Time and Again

II

The tiny, battered ship sank lower, slowly, like a floating feather, drifting down toward the field in the slant of morning sun.

The bearded, ragged man in the pilot's chair sat tensed, straining every nerve.

Tricky, said his brain. Hard and tricky to handle so much weight, to judge the distance and the speed…hard to make the tons of metal float down against the savage pull of gravity. Harder even than the lifting of it when there had been no consideration but that it should rise and move out into space.

For a moment the ship wavered and he fought it, fought it with every shred of will and mind…and then it floated once again, hovering just a few feet above the surface of the field.

He let it down, gently, so that it scarcely clicked when it touched the ground.

He sat rigid in the seat, slowly going limp, relaxing by inches, first one muscle, then another. Tired, he told himself. The toughest job I've ever done. Another few miles and I would have let her crash.

Far down the field was a clump of buildings and a ground car had swung away from them and was racing down the strip toward him.

A breeze curled in through the shattered vision port and touched his face, reminding him…

Breathe, he told himself. You must be breathing when they come. You must be breathing and you must walk out and you must smile at them. There must be nothing they will notice. Right away, at least. The beard and clothes will help some. They'll be so busy gaping at them that they will miss a little thing. But not breathing. They might notice if you weren't breathing.

Carefully, he pulled in a breath of air, felt the sting of it run along his nostrils and gush inside his throat, felt the fire of it when it reached his lungs.

Another breath and another one and the air had scent and life and a strange exhilaration. The blood throbbed in his throat and beat against his temples and he held his fingers to one wrist and felt it pulsing there.

Sickness came, a brief, stomach-retching sickness that he fought against, holding his body rigid, remembering all the things that he must do.

The power of will, he told himself, the power of mind…the power that no man uses to its full capacity. The will to tell a body the things that it must do, the power to start an engine turning after years of doing nothing.

One breath and then another. And the heart is beating now, steadier, steadier, throbbing like a pump.

Be quiet, stomach.

Get going, liver.

Keep on pumping, heart.

It isn't as if you were old and rusted, for you never were. The other system took care that you were kept in shape, that you were ready at an instant's notice on a stand-by basis.

But the switch-over was a shock. He had known that it would be. He had dreaded its coming, for he had known what it would mean. The agony of a new kind of life and metabolism.

In his mind he held a blueprint of his body and all its working parts…a shifting, wobbly picture that shivered and blurred and ran color into color.

But it steadied under the hardening of his mind, the driving of his will, and finally the blueprint was still and sharp and bright and he knew that the worst was over.

He clung to the ship's controls with hands clenched so fiercely they almost dented metal and perspiration poured down his body and he was limp and weak.

Nerves grew quiet and the blood pumped on and he knew that he was breathing without even thinking of it.

For a moment longer he sat quietly in the seat, relaxing. The breeze came in the shattered port and brushed against his cheek. The ground car was coming very close.

"Johnny," he whispered, "we are home. We made it. This is my home, Johnny. The place I talked about."

But there was no answer, just a stir of comfort deep inside his brain, a strange, nestling comfort such as one may know when one is eight years old and snuggles into bed.

"Johnny!" he cried.

And he felt the stir again…a self-assuring stir like the feel of a dog's muzzle against a held-down palm.

Someone was beating at the ship's door, beating with his fists and crying out.

"All right," said Asher Sutton, "I'm coming. I'll be right along."

He reached down and lifted the attaché case from beside the seat, tucked it underneath his arm. He went to the lock and twirled it open and stepped out on the ground.

There was only one man.

"Hello," said Asher Sutton.

"Welcome to Earth, sir," said the man, and the "sir" struck a chord of memory. His eyes went to the man's forehead and he saw the faint tattooing of the serial number.

He had forgotten about androids. Perhaps a lot of other things as well. Little habit patterns that had sloughed away with the span of twenty years.

He saw the android staring at him, at the naked knee showing through the worn cloth, at the lack of shoes.

"Where I've been," said Sutton, sharply, "you couldn't buy a new suit every day."

"No, sir," said the android.

"And the beard," said Sutton, "is because I couldn't shave."

"I've seen beards before," the android told him.

Sutton stood quietly and stared at the world before him…at the upthrust of towers shining in the morning sun; at the green of park and meadow, at the darker green of trees and the blue and scarlet splashes of flower gardens on sloping terraces.

He took a deep breath and felt the air flooding in his lungs, seeking out all the distant sacs that had been starved so long. And it was coming back to him, coining back again…the remembrance of life on Earth, of early morning sun and flaming sunsets, of deep blue sky and dew upon the grass, the swift blur of human talk and the lilt of human music, the friendliness of the birds and squirrels, and the peace and comfort.

"The car is waiting, sir," the android said. "I will take you to a human."

"I'd rather walk," said Sutton.

The android shook his head. "The human is waiting and he is most impatient."

"Oh, all right," said Sutton.

