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.