The one bit of proof, if one may call it proof, that I have to support my theories, is that the man I met could well have been a future man, might well have sprung from some civilization further advanced than ours. For it must be apparent to whoever reads this letter that in my talk with him he used me for his own purpose, that he pulled the wool over my eyes as easily as a man of my day might pull it over the eyes of a Homeric Greek or some member of Attila's tribe. He was, I am sure, a man well versed in semantics and in psychology. Looking back, I know that he always was one long jump ahead of me.
I write this not only so that any theories which I may have, and which I shrink from telling in my lifetime, may not be wholly lost, but may be available at some future time when a more enlightened knowledge than we have today may be able to make something out of them. And I hope that reading them, one will not laugh since I am dead. For if one did laugh, I am afraid that, dead as I might be, I would surely know it.
That is the failing of us Suttons—we cannot bear to be made the butt of laughter.
And in case that one may believe that my mind is twisted, I herewith enclose a physician's certificate, signed just three days ago, asserting that upon examination he found me of sound body and sane mind.
But the story I have to tell is not yet entirely done. These additional events should have been included in earlier sequence, but I found no place in which they logically would fit.
They concern the strange incident of the stolen clothing and the advent of William Jones.
The clothing was stolen a few days after the incident in the bluff pasture. Martha had done the washing early in the day, before the heat of the summer sun set in, and hung it on the line. When she went to take in the clothes, she found that an old pair of overalls of mine, a shirt belonging to Roland and a couple pairs of socks, the ownership of which I fear I have forgotten, had disappeared.
The theft made quite a stir among us, for thievery is a thing which does not often happen in our community. We checked through our list of neighbors with a somewhat guilty feeling, for while we spoke no word aloud that anyone could hear, we knew in our hearts that even thinking of any of the near-by folks in connection with the theft was a rank injustice.
We talked about it off and on for several days, and finally agreed that the theft must have been the work of some passing tramp, although even that explanation was scarcely satisfactory, for we are off the beaten way and tramps do not often pass and that year as I remember it was a year of great prosperity and there were few tramps.
It was two weeks or so after the theft of the clothing that William Jones came to the house and asked if we might need a hand to help with the harvest. We were glad to take him on, for we were short of help and the wages that he asked were far below the going pay. We took him on for the harvest only, but he proved so capable that we have kept him all these years. Even as I write this, he is out in the barnyard readying the binder for the small grain cutting.
There is a funny thing about William Jones. In this country a man soon acquires a nickname or at least a diminutive of his own. But William Jones always has been William. He never has been Will or Bill or Willy. Nor has he been Spike or Bud or Kid. There is a quiet dignity about him that makes everyone respect him, and his love of work and his quiet, intelligent interest in fanning have won him a place in the community far above the usual status of a hired hand.
He is completely sober and he never drinks, a thing for which I am thankful, although at one time I had my misgivings. For when he came to us, he had a bandage on his head and he explained to me, shamefacedly, that he had been hurt in a tavern brawl across the river somewhere in Crawford County.
I don't know when it was that I began to wonder about William Jones. Certainly it was not at first, for I accepted him for what he pretended to be, a man looking for work. If there was any resemblance to the man I had talked with down in the pasture, I did not notice it then. And, now, having noticed it at this late date, I wonder if my mind may not be playing tricks, if my imagination, running riot with my theories of time travel, may not have conditioned me to a point where I see a mystery crouching back of every tree.
But the conviction has grown upon me through the years as I have associated with him. For all that he tries to keep his place, attempts to adopt his idiom to match our idiom, there are times that his speech hints at an education and an understanding one would not expect to find in a man who works on the farm for seventy-five dollars a month and board.
There is, too, his natural shyness, which is a thing one would expect to find if a man were deliberately attempting to adapt himself to a society that was not his own.
And there is the matter of clothes. Thinking back, I can't be sure about the overalls, for all overalls look very much alike. But the shirt was exactly like the shirt that had been stolen from the line, although I tell myself that it would not be improbable for two men to own the same kind of shirt. And he was barefooted, which seemed a funny thing even at the time, but he explained it by saying that he had been down on his luck and I remember I advanced him enough money to buy some shoes and socks. But it turned out that he didn't need the socks, for he had two pairs in his pocket.
A few years ago I decided several times that I would speak to him about the matter, but each time my resolution failed and now I know I never will. For I like William Jones and William Jones likes me and I would not for the world destroy that mutual liking by a question that might send him fleeing from the farm.
There is yet one other thing which goes to make William Jones unlike most farm hands. With his first money from his work here, he bought a typewriter, and during the first two or three years that he was with us he spent long hours of his evenings in his room using the typewriter and tramping about the room, as a man who is thinking is apt to walk.
And then one day, in the early morning, before the rest of us had gotten from our beds, he took a great sheaf of paper, apparently the result of those long hours of work, and burned it. Watching from my bedroom window, I watched him do it and he stayed until he was sure that the last scrap of the paper had been burned. Then he turned around and walked back slowly to the house.
