Time and Again

by Clifford D. Simak

  "You haven't grown bitter, Ash? Something that you found."

  "Not bitter," Sutton told him.

  Somewhere a clock was ticking, loud in the sudden hush.

  "Doctor," said Sutton, "what do you know of destiny?"

  "It's strange to hear you talk of destiny," said Dr. Raven. "You always were a man who never was inclined to bow to destiny."

  "I mean documentary destiny," Sutton explained. "Not the abstraction, but the actual thing, the actual belief in destiny. What do the records say?"

  "There always have been men who believed in destiny," said Dr. Raven. "Some of them, it would appear, with some justification. But mostly, they didn't call it destiny. They called it luck or a hunch or inspiration or something else. There have been historians who wrote of manifest destiny, but those were no more than words. Just a matter of semantics. Of course, there were some fanatics and there were others who believed in destiny, but practiced fatalism."

  "But there is no evidence," said Sutton. "No actual evidence of a thing called destiny? An actual force. A living, vital thing. Something you can put your finger on."

  Dr. Raven shook his head. "None that I know of, Ash. Destiny, after all, is just a word. It isn't something that you can pin down. Faith, too, at one time, may have been no more than a word, just as destiny is today. But millions of people and thousands of years made it an actual force, a thing that can be defined and invoked and a thing to live by."

  "But hunches and luck," protested Sutton. "Those are just happenstance."

  "They might be glimmerings of destiny," Dr. Raven declared. "Flashes showing through. A hint of a broad stream of happening behavior. One cannot know, of course. Man can be blind to so many things until he has the facts. Turning points in history have rested on a hunch. Inspired belief in one's own ability has changed the course of events more times than one can count."

  He rose and walked to a bookcase, stood with his head tilted back.

  "Somewhere," he said, "if I can find it, there is a book."

  He searched and did not find it.

  "No matter," he declared, "I'll run onto it later if you are still interested. It tells about an old African tribe with a strange belief. They believed that each man's spirit or consciousness or ego or whatever you may call it had a partner, a counterpart on some distant star. If I remember rightly, they even knew which star and could point it out in the evening sky."

  He turned around from the bookcase and stared at Sutton.

  "That might be destiny, you know," he said. "It might, very well, at that."

  He crossed the room to stand in front of the cold fireplace, hands locked behind his back, silver head tilted to one side.

  "Why are you so interested in destiny?" he asked.

  "Because I found destiny," said Sutton.

  XV

  THE FACE in the visiplate was masked and Adams spoke in chilly anger:, "I do not receive masked calls."

  "You will this one," said the voice form behind the mask. "I am the man you talked to on the patio. Remember?"

  "Calling from the future, I presume," said Adams.

  "No, I still am in your time. I have been watching you."

  "Watching Sutton, too?"

  The masked head nodded. "You have seen him now. What do you think?"

  "He's hiding something," Adams said. "And not all of him is human."

  "You're going to have him killed?"

  "No," said Adams. "No, I don't think I will. He knows something that we need to know. And we won't get it out of him by killing."

  "What he knows," said the masked voice, "is better dead with the man who knows it."

  "Perhaps," said Adams, "we could come to an understanding if you would tell me what this is all about."

  "I can't tell you, Adams. I wish I could. I can't tell you the future."

  "And until you do," snapped Adams, "I won't let you change the past."

  And he was thinking: The man is scared. Scared and almost desperate. He could kill Sutton any time he wished, but he is afraid to do it. Sutton has to be killed by a man of his own time…literally has to be, for time may not tolerate the extension of violence from one bracket to the next.

  "By the way," said the future man.

  "Yes," said Adams.

  "I was going to ask you how things are on Aldebaran XII."

  Adams sat rigid in his chair, anger flaming in him.

  "If it hadn't been for Sutton," said the masked man, "there would have been no incident on Aldebaran XII."

