Time is the Simplest Thing

TWENTY-FOUR

Rand was a blacker blob in the darkness as he stepped forward and picked the flashlight off the floor. He pivoted to turn the light full upon the star machine and in the flood of brightness tiny little dust motes could be seen dancing in the heart of the machine.

“Yes,” said Rand, “very neatly done. I don’t know how you did it and I don’t know why you did it, but you most certainly have taken care of it.”

He turned the flashlight off and for a moment they stood silent in the darkness, relieved by the streaks of moonlight that came through the windows.

Then Rand said: “I suppose you know that Fishhook owes you a vote of thanks for this.”

“Come off of it,” Blaine told him, roughly. “You know very well it was not done for Fishhook.”

“Nevertheless,” said Kirby, “it happens that in this particular area our interests coincide. We could not let this machine stay lost. We could not allow it to remain in improper hands. You understand, of course.”

“Perfectly,” said Blaine.

Rand sighed. “I had expected trouble and if there is anything Fishhook doesn’t want, it’s trouble. Particularly when that trouble is out in the hinterlands.”

“There’s not been any trouble,” Blaine told him, “that needs to worry Fishhook.”

“I am glad to hear it. And you, Shep? How are you getting on?”

“Not too badly, Kirby.”

“That is nice,” said Kirby. “That is very nice. It makes me feel so good. And now, I would imagine, we should get out of here.”

He led the way across the floor back to the broken window and stood aside.

“You first,” he said to Blaine, “and I’ll be right behind you. I would ask, as one friend to another, that you not try to run away.”

“No need to fear,” Blaine told him dryly, then climbed quickly through the window.

He could run, of course, he told himself, but that would be extremely foolish, for there was no doubt Rand would have a gun and he would be quite efficient with it, even in the moonlight. And more than that, if there were any shooting, Harriet might come running to be of what help she could and if she got involved in this, then he’d be truly friendless. Otherwise, he told himself, almost prayerfully, Harriet would stay hidden in the willow clump. She would see what happened and in just a little while she’d have an angle figured out.

Harriet was, he told himself, the only hope he had.

He dropped out of the window and stood to one side for Rand to clamber through.

Rand hit the ground and turned toward him, just a bit too quickly, too much like a hunter, then he relaxed and chuckled.

“It was a slick trick, Shep,” he said. “Efficiently engineered. Someday you’ll have to tell me exactly how you did it. To steal a star machine is not an easy thing.”

Blaine gulped down his astonishment, and hoped the moonlight hid the look he knew must be upon his face.

Rand reached out a hand and took him companionably by the elbow.

“The car’s down here,” he said. “Right down by the road.”

They walked together across the patch of rustling weeds, and the land lay different now, no longer dark and fearsome, but a place of painted magic stretched out in the moonlight. To their right lay the town, a mass of darkened houses that looked more like mounds than houses, with the faint tracery of nude trees standing up like ragged paintbrushes reared against the eastern sky. To the west and north lay the silver prairie land, flat and featureless and made immense by its very lack of features.

And just down the road was the clump of willows.

Blaine shot a quick glance at the clump and there were only willows. There was no glint of moonlight bouncing off metal. He walked a pace or two, then took another look and this time, he knew, there could be no mistake. There was no car in that clump of willows. Harriet was gone.

Good girl, he thought. She had a lot of sense. She’d probably gotten out of there as soon as Rand showed up. She’d figure, more than likely, that the one way she’d be most valuable would be to make a getaway against another day.

“I don’t suppose,” said Rand, “that you have a place to stay.”

“No,” said Blaine, “I haven’t.”

“Bad town,” Rand told him. “They take this witchcraft-werewolf business seriously indeed. Cops stopped me twice. Warned me under cover. Told me very sternly it was for my own protection.”

“They’re all wrought up,” said Blaine. “Lambert Finn is here.”

“Oh, yes,” Rand said carelessly. “An old friend of ours.”

“Not of mine. I never met the man.”

“A charming soul,” said Rand. “A very charming one.”

Blaine said: “I know very little of him. Just what I have heard.”

Rand grunted.

“I would suggest,” he said, “that you spend the night at the Post. The factor will be able to find some place to bed you down. I wouldn’t be surprised if he could dig up a bottle, too. I suddenly feel the need of a monstrous slug of booze.”

