The Complete Serials

by Clifford D. Simak

  So that was it, thought Sutton. That was the thing that had bothered him, the clue that he had told himself would explain Case, who he was and what he was and why he was here on this asteroid.

  A military man.

  I should have guessed, Sutton said to himself. But I was thinking in the present . . . not the past or future. And there are no military men, as such, in the world today. Although there were military men before my time and apparently there will be military men in ages yet to come.

  He said to Case: “War in four dimensions must be slightly complicated.”

  And he didn’t say it because he was. interested at the moment in war, either in three or four dimensions, but because he felt that it was his turn to talk, his turn to keep this Mad Hatter tea chatter going at its proper senseless pace.

  For that was what it was, he told himself . . . an utterly illogical situation, a madcap, slightly psychotic interlude that might have its purpose, but hidden and tangled in confusion.

  The time has come, the Walrus said, to talk of many things, of sealing wax and sailing ships, of cabbages and . . .

  Case smiled when he spoke to him, a tight, hard, clipped military smile.

  “Primarily,” Case said, “it is a matter of charts and graphs and very special knowledge and some super-guessing. You figure out where the enemy may be and what he may be thinking and you get there first.”

  Sutton shrugged. “Basically that always was the principle,” he said. “You got there fastest . . .”

  “Ah,” said Pringle, “but there are now so many more places where the enemy may go.”

  “You work with thought graphs and attitude charts and historic reports,” said Case, almost as if he had not been interrupted. “You trace back certain happenings and then you return and try to change some of those happenings . . . just a little, you understand, for you must not change them much. Only enough so the end result is slightly different, just a little less favorable to the enemy. One change here and another there and you have him on the run.”

  “It drives you nuts,” said Pringle confidentially. “Because you must be sure, you see. You pick out a nice juicy historic trend and you figure it out to the finest detail and you pick a key point where change is indicated, so you go back and change it . . .”

  “AND then,” said Case, “it kicks you in the face.”

  “Because, you understand,” explained Pringle, “the historian was wrong. Some of his material was wrong or his method was clumsy or his reasoning was off . . .”

  “Somewhere along the line,” said Case, “he missed a factor.”

  “That’s right,” said Pringle, “somewhere he missed a factor and you find, after you have changed it, that it affects your side more than it does your enemy’s.”

  “Now, Mr. Bones,” said Sutton, his face straight, “I wonder if you could tell me why a chicken runs across the road.”

  “Yes, Mr. Interlocutor,” said Pringle, also without a smile. “Because it wants to get on the other side.”

  Cartoon stuff, thought Sutton. A scene jerked raw and bleeding from a crazy humorist’s routine.

  But clever. Pringle was a propagandist and he was no fool. He knew semantics and he knew psychology. He knew all there was to know about the human race, so far as that knowledge could serve his sinister unknown purpose.

  A man had landed in the high pasture one morning, 6,000 years before, and John H. Sutton, Esq., had come ambling down the hill, swinging a stick, for he was the sort of man who would have carried a stick—a stout, strong hickory stick, no doubt, cut and trimmed with his own jackknife. And the man had talked with him and had used the same kind of mental tactics on John H. Sutton as Pringle now was trying to use on Sutton’s far descendant.

  Go ahead, said Sutton to himself. Talk yourself hoarse in the throat and dry in the tongue. And pretty soon we’ll get down to business.

  As if he had read Sutton’s thoughts, Case said to Pringle: “Jake, it isn’t working out.”

  “No, I guess it ain’t,” said Pringle.

  “Let’s sit down,” said Case.

  Sutton felt a flood of relief. Now, he told himself, he would find out what the others wanted, might get some clue to what was going on.

  He sat down in a pressure chair; and from where he sat he could see the front end of the spaceship’s cabin, a tiny living space that shrieked efficiency. The control board canted in front of the pilot’s chair, but there were few controls. A row of buttons, lever or two, a panel of toggles that probably controlled lights and ports and such . . . and that was all. Efficient and simple, no foolishness, a minimum of manual controls. The ship, Sutton thought, must almost fly itself.

