Time is the Simplest Thing

THIRTY-THREE

The hotel lobby was quiet and almost empty. One man was dozing in a chair. Another read a paper. A bored clerk stood behind the desk, staring across the street and snapping his fingers absent-mindedly.

Blaine crossed the lobby and went down the short corridor toward the stairs. The elevator operator lounged beside the open cage.

“Lift, sir?” he asked.

“No bother,” Blaine told him. “It’s just one short flight.”

He turned and started up the stairs and he felt the skin tightening on his back and there was a prickling of the hairs at the base of his skull. For he might very well, he knew, be walking straight to death.

But he had to gamble.

The carpet on the tread muffled his footfalls so that he moved up the stairs in silence except for the nervous whistling of his breath.

He reached the second floor and it was the same as it had been before. Not a thing had changed. The guard still sat in the chair tilted back against the wall. And as Blaine came toward him, he tilted forward and sat spraddle-legged, waiting.

“You can’t go in now,” the guard told Blaine. “He chased everybody out. He said he’d try to sleep.”

Blaine nodded. “He had a real tough time.”

The guard said, confidentially: “I never seen a man hit quite so hard. Who do you figure done it?”

“Some more of this damn magic.”

The guard nodded sagely. “Although he wasn’t himself even before it happened. He was all right that first time you saw him, but right after that, right after you left, he was not himself.”

“I didn’t see any difference in him.”

“Like I told you, he was all right. He came back all right. An hour or so later I looked in and he was sitting in his chair, staring at the door. A funny kind of stare. As if he maybe hurt inside. And he didn’t even see me when I looked. Didn’t know that I was there until I spoke to him.”

“Maybe he was thinking.”

“Yeah, I suppose. But yesterday was awful. There was all the crowd here, come to hear him speak, and all of them reporters, and they went out to the shed where he had this star machine . . .”

“I wasn’t here,” said Blaine, “but I heard about it. It must have been quite a shock.”

“I thought he’d die right there,” said the guard. “Right there on the spot. He got purple in the face and—”

“What do you say,” suggested Blaine, “if we just look in? If he’s asleep, I’ll leave. But if he’s still awake, I’d like a quick word with him. It’s really quite important.”

“Well, I guess that would be all right. Seeing you’re his friend.”

And that, thought Blaine, was the final pay-off in this fantastic game. Finn had not breathed a word about him, for he’d not dared to breathe a word about him. Finn had let it be presumed that he was a friend, for such a presumption was a shield for Finn himself. And that was why there’d been no hunt for him. That was why Finn’s hoods had not turned Hamilton inside out in a frantic search for him.

This was the pay-off, then — unless it was a trap.

He felt his muscles tensing and he forced them to relax.

The guard was getting up and fumbling for the key.

“Hey, wait a minute there,” said Blaine. “You’d better shake me down.”

The guard grinned at him. “No need of that,” he said. “You was clean before. You and Finn went out of here arm in arm. He told me you was an old friend he hadn’t seen in years.”

He found the key and unlocked the door.

“I’ll go in first,” he said. “I’ll see if he’s asleep.”

He swung the door open quietly and moved across the threshold, Blaine following close behind.

The guard stopped so abruptly that Blaine bumped into him.

The guard was making funny noises deep inside his throat.

Blaine put out a hand and pushed him roughly to one side.

Finn was lying on the floor.

And there was about him a strange sense of alienness.

His body was twisted as if someone had taken it and twisted it beyond the natural ability of a body to contort itself. His face, resting on one cheek, was the visage of a man who had glimpsed the fires of hell and had smelled the stench of bodies that burned eternally. His black clothing had an obscene shine in the light from the lamp that stood beside a chair not far from the body. There was a wide blot of darkness in the carpeting about his head and chest. And there was the horror of a throat that had been slashed wide open.

The guard still was standing to one side of the door and the noises in his throat had changed to gagging noises.

Blaine walked close to Finn and there, beside the out-flung hand, was the instrument of death — an old-fashioned, straight-edge razor that should have been safely tucked away in a museum.

Now, Blaine knew, all hope was gone. There could be no bargain made. For Lambert Finn was beyond all bargaining.

To the very last the man had stayed in character, had remained his harsh, stern self. No easy way for him, but the toughest way of all for a man to take his life.

But even so, Blaine thought, staring in chilled horror at the red gash in the throat, there had been no need to do the job so thoroughly, to keep on slashing with the razor even as he died.