“I could stand one myself,” Blaine told him.

For there was no sense of fighting now, no more sense than running. You went along with them and waited for your chance. They tried to throw you off your balance and you tried to throw them off theirs. And all along you knew, both of you might know, that it was a most polite but very deadly game.

Although he wondered why he bothered. After the last few weeks, he told himself, Fishhook would seem an engaging place. Even if they sent him to the detention resort in Baja California, it would be better than the prospect he faced in this Missouri river town.

They reached the car that sat beside the road, and Blaine waited for Rand to get underneath the wheel, then crawled in himself.

Rand started the engine but did not switch on the lights. He pulled the machine out into the roadway and went drifting down it.

“The police can’t really do much more,” he said, “than run you under cover, but there seems to me no point in getting tangled up with them if you can avoid it.”

“None at all,” said Blaine.

Rand avoided the center of the town, went sneaking down the side streets. Finally he cut back and went sliding up an alley, swung into a parking lot and stopped.

“Here we are,” he said. “Let’s go get that drink.”

The back door opened to his knock and they walked into the back room of the Trading Post. Most of the place, Blaine saw, was used as storage space, but one corner of it served as a living room. There was a bed and stove and table. There was a massive stone fireplace with a wood fire burning in it and comfortable chairs ranged in front of it.

Up near the door that went into the front part of the store stood a massive boxlike structure, and Blaine, although he’d never seen one, recognized it immediately as a transo — the matter transference machine which made the vast network of Trading Posts stretched around the globe an economic possibility. Through that box could come, with a moment’s notice, any of the merchandise for which any of the thousands of retail outlets might find itself in need.

This was the machine that Dalton had talked about that night at Charline’s party — the machine which he had said could wipe out the world’s transportation interests if Fishhook ever chose to put it in public use.

Rand waved a hand at one of the chairs. “Make yourself comfortable,” he said to Blaine. “Grant will rustle up a bottle. You have one, don’t you, Grant?”

The factor grinned. “You know I do. How else could I live in a place like this?”

Blaine sat down in one of the chairs before the fire, and Rand took one facing him. He rubbed his hands together.

“We parted over a bottle,” he reminded Blaine. “I’d say it was only fitting to renew our acquaintance over one.”

Blaine felt a tenseness growing in him, the sense of being trapped, but he grinned at Rand.

“You know the margin that I had that night?” he asked. “Eight lousy little minutes. That was all I had.”

“You miscalculated, Shep. You had exactly twelve. The boys were a little slow in getting out the tape.”

“And Freddy. Who’d ever thought that Freddy worked for you?”

“You’d be surprised,” Rand told him blandly, “at some of the people I have working for me.”

They sat easily before the blazing fire of apple wood, measuring one another.

Finally Rand said: “Why don’t you tell me, Shep? I haven’t all the answers. I can’t get it figured out. You ran into that situation out beyond the Pleiades and you got it buttoned up. . . .”

“Buttoned up?”

“Sure. Buttoned up. Exclusive. We knew that you had something and we sent some others out there and your creature sits and stares at them and that is all it does. They try to talk with it and it’s absolutely dumb. It pretends it doesn’t hear them. It makes out not to understand. . . .”

“Brotherhood,” said Blaine. “We went through the rites. You wouldn’t understand.”

“I think I do,” said Rand. “How alien are you, Shep?”

“Try me out and see.”

Rand shuddered. “No, thanks. You see, I’ve followed up your trail. It began with Freddy and got weirder as it went along.”

“And what do you intend to do about it?”

“Damned if I know,” said Rand.

The factor brought a bottle and two glasses.

“None for yourself?” asked Rand.

Grant shook his head. “I’ve got some stock arranging up front. If you don’t mind . . .”

“Of course not,” Rand told him. “Go on with your work. One thing . . .”

“What, sir?”

“I wonder if Mr. Blaine could spend the night here.”

“Certainly. Although it’s pretty crude.”

“I don’t mind,” said Blaine.”

“I’d offer you my bed, sir, but frankly it’s no bargain. Once you get used to it, you can live with it, but to start out with—”

“I wouldn’t think of taking it.”

“I could get some blankets and you could bed down on the floor. Believe me, it would be better than the bed.”

“Anything,” said Blaine. “I’ll be thankful for anything at all.”

