“I don’t know which,” said Adams, “but you are either the greatest man or the biggest damn fool that I have ever known.”
XXXI
BRIDGEPORT dreamed in its rock-hemmed niche alongside the swiftly flowing river. The summer sun beat down into the pocket between the tree-mantled cliffs with a fierceness that seemed to squeeze the last hope of life and energy out of everything . . . out of the weather beaten houses, out of the dust that lay along the street, out of leaf-wilted shrub and bush and beaten rows of flowers.
The railroad tracks curved around a bluff and entered the town, then curved around another bluff and were gone again. For the short span of this arc out of somewhere into nowhere, they shone in the sun with the burnished sharpness of a whetted knife.
Between the tracks and river, the railroad station drowsed, a foursquare building that had the look of having hunched its shoulders against summer sun and winter cold for so many years that it stood despondent and cringing, waiting for the next whiplash of weather.
Sutton stood on the station platform and listened to the river, the suck and swish of tiny whirlpools that ran along the shore, the gurgle of water flowing across a hidden, upward-canted log, the soft sigh of watery fingers grasping at the tip of a downward-drooping branch. And above it all, cutting through it all, the real noise of the river.
He lifted his head and squinted against the sun to follow the mighty metal span that leaped across the river from the bluff-top, slanting down toward the high-graded roadbed that walked across the gently rising valley on the other shore.
Man leaped rivers on great spans of steel and he never heard the talk of rivers as they rolled down to the sea. Man leaped seas on wings powered by smooth, sleek engines, and the thunder of the sea was a sound lost in the empty vault Of sky. Man crossed space in metallic cylinders that twisted time and space and hurled Man and his miraculous machines down alleys of conjectural mathematics that were not even dreamed of in this world of Bridgeport, 1977.
Man was in a hurry and he went too far, too fast. So far and fast that he missed many things . . . things that he should have taken time to learn as he went along . . . things that someday in some future age he would take the time to study. Someday Man would come back along the trail again and learn the things he’d missed and wonder why he missed them and think upon the years that were lost for never knowing them.
Sutton stepped down from the platform and found a faint footpath that went down to the river. Carefully, he made his way along it, for it was soft and crumbly and there were stones that might turn underfoot.
AT THE end of the footpath he found the old man.
The oldster sat perched on a small boulder planted in the mud and he held a cane pole slanted riverwise across his knees. An ancient pipe protruded from a two-weeks’ growth of graying whiskers, and an earthenware jug with a corncob for a cork sat ;beside him, easy to his hand.
Sutton sat down cautiously on the shelving shore beside the boulder and wondered at the coolness of the shade from the trees and undergrowth—a welcome coolness after the fierce splash of sun upon the village just a few rods up the bank.
“Catching anything?” he asked.
“Nope,” said the Old man.
He puffed away at his pipe and Sutton watched in fascinated silence. One would have sworn, he told himself, that the mop of whiskers was on fire.
“Didn’t catch nothing yesterday, either,” the old man added. He took his pipe out of his mouth with a deliberate, considered motion and. spat neatly into the center of a river eddy. “Didn’t catch nothing the day before yesterday.”
“You want to catch something, don’t you?” Sutton asked.
“Nope.” The old man put down a hand and lifted the jug, worked out the corncob cork and wiped the jug’s neck carefully with a dirty hand. “Have a snort,” he invited.
Sutton, remembering the dirty hand, took it, gagging to himself. Cautiously, he lifted it and tipped it to his mouth.
The stuff splashed and gurgled down his throat and it was liquid fire laced with gall and with a touch of brimstone to give it something extra.
Sutton snatched the jug away and held it by the handle, keeping his mouth wide open to cool it and air out the taste.
The old man took the jug back and Sutton swabbed at the tears running down his cheeks.
“Ain’t aged the way she should be,” the old man apologized. “But I ain’t got the time to fool around with that.”
He took himself a hooker, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and whooshed out his breath in gusty satisfaction. He put the jug down again and worked the cork in tight.
“Stranger, ain’t you?” he asked Sutton. “Don’t recall seeing you around.”
SUTTON nodded. “Looking for some people by the name of Sutton. John H. Sutton.”
The old man chuckled. “Old John, eh? Him and me was kids together. Sneakiest little rascal that I ever knew. Ain’t worth a tinker’s damn, old John ain’t. Went off to law school and got him an education. But he didn’t make a go of it. Roosting out on a farm up on the ridge, over there across the river.” He shot a look at Sutton. “You ain’t no relative of his, are you?”
“Well,” said Sutton, “not exactly. Not very close, at least.”
“Tomorrow’s the Fourth,” said the old man, “and I recollect the time that John and me blew up a culvert in Campbell Hollow, come the Fourth. Found some dynamite a road gang had been using for blasting. John and me, we figured it would make a bigger bang if we confined it, sort of. So we put her in the culvert pipe and lit a long fuse. Mister, it blew that culvert all to hell. I recollect our dads like to took the hide off us for doing it.”
Dead ringer, thought Sutton. John H. Sutton is just across the river and tomorrow is the Fourth. July 4, 1977, that’s what the letter said.
