The Works of Clifford D. Simak Volume Two Page 50

  “I won’t lecture you,” he said, angry at the smooth way Dean had put him on the defensive. “I won’t preach at you. You either accept destiny or you ignore it. So far as I’m concerned I’ll not raise a hand to convince any single man. The book I wrote tells you what I know. You can take it or you can leave it … it’s all the same to me.”

  “Sutton,” said Dean, “you’re batting your head against a stone wall. You haven’t got a chance. You’re fighting humankind. The whole human race against you … and nothing’s ever stood against the human race. All you have is a pack of measly androids and a few renegade humans … the kind of humans that used to swarm to the old cult-worships.”

  “The empire is built on androids and robots,” Sutton told him. “They can throw you for a loss any time they want to. Without them you couldn’t hold a single foot of ground outside the Solar system.”

  “They will stick with us in the empire business,” Dean told him, very confident. “They may fight us on this business of destiny, but they’ll stay with us because they can’t get along without us. They can’t reproduce, you know. And they can’t make themselves. They have to have humans to keep their race going, to replace the ones who get knocked off.”

  He chuckled. “Until one android can create another android, they will stick with us and they will work with us. For if they didn’t, that would be racial suicide.”

  “What I can’t understand,” said Sutton, “is how you know which ones are fighting you and which are sticking with you.”

  “That,” said Dean, “is the hell of it … we don’t. If we did, we’d make short work of this lousy war. The android who fought you yesterday may shine your shoes tomorrow, and how are you to know? The answer is, you don’t.”

  He picked up a tiny stone and flicked it out on the pasture grass.

  “Sutton,” he said, “it’s enough to drive you nuts. No battles, really. Just guerrilla skirmishes here and there, when one small task force sent out to do a time-fixing job is ambushed by another task force sent out by the other side to intercept them.”

  “As I intercepted you,” said Sutton.

  “Huh …” said Dean, and then he brightened. “Why, sure,” he said, “as you intercepted me.”

  One moment Dean was sitting with his back against the machine, talking as if he meant to keep on talking … and in the next moment his body was a fluid blaze of motion, jackknifing upward and forward in a lunge toward the wrench that Sutton held.

  Sutton moved instinctively, toes tightening their grip upon the ground, leg muscles flexing to drive his body upward, arm starting to jerk the wrench away.

  But Dean had the advantage of one long second’s start.

  Sutton felt the wrench ripped from his grip, saw the flash of it in the sun as Dean swung it upward for the blow.

  Dean’s lips were moving and even as he tried to duck, even as he tried to throw up his arms to shield his head, Sutton read the words the other’s lips were saying.

  “So you thought it would be me!”

  Pain exploded inside Sutton’s head and for one surprised instant he knew that he was falling, the ground rushing upward at his face. Then there was no ground, but only darkness that he fell through for long eternities.

  XXXVII

  Tricked!

  Tricked by a smooth character from five hundred years ahead in time.

  Tricked by a letter from six thousand years out of the past.

  Tricked, said Sutton, by my own muddle-headedness.

  He sat up and held his head in his hands and felt the westering sun against his back, heard the squalling of a catbird in the blackberry patch and the sound of the wind as it ran along the corn rows.

  Tricked and trapped, he said.

  He took his hands from his head and there in the trampled grass lay the wrench with the blood upon it. Sutton spread out his fingers and blood was on them, too … warm and sticky blood. Gingerly he touched his head with gentle hand and his hair was matted down.

  Pattern, he said. It all runs in a pattern.

  Here am I and there is the wrench and just beyond the fence is the field of corn that is better than knee-high on this splendid afternoon of July 4, 1977.

  The ship is gone and in another hour or so John H. Sutton will come waddling down the hill to ask the questions that he forgot to ask before. And ten years from now he will write a letter and in it he will record his suspicions concerning me and I will be in the farmyard at the very moment pumping me a drink.

  Sutton staggered to his feet and stood in the empty afternoon, with the sweep of sky above the horizon of the ridge and the panorama of the winding river far down the slope below.

  He touched the wrench with his toe and thought, I could break the pattern. I could take the wrench and then John H. would never find it and with one thing in the pattern changed the end might not be the same.

  I read the letter wrong, he thought. I always figured it would be the other man, not me. It never once occurred to me that it was my blood upon the wrench and that I would be the one who would steal the clothes from off the line.

  And yet there were certain things that didn’t track. He still had his clothes and there would be no need to steal. His ship was still resting on the river’s bottom and there was no need to stay.

  Yet it had happened once before, for if it had not happened, why had there been the letter? The letter had made him come here and the letter had been written because he had come, so he must have come before. And in that other time he’d stayed … and stayed only because he could not get away. This time he would go back, this time he need not stay.

  A second chance, he thought. I’ve been given another chance.

  Yet that wasn’t right, for if there had been a second time, old John H. would have known about it. And there couldn’t be a second time, for this was the very day that John H. had talked to the man out of the future.

