However, we are very careful to use the wrench only when there are no outside eyes to see it, for it smacks too much of magic or of witchcraft to be allowed on public view. The general knowledge that we possessed such a wrench almost certainly would lead to unwholesome speculation among our neighbors. And since we are ah honest and respectable family, such a situation is the furthest from our wish.
NONE of us ever talk about the man and the machine I found in the bluff pasture, even among ourselves. We seem tactfully to recognize that it is a subject which does not befit sober farmers.
But while we do not talk about it, I do know that I, myself, think about it much. I spend more time than usual at the boulder resting place, just why, I do not know, unless it is in the feeble hope that somehow I may find a clue which either will substantiate or disprove the theory I have formed to account for the happening.
For I believe, without proof of any sort, that the man was a man who came from time and that the machine was a time machine and the wrench is a tool which will not be discovered nor manufactured for more years to come than I might possibly guess.
I believe that somewhere in the future, Man has discovered a method by which he moves through time and that undoubtedly he has evolved a very rigid code of ethics and practices, in order to prevent the paradoxes which would result from indiscriminate time traveling or meddling in the affairs of other times.
I believe that the leaving of the wrench in my time provides.one of those paradoxes which in itself is simple, but which under certain circumstances might lead to many complications. For that reason, I have impressed upon the family the strict necessity of keeping it secret.
Likewise, I have come to the conclusion—also unsupported—that the cleft, at the head of which the boulder is located, may be a road through time, or at least part of a road, a single point where our present time coincides very closely through the operation of some as-yet-unknown principle with another time far removed from us. It may be a place in space-time where less resistance is encountered in traveling through time than in other places, and, having been discovered, is used quite frequently. Or it may simply be that it is a time road more deeply rutted, more frequently used than many other time roads, with the result that whatever medium, separates one time from another time had been worn thin, or had bulged a bit, or whatever would happen under such a circumstance.
That reasoning might explain the strange eerie tingling of the place, the sense of expectancy.
The reader must bear in mind, of course, that I am an old, old man, that I have outlived the ordinary span of human life and that I continue to exist through some quirk of human destiny. While it does not seem so to myself, it may be that my mind is not as sharp or keen not as analytical as it may once have been, and that as a result I am susceptible to ideas which would be rejected by a younger person.
The one bit of proof, if one may call it proof, that I have to support my theories is that the man I met could well have been a future man, might well have sprung from some civilization further advanced than ours. For it must be apparent to whoever reads this letter that in my talk with him he used me for his own purpose, that he pulled the wool over my eyes as easily as a man of my day might pull it over the eyes of a Homeric Greek or some member of Attila’s tribe. He was, I am sure, a man versed in semantics and in psychology. Certainly, he always was one long jump ahead of me.
I write this now only so that my theories, which I shrink from telling in my lifetime, may not be wholly lost, but may be available at some future time when a more enlightened knowledge than we have today may be able to make something out of them. And I hope that, reading them, one will not laugh, since I am dead. For if one did laugh, I am afraid that, dead as I might be, I would surely know it.
THAT is the failing of us Suttons—we cannot bear to be made the butt of laughter.
And in case one may believe that my mind is twisted, I herewith enclose a physician’s certificate, signed just three days ago, asserting that upon examination he found me sound of body and mind.
But the story I have to tell is not yet entirely done. These additional events should have been included in earlier sequence, but I found no place in which they logically would fit.
They concern the strange incident of the stolen clothing and the coming of William Jones.
The clothing was stolen a few days after the incident in the high pasture. Martha had done the washing early in the day,” before the heat of the summer sun, and hung it on the line. When she went to take in the clothes, she found that an old pair of overalls of mine, a shirt belonging to Roland and a couple pair of socks, the ownership of which I fear I have forgotten, had disappeared.
The theft made quite a stir among us„ for thievery is a thing which does not often happen in our community. We talked about it off and on for several days, and finally agreed that the theft must have been the work of some passing tramp. Even that explanation was scarcely satisfactory. We are off the beaten way and tramps do not often pass, and that year, as I remember it, was a year of great prosperity and there were few tramps.
It was two weeks or so after the theft of the clothing that William Jones came to the house and asked if we might need a hand to help with the harvest. We were glad to take him on, for we were short of help and the wages that he asked were far below the going pay. We took him on for the harvest only, but he proved so capable that we have kept him all of ten years. Even as I write this, he is out in the barnyard readying the binder for the small grain cutting.
There is a funny thing about William Jones. In this country a man soon acquires a nickname or at least a variation of his own. But William Jones always has been William Jones. He never has been Will or Bill or Willie. Nor has he been Spike or Bub or Kid. Not even Jonesy. There is a quiet dignity about him that makes everyone respect him, and his love of work and his quiet, intelligent interest in farming raise him far above the usual status of a hired hand in the community.
He never drinks, a thing for which I am thankful, although at one time I had my misgivings. For when he came to us, he had a bandage on his head and he explained to me, shamefacedly, that he had been hurt in a tavern brawl across the river somewhere in Crawford County.
