He released the grip he had upon the star machine and ran his hand against the glasslike smoothness of its metal structure.
There was a way—if he could only do it. He had the knowledge now, but did he have die technique?
Time, the Pinkness had told him—time is the simplest thing there is. But still, Blaine told himself, not as easily handled as the creature had made out.
He stood there thinking and the thing that he must do became very clear indeed.
The past was a worthless path to follow, for the. machine was in the past already. It had left a long and nebulous trail clear across the past.
But the future was a different matter. If it could be moved into the future, this present moment and all succeeding present moments would then become its past and all that would remain would be the ghostly track of it—and a laughter and a mocking and a thing of magic which would make no proper subject for a rabble-rousing sermon by a man named Lambert Finn.
And more than that, thought Blaine, it would more than likely, scare the hell right out of him.
He reached out with his mind to encircle the machine and it was no use. His mind would open up and reach, but there was a lack of stretch in it and he could not take in all of the machine. So lie rested and then he tried again.
There was a strangeness and an alienness in the shed he had not noticed and there was an unknown menace in the scraping of the weeds outside the broken window and the air held a sharpness and a tang that raised bristles on his neck. It was most confusing, for suddenly it seemed that he had lost all rapport with this world in which he found himself and that nothing, not the earth he stood on nor the air he breathed or even the body that he wore was anything he’d ever known before and there was a horror in this lack of familiarity, in this shift from the known which he no longer could remember into this unknown for which he had no focal points. But it would be all right, it all would come aright if he could move this strange artifact he held within his mind, for it had been for this purpose that he had been called forth from the darkness and the warmness and the snug security and if he got the job done he could go back again, back to his memories of other days and his slow assimilation of new data and the miser-satisfaction of counting up the new facts, one by one, as he piled them in neat stacks.
The artifact, for all its strangeness, was an easy thing to handle. Its roots did not run back too far and the coordinates were falling very satisfactorily into place and he almost had it made. But he must not hurry despite his screaming need to hurry; he must somewhere snare some patience. So lie waited for the coordinates to go clicking into place and he made exact and unhurried measurement of the temporal strain and he gave the thing a twitch at just the right degree of twist and it was exactly where he had wanted it.
Then he dived back home again, back into the dark and warmness and Blaine stood shorn of all but his human self in a place of foggy nothingness.
There was nothing there—nothing but himself and the star machine. He reached out his hand and touched the star machine and it was very solid. It was, so far as lie could see, the only solid thing there was.
For the fog itself, if fog were what it was, had an unreal quality, as if it were striving to camouflage its very fact of being.
Blaine stood quietly, afraid to move—afraid that any movement might plunge him into some pit of black foreverness.
For this, he realized, was the future. It was a place without a single feature of the space-time matrix that he knew. It was a place where nothing yet had happened—an utter emptiness. There was neither light nor dark; there was nothing here but emptiness. There had never been anything in this place, nor was anything ever intended to occupy this place—until this very moment when he and his machine had been thrust upon it, intruders who had overstepped their time.
He let his breath out slowly and breathed in again—and there was nothing to breathe in!
Blackness rushed in upon him and the throbbing of his heart beat loud within his head and he reached out desperately to grab at something—at anything—in this place where there was not a thing to grab.
Even as he did, the alienness came back, a startled, frightened alienness, and a hodge-podge of queer symbolic figures, which even in his agony of mind, he took to be some outre mathematics, went flooding through his brain.
There was air again to breathe and there was solid floor beneath his feet and he smelled the mustiness of the inside of the deserted highway shed.
He was back home again and so was the alienness, for it was gone from him. Back, he told himself, to the darkness and the warmth inside his very brain.
He stood erect and mentally checked himself and he was all right. He opened his eyes slowly, for they somehow had been closed, and there was only darkness until he remembered the flashlight still clutched in his hand. And yet not as dark as it had been before. Now light from a newly-risen moon poured through the broken window.
He lifted the flashlight and shoved the contact button and the light sprang out and the machine was there before him, but strange and unsubstantial—the ghost of a machine, the trail that it had left behind it when it had moved into the future.
He lifted his free arm and used his jacket sleeve to wipe his forehead dry. For it was over now. He had done what he had come to do. He’d struck the blow for Stone; he’d stopped Finn in his tracks.
There was here no object lesson; there was no longer any text for Finn to preach upon. There was, instead, a mocking jeer from the very magic that Finn had fought for years.
Behind him he sensed a movement and he swung around so hurriedly that his fingers loosened on the flashlight and it fell upon the floor and rolled.
Out of the darkness, a voice spoke.
“Shep,” it said, with full heartiness, “that was very neatly done.”
Blaine froze and hopelessness flooded in.
For this was the end, he knew. He had come as far as he was going to. He had finally run his race.
He knew that hearty voice. He never could forget it.
The man standing in the darkness of the shed was his old friend, Kirby Rand!
XXIV
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. Some day 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 paint brushes 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 of 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.
But he was disturbed even as he thought about it. For while that would be the smart course, it would not be Harriet’s course. She would be more likely to stick around to help; it would be even like her to come barging blindly in to see what she could do.
“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 of theirs. And all along you knew, the 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 die 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 Jo. 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, 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. Ir 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. “We 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 die 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 hadn’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 Finns crusade go rolling ahead to its inevitable conclusion.
The Complete Serials Page 75
