The Works of Clifford D. Simak Volume Two Page 49

  The old man chuckled. “Old John, eh? Him and me was kids together. Sneakiest little rascal that I ever knew. Ain’t worth a tinker’s damn, old John ain’t. Went off to law school and got him an education. But he didn’t make a go of it. Roosting out on a farm up on the ridge, over there across the river.”

  He shot a look at Sutton. “You ain’t no relative of his, are you?”

  “Well,” said Sutton, “not exactly. Not very close, at least.”

  “Tomorrow’s the Fourth,” said the old man, “and I recollect the time that John and me blew up a culvert in Campbell Hollow, come the Fourth. Found some dynamite a road gang had been using for blasting. John and me, we figured it would make a bigger bang if we confined it, sort of. So we put her in the culvert pipe and lit a long fuse. Mister, it blew that culvert all to hell. I recollect our dads like to took the hide off us for doing it.”

  Dead ringer, thought Sutton. John H. Sutton is just across the river and tomorrow is the Fourth. July 4, 1977, that’s what the letter said.

  And I didn’t have to ask. The old codger up and told me.

  The sun was a furnace blast from the river’s surface, but here, underneath the trees, one just caught the edge of the flare of heat. A leaf floated by and there was a grasshopper riding on it. The grasshopper tried to jump ashore, but his jump fell short and the current grabbed him and swallowed him and took him out of sight.

  “Never had a chance,” said the old man, “that hopper didn’t. Wickedest river in these United States, the old Wisconsin is. Can’t trust her. Tried to run steamboats on her in the early days, but they couldn’t do it, for where there was a channel one day there’d be a sand bar on the next. Current shifts the sand something awful. Government fellow wrote a report on her once. Said the only way you could use the Wisconsin for navigation was to lathe and plaster it.”

  From far overhead came the rumble of traffic crossing the bridge. A train came by, chuffing and grinding, a long freight that dragged itself up the valley. Long after it had passed, Sutton heard its whistle hooting like a lost voice for some unseen crossing.

  “Destiny,” said the old man, “sure wasn’t working worth a hoot for that hopper, was it?”

  Sutton sat bolt upright, stammering. “What was that you said?”

  “Don’t mind me,” the old man told him. “I go around mumbling to myself. Sometimes people hear me and think that I’m crazy.”

  “But destiny? You said something about destiny.”

  “Interested in it, lad,” said the old man. “Wrote a story about it once. Didn’t amount to much. Used to mess around some, writing, in my early days.”

  Sutton relaxed and lay back.

  A dragonfly skimmed the water’s surface. Far up the bank, a small fish jumped and left a widening circle in the water.

  “About this fishing,” said Sutton. “You don’t seem to care whether you catch anything or not.”

  “Rather not,” the old man told him. “Catch something and you got to take it off the hook. Then you got to bait up again and throw the hook back in the river. Then you got to clean the fish. It’s an awful sight of work.”

  He took the pipe out of his mouth and spat carefully into the river.

  “Ever read Thoreau, son?”

  Sutton shook his head, trying to remember. The name struck a chord of memory. There had been a fragment in a book of ancient literature in his college days. All that was left of what was believed to have been an extensive piece of writing.

  “You ought to,” the old man told him. “He had the right idea, Thoreau did.”

  Sutton rose and dusted off his trousers.

  “Stick around,” the old man said. “You ain’t bothering me. Hardly at all.”

  “Got to be getting along,” said Sutton.

  “Hunt me up some other time,” the old man said. “We could talk some more. My name is Cliff, but they call me Old Cliff now. Just ask for Old Cliff. Everybody knows me.”

  “Someday,” Sutton said politely, “I’ll do just that.”

  “Care for another snort before you go?”

  “No, thank you,” said Sutton, backing off. “No, thank you very much.”

  “Oh, well,” the old man said. He lifted the jug and took a long and gurgling drink. He lowered the jug and whooshed out his breath, but it was not so spectacular this time. There was no butterfly.

