The Works of Clifford D. Simak Volume Two Page 52

  But there was a line … a line he had never crossed, either through innate decency or a fear of being apprehended. He could not decide quite which.

  The road was a dusty strip of white that ran along the ridge, twisting between the deep bowls of darkness where the land fell away into deep hollows. Sutton walked slowly, footfalls muffled by the dust. The land was black and the road was white and the stars were large and soft in the summer night. So different, Sutton thought, from the winter stars. In the winter the stars retreated high into the sky and glowed with a hard and steely light.

  Peace and quiet, he told himself. In this corner of the ancient Earth there is peace and quiet, unbroken by the turbulence of twentieth-century living.

  From a land like this came the steady men, the men who in a few more generations would ride the ships out to the stars. Here, in the quiet corners of the world, were built the stamina and courage, the depth of character and the deep convictions that would take the engines that more brilliant, less stable men had dreamed and drive them to the farthest rims of the galaxy, there to hold key worlds for the glory and the profit of the race.

  The profit, Sutton said.

  Ten years, he thought, and the involuntary compact with time has been consummated … each condition filled. I am free to go, to go anywhere, any time I choose.

  But there was no place to go and no way to get there.

  I would like to stay, said Sutton. It is pleasant here.

  “Johnny,” he said. “Johnny, what are we going to do?”

  He felt the stir in his mind, the old dog stir, the wagging tail, the comfort of blankets tucked about a child in his trundle bed.

  “It’s all right, Ash,” said Johnny. “Everything’s all right. You needed these ten years.”

  “You’ve stayed with me, Johnny.”

  “I am you,” said Johnny. “I came when you were born. I’ll stay until you die.”

  “And then?”

  “You’ll not need me, Ash. I’ll go to something else. Nothing walks alone.”

  None walks alone, said Sutton, and he said it like a prayer.

  And he was not alone.

  Someone walked beside him and where he’d come from and how long he’d been there Sutton did not know.

  “This is a splendid walk,” said the man, whose face was hidden in darkness. “Do you take it often?”

  “Almost every night,” said Sutton’s tongue and his brain said, Steady! Steady!

  “It is so quiet,” said the man. “So quiet and alone. It is good for thinking. A man could do a lot of thinking, walking nights out here.”

  Sutton did not answer.

  They plodded along, side by side, and even while he fought to keep relaxed, Sutton felt his body tensing.

  “You’ve been doing a lot of thinking, Sutton,” said the man. “Ten whole years of thinking.”

  “You should know,” said Sutton. “You’ve been watching me.”

  “We’ve watched,” said the man. “And our machines have watched. We got you down on tape and we know a lot about you. A whole lot more than we did ten years ago.”

  “Ten years ago,” said Sutton, “you sent two men to buy me off.”

  “I know,” replied the man. “We have often wondered what became of them.”

  “That’s an easy one,” Sutton said. “I killed them.”

  “They had a proposition.”

  “I know,” said Sutton. “They offered me a planet.”

  “I knew at the time it wouldn’t work,” the man declared. “I told Trevor that it wouldn’t work.”

  “I suppose you have another proposition?” Sutton asked. “A slightly higher price?”

  “Not exactly,” said the man. “We thought this time we’d cut out the bargaining and just let you name your price.”

  “I’ll think about it,” Sutton told him. “I’m not too sure I can think up a price.”

  “As you wish, Sutton,” said the man. “We’ll be waiting … and watching. Just give us the sign when you’ve made up your mind.”

  “A sign?”

  “Sure. Just write us a note. We’ll be looking over your shoulder. Or just say … ‘Well, I’ve made up my mind.’ We’ll be listening and we’ll hear.”

  “Simple,” Sutton said. “Simple as all that.”

  “We made it easy for you,” said the man. “Good evening, Mr. Sutton.”

