The Works of Clifford D. Simak Volume Two Page 36

  Thorne was there and Thorne was an able man. He wouldn’t rest until he’d wrung the last ounce of information from the broken wreck and bodies.

  I wish I could forget it, Adams told himself. It’s important, yes, but not all-important.

  A buzzer hummed at Adams and he flipped up a tumbler on his desk.

  “What is it?”

  An android voice answered, “It’s Mr. Thorne, sir, on the mentophone from Andrelon.”

  “Thank you, Alice,” Adams said.

  He clicked open a drawer and took out the cap, placed it on his head, adjusted it with steady fingers. Thoughts flickered through his brain, disjointed, random thoughts, all faint and faraway. Ghost thoughts drifting through the universe—residual flotsam from the minds of things in time and space that was unguessable.

  Adams flinched.

  I’ll never get used to it, he told himself. I will always duck, like the kid who knows he deserves a cuffing.

  The ghost thoughts peeped and chittered at him.

  Adams closed his eyes and settled back.

  “Hello, Thorne,” he thought.

  Thorne’s thought came in, thinned and scratchy over the space of more than fifty light-years.

  “That you, Adams? Pretty weak out here.”

  “Yes, it’s me. What’s up?”

  A high, singsong thought came in and skipped along his brain:

  Spill the rattle … pinch the fish … oxygen is high-priced.

  Adams forced the thought out of his brain, built up his concentration.

  “Start over again, Thorne. A ghost came along and blotted you out.”

  Thorne’s thought was louder now, more distinct.

  “I wanted to ask you about a name. Seems to me I heard it once before, but I can’t be sure.”

  “What name?”

  Thorne was spacing his thoughts now, placing them slowly and with emphasis to cut through the static.

  “The name is Asher Sutton.”

  Adams sat bolt upright in his chair. His mouth flapped open.

  “What?” he roared.

  “Walk west,” said a voice in his brain. “Walk west and then straight up.”

  Thorne’s thought came in: “… it was the name that was on the flyleaf.…”

  “Start over,” Adams pleaded. “Start over and take it slow. We got blotted out again. I couldn’t hear a thing you thought.”

  Thorne’s thoughts came slowly, power behind each word:

  “It was like this. You remember that wreck we had out here? Five men killed …”

  “Yes. Yes. Of course, I remember it.”

  “Well, we found a book, or what once had been a book, on one of the corpses. The book was burned, scorched through and through by radiation. The robots did what they could with it, but that wasn’t much. A word here and there. Nothing you could make any sense out of.…”

  The thought static purred and rumbled. Half thoughts cut through. Rambling thought-snatches that had no sense or meaning even if they had been heard in their human sense or meaning—that could have had no human entirety.

  “Start over,” Adams thought desperately. “Start over.”

  “You know about this wreck. Five men …”

  “Yes. Yes. I got that much. Up to the part about the book. Where does Sutton come in?”

  “That was about all the robotics could figure out,” Thorne told him. “Just three words: ‘by Asher Sutton.’ As if he might have been the author. As if the book might have been written by him. It was on one of the first pages. The title page, maybe. Such and such a book by Asher Sutton.”

  There was silence, even the ghost voices still for a moment. Then a piping, lisping thought came in … a baby thought, immature and puling. And the thought was without context, untranslatable, almost meaningless. But hideous and nerve-wrenching in its alien connotation.

  Adams felt the sudden chill of fear slice into his marrow, grasped the chair arms with both his hands and hung on tight while a filthy, taloned claw twisted at his entrails.

  Suddenly the thought was gone. Fifty light-years of space whistled in the cold.

  Adams relaxed, felt the perspiration running from his armpits, trickling down his ribs.

  “You there, Thorne?” he asked.

  “Yes. I caught some of that one, too.”

  “Pretty bad, wasn’t it?”

  “I’ve never heard much worse,” Thorne told him.

  There was a moment’s silence. Then Thorne’s thoughts took up again.

