Time and Again (6 page)

"I understand," said Sutton. "I think I understood when they caught me in the lobby. Without being able to put it into words…"

"It's this way, sir," said Herkimer. "The human race has made us. That is the thing that rankles. They made us with exactly the same spirit that a farmer breeds his cattle. They make us for a purpose and use us for that purpose. They may be kind to us, but there's pity back of kindness. They do not allow us to stand on our own abilities. We have no inherent claim, are allowed no inherent claim, to the basic rights of mankind. We…"

He paused and the glitter in his eyes turned off and his face smoothed out.

"I bore you, sir," he said.

Sutton spoke sharply. "I'm your friend in this matter, Herkimer. Don't forget that for a moment. I am your friend and I proved it in advance by not signing that petition."

He stood staring at the android. Impudent and sly, he thought. And that's the way we've made them. That is the mark of slavery that goes with the mark upon the forehead.

"You may rest assured," he told Herkimer, "that I have no pity for you."

"Thank you, sir," said Herkimer. "Thank you for all of us."

Sutton turned to the door.

"You are to be congratulated, sir," said Herkimer. "You gave a very good account of yourself last night."

Sutton turned back to the room.

"Benton missed," he said. "I couldn't help but kill him."

Herkimer nodded. "But it isn't only that, sir. This happens to be the first time I ever heard of a man being killed by a bullet in the arm."

"In the arm!"

"Precisely, sir. The bullet smashed his arm, but it didn't touch him otherwise."

"He was dead, wasn't he?"

"Oh, yes," said Herkimer. "Very, very dead."

XIII

A
DAMS THUMBED
the lighter and waited for the flame to steady. His eyes were fixed on Sutton and there was no softness in them, but there was softness and irritability and a certain faint unsureness in the man himself, hidden well, but there.

That staring, Sutton told himself, is an old trick of his. He glares at you and keeps his face frozen like a sphinx and if you aren't used to him and on to all his tricks, he'll have you thinking that he is God Almighty.

But he doesn't do the glaring quite as well as he used to do it. There's strain in him now and there was no strain in him twenty years ago. Just hardness, then. Granite, and now the granite is beginning to weather.

There's something on his mind. There's something that isn't going well.

Adams passed the lighter flame over the loaded bowl of his pipe, back and forth deliberately, taking his time, making Sutton wait.

"You know, of course," said Sutton, speaking quietly, "that I can't be frank with you."

The lighter flame snapped off and Adams straightened in his chair.

"Eh?" he asked.

Sutton hugged himself. Caught him off base. Threw him for a loss. A passed pawn, he told himself. That's what it is…a passed pawn.

He said aloud, "You know by now, of course, that I flew home a ship that could not be flown. You know I had no space-suit and that the ports were broken and the hull was riddled. I had no food and water and 61 is eleven light-years away."

Adams nodded bleakly. "Yes, we know all that."

"How I got back or what happened to me has nothing to do with my report and I don't intend to tell you."

Adams rumbled at him, "Then why mention it at all?"

"Just so we'll understand one another," Sutton said. "So that you won't ask a lot of questions that will get no answer. It will save a lot of time."

Adams leaned back in his chair and puffed his pipe contentedly.

"You were sent out to get information, Ash," he reminded Sutton. "Any kind of information. Anything that would make Cygni more understandable. You represented Earth and you were paid by Earth and you surely owe Earth something."

"I owe Cygni something, too," said Sutton. "I owe Cygni my life. My ship crashed and I was killed."

Adams nodded, almost sleepily.

"Yes, that is what Clark said. That you were killed."

"Who is Clark?"

"Clark is a space construction engineer," Adams told him. "Sleeps with ships and blueprints. He studied your ship and he calculated a graph of force co-ordinates. He reported that if you were inside the ship when it hit, you didn't have a chance."

Adams stared at the ceiling.

"Clark said that if you were in that ship when it hit you would have been reduced to jelly."

"It's wonderful," said Sutton, dryly, "what a man can do with figures."

Adams prodded him again. "Anderson said you weren't human."

"I suppose Anderson could tell that by looking at the ship."

Adams nodded. "No food, no air. It was the logical conclusion for anyone to draw."

