Time is the Simplest Thing

NINE

The priest came into the cell and stood for a moment, blinking in the dimness.

Blaine stood and said to him: “I am glad you came. The best I can offer you is a seat here on the bunk.”

“It’s all right,” said the priest. “I thank you. I am Father Flanagan and I hope I’m not intruding.”

“Not in the least,” said Blaine. “I am glad to see you.”

Father Flanagan eased himself to a seat upon the bunk, groaning a little with the effort. He was an aged man who ran to corpulence, with a kindly face and withered hands that looked as if they might be crippled by arthritis.

“Sit down, my son,” he said. “I hope I don’t disturb you. I warn you at the outset that I’m a horrible busybody. It would come, I would suspect, from being the shepherd to a group of people who are largely children, irrespective of their years. Is there anything you would like to talk about?”

“Anything at all,” said Blaine, “except possibly religion.”

“You are not a religious man, my son?”

“Not particularly,” said Blaine. “Whenever I consider it, I tend to become confused.”

The old man shook his head. “These are ungodly days. There are many like you. It is a worry to me. To Holy Mother Church as well. We have fallen on hard times of the spirit, with many of the people more concerned with fear of evil than contemplation of the good. There is talk of werewolf and incubus and devil, and a hundred years ago all fear of such had been washed out of our minds.”

He turned his body ponderously and sat sidewise the better to face Blaine.

“The sheriff tells me,” he said, “that you come from Fishhook.”

“There is no use,” said Blaine, “of my denying it.”

“I have never talked with anyone from Fishhook,” the old priest said, mumbling just a little, as if be might be talking to himself rather than to Blaine. “I have only heard of Fishhook, and some of the stories I have heard of it are incredible and wild. There was a factor here for a time before the people burned the Post, but I never went to see him. The people would not have understood.”

“From what happened here this morning,” Blaine agreed, “I rather doubt they would have.”

“They say you are a paranormal. . . .”

“Parry is the word,” Blaine told him. “No need to dress it up.”

“And you are really one?”

“Father, I am at a loss to understand your interest.”

“Just academic,” said Father Flanagan. “I can assure you, purely academic. Something that is of interest to me personally. You are as safe with me as if you were in confessional.”

“There was a day,” said Blaine, “when science was deeply suspect as the hidden foes of all religious truth. We have the same thing here.”

“But the people,” said Father Flanagan, “are afraid again. They close and bar their doors. They do not go out of night. They have hex signs — hex signs, mind you, instead of the blessed crucifix — hanging on their gates and the gables of their houses. They whisper of things which have been dead and dust since the Middle Ages. They tremble in the smoky chimney corners of their minds. They have lost much of their ancient faith. They go through all the rituals, of course, but I see it in their faces, I sense it in their talk, I glimpse it in their minds. They have lost the simple art of faith.”

“No, Father, I don’t think they have. They’re just very troubled people.”

“The entire world is troubled,” said Father Flanagan.

And that was right, Blaine told himself — the entire world was troubled. For it had lost a cultural hero and had not been able to acquire another for all that it had tried. It had lost an anchor which had held it against the winds of illogic and unreason and it was now adrift upon an ocean for which there was no chart.

At one time science had served as the cultural hero. It had logic and reason and an ultimate precision that probed down into the atom and out to the farther edge of space. It spawned gadgets by the millions for the comfort of its worshipers and it placed the hand and eye of Man upon the entire universe, by proxy. It was something you could trust in, for it was the sum of human wisdom among many other things.

But principally it was translated into machines and machine technology, for science was an abstract, but machines were something that anyone could see.

Then there came the day when Man, for all his wondrous machines, for all his famed technology, had been driven back from space, had been whipped howling from the heavens back to the den of Earth. And that day the cultural god of science had shone a bit less brightly, had died a little in the people’s minds.

And that other day, when Man had gone to the stars without the benefit of machines, the worship of technology had died for good and all. Machines and technology and science itself still existed, still were in daily use, still were of vast importance, but they no longer formed a cult.

For while Fishhook used machines, they were not machines as such — not machines that could be accepted by the common mass of mankind. For they had no pistons and no wheels, no gears, no shafts, no levers, not a single button — they had nothing of the component parts of a commonplace machine. They were strange and alien and they had no common touch.

