Quietly his mind moved back along the track of time to his final conscious moment. There had been guns flickering in the night and there had been a hand that reached out and cupped his nose.
Drugged, Sutton told himself. Drugged and dragged away.
Before that there had been a cricket and the frogs singing in the marsh and the talking brook that babbled down the hill, hurrying to get wherever it was going.
And before that a man who had sat across a desk from him and told him about a corporation and a dream and plan the corporation held.
Fantastic, Sutton thought. And in the bright light of the room, the very idea was one of utter fantasy…that Man should go out, not only to the stars, but to the galaxies.
But there was greatness in it, a very human greatness. There had been a time when it had been fantasy to think that Man could ever lift himself from the bosom of the planet of his birth. And another time when it had been fantasy to think that Man would go beyond the Solar system, out into the dread reaches of nothingness that stretched between the stars.
But there had been strength in Trevor, and conviction as well as strength. A man who knew where he was going and why he was going and what it took to get there.
Manifest destiny, Trevor had said. That is what it takes. That is what it needs.
Man would be great and he'd be a god. The concepts of life and thought that had been born on the Earth would be the basic concepts of the entire universe, of the fragile bubble of space and time that bobbed along on a sea of mystery beyond which no mind could penetrate. And yet, by the time that Man got where he was headed for, he might well be able to penetrate that, too.
A mirror stood in one corner of the room and in it he saw the reflection of the lower half of his body, lying on the bed, naked except for a pair of shorts. He wiggled his toes and watched them in the glass.