  Sutton shook his head.

  There had been only one time that this had happened, and this, of course, was it.

  Something will happen, he told himself. Something that will not let me go back. Somehow I will be forced to steal the clothes and in the end I’ll walk to that farmhouse up there and ask if they need a hand for harvest.

  For the pattern was set. It had to be set.

  Sutton touched the wrench with his toe again, pondering.

  Then he turned and went down the hill. Glancing over his shoulder as he plunged into the woods, he saw old John H. coming down the hill.

  XXXVIII

  For three days Sutton toiled to free the ship from the tons of sand that the treacherous, swift-running river currents had mounded over it. And admitted, when three days were gone, that it was a hopeless task, for the current piled up the sand as fast as he could clear it.

  From there on he concentrated on clearing an opening to the entrance lock, and after another day and many cave-ins, he accomplished his purpose.

  Wearily he braced himself against the metal of the ship.

  A gamble, he told himself. But I will have to gamble.

  For there was no possibility of wrenching the ship free by using the engines. The tubes, he knew, were packed with sand and any attempt to throw in the rockets would simply mean that he and the ship and a good portion of the landscape would evaporate in a flashing puff of atomic fury.

  He had lifted a ship from a Cygnian planet and driven it across eleven years of space by the power of mind alone. He had rolled two sixes.

  Perhaps, he told himself. Perhaps …

  There were tons of sand and he was deathly tired, tired despite the smooth, efficient functioning of his non-human system of metabolism.

  I rolled two sixes, he said.

  Once I rolled two sixes and surely that was harder than the task I must do now. Although that called for deftness and this will call for power … and suppose, just suppose I haven’t got the strength.

  For it would take strength to lift this buried mass of metal out of the mound of
sand. Not the strength of muscles, but the strength of mind.

  Of course, he told himself, if he could not lift the ship he still could use the time-mover, shift the ship, lying where it was, forward six thousand years. Although there were hazards he did not like to think about. For in shifting the ship through time, he would be exposing it to every threat and vagary of the river through the whole six thousand years.

  He put his hand up to his throat, feeling for the key chain that hung around his neck.

  And there was no chain!

  Mind dulled by sudden terror, he stood frozen for a moment.

  Pockets, he thought, but his hands fumbled with a dread certainty that there was no hope. For he never put the keys in his pockets … always on their chain around his neck where they would be safe.

  He searched, feverishly at first, then with a grim, cold thoroughness.

  His pockets held no key.

  The chain broke, he thought in frantic desperation. The chain broke and it fell inside my clothes. He patted himself, carefully, from head to foot, and it was not there. He tossed the shirt aside and, sitting down, pulled off his trousers, searching in their folds, turning them inside out.

  And there was no key.

  On hands and knees, he searched the sands of the river bed, fumbling in the dim light that filtered through the rushing water.

  An hour later he gave up.

  The shifting, water-driven sand already had closed the trench he had dug to the lock and there was now no point of getting to the lock, for he could not open it when he got there.

  His shirt and trousers had vanished with the current.

  Wearily, beaten, he turned toward the shore, forcing his way through the stubborn water. His head broke into open air and the first stars of evening were shining in the east.

  On shore he sat down with his back against a tree. He took one breath and then another, willed the first heartbeat, then the second and a third … nursed the human metabolism back into action once again.

  The river gurgled at him, deep laughter on its tongue. In the wooded valley a whippoorwill began his measured chugging. Fireflies danced through the blackness of the bushes.

  A mosquito stung him and he slapped at it futilely.

  A place to sleep, he thought. A hay-loft in a barn, perhaps. And pilfered food from a farmer’s garden to fill his empty belly. Then clothes.

  At least he knew where he’d get the clothes.

  XXXIX

  Sundays were lonely.

  During the rest of the week there was work—physical labor—for a man to do, the endless, trudging round of work that is necessary to extract a living from the soil. Land to plow, crops to be put in and tended and finally harvested, wood to cut, fences to be built and mended, machines to be repaired—things that must be done with bone and muscle, with calloused hand and aching back and the hot sun on one’s neck or the whiplash of windy cold biting at one’s bones.

  For six days a farmer labored and the labor was a thing that dulled one to the aching emptiness of memory and at night, when work was done, sleep was swift and merciful. There were times when the work, not only for its sedative effect but of its very self, became a thing of interest and of satisfaction. The straight line of new-set fence posts became a minor triumph when one glanced back along their length. The harvest field, with its dust upon one’s hoes and its smell of sun on golden straw and the clacking of the binder as it went its rounds, became a full-breasted symbolism of plenty and contentment. And there were moments when the pink blush of apple blossoms shining through the silver rain of spring became a wild and pagan paean of the resurrection of the Earth from the frosts of winter.

  For six days a man would labor and would not have time to think; on the seventh day he rested and braced himself for the loneliness and the thoughts of desperation that idleness would bring.