  Case slid down into a chair and crossed his long legs, stretching them out in front of him, sitting on his backbone. Pringle perched on a chair’s edge, leaning forward, rubbing hairy hands.

  “Sutton,” asked Case, “what is it that you want?”

  “Not a thing,” said Sutton. “Not a single thing.”

  “But that’s foolish,” Pringle protested. “There must be something you want.”

  “A little information, maybe.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like what this is all about.”

  “You’re going to write a book,” said Case.

  “Yes,” said Sutton. “I intend to write a book.”

  “And you want to sell that book.”

  “I hope to see it published.”

  “A BOOK,” Case pointed out, “is a commodity. It’s a product of brain and muscle. It has a market value.”

  “I suppose,” said Sutton, “that you are in the market.”

  “We are publishers,” said Case, “looking for a book.”

  “A best seller,” Pringle added.

  Case uncrossed his legs, hitched himself higher in the chair. “It’s all quite simple,” he said. “Just a business deal. We wish you would set your price.”

  “Make it high,” urged Pringle. “We are prepared to pay.”

  “I have no price in mind,” said Sutton.

  “We had discussed it,” Case told him, “in a rather speculative manner, wondering how much you might want and how much we might be willing to give. We figured a planet might be attractive to you.”

  “We’d make it a dozen planets,” Pringle said, “but that doesn’t make sense. What would a man do with a dozen planets?”

  “He might rent them out,” said Sutton.

  “You mean,” asked Case, “that you might be interested in a dozen planets?”

  “No, I wouldn’t,” Sutton answered. “Pringle wondered what a man would do with a dozen planets and I was being helpful. I said . . .”

  Pringle leaned so far forward in his chair that he was almost off it. “Look, we aren’t talking about one of the backwoods planets out at the tail end of nowhere. We’re offering you a landscaped planet, free of all venomous and hostile life, with a salubrious climate and tractable natives and all the customary living accommodations and improvements.”

  “And the money,” said Case, “to keep it running for the rest of your life.”

  “Right spang in the middle of the galaxy,” said Pringle. “It’s an address you wouldn’t be ashamed of.”

  “I’m not interested,” said Sutton. Case’s temper cracked. “Good Lord, what is it that you want?”

  “I want information,” Sutton said. Case sighed. “All right, then. We’ll give you information.”

  “Why do you want my book?”

  “There are three parties interested in your book,” said Case. “One of those parties would kill you to prevent your writing it. What is more to the point, they probably will if you don’t throw in with us.”

  “And the third party?”

  “The third party wants you to write the book, all right, but they won’t pay you a thing for doing it. They’ll do all they can to make it easy for you to write the book and they’ll try to protect you from the ones that would like to kill you, but they’re not
offering any money.”

  “If I took you up,” said Sutton, “I suppose you’d help me write the book? Conferences and so forth?”

  “Naturally,” said Case. “We’d have an interest in it. We’d want it done the best way possible.”

  “After all,” said Pringle, “our interest would be as great as yours.”

  “That’s what I thought,” Sutton told them. “My book is not for sale.”

  “We’d boost the ante some,” said Pringle.

  “It still is not for sale.”

  “That’s your final word?” asked Case. “Your considered opinion?” Sutton nodded.

  Case sighed. “Then,” he said, “I guess we have to kill you.”

  He took a gun out of his pocket.

  XXIII

  THE psych-tracer ticked on, endlessly, running fast, then slow, skipping a beat now and then like the erratic time measurement of a clock with hiccoughs.

  It was the only sound in the room and to Adams it seemed as if he were listening to the beating of a heart, the breathing of a man, the throb of blood along the jugular vein.

