Time and Again

XLIX

"You didn't stay long with your friends," said Trevor.

Sutton shook his head. "We had a disagreement."

"Something about this Cradle business?"

"You might call it that," said Sutton. "It goes a good deal deeper. The fundamental prejudices rooted between androids and humans."

"Herkimer killed an android who brought him a message about the Cradle," Trevor said.

"He thought it was someone that you sent. Someone masquerading as an android. That is why he killed him."

Trevor pursed his mouth sanctimoniously. "Too bad," he said. "Too bad. Mind telling me how he recognized the…might we call it the deception?"

"That is something," Sutton said, "that I'm not telling you."

Trevor labored at acting unconcerned. "The main point is," he said, "that it didn't work."

"You mean the androids didn't run helter-skelter for the Cradle and show you where it was."

Trevor nodded. "There was another angle to it, too. They might have pulled some of their guards off the crisis points. That would have helped us some."

"Double-barreled," said Sutton.

"Oh, most assuredly," said Trevor. "Nothing like getting the other fellow square behind the eight-ball."

He squinted at Sutton's face.

"Since when," he asked, "and why did you desert the human race?"

Sutton put his hand up to his face, felt the hardness of the plastic that had remodeled his features into those of another person.

"It was Herkimer's idea," he declared. "He thought it would make me hard to spot. You wouldn't be looking for an android, you know."

Trevor nodded agreement. "It would have helped," he said. "It would have fooled us for a while, but when you walked away and the tracer followed you, we knew who you were."

The squirrel came hopping across the grass, sat down in front of them and looked them over.

"Sutton," Trevor asked, "how much do you know about this Cradle business?"

"Nothing," Sutton told him. "They told me I was a human and it was an android matter."

"You can see from that how important it must be."

"I think I can," said Sutton.

"You can guess, just from the name, what it might be."

"That's not too hard to do," said Sutton.

"Because we needed a greater force of humans," said Trevor, "we made the first androids a thousand years ago. We needed them to fill out the too-thin ranks of mankind. We made them as close to humans as we could. They could do everything the humans could except one thing."

"They can't reproduce," said Sutton. "I wonder, Trevor, if it had been possible, if we would have given that power to them, too. For if we had, they would have been true humans. There would have been no difference between a man whose ancestors were made in a laboratory and those whose ancestors stemmed back to the primal ocean. The androids would have been a self-continuing race, and they wouldn't have been androids. They would have been humans. We would have been adding to our population by chemical as well as biological means."

"I don't know," said Trevor. "Honestly, I don't. Of course, the wonder is that we could make them at all, that we could produce life in the laboratory. Think of the sheer intellectual ability and the technical skill that went into it. For centuries men had tried to find out what life was, had run down one blind alley after another, bumping into stone wall after stone wall. Failing in a scientific answer, many of them turned back to the divine source, to a mythical answer, to the belief that it was a matter of divine intervention. The idea is perfectly expressed by du Noüy, who wrote back in the twentieth century."

"We gave the androids one thing we do not have ourselves," said Sutton, calmly.

Trevor stared at him, suddenly hard, suddenly suspicious.

"You…"

"We gave them inferiority," said Sutton. "We made them less than human. We supplied them with a reason to fight us. We denied them something they have to fight to get…equality. We furnished them with a motive Man lost long ago. Man no longer needs to prove he is as good as anyone else, that he is the greatest animal in his world or in his galaxy."

"They're equal now," said Trevor, bitterly. "The androids have been reproducing themselves…chemically, not biologically, for a long time now."

"We could have expected it," said Sutton. "We should have suspected it long ago."

"I suppose we should have," Trevor admitted. "We gave them the same brains we have ourselves. We gave them, or we tried to give them, a human perspective."

"And we put a mark upon their foreheads," Sutton told him.

Trevor made an angry motion with his hand.

"That little matter is being taken care of now," he said. "When the androids make another android they don't bother to put a mark upon his head."

Sutton started and then settled back as the thunder hit him…thunder that rolled and rumbled in his brain, a growing, painful, roaring thunder that shut out everything.

He had said a weapon. He had said there was a weapon…

"They could make themselves better than they were originally," said Trevor. "They could improve upon the model. They could build a super-race, a mutant race, call it what you will…"

Only one weapon, he had said. And you can't fight with just one cannon.

Sutton put a hand up to his forehead, rubbed hard against his brow.

"Sure," said Trevor. "You can go nuts thinking about it. I have. You can conjure up all sorts of possibilities. They could push us out. The new pushing out the old."

"The race would be human still," said Sutton.

"We built slowly, Sutton," Trevor said. "The old race. The biological race. We came up from the dawn of Man, we came up from chipped flints and fist ax, from the cave and the tree top nest. We've built too slowly and painfully and bloodily to have our heritage taken from us by something to which that slowness and the pain and blood would mean not a thing at all."

One gun, Sutton thought. But he had been wrong. There were a thousand guns, a million guns, wheeling into line. A million guns to save destiny for all life that was or would be. Now or a million billion years from now.

"I suppose," he said, shakily, "that you feel now I should throw in with you."

"I want you," said Trevor, "to find out for me where the Cradle is."

"So you can smash it," Sutton said.

"So I can save humanity," said Trevor. "The old humanity. The real humanity."

"You feel," said Sutton, "that all humans should stick together now."

"If you have a streak of the human in you," said Trevor, "you will be with us now."

"There was a time," said Sutton, "back on Earth, before men went to the stars, that the human race was the most important thing the mind of Man could know. That isn't true any longer, Trevor. There are other races just as great."

"Each race," said Trevor, "is loyal to its own. The human race must be loyal unto itself."

"I am going to be traitor," Sutton said. "I may be wrong, but I still think that destiny is greater than humanity."

"You mean that you refuse to help us?"

"Not only that," said Sutton. "I am going to fight you. I'm telling you this now so that you will know. If you want to kill me, Trevor, now's the time to do it. Because if you don't do it now, it will be too late."

"I wouldn't kill you for all the world," said Trevor. "Because I need the words you wrote. Despite you and the androids, Sutton, we'll read them the way we want them read. And so will all the other slimy, crawling things you admire so much. There's nothing in God's world that can stand before the human race, that can match the human race…"

Sutton saw the loathing that was on Trevor's face.

"I'm leaving you to yourself, Sutton," Trevor told him. "Your name will go down as the blackest blot in all of human history. The syllables of your name will be a sound that the last human will gag upon if he tries to speak it. Sutton will become a common noun with which one man will insult another…"

He called Sutton a name that was a fighting word and Sutton did not stir upon the bench.

Trevor stood up and started to walk away and then turned back. His voice was not much larger than a whisper, but it cut into Sutton's brain like a whetted knife.

"Go and wash your face," he said. "Wash off the plastic and the mark. But you'll never be human again, Sutton. You'll never dare to call yourself a man again."

He turned on his heel and walked away, and staring at his back, Sutton saw the back of humanity turned upon him forevermore.

Somewhere in his brain, as if it were from far away, he seemed to hear the sound of a slamming door.