The Works of Clifford D. Simak Volume Two Page 53

  “Wait a minute,” Sutton told him. “Is there a corporation or are you just posing fables?”

  “There is a corporation,” Trevor told him, “and I am the man who heads it. Varied interests pooling their resources … and there will be more and more of them as time goes on. As soon as we can show something tangible.”

  “By tangible, you mean destiny for the human race, for the human race alone?”

  Trevor nodded. “Then we’ll have something to talk about. A commodity to sell. Something to back up our sales talk.”

  Sutton shook his head. “I can’t see what you expect to gain.”

  “Three things,” Trevor told him. “Wealth and power and knowledge. The wealth and power and knowledge of the universe. For Man alone, you understand. For a single race. For people like you and me. And of the three, knowledge perhaps would be the greatest prize of all, for knowledge, added to and compounded, correlated and co-ordinated, would lead to even greater wealth and power … and to greater knowledge.”

  “It is madness,” said Sutton. “You and I, Trevor, will be drifting dust, and not only ourselves, but the very era in which we live out this moment will be forgotten before the job is done.”

  “Remember the corporation.”

  “I’m remembering the corporation,” Sutton said, “but I can’t help but think in terms of people. You and I and the other people like us.”

  “’Let’s think in terms of people, then,” said Trevor, smoothly. “One day the life that runs in you will run in the brain and blood and muscle of a man who shall be part owner of the universe. There will be trillions upon trillions of life forms to serve him, there will be wealth that he cannot count, there will be knowledge of which you and I cannot even dream.”

  Sutton sat quietly, slumped in his chair.

  “You’re the only man,” said Trevor, “who is standing in the way. You’re the man who is blocking the project for a million years.”

  “You need destiny,” said Sutton, “and destiny is not mine to give away.”

  “You are a human being, Sutton,” Trevor told him, talking evenly. “You are a man. It is the people of your own race that I’m talking to you about.”

  “Destiny,” said Sutton, “belongs to everything that lives. Not to Man alone, but to every form of life.”

  “It needn’t,” Trevor told him. “You are the only man who knows. You are the man who can tell the facts. You can make it a manifest destiny for the human race instead of a personal destiny for every crawling, cackling, sniveling thing that has the gift of life.”

  Sutton didn’t answer.

  “One word from you,” said Trevor, “and the thing is done.”

  “It can’t be done,” said Sutton, “this scheme of yours. Think of the sheer time, the thousands of years, even at the rate of speed of the starships of today, to cross intergalactic space. Only from this galaxy to the next … not from this galaxy to the ultimate galaxy.”

  Trevor sighed. “You forget what I said about the compounding of knowledge. Two and two won’t make four, my friend. It will make much more than four. In some instances thousands of times more than four.”

  Sutton shook his head, wearily.

  But Trevor was right, he knew. Knowledge and technique would pyramid exactly as he said. Even, once Man had the time to do it, the knowledge in one galaxy alone …

  “One word from you,” Trevor said, “and the time war is at an end. One word and the security of the human race is guaranteed forever. For all the race will need is the knowledge that you can give it.”

  “It wouldn’t be the truth,” said Sutton.

  “That,” said Trevor, “doesn’t have a thing to do with it.”

  “You don’t need manifest destiny,” said Sutton, “to carry out your project.”

  “We have to have the human race behind us,” Trevor said. “We have to have something that is big enough to capture their imagination. Something important enough to make them pay attention. And manifest destiny, manifest destiny as it applies to the universe, is the thing to turn the trick.”

  “Twenty years ago,” said Sutton, “I would have thrown in with you.”

  “And now?” asked Trevor.

  Sutton shook his head. “Not now. I know more than I did twenty years ago. Twenty years ago I was a human, Trevor. I’m not too sure I’m entirely human any longer.”

  “I hadn’t mentioned the matter of reward,” said Trevor. “That goes without saying.”

  “No, thanks,” said Sutton. “I’d like to keep on living.”

  Trevor flipped a clip at the inkwell and it missed.

  “You’re slipping,” Sutton said. “Your percentage is way off.”

  Trevor picked up another clip.

  “All right,” he said. “Go ahead and have your fun. There’s a war on and we’ll win that war. It’s a hellish way to fight, but we’re doing it the best we can. No war anywhere, no surface indication of war, for you understand the galaxy is in utter and absolute peace under the rule of benevolent Earthmen. We can win without you, Sutton, but it would be easier with you.”

  “You’re going to turn me loose?” Sutton asked, in mock surprise.

  “Why, sure,” Trevor told him. “Go on out and beat your head against a stone wall a little longer. In the end, you’ll get tired of it. Eventually you’ll give up out of sheer exhaustion. You’ll come back then and give us the thing we want.”

  Sutton rose to his feet.

  He stood for a moment, indecisive.

  “What are you waiting for?” asked Trevor.

  “One thing has me puzzled,” Sutton told him. “The book, somehow, somewhere, already has been written. It has been a fact for almost five hundred years. How are you going to change that? If I write it now the way you want it written, it will change the human setup.…”

  Trevor laughed. “We got that one figured out. Let us say that finally, after all of these years, the original of your manuscript is discovered. It can be readily and indisputably identified by certain characteristics which you will very carefully incorporate into it when you write it. It will be found and proclaimed, and what is more, proved … and the human race will have its destiny.

