The Works of Clifford D. Simak Volume Two Read online

  “And wihch is it?”

  “They aren’t dangerous,” said Sutton.

  Adams waited and Sutton sat silently.

  Finally Adams said, “And that is all?”

  “That is all,” said Sutton.

  Adams tapped his teeth with the bit of his pipe. “I’d hate to have to send another man out to check up,” he said. “Especially after I had told everyone you’d bring back all the dope.”

  “It wouldn’t do any good,” said Sutton. “No one could get through.”

  “You did.”

  “Yes, and I was the first. Because I was the first, I also was the last.”

  Across the desk, Adams smiled winterly. “You were fond of those people, Ash.”

  “They weren’t people.”

  “Well … beings, then.”

  “They weren’t even beings. It’s hard to tell you exactly what they are. You’d laugh at me if I told you what I really think they are.”

  Adams grunted. “Come the closest that you can.”

  “Symbiotic abstractions. That’s close enough, as close as I can come.”

  “You mean they really don’t exist?” asked Adams.

  “Oh, they exist all right. They are there and you are aware of them. As aware of them as I am aware of you, or you of me.”

  “And they make sense?”

  “Yes,” said Sutton, “they make sense.”

  “And no one can get through again?”

  Sutton shook his head. “Why don’t you cross Cygni off your list? Pretend it isn’t there. There is no danger from Cygni. The Cygnians will never bother Man, and Man will never get there. There is no use of trying?”

  “They aren’t mechanical?”

  “No,” said Sutton. “They’re not mechanical.”

  Adams changed the subject “Let me see. How old are you, Ash?”

  “Sixty-one,” said Sutton.

  “Humpf,” said Adams. “Just a kid. Just getting started.” His pipe had gone out and he worried at it with a finger, probing at the bowl, scowling at it.

  “What do you plan to do?” he asked.

  “I have no plans.”

  “You want to stay on with the service, don’t you?”

  “That depends,” said Sutton, “on how you feel about it. I had presumed, of course, that you wouldn’t want me.”

  “We owe you twenty years’ back pay,” said Adams, almost kindly. “It’s waiting for you. You can pick it up when you go out. You also have three or four years of vacation coming. Why don’t you take it now?”

  Sutton said nothing.

  “Come back later on,” said Adams. “We’ll have another talk.”

  “I won’t change my mind,” said Sutton.

  “No one will ask you to.”

  Sutton stood up slowly.

  “I’m sorry,” Adams said, “that I haven’t your confidence.”

  “I went out to do a job,” Sutton told him, crisply. “I’ve done that job. I’ve made my report.”

  “So you have,” said Adams.

  “I suppose,” said Sutton, “you will keep in touch with me.”

  Adams’ eyes twinkled grimly. “Most certainly, Ash. I shall keep in touch with you.”

  XIV

  Sutton sat quietly in the chair and forty years were canceled from his life.

  For it was like going back all of forty years … even to the teacups.

  Through the open windows of Dr. Raven’s study came young voices and the sound of student’s feet tramping past along the walk. The wind talked in the elms and it was a sound with which he was familiar. Far off a chapel bell tolled and there was girlish laughter just across the way.

  Dr. Raven handed him his teacup.

  “I think that I am right,” he said, and his eyes were twinkling. “Three lumps and no cream.”

  “Yes, that’s right,” said Sutton, astonished that he should remember.

  But remembering, he told himself, was easy. I seem to be able to remember almost everything. As if the old sets of habit patterns had been kept bright and polished in my mind through all the alien years, waiting, like a set of cherished silver standing on a shelf, until it was time for them to be used again.

  “I remember little things,” said Dr. Raven. “Little, inconsequential things, like how many lumps of sugar and what a man said sixty years ago, but I don’t do so well, sometimes, at the big things … the things you would expect a man to remember.”

  The white marble fireplace flared to the vaulted ceiling and the university’s coat of arms upon its polished face was as bright as the last day Sutton had seen it.

  “I suppose,” he said, “you wonder why I came.”

  “Not at all,” said Dr. Raven. “All my boys come back to see me. And I am glad to see them. It makes me feel so proud.”

  “I’ve been wondering myself,” said Sutton. “And I guess I know what it is, but it is hard to say.”

  “Let’s take it easy then,” said Dr. Raven. “Remember, the way we used to. We sat and talked around a thing and finally before we knew it, we had found the core.”

  Sutton laughed shortly.

  “Yes, I remember, doctor. Fine points of theology. The vital differences in comparative religion. Tell me this. You have spent a lifetime at it, you know more about religions, Earthly and otherwise, than any man on Earth. Have you been able to keep one faith? Have you ever been tempted from the teaching of your race?”

  Dr. Raven set down his teacup.

  “I might have known,” he said, “you would embarrass me. You used to do it all the time. You had the uncanny ability to hit exactly on the question that a man found it hard to answer.”

  “I won’t embarrass you any longer,” Sutton told him. “I take it that you have found some good, one might say superior, points in alien religions.”

  “You found a new religion?”

  “No,” said Sutton. “Not a religion.”

  The chapel bell kept on tolling and the girl who had laughed was gone. The footsteps along the walk were far off in the distance.