So Man had lost his cultural hero and since his nature was so fashioned that he must have some abstract hero-worship, because he must always have an ideal and a goal, a vacuum was created that screamed aloud for filling.

Paranormal kinetics, for all its strangeness, for all its alien concept, filled the bill exactly. For here, finally, were all the crackpot cults completely justified; here, at last, was the promise of ultimate wish-fulfillment; here was something exotic enough, or that could be made exotic, to satisfy the depth of human emotion such as a mere machine never had been able.

Here, so help us God, was magic!

So the world went off on a magic jag.

The pendulum had swung too far, as always, and now was swinging back, and the horror of intolerance had been loosed upon the land.

So Man once again was without a cultural hero, but had acquired instead a neosuperstition that went howling through the dark of a second Middle Ages.

“I have puzzled much upon the matter,” said Father Flanagan. “It is something which naturally must concern even so unworthy a servant of the Church as I. For whatever may concern the souls and the minds of men is of interest to the Church and to the Holy Father. It has been the historic position of Rome that we must so concern ourselves.”

Blaine bowed slightly in recognition of the sincerity of the man, but there was a fleck of bitterness in his voice when he answered: “So you’ve come to study me. You are here to question me.”

There was sadness in the old priest’s voice. “I prayed you would not see it in this light. I have failed, I see. I came to you as to someone who could help me and, through me, the Church. For, my son, the Church at times needs help. It is not too proud to say so, for all that it has been charged, through all its history, with excessive pride. You are a man, an intelligent man, who is a part of this thing which serves to puzzle us. I thought that you might help me.”

Blaine sat silent, and the priest sat looking at him, a humble man who sought a favor, and yet with a sense of inner strength one could not help but feel.

“I would not mind,” said Blaine. “Not that I think for a moment it would do any good. You’re a part of what is in this town.”

“Not so, my son. We neither sanction nor condemn. We do not have facts enough.”

“I’ll tell you about myself,” said Blaine, “if that is what you want to know. I am a traveler. My job is to go out to the stars. I climb into a machine — well, not exactly a machine, rather it’s a symbolic contrivance that helps me free my mind, that possibly even gives my mind a kick in the right direction. And it helps with the navigation — Look, Father, this is hard to say in simple, common terms. It sounds like gibberish.”

“I am following you with no difficulty.”

“Well, this navigation. That’s another funny thing. There are factors involved that there is no way to put one’s tongue to them. In science it would be mathematics, but it’s not actually mathematics. It’s a way of getting there, of knowing where you’re going.”

“Magic?”

“Hell, no — pardon me, Father. No, it isn’t magic. Once you understand it, once you get the feel of it, it is clear and simple and it becomes a part of you. It is as natural as breathing and as easy as falling off a log. I would imagine—”

“I would think,” said Father Flanagan, “that it is unnecessary to go into the mechanics of it. Could you tell me how it feels to be on another star?”

“Why,” Blaine told him, “no different than sitting here with you. At first — the first few times, that is — you feel obscenely naked, with just your mind and not your body. . . .”

“And your mind wanders all about?”

“Well, no. It could, of course, but it doesn’t. Usually you stuff yourself inside the machine you took along with you.”

“Machine?”

“A monitoring contraption. It picks up all the data, gets it down on tape. You get the entire picture. Not just what you see yourself — although it’s not actually seeing; it’s sensing — but you get it all, everything that can possibly be caught. In theory, and largely in practice, the machine picks up the data, and the mind is there for interpretation only.”

“And what do you see?”

Blaine laughed. “Father, that would take longer than either of us have.”

“Nothing like on Earth?”

“Not often, for there are not too many Earth-like planets. Proportionately, that is. There are, in fact, quite a lot in number. But we’re not limited to Earth-like planets. We can go anywhere it is possible for the machine to function, and the way those machines are engineered, that means almost anywhere. . . .”

“Even to the heart of another sun?”

“Not the machine. It would be destroyed. I imagine that the mind could. But it’s not been done. So far as I know, that is.”

“And your feelings? What do you think?”

