They climbed the last hundred yards and reached the man-made plateau, then stood and stared across the nightmare landscape, and as he looked, Sutton felt the cold hand of loneliness reach down with icy fingers to take him in its grip. For here was sheer, mad loneliness such as he had never dreamed. Here was the very negation of life and motion, here was the stark, bald beginning when there was no life, nor even thought of life. Here anything that knew or thought or moved was an alien thing, a disease, a cancer on the face of nothingness.
A footstep crunched behind them and they swung around.
A man moved out of the starry darkness. His voice was pleasant and heavy as he spoke to them.
“Good evening,” he said and waited for a moment, then added by way of explanation, “We heard you land and I walked out to meet you.”
Eva’s voice was cold and just a little angry. “You take us by surprise,” she said. “We had not expected anyone.”
The man’s tone stiffened. “I hope we are not trespassing. We are friends of Mr. Benton and he told us to use the place at our convenience.”
“Mr. Benton is dead,” said Eva, frostily. “This man is the new owner.”
The man’s head turned toward Sutton.
“I’m sorry, sir,” he said. “We did not know. Of course, we’ll leave, the first moment that we can.”
“I see no reason,” Sutton told him, “why you should not stay.”
“Mr. Sutton,” said Eva, primly, “came here for peace and quiet. He expects to write a book.”
“A book,” said the man. “An author, eh?”
Sutton had the uncomfortable feeling that the man was laughing, not at him alone, but at the three of them.
“Mr. Sutton?” said the man, acting as if he were thinking hard. “I can’t seem to recall the name. But, then, I’m not a great reader.”
“I’ve never written anything before,” said Sutton.
“Oh well, then,” said the man, laughing as if he were relieved, “that probably explains it.”
“It’s cold out here,” Herkimer said, abruptly. “Let us get indoors.”
“Certainly,” said the man. “Yes, it is cold, although I hadn’t noticed it. By the way, my name is Pringle. My partner’s name is Case.”
No one answered him and after a few seconds he turned and trotted ahead of them, like a happy dog, leading the way.
The lodge, Sutton saw as they approached it, was larger than it had seemed from the valley where they had brought the ship in. It loomed huge and black against the starlit backdrop, and if one had not known that it was there it might have been mistaken for another rock formation.
The door opened as their feet sounded on the massive stone steps which led up to it and another man stood there, stiff and erect and tall, thin, but with whipcord strength about him as the light from inside the room threw his figure into black relief.
“The new owner, Case,” said Pringle, and it seemed to Sutton that he pitched his voice just a key too low, that he emphasized the words just a bit too much. As if he meant the words to be a warning.
“Benton died, you know,” said Pringle and Case answered, “Oh, did he? How peculiar.”
Which, Sutton thought, was a funny thing to say.
Case stood to one side to let them enter, then pulled shut the door.
The room was huge, with only one lamp burning, and shadows pressed in upon them out of the dark corners and the cavernous arch of the raftered ceiling.
“I am afraid,” said Pringle, “that you’ll have to look out for yourselves. Case and I are roughing it and we brought along no robots. Although I can fix up something if you happen to be hungry. A hot drink, perhaps, and some sandwiches?”
“We ate just before we landed,” Eva said, “and Herkimer will take care of what few things we have.”
“Then take a chair,” urged Pringle. “That one over there is comfortable. We will talk a bit.”
“I’m afraid we can’t. The trip was just a little rough.”
“You’re an ungracious young lady,” Pringle said, and his words were halfway between jest and anger.
“I’m a tired young lady.”
Pringle walked to a wall, flipped up toggles. Lights sprang into being.
“The bedrooms are up the stairs,” he said. “Off the balcony. Case and I have the first and second to the left. You may have your pick from any of the rest.”
He moved forward to lead them up the stairs. But Case spoke up and Pringle stopped and waited, one hand on the lower curve of the stair rail.
“Mr. Sutton,” said Case, “it seems to me I have heard your name somewhere.”
“I don’t think so,” said Sutton. “I’m a most unimportant person.”
“But you killed Benton.”
“No one said I killed him.”
Case did not laugh, but his voice said that if he had not been Case he would have laughed.
“Nevertheless, you must have killed him. For I happen to know that is the only way anyone could get this asteroid. Benton loved it and this side of life he’d never give it up.”
“Since you insist, then, I did kill Benton.”
Case shook his head, bewildered. “Remarkable,” he said. “Remarkable.”
“Good night, Mr. Case,” said Eva, and then she spoke to Pringle. “No need to trouble you. We will find our way.”
“No trouble,” Pringle rumbled back. “No trouble at all.” And, once again, he was laughing at them.
He jogged lightly up the stairs.
XX
Pringle and Case were wrong. There was something wrong about them. The very fact that they were here, at the lodge, was sinister.
There had been mockery in Pringle’s voice. And he had been laughing at them all the time, laughing with a sneering amusement, enjoying some thinly varnished joke that they did not know.
