"Sutton," said Dean, "you're batting your head against a stone wall. You haven't got a chance. You're fighting humankind. The whole human race against you…and nothing's ever stood against the human race. All you have is a pack of measly androids and a few renegade humans…the kind of humans that used to swarm to the old Cult-worships."
"The empire is built on androids and robots," Sutton told him. "They can throw you for a loss any time they want to. Without them you couldn't hold a single foot of ground outside the Solar system."
"They will stick with us in the empire business," Dean told him, very confident. "They may fight us on this business of destiny, but they'll stay with us because they can't get along without us. They can't reproduce, you know. And they can't make themselves. They have to have humans to keep their race going, to replace the ones who get knocked off."
He chuckled. "Until one android can create another android, they will stick with us and they will work with us. For if they didn't, that would be racial suicide."
"What I can't understand," said Sutton, "is how you know which ones are fighting you and which are sticking with you."
"That," said Dean, "is the hell of it…we don't. If we did, we'd make short work of this lousy war. The android who fought you yesterday may shine your shoes tomorrow, and how are you to know? The answer is, you don't."
He picked up a tiny stone and flicked it out on the pasture grass.
"Sutton," he said, "it's enough to drive you nuts. No battles, really. Just guerrilla skirmishes here and there, when one small task force sent out to do a time-fixing job is ambushed by another task force sent out by the other side to intercept them."
"As I intercepted you," said Sutton.
"Huh…" said Dean, and then he brightened. "Why, sure," he said, "as you intercepted me."
One moment Dean was sitting with his back against the machine, talking as if he meant to keep on talking…and in the next moment his body was a fluid blaze of motion, jackknifing upward and forward in a lunge toward the wrench that Sutton held.
Sutton moved instinctively, toes tightening their grip upon the ground, leg muscles flexing to drive his body upward, arm starting to jerk the wrench away.
But Dean had the advantage of one long second's start.
Sutton felt the wrench ripped from his grip, saw the flash of it in the sun as Dean swung it upward for the blow.
Dean's lips were moving and even as he tried to duck, even as he tried to throw up his arms to shield his head, Sutton read the words the other's lips were saying.
"So you thought it would be me!"
Pain exploded inside Sutton's head and for one surprised instant he knew that he was falling, the ground rushing upward at his face. Then there was no ground, but only darkness that he fell through for long eternities.
XXXVII
Tricked!
Tricked by a smooth character from five hundred years ahead in time.
Tricked by a letter from six thousand years out of the past.
Tricked, said Sutton, by my own muddle-headedness.
He sat up and held his head in his hands and felt the westering sun against his back, heard the squalling of a catbird in the blackberry patch and the sound of the wind as it ran along the corn rows.
Tricked and trapped, he said.
He took his hands from his head and there in the trampled grass lay the wrench with the blood upon it. Sutton spread out his fingers and blood was on them, too…warm and sticky blood. Gingerly he touched his head with gentle hand and his hair was matted down.
Pattern, he said. It all runs in a pattern.
Here am I and there is the wrench and just beyond the fence is the field of corn that is better than knee-high on this splendid afternoon of July 4, 1977.
The ship is gone and in another hour or so John H. Sutton will come waddling down the hill to ask the questions that he forgot to ask before. And ten years from now he will write a letter and in it he will record his suspicions concerning me and I will be in the farmyard at the very moment pumping me a drink.
Sutton staggered to his feet and stood in the empty afternoon, with the sweep of sky above the horizon of the ridge and the panorama of the winding river far down the slope below.
He touched the wrench with his toe and thought, I could break the pattern. I could take the wrench and then John H. would never find it and with one thing in the pattern changed the end might not be the same.
I read the letter wrong, he thought. I always figured it would be the other man, not me. It never once occurred to me that it was my blood upon the wrench and that I would be the one who would steal the clothes from off the line.
And yet there were certain things that didn't track. He still had his clothes and there would be no need to steal. His ship was still resting on the river's bottom and there was no need to stay.
Yet it had happened once before, for if it had not happened, why had there been the letter? The letter had made him come here and the letter had been written because he had come, so he must have come before. And in that other time he'd stayed…and stayed only because he could not get away. This time he would go back, this time he need not stay.
A second chance, he thought, I've been given another chance.
Yet that wasn't right, for if there had been a second time, old John H. would have known about it. And there couldn't be a second time, for this was the very day that John H. had talked to the man out of the future.
Sutton shook his head.
There had been only one time that this had happened, and this, of course, was it.
Something will happen, he told himself. Something that will not let me go back. Somehow I will be forced to steal the clothes and in the end I'll walk to that farmhouse up there and ask if they need a hand for harvest.
For the pattern was set. It had to be set.
Sutton touched the wrench with his toe again, pondering.
Then he turned and went down the hill. Glancing over his shoulder as he plunged into the woods, he saw old John H. coming down the hill.
XXXVIII
For three days Sutton toiled to free the ship from the tons of sand that the treacherous, swift-running river currents had mounded over it. And admitted, when three days were gone, that it was a hopeless task, for the current piled up the sand as fast as he could clear it.
From there on he concentrated on clearing an opening to the entrance lock, and after another day and many cave-ins, he accomplished his purpose.
Wearily he braced himself against the metal of the ship.
A gamble, he told himself. But I will have to gamble.
For there was no possibility of wrenching the ship free by using the engines. The tubes, he knew, were packed with sand and any attempt to throw in the rockets would simply mean that he and the ship and a good portion of the landscape would evaporate in a flashing puff of atomic fury.
He had lifted a ship from a Cygnian planet and driven it across eleven years of space by the power of mind alone. He had rolled two sixes.
Perhaps, he told himself. Perhaps…
There were tons of sand, and he was deathly tired, tired despite the smooth, efficient functioning of his nonhuman system of metabolism.
I rolled two sixes, he said.
Once I rolled two sixes and surely that was harder than the task I must do now. Although that called for deftness and this will call for power…and suppose, just suppose I haven't got the strength.
For it would take strength to lift this buried mass of metal out of the mound of sand. Not the strength of muscles, but the strength of mind.
Of course, he told himself, if he could not lift the ship he still could use the time-mover, shift the ship, lying where it was, forward six thousand years. Although there was hazards he did not like to think about. For in shifting the ship through time, he would be exposing it to every threat and vagary of the river through the whole six thousand years.