“So we switch sides,” explained Case, “and we shoot you. Morgan will pay high for you, but he wants you dead. Your carcass will be worth a good deal to Morgan. Oh, yes, quite a lot.”
“And you will sell it to him.”
“Of course,” said Pringle. “We never miss a bet.”
Case purred at Sutton: “You do not object, I hope.”
Sutton shrugged indifferently. “What you do with my cadaver is no concern of mine.”
“Well, then,” said Case, and he raised the gun.
“Just a second,” Sutton said. Case lowered the gun. “Now what?”
“He wants a cigaret,” said Pringle. “Men who are about to be executed always want a cigaret or a glass of wine or a chicken dinner or something of the sort.”
“I want to ask a question,” Sutton said.
Case nodded.
“I take it,” Sutton said, “that in your time I’ve already written this book.”
“That’s right,” Case told him. “An honest and efficient job.”
“Under your imprint or someone else’s?”
Pringle cackled. “Under someone else’s, of course. If you did it under ours, why do you think we’d be back here at all?”
Sutton wrinkled his brow. “I’ve already written it,” he said, “without your help and without your editing. Now if I did it a second time, and wrote it the way you wanted, there would be complications.”
“None,” said Case, “we couldn’t overcome. Nothing that could not be explained quite satisfactorily.”
“And now that you’re going to kill me, there’ll be no book at all. How will you handle that?”
Case frowned. “It will be difficult and unfortunate . . . unfortunate for many people. But we’ll work it out.” He raised the gun. “Sure you won’t change your mind?”
Sutton shook his head.
They won’t shoot, he told himself. It’s a bluff. The deck is cold and . . .
Case pulled the trigger.
A mighty force, like a striking list, slammed into Sutton’s body and shoved him back so hard that the chair tilted and then slued around, yawing like a ship caught in magnetic stresses.
Fire flashed within his skull. He felt one swift shriek of agony that took him in its claws and lifted him and shook him, jangling every nerve, grating every bone.
There was one thought, one fleeting thought that he tried to grasp and hold, but it wriggled from his brain like an eel slipping free from bloody fingers.
Change, said the thought. Change.
He felt the change . . . felt it start even as he died.
And death was a soft thing, soft and black, cool and sweet and gracious. He slipped into it as a swimmer slips into the surf and it closed over him and held him. He felt the pulse and beat of it and knew the vastness and the sureness of it.
Back on Earth, the psych-tracer faltered to a stop and Christopher Adams got up and put on his hat and went home for the first time in his life before the day was done.
XXV
HERKIMER lay on his bed and tried to sleep, but sleep was long in coming. And he wondered that he should sleep . . . that he should sleep and eat and drink as Man. For he was not a man and would never be a man.
His origin was chemical and Man’s was biological. He was the imitation and Man was reality. It is the method, he told himself, the method and the terminology, that keep me from being Man, for in all things else we are the same.
The method and the name of android and the tattoo mark I wear upon my brow.
I am as good as Man and as smart as Man, for all I act the clown, and could be as treacherous as Man if I had the chance. Except I wear a tattoo mark and I am owned and I have no soul . . . although sometimes I wonder.
Herkimer lay very quiet-and gazed at the ceiling and tried to remember certain things, but it was frighteningly complicated.
First there was the tool and then the machine, which was no more than a complicated tool, and both machine and tool were no more than the extension of a hand.
Man’s hand, of course.
Then came the robot and a robot was a machine that walked like a man. That walked and looked and talked like a man and did the things Man wished, but it was a caricature. No matter how sleekly machined, no matter how cleverly designed, there never was a danger that it be mistaken for a man.
And after the robot?
We are not robots, Herkimer told himself, and we are not men. We are not machines, because we are flesh and blood. We are chemicals made into the shapes of our creators and assigned a chemical life so close to the life of our makers that some day one of them will find, to his astonishment, that there is no difference.
Made in the shape of men . . . and the resemblance is so close that we wear a tattoo mark so that men may know us apart.
So close to Man and yet not Man.
Although there is hope . . . if we can keep the Cradle secret, if we can keep it hidden from the eyes of Man. Someday there will be no difference. Someday a man will talk to an android and think he is talking to a fellow man. And he will be.
HERKIMER stretched his arms and folded them over his head. He tried to examine his mind, to arrive at motives and evaluations, but it was hard to do. No rancor, certainly. No jealousy. No bitterness. Just a nagging feeling of inadequacy, of having almost reached the goal and fallen short.
But there was comfort, he thought. There was comfort if nothing else.
And that comfort must be kept. Kept for those like himself, the ones that were less than Man.
He lay for a long time, thinking about comfort, watching the dark square of the window with the rime of frost upon it and the stars shining through the frost, listening to the thin whine of the feeble, vicious weasel-wind as it snarled across the roof.
Sleep did not come and he got up at last and turned on the light. Shivering, he got into his clothes and pulled a book out of his pocket. Huddling close to the lamp, he turned the pages to a passage worn thin with reading.
There is no thing, no matter, how created, how born or how conceived or made, which knows the pulse of life, that goes alone. That assurance I can give you . . .
