Time and Again

by Clifford D. Simak

  Sutton had died, but not on Earth nor in Earth's solar system and not at the age 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 counterespionage of the Revisionists, 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 the 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 defeat. Victory for an officialdom that was at once too timid and too vicious to take any active part in the struggle of the book. An officialdom that sought to keep the status quo, willing to wipe out centuries of thought to safely maintain its foothold in the galaxy.

  Such a defeat, she knew, would be even worse than a defeat by the Revisionists, for if the Revisionists had 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 visaphone 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 said. "He asked about a place called Bridgeport, Wisconsin."

  "As if he were going there?"

  "As if he were going there," the robot said.

  "Quick," said Eva, "tell me. 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, but 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 don't know."

  "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 come out all right."

  "You're sure of that?"

  "I'm sure of it," the robot said.

  Eva snapped the visor off and walked back to the window.

  Ash, she thought. Ash, my love, you simply have to be all right. You must know what you're doing. You must come back to us and you must write the book and…

  Not for me alone, she said. Not for me alone, for I, least of all of them, have a claim on you. But the galaxy has a claim on you, and maybe someday the universe. The little striving lives are waiting for your words and the hope and dignity they spell. And most of all the dignity, she said. Dignity ahead of hope. The dignity of equality—the dignity of the knowledge that all life is on an equal basis, that life is all that matters, that life is the badge of a greater brotherhood than anything the mind of Man has ever spelled out in all its theorizing.

  And I, she thought. I have no right to think the way I do, to feel the way I do.

  But I can't help it, Ash.

  I can't help but love you, Ash.

  Someday, she said. Someday.

  She stood straight and lonely and the tears came in her eyes and trickled down her cheeks and she did not raise her hand to wipe them off.

  Dreams, she said. Broken dreams are bad enough. But the dream that has no hope…the dream that is doomed long before it's broken, that's the worst of all.

  XXXVI

  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 and spread out in widening crinkles to hide the amazement that glittered in his eyes.

  "Good afternoon," said Sutton.

  John H. Sutton was a speck that had almost climbed the hill. The sun had passed its zenith and was swinging toward the west. Down in the river's valley a half-dozen crows were cawing and 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."

  "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 and 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 said. "He will get to wondering and he will come back. He had a lot of questions he forgot to ask."

  "Not for a while," Sutton told him. "Not until he's eaten and had an after-dinner nap."

  Dean grunted and eased himself to a sitting position, back against the ship.

  "Random factors," he said. "That's what balls the detail up. You're a random factor, Sutton. It wasn't planned this way."

  Sutton sat down easily and picked up the wrench. He weighed it in his hand. Blood, he thought, talking to the wrench. You'll have blood upon one end before the day is out.

  "Tell me," said Dean. "Now that you are here, what do you plan to do?"

  "Easy," said Sutton. "You're going to talk to me. You're going to tell me something that I need to know."

  "Gladly," Dean agreed.

  "You said you came from the eighty-fourth. What year?"

  "Eighty-three eighty-six," said Dean. "But if I were you, I'd go up a little ways. You'd find more to interest you."

  "But you figure I'll never get even so far as that," said Sutton. "You think that you will win."

  "Of course I do," said Dean.

  Sutton dug into the ground with the wrench.

  "A while ago," he said, "I found a man who died very shortly after. He recognized me and he made a sign, with his fingers raised."

  Dean spat upon the ground.

  "Android," he said. "They worship you, Sutton. They made a religion out of you. Because, you see, you gave them hope to cling to. You gave them something equal, something that made them, in one way, the equal of Man."

  "I take it," Sutton said, "you don't believe a thing I wrote."

  "Should I?"

  "I do," said Sutton.

  Dean said nothing.

  "You have taken the thing I wrote," said Sutton, evenly, "and you are trying to use it to fashion one more rung in the ladder of Man's vanity. You have missed the point entirely. You have no sense of destiny because you gave destiny no chance."

  And he felt foolish even as he said it, for it sounded so much like preaching. So much like what the men of old had said of faith when faith was just a word, before it had become a force to really reckon with. Like the old-time Bible-pounding preachers, who wore cowhide boots and
whose iron-gray hair was rumpled and whose flowing beard was stained with tobacco juice.

