Time Is the Simplest Thing by Clifford D. Simak Page B

for life—life kept moving on, keeping pace with the present, and once it had passed, all traces of it or its existences were carefully erased.
    There were certain basic things, perhaps—the very earth, itself—which existed through every point in time, holding a sort of limited eternity to provide a solid matrix. And the dead—the dead and fabricated—stayed in the past as ghosts. The fence posts and the wire strung on them, the dead trees, the farm buildings and the bridge were shadows of the present persisting in the past. Persisting, perhaps, reluctantly, because since they had no life they could not move along. They were bound in time and stretched through time and they were long, long shadows.
    He was, he realized with a shock, the only living thing existing in this moment on this earth. He and nothing else.
    He rose from his knees and dusted off his hands. He stood looking at the bridge, and in the brightness of the moonlight there seemed nothing wrong with it. And yet he knew the wrongness of it.
    Trapped, he thought. If he did not know how to get out of here, then surely he was trapped—and he did not know.
    There was nothing in all of human experience which gave him any chance or any hope to know.
    He stood silent in the road, wondering how human he could be, how much humanity there still might be left to him. And if he were not entirely human, if there still were alienness, then he had a chance.
    He felt human, he told himself—yet how was he to judge? For he still would be himself if he were entirely alien. Human, half human, or not human in the slightest, he still would be himself. He’d scarcely know the difference. There was no other outside point from which he could stand and judge himself with anything like objectivity.
    He (or whatever he might be) had known in a time of terror and of panic how to slip into the past, and it stood to reason that, knowing that, he likewise should know how to slide back into the present, or what had been his present—back to that point in time, whatever one might call it, where life was possible.
    But the hard, cold fact was there: He had no idea of how it might be done!
    He looked about him, at the antiseptic coldness of the moonlight-painted land, and a shudder started at the core of him. He tried to stop the shudder, for he recognized it as the prelude to unreasoned terror, but the shudder would not stop.
    He gritted mental teeth, and the shudder kept on growing and suddenly he knew—with one corner of his mind, he knew.
    Then there was the sound of wind blowing in the cottonwoods—and there’d been no cottonwoods before. Something, too, had happened to the shudder, for it was there no longer. He was himself again.
    There were insects fiddling stridently somewhere in the grass and bushes, and there were flecks of light moving in the night to betray the lightning bug. And through the shuttered window of the house up on the hill came thin, strangled shafts of light.
    He turned off the road and walked down into the stream bed, stepped through the foot-deep water and up the other bank among the cottonwoods.
    He was back again, back where he’d started from. He’d come from past to present and he’d done it by himself. For a fleeting moment, at the very end of it, he had caught the method, but it had slipped from him again and he did not know it now.
    But that did not matter. He was safely home.

TWELVE
    He woke before morning light, when the birds first began to chirp, and made his way up the hill to the garden patch just below the house. He got three ears of corn, he dug into a hill of potatoes, he dug up a butcher plant and noted with some satisfaction that it had four steaks upon it.
    Back in the grove of cottonwoods, he searched through his pockets until he found the book of matches the sheriff had let him keep of all the stuff he had. He flipped back the cover and saw there were three matches left.
    Regarding the