Ker-rup…
War, the man in the mask had said.
And hours later, a ship had come screaming down across the hills like a blazing comet to plunge into a swamp.
A ship such as no man as yet had made, carrying melted weapons that were unlike any that man had yet invented. A ship whose thunder in the night had roused the sleeping inhabitants for miles around, whose flaming metal had been a beacon glowing in the sky.
A ship and a body and a track that led from ship to body across three hundred yards of marsh. The trace of one man's footprints and the furrowing trail of other feet that dragged across the mud. And the man who had carried the dead man had been Asher Sutton, for Sutton's fingerprints were on the muddied clothing of the man lying at the swamp's edge.
Sutton, though Adams wearily. It is always Sutton. Sutton's name on the flyleaf out of Aldebaran XII. Sutton's fingerprints upon a dead man's clothing. The man in the mask had said there would have been no incident on Aldebaran if it had not been for Sutton. And Sutton had killed Benton with a bullet in the arm.
Ker-rup, clickity, click, ker-rup…
Dr. Raven had sat in that chair across the desk and told of the afternoon Sutton had dropped in at the university.
"He found destiny," Dr. Raven had said and he said it as if it were commonplace, as if it were a thing that could not be questioned and a thing that could have been expected all along to happen.
Not a religion, Dr. Raven had said, with the afternoon sunlight shining on his snow-white hair. Oh, dear, no, not a religion. Destiny, don't you understand?