In the 80th century, Man rules the galaxy, but even with the aid of billions of robots and androids—synthetic humans—his numbers are too small for more than a tenuous hold an all the stars and their planetary systems. All change, all danger of any sort, is a potential threat to the empire. One possible danger spot is 61 Cygni, unapproachable because a shield of force keeps Earth ships away.
Asher Sutton, agent of the Department of Galactic Investigation, is the only man who has ever landed on a Cygnian world. That was 20 years before the story opens. Now he returns to Earth… in a ship that cannot fly, with no food, air, or water aboard. His chief, Christopher Adams, is warned of Sutton’s return by a man who claims to come from the future, and who advises Adams to have Sutton killed.
Sutton escapes assassination, but finds himself the center of a war in time, originating several centuries in his future, but spreading through all ages of human existence. The war is being fought over the interpretation of a book Sutton apparently will write at some future date, for on two occasions he discovers copies of his unwritten book on men who have come back to the past.
Sutton’s book will state, when he writes it, that the inhabitants of 61 Cygni are symbiotic abstractions—not human, not even beings in our sense of the word. They form mutually beneficial partnerships with all individual life when it comes into existence, and stay with it until it dies. In truth, they are destiny, the unspoken voice that attempts to guide every living thing in a path which will help to attain the greatest possible fulfilment. The symbiotic abstractions attain a semblance of life in this relationship, while the unsuspecting host gains destiny. Sutton’s premise is clear and unmistakable… all forms of life have destiny, not just humanity.
To inform the intelligent, thinking beings of the galaxy, Sutton was returned to life after his crash on 61 Cygni, twenty years before, given a secondary body that lives on pure energy, that can manipulate objects with mental energy, and kill by the force of hate alone, and he was sent back to Earth as ambassador.
But it is Sutton’s premise that has caused the war in time. Prime opponents are the Revisionists, who want to interpret Sutton’s book as meaning that only humans are beneficiaries of destiny. Against them are the androids, who are human in all respects but one… their inability to reproduce biologically.
In a girl named Eva Armour and an android named Herkimer, Sutton finds two friends. Another friend he could have counted on, Buster, his old family robot, has homesteaded a planet on the outer rim of the galaxy. Before going, Buster left a trunk for Sutton. Among the junk in the trunk, Sutton finds a queer wrench and an unopened letter, 6,000 years old.
Opening the letter, Sutton finds that it was written by a John H. Sutton, who tells of encountering a man who apparently had come in a ship from the future. After talking to the man, John H. returns a few hours later to the scene, but finds the ship and the man gone. On the grass lies a bloodstained wrench, apparently the very wrench which Sutton had found in the trunk. A few days later, the letter relates, a man comes to the Sutton farm looking for work. He stays there for ten years and at the time of the writing, John H. feels certain that he is the man from the future, somehow marooned in the 20th century. Fearful of ridicule if he told the story during his lifetime, John H. Sutton has left the letter to be opened after his death. Somehow it never was.
Because of the danger to Sutton on Earth, Herkimer and Eva Armour kidnap Sutton to an asteroid, where they plan that he will write his book. There, however, they find two men who turn out to be agents of the Revisionists. They offer Sutton any price he may ask if he will write the book so it will appear that only humans are the beneficiaries of destiny. When he refuses, they kill him.
Just as his human body is killed, however, he manages to switch to his second, alien body, which operates on pure energy. He destroys the two Revisionists and takes their time ship.
Determined to prevent the attempt of the human race to seize destiny as its own, Sutton decides to return to the 20th century, to the time and place where John H. Sutton had met the man from the future. There, in that incident of 6,000 years before, he feels certain, lies the key to the entire situation.
Returning, he witnesses from the edge of a woods the meeting between the man from the future and Sutton’s remote ancestor. When John H. leaves, Sutton approaches the ship. The man from the future is holding a wrench and Sutton forces him to drop it. But in the ensuing fight, the man regains the wrench and strikes at Sutton’s head. Even as the wrench descends upon his skull, Sutton realizes that not the man from the future, but he himself will be marooned in the 20th century.
Tricked by a smooth character from 500 years ahead in time.
Tricked by a letter from 6,000 years out of the past.
Tricked, groaned Sutton, by my own muddle-headedness.
He sat up and held his head in his hands and felt the westering Sun against his back, heard the squalling of a catbird in the blackberry patch and the sound of the wind as it ran along the corn rows.
Tricked and trapped, he said through his teeth.
He took his hands from his head and there in the trampled grass lay the wrench with the blood on it. Sutton spread out his fingers and blood was on them, too… warm and sticky blood. Gingerly he touched his head with a cautious hand and his hair was wet and matted down.
Pattern, he said viciously. It all runs in a pattern.
Here I am and there is the wrench and just beyond the fence is the field of corn that is better than knee high on this splendid afternoon of July 4, 1977.
The ship from the future is gone and in another hour or so John H. Sutton will come waddling down the hill to ask the questions that he forgot to ask before. And ten years from now he will write a letter and in it he will record his suspicions about me and I will be in the farm yard at that very moment pumping a drink.
Sutton staggered to his feet and stood in the empty afternoon, with the sweep of sky above the horizon of the ridge and the panorama of the winding river far down the slope below.
He touched the wrench with his toe and thought: I could break the pattern. I could take the wrench and then John H. would never find it, and, with one thing in the pattern changed, the end might not be the same.
I read the letter wrong, he thought. I always figured it would be the other man, not me. It never once occurred to me that it was my blood upon the wrench and that I would be the one who would steal the clothes off the line.
And yet he realized there were certain things that didn’t track. He still had his clothes and there would be no need to steal. His ship still was resting on the river’s bottom and there was no need to stay in the past.
Yet it had happened once before, for if it had not happened, why had there been the letter? The letter had made him come here and the letter had been written because he had come, so he must have come before. And in that other time he’d stayed… and stayed only because he could not get away. This time he would go back; this time he need not stay.
A second chance, he thought. I’ve been given another chance.
Yet that wasn’t right, for if there had been a second time, old John H. would have known about it. And there couldn’t be a second time, for this was the very day that John H. had talked to the man out of the future.
Sutton shook his head.
There had been only one time that this had happened, and this, of course, was it.
Something will stop me, he told himself. Something will not let me go back. Somehow I will be forced to steal the clothes and in the end I’ll walk to that farmhouse up there and ask if they need a hand for the harvest.
For the pattern was set. It had to be set.
Sutton touched the wrench with his toe again, pondering.
Then he turned and went down the hill. Glancing over his shoulder as he plunged into the woods, he saw old John H. coming down the hill.
FOR three days Sutton toiled to free the ship from the tons of sand that the treacherous, swift-running river currents had mounded over it. And he admitted, when three days were gone, that it was a hopeless task, for the current piled up the sand as fast as he could clear it.
After that, he concentrated on clearing an opening to the entrance lock and when another day went by with many cave-ins, he accomplished his purpose.
Wearily he braced himself against the metal of the ship.
A gamble, he told himself. But I will have to gamble.
For there was no possibility of wrenching the ship free by using the engines. The tubes, he knew, were packed with sand and any attempt to use the rockets would simply mean that he and the ship and a good portion of the landscape would evaporate in a flashing puff of atomic fury.
He had lifted a ship from a Cygnian planet and driven it across eleven years of space by the power of mind alone. He had rolled two sixes.
Perhaps, he told himself. Perhaps…
There were tons of sand and he was deathly tired, tired despite the smooth, efficient functioning of his non-human system of metabolism.
I rolled two sixes, he said. Surely that was harder than the task I must do now. Although that called for deftness and this will call for power… and suppose, just suppose I haven’t got the strength.
For it would take strength to lift this buried mass of metal out of the mound of sand. Not the strength of muscles, but the strength of mind.
Of course, he told himself, if he could not lift the ship, he still could use the time-mover, shift the ship, lying where it was, forward 6,000 years. Although there were hazards he did not like to think about. For in shifting the ship through time, he would be exposing it to every threat and vagary of the river through the whole 6,000 years.
He put his hand up to his throat, feeling for the key chain that hung around his neck.
There was no chain!
Mind dulled by sudden terror, he stood frozen for a moment.
Pockets, he thought, but his hands fumbled with a dread certainty that there was no hope. For he never put the keys of the ship in his pockets… always on their chain around his neck where they would be safe.
He searched, feverishly at first, then with a grim, cold thoroughness.
His pockets held no keys.
The chain broke, he thought in frantic desperation. The chain broke and it fell inside my clothes. He patted himself, carefully, from head to foot, and it was not there. He took off his shirt, gently, cautiously, feeling for the missing keys. He tossed the shirt aside, and sitting down, pulled off his trousers, searching in their folds, turning them inside out.
There were no keys.
On hands and knees, he searched the sands of the river bed, fumbling in the dim light that filtered through the rushing water.
An hour later he gave up.
The shifting, water-driven sand already had closed the trench he had dug to the lock, and now there was no point of getting to the lock, for he could not open it when he got there.
His shirt and trousers had vanished with the current.
Wearily, beaten, he turned toward the shore, forcing his way through the stubborn water. His head broke into open air and the first stars of evening were shining in the east.
On shore he sat down with his back against a tree. He took one breath and then another, willed the first heartbeat, then the second and a third… nursed the human metabolism back into action once again.
The river gurgled at him, deep laughter on its tongue. In the wooded valley a whippoorwill began its sadistic suggestion. Fireflies danced through the blackness of the bushes.
A mosquito stung him and he slapped at it savagely.
A place to sleep, he thought. A hay-loft in a barn, perhaps. And pilfered food from a farmer’s garden to fill his empty belly. Then clothes.
At least he knew where he’d get the clothes.
SUNDAYS were lonely. During the rest of the week there was work—physical labor—for a man to do, the endless, trudging round of work that is necessary to extract a living from the soil. Land to plow, crops to be put in and tended and finally harvested, wood to cut, fences to be built and mended, machines to be repaired—things that must be done with bone and muscle, with calloused hand and aching back and the hot Sun on one’s neck or the whiplash of windy cold biting at one’s bones.
For six days a farmer labored and the labor was a thing that dulled one to the aching emptiness of memory, and, at night, when work was done, sleep was swift and merciful. There were times when the work, not only for its sedative effect, but of its very self became a thing of interest and of satisfaction. The straight line of new-set fence posts became a minor triumph when one glanced back along their length. The harvest field with its dust upon one’s shoes and its smell of Sun on golden straw and the clacking of the binder as it went its rounds became a full-breasted symbolism of plenty and contentment. And there were moments when the pink blush of apple blossoms shining through the silver rain of spring became, a wild and pagan paean of the resurrection of the Earth from the frosts of winter.
For six days a man would labor and would not have time to think; on the seventh day he rested and braced himself for the loneliness and the thoughts of desperation that idleness would bring.
Not a loneliness for a people or a world or a way of life, for this world was kindlier and closer to Earth and life and safer—much safer—than the world one had left behind. But a nagging loneliness, an accusing loneliness that talked of a job that waited; a piece of work that now might wait forever, a task that must be done, but now never might be done.
At first there had been hope.
Surely, Sutton thought, they will look for me. Surely they will find a way to reach me.
The thought was a comfort that he hugged close against himself, a peace of mind that he could not bring himself to analyze too closely. For he realized, even as he coddled it, that it was unrealistic, that it might not survive too close a scrutiny, that it was fashioned of faith and of wishful thinking and that for all its wealth of comfort it might be a fragile bauble.
THE past cannot be changed, he argued with himself, not in its entirety. It can be altered—subtly. It can be twisted and it can be dented and it can be whittled down, but by and large it stands. And that is why I’m here and will have to stay until old John H. writes the letter to himself. For the past is in the letter—the letter brought me here and it will keep me here until it’s finally written. Up to that point the pattern must necessarily hold, for up to that point in time the past, so far as I and my relation with it are concerned, is a known and a revealed past. But the moment the letter is written, it becomes an unknown past; it tends to the speculative and there is no known pattern. After the letter is written, so far as I’m concerned, anything can happen.
Although he admitted, even as he thought it, that his premise was fallacious. Known or not, revealed or unrevealed, the past would form a pattern. For the past had happened. He was living in a time that already had been set and molded.