Rand picked up the bottle and uncorked it.

“I’ll bring out the blankets in a little while,” the factor told them.

“Thank you, Grant,” said Rand.

The man left. The door that led into the front part of the store sighed softly shut behind him.

Rand poured out the liquor.

“Actually,” he said, “unless you want to, you don’t have to stay here.”

“No?”

“I’m going back to Fishhook. Through the transo. You could come along.”

Blaine was silent. Rand handed him the drink.

“Well, what do you say?” he asked.

Blaine laughed. “You’re making it too easy.”

“Perhaps I am,” said Rand.

He took a drink and settled back into the chair.

“The alien part I can understand,” he said. “That is an occupational hazard faced by every traveler. But how does the star machine tie up? You were in cahoots with Stone, of course.”

“You know that Stone is dead.”

“No, I haven’t heard that.” But he was unconvincing.

And suddenly, from the quality of Rand’s voice, from some intuition, Blaine knew that Rand did not care that Stone was dead or that Finn might be in town. It was all one with him. Or it might be even more than that. It might be that Rand was quite satisfied to know that Stone was dead, that he might approve in good part with what Finn was doing. For Fishhook’s monopoly rested upon a nonparry world, upon all the millions of people in the world being forced to look to Fishhook for the commerce with the stars. And so Fishhook and Rand, Blaine realized with something of a shock, might even be quite willing to see Finn’s crusade go rolling ahead to its inevitable conclusion.

And if that was true, could it have been Fishhook instead of Finn which had struck the lethal blow at Stone?

He recoiled at the thought, but it clung inside his brain — for the situation was revealing itself as more than just a simple struggle between Finn and Stone.

It might be best, he told himself, to disclaim immediately any connection whatsoever with the star machine. Perhaps he should have made the disclaimer back there at the shed when Rand first had mentioned it. But if he told the truth, if he told Rand now that he had not known of the star machine until just hours ago, he conceivably might lose a bargaining point of uncertain value. And even if he told him, Rand more than likely would refuse to believe him, for he, after all, had helped Riley nurse the truck which had carried it almost all the way from Mexico.

“It took you plenty long,” said Blaine, “to catch up with me. Are you, maybe, losing your grip? Or were you just amused?”

Rand frowned. “We almost lost you, Shep. We had you pegged in that town where they were about to hang you.”

“You were even there that night?”

“Well, not personally,” said Rand, “but I had some men there.”

“And you were about to let me hang?”

“Well, I tell you honestly, we were of divided mind. But you took the decision right out of our hands.”

“But if not . . .”

“I think most likely we would have let you hang. There was the possibility, of course, that if we grabbed you off, you could have led us to the star machine. But we were fairly confident, at that point, we could spot it for ourselves.”

He crashed his glass down on the table. “Of all the crazy things!” he yelled. “Hauling a machine like that in the rattletrap you used. Whatever—”

“Simple,” said Blaine, answering for Stone. “And you know the answer just as well as I do. No one would be that crazy. If you had stolen something very valuable, you’d get it as far away and as fast as possible. . . .”

“Anybody would,” said Rand.

He saw Blaine grinning at him and grinned back.

“Shep,” he said, “come clean with me. We were good friends once. Maybe, for all I know, we’re still the best of friends.”

“What do you want to know?”

“You took that machine someplace just now.”

Blaine nodded.

“And you can get it back again.”

“No,” Blaine told him. “I’m pretty sure I can’t. I was — well, just sort of playing a joke on someone.”

“On me, perhaps?”

“Not you. On Lambert Finn.”

“You don’t like Finn, do you?”

“I’ve never met the man.”

Rand picked up the bottle and filled the glasses once again. He drank half of the liquor in his glass and then stood up.

“I have to leave,” he said, looking at his watch. “One of Charline’s parties. Wouldn’t miss it for the world. You’re sure that you won’t come? Charline would be glad to have you.”

“No, thanks. I’ll stay right here. Give Freddy my regards.”

“Freddy,” said Rand, “isn’t with us any more.”

Blaine got up and walked with Rand over to the transo. Rand opened the door. The inside of it looked something like a freight elevator.

“Too bad,” said Rand, “we can’t use these out in space. It would free a lot of manpower.”

“I suppose,” Blaine said, “that you are working on it.”

