Brakes hissed and tires screeched on the pavement as Sutton slued the car around to bring it to a stop. Even before the machine came to a halt, he was out of the door and running down the slope toward the strange, black craft that nickered in the swamp.
Water sloshed around his ankles and knife-edged grass slashed at his legs. The puddles gleamed black and oily in the light from the flaming craft. The frogs still kept up their peeping at the far edge of the marsh.
Something flopped and struggled in a pool of muddy, flame-stained water just a few feet from the burning ship and Sutton, plunging forward, saw it was a man.
He caught the gleaming white of frightened, piteous eyeballs shining in the flame as the man lifted himself on his mud-caked arms and tried to drag his body forward. He saw the flash of teeth as pain twisted the face into grisly anguish. And his nostrils took the smell of charred, crisped flesh and knew it for what it was.
He stooped and locked his hands beneath the armpits of the man, hauled him upright, dragged him back across the swamp. Mud sucked at his feet and he heard the splashing behind him, the horrible, dragging splash of the other's body trailing through the water and the slime.
There was dry land beneath his feet and he began the climb back up the slope toward the car. Sounds came from the bobbing head of the man he carried, thick, slobbering sounds that might have been words if one had had the time to listen.
Sutton cast a quick glance over his shoulder and saw the flames mounting straight into the sky, a pillar of blue that lighted up the night. Marsh birds, roused from their nests, flew blinded and in panic through the garish light, waking the night with their squawks of terror.
"The atomics," said Sutton, aloud. "The atomics…"
They couldn't hold for long in a flame like that. The automatics would melt down and the marsh would be a crater and the hills would be charred from horizon to horizon.
"No," said the bobbing head. "No…no atomics."
Sutton's foot caught in a root and he stumbled to his knees. The body of the man slid from his mud-caked grasp.
The man struggled, trying to turn over.
Sutton helped him and he lay on his back, his face toward the sky.
He was young, Sutton saw…young beneath the mask of mud and pain.
"No atomics," said the man. "I dumped them."
There was pride in the words, pride in a job well done. But the words had cost him heavily. He lay still, so still that he might not have been living at all.
Then his breath came to life again and whistled in his throat. Sutton saw the blood pumping through the temples beneath the burned and twisted skin. The man's jaw worked and words came out, limping, tangled words.
"There was a battle…back in '83…I saw him coming…tried to time-jump…" The words gurgled and got lost, then gushed out again. "Got new guns…set metal afire…"
He turned his head and apparently saw Sutton for the first time. He started up and then fell back, gasping with the effort.
"Sutton!"
Sutton bent above him. "I will carry you. Get you to a doctor."
"Asher Sutton!" The two words were a whisper.
For a moment Sutton caught the triumphant, almost fanatic gleam that washed across the eyes of the dying man, half understood the gesture of the half-raised arm, of the cryptic sign that the fingers made.
Then the gleam faded and the arm dropped back and the fingers came apart.
Sutton knew, even before he bent with his head turned against the heart, that the man was dead.
Slowly Sutton stood up.
The flame was dying down and the birds had gone. The craft lay half buried in the mud and its lines, he noted, were none he had ever seen.
Asher Sutton, the man had said. And his eyes had lighted up and he had made a sign just before he died. And there had been a battle back in '83.
Eighty-three what?
The man had tried to time-jump…who had ever heard of time-jump?
I never saw the man before, said Sutton, as if he might be denying something that was criminal. So help me, I don't know him even now. And yet he cried my name and it sounded as if he knew me and was very glad to see me and he made a sign…a sign that went with the name.
He stared down at the dead man lying at his feet and saw the pity of it, the crumpled legs that dangled even flat upon the ground, the stiffened arms, the lolling head and the flash of moonlight on the teeth where the mouth had opened.
Carefully, Sutton went down on his knees, ran his hands over the body, seeking something…some bulging pocket that might give a clue to the man who lay there dead.
Because he knew me. And I must know how he knew me. And none of it makes sense.
There was a small book in the breast pocket of the coat and Sutton slipped it out. The title was in gold on black leather, and even in the moonlight Sutton could read the letters that flamed, from the cover to hit him straight between the eyes.
THIS IS DESTINY
By
Asher Sutton
Sutton did not move.
He crouched there on the ground, like a cowering thing, stricken by the golden letters on the leather cover.
A book!
A book he meant to write, but hadn't written yet!
A book he wouldn't write for many months to come!
And yet here it was, dog-eared and limp from reading.
An involuntary choking sound rose unbidden in his throat.
He felt the chill of the fog rising from the marsh, the loneliness of a wild bird's crying.
A strange ship had plunged into the marsh, disabled and burning. A man had escaped from the ship, but on the verge of death. Before he died he had recognized Sutton and had called his name. In his pocket he had a book that was not even written.
Those were the facts…the bare, hard facts. There was no explanation.
Faint sounds of human voices drifted down the night and Sutton rose swiftly to his feet, stood poised and waiting, listening. The voices came again.
Someone had heard the crash and was coming to investigate, coming down the road, calling to others who also had heard the crash.
Sutton turned and walked swiftly up the slope to the car.
There was, he told himself, no earthly use of waiting.
Those coming down the road would only cause him trouble.
XVII
A man was waiting in the clump of lilac bushes across the road and there was another one crouched in the shadow of the courtyard wall.
Sutton walked slowly forward, strolling, taking his time.
"Johnny," he said, soundlessly.
"Yes, Ash."
"That is all there are — just those two?"
"I think there is another one, but I can't place him. All of them are armed."
Sutton felt the stir of comfort in his brain, the sense of self-assurance, the sense of aid and comradeship.
"Keep me posted, Johnny."
He whistled a bar or two, from a tune that had been forgotten long ago but still was fresh in his mind from twenty years before.
The rent-a-car garage was two blocks up the road, the Orion Arms two blocks farther down. Between him and the Arms were two men, waiting with guns. Two and maybe more.
Between the garage and hotel was nothing…just the landscaped beauty that was a residential, administrative Earth. An Earth dedicated to beauty and to ruling…planted with a garden's care, every inch of it mapped out by landscape architects with clumps of shrubs and lanes of trees and carefully tended flower beds.
An ideal place, Sutton told himself, to execute an ambush.
Adams, he wondered. Although, it hardly could be Adams. He had something that Adams expected to find out and killing the man who holds information that you want, no matter how irate you may be at him, is downright infantile.