Time and Again

by Clifford D. Simak

  "Contentedness," said Asher Sutton, "is an indication of complete adjustment to one's particular environment. It is a thing that is not often found…that is too seldom found. Someday Man and other things as well, will know how to achieve it and there will be peace and happiness in all the galaxy."

  John H. chuckled. "You take in a lot of territory, William."

  "I was taking the long-range view," said Sutton. "Someday Man will be going to the stars."

  John H. nodded. "Yes, I suppose they will. But they will go too soon. Before Man goes to the stars he should learn how to live on Earth."

  He yawned and said, "I think I will turn in. Getting old, you know, and I need my rest."

  "I'm going to walk around a bit," said Sutton.

  "You do a lot of walking, William."

  "After dark," said Sutton, "the land is different from what it is in daylight. It smells differently. Sweet and fresh and clean, as if it were just washed. You hear things in the quietness you do not hear in daylight. You walk and you are alone with the land and the land belongs to you."

  John H. wagged his head. "It's not the land that's different, William. It is you. Sometimes I think you see and hear things the rest of us do not know. Almost, William…" he hesitated, then went on, "almost as if you did not quite belong."

  "Sometimes I think I don't," said Sutton.

  "Remember this," John H. told him. "You are one of us…one of the family, seems like. Let me see, how many years now?"

  "Ten," said Sutton.

  "That's right," said John H. "I can well recall the day you came, but sometimes I forget.. Sometimes it seems that you were always here. Sometimes I catch myself thinking you're a Sutton."

  He hacked and cleared his throat, spitting in the dust. "I borrowed your typewriter the other day, William," he said. "I had a letter I had to write. It was an important letter and I wanted it done right."

  "It's all right," said Sutton. "I'm glad it was some use to you."

  "Getting any writing done these days, William?"

  "No," said Sutton, "I gave up. I couldn't do it. I lost my notes, you see. I had it all figured out and I had it down on paper, and I thought maybe I could remember it, but I found I couldn't. It's no use trying."

  John H.'s voice was a soft, low growl in the darkness. "You in any kind of trouble, William?"

  "No," said Sutton. "Not exactly trouble."

  "Anything I can do to help?"

  "Not a thing," said Sutton.

  "Let me know if there is," said the old man. "We'd do anything for you."

  "Someday I may go away," said Sutton. "Maybe suddenly. If I do I wish you would forget me, forget I was ever here."

  "That's what you wish, lad?"

  "Yes, it is," said Sutton.

  "We can't forget you, William," said old John H. "We never could do that. But we won't talk about you. If someone comes and asks about you we'll act as if you were never here."

  He paused. "Is that the way you want it, William?"

  "Yes," said Sutton. "If you don't mind, that's the way I want it."

  They stood silent for a moment, facing one another in the dark, then the old man turned around and clumped toward the lighted windows of the house, and Sutton, turning too, leaned his arms on the pasture bars and stared across the river where the faerie lights were blinking in a land of never-never.

  Ten years, thought Sutton, and the letter's written. Ten years and the conditions of the past are met. Now the past can get along without me, for I was only staying so that John H. could write the letter…so that he could write it and I could find it in an old trunk six thousand years from now and read it on a nameless asteroid I won by killing a man in a place that will be called the Zag House.

  The Zag House, he thought, will be over there across the river, far up the prairie above the ancient town of Prairie du Chien, and the University of North America, with its matchless towers of beauty, will be set on the hills there to the north and Adams' house will be near the confluence of the Wisconsin and Mississippi Rivers. Great ships will climb into the sky from the Iowa prairies and head out for the stars that even now are twinkling overhead…and other stars that no man's eye can see unaided.

  The Zag House will be over there, far across the river. And that is where someday, six thousand years from now, I will meet a little girl in a checkered apron. As in a storybook, he thought. Boy meets girl and the boy is towheaded with a cowlick and he's barefooted and the girl twists her apron in her hands and tells him what her name is…

  He straightened and gripped the top bar of the pasture gate.

