Beyond the Barriers of Space and Time

by Judith Merril (ed. )

  Wind rustled the long grass and stirred the leafless branches of trees. Ted could hear and think again, standing still and breathing in deep, shuddering breaths of air to clean his lungs. Briefly he planned what to do. He would call the sheriff and say that a hunter hunting out of season had shot at him and he had been forced to knock the man out. The sheriff would take the man away, out of thought range.

  Before he started back to telephone he looked again at the peaceful, simple scene of field and trees and sky. A memory of horror came into clarity. The hunter had been psychotic.

  Thinking back, Ted recognized parts of it, like faces glimpsed in writhing smoke. The evil symbols of psychiatry, the bloody poetry of the Golden Bough, that had been the law of mankind in the five hundred thousand lost years before history. Torture and sacrifice, lust and death, a mechanism in perfect balance, a short circuit of conditioning through a glowing channel of symbols, an irreversible and perfect integration of traumas. It is easy to go mad, but it is not easy to go sane.

  “Shut up!” Ted had been screaming inside his mind as he struck. “Shut up.”

  It had stopped. It had shut up. The symbols were fading without having found root in his mind. The sheriff would take the man away out of thought reach, and there would be no danger. It had stopped.

  The burned hand avoids the fire. Something else had stopped. Ted’s mind was queerly silent, queerly calm and empty, as he walked home across the winter fields, wondering how it had happened at all, kicking himself with humor for a suggestible fool, not yet missing—Jake.

  And Jake lay awake in his pen, waving his rattle in random motions, and crowing “glaglagla gla—” in a motor sensory cycle.

  He would be a normal baby, as Ted had been, and as Ted’s father before him.

  And as all mankind was “normal.”