  “Maybe I’m just wasting time. But it seemed to me I remembered that name.”

  “You have,” Adams thought back. “Sutton went to 61 Cygni.”

  “Oh, he’s the one!”

  “He got back this morning.”

  “Couldn’t have been him, then. Someone else by the same name, maybe.”

  “Must have been,” thought Adams.

  “Nothing else to report,” Thorne told him. “The name just bothered me.”

  “Keep at it,” Adams thought. “Let me know anything that turns up.”

  “I will,” Thorne promised. “Good-bye.”

  “Thanks for calling.”

  Adams lifted off the cap. He opened his eyes and the sight of the room, commonplace and Earthly, with the sun streaming through the window, was almost a physical shock.

  He sat limp in his chair, thinking, remembering.

  The man had come at twilight, stepping out of the shadows onto the patio and he had sat down in the darkness and talked like any other man. Except the things he said were crazy.

  When he returns, Sutton must be killed. I am your successor.

  Crazy talk.

  Unbelievable.

  Impossible.

  And, still, maybe I should have listened. Maybe I should have heard him out instead of flying off the handle.

  Except that you don’t kill a man who comes back after twenty years.

  Especially a man like Sutton.

  Sutton is a good man. One of the best the Bureau has. Slick as a whistle, well grounded in alien psychology, an authority on galactic politics. No other man could have done the Cygnian job as well.

  If he did it.

  I don’t know that, of course. But he’ll be in tomorrow and he’ll tell me all about it.

  A man is entitled to a day’s rest after twenty years.

  Slowly, Adams put away the mento-cap, reached out an almost reluctant hand and snapped up a tumbler.

  Alice answered.

  “Send me in the Asher Sutton file.”

  “Yes, Mr. Adams.”

  Adams settled back in his chair.

  The warmth of the sun felt good across his shoulders. The ticking of the clock was comforting.

  Commonplace and comforting after the ghost voices whispering out in space. Thoughts that one could not pin down, that one could not trace back and say, “This one started here and then.”

  Although we’re trying, Adams thought. Man will try anything, take any sort of chance, gamble on no odds at all.

  He chuckled to himself. Chuckled at the weirdness of the project.

  Thousands of listeners listening in on the random thoughts of random time and space listening in for clues, for hints, for leads. Seeking a driblet of sense from the stream of gibberish … hunting the word or sentence or disassociated thought that might be translated into a new philosophy or a new technique or a new science … or a new something that the human race had never even dreamed of.

  A new concept, said Adams, talking to himself. An entirely new concept.

  Adams scowled to himself.

  A new concept might be dangerous. This was not the time for anything that did not fit in the groove, that did not match the pattern of human thought and action.

  There could be no confusion. There could be nothing but the sheer, bulldog determination to hang on, to sink in one’s teeth and stay. To maintain the status quo.

  Later, someday, many centuries from now, there would be a time and place and ro
om for a new concept. When Man’s grip was firmer, when the line was not too thin, when a mistake or two would not spell disaster.

  Man, at the moment, controlled every factor. He held the edge at every point … a slight edge, admitted, but at least an edge. And it must stay that way. There must be nothing that would tip the scale in the wrong direction. Not a word or thought, not an action or a whisper.

  VII

  Apparently they had been waiting for him for some time and they intercepted him when he stepped out of the elevator on his way to the dining room for lunch.

  There were three of them and they stood ranged in front of him, as if doggedly determined that he should not escape.

  “Mr. Sutton?” one of them asked, and Sutton nodded.

  The man was a somewhat seedy character. He might not actually have slept in his clothes, although the first impression was that he had. He clutched a threadbare cap with stubby, grimed fingers. The fingernails were rimmed with the blue of dirt.

  “What may I do for you?” asked Sutton.

  “We’d like to talk to you, sir, if you don’t mind,” said the woman of the trio. “You see, we’re a sort of delegation.”