  "Eva," he said, "where are you?"

  Her hair was copper and her eyes…what color were her eyes? I have studied you for twenty years, she had said, and he had kissed her for it, not believing the words she spoke, but ready to believe the unspoken word that lay upon her face and body.

  Somewhere she still existed, somewhere in time and space. Somewhere she might be thinking of him as even now he thought of her. If he tried hard enough, he might contact her. Might drive his hunger for her through the folds of space and time and let her know that he still remembered, let her know that somehow, sometime he would come back to her.

  But even as he thought of it, he knew that it was hopeless, that he floundered in the grasp of forgotten time as a man may flounder in a running sea. It was not he who would reach out for her, but she or Herkimer or someone else who would reach out to him…if anyone ever did.. Ten years, he thought, and they have forgotten me. And is it because they cannot find me, or having found me, cannot reach me; or is it for a purpose, and if that is it, what can the purpose be?

  There had been times when he had felt that he was being watched, that nasty touch of cold between the shoulder blades. And there had been the time when someone had run from him when he had been in the woods late of a summer evening hunting for the fence-jumping, cross-eyed heifer that was forever getting lost.

  He turned from the pasture bars and crossed the barnyard, making his way in the darkness as a man will walk in a well-remembered room. From the barn came the scent of freshly mown hay and in the row of chicken coops one of the young birds was cheeping sleepily.

  Even as he walked, his mind flicked out and touched the disturbed chicken's mind.

  Fluttering apprehension of an unknown thing…there had been a sound coming on the edge of sleep. And a sound was danger…a signal of an unknown danger. Sound and nowhere to go. Darkness and sound. Insecurity.

  Sutton pulled back his mind and walked on. Not much stability in a chicken, he thought. A cow was contented and its thought and purpose as slow-moving as its feeding. A dog was alive and friendly, and a cat, no matter how well tamed it might be, still walked the jungle's edge.

  I know them all, he thought. I have been each one of them. And there are some that are not quite pleasant. A rat, for example, or a weasel or a bass lying in wait beneath the lily pads. But the skunk…the skunk was a pleasant fellow. One could enjoy living as a skunk.

  Curiosity or practice? Perhaps curiosity, he admitted, the human penchant for prying into things that were hung with signs: No Trespassing. Keep Out. Private. Do Not Disturb. But practice as well, learning one of the tools of the second body. Learning how to move into another mind and share its every shade of intellectual and emotional reaction.

  But there was a line…a line he had never crossed, either through innate decency or a fear of being apprehended. He could not decide quite which.

  The road was a dusty strip of white that ran along the ridge, twisting between the deep bowls of darkness where the land fell away into deep hollows. Sutton walked slowly, footfalls muffled by the dust. The land was black and the road was white and the stars were large and soft in the summer night. So different, Sutton thought, from the winter stars. In the winter the stars retreated high into the sky and glowed with a hard and steely light.

  Peace and quiet, he told himself. In this corner of the ancient Earth there is peace and quiet, unbroken
by the turbulence of twentieth-century living.

  From a land like this came the steady men, the men who in a few more generations would ride the ships out to the stars. Here, in the quiet corners of the world, were built the stamina and courage, the depth of character and the deep convictions that would take the engines that more brilliant, less stable men had dreamed and drive them to the farthest rims of the galaxy, there to hold key worlds for the glory and the profit of the race.

  The profit, Sutton said.

  Ten years, he thought, and the involuntary compact with time has been consummated…each condition filled. I am free to go, to go anywhere, any time I choose.

  But there was no place to go and no way to get there.

  I would like to stay, said Sutton. It is pleasant here.

  "Johnny," he said. "Johnny, what are we going to do?"

  He felt the stir in his mind, the old dog stir, the wagging tail, the comfort of blankets tucked about a child in his trundle bed.

