him.
Safe with a hole blasted through his chest, with blood splashed down his shirt front and running down his legs.
Handy thing to have, he thought grimly, this second body of mine. This body that was grafted on me by the Cygnians. It will keep me going until…until…
Until what?
Until I can get back to Earth and walk into a doctor's office and say, 'I got shot up some. How about a patching job?'
Sutton chuckled.
He could see the doctor dropping dead.
Or going back to Cygni?
But they wouldn't let me in.
Or just going back to Earth the way I am and forgetting about the doctor.
I could get other clothes and the bleeding will stop when the blood's all gone.
But I wouldn't breathe, and they would notice that.
'Johnny,' he said, but there was no answer, just a feeble stir of life within his brain, a sign of recognition, as a dog would wag its tail to let you know it heard but was too busy with a bone to let anything distract it.
'Johnny, is there any way?'
For there might be a way. It was a hope to cling to, it was a thing to think about.
Not even yet, he suspected, had he begun to plumb the strange depth of abilities lodged within his body and his mind.
He had not known that his hate alone could kill, that hate could spear out from his brain like a lance of steel and strike a man down dead. And yet Benton had died with a bullet in the arm…and he had been dead before the bullet hit him. For Benton had fired first and missed and Benton, alive, never would have missed.
He had not known that by mind alone he could control the energy that was needed to lift the dead weight of a ship from a boulder bed and fly it across eleven years of space. And yet that is what he'd done, winnowing the energy from the flaming stars so far away they dimmed to almost nothing, from the random specks of matter that floated in the void.
And while he knew that he could change at will from one life to another, he had not known for certain that when one way of life was killed, the other way would take over automatically. Yet that was what had happened. Case had killed him and he had died and he had come to life again. But he had died before the change had started. Of that much he was sure. For he remembered death and recognized it. He knew it from the time before.
He felt his body eating…sucking at the stars as a human sucks an orange, nibbling at the energy imprisoned in the bit of rock to which the ship was clamped, pouncing on the tiny leaks of power from the ship's atomic motors.
Eating to grow strong, eating to repair…
'Johnny, is there any way?'
And there was no answer.
He let his head sag forward until it lay upon the inclined panel that housed the instruments.
His body went on eating, sucking at the stars.
He listened to the slow drip of blood falling from his body and splashing on the floor.
His mind was clouding and he let it cloud, for there was nothing to do…there was no need to use it, he did not know how to use it. He did not know what he could do or what he couldn't do, nor how to go about it.
He had fallen, he remembered, screaming down the alien sky, knowing a moment of wild elation that he had broken through, that the world of Cygni VII lay beneath his hand. That what all the navies of the Earth had failed to do, he'd done.
The planet was rushing up and he saw the tangled geography of it that snaked in black and gray across his visionplate.
It was twenty years ago, but he remembered it, in the gray fog of his mind, as if it were yesterday or this very moment.
He reached out a hand and hauled back on a lever and the lever would not move. The ship plunged down and for a moment he felt a rising panic that exploded into fear.
One fact stood out, one stark, black fact in all the flashing fragments of thoughts and schemes and prayer that went screeching through his brain. One stark fact…he was about to crash.
He did not remember crashing, for he probably never knew exactly when he crashed. It was only fear and terror and then no fear or terror. It was consciousness and awareness and then a nothingness that was a restfulness and a vast forgetting.
Awareness came back…in a moment or an aeon — which, he could not tell. But an awareness that was different, a sentiency that was only partly human, just a small percentage human. And a knowledge that was new, but which it seemed he had held forever.
He sensed or knew, for it was not seeing, his body stretched out on the ground, smashed and broken, twisted out of human shape. And although he knew it was his body and knew its every superficial function and the plan of its assembly, he felt a twinge of wonder at the thing which lay there and knew that here was a problem which would tax his utmost ingenuity.
For the body must be put together, must be straightened out and reintegrated and co-ordinated so that it would work and the life that had escaped it be returned to it again.
He thought of Humpty Dumpty and the thought was strange, as if the nursery rhyme were something new or something long forgotten.
Humpty Dumpty, said another part of him, supplies no answer, and he knew that it was right, for Humpty, he recalled, could not be put together.
He became aware there were two of him, for one part of him had answered the other part of him. The answerer and the other, and although they were one, they were also separate. There was a cleavage he could not understand.
I am your destiny, said the answerer. I was with you when you came to life and I stay with you till you die. I do not control you and I do not coerce you, but I try to guide you, although you do not know it.
Sutton, the small part of him that was Sutton, said, 'I know it now.'
He knew it as if he'd always known it and that was queer, for he had only learned it. Knowledge, he realized, was all tangled up, for there were two of him…he and destiny. He could not immediately distinguish between the things he knew as Sutton alone and those he knew as Sutton plus Sutton's destiny.
I cannot know, he thought. I could not know then and I cannot know now. For there still is deep within me the two facets of my being, the human that I am and the destiny that guides me to a greater glory and a greater life if I will only let it.
For it will not coerce me and it will not stop me. It will only give me hunches, it will only whisper to me. It is the thing called conscience and the thing called judgment and the thing called righteousness.
And it sits within my brain as it sits within the brain of no other thing, for I am one with it as is no other thing. I know of it with a dreadful certainty and they do not know at all or, if they do, they only guess at the great immensity of its truthfulness.
And all must know. All must know as I know.
But there is something going on to keep them from knowing, or to twist their knowledge so their knowing is all wrong. I must find out what it is and I must correct it. And somehow or other I must strike into the future, I must set it aright for the days I will not see.
I am your destiny, the answerer had said.
Destiny, not fatalism.
Destiny, not foreordination.
Destiny, the way of men and races and of worlds.
Destiny, the way you made your life, the way you shaped your living…the way it was meant to be, the way that it would be if you listened to the still, small voice that talked to you at the many turning points and crossroads.
But if you did not listen…why, then, you did not listen and you did not hear. And there was no power that
