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.