Asher Sutton, special agent of the Department of Galactic Investigation, returned today from 61 Cygni, to which he was assigned twenty years ago. Hope of his return had been abandoned several years ago. Immediately upon landing a guard was thrown around his ship and he was in seclusion at the Orion Arms. All attempts to reach him for a statement failed. Shortly after his arrival, he was called out by Geoffrey Benton. Mr. Sutton chose a pistol and informality.
Sutton read the item again. All attempts to reach him…
Herkimer had said there were reporters and photographers in the lobby and ten minutes later Ferdinand had sworn there weren't. He had had no calls. There had been no attempt to reach him. Or had there? Attempts that had been neatly stopped. Stopped by the same person who had lain in wait for him, the same power that had been inside the room when he stepped across the threshold.
He dropped the paper to the floor, sat thinking.
He had been challenged by one of Earth's foremost, if not the foremost, duelist.
The old family robot had run away…or had been persuaded to run away.
Attempts by the press to reach him had been stopped…cold.
The visor purred at him and he jumped.
A call.
The first since he had arrived.
He swung around in his chair and flipped up the switch.
A woman's face came in. Granite eyes and skin magnolia-white, hair a copper glory.
"My name is Eva Armour," she said. "I am the one who asked you to wait with the elevator."
"I recognized you," said Sutton.
"I called to make amends."
"There is no need…"
"But, Mr. Sutton, there is. You thought I was laughing at you and I really wasn't."
"I looked funny," Sutton told her. "It was your privilege to laugh."
"Will you take me out to dinner?" she asked.
"Certainly," said Sutton. "I would be delighted to."
"And someplace afterwards," she suggested. "We'll make an evening of it."
"Gladly," said Sutton.
"I'll meet you in the lobby at seven," she said. "And I won't be late."
The visor faded and Sutton sat stiffly in the chair.
They'd make an evening of it, she had said. And he was afraid she might be right.
They'd make an evening of it, and, he said, talking to himself, you'll be lucky if you're alive tomorrow.
X
Adams sat silently, facing the four men who had come into his office, trying to make out what they might be thinking. But their faces wore the masks of everyday.
Clark, the space construction engineer, clutched a field book in his hand and his face was set and stern. There was no foolishness about Clark…ever.
Anderson, anatomist, big and rough, was lighting up his pipe, and for the moment that seemed, to him, the most important thing in all the world.
Blackburn, the psychologist, frowned at the glowing tip of his cigarette, and Shulcross, the language expert, sprawled sloppily in his chair like an empty sack.
They found something, Adams told himself. They found plenty and some of it has them tangled up.
"Clark," said Adams, "suppose you start us out."
"We looked the ship over," Clark told him, "and we found it couldn't fly."
"But it did," said Adams. "Sutton brought it home."
Clark shrugged. "He might as well have used a log. Or a hunk of rock. Either one would have served the purpose. Either one would fly just as well as, or better than, that heap of junk."
"Junk?"
"The engines were washed out," said Clark. "The safety automatics were the only things that kept them from atomizing. The ports were cracked, some of them were broken. One of the tubes was busted off and lost. The whole ship was twisted out of line."
"You mean it was warped?"
"It had struck something," Clark declared. "Struck it hard and fast. Seams were opened, the structural plates were bent, the whole thing was twisted out of kilter. Even if you could start the engines, the ship would never handle. Even with the tubes O.K., you couldn't set a course. Give it any drive and it would simply corkscrew."
Anderson cleared his throat. "What would have happened to Sutton if he'd been in it when it struck?"
"He would have died," said Clark.
"You are positive of that?"
"No question of it. Even a miracle wouldn't have saved him. We thought of that same thing, so we worked it out. We rigged up a diagram and we used the most conservative force factors to show theoretic effects…"
Adams interrupted. "But he must have been in the ship."
Clark shook his head stubbornly. "If he was, he died. Our diagram shows he didn't have a chance. If one force didn't kill him, a dozen others would."
"Sutton came back," Adams pointed out.
The two stared at one another, half angrily.
Anderson broke the silence. "Had he tried to fix it up?"
Clark shook his head. "Not a mark to show he did. There would have been no use in trying. Sutton didn't know a thing about mechanics. Not a single thing. I checked on that. He had no training, no natural inclination. And it takes a man with savvy to repair an atomic engine. Fix it, not rebuild it. And this setup would have called for complete rebuilding."
Shulcross spoke for the first time, softly, quietly, not moving from his awkward slouch.
"Maybe we're starting wrong," he said. "Starting in the middle. If we started at the beginning, laid the groundwork first, we might get a better idea of what really happened."
They looked at him, all of them, wondering what he meant.
Shulcross saw it was up to him to go ahead. He spoke to Adams:
"Do you have any idea of what sort of place this Cygnian world might be? This place that Sutton went."
Adams smiled wearily. "We aren't positive. Much like Earth, perhaps. We've never been able to get close enough to know. It's the seventh planet of 61 Cygni. It might have been any one of the system's sixteen planets, but mathematically it was figured out that the seventh planet had the best chance of sustaining life."
He paused and looked around the circle of faces and saw that they were waiting for him to go on.
"Sixty-one," he said, "is a near neighbor of ours. It was one of the first suns that Man headed for when he left the Solar system. Ever since it has been a thorn in our sides."
Anderson grinned. "Because we couldn't crack it."
Adams nodded. "That's right. A secret system in a galaxy that held few secrets from Man any time he wanted to go out and take the trouble to solve them.
"We've run into all sorts of weird things, of course. Planetary conditions that, to this day, we haven't licked. Funny, dangerous life. Economic systems and psychological concepts that had us floored and still give us a headache every time we think of them. But we always were able, at the very least, to see the thing that gave us trouble, to know the thing that licked us. With Cygni it was different. We couldn't even get there.
"The planets are either cloud-covered or screened, for we've never seen the surface of a single one of them. And when you get within a few billion miles of the system you start sliding." He looked at Clark. "That's the right word, isn't it?"
"There's no word for it," Clark told him, "but sliding comes as close as any. You aren't stopped or you aren't slowed, but you are deflected. As if the ship had hit ice, although it would be something slicker than ice. Whatever it is, it doesn't register. There's no sign of it, nothing that you can see or nothing that makes even the faintest flicker on the instruments, but you hit it and you slide off course. You correct and you slide off course again. In the early days, it drove men mad trying to reach the system and never getting a mile nearer than a certain imaginary line."