  Sutton climbed the bank to the blaze of sun again.

  “Sure,” said the station agent, “the Suttons live just across the river, over in Grant County. Several ways to get there. Which one would you like?”

  “The longest one,” Sutton told him. “I’m not in any hurry.”

  The moon was coming up when Sutton climbed the hill to reach the bridge.

  He was in no hurry, for he had all night.

  XXXIV

  The land was wild … wilder than anything Sutton had ever seen on the lawn-mowered, trimmed and watered parks of his native Earth. The land tilted upward, as if it rested on a knife edge, and it was littered by great clumps of stone which appeared to have been flung down in god-like anger by a giant hand out of forgotten time. Stark bluffs speared upward, soaring massively, masked by mighty trees that seemed to have strived, at one time, to match the height and dignity of the rocky cliffs. But now they stood defeated, content to be less than the very cliffs, but with a certain dignity and patience learned, no doubt, through their ancient striving.

  Summer flowers huddled in the spaces between the strewn rocks or clung close to the mossy root-mounds of the larger trees. A squirrel sat on a limb somewhere and chattered half in anger, half in rapture at the rising sun.

  Sutton toiled upward, following the rock-filled ravine from the river road. At times he walked, but more often he went on hands and knees, clawing his way up the slope.

  He stopped often and stood with heels dug in and back resting against a tree, wiping the perspiration from his dripping face. In the valley below, the river that had seemed roiled and muddy as he walked along it on the road had assumed a blueness that challenged the very blueness of the sky which it reflected. And the air was crystal clear above it, clearer than the air had ever seemed before. A hawk dived down across the gulf of space between the blueness of the sky and the blueness of the river and it seemed to Sutton that he could see each separate feather in the folded wings.

  Once, through the trees, he glimpsed the break in the cliffs ahead and knew that he was at the place that old John Sutton had mentioned in his letter.

  The sun was only a couple of hours high and there still was time. There still would be time, for John Sutton had talked to the man only a couple of hours or so and then had gone to dinner.

  From there on, with the cleft of the cliff in sight, Sutton took his time. He reached the top and found the boulder that his old ancestor had spoken of and it was appropriate for sitting.

  He sat upon it and stared across the valley and was grateful for the shade.

  And there was peace, as John Sutton had said there was. Peace and the quieting majesty of the scene before him … the strange third-dimensional quality of the space that hung, as if alive, above the river valley. Strangeness, too, the strangeness of expected … and unexpected … happenings.

  He looked at his watch and it was half past nine, so he left the boulder and lay down behind a patch of brush and waited. Almost as he did, there was a soft, smooth swish of motor-noise and a ship came down, a tiny one-man ship, slanting across the trees, to land in the pasture just beyond the fence.

  A man got out and leaned against the ship, staring at the sky and trees, as if he were satisfying himself that he had reached his destination.

  Sutton chuckled quietly to himself.

  Stage setting, he said. Dropping in unexpectedly and with a crippled ship … no need to explain your presence. Waiting for a man to come walking up and talk to you. Most natural thing in all the world. You didn’t seek him out, he saw you and came to you and of course he talked.

  You couldn�
��t come walking up the road and turn in at the gate and knock at the door and say:

  “I came to pick up all the scandal and the dirt I can about the Sutton family. I wonder if I might sit down and talk with you.”

  But you could land in a pasture with a crippled ship and first you’d talk of corn and pasture, of weather and of grass, and finally you’d get around to talking about personal and family matters.

  The man had gotten out his wrench now and was tinkering at the ship.

  It must almost be time.

  Sutton lifted himself on his arms and stared through the close-laced branches of the hazel brush.

  John H. Sutton was coming down the hill, a big-bellied man with a trim white beard and an old black hat, and his walk was a waddle with some swagger in it.

  XXXV

  So this is failure, Eva Armour thought. This is how failure feels. Dry in the throat and heavy in the heart and tiredness in the brain.

  I am bitter, she told herself, and I have a right to be. Although I am so tired with trying and with failure that the knife edge of bitterness is dulled.

