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

road.
    Harriet sat waiting in the car, and he walked around it and opened the door. He slid into the seat.
    Weariness hit him, a terrible, bone-aching weariness, as if he had been runnings, as if he’d run too far. He sank into the seat and looked at his hands lying in his lap and saw that they were trembling.
    Harriet turned to look at him. “It didn’t take you long,” she said.
    â€œI got a break,” said Blaine. “I hurried.”
    She put the car in gear and it floated up the road, its airjets thrumming and the canyon walls picking up the thrumming to fling it back and forth.
    â€œI hope,” said Blaine, “you know where you are going. The road ends up here a ways.”
    â€œDon’t worry, Shep. I know.”
    He was too tired to argue. He was all beaten out.
    And he had a right to be, he told himself, for he had been moving ten times (or a hundred times?) faster than he should, than the human body ever had been intended to. He had been using energy at a terrific rate—his heart had beat the faster, his lungs had worked the harder, and his muscles had gone sliding back and forth at an astounding rate.
    He lay quietly, his mind agape at what had happened, and wondering, too, what had made it happen. Although the wonder was a formalized and an academic wonder, for he knew what it was.
    The Pinkness had faded out of him, and he went hunting it and found it, snug inside its den.
    Thanks , he said to it.
    Although it seemed a little funny that he should be thanking it, for it was a part of him—it was inside his skull, it sheltered in his brain. And yet not a part of him, not yet a part of him. But a skulker no longer, a fugitive no more.
    The car went fleeing up the canyon, and the air was fresh and cool, as if it had been new-washed in some clear mountain stream, and the smell of pine came down between the walls like the smell of a faint and delicate perfume.
    Perhaps, he told himself, it had been with no thought of helping him that the thing inside his brain had acted as it did. Rather it might have been an almost automatic reflex action for the preservation of itself. But no matter what it was, it had saved him as surely as itself. For the two of them were one. No longer could either of them act independently of the other. They were bound together by the legerdemain of that sprawling Pinkness on that other planet, by the double of the thing that had come to live with him—for the thing within his mind was a shadow of its other self five thousand light years distant.
    â€œHave trouble?” Harriet asked.
    â€œI met up with Freddy.”
    â€œFreddy Bates, you mean.”
    â€œHe’s the one and only Freddy.”
    â€œThe little nincompoop.”
    â€œYour little nincompoop,” said Blaine, “was packing a gun and he had blood within his eyes.”
    â€œYou don’t mean—”
    â€œHarriet,” said Blaine, “this is liable to get rough. Why don’t you let me out—”
    â€œNot on your life,” said Harriet. “I’ve never had so much fun in all my life.”
    â€œYou aren’t going anywhere. You haven’t much road left.”
    â€œShep, you may not think it to look at me, but I’m the intellectual type. I do a lot of reading and I like history best of all. Bloody battle history. Especially if there are a lot of campaign maps to follow.”
    â€œSo?”
    â€œSo I’ve found out one thing. It is always a good idea to have a line of retreat laid out.”
    â€œBut not up this road.”
    â€œUp this road,” she said.
    He turned his head and watched her profile and she didn’t look the part—not the hard-boiled newspaper gal that she really was. No chatter column writer nor a sob sister nor a society hen, but one of the dozen or so top-notch reporters spelling out the big picture of Fishhook for one of the biggest newspapers in North America.
    And yet as chic, he