Time and Again

XII

The trunk came in the morning when Sutton was finishing his breakfast.

It was old and battered, the ancient rawhide covering hanging in tatters to reveal the marred steel skeleton, flecked here and there with rust. A key was in the lock and the straps were broken. Mice had gnawed the leather completely off one end.

Sutton remembered it…it was the one that had stood in the far corner of the attic when he had been a boy and gone there to play on rainy afternoons.

He picked up the neatly folded copy of the morning edition of the Galactic Press that had come with his breakfast tray and shook it out.

The item he was looking for was on the front page, the third item in the Earth news column:

There was a final sentence, the most damning that could be written of a duelist.

Sutton folded the paper again and laid it carefully on the table. He lit a cigarette.

I thought it would be me, he told himself. I never fired a gun like that before…scarcely knew a gun like that existed. Although I had read about them and knew about them. But I wasn't interested in dueling, and duelists and collectors and antiquarians are the only ones who would know about an ancient weapon.

Of course, I didn't really kill him. Benton killed himself. If he hadn't missed — and there was no excuse for missing — the item would have read the other way around.

We'll make an evening of it, the girl had said, and she might have known. We'll have dinner and make an evening of it. We'll make an evening of it and Geoffrey Benton will kill you at the Zag House.

Yes, said Sutton to himself, she might have known. She knows too many things. About the spy traps in this room, for instance. And about someone who had Benton conditioned to challenge me and kill me.

She said friend when I asked her friend or foe, but a word is an easy thing. Anyone at all can speak a single word and there is no way to know if it is true or false.

She said she had studied me for twenty years and that is false, of course, for twenty years ago I was setting out for Cygni and I was unimportant. Just a cog in a great machine. I am unimportant still, unimportant to everyone but myself and a great idea that no human but myself could possibly know about. For no matter if the manuscript was photostated, there is not a soul who can read it.

She said friend when I asked her friend or foe. And she knew that Benton had been conditioned to challenge me and kill me. And she had called me up and made a dinner date.

And words are easy things to say. But there are other things than words that are not easy to twist from lie to truth…the way her lips felt beneath my lips, the tenderness of fingertips that slide along the cheek.

He snubbed out the cigarette and rose and walked over to the trunk. The lock was rusty and the key turned hard, but he finally got it open and lifted up the lid.

The trunk was half full of papers very neatly piled. Sutton, looking at them, chuckled. Buster always was a methodical soul. But, then, all robots were methodical. It was the nature of them. Methodical and, what was it Herkimer had said? Stubborn, that was it. Methodical and stubborn.

He squatted on the floor beside the trunk and rummaged through the contents. Old letters tied neatly in bundles. An old notebook from his college days. A sheaf of clipped-together documents that undoubtedly were outdated. A scrapbook littered with clippings that had not been pasted up. An album half filled with a cheap stamp collection.

He squatted back on his heels and turned the pages of the album lovingly, childhood coming back again. Cheap stamps because he had had no money to buy the better ones. Gaudy ones because they had appealed to him. Most of them in poor condition, but there had been a time when they had seemed wonderful.

The stamp craze, he remembered, had lasted two years…three years at the most. He had pored over catalogues, had traded, had bought cheap packets, picked up the strange lingo of the hobby…perforate, imperforate, shades, watermarks, intaglio.

He smiled softly at the happiness of memory. There had been stamps he'd wanted but could never have, and he had studied the illustrations of them until he knew each of them by heart. He lifted his head and stared at the wall and tried to remember what some of them were like, but there was no recollection. The once all-important thing had been buried by more than fifty years of other all-important matters.

He laid the album to one side, went at the trunk again.

More notebooks and letters. Loose clippings. A curious-looking wrench. A well-chewed bone that at one time probably had been the property and the solace of some well-loved but now forgotten family dog.

Junk, said Sutton. Buster could have saved a lot of time by simply burning it.

A couple of old newspapers. A moth-eaten pennant. A bulky letter that never had been opened.

Sutton tossed it on top of the rest of the litter he had taken from the trunk, then hesitated, put out his hand and picked it up again.

That stamp looked queer. The color, for one thing.

Memory ticked within his brain and he saw the stamp again, saw it as he had seen it when a lad…not the stamp, itself, of course, but the illustration of it in a catalogue.