  "It's all right, Ash," said Johnny. "Everything's all right. You needed these ten years."

  "You've stayed with me, Johnny."

  "I am you," said Johnny. "I came when you were born. I'll stay until you die."

  "And then?"

  "You'll not need me, Ash. I'll go to something else. Nothing walks alone."

  None walks alone, said Sutton, and he said it like a prayer.

  And he was not alone.

  Someone walked beside him and where he'd come from and how long he'd been there Sutton did not know.

  "This is a splendid walk," said the man, whose face was hidden in darkness. "Do you take it often?"

  "Almost every night," said Sutton's tongue and his brain said, Steady! Steady!

  "It is so quiet," said the man. "So quiet and alone. It is good for thinking. A man could do a lot of thinking, walking nights out here."

  Sutton did not answer.

  They plodded along, side by side, and even while he fought to keep relaxed, Sutton felt his body tensing.

  "You've been doing a lot of thinking, Sutton," said the man. "Ten whole years of thinking."

  "You should know," said Sutton. "You've been watching me."

  "We've watched," said the man. "And our machines have watched. We got you down on tape and we know a lot about you. A whole lot more than we did ten years ago."

  "Ten years ago," said Sutton, "you sent two men to buy me off."

  "I know," replied the man. "We have often wondered what became of them."

  "That's an easy one," Sutton said. "I killed them."

  "They had a proposition."

  "I know," said Sutton. "They offered me a planet."

  "I knew at the time it wouldn't work," the man declared. "I told Trevor that it wouldn't work."

  "I suppose you have another proposition?" Sutton asked. "A slightly higher price?"

  "Not exactly," said the man. "We thought this time we'd cut out the bargaining and just let you name your price."

  "I'll think about it," Sutton told him. "I'm not too sure I can think up a price."

  "As you wish, Sutton," said the man. "We'll be waiting…and watching. Just give us the sign when you've made up your mind."

  "A sign?"

  "Sure. Just write us a note. We'll be looking over your shoulder. Or just say…'Well, I've made up my mind.' We'll be listening and we'll hear."

  "Simple," Sutton said. "Simple as all that."

  "We make it easy for you," said the man. "Good evening, Mr. Sutton."

  Sutton did not see him do it, but he sensed that he had touched his hat…if he wore a hat. Then he was gone, turning off the road and going down across the pasture, walking in the dark, heading for the woods that sloped to the river bluffs.

  Sutton stood in the dusty road and listened to him go—the soft swish of dew-laden grass brushing on his shoes, the muted pad of his feet walking in the pasture.

  Contact at last! After ten years, contact with the people from another time. But the wrong people. Not his people.

  The Revisionists had been watching him, even as he had sensed them watching. Watching and waiting, waiting for ten years. But, of course, not ten years of their time, just ten years of his. Machines and watchers would have been sprinkled through those ten years, so that the job could have been done in a year or a month or even in a week if they had wanted to throw enough men and materials into the effort.

  But why wait ten years? To soften him up, to make him ready to jump at anything they offered?

  To soften him up? He grinned wryly in the dark.

  Then suddenly the picture came to him and he stood there stupidly, wondering why he hadn't thought of it much sooner.

  They hadn't waited to soften him up…they had waited for old John H. to write the letter. For they knew about the letter. They had studied old John H. and they knew he'd write a letter. They had him down on tape and they knew him inside out and they had figured to an eyelash the way his mind would work.

  The letter was the key to the whole thing. The letter was the lure that had been used to suck Asher Sutton back into this time. They had lured him, then sealed him off and kept him, kept him as surely as if they'd had him in a cage. They had studied him and they knew him and they had him figured out. They knew what he would do as surely as they had known what old John H. would do.

  His mind flicked out and probed cautiously at the brain of the man striding down the hill.

  Chickens and cats and dogs and meadow mice—and not one of them suspected, not one of them had known, that another mind than theirs had occupied their brain.