Even in that thought there was a hope, however. Even in the unknownness of the past and the knowledge that what had happened was a thing that stood unchanged, there must be hope. For somewhere, somewhen he had written a book. The book existed and therefore had happened, although, of course, it had not happened yet. But he had seen two copies of the book and that meant that in some future age the book was a factor in the pattern of the past.
Sometime, said Sutton, they will find me. Sometime before it is too late.
They will hunt for me and find me. They will have to find me.
They? he asked himself, finally honest with himself.
Herkimer, an android.
Eva Armour, a woman.
They… two people.
But not those two alone. Surely not those two alone. Back of them, like a shadowy army, all the other androids and all the robots that Man had ever fashioned. And here and there a human who saw the rightness of the proposition that Man could not, by mere self-assertion, be a special being; understanding that it was to his greater glory to take his place among the other things of life, as a simple thing of life, as a form of life that could lead and teach and be a friend, rather than a power-hungry creature that conquered and ruled and stood as one apart.
They would look for him, of course, but where?
With all of time and all of space to search in, how would they know when and where to look?
THE robot at the information center, he remembered, could tell them that he had inquired about an ancient town called Bridgeport, Wisconsin. And that would tell them where. But no one could tell them when.
For no one knew about the letter… absolutely no one. He remembered how the dried and flaky mucilage had showered down across his hands in a white and aged powder when his thumb nail had cracked loose the flap of the envelope. No one, certainly, had seen the contents of that letter since the day it had been written until he, himself, had opened it.
He realized now that he should have gotten word to someone… word of where and when he was going and what he meant to do. But he had been so confident and it had seemed such a simple thing, such a splendid plan.
A splendid plan in the very directness of its action… to intercept the Revisionist, to knock him out and take his ship and go forward into time to take his place. It could have been arranged, of that he was certain. There would have been an android somewhere to help fashion his disguise. There would have been papers in the ship and androids from the future to brief him on the things that he would have had to know.
A splendid plan… except it hadn’t worked.
I could have told the information robot, Sutton told himself. He certainly was one of us. He would have passed the word along.
He sat with his back against the tree and stared out across the river valley, hazy with the blue of the Indian summer. In the field below him the corn stood in brown and golden shocks, like a village of wigwams that clustered tight and warm against the sure knowledge of the winter’s coming. To the west the bluffs of the Mississippi were a purple cloud that crouched close against the land. To the north the golden land swept up in low hill rising on low hill until it reached a misty point where, somewhere, land stopped and sky began, although one could not find the definite dividing point, no clear-cut pencil mark that held the two apart.
A field mouse came out of a corn shock and looked at Sutton for a moment with its beady eyes, then squeaked in sudden fright and whisked into the shock again, its tail looped above its back in frantic alarm.
Simple folk, thought Sutton. The little, simple, furry folk. They would be with me, too, if they could only know. The bluejay and the field mouse, the owl and hawk and squirrel. A brotherhood, he thought… the brotherhood of life.
HE HEARD the mouse rustling in the shock and he tried to imagine what life as a mouse might mean. Fear first of all, of course, the ever-present, quivering, overriding fear of other life, of owl and hawk, of mink and fox and skunk. And the fear of Man, he added. All things fear Man. Man has caused all things to fear him.
Then there would be hunger, or at least the dread and threat of hunger. And the urge to reproduce. There would be the urgency and the happiness of life, the thrill of swiftly moving feet and the sleek contentment of the well-filled belly and the sweetness of sleep… and what else? What else might fill a mouse’s life?
He crouched in a place of safety and listened and knew that all was well. All was safe and there were food and shelter against the coming cold. For he knew about the cold, not so much from the experience of other winters as from an instinct handed down through many generations of shivering in the cold and dying of winter famine.
To his ears came the soft rustlings in the corn shock as others of his kind moved softly on their business. He smelled the sweetness of the Sun-cured grass that had been brought in to fashion nests for warm and easy sleeping. And he smelled, as well, the grains of corn and the succulent weed seeds that would keep their bellies full.
All is well, he thought. All is as it should be. But one must keep watch, one must never lower one’s guard, for security is a thing that can be swept away in a single instant. And we are so soft… we are so soft and frail, and we make good eating. A paw-step in the dark can spell swift and sure disaster. A whir of wings is the song of death.
He closed his eyes and tucked his feet beneath him and wrapped his tail around him…
Sutton sat with his back against the tree and suddenly, without knowing how or when he had become so, he was rigid with the knowledge of what had happened.
He had closed his eyes and tucked his feet beneath him and wrapped his tail about him and he had known the simple fears and the artless, ambitionless contentment of another life… of a life that hid in a corn shock from the paw-steps and the wings, that slept in Sun-scented grass and felt a vague but vital happiness in the sure and fundamental knowledge of food and warmth and shelter.
HE HAD not felt it merely, or known it alone… he had been the little creature, he had been the mouse that the corn shock sheltered; and at the one and the same time he had been Asher Sutton, sitting with his back against a straight-trunked shellbark hickory tree, gazing out across the autumn-painted valley.
There were two of us, said Sutton. I, myself, and I, the mouse. There were two of us at once, each with his separate identity. The mouse, the real mouse, did not know it, for if he had known or guessed, I would have known as well, for I was as much the mouse as I was myself.
He sat quiet and still, not a muscle moving, wonder gnawing at him. Wonder and a fear, a fear of a dormant alienness that lay within his brain.
He had brought a ship from Cygni, he had returned from death, he had rolled a six. Now this!
A man is born and he has a body and a mind that have many functions, some of them complex, and it takes him years to learn those functions, more years to master them. Months before one takes a toddling step, months more before one shapes a word, years before thought and logic become polished tools… and sometimes, said Sutton, sometimes they never do.
Even then there is a certain guidance, the guidance of experienced mentors… parents at first and teachers after that and the doctors and the churches and all the men of science and the people that one meets. All the people, all the contacts, all the forces that operate to shape one into a social being capable of using the talents that he holds for the good of himself and the society which guides him and holds him to its path.
Heritage, too, thought Sutton… the inbred knowledge and the will to do and think certain things in a certain way. The tradition of what other men have done and the precepts that have been fashioned from the wisdom of the ages.
The normal human has one body and one mind, and Lord knows, Sutton thought, that is enough for any man to get along with. But I, to all intent, have what amounts to a second body and perhaps even a second mind, but for that second body I have no mentors and I have no heritage. I do not know how to use it yet; I’m just taking my first toddling step. I am finding out, slowly, one by one, the things that I may do. Later on, if I live long enough, I may even learn to do them well.
But there are mistakes that one will make. A child will stumble when it walks at first, and its words, to begin with, are only the approximation of words, and it does not know enough not to burn its finger with matches it has lighted.
“Johnny,” he said. “Johnny, talk to me.”
“Yes, Ash?”
“Is there more, Johnny?”
“Wait and see,” said Johnny. “I cannot tell you. You must wait and see.”
THE android investigator said: “We checked Bridgeport back to the year 2,000 and we are convinced nothing happened there. It was a small village and it lay off the main trunk of world happenings.”
“It wouldn’t have to be a big thing,” Eva Armour told him. “It could have been a little thing. Just some slight clue. A word out of the context of the future, perhaps. A word that Sutton might have dropped in some unguarded moment and someone else picked up and used. Within a few years a word like that would become a part of the dialect of that community.”
“We checked for the little things, miss,” the investigator said. “We checked for any change, any hint that might point to Sutton having been in that community. We used approved methods and we covered the field. But we found nothing, absolutely nothing. The place is barren of any leads at all.”
“He must have gone there,” said Eva. “The robot at the information center talked to him. He asked about Bridgeport. It indicates that he had some interest in the place.”
“But it didn’t necessarily indicate that he was going there,” Herkimer pointed out.
“He went some place,” said Eva. “Where did he go?”
“We threw in as large a force of investigators as was possible without arousing suspicion, both locally and in the future,” the investigator told them. “Our men practically fell over one another. We sent them out as book salesmen and scissor grinders and unemployed laborers looking for work. We canvassed every home for forty miles around, first at twenty-year intervals, then, when we found nothing, at ten, and finally at five. If there had been any word or any rumor, we would have run across it.”
“Back to the year 2,000, you say?” asked Herkimer. “Why not to 1999 or 1950 or even 1800?”
“We had to set an arbitrary date somewhere,” the investigator told him.
“The Sutton family lived in that locality,” said Eva. “I suppose you investigated them just a bit more closely.‘”
“We had men working on the Sutton farm off and on,” said the investigator. “As often as the family was in need of any help on the farm, one of our men showed up to get himself the job. When the family needed no help, we had men on other farms nearby. One of our men bought a tract of timber in that locality and spent ten years at woodcutting… he could have stretched it out much longer, but we were afraid someone would get suspicious.
“We did this from the year 2,000 up to 3150, when the last of the family moved from the area.”
EVA looked at Herkimer. “The family has been checked all the way?” she asked.
Herkimer nodded. “Right to the day that Asher left for Cygni. There’s nothing that would help us.”
Eva said, “It seems so hopeless. He is somewhere. Something happened to him. The future, perhaps.”
“That’s what I was thinking.”
Herkimer told her. “The Revisionists may have intercepted him. They may be holding him.”
“They couldn’t hold him… not Asher Sutton,” Eva said. “They couldn’t hold him if he knew all his powers.”
“But he doesn’t know them,” Herkimer reminded her. “And we couldn’t tell him about them or draw them to his attention. He had to find them for himself. He had to be put under pressure and suddenly discover them by natural reaction. He couldn’t be taught them; he had to evolve into them.”
“We did so well,” said Eva. “We seemed to be doing so well. We forced Morgan into ill-considered action by conditioning Benton into challenging Sutton, the one quick way to get rid of Asher when Adams failed to fall in with the plan to kill him. And that Benton incident put Asher on his guard without our having to tell him that he should be careful. And now,” she said. “And now…”
“The book was written,” Herkimer told her.
“But it doesn’t have to be,” said Eva. “You and I may be no more than puppets in some probability world that will pinch out tomorrow.”
“We’ll cover all key points in the future,” Herkimer promised her. “We’ll redouble our espionage of the Revisionists, check back on every task force of the past. Maybe we’ll learn something.”
“It’s the random factors,” Eva said. “You can’t be sure, ever. All of time and space for them to happen in. How can we know where to look or turn? Do we have to fight our way through every possible happening to get the thing we want?”
“You forget one factor,” Herkimer said calmly.
“One factor?”
“Yes, Sutton himself. Sutton is somewhere and I have great faith in him. In him and his destiny. For, you see, he listens closely to his destiny and that will pay off in the end.”
Eva walked to the window.
Ash, she thought. Ash, my love, you simply have to be all right. You must know what you’re doing. You must come back to us and you must write the book and…
Not for me alone, she thought. Not for me alone, for I, least of all of them, have a claim on you. But the galaxy has a claim on you, and maybe someday the universe. The little striving lives are waiting for. your words and the hope and dignity they spell. And most of all the dignity. Dignity ahead of hope. The dignity of equality… the dignity of the knowledge that all life is on an equal basis… that life is all that matters… that life is the badge of a greater brotherhood than anything the mind of Man has ever spelled out in all its theorizing.
And I, she thought, have no right to think the way I do, to feel the way I do.
But I can’t help it, Ash. I can’t help but love you.
Someday, she thought, and knew it for a hopeless wish.
She stood straight and lonely and the tears moved slowly down her cheeks, and she did not raise her hand to brush them off.
Dreams, she thought. Broken dreams are bad enough. But the dream that has no hope… the dream that is doomed long before it’s broken… that’s the worst of all.
YOU are a strange man, William Jones,” John H. Sutton told him. “And a good one, too. I’ve never had a better hired hand in all the years I’ve farmed. None of the others would stay more than a year or two, always running off, always going somewhere.”
“I have no place to go,” said Asher Sutton. “There’s no place I want to go. This is as good as any.”
And it was better, he told himself, than he had thought it would be, for here were peace and security and living close to nature that no man of his own age ever had experienced.
The two men leaned on the pasture bars and watched the twinkling of the house and auto lights from across the river. In the darkness on the slope below them, the cattle, turned out after milking, moved about with quiet, soft sounds, cropping a last few mouthfuls of grass before settling down to sleep. A breeze with a touch of coolness in it drifted up the slope and it was fine and soothing after a day of heat.
