Sutton did not see him do it, but he sensed that he had touched his hat…if he wore a hat. Then he was gone, turning off the road and going down across the pasture, walking in the dark, heading for the woods that sloped to the river bluffs.
Sutton stood in the dusty road and listened to him go — the soft swish of dew-laden grass brushing on his shoes, the muted pad of his feet walking in the pasture.
Contact at last! After ten years, contact with the people from another time. But the wrong people. Not his people.
The Revisionists had been watching him, even as he had sensed them watching. Watching and waiting, waiting for ten years. But, of course, not ten years of their time, just ten years of his. Machines and watchers would have been sprinkled through those ten years, so that the job could have been done in a year or a month or even in a week if they had wanted to throw enough men and materials into the effort.
But why wait ten years? To soften him up, to make him ready to jump at anything they offered?
To soften him up? He grinned wryly in the dark.
Then suddenly the picture came to him and he stood there stupidly, wondering why he hadn't thought of it much sooner.
They hadn't waited to soften him up…they had waited for old John H. to write the letter. For they knew about the letter. They had studied old John H. and they knew he'd write a letter. They had him down on tape and they knew him inside out and they had figured to an eyelash the way his mind would work.
The letter was the key to the whole thing. The letter was the lure that had been used to suck Asher Sutton back into this time. They had lured him, then sealed him off and kept him, kept him as surely as if they'd had him in a cage. They had studied him and they knew him and they had him figured out. They knew what he would do as surely as they had known what old John H. would do.
His mind flicked out and probed cautiously at the brain of the man striding down the hill.