Time Is the Simplest Thing (14 page)

The skidding stopped, and Blaine groped blindly for the gun, and the gun barrel came lashing down out of the darkness and struck him across the ribs. He swore and grasped for it, but Riley had it raised again for another blow. Blaine punched out desperately in the darkness, and his fist caught yielding flesh that grunted at the blow. The gun thudded down, missing his face by the fraction of an inch.

His hand snaked out and grasped it and jerked, twisting as he jerked, and the gun came free.

Blaine rolled, carrying the gun with him, and scrambled to his feet.

Out at the edge of light, he saw Riley coming in a bull rush, with his arms outspread, with his shoulders bunched, his mouth a snarling slit slashed across his face.

Blaine lifted the gun and flung it out into the darkness with Riley almost on him. He sidestepped, but not quite far enough. One of Riley's hamlike hands caught him on the hip. Blaine spun with the hand and sidestepped again. Riley tried to check his rush but seemed unable to. He twisted his body frantically, but his momentum drove him forward and he slammed with a resounding whack into the front end of the truck.

He folded then and slid into a heap. Blaine stood watching him and there was no motion in the man.

The night was silent. There were just the two of them. All the rest had gone. He and Riley were alone with the battered truck.

Blaine swung around and looked into the sky and there was nothing there but the moon and stars and the lonesome prairie wind.

He turned back to Riley, and the man was alive, he saw. He had hauled himself into a sitting position, braced against the front end of the truck. There was a cut across his forehead where he had struck on metal and there was no fight left in him. He was out of breath and panting and there was a wild glare in his eyes.

Blaine took a pace toward him.

“You damn fool,” he said. “If you'd fired at them again, they'd have been on top of us. They'd have torn us to pieces.”

Riley stared at him, and his mouth was working but no words came out—just the one word: “You—you—you.”

Blaine stepped forward and held out a hand to help him to his feet, but Riley shrank away from him, pressing his body tight against the truck as if he would intrude into the very metal.

“You're one of them!” he shouted. “I guessed it days ago.…”

“You're crazy!”

“But you are! You are afraid of being seen. You stick close to the truck. I always am the one who goes for the eats and coffee. You won't ever go. I always bargain for the gas. It is never you.”

“It's your truck,” said Blaine. “You have money and I don't. You know I am dead broke.”

“The way you came to me,” wailed Riley. “Walking from the woods. You must have spent the night in them there woods! And you never believed in nothing, the way ordinary people do.”

“I'm not a fool,” said Blaine. “That's the only reason. I'm no more PK than you are. If I were, do you think I'd have ridden this far in your junk heap of a truck?”

He strode forward and seized Riley and jerked him to his feet. He shook him so his head bobbed back and forth.

“Snap out of it!” yelled Blaine. “We're safe. Let's get out of here.”

“The gun! You threw away the gun!”

“The hell with the gun. Get into that truck.”

“But you talked with them! I heard you talking to them!”

“I never said a word.”

“Not with your mouth,” said Riley. “Not with your tongue. But I heard you talking with them. Not all of what you said. Just pieces of it. I tell you that I heard you.”

Blaine pushed him back against the truck and held him with one hand while with the other he opened the cab door.

“Get in there and shut up,” Blaine said, bitterly. “You and your God-damned gun! You and your silver shot! You and your hearing things!”

For it was too late, he told himself. It would be useless telling him. It would be a waste of time to show him or to try to help. Perhaps if he ever guessed the truth, he might lose his last thin fingerhold on reason and finally go insane, wallowing in a morass of guilt associations.

Blaine walked around the truck and got in on the other side. He started the engine and wheeled the vehicle back into a highway lane.

They drove for an hour in silence, with Riley hunched into his corner. Blaine felt his watching eyes.

Finally Riley said: “I'm sorry, Blaine. I guess that you were right back there.”

“Sure I was,” said Blaine. “If you had started shooting—”

“That's not what I meant,” said Riley. “If you'd been one of them, you'd have thrown in with them. They could have whisked you anywhere you wanted quicker than this rig.”

Blaine chuckled. “Just to prove it to you I'll pick up the eats and coffee in the morning. If you'll trust me with the money, that is.”

FIFTEEN

Blaine sat on the stool in the hamburger joint, waiting for the man to bag a half-dozen sandwiches and fill the pail with coffee. There were only two other customers in the place, and they paid no attention to him. One had finished eating and was reading a paper. The other, poised above his plate, was shoveling in a gooey mess that originally had been eggs and fried potatoes but now looked like some new kind of dog food from being thoroughly mixed together.

Blaine turned from looking at the men and stared out the massive slab of glass which comprised two sides of the building.

The morning street was quiet, with only a few cars moving and only one man walking.

Probably it had been foolish, he told himself, to come out like this in an utterly mad and perhaps rather useless attempt to throw Riley off his guard, to attempt to reassure him. For it was more than likely that no matter what he did and no matter what Riley said, the trucker would continue to carry some suspicion.

But, Blaine thought, it would not be for long, for they must be near the river, and Pierre must be just a few miles to the north. And a funny thing, he thought—Riley had never told him where he had been going. Although it was not queer; it fit in with all the rest of it—the man's evident fright and his secrecy concerning what he carried.

He swung back from the window and watched the man put the hamburgers in the sack and fill the pail with coffee. He paid with the five-dollar bill Riley had given him and pocketed the change.

He went out into the street and headed for the bulk oil station where Riley and the truck were waiting. It was too early yet for anyone to be at the station, and they'd eat their breakfast while waiting for someone to show up. Then they'd fill the tank and be on their way, and this, thought Blaine, might be the last day he'd be with the truck.