  She folded fat hands over a plump stomach and did her best to beam at him. The effect of the beam was spoiled by the wispy hair that straggled out from beneath her dowdy hat.

  “I was just on my way to lunch,” said Sutton, hesitantly, trying to make it sound as if he were in a hurry, trying to put some irritation into his voice while still staying within the bounds of civility.

  The woman kept on beaming.

  “I’m Mrs. Jellicoe,” she said, acting as if he must be glad to get the information. “And this gentleman, the one who spoke to you, is Mr. Hamilton. The other one of us is Captain Stevens.”

  Captain Stevens, Sutton noted, was a beefy individual, better dressed than the other two. His blue eyes twinkled at Sutton, as if he might be saying: I don’t approve of these people any more than you do, Sutton, but I’m along with them and I’ll do the best I can.

  “Captain?” said Sutton. “One of the star ships, I presume.”

  Stevens nodded. “Retired,” he said.

  He cleared his throat. “We hate to bother you, Sutton, but we tried to get through to your rooms and couldn’t. We’ve waited several hours. I hope you’ll not disappoint us.”

  “It’ll just be a little while,” pleaded Mrs. Jellicoe.

  “We could sit over here,” said Hamilton, twirling the cap in his dirty fingers. “We saved a chair for you.”

  “As you wish,” said Sutton.

  He followed them back to the corner from which they had advanced upon him and took the proffered chair.

  “Now,” he said, “tell me what this is all about.”

  Mrs. Jellicoe took a deep breath. “We’re representing the Android Equality League,” she said.

  Stevens broke in, successfully heading off the long speech that Mrs. Jellicoe seemed on the point of making. “I am sure,” he said, “that Mr. Sutton has heard of us at one time or another. The League has been in existence for these many years.”

  “I have heard of the League,” said Sutton.

  “Perhaps,” said Mrs. Jelicoe, “you’ve read our literature.”

  “No,” said Sutton. “I can’t say that I have.”

  “Here’s some of it, then,” said Hamilton. He dug with a grimy hand into an inside coat pocket, came out with a fistful of dog-eared leaflets and tracts. He held them out to Sutton and Sutton took them gingerly, laid them on the floor beside his chair.

  “Briefly,” said Stevens, “we represent the belief that androids should be granted equality with the human race. They are human, in actuality, in every characteristic except one.”

  “They can’t have babies,” Mrs. Jellicoe blurted out.

  Stevens lifted his sandy eyebrows briefly and glanced at Sutton half apologetically.

  He cleared his throat. “That’s quite right, sir,” he said, “as you probably know. They are sterile, quite sterile. In other words, the human race can manufacture, chemically, a perfect human body, but it has been unable to solve the mystery of biological conception. Many attempts have been made to duplicate the chromosomes and genes, fertile eggs and sperm, but none has been successful.”

  “Someday, perhaps,” said Sutton.

  Mrs. Jellicoe shook her head. “We aren’t meant to know all things, Mr. Sutton,” she declared sanctimoniously. “There is a Power that guards against our knowing everything. There is …”

  Stevens interrupted her. “Briefly, sir, we are interested in bringing about an acceptance of equality between the biological human race, the born human race, and the chemically manufactured human race that we call the androids. We contend that they are basically the same, that both are human beings, that each is entitled to the common heritage of the human race.

  “We, the original, biological human race, created the androids in order to bolster our population, in order that there might be more humans to man the command posts and administration centers spread through the galaxy. You perhaps are well aware that the only reason we have not brought the galaxy more closely under our control is the lack of human supervision.”

  “I am well aware of that,” said Sutton.

  And he was thinking: no wonder. No wonder that this Equality League is regarded as a band of crackpots. A flighty old woman, a stumbling, dirty oaf, a retired space captain with time hanging heavy on his hands and nothing else to do.

