They would kill him as they had killed others, as they would kill many more, but their fate was already settled, the battle already had been won.
Someone pushed him from behind and he went skidding down the smooth stone steps. He slipped and fell and rolled, and the mob closed in upon him. There were many hands upon him, there were fingers grinding into muscles, there was the hot foul breath and the odor of their mouths blowing in his face.
The many hands jerked him to his feet and pushed him back and forth. Someone punched him in the belly and another slapped him hard across the face and out of the bull-roaring of the crowd came one bellowing voice: “Go on, you stinking parry, teleport yourself! That’s all you have to do. Just teleport yourself.”
And that was most fitting mockery — for there were very few indeed who could teleport themselves. There were the levitators who could move themselves through the air like birds, and there were many others, like Blaine, who could teleport small objects, and others, also like Blaine, who could teleport their minds over many light years, but with the help of weird machines. But the true self-teleport, who could snap his body from one location to another in the fraction of an instant, was extremely hard to come by.
The crowd took up the mocking chant: “Teleport yourself! Teleport! Teleport! Teleport yourself, you dirty, stinking parry!” Laughing all the time at their cleverness, smirking all the time at the indignity thus heaped upon their victim. And never for a moment ceasing to use hands and feet upon him.
There was a warmness running down his chin, and one lip felt puffed and swollen, and there was a saltiness in his mouth. His belly ached and his ribs were sore, and the feet and fists still kept punching in.
Then another bellowing voice roared above the din: “Cut that out! Leave the man alone!”
The crowd fell back, but they still ringed him in, and Blaine, standing in the center of the human circle, looked around it and in the last faint light of dusk saw the rat eyes gleaming, and flaked saliva on the lips, sensed the hate that rose and rolled toward him like a body smell.
The circle parted and two men came through — one a small and fussy man who might have been a bookkeeper or a clerk, and the other a massive bruiser with a face that looked as if it were a place where chickens scratched in their search for grubs and worms. The big man had a rope coiled on one arm and from his hand he dangled one end of the rope fashioned very neatly into a hangman’s noose.
The two of them stopped in front of Blaine, and the small man turned slightly to face one segment of the circle.
“Gents,” he said, in a voice that any funeral director would have been proud to own, “we must conduct ourselves with a certain decency and dignity. We have nothing personal against this man, only against the system and the abomination of which he is a part.”
“You tell ’em, Buster!” yelled an enthusiastic voice from the fringes of the crowd.
The man with the funeral director’s voice held up a hand for silence.
“It is a sad and solemn duty,” he said unctuously, “that we must perform, but it is a duty. Let us proceed with it in a seemly fashion.”
“Yeah,” yelled the enthusiast, “let us get it done with. Let’s hang the dirty bastard!”
The big man came close to Blaine and lifted up the noose. He dropped it almost gently over Blaine’s head so that it rested on his shoulders. Then he slowly tightened it until it was snug about the neck.
The rope was new and prickly and it burned like a red-hot iron, and the numbness that had settled into Blaine’s body ran out of him like water and left him standing cold and empty and naked before all eternity.
All the time, even while it had been happening, he had clung subconsciously to the firm conviction that it could not happen — that he couldn’t die this way; that it could and did happen to many other people, but not to Shepherd Blaine.
And now death was only minutes distant; the instrument of death already put in place. These men — these men he did not know, these men he’d never know — were about to take his life.
He tried to lift his hands to snatch the rope away, but his arms would not stir from where they hung limply from his shoulders. He gulped, for there already was the sense of slow, painful strangulation.
And they hadn’t even begun to hang him yet!
The coldness of his empty self grew colder with the chill of overwhelming fear — fear that took him in its fist and held him stiff and rigid while it froze him solid. The blood, it seemed, stopped running in his veins and he seemed to have no body and the ice piled up and up inside his brain until he thought his skull would burst.
And from some far nether region of that brain came the fleeting realization that he no longer was a man, but mere frightened animal. Too cold, still too proud to whimper, too frozen in his terror to move a single muscle — only kept from screaming because his frozen tongue and throat could no longer function.
But if he could not scream aloud, he screamed inside himself. And the scream built up and up, a mounting tension that could find no way to effect release. And he knew that if no release were found in another instant he would blow apart from the sheer pressure of the tension.
There was a split second — not of blackout, but of unawareness — then he stood alone and he was cold no longer.
He stood on the crumbling brick of the ancient walk that led up to the courthouse entrance, and the rope was still about his neck, but there was no one in the courthouse square.
He was all alone in an empty town!
ELEVEN
There was less of dusk and more of light and there was a quietness that was unimaginable.
There was no grass.
There were no trees.
There were no men, nor any sign of men.
The courthouse lawn, or what had been the lawn, stretched naked down to the asphalt street. There was no grass upon the lawn. It was soil and pebble. Not dried-out grass or killed-out grass, but not any grass at all. As if there had never been such a thing as grass. As if grass never had existed.
With the rope still trailing from his neck, Blaine slowly pivoted to look in all directions. And in all directions it was the self-same scene. The courthouse still stood starkly against the last light of the day. The street was still and empty, with cars parked at the curb. The store fronts lined the street, their windows staring blindly.
There was one tree — lone and dead — standing at the corner beside the barber shop.
And no men anywhere. No birds or song of birds. No dogs. No cats. Nor an insect humming. Perhaps, thought Blaine, not even a bacteria or a microbe.
Cautiously, almost as if afraid by doing so he might break the spell, Blaine put up his hands and loosened the rope. He slipped it over his head and tossed it to the ground. He massaged his neck carefully with one hand, for the neck still stung. There were little prickles in it, where tiny pieces of the fiber had broken off and still stuck in the skin.
He took a tentative step and found that he could walk, although his body still was sore from the casual beating it had taken. He walked out into the street and stood in the middle of it and looked up and down its length. It was deserted so far as he could see.
The sun had set, and dark was not far off and that meant, he told himself, that he had come back just a little time.
And stood astounded, frozen in the middle of the street, that he should have known.
For he did know! Without a doubt he knew exactly what he had accomplished. Although, he thought, he must have done it without a conscious effort, almost instinctively, a sort of conditioned reflex action to escape the danger.