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.