The Works of Clifford D. Simak Volume Two Page 41

  “There was a battle … back in ’83 … I saw him coming … tried to time-jump …” The words gurgled and got lost, then gushed out again. “Got new guns … set metal afire …”

  He turned his head and apparently saw Sutton for the first time. He started up and then fell back, gasping with the effort.

  “Sutton!”

  Sutton bent above him. “I will carry you. Get you to a doctor.”

  “Asher Sutton!” The two words were a whisper.

  For a moment Sutton caught the triumphant, almost fanatic gleam that washed across the eyes of the dying man, half understood the gesture of the half-raised arm, of the cryptic sign that the fingers made.

  Then the gleam faded and the arm dropped back and the fingers came apart.

  Sutton knew, even before he bent with his head turned against the heart, that the man was dead.

  Slowly Sutton stood up.

  The flame was dying down and the birds had gone. The craft lay half buried in the mud and its lines, he noted, were none he had ever seen.

  Asher Sutton, the man had said. And his eyes had lighted up and he had made a sign just before he died. And there had been a battle back in ’83.

  Eighty-three what?

  The man had tried to time-jump … who had ever heard of time-jump?

  I never saw the man before, said Sutton, as if he might be denying something that was criminal. So help me, I don’t know him even now. And yet he cried my name and it sounded as if he knew me and was very glad to see me and he made a sign … a sign that went with the name.

  He stared down at the dead man lying at his feet and saw the pity of it, the crumpled legs that dangled even flat upon the ground, the stiffened arms, the lolling head and the flash of moonlight on the teeth where the mouth had opened.

  Carefully, Sutton went down on his knees, ran his hands over the body, seeking something … some bulging pocket that might give a clue to the man who lay there dead.

  Because he knew me. And I must know how he knew me. And none of it makes sense.

  There was a small book in the breast pocket of the coat and Sutton slipped it out. The title was in gold on black leather, and even in the moonlight Sutton could read the letters that flamed from the cover to hit him straight between the eyes.

  THIS IS DESTINY

  By

  Asher Sutton

  Sutton did not move.

  He crouched there on the ground, like a cowering thing, stricken by the golden letters on the leather cover.

  A book!

  A book he meant to write for many months to come!

  A book he meant to write, but hadn’t written yet!

  And yet here it was, dog-eared and limp from reading.

  An involuntary choking sound rose unbidden in his throat.

  He felt the chill of the fog rising from the marsh, the loneliness of a wild bird’s crying.

  A strange ship had plunged into the marsh, disabled and burning. A man had escaped from the ship, but on the verge of death. Before he died he had recognized Sutton and had called his name. In his pocket he had a book that was not even written.

  Those were the facts … the bare, hard facts. There was no explanation.

  Faint sounds of human voices drifted down the night and Sutton rose swiftly to his feet, stood poised and waiting, listening. The voices came again.

  Someone had heard the crash and was coming to investigate, coming down the road, calling to others who also had heard the crash.

  Sutton turned and walked swiftly up the slope to the car.

  There was, he told himself, no earthly use of waiting.

  Those coming down the road would only cause him trouble.

  XVII

  A man was waiting in the clump of lilac bushes across the road and there was another one crouched in the shadow of the courtyard wall.

  Sutton walked slowly forward, strolling, taking his time.

  “Johnny,” he said, soundlessly.

  “Yes, Ash.”

  “That is all there are—just those two?”

  “I think there is another one, but I can’t place him. All of them are armed.”

  Sutton felt the stir of comfort in his brain, the sense of self-assurance, the sense of aid and comradeship.

  “Keep me posted, Johnny.”

  He whistled a bar or two, from a tune that had been forgotten long ago but still was fresh in his mind from twenty years before.

  The rent-a-car garage was two blocks up the road, the Orion Arms two blocks farther down. Between him and the Arms were two men, waiting with guns. Two and maybe more.

