No jealousy. No bitterness. But a nagging feeling of inadequacy, of almost having reached the goal and falling short.
But there was comfort, he thought. There was comfort if there was nothing else.
And that comfort must be kept. Kept for the little ones, for the ones that were less than Man.
He lay for a long time, thinking about comfort watching the dark square of the window with the rime of frost upon it and the stars shining through the frost, listening to the thin whine of the feeble, vicious weasel-wind as it knifed across the roof.
Sleep did not come and he got up at last and turned on the light. Shivering, he got into his clothes and pulled a book out of his pocket. Huddling close to the lamp, he turned the pages to a passage worn thin with reading.
There is no thing, no matter how created, how born or how conceived or made, which knows the pulse of life, that goes alone. That assurance I can give you…
He closed the book and held it clasped between the palms of his two hands.
'…how born or how conceived
Made.
All that mattered was the pulse of life.
Comfort.
And it must be kept.
I did my duty, he told himself. My willing, almost eager, duty. I still am doing it.
I acted the part, he told himself, and I think I acted well. I acted a part when I carried the challenge to Asher Sutton's room. I acted a part when I came to him as a part of the
I did my duty for him…and yet not for him, but comfort, for the privilege of knowing and believing that neither I nor any other living thing, no matter how lowly it may be, will ever be alone.
I hit him. I hit him on the button and I knocked him out and I lifted him in my arms and carried him.
He was angry at me, but that does not matter. For his anger cannot wash away a single word of the thing he gave me.
Thunder shook the house, and the window, for a moment, flared with sudden crimson.
Herkimer came to his feet and ran to the window and stood there, gripping the ledge, watching the red twinkle of dwindling rocket tubes.
Fear hit him in the stomach and he raced out of the door and down the hall, to Sutton's room.
He did not knock nor did he turn the knob. He hit the door and it shattered open, with a wrecked and twisted lock dangling by its screws.
The bed was empty and there was no one in the room.
XXVIII
Sutton sensed resurrection and he fought against it, for death was so comfortable. Like a soft, warm bed. And resurrection was a strident, insistent, maddening alarm clock that shrilled across the predawn chill of a dreadful, frowzy room. Dreadful with its life and its bare reality and its sharp, sickening reminder that one must get up and walk into reality again.
But this is not the first time. No, indeed, said Sutton. This is not the first time that I died and came to life again. For I did it once before and that time I was dead for a long, long time.
There was a hard, flat surface underneath him and he lay face down upon it and for what seemed an interminable stretch of time his mind struggled to visualize the hardness and smoothness beneath him. Hard and flat and smooth, three words, but they did not help one see or understand the thing that they described.
He felt life creep back and quicken, seep along his legs and arms. But he wasn't breathing and his heart was still.
Floor!
That was it…that was the word for the thing on which he lay. The flat, hard surface was a floor.
Sounds came to him, but at first he didn't call them sounds, for he had no word for them at all, and then, a moment later, he knew that they were sounds.
Now he could move one finger. Then a second finger.
He opened his eyes and there was light.
The sounds were voices and the voices were words and the words were thoughts.
It takes so long to figure things out, Sutton told himself.
'We should have tried a little harder,' said a voice, 'and a little longer. The trouble with us, Case, is that we have no patience.'
'Patience wouldn't have done a bit of good,' said Case. 'He was convinced that we were bluffing. No matter what we'd done or said, he'd still have thought we were bluffing and we would have gotten nowhere. There was only one thing to do.'
'Yes, I know,' Pringle agreed. 'Convince him that we weren't bluffing.'
He made a sound of blowing out his breath. 'Pity, too,' he said. 'He was such a bright young man.'
They were silent for a time and now it was not life alone, but strength, that was flowing into Sutton. Strength to stand and walk, strength to lift his arms, strength to vent his anger. Strength to kill two men.
'We won't do so badly,' Pringle said. 'Morgan and his crowd will pay us handsomely.'
Case was squeamish. 'I don't like it, Pringle. A dead man is a dead man if you leave him dead. But when you sell him, that makes you a butcher.'
'That's not the thing that's worrying me,' Pringle told him. 'What will it do to the future, Case? To our future. We had a future with many of its facets based on Sutton's book. If we had managed to change the book a little it wouldn't have mattered much…wouldn't have mattered at all, in fact, the way we had it figured out. But now Sutton's dead. There will be no book by Sutton. The future will be different.'
Sutton rose to his feet.
They spun around and faced him and Case's hand went for his gun.
'Go ahead,' invited Sutton. 'Shoot me full of holes. You won't live a minute longer for it.'
He tried to hate them, as he had hated Benton during that one fleeting moment back on Earth. Hatred so strong and primal that it had blasted the man's mind into oblivion.
But there was no hate. Just a ponderous, determined will to kill.
He moved forward on sturdy legs and his hands reached out.
Pringle ran, squealing like a rat, seeking to escape. Case's gun spat twice and when blood oozed out and ran down Sutton's chest and he still came on, Case threw away his weapon and backed against the wall.
It didn't take long.
They couldn't get away.
There was no place to go.
XXIX
Sutton maneuvered the ship down against the tiny asteroid, a whirling piece of debris not much bigger than the ship itself. He felt it touch and his thumb reached out and knocked over the gravity lever and the ship clamped down, to go tumbling through space with the twisting chunk of rock.
Sutton let his hands fall to his side, sat quietly in the pilot's chair. In front of him, space was black and friendless, streaked by the pinpoint stars that spun in lines of fire across the field of vision, writing cryptic messages of cold, white light across the cosmos as the asteroid bumbled on its erratic course.
Safe, he told himself. Safe for a while, at least. Perhaps safe forever, for there might be no one looking for
