The Works of Clifford D. Simak Volume Two Page 56

  Sutton mumbled, confused. “Trevor is afraid the androids will take over. That there will be no more humans. No more original, biological humans …”

  “Ash,” she said, “you are bothering yourself over something that a thousand generations from now will not have been solved. What’s the use of it?”

  He shook his head. “I guess there is no use. It keeps stirring around in my head. There’s no rest for me. Once it was so clear-cut and simple. I would write a book and the galaxy would read it and accept it and everything would be just fine.”

  “It still can be that way,” she said. “After a while, after a long while. But to do it we have to stop Trevor. He is blinded by the same tangled semantics that blind you.”

  “Herkimer said one weapon would do it,” Sutton said. “One weapon would be the balance that was needed. Eva, the androids have gone a long way in their research, haven’t they? Chemical, I mean. The study of the human body. They would have to, to do what they have done.”

  She nodded. “A long way, Ash.”

  “They have a scanner, then … a machine that could take a person apart, molecule by molecule, record it almost atom for atom. Make a blueprint for another body.”

  “We’ve done that very thing,” said Eva. “We’ve duplicated men in Trevor’s organization. Kidnaped them and blueprinted them and made a duplicate … sent him back the duplicate and placed the other under benevolent detention. It’s only been through tricks like that that we’ve been able to hold our own at all.”

  “You could duplicate me?” asked Sutton.

  “Certainly, Ash, but …”

  “A different face, of course,” said Sutton. “But a duplicate brain and … well, a few other things.”

  Eva nodded. “Your special abilities,” she said.

  “I can get into another mind,” said Sutton. “Not mere telepathy, but the actual power to be another person, to be that other mind, to see and know and feel the same things that the other mind may see or know or feel. I don’t know how it’s done, but it must be something in the brain structure. If you duplicated my brain, the abilities should go along with the duplication. Not all of the duplicates would have it, maybe, not all of them could use it, but there would be some of them that could.”

  She gasped. “Ash, you would mean …”

  “You would know everything,” said Sutton, “that Trevor thinks. Every word and thought that passes through his mind. Because one of you would be Trevor. And the same thing with every other person who has anything to do with the war in time. You would know as soon as they know what they’re going to do. You could plan to meet any threat they might be considering. You could block them at everything they tried.”

  “It would be stalemate,” Eva said, “and that is exactly what we want. A strategy of stalemate, Ash. They wouldn’t know how they were being blocked and many times they would not know who was blocking them. It would seem to them that luck was permanently against them … that destiny was against them.”

  “Trevor, himself, gave me the idea,” Sutton said. “He told me to go out and butt my head against a wall for a while. He told me that finally I would get tired of doing it. He said that after a while I would give up.”

  “Ten years,” said Eva. “Ten years should do the job. But if ten won’t, why, then, a hundred. Or a thousand if it takes that long. We have all the time there is.”

  “Finally,” said Sutton, “they would give up. Literally throw up their hands and quit. It would be such a futile thing. Never winning. Always fighting hard and never winning.”

  They sat in the room with its one little oasis of light that stood guard against the darkness that pressed in upon them and there was no triumph in them, for this was not a thing of triumph. This was a matter of necessity and not one of conquest. This was Man fighting himself and winning and losing at the same time.

  “You can arrange this scanning soon?” asked Sutton.

  Eva nodded. “Tomorrow, Ash?”

  She looked at him, queerly. “What’s your hurry?”

  “I am leaving,” Sutton said. “Running away to a refuge that I thought of. That is, if you’ll lend me a ship.”

  “Any ship you want.”

  “It would be more convenient that way,” he told her. “Otherwise, I’d have to steal one.”

  She did not ask the question that he had expected and he went on, “I have to write the book.”

  “There are plenty of places, Ash, where you could write the book. Safe places. Places that could be arranged to be foolproof safe.”

  He shook his head.

  “There’s an old robot,” he said. “He’s the only folks I have. When I was on Cygni, he went out to one of the star systems at the very edge and filed a homestead. I am going there.”

  “I understand,” she said, speaking very gravely.

  “There’s just one thing,” said Sutton. “I keep remembering a little girl who came and spoke to me when I was fishing. I know that she was a person conditioned in my mind. I know she was put there for a purpose, but it makes no difference. I keep thinking of her.”

  He looked at Eva and saw how the lamplight turned her hair into a copper glory.

  “I don’t know if I’ll ever be in love,” said Sutton. “I can’t tell you for sure if I love you, Eva. But I wish you would go with me out to Buster’s planet.”

  She shook her head. “Ash, I must stay here, for a while at least. I’ve worked for years on this thing. I must see it through.”

  Her eyes were misty in the lamplight. “Perhaps sometime, Ash, if you still want me. Perhaps a little later I can come.”

  Sutton said, simply, “I’ll always want you, Eva.”

  He reached out a hand and tenderly touched the copper curl that dropped against her forehead.

  “I know that you’ll never come,” he said. “If it had been just a little different … if we had been two ordinary people living ordinary lives.”

  “There’s a greatness in you, Ash,” she told him. “You will be a god to many people.”