Only a man of hate would do that, a man insane with the hate of self — a man who despised and loathed what he had become.

Unclean — unclean with an alien mind inside his antiseptic skull. A thing like that would drive a man like Finn to death; a fastidious fanatic who could become obsessed with his self-conceived idea of a perfect state could not live with nor survive the disorderly enigma of an alien mind.

Blaine turned on his heel and walked out of the room. In the corridor the guard was in a corner, doubled over, retching.

“You stay here,” Blaine told him. “I’ll call the cops.”

The man turned around. His eyes were glazed with horror. He wiped feebly at his chin.

“My God,” he said, “I ask you, did you ever see a mess—”

“Sit down,” said Blaine, “and take it easy. I’ll be right back.”

Although he wouldn’t be. Now was the time to blow. He needed time and he’d get a little time. For the guard was too shaken to do anything for quite a little while.

But as soon as the news was known, all hell was bound to break.

God help the parry, Blaine thought, who is caught this night! He went swiftly down the corridor and ran down the stairs. The lobby still was empty and he set out across it briskly.

As he reached the door, it came open suddenly and someone came through it, walking briskly, too.

A purse clattered to the floor, and Blaine’s hands reached out to steady the woman who had come through the doorway.

Harriet! Get out of here! Get out!

My purse!

He stooped to scoop it up and as he lifted it, the catch came open and something black and heavy fell. His free hand snapped at it and had it and he worked it back along his palm so that it was hidden.

Harriet had turned around and was going out the door. Blaine hurried after her and caught her by the elbow, urging her along.

He reached his car and stooped to open the door. He pushed her to the seat.

But, Shep, my car is just a block —

No time. We’re getting out of here.

He ran around the car and got in. He jerked it from the curb and out into the street. Moving far more slowly than he wanted, he eased it down the block, turned at the intersection, heading for the highway.

Just ahead stood the gutted structure of the Trading Post. He had been holding the purse in his lap and now he gave it to her.

“How about the gun?” he asked.

“I was going to kill him,” she shouted. “I was going to shoot him dead.”

“No need to do that now. He is already dead.”

She turned toward him quickly.

“You!”

“Well, now, I guess that you could say so.”

“But, Shep, you know. You either killed him or you—”

“All right,” he said. “I killed him.”

And it was no lie. No matter by what hand Lambert Finn had died, he, Shepherd Blaine, had killed him.

“I had reason to,” he said. “But you?”

“He had Godfrey killed. That itself would have been enough.”

“You were in love with Godfrey.”

“Yes, I suppose I was. He was such a great guy, Shep.”

“I know how great he was. We were friends in Fishhook.”

“It hurts,” said Harriet. “Oh, Shep, how it hurts!”

“And that night . . .”

“There was no time for tears,” she said. “There’s never time for tears.”

“You knew about all this . . .”

“For a long time. It was my job to know.”

He reached the highway and turned down it, back toward Hamilton. The sun had set. Twilight had crept across the land and in the east one star was twinkling, just above the prairie.

“And now?” he asked.

“Now I have a story. As much of it as I ever can.”

“You’re going to write it. Will your paper run it?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “But I have to write it. You understand that I have to write it. I’m going to New York. . . .”

“Wrong,” he said. “You’re going to Fishhook. Not by car. From the nearest airport. . . .”

“But, Shep—”

“It’s not safe,” Blaine told her. “Not for anyone who has the faintest hint of parry. Even minor telepaths, like you.”

“I can’t do it, Shep. I—”

“Listen, Harriet. Finn had set up a Halloween outbreak by the parries, a sort of counterintelligence move. The other parries, when they learned about it, tried to stop it. They did stop part of it, but I don’t know to what extent. Whatever happens will be happening tonight. He would have used the outbreak to step up intolerance, to trigger rigid legislation. There would have been some violence, of course, but that was not, by and large, Finn’s purpose. But now, with Finn dead . . .”

Harriet drew in her breath. “They’ll wipe us out,” she said.

“They’ll do their best. But there is a way. . . .”

“Knowing this, you still killed Finn!”

“Look, Harriet, I didn’t really kill him. I went to bargain with him. I found a way to take the parries off Earth. I was going to promise to clean every parry off the Earth, clean out of his way, if he’d hold off his dogs for a week or two. . . .”

“But you said you killed him.”

“Maybe,” said Blaine, “I better fill you in. So when you come to write your story you can write it all.”