  "I won't lecture you," he said, angry at the smooth way Dean had put him on the defensive. "I won't preach at you. You either accept destiny or you ignore it. So far as I'm concerned I'll not raise a hand to convince any single man. The book I wrote tells you what I know. You can take it or you can leave it…it's all the same to me."

  "Sutton," said Dean, "you're batting your head against a stone wall. You haven't got a chance. You're fighting humankind. The whole human race against you…and nothing's ever stood against the human race. All you have is a pack of measly androids and a few renegade humans…the kind of humans that used to swarm to the old Cult-worships."

  "The empire is built on androids and robots," Sutton told him. "They can throw you for a loss any time they want to. Without them you couldn't hold a single foot of ground outside the Solar system."

  "They will stick with us in the empire business," Dean told him, very confident. "They may fight us on this business of destiny, but they'll stay with us because they can't get along without us. They can't reproduce, you know. And they can't make themselves. They have to have humans to keep their race going, to replace the ones who get knocked off."

  He chuckled. "Until one android can create another android, they will stick with us and they will work with us. For if they didn't, that would be racial suicide."

  "What I can't understand," said Sutton, "is how you know which ones are fighting you and which are sticking with you."

  "That," said Dean, "is the hell of it…we don't. If we did, we'd make short work of this lousy war. The android who fought you yesterday may shine your shoes tomorrow, and how are you to know? The answer is, you don't."

  He picked up a tiny stone and flicked it out on the pasture grass.

  "Sutton," he said, "it's enough to drive you nuts. No battles, really. Just guerrilla skirmishes here and there, when one small task force sent out to do a time-fixing job is ambushed by another task force sent out by the other side to intercept them."

  "As I intercepted you," said Sutton.

  "Huh…" said Dean, and then he brightened. "Why, sure," he said, "as you intercepted me."

  One moment Dean was sitting with his back against the machine, talking as if he meant to keep on talking…and in the next moment his body was a fluid blaze of motion, jackknifing upward and forward in a lunge toward the wrench that Sutton held.

  Sutton moved instinctively, toes tightening their grip upon the ground, leg muscles flexing to drive his body upward, arm starting to jerk the wrench away.

  But Dean had the advantage of one long second's start.

  Sutton felt the wrench ripped from his grip, saw the flash of it in the sun as Dean swung it upward for the blow.

  Dean's lips were moving and even as he tried to duck, even as he tried to throw up his arms to shield his head, Sutton read the words the other's lips were saying.

  "So you thought it would be me!"

  Pain exploded inside Sutton's head and for one surprised instant he knew that he was falling, the ground rushing upward at his face. Then there was no ground, but only darkness that he fell through for long eternities.

  XXXVII

  TRICKED!

  Tricked by a smooth character from five hundred years ahead in time.

  Tricked by a letter from six thousand years out of the past.

  Tricked, said Sutton, by my own muddle-headedness.

  He sat up and held his head in his hands and felt the westering sun against his back, heard the squalling of a catbird in the blackberry patch and the sound of the wind as it ran along the corn rows.

  Tricked and trapped, he said.

  He took his hands from his head and there in the trampled grass lay the wrench with the blood upon it. Sutton spread out his fingers and blood was on them, too…warm and sticky blood. Gingerly he touched his head with gentle hand and his hair was matted down.

  Pattern, he said. It all runs in a pattern.

  Here am I and there is the wrench and just beyond the fence is the field of corn that is better than knee-high on this splendid afternoon of July 4, 1977.

  The ship is gone and in another hour or so John H. Sutton will come waddling down the hill to ask the questions that he forgot to ask before. And ten years from now he will write a letter and in it he will record his suspicions concerning me and I will be in the farmyard at the very moment pumping me a drink.

  Sutton staggered to his feet and stood in the empty afternoon, with the sweep of sky above the horizon of the ridge and the panorama of the winding river far down the slope below.

  He touched the wrench with his toe and thought, I could break the pattern. I could take the wrench and then John H. would never find it and with one thing in the pattern changed the end might not be the same.