For once they hit the river, he'd get off and start heading north for Pierre.

The morning was cool almost to the point of chill, and the air burned in his nose as he breathed it in. It was going to be another good day, he knew—another moment of October with its winelike air and its smoky sky.

As he came to the street where the bulk station was located, the truck was not in sight.

Perhaps, he told himself, Riley might have moved it. But even as he thought it, he knew it was not right. He knew he had been ditched.

At the cost of a few dollars, at the cost of finding someplace else to get a tank of gas, the trucker had rid himself of Blaine.

It came to Blaine as no great shock, for he realized that he'd been expecting it, although not admitting to himself that he expected it. After all, from Riley's point of view, it was an astoundingly simple solution to his suspicions of the night before.

To convince himself, to make sure there was no mistake, Blaine walked around the block.

The truck was not in sight. And he was on his own.

In just a little while the town would be coming to life, and before that happened he must be out of sight. He must find a place where he could hide out for the day.

He stood for a moment to orient himself.

The nearer edge of town, he was certain, lay to the east, for they had driven through the southern edge of it for a mile or two.

He started out, walking as fast as was possible, but not so fast, he hoped, as would attract attention. A few cars went by along the street, once a man came out of his house to pick up the morning paper, once he met another man with a lunch bucket swinging from his hand. No one paid attention to him.

The houses dwindled out, and he reached the last street in the town. Here the prairie ended and the land began to tumble down, in a jumble of wooded hills and knolls, each one lower than the last, and he knew that the Missouri lay beyond. Somewhere down there where the last hill ended, the mighty stream gurgled on its way with its shifting sand bars and its willow islands.

He made his way across a field and climbed a fence and went down the bank of a steep ravine and at the bottom of it was a tiny creek that chuckled at its banks and just beyond was a pool with a clump of willows growing close beside it.

Blaine got down on his hands and knees and crawled beneath the willows. It was a perfect hideout. It was outside the town and there was nothing to bring anybody here—the stream was too small to fish and it was too late for swimming. He would not be disturbed.

There would be no one to sense the flashing mirror he carried in his mind; there'd be no one to yell “Parry!”

And come night he could move on.

He ate three of the hamburgers and drank some of the coffee.

The sun came up and filtered through the willows to make a dappled pattern of sunshine and shadow.

From the town came far-off sounds—the rumble of a truck, the purring of an engine, the barking of some dogs, the calling of a mother rounding up the kids.

It had been a long road from that night in Fishhook, Blaine told himself, sitting in the willow shade and poking with a stick into the sandy ground. A long ways from Charline's and from Freddy Bates. And up until this moment he'd had no time to even think about it.

There had been a question then, and there was still a question now: Whether it had been smart to run away from Fishhook; whether, despite all Godfrey Stone had said, it might not have been the wiser course to stay and take his chances of whatever Fishhook might have had in store.

He sat there and thought about it and he went back to the bright blue room where all had been set in motion. And he saw the room again as if it were only yesterday—better than if it were only yesterday. The alien stars were shining faintly down on this room which had no roof, and the bright blue floor was smooth beneath the rolling of his wheels, and the room was filled with the weird fabricated pieces that might have been furniture or art objects or appliances or almost anything at all.

It all came alive for him as it should not come alive—clear and concise, with no rough edges and nothing blurred, with not a thing put in and not a thing left out.

The Pinkness was sprawling at its ease and it roused and said to him:
So you came back again!

And he was really there.

Without machine or body, without any outward trappings, with nothing but his naked mind, Shepherd Blaine had come back to the Pinkness.

SIXTEEN

You cannot see a mind.

But the Pinkness saw it, or sensed it—or at least it knew that the mind was there.

And to Shepherd Blaine there was no surprise and no alienness. It seemed almost as if he were coming home, for the bright blue of the room was much more homelike and familiar than it had seemed that first time.

Well
, the Pinkness said, looking the mind up and down,
you make a pretty pair!

And that was it, of course, thought the part of the mind that still was Shepherd Blaine—he, or at least a part of him, perhaps as much as half of him, had come home, indeed. For he was, in some percentage not yet determined, perhaps impossible to determine, a part of the alien he faced. He was Shepherd Blaine, traveler from Earth, and likewise a carbon copy of this thing that dwelt in the bright blue room.

And how are you getting on?
the alien asked most affably. As if he didn't know.

There is just one thing
, said Blaine, hurrying to get it in against the time when he might be forced to go from here.
There is just one thing. You've made us like a mirror. We bounce back at people
.

Why, of course
, the alien told him.
That is the only way to do it. On an alien planet you would need some shielding. You don't want intelligences prying round in you. So you bounce back their prying. Here at home, of course, there would be no need.…

But you don't understand
, protested Blaine.
It doesn't protect us. It attracts attention to us. It almost got us killed
.

There is no such thing
, the alien told Blaine, gruffly.
There is no such thing as killed. There is no such thing as death. It is such a horrid waste. Although I may be wrong. It seems to me that there was a planet, very long ago …

One could almost hear him riffling through the dry filing cases of his cluttered memory.

Yes
, he said,
there was a planet. There were several planets. And it was a shame. I cannot understand it. It makes no sense at all
.

I can assure you
, Blaine told him,
that on my planet there is death for everything. For every single thing
.…

For everything?

Well, I can't be sure. Perhaps
…

You see
, the creature said.
Even on your planet it is not universal
.

I do not know
, said Blaine.
It seems to me that I remember there are deathless things
.

Normal things, you mean
.

Death has a purpose
, Blaine persisted.
It is a process, a function that has made the development of species and the differentiation of species possible on my planet. It averts the dead end. It is an eraser that wipes out mistakes, that provides for new beginnings
.