“We always get a cool night breeze,” said old John H. “No matter how hot the day may be, we have easy sleeping.”
He sighed. “I wonder sometimes,” he said, “how well contented a man should let himself become. I wonder if it may not be a sign of—well, almost sinfulness. For Man is not by nature a contented animal. He is restless and unhappy and it’s that same unhappiness that has driven him, like a lash across his back, to his great accomplishments.”
“Contentedness,” said Asher Sutton, “is an indication of complete adjustment to one’s particular environment. It is a thing that is not often found… that is too seldom found. Someday Man, and other creatures as well, will know how to achieve it and there will be peace and happiness in all the galaxy.”
John H. chuckled. “You take in a lot of territory, William.”
“I was taking the long-range view,” said Sutton. “Someday Man will be going to the stars.”
John H. nodded. “Yes, I suppose he will. But he will go too soon. Before Man goes to the stars, he should learn how to live on Earth.”
He yawned and said: “I think I will turn in. Getting old, you know, and I need my rest.”
“I’m going to walk around a bit,” said Sutton.
“You do a lot of walking, William.”
“After dark,” said Sutton, “the land is different than it is in daylight. It smells different. Sweet and fresh and clean, as if it were just washed. You hear things in the quietness you do not hear in daylight. You walk and you are alone with the land and the land belongs to you.”
JOHN H. wagged his head. “It’s not the land that’s different, William. It is you. Sometimes I think you see and hear things that the rest of us do not know. Almost, William…” he hesitated, then added abruptly, “almost as if you did not quite belong.”
“Sometimes I think I don’t.”
“Remember this,” John H. told him. “You are one of us… one of the family, seems like. Let me see, how many years now?”
“Ten,” said Sutton. “That’s right. I can usually recall the day you came, but sometimes I forget. Sometimes it seems that you were always here. Sometimes I catch myself thinking you’re a Sutton.”
He hacked and cleared his throat, spitting in the dust. “I borrowed your typewriter the other day, William. I had a letter I had to write. It was an important letter and I wanted it done properly.”
“It’s all right,” said Sutton. “I’m glad it was some use to you.”
“Getting any writing done these days, William?”
“No,” said Sutton, “I gave up. I couldn’t do it. I lost my notes, you see. I had it all figured out. and I had it down on paper, and I thought maybe I could remember it, but I found I couldn’t. It’s no use trying.”
John H.’s voice was a soft, low sound in the darkness. “You in any kind of trouble, William?”
“No,” said Sutton. “Not exactly trouble.”
“Anything I can do to help?”
“Not a thing,” said Sutton.
“Let me know if there is,” insisted the old man. “We’d do anything for you.”
“Someday I may go away,” said Sutton. “Maybe suddenly. If I do, I wish you would forget me, forget I was ever here.”
“That’s what you wish, lad?”
“Yes, it is,” said Sutton.
“We can’t forget you, William. We never could do that. But we won’t talk about you. If someone comes and asks about you, we’ll act as if you never had been here.”
He paused. “Is that the way you want it, William?”
“Yes,” said Sutton. “If you don’t mind, that’s the way I want it.”
They stood silent for a moment, facing one another in the dark. Then the old man turned around and clumped toward the lighted windows of the house and Sutton, turning, too, leaned his arms on the pasture bars and stared across the river where the faery lights were blinking in a land of never-never.
TEN years, thought Sutton, and the letter’s written. Ten years and the conditions of the past are met. Now the past can get along without me, for I was only staying so that John H. could write the letter… so that he could write it and I could find it in an old trunk 6,000 years from now and read it on a nameless asteroid I won by killing a man in a place of synthetic dreams that will be called the Zag House.
The Zag House will be over there across the river, he thought, far up the plain above the ancient town of Prairie du Chien; and the University of North America, with its towers of beauty, will be set on the hills there to the north, and Adams’ house will be near the confluence of the Wisconsin and Mississippi Rivers. Great ships will climb into the sky from the Iowa prairies and head out for the stars that even now are twinkling overhead… and other stars that no man’s eye can see unaided.
Far across the river, he thought, that’s where the Zag House will be. And that is where someday, 6,000 years from now, I will meet a little girl in a checkered apron. Like in a story, he thought. Boy meets girl and the boy is tow-headed with a cowlick and he’s barefooted and the girl twists her apron in her little hands and tells him what her name is…
He. straightened and gripped the top bar of the pasture gate.
“Eva,” he said hopelessly, “where are you?”
Her hair was copper and her eyes . . what color were her eyes? I have studied you for twenty years, she had said, and he had wanted to kiss her for it, not believing the words she spoke, but ready to believe the unspoken word of her proud face and lovely body.
Somewhere she still existed, somewhere in time and space. Somewhere she might be thinking of him as even now he thought of her. If he tried hard enough, he might contact her. Might drive his hunger for her through the folds of space and time and let her know that he still remembered, still wanted her, that somehow, sometime he would come back to her.
But even as he thought of it, he knew that it was unreal, that he floundered in the grasp of forgotten time as a man may flounder in a running sea. It was not he who would reach out for her, for he could not, but she or Herkimer or someone else might reach out to him… if anyone ever did.
Ten years, he thought, and they seem to have forgotten me. Is it because they cannot find me, or, having found me, cannot reach me? Or is it for a purpose, and if that is it, what can the purpose be?
There had been times when he had felt that he was being watched, that nasty touch of cold between the shoulder blades. And there had been the time when someone had run from him when he had been in the woods, late of a summer evening, hunting for the fence-jumping, cross-eyed heifer that was forever getting lost.
He turned from the pasture bars and through the barnyard, making his way in the darkness as a man will walk in a well-remembered room. From the barn came the scent of freshly mown hay, and in the row of chicken coops one of the young birds was cheeping sleepily.
EVEN as he walked, his mind flicked out and touched the disturbed chicken’s mind.
Fluttering dread of an unknown thing… there had been a sound coming on the edge of sleep. And a sound was danger… a signal of an unknown danger. Sound and nowhere to go. Darkness and sound. Apprehension.
Sutton pulled back his mind and walked on. Not much stability in a chicken, he thought. A cow was contented and its thought and purpose as slow-moving as its feeding. A dog was alive and friendly, and a cat, no matter how well tamed it might be, still walked the jungle’s edge.
I know them all, he thought. I have been each one of them. And there are some that are not quite pleasant. A rat, for example, or a weasel or a bass lying in wait beneath the lily pads. But the skunk… the skunk was a pleasant fellow. One could enjoy living as a skunk.
Curiosity or practice? Perhaps curiosity, he admitted, the human penchant for prying into things that were hung with signs: No Trespassing. Keep Out. Private. Do Not Disturb. But practice as well, learning one of the tools of the second body. Learning how to move into another mind and share its every shade of intellectual and emotional reactions.
But there was a line… a line he had never crossed, either through innate decency or a fear of being found out. He could not decide quite which.
The road was a dusty strip of white that ran along the ridge, twisting between the deep bowls of darkness where the land fell away into deep hollows. Sutton walked slowly, footfalls muffled by the dust. The land was black and the road was white and the stars were large and soft in the summer night. So different, Sutton thought, from the winter stars. In the winter the stars retreated high into the sky and glowed with a hard and steely light.
Peace and quiet, he told himself. In this corner of the ancient Earth there is peace and quiet, unbroken by the turbulence of twentieth century living.
From a land like this came the steady men, the men who in a few more generations would ride the ships out to the stars. Here, in the quiet corners of the world, were built the stamina and courage, the depth of character and the deep convictions that would take the engines that more brilliant, less stable men had dreamed, and drive them to the farthest rims of the galaxy, there to hold key. worlds for the glory and the profit of the race.
The profit, Sutton said. The glory gets dimmed by profit somehow.
Ten years, he thought, and the involuntary compact with time has been consummated… each condition filled. I am free to go.
But there was no place to go and no way to get there.
I would like to stay, said Sutton. It is pleasant here.
“Johnny,” he said. “Johnny, what are we going to do?”
HE FELT the stir in his mind, the old canine stir, the wagging tail, the comfort of blankets tucked about a child in his bed.
“It’s all right, Ash,” said Johnny. “Everything’s all right. You needed these ten years.”
“You’ve stayed with me, Johnny.”
“I am you,” said Johnny. “I came when you were born, I’ll stay until you die.”
“And then?”
“You’ll not need me, Ash. I’ll go to something or someone else. None walks alone.” None walks alone, said Sutton, and he said it like a prayer.
And he was not alone.
Someone walked beside him, and where he’d come from, and how long he’d been there, Sutton did not know.
“This, is a splendid walk,” said the man, whose face was hidden in darkness. “Do you take it often?”
“Almost every night,” said Sutton’s tongue, and his brain warned: Steady! Steady!
“It’s so quiet,” said the man. “So quiet and alone. It is good for thinking. A man could do a lot of thinking, walking nights out here.”
Sutton did not answer.
They plodded along, side by side, and even while he fought to keep relaxed, Sutton felt his body tensing.
“You’ve been doing a lot of thinking, Sutton,” said the man. “Ten whole years of thinking.”
“You should know,” said Sutton. “You’ve been watching me.”
“We’ve watched,” admitted the man. “And our machines have watched. We got you down on tape and we know a lot about you. A whole lot more than we did ten years ago.”
“Ten years ago,” said Sutton, “you sent two men to buy me off.”
“I know,” replied the man. “We have often wondered what became of them.”
“That’s an easy one,” Sutton said. “I killed them.”
“They had a proposition.”
“If you can call it that. They offered me a planet.”
“I knew at the time it wouldn’t work,” the man declared. “I told Trevor that it wouldn’t work.”
“I suppose you have another proposition?” Sutton asked. “A slightly higher price?”
“Not exactly,” said the man. “We thought this time we’d cut out the bargaining and just let you name your price.”
“I’ll think about it,” Sutton told him. “I’m not too sure I can think up a price.”
“As you wish, Sutton,” said the man. “We’ll be waiting… and watching. Just give us the sign when you’ve made up your mind.”
“A sign?”
“Sure. Just write us a note. We’ll be looking over your shoulder. Or just say… ‘Well, I’ve made up my mind.’ We’ll be listening and we’ll hear.”
“Simple,” Sutton replied. “Nothing to it.”
“We make it easy for you,” said the man. “Good evening, Mr. Sutton.”
Sutton did not see him do it, but sensed that he had touched his hat…if he wore a hat. Then he was gone, turning off the road and going down across the pasture, walking in the dark, heading for the woods that sloped to the river bluffs.
SUTTON stood in the dusty road and listened to him go—the soft swish of dew-laden grass brushing on his shoes, the muted pad of his feet in the pasture.
Contact at last! After ten years, contact with the people from another time. But the wrong people. Not his people.
The Revisionists had been watching him, even as he had sensed them watching. Watching and waiting, waiting for ten years. But, of course, not ten years of their time, just ten years of his. Machines and watchers would have been sprinkled through those ten years, so that the job could have been done in a year or a month, or even in a week, if they had wanted to throw enough men and materials into the effort.
But why wait ten years? To soften him up, to make him ready to jump at anything they offered?
To soften him up? He grinned wryly in the dark.
Then suddenly the picture came to him and he stood there stupidly, wondering why he hadn’t thought of it much sooner.
They hadn’t waited to soften him up… they had waited for old John H. to write the letter. For they knew about the letter. They had studied old John H. and they knew he’d write a letter. They had him down on tape and they knew him inside out and they had figured to an eyelash the way his mind would work.
The letter was the key to the whole thing. The letter was the lure that had been used to suck Asher Sutton back into this time. They had lured him, then sealed him off and kept him, kept him as surely as if they’d had him in a cage. They had studied him and they knew him and they had him figured out. They knew what he would do as surely as they had known what old John H. would do.
His mind flicked out and probed cautiously at the brain of the man striding down the hill.
Chickens and cats and dogs and meadow mice—and not one of them suspected, not one of them had known that another mind than theirs had occupied their brain.
But the brain of a man might be a different matter. Highly trained and sensitive, it might detect: outside interference, might sense, if it did not actually know, the invasion of itself.
