Read Online Time Is the Simplest Thing by Clifford D. Simak - Free Book Online Page B

fronts, chewing tobacco and spitting out onto the sidewalks, creating little pools of sticky amber liquid which looked like old bloodstains. They sat there languidly and chewed and occasionally talked among themselves, not looking at the courthouse, looking nowhere in particular, but being very nonchalant about their deadly loafing.
    But they were watching the courthouse, Blaine knew. They were watching him—the man with the mirror in his mind. The mind, Old Sara told the sheriff, that bounces back at you.
    And that had been what Kirby Rand had seen, that had been what had tipped him off and set Fishhook on the trail. Which meant that Rand, if he were not a peeper, then certainly was a spotter. Although, Blaine thought, it didn’t really matter whether Rand was a peeper or a spotter, for a peeper would have little luck in reading a mind that bounced right back at you.
    And that meant, Blaine realized, that he carried in his mind the equivalent of a flashing warning light for anyone with the ability to see. There’d be nowhere he’d be safe. There’d be no place he could hide. He’d ring a loud and angry bell for any peeper or any spotter or any hounder that came within his range.
    He’d not been that way before. He was quite certain of it. Someone would have mentioned it or it would have been on his psych report.
    You , he said to the hider in his mind, come out of there!
    It wagged its tail. It wriggled like a happy dog. It did not come out.
    Blaine went back to the bunk and sat down on the edge of it.
    Harriet would be back with some sort of help. Or maybe the sheriff would let him go before then, as soon as it was safe. Although the sheriff didn’t have to, for the sheriff had good grounds to hold him—the possession of the gun.
    Buster , he said to his boon companion, it may be up to you again. We may need another trick .
    For the thing inside his mind had come up with a trick before—a very trick in time. Or metabolism? There was no way of knowing which, whether he had moved faster than was customary or whether time had been slowed down for everyone but him.
    And when he got away, what then?
    Up to South Dakota, as Harriet had said?
    He might as well, he told himself, for he had no other plans. There had been no time in which he could make any plans. It had been a bare, bald matter of getting out of Fishhook’s clutches. Years ago, he told himself, he should have laid his plans, but it had seemed a far thing then. It had seemed a circumstance that could never happen to him. So here he was, stuck inside a jail cell in a little town of which he did not even know the name, with no more than fifteen dollars and that locked in the sheriff’s desk.
    He sat and listened to a gasoline car come stuttering down the street, and somewhere a bird was chirping. And he was in a jam, he admitted to himself—he was in an awful jam.
    The men were waiting out there, sitting on the steps, trying very hard not to seem to watch the courthouse, and he did not like the looks of it.
    The door in the sheriff’s office opened and banged again, and there was the sound of feet moving on the floor. Voices came indistinctly, and Blaine didn’t try to listen. What was the use of listening? What was the use of anything?
    Then the sheriff’s deliberate tread moved across the office and out into the corridor. Blaine looked up as the sheriff stopped just outside his cell.
    â€œBlaine,” the sheriff said, “the Father’s here to see you.”
    â€œWhat father?”
    â€œThe priest, you heathen. The pastor of this parish.”
    â€œI can’t understand,” said Blaine, “why he’d be interested.”
    â€œYou’re a human being, aren’t you?” said the sheriff. “You have got a soul.”
    â€œI will not deny it.”
    The sheriff regarded him with a stern and puzzled look. “Why didn’t you tell me that you were from