The Works of Clifford D. Simak Volume Two Page 55

  For he was being watched, he knew. Kept under observation, for by this time, certainly, Trevor would know that the android who had walked out of Eva Armour’s house could be none other than he. The psych-tracer, long ago, would have told the story, would have traced his movements and pinpointed him for Trevor’s men to watch.

  Take it easy, he told himself. Dawdle. Loaf. Act as if you didn’t have a thing to do, as if you didn’t have a thought in mind.

  You can’t fool them, but you can at least catch them unguarded when you have to move.

  And there were many things to do, many things left to think about, although he was satisfied that the course of action he had planned was the course to take.

  He took them up, step by step, checking them over for any chance of slip-up.

  First, back to Eva’s house to get the manuscript notes he had left on the hunting asteroid, notes that either Eva or Herkimer must have kept through all the years … or was it only weeks?

  That would be ticklish and embarrassing business at the best. But they were his notes, he told himself. They were his to claim. He had no commitments in this business.

  “I have come to get my notes. I suppose you still have them somewhere.”

  Or, “Remember the attaché case I had? I wonder if you took care of it for me.”

  Or, “I’m going on a trip. I’d appreciate my notes if you can lay your hands on them.”

  Or—

  But it was no use. However he might say it, whatever he might do, the first step would be to reclaim the notes.

  Dawdle up till then, he told himself. Work your way back toward the house until it’s almost dark. Then get the notes and after that move fast—so fast that Trevor’s gang can’t catch up with you.

  Second was the ship, the ship that he must steal.

  He had spotted it earlier in the day while loafing at the area spaceport. Sleek and small, he knew that it would be a fast job, and the stiff, military bearing of the officer who had been directing the provisioning and refueling had been the final tip-off that it was the ship he wanted.

  Loafing outside the barrier fence, playing the part of an idly curious, no-good android, he had carefully entered the officer’s mind. Ten minutes later, he was on his way with the information that he needed.

  The ship did carry a time warp unit.

  It was not taking off until the next morning.

  It would be guarded during the night.

  Without a doubt, Sutton told himself, one of Trevor’s ships, one of the fighting fleetships of the Revisionists.

  It would take nerve, he knew, to steal the ship. Nerve and fast footwork and a readiness and the ability to kill.

  Saunter out onto the field, as if he were waiting for an incoming ship, mingling with the crowd. Slip out of the crowd and walk across the field, acting as if he had a right to be there. Not run … walk. Run only if someone challenged him and made the challenge stick. Run then. Fight. Kill, if necessary. But get the ship.

  Get the ship and pile on the speed to the limit of endurance, heading in a direction away from his destination, driving the ship for everything that was in it.

  Two years out, or sooner if necessary, he would throw in the time unit, roll himself and the ship a couple of centuries into the past.

  Once in the past, he would have to ditch the motors, for undoubtedly they would have built-in recognition signals which could be traced. Unship them and let them travel in the direction he had been going.

  Then take over the empty hull with his nonhuman body, swing around and head toward Buster’s planet, still piling on the speed, building it up to that fantastic figure that was necessary to jump great interstellar spaces.

  Vaguely he wondered how his body, how the drive of his energy-intake body, would compare with the actual motors in the long haul. Better, he decided. Better than the motors. Faster and stronger.

  But it would take years, many years of time, for Buster was far out.

  He checked. Unshipping the engines would throw off pursuit. The pursuers would follow the recognition signals in the motors, would spend long days in overhauling them before they discovered their mistake.

  Check.

  The time roll would unhook the contact of Trevor’s psych-tracers, for they could not operate through time.

  Check.

  By the time other tracers could be set in other times to find him he would be so far out that the tracers would go insane trying to catch up on the time lag of his whereabouts—if, in fact, they could ever find it in the vastness of the outer reaches of the galaxy.

  Check.

  If it works, he thought. If it only works. If there isn’t some sort of slip-up, some kind of unseen factor.

  A squirrel skipped across the grass, sat up on its haunches and took a long look at him. Then, deciding that he was not dangerous, it started a busy search in the grass for imaginary buried treasure.

  Cut loose, thought Sutton. Cut loose from everything that holds me. Cut loose and get the job done. Forget Trevor and his Revisionists, forget Herkimer and the androids. Get the book written.

  Trevor wants to buy me. And the androids do not trust me. And Morgan, if he had the chance, would kill me.

  The androids do not trust me.

  That’s foolish, he told himself.

  Childish.

  And yet, they did not trust him. You are human, Eva had told him. The humans are your people. You are a member of the race.

  He shook his head, bewildered by the situation.

  There was one thing that stood out clearly. One thing he had to do. One obligation that was his and one that must be fulfilled or all else would be with utterly no meaning.

  There is a thing called destiny.

  The knowledge of that destiny has been granted me. Not as a human being, not as a member of the human race, but as an instrument to transmit that knowledge to all other thinking life.

  I must write a book to do it.

  I must make that book as clear and forceful and as honest as I can.

  Having done that, I have discharged my responsibility.

  Having done that, there is no further claim upon me.