The girl won’t wail. I’ve been away too long. Her affections are less than skin deep and she has no morals, absolutely none, and I’m the one to know. I’ve been on this damn patrol too long. She will be tired of waiting… she was tired of waiting when I was gone three hours. To hell with her… I can get another one. But not like her… not exactly like her. There isn’t another one anywhere quite like her.
Whoever said this Sutton guy would be an easy one to crack was crazy as a loon. God, after ten years in a dump like this, I’d fall on someone’s neck and kiss ’em if they came back from my own time. Anyone at all… friend or foe, it would make no difference. Bill what does Sutton do? Not a damn word. Not a single syllable of surprise in any word he spoke. When I first spoke to him, he didn’t even break his stride, kept right on walking as if he knew I’d been there all the time. Cripes, I could use a drink. Nerve-wracking work.
Wish I could forget that girl. Wish she would be waiting for me, but I know she won’t. Wish…
SUTTON snapped back his mind, stood quietly in the road.
And inside himself he felt the shiver of triumph, the swift backwash of relief and triumph. They didn’t know. In all their ten years of watching, they had seen no more than the superficial things.. They had him down on tape, but they didn’t know all that went on within his mind.
A human mind, perhaps. But not his mind. A human mind they might be able to strip as bare as a sickled field, might dissect it and analyze it and read the story in it. But his mind told them only what it wished to tell them, only enough so that there would be no suspicion that he was holding back. Ten years ago Adams’ gang had tried to tap his mind and had not even dented it.
The Revisionists had watched ten years and they knew each motion that he made, many of the things that he had thought.
But they did not know that he could go to live within the mind of a mouse or a catfish or a man.
For if they had known, they would have set up certain safeguards, would have been on the alert against him.
And they weren’t. No more alert than the mouse had been.
He glanced back the road to where the Sutton farmhouse stood upon the hill. For a moment he thought that he could see it, a darker mass against the darkness of the sky, but that, he knew, was no more than pure imagination. He knew it was there and he had formed a mental image.
One by one, he checked the items in his room. The books, the few scribbled papers, the razor.
There was nothing there, he knew, that he could not leave behind. Not a thing that would arouse suspicion. Nothing that could be fastened on in some later day and turned into a weapon to be used against him.
He had been prepared against this day, knowing that some day it would come—that some day Herkimer or the Revisionists or an agent from the government would step from behind a tree and walk along beside him.
Knowing? Well, not exactly. Hoping. And ready for the hope.
Long years ago his futile attempt to write the book of destiny without his notes had gone up in smoke. All that remained was a heap of paper ash, mixed these many years with the soil. Bleached away by the rains, gone as chemical elements into a head of wheat or an ear of corn.
He was ready. Packed and ready. His mind had been packed and ready, he knew now, for these many years.
Softly he stepped off the road and went down across the pasture, following the man who walked toward the river bluffs. His mind flicked out and tracked him through the darkness, using his thoughts to track him as a hound would use his nose to track a fox.
HE OVERHAULED him scant minutes after he had entered the fringe of trees and after that kept a few paces behind him, walking carefully to guard against the suddenly snapping twig, the swish of swaying bushes that could have warned his quarry.
The ship lay within a deep ravine and at a hail it lighted up and a port swung open. Another man stood in the port and stared into the night.
“That you, Gus?” he called.
The other swore at him. “Who else do you think would be floundering around in these woods at the dead of night?”
“I got to worrying,” said the man in the port. “You were gone longer than I thought you would be. Just getting ready to set out and hunt for you.”
“You’re always worrying,” Gus growled at him. “Between you and this outlandish ancient world, I’m fed up. Trevor can find someone else to do this kind of work from here on out.”
He scrambled up the steps into the ship. “Get going,” he told the other man tersely. “We’re getting out of here.”
He turned to shut the port, but Sutton already had it closed.
Gus took two steps backward, brought up against an anchored chair and stood there, grinning.
“Look at what we got,” he said. “Hey, Pinky, look at what followed me back home.”
Sutton smiled at them grimly. “If you gentlemen have no objection, I’ll hitch a ride with you.”
“And if we have objections?” Pinky asked.
“I’m riding this ship,” Sutton told him. “With you or without you. Take your choice.”
“This is Sutton,” Gus told Pinky. “The Mr. Sutton. Trevor will be glad to see you, Sutton.”
Trevor… Trevor. That was three times he had heard the name, and somewhere else he had heard it once before. He stood with his back against the closed port and his mind returned to another ship and another two men.
“Trevor,” Case had said, or had it been Pringle who had said it? “Trevor? Why, Trevor is the head of the corporation.”
“I’ve been looking forward, all these years,” Sutton told them, “to meeting Mr. Trevor. He and I will have a lot to talk about.”
“Get her going, Pinky,” Gus said. “And send ahead a message. Trevor will want to break out the guard of honor for us. We’re bringing Asher Sutton back.”
TREVOR picked up a paper clip and flipped it at an ink well on the desk. The clip landed in the ink.
“Getting pretty good,” said Trevor: “Hit it seven times out of every ten. Used to be I missed it seven times out of every ten.”
He looked at Sutton, studying him.
“You look like an ordinary man,” he said. “I should be able to talk with you and make you understand.”
“I haven’t any horns,” said Sutton, “if that is what you mean.”
“Nor,” said Trevor, “any halo, either, so far as I’m concerned.”
He flipped another paper clip and it missed the ink well.
“Seven out of ten,” said Trevor.
He flipped another one.
“Sutton,” said Trevor, “you know a great deal about destiny. Have you ever thought of it in terms of manifest destiny?”
Sutton shrugged. “You’re using an antiquated term. Pure and simple propaganda of the nineteenth century. There was a certain nation that wore that one threadbare.”
“Propaganda?” Trevor repeated. “Let’s call it psychology. You say a thing so often and so well that after a time everyone believes it. Even, finally, yourself.”
“This manifest destiny,” said Sutton. “For the human race, I presume?”
“Naturally,” said Trevor. “After all, we’re the animals that would know how to use it to the best advantage.”
“You pass up a point,” declared Sutton. “The humans don’t need it. They already think they are great and right and holy. Certainly you don’t need to propagandize them.”
“In the short view, you are right,” agreed Trevor. “But in the short view only.” He stabbed a sudden finger at Sutton. “Once we have the galaxy in hand, what do we do then?”
“Why,” said Sutton and stopped. “Why, I suppose…”
“That’s exactly it,” said Trevor. “You don’t know where you’re going. Nor does the human race.”
“And manifest destiny?” asked Sutton. “If we had manifest destiny, it would be different?”
Trevor’s words were scarcely more than a whisper. “There are other galaxies, Sutton. Greater even than this one. Many other galaxies.”
Good Lord! thought Sutton.
He started to speak and then closed his mouth and sat stiffly in his chair.
Trevor’s whisper speared at him from across the desk.
“Staggers you, doesn’t it?” he demanded.
Sutton tried to speak aloud, but his voice came out a whisper, too.
“You’re mad, Trevor. Absolutely mad.”
“The long-range view,” said Trevor. “That is what we need. The absolutely unshakable belief in human destiny, the positive and all-inclusive conviction that Man is meant not only to take over this galaxy alone, but all the galaxies, the entire universe.”
“YOU should live long enough,” said Sutton, sudden mockery rising to his tongue.
“I won’t see it, of course,” admitted Trevor. “And neither will you. Nor will our children’s children or their children for many generations.”
“It will take a million years,” Sutton told him.
“More than a million years,” Trevor answered calmly. “You have no idea, no conception of the scope of the universe. In a million years we’ll just be getting a good start…”
“Then, why, for the love of heaven, do you and I sit here and quibble about it?”
“Logic,” said Trevor.
“There is no real logic,” Sutton declared, “in planning a million years ahead. A man can plan his own lifetime, if he wishes, and there is some logic in that. Or the life of his children and there still would be some logic in it… and maybe in the life of his grandchildren. But beyond that there can be no logic.”
‘“Sutton,” asked Trevor, “did you ever hear of a corporation?”
“Why, yes, of course, but…”
“A corporation could plan for a million years,” said Trevor. “It could plan very logically.‘”
“A corporation is not a man,” said Sutton. “It is not an entity.”
“But it is,” insisted Trevor. “An entity composed of men and created by men to carry out their wishes. It is a living, operative concept that is handed down from one generation to another to carry out a plan too vast to be accomplished in the lifetime of one man alone.”
“Your corporation publishes books, too, doesn’t it?” asked Sutton.
Trevor stared at him. “Who told you that?” he snapped.
“A couple of men by the name of Case and Pringle. They tried to buy my book for your corporation.”
“Case and Pringle are out on a mission,” Trevor said. “I had expected them back…”
“They won’t be coming back.”
“You killed them,” Trevor said, flatly.
“They tried to kill me first. I’m awfully hard to kill.”
“That would have been against my orders, Sutton. I do not want you killed.”
“They were on their own,” said Sutton. “They were going to sell my carcass to Morgan.”
There was no way of telling, Sutton thought, how you hit this man. There was no difference of expression in his eyes, no faintest flicker of change across his face.
“I appreciate your killing them,” said Trevor. “It saves me the bother.”
He flicked a clip at the ink well and it was a hit.
“It’s logical,” he continued, as though Sutton had not spoken, “that a corporation should plan a million years ahead. It provides a framework within which a certain project may be carried forward without interruption, although the personnel in charge should change from time to time.”
“Wait a minute,” Sutton told him. “Is there a corporation or are you just posing fables?”
“THERE is a corporation,” Trevor told him, “and I am the man who heads it. Varied interests pooling their resources… and there will be more and more of them as time goes on. As soon as we can show something tangible.”
“By tangible, you mean destiny for the human race, for the human race alone?”
Trevor nodded. “Then we’ll have something to talk about. A commodity to sell. Something to back up our sales talk.”
Sutton shook his head. “I can’t see what you expect to gain.”
“Three things,” Trevor told him. “Wealth and power and knowledge. The wealth and power and knowledge of the universe. For Man alone, you understand. For a single race. For people like you and me. And of the three items, knowledge perhaps would be the greatest prize of all, for knowledge, added to and compounded, correlated and coordinated, would lead to even greater wealth and power… and to greater knowledge.”
“It is madness,” said Sutton. “You and I, Trevor, will be drifting dust, and not only ourselves, but the very era in which we live out this moment will be forgotten before the job is done.”
“Remember the corporation.”
“I’m remembering the corporation,” Sutton said, “but I can’t help but think in terms of people. You and I and the other people like us.”
“Let’s think in terms of people, then,” said Trevor, smoothly. “One day the life that runs in you will run in the brain and blood and muscle of a man who shall be part owner of the universe. There will be trillions upon trillions of life-forms to serve him, there will be wealth that he cannot count, there will be knowledge of which you and I cannot even dream.”
Sutton sat quietly, taut in his chair.
“You’re the only man,” said Trevor, “who is standing in the way. You’re the man who is blocking the project for a million years.”
“You need destiny,” said Sutton, “and destiny is not mine to give away.”
“You are a human being, Sutton,” Trevor told him, talking evenly. “You are a man. It is the people of your own race that I’m talking to you about.”
“Destiny,” said Sutton, “belongs to everything that lives. Not to Man alone, but to every form of life.”
“It needn’t,” Trevor contradicted. “You are the only man who knows. You are the man who can tell the facts. You can make it a manifest destiny for the human race instead of a personal destiny for every crawling, cackling, sniveling thing that has the gift of life.”
Sutton didn’t answer.
“One word from you,” said Trevor, “and the thing is done.”
“It can’t be done,” said Sutton. “This scheme of yours—think of the sheer time, the thousands of years, even at the rate of speed of the star-ships of today, to cross intergalactic space. Only from this galaxy to the next… not from this to the outermost galaxy.”
TREVOR sighed. “You forget what I said about the compounding of knowledge. Two and two won’t make four, my friend. It will make much more than four. In some instances thousands of times more than four.”
Sutton shook his head, wearily. But Trevor was right, he knew. Knowledge and technique would pyramid exactly as he said. Even, once Man had the time to do it, the knowledge in a single galaxy alone…
“One word from you,” said Trevor, “and the war is at an end. One word and the security of the human race is guaranteed forever. For all the race will need is the knowledge that you can give it.”
“It wouldn’t be the truth.”
