“Not for a while,” Sutton told him. “Not until he’s eaten and had an after-dinner nap.”
Dean grunted and eased himself to a sitting position, his back against the ship. “Random factors,” he said. “That’s what balls up the detail. You’re a random factor, Sutton. It wasn’t planned this way.”
Sutton sat down easily and picked up the wrench. He weighed it in his hand. Blood, he thought, looking at the wrench. You’ll have blood upon one end before the day is out.
“Tell me,” said Dean. “Now that you are here, what do you plan to do?”
“Easy,” said Sutton. “You’re going to talk to me. You’re going to tell me something that I need to know.”
“Gladly,” Dean agreed.
“You said you came from the eighty-fourth. What year?”
“Eighty-three eighty-six,” said Dean. “But if I were you, I’d go a little past that. You’d find more to interest you.”
“But you figure I’ll never get even as far as that,” said Sutton. “You think that you will win.”
“Of course I do,” said Dean.
Sutton dug into the ground with the wrench. “A while ago, I found a man who died very shortly after. He recognized me and he made a sign with his fingers.”
Dean spat upon the ground. “Android. They worship you, Sutton. They made a religion out of you. Because, you see, you gave them hope to cling to. You gave them something that made them, in one way, the equal of Man.”
“I take it,” Sutton said, “you don’t believe a thing I wrote.”
“Should I?”
“I do,” said Sutton.
DEAN said nothing.
“You have taken the thing I wrote,” said Sutton evenly, “and you are trying to use it to fashion one more rung in the ladder of Man’s vanity. You have missed the point entirely. You have no sense of destiny because you gave destiny no chance whatever.”
And he felt foolish even as he said it, for it sounded so much like preaching. So much like what the men of old had said of faith when faith was just a word, before it had become a force to really reckon with.
“I won’t lecture you,” he said, angry at the smooth way Dean had put him on the defensive. “I won’t preach at you. You either accept destiny or you ignore it. So far as I’m concerned I’ll not raise a hand to convince any single man. The book I wrote tells you what I know. You can take it or you can leave it. . . it’s all the same to me.”
“Sutton,” said Dean, “you’re batting your head against a stone wall. You haven’t got a chance. You’re fighting humankind. The whole human race against you . . . and nothing’s ever stood against the human race. All you have is a pack of measly androids and a few renegade humans . . . the kind of humans that used to swarm to the old cult-worships.”
“The empire is built on androids and robots,” Sutton told him. “They can throw you out any time they want to. Without them you couldn’t hold a single foot of ground outside the solar system.”
“They will stick with us in the empire,” Dean retorted, very confident. “They may fight us on this business of destiny, but they’ll stay with us because they can’t get along without us. They can’t reproduce, you know. And they can’t make themselves. They have to have humans to keep their race going, to replace the ones who get knocked off.”
He chuckled. “Until one android, can create another android, they will stick with, us and they will work with us. If they didn’t, they would be committing racial suicide.”
“What I can’t understand,” said Sutton, “is how you know which ones are fighting you and which are sticking with you.”
“That,” said Dean, “is the hell of it . . . we don’t. If we did, we’d make short work of this lousy war. The android who fought you yesterday may shine your shoes tomorrow, and how are you to know? The answer is, you don’t.”
HE PICKED up a tiny stone and flicked it out on the pasture grass.
“Sutton,” he said, “it’s enough to drive you nuts. No battles, really. Just guerrilla skirmishes here and there, when one small task force sent out to do a time-fixing job is ambushed by another task force sent out by the other side to intercept them.”
“Like I intercepted you,” said Sutton.
“Huh . . .” said Dean, and then he brightened. “Why, sure. Like you intercepted me.”
One moment Dean was sitting with his back against the machine, talking as if he meant to keep on talking . . . and in the next moment his body was a fluid streak of motion, jackknifing up and forward in a lunge toward the wrench that Sutton held.