  Between the garage and hotel was nothing … just the landscaped beauty that was a residential, administrative Earth. An Earth dedicated to beauty and to ruling … planted with a garden’s care, every inch of it mapped out by landscape architects with clumps of shrubs and lanes of trees and carefully tended flower beds.

  An ideal place, Sutton told himself, to execute an ambush.

  Adams, he wondered. Although, it hardly could be Adams. He had something that Adams expected to find out and killing the man who holds information that you want, no matter how irate you may be at him, is downright infantile.

  Or those others that Eva had told him of … the ones who had Benton conditioned and all set to kill him.

  They tied in better than Adams did, for Adams wanted him to stay alive, and these others, whoever they might be, were quite content to kill him.

  He dropped his hand in his coat pocket as if searching for a cigarette and his fingers touched the steel of the gun he had used on Benton. He let his fingers wrap around it and then pulled them away and took his hand out of the pocket and found the cigarettes in another pocket.

  Not time yet, he told himself. Time later on to use the gun, if he had to use it, if he had a chance to use it.

  He stopped to light the cigarette, dallying, taking his time, playing for time.

  The gun would be a poor weapon, he knew, but better than none at all. In the dark, he probably couldn’t hit the broad side of a house, but it would make a noise and the waiting men were not counting on noise. If they hadn’t minded noise, they could have stepped out minutes ago and mowed him down.

  “Ash,” said Johnny, “there is another man. Just in that bush ahead. He expects to let you pass and then they’ll have you three ways.”

  Sutton grunted. “Good, tell me exactly.”

  “The bush with the white flowers. He’s on this edge of it. Quite close to the walk, so he can step around and be behind you the minute that you pass.”

  Sutton puffed on the cigarette, making it glow like a red eye in the dark.

  “Shall we take him, Johnny?”

  “Yes, we’d better take him.”

  Sutton resumed his stroll and now he saw the bush, four paces away, no more.

  One step. I wonder what it’s all about.

  Two steps.

  Cut out your wondering. Act now and do your wondering later.

  Three steps.

  There he is. I see him.

  Sutton was off the walk in a single stride. The gun whipped out of his pocket and at his second stride it talked, two quick, ugly words.

  The man behind the bush bent foward on his knees, swayed there for a moment then flattened on his face. His gun fell from his fingers, and in a single swoop Sutton scooped it up. It was, he saw, an electronic device, a vicious thing that could kill even with a near-miss, owing to the field of distortion that its beam set up. A gun like that had been new and secret twenty years ago, but now, apparently, anyone could get it.

  Gun in hand, Sutton wheeled and ran, twisting through the shrubbery, ducking overhanging branches, plowing through a tulip bed. Out of the corner of one eye, he caught a twinkle … the twinkling breath of a silent flamming gun, and the dancing path of silver that it sliced into the night.

  He plunged through a ripping, tearing hedge, waded a stream, found himself in a clump of evergreen and birch. He stopped to get back his breath, s
taring back over the way that he had come.

  The countryside lay quiet and peaceful, a silvered picture painted by the moon. No one or nothing stirred. The gun long ago had ceased its flickering.

  Johnny’s warning came suddenly:

  “Ash! Behind you. Friendly …”

  Sutton wheeled, gun half lifted.

  Herkimer was running in the moonlight, like a hound hunting for a trace.

  Sutton stepped from the copse and called gently. Herkimer stopped his running, wheeled around, then loped toward him.

  “Mr. Sutton, sir …”

  “Yes, Herkimer.”

  “We’ve got to run for it.”

  “Yes,” said Sutton, “I suppose we have. I walked into a trap. There were three of them laying for me.”

  “It’s worse than that,” said Herkimer. “It’s not only the Revisionists and Morgan, but it’s Adams, too.”

  “Adams?”

  “Adams has given orders that you be killed on sight.”

  Sutton stiffened. “How do you know?” he snapped.

  “The girl,” said Herkimer. “Eva. The one you asked about. She told me.”

  Herkimer walked forward, stood face to face with Sutton.

