Time and Again

by Clifford D. Simak

  "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," said 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 lick."

  "That's right," said Pringle, "somewhere he missed a lick 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, "I wonder if you could tell me why a chicken runs across the road."

  "Yes, sir, Mr. Interlocutor," said Pringle. "Because it wants to get on the other side."

  Mutt and Jeff, thought Sutton. A scene jerked raw and bleeding from a Krazy Kat cartoon.

  But clever. Pringle was a propagandist and he was no fool. He knew semantics and he knew psychology and he even knew about the ancient minstrel shows. He knew all there was to know about the human race, so far as that knowledge could serve him in the human past.

  A man had landed in the bluff pasture one morning six thousand 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 silently. Talk yourself hoarse in the throat and squeaky in the tongue. For I am on to you and you're the one who knows it. 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 chair and from where he sat he could see the front end of the 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, a 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?"

  "For one thing," said Sutton, "this time business…"

  "You don't know?" asked Case. "Why, it was a man in your own time. A man who is living at this very moment…"

  "Case," said Pringle, "this is 7990. Michaelson really did very little with it until 8003."

  Case clapped a hand to his forehead. "Oh, so it is," he said. "I keep forgetting."

  "See," Pringle said to Sutton. "See what I mean?"

  Sutton nodded, although for the life of him he didn't see what Pringle meant.

  "But how?" asked Sutton.

  "It's all a matter of the mind," said Pringle.

  "Certainly," said Case. "If you'd just stop to think of it, you would know it was."

  "Time is a mental concept," said Pringle. "They looked for time everywhere else before they located it in the human mind. They thought it was a fourth dimension. You remember Einstein…"

  "Einstein didn't say it was a fourth dimension," said Case. "Not a dimension as you think of length or breadth or depth. He thought of it as duration…"

  "That's a fourth dimension," said Pringle.

  "No, it's not," said Case.

  "Gentlemen," said Sutton. "Gentlemen."

  "Well, anyhow," said Case, "this Michaelson of yours figured out it was a mental concept, that time was in the mind only, that it has no physical properties outside of Man's ability to comprehend and encompass it. He found that a man with a strong enough time sense…"

  "There are men, you know," said Pringle, "who have what amounts to an exaggerated time sense. They can tell you ten minutes have passed since a certain event has transpired and ten minutes have gone past. They can count the seconds off as well and as accurately as any watch."

  "So Michaelson built a time brain," said Case. "A brain with its time sense exaggerated many billionfold, and he found that such a time brain could control time within a certain area…that it could master time and move through time and carry along with it any objects which might be within the field of power."

  "And that is what we use today," said Pringle. "A time brain. You just set the lever that tells the brain where you want to go…or rather, when you want to go…and the time brain does the rest."

  He beamed at Sutton. "Simple, isn't it?"

  "I have no doubt," said Sutton, "that it is very simple."

  "And now, Mr. Sutton," said Case, "what else do you want?"

  "Not a thing," said Sutton. "Not a single thing."

  "But that's foolish," Pringle protested. "There must be something that 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 want 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 go ahead and set your price."

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

  "I have no price in mind," said Sutton.

  "We have 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 quite 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 don't," Sutton told him. "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 almost fell on his face.

  "Look," he said, "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 disgusting 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, man, 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 other party, the third party?"


  "The third party wants you to write the book, all right, but they won't pay you a dime 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. Editorial 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."

  "I'm sorry," 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've got to kill you."

  He took a gun out of his pocket.

  XXV

  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 inside the service 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 lifted up his hand and 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, or of the three men who had been assigned to carry out the order.

  Adams smiled grimly.

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

  That was Sutton's heart and breath…that was 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 with its chuckling and its 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 engaged in 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, though Adams wearily. It is always Sutton. Sutton's name on 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 with a bullet in the arm.

  Ker-rup, clickity, click, ker-rup…

  Dr. Raven 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 not be questioned and a thing that could have been expected all along to happen.

  Not a religion, Dr. Raven had said, with the afternoon sunlight shining on his snow-white hair. Oh, dear, no, not a religion. Destiny, don't you understand?

  Destiny, noun. Destiny—the predetermined course of 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 abstraction.

  "You forget," Dr. Raven had told him, 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 as to how best to describe them. He said 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.

  What it would look like—or what it might be.

  The informational robot had been very technical when Adams had put the question to him.

  "Symbiosis," he had said. "Why, sir, symbiosis is quite simple. It is a mutually beneficial internal partnership between two organisms of different kinds. Mutually beneficial, you understand, sir. That is the important thing—that mutually beneficial business. Not a benefit to one of the things alone, but to both of them.

  "Commensalism, now, that is something else. In commensalism there still is mutual benefit, sir, but the relationship is external, not internal. Nor parasitism, either, for that matter. Because in parasitic instances only one thing benefits. The host does not benefit, just the parasite.

  "Some of this may sound confusing, sir, but…"

  "Tell me," Adams had asked him, "about symbiosis. I don't care about all this other stuff."

  "It really is," the robot said, "a very simple thing. Now, take heather, for instance. You know, of course, that it is associated with a certain fungus."

  "No," Adams said, "I didn't."

  "Well, it is," the robot said. "A fungus that grows inside of it, inside its roots and branches, its flowers and leaves, even in its seed. If it weren't for this fungus, the heather couldn't grow on the kind of soil it does. No other plant can grow on so poor a soil. Because, you see, sir, no other plant has this particular fungus associated with it. The heather gives the fungus a place to live and the fungus makes it possible for the heather to make its living on the scanty soil where it has no opposition."

  "I wouldn't call that," Adams had told him, "a very simple business."

  "Well," said the robot, "there are other things, of course. Certain lichens are no more than a symbiotic combination of an alga and a fungus. In other words, there is no such a thing as a lichen in this case. It's just two other things."

  "It's a wonder to me," said Adams sourly, "that you don't simply melt down in the white heat of your brilliance."

  "Then there are certain green animals," said the robot.

  "Frogs," said Adams.

  "Not frogs," the robot said. "Certain simple, primal animals. Things that live in the water, you know. They establish a symbiotic relationship with certain algae. The animal uses the oxygen which the plant gives off and the plant uses the carbon dioxide the animal gives off.

  "And there's a worm with a symbiotic alga which aids it in its dige
stive processes. Everything works swell except when sometimes, the worm digests the alga and then it dies because, without the alga, it can't digest its food."

  "All very interesting," Adams had told the robot. "Now can you tell me what a symbiotic abstraction might be?"

  "No," the robot had said, "I can't."

  And Dr. Raven, sitting, at the desk, had said the same. "It would be rather difficult," he said, "to know just what a symbiotic abstraction might be."

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

  And Raven, 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, one 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 cricling 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 all the vast associations of ideas which represented 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-rup, clickity, click…

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

  It would be spread thin, too, like Man across the galaxy.