Time and Again

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.