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Time Quarry






Time Quarry
by Clifford D. Simak








An A\NN/A Preservation Edition.

Notes









THE mail came out of the twilight when the greenish-yellow of the sun’s last glow still lingered in the west. He paused at the edge of the patio and called. “Mr. Adams, is that you?” The chair creaked as Christopher Adams shifted his weight, startled by the voice. Then he remembered.

A new neighbor had moved in across the meadow a day or two ago. Jonathon had told him… and Jonathon knew all the gossip within a hundred miles. Human gossip as well as android and robot gossip.

“Come on in,” said Adams. “Glad you dropped around.”

He hoped his voice sounded as hearty and neighborly as he had tried to make it. For he wasn’t glad. He was a little nettled, upset by this sudden shadow that came out of the twilight and walked across the patio.

This is my hour, he thought angrily. The one hour I give myself. The hour that I forget… forget the thousand problems that have to do with other star systems. Forget them and turn back to the green-blackness and the hush and the subtle sunset shadow-show that belong to my own planet. For here, on this patio, there are no mentophone reports, no robot files, no galactic co-ordination conferences… no psychological intrigue, no alien reaction charts. Nothing complicated or mysterious.

With half his mind, he knew the stranger had come across the patio and was reaching out a hand for a chair to sit in; and with the other half, once again, he wondered about the blackened bodies lying on the river bank on far-off Aldebaran XII, and the twisted machine that was wrapped around the tree.

Three humans had died there… three humans and two androids, and androids were almost human, different only in that they were manufactured instead of born. And humans must not die by violence unless it be by the violence of another human. Even then it must be on the field of honor, with all the formality and technicality of the code duello, or in the less polished affairs of revenge or execution.

For human life was sacrosanct. It had to be or there’d be no human life. Man was so pitifully outnumbered.

Violence or accident?

And accident was ridiculous.

There were few accidents, almost none at all. The near-perfection of mechanical performance, the almost human intelligence and reactions of machines to any known danger, long ago had cut accidents to an almost non-existent figure.

No modern machine would be crude enough to crash into a tree. A more subtle, less apparent danger, maybe. But never a tree.

So it must be violence.

And it could not be human violence, for human violence would have advertised the fact. Human violence had nothing to fear… there was no recourse to law, scarcely a moral code to which a human killer would be answerable.








THREE humans dead, fifty light years distant, and it became a thing of great importance to a man sitting on his patio on Earth. A thing of prime importance, for no human must die by other hands than human without a terrible vengeance. Human life must not be taken without a monstrous price anywhere in the galaxy, or the human race would end forever, and the great galactic brotherhood of intelligence would plummet down into the darkness and the distance that had scattered it before.

Adams slumped lower in his chair, forcing himself to relax, furious at himself for thinking… for it was his rule that in this time of twilight he thought of nothing… or as close to nothing as his restless mind could manage.

The stranger’s voice seemed to come from far away and yet Adams knew he was sitting at his side.

“Nice evening,” the stranger said.

Adams chuckled. “The evenings are always nice. The Weather boys don’t let it rain until later on, when everyone’s asleep.”

In a thicket down the hill, a thrush struck up its evensong and the liquid notes ran like a quieting hand across a drowsing world. Along the creek a frog or two were trying out their throats. Far away, in some dim other-world, a whip-poor-will began his chugging question. Across the meadow and up the climbing hills, the lights came on in houses here and there.

“This is the best part of the day,” said Adams.

HE DROPPED his hand into his pocket, brought out tobacco pouch and pipe. “Smoke?”

The stranger shook his head. “As a matter of fact, I am here on business.”

Adams’ voice turned crisp. “See me in the morning, then. I don’t do business after hours.”

The stranger said softly: “It’s about Asher Sutton.”

Adams’ body tensed and his fingers shook as he filled his pipe. He was glad that it was dark so the stranger could not see.

“Sutton will be coming back,” the stranger said.

Adams shook his head. “No chance. He went out twenty years ago.”

“You haven’t crossed him off?”

“No,” said Adams slowly. “He still is on the payroll, if that is what you mean.”

“Why?” asked the man. “Why do you keep him on?”

Adams tamped the tobacco in the bowl, considering. “Sentiment, I guess. Faith in Asher Sutton. Although the faith is running out.”

“Just five days from now,” the stranger said, “Sutton will come back.” He paused a moment, then added: “Early in the morning.”

“There’s no way you could know a thing like that.”

“But I do. It’s recorded fact.”

Adams snorted. “It hasn’t happened yet.”

“In my time it has.”

Adams jerked upright in his chair. “In your time?”

“Yes,” said the stranger quietly. “You see, Mr. Adams, I am your successor.”

“Look here, young man…”

“Not young man. I am half again your age. I am getting old.”

“I have no successor,” said Adams coldly. “There’s been no talk of one. I’m good for another hundred years. Maybe more than that.”

“Yes,” the stranger said, “for more than a hundred years. For much more than that.”

Adams leaned back quietly in his chair. He put his pipe in his mouth and lit it with a hand that was suddenly steady.

“Let’s take this easy,” he said. “You say you are my successor…that you took over my job after I quit or died. That means you came out of the future. Not that I believe you for a moment, of course. But just for argument…”

“There was a news item the other day,” the stranger said. “About a man named Michaelson who claimed he went into the future.”

“I read that. One second! How could a man know he went one second into time? How could he measure it and know? What difference would it make?”

“None,” the stranger agreed. “Not the first time. But the next time he will go into the future five seconds. Five seconds, Mr. Adams. Five tickings of the clock. The space of one short breath. There must be a starting point for all things.”

“Time travel?”

The stranger nodded.

“I don’t believe it,” Adams said. “In the last five thousand years we have conquered the galaxy…”

“Conquer is not the right word, Mr. Adams.”

“Well, taken over, then. Moved in. However you wish it. And we have found strange things. Stranger things than we ever dreamed. But never time travel.” He waved his hand at the stars. “In all that space out there, no one had time travel. No one.”

“You have it now,” the stranger said. “Since two weeks ago. Michaelson went into time, one second into time. A start. That is all that’s needed.”

“All right,” said Adams. “Let us say you are the man who in a hundred years or so will take my place. Let’s pretend you traveled back in time. Then why come here?”

“To tell you that Asher Sutton will return.”

“I would know it when he came,” said Adams. “Why must I know now?”

“When he returns,” the stranger said, “Sutton must be killed.”

II

THE tiny, battered ship sank lower, slowly, like a floating feather, drifting down toward the field in the slant of morning sun. The bearded, ragged man in the pilot’s chair sat tensed, not breathing.

Tricky, said his brain. Hard and tricky to handle so much weight, to judge the distance and the speed… hard to make the tons of metal float down against the savage pull of gravity. Harder even than the lifting of it, when there had been no consideration but that it should rise and move out into space.

For a moment the ship wavered and he fought it with every shred of will and mind… and then it floated once again, hovering just a few feet above the surface of the field.

He let it down, gently, so that it scarcely bumped when it touched the ground.

He sat rigid in the seat, slowly going limp, relaxing by inches, first one muscle, then another. Tired, he told himself. The toughest job I’ve ever done. Another few miles and I would have let the whole weight of the ship crash.

Far down the field was a clump of buildings. A ground car had swung away from them and was racing down the strip toward him. A breeze curled in through the shattered vision port and touched his face, reminding him…

Breathe, he told himself. You must be breathing when they come. You must be breathing and you must walk out and you must smile at them. There must be nothing they will notice. Right away, at least. The beard and clothes will help some. They’ll be so busy gaping at them that they will miss a little thing. But not breathing. They might notice if you weren’t breathing.

Carefully, he pulled in a breath of air, felt the sting of it run along his nostrils and gush inside his throat, felt the fire of it when it reached his lungs.

Another breath and another one and the air had scent and life and a strange exhilaration. The blood throbbed in his throat and beat against his temples and he held his fingers to one wrist and felt it pulsing there.

Sickness came, a brief, stomach-retching sickness that he fought against, holding his body rigid, remembering all the things that he must do. The power of will, he told himself, the power of mind… the power that no man uses to its full capacity. The will to tell a body the things that it must do, the power to start an engine turning after years of doing nothing.

One breath and then another. And the heart is beating now, steadier, steadier.

Be quiet, stomach.

Get going, liver.

Keep pumping, heart.

It isn’t as if you were old and rusted, for you never were. The other system took care that you were kept in shape, that you were ready at an instant’s notice to be as you were.

But the switch-over was a shock. He had known that it would be. He had dreaded its coming, for he had known what it would mean: the agony of a new kind of life and metabolism.

IN HIS mind he held a blueprint of his body and all its working parts… a shifting, wobbly picture that shivered and blurred and ran color into color. But it steadied under the hardening of his mind, the driving of his will, and finally the blueprint was still and sharp and bright and he knew that the worst was over.

He clung to the ship’s controls with hands clenched so fiercely, they almost dented metal, and perspiration poured down his body, and he was limp and weak. Nerves grew quiet and the blood pumped on, and he knew that he was breathing without even thinking of it.

For a moment longer he sat quietly in the seat, relaxing. The breeze came in the shattered port and brushed against his cheek. The ground car was coming very close.

“Johnny,” he whispered, “we are home. We made it. This is my home, Johnny. The place I talked about.”

But there was no answer, just a stir of comfort deep inside his brain, a strange, nestling comfort such as one may know when one is eight years old and snuggles into bed.

“Johnny!” he cried.

And he felt the stir again… a self-assuring stir like the feel of a dog’s muzzle against a hand.

Someone was beating at the ship’s door, beating with fists and crying out.

“All right,” said Asher Sutton. “I’m coming. I’ll be right along.”

He reached down and lifted the attache case from beside the seat, tucked it underneath his arm. He went to the lock and twirled it open and stepped out on the ground.

There was only one man.

“Hello,” said Asher Sutton.

“Welcome to Earth, sir,” said the man, and the “sir” struck a chord of memory. Sutton’s eyes went to the man’s forehead and he saw the tattooing of the serial number, the only indication that this was a synthetic human being, an android.

Sutton had forgotten about androids. Perhaps a lot of other things as we’ll. Little habit patterns that had sloughed away with the span of twenty years.

HE SAW the android staring at him, at the naked knee showing through the worn cloth, at the lack of shoes.

“Where I’ve been,” said Sutton, sharply, “you couldn’t buy a new suit every day.”

“No, sir,” said the android.

“And the beard,” said Sutton, “is because I had nothing to shave with.”

“I’ve seen beards before,” the android told him.

Sutton stood quietly and stared at the world before him… at the upthrust of towers shining in the morning sun, at the green of park and meadow, at the darker green of trees and the blue and scarlet splashes of flower gardens on sloping terraces.

He took a deep breath and felt the air flooding in his lungs, seeking out all the distant cells that had been starved so long. And it was coming back to him, coming back again… the remembrance of life on Earth, of early morning sun and flaming sunsets, of deep blue sky and dew upon the grass, the swift blur of human talk and the lilt of human music.

“The car is waiting, sir,” the android said. “I will take you to a human.”

“I’d rather walk,” said Sutton.

THE android shook his head. “The human is waiting and he is most impatient.”

“Oh, all right,” said Sutton. The seat was soft and he sank into it gratefully, cradling the attache case carefully in his lap. He stared out of the window, fascinated by the green of Earth. The green fields of Earth, he said. Or was it the green vales? No matter now. It was a song written long ago, in the time when there had been fields on Earth, instead of parks, when Man had turned the soil for more important things than flower beds. In the day, thousands of years before, when Man had just begun to feel the stir of space within his soul. Long years before Earth had become the capital, and the center of galactic empire.

A great starship was taking off at the far end of the field, sliding down the ice-smooth plastic skid-way with the red-hot flare of booster jets frothing in its tubes. Its nose slammed into the upward curve of the take-off ramp and it was away, a rumbling streak of silver that shot into the blue. For a moment it flickered a golden red in the morning sunlight, and then was gone, vanished.

SUTTON brought his gaze back to Earth again, sat soaking in the sight of it as a man soaks in the first strong sun of spring after months of winter.

Far to the north towered the twin spires of the Justice Bureau, Alien Branch. And to the east the pile of gleaming plastics and glass that was the University of North America. And other buildings that he had forgotten… buildings for which he found he had no name, miles apart, with parks and homesites in between. The homes were masked by trees and shrubbery—none sat in barren loneliness—and, through the green of the curving hills, Sutton caught the glints of color that were roofs and walls.

The car slid to a stop before the Administration Building and the android opened the door. “This way, sir.”

Only a few chairs in the lobby were occupied and most of those by humans. Humans or androids, thought Sutton, you can’t tell the difference until you see their foreheads.

The sign upon the forehead, the brand of manufacture. The telltale mark that said: “This man is not a human, although he looks like one.”

These are the ones who will listen to me. These are the ones who will pay attention. These are the ones who will save me against any future enmity that Man may raise against me.

For they are worse than the disinherited. They are not the has-beens; they are the never-weres. They are not born of woman, but of the laboratory. Their mother is a bin of chemicals and their father the ingenuity and technology of the creator race.

Android: An artificial human. A human made in the laboratory out of Man’s own knowledge of chemicals and atomic and molecular structure and the strange reaction that is known as life.

Human in all but two respects—the mark upon the forehead and the ability to reproduce biologically.

Artificial humans to help the real humans, the biological humans, to carry the load of galactic empire, to make the thin line of humanity stronger, thicker. But kept in their place. Oh, yes, most definitely kept in their rightful place by psycho-conditioning and savagely enforced rules and laws.