  "But Sutton wasn't back yet," snapped Adams. "He wasn't even here…"

  His voice ran down, for he remembered something. The name on the flyleaf…"by Asher Sutton."

  "Look," said Adams, "tell me, for the love of heaven, if you have anything to tell."

  "You mean to say you haven't guessed what it might be?"

  Adams shook his head.

  "It's war," the voice said.

  "But there is no war."

  "Not in your time, but in another time."

  "But how…"

  "Remember Michaelson?"

  "The man who went a second into time."

  The masked head nodded and the screen went blank and Adams sat and felt the chill of horror trickle through his body.

  The visor buzzer purred at him and mechanically he snapped the toggle over.

  It was Nelson in the glass.

  "Sutton just left the university," Nelson said. "He spent an hour with Dr. Horace Raven. Dr. Raven, if you don't recall, is a professor of comparative religion."

  "Oh," said Adams. "Oh, so that is it."

  He tapped his fingers on the desk, half irritated, half frightened.

  It would be a shame, he thought, to kill a man like Sutton.

  But it might be best.

  Yes, he told himself, it might be for the best,

  XVI

  CLARK SAID that he had died and Clark was an engineer. Clark made a graph and death was in the graph; mathematics foretold that certain strains and stresses would turn a body into human jelly.

  And Anderson had said he wasn't human and how was Anderson to know?

  The road curved ahead, a silver strip shining in the moonlight, and the sounds and smells of night lay across the land. The sharp, clean smell of growing things, the mystery smell of water. A creek ran through the marsh that lay off to the right and Sutton, from behind the wheel, caught the flashing hint of winding, moonlit water as he took a curve. Peeping frogs made a veil of pixy sound that hugged against the hills and fireflies were swinging lanterns that signaled through the dark.

  And how was Anderson to know?

  How, asked Sutton, unless he examined me? Unless he was the one who tried to probe into my mind after I had been knocked out when I walked into my room?

  Adams had tipped his hand and Adams never tipped his hand unless he wanted one to see. Unless he had an ace tucked neatly up his sleeve.

  He wanted me to know, Sutton told himself. He wanted me to know, but he couldn't tell me. He couldn't tell me he had me down on tape and film, that he was the one who had rigged up the room.

  But he could let me know by making just one slip, a carefully calculated slip, like the one on Anderson. He knew that I would catch and he thinks he can jitter me.

  The headlights caught, momentarily, the gray-black massive lines of a house that huddled on a hillside and then there was another curve. A night bird, black and ghostly, fluttered across the road and the shadow of its flight danced down the cone of light.

  Adams was the one, said Sutton, talking to himself. He was the one who was waiting for me. He knew, somehow, that I was coming, and he was all primed and cocked. He had me tagged and ticketed before I hit the ground and he gave me a going over before I knew what was going on.

  And undoubtedly he found a whole lot more than he bargained for.

  Sutton chuckled dryly. And the chuckle was a scream that came slanting down the hill slope in a blaze of streaming fire…a stream of fire that ende
d in the marsh, that died down momentarily, then licked out in blue and red.

  Brakes hissed and tires screeched on the pavement as Sutton slued the car around to bring it to a stop. Even before the machine came to a halt, he was out of the door and running down the slope toward the strange, black craft that nickered in the swamp.

  Water sloshed around his ankles and knife-edged grass slashed at his legs. The puddles gleamed black and oily in the light from the flaming craft. The frogs still kept up their peeping at the far edge of the marsh.

  Something flopped and struggled in a pool of muddy, flame-stained water just a few feet from the burning ship and Sutton, plunging forward, saw it was a man.

  He caught the gleaming white of frightened, piteous eyeballs shining in the flame as the man lifted himself on his mud-caked arms and tried to drag his body forward. He saw the flash of teeth as pain twisted the face into grisly anguish. And his nostrils took the smell of charred, crisped flesh and knew it for what it was.