  But the brain of a man might be a different matter. Highly trained and sensitive, it might detect outside interference, might sense if it did not actually know the invasion of itself.

  The girl won't wait. I've been away too long. Her affections are less than skin-deep and she has no morals, absolutely none, and I'm the one to know. I've been on this damn patrol too long. She will be tired of waiting…she was tired of waiting when I was gone three hours. To hell with her…I can get another one. But not like her…not exactly like her. There isn't another one anywhere quite like her.

  Whoever said this Sutton guy would be an easy one to crack was crazy as a loon. God, after ten years in a dump like this, I'd fall on someone's neck and kiss 'em if they came back from my own time. Anyone at all…friend or foe, it would make no difference. But what does Sutton do? Not a God-damn word. Not a single syllable of surprise in any word he spoke. When I first spoke to him he didn't even break his stride, kept right on walking as if he knew I'd been there all the time. Cripes, I could use a drink. Nerve-racking work.

  Wish I could forget that girl. Wish she would be waiting for me but I know she won't. Wish…

  Sutton snapped back his mind, stood quietly in the road.

  And inside himself he felt the shiver of triumph, the swift backwash of relief and triumph. They didn't know. In all their ten years of watching they had seen no more than the superficial things. They had him down on tape, but they didn't know all that went on within his mind.

  A human mind, perhaps. But not his mind. A human mind they might be able to strip as bare as a sickled field, might dissect it and analyze it and read the story in it. But his mind told them only what it wished to tell them, only enough so that there would be no suspicion that he was holding back. Ten years ago Adams' gang had tried to tap his mind and had not even dented it.

  The Revisionists had watched ten years and they knew each motion that he made, many of the things that he had thought.

  But they did not know that he could go to live within the mind of a mouse or a catfish or a man.

  For if they had known they would have set up certain safeguards, would have been on the alert against him.

  And they weren't. No more alert than the mouse had been.

  He glanced back to the road to where the Sutton farmhouse stood upon the hill. For a moment he thought that he could see it, a darker mass against the darkness of the sky, but that, he
knew, was no more than pure imagination. He knew that it was there and he had formed a mental image.

  One by one, he checked the items in his room. The books, the few scribbled sheets of paper, the razor.

  There was nothing there, he knew, that he could not leave behind. Not a thing that would arouse suspicion. Nothing that could be fastened on in some later day and turned into a weapon to be used against him.

  He had been prepared against this day, knowing that someday it would come—that someday Herkimer or the Revisionists or an agent from the government would step from behind a tree and walk along beside him.

  Knowing? Well, not exactly. Hoping. And ready for the hope.

  Long years ago his futile attempt to write the book of destiny without his notes had gone up in smoke. All that remained was a heap of paper ash, mixed these many years with the soil, leached away by the rains, gone as chemical elements into a head of wheat or an ear of corn.

  He was ready. Packed and ready. His mind had been packed and ready, he knew now, for these many years.

  Softly he stepped off the road and went down across the pasture, following the man who walked toward the river bluffs. His mind flicked out and tracked him through the darkness, using his mind to track him as a hound would use his nose to track a coon.

  He overhauled him scant minutes after he had entered the fringe of trees and after that kept a few paces behind him, walking carefully to guard against the suddenly snapping twig, the swish of swaying bushes that could have warned his quarry.

  The ship lay within a deep ravine and at a hail it lighted up and a port swung open. Another man stood in the lighted port and stared into the night.

  "That you, Gus?" he called.

  The other swore at him. "Sure. Who else do you think would be floundering around in these woods at the dead of night?"

  "I got to worrying," said the man in the port. "You were gone longer than I thought you would be. Just getting ready to set out and hunt for you."

  "You're always worrying," Gus growled at him. "Between you and this outlandish world, I'm fed up. Trevor can find someone else to do this kind of work from here on out."