I don’t know when it was that I began to wonder about William Jones. Certainly it was not at first, for I accepted him for what he pretended to be, a man looking for work. If there was any resemblance to the man I had talked with down in the pasture, I did not notice it then. And, now, having seen it at this late date, I wonder if my imagination, running riot with my theories of time travel, may not have conditioned me to a point where I see a mystery crouching back of every tree.
But the conviction has grown upon me through the years I have associated with him. For all that he tries to keep his place, attempts to adapt his idiom to match our idiom, there are times when his speech hints at an education and an understanding one would not expect to find in a man who works on a farm for $75 a month and board.
THERE, too, is his natural shyness, which is a thing one would expect to find if a man were deliberately attempting to adapt himself to a society that was not his own.
And there is the matter of the clothes. Thinking back, I can’t be sure about the overalls, for all overalls look alike. But the shirt was exactly like the shirt that had been stolen from the line, although I tell myself that it would not be improbable for two men to own the same kind of shirt. And he was barefooted, which seemed a funny thing even at the time, but he explained it by saying that he-had been down on his luck and I remember I advanced him enough money to buy some shoes and socks. But it turned out that he didn’t need the socks, for he had two pair in his pocket.
A few years ago I decided several times that I would speak to him about the matter, but each time my resolution failed and now I know I never will. For I like William Jones and William Jones likes me and I would not for the world destroy that mutual liking by a question that might send him fleeing from the farm.
There is yet one
other thing which goes to make William Jones unlike most farm hands. With his first money from his work here, he bought a typewriter and during the first two or three years that he was with us, he spent long hours of his evenings in his room using the typewriter and tramping about the room, as a man who is thinking is apt to walk.
And then one day, in the early morning, before the rest of us had gotten from our beds, he took a great sheaf of paper, apparently the result of those long hours of work, and burned it. Watching from my bed room window, I watched him do it and he stayed until he was sure that the last scrap of the paper had been burned. Then he turned around and walked back slowly to the house.
I never mentioned to him the burning of the paper, for I felt, somehow, that it was something he did not wish another man to know.
I might go on for many pages and write down many other inconsequential, trivial things which rattle in my skull, but they would not add one iota of actual information, and might, in fact, convince the reader that I am in my dotage.
To whom this letter may reach, I wish to make one last assurance. While my theory may be wrong, I would have him or her believe that the facts I have told are true. I would have him or her know that I did see a strange machine in the high pasture and that I did talk with a strange man, that I picked up a wrench with blood upon it, that clothes were stolen from the wash line and that even now a man named William Jones is pumping himself a drink of water at the well, for the day is very hot.
Sincerely,
John H. Sutton
XX
ASHER SUTTON folded the letter and the crackling of the old paper rippled across the quietness of the room unlike a spiteful snarl of thunder.
Then he recalled something and unfolded the sheaf of leaves again and found the thing that had been mentioned. It was yellow and old . . . not as good a quality of paper as the letter had been written on. The writing was by hand, with ink, and the lines were faded so they hardly could be read. The date was unclear, except for the final 7.
Sutton puzzled it out:
John H. Sutton today has been examined by me and I find him sound of mind and body.
The signature was a scrawl that probably could not have been read even when the ink was scarcely dry, but there were two letters that stood out fairly clearly at the very end. The letters were M. D.
Sutton stared across the room and saw in his mind the scene of that long gone day.
“Doctor, I’ve a mind to make a will. Wonder if you could . . .” For John H. Sutton never would have told the doctor the real reason for that slip of paper . . . the real reason why he wanted it established that he was not insane.
Sutton could imagine him. Ponderous in his walk, slow, deliberate, taking plenty of time to think things over, placing vast values on qualities and fictions which even in that day were shopworn and losing caste from centuries of over-glorification.
An old tyrant to his family, more likely. A fuddy-duddy among his neighbors, who laughed behind his back. A man lacking in humor and crinkling his brow over fine matters of etiquette and ethics.
He had been trained for the law and he had a lawyer’s mind; that much, at least, the letter told with clarity. A lawyer’s mind for detail, and a landed man’s quality of slowness, and an old man’s garrulity.
But there was no mistaking John Sutton’s sincerity. He believed he had seen a strange machine and had talked with a strange man and had picked up a wrench stained with . . .
A wrench!
Sutton sat upright on the bed.
THE wrench had been in the trunk. He had held it in his hand. He had picked it up and tossed it on the pile of junk.
Sutton’s hand trembled as he slid the letter back into its envelope. First it had been the stamp that had intrigued him, a stamp that was worth Lord knew how much. . . then it was the letter itself and the mystery of its being sealed . . . and now there was the wrench. And the wrench clinched everything.
For the wrench meant that there actually had been a strange machine and a stranger man . . . a man who knew enough semantics and psychology to talk a talkative, self-centered oldster off his mental feet. Fast enough on the uptake to keep this inspection-tripping farmer from asking him the very questions the man was bubbling to ask.