“Oh, certainly,” Rand told him. “It’s just a matter of refining the controls.”

He held out his hand. “So long, Shep. I’ll be seeing you.”

“Good-by, Kirby,” said Blaine. “Not if I can help it.”

Rand grinned and stepped into the machine and closed the door. There was no flashing light — nothing to show the machine had operated.

And yet by now, Blaine knew, Kirby Rand was back in Fishhook.

He turned from the transo and started back for the chair beside the fire.

The door from the store up front swung open, and Grant came into the room. He had a striped robe folded on his arm.

“I’ve got just the thing,” he announced. “I had forgotten that I had it.”

He lifted the robe off his arm and shook it out.

“Isn’t it a beauty?” he demanded.

It was all of that. It was a fur of some sort and there was something about the fur itself that made it glitter in the firelight, as if someone had dusted it with tiny diamond fragments. It was a golden yellow with black stripes that ran diagonally and it had the look of silk rather than of fur.

“It’s been around for years,” said Grant. “There was this man camping on the river and he came in and ordered it. Fishhook had a bit of trouble locating one immediately, but they finally delivered. As you know, sir, they always do.”

“Yes, I know,” said Blaine.

“Then the man never did show up. But the fur was so beautiful I could never send it back. I kept it on inventory, pretending that someday I’d have a chance to sell it. I never will, of course. It costs too much money for a one-horse town like this.”

“What is it?”

“The warmest, lightest, softest fur in the universe. Campers carry it. Better than a sleeping bag.”

“I couldn’t use it,” protested Blaine. “Just an ordinary blanket—”

“But you must,” Grant told him. “As a favor to me, sir. My accommodations are so poor, I feel deeply shamed. But if I knew you were sleeping in a luxury item . . .”

Blaine laughed and held out his hand.

“All right,” he said. “And thanks.”

Grant gave him the robe, and Blaine weighed it in his hand, not quite believing it could be so light.

“I’ve still got a little work,” the factor told him. “If you don’t mind, I’ll go back and finish it. You can bed down anywhere.”

“Go ahead,” said Blaine. “I’ll finish up my drink and then turn in. Would you have one with me?”

“Later on,” the factor said. “I always have a snort before I go to bed.”

“I’ll leave the bottle for you.”

“Good night, sir,” the factor said. “See you in the morning.”

Blaine went back to the chair and sat down in it, with the robe lying in his lap. He stroked it with his hand and it was so soft and warm that it gave the illusion of being still alive.

He picked up the glass and worked leisurely on the liquor and puzzled over Rand.

The man was probably the most dangerous man on earth, despite what Stone had said of Finn — the most dangerous personally, a silky, bulldog danger, a bloodhound of a man who carried out the policies of Fishhook as if they had been holy orders. No enemy of Fishhook was ever safe from Rand.

And yet he had not insisted that Blaine go back with him. He had been almost casual in his invitation, as if it had been no more than a minor social matter, and he had displayed no resentment nor no apparent disappointment upon Blaine’s refusal. Nor had he made a move toward force, although that, Blaine told himself, was more than likely due to his lack of knowledge with what he might be dealing. Along the trail, apparently, he had happened on enough to put him on his guard, to know that the man he followed had some secret abilities entirely new to Fishhook.

So he’d move slowly and cautiously, and he’d cover up with a nonchalance that fooled no one at all. For Rand, Blaine knew, was a man who would not give up.

He had something up his sleeve, Blaine knew — something so well hidden that no corner of it showed.

There was a trap all set and baited. There was no doubt of it.

Blaine sat quietly in his chair and finished off the liquor in his glass.

Perhaps it was foolish of him to remain here in the Post. Perhaps it would be better if he just got up and left. And yet that might be the very thing Rand would have figured him to do. Perhaps the trap was outside the door and not in the Post at all. It could be very likely that this room was the one safe place in all the world for him to spend the night.

He needed shelter, but he did not need the sleep. Perhaps the thing to do was stay here, but not to go to sleep. He could lie on the floor, with the robe wrapped tight about him and pretend to sleep, but keeping watch on Grant. For if there were a trap in this room, Grant was the one to spring it.

He put his glass back on the table beside the one that Rand has used, still a quarter full of liquor. He moved the bottle over to make a set piece out of the bottle and the glasses, the three of them together. He bundled the robe underneath his arm and walked over to the fire. He picked up the poker and pushed the burning logs together to revive their dying flame.

