The room was huge, with only one lamp burning, and shadows pressed in upon them out of the dark corners and the cavernous arch of the raftered ceiling.
"I am afraid," said Pringle, "that you'll have to look out for yourselves. Case and I are roughing it and we brought along no robots. Although I can fix up something if you happen to be hungry. A hot drink, perhaps, and some sandwiches?"
"We ate just before we landed," Eva said, "and Herkimer will take care of what few things we have."
"Then take a chair," urged Pringle. "That one over there is comfortable. We will talk a bit."
"I'm afraid we can't. The trip was just a little rough."
"You're an ungracious young lady," Pringle said, and his words were halfway between jest and anger.
"I'm a tired young lady."
Pringle walked to a wall, flipped up toggles. Lights sprang into being.
"The bedrooms are up the stairs," he said. "Off the balcony. Case and I have the first and second to the left. You may have your pick from any of the rest."
He moved forward to lead them up the stairs. But Case spoke up and Pringle stopped and waited, one hand on tie lower curve of the stair rail.
"Mr. Sutton," said Case, "it seems to me I have heard your name somewhere."
"I don't think so," said Sutton. "I'm a most unimportant person."
"But you killed Benton."
"No one said I killed him."
Case did not laugh, but his voice said that if he had not been Case he would have laughed.
"Nevertheless, you must have killed him. For I happen to know that is the only way anyone could get this asteroid. Benton loved it and this side of life he'd never give it up."
"Since you insist, then, I did kill Benton."
Case shook his head, bewildered. "Remarkable," he said. "Remarkable."
"Good night, Mr. Case," said Eva, and then she spoke to Pringle. "No need to trouble you. We will find our way."
"No trouble," Pringle rumbled back. "No trouble at all." And, once again, he was laughing at them.
He jogged lightly up the stairs.
XX
Pringle and Case were wrong. There was something wrong about them. The very fact that they were here, at the lodge, was sinister.
There had been mockery in Pringle's voice. And he had been laughing at them all the time, laughing with a sneering amusement, enjoying some thinly varnished joke that they did not know.
Pringle was a talker, a buffoon…but Case was stiff and straight and correct and when he spoke his words were clipped and sharp. There was something about Case…some point…some resemblance…a resemblance to something that escaped Sutton at the moment.
Sitting on the edge of his bed, Sutton frowned.
If I could just remember, he told himself. If I could put my finger on that mannerism, on the way he talks and walks and holds himself erect. If I could associate that with a certain thing I know, it would explain a lot. It might even tell me who Case is, or what he is, or even why he's here.
Case knew that I killed Benton. Case knows who I am. And he should have kept his mouth shut, but he had to let me know he knew, because that way he bolstered up his ego and even if he doesn't look it, his ego may need boosting.
Eva didn't trust them, either, for she tried to tell me something when we parted at her door and I couldn't quite make out what it was from the way she moved her lips, although it looked as if she was trying to say, "Don't trust them."
As if I would trust anyone…anyone at all.
Sutton wiggled his toes and stared at them, fascinated. He tried to wiggle them in series and they wouldn't wiggle that way. He tried to match the wiggling of each toe on each foot and they wouldn't match.
I can't even control my own body, he thought, and it was a funny thing to think.
Pringle and Case were waiting for us, Sutton told himself, and wondered even as he said it if he might not be giving himself over to sheer fantasy. For how could they be waiting when they could not have known that Herkimer and Eva would head for the asteroid?
He shook his head, but the belief that the two had been waiting for them stayed…an idea clinging like a burr.
After all, it was not so strange. Adams had known that he was coming back to Earth, returning home after twenty years. Adams knew and set a trap for him…and there was no way, absolutely no way that Adams could have known.
And why, he asked himself. Why?
Why did Adams set the trap?
Why had Buster run away to homestead a planet?
Why had someone conditioned Benton to issue a challenge?
Why had Eva and Herkimer brought him to the asteroid?
To write a book, they said.
But the book was written.
The book…
He reached for his coat, which hung from the back of a chair. From it, he took out the gold-lettered copy of the book, and as he pulled it out the letter came with it and fell upon the carpet. He picked the letter up and put it on the bed beside him and opened the book to the flyleaf.
THIS IS DESTINY, it said, By Asher Sutton.
Underneath the title, at the very bottom of the page, was a line of fine print.
Sutton had to hold the book a little closer so that he could read it.
It said: Original Version.
And that was all. No date of publication. No marks of copyright. No publisher's imprint.
Just the title and the author and the line of print that said Original Version.
As if, he thought…as if the book was so well known, so firm a fixture in the lives of everyone, that anything other than the title and the author would be superfluous.
He turned two pages and they were blank and then another page and the text began…
We are not alone.
No one ever is alone.
Not since the first faint stirring of the first flicker of life on the first planet in the galaxy that knew the quickening of life, has there ever been a single entity that walked or crawled or slithered down the path of life alone.
And that is it, he thought. That is the way I mean to write it.
That was the way I wrote it.
For I must have written it. Sometime, somewhere, I must have written it, for I hold it in my hands.
He closed the book and put it back carefully in the pocket and hung the coat back on the chair.
For I must not read, he told himself. I must not read and know the way that it will go, for then I would write the way that I had read it, and I must not do that. I must write it the way I know it is, the way I plan to write it, the only way to write it.
I must be honest, for someday the race of man…and the race of other things as well…may know the book and read it and every word must be exactly so and I must write so well and so simply that all can understand.
He threw back the covers of the bed and crawled beneath them, and as he did he saw the letter and picked it up.
With a steady finger, he inserted his nail beneath the flap and ran it along the edge and the mucilage dissolved in a brittle storm of powder that showered down on the sheet.
He took the letter out and unfolded it carefully, so that it would not break, and saw that it was typewritten, with many mistakes that were X'd out, as if the man who wrote it found a typewriter an unhandy thing to use.
He rolled over on one side and held the paper under the lamp and this is what he read:
XXI
Bridgeport, Wis.
July 11, 1987
I write this letter to myself, so that the postmark may prove beyond controversy the day and year that it was written, and I shall not open it but shall place it among my effects against the day when someone, a member of my own family, God willing, may open it and read. And reading, know the thing that I believe and think, but dare not say while I am still alive, lest someone call me touched.