  “We’ll explain the past unpleasantness by very convincing historic evidence of earlier tampering with the manuscript. Even your friends, the androids, will have to believe what we say once we get through with it.”

  “Clever,” Sutton said.

  “I think so, too,” said Trevor.

  XLIII

  At the building’s entrance a man was waiting for him. He raised his hand in what might have been a brief salute.

  “Just a minute, Mr. Sutton.”

  “Yes, what is it?”

  “There’ll be a few of us following you, sir. Orders, you know.”

  “But …”

  “Nothing personal, sir. We won’t interfere with anything you want to do. Just guarding you, sir.”

  “Guarding me?”

  “Certainly, sir. Morgan’s crowd, you know. Can’t let them pop you off.”

  “You can’t know,” Sutton told him, “how deeply I appreciate your interest.”

  “It’s nothing sir,” the man told him. “Just part of the day’s work. Glad to do it. Don’t mention it at all.”

  He stepped back again and Sutton wheeled and walked down the steps and followed the cinder walk that flanked the avenue.

  The sun was near to setting and looking back over his shoulder he saw the tall, straight lines of the gigantic office building in which he had talked to Trevor outlined against the brightness of the western sky. But of anyone who might be following him he did not see a sign.

  He had no place to go. He had no idea where to go. But he realized that he couldn’t stand around wringing his hands. He’d walk, he told himself, and think, and wait for whatever was going to happen next to happen.

  He met other walkers and a few of them stared at him curiously, and now, for the first time, Sutton realized that he sti
ll wore the clothing of the twentieth-century farm hand … blue denim overalls and cotton shirt, with heavy, serviceable farm shoes on his feet.

  But here, he knew, even such an outlandish costume would not arouse undue suspicion. For on Earth, with its visiting dignitaries from far Solar systems, with its Babel of races employed in the different governmental departments, with its exchange students, its diplomats and legislators representing backwoods planets, how a man dressed would arouse but slight curiosity.

  By morning, he told himself, he’d have to find some hiding place, some retreat where he could relax and figure out some of the angles in this world of five hundred years ahead.

  Either that or locate an android he could trust to put him in touch with the android organization … for although he had never been told so, he had no doubt there was android organization. There would have to be to fight a war in time.

  He turned off the path that flanked the roadway and took another one, a faint footpath that led out across marshy land toward a range of low hills to the north.

  Suddenly now he realized that he was hungry and that he should have dropped into one of the shops in the office building for a bite of food. And then he remembered that he had no money with which to pay for food. A few twentieth-century dollars were in his pockets, but they would be worthless here as a medium of exchange, although quite possibly they might have some value as collector’s items.

  Dusk came over the land and the frogs began their chorus, first from far away and then, with others joining in, the marsh resounded with their throaty pipings. Sutton walked through a world of faërie sound, and as he walked it almost seemed as if his feet did not touch the ground, but it floated along, driven by the breath of sound that rose to meet the first faint stars of evening shining above the dark heights that lay ahead.

  Short hours ago, he thought, he had walked a dusty hilltop road in the twentieth century, scuffing the white dust with his shoes … and some of the white dust, he saw, still clung to his shoes. Even as the memory of that hilltop road clung to his memory. Memory and dust, he thought, link us to the past.

  He reached the hills and began to climb them and the night was sweet with the smell of pine and the scent of forest flowers.

  He came to the top of a slight rise and stood there for a moment, looking out across the velvety softness of the night. Somewhere, near at hand, a cricket was tentatively tuning up his fiddle, and from the marsh came the muted sound of frogs. In the darkness just ahead of him a stream was splashing along its rocky bed and it talked as it went along, talked to the trees and its grassy banks and the nodding flowers that hung their sleepy heads above it.

  “I would like to stop,” it said. “I would like to stop and talk with you. But I can’t, you see. I must hurry on. I have some place I must go. I can’t waste a minute. I must hurry on.”

  Like Man, thought Sutton. For Man is driven like the stream. Man is driven by circumstance and necessity and the bright-eyed ambition of other restless men who will not let him be.

  He did not hear a sound, but he felt the great hand close upon his arm and jerk him off the path. Twisting, he sought to free himself of the grasp, and saw the dark blur of the man who had grabbed him. He balled his fist and swung it and it was a sledge-hammer slamming at the dark head, but it never reached its mark. A charging body slammed into his knees and bent them under him, arms wrapped themselves around his legs and he staggered, falling on his face.

  He sat up and somewhere off to the right he heard the soft snickering of rapidly firing guns and caught, out of the tail of his eyes, their bright flicker in the night.

  Then a hand came out of nowhere and cupped itself around his mouth and nose.

  “Powder!” he thought.

  And even as he thought it, he knew no more of dark figures in the woods, nor the cheeping frogs nor the snarling of the guns.

  XLIV

  Sutton opened his eyes to strangeness and lay quietly on the bed. A breeze came through an open window and the room, decorated with fantastic life-murals, was splashed with brilliant sunlight. The breeze brought in the scent of blooming flowers and in a tree outside a bird was chirping contentedly.