He bent above the letter and caught a sudden, gasping breath.

The stamp was old, incredibly old…incredibly old and worth…good Lord, how much was it worth?

He tried to make out the postmark, but it was so faint with time that it blurred before his eyes.

He got up slowly and carried the letter to the table, bent above it, puzzling out the town name.

Bridgeport, probably. And WIS.? Some old state, perhaps. Some political division lost in the mist of time.

July, 1980-some thing!

Six thousand years ago!

Sutton's hand shook.

An unopened letter, mailed sixty centuries ago. Tossed in with this heap of junk. Lying cheek by jowl with a tooth-scarred bone and a funny wrench.

An unopened letter…and with a stamp that was worth a fortune.

Sutton read the postmark again. Bridgeport, Wis. July, it looked like 11…July 11, 198-. The missing numeral in the year was too faint to make out. Maybe with a good glass it could be done.

The address, faded but still legible, said:

So that was what WIS. was. Wisconsin.

And the name was Sutton.

Of course, it would be Sutton.

What had Buster's android lawyer said? A trunkful of family papers.

I'll have to look into historic geography, Sutton thought. I'll have to find out just where Wisconsin was.

But John Sutton? John H. Sutton. That was another matter. Just another Sutton. One who had been dust these many years. A man who sometimes forgot to open up his mail.

Sutton turned the letter and examined the flap. There was no sign of tampering. The adhesive was flaking with age and when he ran a fingernail along one corner the mucilage came loose in a tiny shower of powder. The paper, he saw, was brittle and would require careful handling.

A trunkful of family papers, the android Wellington had said when he came into the room and balanced himself very primly on the edge of a chair and laid his hat precisely on the tabletop.

And it was a trunkful of junk instead. Bones and wrenches and paper clips and clippings. Old notebooks and letters and a letter that had been mailed six thousand years ago and never had been opened.

Did Buster know about the letter…but even as he asked himself the question Sutton knew that Buster did.

And he had tried to hide it…and he had succeeded. He had tossed it in with other odds and ends, well knowing that it would be found, but by the man for whom it was intended. For the trunk was deliberately made to appear of no importance. It was old and battered and the key was in the lock and it said there's nothing in me, but if you want to waste your time, why, go ahead and look. And if anyone had looked, the clutter would have seemed no more than what it was with one exception…the worthless accumulation of outworn sentiment.

Sutton reached out a finger and tapped the bulky letter lying on the table.

John H. Sutton, an ancestor six thousand years removed. His blood runs in my veins, though many times diluted. But he was a man who lived and breathed and ate and died, who saw the sunrise against the green Wisconsin hills…if Wisconsin has any hills, wherever it may be.

He felt the heat of summer and shivered in the cold of winter. He read the papers and talked politics with neighbors up the road. He worried about many things, both big and small, and most of them would be small, the way worries usually are.

He went fishing, in the river a few miles away from home and he may have puttered in his garden in his declining years when he had little else to do.

A man like me, although there would be minor differences. He had a vermiform appendix and it may have caused him trouble. He had wisdom teeth and they may have caused him trouble, too. And he probably died at eighty or very shortly after, although he may as well have died much earlier. And when I am eighty, Sutton thought, I will be just entering my prime.

But there would be compensations. John H. Sutton would have lived closer to the Earth, for the Earth was all he had. He would have been unplagued by alien psychology and Earth would have been a living place instead of a governing place where not a thing is grown for its economic worth, not a wheel is turned for economic purpose. He could have chosen his lifework from the whole broad field of human endeavor instead of being forced into governmental work, into the job of governing a flimsy expanse of galactic empire.

And, somewhere, lost now, there were Suttons before him, and after him, lost too, many other Suttons. The chain of life runs smoothly from one generation to the next and none of the links stand out except here and there a link one sees by accident. By the accident of history or the accident of myth or the accident of not opening a letter.

The doorbell chimed and Sutton, startled, scooped up the letter and slid it into the inside pocket of his coat.

"Come in," he called.

It was Herkimer.

"Good morning, sir," he said.

Sutton glared at him. "What do you want?" he asked.

"I belong to you," Herkimer told him, blandly. "I'm part of your third of Benton's property."

"My third…" and then he remembered.

