Time and Again

  "He's killed sixteen men," Herkimer said, stiffly. "He plans to lay away his guns when he makes it twenty-five."

  He looked straight at Sutton and said, "You're the seventeenth."

  Sutton said, meekly, "I'll try to make it easy for him."

  "How would you wish it, sir?" asked Herkimer. "Formal, or informal?"

  "Let's make it catch-as-catch-can."

  Herkimer was disapproving. "There are certain conventions…"

  "You can tell Mr. Benton," said Sutton, "that I don't plan to ambush him."

  Herkimer picked up his cap, put it on his head.

  "The best of luck, sir," he said.

  "Why, thank you, Herkimer," said Sutton.

  The door closed and Sutton was alone. He turned back to the screen. Benton played to double up his rooks. Oscar chuckled at him, slid a bishop three squares along the board and put Benton's king in check.

  Sutton snapped the visor off.

  He scraped a hand across his now-shaved chin.

  Coincidence or plan? It was hard to know.

  One of the mermaids had climbed to the edge of the fountain and balanced her three-inch self precariously. She whistled at Sutton. He turned swiftly at the sound and she dived into the pool, swam in circles, mocking him with obscene signs.

  Sutton leaned forward, reached into the visor rack, brought out the INF-JAT directory, flipped the pages swiftly.

  INFORMATION-Terrestrial.

  And the headings:

  Culinary

  Culture

  Customs

  That would be it. Customs.

  He found DUELING, noted the number and put back the book. He reset the dial and snapped the tumbler for direct communication.

  A robot's streamlined, modernistic face filled the plate.

  "At your service, sir," it said.

  "I have been challenged to a duel," said Sutton.

  The robot waited for the question.

  "I don't want to fight a duel," said Sutton. "Is there any way, legally, for me to back out? I'd like to do it gracefully, too, but I won't insist on that."

  "There is no way," the robot said.

  "No way at all?"

  "You are under one hundred?" the robot asked.

  "Yes."

  "You are sound of mind and body?"

  "I think so."

  "You are or you aren't. Make up your mind."

  "I am," said Sutton.

  "You do not belong to any bona fide religion that prohibits killing?"

  "I presume I could classify myself as a Christian," said Sutton. "I believe there is a Commandment about killing."

  The robot shook his head. "It doesn't count."

  "It is clear and specific," Sutton argued. "It says, 'Thou shalt not kill.' "

  "It is all of that," the robot told him. "But it has been discredited. You humans discredited it yourselves. You never obeyed it. You either obey or you forfeit it. You can't forget it with one breath and invoke it with the next."

  "I guess I'm sunk then," said Sutton.

  "According to the revision of the year 7990," said the robot, "arrived at by convention, any male human under the age of one hundred, sound in mind and body, and unhampered by religious bonds or belief, which are subject to a court of inquiry, must fight a duel whenever challenged."

  "I see," said Sutton.

  "The history of dueling," said the robot, "is very interesting."

  "It is barbaric," said Sutton.

  "Perhaps so. But the humans are still barbaric in many other ways as well."

  "You're impertinent," Sutton told him.

  "I'm sick and tired of it," the robot said. "Sick and tired of the smugness of you humans. You say you've outlawed war and you haven't, really. You've just fixed it so no one dares to fight you. You say you have abolished crime and you have, except for human crime. And a lot of crime you have abolished isn't crime at all, except by human standards."

  "You're taking a long chance, friend," said Sutton, softly, "talking the way you are."

  "You can pull the plug on me," the robot told him, "any time you want to. Life isn't worth it, the kind of job I have."

  He saw the look on Sutton's face and hurried on.

