“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 and that gave them 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, though he still has a need to feel superior to other humans for some arbitrary and unimportant difference. Once it was religion, nationality, the color of the skin. Now it’s the ability to reproduce.”
“They’re equal now,” said Trevor, bitterly. “The androids have been reproducing themselves . . . chemically, not biologically, for a long time now.”
“We should have expected it,” said Sutton.
“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.”
TREVOR made an angry motion with his hand. “That little matter is being taken care of now. When the androids make another android, they don’t bother to put a mark upon his head.”
Sutton started 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,” continued Trevor. “They could improve upon the model. They could build a super-race, a mutant race, call it what you will . . .”
Only one weapon, Sutton 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. The old race. The biological race. We came up from the dawn of Man. We came up from chipped flints and fist axe, 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, 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 I should throw in with you.”
“I want you,” said Trevor, “to find out for me where the Cradle is. You could get the androids to tell you.”
“So you can smash it.”
“So I can save humanity. The old humanity. The real humanity.”
“You feel that all humans should stick together now.”
“If you have a streak of human in you, you will be with us now.”
“There was a time,” said Sutton, “back on Earth, before men went to the stars, when 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. Either actually or potentially.”
“Each race,” answered Trevor, “is loyal to its own. The human race must be loyal unto itself.”
“I am going to be traitor. I may be wrong, but I still think that destiny is greater than humanity.”
“You refuse to help us?”
“Not only that,” said Sutton. “I am going to fight you. 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 worlds,” Trevor assured him coldly. “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 the whole universe that can stand before the human race, that can match the human race . . .” Sutton saw loathing on his 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 . . .”
Trevor stood up and started to walk away and then turned back. His voice was not much more 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. Staring at his back, Sutton seemed to hear the sound of a slamming door.
XLVIII
THERE was one lamp lighted in a corner of the room. The attache 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 right now.”
And there it was, he thought, the thing he had worried about that afternoon, the thing that he had tried to put in words.
“I told you about a weapon at breakfast this morning,” he went on. “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, her lovely face drawn in the lamplight. “I remember, Ash.”
“There are a million of them,” said Ash. “As many as you want. There’s no limit to the number there can be.”
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 closed in his hair and she shook his head gently, tenderly.
“Ash,” she said, “you washed the plastic off your face. You are Ash again.”
He nodded. “I wanted to be human again.”
“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 were quite a natural thing to say. “We even 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 oddly 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 Herkimer 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, axe 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 harshly. “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.”
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 there is no reason to fight. T
he Cradle will solve the secret of biological reproduction. Not for centuries, of course, but ultimately. What’s the use of agonizing over a difference that eventually won’t exist?”
He shook his head. “I guess there is no use. It keeps stirring around in my head, though, accusing me of treason. Once it was so clear 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. When Man stops believing that racial loyalty means the right to subjugate all other life. It will come, Ash, and humanity will be greater for it, allied to everything that lives, not an arrogant and fearful master.”
“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 . . . 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,” 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.”
“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 inherent in the brain structure. If you duplicated my brain, the ability should go along with the duplication. Not all of the duplicates would have it, maybe, not all of them could use it, but some of them could.”
She gasped. “Ash, that 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 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 some more. 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 must take 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, 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.
“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’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 on a homestead. I am going there.”
“I understand,” she said, speaking very softly.
“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 am still allowed to love,” said Sutton. “I can’t tell you for sure if I will always be allowed to love you, Eva. But I wish you would go with me out to Buster’s planet.”
“I can’t,” she cried. “Don’t ask me to.”
“But I must. I’ve suffered enough alone. I deserve you, don’t I?”
Her eyes were misty in the lamplight. “Perhaps sometime, Ash, if you still want me. But there’s this war that must not be lost . . .”
Sutton said, simply: “I’ll always want you, Eva. The war can’t be lost any more.”
She was against him, her lips to his, her words muffled and hungry. “I want to. Oh, I want to.”
XLIX
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 had been 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 become a sound being senselessly 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 out of the caves and took them for ourselves, in which to shape the first pattern of a human civilization. We are the ones who painted the colorful bison on the hidden walls, working in the light of mud lamps with moss for wicks and animal 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—and 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 could frame the thought it formed. It made him kin to something far greater than a race of thinking, brawling, ambitious primates. It made him kin to all life . . . all life.
Sutton answered it. “Thank you, Johnny. Thank you very much.”
And he was astonished that he could answer Johnny when he could not answer all the others.
The machines went on with their clicking.
L
HERKIMER stood alone in the darkness underneath the trees and watched the two of them walk across the field toward the ship.
She should have stayed, he thought. He would have gone without her. He would not have guessed the real reason why she should have stayed. No more than he guesses even now that we sent Buster out to the Tower stars many years ago to establish refuge for him—well knowing that the day might come when he would need that refuge.
She had told him at first that she couldn’t go with him. She should have stuck it out, thought Herkimer. But she is too human. That is the trouble with all of us—we are too human.
Out on the tiny field, fire flickered in the mouths of the tubes and the silvery ship lurched down the launching ramp. Gathering speed, it slammed along the up-curve and hurled itself into the sky, a breath of fire that blazed against the night.
Herkimer stood with tilted head and watched it until it was a tiny pinpoint of light that was fleeing spaceward.
He lifted a hand hesitantly, half doubting the fitness of a parting gesture.
“Good-by, Ash,” he said underneath his breath. “Good-by, Ash. God bless you, Eva.”
Standing there, he had a hopeful thought.
Perhaps, he told himself, Sutton never will learn she is an android woman. But he knew then that Eva would tell the truth and that it would hot change Sutton’s love for her.
The Complete Serials Page 37
