Time and Again (13 page)

Happenstance or accident or pure blind luck…it would be destiny.

I lived with destiny, as destiny…I was a part of destiny instead of destiny being a part of me, and we came to know each other as if we were two humans…better than if we were two humans. For destiny was I and I was destiny. Destiny had no name and I called it Johnny and the fact I had to name him is a joke that destiny, my destiny, still can chuckle over.

I lived with Johnny, the vital part of me, the spark of me that men call life and do not understand…the part of me I still do not understand…until my body had been repaired again. And then I returned to it and it was a different body and a better body, for the many destinies had been astounded and horrified at the inefficiency and the flimsy structure of the human body.

And when they fixed it up, they made it better. They tinkered it so it had a lot of things it did not have before…many things, I suspect, I still do not know about and will not know about until it is time to use them. Some things, perhaps, I'll never know about.

When I went back to my body, destiny came and lived with me again, but now I knew him and recognized him and I called him Johnny and we talked together and I never failed to hear him, as I must many times have failed to hear him in the past.

Symbiosis, Sutton told himself, a higher symbiosis than the symbiosis of heather with its fungus or the primitive animal with its alga. A mental symbiosis. I am the host and Johnny is my guest and we get along together because we understand each other. Johnny gives me an awareness of my destiny, of the operative force of destiny that shapes my hours and days, and I give Johnny the semblance of life that he could not have through his existence independently.

"Johnny," he called and there was no answer.

He waited and there was no answer.

"Johnny," he called again and there was terror in his voice. For Johnny must be there. Destiny must be there.

Unless…unless…the thought struck him slowly, kindly. Unless he were really dead. Unless this were dreaming, unless this were a twilight zone where knowledge and a sense of being linger for a moment between the state of life and death.

Johnny's voice was small, very small and very far away.

"Ash."

"Yes, Johnny."

"The engines, Ash. The engines."

He fought his body out of the pilot's chair, stood on weaving legs.

He could scarcely see…just the faded, blurred, shifting outline of the shape of metal that enclosed him. His feet were leaden weights that he could not move…that were no part of him at all.

He stumbled, staggered forward, fell flat upon his face.

Shock, he thought. The shock of violence, the shock of death, the shock of draining blood, of mangled, blasted flesh.

There had been strength, a surge of strength that had brought him, clear-eyed, clear-brained, to his feet. A strength that had been great enough to take the lives of the two men who had killed him. The strength was vengeance.

But that strength was gone and now he knew it had been the strength of brain, the strength of will rather than of mere bone and muscle that had let him do it.

He struggled to his hands and knees and crept. He stopped and rested and then crept a few feet more and his head hung limp between his shoulders, drooling blood and mucus and slobbered stomach slime that left a trail across the floor.

He found the door of the engine room and by slow degrees pulled himself upward to the latch.

His fingers found the latch and pulled it down, but they had no strength and they slipped off the metal and he fell into a huddled pile of sheer defeat against the hard coldness of the door.

He waited for a long time and then he tried again and this time the latch clicked open even as his fingers slipped again, and as he fell, he fell across the threshold.

Finally, after so long a wait that he thought he could never do it, he got on hands and knees again and crept forward by slow inches.

XXX

A
SHER
S
UTTON
awoke to darkness.

To darkness and an unknowing.

To unknowing and a slow, exploding wonder.

He was lying on a hard, smooth surface and a roof of metal came down close above his head. And beside him was a thing that purred and rumbled. One arm was flung across the purring thing and somehow he knew that he had slept with the thing clasped in his arms, with his body pressed against it, as a child might sleep with a beloved Teddy bear.

There was no sense of time and no sense of place and no sense of any life before. As if he had sprung full-limbed by magic into life and intelligence and knowing.

He lay still and his eyes became accustomed to the dark and he saw the open door and the dark stain, now dry, that led across the threshold into the room beyond. Something had dragged itself there, from the other room into this one, and left a trail behind it, and he lay for a long time, wondering what the thing might be, with the queasiness of terror gnawing at his mind. For the thing might still be with him and it might be dangerous.

But he felt he was alone, sensed a loneness in the throbbing of the engine at his side…and it was thus for the first time that he knew the purring thing for what it was. Name and recognition had slipped into his consciousness without conscious effort, as if it were a thing he had known all the time, and now he knew what it was, except that it seemed to him the name had come ahead of recognition and that, he thought, was strange.

