Time and Again

XXVIII

Sutton sensed resurrection and he fought against it, for death was so comfortable. Like a soft, warm bed. And resurrection was a strident, insistent, maddening alarm clock that shrilled across the predawn chill of a dreadful, frowzy room. Dreadful with its life and its bare reality and its sharp, sickening reminder that one must get up and walk into reality again.

But this is not the first time. No, indeed, said Sutton. This is not the first time that I died and came to life again. For I did it once before and that time I was dead for a long, long time.

There was a hard, flat surface underneath him and he lay face down upon it and for what seemed an interminable stretch of time his mind struggled to visualize the hardness and smoothness beneath him. Hard and flat and smooth, three words, but they did not help one see or understand the thing that they described.

He felt life creep back and quicken, seep along his legs and arms. But he wasn't breathing and his heart was still.

Floor!

That was it…that was the word for the thing on which he lay. The flat, hard surface was a floor.

Sounds came to him, but at first he didn't call them sounds, for he had no word for them at all, and then, a moment later, he knew that they were sounds.

Now he could move one finger. Then a second finger.

He opened his eyes and there was light.

The sounds were voices and the voices were words and the words were thoughts.

It takes so long to figure things out, Sutton told himself.

"We should have tried a little harder," said a voice, "and a little longer. The trouble with us, Case, is that we have no patience."

"Patience wouldn't have done a bit of good," said Case. "He was convinced that we were bluffing. No matter what we'd done or said, he'd still have thought we were bluffing and we would have gotten nowhere. There was only one thing to do."

"Yes, I know," Pringle agreed. "Convince him that we weren't bluffing."

He made a sound of blowing out his breath. "Pity, too," he said. "He was such a bright young man."

They were silent for a time and now it was not life alone, but strength, that was flowing into Sutton. Strength to stand and walk, strength to lift his arms, strength to vent his anger. Strength to kill two men.

"We won't do so badly," Pringle said. "Morgan and his crowd will pay us handsomely."

Case was squeamish. "I don't like it, Pringle. A dead man is a dead man if you leave him dead. But when you sell him, that makes you a butcher."

"That's not the thing that's worrying me," Pringle told him. "What will it do to the future, Case? To our future. We had a future with many of its facets based on Sutton's book. If we had managed to change the book a little it wouldn't have mattered much…wouldn't have mattered at all, in fact, the way we had it figured out. But now Sutton's dead. There will be no book by Sutton. The future will be different."

Sutton rose to his feet.

They spun around and faced him and Case's hand went for his gun.

"Go ahead," invited Sutton. "Shoot me full of holes. You won't live a minute longer for it."

He tried to hate them, as he had hated Benton during that one fleeting moment back on Earth. Hatred so strong and primal that it had blasted the man's mind into oblivion.

But there was no hate. Just a ponderous, determined will to kill.

He moved forward on sturdy legs and his hands reached out.

Pringle ran, squealing like a rat, seeking to escape. Case's gun spat twice and when blood oozed out and ran down Sutton's chest and he still came on, Case threw away his weapon and backed against the wall.

It didn't take long.

They couldn't get away.

There was no place to go.