I never mentioned to him the burning of the paper, for I felt, somehow, that it was something he did not wish another man to know.
I might go on for many pages and write down many other inconsequential, trivial things which rattle in my skull, but they would not add one iota to the telling of the thing I've told and might, in fact, convince the reader that I am in my dotage.
To whoever may peruse this, I wish to make one last assurance. While my theory may be wrong, I would have him or her believe that the facts I have told are true. I would have him or her know that I did see a strange machine in the bluff pasture and that I did talk with a strange man, that I picked up a wrench with blood upon it, that clothes were stolen from the wash line and that even now a man named William Jones is pumping himself a drink of water at the well, for the day is very hot.
Sincerely,
John H. Sutton
XXII
SUTTON FOLDED the letter and the crackling of the old paper rippled across the quietness of the room like a spiteful snarl of thunder.
Then he recalled something and unfolded the sheaf of leaves again and found the thing that had been mentioned. It was yellow and old…not as good a quality of paper as the letter had been written on. The writing was by hand, with ink, and the lines were faded so they hardly could be read. The date was unclear, except for the final 7.
Sutton puzzled it out:
John H. Sutton today has been examined by me and I find him sound of mind and body.
The signature was a scrawl that probably could not have been read even when the ink was scarcely dry, but there were two letters that stood out fairly clearly at the very end.
The letters were M.D.
Sutton stared across the room and saw in his mind the scene of that long-gone day.
"Doctor, I've a mind
to make a will. Wonder if you could…"
For John H. Sutton never would have told the doctor the real reason for that slip of paper…the real reason why he wanted it established that he was not insane.
Sutton could imagine him. Ponderous in his walk, slow, deliberate, taking plenty of time to think things over, placing vast values on qualities and fictions which even in that day were shopworn and losing caste from centuries of overglorification.
An old tyrant to his family, more than likely. A fuddy-duddy among his neighbors, who laughed behind his back. A man lacking in humor and crinkling his brow over fine matters of etiquette and ethics.
He had been trained for the law and he had a lawyer's mind, that much at least the letter told with clarity. A lawyer's mind for detail and a landed man's quality of slowness and an old man's garrulity.
But there was no mistaking the man's sincerity. He believed he had seen a strange machine and had talked with a strange man and had picked up a wrench stained with…
A wrench!
Sutton sat bolt upright on the bed.
The wrench had been in the trunk. He, Asher Sutton, had held it in his hand. He had picked it up and tossed it on the pile of junk along with the dog-gnawed bone and the college notebooks.
Sutton's hand trembled as he slid the letter back into its envelope. First it had been the stamp that had intrigued him, a stamp that was worth Lord knows how many thousand dollars…then it was the letter itself and the mystery of its being sealed…and now there was the wrench. And the wrench clinched everything.
For the wrench meant that there actually had been a strange machine and a stranger man…a man who knew enough semantics and psychology to speak a talkative, self-centered oldster off his mental feet. Fast enough on the uptake to keep this inspection-tripping farmer from asking him the very questions the man was bubbling to ask.
Who are you and where did you come from and what's that machine and how does it run, I never saw the like of it before…
Hard to answer, if they were ever asked.
But they were not asked.
John H. Sutton had had the last word…as would have been his habit.
Asher Sutton chuckled, thinking of John H. Sutton's having the last word and how it came about. It would please the old boy if he could only know, but, of course, he couldn't.
There had been some slip, of course. The letter had been lost or mislaid somehow and then mislaid again…and finally, somehow, it had come into the hands of another Sutton, six thousand years removed.
And the first Sutton, more than likely, it would have done a bit of good. For the letter tied in someplace, had some significance in the mystery of the moment.
Men who traveled in time. Men whose time machines went haywire and came to landfall or timefall, whichever you might call it, in a cow pasture. And other men who fought in time and screamed through folds of time in burning ships and landed in a swamp.
A battle back in eighty-three, the dying youth had said. Not a battle at Waterloo or off the Martian orbit, but back-in eighty-three.
And the man had cried his name just before he died and lifted himself to make a sign with strangely twisted fingers. So I am known, thought Sutton, up in eighty-three and beyond eighty-three, for the boy said back and that means that in his time a time three centuries yet to come is historically the past.
He reached for his coat again and slid the letter into the pocket with the book, then rolled out of bed. He reached for his clothes and began to dress.
For it had come to him, the thing he had to do.
Pringle and Case had used a ship to get to the asteroid and he must find that ship.
XXIII
THE LODGE was deserted, big and empty with an alienness in its emptiness that made Sutton, who should have been accustomed to alienness, shiver as he felt it touch him.
He stood for a moment outside his door and listened to the whispering of the place, the faint, illogical breathing of the house, the creak of frost-expanded timbers, the caress of wind against a windowpane, and the noises that could not be explained by either frost or wind, the living sound of something that is not alive.