Sutton moved instinctively, toes tightening against the ground, leg muscles flexing to drive his body aside, hand starting to jerk the wrench away.
But Dean had the advantage, of a full second’s start.
Sutton felt the wrench ripped from his grip, saw the flash of it in. the sun as Dean swung it sharply for the blow.
Dean’s lips were moving. Even as he tried to throw up his arms to shield his head, Sutton read the words the other’s lips were ironically forming:
“So you thought the blood on the wrench would be mine!”
Then pain exploded inside Sutton’s head and he fell through darkness.
—CLIFFORD D. SIMAK
CONCLUDED NEXT MONTH
Conclusion of a 3-part serial
The war in time needed bigger battalions to decide victory—but those battalions all had to be composed of one man!
SYNOPSIS
In the 80th century, Man rules the galaxy, but even with the aid of billions of robots and androids—synthetic humans—his numbers are too small for more than a tenuous hold on all the stars and their planetary systems. All change, all danger of any sort, is a potential threat to the empire. One possible danger spot is 61 Cygni, unapproachable because a shield of force keeps Earth ships away.
Asher Sutton, agent of the Department of Galactic Investigation, is the only man who has ever landed on a Cygnian world. That was 20 years before the story opens. Now he returns to Earth . . . in a ship that cannot fly, with no food, air, or water aboard. His chief,
Christopher Adams, is warned of Sutton’s return by a man who claims to come from the future, and who advises Adams to have Sutton killed.
Sutton escapes assassination, but finds himself the center of a war in time, originating several centuries in his future, but spreading through all ages of human existence. The war is being fought over the interpretation of a book Sutton apparently will write at some future date, for on two occasions he discovers copies of his unwritten book on men who have come back to the past.
Sutton’s book will stale, when he writes it, that the inhabitants of 61 Cygni are symbiotic abstractions—not human, not even beings in our sense of the word. They form mutually beneficial partnerships with all individual life when it comes into existence, and stay with it until it dies. In truth, they are destiny, the unspoken voice that attempts to guide every living thing in a path which will help to attain the greatest possible fulfilment. The symbiotic abstractions attain a semblance of life in this relationship, while the unsuspecting host gains destiny. Sutton’s premise is clear and unmistakable . . . all forms of life have destiny, not just humanity.
To inform the intelligent, thinking beings of the galaxy, Sutton was returned to life after his crash on 61 Cygni, twenty years before, given a secondary body that lives on pure energy, that can manipulate objects with mental energy, and kill by the force of hate alone, and he was sent back to Earth as ambassador.
But it is Sutton’s premise that has caused the war in time. Prime opponents are the Revisionists, who want to interpret Sutton’s book as meaning that only humans are beneficiaries of destiny. Against them are the androids, who are human in all respects but one . . . their inability to reproduce biologically.
In a girl named Eva Armour and an android named Herkimer, Sutton finds two friends. Another friend he could have counted on, Buster, his old family robot, has homesteaded a planet on the outer rim of the
galaxy. Before going, Buster left a trunk for Sutton. Among the junk in the trunk, Sutton finds a queer wrench and an unopened letter, 6,000 years old.
Opening the letter, Sutton finds that it was written by a John H. Sutton, who tells of encountering a man who apparently had come in a ship from the future. After talking to the man, John H. returns a few hours later to the scene, but finds the ship and the man gone. On the grass lies a bloodstained wrench, apparently the very wrench which Sutton had found in the trunk. A few days later, the letter relates, a man comes to the Sutton farm looking for work. He stays there for ten years and at the time of the writing, John H. feels certain that he is the man from the future, somehow marooned in the 20th century. Fearful of ridicule if he told the story during his lifetime, John H. Sutton has left the letter to be opened after his death. Somehow it never was.
Because of the danger to Sutton on Earth, Herkimer and Eva Armour kidnap Sutton to an asteroid, where they plan that he will write his book. There, however, they find two men who turn out to be agents of the Revisionists. They offer Sutton any price he may ask if he will write the book so it will appear that only humans are the beneficiaries of destiny. When he refuses, they kill him.