  He grimaced at the pile of dossiers which a moment before he had swept from his desk onto the floor with an angry sweep of his hand. For there was nothing-in them . . . absolutely nothing. Every one was perfect, every one checked. Birth certificates, scholastic records, recommendations, loyalty checks, psych examinations, all of them were as they should be. There was not a single flaw.

  That was the trouble . . . in all the records of the Service’s personnel, there was not a single flaw. Not a thing a man could point to. Not a thing on which one could anchor suspicion.

  Lily white and pure.

  Yet someone inside the Service had stolen Sutton’s dossier. Someone had tipped off Sutton on the gun-trap laid for him at the Orion Arms. Someone had been ready and waiting, knowing of the trap, to whisk him out of reach.

  “Spies,” said Adams to himself, and he made his hand into a fist and hit the desk so hard that his knuckles stung.

  For no one but an insider could have made away with Sutton’s dossier. No one but an insider could have known of the decision to destroy Sutton, nor of the three men. who had been assigned to carry out the order.

  Adams smiled grimly.

  The tracer chuckled at him. Ker-up, it said, ker-up, clickity, click, ker-up.

  That was Sutton’s heart and breath . . . Sutton’s life ticking away somewhere. So long as Sutton lived, no matter where he was or what he might be doing, the tracer would go on chuckling and burping.

  Ker-rup, ker-rup, ker-rup . . .

  Somewhere in the asteroid belt, the tracer had said, and that was a very general location, but it could be narrowed. Already ships with other tracers aboard were narrowing it down. Sooner or later, hours or days or weeks, Sutton would be found.

  Ker-rup . . .

  War, the man in the mask had said.

  And hours later, a ship had come screaming down across the hills, like a blazing comet, to plunge into a swamp.

  A ship such as no man as yet had made, carrying melted weapons that were unlike any that Man had yet invented. A ship whose thunder in the night had roused the sleeping inhabitants for miles around, whose flaming metal had been a beacon glowing in the sky.

  A ship and a body, and a track that led from ship to body across three hundred yards of marsh. The trace of one man’s footprints and the furrowing trail of other feet that dragged across the mud. And the man who had carried the dead man had been Asher Sutton, for Sutton’s fingerprints were on the muddied clothing of the man lying at the swamp’s edge.

  Sutton, thought Adams wearily. It is always Sutton. Sutton’s name upon the flyleaf out of Aldebaran XII. Sutton’s fingerprints upon a dead, man’s clothing. The man in the mask had said there would have been no incident on Aldebaran if it had not been for Sutton. And Sutton had killed Benton, Earth’s greatest duelist—with a bullet in the arm.

  Ker-up, clickity, click, ker-up . . .

  Dr. Raven, called in by Adams, had sat in that chair across the desk and told of the afternoon Sutton had dropped in at the university.

  “He found destiny,” Dr. Raven had said, and he said it as if it were commonplace, as if it were a thing that could have been expected all along.

  “Not a religion,” Dr. Raven had said, with the afternoon sunlight shining on his snow white hair. “Oh, dear, no, not a religion. Actual destiny.”

  DESTINY, noun. Destiny—the predetermined course in events often conceived as a resistless power or agency . . .

  “The accepted definition,” Dr. Raven had said, as if he might be addressing a lecture hall, “may have to be modified slightly when Asher writes his book.”

  But how could Sutton find destiny? Destiny was an idea, an abstract.

  “You forget,” Dr. Raven had told Adams, speaking gently as one would to a child, “that part about the resistless power or agency. That is what he found . . . the power or agency.”

  “Sutton told me about the beings he found on Cygni,” Adams had said. “He was at a loss to describe them. The nearest that he could come was symbiotic abstractions.”

  Dr. Raven had nodded his head and pulled his shell-like ears and figured that maybe symbiotic abstractions would fit the bill, although it was hard for one to decide just what a symbiotic abstraction was, or what it would look like.

