Time and Again

L

There was one lamp lighted, in a corner of the room. The attaché case lay on a table underneath the lamp and Eva Armour was standing beside a chair, as if she had been expecting him.

"You came back," said Eva, "to get your notes. I have them ready for you."

He stood just inside the door and shook his head.

"Not yet," he said. "Later I will need the notes. Not yet."

And there it was, he thought, the thing he had worried about that afternoon, the thing that he had tried to find the words to say.

"I told you about a weapon at breakfast this morning," he said. "You must remember what I said about it. I said there was only one weapon. I said you can't fight a war with just one gun."

Eva nodded, face drawn in the lamplight. "I remember, Ash."

"There are a million of them," said Ash. "As many as you want."

He moved slowly across the room until he stood face to face with her.

"I am on your side," he told her, simply. "I saw Trevor this afternoon. He cursed me for all humanity."

Slowly she put up a hand and he felt it slide across his face, the palm cool and smooth. Her fingers tightened in his hair and she shook his head gently, tenderly.

"Ash," she said, "you washed your face. You are Ash again."

He nodded. "I wanted to be human again," he told her.

"Trevor told you about the Cradle, Ash?"

"I'd guessed some of it," Sutton said. "He told me the rest. About the androids that wear no mark."

"We use them as spies," she said, as if it was quite a natural thing to say. "We have some of them in Trevor's headquarters. He thinks that they are human."

"Herkimer?" he asked.

"He isn't here, Ash. He wouldn't be here, after what happened out on the patio."

"Of course," said Sutton. "Of course he wouldn't. Eva, we humans are such heels."

"Sit down," she told him. "That chair over there. You talk so funny that you scare me."

He sat down.

"Tell me what happened," she demanded.

He didn't tell her. He said, "I thought of Herkimer this afternoon. When Trevor was talking with me. I hit him this morning and I would hit him tomorrow morning if he said the same thing to me. It's something in the human blood, Eva. We fought our way up. With fist ax and club and gun and atom bomb and…"

"Shut up," cried Eva. "Keep still, can't you?"

He looked up at her in astonishment.

"Human, you say," she said. "And what is Herkimer if he isn't human? He is a human, made by humans. A robot can make another robot and they're still robots aren't they? A human makes another human and both of them are humans."

Sutton mumbled, confused. "Trevor is afraid the androids will take over. That there will be no more humans. No more original, biological humans…"

"Ash," she said, "you are bothering yourself over something that a thousand generations from now will not have been solved. What's the use of it?"

He shook his head. "I guess there is no use. It keeps stirring around in my head. There's no rest for me. Once it was so clear-cut and simple. I would write a book and the galaxy would read it and accept it and everything would be just fine."

"It still can be that way," she said. "After a while, after a long while. But to do it we have to stop Trevor. He is blinded by the same tangled semantics that blind you."

"Herkimer said one weapon would do it," Sutton said. "One weapon would be the balance that was needed. Eva, the androids have gone a long way in their research, haven't they? Chemical, I mean. The study of the human body. They would have to, to do what they have done."

She nodded. "A long way, Ash."

"They have a scanner, then…a machine that could take a person apart, molecule by molecule, record it almost atom for atom. Make a blueprint for another body."

"We've done that very thing," said Eva. "We've duplicated men in Trevor's organization. Kidnapped them and blueprinted them and made a duplicate…sent him back the duplicate and placed the other under benevolent detention. It's only been through tricks like that that we've been able to hold our own at all."

"You could duplicate me?" asked Sutton.

"Certainly, Ash, but…"

"A different face, of course," said Sutton. "But a duplicate brain and…well, a few other things."

Eva nodded. "Your special abilities," she said.

"I can get into another mind," said Sutton. "Not mere telepathy, but the actual power to be another person, to be that other mind, to see and know and feel the same things that the other mind may see or know or feel. I don't know how it's done, but it must be something in the brain structure. If you duplicated my brain, the abilities should go along with the duplication. Not all of the duplicates would have it, maybe, not all of them could use it, but there would be some of them that could."

She gasped. "Ash, that would mean…"

"You would know everything," said Sutton, "that Trevor thinks. Every word and thought that passes through his mind. Because one of you would be Trevor. And the same thing with every other person who has anything to do with the war in time. You would know as soon as they know what they're going to do. You could plan to meet any threat they might be considering. You could block them at everything they tried."

"It would be stalemate," Eva said, "and that is exactly what we want. A strategy of stalemate, Ash. They wouldn't know how they were being blocked and many times they would not know who was blocking them. It would seem to them that luck was permanently against them…that destiny was against them."

"Trevor, himself, gave me the idea," Sutton said. "He told me to go out and butt my head against a wall for a while. He told me that finally I would get tired of doing it. He said that after a while I would give up."

"Ten years," said Eva. "Ten years should do the job. But if ten won't, why, then, a hundred. Or a thousand if it takes that long. We have all the time there is."

"Finally," said Sutton, "they would give up. Literally throw up their hands and quit. It would be such a futile thing. Never winning. Always fighting hard and never winning."

They sat in the room with its one little oasis of light that stood guard against the darkness that pressed in upon them and there was no triumph in them, for this was not a thing of triumph. This was a matter of necessity and not one of conquest. This was Man fighting himself and winning and losing at the same time.

"You can arrange this scanning soon?" asked Sutton.

Eva nodded. "Tomorrow, Ash?"

She looked at him queerly. "What's your hurry?"

"I am leaving," Sutton said. "Running away to a refuge that I thought of. That is, if you'll lend me a ship."

"Any ship you want."

"It would be more convenient that way," he told her. "Otherwise, I'd have to steal one."

She did not ask the question that he had expected and he went on, "I have to write the book."

"There are plenty of places, Ash, where you could write the book. Safe places. Places that could be arranged to be foolproof safe."

He shook his head.

"There's an old robot," he said. "He's the only folks I have. When I was on Cygni, he went out to one of the star systems at the very edge and filed a homestead. I am going there."

"I understand," she said, speaking very gravely.

"There's just one thing," said Sutton. "I keep remembering a little girl who came and spoke to me when I was fishing. I know that she was a person conditioned in my mind. I know she was put there for a purpose, but it makes no difference. I keep thinking of her."

He looked at Eva and saw how the lamplight turned her hair into a copper glory.

"I don't know if I'll ever be in love," said Sutton. "I can't tell you for sure if I love you, Eva. But I wish you would go with me out to Buster's planet."

She shook her head. "Ash, I must stay here, for a while at least. I've worked for years on this thing. I must see it through."

Her eyes were misty in the lamplight. "Perhaps sometime, Ash, if you still want me. Perhaps a little later I can come."

Sutton said, simply, "I'll always want you, Eva."

He reached out a hand and tenderly touched the copper curl that dropped against her forehead.

"I know that you'll never come," he said. "If it had been just a little different…if we had been two ordinary people living ordinary lives."

"There's a greatness in you, Ash," she told him. "You will be a god to many people."

He stood silently and felt the loneliness of eternity closing in upon him. There was no greatness, as she had said, only the loneliness and bitterness of a man who stood alone and would stand alone forever.