"The psych-tracer in Adams' office has stopped," Herkimer had said and then the plate had gone dead as he cut the visor.
There was no trace of Sutton and the tracer had gone dead.
That meant that Sutton was dead and he could not be dead, for historically he had written a book and as yet he had not written it.
Although history was something that you couldn't trust. It was put together wrong, or copied wrong, or misinterpreted, or improved upon by a man with a misplaced imagination. Truth was so hard to keep, myth and fable so easy to breathe into a life that was more logical and more acceptable than truth.
Half the history of Sutton, Eva knew, must be purely apocryphal. And yet there were certain truths that must be truths indeed.
Someone had written a book and it would have had to be Sutton, for no one else could break the language in which his notes were written and the words themselves breathed the very sincerity of the man himself.
Sutton had died, but not on Earth nor in Earth's solar system and not at the age of sixty. He had died on a planet circling some far star and he had not died for many, many years.
These were truths that could not well be twisted. These were truths that had to stand until they were disproved.
And yet the tracer had stopped.
Eva got up from her chair and walked across the room to the window that looked out on the landscaped grounds of the Orion Arms. Fireflies were dotting the bushes with their brief, cold flame and the late moon was coming up behind a cloud that looked like a gentle hill.