Sometime in the middle of the night he turned the final page and closed the book. He stretched, yawned, rose and staggered. He had not realized that his right foot had grown numb. He reseated himself and waited for the tingling to pass. When it did, he climbed the ladder and replaced the volume. He restored the ladder to its corner. He could have had robot-extensors and gray-lifts, but he preferred libraries of the old-fashioned sort.
He passed through sliding windows and walked to his bar on the west terrace. He seated himself before it and the light to its rear came on.
"Bourbon and water," he said. "Make it a double."
There was a ten-second pause, during which he could feel the faintest of vibrations through his fingertips resting on the bar. Then a six-by-six square opened before him and the drink slowly rose into sight, coming flush with the counter top. He raised it and sipped.
"... And a pack of cigarettes," he added, remembering that he had finished his some hours before.
These were delivered. He opened the pack and lit one with what was probably the last Zippo lighter outside of museums. Certainly the last functioning one. Every piece of it had been replaced, countless times, by custom-made duplicates turned out solely to repair _this_ lighter--so it was not, properly speaking, an antique; it was more in the nature of a direct descendant. His brother had given it to him-- When? He took another sip. He still had the original around somewhere, all the broken pieces reassembled within its scratched case. Probably in the bottom drawer of that old dresser .
He dragged on the cigarette and felt the drink grow hot in his stomach, then move its momentary warmth into regions beyond. An orange moon hung low on the horizon and a rapidly moving white one was pacing midheaven. He smiled faintly, listened to the toadingales in their wallows. They were doing something of Vivaldi's. Was it from _Summer?_ Yes. There it was. He took another swallow and swirled the remainder in hi's glass.
Yes, this was his job, he decided. He was really the only one of them with experience in the area. And of course the priest would rather send the inquiry to an alien than to one of his own people. Less of a chance for reprimand, for racial reasons; and if there was something dangerous involved .
Cynical, he decided, and you don't want to be cynical. Just practical. Whatever prompted the thing, it's yours now; and you know what happened the last time something like this occurred. It must be dealt with. The fact that there will be no element of control means that, ultimately, it will be aimed at everybody.
He finished his drink, ground out his cigarette. The glass dropped from sight. The panel slid closed.
"Give me another of the same," he said; and quickly, "Not the cigarettes," as he remembered the new servomech's program.
The drink was replaced and he took it with him into his study. There, he dropped into and semi-reclined his favorite chair. He dimmed the lights, caused the room temperature to drop to 62 degrees Fahrenheit, moved a control which brought about the ignition of real logs in the fireplace across the room from him, dropped a tri-dee night winter scene upon the room's one window (it would have taken him several hours to arrange for the real thing), extinguished all the lights now he saw that the fire was taking and settled back into his favorite thinking environment.
In the morning, he switched on his automatic Secretary and Files unit.
"First order of business," he dictated. "I want to talk with Dr. Matthews and my three best programmers immediately after breakfast--here in my study. I want breakfast, by the way, in twenty minutes. You estimate the eating time."
"Do you wish to speak with them singly or as a group?" came the voice from the hidden speaker.
"As a group. Now--"
"What would you like for breakfast?" S & F interrupted.
"Anything at all. Now--"
"Please be more specific. The last time you said 'Anything'--"
"All right. Hamandeggsandtoastandmarmaladeandcoffee. Now, the second thing I want is for someone high up on my staff to contact the Surgeon General or the Director of Health or whatever the hell his title is, in the SEL complex. I want full access to that Panopath computer of theirs no later than tomorrow afternoon, local time, via remote input from here on Homefree. Third, have the port hands start checking over the T for distance-jumping. Fourth, find out who it belongs to and get me the dossier. That's it."
Approximately an hour and a quarter later when they had assembled in his study, he waved them toward chairs and smiled.
"Gentlemen," he said, "I require your assistance in obtaining some information. I am not certain as to the specific nature of the information or the questions I must ask in order to come by it, though I do have some vague notions. It will concern people, places, events, probabilities and diseases. Some of the things I wish to know concern happenings fifteen or twenty years past, and some quite recent. It could take a long while to come up with sufficient information for me to act upon, but I do not have a long while. I want it in two or three days. Your job, therefore, will first be to assist me in formulating the appropriate questions, and then to place those questions on my behalf before a data source which I believe capable of providing what I need. That is the general situation. Now we shall discuss specifics."
Late that afternoon, after they had departed, he realized that there was nothing more he could do for the time being, and so turned his attention to other matters.
That evening, however, as he wandered through his arsenal, it was for purposes of making a routine safety check, he told himself. But as time passed, he found that he was checking only the smaller, more lethal pieces, such as might be borne easily by one man, perhaps carried concealed and capable of striking from a distance. When he realized what he was doing he did not stop, however. As, among other things, the only living deicide in the galaxy, he felt it his bounden duty always to be prepared, just in case.
Thus did Francis Sandow spend the days before his departure for Deiba.
Anxious to test his new powers on a smaller scale before moving on to the large urban centers of Summit--a far more heavily populated world than Cleech--Heidel von Hymack orbited the world at a great altitude while he studied its maps and read statistics concerning that synthetic planet.
Then, careful to avoid the traffic control centers of the great space ports, he dropped into a thinly populated, backwoods area of its second major continent, Soris. There, in a canyon, he concealed the vessel he had used, beneath an overhang of rock. He locked its controls and its ports, and with a tiny beamer he had found in a rack, he cut brush for camouflage and arranged it about the jump-buggy.
Moving away, staff in his mottled hand, walking, he broke into song. At an earlier date, this would have surprised him, for he did not understand the words that he sang and the tune was a thing out of dream.
After a time, he saw a small farmhouse built against the side of a hill . .
The music throbbed about him as he set his laboratory in order. He cleaned, adjusted, locked down, put away everything which would not be needed for a time. His giant, ghostlike figure drifted about the ship, straightening, ordering.
I'm becoming a bit old-maidish, he chided himself, smiling inwardly. A place for everything and all of it there. What will it be like if I have the opportunity to go back, be around people again, readapt? Of course, I adapted to deep space ... Still, it would be quite a change. There is nobody who could tackle my condition yet, if H cannot do anything for me. So it would be years off. Several centuries, most likely. Discounting some unexpected breakthrough. What will it be like if it takes several centuries? What will _I_ be like by then? A ghost of a ghost? The only human alien to his own species? What will my descendants say?