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.
He reached the hills and began to climb them and the night was sweet with the smell of pine and the scent of forest flowers.
He came to the top of a slight rise and stood there for a moment, looking out across the velvety softness of the night. Somewhere, near at hand, a cricket was tentatively tuning up his fiddle, and from the marsh came the muted sound of frogs. In the darkness just ahead of him a stream was splashing along its rocky bed and it talked as it went along, talked to the trees and its grassy banks and the nodding flowers that hung their sleepy heads above it.