to tell.

He came slowly to his feet and stood straight, faced into the cutting wind, with the hiss of snow driving through the willows, with the angry growl of the storm-lashed river and the falling dark, and there was another answer to a question yet unasked.

He could not live the night on this island and there was no way to leave it. It might be, for all he knew, no more than a hundred feet from shore, but even if it were, what difference would it make? Ten to one he’d be little better off on shore than he was right here.

There had to be a way, he insisted to himself. He could not die on this stinking little dot of real estate, this crummy little island. Not that his life was worth so much — perhaps not even to himself. But he was the one man who could get to Pierre for help.

And that was a laugh. For he’d never get to Pierre. He’d not get off the island. In the end, he’d simply stay right where he was and it was more than likely that he’d not be found.

When the spring floods came, he’d go down the river with all the other debris that the stream would collect and carry in its raging torrent.

He turned and went back a ways from the water’s edge. He found a place where he was partially shielded from the wind by the thickness of the willows and deliberately sat down, with his legs stuck out straight before him. He turned up the collar of his jacket and it was a gesture only, for it did no good. He folded his arms tight across his chest and pinched half-frozen hands into the feeble warmth of armpits and stared straight ahead into the ghostly twilight.

This was wrong, he knew. When a man got caught in a fix like this, he kept on the move. He kept the blood flowing in his veins. He fought off sleep. He beat and flailed his arms. He stamped his feet. He fought to keep alive.

But it was no use, he thought. A man could go through all the misery of the fight and still die in the end.

There must be another way, a better way than that.

A real smart man would think of a better way than that.

The problem, he told himself, trying to divorce himself from the situation for the sake of objectivity — the problem was to get himself, his body, off this island and not only off this island, but to a place of safety.

But there was no place of safety.

Although suddenly there was.

There was a place that he could go. He could go back to that bright-blue living room where the Pinkness dwelled.

But no! That would be no better than staying on the island, for if he went he’d only go in mind and leave his body here. When he returned, the body, more than likely, would be unfit for use.

If he could take his body there, it would be all right.

But he couldn’t take his body.

And even if he could, it might be very wrong and very likely deadly.

He tried to recall the data on that distant planet and it had escaped him. So he went digging after it and hauled it up from the deep recesses where he had buried it and regarded it with horror.

He’d not live a minute if he went there in his body!

It was pure and simple poison for his kind of life.

But there must be other places. There would be other places if only he could go there — if all of him could go there.

He sat hunched against the cold and wet and didn’t even feel the cold and wet.

He sought the Pinkness in him and he called it and there was no answer.

He called again and yet again and there was no answer. He probed and searched and hunted and he found no sign of it and he knew, almost as if a voice had spoken out and told him, that there was no use of further call or hunting, for he would not find it. He would never find it now, for he was a part of it. The two of them had run together and there was no longer either a Pinkness or a human, but some strange alloy that was the two of them.

To go on hunting for it would be like hunting for himself.

Whatever he would do, he must do himself, by the total power of whatever he’d become.

There were data and ideas, there was knowledge, there was know-how and there was a certain dirtiness that was Lambert Finn.

He went down into his mind, into the shelves and pigeon-holes, into the barrels and bins and boxes, into the still incredible junk heap that was as yet unsorted, the tangled billions of odds and ends that had been dumped helter-skelter into him by a helter-skelter being.

He found items that startled him and some that disgusted him and others that were swell ideas, but which in no way applied to his present problem.

And all the time, like some persistent busybody, running underfoot, the mind of Lambert Finn, unabsorbed as yet, perhaps never to be absorbed but always to remain dodging in and out of corners, kept getting in the way.

He pushed it to one side, he shoved it from his path, he swept it under rugs and he kept on searching — but the dirty thoughts and concepts and ideas, the thoughts of Finn, the unraveling subject matter of that core of raging horror from Finn’s nightmare of a planet, still kept popping up.

And as, for the hundredth time, he swept the dirtiness away, he caught a hint of what he wanted and went scrabbling after it — scrabbling after it through all the obscenity and evil of that core of writhing horror which he had wrested from Finn’s mind. For it was there he found it — not in the bright array of junk he’d inherited from the Pinkness, but in the mass of garbage he had stole away from Finn.

It was an alien knowledge and a crooked, slimy knowledge, and he knew it had its origin on the planet that had sent Finn home a maniac and as he held it in his mental hands and saw the way it worked, how simply it worked, how logical the concepts, he grasped at least a corner of the guilt and fear which had sent Finn in raging hate up and down the land.

For with this kind of know-how the stars lay open, physically open, to all the life in the universe. And to Finn’s unbalanced mind that could mean one thing only — that Earth lay open, too. And most specifically that it lay open to the planet which had held the knowledge. Not thinking of how other races might make use of it, not recognizing it as a tool the human race could use to its benefit, he’d seen it simply as a bridge between the place he’d found and the planet he called home. And he had fought with all he had to pull the old home planet back to is former smallness, to break its contact with the stars, to starve and strangle Fishhook by wiping out the parries who in the future might be drafted or invited to carry on the work of Fishhook.

For Finn had reasoned, Blaine thought, with Finn’s reasoning an open book before him, that if Earth stayed obscure and small and attracted no attention, the universe would pass it by and it would then be safe.

But however that might be, he held within his mind the technique to go in body to the stars — and a way to save his life.

But now he must find a planet where he could safely go — a planet which would not poison him or drown him or crush him, a place where he could live.

He dipped again into his mind and there, hauled from the junk heap and neatly catalogued, were thousands of planets the Pinkness at one time had visited.

He searched and found a hundred different kinds of planets and each one deadly to unprotected human life. And the horror grew — that with a way of going, he could find no planet soon enough where it would be safe to go.

The howling of the storm intruded on him, breaking through the fierce concentration of his search, and he knew that he was cold — far colder than he’d known. He tried to move a leg and could barely move it. The wind shrieked at him, mocking, as it went fleeing down the river and in between the gusts of wind he could hear the dry, rattling sound of hard snow pellets shotgunning through the willows.

He retreated from the wind and snow and cold, from the shrieking and the rattle — and there was the planet, the one he had been seeking.

He checked the data twice and it was satisfactory. He tattooed the co-ordinates. He got the picture in his mind. Then slowly, piece by piece, he fed in the long-hop method — and the sun was warm.

He was lying on his face and beneath him was grass and the smell of grass and earth. The howling of the storm was gone and there was no rattle in the willows.

He rolled over and sat up.

He held his breath at what he saw.

He was in paradise!