Sutton shook his head. "Anderson is wrong. If I weren't human, you never would have seen me. I would not have come back at all. But I was homesick for Earth and you were expecting a report."

"You took your time," Adams accused him.

"I had to be sure," Sutton told him. "I had to know, you see. I had to be able to come back and tell you one thing or another. I had to tell you if the Cygnians were dangerous or if they weren't."

"And which is it?"

"They aren't dangerous," said Sutton.

Adams waited and Sutton sat silently.

Finally Adams said, "And that is all?"

"That is all," said Sutton.

Adams tapped his teeth with the bit of his pipe. "I'd hate to have to send another man out to check up," he said. "Especially after I had told everyone you'd bring back all the dope."

"It wouldn't do any good," said Sutton. "No one could get through."

"You did."

"Yes, and I was the first. Because I was the first, I also was the last."

Across the desk, Adams smiled winterly. "You were fond of those people, Ash."

"They weren't people."

"Well…beings, then."

"They weren't even beings. It's hard to tell you exactly what they are. You'd laugh at me if I told you what I really think they are."

Adams grunted. "Come the closest that you can."

"Symbiotic abstractions. That's close enough, as close as I can come."

"You mean they really don't exist?" asked Adams.

"Oh, they exist all right. They are there and you are aware of them. As aware of them as I am aware of you, or you of me."

"And they make sense?"

"Yes," said Sutton, "they make sense."

"And no one can get through again?"

Sutton shook his head. "Why don't you cross Cygni off your list? Pretend it isn't there. There is no danger from Cygni. The Cygnians will never bother Man, and Man will never get there. There is no use of trying?"

"They aren't mechanical?"

"No," said Sutton. "They're not mechanical."

Adams changed the subject "Let me see. How old are you, Ash?"

"Sixty-one," said Sutton.

"Humpf," said Adams. "Just a kid. Just getting started." His pipe had gone out and he worried at it with a finger, probing at the bowl, scowling at it.

"What do you plan to do?" he asked.

"I have no plans."

"You want to stay on with the service, don't you?"

"That depends," said Sutton, "on how you feel about it. I had presumed, of course, that you wouldn't want me."

"We owe you twenty years' back pay," said Adams, almost kindly. "It's waiting for you. You can pick it up when you go out. You also have three or four years of vacation coming. Why don't you take it now?"

Sutton said nothing.

"Come back later on," said Adams. "We'll have another talk."

"I won't change my mind," said Sutton.

"No one will ask you to."

Sutton stood up slowly.

"I'm sorry," Adams said, "that I haven't your confidence."

"I went out to do a job," Sutton told him, crisply. "I've done that job. I've made my report."

"So you have," said Adams.

"I suppose," said Sutton, "you will keep in touch with me."

Adams' eyes twinkled grimly. "Most certainly, Ash. I shall keep in touch with you."

XIV

S
UTTON SAT QUIETLY
in the chair and forty years were canceled from his life.

For it was like going back all of forty years…even to the teacups.

Through the open windows of Dr. Raven's study came young voices and the sound of students' feet tramping past along the walk. The wind talked in the elms and it was a sound with which he was familiar. Far off a chapel bell tolled and there was girlish laughter just across the way.

Dr. Raven handed him his teacup.

"I think that I am right," he said, and his eyes were twinkling. "Three lumps and no cream."

"Yes, that's right," said Sutton, astonished that he should remember.

But remembering, he told himself, was easy. I seem to be able to remember almost everything. As if the old sets of habit patterns had been kept bright and polished in my mind through all the alien years, waiting, like a set of cherished silver standing on a shelf, until its was time for them to be used again.

"I remember little things," said Dr. Raven. "Little, inconsequential things, like how many lumps of sugar and what a man said sixty years ago, but I don't do so well, sometimes, at the big things…the things you would expect a man to remember."

The white marble fireplace flared to the vaulted ceiling and the university's coat of arms upon its polished face was as bright as the last day Sutton had seen it.

"I suppose," he said, "you wonder why I came."

"Not at all," said Dr. Raven. "All my boys come back to see me. And I am glad to see them. It makes me feel so proud."

