The door opened as their feet sounded on the massive stone steps which led up to it. Another man stood there, stiff and erect and tall, thin, but with whipcord strength about him, as the light from inside the room outlined his figure harshly.
“The new owner, Case,” said Pringle, and it seemed to Sutton that he emphasized the words just a bit too much. As if he meant his tone to be a warning.
“Benton died, you know,” said Pringle, and Case answered: “Oh, did he? How peculiar.”
Which, Sutton thought, was a funny thing to say.
Case stood to one side to let them enter, then pulled shut the door.
The room was immense, with only one lamp burning, and shadows pressed in upon them out of the dark corners and the cavernous arch of the raftered ceiling.
I am afraid,” said Pringle, “that you’ll have to look out for yourselves. Case and I are roughing it and w-e brought along no robots, although I can fix up something if you happen to be hungry. A hot drink, perhaps, and some sandwiches?”
“WE ATE just before we landed,” Eva said, “and Herkimer will take care of what few things we have.”
“Then take a chair,” urged Pringle. “That one over there is comfortable. We can talk a bit.”
“Not right now, thanks. The trip was just a little rough.”
“You’re an ungracious young lady,” Pringle said, and his words were halfway between jest and anger. “I’m a tired young lady.”
Pringle walked to a wall, flipped up toggles. Lights sprang into being. “The bedrooms are upstairs,” he said. “Off the balcony. Case and I have the first and second to the left. Take your pick from any of the rest.”
He moved forward to lead them up the stairs. But Case spoke up and Pringle stopped and waited, one hand on the lower curve of the stair rail.
“Mr. Sutton,” said Case, “it seems to me I have heard your name somewhere.”
“I don’t think so,” said Sutton. “I’m a very unimportant person.”
“But you killed Benton.”
“No one said I killed him.”
Case did not laugh, but his voice said that if he had not been Case, he would have. “Nevertheless, you must have killed him. I happen to know that is the only way anyone could get this asteroid. Benton loved it and this side of life he’d never give it up.”
“Since you insist, then I did kill Benton.”
Case shook his head, awed. “Remarkable,” he said. “Absolutely remarkable.”
“Good night, Mr. Case,” said Eva, and then turned to Pringle. “No need to trouble you. We will find our way.”
“No trouble,” Pringle rumbled back. “No trouble at all.” And, once again, he was laughing at them.
He jogged lightly up the stairs.
XVIII
THERE was something wrong about Pringle and Case. The very fact that they were here, at the lodge, was sinister.
There had been mockery in Pringle’s voice. He had been laughing at them all the time, laughing with a sneering amusement, enjoying some thinly varnished joke that they did not know.
Pringle was a talker, a buffoon . . . but Case was stiff and straight and correct, and when he spoke his words were clipped and sharp. There was something about Case . . . some point . . . some resemblance to something that escaped Sutton at the moment.
Sitting on the edge of his bed, Sutton frowned.
If I could just remember, he told himself. If I could put my finger on that mannerism, on the way he talks and walks and holds himself erect. If I could associate that with a certain thing I can’t identify, it would explain a lot. It might tell me who Case is, or what he is, or even why he’s here.
Case knew that I killed Benton. Case knows who I am. And he should have kept his mouth shut, but he had to let me know he knew, because that way he bolstered up his ego and even if he doesn’t look it, his ego may need boosting.
Eva didn’t trust them, either, for she tried to tell me something when we parted at her door. I couldn’t quite make out what it was from the way she moved her lips, although it looked like she was trying to say: “Don’t trust them.”
As if I would trust anyone . . . anyone at all.
Sutton wiggled his toes and stared at them, fascinated. He tried to wiggle them in series and they wouldn’t wiggle that way. He tried to match the wiggling of each toe on each foot and they wouldn’t match.
I can’t even control my own body, he thought, and it was a funny thing to think.
Pringle and Case were waiting for us, Sutton told himself, and wondered even as he said it if he might not be giving himself over to sheer imagery. For how could they be waiting when they could not have known that Herkimer and Eva would head for the asteroid?
He shook his head, but the belief that the two had been waiting for them stayed. . .
After all, it was not so strange. Adams had known that he was coming back to Earth, returning home after twenty years. Adams knew and set a trap for him . . . and there was no way, absolutely no way that Adams could have known.
Why had Adams set the trap?
Why had Buster run away to homestead a planet?
Why had someone conditioned Benton to kill Sutton?
Why had three men been waiting for Sutton when he came back to the Orion Arms?
Why had Eva and Herkimer brought him to the asteroid?
To write a book, they had said.
But the book was written.
The book . . .
He reached for his coat, which hung from the back of a chair. From it, he took out the gold-lettered copy of the book and as he pulled it out, the letter came with it and fell upon the carpet. He picked the letter up and put it on the bed beside him and opened the book to the flyleaf.