  “Have you ever felt,” asked Sutton, “as if you sat on God’s right hand and heard a thing that you knew you were never meant to hear?”

  Dr. Raven shook his head. “No, I don’t think I ever have.”

  “If you did, what would you do?”

  “I think,” said Dr. Raven, “that I might be as troubled by it as you are.”

  “We’ve lived by faith alone,” said Sutton, “for eight thousand years at least and probably more than that. Certainly more than that. For it must have been faith, a glimmer of some sort of faith, that made the Neanderthaler paint the shinbones red and nest the skulls so they faced toward the east.”

  “Faith,” said Dr. Raven gently, “is a powerful thing.”

  “Yes, powerful,” Sutton agreed, “but even in its strength it is our own confession of weakness. Our own admission that we are not strong enough to stand alone, that we must have a staff to lean upon, the expressed hope and conviction that there is some greater power which will lend us aid and guidance.”

  “You haven’t grown bitter, Ash? Something that you found?”

  “Not bitter,” Sutton told him.

  Somewhere a clock was ticking, loud in the sudden hush.

  “Doctor,” said Sutton, “what do you know of destiny?”

  “It’s strange to hear you talk of destiny,” said Dr. Raven. “You always were a man who never was inclined to bow to destiny.”

  “I mean documentary destiny,” Sutton explained. “Not the abstraction, but the actual thing, the actual belief in destiny. What do the records say?”

  “There always have been men who believed in destiny,” said Dr. Raven. “Some of them, it would appear, with some justification. But mostly, they didn’t call it destiny. They called it luck or a hunch or inspiration or something else. There have been historians who wrote of manifest destiny, but those were no more than words. Just a matter of semantics. Of course, there were some fan
atics and there were others who believed in destiny, but practiced fatalism.”

  “But there is no evidence,” said Sutton. “No actual evidence of a thing called destiny? An actual force. A living, vital thing. Something you can put your finger on.”

  Dr. Raven shook his head. “None that I know of, Ash. Destiny, after all, is just a word. It isn’t something that you can pin down. Faith, too, at one time, may have been no more than a word, just as destiny is today. But millions of people and thousands of years made it an actual force, a thing that can be defined and invoked and a thing to live by.”

  “But hunches and luck,” protested Sutton. “Those are just happenstance.”

  “They might be glimmerings of destiny,” Dr. Raven declared. “Flashes showing through. A hint of a broad stream of happening behavior. One cannot know of course. Many can be blind to so many things until he has the facts. Turning points in history have rested on a hunch. Inspired belief in one’s own ability has changed the course of events more times than one can count.”

  He rose and walked to a bookcase, stood with his head tilted back.

  “Somewhere,” he said, “if I can find it, there is a book.”

  He searched and did not find it.

  “No matter,” he declared, “I’ll run onto it later if you are still interested. It tells about an old African tribe with a strange belief. They believed that each man’s spirit or consciousness or ego or whatever you may call it had a partner, a counterpart on some distant star. If I remember rightly, they even knew which star and could point it out in the evening sky.”

  He turned around from the bookcase and stared at Sutton.

  “That might be destiny, you know,” he said. “It might, very well, at that.”

  He crossed the room to stand in front of the cold fireplace, hands locked behind his back, silver head titled to one side.

  “Why are you so interested in destiny?” he asked.

  “Because I found destiny,” said Sutton.

  XV

  The face in the visiplate was masked and Adams spoke in chilly anger: “I do not receive masked calls.”

  “You will this one,” said the voice form behind the mask. “I am the man you talked to on the patio. Remember?”

  “Calling from the future, I presume,” said Adams.

  “No, I still am in your time. I have been watching you.”

  “Watching Sutton, too?”

  The masked head nodded. “You have seen him now. What do you think?”

  “He’s hiding something,” Adams said. “And not all of him is human.”

  “You’re going to have him killed?”

  “No,” said Adams. “No, I don’t think I will. He knows something that we need to know. And we won’t get it out of him by killing.”

  “What he knows,” said the masked voice, “is better dead with the man who knows it.”

  “Perhaps,” said Adams, “we could come to an understanding if you would tell me what this is all about.”

  “I can’t tell you, Adams. I wish I could. I can’t tell you the future.”

  “And until you do,” snapped Adams, “I won’t let you change the past.”

  And he was thinking: The man is scared. Scared and almost desperate. He would kill Sutton any time he wished, but he is afraid to do it. Sutton has to be killed by a man of his own time … literally has to be, for time may not tolerate the extension of violence from one bracket to the next.

  “By the way,” said the future man.

  “Yes,” said Adams.

  “I was going to ask you how things are on Aldebaran XII.”

  Adams sat rigid in his chair, anger flaming in him.

  “If it hadn’t been for Sutton,” said the masked man, “there would have been no incident on Aldebaran XII.”

  “But Sutton wasn’t back yet,” snapped Adams. “He wasn’t even here.…”

  His voice ran down, for he remembered something. The name on the flyleaf … “by Asher Sutton.”

  “Look,” said Adams, “tell me, for the love of heaven, if you have anything to tell.”