“That,” replied Trevor, “doesn’t have a thing to do with it.”
“You don’t need manifest destiny,” said Sutton, “to carry out your project.”
“We have to have the human race behind us. We have to have something that is big enough to capture their imagination. Something important enough to make them pay attention. And manifest destiny—manifest destiny as it applies to the universe—is the thing to turn the trick.”
“Thirty years ago,” said Sutton, “I might have thrown in with you.”
“And now?” asked Trevor.
Sutton shook his head. “Not now. I know more than I did thirty years ago. Thirty years ago I was a human, Trevor. I’m not too sure I’m entirely human any longer.”
“I hadn’t mentioned the matter of reward,” said Trevor. “That goes without saying.”
“No, thanks,” said Sutton. “I’d like to keep on living.”
Trevor flipped a clip at the ink well and it missed.
“You’re slipping,” Sutton said. “Your percentage is way off.”
Trevor picked up another clip.
“All right,” he said. “Go ahead and have your fun. There’s a war on and we’ll win that war. It’s a hellish way to fight, but we’re doing it the best we can. No war anywhere, no surface indication of war, for you understand the galaxy is in utter and absolute peace under the rule of benevolent Earthmen. We can win without you, Sutton, but it would be easier with you.”
“You’re going to turn me loose?” Sutton asked.
“Why, sure,” Trevor told him. “Go on out and beat your head against a stone wall a little longer. In the end, you’ll get tired of it. Eventually you’ll give up out of sheer exhaustion. You’ll come back then and give us the thing we want.”
Sutton rose to his feet.
He stood for a moment, indecisive.
“What are you waiting for?” asked Trevor.
“One thing has me puzzled,” Sutton answered. “The book, somehow, somewhere, already has been written. It has been a fact for almost five hundred years. How are you going to change that? If I write it now the way you want it written, it will change the human setup…”
Trevor laughed. “We got that one all figured out. Let us say that finally, after all of these years, the original of your manuscript is discovered. It can be readily and indisputably identified by certain characteristics which you will very carefully incorporate into it when you write it. It will be found and proclaimed, and what is more, proven… and the human race will have its destiny.
“We’ll explain the past unpleasantness by very convincing historical evidence of earlier tampering with the manuscript. Even your friends, the androids, will have to believe what we say, once we get through with it.”
“Clever,” Sutton admitted.
“I think so, too,” said Trevor.
“Too bad you won’t have a chance to try it,” Sutton said.
AT THE building’s entrance a man was waiting for him. He raised his hand in what might have been a brief salute. “Just a minute, Mr. Sutton.”
“Yes, what is it?”
“There’ll be a few of us following you, sir. Orders, you know.”
“But…”
“Nothing personal, sir. We won’t interfere with anything you want to do. Just guarding you, sir.”
“Guarding me?”
“Certainly, sir. Morgan’s crowd, you know. Can’t let them kill you off.”
“You can’t know,” Sutton told him, “how deeply I appreciate your interest.”
“It’s nothing, sir,” the man told him. “Just part of the day’s work. Glad to do it. Don’t mention it at all.”
He stepped back again and Sutton wheeled and walked down the steps and followed the cinder walk that flanked the avenue.
The Sun was near to setting.
Looking back over his shoulder, he saw the tall, straight lines of the gigantic office building in which he had talked to Trevor outlined against the brightness of the western sky. But of anyone who might be following him he did not see a sign.
He had no place to go. He had no idea where to go. But he realized that he couldn’t stand around feeling lost. He’d walk, he told himself, and think, and wait for whatever was going to happen next to happen.
He met other walkers and a few of them stared at him curiously and now, for the first time, Sutton realized that he still wore the clothing of a twentieth-century farm hand… blue denim overalls and cotton shirt, with heavy, serviceable farm shoes on his feet.
But here, he knew, even such an outlandish costume would not arouse undue suspicion. For on Earth, with its visiting dignitaries from far solar systems, with its Babel of races employed in the different governmental departments, with its exchange students, its diplomats and legislators representing backwoods planets, how a man dressed would arouse but slight curiosity.
By morning, he told himself, he’d have to find some hiding place, some retreat where he could relax and figure out some of the angles in this world of five hundred years ahead.
Either that or locate an android he could trust to put him in touch with the android organization… for although he had never been told so, he had no doubt there was an android organization. There would have to be to fight a war in time.
HE TURNED off the path that flanked the roadway and took another one, a faint footpath that led out across marshy land toward a range of low hills.
Suddenly now he realized that he was hungry and that he should have dropped into one of the shops in the office building for a bite of food. And then he remembered that he had no money with which to pay for food. A few twentieth-century dollars were in his pockets, but they would be worthless here as a medium of exchange, although quite possibly they might be collectors’ items.
Short hours ago, he thought, he had walked a dusty hilltop road in the twentieth century, scuffing the white dust with his shoes… and some of the white dust, he saw, still clung to the leather. Even as the memory of that hilltop road still clung to his memory. Memory and dust, he thought, link us to the past.
He reached the hills and began to climb them and the night was sweet with the smell of pine.
He came to the top of a slight rise and stood there for a moment, looking out across the velvety softness of the night. Somewhere, near at hand, a cricket was tentatively tuning up his fiddle, and from the marsh came the muted sound of frogs. In the darkness just ahead of him, a stream was splashing along its rocky bed and it talked as it went along, talked to the trees and its grassy banks and the nodding flowers above them.
“I would like to stop,” it said. “I would like to stop and talk with you. But I can’t, you see. I must hurry on. I have some place I must go. I can’t waste a minute. I must hurry on.”
Like Man, thought Sutton. For Man is driven like the stream. Man is driven by circumstance and necessity and the bright-eyed ambition of other restless men who will not let them be.
He did not hear a sound, but he felt the great hand close upon his arm and yank him off the path. Twisting, he sought to free himself of the grasp, and saw the dark blur of the man who had grabbed him. He balled his fist and swung it and it was a sledge-hammer slamming at the dark head, but it never reached its mark. A charging body slammed into his knees and drove them inward under him. Arms wrapped themselves around his legs and he staggered, falling on his face.
He sat up and somewhere off to the right he heard the soft snickering of rapidly firing guns and caught, out of the tail of his eyes, their bright flicker in the night.
Then a hand came out of nowhere and cupped itself around his mouth and nose.
“Sleeping powder!” he thought. “Must hold my breath…”
And even as he thought it, the dark figures in the woods, the cheeping frogs and the snarling of the guns fused into silence.
SUTTON opened his eyes to strangeness and lay quietly on the bed. A breeze came through an open window and the room, decorated with fantastic life-murals, was splashed with brilliant sunlight. The breeze brought in the scent of blooming flowers and in a tree outside a bird was chirping contentedly.
Slowly Sutton let his senses reach out and gather in the facts of the room, the facts of strangeness… the unfamiliar furniture, the contour of the room itself, the green and purple monkeys that chased one another along the wavy vine that ran around the border of the walls.
Quietly his mind moved back along the track of time to his final conscious moment. There had been guns flickering in the night and there had been a hand that reached out and cupped his nose.
Drugged, Sutton told himself. Drugged and dragged away.
Before that there had been a cricket and the frogs singing in the marsh and the talking brook that babbled down the hill, hurrying to get wherever it was going.
And before that a man had sat across a desk from him and told him about a corporation and a dream and a plan the corporation held.
Fantastic, Sutton thought. And in the bright light of the room, the very idea was one of utter fantasy… that Man should go out, not only to the stars, but to the other galaxies, and plan a million years ahead.
But there was greatness in it, a very human greatness. There had been a time when it had been fantasy to think that Man could ever lift himself from the bosom of the planet of his birth. And another time when it had been fantasy to think that Man would go beyond the solar system, out into the dread reaches of nothingness that stretched between the stars. And through time itself…
But there had been strength in Trevor, and conviction as well as strength. A man who knew where he was going and why he was going and what it took to get there.
Manifest destiny, Trevor had said. That is what it takes. That is what it needs.
Man would be almost a god. The concepts of life and thought that had been born on the Earth would be the basic concepts of the entire universe, of the fragile bubble of space and time that bobbed along on a sea of mystery beyond which no mind could penetrate. And yet, by the time that Man got where he was headed for, he might well be able to penetrate that, too.
A MIRROR stood in one corner of the room and in it he saw the reflection of the lower half of his body, lying on the bed, naked except for a pair of shorts. He wiggled his toes and watched them in the glass.
And you’re the only one who is stopping us, Trevor had told him. You’re the one man standing in the way of Man. You’re the stumbling block. You are keeping men from being gods.
But all men did not think as Trevor did. All men were not tangled in the blind chauvinism of the human race.
Always there are men who know that humanity is a single race, men who refuse to exploit other forms of life. Teachers. Missionaries. Vegetarians. Ordinary feeling human beings.
Even in his time, there had been men who treated androids sympathetically and Sutton had been one of them, though he knew now that it was the sympathy of the master for the underdog. The androids had not misunderstood; they knew it wasn’t equality that was offered or would be granted, that sympathy could turn to savage reprisal if they acted as equals. Occasionally one would, swaggering and belligerent in the way of the frightened and insecure, and his ghastly fate served as example to others who might, as the saying went, get out of hand.
For the human race, thought Sutton, cannot even for a moment forget that it is human, cannot achieve the greatness of humility that will unquestioningly accord equality. Even while the humane argue for the equality of androids, they cannot help but patronize the very ones that they would make equal.
What was it Herkimer had said? Equality not by edict, not by human tolerance. But that was the only way the human race would ever accord equality… by edict, by dispensation, a gesture of tolerance where there was none, actually.
AND yet, thought Sutton, there is Eva Armour. There may be others like her. Somewhere, working with the androids even now, there may be others like her.
He swung his feet out of bed and sat on the bed’s edge. A pair of slippers stood on the floor and he worked his feet into them, stood up and walked to the mirror.
A strange face stared back at him, a face he’d never seen before, and for a moment muddy panic surged within his brain.
Then, sudden suspicion blossoming, his hand went up to his forehead and rubbed at the smudge that was there, set obliquely across his brow.
Bending low, with his face close to the mirror, he verified the thought.
The smudge upon his brow was an android identification mark! An identification key and number!
WITH his fingers he carefully explored his face, located the plastic coatings of flesh that had changed its contours until he was unrecognizable.
He turned around, made his way back to the bed, sat down upon it cautiously and gripped the edge of the mattress with his hands.
Disguised, he told himself. Made into an android. Kidnaped a human and an android when he woke.
The door clicked and Herkimer said: “Good morning, sir. I trust that you are comfortable.”
Sutton jerked erect. “So it was you,” he said.
Herkimer nodded happily. “At your service, sir. Is there anything you wish?”
“You didn’t have to knock me out,” said Sutton. “This is the second time. I’m getting tired of it.”
“We had to work fast, sir,” said Herkimer. “We couldn’t have you messing up things, stumbling around and asking questions and wanting to know what it was all about. We just drugged you and hauled you off. It was, believe me, sir, much simpler that way.”
“There was some shooting,” Sutton said. “I heard the guns.”
“It seems,” Herkimer told him, “that there were a few Revisionists lurking about, and it gets a little complicated, sir, when one tries to explain during a fight.”
“You tangle with those Revisionists?”
“Well, to tell the truth,” said Herkimer, “some of them were so rash as to draw their guns. It was most unwise of them, sir. They got the worst of it.”
“It won’t do us a bit of good,” said Sutton, “if the idea was to get me out of the clutches of Trevor’s mob. Trevor will have a psych tracer on me. He knows where I am and this place will be watched three deep.”
Herkimer grinned. “It is, sir. His men are practically bumping into one another all around the place.”
“Then why this get-up?” Sutton demanded angrily. “Why disguise me?”
“Well, sir,” explained Herkimer, “it’s like this. We figured no human in his right mind ever would want to be taken for an android. So we turned you into one. They’ll be looking for a human. It would never occur to them to take a second look at an android when they were looking for a human.”
Sutton grunted. “Smart,” he said. “I hope it doesn’t…”
“Oh, they’ll get onto it after a while, sir,” Herkimer admitted, cheerfully. “But it will give us some time. Time to work out some plans.”
He moved swiftly around the room, opening chest drawers and taking out clothing.
