"We won't do so badly," Pringle said. "Morgan and his crowd will pay us handsomely."
Case was squeamish. "I don't like it, Pringle. A dead man is a dead man if you leave him dead. But when you sell him, that makes you a butcher."
"That's not the thing that's worrying me," Pringle told him. "What will it do to the future, Case? To our future. We had a future with many of its facets based on Sutton's book. If we had managed to change the book a little it wouldn't have mattered much…wouldn't have mattered at all, in fact, the way we had it figured out. But now Sutton's dead. There will be no book by Sutton. The future will be different."
Sutton rose to his feet.
They spun around and faced him and Case's hand went for his gun.
"Go ahead," invited Sutton. "Shoot me full of holes. You won't live a minute longer for it."
He tried to hate them, as he had hated Benton during that one fleeting moment back on Earth. Hatred so strong and primal that it had blasted the man's mind into oblivion.
But there was no hate. Just a ponderous, determined will to kill.
He moved forward on sturdy legs and his hands reached out.
Pringle ran, squealing like a rat, seeking to escape. Case's gun spat twice and when blood oozed out and ran down Sutton's chest and he still came on, Case threw away his weapon and backed against the wall.