THE corridor was empty. Sutton, his bare feet slapping on the floor, followed the android.

The door before which they stopped said:



THOMAS H. DAVIS

(Human)

Operations Chief



“In there,” the android said.

Sutton walked in and the man behind the desk looked up.

“I’m a human,” Sutton told him. “I may not look it, but I am.”

The man jerked his thumb toward a chair. “Sit down.”

Sutton sat.

“Why didn’t you answer our signals?” Davis asked.

“My set was broken.”

“Your ship has no identity.”

“The rains washed it off,” said Sutton, “and I had no paint.”

“Rain doesn’t wash off paint.”

“Not Earth rain. Where I was, it does.”

“Your motors?” asked Davis. “We could pick up nothing from them.”

“They weren’t working.”

Davis’ Adam’s apple bobbed up and down. “Weren’t working? How did you navigate?”

“With energy,” said Sutton.

“Energy…”

Sutton stared at him icily. “Anything else you want to know?”

Davis was confused. The answers were all wrong. He fiddled with a pencil. “Just the usual things, I guess.” He drew a pad of forms before him.

“Name?”

“Asher Sutton.”

“Origin of fli—Say, wait a minute! Asher Sutton?”

“That’s right.”

Davis flung the pencil on the desk, pushed away the pad. “Why didn’t you tell me that first?”

“I didn’t have a chance.”

Davis was flustered. “If I had known…”

“It’s the beard,” said Sutton.

“My father talked about you often. Jim Davis. Maybe you remember him.”

Sutton shook his head.

“Great friend of your father’s. That is… they more or less knew one another.”

“How is my father?” asked Sutton.

“Great,” said Davis enthusiastically. “Getting along in years, but standing up…”

“My father and mother,” Sutton told him coldly, “died forty years ago. In the Argus pandemic.” He heaved himself to his feet, faced Davis squarely. “If you’re through, I’d like to go to my hotel. They’ll find some room for me.”

“Certainly, Mr. Sutton, certainly. Which hotel?”

“The Orion Arms.”

Davis reached into a drawer, took out a directory, flipped the pages, ran a shaking finger down a column.

“Cherry 26-3489,” he said. “The teleport is over there.”

He pointed to a booth set flush into the wall, where a dematerializer could transport matter instantly to any other teleport booth anywhere on Earth.

“Thanks,” said Sutton.

“About your father, Mr. Sutton…”

“I know,” said Sutton. “I’m glad you tipped me off.”

He swung around and walked to the teleport. Before he closed the door, he looked back.

Davis was on the visaphone, talking rapidly.

III

TWENTY years had not changed the Orion Arms.

To Sutton, stepping out of the teleport, it looked the same as the day he had walked away. A little shabbier, but it was home, the quiet whisper of hushed activity, the dowdy furnishings, the finger-to-the lip, tiptoe atmosphere, the stiff respectability that he had remembered and dreamed about in the long years of alienness.

The life mural along the wall was the same as ever. A little faded now, but the same goatish Pan still chased, after twenty years, the same terror-stricken maiden across the self-same hills and dales. And the same rabbit hopped from behind a bush and watched the chase with all his customary boredom, chewing his everlasting cud of clover.

The self-adjusting furniture, bought before the management had considered throwing the hostelry open to the unhuman trade, had been out-of-date twenty years ago. But it still was there. It had been repainted, in soft, genteel pastels, its self-adjustment features still confined to human forms.

The spongy floor covering had lost some of its sponginess, and the Cetian cactus must have died at last, for a pot of frankly Terrestial geraniums now occupied its place.

The clerk snapped off the visa-phone and turned back to the room.

“Good morning, Mr. Sutton,” he said, in his cultured android voice. Then he added, almost as an afterthought: “We’ve been wondering when you would show up.”

“Twenty years,” said Sutton drily, “is a long time to wonder.”

“We’ve kept your old suite for you. We knew you would want it. Mary has kept it cleaned and ready for you ever since you left.”

“That was nice of you, Ferdinand.”

“You’ve hardly changed at all. Just the beard. I knew you the second that I turned and saw you.”

“The beard and clothes,” said Sutton. “The clothes are pretty bad.”

“I don’t suppose you have luggage, Mr. Sutton.”

“No. Could I get something to eat?”

“Breakfast, perhaps? We still are serving breakfast. You always liked scrambled eggs for breakfast.”

“That sounds all right,” said Sutton. “Send them up with a change of clothes.”

He turned slowly from the desk and walked to the elevator. He was about to close the door when a voice called: “Just a moment, please.”

The girl was running across the lobby. Rangy and copper-haired, she slid into the lift, pressed her back against the wall.

“Thanks very much,” she said. “Thanks so much for waiting.”

Her skin, Sutton saw, was magnolia-white and her eyes were granite-colored with shadows deep within them. He closed the door softly. “I was glad to wait,” he said. Her lips twitched just a little, and he added, “I don’t like shoes. They cramp my feet.”

He pressed the button savagely and the lift sprang upward. The lights ticked off the floors. Sutton stopped the cage. “This is my floor,” he said.

HE HAD the door open and was halfway out, when she spoke to him. “Mister.”

“Yes, what is it?”

“I didn’t mean to laugh. I really-truly didn’t.”

“You had a right to laugh,” said Sutton, and closed the door behind him. He stood for a moment, fighting down a sudden tenseness that seized him like a mighty fist.

Careful, he told himself, take it easy, boy. You are home at last. This is the place you dreamed of. Just a few doors down and you are finally home. You will reach out and turn the knob and push open the door and it will be there, just as you remembered it. The favorite chair, the life-paintings on the wall, the little fountain with the mermaids from Venus, and the windows where you can sit and fill your eyes with Earth.

But you can’t get emotional. You can’t go soft and scared.

For that chap back at the spaceport lied. And hotels don’t keep rooms waiting for all of twenty years.

There is something wrong. I don’t know what, but something. Something terribly wrong.

He took a slow step… and then another, fighting down the tension, swallowing the dryness of excitement welling in his throat.

One of the paintings, he remembered, was a forest brook, with birds flitting in the trees. And at the most unexpected times one of the birds would sing, usually with the dawn or the going of the sun. And the water babbled with a happy song that held one listening.

He knew that he was running and he didn’t try to stop. His fingers curled around the door knob and turned it.

The room was there… the favorite chair, the babble of the brook, the splashing of the mermaids…

He caught the whiff of danger as he stepped across the threshold and he tried to turn and run, but he was too late. He felt his body crumpling forward to crash toward the floor.

“Johnny!” he cried and the cry bubbled in his throat. “Johnny!”

Inside his brain a voice whispered back: “It’s all right, Ash. We’re still joined.”

Then darkness came.

IV

THERE was someone in the room and Sutton kept his eyelids down, kept his breathing slow. Someone in the room was pacing quietly, stopping now before the window to look out, moving over to the mantlepiece to stare at the painting of the forest brook. And in the stillness of the room, Sutton heard the laughing babble of the painted stream against the splashing of the fountain, heard the faint bird notes that came from the painted trees, imagined that even from the distance that he lay he could smell the forest mold and the cool, wet perfume of the moss that grew along the stream.

The person in the room crossed back again and sat down in a chair. He whistled a tune, almost inaudibly. A funny, little lilting tune that Sutton had not heard before.

Someone gave me a going over, Sutton told himself. Knocked me out fast, with gas or powder, then gave me an overhauling. I seem to remember some of it… hazy and far away. Lights that glowed and a probing at my brain. And I might have fought against it, but I knew it was no use. And, besides, they’re welcome to anything they found. Yes, they’re welcome to anything they pried out of my mind. But they’ve found all they’re going to find and they have gone away. They left someone to watch me and he still is in the room, waiting for me to wake up, probably.

Sutton stirred on the bed and opened his eyes, kept them glazed and only partly focused.

The man rose from the chair and Sutton saw that he was dressed in white. He crossed the room and leaned above the bed.

“All right now?” he asked.

Sutton raised a hand and passed it, bewildered, across his face. “Yes, I guess I am.”

“You passed out,” the man said.

“Something I forgot to eat.”

THE man shook his head. “The trip, probably. It must have been a tough one.”

“Yes,” said Sutton. “Tough.”

Go ahead, he thought. Go ahead and ask some more. Those are your instructions. Catch me while I’m groggy, pump me like a well. Go ahead and ask the questions and earn your lousy money.

But he was wrong. The man straightened up. “I think you’ll be all right,” he said. “If you aren’t, call me. My card is on the mantle.”

“Thanks, doctor,” said Sutton.

He watched him walk across the room, waited until he heard the door click, then sat up in bed. His clothing lay in a pile in the center of the floor. His case? Yes, there it was, lying on a chair. Ransacked, no doubt, probably photostated. Spy rays, too, more than likely. All over the room. Ears listening and eyes watching.

But who? he asked himself. No one knew he was returning. No one could have known. Not even Adams. There was no way to know. There had been no way that he could let them know.

Funny. Funny the way Davis at the spaceport had recognized his name and told a lie to cover up. Funny the way Ferdinand pretended his suite had been kept for him for all these twenty years. Funny, too, how Ferdinand had turned around and spoken, as if twenty years were nothing.

Organized, said Sutton. Clicking like a relay system. Set and waiting. But why should anyone be waiting? No one knew when he’d be coming back. Or if he would come at all.

And even if someone did know, why go to all the trouble?

For they could not know, he thought… they could not know the thing I have, they could not even guess. Even if they did know I was coming back, incredible as it might be that they should know, even that would be more credible by a million times than that they should know the real reason for my coming.

And knowing, he said, they would not believe.

His eyes found the attache case lying on the chair, and Stared at it.

And knowing, he said again, they would not believe.

When they look the ship over, of course, they will do some wondering. Then there might be some excuse for the thing that happened. But they didn’t have time to look at the ship. They didn’t wait a minute. They were laying for me and they gave me the works from the second that I landed.

Davis shoved me into a teleport and grabbed his phone like mad.

And Ferdinand knew that I was on I the way, he knew he’d see me when he turned around. And the girl—the girl with the granite eyes?

Sutton got up and stretched. A bath and shave, first of all, he told himself. And then some clothes and breakfast. A visor call or two.

Don’t act as if you’ve got the wind up, he warned himself. Act naturally. Talk to yourself. Pinch out a blackhead. Scratch your back against a door casing. Act as if you think you are alone.

But be careful.

There is someone watching.

V

SUTTON was finishing breakfast when the android came.

“My name is Herkimer,” the android told him, “and I belong to Mr. Geoffrey Benton.”

“Mr. Benton sent you here?”

“Yes. He sends a challenge.”

“A challenge?”

“Yes. You know, a duel.”

“But I am unarmed.”

“You cannot be unarmed,” said Herkimer.

“I never fought a duel in all my life,” said Sutton. “I don’t intend to now.”

“You are vulnerable.”

“What do you mean, vulnerable? If I go unarmed…”

“But you cannot go unarmed. The code was changed just a year or two ago. No man younger than a hundred years can go unarmed.”

“But if one does?”

“Why, then,” said Herkimer, “anyone who wants to can pot him like a rabbit.”

“You are sure of this?”

Herkimer dug into his pocket, brought out a tiny book. He wet his finger and fumbled at the pages. “It’s right here.”

“Never mind,” said Sutton. “I will take your word.”

“You accept the challenge, then?”

Sutton grimaced. “I suppose I have to. Mr. Benton will wait, I presume, until I buy a gun.”

“No need of that,” Herkimer told him brightly. “I brought one along. Mr. Benton always does that. Just a courtesy, you know. In case someone hasn’t got one.”

He reached into his pocket and held out the weapon. Sutton took it and laid it on the table. “Awkward looking thing,” he said.

Herkimer stiffened. “It’s traditional. The finest weapon made. Shoots a .45 caliber slug. Hand-loaded ammunition. Sights are tested in for fifty feet.”

“You pull this?” asked Sutton, pointing.

Herkimer nodded. “It is called a trigger. And you don’t pull it. You squeeze it.”

“Just why does Mr. Benton challenge me?” asked Sutton. “I don’t even know the man.”

“You are famous,” said Herkimer.

“Not that I have heard of.”

“You are an investigator,” Herkimer pointed out. “You have just come back from a long and perilous mission. You’re carrying a mysterious attache case. And there are reporters waiting in the lobby to interview you.”

Sutton nodded. “I see. When Benton kills someone, he likes him to be famous.”

“Of course. More publicity.”

“But I don’t know your Mr. Benton. How will I know who I’m supposed to shoot at?”

“I’ll show you,” said Herkimer, “on the televisor.” He stepped to the desk, dialed a number and stepped back. “That’s him.”

In the screen a man was sitting before a chess table. The pieces were in mid-game. Across the board stood a beautifully machined robotic. The man reached out a hand, thoughtfully played his knight. The robotic clicked and chuckled. It moved a pawn. Benton’s shoulders hunched forward and he bent above the board. One hand came around and scratched the back of his neck.

“Oscar’s got him worried,” said Herkimer. “He always has him worried. Mr. Benton hasn’t won a single game in the last ten years.”

“Why does he keep on playing?”

“Stubborn,” said Herkimer. “But Oscar’s stubborn, too.” He made a motion with his hand. “Machines can be so much more stubborn than humans. It’s the way they’re built.”

“But Benton must have known, when he had Oscar fabricated, that Oscar would beat him,” Sutton pointed out. A human simply can’t beat a robotic expert.”