Who are you and where did you come from and what’s that machine and how does it run and I never saw the like of it before . . .
Hard to answer, if they were ever asked.
They were not asked.
But Asher Sutton chuckled, thinking of John H. Sutton’s having the last word and how it had come about. It would please the old boy if he could only know, but, of course, he couldn’t.
There had been some slips naturally. The letter had. been lost or mislaid . . . and finally, somehow, it had come into the hands of another Sutton, 6,000 years removed.
And Asher Sutton was the only Sutton for whom the letter would have done a bit of good. For the letter tied in someplace, had some significance in the mystery that involved him.
Men who traveled in time. Men whose time machines went haywire and came to landfall or timefall, whichever you might call it, in a cow pasture. And other men who fought in time and screamed through folds of time in burning ships and crashed in a swamp.
A battle back in ’83, the dying youth had said. Not a battle at Waterloo or off the Martian orbit, but back in ’83. And the man had cried his name just before he died and lifted himself to make a sign with strangely twisted fingers.
So I am known, thought Sutton, up in ’83 and beyond ’83, for the boy said back and that means that, in his time, a time three centuries yet to come is historically the past.
Sutton reached for his coat again and slid the letter into the pocket with the book, then rolled out of bed. He reached for his clothes and began to dress.
Pringle and Case had used a spaceship to get to the asteroid. Sutton had to find that ship.
XXI
THE lodge was deserted, big and empty with an alienness in its emptiness that made Sutton, who should have been accustomed to alienness, shiver as he felt it touch him.
He stood for a moment outside his door and listened to the whispering of the place, the faint, illogical breathing of the house, the creak of frost-expanded walls, the caress of wind against a windowpane, and the noises that could not be explained by either frost or wind, the living sound of something that is not alive.
The carpeting in the hall deadened his footsteps as he went down it toward the stairs. Snores came from one of the two rooms which Pringle had said that he and Case occupied, and Sutton wondered for a moment which one of them it was that snored.
He went carefully down the stairs, trailing his hand along the bannister to guide him. When he reached the massive living space, he waited, standing motionless so that his eyes might become accustomed to the deeper dark that crouched there like lairing animals.
Slowly the animals took the shapes of chairs and couches, tables, cabinets and cases. One of the chairs, he saw, had a man sitting in it.
As if he had become aware that Sutton had seen him, the man stirred, turning his face toward him. And although it was too dark to see his features, Sutton knew that the man in the chair was Case.
Then, he thought, the man who Snores is Pringle, although he knew it made no difference which it was.
“SO Mr. Sutton,” Case said slowly, “you decided to go out and try to find our ship.”
“Yes,” Sutton said, “I did.”
“Now that is fine,” said Case. “That is the way I like a man to speak up and say what’s on his mind.” He sighed. “You meet so many devious persons, so many people who try to lie to you, so many people who tell you half truths and feel, while they’re doing it, that they are being clever.”
He rose out of the chair, tall and straight and prim.
“Mr. Sutton,” he said, “I like you very much.”
Sutton felt like grinning at the absurdity of the situation, but a coldness and a half anger in him told him this wa
s no laughing matter.
Footsteps padded softly down the stairs behind him and Pringle’s voice whispered through the room: “So he decided to make a try for it.”
“As you see,” said Case.
“I told you that he would,” said Pringle, almost triumphantly. “I told you that he would get it figured out.” Sutton choked down the gorge that rose into his throat. But the anger held, anger at the way they talked about him as if he weren’t there.
“I fear,” said Case to Sutton, “that we have disturbed you. We are most untactful people and you are sensitive. But let’s forget it all and get down to business now. You wanted, I believe, to ferret out our ship.” Sutton shrugged his shoulders. “That’s out now, isn’t it?”
“Oh, but you misunderstand,” said Case. “We have no objection. Go ahead and ferret.”
“Meaning I can’t find it?”
“Meaning that you can,” said Case. “We didn’t try to hide it.”
“We’ll even show you the way,” said Pringle. “We’ll go along with you. It will take you a lot less time.” Sutton felt a fine ooze of perspiration break out along his hairline.
A trap, he told himself. A trap laid out in plain sight and not even baited. And he’d walked into it without even looking.
But it was too late now. There was no backing out.
He tried to make his voice sound unconcerned.
“All right,” he said. “I’ll gamble with you.”
XXII
THE ship was strange, but very real. And it was the only thing that was. All the rest of the situation had a vague, unrealistic, almost fairy character about it, as if it might be a bad dream and Sutton would wake up and for an agonizing moment try to distinguish between dream and reality.
“That map over there,” said Pringle, “puzzles you, no doubt. There is every reason that it should. It is a time map.” He chuckled and rubbed the back of his head with a beefy Rand. “Tell the truth, I don’t understand the thing myself. Case does. Case is a military man and I’m just a propagandist. A propagandist doesn’t have to know what he is talking about, just so he talks convincingly. But a military man does. A military man has to know; some day his life may depend on knowing.”
The Complete Serials Page 25