He did not knock nor did he turn the knob. He hit the door and it shattered open, with a wrecked and twisted lock dangling by its screws.
The bed was empty and there was no one in the room.
XXVIII
Sutton sensed resurrection and he fought against it, for death was so comfortable. Like a soft, warm bed. And resurrection was a strident, insistent, maddening alarm clock that shrilled across the predawn chill of a dreadful, frowzy room. Dreadful with its life and its bare reality and its sharp, sickening reminder that one must get up and walk into reality again.
But this is not the first time. No, indeed, said Sutton. This is not the first time that I died and came to life again. For I did it once before and that time I was dead for a long, long time.
There was a hard, flat surface underneath him and he lay face down upon it and for what seemed an interminable stretch of time his mind struggled to visualize the hardness and smoothness beneath him. Hard and flat and smooth, three words, but they did not help one see or understand the thing that they described.
He felt life creep back and quicken, seep along his legs and arms. But he wasn't breathing and his heart was still.
Floor!
That was it…that was the word for the thing on which he lay. The flat, hard surface was a floor.
Sounds came to him, but at first he didn't call them sounds, for he had no word for them at all, and then, a moment later, he knew that they were sounds.
Now he could move one finger. Then a second finger.
He opened his eyes and there was light.
The sounds were voices and the voices were words and the words were thoughts.
It takes so long to figure things out, Sutton told himself.
"We should have tried a little harder," said a voice, "and a little longer. The trouble with us, Case, is that we have no patience."
"Patience wouldn't have done a bit of good," said Case. "He was convinced that we were bluffing. No matter what we'd done or said, he'd still have thought we were bluffing and we would have gotten nowhere. There was only one thing to do."
"Yes, I know," Pringle agreed. "Convince him that we weren't bluffing."
He made a sound of blowing out his breath. "Pity, too," he said. "He was such a bright young man."
They were silent for a time and now it was not life alone, but strength, that was flowing into Sutton. Strength to stand and walk, strength to lift his arms, strength to vent his anger. Strength to kill two men.
"We won't do so badly," Pringle said. "Morgan and his crowd will pay us handsomely."
Case was squeamish. "I don't like it, Pringle. A dead man is a dead man if you leave him dead. But when you sell him, that makes you a butcher."
"That's not the thing that's worrying me," Pringle told him. "What will it do to the future, Case? To our future. We had a future with many of its facets based on Sutton's book. If we had managed to change the book a little it wouldn't have mattered much…wouldn't have mattered at all, in fact, the way we had it figured out. But now Sutton's dead. There will be no book by Sutton. The future will be different."
Sutton rose to his feet.
They spun around and faced him and Case's hand went for his gun.
"Go ahead," invited Sutton. "Shoot me full of holes. You won't live a minute longer for it."
He tried to hate them, as he had hated Benton during that one fleeting moment back on Earth. Hatred so strong and primal that it had blasted the man's mind into oblivion.
But there was no hate. Just a ponderous, determined will to kill.
He moved forward on sturdy legs and his hands reached out.
Pringle ran, squealing like a rat, seeking to escape. Case's gun spat twice and when blood oozed out and ran down Sutton's chest and he still came on, Case threw away his weapon and backed against the wall.
It didn't take long.
They couldn't get away.
There was no place to go.
XXIX
Sutton maneuvered the ship down against the tiny asteroid, a whirling piece of debris not much bigger than the ship itself. He felt it touch and his thumb reached out and knocked over the gravity lever and the ship clamped down, to go tumbling through space with the twisting chunk of rock.
Sutton let his hands fall to his side, sat quietly in the pilot's chair. In front of him, space was black and friendless, streaked by the pinpoint stars that spun in lines of fire across the field of vision, writing cryptic messages of cold, white light across the cosmos as the asteroid bumbled on its erratic course.
Safe, he told himself. Safe for a while, at least. Perhaps safe forever, for there might be no one looking for 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.