  “You have to trust me, sir. You said this morning I’d put the finger on you, but I never would. I was with you from the very first.”

  “But the girl,” said Sutton.

  “Eva’s with you, too, sir. We started out to find you as soon as we found out, but we were too late to catch you. Eva’s waiting with the ship.”

  “A ship,” said Sutton. “A ship and everything.”

  “It’s your own ship, sir,” said Herkimer. “The one you got from Benton. The ship that went along with me.”

  “And you want me to come with you and get into this ship and …”

  “I’m sorry, sir,” said Herkimer.

  He moved so fast that Sutton couldn’t do a thing.

  He saw the fist coming and he tried to raise his gun. He felt the sudden fury grow cold within his brain and then there was a crushing impact and his head snapped back so that for a moment, before his eyelids closed, he saw the wheel of stars against a spinning sky.

  He felt his knees buckling under him and his body falling.

  But he was out, stone-cold, when his body hit the ground.

  XVIII

  Eva armour was calling to him softly.

  “Ash. Oh, Ash. Wake up.”

  To Sutton’s ears came the muted mutter of the coasting rockets, the hollow, thrumming sound of a small ship hurtling through space.

  “Johnny,” said Sutton’s mind.

  “We’re in a ship, Ash.”

  “How many are there?”

  “The Android and the girl. The one called Eva. And they are friendly. I told you they were friendly. Why don’t you pay attention?”

  “I can’t trust anyone.”

  “Not even me?”

  “Not your judgment, Johnny. You are new to Earth.”

  “Not new, Ash. I know Earth and Earthmen. Much better than you know them. You’re not the first Earthman I’ve lived with.”

  “I can’t remember, Johnny. There’s something to remember. I try to remember it and there’s nothing but a blur. The big things, of course, the things I learned, the things I wrote down and took away. But not the place itself or the people in it.”

  “They aren’t people, Ash.”

  “I know. I can’t remember.”

  “You’re not supposed to, Ash. It was all too alien. You can’t carry such memories with you … you shouldn’t carry such alien memories, for when you carry them too closely, you are a part of them. And you had to stay human, Ash. We have to keep you human.”

  “But someday I must remember. Someday …”

  “When you must remember them, you will remember them. I will see to that.”

  “And, Johnny.”

  “What is it, Ash?”

  “You don’t mind this Johnny business?”

  “What about it, Ash?”

  “I shouldn’t call you ‘Johnny.’ It is flippant and familiar … but it is friendly. It is the friendliest name I know. That is why I call you it.”

  “I do not mind,” said Johnny. “I do not mind at all.”

  “You understand any of this, Johnny? About Morgan? And the Revisionists?”

  “No, Ash.”

  “But you see a pattern?”

  “I am beginning to.”

  Eva Armour shook him. “Wake up, Ash,” she said. “Can’t you hear me, Ash? Wake up.”

  Sutton opened his eyes. He was lying on a bunk and the girl still was shaking him.

  “O.K.,” he said. “You can stop now. O.K.”

  He swung his legs off the bunk and sat on its edge. His hand went up and felt the lump on his jaw.

  “Herkimer had to hit you,” Eva said. “He didn’t want to hit you, but you were unreasonable and we had no time to lose.”

  “Herkimer?”

  “Certainly. You remember Herkimer, Ash. He was Benton’s android. He’s piloting this ship.”

  The ship, Sutton saw, was small, but it was clean and comfortable and there would have been room for another passenger or two. Herkimer, talking his precise, copybook speech, had said it was small but serviceable.

  “Since you’ve kidnaped me,” Sutton told the girl, “I don’t suppose you’d mind telling me where we’re going.”

  “We don’t mind at all,” said Eva. “We’re going to the hunting asteroid that you got from Benton. It has a lodge and a good supply of food and no one will think of looking for us there.”

  “That’s fine,” said Sutton, grinning. “I could do with a spot of hunting.”