  He stood silently and felt the loneliness of eternity closing in upon him. There was no greatness, as she had said, only the loneliness and bitterness of a man who stood alone and would stand alone forever.

  LI

  Sutton floated in a sea of light and from far away he heard the humming of the machines at work, little busy machines that were dissecting him with their tiny fingers of probing light and clicking shutters and the sensitive paper that ran like a streak of burnished silver through the holders. Dissecting and weighing, probing and measuring … missing nothing, adding nothing. A faithful record not of himself alone but of every particle of him, of every cell and molecule, of every branching nerve and muscle fiber.

  And from somewhere else, also far away, from a place beyond the sea of light that held him, a voice said one word and kept repeating it:

  Traitor.

  Traitor.

  Traitor.

  One word without an exclamation point. A voice that had no emphasis. One flat word.

  First there was one voice crying it and then another joined and then there was a crowd and finally it was a roaring mob and the sound and word built up until it was a world of voices that were crying out the word. Crying out the word until there was no longer any meaning in it, until it had lost its meaning and became a sound many times repeated.

  Sutton tried to answer and there was no answer nor any way to answer. He had no voice, for he had no lips or tongue or throat. He was an entity that floated in the sea of light and the word kept on, never changing … never stopping.

  But back of the word, a background to the word, there were other words unspoken.

  We are the ones who clicked the flints together and built the first fire of Man’s own making. We are the ones who drove the beasts from out the caves and took them for ourselves, in which to shape the first pattern of a human culture. We are the ones who painted the colorful bison on the hidden walls, working in the light of lam
ps with moss for wicks and fat for oil. We are the ones who tilled the soil and tamed the seed to grow beneath our hand. We are the ones who built great cities that our own kind might live together and accomplish the greatness that a handful could not even try. We are the ones who dreamed of stars. We are the ones who broke the atom to the harness of our minds.

  It is our heritage you spend. It is our traditions that you give away to things that we have made, that we have fashioned with the deftness of our hands and the sharpness of our minds.

  The machines clicked on and the voice kept on with the one word it was saying.

  But there was another voice, deep within the undefinable being that was Asher Sutton, a faint voice …

  It said no word, for there was no word that framed the thought it said.

  Sutton answered it. “Thank you, Johnny,” he said. “Thank you very much.”

  And was astonished that he could answer Johnny when he could not answer all the others.

  The machines went on with their clicking.

  LII

  The silvery ship roared down the lauching ramp, slammed into the upcurve and hurled itself into the sky, a breath of fire that blazed against the blue.

  “He doesn’t know,” said Herkimer, “that we arranged it for him. He does not know we managed him to the last, that we sent Buster out many years ago to establish refuge for him, knowing that someday he might need that refuge.”

  “Herkimer,” said Eva. “Herkimer …”

  Her voice choked. “He asked me to go with him, Herkimer. He said he needed me. And I couldn’t go. And I couldn’t explain.”

  She kept her head tilted, watching the tiny pinpoint of fire that was fleeing spaceward.

  “He had to keep on thinking,” Eva said, “that there were some humans he had helped, that there were some humans who still believed in him.”

  Herkimer nodded. “It was the only thing to do, Eva. It was what you had to do. We took enough from him, enough of his humanity. We could not take it all.”

  She put her hands up to her face and huddled her shoulders and stood there, an android woman crying out her heart.

  Way Station

  1

  The noise was ended now. The smoke drifted like thin, gray wisps of fog above the tortured earth and the shattered fences and the peach trees that had been whittled into toothpicks by the cannon fire. For a moment silence, if not peace, fell upon those few square miles of ground where just a while before men had screamed and torn at one another in the frenzy of old hate and had contended in an ancient striving and then had fallen apart, exhausted.

  For endless time, it seemed, there had been belching thunder rolling from horizon to horizon and the gouted earth that had spouted in the sky and the screams of horses and the hoarse bellowing of men; the whistling of metal and the thud when the whistle ended; the flash of searing fire and the brightness of the steel; the bravery of the colors snapping in the battle wind.

  Then it all had ended and there was a silence.

  But silence was an alien note that held no right upon this field or day, and it was broken by the whimper and the pain, the cry for water, and the prayer for death—the crying and the calling and the whimpering that would go on for hours beneath the summer sun. Later the huddled shapes would grow quiet and still and there would be an odor that would sicken all who passed, and the graves would be shallow graves.

  There was wheat that never would be harvested, trees that would not bloom when spring came round again, and on the slope of land that ran up to the ridge the words unspoken and the deeds undone and the sodden bundles that cried aloud the emptiness and the waste of death.

  There were proud names that were the prouder now, but now no more than names to echo down the ages—the Iron Brigade, the 5th New Hampshire, the 1st Minnesota, the 2nd Massachusetts, the 16th Maine.

  And there was Enoch Wallace.

  He still held the shattered musket and there were blisters on his hands. His face was smudged with powder. His shoes were caked with dust and blood.

  He was still alive.

  2

  Dr. Erwin Hardwicke rolled the pencil back and forth between his palms, an irritating business. He eyed the man across the desk from him with some calculation.