So the thing beside him was an engine and he was lying on the floor and the metal close above his head was a roof of some sort. A narrow space, he thought. A narrow space that housed an engine and a door that opened into another room.

A ship. That was it. He was in a ship. And the trail of dark that ran across the threshold.

At first he thought that some other thing, some imagined thing, had crawled in slime of its own making to mark the trail, but now he remembered. It had been himself…himself crawling to the engines.

Lying quietly, it came back to him and in wonder he tested his aliveness. He lifted a hand and felt his chest and the clothes were burned away and their scorched edges were crisp between his fingers, but his chest was whole…whole and smooth and hard. Good human flesh. No holes.

So it was possible, he thought. I remember that I wondered if it was…if Johnny might not have some trick up his sleeve, if my body might not have some capability which I could not suspect.

It sucked at the stars and it nibbled at the asteroid and it yearned toward the engines. It wanted energy. And the engines had the energy…more than the distant stars, more than the cold, frozen chunk of rock that was the asteroid.

So I crawled to reach the engines and I left a dark death-trail behind me and I slept with the engines in my arms. And my body, my direct-intake, energy-eating body sucked the power that was needed from the flaming core of the reaction chambers.

And I am whole again.

I am back in my breath-and-blood body once again and I can go back to Earth.

He crawled out of the engine room and stood on his two feet.

Faint starlight came through the visionplates and scattered like jewel dust along the floor and walls. And there were two huddled shapes, one in the middle of the floor and another in a corner.

His mind took them in and nosed them as a dog would nose a bone and in a little while he remembered what they were. The humanity within him shivered at the black, sprawled shapes, but another part of him, a cold, hard inner core, stood calculating and undismayed in the face of death.

He moved forward on slow feet and slowly knelt beside one of the bodies. It must be Case, he thought, for Case was thin and tall. But he could not see the face and he did not wish to see the face, for in some dark corner of his mind he still remembered what the faces had been like.

His hands went down and searched, winnowing through the clothing. He made a tiny pile of things he found and finally he found the thing he was looking for.

Squatting on his heels, he opened the book to the title page and it was the same as the one he carried in his pocket. The same except for a single line of type, the tiny line at the very bottom.

And the line said:

Revised Edition

So that was it. That was the meaning of the word that had puzzled him: Revisionists.

There had been a book and it had been revised. Those who lived by the revised edition were the Revisionists. And the others? He wondered, running through the names…Fundamentalists, Primitives, Orthodox, Hard-Shell. There were others, he was sure, and it didn't matter. It didn't really matter what the others would be called.

There were two blank pages and the text began:

We are not alone.

No one ever is alone.

Not since the first faint stirring of the first flicker of life on the first planet in the galaxy that knew the quickening of life, has there ever been a single entity that walked or crawled or slithered down the path of life alone.*

His eye went down the page to the first footnote.

*This is the first of many statements which, wrongly interpreted, have caused some readers to believe that Sutton meant to say that life, regardless of its intelligence or moral precepts, is the beneficiary of destiny. His first line should refute this entire line of reasoning, for Sutton used the pronoun "we" and all students of semantics are agreed that it is a common idiom for any genus, when speaking of itself, to use such a personal pronoun. Had Sutton meant all life, he would have written "all life" But by using the personal pronoun, he undeniably was referring to his own genus, the human race, and the human race alone. He apparently erroneously believed, a not uncommon belief of the day, that the Earth had been the first planet of the galaxy to know the quickening of life. There is no doubt that, in part, Sutton's revelations of his great discovery of destiny have been tampered with. Assiduous research and study, however, have resulted in determining beyond reasonable doubt which portions are genuine and which are not. Those parts which patently have been altered will be noted and the reasons for this belief will be carefully and frankly pointed out.

Sutton riffled through the pages quickly. More than half the text was taken up by the fine-print footnotes. Some of the pages had two or three lines of actual text and the rest was filled with lengthy explanation and refutation.

He slapped the book shut, held it between his flattened palms.

I tried so hard, he thought. I repeated and reiterated and underscored. Not human life alone, but all life. Everything that was aware.

And yet they twist my words.

They fight a war so that my words shall not be the words I wrote, so that the things I meant to say shall be misinterpreted. They scheme and fight and murder so that the great cloak of destiny shall rest on one race alone…so that the most vicious race of animals ever spawned shall steal the thing that was meant not for them alone, but for every living thing.