Just as his human body is killed, however, he manages to switch to his second, alien body, which operates on pure energy. He destroys the two Revisionists and takes their time ship.
Determined to prevent the attempt of the human race to seize destiny as its own, Sutton decides to return to the 20th century, to the time and place where John H. Sutton had met the man from the future. There, in that incident of 6,000 years before, he feels certain, lies the key to the entire situation.
Returning, he witnesses from the edge of a woods the meeting between the man from the future and Sutton’s remote ancestor. When John H. leaves, Sutton approaches the ship. The man from the future is holding a wrench and Sutton forces him to drop it. But in the ensuing fight, the man regains the wrench and strikes at Sutton’s head. Even as the wrench descends upon his skull, Sutton realizes that not the man from the future, but he himself will be marooned in the 20th century.
CONCLUSION
XXXV
TRICKED!
Tricked by a smooth character from 500 years ahead in time.
Tricked by a letter from 6,000 years out of the past.
Tricked, groaned Sutton, by my own muddle-headedness.
He sat up and held his head in his hands and felt the westering Sun against his back, heard the squalling of a catbird in the blackberry patch and the sound of the wind as it ran along the corn rows.
Tricked and trapped, he said through his teeth.
He took his hands from his head and there in the trampled grass lay the wrench with the blood on it. Sutton spread out his fingers and blood was on them, too . . . warm and sticky blood. Gingerly he touched his head with a cautious hand and his hair was wet and matted down.
Pattern, he said viciously. It all runs in a pattern.
Here I am and there is the wrench and just beyond the fence is the field of corn that is better than knee high on this splendid afternoon of July 4, 1977.
The ship from the future is gone and in another hour or so John H. Sutton will come waddling down the hill to ask the questions that he forgot to ask before. And ten years from now he will write a letter and in it he will record his suspicions about me and I will be in the farm yard at that very moment pumping a drink.
Sutton staggered to his feet and stood in the empty afternoon, with the sweep of sky above the horizon of the ridge and the panorama of the winding river far down the slope below.
He touched the wrench with his toe and thought: I could break the pattern. I could take the wrench and then John H. would never find it, and, with one thing in the pattern changed, the end might not be the same.
I read the letter wrong, he thought. I always figured it would be the other man, not me. It never once occurred to me that it was my blood upon the wrench and that I would be the one who would steal the clothes off the line.
And yet he realized there were certain things that didn’t track. He still had his clothes and there would be no need to steal. His ship still was resting on the river’s bottom and there was no need to stay in the past.
Yet it had happened once before, for if it had not happened, why had there been the letter? The letter had made him come here and the letter had been written because he had come, so he must have come before. And in that other time he’d stayed . . . and stayed only because he could not get away. This time he would go back; this time he need not stay.
A second chance, he thought. I’ve been given another chance.
Yet that wasn’t right, for if there had been a second time, old John H. would have known about it. And there couldn’t be a second time, for this was the very day that John H. had talked to the man out of the future.
Sutton shook his head.
There had been only one time that this had happened, and this, of course, was it.
Something will stop me, he told himself. Something will not let me go back. Somehow I will be forced to steal the clothes and in the end I’ll walk to that farmhouse up there and ask if they need a hand for the harvest.
For the pattern was set. It had to be set.
Sutton touched the wrench with his toe again, pondering.
Then he turned and went down the hill. Glancing over his shoulder as he plunged into the woods, he saw old John H. coming down the hill.
XXXVI
FOR three days Sutton toiled to free the ship from the tons of sand that the treacherous, swift-running river currents had mounded over it. And he admitted, when three days were gone, that it was a hopeless task, for the current piled up the sand as fast as he could clear it.
After that, he concentrated on clearing an opening to the entrance lock and when another day went by with many cave-ins, he accomplished his purpose.