“Mr. Benton knew that,” said Herkimer, “but he didn’t believe it. He wanted to prove otherwise.”

“Egomaniac,” said Sutton.

Herkimer stared at him calmly. “I believe that you are right, sir. I’ve sometimes thought the same myself.”

SUTTON brought his gaze back to Benton, who was still hunched above the board, the knuckles of one hand thrust hard against his mouth. The veined face was scrubbed and pink and chubby and the brooding eyes, thoughtful as they were, still held a fat twinkle of culture and good fellowship.

“You’ll know him now?” asked Herkimer.

Sutton nodded. “Yes, I think I can pick him out. He doesn’t look too dangerous.”

“He’s killed sixteen men,” Herkimer said stiffly. “He plans to lay away his guns when he makes it twenty-five.” He looked straight at Sutton and said: “You’re the seventeenth.”

“I’ll try to make it easy for him.”

“How would you wish it, sir?” asked Herkimer. “Formal or informal?”

“Let’s make it catch-as-catch-can.”

Herkimer was disapproving. “There are certain conventions…”

“You can tell Mr. Benton,” said Sutton, “that I don’t plan to ambush him.”

Herkimer picked up his cap, put it on his head. “The best of luck, sir.”

“Why, thank you, Herkimer,” said Sutton.

THE door closed and Sutton was alone. He turned back to the screen. Benton played to double up his rooks. Oscar chuckled at him, slid a bishop three squares along the board and put Benton’s king in check.

Sutton snapped the visor off.

He scraped a hand across his now-shaved chin.

Coincidence or plan?







One of the mermaids had climbed to the edge of the fountain and balanced her three-inch self precariously. She whistled at Sutton. He turned at the sound and she dived into the pool, swam in circles, mocking him with obscene gestures.

Sutton leaned forward, reached into the visor rack, brought out the INF-JAT directory, flipped the pages swiftly.



INFORMATION—Terrestrial
Culinary
Culture
Customs



That would be it. Customs.

He found DUELING, noted the number and put back the book. He reset the dial and snapped the tumbler for direct communication.

A robot’s streamlined, metallic face filled the plate. “At your service, sir,” it said.

“I have been challenged to a duel,” said Sutton.

The robot waited for the question.

“I don’t want to fight a duel,” said Sutton. “Is there any way, legally, for me to back out? I’d like to do it gracefully, too, but I won’t insist on that.”

“There is no way,” the robot said.

“No way at all?”

“You are under one hundred?” the robot asked.

“Yes.”

“You are sound of mind and body?”

“I think so.”

“You are or you aren’t. Make up your mind.”

“I am,” said Sutton.

“You do not belong to any bona fide religion that prohibits killing?”

“I presume I could classify myself as a Christian,” said Sutton. “Isn’t there a Commandment against killing?”

The robot shook his head. “It doesn’t count.”

“It’s clear and specific,” Sutton argued. “It says one should not kill.”

“It does,” the robot told him. “But it has been discredited. You humans never obeyed it. You either obey a law or you forfeit it.”

“I guess I’m sunk then,” said Sutton.

“According to the revision of the year 7990,” said the robot, “arrived at by convention, any human under the age of one hundred, of male sex, sound in mind and body, unhampered by religious bonds or belief, which are subject to a court of inquiry, must fight a duel whenever challenged.”

“I see.”

“The history of dueling,” said the robot, “is very interesting.”

“It’s barbaric,” said Sutton.

“Perhaps so. But you humans are still barbaric in many, other ways as well.”

“You’re impertinent.”

“I’m sick and tired,” the robot said. “Sick and tired of the smugness of you humans. You say you’ve outlawed war and you haven’t, really. You’ve just fixed it so no one dares to fight you. You say you have abolished crime and you have, except for human crime. And a lot of the crime you have abolished isn’t crime at all, except by human standards.”

“You’re taking a long chance, friend,” warned Sutton, “talking the way you are.”

“You can pull the plug on me,” the robot told him, “any time you want to. Life isn’t worth it, the kind of job I have.”







HE SAW the look on Sutton’s face and hurried on. “Try to see it this way, sir. Through all his history, Man has been a killer. He was smart and brutal, even from the first. He was a puny thing, but he found how to use a club and rocks, and when the rocks weren’t sharp enough, he chipped them so they were. There were things, at first, he should not by rights have killed. They should have killed him. But he was smart and he had the club and flints and he killed the mammoth and the sabertooth and other things he could not have faced bare-handed. So he won the Earth from the animals. He wiped them out, except the ones he allowed to live for the service that they gave him. And even as he fought with the animals, he fought with others of his kind. After the animals were gone, he kept on fighting… man against man, nation against nation.”

“But that is past,” said Sutton. “There hasn’t been a war for more than a thousand years. Humans have no need of fighting now.”

“That is just the point,” the robot insisted. “There is no more need of fighting, no more need of killing. Oh, once in a while, perhaps, on some far-off planet, where a human must kill to protect his life or to uphold human dignity and power. But, by and large, there is no need of killing.

“And yet you kill. You must kill. The old brutality is in you. You are drunk with power and killing is a sign of power. It has become a habit with you… a thing you’ve carried from the caves. There’s nothing left to kill but one another, so you kill one another and you call it dueling. You know it’s wrong, and you’re hypocritical about it. You’ve set up a fine system of semantics to make it sound respectable and brave and noble. You call it traditional and chivalric… and even if you don’t call it that in so many words, that is what you think. You cloak it with the trappings of your vicious past, you dress it up with words, and the words are only tinsel.”

“Look,” said Sutton, “I don’t want to fight this duel. I don’t think its…”

There was vindictive glee in the robot’s voice. “But you’ve got to fight it. There’s no way to back out. Maybe you would like some pointers. I have all sorts of tricks…”

“I thought you didn’t approve of dueling.”

“I don’t,” the robot said. “But it’s my job. I’m stuck with it. I try to do it well. I can tell you the personal history of every man who ever fought a duel. I can talk for hours on the advantages of rapiers over pistols. Or if you’d rather I argued for pistols, I can do that, too. I can tell you about the old American West gun slicks and the Chicago gangsters and the handkerchief and dagger duels and…”

“No, thanks,” said Sutton.

“You aren’t interested?”

“I haven’t got the time.”

“But, sir,” the robot pleaded, “I don’t get a chance too often. I don’t get many calls. Just an hour or so…

“No,” said Sutton firmly.

“All right, then. Maybe you’d tell me who has challenged you.”

“Benton. Geoffrey Benton.”

The robot whistled.

“Is he that good?” asked Sutton.

“All of it,” the robot said.

Sutton shut the visor off.

He sat quietly in his chair, staring at the gun. Slowly he reached out a hand and picked it up. The butt fitted snugly in his hand. His finger curled around the trigger. He lifted it and sighted at the door knob.

It was easy to handle. Almost like it was a part of him. There was a feel of power within it… of power and mastery. As if he suddenly were stronger and greater… and more dangerous.

He sighed and laid it down. The robot had been right.

He reached out to the visor, pushed the signal for the lobby desk. Ferdinand’s face came in.

“Anyone waiting down there for me, Ferdinand?”

“Not a soul,” said Ferdinand.

“Anyone asked for me?”

“No one, Mr. Sutton.”

“No reporters? No photographers?”

“No, Mr. Sutton. Were you expecting them?”

Sutton didn’t answer. He cut off, feeling very silly.

VI

MAN was spread thin throughout the galaxy. A lone man here, a handful there. Slim creatures of bone and brain and muscle to hold a galaxy in check. Slight shoulders to hold up the cloak of human greatness spread across the light years.

For Man had flown too fast, had driven far beyond his physical capacity. Not by strength did he hold his starry outposts, but by something else… by depth of human character, by his colossal conceit, by his ferocious conviction that Man was the greatest living thing the galaxy had spawned. All this in spite of many evidences that he was not…evidence that he cast aside, scornful of any greatness that was not ruthless and aggressive.

Too thin, Christopher Adams told himself. Too thin and stretched too far. One man backed by a dozen androids and a hundred robots could hold a solar system. Could hold it until there were more men or until something cracked.

In time there’d be more men, if the birth rate increased. But it would be many centuries before the line could grow much thicker, for Man only held the keypoints… one planet in an entire system, and not in every system. Man had leapfrogged since there weren’t men enough, had set up strategic spheres of influence, had bypassed all but the richest, most influential systems.

THERE was room to spread, room for a million years. If there were any humans left by then.

If the life on those other planets let the humans live, if there never came a day when they would be willing to pay the terrible price of wiping out mankind.

The price would be high, said Adams, talking to himself, but it could be done. Just a few hours’ job. Humans in the morning, no humans left by night. What if a thousand others died for every human death… or ten thousand, or a hundred thousand? Under certain circumstances, such a price might be cheap.

There were islands of resistance even now where one walked carefully… or even walked around. Like 61 Cygni, for example.

It took judgment… and some tolerance… and a great measure of latent brutality, but, most of all, conceit, the absolute, unshakable conviction that Man was sacrosanct, that he could not be touched, that he could die only individually.

But five had died, three humans and two androids, beside a river that flowed on Aldebaran XII, just a few short miles from Andrelon, the planetary capital.

They had died of violence, of that there was no question.

Adams’ eyes sought out the paragraph of Thorne’s latest report:

Force had been applied from the outside. We found a hole burned through the atomic shielding of the engine. The force must have been controlled or it would have resulted in absolute destruction. The automatics got in their work and headed off the blast, but the machine went out of control and smashed into the tree. The area was saturated with intensive radiation.

Good man, Thorne, thought Adams. He won’t let a single thing be missed. He had those robots in there before the place was safe for humans.

But there wasn’t much to find… not much that gave an answer. Just a batch of question marks.

Five had died, and when that was said, that was the end of fact. For they were burned and battered and there were no features left, no fingerprints or eyeprints to match against the records.

A few feet away from the strewn blackness of the bodies, the machine had smashed into a tree. A machine that, like the men, was without a record. A machine without a counterpart in the known galaxy and, so far at least, a machine without a purpose.

Thorne would give it the works. He would set it up in solidographs, down to the last shattered piece of glass and plastic. He would have it analyzed and diagramed and the robots would put it in scanners that would peel it and record it molecule by molecule.

And they might find something. Just possibly they might.

Adams shoved the report to one side and leaned back in his chair. Idly, he spelled out his name lettered across the office door, reading backward slowly and with exaggerated care. As if he’d never seen the name before. As if he did not know it. Puzzling it out.

And then the line beneath it:



SUPERVISOR, ALIEN

RELATIONS BUREAU

Space Sector 16



And the line beneath that:



Department of Galactic
Investigation (Justice)



EARLY afternoon sunlight slanted through a window and fell across his head, highlighting the clipped silver mustache, the whitening temple hair.

Five men had died…

He wished that he could get it out of his mind. There was other work. This Sutton thing, for instance. The reports on that would be coming in within an hour or so.

But there was a photograph… a photograph from Thorne, that he could not forget.

A smashed machine and broken bodies and a great smoking gash sliced across the turf. The silver river flowed in a silence that one knew was there even in the photograph, and far in the distance the spidery web of Andrelon rose against a pinkish sky.

Adams smiled softly to himself. Aldebaran XII, he thought, must be a lovely world. He never had been there and he never would be there… for there were too many planets for one man to even dream of seeing all.

Someday, perhaps, when the teleports would transmit matter instantly across light years instead of puny miles… perhaps then a man might just whisk across to any planet that he wished, for a day or hour, or just to say he’d been there.

But Adams didn’t need to be there. He had eyes and ears there, as he had on every occupied planet within the entire galactic sector.

Thorne was there, and Thorne was an able man. He wouldn’t rest until he’d, wrung the last ounce of information from the broken wreck and bodies.

I wish I could forget it, Adams told himself. It’s important, yes, but not all-important.

A buzzer hummed at Adams and he flipped up a tumbler on his desk. “What is it?”

A female android voice answered: “It’s Mr. Thorne, sir, on the mentophone from Andrelon.”

“Thank you, Alice,” Adams said.

He clicked open a drawer and took out the mentophone cap, placed it on his head, adjusted it with steady fingers. Thoughts flickered through his brain, disjointed, random thought, enormously amplified by the Electro-Neuron Boosting Stations. Ghost thoughts drifting through the universe—residual flotsam from the minds of men and creatures back to the unguessable past.

Adams flinched. I’ll never get used to it, he told himself. I will always duck, like the kid who anticipates a cuffing.

The ghost thoughts peeped and cluttered at him.

Adams closed his eyes and settled back. “Hello, Thorne,” he thought.

Thorne’s thought came in, thinned and tenuous over the distance of more than fifty light years.

“That you, Adams?”

“Yes, it’s me. What’s up?”

A high, sing-song thought came in and skipped along his brain: Spill the rattle… pinch the fish … oxygen is high-priced.

Adams forced the unwanted thought out of his brain, built up his concentration. “Start over again, Thorne. A ghost thought came along and blotted you out.”

Thorne’s thought was louder now, more distinct. I wanted to ask you about a name. Seems to me I heard it once before, but I can’t be sure.”

“What name?”

Thorne was spacing his thoughts now, placing them slowly and with emphasis to cut through the static. “The name is Asher Sutton.”

ADAMS sat bolt upright in his chair. His mouth flapped open. “What?” he roared.

“Walk west,” said a voice in his brain. “Walk west and then straight up.”

Thorne’s thought came in… “it was the name that was on the fly leaf…”

“Start over,” Adams concentrated. “Start over and take it slow. I couldn’t hear a thing you thought.”