  Slowly Sutton let his senses reach out and gather in the facts of the room, the facts of strangeness … the unfamiliar furniture, the contour of the room itself, the green and purple monkeys that chased one another along the wavy vine that ran around the border of the walls.

  Quietly his mind moved back along the track of time to his final conscious moment. There had been guns flickering in the night and there had been a hand that reached out and cupped his nose.

  Drugged, Sutton told himself. Drugged and dragged away.

  Before that there had been a cricket and the frogs singing in the marsh and the talking brook that babbled down the hill, hurrying to get wherever it was going.

  And before that a man who had sat across a desk from him and told him about a corporation and a dream and plan the corporation held.

  Fantastic, Sutton thought. And in the bright light of the room, the very idea was one of utter fantasy … that Man should go out, not only to the stars, but to the galaxies.

  But there was greatness in it, a very human greatness. There had been a time when it had been fantasy to think that Man could ever lift himself from the bosom of the planet of his birth. And another time when it had been fantasy to think that Man would go beyond the Solar system, out into the dread reaches of nothingness that stretched between the stars.

  But there had been strength in Trevor, and conviction as well as strength. A man who knew where he was going and why he was going and what it took to get there.

  Manifest destiny, Trevor had said. That is what it takes. That is what it needs.

  Man would be great and he’d be a god. The concepts of life and thought that had been born on the Earth would be the basic concepts of the entire universe, of the fragile bubble of space and time that bobbed along on a sea of mystery beyond which no mind could penetrate. And yet, by the time that Man got where he was headed for, he might well be able to penetrate that, too.

  A mirror stood in one corner of the room and in it he saw the reflection of the lower half of his body, lying on the bed, naked except for a pair of shorts. He wiggled his toes and watched them in the glass.

  And you’re the only one who is stopping us, Trevor had told him. You’re the one man standing in the way of Man. You’re the stumbling block. You are keeping men from being gods.

  But all men did not think as Trevor did. All men were not tangled in the blind chauvinism of the human race.

  The delegates from the Android Equality League had talked to him one noon, had caught him as he stepped off the elevator on his way to lunch, and had stood ranged before him as if they expected him to attempt escape and were set to cut him off.

  One of them had twisted a threadbare cap in his dirty fingers and the woman’s hair had dangled and she had folded her hands across her stomach, as determined, stolid women do.

  They had been crackpots, certainly. They were fervent crusaders in a cause that held them up to a quiet and devastating scorn. Even the androids were not sympathetic to them, even the androids for whom they were working saw through the human ineffectiveness and the gaudy exhibitionism of their efforts.

  For the human race, thought Sutton, cannot even for a moment forget that it is human, cannot achieve the greatness of humility that will unquestioningly accord equality. Even while the League fought for the equality of androids, they could not help but patronize the very ones that they would make equal.

  What was it Herkimer had said? Equality not by special dispensation, not by human tolerance. But that was the only way the human race would ever accord equality … by dispensation or by overweening tolerance.

  And yet that pitiful handful of patronizers had been the only humans he might have turned to for help.

  A man who twisted his cap in grimy fingers, an old, officious woman and another man with time heavy on his
hands and nothing else to do.

  And yet, thought Sutton … and yet, there is Eva Armour.

  There may be others like her. Somewhere, working with the androids even now, there may be others like her.

  He swung his feet out of bed and sat on the bed’s edge. A pair of slippers stood on the floor and he worked his feet into them, stood up and walked to the mirror.

  A strange face stared back at him, a face he’d never seen before, and for a moment muddy panic surged within his brain.

  Then, sudden suspicion blossoming, his hand went up to his forehead and rubbed at the smudge that was there, set obliquely across his brow.

  Bending low, with his face close to the mirror, he verified the thought.

  The smudge upon his brow was an android identification mark! An identification key and a serial number!

  With his fingers he carefully explored his face, located the plastic overcoats that had changed its contours until he was unrecognizable.

  He turned around, made his way back to the bed, sat down upon it cautiously and gripped the edge of the mattress with his hands.

  Disguised, he told himself. Made into an android. Kidnaped a human, and an android when he woke.

  The door clicked and Herkimer said, “Good morning, sir. I trust that you are comfortable.”

  Sutton jerked erect. “So it was you,” he said.

  Herkimer nodded happily. “At your service, sir. Is there anything you wish?”

  “You didn’t have to knock me out,” said Sutton.

  “We had to work fast, sir,” said Herkimer. “We couldn’t have you messing up things, stumbling around and asking questions and wanting to know what it was all about. We just drugged you and hauled you off. It was, believe me, sir, much simpler that way.”

  “There was some shooting,” Sutton said. “I heard the guns.”

  “It seems,” Herkimer told him, “that there were a few Revisionists lurking about, and it gets a little complicated, sir, when one tries to tell about it.”

  “You tangle with those Revisionists?”

  “Well, to tell the truth,” said Herkimer, “some of them were so rash as to draw their guns. It was most unwise of them, sir. They got the worst of it.”