He closed the book and held it clasped between the palms of his two hands.
. . . how born or how conceived or made.
Made.
All that mattered was the pulse of life, the stir of sentiency.
Comfort.
And it must be kept.
I did my duty, he told himself. My willing, almost eager duty. I still am doing it.
I acted the part, he told himself, and I think I acted well. I acted a part when I carried the challenge to Asher Sutton’s room. I acted a part when I came to him as a part of the estate duello . . . the saucy, subservient part of any common android.
I did my duty for him . . . and yet not for him, but for comfort, for the privilege of knowing and believing that neither I nor any other living thing, no matter how lowly it may be, will ever be alone.
I hit him. I hit him on the button and knocked him out, and I lifted him in my arms and carried him into the spaceship.
He was angry at me, but that does not matter. His anger cannot wash away a single word of the assurance he gave me.
Thunder shook the house. The window, for a moment, flared with sudden crimson.
Herkimer came to his feet and ran for the window and stood there, gripping the ledge, watching the red twinkle of dwindling rocket tubes.
Fear hit him in the stomach and he raced out of the door and down the hall, to Sutton’s room.
He did not knock nor did he turn the knob. He hit the door and it shattered open, with a wrecked and twisted lock dangling by its screws.
The bed was empty and there was no one in the room.
XXVI
SUTTON sensed resurrection and he fought against it, for death was so comfortable. Like a soft, warm, bed. And resurrection was a strident, insistent, maddening alarm clock that shrilled across the predawn chili of a dreadful,
frowsy room. Dreadful with its life and its raw reality and its sharp, sickening reminder that one must get up.
But this is not the first time, said Sutton. This is not the first time that I died and came to life again. For I did it once before and that time I was dead for a long, long time.
There was a hard, flat surface underneath him and he lay face down, upon it. For what seemed an interminable stretch of time, his mind struggled to visualize the hardness and smoothness beneath him. Hard and flat and smooth, three words, but they did not help one see or understand the thing that they described.
He felt life creep back and quicken, seep along his legs and arms. But he wasn’t breathing and his heart was still.
Floor.
That was it . . . that was the word for the thing on which he lay. The flat, hard, smooth surface was a floor. The floor of what?
Sounds came to him, but at first he didn’t call them sounds, for he had no word for them at all, and then, a moment later, he remembered that that was the word.
Now he could move one finger. Then a second finger.
He opened his eyes and there was light.
The sounds were voices and the voices were words and the words were thoughts.
It takes so long to figure things out, Sutton wearily told himself.
“We should have tried a little harder,” said a voice, “and a little longer. The trouble with us, Case, is that we have no patience.”
“Patience wouldn’t have done a bit of good,” said Case. “He was convinced that we were bluffing. No matter what we’d done or said, he’d still have thought we were bluffing and we would have gotten nowhere. There was only one thing to do.”
“YES, I know,” Pringle agreed. “Convince him that we weren’t bluffing.” He made a sound of blowing out his breath. “Pity, too. He was such a bright young man.”
They were silent for a time and now it was not life alone, but strength, that was flowing into Sutton. Strength to stand and walk, strength to lift his arms, strength to vent his anger. Strength to kill two men.
“We won’t do so badly,” Pringle went on. “Morgan and his crowd will pay us just as much.”
Case was squeamish. “I don’t like it, Pringle. A dead man is a dead man if you kill him and leave him. But when you sell him, that makes you a butcher.”
“That’s not the thing that’s worrying me,” Pringle answered. “What will it do to the future, Case? To our future. We had a future with many of its facets based on Sutton’s book. If we had managed to change the book a little, it wouldn’t have mattered much . . . wouldn’t have mattered at all, in fact, the way we had it figured out. But now Sutton’s dead. There will be no book by Sutton. The future will be completely different.”
Sutton rose to his feet.
They spun around and faced him and Case’s hand went for his gun.
“Go ahead,” invited Sutton. “Shoot me full of holes. You won’t live a minute longer for it.”
He tried to hate them, as he had hated Benton during that one fleeting moment back on Earth. Hatred so strong and primal that it had blasted the man’s mind into oblivion.
. . . killed him with only a puzzling bullet in his arm and a hate-shattered brain.
But there was no hate. Just a ponderous, determined will to destroy a bothersome hindrance.
He moved forward on inexorable legs and his hands readied out.
Pringle ran, squealing, seeking to escape. Case’s gun spat twice and when blood oozed out and ran down Sutton’s chest and he still came on, Case threw away his weapon and backed against the wall.
It didn’t take long.
They couldn’t get away.
There was no place to go.
XXVII
SUTTON maneuvered the ship down against the tiny asteroid, a whirling piece of debris not much bigger than the ship itself. He felt it touch and his thumb reached out and snubbed over the gravity lever. The ship clamped down, to go tumbling through space with the twisting chunk of rock.
Sutton let his hands fall to his side and sat quietly in the pilot’s chair. In front of him, space was black and friendless, streaked by the pinpoint stars that spun in lines of fire across the field of vision, writing cryptic messages of cold, white light across the cosmos as the asteroid bumbled on its erratic course.