  "Try to see it this way, sir. Through all his history, Man has been a killer. He was smart and brutal, even from the first. He was a puny thing, but he found how to use a club and rocks, and when the rocks weren't sharp enough he chipped them so they were. There were things, at first, he should not by rights have killed. They should have killed him. But he was smart and he had the club and flints and he killed the mammoth and the saber tooth and other things he could not have faced barehanded. So he won the Earth from the animals. He wiped them out, except the ones he allowed to live for the service that they gave him. And even as he fought with the animals, he fought with others of his kind. After the animals were gone, he kept on fighting…man against man, nation against nation."

  "But that is past," said Sutton. "There hasn't been a war for more than a thousand years. Humans have no need of fighting now."

  "That is just the point," the robot told him. "There is no more need of fighting, no more need of killing. Oh, once in a while, perhaps, on some far-off planet where a human must kill to protect his life or to uphold human dignity and power. But, by and large, there is no need of killing.

  "And yet you kill. You must kill. The old brutality is in you. You are drunk with power and killing is a sign of power. It has become a habit with you…a thing you've carried from the caves. There's nothing left to kill but one another, so you kill one another and you call it dueling. You know it's wrong and you're hypocritical about it. You've set up a fine system of semantics to make it sound respectable and brave and noble. You call it traditional and chivalric…and even if you don't call it that in so many words, that is what you think. You cloak it with the trappings of your vicious past, you dress it up with words and the words are only tinsel."

  "Look," said Sutton, "I don't want to fight this duel. I don't think it's…"

  There was vindictive glee in the robot's voice.

  "But you've got to fight it. There's no way to back out. Maybe you would like some pointers. I have all sorts of tricks…"

  "I thought you didn't approve of dueling."

  "I don't," the robot said. "But it's my job. I'm stuck with it. I try to do it well. I can tell you the personal history of every man who ever fought a duel. I can talk for hours on the advantage of rapiers over pistols. Or if you'd rather I argued for pistols, I can do that, too. I can tell you about the old American West gun slicks and the Chicago gangsters and the handkerchief and dagger deals and…"

  "No, thanks," said Sutton.

  "You aren't interested?"

  "I haven't got the time."

  "But, sir," the robot pleaded, "I don't get a chance too often. I don't get many calls. Just an hour or so…"

  "No," said Sutton, firmly.

  "All right, then. Maybe you'd tell me who has challenged you."

  "Benton. Geoffrey Benton."

  The robot whistled.

  "Is he that good?" asked Sutton.

  "All of it," the robot said.

  Sutton shut the visor off.

  He sat quietly in his chair, staring at the gun. Slowly he reached out a hand and picked it up. The butt fitted snugly in his hand. His finger curled around the trigger. He lifted it and sighted at the doorknob.

  It was easy to handle. Almost as if it were a part of him. There was a feel of power within it…of power and mastery. As if he suddenly were stronger and greater…and more dangerous.

  He sighed and laid it down.

  The robot had been right.

  He reached out to the visor, pushed the signal for the lobby desk.

  Ferdinand's face came in.

  "Anyone waiting down there for me, Ferdinand?"

  "Not a soul," said Ferdinand.

  "Anyone asked for me?"

  "No one, Mr. Sutton."

  "No reporters?
Or photographers?"

  "No, Mr. Sutton. Were you expecting them?"

  Sutton didn't answer.

  He cut off, feeling very silly.

  VI

  MAN WAS SPREAD thin throughout the galaxy. A lone man here, a handful there. Slim blobs of bone and brain and muscle to hold a galaxy in check. Slight shoulders to hold up the cloak of human greatness spread across the light-years.

  For Man had flown too fast, had driven far beyond his physical capacity. Not by strength did he hold his starry outposts, but by something else…by depth of human character, by his colossal conceit, by his ferocious conviction that Man was the greatest living thing the galaxy had spawned. All this in spite of many evidences that he was not…evidence that he took and evaluated and cast aside, scornful of any greatness that was not ruthless and aggressive.

  Too thin, Christopher Adams told himself. Too thin and stretched too far. One man backed by a dozen androids and a hundred robots could hold a solar system. Could hold it until there were more men or until something cracked.

