The Works of Clifford D. Simak Volume Two Page 44

  Who are you and where did you come from and what’s that machine and how does it run, I never saw the like of it before …

  Hard to answer, if they were ever asked.

  But they were not asked.

  John H. Sutton had had the last word … as would have been his habit.

  Asher Sutton chuckled, thinking of John H. Sutton’s having the last word and how it came about. It would please the old boy if he could only know, but, of course, he couldn’t.

  There had been some slip, of course. The letter had been lost or mislaid somehow and then mislaid again … and finally, somehow, it had come into the hands of another Sutton, six thousand years removed.

  And the first Sutton, more than likely, it would have done a bit of good. For the letter tied in someplace, had some significance in the mystery of the moment.

  Men who traveled in time. Men whose time machines went haywire and came to landfall or timefall, whichever you might call it, in a cow pasture. And other men who fought in time and screamed through folds of time in burning ships and landed in a swamp.

  A battle back in eighty-three, the dying youth had said. Not a battle at Waterloo or off the Martian orbit, but back in eighty-three.

  And the man had cried his name just before he died and lifted himself to make a sign with strangely twisted fingers. So I am known, thought Sutton, up in eighty-three and beyond eighty-three, for the boy said back and that means that in his time a time three centuries yet to come is historically the past.

  He reached for his coat again and slid the letter into the pocket with the book, then rolled out of bed. He reached for his clothes and began to dress.

  For it had come to him, the thing he had to do.

  Pringle and Case had used a ship to get to the asteroid and he must find that ship.

  XXIII

  The lodge was deserted, big and empty with an alienness in its emptiness that made Sutton, who should have been accustomed to alienness, shiver as he felt it touch him.

  He stood for a moment outside his door and listened to the whispering of the place, the faint, illogical breathing of the house, the creak of frost-expanded timbers, the caress of wind against a windowpane, and the noises that could not be explained by either frost or wind, the living sound of something that is not alive.

  The carpeting in the hall deadened his footsteps as he went down it toward the stairs. Snores came from one of the two rooms which Pringle had said that he and Case occupied and Sutton wondered for a moment which one of them it was that snored.

  He went carefully down the stairs, trailing his hand along the banister to guide him, and when he reached the massive living space he waited, standing stock-still so that his eyes might become accustomed to the deeper dark that crouched there like lairing animals.

  Slowly the animals took the shapes of chairs and couches, tables, cabinets and cases, and one of the chairs, he saw, had a man sitting in it.

  As if he had become aware that Sutton had seen him, the man stirred, turning his face toward him. And although it was too dark to see his features, Sutton knew that the man in the chair was Case.

  Then, he thought, the man who snores is Pringle, although he knew that it made no difference which it was that snored.

  “So, Mr. Sutton,” Case said, slowly, “you decided to go out and try to find our ship.”

  “Yes,” Sutton said, “I did.”

  “Now, that is fine,” said Case. “That is the way I like a man to speak up and say what’s on his mind.” He sighed. “You meet so many devious persons,” he said. “So many people who try to lie to you. So many people who tell you half-truths and feel, while they’re doing it, that they are being clever.”

  He rose out of the chair, tall and straight and prim.

  “Mr. Sutton,” he said, “I like you very much.”

  Sutton felt the absurdity of the situation, but there was a coldness and a half-anger in him that told him this was no laughing matter.

  Footsteps padded softly down the stairs behind him and Pringle’s voice whispered through the room.

  “So he decided to make a try for it.”

  “As you see,” said Case.

  “I told you that he would,” said Pringle, almost triumphantly. “I told you that he would get it figured out.”

  Sutton choked down the gorge that rose into his throat. But the anger held … anger at the way they talked about him as if he weren’t there.

  “I fear,” said Case to Sutton, “that we have disturbed you. We are most untactful people and you are sensitive. But let’s forget it all and get down to business now. You wanted, I believe, to ferret out our ship.”

  Sutton shrugged his shoulders. “It’s your move now,” he said.

  “Oh, but you misunderstand,” said Case. “We have no objection. Go ahead and ferret.”

  “Meaning I can’t find it?”

  “Meaning that you can,” said Case. “We didn’t try to hide it.”

  “We’ll even show you the way,” said Pringle. “We’ll go along with you. It will take you a lot less time.”

  Sutton felt the fine ooze of perspiration break out along his hairline and dampen his forehead.

  A trap, he told himself. A trap laid out in plain sight and not even baited. And he’d walked into it without even looking.

  But it was too late now. There was no backing out.

  He tried to make his voice sound unconcerned.

  “O.K.,” he said. “I’ll gamble with you.”

  XXIV

  The ship was real—strange, but very real. And it was the only thing that was. All the rest of the situation had a vague, unrealistic, almost faërie character about it, as if it might be a bad dream and one would wake up any moment and for an agonizing second try to distinguish between drama and reality.

  “That map over there,” said Pringle, “puzzles you, no doubt. And there is every reason that it should. For it is a time map.”

  He chuckled and rubbed the back of his head with a beefy hand.

