Time and Again
Page 23
"I suppose," he said, shakily, "that you feel now I should throw in with you."
"I want you," said Trevor, "to find out for me where the Cradle is."
"So you can smash it," Sutton said.
"So I can save humanity," said Trevor. "The old humanity. The real humanity."
"You feel," said Sutton, "that all humans should stick together now."
"If you have a streak of the human in you," said Trevor, "you will be with us now."
"There was a time," said Sutton, "back on Earth, before men went to the stars, that the human race was the most important thing the mind of Man could know. That isn't true any longer, Trevor. There are other races just as great."
"Each race," said Trevor, "is loyal to its own. The human race must be loyal unto itself."
"I am going to be traitor," Sutton said. "I may be wrong, but I still think that destiny is greater than humanity."
"You mean that you refuse to help us?"
"Not only that," said Sutton. "I am going to fight you. I'm telling you this now so that you will know. If you want to kill me, Trevor, now's the time to do it. Because if you don't do it now, it will be too late."
"I wouldn't kill you for all the world," said Trevor. "Because I need the words you wrote. Despite you and the androids, Sutton, we'll read them the way we want them read. And so will all the other slimy, crawling things you admire so much. There's nothing in God's world that can stand before the human race, that can match the human race…"
Sutton saw the loathing that was on Trevor's face.
"I'm leaving you to yourself, Sutton," Trevor told him. "Your name will go down as the blackest blot in all of human history. The syllables of your name will be a sound that the last human will gag upon if he tries to speak it. Sutton will become a common noun with which one man will insult another…"
He called Sutton a name that was a fighting word and Sutton did not stir upon the bench.
Trevor stood up and started to walk away and then turned back. His voice was not much larger than a whisper, but it cut into Sutton's brain like a whetted knife.
"Go and wash your face," he said. "Wash off the plastic and the mark. But you'll never be human again, Sutton. You'll never dare to call yourself a man again."
He turned on his heel and walked away, and staring at his back, Sutton saw the back of humanity turned upon him forevermore.
Somewhere in his brain, as if it were from far away, he seemed to hear the sound of a slamming door.
L
THERE WAS one lamp lighted, in a corner of the room. The attaché case lay on a table underneath the lamp and Eva Armour was standing beside a chair, as if she had been expecting him.
"You came back," said Eva, "to get your notes. I have them ready for you."
He stood just inside the door and shook his head.
"Not yet," he said. "Later I will need the notes. Not yet."
And there it was, he thought, the thing he had worried about that afternoon, the thing that he had tried to find the words to say.
"I told you about a weapon at breakfast this morning," he said. "You must remember what I said about it. I said there was only one weapon. I said you can't fight a war with just one gun."
Eva nodded, face drawn in the lamplight. "I remember, Ash."
"There are a million of them," said Ash. "As many as you want."
He moved slowly across the room until he stood face to face with her.
"I am on your side," he told her, simply. "I saw Trevor this afternoon. He cursed me for all humanity."
Slowly she put up a hand and he felt it slide across his face, the palm cool and smooth. Her fingers tightened in his hair and she shook his head gently, tenderly.
"Ash," she said, "you washed your face. You are Ash again."
He nodded. "I wanted to be human again," he told her.
"Trevor told you about the Cradle, Ash?"
"I'd guessed some of it," Sutton said. "He told me the rest. About the androids that wear no mark."
"We use them as spies," she said, as if it was quite a natural thing to say. "We have some of them in Trevor's headquarters. He thinks that they are human."
"Herkimer?" he asked.
"He isn't here, Ash. He wouldn't be here, after what happened out on the patio."
"Of course," said Sutton. "Of course he wouldn't. Eva, we humans are such heels."
"Sit down," she told him. "That chair over there. You talk so funny that you scare me."
He sat down.
"Tell me what happened," she demanded.
He didn't tell her. He said, "I thought of Herkimer this afternoon. When Trevor was talking with me. I hit him this morning and I would hit him tomorrow morning if he said the same thing to me. It's something in the human blood, Eva. We fought our way up. With fist ax and club and gun and atom bomb and…"
"Shut up," cried Eva. "Keep still, can't you?"
He looked up at her in astonishment.
