“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 at 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 employees 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 Shulcross, 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 . . .”
“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 some one 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.”
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