And the man had cried his name just before he died and lifted himself to make a sign with strangely twisted fingers. So I am known, thought Sutton, up in eighty-three and beyond eighty-three, for the boy said back and that means that in his time a time three centuries yet to come is historically the past.
He reached for his coat again and slid the letter into the pocket with the book, then rolled out of bed. He reached for his clothes and began to dress.
For it had come to him, the thing he had to do.
Pringle and Case had used a ship to get to the asteroid and he must find that ship.
XXIII
The lodge was deserted, big and empty with an alienness in its emptiness that made Sutton, who should have been accustomed to alienness, shiver as he felt it touch him.
He stood for a moment outside his door and listened to the whispering of the place, the faint, illogical breathing of the house, the creak of frost-expanded timbers, the caress of wind against a windowpane, and the noises that could not be explained by either frost or wind, the living sound of something that is not alive.
The carpeting in the hall deadened his footsteps as he went down it toward the stairs. Snores came from one of the two rooms which Pringle had said that he and Case occupied and Sutton wondered for a moment which one of them it was that snored.
He went carefully down the stairs, trailing his hand along the banister to guide him, and when he reached the massive living space he waited, standing stock-still so that his eyes might become accustomed to the deeper dark that crouched there like lairing animals.
Slowly the animals took the shapes of chairs and couches, tables, cabinets and cases, and one of the chairs, he saw, had a man sitting in it.