'Getting any writing done these days, William?'
'No,' said Sutton, 'I gave up. I couldn't do it. I lost my notes, you see. I had it all figured out and I had it down on paper, and I thought maybe I could remember it, but I found I couldn't. It's no use trying.'
John H.'s voice was a soft, low growl in the darkness. 'You in any kind of trouble, William?'
'No,' said Sutton. 'Not exactly trouble.'
'Anything I can do to help?'
'Not a thing,' said Sutton.
'Let me know if there is,' said the old man. 'We'd do anything for you.'
'Someday I may go away,' said Sutton. 'Maybe suddenly. If I do I wish you would forget me, forget I was ever here.'
'That's what you wish, lad?'
'Yes, it is,' said Sutton.
'We can't forget you, William,' said old John H. 'We never could do that. But we won't talk about you. If someone comes and asks about you we'll act as if you were never here.'
He paused. 'Is that the way you want it, William?'
'Yes,' said Sutton. 'If you don't mind, that's the way I want it.'
They stood silent for a moment, facing one another in the dark, then the old man turned around and clumped toward the lighted windows of the house, and Sutton, turning too, leaned his arms on the pasture bars and stared across the river where the faerie lights were blinking in a land of never-never.
Ten years, thought Sutton, and the letter's written. Ten years and the conditions of the past are met. Now the past can get along without me, for I was only staying so that John H. could write the letter…so that he could write it and I could find it in an old trunk six thousand years from now and read it on a nameless asteroid I won by killing a man in a place that will be called the Zag House.
The Zag House, he thought, will be over there across the river, far up the prairie above the ancient town of Prairie du Chien, and the University of North America, with its matchless towers of beauty, will be set on the hills there to the north and Adams' house will be near the confluence of the Wisconsin and Mississippi Rivers. Great ships will climb into the sky from the Iowa prairies and head out for the stars that even now are twinkling overhead…and other stars that no man's eye can see unaided.
The Zag House will be over there, far across the river. And that is where someday, six thousand years from now, I will meet a little girl in a checkered apron. As in a storybook, he thought. Boy meets girl and the boy is towheaded with a cowlick and he's barefooted and the girl twists her apron in her hands and tells him what her name is…
He straightened and gripped the top bar of the pasture gate.
'Eva,' he said, 'where are you?'
Her hair was copper and her eyes…what color were her eyes? I have studied you for twenty years, she had said, and he had kissed her for it, not believing the words she spoke, but ready to believe the unspoken word that lay upon her face and body.
Somewhere she still existed, somewhere in time and space. Somewhere she might be thinking of him as even now he thought of her. If he tried hard enough, he might contact her. Might drive his hunger for her through the folds of space and time and let her know that he still remembered, let her know that somehow, sometime he would come back to her.
But even as he thought of it, he knew that it was hopeless, that he floundered in the grasp of forgotten time as a man may flounder in a running sea. It was not he who would reach out for her, but she or Herkimer or someone else who would reach out to him…if anyone ever did.. Ten years, he thought, and they have forgotten me. And is it because they cannot find me, or having found me, cannot reach me; or is it for a purpose, and if that is it, what can the purpose be?
There had been times when he had felt that he was being watched, that nasty touch of cold between the shoulder blades. And there had been the time when someone had run from him when he had been in the woods late of a summer evening hunting for the fence-jumping, cross-eyed heifer that was forever getting lost.
He turned from the pasture bars and crossed the barnyard, making his way in the darkness as a man will walk in a well-remembered room. From the barn came the scent of freshly mown hay and in the row of chicken coops one of the young birds was cheeping sleepily.
Even as he walked, his mind flicked out and touched the disturbed chicken's mind.
Fluttering apprehension of an unknown thing…there had been a sound coming on the edge of sleep. And a sound was danger…a signal of an unknown danger. Sound and nowhere to go. Darkness and sound. Insecurity.
Sutton pulled back his mind and walked on. Not much stability in a chicken, he thought. A cow was contented and its thought and purpose as slow-moving as its feeding. A dog was alive and friendly, and a cat, no matter how well tamed it might be, still walked the jungle's edge.
I know them all, he thought. I have been each one of them. And there are some that are not quite pleasant. A rat, for example, or a weasel or a bass lying in wait beneath the lily pads. But the skunk…the skunk was a pleasant fellow. One could enjoy living as a skunk.
Curiosity or practice? Perhaps curiosity, he admitted, the human penchant for prying into things that were hung with signs: No Trespassing. Keep Out. Private. Do Not Disturb. But practice as well, learning one of the tools of the second body. Learning how to move into another mind and share its every shade of intellectual and emotional reaction.
But there was a line…a line he had never crossed, either through innate decency or a fear of being apprehended. He could not decide quite which.
The road was a dusty strip of white that ran along the ridge, twisting between the deep bowls of darkness where the land fell away into deep hollows. Sutton walked slowly, footfalls muffled by the dust. The land was black and the road was white and the stars were large and soft in the summer night. So different, Sutton thought, from the winter stars. In the winter the stars retreated high into the sky and glowed with a hard and steely light.
Peace and quiet, he told himself. In this corner of the ancient Earth there is peace and quiet, unbroken by the turbulence of twentieth-century living.
From a land like this came the steady men, the men who in a few more generations would ride the ships out to the stars. Here, in the quiet corners of the world, were built the stamina and courage, the depth of character and the deep convictions that would take the engines that more brilliant, less stable men had dreamed and drive them to the farthest rims of the galaxy, there to hold key worlds for the glory and the profit of the race.
The profit, Sutton said.
Ten years, he thought, and the involuntary compact with time has been consummated…each condition filled. I am free to go, to go anywhere, any time I choose.
But there was no place to go and no way to get there.
I would like to stay, said Sutton. It is pleasant here.
'Johnny,' he said. 'Johnny, what are we going to do?'
He felt the stir in his mind, the old dog stir, the wagging tail, the comfort of blankets tucked about a child in his trundle bed.
'It's all right, Ash,' said Johnny. 'Everything's all right. You needed these ten years.'
'You've stayed with me, Johnny.'
'I am you,' said Johnny. 'I came when you were born. I'll stay until you die.'
'And then?'
'You'll not need me, Ash. I'll go to something else. Nothing walks alone.'
None walks alone, said Sutton, and he said it like a prayer.
And he was not alone.
Someone walked beside him and where he'd come from and how long he'd been there Sutton did not know.
'This is a splendid walk,' said the man, whose face was hidden in darkness. 'Do you take it often?'
'Almost every night,' said Sutton's tongue and his brain said, Steady! Steady!
'It is so quiet,' said the man. 'So quiet and alone. It is good for thinking. A man could do a lot of thinking, walking nights out here.'
Sutton did not answer.