  He stooped and locked his hands beneath the armpits of the man, hauled him upright, dragged him back across the swamp. Mud sucked at his feet and he heard the splashing behind him, the horrible, dragging splash of the other's body trailing through the water and the slime.

  There was dry land beneath his feet and he began the climb back up the slope toward the car. Sounds came from the bobbing head of the man he carried, thick, slobbering sounds that might have been words if one had had the time to listen.

  Sutton cast a quick glance over his shoulder and saw the flames mounting straight into the sky, a pillar of blue that lighted up the night. Marsh birds, roused from their nests, flew blinded and in panic through the garish light, waking the night with their squawks of terror.

  "The atomics," said Sutton, aloud. "The atomics…"

  They couldn't hold for long in a flame like that. The automatics would melt down and the marsh would be a crater and the hills would be charred from horizon to horizon.

  "No," said the bobbing head. "No…no atomics."

  Sutton's foot caught in a root and he stumbled to his knees. The body of the man slid from his mud-caked grasp.

  The man struggled, trying to turn over.

  Sutton helped him and he lay on his back, his face toward the sky.

  He was young, Sutton saw…young beneath the mask of mud and pain.

  "No atomics," said the man. "I dumped them."

  There was pride in the words, pride in a job well done. But the words had cost him heavily. He lay still, so still that he might not have been living at all.

  Then his breath came to life again and whistled in his throat. Sutton saw the blood pumping through the temples beneath the burned and twisted skin. The man's jaw worked and words came out, limping, tangled words.

  "There was a battle…back in '83…I saw him coming…tried to time-jump…" The words gurgled and got lost, then gushed out again. "Got new guns…set metal afire…"

  He turned his head and apparently saw Sutton for the first time. He started up and then fell back, gasping with the effort.

  "Sutton!"

  Sutton bent above him. "I will carry you. Get you to a doctor."

  "Asher Sutton!" The two words were a whisper.

  For a moment Sutton caught the triumphant, almost fanatic gleam that washed across the eyes of the dying man, half understood the gesture of the half-raised arm, of the cryptic sign that the fingers made.

  Then the gleam faded and the arm dropped back and the fingers came apart.

  Sutton knew, even before he bent with his head turned against the heart, that the man was dead.

  Slowly Sutton stood up.

  The flame was dying down and the birds had gone. The craft lay half buried in the mud and its lines, he noted, were none he had ever seen.

  Asher Sutton, the man had said. And his eyes had lighted up and he had made a sign just before he died. And there had been a battle back in '83.

  Eighty-three what?

  The man had tried to time-jump…who had ever heard of time-jump?

  I never saw the man before, said Sutton, as if he might be denying something that was criminal. So help me, I don't know him even now. And yet he cried my name and it sounded as if he knew me and was very glad to see me and he made a sign…a sign that went with the name.

  He stared down at the dead man lying at his feet and saw the pity of it, the crumpled legs that dangled even flat upon the ground, the stiffened arms, the lolling head and the flash of moonlight on the teeth where the mouth had opened.

  Carefully, Sutton went down on his knees, ran his hands over the body, seeking something…some bulging pocket that might give a clue to the man who lay there dead.

  Because he knew me. And I must know how he knew me. And none of it makes sense.

  There was a small book in the breast pocket of the coat and Sutton slipped it out. The title was in gold on black leather, and even in the moonlight Sutton could read the letters that flamed, from the cover to hit him straight between the eyes.

  THIS IS DESTINY

  By

  Asher Sutton

  Sutton did not move.

  He crouched there on the ground, like a cowering thing, stricken by the golden letters on the leather cover.

  A book!

  A book he meant to write, but hadn't written yet!

  A book he wouldn't write for many months to come!

  And yet here it was, dog-eared and limp from reading.

  An involuntary choking sound rose unbidden in his throat.

  He felt the chill of the fog rising from the marsh, the loneliness of a wild bird's crying.

