Time is the Simplest Thing

THIRTY-FOUR

Hamilton was silent and so empty you could feel the emptiness.

Blaine stopped the car in the square and got out of it. Not a light was showing, and the soft sound of the river came clearly to his ears.

“They are gone,” he said.

Harriet got out of the car and came around it to stand beside him.

“All right, pal,” she said. “Get onto your horse.”

He shook his head.

“But you have to go. You have to follow them. You belong with them.”

“Someday,” said Blaine. “Someday, years from now. There’s still work to do. There’ll be pockets of parries all up and down the land. Fearful and in hiding. I have to search them out. I have to save as many as I can.”

“You’ll never live to do it. You’ll be a special target. Finn’s men will never rest. . . .”

“If the pressure gets too bad, I’ll go. I’m no hero, Harriet. Basically, I’m a coward.”

“You’ll promise that?” she asked.

“Of course. Cross my heart. And you’re going back to Fishhook. You’ll be safe in Fishhook. Straight to the airport up in Pierre.”

She turned and went back to the car, started to get in, then turned back again.

“But you’ll need the car.”

He chuckled. “If I need one, there’s a village full of cars. I can pick the one I want. They couldn’t take their cars.”

She got behind the wheel and turned her head to say good-by.

“One thing,” said Blaine. “What happened to you when I was in the shed?”

Her laughter had a sharpness to it. “When Rand drove up, I pulled out. I went to get some help. I figured I should get on the phone to Pierre. There’d been men up there who’d helped us.”

“But?”

“The police stopped me and threw me into jail. They let me out the morning after, and I’ve been looking for you since.”

“Stout gal,” he said, and there was a faint throbbing in the air — a noise from far away.

Blaine stiffened, listening. The noise grew louder, deeper — the sound of many cars.

“Quick,” he said. “No lights. Slant across the bluff. You’ll hit the road up north.”

“Shep, what’s got into you?”

“That noise you hear is cars. A posse coming here. They know that Finn is dead.”

“You, Shep?”

“I’ll be all right. Get going.”

She started the motor.

“Be seeing you,” she said.

“Get moving, Harriet! And thanks a lot. Thanks for everything. Tell Charline hello.”

“Good-by, Shep,” she said, and the car was moving, swinging in a circle to head up a street that led toward the bluff.

She’ll make it all right, he told himself. Anyone who could drive those blind mountains out of Fishhook would have no trouble here.

“Good-by, Harriet,” he had said. “Tell Charline hello.” And why had he said that? he wondered. A hail and farewell to the old life, more than likely — a reaching out to touch hands with the past. Although there’d be no past in Fishhook. Charline would go on having parties, and the most peculiar people would continue showing up without having been invited. For Fishhook was a glamour and a glitter and a ghost. Without knowing it, Fishhook now was dead. And it was a pity. For Fishhook had been one of the greatest, one of the giddiest, one of the gladdest things that had ever happened to the human race.

He stood lonely in the square and listened to the furious sound of the coming cars. Far to the west he saw the flashing of their lights. A chill breeze came off the river and tugged at his trouser legs and jacket sleeves.

All over the world, he thought. All over the world tonight there’d be screaming cars and the slavering mobs and the running people.

He put his hand into a jacket pocket and felt the shape and the weight of the gun that had fallen from Harriet’s purse. His fingers closed around it — but that, he thought, was not the way to fight them.

There was another way to fight them, a long-range way to fight them. Isolate them and strangle them in their own mediocrity. Give them what they wanted — a planet full of people who were merely normal. A planet full of people who could huddle here and rot — never knowing space, never getting to the stars, never going anyplace or doing anything. Like a man who rocked away his life sitting in a rocking chair on a porch of some little dying town.

Without recruits from outside, Fishhook itself would falter in another hundred years, come to a dead stop within still another hundred. For the parries on the other planets would recruit from Fishhook even as they winnowed through the world to rescue their own kind.

But it wouldn’t matter in another hundred years, for the human race would then be safe on the other planets, building the kind of life and the kind of culture they’d been denied upon the Earth.

He started to move across the square, heading toward the bluffs. For he must be out of town, or nearly out of town, before the cars came in.

And he was, he knew, on a lonely path once more. But not so lonely now, for now he had a purpose. A purpose, he told himself with a sudden flickering of pride, he had hewn out himself.

He straightened his shoulders against the chillness of the wind and moved a bit more briskly. For there was work to do. A lot of work to do.

Something moved in the shadow of the trees off to the left, and Blaine, catching the movement with one corner of his mind, wheeled swiftly.

The movement came toward him, slowly, just a bit uncertainly.

“Shep?”

“Anita!” he cried. “You little fool! Anita!”

She came running from the darkness and was in his arms.

“I wouldn’t go,” she said. “I wouldn’t go without you. I knew you would come back.”

He crushed her to him and bent to kiss her and there was nothing in the world, nothing in the universe, but the two of them. There was blood and lilacs and the shining star and the wind upon the hilltop and the two of them and that was all there was.

Except the screaming of the cars as they came tearing down the road.

Blaine jerked away from her. “Run!” he cried. “You must, Anita!”

“Like the wind,” she said.

They ran.

“Up the bluff,” she said. “There’s a car up there. I took it up as soon as it got dark.”

Halfway up the bluff they stopped and looked back.

The first flames were beginning to run in the huddled blackness of the village, and screams of futile rage came drifting up the slope. Gunfire rattled hollowly, torn by the wind.

“They’re shooting at shadows,” said Anita. “There is nothing down there. Not even dogs or cats. The kids took them along.”

But in many other villages, thought Blaine, in many other places, there would be more than shadows. There would be fire and gunsmoke and the knotted rope and the bloody knife. And there might be as well the pattering of rapid feet and the dark shape in the sky and a howling on the hills.

“Anita,” he asked, “are there really werewolves?”

“Yes,” she told him. “Your werewolves are down there.”

And that was right, he thought. The darkness of the mind, the bleakness of the thought, the shallowness of purpose. These were the werewolves of the world.

The two of them turned their backs upon the village and headed up the slope.

Behind them the flames of hate grew taller, hotter. But ahead, above the bluff top, the distant stars glowed with certain promise.