  Sutton did not see him do it, but he sensed that he had touched his hat … if he wore a hat. Then he was gone, turning off the road and going down across the pasture, walking in the dark, heading for the woods that sloped to the river bluffs.

  Sutton stood in the dusty road and listened to him go—the soft swish of dew-laden grass brushing on his shoes, the muted pad of his feet walking in the pasture.

  Contact at last! After ten years, contact with the people from another time. But the wrong people. Not his people.

  The Revisionists had been watching him, even as he had sensed them watching. Watching and waiting, waiting for ten years. But, of course, not ten years of their time, just ten years of his. Machines and watchers would have been sprinkled through those ten years, so that the job could have been done in a year or a month or even in, a week if they had wanted to throw enough men and materials into the effort.

  But why wait ten years? To soften him up, to make him ready to jump at anything they offered?

  To soften him up? He grinned wryly in the dark.

  Then suddenly the picture came to him and he stood there stupidly, wondering why he hadn’t thought of it much sooner.

  They hadn’t waited to soften him up … they had waited for old John H. to write the letter. For they knew about the letter. They had studied old John H. and they knew he’d write a letter. They had him down on tape and they knew him inside out and they had figured to an eyelash the way his mind would work.

  The letter was the key to the whole thing. The letter was the lure that had been used to suck Asher Sutton back into this time. They had lured him, then sealed him off and kept him, kept him as surely as if they’d had him in a cage. They had studied him and they knew him and they had him figured out. They knew what he would do as surely as they had known what old John H. would do.

  His mind flicked out and probed cautiously at the brain of the man striding down the hill.

  Chickens and cats and dogs and meadow mice—and not one of them suspected, not one of them had known, that another mind than theirs had occupied their brain.

  But the brain of a man might be a different matter. Highly trained and sensitive, it might detect outside interference, might sense if it did not actually know the invasion of itself.

  The girl won’t wait. I’ve been away too long. Her affections are less than skin-deep and she has no morals, absolutely none, and I’m the one to know. I’ve been on this damn patrol too long. She will be tired of waiting … she was tired of waiting when I was gone three hours. To hell with her … I can get another one. But not like her … not exactly like her. There isn’t another one anywhere quite like her.

  Whoever said this Sutton guy would be an easy one to crack was crazy as a loon. God, after ten years in a dump like this, I’d fall on someone’s neck and kiss ’em if they came back from my own time. Anyone at all … friend or foe, it would make no difference. But what does Sutton do? Not a God-damn word. Not a single syllable of surprise in any word he spoke. When I first spoke to him he didn’t even break his stride, kept right on walking as if he knew I’d been there all the time. Cripes, I could use a drink. Nerve-racking work.

  Wish I could forget that girl. Wish she would be waiting for me but I know she won’t. Wish …

  Sutton snapped back his mind, stood quietly in the road.

  And inside himself he felt the shiver of triumph, the swift backwash of relief and triumph. They didn’t know. In all their ten years of watching they had seen no more than the superficial things. They had him down on tape, but they didn’t know all that went on within his mind.

&n
bsp; A human mind, perhaps. But not his mind. A human mind they might be able to strip as bare as a sickled field, might dissect it and analyze it and read the story in it. But his mind told them only what it wished to tell them, only enough so that there would be no suspicion that he was holding back. Ten years ago Adams’ gang had tried to tap his mind and had not even dented it.

  The Revisionists had watched ten years and they knew each motion that he made, many of the things that he had thought.

  But they did not know that he could go to live within the mind of a mouse or a catfish or a man.

  For if they had known they would have set up certain safeguards, would have been on the alert against him.

  And they weren’t. No more alert than the mouse had been.

  He glanced back to the road to where the Sutton farmhouse stood upon the hill. For a moment he thought that he could see it, a darker mass against the darkness of the sky, but that, he knew, was no more than pure imagination. He knew that it was there and he had formed a mental image.

  One by one, he checked the items in his room. The books, the few scribbled sheets of paper, the razor.