“It’s very nice, sir,” he said, “to have you back again. We tried to find you, but it was no dice. We figured the Revisionists had you cooped up somewhere, so we redoubled our security here and kept a close watch on everything that happened. For the past five weeks we’ve known every move that Trevor and his gang has made.”
“Five weeks!” gasped Sutton. “Did you say five weeks?”
“Certainly, sir. Five weeks. You disappeared just seven weeks ago.”
“By my calendar,” said Sutton, “it was ten years.”
Herkimer wagged his head sagely, unstartled. “Time is the funniest thing, sir. There’s just no way to make subjective and objective time come out right.”
He laid clothing on the bed. “If you’ll get into these, sir, we’ll go down for breakfast. Eva is waiting—and will be glad to see you.”
TREVOR missed with three clips in a row. He flung the rest of them down on the desk.
“You’re sure of this?” he asked the man across the desk.
The man nodded, tight-lipped. “It might be android propaganda, you know,” said Trevor. “They’re clever. That’s a thing you never must forget. An android, for all his bowing and his scraping, is just as smart as we are.”
“Do you realize what it means?” the man demanded. “It means…”
“I can tell you what it means,” said Trevor. “From now on we can’t be sure which of us are human. There’ll be no sure way of knowing who’s a human and who’s an android. You could be an android. I could be…”
“Exactly,” said the man.
“That’s why Sutton was so smug yesterday afternoon,” said Trevor. “He sat there, where you are sitting, and I had the impression that he was laughing at me all the time…”
“I don’t think Sutton knows,” said the man. “It’s an android secret. Only a few of them know it. They certainly wouldn’t take a chance on any human knowing it.”
“Not even Sutton?”
“Not even Sutton,” said the man.
“Cradle,” said Trevor. “Nice sense of fitness they have.”
“You’re going to do something about it, certainly,” said the man impatiently.
Trevor put his elbows on the desk and matched fingertips.
“Of course I am,” he said. “Do you think I’d ever sit back and not do something?”
EVA ARMOUR rose from the table on the patio and held out both her hands in greeting. Sutton pulled her close to him, planted a kiss on her upturned lips.
“That,” he said, “is for the million times I have thought of you.”
She laughed at him, suddenly gay and happy.
“Now, Ash, a million times?”
“Tangled time,” said Herkimer. “He’s been away ten years.”
“Oh,” said Eva. “Oh, Ash, how horrible!”
He grinned at her. “Not too horrible. I had ten years of rest. Ten years of peace and quiet. Working on a farm, you know. It was a little rough at first, but I was actually sorry when I had to leave. Except that it meant coming back to you.”
He held a chair for her, took one himself between her and Herkimer.
They ate… ham and eggs, toast and marmalade, strong, black coffee. It was pleasant on the patio. In the trees above them birds quarreled amiably. In the clover at the edge of the bricks and stones that formed the paving, bees hummed among the blossoms.
“How do you like my place, Ash?” asked Eva.
“It’s wonderful,” he said, and then, as if the two ideas might be connected in some way, he added, “I saw Trevor yesterday. He took me to the mountain top and showed me the universe.”
Eva drew in her breath sharply, and Sutton looked up quickly from his plate. Herkimer was waiting with drawn face, with fork poised in mid-air, halfway to his mouth.
“What’s the matter with you two?” Sutton asked, offended. “Don’t you trust me?”
And even as he, asked the question, he answered it himself. Of course they wouldn’t trust him. He was human and he could betray his own beliefs. He could twist destiny so that it was a thing for the human race alone. And there was no way in which they could be sure that he would not do this. Why should they trust a man who still felt uncomfortable and patronizing eating with an android? For he did, even now, though he was ashamed and blamed a lifetime of conditioning.
“Ash,” said Eva, “you refused to…”
“I left Trevor with an idea that I would be back to talk it over. Nothing that I said or did. He just believes I will. Told me to go out and beat my head against the wall some more.”
“You have thought about it, sir?” asked Herkimer.
Sutton shook his head. “No. Not too much. I haven’t sat down and mulled it over, if that is what you mean. It would have its points if I were merely human. Sometimes I frankly wonder how much of the human there may be left in me.”
“How much of it do you know, Ash?” Eva asked, speaking softly. Her eyes questioned him.
SUTTON scrubbed a hand across his forehead. “Most of it, I think. I know about the war in time and how and why it’s being fought. I know about myself. I have two bodies and two minds, or at least substitute bodies and minds. I know some of the things that I can do. There may be other abilities I do not know about. One grows into them. Each new thing comes hard.”
“We couldn’t tell you,” Eva said. “It would have been so simple if we could have told you. To start with, you would not have believed the things we told you. And, when dealing with time, one interferes as little as possible. Just enough to turn an event in the right direction.
“I tried to warn you. Remember, Ash? As near as I could come to warning.”
He nodded. “After I killed Benton in the Zag House. You told me you had studied me for twenty years.”
“And, remember, I was the little girl in the checkered apron.”
He looked at her in surprise. “You knew about that? It wasn’t just part of the Zag dream?”
“Identification planted by suggestion,” said Herkimer. “So that you could identify Eva as a friend, as someone you had known before and who was close to you. So that you would accept her and whatever help she was allowed to offer.”
“But it was a dream.”
“A Zag dream,” said Herkimer. “The Zag is one of us. His race would benefit if destiny can stand for everyone and not the human race alone.”
SUTTON said: “Trevor is too confident. Not just pretending to be confident, but really confident. I keep coming back to that remark he made. Go out, he said, and butt your head some more.”
“He’s counting on you as a human being,” Eva said.
Sutton shook his head. “I can’t think that’s it. He must have some scheme up his sleeve, some maneuver that we won’t be able to check.”
Herkimer spoke slowly. “I don’t like that, sir. The war’s not going too well as it is. If we had to win, we’d be lost right now.”
“If we had to win? I don’t understand…”
“We don’t have to win, sir,” said Herkimer. “All we have to do is fight a holding action, prevent the Revisionists from destroying the book as you will write it. From the very first we have not tried to change a single entry. We’ve tried to keep them from being changed.”
Sutton nodded. “On his part, Trevor has to win decisively. He must smash the original text, either prevent it from being written as I mean to write it or discredit it so thoroughly that not even an android will believe it.”
“You’re right, sir,” Herkimer told him. “Unless he can do that, the humans cannot claim destiny for their own, cannot make other life believe that destiny is reserved for the human race alone.”
“And that is all he wants,” said Eva. “Not the destiny itself, for no human can have the faith in destiny that say, for example, an android can. To Trevor it is merely a matter of propaganda… to make the human race believe so completely that it is destined that it will not rest until it holds the universe.”
“So long,” said Herkimer, “as we can keep him from doing that, we can state that we are winning. But the issue is so finely balanced that a new approach by either side would score heavily. A new weapon could be a factor that would mean victory or defeat.”
“I have a weapon,” Sutton said. “A made-to-order weapon that would beat them… but there’s no way that it can be used.”
Neither of them asked the question, but he saw it on their faces and he answered it.
“There’s only one such weapon. Only one gun. You can’t fight a war with just one gun.”
Feet pounded around the corner of the house. When they turned, they saw an android running toward them across the patio. Dust stained his clothing and his face was red from running. He came to a stop and faced them, clutching at the table’s edge.
“They tried to kill me,” he panted, the words coming out in gushes. “The place is surrounded…”
“Andrew, you fool,” snapped Herkimer. “What do you mean by running in like this? They will know…”
“They’ve found out about the Cradle,” Andrew gasped. “They know…”
Herkimer came erect in one swift motion. The chair on which he had been sitting tipped over with the violence of his rising and his face was suddenly so white that the identification tattoo on his forehead stood out with startling clearness.
“They know where…?”
ANDREW shook his head. “Not where. They just found out about it. Just now. We still have time…”
“We’ll call in all the ships,” said Herkimer. “We’ll have to pull all the guards off the crisis points .”
“But you can’t,” cried Eva. “That’s exactly what they would want you to do. That is all that is stopping them…”
“We have to,” Herkimer said grimly. “There’s no choice. If they destroy the Cradle…”
“Herkimer,” said Eva, and there was a deadly calm in her unhurried words. “The mark!”
Andrew swung around toward her, then took a backward step. Herkimer’s hand flashed underneath his coat and Andrew turned to run, heading for the low wall that rimmed the patio.
The knife in Herkimer’s hand flashed in the Sun and was suddenly a spinning wheel that tracked the running android. It caught him before he reached the wall and he went down into a heap of huddled clothing.
The knife, Sutton saw, was neatly buried in his neck.
“HAVE you noticed, sir,” said Herkimer, “how the little things, the inconsequential, trivial factors come to play so big a part in any happening?”
He touched the huddled body with his foot.
“Perfect,” he said. “Absolutely perfect. Except that before reporting to us, he should have smeared some lacquer over his identification mark. Many androids do it in an attempt to hide the mark, but it’s seldom much of a success. After only a short time, the mark shows through.”
“But lacquer?” asked Sutton.
“A little code we have,” said Herkimer. “A very simple thing. It’s the recognition sign for an agent reporting. A password, as it were. It takes a moment only. Some lacquer on your finger and a smear across your forehead.”
“So simple a thing,” said Eva, “that no one, absolutely no one, would ever notice it.”
Sutton nodded. “One of Trevor’s men?”
Herkimer nodded. “Impersonating one of our men. Sent to smoke us out. Sent to start us running, panicked to save the Cradle.”
“This Cradle…”
“But it means,” said Eva, “that Trevor knows about it. He doesn’t know where it is, but he knows about it. And he’ll hunt until he finds it and then…”
Herkimer’s gesture stopped her.
“What is wrong?” asked Sutton.
For there was something wrong, something that was terribly wrong. The whole atmosphere of the place had grown harsh. The friendliness was gone… the trust and friendliness and the oneness of their purpose. Shattered by an android who had run across the patio and talked about a thing that he called a Cradle and died, seconds later, with a knife blade through his throat.
Instinctively Sutton’s mind reached out for Herkimer and then he drew it back. It was not an ability, he told himself, that one used upon a friend. It was an ability that one must keep in trust, not to be used curiously or idly, but only where the end result would justify its use.
“What’s gone sour?” he asked. “What is the matter?”
“Sir,” said Herkimer, “you are a human being and this is an android matter.”
For a moment Sutton stood stiff and straight, his mind absorbing the shock of the words that Herkimer had spoken, the black fury boiling ice cold inside his body.
Then, deliberately, as if he had planned to do it, as if it was an action he had decided upon after long consideration, he made a tight fist and swung his arm.
It was a vicious blow, with all his weight and all his strength and anger back of it, and Herkimer went down like an ox beneath a hammer.
“Ash!” cried Eva.
She clutched at his arm, but he shook her off.
HERKIMER was sitting up, his hands covering his face, blood dripping down between his fingers.
Sutton spoke to him. “I have not sold destiny, nor do I intend to sell it. Although, God knows, if I did, it would be no more than the lot of you deserve.”
“Ash,” said Eva softly. “Ash, we must be sure.”
“How can I make you sure?” he asked. “I can only tell you.”
“They are your people, Ash,” she said. “Your race. Their greatness is your greatness, too. You can’t blame Herkimer for thinking…”
“They’re your people, too,” said Sutton. “The taint that applies to me applies to you as well.”
She shook her head.
“I’m a special case,” she said. “I was orphaned when I was only a few weeks old. The family androids took me over. They raised me. Herkimer was one of them. I’m much more an android, Ash, than I am a human being.”
Herkimer was still sitting on the grass, beside the sprawled, dead body of Trevor’s agent. He did not take his hands from his face. He made no sign that he was going to. The blood still dripped down between his finger and trickled down his arms.
Sutton said to Eva: “It was very nice to see you again. And thank you for the breakfast.”
He turned on his heel and walked away, across the patio and over the low wall and out into the path that led down to the road.
He heard Eva cry out for him to stop, but he pretended not to hear her.
I was raised by androids, she had said. And he had been raised by Buster, a robot, not even an android. By Buster, who had taught him how to fight when the kid down the road had given him a licking. Buster, who had whaled him good and proper for eating green apples. By Buster, who had gone out, five hundred years before, to homestead a planet.
