“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 them be.
He did not hear a sound, but he felt the great hand dose upon his arm and yank 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 drove them inward 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.
“Sleeping powder!” he thought. “Must hold my breath . . .”
And even as he thought it, the dark figures in the woods, the cheeping frogs and the snarling of the guns fused into silence.
XLII
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 had sat across a desk from him and told him about a corporation and a dream and a 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 other galaxies, and plan a million years ahead.
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. And through time itself . . .
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 almost 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.
Always there are men who know that humanity is a single race, men who refuse to exploit other forms of life. Teachers. Missionaries. Vegetarians. Ordinary feeling human beings.
Even in his time, there had been men who treated androids sympathetically and Sutton had been one of them, though he knew now that it was the sympathy of the master for the underdog. The androids had not misunderstood; they knew it wasn’t equality that was offered or would be granted, that sympathy could turn to savage reprisal if they acted as equals. Occasionally one would, swaggering and belligerent in the way of the frightened and insecure, and his ghastly fate served as example to others who might, as the saying went, get out of hand.
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 humane argue for the equality of androids, they cannot help but patronize the very ones that they would make equal.
What was it Herkimer had said? Equality not by edict, not by human tolerance. But that was the only way the human race would ever accord equality . . . by edict, by dispensation, a gesture of tolerance where there was none, actually.
AND yet, thought Sutton, 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 number!
WITH his fingers he carefully explored his face, located the plastic coatings of flesh 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. “This is the second time. I’m getting tired of it.”
“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 explain during a fight.”
“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.”
“It won’t do us a bit of good,” said Sutton, “if the idea was to get me out of the clutches of Trevor’s mob. Trevor will have a psych tracer on me. He knows where I am and this place will be watched three deep.”
Herkimer grinned. “It is, sir. His men are practically bumping into one another all around the place.”
“Then why this get-up?” Sutton demanded angrily. “Why disguise me?”
“Well, sir,” explained Herkimer, “it’s like this. We figured no human in his right mind ever would want to
be taken for an android. So we turned you into one. They’ll be looking for a human. It would never occur to them to take a second look at an android when they were looking for a human.”
Sutton grunted. “Smart,” he said. “I hope it doesn’t . . .”
“Oh, they’ll get onto it after a while, sir,” Herkimer admitted, cheerfully. “But it will give us some time. Time to work out some plans.”
He moved swiftly around the room, opening chest drawers and taking out clothing.
“It’s very nice, sir,” he said, “to have you back again. We tried to find you, but it was no dice. We figured the Revisionists had you cooped up somewhere, so we redoubled our security here and kept a close watch on everything that happened. For the past five weeks we’ve known every move that Trevor and his gang has made.”
“Five weeks!” gasped Sutton. “Did you say five weeks?”
“Certainly, sir. Five weeks. You disappeared just seven weeks ago.”
“By my calendar,” said Sutton, “it was ten years.”
Herkimer wagged his head sagely, unstartled. “Time is the funniest thing, sir. There’s just no way to make subjective and objective time come out right.”
He laid clothing on the bed. “If you’ll get into these, sir, we’ll go down for breakfast. Eva is waiting—and will be glad to see you.”
XLIII
TREVOR missed with three clips in a row. He flung the rest of them down on the desk.
“You’re sure of this?” he asked the man across the desk.
The man nodded, tight-lipped. “It might be android propaganda, you know,” said Trevor. “They’re clever. That’s a thing you never must forget. An android, for all his bowing and his scraping, is just as smart as we are.”
“Do you realize what it means?” the man demanded. “It means . . .”
“I can tell you what it means,” said Trevor. “From now on we can’t be sure which of us are human. There’ll be no sure way of knowing who’s a human and who’s an android. You could be an android. I could be . . .”
“Exactly,” said the man.
“That’s why Sutton was so smug yesterday afternoon,” said Trevor. “He sat there, where you are sitting, and I had the impression that he was laughing at me all the time . . .”
“I don’t think Sutton knows,” said the man. “It’s an android secret. Only a few of them know it. They certainly wouldn’t take a chance on any human knowing it.”
“Not even Sutton?”
“Not even Sutton,” said the man.
“Cradle,” said Trevor. “Nice sense of fitness they have.”
“You’re going to do something about it, certainly,” said the man impatiently.
Trevor put his elbows on the desk and matched fingertips.
“Of course I am,” he said. “Do you think I’d ever sit back and not do something?”
XLIV
EVA ARMOUR rose from the table on the patio and held out both her hands in greeting. Sutton pulled her close to him, planted a kiss on her upturned lips.
“That,” he said, “is for the million times I have thought of you.”
She laughed at him, suddenly gay and happy.
“Now, Ash, a billion times?”
“Tangled time,” said Herkimer. “He’s been away ten years.”
“Oh,” said Eva. “Oh, Ash, how horrible!”
He grinned at her. “Not too horrible. I had ten years of rest. Ten years of peace and quiet. Working on a farm, you know. It was a little rough at first, but I was actually sorry when I had to leave. Except that it meant coming back to you.”
He held a chair for her, took one himself between her and Herkimer.