And somehow I must stop it. Somehow it must be stopped. Somehow my words must stand, so that all may read and know without the smoke screen of petty theorizing and learned interpretation and weasel logic.

For it is so simple. Such a simple thing. All life has destiny, not human life alone.

There is one destiny creature for every other living thing. For every living thing and then to spare. They wait for life to happen and each time it occurs one of them is there and stays there until that particular life is ended. How, I do not know, nor why. I do not know if the actual Johnny is lodged within my mind and being or if he merely keeps in contact with me from Cygni. But I know that he is with me. I know that he will stay.

And yet the Revisionists will twist my words and discredit me. They will change my book and dig up old scandals about the Suttons so that the mistakes of my forebears, magnified many times, will tend to smear my name.

They sent back a man who talked to John H. Sutton and he told them things that they could have used. For John Sutton said that there are skeletons in every family closet and in that he spoke the truth. And, old and garrulous as he was, he talked about those skeletons.

But those tales were not carried forward into the future to be of any use, for the man who heard them came tramping up the road with a bandage on his head and no shoes on his feet. Something happened and he could not go back.

Something happened.

Something…

Sutton rose slowly.

Something happened, he said, talking to himself, and I know what it was.

Six thousand years ago in a place that was called Wisconsin.

He moved forward, heading for the pilot's chair.

Asher Sutton was going to Wisconsin.

XXXI

C
HRISTOPHER
A
DAMS
came into his office and hung up his hat and coat.

He turned around and pulled out the chair before his desk, and in the act of sitting down he froze and listened.

The psych-tracer burped at him.

Ker-rup,
it chuckled,
ker-rup, clickity, click, ker-rup.

Christopher Adams straightened from his half-sitting, half-standing position and put on his hat and coat again.

Going out, he slammed the door behind him.

And in all his life, he had never slammed a door.

XXXII

S
UTTON BREASTED
the river, swimming with slow, sure strokes. The water was warm against his body and it talked to him with a deep, important voice and Sutton thought, It is trying to tell me something, as it has tried to tell the people something all down through the ages. A mighty tongue talking down the land, gossiping to itself when there is no one else to hear, but trying, always trying to tell its people the news it has to tell. Some of them, perhaps, have grasped a certain truth and a certain philosophy from the river, but none of them have ever reached the meaning of the river's language, for it is an unknown language.

Like the language, Sutton thought, I used to make my notes. For they had to be in a language which no one else could read, a language that had been forgotten in the galaxy aeons before any tongue now living lisped its baby talk. Either a language that had been forgotten or one that never could be known.

I do not know that language, Sutton told himself, the language of my notes. I do not know whence it came or when or how. I asked, but they would not tell me. Johnny tried to tell me once, but I could not grasp it, for it was a thing that the brain of Man could not accept.

I know its symbols and the things they stand for, but I do not know the sounds that make it. My tongue might not be able to form the sounds that make the spoken language. For all I know it might be the language that this river talks…or the language of some race that went to disaster and to dust a million years ago.

The black of night came down to nestle against the black of flowing river and the moon had not risen, would not rise for many hours to come. The starlight made little diamond points on the rippling waves of the pulsing river, and on the shore ahead the lights of homes made jagged patterns up and down the land.

Herkimer has the notes, Sutton told himself, and I hope he has sense enough to hide them. For I will need them later, but not now. I would like to see Herkimer, but I can't take the chance, for they'll be watching him. And there's no doubt they have a tracer on me, but if I move fast enough, I can keep out of their way.

His feet struck gravel bottom and he let himself down, waded up the shelving shore. The night wind struck him and he shivered, for the river had been warm from a day of sun and the wind had a touch of chill.

Herkimer, of course, would be one of those who had come back to see that he wrote the book as he would have written it if there had been no interference. Herkimer and Eva…and of the two, Sutton told himself, he could trust Herkimer the most. For an android would fight, would fight and die for the thing that the book would say. The android and the dog and horse and honeybee and ant. But the dog and horse and honeybee and ant would never know, for they could not read.

He found a grassy bank and sat down and took off his clothes to wring them dry, then put them on again. Then he struck out across the meadow toward the highway that arrowed up the valley.

No one would find the ship at the bottom of the river…not for a while, at least. And a few hours was all he needed. A few hours to ask a thing that he must know, a few hours to get back to the ship again.

But he couldn't waste any time. He had to get the information the quickest way he could. For if Adams had a tracer on him, and Adams would have a tracer on him, they would already know that he had returned to Earth.