"I've been wondering myself," said Sutton. "And I guess I know what it is, but it is hard to say."

"Let's take it easy then," said Dr. Raven. "Remember, the way we used to. We sat and talked around a thing and finally, before we knew it, we had found the core."

Sutton laughed shortly.

"Yes, I remember, doctor. Fine points of theology. The vital differences in comparative religion. Tell me this. You have spent a lifetime at it, you know more about religions, Earthly and otherwise, than any man on Earth. Have you been able to keep one faith? Have you ever been tempted from the teaching of your race?"

Dr. Raven set down his teacup.

"I might have known," he said, "you would embarrass me. You used to do it all the time. You had the uncanny ability to hit exactly on the question that a man found it hard to answer."

"I won't embarrass you any longer," Sutton told him. "I take it that you have found some good, one might say superior, points in alien religions."

"You found a new religion?"

"No," said Sutton. "Not a religion."

The chapel bell kept on tolling and the girl who had laughed was gone. The footsteps along the walk were far off in the distance.

"Have you ever felt," asked Sutton, "as if you sat on God's right hand and heard a thing that you knew you were never meant to hear?"

Dr. Raven shook his head. "No, I don't think I ever have."

"If you did, what would you do?"

"I think," said Dr. Raven, "that I might be as troubled by it as you are."

"We've lived by faith alone," said Sutton, "for eight thousand years at least and probably more than that. Certainly more than that. For it must have been faith, a glimmer of some sort of faith, that made the Neanderthaler paint the shinbones red and nest the skulls so they faced toward the east."

"Faith," said Dr. Raven gently, "is a powerful thing."

"Yes, powerful," Sutton agreed, "but even in its strength it is our own confession of weakness. Our own admission that we are not strong enough to stand alone, that we must have a staff to lean upon, the expressed hope and conviction that there is some greater power which will lend us aid and guidance."

"You haven't grown bitter, Ash? Something that you found."

"Not bitter," Sutton told him.

Somewhere a clock was ticking, loud in the sudden hush.

"Doctor," said Sutton, "what do you know of destiny?"

"It's strange to hear you talk of destiny," said Dr. Raven. "You always were a man who never was inclined to bow to destiny."

"I mean documentary destiny," Sutton explained. "Not the abstraction, but the actual thing, the actual belief in destiny. What do the records say?"

"There always have been men who believed in destiny," said Dr. Raven. "Some of them, it would appear, with some justification. But mostly, they didn't call it destiny. They called it luck or a hunch or inspiration or something else. There have been historians who wrote of manifest destiny, but those were no more than words. Just a matter of semantics. Of course, there were some fanatics and there were others who believed in destiny, but practiced fatalism."

"But there is no evidence," said Sutton. "No actual evidence of a thing called destiny? An actual force. A living, vital thing. Something you can put your finger on."

Dr. Raven shook his head. "None that I know of, Ash. Destiny, after all, is just a word. It isn't something that you can pin down. Faith, too, at one time, may have been no more than a word, just as destiny is today. But millions of people and thousands of years made it an actual force, a thing that can be defined and invoked and a thing to live by."

"But hunches and luck," protested Sutton. "Those are just happenstance."

"They might be glimmerings of destiny," Dr. Raven declared. "Flashes showing through. A hint of a broad stream of happening behavior. One cannot know, of course. Man can be blind to so many things until he has the facts. Turning points in history have rested on a hunch. Inspired belief in one's own ability has changed the course of events more times than one can count."

He rose and walked to a bookcase, stood with his head tilted back.

"Somewhere," he said, "if I can find it, there is a book."

He searched and did not find it.

"No matter," he declared, "I'll run onto it later if you are still interested. It tells about an old African tribe with a strange belief. They believed that each man's spirit or consciousness or ego or whatever you may call it had a partner, a counterpart on some distant star. If I remember rightly, they even knew which star and could point it out in the evening sky."

He turned around from the bookcase and stared at Sutton.

"That might be destiny, you know," he said. "It might, very well, at that."

He crossed the room to stand in front of the cold fireplace, hands locked behind his back, silver head tilted to one side.

"Why are you so interested in destiny?" he asked.

"Because I found destiny," said Sutton.