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