Thorne’s thoughts came slowly, intense mental power behind each word: “It was like this. You remember that wreck we had out here? Five men killed…”

“Yes, yes. Of course I remember it.”

“Well, we found a book, or what once had been a book, on one of the corpses. The book was burned, scorched through and through by radiation. The robots did what they could with it, but that wasn’t much. A word here and there. Nothing you could make any sense out of…”

The thought static purred and fumbled. Half thoughts cut through. Rambling thought-snatches that had no human sense or meaning—that could have had no human sense or meaning even if they had been heard in their entirety.

“Start over,” Adams thought desperately. “Start over.”

“You know about this wreck. Five men…”

“Yes, yes. I got that much. Up to the part about the book. Where does Sutton come in?”

“That was about all the robotics could figure out,” Thorne told him. “Just three words. ‘By Asher Sutton.’ Like he might have been the author. Like the book might have been written by him. It was on one of the first pages. The title page, maybe. Such and such a book by Asher Sutton.”

There was silence. Even the ghost voices were still for a moment. Then a piping, lisping thought came in… a baby thought, immature and puling. And the thought was without context, untranslatable, almost meaningless… but hideous and nerve-wrenching in its alien imbecility.

Adams felt the sudden chill of fear slice into his marrow. He grasped the chair arms with both his hands and hung on tight while the degraded mindlessness babbled in his brain.

SUDDENLY the thought was gone. Fifty light years of space whistled in the cold.

Adams relaxed, felt the perspiration running from his armpits, trickling down his ribs. “You there, Thorne?” he asked.

“Yes. I caught some of that one, too.”

“Pretty bad, wasn’t it?”

“I’ve never heard much worse,” Thorne told him. There was a moment’s silence. Then Thorne’s thoughts took up again. “Maybe I’m just wasting time. But it seemed to me I remembered that name.”

“You have,” Adams thought back. “Sutton went to 61 Cygni.”

“Oh, he’s the one!”

“He got back this morning.”

“Couldn’t have been him, then. Someone else by the same name.”

“Must have been,” thought Adams.

“Nothing else to report,” Thorne told him. “The name just bothered me.

“Keep at it,” Adams thought. “Let me know anything that turns up.

“I will,” Thorne promised. “Good-bye.”

“Thanks for calling.”



ADAMS lifted off the mentophone cap. He opened his eyes and the sight of the room, commonplace and Earthly, with the sun streaming through the window, was almost a physical shock.

He sat limp in his chair, thinking, remembering.

The man had come at twilight, stepping out of the shadows onto the patio, and he had sat down in the darkness and talked like any other man. Except the things he said.

When he returns, Sutton must be killed. I am your successor. Crazy talk. Unbelievable. Impossible.

And, still, maybe I should have listened. Maybe I should have heard him out instead of flying off the handle.

Except that you don’t kill a man who comes back after twenty years.

Especially a man like Sutton.

Sutton is a good man. One of the best the Bureau has. Slick as a whistle, well grounded in alien psychology, an authority on galactic politics. No other man could have done the Cygnian job as well.

If he did it.

I don’t know that, of course. But he’ll be in tomorrow and he’ll tell me all about it.

A man is entitled to a day’s rest after twenty years.

Slowly, Adams reached out an almost reluctant hand and snapped up a tumbler.

Alice answered.

“Send me in the Asher Sutton file.”

“Yes, Mr. Adams.”

Adams settled back in his chair.

The warmth of the sun felt good across his shoulders. The ticking of the clock was comforting after the ghost voices whispering out in space. Thoughts that one could not pin down, that one could not trace back and say: “This one started here and then.”

Although we’re trying, Adams thought. He chuckled to himself at the weirdness of the project.

Thousands of listeners listening in on the random thoughts of random time and space, listening in for clues, for hints, for leads. Seeking a driblet of sense from the stream of gibberish… hunting the word or sentence or disassociated thought that might be translated into a new philosophy or a new technique or a new science… or a new something that the human race had never even dreamed of.

A new concept, said Adams, talking to himself. An entirely new concept.

Adams scowled to himself.

A new concept might be dangerous. This was not the time for anything that did not fit into human society, that did not match the pattern of human thought and action.

There must be no confusion.

There must be nothing but the sheer, bulldog determination to hang on, to sink in one’s teeth and stay. To maintain the status quo.

Later, someday, many centuries from now, there would be a time and place and room for a new concept. When Man’s grip was firmer, when the line was not too thin, when a mistake or two would not spell disaster.

Man, at the moment, controlled every factor. He held the edge at every point… a slight edge, admitted, but certainly an edge. And it must stay that way. There must be nothing that would tip the scale in the wrong direction. Not a word or thought, not an action or a whisper.

The desk buzzer lighted up and snarled at him.

“Yes?” said Adams.

Alice’s words tumbled over one another. “The file, sir. The Sutton file.”

“What about the Sutton file? Bring it in here.”

“It’s gone, sir.”

“Someone is using it.”‘

“No, sir, not that. It has been stolen.”

Adams jerked straight upright. “Stolen!”

“That is right, sir. Twenty years ago.”

“But twenty years…”

“We checked the security points,” said Alice. “It was stolen three days after Mr. Sutton set out for 61 Cygni.”

VII

THE lawyer told Sutton his name was Wellington. He had painted a thin coat of plastic lacquer over his forehead to hide the tattoo, but the mark of the manufacture showed through, provided one looked closely.

He laid his hat very carefully on a table, sat down meticulously in a chair and placed his briefcase across his knee. He handed Sutton a rolled-up paper.

“Your newspaper, sir,” he said. “It was outside the door. I thought that you might want it.”

“Thanks,” said Sutton.

Wellington cleared his throat. “You are Asher Sutton?” he asked.

Sutton nodded.

“I represent a certain robot who commonly went by the name of Buster. You may remember him.”

Sutton leaned quickly forward. “Remember him? Why, he was a second father to me. Raised me after both my parents died. He has been with the Sutton family for almost four thousand years.”

Wellington cleared his throat again. “Quite so.”

Sutton leaned back in his chair, crushing the newspaper in his grip. “Don’t tell me…”

Wellington waved a sober hand. “No, he’s in no trouble. Not yet, that is. Not unless you choose to make it for him.”

“What has he done?” asked Sutton.

“He has run away.”

“Good Lord! Run away? Where to?”

Wellington squirmed uneasily in the chair. “To one of the Tower stars, I believe.”

“But,” protested Sutton, “that’s way out. Out almost to the edge of the galaxy.”

Wellington nodded. “He bought himself a new body and a ship and stocked it up…”

“With what? asked Sutton. ”Buster had no money.”

“Oh, yes, he had. Money he had saved over—what was it you said?—four thousand years or so. Tips from guests, Christmas presents, one thing and another. It would all count up… in four thouand years. Placed at interest, you know.”

“But why?” asked Sutton. “What does he intend to do?”

“He took out a homestead on a planet. He didn’t sneak away. He filed his claim, so you can trace him if you wish. He used the family name, sir. That worried him a little. He hoped you wouldn’t mind.”

Sutton shook his head. “Not at all. He has a right to that name, as good a right as I have myself.”

“You don’t mind, then?” asked Wellington. “About the whole thing, I mean? After all, he was your property.

“No,” said Sutton, “I don’t mind. But I was looking forward to seeing him again. I called the old home place, but there was no answer. I thought he might be out.”

Wellington reached into the inside pocket of his coat. “He left you a letter,” he said, holding it out.

Sutton took it. It had his name written across its face. He turned it over, but there was nothing more.

“He also,” said Wellington, “left an old trunk in my custody. Said it contained some old family papers that you might find of interest.”

Sutton sat quietly staring across the room, seeing nothing.

There had been an apple tree at the gate, and each year young Ash Sutton had eaten the apples when they were green, and Buster had nursed him each time gently through the crisis and then had whaled him good and proper to teach him respect for his human metabolism. And when the kid down the road had licked him on the way home from school, it had been Buster who had taken him out in the backyard and taught him how to fight with head as well as hands.

Sutton clenched his fists unconsciously, remembering the surge of satisfaction, the red rawness of his knuckles. The kid down the road, he recalled, had nursed a black eye for a week and become his fastest friend.

“About the trunk, sir?” asked Wellington. “You will want it delivered?”

“Yes,” said Sutton, “if you please.”

“It will be here tomorrow morning.” The android picked up his hat and rose. “I want to thank you, sir, for my client. He assured me you would be reasonable.”

“Not reasonable,” said Sutton. “Just fair. He took care of us for many years. He has earned his freedom.”

“Good day, sir,” said Wellington.

“Good day,” said Sutton. “And thank you very much.”

One of the mermaids whistled a Sutton. Sutton told her. “One of these days, my beauty, you’ll do that once too often.”

She thumbed her nose at him and dived into the fountain.

The door clicked shut as Wellington left.

Slowly, Sutton tore the letter open, spread out the single page:

Dear Ash—I went to see Mr. Adams today and he told me that he was afraid that you would not come back, but I told him that I knew you would. So I’m not doing this because I think you won’t come back and that you will never know… because I know you will. Since you left me and struck out on your own, I have felt old and useless. In a galaxy where there were many things to do, I was doing nothing. You told me you just wanted me to live on at the old place and take it easy, and I knew you did that because you were kind and would not sell me even if you had no use for me. So I’m doing something I have always wanted to do. I am filing on a planet. It sounds like a pretty good planet and I should be able to do something with it. I shall fix it up and build a home and maybe someday you will come and visit me.

P. S. If you ever want me, you can find out where I am at the homestead office.

GENTLY, Sutton folded the sheet, put it in his pocket.

He sat idly in the chair, listening to the purling of the stream that gushed through the painting hung above the fireplace. A bird sang and a fish jumped in a quiet pool around the bend, just outside the frame.

Tomorrow, he thought, I will see Adams. Maybe I can find out if he’s behind what happened. Although why should he be? I’m working for him. I’m carrying out his orders.

He shook his head. No, it couldn’t be Adams.

But it must be someone. Someone who had been laying for him, who even now was watching.

He shrugged mental shoulders, picked up the newspaper and opened it.

It was the Galactic Press and in twenty years its format had not changed. Conservative columns of gray type ran down the page, broken only by laconic headings. Earth news started in the upper left-hand corner of the front page, followed by Martian news, by Venusian news, by the column from the asteroids, the column and a half from the Jovian moons… then the outer planets. News from the rest of the galaxy, he knew, could be found on the inside pages. A paragraph or two to each story. Like the old community personal columns in the country papers of many centuries before.

Still, thought Sutton, smoothing out the paper, it was the only way it could be handled. There was so much news… news from many worlds, from many sectors… human news, android and robot news, alien news. The items had to be boiled down, condensed, compressed, making one word do the job of a hundred.

There were other papers, of course, serving isolated sections, and these would give the local news in more detail. But on Earth there was need of galactic-wide news coverage… for Earth was the capital of the galaxy, a planet that was nothing but a capital, a planet that grew no food, allowed no industries, that made its business nothing but government. A planet whose every inch was landscaped and tended like a lawn or park or garden.

Sutton ran his eye down the Earth column. An earthquake in eastern Asia. A new underwater development for the housing of alien employes and representatives from watery worlds. Delivery of three new star ships to the Sector 19 run. And then:

Asher Sutton, special agent of the department of galactic investigation, returned today from 61 Cygni, to which he was assigned twenty years ago. Hope of his return had been abandoned. Immediately upon his landing, a guard was thrown around his ship and he was in seclusion at the Orion Arms. All attempts to reach him for a statement failed. Shortly after his arrival, he was called out by Geoffrey Benton. Mr. Sutton chose a pistol and informality.

Sutton read the item again. All attempts to reach him…

Herkimer had said there were reporters and photographers in the lobby, and ten minutes later Ferdinand had sworn there weren’t. He had had no calls. There had been no attempt to reach him. Or had there?

Attempts that had been neatly stopped. Stopped by the same person who had lain in wait for him, the same power that had been inside the room when he stepped across the threshold.

He dropped the paper to the floor, sat thinking.

He had been drugged and searched, an attempt made to probe his mind. His attache case had been ransacked. He had been challenged by one of Earth’s foremost duelists. The old family robot had run away… or been persuaded to run away. Attempts by the press to reach him had been stopped cold.

The visor purred at him.

A call. The first since he had arrived.

HE SWUNG around in his chair and flipped up the switch.

A woman’s face came in. Granite eyes and skin magnolia white, hair a copper glory.

“My name is Eva Armour,” she said. “I am the one who asked you to hold the elevator.”

“I recognized you,” said Sutton.

“I called to make amends.”

“There is no need…”

“But there is, Mr. Sutton. You thought I was laughing at you and I really wasn’t.”

“I looked funny,” Sutton told her. “It was your privilege to laugh.”

“Will you take me out to dinner?” she asked.

“Certainly,” gasped Sutton. “I would be delighted to.”

“And someplace afterward,” she suggested. “We’ll make an evening of it.”

“Gladly.”

“I’ll meet you in the lobby at seven,” she said. “And I won’t be late.”

The visor faded and Sutton sat stiffly in the chair.

We’ll make an evening of it, he said, talking to himself, and you’ll be lucky if you’re alive tomorrow.

VIII

ADAMS silently faced the four men who had come into his office, trying to make out what they might be thinking. But their faces gave no indication.

Clark, the space construction engineer, clutched a field book in his hand and his face was set and stern. There was no foolishness about Clark… ever.

