Man was spread thin throughout the galaxy. A lone man here, a handful there. Slim blobs of bone and brain and muscle to hold a galaxy in check. Slight shoulders to hold up the cloak of human greatness spread across the light-years.
For Man had flown too fast, had driven far beyond his physical capacity. Not by strength did he hold his starry outposts, but by something else…by depth of human character, by his colossal conceit, by his ferocious conviction that Man was the greatest living thing the galaxy had spawned. All this in spite of many evidences that he was not…evidence that he took and evaluated and cast aside, scornful of any greatness that was not ruthless and aggressive.
Too thin, Christopher Adams told himself. Too thin and stretched too far. One man backed by a dozen androids and a hundred robots could hold a solar system. Could hold it until there were more men or until something cracked.
In time there'd be more men, if the birthrate held. But it would be many centuries before the line would grow much thicker, for Man held only the key points…one planet in an entire system, and not in every system. Man had leap-frogged since there weren't men enough, had set up strategic spheres of influence, had by-passed all but the richest, most influential systems.
There was room to spread, room for a million years.
If there were any humans left in a million years.
If the life on those other planets let the humans live, if there never came a day when they would be willing to pay the terrible price of wiping out the race.
The price would be high, said Adams, talking to himself. But it would be done, and it would be easy. Just a few hours' job. Humans in the morning, no humans left by night. What if a thousand others died for every human death…or ten thousand, or a hundred thousand? Under certain circumstances, such a price might well be counted cheap.
There were islands of resistance even now where one walked carefully…or even walked around. Like 61 Cygni, for example.
It took judgment…and some tolerance…and a great measure of latent brutality, but, most of all, conceit, the absolute, unshakable conviction that Man was sacrosanct, that he could not be touched, that he could scarcely die.
But five men had died, three humans and two androids, beside a river that flowed on Aldebaran XII, just a few short miles from Andrelon, the planetary capital.
They had died of violence, of that there was no question.
Adams' eyes sought out the paragraph of Thorne's latest report:
Force had been applied from the outside. We found a hole burned through the atomic shielding of the engine. The force must have been controlled or it would have resulted in absolute destruction. The automatics got in their-work and headed off the blast, but the machine went out of control and smashed into the tree. The area was saturated with intensive radiation.
Good man, Thorne, thought Adams. He won't let a single thing be missed. He had those robots in there before the place was cool.
But there wasn't much to find…not much that gave an answer. Just a batch of question marks.
Five men had died and when that was said, that was the end of fact. For they were burned and battered and there were no features left, no fingerprints or eyeprints to match against the records.
A few feet away from the strewn blackness of the bodies the machine had smashed into a tree, had wrapped itself around and half sheared the trunk in two. A machine that, like the men, was without a record. A machine without a counterpart in the known galaxy and, so far at least, a machine without a purpose.
Thorne would give it the works. He would set it up in solidographs, down to the last shattered piece of glass and plastic. He would have it analyzed and diagramed and the robots would put it in scanners that would peel it and record it molecule by molecule.
And they might find something. Just possibly they might.
Adams shoved the report to one side and leaned back in his chair. Idly, he spelled out his name lettered across the office door, reading backwards slowly and with exaggerated care. As if he'd never seen the name before. As if he did not know it. Puzzling it out.
And then the line beneath it:
SUPERVISOR, ALIEN RELATIONS BUREAU. SPACE SECTOR 16.
And the line beneath that:
DEPARTMENT OF GALACTIC INVESTIGATION (JUSTICE).
Early afternoon sunlight slanted through a window and fell across his head, highlighting the clipped silver mustache, the whitening temple hair.
Five men had died…
He wished that he could get it out of his mind. There was other work. This Sutton thing, for instance. The reports on that would be coming in within an hour or so.
But there was a photograph…a photograph from Thorne, that he could not forget.
A smashed machine and broken bodies and a great smoking gash sliced across the turf. The silver river flowed in a silence that one knew was there even in the photograph and far in the distance the spidery web of Andrelon rose against a pinkish sky.
Adams smiled softly to himself. Aldebaran XII, he thought, must be a lovely world. He never had been there and he never would be there…for there were too many planets, too many planets for one man to even dream of seeing all.
Someday, perhaps, when the teleports would work across light-years instead of puny miles…perhaps then a man might just step across to any planet that he wished, for a day or hour or just to say he'd been there.
But Adams didn't need to be there…he had eyes and ears there, as he had on every occupied planet within the entire sector.
Thorne was there and Thorne was an able man. He wouldn't rest until he'd wrung the last ounce of information from the broken wreck and bodies.
I wish I could forget it, Adams told himself. It's important, yes, but not all-important.
A buzzer hummed at Adams and he flipped up a tumbler on his desk.
"What is it?"
An android voice answered, "It's Mr. Thorne, sir, on the mentophone from Andrelon."
"Thank you, Alice," Adams said.
He clicked open a drawer and took out the cap, placed it on his head, adjusted it with steady fingers. Thoughts flickered through his brain, disjointed, random thoughts, all faint and faraway. Ghost thoughts drifting through the universe — residual flotsam from the minds of things in time and space that was unguessable.
Adams flinched.
I'll never get used to it, he told himself. I will always duck, like the kid who knows he deserves a cuffing.
The ghost thoughts peeped and chittered at him.
Adams closed his eyes and settled back.
"Hello, Thorne," he thought.
Thorne's thought came in, thinned and scratchy over the space of more than fifty light-years.
"That you, Adams? Pretty weak out here."
"Yes, it's me. What's up?"