Once again came the old nagging wonder about Adams. How had Adams known that he was coming back and why had he set a mousetrap for him when he did arrive? What information had he gotten that would make him give the order that Sutton must be shot on sight?

Someone had gotten to him…someone who had evidence to show him. For Adams would not go on anything less than evidence. And the only person who could have given him any information would have been someone from the future. One of those, perhaps, who contended that the book must not be written, that it must not exist, that the knowledge that it held be blotted out forever. And if the man who was to write should die, what could be more simple?

Except that the book had been written. That the book already did exist. That the knowledge apparently was spread across the galaxy.

That would be catastrophe…for if the book were not written, then it never had existed and the whole segment of the future that had been touched by the book in any wise would be blotted out along with the book that had not been.

And that could not be, Sutton told himself.

That meant that Asher Sutton could not, would not, be allowed to die before the book was written.

However it were written, the book must be written or the future was a lie.

Sutton shrugged. The tangled thread of logic was too much for him. There was no precept, no precedent upon which one might develop the pattern of cause and result.

Alternate futures? Maybe, but it didn't seem likely. Alternate futures were a fantasy that employed semantics twisting to prove a point, a clever use of words that covered up and masked the fallacies.

He crossed the road and took a foot path that led to a house standing on a knoll.

In the marsh down near the river, the frogs had struck up their piping and somewhere far away a wild duck called in the darkness. In the hills the whipporwills began the evening forum. The scent of new-cut grass lay heavy in the air and the smell of river night fog was crawling up the hills.

The path came out on a patio and Sutton moved across it.

A man's voice came to him.

"Good evening, sir," it said, and Sutton wheeled around.

He saw the man, then, for the first time. A man who sat in his chair and smoked his pipe beneath the evening stars.

"I hate to bother you," said Sutton, "but I wonder if I might use your visor."

"Certainly, Ash," said Adams. "Certainly. Anything you wish."

Sutton started and then felt himself freeze into a man of steel and ice.

Adams!

Of all the homes along the river, he would walk in on Adams!

Adams chuckled at him. "Destiny works against you, Ash."

Sutton moved forward, found a chair in the darkness and sat down.

"You have a pleasant place," he said.

"A very pleasant place," said Adams.

Adams tapped out his pipe and put it in his pocket.

"So you died again," he said.

"I was killed," said Sutton. "I got unkilled almost immediately."

"Some of my boys?" asked Adams. "They are hunting for you."

"A couple of strangers," said Sutton. "Some of Morgan's gang."

Adams shook his head. "I don't know the name," he said.

"He probably didn't tell his name," said Sutton. "He told you I was coming back."

"So that was it," said Adams. "The man out of the future. You have him worried, Ash."

"I need to make a visor call," said Sutton.

"You can use the visor," said Adams.

"And I need an hour."

Adams shook his head.

"I can't give you an hour."

"A half hour, then. I may have a chance to make it. A half hour after I finish my call."

"Nor a half hour, either."

"You never gamble, do you, Adams?"

"Never," said Adams.

"I do," said Sutton. He rose. "Where is that visor? I'm going to gamble on you."

"Sit down, Ash," said Adams, almost kindly. "Sit down and tell me something."

Stubbornly, Sutton remained standing.

"If you could give me your word," said Adams, "that this destiny business won't harm Man. If you could tell me it won't give aid and comfort to our enemies."

"Man hasn't any enemies," said Ash, "except the ones he's made."

"The galaxy is waiting for us to crack," said Adams. "Waiting to close in at the first faint sign of weakness."

"That's because we taught them it," said Sutton. "They watched us use their own weaknesses to push them off their feet."

"What will this destiny do?" asked Adams.

"It will teach Man humility," said Sutton. "Humility and responsibility."

"It's not a religion," said Adams. "That's what Raven told me. But it sounds like a religion…with all that humility pother."

"Dr. Raven was right," Sutton told him. "It's not a religion. Destiny and religions could flourish side by side and exist in perfect peace. They do not encroach upon one another. Rather, they would complement one another. Destiny stands for the same things most religions stand for and it holds out no promise of an afterlife. It leaves that to religion."

"Ash," said Adams quietly, "you have read your history."

Sutton nodded.

"Think back," said Adams. "Remember the crusades. Remember the rise of Mohammedanism. Remember Cromwell in England. Remember Germany and America. And Russia and America. Religion and ideas, Ash. Religion and ideas. Man will fight for an idea when he wouldn't lift a hand for land or life or honor. But an idea…that's a different thing."