“THIS IS DESTINY,” it said, “By Asher Sutton.”
Underneath the title, at the very bottom of the page, was a line of fine print. Sutton had to hold the book a little closer so that he could read it:
Original Version
And that was all. No date of publication. No marks of copyright. No publisher’s imprint. Just the title and the author and the line of print that said Original Version.
As if, he thought . . . as if the book were so well known, so firm a fixture in the lives of everyone, that anything other than the title and the author would be superfluous.
HE TURNED two pages and they were blank, and then another page, 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 sentiency, has there ever been a single entity that walked or crawled or slithered down the path of life alone.
And that was it, he thought. That is the way I mean to write it.
That was the way I wrote it.
For I must have written it: Sometime, somewhere, I must have written it, for I hold it in my hands.
He closed the book and put it back carefully in the pocket and hung the coat back on the chair.
I must not read it, he told himself. I must not read and know the way that it will go, for then I would write the way that I had read it, and I must not do that. I must write it the way I know it is, the way I plan to write it. I must be honest, for someday the race of Man . . . and the races of other things as well . . . may know the book and read it and every word must be exactly so, and I must write so well and so simply that all can understand.
He threw back the covers of the bed and lay down, and as he did, he saw the letter and picked it up.
With a steady finger, he inserted his nail beneath the flap and ran it along the edge and the mucilage dissolved in a brittle shower of powder. He took the letter out and unfolded it carefully, so that it would not break and saw that it was typewritten, with many mistakes that were X’d out, as, if the man who wrote it had found a typewriter an unhandy thing to use.
Sutton rolled over on one side and held the paper under the lamp and read the livi
ng words of a man 6,000 years dead.
XIX
Bridgeport, Wis.,
July 11, 1987
I WRITE this letter to myself, so that the postmark may prove beyond controversy the day and year that it was written. I shall not open it, but shall place it among my effects against the day when someone —a far-distant member of my own family, God willing—may open it and read. And reading, know the thing that I believe and think, but dare not say while I am still alive, lest someone call me touched.
For I have not long to live. I have lasted more than a man’s average span and while I still am hale and hearty, I know full well the hand of time may miss a man at one reaping, and get him at the next. Hence, I hasten to introduce myself and the mystery I have come to know.
My name is John H. Sutton and I, am a member of a numerous family which had its roots in the east, but one branch of which situated in this locality about one hundred years ago.
I must ask, if the reader of this be unacquainted with the Suttons, that my word be taken at face value without substantiating proof. However, I would like to state that we Suttons are a sober lot and not given to jokes, and that our reputation for integrity and honesty is singularly unquestioned.
While I was educated for the law, I soon found it not entirely to my liking and for the last forty years or more have followed the occupation of farming, finding more contentment in it than I ever found in law. For farming is an honest and a soul-warming job that gives one contact with the first essentials of living.
For the past number of years I have not been physically able to continue with the more strenuous labor of the farm but pride myself that I still do most of the chores and still hold active management, which means that I am in the habit of making regular tours of the acres to see how things are coming.
Of late years, as. My step has slowed and I have found exertion tiring, I have fallen into the habit of arbitrarily setting for myself certain places of rest during my inspection of the farm. One spot has always had, from the very first, a sense of the special for me. If I were still a child, I might best explain it by saying that it seems to be an enchanted place.
It is a deep cleft in the bluff that runs down to the river valley and it is located at the north end of the high pasture. There is a fair-sized boulder at the top of the cleft, and this boulder is shaped appropriately for sitting, which may be one of the reasons why I like it, for I am a man who takes to comfort.
From the boulder one may see the sweep of the river valley with a stressed third-dimensional quality, due no doubt to the height of the vantage point plus the clearness of the air, although at times the whole scene is enveloped with a blue mist of particularly tantalizing and lucid clarity.
IT IS as if the place were tingling . . . waiting for something to happen . . . as if that one particular spot-held great possibilities for drama or for revelation. There, on that one area of Earth, something could or might happen which could happen nowhere else on the entire planet. I have, at times, tried to imagine what that happening might be, and I shrink from telling some of the possibilities that I have imagined, although, in truth, in other things I am perhaps not imaginative enough.
To approach the boulder, I cut across the lower end of the bluff pasture, a place which is often in better grass than the rest of the grazing area, for the cattle, for some reason, do not often venture there. The pasture ends in a thin growth of trees, the forerunners of the mass of foliage which sweeps down the bluff side. Just a few rods inside the trees is the boulder, and because of the trees the boulder is always shaded, no matter what the time of the day, but the view is unobstructed because of the rapid shelving of the ground.
One day about ten years ago—July 4, 1977, to be exact—I approached this place and found a man and a strange machine at the lower end of the pasture, just clear of the trees.