>Sutton walked with the icy fury still running in his blood. They didn’t trust me, he said. They thought I might sell out. After all the years of waiting, after all the years of planning and of thinking.
“Johnny,” he said.
“What is it, Ash?”
“What’s going on, Johnny? What about all this?”
“You’re a stinker, Ash.”
“To hell with you,” said Sutton. “You and all the rest of them.”
Trevor’s men, he knew, must be around the house, watching and waiting. He expected to be stopped. But he wasn’t stopped. He didn’t see a soul.
SUTTON stepped into the visor booth and closed the door behind him. From the rack along the wall, he took out the directory and hunted up the number. He dialed and snapped the toggle and there was a robot on the screen.
“Information,” said the robot, his eyes seeking out the forehead of the man who called. Since it was an android, he dropped the customary “sir.”
“Information. Records. What can I do for you?”
“Is there any possibility,” asked Sutton, “that this call could be tapped?”
“None,” said the robot. “Absolutely none. You see…”
“I want to see the homestead filings for the year 7990.”
“Earth filings?”
Sutton nodded.
“Just a moment,” said the robot.
Sutton waited, watching the robot select the proper spool and mount it on the viewer.
“They are arranged alphabetically,” said the robot. “What name did you wish?”
“The name begins with ‘S’,” said Sutton. “Let me see the ‘S’s.”
The unwinding spool was a blur on the screen. It slowed momentarily at the “M”s, spun to the “P”s, then went more slowly.
The “S” list dragged by.
“Toward the end,” said Sutton, and, finally, “Hold it.”
For there was the entry that he sought.
Sutton, Buster…
He read the planet description three times to make sure he had it firmly in his mind.
“That’s all,” he said. “Thank you very much.”
The robot grumbled at him and shut off the screen.
Outside again, Sutton ambled easily across the foyer of the office building he had selected to place his call. On the road outside, he walked up the road, branched off onto a path and found a bench with a pleasant view.
He sat down on the bench and forced himself to relax.
He was being watched, he knew. Kept under observation, for by this time, certainly, Trevor would know that the android who had walked out of Eva Armour’s house was actually Asher Sutton. The psych tracer long ago would have told the story, would have traced his movements and pin-pointed him for Trevor’s men to watch.
Take it easy, he told himself. Dawdle. Loaf. Act as if you didn’t have a thing to do, as if you didn’t have a thought in mind.
You can’t fool them, but you can at least catch them unguarded when you have to move.
And there were many things to do, many things left to think about, although he was satisfied that the course of action he had planned was the course to take.
He took them up, step by step, checking them over for any chance of slip-up.
FIRST, back to Eva’s house to get the manuscript notes he had left on the hunting asteroid, notes that either Eva or Herkimer must have kept through all the years… or was it only weeks?
That would be a ticklish and embarrassing business at the best. But they were his notes, he told himself. They were his to claim. He had no commitments in this conflict.
“I have come to get my notes. I suppose you still have them somewhere.”
Or—“Remember the attache case I had? I wonder if you took care of it for me.”
Or—“I’m going on a trip. I’d appreciate my notes if you can lay your hands on them.”
Or—
But it was no use. However he might say it, whatever he might do, the first step would be to reclaim the notes.
Dawdle up till then, he told himself. Work your way back toward the house until it’s almost dark. Then get the notes and after that move fast—so fast that Trevor’s gang can’t catch up with you.
Second was the ship, the ship that he must steal.
He had spotted it earlier in the day while loafing at the area spaceport. Sleek and small, it would be a fast job, and the stiff, military bearing of the officer who had been directing the provisioning and refueling had been the final tip-off that it was the ship he wanted.
Loafing outside the barrier fence, playing the part of an idly curious, no-good android, he had carefully entered the officer’s mind. Ten minutes later, he was on his way, with the information that he needed.
The ship did carry a time-warp unit.
It was not taking off until the next morning.
It would be guarded during the night.
Without a doubt, Sutton told himself, one of Trevor’s ships, one of the fighting warships of the Revisionists.
It would take nerve, he knew, to steal the ship. Nerve and fast footwork and a readiness and the ability to kill.
Saunter out onto the field, as if he were waiting for an incoming ship, mingling with the crowd. Slip out of the crowd and walk across the field, acting as if he had a right to be there. Not run… walk. Run only if someone challenged him and made the challenge stick. Run then. Fight. Kill, if necessary. But get the ship.
Get the ship and pile on the speed to the limit of endurance, heading in a direction away from his destination, driving the ship with everything that was in it.
Two years out, or sooner if necessary, he would throw in the time unit, roll himself and the ship a couple of centuries into the past.
Once in the past, he would have to ditch the motors, for undoubtedly they would have built-in recognition signals which could be traced. Unship them and let them travel in the direction he had been going.
THEN take over the empty hull with his non-human body, swing around and head toward Buster’s planet, still piling on the speed, building it up to that fantastic figure that was necessary to jump great interstellar spaces.
Vaguely he wondered how his body, how the drive of his energy-intake body, would compare with the actual motors in the long haul. Better, he decided. Better than the motors. Faster and stronger.
But it would take years—many years of time, for Buster was far out.
He listed the moves:
Unshipping the engines would throw off pursuit. The pursuers would follow the recognition-signals in the motors, would spend long days in overhauling them before they discovered their mistake.
Check.
The time roll would unhook the contact of Trevor’s psych tracers, for they could not operate through time.
Check.
By the time other tracers could be set in other times to find him, he would be so far out that the tracers would go insane trying to catch up on the time-lag of his whereabouts—if, in fact, they could ever find it in the vastness of the outer reaches of the galaxy.
Check.
If it works, he thought. If it only works. If there isn’t some sort of slip-up, some kind of unseen factor.
A squirrel skipped across the grass, sat up on its haunches and took a long look at him. Then, deciding that he was not dangerous, it started a busy search in the grass for imaginary buried treasure.
Cut loose, thought Sutton. Cut loose from everything that holds me. Cut loose and get the job done. Forget Trevor and his Revisionists, forget Herkimer and the androids. Forget Eva. Get the book written.
Trevor wants to buy me. Eva wants to use me; I’m nothing to her as a man. And the androids do not trust me. And Morgan, if he had the chance, would kill me.
The androids do not trust me.
That’s foolish, he told himself.
Childish.
And yet they did not trust him. You are a human, Eva had told him. The humans are your people. I’m much more an android, Ash, than I am a human being.
He shook his head, bewildered by the situation.
There was one thing that stood out clearly. One thing he had to do. One obligation that was his and one that must be fulfilled or all else would be with utterly no meaning.
There is a thing called destiny.
The knowledge of that destiny has been granted me. Not as a human being, not as a member of the human race, but as an instrument to transmit that knowledge to all other thinking life.
I must write a book to do it.
I must make that book as clear and forceful and as honest as I can.
Having done that, I shall have discharged my responsibility.
Having done that, it does not matter what may happen to me.
Having done that, there is no further claim upon me.
A footstep sounded on the path back of the bench and Sutton turned around.
“Mr. Sutton, isn’t it?” said the man.
Sutton nodded.
“Sit down, Trevor,” he said. “I’ve been expecting you.”
“YOU didn’t stay long with your friends,” said Trevor.
Sutton shook his head. “We had a disagreement.”
“Something about this Cradle business?”
“You might call it that,” said Sutton. “It goes a good deal deeper. The fundamental prejudices rooted between androids and humans.”
“Herkimer killed an android who brought him a message about the Cradle,” Trevor said.
“He thought it was someone that you sent. Someone masquerading as an android. That is why he killed him.”
Trevor pursed his mouth sanctimoniously. “Too bad,” he said. “Too bad. Mind telling me how he recognized the… might we call it the deception?”
“That is something,” Sutton said, “that you will have to figure out without my help.”
Trevor labored at acting unconcerned. “The main point is,” he said, “that it didn’t work.”
“You mean the androids didn’t run helter-skelter for the Cradle and show you where it was.”
Trevor nodded. “There was another angle to it, too. They might have pulled some of their guards off the crisis points. That would have helped us some.”
“Double-barreled,” said Sutton. “Very shrewd.”
“Oh, most assuredly,” agreed Trevor. “Nothing like getting the other fellow square behind the eight-ball.”
He squinted at Sutton’s face.
“Since when,” he asked, “and why did you desert the human race?”
Sutton put his hand up to his face, felt the resilience of the plastic that had remodeled his features into those of another person.
“It was Herkimer’s idea,” he declared. “He thought it would make me hard to spot. You wouldn’t be looking for an android, you know.”
Trevor nodded agreement. “It might have helped,” he said. “It would have fooled us for a while, but when you walked away and the tracer followed you, we knew who you were.”
The squirrel came hopping across the grass and looked them over.
“Sutton,” Trevor asked, “how much do you know about this Cradle business?”
“Nothing,” Sutton replied. “They told me I was a human and it was an android matter.”
“You can see from that how important it must be.”
“I think I can,” said Sutton.
“You can guess, just from the name, what it might be.”
“That’s not too hard to do.”
“Because we needed a greater force of humans,” said Trevor, “we made the first androids a thousand years ago. We needed them to fill out the too-thin ranks of Mankind. We made them as close to humans as we could. They could do everything the humans could except one thing.”
“They can’t reproduce,” said Sutton. “I wonder, Trevor, assuming it had been possible, whether we would have given that power to them, too. If we had, they would have been true humans. There would have been no difference whatever between men whose ancestors were made in a laboratory and those whose ancestors stemmed back to the primal ocean. The androids would have been a self-continuing race, and they wouldn’t have been androids. They would have been humans. We would have been adding to our population by biological as well as chemical means.”
“I DON’T know,” said Trevor. “Honestly, I don’t. Of course, the wonder is that we could make them at all, that we could produce life in the laboratory. Think of the sheer intellectual ability and the technical skill that went into it.
For centuries men had tried to find out what life was, had run down one blind alley after another, getting nowhere near the secret at all. Failing in a scientific answer, many of them turned back to a divine source, to a mythical answer, to the belief that it was a matter of supernatural intervention. The idea is perfectly expressed by du Nouy, who wrote back in the twentieth century.”
“We gave the androids one thing we do not have ourselves,” said Sutton, calmly.
Trevor stared at him, suddenly hard, suddenly suspicious.
“You…”
“We gave them inferiority,” said Sutton. “We made them less than human and that gave them a reason to fight us. We denied them something they have to fight to get… equality. We furnished them with a motive Man lost long ago, though he still has a need to feel superior to other humans for some arbitrary and unimportant difference. Once it was religion, nationality, the color of the skin. Now it’s the ability to reproduce.”
“They’re equal now,” said Trevor, bitterly. “The androids have been reproducing themselves… chemically, not biologically, for a long time now.”
“We should have expected it,” said Sutton.
“I suppose we should have,” Trevor admitted. “We gave them the same brains we have ourselves.
We gave them—or we tried to give them—a human perspective.”
“And we put a mark upon their foreheads.”
TREVOR made an angry motion with his hand. “That little matter is being taken care of now. When the androids make another android, they don’t bother to put a mark upon his head.”
Sutton started as the thunder hit him… thunder that rolled and rumbled in his brain, a growing, painful, roaring thunder that shut out everything.
He had said a weapon. He had said there was a weapon…
“They could make themselves better than they were originally,” continued Trevor. “They could improve upon the model. They could build a super-race, a mutant race, call it what you will…”
Only one weapon, Sutton had said. And you can’t fight with just one cannon.
Sutton put a hand up to his forehead, rubbed hard against his brow.
“Sure,” said Trevor. “You can go nuts thinking about it. I have. You can conjure up all sorts of possibilities. They could push us out. The new pushing out the old.”
“The race would be human still,” said Sutton.
“We built slowly, Sutton. The old race. The biological race. We came up from the dawn of Man. We came up from chipped flints and fist axe, from the cave and the treetop nest. We’ve built too slowly and painfully and bloodily to have our heritage taken from us by something to which that slowness and the pain and blood would mean not a thing at all.”
One gun, Sutton thought. But he had been wrong. There were a thousand guns, a million guns, to save destiny for all life that was or would be. Now or a million-billion years from now.
“I suppose,” he said, shakily, “that you feel I should throw in with you.”
“I want you,” said Trevor, “to find out for me where the Cradle is. You could get the androids to tell you.”
“So you can smash it.”
