Time and Again Read Free

who will pay attention. These are the ones who will save me against any future enmity that Man may raise against me.
    For they are worse than the disinherited. They are not the has-beens, they are the never-weres.
    They were not born of woman but of the laboratory. Their mother is a bin of chemicals and their father the ingenuity and technology of the normal race.
    Android: An artificial human. A human made in the laboratory out of Man's own deep knowledge of chemicals and atomic and molecular structure and the strange reaction that is known as life.
    Human in all but two respects—the mark upon the forehead and the inability to reproduce biologically.
    Artificial humans to help the real humans, the biological humans, carry the load of galactic empire, to make the thin line of humanity the thicker. But kept in their place. Oh, yes, most definitely kept in their right place.
    The corridor was empty, and Sutton, his bare feet slapping on the floor, followed the android.
    The door before which they stopped said:

    THOMAS H. DAVIS
    (Human)
    Operations Chief

    "In there," the android said.
    Sutton walked in and the man behind the desk looked up and gulped.
    "I'm a human," Sutton told him. "I may not look it, but I am."
    The man jerked his thumb toward a chair. "Sit down," he said.
    Sutton sat.
    "Why didn't you answer our signals?" Davis asked.
    "My set was broken," Sutton told him.
    "Your ship has no identity."
    "The rains washed it off," said Sutton, "and I had no paint."
    "Rain doesn't wash off paint."
    "Not Earth rain," said Sutton. "Where I was, it does."
    "Your motors?" asked Davis. "We could pick up nothing from them."
    "They weren't working," Sutton told him.
    Davis' Adam's apple bobbed up and down. "Weren't working. How did you navigate?"
    "With energy," said Sutton.
    "Energy…" Davis choked.
    Sutton stared at him icily.
    "Anything else?" he asked.
    Davis was confused. The red tape had gotten tangled. The answers were all wrong. He fiddled with a pencil.
    "Just the usual things, I guess." He drew a pad of forms before him.
    "Name?"
    "Asher Sutton."
    "Origin of fli…Say, wait a minute! Asher Sutton!"
    Davis flung the pencil on the pad, pushed away the pad.
    "That's right."
    "Why didn't you tell me that at first?"
    "I didn't have a chance."
    Davis was flustered.
    "If I had known…" he said.
    "It's the beard," said Sutton.
    "My father talked about you often. Jim Davis. Maybe you remember him."
    Sutton shook his head.
    "Great friend of your father's. That is…they knew one another."
    "How is my father?" asked Sutton.
    "Great," said Davis, enthusiastically. "Keeping well. Getting along in years, but standing up…"
    "My father and mother," Sutton told him, coldly, "died fifty years ago. In the Argus pandemic."
    He heaved himself to his feet, faced Davis squarely.
    "If you're through," he said, "I'd like to go to my hotel. They'll find some room for me."
    "Certainly, Mr. Sutton, certainly. Which hotel?"
    "The Orion Arms."
    Davis reached into a drawer, took out a directory, flipped the pages, ran a shaking finger down a column.
    "Cherry 26-3489," he said. "The teleport is over there."
    He pointed to a booth set flush into the wall.
    "Thanks," said Sutton.
    "About your father, Mr. Sutton…"
    "I know," said Sutton. "I'm glad you tipped me off."
    He swung around and walked to the teleport. Before he closed the door, he looked back.
    Davis was on the visaphone, talking rapidly.

III

    T WENTY YEARS had not changed the Orion Arms.
    To Sutton, stepping out of the teleport, it looked the same as the day he had walked away. A little shabbier and slightly more on the fuddy-duddy side…but it was home, the quiet whisper of hushed activity, the dowdy furnishings, the finger-to-the-lip, tiptoe atmosphere, the stressed respectability that he had remembered and dreamed about in the long years of alienness.
    The life-mural along the wall was the same as ever. A little faded with long running, but the self-same one that Sutton had