It was the law. Whoever kills another in a duel inherits one third of the dead man's property. That was the law…a law he had forgotten.

"I hope you don't object," said Herkimer. "I am easy to get along with and very quick to learn and I like to work. I can cook and sew and run errands and I can read and write."

"And put the finger on me."

"Oh, no, I never would do that."

"Why not?"

"Because you are my master."

"We'll see," said Sutton, sourly.

"But I'm not all," said Herkimer. "There are other things. There's an asteroid, a hunting asteroid stocked with the finest game, and a spaceship. A small one, it's true, but very serviceable. There is several thousand dollars and an estate out on the west coast and some wildcat planetary development stock and a number of other small things, too numerous to mention."

Herkimer dipped into his pocket and brought out a notebook.

"I have them written out if you would care to listen."

"Not now," said Sutton. "I have work to do."

Herkimer brightened.

"Something I could do, no doubt. Something I could help with."

"Nothing," said Sutton. "I am going to see Adams."

"I could carry your case. That one over there."

"I'm not taking the case."

"But, sir…"

"You sit down and fold your hands and wait until I get back."

"I'll get into mischief," the android warned. "I just know I will."

"All right, then. There is something you can do. That case you mentioned. You can watch it."

"Yes, sir," said Herkimer, plainly disappointed.

"And don't waste your time trying to read what's in it," said Sutton. "You won't be able to."

"Oh," said Herkimer, still more disappointed.

"There's another thing. A girl by the name of Eva Armour lives in this hotel. Know anything about her?"

Herkimer shook his head. "But I have a cousin…"

"A cousin?"

"Sure. A cousin. She was made in the same laboratory as I and that makes her my cousin."

"You have a lot of cousins, then."

"Yes," said Herkimer, "I have many thousand. And we stick together. Which," he said, very sanctimoniously, "is the way it should be with families."

"You think this cousin might know someting?"

Herkimer nodded. "She works in the hotel. She can tell me something."

He picked up a leaflet off a stack that was on a table.

"I see, sir," he said, "that they got to you."

"What are you talking about?" Sutton demanded angrily.

"The Equality Leaguers," said Herkimer. "They lie in wait for anyone who might have some importance. They have a petition."

"Yes," said Sutton, "they did say something about a petition. Wanted me to sign it."

"And you didn't, sir?"

"No," said Sutton, shortly.

He stared at Herkimer. "You're an android," he said, bluntly. "I would expect you to be sympathetic with them."

"Sir," said Herkimer, "they may mean all right, but they go about it wrong. They ask for charity for us, pity for us. We do not want charity and pity."

"What do you want?"

"Acceptance as human equals," said Herkimer, "but acceptance on our merits, not by special dispensation, not by human tolerance."

"I understand," said Sutton. "I think I understood when they caught me in the lobby. Without being able to put it into words…"

"It's this way, sir," said Herkimer. "The human race has made us. That is the thing that rankles. They made us with exactly the same spirit that a farmer breeds his cattle. They make us for a purpose and use us for that purpose. They may be kind to us, but there's pity back of kindness. They do not allow us to stand on our own abilities. We have no inherent claim, are allowed no inherent claim, to the basic rights of mankind. We…"

He paused and the glitter in his eyes turned off and his face smoothed out.

"I bore you, sir," he said.

Sutton spoke sharply. "I'm your friend in this matter, Herkimer. Don't forget that for a moment. I am your friend and I proved it in advance by not signing that petition."

He stood staring at the android. Impudent and sly, he thought. And that's the way we've made them. That is the mark of slavery that goes with the mark upon the forehead.

"You may rest assured," he told Herkimer, "that I have no pity for you."

"Thank you, sir," said Herkimer. "Thank you for all of us."

Sutton turned to the door.

"You are to be congratulated, sir," said Herkimer. "You gave a very good account of yourself last night."

Sutton turned back to the room.

"Benton missed," he said. "I couldn't help but kill him."

Herkimer nodded. "But it isn't only that, sir. This happens to be the first time I ever heard of a man being killed by a bullet in the arm."

"In the arm!"

"Precisely, sir. The bullet smashed his arm, but it didn't touch him otherwise."

"He was dead, wasn't he?"

"Oh, yes," said Herkimer. "Very, very dead."