  Under questioning, he reiterated that it was not a new religion Sutton had found. “Oh, gracious, no, not a religion.”

  And heaven, Adams thought, should be the one to know, for he was one of the galaxy’s best and most widely known comparative religionists.

  “Although it would be a new idea,” Dr. Raven had said. “Bless me, yes, an absolutely new idea.”

  And ideas are dangerous, Adams told himself.

  For Man was spread thin across the galaxy. So thin that one word—literally one spoken word or unbidden thought—might be enough to set off the train of rebellion and of violence that would sweep Man back to the solar system, back to the puny ring of circling planets that had caged him in before.

  One could not take a chance. One could not gamble with an imponderable.

  Better that one man die needlessly than that the whole race lose its grip upon the galaxy. Better that one new idea, however great, be blotted out than that Mankind be swept from the billion stars.

  Item one: Sutton wasn’t human.

  Item Two: He was not telling all he knew.

  Item Three: He had a manuscript, which was not decipherable.

  Item Four: He meant to write a book.

  Item Five: He had a new idea.

  Conclusion: Sutton must be killed.

  Ker-up, clickity, click . . .

  War, the man had said. A war in time.

  IT WOULD spread thin, too, like Man across the galaxy.

  It would be three-dimensional chess with a million billion squares and pieces, and with the rules changing at every move.

  It would reach back to win its battles. It would strike at points in time and space which would not even know that there was a war. It could, logically, go back to the silver mines of Athens, to the horse and chariot of Thutmoses III, to the sailing of Columbus. It would involve all fields of human endeavor and human speculation, and it would twist the dreams of men who had never thought of time except as a moving shadow across a sun dial’s face.

  It would involve spies and propagandists—-spies to learn the factors of the past so that they could be plotted in the campaign strategy, propagandists to twist the fabric of the past so that strategy could be the more effective.

  It would load the personnel of the Justice Department of the year 7990 with spies and fifth columnists and saboteurs. And it would do that so cleverly one could never find the spies.

  But, as in an ordinary, honest war, there would be strategic points. As in chess, there would be one key piece.

  Sutton was that piece. He was the pawn that stood in the way of the sweep of bishop and of rook. He was the
pawn that both sides were lining up on, bring all their pressure on a single point . . . and when one side was ready, when it gained a fraction of advantage, the slaughter would begin.

  Adams folded his arms upon the desk and laid his head upon them. His shoulders twitched, but he had no tears.

  “Ash, boy,” he said. “Ash, I counted on you so much.”

  The silence brought him straight in the chair again.

  For a moment, he was unable to locate it . . . determine what was wrong. And then he knew.

  The psych-tracer had stopped its burping.

  He leaned forward and bent above it and there was no sound of heart, of breath, of blood coursing in the body.

  The motivating force that had operated it—Asher Sutton—has ceased to be.

  Slowly, Adams rose from his chair, took down his hat and put it on.

  For the first time in his life, Christopher Adams was going home before the day was over.

  XXIV

  SUTTON stiffened in his chair and then relaxed. For this was a bluff, he told himself. These men wouldn’t kill him. They wanted the book and dead men do not write.

  Case answered him, almost as if Sutton had spoken what he thought aloud. “You must not count on us as honorable men; neither of us ourselves would lay a claim to that. Pringle, I think, will bear me out in that.”

  “Oh, certainly,” said Pringle. “I have no use for honor.”

  “It would have meant a great deal to us if we could have taken you back to Trevor and . . .”

  “Wait a second,” interrupted Sutton. “Who is this Trevor? He’s a new one.”

  “Oh, Trevor,” said Pringle. “Just an oversight. Trevor is the head of the corporation.”

  “The corporation,” added Case, “that wants to get your book.”

  “Trevor would have heaped us with honors,” Pringle said, “and loaded us with wealth if we had pulled it off. But since you won’t cooperate, we’ll have to cast around for some other way to make ourselves a profit.”