Time and Again Read Online Free PDF

no features left, no fingerprints or eyeprints to match against the records.
    A few feet away from the strewn blackness of the bodies the machine had smashed into a tree, had wrapped itself around and half sheared the trunk in two. A machine that, like the men, was without a record. A machine without a counterpart in the known galaxy and, so far at least, a machine without a purpose.
    Thorne would give it the works. He would set it up in solidographs, down to the last shattered piece of glass and plastic. He would have it analyzed and diagramed and the robots would put it in scanners that would peel it and record it molecule by molecule.
    And they might find something. Just possibly they might.
    Adams shoved the report to one side and leaned back in his chair. Idly, he spelled out his name lettered across the office door, reading backwards slowly and with exaggerated care. As if he'd never seen the name before. As if he did not know it. Puzzling it out.
    And then the line beneath it:
    SUPERVISOR, ALIEN RELATIONS BUREAU. SPACE SECTOR 16.
    And the line beneath that:
    DEPARTMENT OF GALACTIC INVESTIGATION (JUSTICE).
    Early afternoon sunlight slanted through a window and fell across his head, highlighting the clipped silver mustache, the whitening temple hair.
    Five men had died…
    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,