"Human, you say," she said. "And what is Herkimer if he isn't human? He is a human, made by humans. A robot can make another robot and they're still robots aren't they? A human makes another human and both of them are humans."
Sutton mumbled, confused. "Trevor is afraid the androids will take over. That there will be no more humans. No more original, biological humans…"
"Ash," she said, "you are bothering yourself over something that a thousand generations from now will not have been solved. What's the use of it?"
He shook his head. "I guess there is no use. It keeps stirring around in my head. There's no rest for me. Once it was so clear-cut and simple. I would write a book and the galaxy would read it and accept it and everything would be just fine."
"It still can be that way," she said. "After a while, after a long while. But to do it we have to stop Trevor. He is blinded by the same tangled semantics that blind you."
"Herkimer said one weapon would do it," Sutton said. "One weapon would be the balance that was needed. Eva, the androids have gone a long way in their research, haven't they? Chemical, I mean. The study of the human body. They would have to, to do what they have done."
She nodded. "A long way, Ash."
"They have a scanner, then…a machine that could take a person apart, molecule by molecule, record it almost atom for atom. Make a blueprint for another body."
"We've done that very thing," said Eva. "We've duplicated men in Trevor's organization. Kidnapped them and blueprinted them and made a duplicate…sent him back the duplicate and placed the other under benevolent detention. It's only been through tricks like that that we've been able to hold our own at all."
"You could duplicate me?" asked Sutton.
"Certainly, Ash, but…"
"A different face, of course," said Sutton. "But a duplicate brain and…well, a few other things."
Eva nodded. "Your special abilities," she said.
"I can get into another mind," said Sutton. "Not mere telepathy, but the actual power to be another person, to be that other mind, to see and know and feel the same things that the other mind may see or know or feel. I don't know how it's done, but it must be something in the brain structure. If you duplicated my brain, the abilities should go along with the duplication. Not all of the duplicates would have it, maybe, not all of them could use it, but there would be some of them that could."
She gasped. "Ash, that would mean…"
"You would know everything," said Sutton, "that Trevor thinks. Every word and thought that passes through his mind. Because one of you would be Trevor. And the same thing with every other person who has anything to do with the war in time. You would know as soon as they know what they're going to do. You could plan to meet any threat they might be considering. You could block them at everything they tried."
"It would be stalemate," Eva said, "and that is exactly what we want. A strategy of stalemate, Ash. They wouldn't know how they were being blocked and many times they would not know who was blocking them. It would seem to them th
at luck was permanently against them…that destiny was against them."
"Trevor, himself, gave me the idea," Sutton said. "He told me to go out and butt my head against a wall for a while. He told me that finally I would get tired of doing it. He said that after a while I would give up."
"Ten years," said Eva. "Ten years should do the job. But if ten won't, why, then, a hundred. Or a thousand if it takes that long. We have all the time there is."
"Finally," said Sutton, "they would give up. Literally throw up their hands and quit. It would be such a futile thing. Never winning. Always fighting hard and never winning."
They sat in the room with its one little oasis of light that stood guard against the darkness that pressed in upon them and there was no triumph in them, for this was not a thing of triumph. This was a matter of necessity and not one of conquest. This was Man fighting himself and winning and losing at the same time.
"You can arrange this scanning soon?" asked Sutton.
Eva nodded. "Tomorrow, Ash?"
She looked at him queerly. "What's your hurry?"
"I am leaving," Sutton said. "Running away to a refuge that I thought of. That is, if you'll lend me a ship."
"Any ship you want."
"It would be more convenient that way," he told her. "Otherwise, I'd have to steal one."
She did not ask the question that he had expected and he went on, "I have to write the book."
"There are plenty of places, Ash, where you could write the book. Safe places. Places that could be arranged to be foolproof safe."
He shook his head.
"There's an old robot," he said. "He's the only folks I have. When I was on Cygni, he went out to one of the star systems at the very edge and filed a homestead. I am going there."
"I understand," she said, speaking very gravely.
"There's just one thing," said Sutton. "I keep remembering a little girl who came and spoke to me when I was fishing. I know that she was a person conditioned in my mind. I know she was put there for a purpose, but it makes no difference. I keep thinking of her."
He looked at Eva and saw how the lamplight turned her hair into a copper glory.
