Time is the Simplest Thing

Blaine brought his hands out of his pockets and rested his knuckles on the desk. He saw Fi

“Your name,” said Fi

“Including that someday I intend to kill you?”

“Including that,” said Fi

“But not tonight,” said Blaine, “because I want to see your face tomorrow. I want to see if you can take it as well as dish it out.”

“And that’s why you came to see me? That’s what you have to tell me?”

“It’s a fu

“To make a bargain, maybe?”

“I hadn’t thought of that. There’s nothing that I want that you can give me.”

“Perhaps not, Mr. Blaine, but you have something that I want. Something for which I’d pay most handsomely.”

Blaine stared at him, not answering.

“You were in on the deal with the star machine,” said Fi

Blaine chuckled at him. “You had me once,” he said. “You let me get away.”

“It was that sniveling doctor,” Fi

“You should pick your people better, Fi

Fi

“About the deal, you mean? It would come high. It would come awfully high.”

“I am prepared to pay,” said Fi

“Just an hour ago,” Blaine told him, “Fishhook had me trussed up for the kill.”

“So you got away,” Fi

“Me especially, you mean? Or just anyone? How about yourself?”

“You especially,” said Fi

“Very well,” said Blaine.

“She,” Fi

“You’re staring mad!” yelled Blaine.

“Stop and think of it,” said Fi

They stood looking at one another across the space of desk, and the silence was a live thing, a third presence in the room.

The red thought rose up inside Blaine’s brain: Why not kill him now?

For the killing would come easy. He was an easy man to hate. Not on principle alone, but personally, clear down to his guts.

All one had to do was think of the hate that rode throughout the land. All one had to do was close one’s eyes and see the slowly turning body, half masked by the leaves; the deserted camp with the propped-up quilts for shelters and the fish for di

He half lifted his hands off the table, then put them down again.

Then he did a thing quite involuntarily, without thinking of it, without a second’s pla

For he could not have done it. He could not have thought of doing it. No human being could.

Blaine said, very calmly: “I trade with you my mind.”

TWENTY-SEVEN

The moon rode high above the knobby bluffs that hemmed in the river valley, and down in the valley a dismal owl was hooting and chuckling to himself in between the hoots. The chuckling of the owl carried clearly in the sharp night air that held the hint of frost.

Blaine halted at the edge of the clump of scraggly cedars that hugged the ground like gnarled and bent old men, and stood tense and listening. But there was nothing except the chuckling of the owl and the faint sound of the stubborn leaves still clinging to a cottonwood downhill from him, and another sound so faint that one wondered if one really heard it — the remote and faery murmur which was the voice of the mighty river flowing stolidly below the face of the moonlit bluffs.

Blaine lowered himself and squatted close against the ground, huddling against the tumbled darkness of the cowering cedars and told himself again that there was no follower, that no one hunted him. Not Fishhook, for with the burning of the Post the way to Fishhook was temporarily closed. And not Lambert Fi

Blaine squatted there, remembering, without a trace of pity in him, the look that had come into Fi

“What have you done!” he’d cried in cold and stony horror. “What have you done to me!”

For he had felt the biting chill of alie

“Thing!” Blaine had told him. “You’re nothing but a thing! You’re no longer Fi

Fi

“Now I must leave,” Blaine had said to him, “and just so there’s no misunderstanding, perhaps you should come along. With an arm about my shoulder as if we were long-lost brothers. You’ll talk to me like a valued and an ancient friend, for if you fail to do this, I’ll manage to make it known exactly what you are.”

Fi

“Exactly what you are,” said Blaine again. “With all of those reporters hearing every word I say.”

That had been enough for Fi

For here was a man, thought Blaine, who could not afford to be attainted with any magic mumbo jumbo even if it worked. Here was the strait-laced, ruthless, stone-jawed reformer who thought of himself as the guardian of the moral values of the entire human race and there must be no hint of scandal, no whisper of suspicion.

So the two of them had gone down the corridor and down the stairs and across the lobby, arm in arm, and talking, with the reporters watching them as they walked along.

They’d gone down into the street, with the burning Post still red against the sky, and had walked along the sidewalk, as if they moved aside for some final word.

Then Blaine had slipped into an alley and had run, heading toward the east, toward the river bluffs.

And here he was, he thought, on the lam again, and without a single plan — just ru

He squatted listening, and the night was empty except for the river and the owl and the leaves on the cottonwood.

He came slowly to his feet and as he did there was another sound, a howling that had the sound of teeth in it, and for an instant he stood paralyzed and cold. Out of the centuries the sound struck a chord of involuntary fear — out of the caves and beyond the caves to that other day when man had lived in terror of the night.

It was a dog, he told himself, or perhaps a prairie wolf. For there were no werewolves. He knew there were no werewolves.

And yet there was an instinct he barely could fight down — the instinct to run, madly and without reason, seeking for a shelter, for any kind of shelter, against the slavering danger that loped across the moonlight.