Ahead lay the tall spires of a city. Graceful, hundreds of feet high, they seemed dreamlike yet somehow oddly familiar to Duane. Somewhere he had seen them before. He dragged deep into his mind, plumbing the cloudy, impenetrable haze that had settled on it, trying to bring forth the memories that he should have had. Amnesia, they called it; complete forgetting of the happenings of a lifetime. He'd heard of it—but never dreamed it could happen to him!
My name, it seems, is Peter Duane, he thought. And they tell me that I killed a man!
The thought was starkly incredible to him. A white-haired man, it had been; someone named Stevens. He tried to remember.
Yes, there had been a white-haired man. And there had been an argument. Something to do with money, with a shipment of goods that Stevens had supplied to Duane. There has even been talk of killing....
But—murder! Duane looked at his hands helplessly.
Andrias, up ahead, was turning around. He looked sharply at Duane, for a long second. An uncertainty clouded his eyes, and abruptly he looked forward again without speaking.
"Who's this man Andrias?" Duane whispered to the nearest guard.
The man stared at him. "Governor Andrias," he said, "is the League's deputy on Callisto. You know—the Earth-Mars League. They put Governor Andrias here to—well, to govern for them."
"League?" Duane asked, wrinkling his brow. He had heard something about a League once, yes. But it was all so nebulous....
The other guard stirred, leaned over. "Shut up," he said heavily. "You'll have plenty of chance for talking later."