I say machine, because that is what it appeared to be, although, to tell the truth, I could not make too much of it. It was like an egg, pointed slightly at each end, as an egg might look if someone stepped on it and did not break it, but spread it out, so that the ends became more pronounced. It had no working parts outside and so far as I could see not even a window, yet it was apparent that the operator of it sat inside.
For the man had what appeared to be a door open and was standing outside and working at what may have been the motor, although, when I ventured a look, it appeared like no motor I had ever seen before. The fact is that I never did get a good look at the motor or at anything else about the contraption. The man, as soon as he saw me, adroitly maneuvered me away from it and engaged me in such pleasant and intelligent conversation that I could not, without rudeness, change the subject long enough to pay attention to all the things that stirred my curiosity. I remember now, thinking back, that there were many things which I wanted to ask him, but which I never got around to, and it seems to me now that he must have anticipated these very questions and deliberately and skillfully steered me away from them.
The plain truth is that he never did tell me who he was or where he came from or why he happened to be in my pasture. And while that may seem rude to the reader of this account, it did not seem rude at the time, for he was such a charming person.
He seemed well informed on farming, although he looked like no farmer. Come to think of it, I do not remember exactly what he did look like, only that he was dressed in a way which I had never seen before. Not garishly, nor outlandishly, nor even in such a manner that one would think of him as foreign, but in clothing which had certain subtle differences difficult to pin down.
He complimented me on the good growth of the pasture grass and asked me how many head of cattle we ran there and how many we were milking and what was the most satisfactory manner we had found to finish off good beef, and answered him as best I could, being very interested in his line of talk, and he kept the conversation going with appropriate comment and questions, some of which I now realize were meant as subtle flattery, although at the time I did not think so.
HE HAD a tool of some sort in his hand and now he frayed it at a field of corn across the fence and said it looked like a good stand and asked me if I thought it would be knee high by the Fourth. I told him that today was the Fourth and that it was, a mite better than knee high and that I was very pleased with it, since it was a new brand of seed that I was trying for the first time. He looked a little taken aback and laughed and said, “So, it’s the Fourth,” and that he had been so busy lately he had got his dates mixed. And then, before I could even wonder how a man could get his dates so mixed that he could miss the “Fourth of July, he was off again on another tack.
He asked how long I had lived here and when I told him, he asked if the family hadn’t been here a long time; somewhere, he said, he had heard the name before. So I told him that we had and before I knew it, he had me telling all about the family, including some anecdotes which we usually do not tell outside the family circle, since they are not exactly the kind of stories that we would care to have known about ourselves. For while our family is conservative and honorable in the main and better in most things than many others, there is no family which does not have a skeleton or two to hide away from view.
We talked until it was long past the dinner hour and when I noticed this, I asked him if he would not take the meal with us, but he thanked me and said that in just a short while he would have the trouble fixed and would be on his way. He said that he had virtually completed whatever repair was needed when I had appeared. I apologized for delaying him, but he assured me that he did not mind at all, that it had been pleasant to spend the time with me.
As I left him, I managed to get in one question. I had been intrigued by the tool which he had held in his hand during our conversation and I asked him what it was. He showed it to me and told me it was a wrench, and it did look something like a wrench, although not very much so.
After I had eaten dinner and had a nap, I walked back to the pasture, determined to ask the stranger some
of the questions which I realized, by this time, he had avoided.
The machine was gone and the stranger, too, with only a print in the pasture grass to show where the machine had stood. But the wrench was there and when I bent to pick it up, I saw that one end was discolored and upon investigation I found that the discoloration was blood. I have, many times since, berated myself for not having had an analysis made to determine whether the blood was human or from some animal.
Likewise, I have wondered many times just what happened there. Who the man was and how he came to leave the wrench and why the heavier end of the wrench was stained with blood.
I still make the boulder one of my regular stops and the boulder still is always in the shade and the view still is unobstructed and the air over the river valley still lends to the scene its strangely deep three-dimensional effect. And the sense of tingling expectancy still hangs above the spot, so I know that the place had not been waiting for this one strange happening alone, but that other strange happenings still may occur. I do not hope nor expect that I shall see another, for the life of man is but a second in comparison with the time of planets.
THE wrench which I picked up is still with us and it has proved a very useful tool. As a matter of fact, we have dispensed with most of our other tools and use it almost alone, since it will adjust itself to almost any nut or stud or will hold a shaft of almost any size from turning. There is no need of adjustment, nor is there any adjustment device that can be found. One simply applies it to whatever piece of metal one wants to take a grip upon and the tool adjusts itself. No great amount of pressure or strength is needed to operate the wrench. It appears to have the tendency to take whatever slight pressure one exerts upon it and multiply that pressure to the exact point needed.
The Complete Serials Page 24