  In time there'd be more men, if the birthrate held. But it would be many centuries before the line would grow much thicker, for Man held only the key points…one planet in an entire system, and not in every system. Man had leap-frogged since there weren't men enough, had set up strategic spheres of influence, had by-passed all but the richest, most influential systems.

  There was room to spread, room for a million years.

  If there were any humans left in a million years.

  If the life on those other planets let the humans live, if there never came a day when they would be willing to pay the terrible price of wiping out the race.

  The price would be high, said Adams, talking to himself. But it would be done, and it would be easy. Just a few hours' job. Humans in the morning, no humans left by night. What if a thousand others died for every human death…or ten thousand, or a hundred thousand? Under certain circumstances, such a price might well be counted cheap.

  There were islands of resistance even now where one walked carefully…or even walked around. Like 61 Cygni, for example.

  It took judgment…and some tolerance…and a great measure of latent brutality, but, most of all, conceit, the absolute, unshakable conviction that Man was sacrosanct, that he could not be touched, that he could scarcely die.

  But five men had died, three humans and two androids, beside a river that flowed on Aldebaran XII, just a few short miles from Andrelon, the planetary capital.

  They had died of violence, of that there was no question.

  Adams' eyes sought out the paragraph of Thorne's latest report:

  Force had been applied from the outside. We found a hole burned through the atomic shielding of the engine. The force must have been controlled or it would have resulted in absolute destruction. The automatics got in their-work and headed off the blast, but the machine went out of control and smashed into the tree. The area was saturated with intensive radiation.

  Good man, Thorne, thought Adams. He won't let a single thing be missed. He had those robots in there before the place was cool.

  But there wasn't much to find…not much that gave an answer. Just a batch of question marks.

  Five men had died and when that was said, that was the end of fact. For they were burned and battered and there were no features left, no fingerprints or eyeprints to match against the records.

  A few feet away from the strewn blackness of the bodies the machine had smashed into a tree, had wrapped itself around and half sheared the trunk in two. A machine that, like the men, was without a record. A machine without a counterpart in the known galaxy and, so far at least, a machine without a purpose.

  Thorne would give it the works. He would set it up in solidographs, down to the last shattered piece of glass and plastic. He would have it analyzed and diagramed and the robots would put it in scanners that would peel it and record it molecule by molecule.

  And they might find something. Just possibly they might.

  Adams shoved the report to one side and leaned back in his chair. Idly, he spelled out his name lettered across the office door, reading backwards slowly and with exaggerated care. As if he'd never seen the name before. As if he did not know it. Puzzling it out.

  And then the line beneath it:

  SUPERVISOR, ALIEN RELATIONS BUREAU. SPACE SECTOR 16.

  And the line beneath that:

  DEPARTMENT OF GALACTIC INVESTIGATION (JUSTICE).

  Early afternoon sunlight slanted through a window and fell across his head, highlighting the clipped silver mustache, the whitening temple hair.

  Five men had died…

  He wished that he could get it out of his mind. There was other work. This Sutton thing, for instance. The reports on that would be coming in within an hour or so.

  But there was a photograph…a photograph from Thorne, that he could not forget.

  A smashed machine and broken bodies and a great smoking gash sliced across the turf. The silver river flowed in a silence that one knew was there even in the photograph and far in the distance the spidery web of Andrelon rose against a pinkish sky.

  Adams smiled softly to himself. Aldebaran XII, he thought, must be a lovely world. He never had been there and he never would be there…for there were too many planets, too many planets for one man to even dream of seeing all.

  Someday, perhaps, when the teleports would work across light-years instead of puny miles…perhaps then a man might just step across to any planet that he wished, for a day or hour or just to say he'd been there.

  But Adams didn't need to be there…he had eyes and ears there, as he had on every occupied planet within the entire sector.

  Thorne was there and Thorne was an able man. He wouldn't rest until he'd wrung the last ounce of information from the broken wreck and bodies.