"And you're afraid of an idea,"

"We can't afford an idea, Ash. Not right now, at least."

"And still," Sutton told him, "it has been the ideas that have made men grow. We wouldn't have a culture or a civilization if it weren't for ideas."

"Right now," said Adams, bitterly, "men are fighting in the future over this destiny of yours."

"That's why I have to make a call," said Sutton. "That's why I need an hour."

Adams rose heavily to his feet.

"I may be making a mistake," he said. "It's something I have never done in all my life. But for once I'll gamble."

He led the way across the patio and into a dimly lighted room, furnished with old-fashioned furniture.

"Jonathon," he called.

Feet pattered in the hall and the android came into the room.

"A pair of dice," said Adams, heavily. "Mr. Sutton and I are about to gamble."

''Dice, sir?"

"Yes, that pair you and the cook are using."

"Yes, sir," said Jonathon.

He turned and disappeared and Sutton listened to his feet going through the house, fainter and fainter.

Adams turned to face him.

"One throw each," he said. "High man wins."

Sutton nodded, tense.

"If you win you get the hour," said Adams. "If I win you take my orders."

"I'll throw with you," said Sutton. "On terms like that, I'm willing to gamble."

And he was thinking:

I lifted the battered ship on Gygni VII and maneuvered it through space. I was the engine and the pilot, the tubes and navigator. Energy garnered by my body took the ship and lifted it and drove it through space…eleven years through space. I brought the ship tonight down through atmosphere with the engines dead so it could not be spotted and I landed in the river. I could pick a book out of that case and carry it to the table without laying hands on it and I could turn the pages without the use of fingertips.

But dice.

Dice are different.

They roll so fast and topple so.

"Win or lose," said Adams, "you can use the visor."

"If I lose," said Sutton, "I won't need it."

Jonathon came back and laid the dice upon a tabletop. He hesitated for a moment and when he saw that the two humans were waiting for him to go, he went.

Sutton nodded at the dice carelessly.

"You first," he said.

Adams picked them up, held them in his fist and shook them, and their clicking was like the porcelain chatter of badly frightened teeth.

His fist came down above the table and his fingers opened and the little white cubes spun and whirled on the polished top. They came to rest and one was a five and the other one a six.

Adams raised his eyes to Sutton and there was nothing in them. No triumph. Absolutely nothing.

"Your turn," said Adams.

Perfect, thought Sutton. Nothing less than perfect. Two sixes. It has to be two sixes.

He stretched out his hand and picked up the dice, shook them in his fist, felt the shape and size of them rolling in his palm.

Now take them in your mind, he told himself…take them in your mind as well as in your fist. Hold them in your mind, make them a part of you, as you made the two ships you drove through space, as you could make a book or chair or a flower you wished to pick.

He changed for a moment and his heart faltered to a stop and the blood slowed to a trickle in his arteries and veins and he was not breathing. He felt the energy system take over, the other body that drew raw energy from anything that might have energy.

His mind reached out and took the dice and shook them inside the prison of his fist and he brought his hand down with a swooping gesture and let his fingers loose and the dice came dancing out.

They were dancing in his brain, too, as well as on the tabletop and he saw them, or sensed them, or was aware of them, as if they were a part of him. Aware of the sides that had the six black dots and the sides with one and all the other sides.

But they were slippery to handle, hard to make go the way he wanted them to go and for a fearful, agonizing second it seemed almost as if the spinning cubes had minds and personalities that were their very own.

One of them was a six and the other still was rolling. The six was coming up and it toppled for a moment, threatening to fall back.

A push, thought Sutton. Just a little push. But with brain power instead of finger power.

The six came up and the two dice lay there, both of them showing sixes.

Sutton drew in a sobbing breath and his heart beat once again and the blood pumped through the veins.

They stood in silence for a moment, staring at one another across the tabletop.

Adams spoke and his voice was quiet and one could not have guessed from any tone he used what he might have felt.

"The visor is over there," he said.

Sutton bowed, ever so slightly, and he felt foolish doing it, like a character out of some incredibly old and bad piece of romantic fiction.

"Destiny," he said, "still is working for me. When it comes to the pinch, destiny is there."

"Your hour will start," said Adams, "as soon as you finish talking."

He turned smartly and walked back to the patio, very stiff and straight.