Pringle was a talker, a buffoon … but Case was stiff and straight and correct and when he spoke his words were clipped and sharp. There was something about Case … some point … some resemblance … a resemblance to something that escaped Sutton at the moment.
Sitting on the edge of his bed. Sutton frowned.
If I could just remember, he told himself. If I could put my finger on that mannerism, on the way he talks and walks and holds himself erect. If I could associate that with a certain thing I know, it would explain a lot. It might even tell me who Case is, or what he is, or even why he’s here.
Case knew that I killed Benton. Case knows who I am. And he should have kept his mouth shut, but he had to let me know he knew, because that way he bolstered up his ego and even if he doesn’t look it, his ego may need boosting.
Eva didn’t trust them, either, for she tried to tell me something when we parted at her door and I couldn’t quite make out what it was from the way she moved her lips, although it looked as if she was trying to say, “Don’t trust them.”
As if I would trust anyone … anyone at all.
Sutton wiggled his toes and stared at them, fascinated. He tried to match the wiggling of each toe on each foot and they wouldn’t match.
I can’t even control my own body, he thought, and it was a funny thing to think.
Pringle and Case were waiting for us, Sutton told himself, and wondered even as he said it if he might not be giving himself over to sheer fantasy. For how could they be waiting when they could not have known that Herkimer and Eva would head for the asteroid?
He shook his head, but the belief that the two had been waiting for them stayed … an idea clinging like a burr.
After all, it was not so strange. Adams had known that he was coming back to Earth, returning home after twenty years. Adams knew and set a trap for him … and there was no way, absolutely no way that Adams could have known.
And why, he asked himself. Why?
Why did Adams set the trap?
Why had Buster run away to homestead a planet?
Why had someone conditioned Benton to issue a challenge?
&
nbsp; Why had Eva and Herkimer brought him to the asteroid?
To write a book, they said.
But the book was written.
The book …
He reached for his coat, which hung from the back of a chair. From it, he took out the gold-lettered copy of the book, and as he pulled it out the letter came with it and fell upon the carpet. He picked the letter up and put it on the bed beside him and opened the book to the flyleaf.
THIS IS DESTINY, it said, By Asher Sutton.
Underneath the title, at the very bottom of the page, was a line of fine print.
Sutton had to hold the book a little closer so that he could read it.
It said: Original Version.
And that was all. No date of publication. No marks of copyright. No publisher’s imprint.
Just the title and the author and the line of print that said Original Version.
As if, he thought … as if the book was so well known, so firm a fixture in the lives of everyone, that anything other than the title and the author would be superfluous.
He turned two pages and they were blank and then another page and the text began.…
We are not alone.
No one ever is alone.
Not since the first faint stirring of the first flicker of life on the first planet in the galaxy that knew the quickening of life, has there ever been a single entity that walked or crawled or slithered down the path of life alone.
And that is it, he thought. That is the way I mean to write it.
That was the way I wrote it.
For I must have written it. Sometime, somewhere. I must have written it, for I hold it in my hands.
He closed the book and put it back carefully in the pocket and hung the coat back on the chair.
For I must not read, he told himself. I must not read and know the way that it will go, for then I would write the way that I had read it, and I must not do that. I must write it the way I know it is, the way I plan to write it, the only way to write it.
I must be honest, for someday the race of man … and the race of other things as well … may know the book and read it and every word must be exactly so and I must write so well and so simply that all can understand.
He threw back the covers of the bed and crawled beneath them, and as he did he saw the letter and picked it up.
With a steady finger, he inserted in his nail beneath the flap and ran it along the edge and the mucilage dissolved in a brittle storm of powder that showered down on the sheet.
He took the letter out and unfolded it carefully, so that it would not break, and saw that it was typewritten, with many mistakes that were X’d out as if the man who wrote it found a typewriter an unhandy thing to use.
He rolled over on one side and held the paper under the lamp and this is what he read:
XXI
Bridgeport, Wis.
July 11, 1987
I write this letter to myself, so that the postmark may prove beyond controversy the day and year that it was written, and I shall not open it but shall place it among my effects against the day when someone, a member of my own family, God willing, may open it and read. And reading, know the thing that I believe and think, but dare not say while I am still alive, lest someone call me touched.
For I have not long to live. I have lasted more than a man’s average allotted span, and while I still am hale and hearty, I know full well the hand of time, while it may miss a man at one reaping, will get him at the next.
I have no morbid fear of death, nor any sentimental wish to gain the brief immortality that a thought accorded me after I am dead may give me, for the thought itself will be a fleeting one and the one who holds it himself will not have too many years of life, for the years of man are short … far too short for any perfect understanding of any of the problems that a lifetime poses.
While it is more than likely that this letter will be read by my immediate descendants, who are well acquainted with me, I am still aware that through some vagary of fate it may fall yet unopened into the hands of someone many years after I am long forgotten, or even into the hands of strangers.
