Time and Again Read Online Free PDF Page B

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,