"You need destiny," said Sutton, "and destiny is not mine to give away."
"You are a human being, Sutton," Trevor told him, talking evenly. "You are a man. It is the people of your own race that I'm talking to you about."
"Destiny," said Sutton, "belongs to everything that lives. Not to Man alone, but to every form of life."
"It needn't," Trevor told him. "You are the only man who knows. You are the man who can tell the facts. You can make it a manifest destiny for the human race instead of a personal destiny for every crawling, cackling, sniveling thing that has the gift of life."
Sutton didn't answer.
"One word from you," said Trevor, "and the thing is done."
"It can't be done," said Sutton, "this scheme of yours. Think of the sheer time, the thousands of years, even at the rate of speed of the starships of today, to cross intergalactic space. Only from this galaxy to the next…not from this galaxy to the ultimate galaxy."
Trevor sighed. "You forget what I said about the compounding of knowledge. Two and two won't make four, my friend. It will make much more than four. In some instances thousands of times more than four."
Sutton shook his head, wearily.
But Trevor was right, he knew. Knowledge and technique would pyramid exactly as he said. Even, once Man had the time to do it, the knowledge in one galaxy alone…
"One word from you," Trevor said, "and the time war is at an end. One word and the security of the human race is guaranteed forever. For all the race will need is the knowledge that you can give it."
"It wouldn't be the truth," said Sutton.
"That," said Trevor, "doesn't have a thing to do with it."
"You don't need manifest destiny," said Sutton, "to carry out your project."
"We have to have the human race behind us," Trevor said. "We have to have something that is big enough to capture their imagination. Something important enough to make them pay attention. And manifest destiny, manifest destiny as it applies to the universe, is the thing to turn the trick."
"Twenty years ago," said Sutton, "I would have thrown in with you."
"And now?" asked Trevor.
Sutton shook his head. "Not now. I know more than I did twenty years ago. Twenty years ago I was a human, Trevor. I'm not too sure I'm entirely human any longer."
"I hadn't mentioned the matter of reward," said Trevor. "That goes without saying."
"No, thanks," said Sutton. "I'd like to keep on living."
Trevor flipped a clip at the inkwell and it missed.
"You're slipping," Sutton said. "Your percentage is way off."
Trevor picked up another clip.
"All right," he said. "Go ahead and have your fun. There's a war on and we'll win that war. It's a hellish way to fight, but we're doing it the best we can. No war anywhere, no surface indication of war, for you understand the galaxy is in utter and absolute peace under the rule of benevolent Earthmen. We can win without you, Sutton, but it would be easier with you."
"You're going to turn me loose?" Sutton asked, in mock surprise.
"Why, sure," Trevor told him. "Go on out and beat your head against a stone wall a little longer. In the end, you'll get tired of it. Eventually you'll give up out of sheer exhaustion. You'll come back then and give us the thing we want."
Sutton rose to his feet.
He stood for a moment, indecisive.
"What are you waiting for?" asked Trevor.
"One thing has me puzzled," Sutton told him. "The book, somehow, somewhere, already has been written. It has been a fact for almost five hundred years. How are you going to change that? If I write it now the way you want it written, it will change the human setup…"
Trevor laughed. "We got that one figured out. Let us say that finally, after all of these years, the original of your manuscript is discovered. It can be readily and indisputably identified by certain characteristcs which you will very carefully incorporate into it when you write it.. It will be found and proclaimed, and what is more, proved…and the human race will have its destiny.
"We'll explain the past unpleasantness by very convincing historic evidence of earlier tampering with the manuscript. Even your friends, the androids, will have to believe what we say once we get through with it."
"Clever," Sutton said.
"I think so, too," said Trevor.
XLIII
At the building's entrance a man was waiting for him. He raised his hand in what might have been a brief salute.
"Just a minute, Mr. Sutton."
"Yes, what is it?"
"There'll be a few of us following you, sir. Orders, you know."
"But…"
"Nothing personal, sir. We won't interfere with anything you want to do. Just guarding you, sir."
"Guarding me?"
"Certainly, sir. Morgan's crowd, you know. Can't let them pop you off."
"You can't know," Sutton told him, "how deeply I appreciate your interest."
"It's nothing sir," the man told him. "Just part of the day's work. Glad to do it. Don't mention it at all."
He stepped back again and Sutton wheeled and walked down the steps and followed the cinder walk that flanked the avenue.
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.