  I read the letter wrong, he thought. I always figured it would be the other man, not me. It never once occurred to me that it was my blood upon the wrench and that I would be the one who would steal the clothes from off the line.

  And yet there were certain things that didn't track. He still had his clothes and there would be no need to steal. His ship was still resting on the river's bottom and there was no need to stay.

  Yet it had happened once before, for if it had not happened, why had there been the letter? The letter had made him come here and the letter had been written because he had come, so he must have come before. And in that other time he'd stayed…and stayed only because he could not get away. This time he would go back, this time he need not stay.

  A second chance, he thought, I've been given another chance.

  Yet that wasn't right, for if there had been a second time, old John H. would have known about it. And there couldn't be a second time, for this was the very day that John H. had talked to the man out of the future.

  Sutton shook his head.

  There had been only one time that this had happened, and this, of course, was it.

  Something will happen, he told himself. Something that will not let me go back. Somehow I will be forced to steal the clothes and in the end I'll walk to that farmhouse up there and ask if they need a hand for harvest.

  For the pattern was set. It had to be set.

  Sutton touched the wrench with his toe again, pondering.

  Then he turned and went down the hill. Glancing over his shoulder as he plunged into the woods, he saw old John H. coming down the hill.

  XXXVIII

  FOR THREE DAYS Sutton toiled to free the ship from the tons of sand that the treacherous, swift-running river currents had mounded over it. And admitted, when three days were gone, that it was a hopeless task, for the current piled up the sand as fast as he could clear it.

  From there on he concentrated on clearing an opening to the entrance lock, and after another day and many cave-ins, he accomplished his purpose.

  Wearily he braced himself against the metal of the ship.

  A gamble, he told himself. But I will have to gamble.

  For there was no possibility of wrenching the ship free by using the engines. The tubes, he knew, were packed with sand and any attempt to throw in the rockets would simply mean that he and the ship and a good portion of the landscape would evaporate in a flashing puff of atomic fury.

  He had lifted a ship from a Cygnian planet and driven it across eleven years of space by the power of mind alone. He had rolled two sixes.

  Perhaps, he told himself. Perhaps…

  There were tons of sand, and he was deathly tired, tired despite the smooth, efficient functioning of his nonhuman system of metabolism.

  I rolled two sixes, he said.

  Once I rolled two sixes and surely that was harder than the task I must do now. Although that called for deftness and this will call for power…and suppose, just suppose I haven't got the strength.

  For it would take strength to lift this buried mass of metal out of the mound of sand. Not the strength of muscles, but the strength of mind.

&
nbsp; Of course, he told himself, if he could not lift the ship he still could use the time-mover, shift the ship, lying where it was, forward six thousand years. Although there was hazards he did not like to think about. For in shifting the ship through time, he would be exposing it to every threat and vagary of the river through the whole six thousand years.

  He put his hand up to his throat, feeling for the key chain that hung around his neck.

  And there was no chain!

  Mind dulled by sudden terror, he stood frozen for a moment.

  Pockets, he thought, but his hands fumbled with a dread certainty that there was no hope. For he never put the keys in his pockets…always on their chain around his neck where they would be safe.

  He searched, feverishly at first, then with a grim, cold thoroughness.

  His pockets held no key.

  The chain broke, he thought in frantic desperation. The chain broke and it fell inside my clothes. He patted himself, carefully, from head to foot, and it was not there. He took off his shirt, gently, cautiously, feeling for the missing key. He tossed the shirt aside and, sitting down, pulled off his trousers, searching in their folds, turning them inside out.

  And there was no key.

  On hands and knees, he searched the sands of the river bed, fumbling in the dim light that filtered through the rushing water.

  An hour later he gave up.

  The shifting, water-driven sand already had closed the trench he had dug to the lock and there was now no point of getting to the lock, for he could not open it when he got there.

  His shirt and trousers had vanished with the current.

  Wearily, beaten, he turned toward the shore, forcing his way through the stubborn water. His head broke into open air and the first stars of evening were shining in the east.

  On shore he sat down with his back against a tree. He took one breath and then another, willed the first heartbeat, then the second and a third…nursed the human metabolism back into action once again.