Time and Again

XIV

Sutton sat quietly in the chair and forty years were canceled from his life.

For it was like going back all of forty years…even to the teacups.

Through the open windows of Dr. Raven's study came young voices and the sound of students' feet tramping past along the walk. The wind talked in the elms and it was a sound with which he was familiar. Far off a chapel bell tolled and there was girlish laughter just across the way.

Dr. Raven handed him his teacup.

"I think that I am right," he said, and his eyes were twinkling. "Three lumps and no cream."

"Yes, that's right," said Sutton, astonished that he should remember.

But remembering, he told himself, was easy. I seem to be able to remember almost everything. As if the old sets of habit patterns had been kept bright and polished in my mind through all the alien years, waiting, like a set of cherished silver standing on a shelf, until its was time for them to be used again.

"I remember little things," said Dr. Raven. "Little, inconsequential things, like how many lumps of sugar and what a man said sixty years ago, but I don't do so well, sometimes, at the big things…the things you would expect a man to remember."

The white marble fireplace flared to the vaulted ceiling and the university's coat of arms upon its polished face was as bright as the last day Sutton had seen it.

"I suppose," he said, "you wonder why I came."

"Not at all," said Dr. Raven. "All my boys come back to see me. And I am glad to see them. It makes me feel so proud."

"I've been wondering myself," said Sutton. "And I guess I know what it is, but it is hard to say."

"Let's take it easy then," said Dr. Raven. "Remember, the way we used to. We sat and talked around a thing and finally, before we knew it, we had found the core."

Sutton laughed shortly.

"Yes, I remember, doctor. Fine points of theology. The vital differences in comparative religion. Tell me this. You have spent a lifetime at it, you know more about religions, Earthly and otherwise, than any man on Earth. Have you been able to keep one faith? Have you ever been tempted from the teaching of your race?"

Dr. Raven set down his teacup.

"I might have known," he said, "you would embarrass me. You used to do it all the time. You had the uncanny ability to hit exactly on the question that a man found it hard to answer."

"I won't embarrass you any longer," Sutton told him. "I take it that you have found some good, one might say superior, points in alien religions."

"You found a new religion?"

"No," said Sutton. "Not a religion."

The chapel bell kept on tolling and the girl who had laughed was gone. The footsteps along the walk were far off in the distance.

"Have you ever felt," asked Sutton, "as if you sat on God's right hand and heard a thing that you knew you were never meant to hear?"

Dr. Raven shook his head. "No, I don't think I ever have."

"If you did, what would you do?"

"I think," said Dr. Raven, "that I might be as troubled by it as you are."

"We've lived by faith alone," said Sutton, "for eight thousand years at least and probably more than that. Certainly more than that. For it must have been faith, a glimmer of some sort of faith, that made the Neanderthaler paint the shinbones red and nest the skulls so they faced toward the east."

"Faith," said Dr. Raven gently, "is a powerful thing."

"Yes, powerful," Sutton agreed, "but even in its strength it is our own confession of weakness. Our own admission that we are not strong enough to stand alone, that we must have a staff to lean upon, the expressed hope and conviction that there is some greater power which will lend us aid and guidance."

"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.