The sun was near to setting and looking back over his shoulder he saw the tall, straight lines of the gigantic office building in which he had talked to Trevor outlined against the brightness of the western sky. But of anyone who might be following him he did not see a sign.
He had no place to go. He had no idea where to go. But he realized that he couldn't stand around wringing his hands. He'd walk, he told himself, and think, and wait for whatever was going to happen next to happen.
He met other walkers and a few of them stared at him curiously, and now, for the first time, Sutton realized that he still wore the clothing of the twentieth-century farm hand…blue denim overalls and cotton shirt, with heavy, serviceable farm shoes on his feet.
But here, he knew, even such an outlandish costume would not arouse undue suspicion. For on Earth, with its visiting dignitaries from far Solar systems, with its Babel of races employed in the different governmental departments, with its exchange students, its diplomats and legislators representing backwoods planets, how a man dressed would arouse but slight curiosity.
By morning, he told himself, he'd have to find some hiding place, some retreat where he could relax and figure out some of the angles in this world of five hundred years ahead.
Either that or locate an android he could trust to put him in touch with the android organization…for although he had never been told so, he had no doubt there was android organization. There would have to be to fight a war in time.
He turned off the path that flanked the roadway and took another one, a faint footpath that led out across marshy land toward a range of low hills to the north.
Suddenly now he realized that he was hungry and that he should have dropped into one of the shops in the office building for a bite of food. And then he remembered that he had no money with which to pay for food. A few twentieth-century dollars were in his pockets, but they would be worthless here as a medium of exchange, although quite possibly they might have some value as collectors' items.
Dusk came over the land and the frogs began their chorus, first from far away and then, with others joining in, the marsh resounded with their throaty pipings. Sutton walked through a world of faerie sound, and as he walked it almost seemed as if his feet did not touch the ground, but floated along, driven by the breath of sound that rose to meet the first faint stars of evening shining above the dark heights that lay ahead.
Short hours ago, he thought, he had walked a dusty hilltop road in the twentieth century, scuffing the white dust with his shoes…and some of the white dust, he saw, still clung to his shoes. Even as the memory of that hilltop road clung to his memory. Memory and dust, he thought, link us to the past.
He reached the hills and began to climb them and the night was sweet with the smell of pine and the scent of forest flowers.
He came to the top of a slight rise and stood there for a moment, looking out across the velvety softness of the night. Somewhere, near at hand, a cricket was tentatively tuning up his fiddle, and from the marsh came the muted sound of frogs. In the darkness just ahead of him a stream was splashing along its rocky bed and it talked as it went along, talked to the trees and its grassy banks and the nodding flowers that hung their sleepy heads above it.
'I would like to stop,' it said. 'I would like to stop and talk with you. But I can't, you see. I must hurry on. I have some place I must go. I can't waste a minute. I must hurry on.'
Like Man, thought Sutton. For Man is driven like the stream. Man is driven by circumstance and necessity and the bright-eyed ambition of other restless men who will not let him be.
He did not hear a sound, but he felt the great hand close upon his arm and jerk him off the path. Twisting, he sought to free himself of the grasp, and saw the dark blur of the man who had grabbed him. He balled his fist and swung it and it was a sledge-hammer slamming at the dark head, but it never reached its mark. A charging body slammed into his knees and bent them under him, arms wrapped themselves around his legs and he staggered, falling on his face.
He sat up and somewhere off to the right he heard the soft snickering of rapidly firing guns and caught, out of the tail of his eyes, their bright flicker in the night.
Then a hand came out of nowhere and cupped itself around his mouth and nose.
'Powder!' he thought.
And ever as he thought it, he knew no more of dark figures in the woods, nor the cheeping frogs nor the snarling of the guns.
XLIV
Sutton opened his eyes to strangeness and lay quietly on the bed. A breeze came through an open window and the room, decorated with fantastic life-murals, was splashed with brilliant sunlight. The breeze brought in the scent of blooming flowers and in a tree outside a bird was chirping contentedly.
Slowly Sutton let his senses reach out and gather in the facts of the room, the facts of strangeness…the unfamiliar furniture, the contour of the room itself, the green and purple monkeys that chased one another along the wavy vine that ran around the border of the walls.
Quietly his mind moved back along the track of time to his final conscious moment. There had been guns flickering in the night and there had been a hand that reached out and cupped his nose.
Drugged, Sutton told himself. Drugged and dragged away.
Before that there had been a cricket and the frogs singing in the marsh and the talking brook that babbled down the hill, hurrying to get wherever it was going.
And before that a man who had sat across a desk from him and told him about a corporation and a dream and plan the corporation held.
Fantastic, Sutton thought. And in the bright light of the room, the very idea was one of utter fantasy…that Man should go out, not only to the stars, but to the galaxies.
But there was greatness in it, a very human greatness. There had been a time when it had been fantasy to think that Man could ever lift himself from the bosom of the planet of his birth. And another time when it had been fantasy to think that Man would go beyond the Solar system, out into the dread reaches of nothingness that stretched between the stars.
But there had been strength in Trevor, and conviction as well as strength. A man who knew where he was going and why he was going and what it took to get there.
Manifest destiny, Trevor had said. That is what it takes. That is what it needs.
Man would be great and he'd be a god. The concepts of life and thought that had been born on the Earth would be the basic concepts of the entire universe, of the fragile bubble of space and time that bobbed along on a sea of mystery beyond which no mind could penetrate. And yet, by the time that Man got where he was headed for, he might well be able to penetrate that, too.
A mirror stood in one corner of the room and in it he saw the reflection of the lower half of his body, lying on the bed, naked except for a pair of shorts. He wiggled his toes and watched them in the glass.
And you're the only one who is stopping us, Trevor had told him. You're the one man standing in the way of Man. You're the stumbling block. You are keeping men from being gods.
But all men did not think as Trevor did. All men were not tangled in the blind chauvinism of the human race.
The delegates from the Android Equality League had talked to him one noon, had caught him as he stepped off the elevator on his way to lunch, and had stood ranged before him as if they expected him to attempt escape and were set to cut him off.
One of them had twisted a threadbare cap in his dirty fingers and the woman's hair had dangled and she had folded her hands across her stomach, as determined, stolid women do.
They had been crackpots, certainly. They were fervent crusaders in a cause that held them up to a quiet and devastating scorn. Even the androids were not sympathetic to them, even the androids for whom they were working saw through the human ineffectiveness and the gaudy exhibitionism of their efforts.
For the human race, thought Sutton, cannot even for a moment forget that it is human, cannot achieve the greatness of humility that will unquestioningly accord equality. Even while the League fought for the equality of
