Time and Again (21 page)

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Authors: Clifford D. Simak

BOOK: Time and Again
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XLIX

"
Y
OU 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 I'm not telling you."

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.

"Oh, most assuredly," said 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 hardness 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 would 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, sat down in front of them and looked them over.

"Sutton," Trevor asked, "how much do you know about this Cradle business?"

"Nothing," Sutton told him. "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," said Sutton.

"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, if it had been possible, if we would have given that power to them, too. For if we had, they would have been true humans. There would have been no difference between a man 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 chemical as well as biological 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, bumping into stone wall after stone wall. Failing in a scientific answer, many of them turned back to the divine source, to a mythical answer, to the belief that it was a matter of divine intervention. The idea is perfectly expressed by du Noüy, 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. We supplied them with 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. Man no longer needs to prove he is as good as anyone else, that he is the greatest animal in his world or in his galaxy."

"They're equal now," said Trevor, bitterly. "The androids have been reproducing themselves…chemically, not biologically, for a long time now."

"We could have expected it," said Sutton. "We should have suspected it long ago."

"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," Sutton told him.

Trevor made an angry motion with his hand.

"That little matter is being taken care of now," he said. "When the androids make another android they don't bother to put a mark upon his head."

Sutton started and then settled back 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," said Trevor. "They could improve upon the model. They could build a super-race, a mutant race, call it what you will…"

Only one weapon, he 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," Trevor said. "The old race. The biological race. We came up from the dawn of Man, we came up from chipped flints and fist ax, from the cave and the tree top 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, wheeling into line. 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 now I should throw in with you."

"I want you," said Trevor, "to find out for me where the Cradle is."

"So you can smash it," Sutton said.

"So I can save humanity," said Trevor. "The old humanity. The real humanity."

"You feel," said Sutton, "that all humans should stick together now."

"If you have a streak of the human in you," said Trevor, "you will be with us now."

"There was a time," said Sutton, "back on Earth, before men went to the stars, that 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."

"Each race," said Trevor, "is loyal to its own. The human race must be loyal unto itself."

"I am going to be traitor," Sutton said. "I may be wrong, but I still think that destiny is greater than humanity."

"You mean that you refuse to help us?"

"Not only that," said Sutton. "I am going to fight you. I'm telling you this now so that you will know. 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 world," said Trevor. "Because 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 God's world that can stand before the human race, that can match the human race…"

Sutton saw the loathing that was on Trevor's 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…"

He called Sutton a name that was a fighting word and Sutton did not stir upon the bench.

Trevor stood up and started to walk away and then turned back. His voice was not much larger 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, and staring at his back, Sutton saw the back of humanity turned upon him forevermore.

Somewhere in his brain, as if it were from far away, he seemed to hear the sound of a slamming door.

L

T
HERE WAS
one lamp lighted, in a corner of the room. The attaché 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 yet."

And there it was, he thought, the thing he had worried about that afternoon, the thing that he had tried to find the words to say.

"I told you about a weapon at breakfast this morning," he said. "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, face drawn in the lamplight. "I remember, Ash."

"There are a million of them," said Ash. "As many as you want."

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 tightened in his hair and she shook his head gently, tenderly.

"Ash," she said, "you washed your face. You are Ash again."

He nodded. "I wanted to be human again," he told her.

"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 was quite a natural thing to say. "We 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 funny 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 him 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 ax 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. "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 a thousand generations from now will not have been solved. What's the use of it?"

He shook his head. "I guess there is no use. It keeps stirring around in my head. There's no rest for me. Once it was so clear-cut 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. But to do it we have to stop Trevor. He is blinded by the same tangled semantics that blind you."

"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, then…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 very thing," said Eva. "We've duplicated men in Trevor's organization. Kidnapped 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," she said.

"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 in the brain structure. If you duplicated my brain, the abilities should go along with the duplication. Not all of the duplicates would have it, maybe, not all of them could use it, but there would be some of them that 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 thing 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 for a while. 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 takes 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 and 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.

Eva nodded. "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 said. "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 a homestead. I am going there."

"I understand," she said, speaking very gravely.

"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'll ever be in love," said Sutton. "I can't tell you for sure if I love you, Eva. But I wish you would go with me out to Buster's planet."

She shook her head. "Ash, I must stay here, for a while at least. I've worked for years on this thing. I must see it through."

Her eyes were misty in the lamplight. "Perhaps sometime, Ash, if you still want me. Perhaps a little later I can come."

Sutton said, simply, "I'll always want you, Eva."

He reached out a hand and tenderly touched the copper curl that dropped against her forehead.

"I know that you'll never come," he said. "If it had been just a little different…if we had been two ordinary people living ordinary lives."

"There's a greatness in you, Ash," she told him. "You will be a god to many people."

He stood silently and felt the loneliness of eternity closing in upon him. There was no greatness, as she had said, only the loneliness and bitterness of a man who stood alone and would stand alone forever.

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