Free Time and Again by Clifford D. Simak Page A

ago and never had been opened.
    Did Buster know about the letter…but even as he asked himself the question Sutton knew that Buster did.
    And he had tried to hide it…and he had succeeded. He had tossed it in with other odds and ends, well knowing that it would be found, but by the man for whom it was intended. For the trunk was deliberately made to appear of no importance. It was old and battered and the key was in the lock and it said there's nothing in me, but if you want to waste your time, why, go ahead and look. And if anyone had looked, the clutter would have seemed no more than what it was with one exception…the worthless accumulation of outworn sentiment.
    Sutton reached out a finger and tapped the bulky letter lying on the table.
    John H. Sutton, an ancestor six thousand years removed. His blood runs in my veins, though many times diluted. But he was a man who lived and breathed and ate and died, who saw the sunrise against the green Wisconsin hills…if Wisconsin has any hills, wherever it may be.
    He felt the heat of summer and shivered in the cold of winter. He read the papers and talked politics with neighbors up the road. He worried about many things, both big and small, and most of them would be small, the way worries usually are.
    He went fishing, in the river a few miles away from home and he may have puttered in his garden in his declining years when he had little else to do.
    A man like me, although there would be minor differences. He had a vermiform appendix and it may have caused him trouble. He had wisdom teeth and they may have caused him trouble, too. And he probably died at eighty or very shortly after, although he may as well have died much earlier. And when I am eighty, Sutton thought, I will be just entering my prime.
    But there would be compensations. John H. Sutton would have lived closer to the Earth, for the Earth was all he had. He would have been unplagued by alien psychology and Earth would have been a living place instead of a governing place where not a thing is grown for its economic worth, not a wheel is turned for economic purpose. He could have chosen his lifework from the whole broad field of human endeavor instead of being forced into governmental work, into the job of governing a flimsy expanse of galactic empire.
    And, somewhere, lost now, there were Suttons before him, and after him, lost too, many other Suttons. The chain of life runs smoothly from one generation to the next and none of the links stand out except here and there a link one sees by accident. By the accident of history or the accident of myth or the accident of not opening a letter.
    The doorbell chimed and Sutton, startled, scooped up the letter and slid it into the inside pocket of his coat.
    "Come in," he called.
    It was Herkimer.
    "Good morning, sir," he said.
    Sutton glared at him. "What do you want?" he asked.
    "I belong to you," Herkimer told him, blandly. "I'm part of your third of Benton's property."
    "My third…" and then he remembered.
    It was the law. Whoever kills another in a duel inherits one third of the dead man's property. That was the law…a law he had forgotten.
    "I hope you don't object," said Herkimer. "I am easy to get along with and very quick to learn and I like to work. I can cook and sew and run errands and I can read and write."
    "And put the finger on me."
    "Oh, no, I never would do that."
    "Why not?"
    "Because you are my master."
    "We'll see," said Sutton, sourly.
    "But I'm not all," said Herkimer. "There are other things. There's an asteroid, a hunting asteroid stocked with the finest game, and a spaceship. A small one, it's true, but very serviceable. There is several thousand dollars and an estate out on the west coast and some wildcat planetary development stock and a number of other small things, too numerous to mention."
    Herkimer dipped into his pocket and brought out a notebook.
    "I have them written out if you would care to listen."
    "Not now," said Sutton. "I have work