Time and Again (17 page)

XL

T
HE ANDROID
investigator said, "We checked Bridgeport back to the year 2000 and we are convinced nothing ever 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 aberration, any hint that might point to Sutton's 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 indicated that he had some interest in the place."

"But it didn't necessarily indicate that he was going there," Herkimer pointed out.

"He went someplace," 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 scissors grinders and unemployed men looking for work. We canvassed every home for twenty 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 2000, you say," said Herkimer. "Why not to 1999 or 1950?"

"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 near by. 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 2000 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 am 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 were 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 told 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 forgot one factor," Herkimer said calmly.

"One factor?"

"Yes, Sutton himself. Sutton is somewhere and I have a great faith in him. In him and his destiny. For, you see, he pays attention to his destiny and that will pay off in the end."

XLI

"
Y
OU 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 a living close to nature that no man of his own age ever had experienced.

They 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 things 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 they will. But they 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 from what it is in daylight. It smells differently. 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 the rest of us do not know. Almost, William…" he hesitated, then went on, "almost as if you did not quite belong."

"Sometimes I think I don't," said Sutton.

"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," said John H. "I can well 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," he said. "I had a letter I had to write. It was an important letter and I wanted it done right."

"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 growl 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," said 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," said old John H. "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 were never 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 faerie 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 six thousand years from now and read it on a nameless asteroid I won by killing a man in a place that will be called the Zag House.

The Zag House, he thought, will be over there across the river, far up the prairie above the ancient town of Prairie du Chien, and the University of North America, with its matchless 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.

The Zag House will be over there, far across the river. And that is where someday, six thousand years from now, I will meet a little girl in a checkered apron. As in a storybook, he thought. Boy meets girl and the boy is towheaded with a cowlick and he's barefooted and the girl twists her apron in her hands and tells him what her name is…

He straightened and gripped the top bar of the pasture gate.

"Eva," he said, "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 kissed her for it, not believing the words she spoke, but ready to believe the unspoken word that lay upon her face and 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, let her know that somehow, sometime he would come back to her.

But even as he thought of it, he knew that it was hopeless, 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, but she or Herkimer or someone else who would reach out to him…if anyone ever did.. Ten years, he thought, and they have forgotten me. And 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 crossed 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 apprehension 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. Insecurity.

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 reaction.

But there was a line…a line he had never crossed, either through innate decency or a fear of being apprehended. 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.

Ten years, he thought, and the involuntary compact with time has been consummated…each condition filled. I am free to go, to go anywhere, any time I choose.

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 dog stir, the wagging tail, the comfort of blankets tucked about a child in his trundle 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 else. Nothing 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 said, Steady! Steady!

"It is 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," said 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."

"I know," said Sutton. "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 said. "Simple as all that."

"We make it easy for you," said the man. "Good evening, Mr. Sutton."

Sutton did not see him do it, but he 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 walking 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.