  I wish I could forget it, Adams told himself. It's important, yes, but not all-important.

  A buzzer hummed at Adams and he flipped up a tumbler on his desk.

  "What is it?"

  An android voice answered, "It's Mr. Thorne, sir, on the mentophone from Andrelon."

  "Thank you, Alice," Adams said.

  He clicked open a drawer and took out the cap, placed it on his head, adjusted it with steady fingers. Thoughts flickered through his brain, disjointed, random thoughts, all faint and faraway. Ghost thoughts drifting through the universe—residual flotsam from the minds of things in time and space that was unguessable.

  Adams flinched.

  I'll never get used to it, he told himself. I will always duck, like the kid who knows he deserves a cuffing.

  The ghost thoughts peeped and chittered at him.

  Adams closed his eyes and settled back.

  "Hello, Thorne," he thought.

  Thorne's thought came in, thinned and scratchy over the space of more than fifty light-years.

  "That you, Adams? Pretty weak out here."

  "Yes, it's me. What's up?"

  A high, singsong thought came in and skipped along his brain:

  Spill the rattle…pinch the fish…oxygen is high-priced.

  Adams forced the thought out of his brain, built up his concentration.

  "Start over again, Thorne. A ghost came along and blotted you out."

  Thorne's thought was louder now, more distinct.

  "I wanted to ask you about a name. Seems to me I heard it once before, but I can't be sure."

  "What name?"

  Thorne was spacing his thoughts now, placing them slowly and with emphasis to cut through the static.

  "The name is Asher Sutton."

  Adams sat bolt upright in his chair. His mouth flapped open.

  "What?" he roared.

  "Walk west," said a voice in his brain. "Walk west and then straight up."

  Thorne's thought came in: "…it was the name that was on the flyleaf…"

  "Start over," Adams pleaded. "Start over and take it slow. We got blotted out again. I couldn't hear a thing you thought."
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  Thorne's thoughts came slowly, power behind each word:

  "It was like this. You remember that wreck we had out here? Five men killed…"

  "Yes. Yes. Of course, I remember it."

  "Well, we found a book, or what once had been a book, on one of the corpses. The book was burned, scorched through and through by radiation. The robots did what they could with it, but that wasn't much. A word here and there. Nothing you could make any sense out of…"

  The thought static purred and rumbled. Half thoughts cut through. Rambling thought-snatches that had no human sense or meaning—that could have had no human sense or meaning even if they had been heard in their entirety.

  "Start over," Adams thought desperately. "Start over.

  "You know about this wreck. Five men…"

  "Yes. Yes. I got that much. Up to the part about the book. Where does Sutton come in?"

  "That was about all the robotics could figure out," Thorne told him. "Just three words: 'by Asher Sutton.' As if he might have been the author. As if the book might have been written by him. It was on one of the first pages. The title page, maybe. Such and such a book by Asher Sutton."

  There was silence, even the ghost voices still for a moment. Then a piping, lisping thought came in…a baby thought, immature and puling. And the thought was without context, untranslatable, almost meaningless. But hideous and nerve-wrenching in its alien connotation.

  Adams felt the sudden chill of fear slice into his marrow, grasped the chair arms with both his hands and hung on tight while a filthy, taloned claw twisted at his entrails.

  Suddenly the thought was gone. Fifty light-years of space whistled in the cold.

  Adams relaxed, felt the perspiration running from his armpits, trickling down his ribs.

  "You there, Thorne?" he asked.

  "Yes. I caught some of that one, too."

  "Pretty bad, wasn't it?"

  "I've never heard much worse," Thorne told him.

  There was a moment's silence. Then Thorne's thoughts took up again.

  "Maybe I'm just wasting time. But it seemed to me I remembered that name."

  "You have," Adams thought back. "Sutton went to 61 Cygni."

  "Oh, he's the one!"

  "He got back this morning."

  "Couldn't have been him, then. Someone else by the same name, maybe."