He’d bed down here, he decided, just before the fire, so that the light of it would be back of him, out into the room.

He spread the robe carefully on the floor, took off his jacket and folded it for a pillow. He kicked off his shoes and lay down on the robe. It was soft and yielding, almost like a mattress despite its lack of thickness. He pulled it over him and it fell together smoothly, like a sleeping bag. There was a comfort in it that he had not felt since those days when he had been a boy and had snuggled down into his bed, underneath the blankets, in his room on the coldest winter nights.

He lay there, staring out into the darkness of the storeroom beyond the living quarters. He could see the faint outlines of barrels and bales and boxes. And lying there in the silence, unbroken except by the occasional crackle of the fire behind him, he became aware of the faint scent which perfumed the room — the indescribable odor of things alien to the Earth. Not an offensive scent, nor exotic, not in any way startling at all, but a smell such as was not upon the Earth, the compounded smell of spice and fabric, of wood and food, of all the many other things which were gathered from the stars. And only a small stock of it here, he knew, only the staples considered necessary for one of the smaller Posts. But a Post with the entire resources of the massive Fishhook warehouses available within a moment’s notice, thanks to the transo standing in its corner.

And this was only a small part of that traffic with the stars — this was only the part that you could put your hands upon, the one small part of it that one could buy or own.

There was also that greater unseen, almost unrealized part of the Fishhook operation — the securing and collecting (and the hoarding, as well) of ideas and of knowledge snared from the depths of space. In the universities of Fishhook, scholars from all parts of the world sifted through this knowledge and sought to correlate and study it, and in some cases to apply it, and in the years to come it would be this knowledge and these ideas which would shape the course and the eventual destiny of all humanity.

But there was more to it than that. There was, first of all, the revealed knowledge and ideas, and secondly, the secret files of learning and the facts kept under lock and key or at the very best reviewed by most confidential boards and panels.

For Fishhook could not, in the name of humanity as well as its own self-interest, release everything it found.

There were certain new approaches, philosophies, ideas, call them what you might, which, while valid in their own particular social structures, were not human in any sense whatever, nor by any stretch of imagination adaptable to the human race and the human sense of value. And there were those others which, while applicable, must be studied closely for possible side effects on human thinking and the human viewpoint before they could be introduced, no matter how obliquely, into the human cultural pattern. And there still were others, wholly applicable, which could not be released for perhaps another hundred years — ideas so far ahead, so revolutionary that they must wait for the human race to catch up with them.

And in this must have lain something of what Stone had been thinking when he had started his crusade to break the monopoly of Fishhook, to bring to the paranormal people of the world outside of Fishhook some measure of the heritage which was rightly theirs by the very virtue of their abilities.

In that Blaine could find agreement with him, for it was not right, he told himself, that all the results of PK should be forever funneled through the tight controls of a monopoly that in the course of a century of existence had somehow lost the fervor of its belief and its strength of human purpose in a welter of commercialism such as no human being, nor any age, had ever known before.

By every rule of decency, parakinetics belonged to Man himself, not to a band of men, not to a corporation, not even to its discoverers nor the inheritors of its discoverers — for the discovery of it, or the realization of it, no matter by what term one might choose to call it, could not in any case be the work of one man or one group of men alone. It was something that must lay within the public domain. It was a truly natural phenomena — more peculiarly a natural resource than wind or wood or water.

Behind Blaine the logs, burning to the point of collapse, fell apart in a fiery crash. He turned to look at them -

Or tried to turn.

But he could not turn.

There was something wrong.

Somehow or other, the robe had become wrapped too tightly.

He pushed his hands out from his side to pull it loose, but he could not push his hands and it would not loosen.

Rather, it tightened. He could feel it tighten.

Terrified, he tried to thrust his body upward, trying to sit up.

He could not do it.

The robe held him in a gentle but unyielding grasp.

He was as effectively trussed as if he’d been tied with rope. The robe, without his knowing it, had become a strait jacket that held him close and snug.

He lay quietly on his back and while a chill went through his body, sweat poured down his forehead and ran into his eyes.

For there had been a trap.

He had been afraid of one.

He had been on guard against it.

And yet, of his own free will and unsuspecting, he had wrapped the trap about him.