  “You mean to say you haven’t guessed what it might be?”

  Adams shook his head.

  “It’s war,” the voice said.

  “But there is no war.”

  “Not in your time, but in another time.”

  “But how …”

  “Remember Michaelson?”

  “The man who went a second into time.”

  The masked head nodded and the screen went blank and Adams sat and felt the chill of horror trickle through his body.

  The visor buzzer purred at him and mechanically he snapped the toggle over.

  It was Nelson in the glass.

  “Sutton just left the university,” Nelson said. “He spent an hour with Dr. Horace Raven. Dr. Raven, if you don’t recall, is a professor of comparative religion.”

  “Oh,” said Adams. “Oh, so that is it.”

  He tapped his fingers on the desk, half irritated, half frightened.

  It would be a shame, he thought, to kill a man like Sutton.

  But it might be best.

  Yes, he told himself, it might be for the best.

  XVI

  Clark said that he had died and Clark was an engineer. Clark made a graph and death was in the graph; mathematics foretold that certain strains and stresses would turn a body into human jelly.

  And Anderson had said he wasn’t human and how was Anderson to know?

  The road curved ahead, a silver strip shining in the moonlight, and the sounds and smells of night lay across the land. The sharp, clean smell of growing things, the mystery smell of water. A creek ran through the marsh that lay off to the right and Sutton, from behind the wheel, caught the flashing hint of winding, moonlit water as he took a curve. Peeping frogs made a veil of pixy sound that hugged against the hills and fireflies were swinging lanterns that signaled through the dark.

  And how was Anderson to know?

  How, asked Sutton, unless he examined me? Unless he was the one who tried to probe into my mind after I had been knocked out when I walked into my room?

  Adams had tipped his hand and Adams never tipped his hand unless he wanted one to see. Unless he had an ace tucked neatly up his sleeve.

  He wanted me to know, Sutton told himself. He wanted me to know, but he couldn’t tell me. He couldn’t tell me he had me down on tape and film, that he was the one who had rigged up the room.

  But he could let me know by making just one slip, a carefully calculated slip, like the one on Anderson. He knew that I would catch and he thinks he can jitter me.

  The headlights caught, momentarily, the gray-black massive lines of a house that huddled on a hillside and then there was another curve. A night bird, black and ghostly, fluttered across the road and the shadow of its flight danced down the cone of light.

  Adams was the one, said Sutton, talking to himself. He was the one who was waiting for me. He knew, somehow, that I was coming, and he was all primed and cocked. He had me tagged and ticketed before I hit the ground and he gave me a going over before I knew what was going on.

  And undoubtedly he found a whole lot more than he bargained for.

  Sutton chuckled dryly. And the chuckle was a scream that came slanting down the hill slope in a blaze of streaming fire … a stream of fire that ended in the marsh, that died down momentarily, then licked out in blue and red.

  Brakes hissed and tires screeched on the pavement as Sutton slued the car around to bring it to a stop. Even before the machine came to a halt, he was out of the door and running down the slope toward the strange, black craft that flickered in the swamp.

  Water sloshed around his ankles and knife-edged grass slashed at his legs. The puddles gleamed black and oily in the light from the flaming craft. The frogs still kept up their peeping at the far edge of the marsh.

  Something flopped and struggled in a pool of muddy, flame-stained water just a few feet from the burning ship and Sutto
n, plunging forward, saw it was a man.

  He caught the gleaming white of frightened, piteous eyeballs shining in the flame as the man lifted himself on his mud-caked arms and tried to drag his body forward. He saw the flash of teeth as pain twisted the face into grisly anguish. And his nostrils took the smell of charred, crisped flesh and knew it for what it was.

  He stooped and locked his hands beneath the armpits of the man, hauled him upright, dragged him back across the swamp. Mud sucked at his feet and he heard the splashing behind him, the horrible, dragging splash of the other’s body trailing through the water and the slime.

  There was dry land beneath his feet and he began the climb back up the slope toward the car. Sounds came from the bobbing head of the man he carried, thick, slobbering sounds that might have been words if one had had the time to listen.

  Sutton cast a quick glance over his shoulder and saw the flames mounting straight into the sky, a pillar of blue that lighted up the night. Marsh birds, roused from their nests, flew blinded and in panic through the garish light, waking the night with their squawks of terror.

  “The atomics,” said Sutton, aloud. “The atomics …”

  They couldn’t hold for long in a flame like that. The automatics would melt down and the marsh would be a crater and the hills would be charred from horizon to horizon.

  “No,” said the bobbing head. “No … no atomics.”

  Sutton’s foot caught in a root and he stumbled to his knees. The body of the man slid from his mud-caked grasp.

  The man struggled, trying to turn over.

  Sutton helped him and he lay on his back, his face toward the sky.

  He was young, Sutton saw … young beneath the mask of mud and pain.

  “No atomics,” said the man. “I dumped them.”

  There was pride in the words, pride in a job well done. But the words had cost him heavily. He lay still, so still that he might not have been living at all.

  Then his breath came to life again and whistled in his throat. Sutton saw the blood pumping through the temples beneath the burned and twisted skin. The man’s jaw worked and words came out, limping, tangled words.