"Doctor," said Sutton, "what do you know of destiny?"
"It's strange to hear you talk of destiny," said Dr. Raven. "You always were a man who never was inclined to bow to destiny."
"I mean documentary destiny," Sutton explained. "Not the abstraction, but the actual thing, the actual belief in destiny. What do the records say?"
"There always have been men who believed in destiny," said Dr. Raven. "Some of them, it would appear, with some justification. But mostly, they didn't call it destiny. They called it luck or a hunch or inspiration or something else. There have been historians who wrote of manifest destiny, but those were no more than words. Just a matter of semantics. Of course, there were some fanatics and there were others who believed in destiny, but practiced fatalism."
"But there is no evidence," said Sutton. "No actual evidence of a thing called destiny? An actual force. A living, vital thing. Something you can put your finger on."
Dr. Raven shook his head. "None that I know of, Ash. Destiny, after all, is just a word. It isn't something that you can pin down. Faith, too, at one time, may have been no more than a word, just as destiny is today. But millions of people and thousands of years made it an actual force, a thing that can be defined and invoked and a thing to live by."
"But hunches and luck," protested Sutton. "Those are just happenstance."
"They might be glimmerings of destiny," Dr. Raven declared. "Flashes showing through. A hint of a broad stream of happening behavior. One cannot know, of course. Man can be blind to so many things until he has the facts. Turning points in history have rested on a hunch. Inspired belief in one's own ability has changed the course of events more times than one can count."
He rose and walked to a bookcase, stood with his head tilted back.
"Somewhere," he said, "if I can find it, there is a book."
He searched and did not find it.
"No matter," he declared, "I'll run onto it later if you are still interested. It tells about an old African tribe with a strange belief. They believed that each man's spirit or consciousness or ego or whatever you may call it had a partner, a counterpart on some distant star. If I remember rightly, they even knew which star and could point it out in the evening sky."
He turned around from the bookcase and stared at Sutton.
"That might be destiny, you know," he said. "It might, very well, at that."
He crossed the room to stand in front of the cold fireplace, hands locked behind his back, silver head tilted to one side.
"Why are you so interested in destiny?" he asked.
"Because I found destiny," said Sutton.
XV
The face in the visiplate was masked and Adams spoke in chilly anger:, "I do not receive masked calls."
"You will this one," said the voice form behind the mask. "I am the man you talked to on the patio. Remember?"
"Calling from the future, I presume," said Adams.
"No, I still am in your time. I have been watching you."
"Watching Sutton, too?"
The masked head nodded. "You have seen him now. What do you think?"
"He's hiding something," Adams said. "And not all of him is human."
"You're going to have him killed?"
"No," said Adams. "No, I don't think I will. He knows something that we need to know. And we won't get it out of him by killing."
"What he knows," said the masked voice, "is better dead with the man who knows it."
"Perhaps," said Adams, "we could come to an understanding if you would tell me what this is all about."
"I can't tell you, Adams. I wish I could. I can't tell you the future."
"And until you do," snapped Adams, "I won't let you change the past."
And he was thinking: The man is scared. Scared and almost desperate. He could kill Sutton any time he wished, but he is afraid to do it. Sutton has to be killed by a man of his own time…literally has to be, for time may not tolerate the extension of violence from one bracket to the next.
"By the way," said the future man.
"Yes," said Adams.
"I was going to ask you how things are on Aldebaran XII."
Adams sat rigid in his chair, anger flaming in him.
"If it hadn't been for Sutton," said the masked man, "there would have been no incident on Aldebaran XII."
"But Sutton wasn't back yet," snapped Adams. "He wasn't even here…"
His voice ran down, for he remembered something. The name on the flyleaf…"by Asher Sutton."
"Look," said Adams, "tell me, for the love of heaven, if you have anything to tell."
"You mean to say you haven't guessed what it might be?"
Adams shook his head.
"It's war," the voice said.
"But there is no war."
"Not in your time, but in another time."
"But how…"
"Remember Michaelson?"
"The man who went a second into time."
The masked head nodded and the screen went blank and Adams sat and felt the chill of horror trickle through his body.
The visor buzzer purred at him and mechanically he snapped the toggle over.
It was Nelson in the glass.
"Sutton just left the university," Nelson said. "He spent an hour with Dr. Horace Raven. Dr. Raven, if you don't recall, is a professor of comparative religion."
"Oh," said Adams. "Oh, so that is it."
He tapped his fingers on the desk, half irritated, half frightened.
It would be a shame, he thought, to kill a man like Sutton.
But it might be best.
Yes, he told himself, it might be for the best,
XVI
Clark said that he had died and Clark was an engineer. Clark made a graph and death was in the graph; mathematics foretold that certain strains and stresses would turn a body into human jelly.
And Anderson had said he wasn't human and how was Anderson to know?
The road curved ahead, a silver strip shining in the moonlight, and the sounds and smells of night lay across the land. The sharp, clean smell of growing things, the mystery smell of water. A creek ran through the marsh that lay off to the right and Sutton, from behind the wheel, caught the flashing hint of winding, moonlit water as he took a curve. Peeping frogs made a veil of pixy sound that hugged against the hills and fireflies were swinging lanterns that signaled through the dark.
And how was Anderson to know?
How, asked Sutton, unless he examined me? Unless he was the one who tried to probe into my mind after I had been knocked out when I walked into my room?
Adams had tipped his hand and Adams never tipped his hand unless he wanted one to see. Unless he had an ace tucked neatly up his sleeve.
He wanted me to know, Sutton told himself. He wanted me to know, but he couldn't tell me. He couldn't tell me he had me down on tape and film, that he was the one who had rigged up the room.
But he could let me know by making just one slip, a carefully calculated slip, like the one on Anderson. He knew that I would catch and he thinks he can jitter me.
The headlights caught, momentarily, the gray-black massive lines of a house that huddled on a hillside and then there was another curve. A night bird, black and ghostly, fluttered across the road and the shadow of its flight danced down the cone of light.
Adams was the one, said Sutton, talking to himself. He was the one who was waiting for me. He knew, somehow, that I was coming, and he was all primed and cocked. He had me tagged and ticketed before I hit the ground and he gave me a going over before I knew what was going on.
And undoubtedly he found a whole lot more than he bargained for.
Sutton chuckled dryly. And the chuckle was a scream that came slanting down the hill slope in a blaze of streaming fire…a stream of fire that ended in the marsh, that died down momentarily, then licked out in blue and red.