  A strange ship had plunged into the marsh, disabled and burning. A man had escaped from the ship, but on the verge of death. Before he died he had recognized Sutton and had called his name. In his pocket he had a book that was not even written.

  Those were the facts…the bare, hard facts. There was no explanation.

  Faint sounds of human voices drifted down the night and Sutton rose swiftly to his feet, stood poised and waiting, listening. The voices came again.

  Someone had heard the crash and was coming to investigate, coming down the road, calling to others who also had heard the crash.

  Sutton turned and walked swiftly up the slope to the car.

  There was, he told himself, no earthly use of waiting.

  Those coming down the road would only cause him trouble.

  XVII

  A MAN was waiting in the clump of lilac bushes across the road and there was another one crouched in the shadow of the courtyard wall.

  Sutton walked slowly forward, strolling, taking his time.

  "Johnny," he said, soundlessly.

  "Yes, Ash."

  "That is all there are—just those two?"

  "I think there is another one, but I can't place him. All of them are armed."

  Sutton felt the stir of comfort in his brain, the sense of self-assurance, the sense of aid and comradeship.

  "Keep me posted, Johnny."

  He whistled a bar or two, from a tune that had been forgotten long ago but still was fresh in his mind from twenty years before.

  The rent-a-car garage was two blocks up the road, the Orion Arms two blocks farther down. Between him and the Arms were two men, waiting with guns. Two and maybe more.

  Between the garage and hotel was nothing…just the landscaped beauty that was a residential, administrative Earth. An Earth dedicated to beauty and to ruling…planted with a garden's care, every inch of it mapped out by landscape architects with clumps of shrubs and lanes of trees and carefully tended flower beds.

  An ideal place, Sutton told himself, to execute an ambush.

  Adams, he wondered. Although, it hardly could be Adams. He had something that Adams expected to find out and killing the man who holds information that you want, no matter how irate you may be at him, is downright infantile.

  Or those others that Eva had told him of…the ones who had Benton conditioned and all set to kill him. />
  They tied in better than Adams did, for Adams wanted him to stay alive, and these others, whoever they might be, were quite content to kill him.

  He dropped his hand in his coat pocket as if searching for a cigarette and his fingers touched the steel of the gun he had used on Benton. He let his fingers wrap around it and then pulled them away and took his hand out of the pocket and found the cigarettes in another pocket.

  Not time yet, he told himself. Time later on to use the gun, if he had to use it, if he had a chance to use it.

  He stopped to light the cigarette, dallying, taking his time, playing for time.

  The gun would be a poor weapon, he knew, but better than none at all. In the dark, he probably couldn't hit the broad side of a house, but it would make a noise and the waiting men were not counting on noise. If they hadn't minded noise, they could have stepped out minutes ago and mowed him down.

  "Ash," said Johnny, "there is another man. Just in that bush ahead. He expects to let you pass and then they'll have you three ways."

  Sutton grunted. "Good, tell me exactly."

  "The bush with the white flowers. He's on this edge of it. Quite close to the walk, so he can step around and be behind you the minute that you pass."

  Sutton puffed on the cigarette, making it glow like a red eye in the dark.

  "Shall we take him, Johnny?"

  "Yes, we'd better take him."

  Sutton resumed his stroll and now he saw the bush, four paces away, no more.

  One step.

  I wonder what it's all about.

  Two steps.

  Cut out your wondering. Act now and do your wondering later.

  Three steps.

  There he is. I see him.

  Sutton was off the walk in a single stride. The gun whipped out of his pocket and at his second stride it talked, two quick, ugly words.

  The man behind the bush bent forward on his knees, swayed there for a moment, then flattened on his face. His gun fell from his fingers, and in a single swoop Sutton scooped it up. It was, he saw, an electronic device, a vicious thing that could kill even with a near-miss, owing to the field of distortion that its beam set up. A gun like that had been new and secret twenty years ago, but now, apparently, anyone could get it.