  “The psych-tracer in Adams’ office has stopped,” Herkimer had said and then the plate had gone dead as he cut the visor.

  There was no trace of Sutton and the tracer had gone dead.

  That meant that Sutton was dead and he could not be dead, for historically he had written a book and as yet he had not written it.

  Although history was something that you couldn’t trust. It was put together wrong, or copied wrong, or misinterpreted, or improved upon by a man with a misplaced imagination. Truth was so hard to keep, myth and fable so easy to breathe into a life that was more logical and more acceptable than truth.

  Half the history of Sutton, Eva knew, must be purely apocryphal. And yet there were certain truths that must be truths indeed.

  Someone had written a book and it would have had to be Sutton, for no one else could break the language in which his notes were written and the words themselves breathed the very sincerity of the man himself.

  Sutton had died, but not on Earth nor in Earth’s solar system and not at the age of sixty. He had died on a planet circling some far star and he had not died for many, many years.

  These were truths that could not well be twisted. These were truths that had to stand until they were disproved.

  And yet the tracer had stopped.

  Eva got up from her chair and walked across the room to the window that looked out on the landscaped grounds of the Orion Arms. Fireflies were dotting the bushes with their brief, cold flame and the late moon was coming up behind a cloud that looked like a gentle hill.

  So much work, she thought. So many years of planning. Androids who had worn no mark upon their forehead and who had been formed to look exactly like the humans they replaced. And other androids who had marks upon their foreheads, but who had not been the androids made in the laboratories of the eightieth century. Elaborate networks of espionage, waiting for the day Sutton would come home. Years of puzzling over the records of the past, trying to separate the truth from the half-truth and the downright error.

  Years of watching and of waiting, parrying the counter-espionage of the Revisionists, laying the groundwork for the day of action. And being careful … always careful. For the eightieth century must not know, must not even guess.

  But there had been unseen factors.

  Morgan had come back and warned Adams that Sutton must be killed.

  Two humans had been planted on the asteroid.

  Although those two factors could not account entirely for what had happened. There was another factor somewhere.

  She stood at the window, looking out at the rising moon, and her brows knit into crinkling lines of thought. But she was too tired. No thought would come.

  Except defeat.

  Defeat would explain it all.

  Sutton might be dead and that would be defeat, utter and complete defeat. Victory for an officialdom that was at once too timid and too vicious to take any active part in the struggle of the book. An officialdom that sought to keep the status quo, willing to wipe out centuries of thought to safely maintain its foothold in the galaxy.

  Such a defeat, she knew, would be even worse than a defeat by the Revisionists, for if the Revisionists had won, there still would be a book, there still would be the teaching of Man’s own destiny. And that, she told herself, was better than no inkling of destiny at all.

  Behind her, the visaphone purred, and she spun around, hurried across the room.

  A robot said, “Mr. Sutton called. He asked about Wisconsin.”

  “Wisconsin?”

  “It’s an old place name,” the robot said. “He asked about a place called Bridgeport, Wisconsin.”

  “As if he were going there?”

  “As if he were going there,” the robot said.

  “Quick,” said Eva, “tell me. Where is this Bridgeport?”

  “Five or six miles away,” said the robot, “and at least four thousand years.”

  She caught her breath. “In time,” she said.

  “Yes, miss, in time.”

  “Tell me exactly,” Eva told him, but the robot shook his head.

  “I don’t know. I couldn’t catch it. His mind was all roiled up. He’d just come through a trying experience.”

  “Then you don’t know.”

  “I wouldn’t bother if I were you,” the robot told her. “He struck me as a man who knew what he was doing. He’ll come out all right.”

  “You’re sure of that?”

  “I’m sure of it,” the robot said.

  Eva snapped the visor off and walked back to the window.

