There had been mockery in Pringle's voice. And he had been laughing at them all the time, laughing with a sneering amusement, enjoying some thinly varnished joke that they did not know.
Pringle was a talker, a buffoon…but Case was stiff and straight and correct and when he spoke his words were clipped and sharp. There was something about Case…some point…some resemblance…a resemblance to something that escaped Sutton at the moment.
Sitting on the edge of his bed, Sutton frowned.
If I could just remember, he told himself. If I could put my finger on that mannerism, on the way he talks and walks and holds himself erect. If I could associate that with a certain thing I know, it would explain a lot. It might even tell me who Case is, or what he is, or even why he's here.
Case knew that I killed Benton. Case knows who I am. And he should have kept his mouth shut, but he had to let me know he knew, because that way he bolstered up his ego and even if he doesn't look it, his ego may need boosting.
Eva didn't trust them, either, for she tried to tell me something when we parted at her door and I couldn't quite make out what it was from the way she moved her lips, although it looked as if she was trying to say, "Don't trust them."
As if I would trust anyone…anyone at all.
Sutton wiggled his toes and stared at them, fascinated. He tried to wiggle them in series and they wouldn't wiggle that way. He tried to match the wiggling of each toe on each foot and they wouldn't match.
I can't even control my own body, he thought, and it was a funny thing to think.
Pringle and Case were waiting for us, Sutton told himself, and wondered even as he said it if he might not be giving himself over to sheer fantasy. For how could they be waiting when they could not have known that Herkimer and Eva would head for the asteroid?