Safe, he told himself. Safe for a while, at least. Perhaps safe forever, for there might be no one looking for him.
Safe with a hole blasted through his chest, with blood running down his front and splashing on the floor.
Handy thing to have, he thought grimly, this second body of mine. This body that was grafted on me by the Cygnians. It will keep me going until . . . until . . .
Until what?
Until I can get back to Earth and walk into a doctor’s office and say: “I got shot up a little. How about a patching job?”
Sutton chuckled. He could see the doctor having a fit.
Or going back to Cygni? But they wouldn’t let me in.
Or just going back to Earth the way I am and forget about the doctor? I could get other clothes and the bleeding will stop when the blood’s all gone.
BUT I wouldn’t breathe, and they would notice that.
“Johnny,” he said, but there was no answer, just a feeble stir of life within his brain, a sign of recognition, like a dog wagging its tail to let you know it heard, but was too busy with a bone to let anything distract it.
“Johnny, is there any way?”
There might be. It was a hope to cling to, a thing to think about.
Not even yet, he suspected, had he begun to plumb the strange depth of abilities lodged within his body and his mind.
He had not known that his hate alone could kill, that hate could spear out from his brain like a lance of steel and strike a man dead. And yet Benton had died with a bullet in the arm . . . only he had been dead before the bullet hit him. For Benton had fired first and missed, and Benton, alive, never would have missed.
Sutton had not known that by mind alone he could control the energy needed to lift the dead weight of a ship from a boulder bed and fly it across eleven years of space. And yet that was what he’d done, winnowing the energy from the flaming stars so far away they dimmed to almost nothing, from the random specks of matter in the void.
And while he knew that he could change at will from one life to another, he had not known for certain that when one way of life w-as killed, the other way would take over automatically. Yet that was what had happened. Case had killed him and he had died and he had come to life again. But he had died before the change had started. Of that much he was sure. For he remembered death and recognized it. He knew it from the time he had died before.
He felt his body eating . . . sucking at the stars as a human sucks an orange, nibbling at the energy imprisoned in the bit of rook to which the ship was clamped, pouncing on the tiny leaks of power from the ship’s atomic motors.
Eating to grow strong, eating to repair . . .
“Johnny, is there any way?”
And there was no answer.
HE LET his head sag forward until it lay upon the inclined panel that housed the instruments. His body went on eating at the stars.
He listened to the slow drip of blood falling from his body and splashing on the floor.
His mind was clouding and he let it cloud, for there was nothing to do. There was no need to use it; he did not know how to use it. He did not know what he could do or what he couldn’t do, nor how to go about it.
He had fallen, he remembered, screaming down the alien sky, knowing in a moment of wild elation that he had broken through, that the world of Cygni VII lay beneath his hand. That what all the navies of the Earth had failed to do, he’d done.
The planet was rushing up and he saw the tangled geography of it that snaked in black and gray across his vision plate.
That was twenty years ago, but he remembered it, in the dim fog of his mind, as if it were happening this very moment.
He
reached out a hand and hauled back on a lever and the lever would not move. The ship plunged down and for a moment he felt a rising fear that exploded into panic.
One fact stood out, one stark, black fact in all the flashing fragments of thoughts and schemes and prayer that went screeching through his brain. One stark fact. . . he was about to crash.
He did not remember crashing, for he probably never knew exactly when he crashed. It was only fear and terror and then no fear nor terror. It was consciousness and awareness and then a nothingness that was a restfulness and a vast forgetting.
Awareness came back . . . in a moment or an eon, which, he could not tell. But an awareness that was different, a sentiency that was only partly human, just a small percentage human. And a knowledge that was new, but which, it seemed, he had held forever.
He sensed or knew, for it was not seeing, his body stretched out on the ground smashed and broken, twisted out of human shape. And although he knew it was his body and knew its every superficial function and the plan of its assembly, he felt a twinge of wonder at the thing which lay there and knew that here was a problem which would tax his utmost ingenuity.
For the body must be put together, must be straightened out and reintegrated and co-ordinated so that it would work and the life that had escaped be returned to it again.
He thought of Humpty Dumpty and the thought was strange, as if the nursery rhyme were something new or something long forgotten.
Humpty Dumpty, said another part of him, supplies no answer, and he knew that it was right, for Humpty, he recalled, could not be put together again.
He became aware there were two of him; one part of him had answered the other part of him. The answerer and the listener, and although they were one, they were also separate. There was a cleavage he could not understand.
“I am your destiny,” said the answerer. “I was with you when you came to life and I will stay with you till you die. I do not control you and I do not coerce you, but I try to guide you, although you do not know it.” Sutton, the small part of him that was Sutton, said: “I know it now.” He knew it as if he’d always known it and that was, queer, for he had only just then learned it. Knowledge, he realized, was all tangled up, for there were two of him . . . he and destiny. He could not immediately distinguish between the things he knew as Sutton alone and those he knew as Sutton plus Sutton’s destiny.
The Complete Serials Page 27