'Like what this is all about.'
'You're going to write a book,' said Case.
'Yes,' said Sutton. 'I intend to write a book.'
'And you want to sell that book.'
'I want to see it published.'
'A book,' Case pointed out, 'is a commodity. It's a product of brain and muscle. It has a market value.'
'I suppose,' said Sutton, 'that you are in the market.'
'We are publishers,' said Case, 'looking for a book.'
'A best seller,' Pringle added.
Case uncrossed his legs, hitched himself higher in the chair.
'It's all quite simple,' he said. 'Just a business deal. We wish you would go ahead and set your price.'
'Make it high,' urged Pringle. 'We are prepared to pay.'
'I have no price in mind,' said Sutton.
'We have discussed it,' Case told him, 'in a rather speculative manner, wondering how much you might want and how much we might be willing to give. We figured a planet might be attractive to you.'
'We'd make it a dozen planets,' Pringle said, 'but that doesn't quite make sense. What would a man do with a dozen planets?'
'He might rent them out,' said Sutton.
'You mean,' asked Case, 'that you might be interested in a dozen planets?'
'No, I don't,' Sutton told him. 'Pringle wondered what a man would do with a dozen planets and I was being helpful. I said…'
Pringle leaned so far forward in his chair that he almost fell on his face.
'Look,' he said, 'we aren't talking about one of the backwoods planets out at the tail end of nowhere. We're offering you a landscaped planet, free of all venomous and disgusting life, with a salubrious climate and tractable natives and all the customary living accommodations and improvements.'
'And the money,' said Case, 'to keep it running for the rest of your life.'
'Right spang in the middle of the galaxy,' said Pringle. 'It's an address you wouldn't be ashamed of.'
'I'm not interested,' said Sutton.
Case's temper cracked.
'Good Lord, man, what is it that you want?'
'I want information,' Sutton said.
Case sighed. 'All right, then. We'll give you information.'
'Why do you want my book?'
'There are three parties interested in your book,' said Case. 'One of those parties would kill you to prevent your writing it. What is more to the point, they probably will if you don't throw in with us.'
'And the other party, the third party?'
'The third party wants you to write the book, all right, but they won't pay you a dime for doing it. They'll do all they can to make it easy for you to write the book and they'll try to protect you from the ones that would like to kill you, but they're not offering any money.'
'If I took you up,' said Sutton, 'I suppose you'd help me write the book. Editorial conferences and so forth.'
'Naturally,' said Case. 'We'd have an interest in it. We'd want it done the best way possible.'
'After all,' said Pringle, 'our interest would be as great as yours.'
'I'm sorry,' Sutton told them, 'my book is not for sale.'
'We'd boost the ante some,' said Pringle.
'It still is not for sale.'
'That's your final word?' asked Case. 'Your considered opinion?'
Sutton nodded.
Case sighed. 'Then,' he said, 'I guess we've got to kill you.'
He took a gun out of his pocket.
XXV
The psych-tracer ticked on, endlessly, running fast, then slow, skipping a beat now and then like the erratic time measurement of a clock with hiccoughs.
It was the only sound in the room and to Adams it seemed as if he were listening to the beating of a heart, the breathing of a man, the throb of blood along the jugular vein.
He grimaced at the pile of dossiers which a moment before he had swept from his desk onto the floor with an angry sweep of his hand. For there was nothing in them…absolutely nothing. Every one was perfect, every one checked. Birth certificates, scholastic records, recommendations, loyalty checks, psych examinations — all of them were as they should be. There was not a single flaw.
That was the trouble…in all the records of the service's personnel there was not a single flaw. Not a thing a man could point to. Not a thing on which one could anchor suspicion.
Lily-white and pure.
Yet, someone inside the service had stolen Sutton's dossier. Someone inside the service had tipped off Sutton on the gun-trap laid for him at the Orion Arms. Someone had been ready and waiting, knowing of the trap, to whisk him out of reach.
Spies, said Adams to himself, and he lifted up his hand and made his hand into a fist and hit the desk so hard that his knuckles stung.
For no one but an insider could have made away with Sutton's dossier. No one but an insider could have known of the decision to destroy Sutton, or of the three men who had been assigned to carry out the order.
Adams smiled grimly.
The tracer chuckled at him.
That was Sutton's heart and breath…that was Sutton's life ticking away somewhere. So long as Sutton lived, no matter where he was or what he might be doing, the tracer would go on with its chuckling and its burping.
Somewhere in the asteroid belt, the tracer had said, and that was a very general location, but it could be narrowed. Already ships with other tracers aboard were engaged in narrowing it down. Sooner or later…hours or days or weeks, Sutton would be found.
War, the man in the mask had said.
And hours later, a ship had come screaming down across the hills like a blazing comet to plunge into a swamp.
A ship such as no man as yet had made, carrying melted weapons that were unlike any that man had yet invented. A ship whose thunder in the night had roused the sleeping inhabitants for miles around, whose flaming metal had been a beacon glowing in the sky.
A ship and a body and a track that led from ship to body across three hundred yards of marsh. The trace of one man's footprints and the furrowing trail of other feet that dragged across the mud. And the man who had carried the dead man had been Asher Sutton, for Sutton's fingerprints were on the muddied clothing of the man lying at the swamp's edge.
Sutton, though Adams wearily. It is always Sutton. Sutton's name on the flyleaf out of Aldebaran XII. Sutton's fingerprints upon a dead man's clothing. The man in the mask had said there would have been no incident on Aldebaran if it had not been for Sutton. And Sutton had killed Benton with a bullet in the arm.
Dr. Raven had sat in that chair across the desk and told of the afternoon Sutton had dropped in at the university.