Anderson, anatomist, big and rough, was lighting his pipe and, for the moment, that seemed to him the most important thing in all the worlds.

Blackburn, the psychologist, frowned at the glowing tip of his cigarette, and Shuleross, the language expert, sprawled sloppily in his chair like a bored youngster.

They found something, Adams told himself. They found plenty and some of it has them tangled up.

“Clark,” said Adams, “suppose you start us out.”

“We looked the ship over,” Clark told him, “and we found it couldn’t fly.”

“But it did,” said Adams. “Sutton brought it home.”

Clark shrugged, “He might as well have used a log. Or a hunk of rock. Either one would have served the purpose. Either one would fly just as well, or better, than that heap of junk.”

“Junk?”

“The engines were washed out,” said Clark. “The safety automatics were the only things that kept them from atomizing. The ports were cracked, some of them were broken. One of the tubes was busted off and lost. The whole ship was twisted out of line.”

“That sounds like a wreck,” Adams objected.

“It had struck something.” Clark declared. “Struck it hard and fast. Seams were opened, the structural plates were bent, the whole thing was twisted out of kilter. Even if you could start the engines, the ship would never handle. Even with the tubes okay you couldn’t set a course. Give it any drive and it would simply corkscrew.”

Anderson cleared his throat. “What would have happened to Sutton if he’d been in it when it it was struck?”

“He would have died,” said Clark.

“You are positive of that?”

“No question. Even a miracle wouldn’t have saved him. We thought of that, so we worked it out. We rigged up a diagram and we used the most conservative force factors to show theoretic effects…”

Adams interrupted. “But he must have been in the ship.”

Clark shook his head stubbornly. “If he was, he died. Our diagram shows he didn’t have a chance. If one force didn’t kill him, a dozen others would.”

“Sutton came back,” Adams said.

THE two stared at one another, half angrily.

Anderson broke the silence. “Had he tried to fix it up?”

Clark shook his head. “Not a mark to show he did. There would have been no use trying. Sutton didn’t know a thing about mechanics. Not a single thing. I checked on that. He had no training, no natural inclination. And it takes a man with savvy to repair an atomic engine. Just to fix it, not rebuild it. And this crash would have called for complete rebuilding.”

Shulcross spoke for the first time, softly, quietly, not moving from his awkward slouch. “Maybe we’re starting in the middle. If we started at the beginning, laid the groundwork first, we might get a better idea of what really happened.”

They looked at him, all of them, wondering what he meant. Shulcross saw it was up to him to go ahead. He spoke to Adams: “Do you have any idea of what sort of place this Cygnian world might be where Sutton went?”

Adams smiled wearily. “We’ve never been able to get close enough to know. It’s the seventh planet of 61 Cygni. It might have been any one of the system’s sixteen planets, but mathematically it was figured out that the seventh planet had the best chance of sustaining life.”

He paused and looked around the circle of faces and saw that they were waiting for him to go on.

“Sixty-one,” he said, “is a near neighbor of ours. It was one of the first suns that Man headed for when he left the solar system. Ever since it has been a thorn in our sides.”

Anderson grinned. “Because we couldn’t crack it.”

Adams nodded. “That’s right. A secret system in a galaxy that held few secrets from Man anytime he wanted to go out and take the trouble to solve them. We’ve run into all sorts of weird things, of course. Planetary conditions that, to this day, we haven’t licked. Weird, dangerous life. Economic systems and psychological concepts that had us floored and still give us a headache every time we think of them. But we were always able, at the very least, to see the thing that gave us trouble, to know the thing that licked us. With Cygni it was different. We couldn’t even get there.

“The planets are either cloud-covered or screened, for we’ve never seen the surface of a single one of them. And when you get within a few billion miles of the system you start sliding.” He turned to Clark. “That’s the right word, isn’t it?”

“There’s no word for it” Clark told him, “but sliding comes as close as any. You aren’t stopped and you aren’t slowed, but you are deflected. As if the ship had hit ice, although it feels slicker than ice. Whatever, it is, it doesn’t register. There’s no sign of it, nothing that you can see, nothing that makes even the faintest flicker on the instruments, but you hit it and you slide off course. You correct and you slide off course again. In the early days, it drove men batty trying to reach the system and never getting a mile nearer than a certain imaginary line.”

“As if,” said Adams, “someone had taken his finger and drawn a deadline around the system.”

“Something like that,” said Clark.

“But Sutton got through,” said Anderson.

“I don’t like it,” Clark declared. “I don’t like a thing about it. Someone got a brainstorm. Our ships are too big, they said. If we use smaller ships, we might squeeze through. As if the thing that kept us off was a mesh holding back the big jobs.”

“Sutton got through,” said Adams stubbornly. “They launched him in a lifeboat and he got through where the big ships couldn’t.”

CLARK shook his head, just as stubbornly. “It doesn’t make sense. Smallness and bigness wouldn’t have a thing to do with it. There’s another factor somewhere, a factor we’ve never even thought of. Sutton got through, all right, and he crashed and if he was in the ship when it crashed, he died. But he didn’t get through only because his ship was small. It was for some other reason.”

The men sat tense, thinking, waiting.

“Why Sutton?” Anderson asked, finally.

Adams answered quietly. “The ship was small. We could only send one man. We picked the man we thought could do the best job if he did get through.”

“And Sutton was the best man?”

“He was,” said Adams.

Anderson said amiably: “Well, apparently he was. He got through.”

“Or was let through,” said Blackburn.

“Not necessarily,” said Anderson.

“It follows,” Blackburn contended. “Why did we want to get into the Cygnian system? To find out if it was dangerous. That was the idea, wasn’t it.

“That was the idea,” Adams agreed. “Anything unknown is potentially dangerous. You can’t write it off until you are sure. Those were Sutton’s instructions: Find out if 61 is dangerous.”

“And, by the same token, they’d want to find out about us,” Blackburn said. “We’d been prying and poking at them for several thousand years. They might have wanted to find out about us as badly as we did about them.”

Anderson nodded. “I see what you mean. They’d chance one man, if they could haul him in, but they wouldn’t let a full-armed ship and a fighting crew get in shooting distance.”

“Exactly,” said Blackburn.

Adams dismissed the line of talk abruptly, said to Clark: “You spoke of dents. Were they made recently?”

“Twenty years ago looks right to me. There was a lot of rust. Some of the wiring was getting pretty soft.”

“Let us suppose, then,” said Anderson, “that Sutton, by some miracle, had the knowledge to fix the ship. Even so, he would have needed materials.”

“Plenty of them,” said Clark.

“The Cygnians could have supplied them,” Shulcross suggested.

“If there are any Cygnians,” said Anderson.

“I don’t believe they could,” Blackburn declared. “A race that hides behind a screen would not be mechanical. If they knew mechanics, they would go out into space instead of shielding themselves from space. I’ll make a guess the Cygnians are non-mechanical.”

“But the screen,” Anderson prompted.

“It wouldn’t have to be mechanical,” Blackburn said flatly. “Some energy force or other we don’t know about.”

Clark smacked his open palm on his knee. “What’s the use of all this speculation? Sutton didn’t repair that ship. He brought it back, somehow, without repair. He didn’t even try to fix it. There are layers of rust on everything and there’s not a wrench mark on it.”

Shulcross leaned forward. “One thing I don’t get: Clark says some of the ports were broken. That means Sutton navigated eleven light years without air to breathe.”

“He used a suit,” said Blackburn.

Clark said quietly: “There weren’t any suits.” He looked around the room, almost as if he feared someone outside the little circle might be listening. “And that isn’t all. There wasn’t any food and there wasn’t any water.”

Anderson tapped out his pipe against the palm of his hand and the hollow sound of tapping echoed in the room. Carefully, deliberately, almost as if he forced himself to concentrate upon it, he dropped the ash from his hand into a tray.

“I might have the answer to that one,” he said. “At least a clue. There is still a lot of work to do before we have the answer. And, then, we can’t be sure.” He was aware of the eyes upon him. “I hesitate to say the thing I have in mind.”

NO ONE spoke a word. The clock on the wall ticked the seconds off.

From far outside the open window, a locust hummed in the quiet of afternoon.

“I don’t think,” said Anderson, “that the man is human.”

The clock ticked on. The locust shrilled to tense silence.

Adams finally spoke. “But the fingerprints checked. The eyeprints, too.”

“Oh, it’s Sutton, all right,” Anderson admitted. “There is no doubt of that. Sutton on the outside. Sutton in the flesh. The same body, or at least part of the same body, that left Earth twenty years ago.”

“What are you getting at?” asked Clark. “If he’s the same, he’s human.”

“You take an old spaceship,” said Anderson, “and you juice it up. Add a gadget here and another there, eliminate one thing, modify another. What have you got?”

“A rebuilt job,” said Clark.

“That’s just the phrase I wanted,” Anderson told them. “Someone or something has done the same to Sutton. He’s a rebuilt job. And the best human job I have ever seen. He’s got two hearts and his nervous system’s haywire… well, not haywire exactly, but different. Certainly not human. And he’s got an extra circulatory system. Not a circulatory system, either, but that is what it looks like. Only it’s not connected with the heart. Right now, I’d say, it’s not being used. Like a spare system. One system starts running down and you can switch to the spare one while you tinker with the first.”

ANDERSON pocketed his pipe, rubbed his hands together almost as if he were washing them.

“Well, there,” he said, “you have it”

Blackburn blurted out: “It sounds impossible.”

Anderson appeared not to have heard him, and yet answered him. “We had Sutton under for the best part of an hour and we put every inch of him on tape and film. It takes some time to analyze a job like that. We aren’t finished yet. But we failed in one thing. We used a psychonometer on his mind and we didn’t get a nibble. Not a quaver, not a thought. Not even mental seepage. His mind was closed, tight shut.”

“Some defect in the meter,” Adams suggested.

“No,” said Anderson. “We checked that.” He looked around the room, from one face to another. “Maybe you don’t realize the implication. When a man is drugged or asleep… or in any case where he is unaware, a psychonometer will turn him inside out. It will dig out things that his waking self would swear he didn’t know. Even when a man fights against it, there is a certain seepage and that seepage widens as his mental resistance wears down.”

“But it didn.’t work with Sutton,” Shulcross said.

“That’s right. It didn’t work with Sutton. I tell you, the man’s not human.”

“And you think he’s different enough, physically, so that he could live in space without air, food and water?”

“I don’t know,” said Anderson. He licked his lips and stared around the room. “I don’t know. I simply don’t.”

Adams spoke softly. “We must not get upset. Alienness is no strange thing to us, Once it might have been, when the first humans went out into space. But today…”

Clark interrupted impatiently. “Alien things themselves don’t bother me. But when a man turns alien…” He gulped, appealed to Anderson. “Do you think he’s dangerous?”

“Possibly,” said Anderson.

“Even if he is, he can’t do much to harm us,” Adams told them calmly. “That place of his is simply clogged with spy rigs.”

“Any reports in yet?” asked Blackburn.

“Just general. Nothing specific. Sutton has been taking it easy. Had a few calls. Made a few himself. Had a visitor or two.”

“He knows he’s being watched,” said Clark. “He’s putting on an act.”

“There’s a rumor around,” said Blackburn, “that Benton challenged him.”

Adams nodded. “Yes, he did. Ash tried to back out of it. That doesn’t sound as if he’s dangerous.”

“Maybe,” speculated Clark, almost hopefully, “Benton will close our case for us.”

Adams smiled thinly. “Somehow I think Ash may have spent the afternoon thinking up a dirty deal for our Mr. Benton.”

Anderson had fished the pipe out of his pocket, was loading it from his pouch. Clark was fumbling for a cigarette.

ADAMS looked at Shulcross. “You have something?”

The language expert nodded. “But it’s not too exciting. We opened Sutton’s case and we found a manuscript. We photostated it and replaced it exactly as it was. But so far it hasn’t done us any good. We can’t read a word of it.”

“Code,” said Blackburn.

Shulcross shook his head. “If it was code, our robots would have cracked it in an hour or two. But it’s not a code. It’s language. And until you get a key, a language can’t be cracked.”

“You’ve checked, of course.”

Shulcross smiled glumly. “Back to the old Earth languages… back to Babylon and Crete. We cross-checked every lingo in the galaxy. None of them came close.”

“Language,” said Blackburn. “A new language. That means Sutton found something.”

“Sutton would,” said Adams. “He’s the best agent I ever had.”

Anderson stirred restlessly in his chair. “You like Sutton?” he asked.

“I do,” said Adams.

“Adams,” said Anderson, “I’ve been wondering. It’s a thing that struck me funny from the first.”

“Yes, what is it?”

“You knew Sutton was coming back. Knew almost to the minute when he would arrive. And you set a mousetrap for him. How come?”

“Just a hunch,” said Adams.

For a long moment all four of them sat looking at him. Then they saw he meant to say no more. They rose and left the room.

IX

ACROSS the room a woman’s laughter floated, sharp-edged with excitement.

The lights changed from the dusk-blue of April to the purple-gray of madness, and the room was another world that floated in a hush that was not exactly silence. Perfume came down a breeze that touched the cheek with ice… perfume that called to mind black orchids in an outland of breathless terror.

The floor swayed beneath Sutton’s feet and he felt Eva’s small fist digging hard into his arm.

The Zag spoke to them—an android with specialized psychic development—and his words were dead and hollow sounds dripping from a mummied husk. “What is it that you wish? Here you live the lives you yearn for… find any escape that, you may seek… possess the things you dream of.”