  A footstep sounded on the path back of the bench and Sutton turned around.

  “Mr. Sutton, isn’t it?” said the man.

  Sutton nodded.

  “Sit down, Trevor,” he said. “I’ve been expecting you.”

  XLIX

  “You didn’t stay long with your friends,” said Trevor.

  Sutton shook his head. “We had a disagreement.”

  “Something about this Cradle business?”

  “You might call it that,” said Sutton. “It goes a good deal deeper. The fundamental prejudices rooted between androids and humans.”

  “Herkimer killed an android who brought him a message about the Cradle,” Trevor said.

  “He thought it was someone that you sent. Someone masquerading as an android. That is why he killed him.”

  Trevor pursed his mouth sanctimoniously. “Too bad,” he said. “Too bad. Mind telling me how he recognized the … might we call it the deception?”

  “That is something,” Sutton said, “that I’m not telling you.”

  Trevor labored at acting unconcerned. “The main point is,” he said, “that it didn’t work.”

  “You mean the androids didn’t run helter-skelter for the Cradle and show you where it was.”

  Trevor nodded. “There was another angle to it, too. They might have pulled some of their guards off the crisis points. That would have helped us some.”

  “Double-barreled,” said Sutton.

  “Oh, most assuredly,” said Trevor. “Nothing like getting the other fellow square behind the eight-ball.”

  He squinted at Sutton’s face.

  “Since when,” he asked, “and why did you desert the human race?”

  Sutton put his hand up to his face, felt the hardness of the plastic that had remodeled his features into those of another person.r />
  “It was Herkimer’s idea,” he declared. “He thought it would make me hard to spot. You wouldn’t be looking for an android, you know.”

  Trevor nodded agreement. “It would have helped,” he said. “It would have fooled us for a while, but when you walked away and the tracer followed you, we knew who you were.”

  The squirrel came hopping across the grass, sat down in front of them and looked them over.

  “Sutton,” Trevor asked, “how much do you know about this Cradle business?”

  “Nothing,” Sutton told him. “They told me I was a human and it was an android matter.”

  “You can see from that how important it must be.”

  “I think I can,” said Sutton.

  “You can guess, just from the name, what it might be.”

  “That’s not too hard to do,” said Sutton.

  “Because we needed a greater force of humans,” said Trevor, “we made the first androids a thousand years ago. We needed them to fill out the too-thin ranks of mankind. We made them as close to humans as we could. They could do everything the humans could except one thing.”

  “They can’t reproduce,” said Sutton. “I wonder, Trevor, if it had been possible, if we would have given that power to them, too. For if we had, they would have been true humans. There would have been no difference between a man whose ancestors were made in a laboratory and those whose ancestors stemmed back to the primal ocean. The androids would have been a self-continuing race, and they wouldn’t have been androids. They would have been humans. We would have been adding to our population by chemical as well as biological means.”

  “I dont’ know,” said Trevor. “Honestly, I don’t. Of course, the wonder is that we could make them at all, that we could produce life in the laboratory. Think of the sheer intellectual ability and the technical skill that went into it. For centuries men had tried to find out what life was, had run down one blind alley after another, bumping into stone wall after stone wall. Failing in a scientific answer, many of them turned back to the divine source, to a mythical answer, to the belief that it was a matter of divine intervention. The idea is perfectly expressed by du Noüy, who wrote back in the twentieth century.”

  “We gave the androids one thing we do not have ourselves,” said Sutton, calmly.

  Trevor stared at him, suddenly hard, suddenly suspicious.

  “You …”

  “We gave them inferiority,” said Sutton. “We made them less than human. We supplied them with a reason to fight us. We denied them something they have to fight to get … equality. We furnished them with a motive Man lost long ago. Man no longer needs to prove he is as good as anyone else, that he is the greatest animal in his world or in his galaxy.”

  “They’re equal now,” said Trevor, bitterly. “The androids have been reproducing themselves … chemically, not biologically, for a long time now.”

  “We could have expected it,” said Sutton. “We should have suspected it long ago.”

  “I suppose we should have,” Trevor admitted. “We gave them the same brains we have ourselves. We gave them, or we tried to give them, a human perspective.”

  “And we put a mark upon their foreheads,” Sutton told him.

  Trevor made an angry motion with his hand.

  “That little matter is being taken care of now,” he said. “When the androids make another android they don’t bother to put a mark upon his head.”

  Sutton started and then settled back as the thunder hit him … thunder that rolled and rumbled in his brain, a growing, painful, roaring thunder that shut out everything.

  He had said a weapon. He had said there was a weapon.…

  “They could make themselves better than they were originally,” said Trevor. “They could improve upon the model. They could build a super-race, a mutant race, call it what you will.…”

  Only one weapon, he had said. And you can’t fight with just one cannon.

  Sutton put a hand up to his forehead, rubbed hard against his brow.

  “Sure,” said Trevor. “You can go nuts thinking about it. I have. You can conjure up all sorts of possibilities. They could push us out. The new pushing out the old.”

  “The race would be human still,” said Sutton.

