'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.'