“So I can save humanity. The old humanity. The real humanity.”
“You feel that all humans should stick together now.”
“If you have a streak of human in you, you will be with us now.”
“There was a time,” said Sutton, “back on Earth, before men went to the stars, when the human race was the most important thing the mind of Man could know. That isn’t true any longer, Trevor. There are other races just as great. Either actually or potentially.”
“Each race,” answered Trevor, “is loyal to its own. The human race must be loyal unto itself.”
“I am going to be traitor. I may be wrong, but I still think that destiny is greater than humanity.”
“You refuse to help us?”
“Not only that,” said Sutton. “I am going to fight you. If you want to kill me, Trevor, now’s the time to do it. Because if you don’t do it now, it will be too late.”
“I wouldn’t kill you for all the worlds,” Trevor assured him coldly. “I need the words you wrote. Despite you and the androids, Sutton, we’ll read them the way we want them read. And so will all the other slimy, crawling things you admire so much. There’s nothing in the whole universe that can stand before the human race, that can match the human race…”
Sutton saw loathing on his face.
“I’m leaving you to yourself, Sutton,” Trevor told him. “Your name will go down as the blackest blot in all of human history. The syllables of your name will be a sound that the last human will gag upon if he tries to speak it. Sutton will become a common noun with which one man will insult another…”
Trevor stood up and started to walk away and then turned back. His voice was not much more than a whisper, but it cut into Sutton’s brain like a whetted knife.
“Go and wash your face,” he said. “Wash off the plastic and the mark. But you’ll never be human again, Sutton. You’ll never dare to call yourself a man again.”
He turned on his heel and walked away. Staring at his back, Sutton seemed to hear the sound of a slamming door.
THERE was one lamp lighted in a corner of the room. The attache case lay on a table underneath the lamp and Eva Armour was standing beside a chair, as if she had been expecting him.
“You came back,” said Eva, “to get your notes. I have them ready for you.”
He stood just inside the door and shook his head.
“Not yet,” he said. “Later I will need the notes. Not right now.”
And there it was, he thought, the thing he had worried about that afternoon, the thing that he had tried to put in words.
“I told you about a weapon at breakfast this morning,” he went on. “You must remember what I said about it. I said there was only one weapon. I said you can’t fight a war with just one gun.”
Eva nodded, her lovely face drawn in the lamplight. “I remember, Ash.”
“There are a million of them,” said Ash. “As many as you want. There’s no limit to the number there can be.”
He moved slowly across the room until he stood face to face with her.
“I am on your side,” he told her, simply. “I saw Trevor this afternoon. He cursed me for all humanity.”
Slowly she put up a hand and he felt it slide across his face, the palm cool and smooth. Her fingers closed in his hair and she shook his head gently, tenderly.
“Ash,” she said, “you washed the plastic off your face. You are Ash again.”
He nodded. “I wanted to be human again.”
“Trevor told you about the Cradle, Ash?”
“I’d guessed some of it,” Sutton said. “He told me the rest. About the androids that wear no mark.”
“We use them as spies,” she said, as if it were quite a natural thing to say. “We even have some of them in Trevor’s headquarters. He thinks that they are human.”
“Herkimer?” he asked.
“He isn’t here, Ash. He wouldn’t be here, after what happened out on the patio.”
“Of course,” said Sutton. “Of course he wouldn’t. Eva, we humans are such heels.”
“Sit down,” she told him. “That chair over there. You talk so oddly that you scare me.”
He sat down.
“Tell me what happened,” she demanded.
He didn’t tell her. He said: “I thought of Herkimer this afternoon. When Trevor was talking with me. I hit Herkimer this morning and I would hit him tomorrow morning if he said the same thing to me. It’s something in the human blood, Eva. We fought our way up. With fist, axe and club and gun and atom bomb and…”
“Shut up,” cried Eva. “Keep still, can’t you?”
He looked up at her in astonishment.
“Human, you say,” she said harshly. “And what is Herkimer if he isn’t human? He is a human, made by humans. A robot can make another robot and they’re still robots, aren’t they? A human makes another human and both of them are humans.”
SUTTON mumbled, confused. “Trevor is afraid the androids will take over. That there will be no more humans. No more original, biological humans…”
“Ash,” she said, “you are bothering yourself over something that there is no reason to fight. The Cradle will solve the secret of biological reproduction. Not for centuries, of course, but ultimately. What’s the use of agonizing over a difference that eventually won’t exist?”
He shook his head. “I guess there is no use. It keeps stirring around in my head, though, accusing me of treason. Once it was so clear and simple. I would write a book and the galaxy would read it and accept it and everything would be just fine.”
“It still can be that way,” she said. “After a while, after a long while. When Man stops believing that racial loyalty means the right to subjugate all other life. It will come, Ash, and humanity will be greater for it, allied to everything that lives, not an arrogant and fearful master.”
“Herkimer said one weapon would do it,” Sutton said. “One weapon would be the balance that was needed. Eva, the androids have gone a long way in their research, haven’t they? Chemical, I mean. The study of the human body. They would have to, to do what they have done.”
She nodded. “A long way, Ash.”
“They have a scanner… a machine that could take a person apart, molecule by molecule, record it almost atom for atom. Make a blueprint for another body.”
“We’ve done that,” said Eva. “We’ve duplicated men in Trevor’s organization. Kidnaped them and blueprinted them and made a duplicate… sent him back the duplicate and placed the other under benevolent detention. It’s only been through tricks like that that we’ve been able to hold our own at all.”
“You could duplicate me?” asked Sutton.
“Certainly, Ash, but…”
“A different face, of course,” said Sutton. “But a duplicate brain and… well, a few other things.”
Eva nodded. “Your special abilities.”
“I can get into another mind.” said Sutton. “Not mere telepathy, but the actual power to be another person, to be that other mind, to see and know and feel the same things that the other mind may see or know or feel. I don’t know how it’s done, but it must be something inherent in the brain structure. If you duplicated my brain, the ability should go along with the duplication. Not all of the duplicates would have it, maybe, not all of them could use it, but some of them could.”
She gasped. “Ash, that would mean…”
“YOU would know everything,” said Sutton, “that Trevor thinks. Every word and thought that passes through his mind. Because one of you would be Trevor. And the same with every other person who has anything to do with the war in time. You would know as soon as they know what they’re going to do. You could plan to meet any threat they might be considering. You could block them at everything they tried.”
“It would be stalemate,” Eva said, “and that is exactly what we want. A strategy of stalemate, Ash. They wouldn’t know how they were being blocked and many times they would not know who was blocking them. It would seem to them that luck was permanently against them… that destiny was against them.”
“Trevor himself gave me the idea,” Sutton said. “He told me to go out and butt my head against a wall some more. He told me that finally I would get tired of doing it He said that after a while I would give up.”
“Ten years,” said Eva. “Ten years should do the job. But if ten won’t, why, then, a hundred. Or a thousand, if it must take that long. “We have all the time there is.”
“Finally,” said Sutton, “they would give up. Literally throw up their hands and quit. It would be such a futile thing. Never winning. Always fighting hard and never winning.”
They sat in the room with its one little oasis of light that stood guard against the darkness that pressed in upon them, and there was no triumph in them, for this was not a thing of triumph. This was a matter of necessity, not one of conquest. This was Man fighting himself, and winning and losing at the same time.
“You can arrange this scanning soon?” asked Sutton.
“Tomorrow, Ash.” She looked at him queerly. “What’s your hurry?”
“I am leaving,” Sutton said. “Running away to a refuge that I thought of. That is, if you’ll lend me a ship.”
“Any ship you want.”
“It would be more convenient that way,” he told her. “Otherwise, I’d have to steal one.”
She did not ask the question that he had expected and he went on: “I have to write the book.”
“There are plenty of places, Ash, where you could write the book. Safe places. Places that could be arranged to be foolproof safe.”
He shook his head. “There’s an old robot. He’s the only folks I have. When I was on Cygni, he went out to one of the star systems at the very edge and filed on a homestead. I am going there.”
“I understand,” she said, speaking very softly.
“There’s just one thing,” said Sutton. “I keep remembering a little girl who came and spoke to me when I was fishing. I know that she was a person conditioned in my mind. I know she was put there for a purpose, but it makes no difference. I keep thinking of her.”
He looked at Eva and saw how the lamplight turned her hair into a copper glory.
“I don’t know if I am still allowed to love,” said Sutton. “I can’t tell you for sure if I will always’ be allowed to love you, Eva. But I wish you would go with me out to Buster’s planet.”
“I can’t,” she cried. “Don’t ask me to.”
“But I must. I’ve suffered enough alone. I deserve you, don’t I?”
Her eyes were misty in the lamplight. “Perhaps sometime, Ash, if you still want me. But there’s this war that must not be lost…” Sutton said, simply: “I’ll always want you, Eva. The war can’t be lost any more.”
She was against him, her lips to his, her words muffled and hungry. “I want to. Oh, I want to.”
SUTTON floated in a sea of light and from far away he heard the humming of the machines at work, little busy machines that were dissecting him with their tiny fingers of probing light and clicking shutters and the sensitive paper that ran like a streak of burnished silver through the holders. Dissecting and weighing, probing and measuring… missing nothing, adding nothing. A faithful record not of himself alone, but of every particle of him, of every cell and molecule, of every branching nerve and muscle fiber.
And from somewhere else, also far away, from a place beyond the sea of light that held him, a voice said one word and kept repeating it:
Traitor. Traitor. Traitor.
One word without an exclamation point. A voice that had no emphasis. One flat word.
First there had been one voice crying it and then another joined and then there was a crowd and finally it was a roaring mob and the sound and word built up until it was a world of voices that were crying out the word. Crying out the word until there was no longer any meaning in it, until it had lost its meaning and become a sound being senselessly repeated.
Sutton tried to answer and there was no answer nor any way to answer. He had no voice, for he, had no lips or tongue or throat. He was an entity that floated in the sea of light and the word kept on, never changing… never stopping.
But back of the word, a background to the word, there were other words unspoken.
We are the ones who clicked the flints together and built the first fire of Man’s own making. We are the ones who drove the beasts out of the caves and took them for ourselves, in which to shape the first pattern of a human civilization. We are the ones who painted the colorful bison on the hidden walls, working in the light of mud lamps with moss for wicks and animal fat for oil. We are the ones who tilled the soil and tamed the seed to grow beneath our hand. We are the ones who built great cities that our own kind might live together and accomplish the greatness that a handful could not even try. We are the ones who dreamed of stars—and broke the atom to the harness of our minds.
It is our heritage you spend. It is our traditions that you give away to things that we have made, that we have fashioned with the deftness of our hands and the sharpness of our minds.
The machines clicked on and the voice kept on with the one word it was saying.
But there was another voice, deep within the undefinable being that was Asher Sutton, a faint voice…
It said no word, for there was no word that could frame the thought it formed. It made him kin to something far greater than a race of thinking, brawling, ambitious primates. It made him kin to all life… all life.
Sutton answered it. “Thank you, Johnny. Thank you very much.”
And he was astonished that he could answer Johnny when he could not answer all the others.
The machines went on with their clicking.
HERKIMER stood alone in the darkness underneath the trees and watched the two of them walk across the field toward the ship.
She should have stayed, he thought. He would have gone without her. He would not have guessed the real reason why she should have stayed. No more than he guesses even now that we sent Buster out to the Tower stars many years ago to establish refuge for him—well knowing that the day might come when he would need that refuge.
She had told him at first that she couldn’t go with him. She should have stuck it out, thought Herkimer. But she is too human. That is the trouble with all of us—we are too human.
Out on the tiny field, fire flickered in the mouths of the tubes and the silvery ship lurched down the launching ramp. Gathering speed, it slammed along the up-curve and hurled itself into the sky, a breath of fire that blazed against the night.
Herkimer stood with tilted head and watched it until it was a tiny pinpoint of light that was fleeing spaceward.
He lifted a hand hesitantly, half doubting the fitness of a parting gesture.
“Good-by, Ash,” he said underneath his breath. “Good-by, Ash. God bless you, Eva.”
Standing there, he had a hopeful thought.
Perhaps, he told himself, Sutton never will learn she is an android woman. But he knew then that Eva would tell the truth and that it would not change Sutton’s love for her.