They ate . . . ham and eggs, toast and marmalade, strong, black coffee. It was pleasant on the patio. In the trees above them birds quarreled amiably. In the clover at the edge of the bricks and stones that formed the paving, bees hummed among the blossoms.
“How do you like my place, Ash?” asked Eva.
“It’s wonderful,” he said, and then, as if the two ideas might be connected in some way, he added, “I saw Trevor yesterday. He took me to the mountain top and showed me the universe.”
Eva drew in her breath sharply, and Sutton looked up quickly from his plate. Herkimer was waiting with drawn face, with fork poised in mid-air, halfway to his mouth.
“What’s the matter with you two?” Sutton asked, offended. “Don’t you trust me?”
And even as he, asked the question, he answered it himself. Of course they wouldn’t trust him. He was human and he could betray his own beliefs. He could twist destiny so that it was a thing for the human race alone. And there was no way in which they could be sure that he would not do this. Why should they trust a man who still felt uncomfortable and patronizing eating with an android? For he did, even now, though he was ashamed and blamed a lifetime of conditioning.
“Ash,” said Eva, “you refused to . . .”
“I left Trevor with an idea that I would be back to talk it over. Nothing that I said or did. He just believes I will. Told me to go out and beat my head against the wall some more.”
“You have thought about it, sir?” asked Herkimer.
Sutton shook his head. “No. Not too much. I haven’t sat down and mulled it over, if that is what you mean. It would have its points if I were merely human. Sometimes I frankly wonder how much of the human there may be left in me.”
“How much of it do you know, Ash?” Eva asked, speaking softly. Her eyes questioned him.
SUTTON scrubbed a hand across his forehead. “Most of it, I think. I know about the war in time and how and why it’s being fought. I know about myself. I have two bodies and two minds, or at least substitute bodies and minds. I know some of the things that I can do. There may be other abilities I do not know about. One grows into them. Each new thing comes hard.”
“We couldn’t tell you,” Eva said. “It would have been so simple if we could have told you. To start with, you would not have believed the things we told you. And, when dealing with time, one interferes as little as possible. Just enough to turn an event in the right direction.
“I tried to warn you. Remember, Ash? As near as I could come to warning.”
He nodded. “After I killed Benton in the Zag House. You told me you had studied me for twenty years.”
“And, remember, I was the little girl in the checkered apron.”
He looked at her in surprise. “You knew about that? It wasn’t just part of the Zag dream?”
“Identification planted by suggestion,” said Herkimer. “So that you could identify Eva as a friend, as someone you had known before and who was close to you. So that you would accept her and whatever help she was allowed to offer.”
“But it was a dream.”
“A Zag dream,” said Herkimer. “The Zag is one of us. His race would benefit if destiny can stand for everyone and not the human race alone.”
SUTTON said: “Trevor is too confident. Not just pretending to be confident, but really confident. I keep coming back to that remark he made. Go out, he said, and butt your head some more.”
“He’s counting on you as a human being,” Eva said.
Sutton shook his head. “I can’t think that’s it. He must have some scheme up his sleeve, some maneuver that we won’t be able to check.”
Herkimer spoke slowly. “I don’t like that, sir. The war’s not going too well as it is. If we had to win, we’d be lost right now.”
“If we had to win? I don’t understand . . .”
“We don’t have to win, sir,” said Herkimer. “All we have to do is fight a holding action, prevent the Revisionists from destroying the book as you will write it. From the very first we have not tried to change a single entry. We’ve tried to keep them from being changed.”
Sutton nodded. “On his part, Trevor has to win decisively. He must smash the original text, either prevent it from being written as I mean to write it or discredit it so thoroughly that not even an android w
ill believe it.”
“You’re right, sir,” Herkimer told him. “Unless he can do that, the humans cannot claim destiny for their own, cannot make other life believe that destiny is reserved for the human race alone.”
“And that is all he wants,” said Eva. “Not the destiny itself, for no human can have the faith in destiny that say, for example, an android can. To Trevor it is merely a matter of propaganda . . . to make the human race believe so completely that it is destined that it will not rest until it holds the universe.”
“So long,” said Herkimer, “as we can keep him from doing that, we can state that we are winning. But the issue is so finely balanced that a new approach by either side would score heavily. A new weapon could be a factor that would mean victory or defeat.”
“I have a weapon,” Sutton said. “A made-to-order weapon that would beat them . . . but there’s no way that it can be used.”
Neither of them asked the question, but he saw it on their faces and he answered it.
“There’s only one such weapon. Only one gun. You can’t fight a war with just one gun.”
Feet pounded around the corner of the house. When they turned, they saw an android running toward them across the patio. Dust stained his clothing and his face was red from running. He came to a stop and faced them, clutching at the table’s edge.
“They tried to kill me,” he panted, the words coming out in gushes. “The place is surrounded . . .”
“Andrew, you fool,” snapped Herkimer. “What do you mean by running in like this? They will know . . .”
“They’ve found out about the Cradle,” Andrew gasped. “They know . . .”
Herkimer came erect in one swift motion. The chair on which he had been sitting tipped over with the violence of his rising and his face was suddenly so white that the identification tattoo on his forehead stood out with startling clearness.
“They know where . . .?”
The Complete Serials Page 35
