The old highway surfacing was broken and full of chuck-holes. It was rough on tires, and the tires were not too good. Nor were new ones, even if Riley had been able to afford them, easy to obtain. The demand for tires of the type used by his battered truck had dropped to almost nothing, and it was only by the greatest luck that they could be found.
There also was another ever-present worry — the finding of gasoline to put into the tank. For there were no service stations; there had been no service stations for almost fifty years. There was no need of service stations when highway traffic moved on atomic power. So, at each town they hunted for a farm service store or a co-operative tank farm to obtain their fuel, for the bulk of farm machinery still used gasoline.
They slept as they could, snatching catnaps whenever the chance came up. They ate on the run, usually out of a paper bag of sandwiches or of doughnuts, with coffee in an old tin pail they carried.
Thus the two of them found their way along the ancient highways, used now by the modern traffic only because the engineering of those highways had been good, only because they represented the easiest, shortest distances between two points.
“I never should have took this job,” said Riley, “but there was good pay in it and I don’t mind telling you that I need the money.”
“You’ll probably make out all right on it,” Blaine reassured him. “You may be a few days late, but we’ll get through all right.”
“If I have any truck left.”
“You didn’t,” Blaine pointed out, “have very much to start with.”
Riley mopped his face with a faded handkerchief that at one time had been turkey red.
“It’s not only the truck and all the work,” he said. “It’s the wear and tear on a man himself.”
For Riley was a frightened man — and the fright, Blaine saw, went down to the bone and core of him.
It was not, Blaine told himself, watching the man, the simple emotional mechanics of a man frightened by the horrific menagerie of mischief and of evil from which, because he had believed in it for his entire life, he could conjure up with no effort whatsoever the terrible fantasies of an age gone past. It was something more than that; it was more immediate than latent nighttime fears.
To Blaine the man was an oddity, a human specimen out of some medieval museum; a man who feared the dark and the imagined forms with which he peopled it; a man who placed reliance in a painted hex sign and in a shotgun loaded with a charge of silver buckshot. He had heard of men like this but had never met one. If there had been any such as this among the people that he met in Fishhook, they had kept it closely hidden behind a sophisticated mask.
But if Riley was a curiosity to Blaine, Blaine was likewise one to him.
“You are not afraid?” he’d ask.
Blaine would shake his head.
“You do not believe these things?”
“To me,” Blaine would tell him, “they have always seemed just a little foolish.”
Riley would protest: “They are not foolish, friend. I can assure you that. I’ve known too many people; I’ve heard too many tales that I know are true. There was an old man when I was a boy back in Indiana. He was found tangled in a fence with his throat ripped out. And there were tracks around the body and the smell of sulfur.”
If it were not this particular story, then it was another, just as gruesome, just as starkly mystic, just as ancient-dark.
And what could one do with that? Blaine wondered. Where would one find an answer? For the belief — the will to believe — was engrained deeply in the human fiber. Not entirely, either, in the matrix of the present situation, but in the blood and bone of Man clear back to the caves. There was in the soul of Man a certain deadly fascination with all things that were macabre. The situation as it stood had been grasped willingly, almost eagerly, by men for whom the world had become a rather tame and vapid place with no terror in it beyond the brute force terror of atomic weapons and the dread uncertainty of unstable men in power.
It had all begun quite innocently as the people grabbed at the new principles of PK for their entertainment and their enjoyment. Almost overnight the fact of mental power had become a fad that had overwhelmed the world. Night clubs had changed their names, there had been startling fashion trends, new teen-age cants had risen, TV had gone overboard with its horror films, and the presses had poured out billions of volumes dealing with the supernatural. There had been new cults, and older cults had flourished. The ouija board came back after two centuries of hiding in the mists of an earlier age which had played with ghosts for kicks but had given up when it had found that you could not play with the spirit world. You either believed in it or you didn’t and there was no middle ground.
There had been quacks and there had been earnest men, considerably deluded, who had made names and fortunes from the fad. Manufacturers had turned out carload after carload of novelties and equipment for the pursuance of this new fad, or new hobby, or new study or religion — the specific term would apply in direct proportion to the seriousness with which each individual might consider it.
It all had been wrong, of course — for paranormal kinetics was not supernatural. Nor was it macabre, nor did it deal with ghost or devil or any of the other of the hordes of forgotten things which came charging happily out of the Middle Ages. It was, instead, a new dimension to Man’s abilities — but the enamored people, agog at this new toy, had adopted it wholeheartedly in all misinterpretation.
As they always did, they had overdone it. They had played so hard at their misinterpretation that they had forgotten, despite warning after warning, that it was misinterpretation. They finally had come to believe in all the weirdness and all the fantasy; they finally regarded it as the gospel truth. Where there had been fun there now were leering fauns; where there had been gags there now were goblins and ghosts.
So the reaction had set in, the inevitable reaction of fanatical reformers, accompanied by the grim, horse-faced cruelty and blindness that goes with all fanatical reform. Now a grim and frightened people hunted down, as a holy mission, their paranormal neighbors.
There were a lot of these, but they were in hiding now or in masquerade. There had always been a lot of them through all the human ages, but mostly unsuspecting, never dreaming that they had powers within themselves fit to reach the stars. They were the people who had been just a little queer, a bit discombobulated and had been regarded tolerantly as harmless by their neighbors. There had been a few, of course, who had been in part effective, but even in their effectiveness they had not believed, or believing, they had used their strange powers poorly, for they could not understand them. And in the later years, when they might have understood it, none of them had dared, for the tribal god of science had called it all damn foolishness.
But when the stubborn men in Mexico had demonstrated that it was not all damn foolishness, then the people dared. Those who had the abilities then felt free to use them, and developed them by use. Others who never suspected that they had them found to their surprise they did and they used them, too. In some cases the abilities were used to good and solid purpose, but in other cases they were wrongly used or used for shallow purpose. And there were those, as well, who practiced this new-found art of theirs for unworthy ends, and a very few, perhaps, who used it in all evil.
Now the good gray moralists and the pulpit-pounding, crag-browed, black-attired reformers were out to quash PK for the evil it had done. They used the psychology of fear; they played upon the natural superstitions; they used the rope and brand and the quick shot in the night and they spread a fear across the land that one could smell in the very air — a thick, foul scent that clogged the nostrils and brought water to the eyes.