"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
Twenty 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 remembered. The same goatish Pan still chased, after twenty years, the same terror-stricken maiden across the self-same hills and dales. And the same rabbit hopped from behind a bush and watched the chase with all his customary boredom, chewing his everlasting cud of clover.
The self-adjusting furniture, bought at a time when the management had considered throwing the hostelry open to the alien trade, had been out-of-date twenty years ago. But it still was there. It had been repainted, in soft, genteel pastels, its self-adjustment features still confined to human forms.
The spongy floor covering had lost some of its sponginess and the Cetian cactus must have died at last, for a pot of frankly Terrestrial geraniums now occupied its place.