A high, singsong thought came in and skipped along his brain:
Spill the rattle…pinch the fish…oxygen is high-priced.
Adams forced the thought out of his brain, built up his concentration.
"Start over again, Thorne. A ghost came along and blotted you out."
Thorne's thought was louder now, more distinct.
"I wanted to ask you about a name. Seems to me I heard it once before, but I can't be sure."
"What name?"
Thorne was spacing his thoughts now, placing them slowly and with emphasis to cut through the static.
"The name is Asher Sutton."
Adams sat bolt upright in his chair. His mouth flapped open.
"What?" he roared.
"Walk west," said a voice in his brain. "Walk west and then straight up."
Thorne's thought came in: "…it was the name that was on the flyleaf…"
"Start over," Adams pleaded. "Start over and take it slow. We got blotted out again. I couldn't hear a thing you thought."
Thorne's thoughts came slowly, power behind each word:
"It was like this. You remember that wreck we had out here? Five men killed…"
"Yes. Yes. Of course, I remember it."
"Well, we found a book, or what once had been a book, on one of the corpses. The book was burned, scorched through and through by radiation. The robots did what they could with it, but that wasn't much. A word here and there. Nothing you could make any sense out of…"
The thought static purred and rumbled. Half thoughts cut through. Rambling thought-snatches that had no human sense or meaning — that could have had no human sense or meaning even if they had been heard in their entirety.
"Start over," Adams thought desperately. "Start over.
"You know about this wreck. Five men…"
"Yes. Yes. I got that much. Up to the part about the book. Where does Sutton come in?"
"That was about all the robotics could figure out," Thorne told him. "Just three words: 'by Asher Sutton.' As if he might have been the author. As if the book might have been written by him. It was on one of the first pages. The title page, maybe. Such and such a book by Asher Sutton."
There was silence, even the ghost voices still for a moment. Then a piping, lisping thought came in…a baby thought, immature and puling. And the thought was without context, untranslatable, almost meaningless. But hideous and nerve-wrenching in its alien connotation.
Adams felt the sudden chill of fear slice into his marrow, grasped the chair arms with both his hands and hung on tight while a filthy, taloned claw twisted at his entrails.
Suddenly the thought was gone. Fifty light-years of space whistled in the cold.
Adams relaxed, felt the perspiration running from his armpits, trickling down his ribs.
"You there, Thorne?" he asked.
"Yes. I caught some of that one, too."
"Pretty bad, wasn't it?"
"I've never heard much worse," Thorne told him.
There was a moment's silence. Then Thorne's thoughts took up again.
"Maybe I'm just wasting time. But it seemed to me I remembered that name."
"You have," Adams thought back. "Sutton went to 61 Cygni."
"Oh, he's the one!"
"He got back this morning."
"Couldn't have been him, then. Someone else by the same name, maybe."
"Must have been," thought Adams.
"Nothing else to report," Thorne told him. "The name just bothered me."
"Keep at it," Adams thought. "Let me know anything that turns up."
"I will," Thorne promised. "Good-by."
"Thanks for calling."
Adams lifted off the cap. He opened his eyes and the sight of the room, commonplace and Earthly, with the sun streaming through the window, was almost a physical shock.
He sat limp in his chair, thinking, remembering.
The man had come at twilight, stepping out of the shadows onto the patio and he had sat down in the darkness and talked like any other man. Except the things he said were crazy.
When he returns, Sutton must be killed. I am your successor.
Crazy talk.
Unbelievable.
Impossible.
And, still, maybe I should have listened. Maybe I should have heard him out instead of flying off the handle.
Except that you don't kill a man who comes back after twenty years.
Especially a man like Sutton.
Sutton is a good man. One of the best the Bureau has. Slick as a whistle, well grounded in alien psychology, an authority on galactic politics. No other man could have done the Cygnian job as well.
If he did it.
I don't know that, of course. But he'll be in tomorrow and he'll tell me all about it.
A man is entitled to a day's rest after twenty years.
Slowly, Adams put away the mento-cap, reached out an almost reluctant hand and snapped up a tumbler.
Alice answered.
"Send me in the Asher Sutton file."
"Yes, Mr. Adams."
Adams settled back in his chair.
The warmth of the sun felt good across his shoulders. The ticking of the clock was comforting.
Commonplace and comforting after the ghost voices whispering out in space. Thoughts that one could not pin down, that one could not trace back and say, "This one started here and then."
Although we're trying, Adams thought. Man will try anything, take any sort of chance, gamble on no odds at all.
He chuckled to himself. Chuckled at the weirdness of the project.
Thousands of listeners listening in on the random thoughts of random time and space listening in for clues, for hints, for leads. Seeking a driblet of sense from the stream of gibberish…hunting the word or sentence or disassociated thought that might be translated into a new philosophy or a new technique or a new science…or a new something that the human race had never even dreamed of.
A new concept, said Adams, talking to himself. An entirely new concept.
Adams scowled to himself.
A new concept might be dangerous. This was not the time for anything that did not fit into the groove, that did not match the pattern of human thought and action.
There could be no confusion. There could be nothing but the sheer, bulldog determination to hang on, to sink in one's teeth and stay. To maintain the status quo.
Later, someday, many centuries from now, there would be a time and place and room for a new concept. When Man's grip was firmer, when the line was not too thin, when a mistake or two would not spell disaster.
Man, at the moment, controlled every factor. He held the edge at every point…a slight edge, admitted, but at least an edge. And it must stay that way. There must be nothing that would tip the scale in the wrong direction. Not a word or thought, not an action or a whisper.