They plodded along, side by side, and even while he fought to keep relaxed, Sutton felt his body tensing.
'You've been doing a lot of thinking, Sutton,' said the man. 'Ten whole years of thinking.'
'You should know,' said Sutton. 'You've been watching me.'
'We've watched,' said the man. 'And our machines have watched. We got you down on tape and we know a lot about you. A whole lot more than we did ten years ago.'
'Ten years ago,' said Sutton, 'you sent two men to buy me off.'
'I know,' replied the man. 'We have often wondered what became of them.'
'That's an easy one,' Sutton said. 'I killed them.'
'They had a proposition.'
'I know,' said Sutton. 'They offered me a planet.'
'I knew at the time it wouldn't work,' the man declared. 'I told Trevor that it wouldn't work.'
'I suppose you have another proposition?' Sutton asked. 'A slightly higher price?'
'Not exactly,' said the man. 'We thought this time we'd cut out the bargaining and just let you name your price.'
'I'll think about it,' Sutton told him. 'I'm not too sure I can think up a price.'
'As you wish, Sutton,' said the man. 'We'll be waiting…and watching. Just give us the sign when you've made up your mind.'
'A sign?'
'Sure. Just write us a note. We'll be looking over your shoulder. Or just say…'Well, I've made up my mind.' We'll be listening and we'll hear.'
'Simple,' Sutton said. 'Simple as all that.'
'We make it easy for you,' said the man. 'Good evening, Mr. Sutton.'
Sutton did not see him do it, but he sensed that he had touched his hat…if he wore a hat. Then he was gone, turning off the road and going down across the pasture, walking in the dark, heading for the woods that sloped to the river bluffs.
Sutton stood in the dusty road and listened to him go — the soft swish of dew-laden grass brushing on his shoes, the muted pad of his feet walking in the pasture.
Contact at last! After ten years, contact with the people from another time. But the wrong people. Not his people.
The Revisionists had been watching him, even as he had sensed them watching. Watching and waiting, waiting for ten years. But, of course, not ten years of their time, just ten years of his. Machines and watchers would have been sprinkled through those ten years, so that the job could have been done in a year or a month or even in a week if they had wanted to throw enough men and materials into the effort.
But why wait ten years? To soften him up, to make him ready to jump at anything they offered?
To soften him up? He grinned wryly in the dark.
Then suddenly the picture came to him and he stood there stupidly, wondering why he hadn't thought of it much sooner.
They hadn't waited to soften him up…they had waited for old John H. to write the letter. For they knew about the letter. They had studied old John H. and they knew he'd write a letter. They had him down on tape and they knew him inside out and they had figured to an eyelash the way his mind would work.
The letter was the key to the whole thing. The letter was the lure that had been used to suck Asher Sutton back into this time. They had lured him, then sealed him off and kept him, kept him as surely as if they'd had him in a cage. They had studied him and they knew him and they had him figured out. They knew what he would do as surely as they had known what old John H. would do.
His mind flicked out and probed cautiously at the brain of the man striding down the hill.
Chickens and cats and dogs and meadow mice — and not one of them suspected, not one of them had known, that another mind than theirs had occupied their brain.
But the brain of a man might be a different matter. Highly trained and sensitive, it might detect outside interference, might sense if it did not actually know the invasion of itself.
The girl won't wait. I've been away too long. Her affections are less than skin-deep and she has no morals, absolutely none, and I'm the one to know. I've been on this damn patrol too long. She will be tired of waiting…she was tired of waiting when I was gone three hours. To hell with her…I can get another one. But not like her…not exactly like her. There isn't another one anywhere quite like her.
Whoever said this Sutton guy would be an easy one to crack was crazy as a loon. God, after ten years in a dump like this, I'd fall on someone's neck and kiss 'em if they came back from my own time. Anyone at all…friend or foe, it would make no difference. But what does Sutton do? Not a God-damn word. Not a single syllable of surprise in any word he spoke. When I first spoke to him he didn't even break his stride, kept right on walking as if he knew I'd been there all the time. Cripes, I could use a drink. Nerve-racking work.
Wish I could forget that girl. Wish she would be waiting for me but I know she won't. Wish…
Sutton snapped back his mind, stood quietly in the road.
And inside himself he felt the shiver of triumph, the swift backwash of relief and triumph. They didn't know. In all their ten years of watching they had seen no more than the superficial things. They had him down on tape, but they didn't know all that went on within his mind.
A human mind, perhaps. But not his mind. A human mind they might be able to strip as bare as a sickled field, might dissect it and analyze it and read the story in it. But his mind told them only what it wished to tell them, only enough so that there would be no suspicion that he was holding back. Ten years ago Adams' gang had tried to tap his mind and had not even dented it.
The Revisionists had watched ten years and they knew each motion that he made, many of the things that he had thought.
But they did not know that he could go to live within the mind of a mouse or a catfish or a man.
For if they had known they would have set up certain safeguards, would have been on the alert against him.
And they weren't. No more alert than the mouse had been.
He glanced back to the road to where the Sutton farmhouse stood upon the hill. For a moment he thought that he could see it, a darker mass against the darkness of the sky, but that, he knew, was no more than pure imagination. He knew that it was there and he had formed a mental image.
One by one, he checked the items in his room. The books, the few scribbled sheets of paper, the razor.
There was nothing there, he knew, that he could not leave behind. Not a thing that would arouse suspicion. Nothing that could be fastened on in some later day and turned into a weapon to be used against him.
He had been prepared against this day, knowing that someday it would come — that someday Herkimer or the Revisionists or an agent from the government would step from behind a tree and walk along beside him.
Knowing? Well, not exactly. Hoping. And ready for the hope.
Long years ago his futile attempt to write the book of destiny without his notes had gone up in smoke. All that remained was a heap of paper ash, mixed these many years with the soil, leached away by the rains, gone as chemical elements into a head of wheat or an ear of corn.
He was ready. Packed and ready. His mind had been packed and ready, he knew now, for these many years.
Softly he stepped off the road and went down across the pasture, following the man who walked toward the river bluffs. His mind flicked out and tracked him through the darkness, using his mind to track him as a hound would use his nose to track a coon.
He overhauled him scant minutes after he had entered the fringe of trees and after that kept a few paces behind him, walking carefully to guard against the suddenly snapping twig, the swish of swaying bushes that could have warned his quarry.
The ship lay within a deep ravine and at a hail it lighted up and a port swung open. Another man stood in the lighted port and stared into the night.
'That you, Gus?' he called.
The other swore at him. 'Sure. Who else do you think would be floundering around in these woods at the
