Time and Again

X

Adams sat silently, facing the four men who had come into his office, trying to make out what they might be thinking. But their faces wore the masks of everyday.

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 up his pipe, and for the moment that seemed, to him, the most important thing in all the world.

Blackburn, the psychologist, frowned at the glowing tip of his cigarette, and Shulcross, the language expert, sprawled sloppily in his chair like an empty sack.

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 as, 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."

"You mean it was warped?"

"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 O.K., 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 struck?"

"He would have died," said Clark.

"You are positive of that?"

"No question of it. Even a miracle wouldn't have saved him. We thought of that same thing, 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 pointed out.

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 in 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. Fix it, not rebuild it. And this setup would have called for complete rebuilding."

Shulcross spoke for the first time, softly, quietly, not moving from his awkward slouch.

"Maybe we're starting wrong," he said. "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? This place that Sutton went."

Adams smiled wearily. "We aren't positive. Much like Earth, perhaps. 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 any time 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. Funny, 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 always were 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 looked at 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 or you aren't slowed, but you are deflected. As if the ship had hit ice, although it would be something slicker than ice. Whatever it is, it doesn't register. There's no sign of it, nothing that you can see or 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 mad 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.

Adams nodded. "Sutton got through," he said.

"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 used smaller ships, we might squeeze through. As if the thing that kept us off was a mesh or something."

"Sutton got through," said Adams, stubbornly. "They launched him in a lifeboat and he got through. His small ship got through where the big ones couldn't."

Clark shook his head, just as stubbornly. "It don't make sense," he said. "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 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, crisply.

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 told him. "Anything unknown is potentially dangerous. You can't write it off until you are sure. These 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 full crew get within shooting distance."

"Exactly," said Blackburn.

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

Clark shook his head. "Twenty years looks right to me. There is 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 then, he would have needed materials."

"Plenty of them," said Clark.

"The Cygnians could have supplied him with 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 nonmechanical."

"But the screen," Anderson prompted.

"It wouldn't have to be mechanical," Blackburn said flatly.

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," he said. "Clark says some of the ports were broken. That means Sutton navigated eleven light-years exposed to space."

"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.

He lowered his voice. "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 forcing 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's still a lot of work to do before we have the answer. And then we can't be sure."

He sat stiffly in the chair, aware of the eyes upon him.

"I hesitate to say the thing I have in mind," he said.

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 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 acting up and you can switch to the spare one while you tinker up 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 he 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 and we didn't get a nibble. Not a quaver, not a thought. Not even seepage. His mind was closed, tight shut."

"Some defect in the meter," Adams suggested.

"No," said Anderson. "We checked that. The psycho was all right."

He looked around the room, from one face to another.

"Maybe you don't realize the implication," he told them. "When a man is drugged or asleep, or in any other 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, live without food and water?"

"I don't know," said Anderson.

He licked his lips and stared around the room, like a wild thing seeking some way to escape.

"I don't know," he said. "I simply don't."

Adams spoke softly. "We must not get upset," he said. "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 generally. 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, Mr. Shulcross."

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."

"Codes," said Blackburn.

Shulcross shook his head. "If it were 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 that I have."

Anderson stirred restlessly in his chair. "You like Sutton?" he asked. "Like him personally?"

"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 to leave the room.