“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.
It was something that he had no way of knowing how to do, that a short minute earlier he would have sworn would be impossible that he do. It was something that no human had ever done before, that no human would have ever dreamed of trying.
For he had moved through time. He had gone into the past a half an hour or so.
He stood in the street, attempting to recall how he might have done it, but all he could remember was the mounting terror that had come rolling, wave on wave, to drown him. There was one answer only: He had done it as a matter of deep-seated knowledge which he had not been aware of having and had accomplished it only as a final, desperate, instinctive effort — as one might, without thinking, throw up an arm to ward off an unexpected blow.
As a human it would have been beyond his capability, but it would not, undoubtedly, have been impossible for the alien mind. As a human being he did not have the instinct, did not have even the beginning of the necessary know-how. It was an ability even outside the pale of paranormal action. There was no question of it: the only way he could have snapped himself through time was by the agency and through the courtesy of the alien mind.
But the alien mind, it seemed, had left him; it was no longer with him. He hunted it and called it, and there was no trace and there was no answer.
He turned to face the north and began to walk, keeping to the center of the street, marching through this ghost town of the past.
The graveyard of the past, he thought. No life anywhere. Just the dead, bare stone and brick, the lifeless clay and wood.
And where had gone the life?
Why must the past be dead?
And what had happened to that mind the alien on the distant star had exchanged with him?
He sought for it again and he could not find it, but he did find traces of it; he found the spoor of it, tiny, muddy footprints that went across his brain; he found bits and pieces that it had left behind — strange, chaotic memories and straws of exotic, disconnected information that floated like flecks of jetsam in a frothy tide.
He did not find it, but he found the answer to its going — the instinctive answer that suddenly was there. The mind had not gone and left him. It had, rather, finally, become a part of him. In the forge of fright and terror, in the chemistry of danger, there had been a psychologic factor that had welded the two of them together.
And yet he still was human. Therefore, he told himself, the answer must be false. But it kept on persisting. There was no reason to it and there was no logic — for if he had two minds, if he were half human and half alien, there would be a difference. A difference he would notice.
The business part of the street had dwindled to shabby residences, and up ahead of him he could see where the village ended — this village which half an hour ago (or a half an hour ahead?) had been most intent upon the killing of him.
He halted for a moment and looked back and he could see the courthouse cupola and remembered that he’d left everything he owned back there, locked in the sheriff’s desk. He hesitated a moment, wondering if he should go back. It was a terrible thing to be without a dollar to his name, with all his pockets empty.