my pasture. And while that may seem rude to the reader of this account, it did not seem rude at the time, for he was such a charming person that one failed to measure him by the same yardstick as one would other people of less accomplishments.
He seemed well informed on farming, although he looked like no farmer. Come to think of it, I do not remember exactly what he did look like, although I seem to recall that he was dressed in a way which I had never seen before. Not garishly, nor outlandishly, nor even in such a manner that one would think of him as foreign, but in clothing which had certain subtle differences difficult to pin down.
He complimented me on the good growth of the pasture grass and asked me how many head of cattle we ran there and how many we were milking and what was the most satisfactory manner we had found to finish off good beef. I answered him as best I could, being very interested in his line of talk, and he kept the conversation going with appropriate comment and questions, some of which I now realize were meant as subtle flattery, although at the time I probably did not think so.
He had a tool of some sort in his hand and now he waved it at a field of corn across the fence and said it looked like a good stand and asked me if I thought it would be knee-high by the Fourth. I told him that today was the Fourth and that it was a mite better than knee-high and that I was very pleased with it, since it was a new brand of seed that I was trying for the first time. He looked a little taken aback and laughed and said so it was the Fourth, and that he had been so busy lately he had got his dates mixed. And then, before I could even wonder how a man could get his dates so mixed that he could miss the Fourth of July, he was off again on another track.
He asked how long I had lived here, and when I told him he asked if the family hadn't been here a long time; somewhere, he said, he had heard the name before. So I told him that we had, and before I knew it he had me telling all about the family, including some anecdotes which we usually do not tell outside the family circle since they are not exactly the kind of stories that we would care to have known about ourselves. For while our family is conservative and honorable in the main and better in most things than many others, there is no family which does not have a skeleton or two to hide away from view.
We talked until it was long past the dinner hour, and when I noticed this I asked him if he would not take the meal with us, but he thanked me and said that in just a short while he would have the trouble fixed and would be on his way. He said that he had virtually completed whatever repair was needed when I had appeared. When I expressed fear that I had too long delayed him, he assured me that he did not mind at all, that it had been pleasant to spend the time with me.
As I left him, I managed to get in one question. I had been intrigued by the tool which he had held in his hand during our conversation and I asked him what it was. He showed it to me and told me it was a wrench and it did look something like a wrench, although not very much so.
After I had eaten dinner and had a nap, I walked back to the pasture, determined to ask the stranger some of the questions which I had realized by this time he had avoided.
But the machine was gone and the stranger too, with only a print in the pasture grass to show where the machine had lain. But the wrench was there, and when I bent to pick it up I saw that one end was discolored, and upon investigation I found that the discoloration was blood. I have, many times since, berated myself for not having had an analysis made to determine whether the blood was human or from some animal.
Likewise, I have wondered many times just what happened there. Who the man was and how come he left the wrench and, why the heavier end of the wrench was stained with blood.
I still make the boulder one of my regular stops and the boulder still is always in the shade and the view still is unobstructed and the air over the river valley still lends to the scene its strangely deep three-dimensional effect. And the sense of tingling expectancy still hangs above the spot, so I know that the place had not been waiting for this one strange happening alone, but that other strange happenings still may occur; that this one happening may have been only one of many happenings, that there may have been uncounted others before it and countless others yet to come. Although I do not hope or expect that I shall see another, for the life of man is but a second in comparison with the time of planets.
The wrench which I picked up is still with us and it has proved a very useful tool. As a matter of fact, we have dispensed with most of our other tools and use it almost alone, for it will adjust itself to almost any nut or burr or will hold a shaft of almost any size from turning. There is no need for adjustment, nor is there any adjustment device that can be found. One simply applies it to whatever piece of metal one wants to take a grip upon and the tool adjusts itself. No great amount of pressure or of strength is needed to operate the wrench, for it appears to have the tendency to take whatever slight pressure one exerts upon it and multiply that pressure to the exact point needed to turn the nut or hold a shaft from turning. However, we are very careful to use the wrench only when there are no outside eyes to see it, for it smacks too much of magic or of witchcraft to be allowed on public view. The general knowledge that we possessed such a wrench almost certainly would lead to unwholesome speculation among our neighbors. And since we are an honest and respectable family, such a situation is the furthest from our wish.
None of us ever talk about the man and the machine I found in the bluff pasture, even among ourselves, for we seem tacitly to recognize that it is a subject which does not fit within the frame of our lives as sober, unimaginative farmers.
But while we do not talk about it, I do know that I, myself, think about it much. I spend more time than usual at the boulder resting place, just why I do not know, unless it is in the feeble hope that there somehow I may find a clue which will either substantiate or disprove the theory I have formed to account for the happening.
For I believe, without proof of any sort, that the man was a man who came from time and that the machine was a time machine and the wrench is a tool which will not be discovered or manufactured for more years to come than I care to think about.
I believe that somewhere in the future man has discovered a method by which he moves through time and that undoubtedly he has involved a very rigid code of ethics and of practices in order to prevent the paradoxes which would result from indiscriminate time traveling or meddling in the affairs of other times. I believe that the leaving of the wrench in my time provides one of those paradoxes which in itself is simple, but which under certain circumstances might lead to many complications. For that reason, I have impressed upon the family the strict necessity of continuing our present attitude of keeping its possession secret.
Likewise, I have come to the conclusion, also unsupported, that the cleft at the head of which the boulder is located may be a road through time, or at least part of a road, a single point where our present time coincides very closely through the operation of some as yet unknown principle with another time far removed from us. It may be a place in the space-time continuum where less resistance is encountered in traveling through time than in other places and, having been discovered, is used quite frequently. Or it may simply be that it is a time road more deeply rutted, more frequently used than many other time roads, with the result that whatever medium separates one time from another time had been worn thin or had been bulged a bit or whatever would happen under such a circumstance.
That reasoning might explain the strange eerie tingling of the place, might account for the sense of expectancy.
The reader must bear in mind, of course, that I am an old, old man, that I have outlived the ordinary span of human life and that I continue to exist through some vagary of human destiny. While it does not seem so to myself, it may well be that my mind is not as sharp or keen nor as analytical as it may once have been, and that as a result I am susceptible to the entertainment of ideas which would be summarily rejected by a normal human being.
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