  “We built slowly, Sutton,” Trevor said. “The old race. The biological race. We came up from the dawn of Man, we came up from chipped flints and fist ax, from the cave and the treetop nest. We’ve built too slowly and painfully and bloodily to have our heritage taken from us by something to which that slowness and the pain and blood would mean not a thing at all.”

  One gun, Sutton thought. But he had been wrong. There were a thousand guns, a million guns, wheeling into line. A million guns to save destiny for all life that was or would be. Now or a million billion years from now.

  “I suppose,” he said, shakily, “that you feel now I should throw in with you.”

  “I want you,” said Trevor, “to find out for me where the Cradle is.”

  “So you can smash it,” Sutton said.

  “So I can save humanity,” said Trevor. “The old humanity. The real humanity.”

  “You feel,” said Sutton, “that all humans should stick together now.”

  “If you have a streak of the human in you,” said Trevor, “you will be with us now.”

  “There was a time,” said Sutton, “back on Earth, before men went to the stars, that the human race was the most important thing the mind of Man could know. That isn’t true any longer, Trevor. There are other races just as great.”

  “Each race,” said Trevor, “is loyal to its own. The human race must be loyal unto itself.”

  “I am going to be traitor,” Sutton said. “I may be wrong, but I still think that destiny is greater than humanity.”

  “You mean that you refuse to help us?”

  “Not only that,” said Sutton. “I am going to fight you. I’m telling you this now so that you will know. If you want to kill me, Trevor, now’s the time to do it. Because if you don’t do it now, it will be too late.”

  “I wouldn’t kill you for all the world,” said Trevor. “Because I need the words you wrote. Despite you and the androids, Sutton, we’ll read them the way we want them read. And so will all the other slimy, crawling things you admire so much. There’s nothing in God’s world that can stand before the human race, that can match the human race.…”

  Sutton saw the loathing that was on Trevor’s face.

  “I’m leaving you to yourself, Sutton,” Trevor told him. “Your name will go down as the blackest blot in all of human history. The syllables of your name will be a sound that the last human will gag upon if he tries to speak it. Sutton will become a common noun with which one man will insult another.…”

  He called Sutton a name that was a fighting word and Sutton did not stir upon the bench.

  Trevor stood up and started to walk away and then turned back. His voice was not much larger than a whisper, but it cut into Sutton’s brain like a whetted knife.

  “Go and wash your face,” he said. “Wash off the plastic and the mark. But you’ll never be human again, Sutton. You’ll never dare to call yourself a man again.”

  He turned on his heel and walked away, and staring at his back, Sutton saw the back of humanity turned upon him forevermore.

  Somewhere in his brain, as if it were from far away, he seemed to hear the sound of a slamming door.

  L

  There was one lamp lighted, in a corner of the room. The attaché case lay on a table underneath the lamp and Eva Armour was standing beside a chair, as if she had been expecting him.

  “You came back,” said Eva, “to get your notes. I have them ready for you.”

  He stood just inside the door and shook his head.

  “Not yet,” he said. “Later I will need the notes. Not yet.”

  And there it was, he thought, the thing he had worried about that afternoon, the thing that he had tried to find the words to say.

&nb
sp; “I told you about a weapon at breakfast this morning,” he said. “You must remember what I said about it. I said there was only one weapon. I said you can’t fight a war with just one gun.”

  Eva nodded, face drawn in the lamplight. “I remember, Ash.”

  “There are a million of them,” said Ash. “As many as you want.”

  He moved slowly across the room until he stood face to face with her.

  “I am on your side,” he told her, simply. “I saw Trevor this afternoon. He cursed me for all humanity.”

  Slowly she put up a hand and he felt it slide across his face, the palm cool and smooth. Her fingers tightened in his hair and she shook his head gently, tenderly.

  “Ash,” she said, “you washed your face. You are Ash again.”

  He nodded. “I wanted to be human again,” he told her.

  “Trevor told you about the Cradle, Ash?”

  “I’d guessed some of it,” Sutton said. “He told me the rest. About the androids that wear no mark.”

  “We use them as spies,” she said, as if it was quite a natural thing to say. “We have some of them in Trevor’s headquarters. He thinks that they are human.”

  “Herkimer?” he asked.

  “He isn’t here, Ash. He wouldn’t be here, after what happened out on the patio.”

  “Of course,” said Sutton. “Of course he wouldn’t. Eva, we humans are such heels.”

  “Sit down,” she told him. “That chair over there. You talk so funny that you scare me.”

  He sat down.

  “Tell me what happened,” she demanded.

  He didn’t tell her. He said, “I thought of Herkimer this afternoon. When Trevor was talking with me. I hit him this morning and I would hit him tomorrow morning if he said the same thing to me. It’s something in the human blood, Eva. We fought our way up. With fist ax and club and gun and atom bomb and …”

  “Shut up,” cried Eva. “Keep still, can’t you?”

  He looked up at her in astonishment.

  “Human, you say,” she said. “And what is Herkimer if he isn’t human? He is a human, made by humans. A robot can make another robot and they’re still robots, aren’t they? A human makes another human and both of them are humans.”