“There was a stream,” said Sutton. “A little creek that ran…”

The light changed to green, a faery green that glowed with soft, quiet life, exuberant, springtime life and the hint of things to come, and there were trees, trees that were fringed and haloed with the glistening, sun-kissed green of first-bursting buds.

Sutton wiggled his toes and knew the grass beneath them, the first tender grass of spring, and smelled the hepatieas and bloodroot that had almost no smell at all… and the stronger scent of sweet Williams blooming on the hill across the creek.

He told himself: “It’s too early for sweet Williams to be in bloom.”

The creek gurgled at him as it ran across the shingle down into the Big Hole, and he hurried forward across the meadow grass, cane pole tight-clutched in one hand, the can of worms in the other.

A bluebird flashed through the trees that climbed the bluff across the meadow and a robin sang high in the top of the mighty elm that grew above the Big Hole.

Sutton found the worn place in the bank, like a chair with the elm’s trunk serving as a back, and he sat down in it and leaned forward to peer into the water. The current ran strong and dark and deep.

Sutton drew in his breath and held it with pent-up anticipation. With shaking hands he found the biggest worm and pulled it from the can, baited up the hook.

Breathlessly, he dropped the hook into the water, canted the pole in front of him for easy handling. The bobber drifted down the swirling slide of water, floated in an eddy where the current turned back upon itself. It jerked, almost disappeared, then bobbed to the surface and floated once again.

Sutton leaned forward, arms aching with tension. But even through the tension, he knew the goodness of the day. The water talked to him and he felt himself grow and become a being that comprehended and became a part of the clean, white ecstasy that was the hills and stream and meadow… earth, cloud, water, sky and sun.

And the bobber went clear under!

He felt the weight and strength of the fish that he had caught. It sailed in an arc above his head and landed in the grass behind him. He laid down his pole, scrambled to his feet and ran.

The chub flopped in the grass and he grabbed the line and held it up. It was a whopper! Sobbing in excitement, he dropped to his knees and grasped the fish, removed the hook with fingers that fumbled in their trembling.

“Hello,” said a childish voice.

Sutton twisted around, still on his knees.

A LITTLE girl stood by the elm tree, and it seemed for a moment that he had seen her somewhere before. But then he realized that she was a stranger and he frowned a little, for girls were no good when it came to fishing. He hoped she wouldn’t stay. It would be just like a girl to hang around and spoil the day for him.

“I am…” she said, speaking a name he did not catch, for she lisped a little.

He did not answer.

“I am eight years old,” she said.

“I am Asher Sutton,” he told her, “and I am ten… going on eleven.”

She stood and stared at him, one hand plucking nervously at the figured apron that she wore. The apron, he noticed, was clean and starched, very stiff and prim, and she was messing it all up with her nervous plucking.

“I am fishing,” he said and tried very hard to keep from sounding too important. “And I just caught a whopper.”

He saw her eyes go large in sudden terror at the sight of something that came up from behind him and he wheeled around, no longer on his knees, but on his feet, and his hand was snaking into the pocket of his coat.

The place was purple-gray and there was shrill woman-laughter and there was a face in front of him… a face he had seen that afternoon and never would forget.

A fat and cultured face that twinkled even now with good fellowship, twinkled despite the deadly squint, and the gun already swinging upward in his hairy, pudgy fist.

Sutton felt his own fingers touch the grip on the gun he carried, felt them tighten around it and jerk it from the pocket. But he was too late, he knew, to beat the spat of flame from a gun that had long seconds start.

Anger flamed within him, cold, desolate, deadly anger. Anger at the pudgy fist, at the smiling face… the face that would smile across a chess board or from behind a gun. The smile of an egotist who would try to beat a robotic that was designed to play a perfect game of chess… an egotist who believed that he could shoot down Asher Sutton.








THE anger, he realized, was something more than anger… something greater and more devastating than the mere working of human adrenal. It was a part of him and something that was more than him, more than the mortal thing of flesh and blood that was Asher Sutton. A terrible thing plucked from non-humanity.

The face before him melted… or it seemed to melt. It changed and the smile was gone, and Sutton felt the anger whip from his brain and slam bullet-hard against the wilting personality that was Geoffrey Benton.

Benton’s gun coughed loudly and, the muzzle-flash was blood red in the purple light. Then Sutton felt the thud of his own gun slamming back against the heel of his hand as he pulled the trigger.

Benton was falling, twisting forward, bending at the middle as if he had hinges in his stomach, and Sutton caught one glimpse of the purple-tinted face before it dropped to the floor. There were surprise and anguish and a terrible over-riding fear printed on the features that had been twisted out of shape.

The crashing of the guns had smashed the place to silence, and through the garish light that swirled with powder smoke, Sutton saw the white blobs of many faces staring at him. Faces that mostly were without expression, although some of them had mouths and the mouths were round and open.

He felt a tugging at his elbow and he moved, guided by the hand upon his arm. Suddenly he was limp and shaken and the anger was no more and he told himself: “I have just killed a man.”

“Quick,” said Eva Armour’s voice.

“We must get out of here. They’ll be swarming at you now. The whole hell’s pack of them.”

“It was you,” he told her. “I remember now. I didn’t catch the name at first. You mumbled it… or I guess you lisped, and I didn’t hear it.”

The girl tugged at his arm. “They had Benton conditioned to kill you. They figured that was all they needed. They never dreamed you could match him in a duel.”

“You were the little girl,” Sutton told her blankly. “You wore a checkered apron and you kept twisting it nervously.”

“What in heaven’s name are you talking about?”

“I was fishing,” Benton said, “and I had just caught a big one when you came along…”

“You’re crazy,” said the girl. “Fishing? Here?”

She pushed open a door and pulled him out and the cool air of night slapped him briskly and shockingly across the face.

“Wait a second,” he cried. He wheeled around and caught the girl’s arms roughly in his hands. “They?” he yelled at her. “What are you talking about? Who are they…”

She stared at him wide-eyed. “You mean you don’t know?”

He shook his head, bewildered.

“Poor Ash,” she said.

Her copper hair was a reddish flame, burnished and alive in the flicker of the sign that flashed on and off above the Zag House facade:



DREAMS TO ORDER
Live the Life You Missed!
Dream Up a Tough One for Us!



AN android doorman spoke to them softly. “You wished a cab, sir?” Even as he spoke, the car was there, sliding smoothly and silently up the driveway, like a black beetle winging from the night. The doorman reached out a hand and swung wide the door. “Quick is the word,” he said.

There was something in the soft, slurred tone that made Sutton move. He stepped inside the car and pulled Eva after him. The android slammed the door.

Sutton tramped on the accelerator and the car screamed down the curving driveway, slid into the highway, roared with leashed impatience as it took the long road curving toward the hills.

“Where?” asked Sutton.

“Back to the Arms,” she said. “They wouldn’t dare to try for you there. Your room is rigged with rays.”

Sutton chuckled. “I have to be careful or I would trip on them. But how come you know?”

“It is my job to know.”

“Friend or foe?” he asked.

“Friend,” she said.

He turned his head and studied her. She had slumped down in the seat and was a little girl again… but she didn’t have a checkered apron and she wasn’t nervous.

“I don’t suppose,” said Sutton, “that it would be any use for me to ask you questions?”

She shook her head.

“If I did, you’d probably lie to me.”

“If I wanted to,” she said.

“I could shake it out of you.”

“You could, but you won’t. You see, Ash, I know you very well.”

“You just met me yesterday.”

“Yes, I know,” she said, “but I’ve studied you for all of twenty years.”

X


THE trunk came in the morning when Sutton was finishing his breakfast.

It was old and battered, the ancient rawhide covering hanging in tatters to reveal the marred steel skeleton, flecked here and there with rust. A key was in the lock and the straps were broken. Mice had gnawed the leather completely off one end.

Sutton remembered it. It was the one that had stood in the far corner of the attic when he had been a boy and gone there to play on rainy afternoons.

He picked up the neatly folded copy of the morning edition of the Galactic Press that had come with his breakfast tray and shook it out.

The article he was looking for was on the front page, the third item in the Earth news column:



Mr. Geoffrey Benton was killed last night in an informal meeting at one of the amusement centers in the university district. The victor was Mr. Asher Sutton, who returned only yesterday from a mission to 61 Cygni.



There was a final sentence, the most damning that could be written of a duelist:



Mr. Benton fired first and missed.



Sutton folded the paper again and laid it carefully on the table. He lit a cigarette.

I thought it would be me, he told himself. I never fired a gun like that before… scarcely knew such a gun existed. Of course, I didn’t really kill Benton. He killed himself. If he hadn’t missed… and there was no excuse for missing…the item would have read the other way around.

We’ll make an evening of it, the girl had said, and she probably knew. We’ll have dinner and make an evening of it and Geoffrey Benton will kill you by appointment at the Zag House.

YES, said Sutton to himself, she might have known. She knows too many things. About the spy traps in this room, for instance. And about someone who had Benton psychologically conditioned to challenge me and kill me.

She said friend when I asked her friend or foe, but a word is an easy thing. There is no way to know if it is true or false.

She said she had studied me for twenty years and that is false, of course, for twenty years ago I was setting out for Cygni and I was unimportant. Just a cog in a great machine. I am unimportant still, unimportant to everyone but myself, and to a great idea that no human but myself could possibly know about. For no matter if the manuscript was photostated; there is not a soul can read it.

He snubbed out the cigarette and rose and walked over to the trunk. The lock was rusty and the key turned hard, but he finally got it open and lifted up the lid.

The trunk was half full of papers neatly piled. Sutton, looking at them, chuckled. Buster always was a methodical soul. But, then, all robots were methodical. It was the nature of them. Methodical and—what was it Herkimer had said?—stubborn.

He squatted on the floor beside the trunk and rummaged through the contents. Old letters tied neatly in bundles. An old notebook from his college days. A sheaf of clipped-together documents that undoubtedly were outdated. A scrapbook littered with clippings that had not been pasted up. An album half filled with a cheap stamp collection.

He squatted back on his heels and turned the pages of the album lovingly, childhood memories coming back again. Cheap stamps because he had had no money to buy the better ones. Gaudy ones because they had appealed to him. The stamp craze, he remembered, had lasted two years… three years at the most. He had pored over catalogs, had traded, picked up the strange lingo of the hobby… perforate, imperforate, shades, watermarks, intaglio.

He smiled at the happiness of memory. There had been stamps he’d wanted, but could never have, and he had studied the illustrations of them until he knew each one by heart. He lifted his head and stared hard at the wall and tried to remember what some of them were like, but there was no recollection. The once all-important thing had been buried by more than fifty years of other all-important matters.







HE LAID the album to one. side, went at the trunk again.

More notebooks and letters. Loose clippings. A curious-looking wrench. A well chewed bone that at one time probably had been the property and the solace of some loved but now forgotten family dog.

Junk, said Sutton. Buster could have saved a lot of time by simply burning it.

A couple of old newspapers. A moth-eaten pennant. A bulky letter that never had been opened. Sutton tossed it on top of the rest of the litter he had taken from the trunk, then hesitated, put out his hand and picked it up again.

That stamp looked queer. The color, for one thing.

Memory ticked within his brain and he saw the stamp as he (had seen it when a lad… not the stamp itself, of course, but the illustration of it in a catalog.

He bent above the letter and caught a sudden, gasping breath.

The stamp was old, incredibly old… incredibly old and worth… good Lord, how much was it worth?

He tried to make out the postmark, but it was faint with time.

He got up slowly and carried the letter to the table, bent above it, puzzling out the town name.

BRIDGEP WIS

Bridgeport, probably. And WIS? Some political division lost in the mist of time.

July 198

July, 1980—something!

Sutton’s hand shook.

AN unopened letter, mailed 6,000 years ago. Tossed in with this heap of junk. Lying cheek by jowl with a tooth-scarred bone and a funny wrench.

An unopened letter… and with a stamp that was worth a fortune.

Sutton read the postmark again. Bridgeport, Wis. July, it looked like 11… July 11, 198—. The missing numeral in the year was too faint to make out. Maybe with a good glass it could be done.

The address, faded but still. legible, said:



Mr. John H. Sutton

Bridgeport

Wisconsin



So that was what WIS was. Wisconsin.

And the name was Sutton.

Of course, it would be Sutton.

What had Buster’s android lawyer said? A trunk full of family papers.

I’ll have to look into historic geography, Sutton thought. I’ll have to find out just where Wisconsin was.

But John H. Sutton. That was another matter. Just another Sutton. One who had been dust these many years. A man who sometimes forgot to open up his mail.

Sutton turned the letter and examined the flap. There was no sign of tampering. The adhesive was flaking with age and when he ran a fingernail along one corner, the mucilage came loose in a tiny shower of powder. The paper, he saw, was brittle and would require careful handling.

A trunk full of family papers, the android Wellington had said when he came into the room and balanced himself very primly on the edge of a chair and laid his hat precisely on the table top.

And it was a trunk full of junk instead. Bones and wrenches and paper clips and clippings. Old notebooks and letters and a letter that had been mailed 6,000 years 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, 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 important inside, but if you want to waste your time, why, go ahead and look. And if anyone had looked, the clutter would have seemed worthless.

SUTTON reached out and tapped the letter lying on the table.

John H. Sutton, an ancestor sixty centuries 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 had any hills, wherever it was. He felt the heat of summer and shivered in the cold of winter. He worried about many things, both big and small and most of them would be small, the way worries usually are.