“I observe,” said Blaine. “That is what I go for.”

“You do not get the feeling that you’re lord of all creation? You do not have the thought that Man holds all the universe in the hollow of his hand?”

“If it’s the sin of pride and vanity you’re thinking of, no, never. You sometimes get a thrill at knowing where you are. You’re often filled with wonder, but more often you are puzzled. You are reminded, again and yet again, of how insignificant you are. And there are times when you forget that you are human. You’re just a blob of life — brother to everything that ever existed or ever will exist.”

“And you think of God?”

“No,” said Blaine. “I can’t say I ever do.”

“That is too bad,” said Father Flanagan. “It is rather frightening. To be out there alone. . . .”

“Father, at the very start I made it plain to you that I was not inclined to be a religious sort of man — not in the accepted sense, that is. And I played square with you.”

“So you did,” said Father Flanagan.

“And if your next question is going to be: Could a religious man go out to the stars and still retain his faith; could he go out and come back full of faith; would traveling to the stars take away something of the true belief he held? Then I’d have to ask you to define your terms.”

“My terms?” asked Father Flanagan, amazed.

“Yes, faith, for one thing. What do you mean by faith? Is faith enough for Man? Should he be satisfied with faith alone? Is there no way of finding out the truth? Is the attitude of faith, of believing in something for which there can be no more than philosophic proof, the true mark of a Christian? Or should the Church long since—”

Father Flanagan raised a hand. “My son!” he said. “My son!”

“Forget it, Father. I should not have said it.”

They sat for a moment, regarding one another; neither understanding. As if we were two aliens, thought Blaine. With viewpoints that did not come within a million miles of coinciding, and yet they both were men.

“I am truly sorry, Father.”

“No need to be. You said it. There are others who believe it, or think it, but would never say it. You at least are honest.”

He reached out and patted Blaine slowly on the arm.

“You are a telepath?” he asked.

“And a teleporter. But limited. Very limited.”

“And that is all?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never dug around.”

“You mean you may have other abilities you are not aware of?”

“Look, Father, in PK you have a certain mental capacity. First, you are the simple things, the easy things — the telepath, the teleport, the huncher. You go on from there — or there are some who do. You grow. Some stop growing after a time and others keep on growing. Each of these abilities is not a separate ability; the abilities themselves are simply manifestations of a wholeness of the mind. They are, lumped together, the mind working as it always should have worked, even from the very first, if it had had its chance.”

“And it is not evil?”

“Certainly. Wrongly used, it’s evil. And it was wrongly used by a lot of people, a lot of amateurs who never took the time to understand or to analyze the power they had. But Man has misused his hands, as well. He killed, he stole—”

“And you are not a warlock?”

Blaine wanted to laugh — the laugh was rising in him — but he could not laugh. There was too much terror for a man to laugh.

“No, Father, I swear to you. I am not a warlock. Nor a werewolf. Nor a—”

The old man raised his hand and stopped him.

“Now, we’re even,” he declared. “I, too, said something I should not have said.”

He rose stiffly from the bunk and held out his hand, the fingers twisted by arthritis or whatever it was that might be wrong with them.

“Thank you,” he said. “God help you.”

“And you’ll be here tonight?”

“Tonight?”

“When the people of this town come to take me out and hang me? Or do they burn them at the stake?”

The old man’s face twisted in revulsion. “You must not think such things. Surely not in this—”

“They burned down the Trading Post. They would have killed the factor.”

“That was wrong,” said Father Flanagan. “I told them that it was. For I am certain members of my parish participated. Not that they were alone in it, for there were many others. But they should have known better. I have worked for years among them against this very sort of thing.”

Blaine put out his hand and grasped the hand of Father Flanagan. The crippled fingers closed with a warm, hard grip.

“The sheriff is a good man,” said the priest. “He will do his best. I will talk to some of them myself.”

“Thank you, Father.”

“My son, are you afraid to die?”

“I don’t know. I have often thought I wouldn’t be. I’ll have to wait and see.”

“You must have faith.”

“Perhaps I will. If ever I can find if. You’ll say a prayer for me?”

“God watch over you. I’ll pray away the blessed afternoon.”