  “You won’t be doing any hunting,” said a voice behind them. Sutton swung around. Herkimer stood in the hatch that led to the pilot’s shell.

  “You’re going to write a book,” said Eva, softly. “Surely you know about the book. The one the Revisionists …”

  “Yes,” Sutton told her. “I know about the book.…”

  He stopped, remembering, and his hand went involuntarily to feel of his breast pocket. The book was there, all right, and something that crinkled when he touched it. He remembered that, too. The letter … the incredibly old letter that John H. Sutton had forgotten to open six thousand years before.

  “About the book,” said Sutton, and then he stopped again, for he was going to say they needn’t bother about writing the book, for he already had a copy. But something stopped him, for he wasn’t certain that it was smart just then to let them know about the book he had.

  “I brought along the case,” said Herkimer. “The manuscript’s all there. I checked through it.”

  “And plenty of paper?” asked Sutton, mocking him.

  “And plenty of paper.”

  Eva Armour leaned toward Sutton, so close that he could smell the fragrance of her copper hair.

  “Don’t you see,” she asked, “how important it is that you write this book? Don’t you understand?”

  Sutton shook his head.

  Important, he thought. Important for what? And whom? And when?

  He remembered the open mouth that death had struck, the teeth that glittered in the moonlight and the words of a dying man still rang sharply in his ears.

  “But I don’t understand,” he said. “Maybe you can tell me.”

  She shook her head. “You write the book,” she told him.

  XIX

  The asteroid was enveloped in the perpetual twilight of the far-from-sun and its frosty peaks speared up like sharp, silvery needles stabbing at the stars.

  The air was sharp and cold and thinner than on Earth and the wonder was, Sutton told himself, that any air could be kept on the place at all. Although at the cost that it had taken to make this or any other asteroid habitable, it would seem that anything should be possible.

  A billion-dollar job at least, Sutton estimated. The cost of the atomic plants alone would run to half that figure and
without atomics there would be no power to run the atmosphere and gravity machines that supplied the air and held it in its place.

  Once, he thought, Man had been content, had been forced to be content, to find his solitude at a lakeshore cottage or a hunting lodge or aboard a pleasure yacht, but now, with a galaxy to spend, Man fixed up an asteroid at a billion bucks a throw or bought out a planet at a bargain price.

  “There’s the lodge,” said Herkimer, and Sutton looked in the direction of the pointing finger. High up on the jigsaw horizon he saw the humped, black building with its one pinpoint of light.

  “What’s the light?” asked Eva. “Is there someone here?”

  Herkimer shook his head. “Someone forgot to turn off a light the last time when they left.”

  Evergreens and birches, ghostlike in the starlight, stood in ragged clumps, like marching soldiers storming the height where the lodge was set.

  “The path is over here,” said Herkimer.

  He led the way and they climbed, with Eva in the center and Sutton bringing up the rear. The path was steep and uneven and the light was none too good, for the thin atmosphere failed to break up the starlight and the stars themselves remained tiny, steely points of light that did not blaze or twinkle, but stood primly in the sky like dots upon a map.

  The lodge, Sutton saw, apparently sat upon a small plateau, and he knew that the plateau would be the work of man, for nowhere else in all this jumbled landscape was it likely that one would find a level spot much bigger than a pocket handkerchief.

  A movement of air so faint and tenuous that it could be scarcely called a breeze rustled down the slope and set the evergreens to moaning. Something scuttled from the path and skittered up the rocks. From somewhere far away came a screaming sound that set one’s teeth on edge.

  “That’s an animal,” Herkimer said quietly. He stopped and waved his hand at the tortured, twisted rock. “Great place to hunt,” he said, and added, “if you don’t break a leg.”

  Sutton looked behind him and saw for the first time the true, savage wildness of the place. A frozen whirlpool of star-speckled terrain stretched below them … great yawning gulfs of blackness above which stood brooding peaks and spirelike pinnacles.

  Sutton shivered at the sight. “Let’s get on,” he said.