He squatted back on his heels and turned the pages of the album lovingly, childhood memories coming bade again. Cheap stamps because he had had no money to buy the better ones. Gaudy ones because they had appealed to him. The stamp craze, he remembered, had lasted two years . . . three years at the most. He had pored over catalogs, had traded, picked up the strange lingo of the hobby . . . perforate, imperforate, shades, watermarks, intaglio.
He smiled at the happiness of memory. There had been stamps he’d wanted, but could never have, and he had studied the illustrations of them until he knew each one by heart. He lifted his head and stared hard at the wall and tried to remember what some of them were like, but there was no recollection. The once all-important thing had been buried by more than fifty years of other all-important matters.
HE LAID the album to one side, went at the trunk again.
More notebooks and letters. Loose clippings. A curious-looking wrench. A well chewed bone that at one time probably had been the property and the solace of some loved but now forgotten family dog.
Junk, said Sutton. Buster could have saved a lot of time by simply burning it.
A couple of old newspapers. A moth-eaten pennant. A bulky letter that never had been opened. Sutton tossed it on top of the rest of the litter he had taken from the trunk, then hesitated, put out his hand and picked it up again.
That stamp looked queer. The color, for one thing.
Memory ticked within his brain and he saw the stamp as he had seen it when a lad . . . not the stamp itself, of course, but the illustration of it in a catalog.
He bent above the letter and caught a sudden, gasping breath.
The stamp was old, incredibly old . . . incredibly old and worth . . . good Lord, how much was it worth?
He tried to make out the postmark, but it was faint with time.
He got up slowly and carried the letter to the table, bent above it, puzzling out the town name.
BRIDGEP WIS
Bridgeport, probably. And WIS? Some political division lost in the mist of time.
July 198
July, 1980—something!
Sutton’s hand shook.
AN unopened letter, mailed 6,000 years ago. Tossed in with this heap of junk. Lying cheek by jowl with a tooth-scarred bone and a funny wrench.
An unopened letter . . . and with a stamp that was worth a fortune.
Sutton read the postmark again. Bridgeport, Wis. July, it looked like 11 . . . July 11, 198—. The missing numeral in the year was too faint to make out. Maybe with a good glass it could be done.
The address, faded but still legible, said:
Mr. John H. Sutton
Bridgeport
Wisconsin
So that was what WIS was. Wisconsin.
And the name was Sutton.
Of course, it would be Sutton.
What had Buster’s android lawyer said? A trunk full of family papers.
I’ll have to look into historic geography, Sutton thought. I’ll have to find out just where Wisconsin was.
But John H. Sutton. That was another matter. Just another Sutton. One who had been dust these many years. A man who sometimes forgot to open up his mail.
Sutton turned the letter and examined the flap. There was no sign of tampering. The adhesive was flaking with age and when he ran a fingernail along one corner, the mucilage came loose in a tiny shower of powder. The paper, he saw, was brittle and would require careful handling.
A trunk full of family papers, the android Wellington had said when he came into the room and balanced himself very primly on the edge of a chair and laid his hat precisely on the table top.
And it was a trunk full of junk instead. Bones and wrenches and paper clips and clippings. Old notebooks and letters and a letter that had been mailed 6,000 years ago and never had been opened.
Did Buster know about the letter?
But even as he asked himself the question, Sutton knew that Buster did.
And he had tried to hide it . . . and he had succeeded. He had tossed it in with other odds and ends, knowing that it would be found, but by the man for whom it was intended. For the trunk was deliberately made to appear of no importance. It was old and battered and the key was in the lock and it said there’s nothing important inside, but if you want to waste your time, why, go ahead and look. And if anyone had looked, the clutter would have seemed worthless.
SUTTON reached out and tapped the letter lying on the table. John H. Sutton, an ancestor sixty centuries removed. His blood runs in my veins, though many times diluted. But he was a man who lived and breathed and ate and died, who saw the sunrise against the green Wisconsin hills . . . if Wisconsin had any hills, wherever it was. He felt the heat of summer and shivered in the cold of winter. He worried about many things, both big and small and most of them would be small, the way worries usually are.
A man like me, although there would be minor differences. He had a vermiform appendix and it may have caused him trouble. He had wisdom teeth and they may have caused him trouble, too. And he probably died at eighty or earlier.
And when I am eighty, Sutton thought, I will be just entering my prime.
But there would be compensations. John H. Sutton would have lived closer to the Earth, for the Earth was all he had. He would have been unplagued by alien psychology and Earth would have been a living place instead of a governing place where not a thing is grown for its economic worth, not a wheel is turned for economic purpose. He could have chosen his life work from the whole broad field of human endeavor instead of being forced into governmental work, into the job of governing a thin cobweb of galactic empire.
And somewhere, lost now, there were Suttons before him, and after him—lost, too—many other Suttons. The chain of life runs smoothly from one generation to the next, and none of the links stands out, except, here and there, a link one sees by accident. By the accident of history, or the accident of myth, or the accident of not opening a letter.
The door bell chimed and Sutton, startled, scooped up the letter and slid it into the inside pocket of his coat.
“Come in,” he called.
It was Herkimer. “Good morning, sir,” he said.
Sutton glared at him. “What do you want?”
“I belong to you,” Herkimer told him blandly. “I’m part of your third of Benton’s property.”
“My third . . .” And then he remembered.
