Clifford Simak - Time is the Simplest Thing

Father Flanagan leaned forward, capping each of his knees with a crippled fist.

“It is important,” he said, “that you understand. You will listen carefully. You will not get angry. You’ll let me have my time.”

“Most certainly,” said Blaine.

“You have heard, perhaps,” said Father Flanagan, “that Holy Mother Church is inflexible and rigid, that she clings to old custom and to ancient thought, that she changes slowly if she changes at all. That the Church is stern and dogmatized and—”

“I’ve heard all that,” said Blaine.

“But it is not true. The Church is modern and it changes. If it had been opposed to change, God save us, it would not have endured in all its greatness and its glory. It is not swayed by the winds of public utterance, it can stand against the groundswell of changing human mores. But it does adapt, although it does so slowly. But that slowness is because it must be very sure.”

“Father, you can’t mean—”

“But I do. I asked you, if you will remember, if you were a warlock and you thought it very funny. . . .”

“Of course I did.”

“It was a basic question,” said Father Flanagan, “a much too simple question, purposely made simple so it could be answered with a yes or no.”

“I’ll answer once again, then. I am not a warlock.”

The old priest sighed. “You persist,” he complained, “in making the telling of what I have to tell you very difficult.”

“Go ahead,” said Blaine. “I’ll restrain myself.”

“The Church must know,” said Father Flanagan, “whether parakinetics is a true human ability or if it may be magic. One day, perhaps many years from now, it must make a ruling. It must take a stand as it historically has taken positions on all moral values through the centuries. It is no secret that a committee of theologians have had the matter under study. . . .”

“And you?” asked Blaine.

“I am only one of many who has been assigned an investigatory role. We simply gather evidence which in due time will come under the scrutiny of the theologians.”

“And I am part of your evidence.”

Father Flanagan nodded solemnly.

“There’s one thing I fall to understand,” said Blaine, “and that is why your faith should have any doubts at all. You have your miracles, completely documented. And what, I ask you, are miracles if they don’t involve PK? Somewhere in the universe human power and divine power must link. Here may be your bridge.”

“You really believe this, son?”

“I’m not a religico. . . .”

“I know you’re not. You told me you were not. But answer me: Is this what you believe?”

“I rather think it is.”

“I do not know,” said Father Flanagan, “if I can quite agree with you. The idea has the smell of heresy. But that’s neither here nor there. The point is that there’s a certain strangeness in you, a strangeness I’ve not found in any of the others.”

“I’m half alien,” Blaine told him bitterly. “No other man has ever been given that distinction. You talk not only with me, but with a being not remotely human — a being that sits on a planet five thousand light years distant. He has lived a million years or more: He’ll live another million or maybe more than that. He sends out his mind to visit other planets and he is a very lonely being for all his visiting. Time is no mystery to him. I doubt there’s very much that is. And all he knows I know and can put to better use than he — when I get the time, if I ever get the time, to get it all dug out and labeled and stacked along the shelves inside my brain.”

The priest drew his breath in slowly. “I thought it might be something of that sort.”

“So do your job,” said Blaine. “Get out the holy water. Sprinkle me with it and I’ll go up in a puff of dirty smoke.”

“You mistake me,” said Father Flanagan. “You mistake my purpose. And my attitude. If there is no evil in the power that sent you to the stars, then there can be no more than incidental evil in what you may absorb there.”

One crippled hand reached out and grasped Blaine’s arm in a crushing grip which one would have sworn was not within its strength.

“You have a great power,” said the priest, “and great knowledge. You have an obligation to use it for the glory of God and the good of all mankind. I, a feeble voice, charge you with that burden and that responsibility. It is not often that such a load is put upon one man. You must not waste it, son. You must not use it wrongly. Nor can you simply let it lie on fallow ground, it was given to you — perhaps by the intervention of some divine power neither of us can understand for a purpose neither of us know. Such things, I am certain, do not come about by pure happenstance.”

“The finger of God,” said Blaine, meaning to jest, but not quite able to make a proper jest, sorry that he’d said it as soon as the words were out.

“The finger of God,” said Father Flanagan, “laid upon your heart.”

“I did not ask for it,” said Blaine. “If anyone had asked me, I would have told them no.”

“Tell me about it,” said Father Flanagan. “From the very start. As a favor to me.”

“In return for a favor of your own.”

“And what is that?” asked Father Flanagan.

“You say you followed me. How could you follow me?”

“Why, bless your soul,” said Father Flanagan. “I thought you might have guessed. You see, I am one of you. I’m a quite efficient hounder.”

Hamilton dreamed beside the river. It had a certain hazy quality and the mellowness of old river towns, for all that it was new. Above it rose the tawny hills and below the hills the checkered fields that came up to the town. Lazy morning smoke rose from the chimneys, and each picketed fence had in its corner a clump of hollyhocks.

“It looks a peaceful place,” said Father Flanagan. “You know what you are doing?”

Blaine nodded. “And you, Father? What about yourself?”

“There is an abbey down the river. I will be welcome there.”

“And I’ll see you again.”

“Perhaps. I’ll be going back to my border town. I’ll be a lonely picket on the borderland of Fishhook.”

“Watching for others who may be coming through?”

The priest nodded. He cut the motor’s speed and turned the boat for shore. It grated gently on the sand and pebbles, and Blaine jumped out of it.

Father Flanagan raised his face toward the western sky and sniffed. “There is weather making,” he declared, looking like a hound-dog snuffling a cold trail. “I can smell the edge of it.”

Blaine walked back through water that came up to his ankles and held out his hand.

“Thanks for the lift,” he said. “It would have been tough walking. And it saved a lot of time.”

“Good-by, my son. God go with you.”

Blaine pushed the boat out into the water. The priest speeded up the motor and swept the boat around. Blaine stood watching as he headed down the stream. Father Flanagan lifted his hand in a last farewell, and Blaine waved back.

Then he waded from the water and took the path up to the village.

He came up to the street and he knew it to be home. Not his home, not the home he once had known, no home he’d ever dreamed of, but home for all the world. It had the peace and surety, the calmness of the spirit, the feel of mental comfort — the sort of place a man could settle down and live in, merely counting off the days, taking each day as it came and the fullness of it, without a thought of future.

There was no one on the street, which was flanked by trim, neat houses, but he could feel them looking at him from out the windows of each house — not spying on him or suspicious of him, but watching with a kindly interest.