  Ash, she thought. Ash, my love, you simply have to be all right. You must know what you’re doing. You must come back to us and you must write the book and …

  Not for me alone, she said. Not for me alone, for I, least of all of them, have a claim on you. But the galaxy has a claim on you, and maybe someday the universe. The little striving lives are waiting for your words and the hope and dignity they spell. And most of all the dignity, she said. Dignity ahead of hope. The dignity of equality—the dignity of the knowledge that all life is on an equal basis, that life is all that matters, that life is the badge of a greater brotherhood than anything the mind of Man has ever spelled out in all its theorizing.

  And I, she thought. I have no right to think the way I do, to feel the way I do.

  But I can’t help it. Ash.

  I can’t help but love you, Ash.

  Someday, she said. Someday.

  She stood straight and lonely and the tears came in her eyes and trickled down her cheeks and she did not raise her hand to wipe them off.

  Dreams, she said. Broken dreams are bad enough. But the dream that has no hope … the dream that is doomed long before it’s broken, that’s the worst of all.

  XXXVI

  A dry stick cracked under Sutton’s feet and the man with the wrench slowly turned around. A swift, smooth smile spread upon his face and spread out in widening crinkles to hide the amazement that glittered in his eyes.

  “Good afternoon,” said Sutton.

  John H. Sutton was a speck that had almost climbed the hill. The sun had passed its zenith and was swinging toward the west. Down in the river’s valley a half-dozen crows were cawing and it was as if the sound came from underneath their feet.

  The man held out his hand. “Mr. Sutton, isn’t it?” he asked. “The Mr. Sutton, of the eightieth.”

  “Drop the wrench,” said Sutton.

  The man pretended not to hear him. “My name is Dean,” he said. “Arnold Dean. I’m from the eighty-fourth.”

  “Drop the wrench,” said Sutton and Dean dropped it. Sutton hooked it along the ground with a toe until it was out of reach.

  “That is better,” he said. “Now, let’s sit down and talk.”

  Dean gestured with a thumb. “The old man will be coming back,” he said. “He will get to wondering and he will come back
. He had a lot of questions he forgot to ask.”

  “Not for a while,” Sutton told him. “Not until he’s eaten and had an after-dinner nap.”

  Dean grunted and eased himself to a sitting position, back against the ship.

  “Random factors,” he said. “That’s what balls the detail up. You’re a random factor, Sutton. It wasn’t planned this way.”

  Sutton sat down easily and picked up the wrench. He weighed it in his hand. Blood, he thought, talking to the wrench. You’ll have blood upon one end before the day is out.

  “Tell me,” said Dean. “Now that you are here, what do you plan to do?”

  “Easy,” said Sutton. “You’re going to talk to me. You’re going to tell me something that I need to know.”

  “Gladly,” Dean agreed.

  “You said you came from the eighty-fourth. What year?”

  “Eighty-three eighty-six,” said Dean. “But if I were you, I’d go up a little ways. You’d find more to interest you.”

  “But you figure I’ll never get even so far as that,” said Sutton. “You think that you will win.”

  “Of course I do,” said Dean.

  Sutton dug into the ground with the wrench.

  “A while ago,” he said, “I found a man who died very shortly after. He recognized me and he made a sign, with his fingers raised.”

  Dean spat upon the ground.

  “Android,” he said. “They worship you, Sutton. They made a religion out of you. Because, you see, you gave them hope to cling to. You gave them something equal, something that made them, in one way, the equal of Man.”

  “I take it,” Sutton said, “you don’t believe a thing I wrote.”

  “Should I?”

  “I do,” said Sutton.

  Dean said nothing.

  “You have taken the thing I wrote,” said Sutton, evenly, “and you are trying to use it to fashion one more rung in the ladder of Man’s vanity. You have missed the point entirely. You have no sense of destiny because you gave destiny no chance.”

  And he felt foolish even as he said it, for it sounded so much like preaching. So much like what the men of old had said of faith when faith was just a word, before it had become a force to really reckon with. Like the old-time Bible-pounding preachers, who wore cowhide boots and whose iron-gray hair was rumpled and whose flowing beard was stained with tobacco juice.