The carpeting in the hall deadened his footsteps as he went down it toward the stairs. Snores came from one of the two rooms which Pringle had said that he and Case occupied and Sutton wondered for a moment which one of them it was that snored.
He went carefully down the stairs, trailing his hand along the banister to guide him, and when he reached the massive living space he waited, standing stock-still so that his eyes might become accustomed to the deeper dark that crouched there like lairing animals.
Slowly the animals took the shapes of chairs and couches, tables, cabinets and cases, and one of the chairs, he saw, had a man sitting in it.
As if he had become aware that Sutton had seen him, the man stirred, turning his face toward him. And although it was too dark to see his features, Sutton knew that the man in the chair was Case.
Then, he thought, the man who snores is Pringle, although he knew that it made no difference which it was that snored.
"So, Mr. Sutton," Case said, slowly, "you decided to go out and try to find our ship."
"Yes," Sutton said, "I did."
"Now, that is fine," said Case. "That is the way I like a man to speak up and say what's on his mind." He sighed. "You meet so many devious persons," he said. "So many people who try to lie to you. So many people who tell you half-truths and feel, while they're doing it, that they are being clever."
He rose out of the chair, tall and straight and prim.
"Mr. Sutton," he said, "I like you very much."
Sutton felt the absurdity of the situation, but there was a coldness and a half-anger in him that told him this was no laughing matter.
Footsteps padded softly down the stairs behind him and Pringle's voice whispered through the room.
"So he decided to make a try for it."
"As you see," said Case.
"I told you that he would," said Pringle, almost triumphantly. "I told you that he would get it figured out."
Sutton choked down the gorge that rose into his throat. But the anger held…anger at the way they talked about him as if he weren't there.
"I fear," said Case to Sutton, "that we have disturbed you. We are most untactful people and you are sensitive. But let's forget it all and get down to business now. You wanted, I believe, to ferret out our ship."
Sutton shrugged his shoulders. "It's your move now," he said.
"Oh, but you misunderstand," said Case. "We have no objection. Go ahead and ferret."
"Meaning I can't find it?"
"Meaning that you can," said Case. "We didn't try to hide it."
"We'll even show you the way," said Pringle. "We'll go along with you. It will take you a lot less time."
Sutton felt the fine ooze of perspiration break out along his hairline and dampen his forehead.
A trap, he told himself. A trap laid out in plain sight and not even baited. And he'd walked into it without even looking.
But it was too late now. There was no backing out.
He tried to make his voice sound unconcerned.
"O.K.," he said. "I'll gamble with you."
XXIV
THE SHIP was real—strange, but very real. And it was the only thing that was. All the rest of the situation had a vague, unrealistic, almost faerie character about it, as if it might be a bad dream and one would wake up any moment and for an agonizing second try to distinguish between drama and reality.
"That map over there," said Pringle, "puzzles you, no doubt. And there is every reason that it should. For it is a time map."
He chuckled and rubbed the back of his head with a beefy hand.
"Tell the truth, I don't understand the thing myself. But Case does. Case is a military man and I'm just a propagandist and a propagandist doesn't have to know what he is talking about, just so he talks about it most convincingly. But a military man does. A military man has t
o know or someday he'll get behind an eight-ball and his life may depend on knowing."
So that was it, thought Sutton. That was the thing that had bothered him. That was the clue that had slipped his mind. The thing he couldn't place about Case, the thing that he had told himself would explain Case, tell who he was and what he was and why he was here on this asteroid.
A military man.
I should have guessed, said Sutton to himself. But I was thinking in the present…not the past or future. And there are no military men, as such, in the world today. Although there were military men before my time and apparently there will be military men in ages yet to come.
He said to Case, "War in four dimensions must be slightly complicated."
And he didn't say it because he was interested at the moment in war, whether in three or four dimensions, but because he felt that it was his turn to talk, his turn to keep this Mad Hare tea chatter at its proper pace.
For that was what it was, he told himself…an utterly illogical situation, a madcap, slightly psychopathic interlude that might have its purpose, but a hidden, tangled purpose.
"The time has come" the Walrus said, "To talk of many things, Of shoes—and ships—and sealing wax—Of cabbages—and kings—"
Case smiled when he spoke to him, a tight, hard, clipped, military smile.
"Primarily," Case said, "it is a matter of charts and graphs and very special knowledge and some superguessing. You figure out where the enemy may be and what he may be thinking and you get there first."
Sutton shrugged. "Basically that always was the principle," he said. "You get there fustest…"
"Ah," said Pringle, "but there are now so many more places where the enemy may go."
"You work with thought graphs and attitude charts and historic reports," said Case, almost as if he had not been interrupted. "You trace back certain happenings and then you go back and try to change some of those happenings…just a little, you understand, for you must not change them much. Just enough so the end result is slightly different, just a little less favorable to the enemy. One change here and another there and you have him on the run."