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,' snapped Adams. 'He wasn't even here…'
His voice ran down, for he remembered something. The name on the flyleaf…'by Asher Sutton.'
'Look,' said Adams, 'tell me, for the love of heaven, if you have anything to tell.'
'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 in another time.'
'But how…'
'Remember Michaelson?'
'The man who went a second into time.'
The masked head nodded and the screen went blank and 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 glass.
'Sutton just left the university,' Nelson said. 'He spent an hour with Dr. Horace Raven. Dr. Raven, if you don't recall, is a professor of comparative religion.'
'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,
XVI
Clark said that he had died and Clark was an engineer. Clark made a graph and death was in the graph; mathematics foretold that certain strains and stresses would turn a body into human jelly.
And Anderson had said he wasn't human and how was Anderson to know?
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.
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 I 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. Unless he had an ace tucked neatly up his sleeve.
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 night bird, black and ghostly, fluttered across the road and the shadow of its flight danced down the cone of light.
Adams was the one, said Sutton, talking to himself. He was the one who was waiting for me. He knew, somehow, that I was coming, and he was all primed and cocked. 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 dryly. And the chuckle was a scream that came slanting down the hill slope in a blaze of streaming fire…a stream of fire 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 of the door and running down the slope toward the strange, black craft that nickered in the swamp.
Water sloshed around his ankles and knife-edged grass slashed at his legs. The puddles gleamed black and oily in the light from the flaming craft. The frogs still kept up their peeping 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 and Sutton, plunging forward, saw it was a man.
He 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 took the smell of charred, crisped flesh and knew it for what it was.
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 if one had had the time to listen.
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 panic through the garish light, waking the night with their squawks of terror.
'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 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…young 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. He lay still, so still that he might not have been living at all.
Then his breath came to life again and whistled in his throat. 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 and then fell back, gasping with the effort.
'Sutton!'
Sutton bent above him. 'I will carry you. Get you to a doctor.'
'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