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 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 life work from the whole broad field of human endeavor instead of being forced into governmental work, into the job of governing a thin cobweb 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 stands 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 door bell 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?”

“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 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,” Sutton remarked sourly.

“But I’m not all,” said Herkimer. “There are other things. There’s a hunting asteroid stocked with the finest game, and a spaceship. A small one, it’s true, but very serviceable. There are 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 brought out a notebook. “I have them written out if you would care to listen.”

“Not now,” said Sutton. “I have work to do.”

Herkimer brightened. “Something I could do, no doubt? Something I could help with?”

“Nothing,” said Sutton. “I am going to see Adams.”

“I could carry your case. That one over there.”

“I’m not taking the case.”

“But, sir…”

“You sit down and fold your hands and wait until I get back.”

“I’ll get into mischief,” the android warned. “I just know I will.”

“All right, then, there is something you can do. That case you mentioned. You can watch it.”

“Yes, sir,” said Herkimer, plainly disappointed.

“And don’t waste your time trying to read what’s in it,” said Sutton. “You won’t be able to.”

“Oh,” said Herkimer, still more disappointed.

“There’s another thing. A girl by the name of Eva Armour lives in this hotel. Know anything about her?”

HERKIMER shook his head. “But I have a cousin…”

“A cousin? An android with a cousin?”

“Yes, sir. She was made in the same laboratory as me and that makes her my cousin.”

“You have a lot of cousins, then.”

“Yes,” said Herkimer, “I have many thousands and we stick together. Which,” he said, very sanctimoniously, “is the way it should be with families.”

“You think this cousin might know something?”

Herkimer shrugged. “She works in the hotel. She might know something.”

Sutton turned to the door.

“You are to be congratulated, sir,” said Herkimer. “You gave a very good account of yourself last night.”

Sutton turned back to the room. “Benton missed,” he said. “I couldn’t help but kill him.”

Herkimer nodded. “But it isn’t only that, sir. This happens to be the first time I ever heard of a man being killed by a bullet in the arm.”

“In the arm?”

“Precisely, sir. The bullet smashed his arm, but it didn’t touch him otherwise. And he died.”

XI

ADAMS thumbed the lighter and waited for the flame to steady. His eyes were fixed on Sutton and there was no softness in them, but there were softness and irritability and a faint unsureness in the man himself, hidden well, but undeniably there.

That staring, Sutton told himself, is an old trick of his. He glares at you and keeps his face frozen like a sphinx and if you aren’t used to him and on to all his tricks, he’ll have you thinking that he knows everything.

But he doesn’t do the glaring quite as well as he use to do it. There’s strain in him now and there was no strain in him twenty years ago. Just granite, and the granite is beginning to weather. There’s something on his mind. There’s something that isn’t going well.

Adams passed the lighter flame over the loaded bowl of his pipe, back and forth, deliberately taking his time, making Sutton wait.

“You know, of course,” said Sutton, speaking quietly, “that I can’t be frank with you.”

The lighter flame snapped off and Adams straightened in his chair. “Eh?” he asked.

Sutton grinned mentally. A passed pawn, he told himself. That’s what Adams is… a passed pawn.

He said aloud: “You know by now, of course, that I came back in a ship that could not fly. You know I had no spacesuit and that the ports were broken and the hull was riddled. I had no food and air and water, and 61 is eleven light years away.”

Adams nodded bleakly. “Yes, we know all that.”

“How I got back or what happened to me has nothing to do with my report and I don’t intend to tell you.”

Adams rumbled at him, “Then why mention it at all?”

“Just so you won’t ask a lot of questions that will get no answer. It will save a lot of time.”

Adams leaned back and puffed his pipe contentedly. “You were sent out to get information, Ash. Any kind of information. Anything that would make Cygni more understandable. You represented Earth and you were paid by Earth and you surely owe Earth something.”

“I owe Cygni something, too,” replied Sutton. “I owe Cygni my life. My ship crashed and I was killed.”

Adams nodded. “Yes, that is what Clark said. He told me you were killed. Clark is a space construction engineer. Sleeps with ships and blueprints. He studied your ship and he calculated a graph of force coordinates. He reported that if you were inside the ship when it hit, you had to be dead.”

“It’s wonderful,” said Sutton, drily, “what a man can do with figures.”

Adams prodded him again. “Anderson said you weren’t human.”

“I suppose Anderson could tell that by looking at the ship.”

Adams nodded. “No food, nor air. It was the logical conclusion for anyone to draw.”

Sutton shook his head. “Anderson is wrong. If I weren’t human, you never would have seen me. I would not have come back at all. But I was homesick for Earth and you were expecting a report.”

“You took your time,” Adams accused.

“I had to be sure. I had to know. I had to be able to come back and tell you if the Cygnians were dangerous or if they weren’t.”

“And which is it?”

“They aren’t dangerous.”

ADAMS waited and Sutton was silent. Finally Adams said: “And that is all?”

“That is all,” said Sutton. Adams tapped his teeth with the bit of his pipe. “I’d hate to have to send another man out to check up. Especially after I had told everyone you’d bring back all the data.”

“It wouldn’t do any good,” said Sutton. “No one could get through.”

“You did.”

“Yes, and I was the first. And because I was the first, I also will be the last.”

Across the desk, Adams smiled winterly. “You were fond of those people, Ash.”

“They aren’t people.”

“Well… beings, then.”

“They aren’t even beings. It’s hard to tell you exactly what they are. You’d laugh if I said what I really think they are.”

Adams grunted. “Try me.”

“Symbiotic abstractions. That’s as close as I can come.”

Adams didn’t laugh. “You mean they really don’t exist?”

“Oh, they exist, all right. They form symbiotic relationships that help them and their alien hosts. Not like parasites, unless maybe like the bacteria that release nitrogen in the soil for plants to live on. Only the bacteria and the plants are separate. They and their hosts aren’t, and each helps the other.”

“But they’re abstractions,” Adams repeated. “They can’t exist.”

“Not as we know the word,” Sutton said. “They do, though.”

“And no one can get through again?”

Sutton leaned forward. “Why don’t you cross Cygni off your list? Pretend it isn’t there. There’s no danger from Cygni. The Cygnians will never bother Man, and Man will never get there again. There’s no use trying.”

“They aren’t mechanical?”

“No,” said Sutton. “An abstraction can’t be mechanical.”

Adams changed the subject. ‘’How old are you, Ash?”

“Fifty-nine.”

“Just a kid,” said Adams. “Just getting started.” His pipe had gone out and he worried the tobacco with his finger, scowling at it. “What do you plan to do?” he asked.

“I have no plans.”

“You want to stay on with the Service, don’t you?”

“That depends on how you feel about it. I had presumed, of course, that you wouldn’t want me.”

“We owe you twenty years back pay,” said Adams, almost kindly. “It’s waiting for you. You can pick it up when you go out. You also have three or four years leave coming to you. Why don’t you take it now?”

Sutton said nothing.

“Come back later on,” said Adams. “We’ll have another talk.”

“I won’t change my mind.”

“No one will ask you to.”

Sutton stood up slowly.

“I’m sorry,” Adams said, “that I haven’t your confidence.”

“I went out to do a job,” Sutton told him crisply. “I’ve done that, job. I’ve made my report.”

“So you have.”

“I suppose,” said Sutton, “you will keep in touch with me.”

Adams’ eyes twinkled grimly.

“Certainly, Ash. I shall keep in touch with you.”

XII

SUTTON sat quietly in the room and forty years were canceled from his life. It was like going back all of forty years… even to the teacups.

Through the open windows of Dr. Raven’s study came young voices and the sound of students’ feet tramping past along the walk. The wind talked in the elms and it was a sound with which he was familiar. Far off a chapel bell tolled and there was girlish laughter just across the way.

Dr. Raven handed him his teacup. “I think that I am right. Three lumps and no cream.”

“Yes, that’s right,” said Sutton, astonished that he should remember.

But remembering, he told himself, was easy. I seem to be able to remember almost everything. As if the old habit patterns had been kept bright and polished in my mind through all the alien years. Waiting, like a set of cherished silver standing on a shelf, until it was time for them to be used again.

“I remember little things,” said Dr. Raven. “Little, inconsequential things, like how many lumps of sugar and what a man said sixty years ago, but I don’t do so well, sometimes, at the big things… the things a man really should remember.”

The white marble fireplace flared to the valuted ceiling and the university’s coat of arms upon its polished face was as bright as the last day Sutton had seen it.

“I SUPPOSE,” he said, “you wonder why I came.”

“Not at all,” said Dr. Raven. “All my boys come back to see me. And I am glad to see them. It makes me feel so proud.”

“I’ve been wondering myself,” said Sutton. “And I guess I know what it is, but it is hard to say.”

“Let’s take it easy, then,” said Dr. Raven. “Remember, the way we used to. We sat and talked around a thing and finally, before we knew it, we had found the core.”

Sutton laughed shortly. “Yes, I remember, doctor. Fine points of theology. The vital differences in comparative religions. Tell me this. You have spent a lifetime at it; you know more about religions, Earthly and otherwise, than any man on Earth. Have you been able to keep one faith? Have you been tempted from the teachings of your race?”

Dr. Raven set down his teacup. “I might have known you would embarrass me. You used to do it all the time. You had the uncanny ability to hit exactly on the question that a man found hardest to answer.”

“I won’t embarrass you any longer,” Sutton told him. “I take it that you have found some good—one might say superior—points in alien religions.”

“You found a new religion?”

“No,” said Sutton. “Not a religion.”

The chapel bell kept on tolling and the girl who had laughed was gone. The footsteps along the walk were far off in the distance.

“Have you ever felt,” asked Sutton, “as if you sat on God’s right hand and heard a thing you knew you were never meant to hear?”

Dr. Raven shook his head. “No, I don’t think I ever have.”

“If you did, what would you do?”

“I think,” said Dr. Raven, “that I might be as troubled by it as you are.”

“We’ve lived by faith alone,” said Sutton, “for ten thousand years at least. More—much more. For it must have been a glimmer of some sort of faith that made the Neanderthaler paint corpses’ shin bones red and nest the skulls so they faced toward the east.”

“Faith,” said Dr. Raven gently, “is a powerful thing.”

“Yes, powerful,” Sutton agreed, “but even in its strength it is our own confession of weakness. Our own admission that we are not strong enough to stand alone, that we must have a hope and conviction that there is some greater power which will lend us aid and guidance.”

“You haven’t grown bitter, Ash?”

“Not bitter.”

Somewhere a clock was ticking, loud in the sudden hush.

“Doctor,” said Sutton, “what do you know of destiny?”

“It’s strange to hear you talk of destiny,“ said Dr. Raven. ”You always were a man who never was inclined to bow to destiny.”

“I mean documentary destiny,” Sutton explained. “Not the abstraction, but the actual belief in destiny. What do the records say?”

“There always have been men who believed in destiny,” said Dr. Raven. “Some of them, it would appear, with some justification. But mostly they didn’t call it destiny. They called it luck or a hunch or inspiration or something else. There have been historians who wrote of manifest destiny, but those were no more than words. Of course, there were some fanatics who preached destiny, but practiced fatalism.”

“But there is no evidence of a thing called destiny? An actual force? A living vital thing?”

Dr. Raven shook his head. “None that I know of, Ash. Destiny, after all, is just a word. It isn’t something that you can pin down. Faith, too, at one time may have been no more than a word, just as destiny is today. But millions of people and thousands of years made it a real force, a thing that can be defined and invoked and lived by.”

“But hunches and luck,” protested Sutton. “Those are just happenstance.”

“They might be glimmerings of destiny,” Dr. Raven declared. “Flashes showing through. A hint of a broad stream of happening behavior. One cannot know, of course. Man is always blind until he has the facts. Turning points in history have rested on a hunch. Inspired belief in one’s own ability has changed the course of events more times than one can count.”

He rose and walked to a book case, stood with his head tilted back.

“Somewhere,” he said, “if I can find it, there is a book.”

He searched and did not find it.

“No matter,” he declared, “I’ll run onto it later if you are still interested. It tells about an old African tribe with a strange belief. They believed that each man’s spirit or consciousness or ego or whatever you may call it had a partner, a counterpart on some distant star. If I remember rightly, they even knew which star and could point it out in the evening sky.”

He turned around from the book case and looked evenly at Sutton.

“That might be destiny, you know,” he said. “It might, very well, at that.”

He crossed the room to stand in front of the cold fireplace,‘ hands locked behind his back, silver head tilted to one side.

“Why are you so interested in destiny?” he asked.

“Because I found destiny,” said Sutton.

XIII

THE face in the visiplate was masked and Adams spoke in chilly anger: “I do not receive masked calls.”

“You will this one,” said the voice from behind the mask. “I am the man you talked to on the patio. Remember?”

“Calling from the future, I presume,” said Adams.

“No, I am still in your time. I have been watching you.”

“Watching Sutton, too?”

The masked head nodded. “You have seen him now. What do you think?”

“He’s hiding something,” Adams said. “And not all of him is human.”

“You’re going to have him killed?”

“No,” said Adams. “No, I don’t think I will. He knows something that we need to know. And we won’t get it out of him by killing.”

“What he knows,” said the masked voice, “is better dead with the man who knows it.”

“Perhaps,” said Adams, “we could come to an understanding if you would tell me what this is all about.”

“I can’t tell you, Adams. I wish I could. I can’t tell you the future.”

“And until you do,” snapped Adams, “I won’t let you change the past.”

