Time and Again

lisped, and I didn't hear it.'

The girl tugged at his arm. 'They had Benton conditioned. 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, gravely. 'You wore a checkered apron and you kept twisting it as if you might be nervous.'

'What in heaven's name are you talking about?'

'Why, I was fishing,' Sutton said, 'and I had just caught a big one when you came along…'

'You're crazy,' said the girl. 'You were never fishing.'

She pushed open a door and shoved him out and the cool air of night slapped him 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 that 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 car, 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 onto 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.'

'Frind 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…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.'

He laughed. 'You haven't thought of me, at all. You just…'

'And Ash.'

'Yes?'

'I think you're wonderful.'

He shot a quick glance at her. She was still in her corner of the seat and the wind had blown one strand of copper hair across her face…and her body was soft and her face was shining. And yet, he thought, and yet…

'That's a nice thing for you to say,' he told her. 'I could kiss you for it.'

'You may kiss me, Ash,' she told him, 'any time you want to.'

After a startled moment he slowed the car and did.

XII

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 item 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 a gun like that existed. Although I had read about them and knew about them. But I wasn't interested in dueling, and duelists and collectors and antiquarians are the only ones who would know about an ancient weapon.

Of course, I didn't really kill him. Benton killed himself. If he hadn't missed — and there was no excuse for missing — the item would have read the other way around.

Mr. Asher Sutton was killed last night in an encounter…

We'll make an evening of it, the girl had said, and she might have known. We'll have dinner and make an evening of it. We'll make an evening of it and Geoffrey Benton will kill you 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 conditioned to challenge me and kill me.

She said friend when I asked her friend or foe, but a word is an easy thing. Anyone at all can speak a single word and 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 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 who can read it.

She said friend when I asked her friend or foe. And she knew that Benton had been conditioned to challenge me and kill me. And she had called me up and made a dinner date.

And words are easy things to say. But there are other things than words that are not easy to twist from lie to