The seat was soft and he sank into it gradually, cradling the attaché case carefully in his lap.

The car was moving and he stared out of the window, fascinated by the green of Earth. "The green fields of Earth," he said. Or was it "the green vales"? No matter now. It was a song written long ago. In the time when there had been fields on Earth, fields instead of parks, when Man had turned the soil for more important things than flower beds. In the day, thousands of years before, when Man had just begun to feel the stir of space within his soul. Long years before Earth had become the capital and the center of galactic empire.

A great star ship was taking off at the far end of the field, sliding down the ice-smooth plastic skidway with the red-hot flare of booster jets frothing in its tubes. Its nose slammed into the upward curve of the take-off ramp and it was away, a rumbling streak of silver that shot into the blue. For a moment it flickered a golden red in the morning sunlight and then was swallowed in the azure mist of sky.

Sutton brought his gaze back to Earth again, sat soaking in the sight of it as a man soaks in the first strong sun of spring after months of winter.

Far to the north towered the twin spires of the Justice Bureau, Alien Branch. And to the east the pile of gleaming plastics and glass that was the University of North America. And other buildings that he had forgotten…buildings for which he found he had no name. But buildings that were miles apart, with parks and homesites in between. The homes were masked by trees and shrubbery — none sat in barren loneliness — and through the green of the curving hills, Sutton caught the glints of color that betrayed where people lived.

The car slid to a stop before the administration building and the android opened the door.

"This way, sir," he said.

Only a few chairs in the lobby were occupied and most of those by humans. Humans or androids, thought Sutton. You can't tell the difference until you see their foreheads.

The sign upon the forehead, the brand of manufacture. The telltale mark that said, "This man is not a human, although he looks like one."

These are the ones who will listen to me. These are the ones who will pay attention. These are the ones who will save me against any future enmity that Man may raise against me.

For they are worse than the disinherited. They are not the has-beens, they are the never-weres.

They were not born of woman but of the laboratory. Their mother is a bin of chemicals and their father the ingenuity and technology of the normal race.

Android: An artificial human. A human made in the laboratory out of Man's own deep knowledge of chemicals and atomic and molecular structure and the strange reaction that is known as life.

Human in all but two respects — the mark upon the forehead and the inability to reproduce biologically.

Artificial humans to help the real humans, the biological humans, carry the load of galactic empire, to make the thin line of humanity the thicker. But kept in their place. Oh, yes, most definitely kept in their right place.

The corridor was empty, and Sutton, his bare feet slapping on the floor, followed the android.

The door before which they stopped said:

"In there," the android said.

Sutton walked in and the man behind the desk looked up and gulped.

"I'm a human," Sutton told him. "I may not look it, but I am."

The man jerked his thumb toward a chair. "Sit down," he said.

Sutton sat.

"Why didn't you answer our signals?" Davis asked.

"My set was broken," Sutton told him.

"Your ship has no identity."

"The rains washed it off," said Sutton, "and I had no paint."

"Rain doesn't wash off paint."

"Not Earth rain," said Sutton. "Where I was, it does."

"Your motors?" asked Davis. "We could pick up nothing from them."

"They weren't working," Sutton told him.

Davis' Adam's apple bobbed up and down. "Weren't working. How did you navigate?"

"With energy," said Sutton.

"Energy…" Davis choked.

Sutton stared at him icily.

"Anything else?" he asked.

Davis was confused. The red tape had gotten tangled. The answers were all wrong. He fiddled with a pencil.

"Just the usual things, I guess." He drew a pad of forms before him.

"Name?"

"Asher Sutton."

"Origin of fli…Say, wait a minute! Asher Sutton!"

Davis flung the pencil on the pad, pushed away the pad.

"That's right."

"Why didn't you tell me that at first?"

"I didn't have a chance."

Davis was flustered.

"If I had known…" he said.

"It's the beard," said Sutton.

"My father talked about you often. Jim Davis. Maybe you remember him."

Sutton shook his head.

"Great friend of your father's. That is…they knew one another."

"How is my father?" asked Sutton.

"Great," said Davis, enthusiastically. "Keeping well. Getting along in years, but standing up…"

"My father and mother," Sutton told him, coldly, "died fifty years ago. In the Argus pandemic."

He heaved himself to his feet, faced Davis squarely.

"If you're through," he said, "I'd like to go to my hotel. They'll find some room for me."

"Certainly, Mr. Sutton, certainly. Which hotel?"

"The Orion Arms."

Davis reached into a drawer, took out a directory, flipped the pages, ran a shaking finger down a column.

"Cherry 26-3489," he said. "The teleport is over there."

He pointed to a booth set flush into the wall.

"Thanks," said Sutton.

"About your father, Mr. Sutton…"

"I know," said Sutton. "I'm glad you tipped me off."

He swung around and walked to the teleport. Before he closed the door, he looked back.

Davis was on the visaphone, talking rapidly.