And he was thinking: The man is scared and almost desperate. He could kill Sutton any time he wished, but he is afraid to do it. Sutton has to be killed by a man of his own time… literally has to be, for time may not tolerate the intrusion of violence from future to past.

“By the way,” said the future man, “how are things on Aldebaran XII?”

ADAMS sat rigid in his chair, anger flaming in him.

“If it hadn’t been for Sutton,” said the masked man, “there would have been no incident on Aldebaran XII.”

“But Sutton wasn’t back yet,” argued Adams. His voice ran down, for he remembered something. The name upon the fly leaf… by Asher Sutton. “Look, tell me. For the love of heaven, if you have anything to tell, tell it.”

“You mean to say you haven’t guessed what it might be?”

Adams shook his head.

“It’s war,” the voice said.

“But there is no war.”

“Not in your time.”

“But how—”

“Remember Michaelson?”

“The man who went a second into time.”

The masked head nodded and the screen went blank. Adams sat and felt the chill of horror trickle through his body.

The visor buzzer purred at him and mechanically he snapped the toggle over.

It was Nelson in the screen. “Sutton just left the university. He spent an hour with Dr. Raven. In case you don’t recall, Dr. Raven is a professor of comparative religions.”

“Oh,” said Adams. “Oh, so that is it.

He tapped his fingers on the desk, half irritated, half frightened.

It would be a shame, he thought, to kill a man like Sutton.

But it might be best.

Yes, he told himself, it might be for the best.

XIV

THE road curved ahead, a silver strip shining in the moonlight, and the sounds and smells of night lay across the land. The sharp, clean smell of growing things, the mystery smell of water. A creek ran through the marsh that lay off to the right, and Sutton, from behind the wheel, caught the flashing hint of winding, moonlit water as he took a curve. Peeping frogs made a veil of pixy sound that hugged against the hills, and fireflies were swinging lanterns that signaled through the dark.

Clark said that Sutton had died, and Clark was an engineer. He had made a graph and mathematics stated that certain strains and stresses would inevitably kill a man.

And Anderson had said Sutton wasn’t human, and how was Anderson to know?

How, asked Sutton, unless he examined me? Unless he was the one who tried to probe into my mind after 1 had been knocked out when I walked into my room?

Adams had tipped his hand and Adams never tipped his hand unless he wanted one to see. He wanted me to know, Sutton told himself. He wanted me to know, but he couldn’t tell me. He couldn’t tell me he had me down on tape and film, that he was the one who had rigged up the room.

But he could let me know by making just one slip, a carefully calculated slip, like the one on Anderson. He knew that I would catch and he thinks he can jitter me.

The headlights caught, momentarily, the gray-black massive lines of a house that huddled on a hillside, and then there was another curve. A nightbird, black and ghostly, fluttered across the road and the shadow of its flight danced down the cone of light.

Adams was the one who was waiting for me. He knew, somehow, that I was coming, and he was ready. He had me tagged and ticketed before I hit the ground, and he gave me a going over before I knew what was going on.

And undoubtedly he found a whole lot more than he bargained for.

Sutton chuckled drily. And the chuckle merged into a scream that came slanting down the hill slope in a blaze of streaming fire… a rush of flame that ended in the marsh, that died down momentarily, then licked out in blue and red.

Brakes hissed and tires screeched on the pavement as Sutton slued the car around to bring it to a stop. Even before the machine came to a halt, he was out the door and running down the slope toward the strange, black craft that flickered in the swamp.

Water sloshed around his ankles and knife-edged grass slashed at his leg. The puddles gleamed black and oily in the light from the flaming craft. The frogs still strained their hoarse throats at the far edge of the marsh.

Something flopped and struggled in a pool of muddy, flame-stained water just a few feet from the burning ship. Sutton, plunging forward, caught the gleaming white of frightened, piteous eyeballs shining in the flame as the man lifted himself on his mud-caked arms and tried to drag his body forward. He saw the flash of teeth as pain twisted the face into grisly anguish. And his nostrils caught the smell of charred, crisped flesh.

He stooped and locked his hands beneath the armpits of the man, hauled him upright, dragged him back across the swamp. Mud sucked at his feet and he heard the splashing behind him, the horrible, dragging splash of the other’s body trailing through the water and the slime.

There was dry land beneath his feet and he began the climb back up the slope toward the car. Sounds came from the bobbing head of the man he carried, thick, slobbering sounds that might have been words.

Sutton cast a quick glance over his shoulder and saw the flames mounting straight into the sky, a pillar of blue that lighted up the night. Marsh birds, roused from their nests, flew blinded and in squawking panic through the garish light.

“The atomics,” said Sutton, aloud. “The atomics…”

They couldn’t hold for long in a flame like that. The automatics would melt down and the marsh would suddenly be a crater and the hills would be charred from horizon to horizon.

“No,” said the bobbing head. “No… no atomics.”

Sutton’s foot caught in a root and he stumbled to his knees. The body of the man slid from his mud-caked grasp. The man struggled, trying to turn over. Sutton helped him and he lay on his back, his face toward the sky.

He was young, Sutton saw, a youth beneath the mask of mud and pain.

“No atomics,” said the man. “I dumped them.”

THERE was pride in the words, pride in a job well done. But the words had cost him heavily. Sutton saw the blood pumping through the temples beneath the burned and twisted skin. The man’s jaw worked and words came out, limping, tangled words.

“There was a battle… back in ’83… I saw him coming… tried to time-jump…” The words gurgled and got lost, then gushed out again. “Got new guns… set metal afire…”

He turned his head and apparently saw Sutton for the first time. He started up. “Asher Sutton!” The two words were a whisper.

For a moment Sutton caught the triumphant, almost fanatic gleam that washed across the eyes of the dying man, wondered at the gesture of the half-raised arm, at the cryptic sign that the fingers made.

Then the gleam faded and the arm dropped back and the fingers separated.

Sutton knew, even before he bent with his head turned against the heart, that the man was dead.

Slowly Sutton stood up. The flame was dying down and the birds had gone. The craft lay almost buried in the mud, and its lines, he noted, were none he had ever seen.

Asher Sutton, the man had said. And his eyes had lighted up and he had made a sign just before he died. And there had been a battle back in ’83.

Eighty-three what?

The man had tried to time-jump… who had ever heard of a time jump?

I never saw the man before, said Sutton. So help me, I don’t know him even now. And yet he cried my name and it sounded as if he knew me and was very glad to see me and he made a sign… a sign that went with the name.

He stared down at the dead man lying at his feet and saw the pity of it, the crumpled legs, the stiffened arms, the lolling head and the flash of moonlight on the teeth where the mouth had fallen open.

Carefully, Sutton went down on his knees, ran his hands over the body, seeking something… some bulging pocket that might give a clue to the man who lay there dead.

Because he knew me. And I must know how he knew me. And none of it makes sense.

There was a small book in the breast pocket of the coat and Sutton slipped it out. The title was in gold upon black leather, and even in the moonlight Sutton could read the letters that flamed from the cover:





THIS IS DESTINY
By
Asher Sutton



Sutton did not move. He crouched there on the ground, like a cowering thing, stricken by the golden letters on the leather cover.

A book!

A book he meant to write, but hadn’t written yet!

A book he wouldn’t write for many months to come!

And yet here it was, dog-eared and limp from reading.

He felt the chill of the fog rising from the marsh, the loneliness of a wild bird’s crying.

A strange ship had plunged into the marsh, disabled and burning. A man had escaped from the ship, but on the verge of death. Before he died he had recognized Sutton and had called his name. In his pocket he had a book that was not even written.









Those were the facts. There was no explanation.

Faint sounds of human voices drifted down the night and Sutton rose swiftly to his feet, stood poised and waiting, listening. The voices came again.

Someone had heard the crash and was coming to investigate, coming down the road, calling to others who also had heard the crash.

Sutton turned and walked swiftly up the slope to the car.

There was, he told himself, no Earthly use of waiting. Those coming down the road might know the answers to his baffling questions—but they wouldn’t tell him. Nobody seemed willing to tell him anything. He had to find out the answers himself.

XV

A MAN was waiting in the clump of lilac bushes across the road and there was another one crouched in the shadow of the courtyard wall.

Sutton walked slowly forward, strolling, taking his time.

“Johnny,” he said, soundlessly.

“Yes, Ash.”

“That is all there are? Just those two?”

“I think there is another one, but I can’t place him. All of them are armed.”

Sutton felt the stir of comfort in his brain, the sense of self-assurance, the sense of aid and comradeship.

“Keep me posted, Johnny.”

He whistled a bar or two, from a tune that had been forgotten long ago, but still was fresh in his mind from twenty years before.

The rent-a-car garage was two blocks up the road, the Orion Arms two blocks farther down. Between him and the Arms were two men, waiting with guns. Two and maybe more.

Between the garage and hotel was nothing… just the landscaped beauty that was a residential, administrative Earth. An Earth dedicated to beauty and to ruling… planted with a garden’s care, every inch of it mapped out by landscape architects with clumps of shrubs and lanes of trees and carefully tended flower beds.

An ideal place, Sutton told himself, for an ambush.

Adams? he wondered. Although it hardly could be Adams. He had something that Adams expected to find out, and killing the man who holds information that you want, no matter how irate you may be at him, is downright useless.

Or those others that Eva had told him of… the ones who had Benton psychologically conditioned to kill him. They tied in better than Adams did, for Adams wanted him to stay alive and these others, whoever they might be, were quite content to kill him.

He dropped his hand in his coat pocket as if searching for a cigarette and his fingers touched the steel of the gun he had used on Benton. He let his fingers wrap around it and then took his hand out of the pocket and found the cigarettes in another pocket.

Not time yet, he told himself. Time later on to use the gun, if he had to use it—if he had a chance to use it.

He stopped to light the cigarette, playing for time. The gun would be a poor weapon, he knew, but better than none at all. In the dark, he probably couldn’t hit the broad side of a house but it would make a noise and the waiting men were not counting on noise. If they hadn’t minded noise, they could have stepped out minutes ago and shot him down.

“Ash,” said Johnny, “there is another man. Just in that bush ahead. He expects to let you pass and then they’ll have you caught in an ambush three ways.”

SUTTON grunted. “Good, tell me exactly.”

“The bush with the white flowers. He’s on this edge of it. Quite close to the walk, so he can step around and be behind you when you pass.”

Sutton puffed on the cigarette, making it glow like a red eye in the dark.

“Shall we take him, Johnny?”

“Yes, before we’re taken.”

Sutton resumed his stroll and now he saw the bush, four paces away, no more.

One step.

I wonder what it’s all about.

Two steps.

Cut out your wondering. Act now and do your wondering later.

Three steps.

There he is. I see him.

Sutton was off the walk in a sudden leap. The gun whipped out of his pocket and it talked, two quick, ugly words.

The man behind the bush bent forward to his knees, swayed there for a moment, then flattened on his face. His gun fell from his fingers and in a single swoop, Sutton scooped it up. It was, he saw, an electronic device, a vicious thing that could kill even with a near miss, due to the field of distortion that its beam set up. A gun like that had been new and secret twenty years ago, but now, apparently, anyone could get it.

Gun in hand, Sutton wheeled and ran, twisting through the shrubbery, ducking overhanging branches, plowing through a tulip bed. Out of the corner of one eye, he caught a twinkle… the twinkling breath of a silent flaming gun, and the dancing, path of silver that it sliced into the night.

He plunged through a ripping, tearing hedge, waded a stream, found himself in a clump of evergreen and birch. He stopped to get his breath, staring back over the way that he had come.

The countryside lay quiet and peaceful, a silvered picture painted by the moon. No one and nothing stirred. The gun long ago had ceased its flickering.

Johnny’s warning came suddenly: “Ash! Behind you. Friendly…”

Sutton wheeled, gun half lifted.

Herkimer was running in the moonlight, like a hound hunting for a trace. “Mr. Sutton, sir…”

“Yes, Herkimer.”

“We have to run for it.”

“Yes,” said Sutton, “I suppose we have. I walked into a trap. There were three of them laying for me.”

“It’s worse than that,” said Herkimer. “It’s worse even than you think. It’s not only Morgan, but it’s Adams, too.”

“Adams?”

“He has given orders that you are to be killed on sight.”

Sutton stiffened. “How do you know?”

“The girl,” said Herkimer. “Eva. The one you asked about. She told me.”

Herkimer walked forward, stood face to face with Sutton.

“You have to trust me, sir. You said this morning I’d put the finger on you, but I never would. I was with you from the very first.”

“But the girl,” said Sutton.

“Eva is with you, too, sir. We started searching for you as soon as we found out, but we were too late to catch you. Eva is waiting with the ship.”

“A ship,” Sutton grimly repeated. “A ship and everything.”

“It’s your own ship, sir. The one you received from Benton’s estate with the hunting asteroid and me.”

Sutton scowled. “And you think I’m stupid enough to come with you and get into this ship and…”

“No, sir, I didn’t think so,” said Herkimer. “I’m sorry.”

He moved so fast that Sutton couldn’t do a thing.

He saw the fist coming and he tried to raise his gun. He felt the sudden fury grow cold within his brain. But that was before there was a sudden crushing impact. His head snapped back so that for a moment, before his eyelids closed, he saw the wheel of stars against a spinning sky. He felt his knees buckle under him.

He was out, stone cold, when his body hit the ground.

CONTINUED NEXT MONTH






Notes and proofing history

Scanned with preliminary proofing by A\NN/A
December 11th, 2007—v1.0
from the original source: Galaxy, October, 1950










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