  Not a loneliness for a people or a world or a way of life, for this world was kindlier and closer to Earth and life and safer—much safer—than the world one had left behind. But a nagging loneliness, an accusing loneliness that talked of a job that waited, a piece of work that now might wait forever, a task that must be done, but now might never be done.

  At first there had been hope.

  Surely, Sutton thought, they will look for me. Surely they will find a way to reach me.

  The thought was a comfort that he hugged close against himself, a peace of mind that he could not bring himself to analyze too closely. For he realized, even as he coddled it, that it was a generalization, that it might not survive too close a scrutiny, that it was fashioned of faith and of wishful thinking and that for all its wealth of comfort it might be a fragile bauble.

  The past cannot be changed, he argued with himself, in its entirety. It can be altered—subtly. It can be twisted and it can be dented and it can be whittled down, but by and large it stands. And that is why I’m here, that must be why I’m here, and I’ll have to stay until old John H. writes the letter to himself. For the past is in the letter—the letter brought me here and it will keep me here until it’s finally written. Up to that point the pattern must necessarily hold, for up to that point in time the past, so far as I and my relation with it are concerned, is a known and revealed past. But the moment the letter is written it becomes an unknown past, it tends to the speculative and there is no known pattern. After the letter’s written, so far as I’m concerned anything can happen.

  Although he admitted, even as he thought it, that his premise was fallacious. For known or not, revealed or unrevealed, the past would form a pattern. For the past had happened. He was living in a time that already had been set and molded.

  Although even in that thought there was a hope, even in the unknownness of the past and the knowledge that by and large what had happened was a thing that stood unchanged, there must be hope. For somewhere, some when he had written a book. The book existed and therefore had happened, although so far as he was concerned it had not happened yet. But he had seen two copies of the book and that meant that in some future age the book was a factor in the pattern of the past.

  Sometime, said Sutton, they will find me. Sometime before it is too late.

  They will hunt for me and find me. They will have to find me.

  They? he asked himself, finally honest with himself.

  Herkimer, an android.

  Eva Armour, a woman.

  They … two people.

  But not those two alone. Surely not those two alone. Back of them, like a shadowy army, all the other androids and all the robots that Man had ever fashioned. And here and there a human who saw the rightness of the proposition that Man could not, by mere self-assertion, be a special being; understanding that it was his greater glory to take his place among the other things of life, as a simple thing of life, as a form of life that could lead and teach and be a friend rather than a thing that conquered and ruled and stood as one apart.

  They would look for him, of course, but where?

  With all of time and all of space to search in, how would they know when and where to look?

  The robot at the information center, he remembered, could tell them that he had inquired about an ancient town called Bridgeport. And that would tell them where. But no one could tell them when.

  For no one knew about the letter … absolutely no one. He remembered how the dried and flaky mucilage had showered down across his hands in a white and aged powder when his thumbnail had cracked loose the flap of the envelope. No one, certainly, had seen the contents of that letter since the day it had been written until he, himself, had opened it.

  He realized now that he should have gotten word to someone … word of where and when he was going and what he meant to do. But he had been so confident and it had seemed such a simple thing, such a splendid plan.

  A splendid plan in the very directness of its action … to intercept the Revisionist, to knock him out and take his ship and go forward into time to take his place. It could have been arranged, of that he was c
ertain. There would have been an android somewhere to help fashion his disguise, there would have been papers in the ship and androids from the future to brief him on the things that he would have to know.

  A splendid plan … except it hadn’t worked.

  I could have told the information robot, Sutton told himself. He certainly was one of us. He would have passed the word along.

  He sat with his back against the tree and stared out across the river valley, hazy with the blue of the Indian summer. In the field below him the corn stood in brown and golden shocks, like a village of wigwams that clustered tight and warm against the sure knowledge of the winter’s coming. To the west the bluffs of the Mississippi were a purple cloud that crouched close against the land. To the north the golden land swept up in low hill rising on low hill until it reached a misty point where, somewhere, land stopped and sky began, although one could not find the definite dividing point, no clear-cut pencil mark that held the two apart.

  A bluejay flashed down across the sky and came to rest upon a sun-washed fence post. It jerked its tail and squalled, scolding anything that might be within its hearing.

  A field mouse came out of a corn shock and looked at Sutton for a moment with its beady eyes, then squeaked in sudden fright and whisked into the shock again, its tail looped above its back in frantic alarm.

  Simple folk, thought Sutton. The little, simple, furry folk. They would be with me, too, if they could only know. The bluejay and the field mouse, the owl and hawk and squirrel. A brotherhood, he thought … the brotherhood of life.

  He heard the mouse rustling in the shock and he tried to imagine what life as a mouse might mean. Fear first of all, of course, the ever-present, quivering, overriding fear of other life, of owl and hawk, of mink and fox and skunk. And the fear of Man and cat and dog. And the fear of Man, he said. All things fear Man. Man has made all things to fear him.