  Stevens was saying, “Thousands of years ago slavery was wiped out as between one biological human and another. But today we have a slavery as between the biological human and the manufactured human. For the androids are owned. They do not live as masters of their own fate, but serve at the direction of an identical form of life … identical in all things except that one is biologically fertile and the other one is sterile.”

  And that, thought Sutton, certainly is something that he learned by rote from out of a book. Like an insurance salesman or an agent for an encyclopedia.

  He said aloud, “What do you want me to do about it?”

  “We want you to sign a petition,” said Mrs. Jellicoe.

  “And make a contribution?”

  “Indeed not,” said Stevens. “Your signature will be enough. It is all we ask. We are always glad to get evidence that men of prestige are with us, that the thinking men and women of the galaxy see the justice of our claim.”

  Sutton scraped back his chair and rose.

  “My name,” he said, “would carry little prestige.”

  “But Mr. Sutton …”

  “I approve of your aims,” said Sutton, “but I am skeptical of your methods of carrying them forward.”

  He made a half bow to them, still sitting in their chairs.

  “And now I must go to lunch,” he said.

  He was halfway across the lobby when someone caught him by the elbow. He whirled, half angrily. It was Hamilton, threadbare cap in hand.

  “You forgot something,” said Hamilton, holding out the leaflets Sutton had left lying on the floor.

  VIII

  The desk buzzer snarled at Adams and he thumbed it up.

  “Yes,” he said. “What is it?”

  Alice’s words tumbled over one another. “The file, sir. The Sutton file.”

  “What about the Sutton file?”

  “It’s gone, sir.”

  “Someone is using it.”

  “No, sir, not that. It has been stolen.”

  Adams jerked erect.

  “Stolen!”

  “Stolen,” said Alice. “That is right, sir. Twenty years ago.”

  “But twenty years …”

  “We checked the security points,” said Alice. “It was stolen just three days after Mr. Sutton set out for 61.”

  IX

  The lawyer said his name was Wellington. He had painted a thin coat of plastic lacquer over his forehead to hide the tattoo mark, but the mark showed through if one looked closel
y. And his voice was the voice of an android.

  He laid his hat very carefully on a table, sat down meticulously in a chair and placed his brief case across his knee. He handed Sutton a rolled-up paper.

  “Your newspaper, sir,” he said. “It was outside the door. I thought that you might want it.”

  “Thanks,” said Sutton.

  Wellington cleared his throat. “You are Asher Sutton?” he asked.

  Sutton nodded.

  “I represent a certain robot who commonly went by the name of Buster, You may remember him.”

  Sutton leaned quickly forward. “Remember him? Why, he was a second father to me. Raised me after both my parents died. He has been with my family for almost four thousand years.”

  Wellington cleared his throat again. “Quite so,” he said.

  Sutton leaned back in his chair, crushing the newspaper in his grip.

  “Don’t tell me …”

  Wellington waved a sober hand. “No, he’s in no trouble. Not yet, that is. Not unless you choose to make it for him.”

  “What has he done?” asked Sutton.

  “He has run away.”

  “Good Lord! Run away. Where to?”

  Wellington squirmed uneasily in the chair. “To one of the Tower stars, I believe.”

  “But,” protested Sutton, “that’s way out. Out almost to the edge.”

  Wellington nodded. “He bought himself a new body and a ship and stocked it up.…”

  “With what?” asked Sutton. “Buster had no money.”

  “Oh yes, he had. Money he had saved over, what was it you said, four thousand years or so. Tips from guests, Christmas presents, one thing and another. It would all count up … in four thousand years. Placed at interest, you know.”

  “But why?” asked Sutton. “What does he intend to do?”

  “He took out a homestead on a planet. He didn’t sneak away. He filed his claim, so you can trace him if you wish. He used the family name, sir. That worried him a little. He hoped you wouldn’t mind.”

  Sutton shook his head. “Not at all,” he said. “He has a right to that name, as good a right as I have myself.”

  “You don’t mind, then?” asked Wellington. “About the whole thing, I mean. After all, he was your property.”