And I didn’t have to ask. The old codger unwittingly told me.
The sun was a furnace blast from the river’s surface, but here, underneath the trees, one just caught the edge of the flare of heat. A leaf floated by and there was a grasshopper riding on it. The grasshopper tried to jump ashore, but his jump fell short and the current grabbed and swallowed him out of sight.
“Never had a chance,” said the old man, “that hopper didn’t. Wickedest river in these United States, the old Wisconsin is. Can’t trust her. Tried to run steamboats on her in the early days, but they couldn’t do it, for where there was a channel one day there’d be a sand bar on the next. Current shifts the sand something awful. Government fellow wrote a report on her once. Said the only way you could use the Wisconsin for navigation was to lathe and plaster it.” From far overhead came the rumble of traffic crossing the bridge. A train came by, chuffing and grinding, a long freight that dragged itself up the valley. Long after it had passed, Sutton heard its whistle hooting.
“Destiny,” said the old man, “sure wasn’t working worth a hoot for that hopper, was it?”
SUTTON sat upright. “What was that you said?”
“Don’t mind me,” the old man told him. “I go around mumbling to myself. Sometimes people hear me; mostly they don’t.”
“But destiny—you said something about destiny.”
“Interested in it, lad? Wrote a story about it once. Didn’t amount to much. Used to mess around some, writing, in my early days.”
Sutton relaxed and lay back.
A dragonfly skimmed the water’s surface. Far up the bank, a small fish jumped and left a widening circle in the water.
“About this fishing,” said Sutton. “You don’t seem to care whether you catch anything or not.”
“Rather not,” the old man told him. “Catch something and you got to take it off the hook. Then you got to bait up again and throw the hook back in the river. Then you got to clean the fish. It’s an awful sight of work.” He took the pipe out of his mouth and spat carefully into the river. “Ever read Thoreau, son?”
Sutton shook his head, trying to remember. The name struck a chord of
memory. There had been a fragment in a book of ancient literature in his college days. All that was left of what was believed to have been an extensive amount of writing.
“You ought to,” the old man told him. “He had the right idea.”
Sutton rose and dusted off his trousers.
“Stick around,” the old man said. “You ain’t bothering me. Hardly none at all.”
“Got to be getting along,” said Sutton.
“Hunt me up some other time,” the old man said. “We could talk some more.”
“Someday,” Sutton answered politely, “I’ll do just that.”
“Care for another snort before you go?”
“No, thank you,” said Sutton, backing off. “No, thank you very much.”
“Oh, well,” the old man said. He lifted the jug and took a long and gurgling drink.
Sutton climbed the bank to the blaze of sun again.
“Sure,” said the station agent in the village, “the Suttons live just across the river, over in Grant County. Several ways to get there. Which one would you like?”
“The longest one,” Sutton told him. “I’m not in any hurry.”
The moon was coming up when Sutton climbed the hill to reach the bridge.
He was in no hurry. He had all night. Tomorrow was the Fourth.
XXXII
THE land was wild . . . wilder than anything Sutton had ever seen on the seeded, trimmed and watered parks of his native Earth. The land tilted upward, as if it rested on a knife edge, and. it was littered by great clumps of stone which appeared to have been flung down in godlike anger by a giant hand out of forgotten time. Stark bluffs speared erect, soaring massively, masked by mighty trees that seemed to have tried, at one time, to have matched the height and dignity of the rocky cliffs. Through the trees, Asher Sutton glimpsed the break in the cliffs ahead and knew that he was at the place that old John Sutton had mentioned in his letter.
The sun was only a couple of hours high and there still was time. There still would be time, for John Sutton had talked to the man only a couple of hours or so and then had gone to dinner.
From there on, with the cleft of the cliff in sight, Sutton took his time. He reached the top and found the boulder that his old ancestor had spoken of. It was almost designed for sitting.
He sat upon it and stared across the valley, grateful for the shade.
And there was peace, as John Sutton had said there was. Peace and the quieting majesty of the scene before him . . . the strange third-dimensional quality of the space that hung, as if alive, above the river valley. Strangeness, too, the strangeness of expected . . . and unexpected . . . happenings.
He looked at his watch. It was half-past nine, so he left the boulder and lay down behind a patch of brush and waited. Almost as he did, there was a soft, smooth swish of motor-noise and a ship came down, a tiny one-man ship, slanting across the trees, to land in the pasture just beyond the fence.
A man got out and leaned against the ship, staring at the sky and trees, as if satisfying himself that he had reached his destination.
Sutton chuckled quietly to himself.
Stage setting, he said. Dropping in unexpectedly and with a crippled ship . . . no need to explain your presence. Waiting for a man to come walking up and talk to you. Most natural thing in all the worlds. You didn’t seek him out; he saw you and came to you, and of course he talked.
You couldn’t come walking up the road and turn in at the gate and knock at the door and say: “I came to pick up all the scandal I can about the Sutton family. I wonder if I might sit down and talk with you.”
But you could land in a pasture with a crippled ship and first you’d talk of corn and pasture, of weather and of grass, and finally you’d get around to talking about personal and family matters.
The man had his wrench out and was tinkering at the ship.
It must almost be time.