  “What I can’t figure out,” said Hardwicke, “is why you should come to us.”

  “Well, you’re the National Academy and I thought …”

  “And you’re Intelligence.”

  “Look, Doctor, if it suits you better, let’s call this visit unofficial. Pretend I’m a puzzled citizen who dropped in to see if you could help.”

  “It’s not that I wouldn’t like to help, but I don’t see how I can. The whole thing is so hazy and so hypothetical.”

  “Damn it, man,” Claude Lewis said, “you can’t deny the proof—the little that I have.”

  “All right, then,” said Hardwicke, “let’s start over once again and take it piece by piece. You say you have this man …”

  “His name,” said Lewis, “is Enoch Wallace: Chronologically, he is one hundred and twenty-four years old. He was born on a farm a few miles from the town of Millville in Wisconsin, April 22, 1840, and he is the only child of Jedediah and Amanda Wallace. He enlisted among the first of them when Abe Lincoln called for volunteers. He was with the Iron Brigade, which was virtually wiped out at Gettysburg in 1863. But Wallace somehow managed to get transferred to another fighting outfit and fought down across Virginia under Grant. He was in on the end of it at Appomattox …”

  “You’ve run a check on him.”

  “I’ve looked up his records. The record of enlistment at the State Capitol in Madison. The rest of it, including discharge here in Washington.”

  “You say he looks like thirty.”

  “Not a day beyond it. Maybe even less than that.”

  “But you haven’t talked with him.”

  Lewis shook his head.

  “He may not be the man. If you had fingerprints …”

  “At the time of the Civil War,” said Lewis, “they’d not thought of fingerprints.”

  “The last of the veterans of the Civil War,” said Hardwicke, “died several years ago. A Confederate drummer boy, I think. There must be some mistake.”

  Lewis shook his head. “I thought so myself, when I was assigned to it.”

  “How come you were assigned? How does Intelligence get involved in a deal like this?”

  “I’ll admit,” said Lewis, “that it’s a bit unusual. But there were so many implications …”

  “Immortality, you mean.”

  “It crossed our mind, perhaps. The chance of it. But only incidentally. There were other considerations. It was a strange setup that bore some looking into.”

  “But Intelligence …”

  Lewis grinned. “You are thinking, why not a scientific outfit? Logically, I suppose it should have been. But one of our men ran afoul of it. He was on vacation. Had relatives back in Wisconsin. Not in that particular area, but some thirty miles away. He heard a rumor—just the vaguest rumor, almost a casual mention. So he nosed around a bit. He didn’t find out too much but enough to make him think there might be something to it.”

  “That’s the thing that puzzles me,” said Hardwicke. “How could a man live for one hundred and twenty-four years in one locality without becoming a celebrity that the world would hear about? Can you imagine what the newspapers could do with a thing like this?”

  “I shudder,” Lewis said, “when I think about it.”

  “You haven’t told me how.”

  “This,” said Lewis, “is a bit hard to explain. You’d have to know the country and the people in it. The southwestern corner of Wisconsin is bounded by two rivers, the Mississippi on the west, the Wisconsin on the north. Away from the rivers there is flat, broad prairie land, rich land, with prosperous farms and towns. But the land that runs down to the
river is rough and rugged; high hills and bluffs and deep ravines and cliffs, and there are certain areas forming bays or pockets that are isolated. They are served by inadequate roads and the small, rough farms are inhabited by a people who are closer, perhaps, to the pioneer days of a hundred years ago than they are to the twentieth century. They have cars, of course, and radios, and someday soon, perhaps, even television. But in spirit they are conservative and clannish—not all the people, of course, not even many of them, but these little isolated neighborhoods.

  “At one time there were a lot of farms in these isolated pockets, but today a man can hardly make a living on a farm of that sort. Slowly the people are being squeezed out of the areas by economic circumstances. They sell their farms for whatever they can get for them and move somewhere else, to the cities mostly, where they can make a living.”

  Hardwicke nodded. “And the ones that are left, of course, are the most conservative and clannish.”

  “Right. Most of the land now is held by absentee owners who make no pretense of farming it. They may run a few head of cattle on it, but that is all. It’s not too bad as a tax write-off for someone who needs that sort of thing. And in the land-bank days a lot of the land was put into the bank.”

  “You’re trying to tell me these backwoods people—is that what you’d call them?—engaged in a conspiracy of silence.”

  “Perhaps not anything,” said Lewis, “as formal or elaborate as that. It is just their way of doing things, a holdover from the old, stout pioneer philosophy. They minded their own business. They didn’t want folks interfering with them and they interfered with no one else. If a man wanted to live to be a thousand, it might be a thing of wonder, but it was his own damned business. And if he wanted to live alone and be let alone while he was doing it, that was his business, too. They might talk about it among themselves, but to no one else. They’d resent it if some outsider tried to talk about it.

  “After a time, I suppose, they came to accept the fact that Wallace kept on being young while they were growing old. The wonder wore off it and they probably didn’t talk about it a great deal, even among themselves. New generations accepted it because their elders saw in it nothing too unusual—and anyhow no one saw much of Wallace because he kept strictly to himself.