  “Tell the truth, I don’t understand the thing myself. But Case does. Case is a military man and I’m just a propagandist and a propagandist doesn’t have to know what he is talking about, just so he talks about it most convincingly. But a military man does. A military man has to know or someday he’ll get behind an eight-ball and his life may depend on knowing.”

  So that was it, thought Sutton. That was the thing that had bothered him. That was the clue that had slipped his mind. The thing he couldn’t place about Case, the thing that he had told himself would explain Case, tell who he was and what he was and why he was here on this asteroid.

  A military man.

  I should have guessed, said Sutton to himself. But I was thinking in the present … not the past or future. And there are no military men, as such, in the world today. Although there were mililtary men before my time and apparently there will be military men in ages yet to come.

  He said to Case, “War in four dimensions must be slightly complicated.”

  And he didn’t say it because he was interested at the moment in war, whether in three or four dimensions, but because he felt that it was his turn to talk, his turn to keep this Mad Hare tea chatter at its proper pace.

  For that was what it was, he told himself … an utterly illogical situation, a madcap, slightly psychopathic interlude that might have its purpose, but a hidden, tangled purpose.

  “The time has come,” the Walrus said, “To talk of many things, Of shoes—and ships—and sealing wax—Of cabbages—and kings—”

  Case smiled when he spoke to him, a tight, hard, clipped, military smile.

  “Primarily,” Case said, “it is a matter of charts and graphs and very special knowledge and some superguessing. You figure out where the enemy may be and what he may be thinking and you get there first.”

  Sutton shrugged. “Basically that always was the principle,” he said. “You get there fustest …”

  “Ah,” said Pringle, “but there are now
so many more places where the enemy may go.”

  “You work with thought graphs and attitude charts and historic reports,” said Case, almost as if he had not been interrupted. “You trace back certain happenings and then you go back and try to change some of those happenings … just a little, you understand, for you must not change them much. Just enough so the end result is slightly different, just a little less favorable to the enemy. One change here and another there and you have him on the run.”

  “It drives you nuts,” said Pringle, confidentially. “Because you must be sure, you see. You pick out a nice juicy historic trend and you figure it out to the finest detail and you pick a key point where change is indicated, so you go back and change it.…”

  “And, then,” said Case, “it kicks you in the face.”

  “Because, you understand,” said Pringle, “the historian was wrong. Some of his material was wrong or his method was clumsy or his reasoning was off.…”

  “Somewhere along the line,” said Case, “he missed a lick.”

  “That’s right,” said Pringle, “somewhere he missed a lick and you find, after you have changed it, that it affects your side more than it does your enemy’s.”

  “Now, Mr. Bones,” said Sutton, “I wonder if you could tell me why a chicken runs across the road.”

  “Yes, sir, Mr. Interlocutor,” said Pringle. “Because it wants to get on the other side.”

  Mutt and Jeff, thought Sutton. A scene jerked raw and bleeding from a Krazy Kat cartoon.

  But clever Pringle was a propagandist and he was no fool. He knew semantics and he knew psychology and he even knew about the ancient minstrel shows. He knew all there was to know about the human race, so far as that knowledge could serve him in the human past.

  A man had landed in the bluff pasture one morning six thousand years before and John H. Sutton, Esq., had come ambling down the hill, swinging a stick, for he was the sort of man who would have carried a stick, a stout, strong hickory stick, no doubt, cut and trimmed with his own jackknife. And the man had talked with him and had used the same kind of mental tactics on John H. Sutton as Pringle now was trying to use an Sutton’s far descendant.

  Go ahead, said Sutton silently. Talk yourself hoarse in the throat and squeaky in the tongue. For I am on to you and you’re the one who knows it. And pretty soon we’ll get down to business.

  As if he had read Sutton’s thoughts, Case said to Pringle:

  “Jake, it isn’t working out.”

  “No, I guess it ain’t,” said Pringle.

  “Let’s sit down,” said Case.

  Sutton felt a flood of relief. Now, he told himself, he would find out what the others wanted, might get some clue to what was going on.

  He sat down in a chair and from where he sat he could see the front end of the cabin, a tiny living space that shrieked efficiency. The control board canted in front of the pilot’s chair, but there were few controls. A row of buttons, a lever or two, a panel of toggles that probably controlled lights and ports and such … and that was all. Efficient and simple … no foolishness, a minimum of manual controls. The ship, Sutton thought, must almost fly itself.

  Case slid down into a chair and crossed his long legs, stretching them out in front of him, sitting on his backbone. Pringle perched on a chair’s edge, leaning forward, rubbing hairy hands.

  “Sutton,” asked Case, “what is it that you want?”

  “For one thing,” said Sutton, “this time business.…”

  “You don’t know?” asked Case. “Why, it was a man in your own time. A man who is living at this very moment.…”

  “Case,” said Pringle, “this is 7990. Michaelson really did very little with it until 8003.”

  Case clapped a hand to his forehead. “Oh, so it is,” he said. “I keep forgetting.”

  “See,” Pringle said to Sutton. “See what I mean?”

  Sutton nodded, although for the life of him he didn’t see what Pringle meant.

  “But how?” asked Sutton.

