“For the same reason”, answered a precise metallic voice from behind his shoulder, “that you went out to Andromeda. He is driven by the need to learn.”
“He wouldn’t have gone if I hadn’t told him all about Vulcan. It’s my fault, Simon.”
Curt Newton looked at his companion. He saw nothing strange in the small square case hovering on its traction beams — the incredibly intricate serum-case that housed the living brain of him who had been Simon Wright, a man. That artificial voice had taught him his first words, the lens-like artificial eyes that watched him now had watched his first stumbling attempts to walk, the microphonic ears had heard his infant wails.
“Simon — do you think Carlin is dead?”
“Speculation is quite useless, Curtis. We can only try to find him.”
“We’ve got to find him”, Newton said, with somber determination. “He helped us when we needed help. And he was our friend.”
Friend. He had had so few close human friends, this man whom the System called Captain Future. Always he had stood in the shadow of a loneliness that was the inescapable heritage of his strange childhood.
Orphaned almost at birth he had grown to manhood on the lonely Moon, knowing no living creature but the three unhuman Futuremen. They had been his playmates, his teachers, his inseparable companions. Inevitably by that upbringing he was forever set apart from his own kind.
Few people had ever penetrated that barrier of reserve. Philip Carlin had been one of them. And now Carlin was gone into mystery.
“If I had been here”, Newton brooded, “I’d never have let him go.”