  There was nothing there, he knew, that he could not leave behind. Not a thing that would arouse suspicion. Nothing that could be fastened on in some later day and turned into a weapon to be used against him.

  He had been prepared against this day, knowing that someday it would come—that someday Herkimer or the Revisionists or an agent from the government would step from behind a tree and walk along beside him.

  Knowing? Well, not exactly. Hoping. And ready for the hope.

  Long years ago his futile attempt to write the book of destiny without his notes had gone up in smoke. All that remained was a heap of paper ash, mixed these many years with the soil, leached away by the rains, gone as chemical elements into a head of wheat or an ear of corn.

  He was ready. Packed and ready. His mind had been packed and ready, he knew now, for these many years.

  Softly he stepped off the road and went down across the pasture, following the man who walked toward the river bluffs. His mind flicked out and tracked him through the darkness, using his mind to track him as a hound would use his nose to track a coon.

  He overhauled him scant minutes after he had entered the fringe of trees and after that kept a few paces behind him, walking carefully to guard against the suddenly snapping twig, the swish of swaying bushes that could have warned his quarry.

  The ship lay within a deep ravine and at a hail it lighted up and a port swung open. Another man stood in the lighted port and stared into the night.

  “That you, Gus?” he called.

  The other swore at him. “Sure. Who else do you think would be floundering around in these woods at the dead of night?”

  “I got to worrying,” said the man in the port. “You were gone longer than I thought you would be. Just getting ready to set out and hunt for you.”

  “You’re always worrying,” Gus growled at him. “Between you and this outlandish world, I’m fed up. Trevor can find someone else to do this kind of work from here on out.”

  He scrambled up the steps into the ship. “Get going,” he told the other man tersely. “We’re getting out of here.”

  He turned to close the port, but Sutton already had it closed.

  Gus took two steps backward, brought up against an anchored chair and stood there, grinning.

  “Look at what we got,” he said. “Hey, Pinky, look at what followed me back home.”

  Sutton smiled at them grimly. “If you gentlemen have no objection, I’ll hitch a ride with you.”

  “And if we have objections?” Pinky asked.

  “I’m riding this ship,” Sutton told him. “With you or without you. Take your choice.”

  “This is Sutton,” Gus told Pinky. “The Mr. Sutton. Trevor will be glad to see you, Sutton.”

  Trevor … Trevor. That was three times he had heard the name, and somewhere else he had heard it once before. He stood with his back against the closed port and his mind went back to another ship and another two men.

  “Trevor,” Case had said, or had it been Pringle who had said it? “Trevor? Why, Trevor is the head of the corporation.”

  “I’ve been looking forward, all these years,” Sutton told him, “to meeting Mr. Trevor. He and I will have a lot to talk about.”

  “Get her going, Pinky,” Gus said. “And send ahead a message. Trevor will want to break out the guard of honor for us. We’re bringing Sutton back.”

  XLII

  Trevor picked up a paper clip and flipped it at an inkwell on the desk. The clip landed in the ink.

  “Getting pretty good,” said Trevor. “Hit it seven times out of every ten. Used to be I missed it seven times out of every ten.”

  He looked at Sutton, studying him.

  “You look like an ordinary man,” he said. “I should be able to talk with you and make you understand.”

  “I haven’t any horns,” said Sutton, “if that is what you mean.”

  “Nor,” said Trevor, “any halo, either, so far as I’m concerned.”

  He flipped another paper clip and it missed the inkwell.

  “Seven out of ten,” said Trevor.

  He flipped another one and it was a hit. Ink spouted up and spattered on the desk.

  “Sutton,” said Trevor, “you know a great deal about destiny. Have you ever thought of it in terms of manifest destiny?”

  Sutton shrugged. “You’re using an antiquated term. Pure and simple propaganda of the nineteenth century. There was a certain nation that wore that one threadbare.”