  “It’s all a matter of the mind,” said Pringle.

  “Certainly,” said Case. “If you’d just stop to think of it, you would know it was.”

  “Time is a mental concept,” said Pringle. “They looked for time everywhere else before they located it in the human mind. They thought it was a fourth dimension. You remember Einstein.…”

  “Einstein didn’t say it was a fourth dimension,” said Case. “Not a dimension as you think of length or breadth or depth. He thought of it as duration.…”

  “That’s a fourth dimension,” said Pringle.

  “No, it’s not,” said Case.

  “Gentlemen,” said Sutton. “Gentlemen.”

  “Well, anyhow,” said Case, “this Michaelson of yours figured out it was a mental concept, that time was in the mind only, that it has no physical properties outside of Man’s ability to comprehend and encompass it. He found that a man with a strong enough time sense …”

  “There are men, you know,” said Pringle, “who have what amounts to an exaggerated time sense. They can tell you ten minutes have passed since a certain event has transpired and ten minutes have gone past. They can count the seconds off as well and as accurately as any watch.”

  “So Michaelson built a time brain,” said Case. “A brain with its time sense exaggerated many billionfold, and he found that such a time brain could control time within a certain area … that it could master time and move through time and carry along with it any objects which might be within the field of power.”

  “And that is what we use today,” said Pringle. “A time brain. You just set the lever that tells the brain where you want to go … or rather, when you want to go … and the time brain does the rest.”

  He beamed at Sutton. “Simple, isn’t it?”

  “I have no doubt,” said Sutton, “that it is very simple.”

  “And now Mr. Sutton,” said Case, “what else do you want?”

  “Not a thing,” said Sutton. “Not a single thing.”

  “But that’s foolish,” Pringle protested. “There must be something that you want.”

  “A little information, maybe.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like what this is all about.”

  “You’re going to write a book,” said Case.

  “Yes,” said Sutton. “I intend to write a book.”

  “And you want to sell that book.”

  “I want to see it published.”

  “A book,” Case pointed out, “is a commodity. It’s a product of brain and muscle. It has a market value.”

  “I suppose,” said Sutton, “that you are in the market.”

  “We are publishers,” said Case, “looking for a book.”

  “A best seller,” Pringle added.

  Case uncrossed his legs, hitched himself higher in the chair.

  “It’s all quite simple,” he said. “Just a business deal. We wish you would go ahead and set your price.”

  “Make it high,” urged Pringle. “We are prepared to pay.”

  “I have no price in mind,” said Sutton.

  “We have discussed it,” Case told him, “in a rather speculative manner, wondering how much you might want and how much we might be willing to give. We figured a planet might be attractive to you.”

  “We’d make it a dozen planets,” Pringle said, “but that doesn’t quite make sense. What would a man do with a dozen planets?”

  “He might rent them out,” said Sutton.

  “You mean,” asked Case, “that you might be interested in a dozen planets?”

  “No, I don’t,” Sutton told him. “Pringle wondered what a man would do with a dozen planets and I was being helpful. I said …”

  Pringle leaned so far forward in his chair that he almost fell on his face.

  “Look,” he said, “we aren’t talking about one of the backwoods planets out at the tail end of nowhere. We’re offering you a landscaped planet, free of all venomous and disgusti
ng life, with a salubrious climate and tractable natives and all the customary living accommodations and improvements.”

  “And the money,” said Case, “to keep it running for the rest of your life.”

  “Right spang in the middle of the galaxy,” said Pringle. “It’s an address you wouldn’t be ashamed of.”

  “I’m not interested,” said Sutton.

  Case’s temper cracked.

  “Good Lord, man, what is it that you want?”

  “I want information,” Sutton said.

  Case sighed. “All right, then. We’ll give you information.”

  “Why do you want my book?”

  “There are three parties interested in your book,” said Case. “One of those parties would kill you to prevent your writing it. What is more to the point, they probably will if you don’t throw in with us.”

  “And the other party, the third party?”

  “The third party wants you to write the book, all right, but they won’t pay you a dime for doing it. They’ll do all they can to make it easy for you to write the book and they’ll try to protect you from the ones that would like to kill you, but they’re not offering any money.”

  “If I took you up,” said Sutton, “I suppose you’d help me write the book. Editorial conferences and so forth.”

  “Naturally,” said Case. “We’d have an interest in it. We’d want it done the best way possible.”

  “After all,” said Pringle, “our interest would be as great as yours.”

  “I’m sorry,” Sutton told them, “my book is not for sale.”

  “We’d boost the ante some,” said Pringle.

  “It still is not for sale.”

  “That’s your final word?” asked Case. “Your considered opinion?”

  Sutton nodded.

  Case sighed. “Then,” he said, “I guess we’ve got to kill you.”

  He took a gun out of his pocket.

  XXV

  The psych-tracer ticked on, endlessly, running fast, then slow, skipping a beat now and then like the erratic time measurement of a clock with hiccoughs.

  It was the only sound in the room and to Adams it seemed as if he were listening to the beating of a heart, the breathing of a man, the throb of blood along the jugular vein.