Time and Again

XXII

Sutton folded the letter and the crackling of the old paper rippled across the quietness of the room like a spiteful snarl of thunder.

Then he recalled something and unfolded the sheaf of leaves again and found the thing that had been mentioned. It was yellow and old…not as good a quality of paper as the letter had been written on. The writing was by hand, with ink, and the lines were faded so they hardly could be read. The date was unclear, except for the final 7.

Sutton puzzled it out:

The signature was a scrawl that probably could not have been read even when the ink was scarcely dry, but there were two letters that stood out fairly clearly at the very end.

The letters were M.D.

Sutton stared across the room and saw in his mind the scene of that long-gone day.

"Doctor, I've a mind to make a will. Wonder if you could…"

For John H. Sutton never would have told the doctor the real reason for that slip of paper…the real reason why he wanted it established that he was not insane.

Sutton could imagine him. Ponderous in his walk, slow, deliberate, taking plenty of time to think things over, placing vast values on qualities and fictions which even in that day were shopworn and losing caste from centuries of overglorification.

An old tyrant to his family, more than likely. A fuddy-duddy among his neighbors, who laughed behind his back. A man lacking in humor and crinkling his brow over fine matters of etiquette and ethics.

He had been trained for the law and he had a lawyer's mind, that much at least the letter told with clarity. A lawyer's mind for detail and a landed man's quality of slowness and an old man's garrulity.

But there was no mistaking the man's sincerity. He believed he had seen a strange machine and had talked with a strange man and had picked up a wrench stained with…

A wrench!

Sutton sat bolt upright on the bed.

The wrench had been in the trunk. He, Asher Sutton, had held it in his hand. He had picked it up and tossed it on the pile of junk along with the dog-gnawed bone and the college notebooks.

Sutton's hand trembled as he slid the letter back into its envelope. First it had been the stamp that had intrigued him, a stamp that was worth Lord knows how many thousand dollars…then it was the letter itself and the mystery of its being sealed…and now there was the wrench. And the wrench clinched everything.

For the wrench meant that there actually had been a strange machine and a stranger man…a man who knew enough semantics and psychology to speak a talkative, self-centered oldster off his mental feet. Fast enough on the uptake to keep this inspection-tripping farmer from asking him the very questions the man was bubbling to ask.

Who are you and where did you come from and what's that machine and how does it run, I never saw the like of it before…

Hard to answer, if they were ever asked.

But they were not asked.

John H. Sutton had had the last word…as would have been his habit.

Asher Sutton chuckled, thinking of John H. Sutton's having the last word and how it came about. It would please the old boy if he could only know, but, of course, he couldn't.

There had been some slip, of course. The letter had been lost or mislaid somehow and then mislaid again…and finally, somehow, it had come into the hands of another Sutton, six thousand years removed.

And the first Sutton, more than likely, it would have done a bit of good. For the letter tied in someplace, had some significance in the mystery of the moment.

Men who traveled in time. Men whose time machines went haywire and came to landfall or timefall, whichever you might call it, in a cow pasture. And other men who fought in time and screamed through folds of time in burning ships and landed in a swamp.

A battle back in eighty-three, the dying youth had said. Not a battle at Waterloo or off the Martian orbit, but back-in eighty-three.

And the man had cried his name just before he died and lifted himself to make a sign with strangely twisted fingers. So I am known, thought Sutton, up in eighty-three and beyond eighty-three, for the boy said back and that means that in his time a time three centuries yet to come is historically the past.

He reached for his coat again and slid the letter into the pocket with the book, then rolled out of bed. He reached for his clothes and began to dress.

For it had come to him, the thing he had to do.

Pringle and Case had used a ship to get to the asteroid and he must find that ship.