Feeling that the circumstance which I have to tell is of more than ordinary interest, even at the risk of reporting something which may be well known to the one who reads this letter, I shall here include some of the basic facts about myself and my locality and situation.
My name is John H. Sutton and I am a member of a numerous family which had its roots in the East, but one branch of which situated in this locality about one hundred years ago. While I must ask, if the reader of this be unacquainted with the Suttons, that my word be taken at face value without substantiating proof, I would like to state that we Suttons are a sober lot and not given to jokes, and that our reputation for integrity and honesty is singularly unquestioned.
While I was educated for the law, I soon found it not entirely to my liking and for the last forty years or more have followed the occupation of farming, finding more content in it that I ever found in law. For farming is an honest and a soul-warming job that gives one contact with the first essentials of living, and there is, I find, a satisfaction that is almost smug in the simple yet mystifying process of raising food from soil.
For the past number of years I have not been physically able to continue with the more strenuous labor of the farm, but pride myself that I still do most of the chores and still hold active management, which means that I am in the habit of making regular tours of the acres to see how things are coming.
Through the years, I have grown to love this country, although it is rough and in many instances not suited to easy cultivation. In fact, I sometimes find myself viewing with pity the men who hold broad, flat acreages with no hills to rest their eyes. Their land may be more fertile and more easily worked than mine, but I have something that they do not have … a setting for my life where I am keenly aware of all the beauties of nature, all the changes of the seasons.
Of late years, as my step has slowed and I have found that more than normal exertion is tiring, I have fallen into the habit of arbitrarily setting for myself certain places of rest during my inspection of the farm. It is not mere coincidence that each of these resting places is a spot which recommends itself to the eye and spirit. I believe, in fact, if the truth be told, that I look forward to these resting places more than I do the inspection of the fields and pastures, although, Lord knows, I derive much satisfaction from every aspect of my trips.
There is one spot which has always had, from the very first, a sense of the special for me. If I were still a child I might best explain it by saying that it seems to be an enchanted place.
It is a deep cleft in the bluff that runs down to the river valley and it is located at the north end of the bluff pasture. There is a fair-sized boulder at the top of the cleft, and this boulder is shaped appropriately for sitting, which may be one of the reasons why I liked it, for I am a man who takes to comfort.
From the boulder one may see the sweep of the river valley with a stressed third-dimensional quality, due no doubt to the height of the vantage point plus the clearness of the air, although at times the whole scene is enveloped with a blue mist of particularly tantalizing and lucid clarity.
The view is a charming one and I have often sat there for an hour at a time, doing absolutely nothing, thinking nothing, but at peace with the world and with myself.
But there is a strangeness to the spot and this strangeness is one that I find hard to explain, for search as I may, I find no word at my command to adequately express the thing I wish to say or the condition which I would describe.
It is as if the place were tingling … as if the place were waiting for something to happen, as if that one particular spot held great possibilities for drama or for revelation, and while revelation may seem a strange word to use, I find that it comes the closest of any to the thing I have felt many times as I sat upon the boulder and gazed across the valley.
It has often seemed to me that th
ere on that one area of earth, something could or might happen which could or might happen nowhere else on the entire planet. And I have, at times, tried to imagine what that happening might be, and I shrink from telling some of the possibilities that I have imagined, although in truth, in other things I am perhaps not imaginative enough.
To approach the boulder, I cut across the lower end of the bluff pasture, a place which is often in better grass than the rest of the grazing area, for the cattle, for some reason, do not often venture there. The pasture ends in a thin growth of trees, the forerunners of the verdant mass of foliage which sweeps down the bluff side. Just a few rods inside the trees is the boulder and because of the trees the boulder is always shaded, no matter what the time of the day, but the view is unobstructed because of the rapid falling away of the ground.
One day about ten years ago, July 4, 1977, to be exact, I approached this place and found a man and a strange machine at the lower end of the pasture, just clear of the trees.
I say machine, because that is what it appeared to be, although to tell the truth I could not make too much of it. It was like an egg, pointed slightly at each end, as an egg might look if someone stepped on it and did not break it, but spread it out, so that the ends became more pronounced. It had no working parts outside and so far as I could see not even a window, although it was apparent that the operator of it sat inside its body.
For the man had what appeared to be a door open and was standing outside and working at what may have been the motor, although when I ventured to look, it appeared like no motor I had ever seen before. Truth to tell, however, I never did get a good look at the motor or at anything else about the contraption, for the man, as soon as he saw me, most adroitly maneuvered me away from it and engaged me in such pleasant and intelligent conversation that I could not, without the utmost rudeness, change the subject or free myself from his inquiries long enough to pay attention to all the things that stirred my curiosity. I remember now, thinking back, that there were many things which I would have liked to ask him but which I never got around to, and it seems to me now that he must have anticipated these very questions and deliberately and skillfully steered me away from them.
The Works of Clifford D. Simak Volume Two Page 42