For Finn had reasoned, Blaine thought, with Finn’s reasoning an open book before him, that if Earth stayed obscure and small and attracted no attention, the universe would pass it by and it would then be safe.
But however that might be, he held within his mind the technique to go in body to the stars — and a way to save his life.
But now he must find a planet where he could safely go — a planet which would not poison him or drown him or crush him, a place where he could live.
He dipped again into his mind and there, hauled from the junk heap and neatly catalogued, were thousands of planets the Pinkness at one time had visited.
He searched and found a hundred different kinds of planets and each one deadly to unprotected human life. And the horror grew — that with a way of going, he could find no planet soon enough where it would be safe to go.
The howling of the storm intruded on him, breaking through the fierce concentration of his search, and he knew that he was cold — far colder than he’d known. He tried to move a leg and could barely move it. The wind shrieked at him, mocking, as it went fleeing down the river and in between the gusts of wind he could hear the dry, rattling sound of hard snow pellets shotgunning through the willows.
He retreated from the wind and snow and cold, from the shrieking and the rattle — and there was the planet, the one he had been seeking.
He checked the data twice and it was satisfactory. He tattooed the co-ordinates. He got the picture in his mind. Then slowly, piece by piece, he fed in the long-hop method — and the sun was warm.
He was lying on his face and beneath him was grass and the smell of grass and earth. The howling of the storm was gone and there was no rattle in the willows.
He rolled over and sat up.
He held his breath at what he saw.
He was in paradise!
THIRTY-TWO
The sun had passed the midday mark and was slanting down the western sky when Blaine came striding down the bluff above the town of Hamilton, walking in the slush and mud after the first storm of the season.
Here he was, he thought, almost too late again — not quite soon enough. For when the sun slipped behind the horizon All Hallows Eve would start.
He wondered how many parry centers the folks of Hamilton had been able to contact. And it was possible, he told himself, that they had done better than anyone could hope. Perhaps they had been lucky. Perhaps they’d hit the jackpot.
And he thought of another thing, of the old priest saying: The finger of God stretched out to touch your heart.
Someday, he thought, the world would look back and wonder at the madness of this day — at the blindness and the folly and the sheer intolerance. Someday there would be vindication. Someday sanity. Someday the Church in Rome would recognize the paranormal as no practicer of witchcraft, but as the natural development of the human race in the grace of God. Someday there would be no social or economic barriers between the parry and the normal — if by that time there should be any normals left. Someday there’d be no need of Fishhook. Even, perhaps, someday there’d be no need of Earth.
For he had found the answer. Failing to reach Pierre, he still had found the answer. He had been forced (by the finger of God, perhaps?) — he had been forced to find the answer.
It was a better answer than the one that Stone had sought. It was a better technique than even Fishhook had. For it did away entirely with the concept of machines. It made a human whole and the master of himself and of the universe.
He strode on down the bluff and struck the trail that ran into Hamilton. In the sky a few scattered, tattered clouds still flew across the valley, the rearguard of the storm. Pools of melt stood along the token roadway and despite the brightness of the sun the wind out of the west had not lost its teeth.
He plodded up the street that led to the center of the town and from a block or two away he could see them waiting for him in the square before the stores — not just a few as had been the case before, but a crowd of them. More than likely, he figured, here was the most of Hamilton.
He walked across the square and the crowd was quiet. He flicked a look at it, searching for Anita, but he did not see her.
On the steps four men waited, the same four he had met before.
He stopped before them.
“Good afternoon,” he said.
“We heard you coming,” Andrews told him.
“I didn’t get to Pierre,” said Blaine. “I tried to get there to find some help for us. But the storm caught me on the river.
Jackson said: “They blocked us on the phone. But we used long tellies. We got through to some of the other groups and they have spread the word. We don’t know how far.”
“Nor how well,” said Andrews.
“Your tellies still can contact these groups?” asked Blaine.
Andrews nodded.
Jackson said: “Finn’s men never showed. And it has us worried. Finn ran into trouble. . . .”
“They should have showed,” said Andrews. “They should have turned us inside out in their hunt for you.”
“Perhaps they don’t want to find me.”
“Perhaps,” Jackson told him coldly, “you’re not what you say you are.”
Blaine’s temper flared. “To hell with you,” he shouted. “I damn near died for you. Go on and save yourselves.”
He turned on his heel and walked away, with the anger surging in him.
It was not his fight. Not personally his fight. No more his fight than any one of them. But he had made it his. Because of Stone, because of Rand and Harriet, because of the priest who’d hounded him across half the continent, he had tried to make a fight of it. And perhaps, as well, because of something undefinable, unknown to himself, unsuspected in himself — some crazy idealism, some deep-rooted sense of justice, some basic aversion to bullies and bigots and reformers.
He had come to this village with a gift — he had hurried here so he could give it to them. And they had stood and questioned his integrity and purpose.
To hell with them, he said.
He had been pushed far enough. He would be pushed no further.
There was just one thing left that was worth the doing and he would go and do it and from that moment on, he told himself, there would be nothing more that mattered, for him or anyone.
“Shep!”
He kept on walking.
“Shep!”
He stopped and turned around.
Anita was walking from the crowd.
“No,” he said.
“But they are not the only ones,” she said. “There are the rest of us. We will listen to you.”
And she was right, of course.
There were the rest of them.
Anita and all the rest of them. The women and the children and those other men who were not in authority. For it was authority that turned men suspicious and stern-faced. Authority and responsibility which made them not themselves, but a sort of corporate body that tried to think as a corporate body rather than a person.
And in this a parry or a community of parries was no different from a normal person or a community of normal persons. Paranormal ability, after all, did not change the person. It merely gave him a chance to become a better person.
“You failed,” Anita said. “We could not expect that you would succeed. You tried and that’s enough.”