  “Propaganda,” Trevor said. “Let’s call it psychology. You say a thing so often and so well that after a time everyone believes it. Even, finally, yourself.”

  “This manifest destiny,” said Sutton. “For the human race, I presume?”

  “Naturally,” said Trevor. “After all, we’re the animals that would know how to use it to the best advantage.”

  “You pass up a point,” declared Sutton. “The humans don’t need it. Already they think they are great and right and holy. Certainly, you don’t need to propagandize them.”

  “In the short view, you are right,” said Trevor. “But in the short view only.”

  He stabbed a sudden finger at Sutton. “Once we have the galaxy in hand, what do we do then?”

  “Why,” said Sutton. “Why, I suppose …”

  “That’s exactly it,” said Trevor. “You don’t know where you’re going. Nor does the human race.”

  “And manifest destiny?” asked Sutton. “If we had manifest destiny, it would be different?”

  Trevor’s words were scarcely more than a whisper. “There are other galaxies, Sutton. Greater even than this one. Many other galaxies.”

  Good Lord! thought Sutton.

  He started to speak and then closed his mouth and sat stiffly in his chair.

  Trevor’s whisper speared at him from across the desk.

  “Staggers you, doesn’t it?” he said.

  Sutton tried to speak aloud, but his voice came out a whisper, too.

  “You’re mad, Trevor. Absolutely mad.”

  “The long-range view,” said Trevor. “That is what we need. The absolutely unshakable belief in human destiny, the positive and all-inclusive conviction that Man is meant not only to take over this galaxy alone but all the galaxies, the entire universe.”

  “You should live long enough,” said Sutton, sudden mockery rising to his tongue.

  “I won’t see it, of course,” said Trevor. “And neither will you. Nor will our children’s children or their children for many generations.”

  “It will take a million years,” Sutton told him.

  “More than a million years,” Trevor told him calmly. “You have no idea, no conception of the scope of the universe. In a million years we’ll be getting a good start.…”

  “Then, why, for the love of heaven, do you and I sit here and quibble about it?”
/>   “Logic,” said Trevor.

  “There is no real logic,” Sutton declared, “in planning a million years ahead. A man can plan his own lifetime, if he wishes, and there is some logic in that. Or the life of his children, and there still would be some logic in it … and maybe in the life of his grandchildren. But beyond that there can be no logic.”

  “Sutton,” asked Trevor, “did you ever hear of a corporation?”

  “Why, yes, of course, but …”

  “A corporation could plan for a million years,” said Trevor. “It could plan very logically.”

  “A corporation is not a man,” said Sutton. “It is not an entity.”

  “But it is,” insisted Trevor. “An entity composed of men and created by men to carry out their wishes. It is a living, operative concept that is handed down from one generation to another to carry out a plan too vast to be accomplished in the lifetime of one man alone.”

  “Your corporation publishes books, too, doesn’t it?” asked Sutton.

  Trevor stared at him. “Who told you that?” he snapped.

  “A couple of men by the name of Case and Pringle,” Sutton said. “They tried to buy my book for your corporation.”

  “Case and Pringle are out on a mission,” Trevor said. “I had expected them back …”

  “They won’t be coming back,” said Sutton.

  “You killed them,” Trevor said, flatly.

  “They tried to kill me first,” said Sutton. “I’m awfully hard to kill.”

  “That would have been against my orders, Sutton. I do not want you killed.”

  “They were on their own,” said Sutton. “They were going to sell my carcass to Morgan.”

  There was no way of telling, Sutton thought, how you hit this man. There was no difference of expression in his eyes, no faintest flicker of change across his face.

  “I appreciate your killing them,” said Trevor. “It saves me the bother.”

  He flicked a clip at the inkwell and it was a hit.

  “It’s logical,” he said, “that a corporation should plan a million years ahead. It provides a framework within which a certain project may be carried forward without interruption although the personnel in charge should change from time to time.”