Sutton lifted himself on his arms and stared through the close-laced branches of the, hazel brush.
John H. Sutton was coming down the hill, a big-bellied man with a trim white beard and an old black hat, and his walk was a waddle with some swagger still left in it.
XXXIII
SO THIS is failure, Eva Armour said. This is how failure feels. Dry in the throat and heavy in the heart and tired in the brain.
I am bitter, she told herself, and I have a right to be. Although I am so tired with trying and with failure that the knife edge of bitterness is dulled.
“The psych tracer in Adams’ office has stopped,” Herkimer had said, and then the plate had gone dead as he cut the visor.
There was no trace of Sutton. The tracer had stopped.
That meant that Sutton was dead.
He could not be dead, for historically he had written a book and he had not yet written it.
But history was something that you couldn’t trust. It was put together wrong, or copied wrong, or misinterpreted, or improved upon by a man with a misplaced-imagination. Truth was so hard to keep, myth and fable so easy to breathe into a life that was more acceptable than truth.
Half the history of Sutton, Eva knew, must be sheer legend. And yet there were certain truths that must be truths indeed.
Someone had written a book and it would have had to be Sutton. No one else could break the language in which his notes were written, and the words themselves breathed the very sincerity of the man himself.
Sutton had died, but not on Earth nor in Earth’s solar system and not a youth of sixty. He had died on a planet circling some far star and he had not died for many, many years.
These were truths that could not well be twisted. These were truths that had to stand until they were disproved.
And yet the tracer had stopped.
Eva got up from her chair and walked across the room to the window that looked out on the landscaped grounds of the Orion Arms. Fireflies were dotting the bushes with their brief, cold, flame and the late moon was coming up behind a cloud that looked like a gentle hill.
So much work, she thought. So many years of planning. Androids who had worn no mark upon their forehead and who had been formed to look exactly like the humans they replaced. And other androids who had marks upon their foreheads, but who had not been the androids made in the laboratories of the eightieth century. Elaborate networks of espionage, waiting for the day Sutton would come home. Years of puzzling over the records of the past, trying to separate the truth from the half-truth and the downright error.
Years of watching and of waiting, parrying the counter-espionage of the Revisionist, laying the groundwork for the day of action. And being careful . . . always careful. For the eightieth century must not know, must not even guess.
But there had been unseen factors.
MORGAN had come back and warned Adams that Sutton must be killed.
Two humans had been planted on Benton’s forfeited asteroid.
Although those two factors could not account entirely for what had happened. There was another factor somewhere.
She stood at the window, looking out at the rising moon, and her brows knit into crinkling lines of thought. But she was too tired. No thought would come.
Except defeat.
Defeat would explain it all.
Sutton might be dead and that would be defeat, utter and complete. Victory for an officialdom that was at once too timid and too vicious to take any active part in the struggle for the book. An officialdom that sought to keep the status quo, willing to wipe out centuries of thought to maintain its grip on the galaxy.
Such a defeat, she knew, would be even worse than a defeat, by the Revisionists. If the Revisionists won, there still would be a book; there still would be the teaching of Man’s own destiny. And that, she told herself, was better than no inkling of destiny at all.
Behind her, the visiphone purred, and she spun around, hurried across the room.
A robot said: “Mr. Sutton called. He asked about Wisconsin.”
“Wisconsin?�
�
“It’s an old place name,” the robot explained. “He asked about a place called Bridgeport, Wisconsin.”
“As if he were going there?”
“It would appear so.”
“Quick,” said Eva. “Where is this Bridgeport?”
“Five or six miles away,” said the robot, “and at least four thousand years.”
She caught her breath. “In time,” she said.
“Yes, miss, in time.”
“Tell me exactly,” Eva told him. The robot shook his head. “I don’t know. I couldn’t catch it. His mind was all roiled up. He’d just come through a trying experience.”
“Then you can’t help.”
“I wouldn’t bother if I were you,” the robot told her. “He struck me as a man who knew what he was doing. He’ll comeout all right.”
“You’re sure of that?”
“I would like to be,” the robot admitted reluctantly.
XXXIV
A DRY stick cracked under Sutton’s feet and the man with the wrench slowly turned around. A swift, smooth smile spread upon his face in widening crinkles to hide the amazement that glittered in his eyes. “Good afternoon,” said, Sutton. John H. Sutton was a stout speck that had almost climbed the hill. The sun had passed its zenith and was swinging toward the west. Down in the river valley, a half-dozen crows were cawing; it was as if the sound came from underneath their feet.
The man held out his hand. “Mr. Sutton, isn’t it?” he asked. “The Mr. Sutton of the eightieth century?”
“Drop the wrench,” said Sutton. The man pretended not to hear him. “My name is Dean,” he said. “Arnold Dean. I’m from the eighty-fourth.”
“Drop the wrench,” said Sutton. Dean dropped it. Sutton hooked it along the ground with a toe until it was out of reach.
“That is better,” he said. “Now, let’s sit down and talk.”
Dean gestured with a thumb. “The old man will be coming back. He will get to wondering and he will come back. He had a lot of questions he forgot to ask.”
The Complete Serials Page 30