Wearily he braced himself against the metal of the ship. A gamble, he told himself. But I will have to gamble.
For there was no possibility of wrenching the ship free by using the engines. The tubes, he knew, were packed with sand and any attempt to use the rockets would simply mean that he and the ship and a good portion of the landscape would evaporate in a flashing puff of atomic fury.
He had lifted a ship from a Cygnian planet and driven it across eleven years of space by the power of mind alone. He had rolled two sixes.
Perhaps, he told himself. Perhaps . . .
There were tons of sand and he was deathly tired, tired despite the smooth, efficient functioning of his non-human system of metabolism.
I rolled two sixes, he said. Surely that was harder than the task I must do now. Although that called for deftness and this will call for power . . . and suppose, just suppose I haven’t got the strength.
For it would take strength to lift this buried mass of metal out of the mound of sand. Not the strength of muscles, but the strength of mind.
Of course, he told himself, if he could not lift the ship, he still could use the time-mover, shift the ship, lying where it was, forward 6,000 years. Although there were hazards he did not like to think about. For in shifting the ship through time, he would be exposing it to every threat and vagary of the river through the whole 6,000 years.
He put his hand up to his throat, feeling for the key chain that hung around his neck.
There was no chain!
Mind dulled by sudden terror, he stood frozen for a moment.
Pockets, he thought, but his hands fumbled with a dread certainty that there was no hope. For he never put the keys of the ship in his pockets . . . always on their chain around his neck where they would be safe.
He searched, feverishly at first, then with a grim, cold thoroughness.
His pockets held no keys.
The chain broke, he thought in frantic desperation. The chain broke and it fell inside my clothes. He patted himself, carefully, from head to foot, and it was not there. He took off his shirt, gently, cautiously,
feeling for the missing keys. He tossed the shirt aside, and sitting down, pulled off his trousers, searching in their folds, turning them inside out.
There were no keys.
On hands and knees, he searched the sands of the river bed, fumbling in the dim light that filtered through the rushing water.
An hour later he gave up.
The shifting, water-driven sand already had closed the trench he had dug to the lock, and now there was no point of getting to the lock, for he could not open it when he got there.
His shirt and trousers had vanished with the current.
Wearily, beaten, he turned toward the shore, forcing his way through the stubborn water. His head broke into open air and the first stars of evening were shining in the east.
On shore he sat down with his back against a tree. He took one breath and then another, willed the first heartbeat, then the second and a third . . . nursed the human metabolism back into action once again.
The river gurgled at him, deep laughter on its tongue. In the wooded valley a whippoorwill began its sadistic suggestion. Fireflies danced through the blackness of the bushes.
A mosquito stung him and he slapped at it savagely.
A place to sleep, he thought, A hay-loft in a barn, perhaps. And pilfered food from a farmer’s garden to fill his empty belly. Then clothes.
At least he knew where he’d get the clothes.
XXXVII
SUNDAYS were lonely.
During the rest of the week there was work—physical labor—for a man to do, the endless, trudging round of work that is necessary to extract a living from the soil. Land to plow, crops to be put in and tended and finally harvested, wood to cut, fences to be built and mended, machines to be repaired—things that must be done with bone and muscle, with calloused hand and aching back and the hot Sun on one’s neck or the whiplash of windy cold biting at one’s bones.
For six days a farmer labored and the labor was a thing that dulled one to the aching emptiness of memory, and, at night, when work was done, sleep was swift and merciful. There were times when the work, not only for its sedative effect, but of its very self became a thing of interest and of satisfaction. The straight line of new-set fence posts became a minor triumph when one glanced back along their length. The harvest field with its dust upon one’s shoes and its smell of Sun on golden straw and the clacking of the binder as it went its rounds became a full-breasted symbolism of plenty and contentment. And there were moments when the pink blush of apple blossoms shining through the silver rain of spring became, a wild and pagan paean of the resurrection of the Earth from the frosts of winter.
The Complete Serials Page 31