It was the law. Whoever kills another in a duel inherits one third of the dead man’s property. That was a law he had forgotten.
“I hope you don’t object,” said Herkimer. “I am easy to get along with and very quick to learn and I like to work. I can cook and sew and run errands and I can read and write.”
“And put the finger on me.”
“Oh, no, I never would do that.”
“Why not?”
“Because you are my master.”
“We’ll see,” Sutton remarked sourly.
“But I’m not all,” said Herkimer. “There are other things. There’s a hunting asteroid stocked with the finest game, and a spaceship. A small one, it’s true, but very serviceable. There are several thousand dollars and an estate out on the West Coast and some wildcat planetary development stock and a number of other, small things, too numerous to mention.” Herkimer brought out a notebook. “I have them written out if you would care to listen.”
“Not now,” said Sutton. “I have work to do.”
Herkimer brightened. “Something I could do, no doubt? Something I could help with?”
“Nothing,” said Sutton. “I am going to see Adams.”
“I could carry your case. That one over there.”
“I’m not taking the case.”
“You sit down and fold your hands and wait until I get back.”
“I’ll get into mischief,” the android warned. “I just know I will.”
“All right, then, there is something you can do. That case you mentioned. You can watch it.”
“Yes, sir,” said Herkimer, plainly disappointed.
“And don’t waste your time trying to read what’s in it,” said Sutton. “You won’t be able to.”
“Oh,” said Herkimer, still more disappointed.
“There’s another thing. A girl by the name of Eva Armour lives in this hotel. Know anything about her?”
HERKIMER shook his head. “But I have a cousin . . .”
“A cousin? An android with a cousin?”
“Yes, sir. She was made in the same laboratory as me and that makes her my cousin.”
“You have a lot of cousins, then.”
“Yes,” said Herkimer, “I have many thousands and we stick together. Which,” he said, very sanctimoniously, “is the way it should be with families.”
“You think this cousin might know something?”
Herkimer shrugged. “She works in the hotel. She might know something.”
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. And he died.”
XI
ADAMS 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 were softness and irritability and a faint unsureness in the man himself, hidden well, but undeniably 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 knows everything.
But he doesn’t do the glaring quite as well as he use to do it. There’s strain in him now and there was no strain in him twenty years ago. Just granite, and 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 grinned mentally. A passed pawn, he told himself. That’s what Adams is . . . a passed pawn.
He said aloud: “You know by now, of course, that I came back in a ship that could not fly. You know I had no spacesuit and that the ports were broken and the hull was riddled. I had no food and air 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 you won’t ask a lot of questions that will get no answer. It will save a lot of time.”
Adams leaned back and puffed his pipe contentedly. “You were sent out to get information, Ash. 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,” replied Sutton. “I owe Cygni my life. My ship crashed and I was killed.”
Adams nodded. “Yes, that is what Clark said. He told me you were killed. Clark is a space construction engineer. Sleeps with ships and blueprints. He studied your ship and he calculated a graph of force coordinates. He reported that if you were inside the ship when it hit, you had to be dead.”
“It’s wonderful,” said Sutton, drily, “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, nor 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.
“I had to be sure. I had to know. I had to be able to come back and tell you if the Cygnians were dangerous or if they weren’t.”
“And which is it?”
“They aren’t dangerous.”
ADAMS waited and Sutton was silent.
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.
Especially after I had told everyone you’d bring back all the data.”
“It wouldn’t do any good,” said Sutton. “No one could get through.”
“You did.”
“Yes, and I was the first. And because I was the first, I also will be the last.”
Across the desk, Adams smiled winterly. “You were fond of those people, Ash.”
“They aren’t people.”
“Well . . . beings, then.”
“They aren’t even beings. It’s hard to tell you exactly what they are. You’d laugh if I said what I really think they are.”
Adams grunted. “Try me.”
“Symbiotic abstractions. That’s as close as I can come.”
Adams didn’t laugh. “You mean they really don’t exist?”
“Oh, they exist, all right. They form symbiotic relationships that help them and their alien hosts. Not like parasites, unless maybe like the bacteria that release nitrogen in the soil for plants to live on. Only the bacteria and the plants are separate. They and their hosts aren’t, and each helps the other.”
“But they’re abstractions,” Adams repeated. “They can’t exist.”
“Not as we know the word,” Sutton said. “They do, though.”
“And no one can get through again?
Sutton leaned forward. “Why don’t you cross Cygni off your list? Pretend it isn’t there. There’s no danger from Cygni. The Cygnians, will never bother Man, and Man will never get there again. There’s no use trying.”
“They aren’t mechanical?”
“No,” said Sutton. “An abstraction can’t be mechanical.”
Adams changed the subject. “How old are you, Ash?”
“Fifty-nine.”
“Just a kid,” said Adams. “Just getting started.” His pipe had gone out and he worried the tobacco with his finger, 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 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 leave coming to you. 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.”
“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.”
“I suppose,” said Sutton, “you will keep in touch with me.”
Adams’ eyes twinkled grimly.
“Certainly, Ash. I shall keep in touch with you.”
XII
SUTTON sat quietly in the room and forty years were canceled from his
life. 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. 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 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 it 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 a man really should 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. Pine points of theology. The vital differences in comparative religions. 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 been tempted from the teachings of your race?”
The Complete Serials Page 21