"I don't know if I'll ever be in love," said Sutton. "I can't tell you for sure if I love you, Eva. But I wish you would go with me out to Buster's planet."
She shook her head. "Ash, I must stay here, for a while at least. I've worked for years on this thing. I must see it through."
Her eyes were misty in the lamplight. "Perhaps sometime, Ash, if you still want me. Perhaps a little later I can come."
Sutton said, simply, "I'll always want you, Eva."
He reached out a hand and tenderly touched the copper curl that dropped against her forehead.
"I know that you'll never come," he said. "If it had been just a little different…if we had been two ordinary people living ordinary lives."
"There's a greatness in you, Ash," she told him. "You will be a god to many people."
He stood silently and felt the loneliness of eternity closing in upon him. There was no greatness, as she had said, only the loneliness and bitterness of a man who stood alone and would stand alone forever.
LI
SUTTON FLOATED in a sea of light and from far away he heard the humming of the machines at work, little busy machines that were dissecting him with their tiny fingers of probing light and clicking shutters and the sensitive paper that ran like a streak of burnished silver through the holders. Dissecting and weighing, probing and measuring…missing nothing, adding nothing. A faithful record not of himself alone but of every particle of him, of every cell and molecule, of every branching nerve and muscle fiber.
And from somewhere else, also far away, from a place beyond the sea of light that held him, a voice said one word and kept repeating it:
Traitor.
Traitor.
Traitor.
One word without an exclamation point. A voice that had no emphasis. One flat word.
First there was one voice crying it and then another joined and then there was a crowd and finally it was a roaring mob and the sound and word built up until it was a world of voices that were crying out the word. Crying out the word until there was no longer any meaning in it, until it had lost its meaning and became a sound many times repeated.
Sutton tried to answer and there was no answer nor any way to answer. He had no voice, for he had no lips or tongue or throat. He was an entity that floated in the sea of light and the word kept on, never changing…never stopping.
But back of the word, a background to the word, there were other words unspoken.
We are the ones who clicked the flints together and built the first fire of Man's own making. We are the ones who drove the beasts from out the caves and took them for ourselves, in which to shape the first pattern of a human culture. We are the ones who painted the colorful bison on the hidden walls, working in the light of lamps with moss for wicks and fat for oil. We are the ones who tilled the soil and tamed the seed to grow beneath our hand. We are the ones who built great cities that our own kind might live together and accomplish the greatness that a handful could not even try. We are the ones who dreamed of stars. We are the ones who broke the atom to the harness of our minds.
It is our heritage you spend. It is our traditions that you give away to things that we have made, that we have fashioned with the deftness of our hands and the sharpness of our minds.
The machines clicked on and the voice kept on with the one word it was saying.
But there was another voice, deep within the undefinable being that was Asher Sutton, a faint voice…
It said no word, for there was no word that framed the thought it said.
Sutton answered it. "Thank you, Johnny," he said. "Thank you very much."
And was astonished that he could answer Johnny when he could not answer all the others.
The machines went on with their clicking.
LII
THE SILVERY ship roared down the launching ramp, slammed into the upcurve and hurled itself into the sky, a breath of fire that blazed against the blue.
"He doesn't know,” said Herkimer, "that we arranged it for him. He does not know we managed him to the last, that we sent Buster out many years ago to establish refuge for him, knowing that someday he might need that refuge."
"Herkimer," said Eva. "Herkimer…"
Her voice choked. "He asked me to go with him, Herkimer. He said he needed me. And I couldn't go. And I couldn't explain."
She kept her head tilted, watching the tiny pinpoint of fire that was fleeing spaceward.
"He had to keep on thinking," Eva said, "that there were some humans he had helped, that there were some humans who still believed in him."
Herkimer nodded. "It was the only thing to do, Eva. It was what you had to do. We took enough from him, enough of his humanity. We could not take it all."
She put her hands up to her face and huddled her shoulders and stood there, an android woman crying out her heart.
CLIFFORD D. SIMAK has been writing science-fiction for more than thirty years. His stories have appeared in almost all the science-fiction magazines, past and present, and he is rated among the top authors in the field.
Mr. Simak was born in Millville, Wisconsin, and now lives in Minnesota.
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