She looked at him queerly. "What's your hurry?"
"I am leaving," Sutton said. "Running away to a refuge that I thought of. That is, if you'll lend me a ship."
"Any ship you want."
"It would be more convenient that way," he told her. "Otherwise, I'd have to steal one."
She did not ask the question that he had expected and he went on, "I have to write the book."
"There are plenty of places, Ash, where you could write the book. Safe places. Places that could be arranged to be foolproof safe."
He shook his head.
"There's an old robot," he said. "He's the only folks I have. When I was on Cygni, he went out to one of the star systems at the very edge and filed a homestead. I am going there."
"I understand," she said, speaking very gravely.
"There's just one thing," said Sutton. "I keep remembering a little girl who came and spoke to me when I was fishing. I know that she was a person conditioned in my mind. I know she was put there for a purpose, but it makes no difference. I keep thinking of her."
He looked at Eva and saw how the lamplight turned her hair into a copper glory.
"I don't know if I'll ever be in love," said Sutton. "I can't tell you for sure if I love you, Eva. But I wish you would go with me out to Buster's planet."
She shook her head. "Ash, I must stay here, for a while at least. I've worked for years on this thing. I must see it through."
Her eyes were misty in the lamplight. "Perhaps sometime, Ash, if you still want me. Perhaps a little later I can come."
Sutton said, simply, "I'll always want you, Eva."
He reached out a hand and tenderly touched the copper curl that dropped against her forehead.
"I know that you'll never come," he said. "If it had been just a little different…if we had been two ordinary people living ordinary lives."
"There's a greatness in you, Ash," she told him. "You will be a god to many people."
He stood silently and felt the loneliness of eternity closing in upon him. There was no greatness, as she had said, only the loneliness and bitterness of a man who stood alone and would stand alone forever.
LI
Sutton floated in a sea of light and from far away he heard the humming of the machines at work, little busy machines that were dissecting him with their tiny fingers of probing light and clicking shutters and the sensitive paper that ran like a streak of burnished silver through the holders. Dissecting and weighing, probing and measuring…missing nothing, adding nothing. A faithful record not of himself alone but of every particle of him, of every cell and molecule, of every branching nerve and muscle fiber.
And from somewhere else, also far away, from a place beyond the sea of light that held him, a voice said one word and kept repeating it:
Traitor.
Traitor.
Traitor.
One word without an exclamation point. A voice that had no emphasis. One flat word.
First there was one voice crying it and then another joined and then there was a crowd and finally it was a roaring mob and the sound and word built up until it was a world of voices that were crying out the word. Crying out the word until there was no longer any meaning in it, until it had lost its meaning and became a sound many times repeated.
Sutton tried to answer and there was no answer nor any way to answer. He had no voice, for he had no lips or tongue or throat. He was an entity that floated in the sea of light and the word kept on, never changing…never stopping.
But back of the word, a background to the word, there were other words unspoken.
We are the ones who clicked the flints together and built the first fire of Man's own making. We are the ones who drove the beasts from out the caves and took them for ourselves, in which to shape the first pattern of a human culture. We are the ones who painted the colorful bison on the hidden walls, working in the light of lamps with moss for wicks and fat for oil. We are the ones who tilled the soil and tamed the seed to grow beneath our hand. We are the ones who built great cities that our own kind might live together and accomplish the greatness that a handful could not even try. We are the ones who dreamed of stars. We are the ones who broke the atom to the harness of our minds.
It is our heritage you spend. It is our traditions that you give away to things that we have made, that we have fashioned with the deftness of our hands and the sharpness of our minds.
The machines clicked on and the voice kept on with the one word it was saying.
But there was another voice, deep within the undefinable being that was Asher Sutton, a faint voice…
It said no word, for there was no word that framed the thought it said.
Sutton answered it. "Thank you, Johnny," he said. "Thank you very much."
And was astonished that he could answer Johnny when he could not answer all the others.
The machines went on with their clicking.
LII
The silvery ship roared down the launching ramp, slammed into the upcurve and hurled itself into the sky, a breath of fire that blazed against the blue.
"He doesn't know,” said Herkimer, "that we arranged it for him. He does not know we managed him to the last, that we sent Buster out many years ago to establish refuge for him, knowing that someday he might need that refuge."
"Herkimer," said Eva. "Herkimer…"
Her voice choked. "He asked me to go with him, Herkimer. He said he needed me. And I couldn't go. And I couldn't explain."
She kept her head tilted, watching the tiny pinpoint of fire that was fleeing spaceward.
"He had to keep on thinking," Eva said, "that there were some humans he had helped, that there were some humans who still believed in him."
Herkimer nodded. "It was the only thing to do, Eva. It was what you had to do. We took enough from him, enough of his humanity. We could not take it all."
She put her hands up to her face and huddled her shoulders and stood there, an android woman crying out her heart.
About the Author
Clifford D. Simak has been writing science-fiction for more than thirty years. His stories have appeared in almost all the science-fiction magazines, past and present, and he is rated among the top authors in the field.
Mr. Simak was born in Millville, Wisconsin, and now lives in Minnesota.