Sutton said, simply, "I'll always want you, Eva."

He reached out a hand and tenderly touched the copper curl that dropped against her forehead.

"I know that you'll never come," he said. "If it had been just a little different…if we had been two ordinary people living ordinary lives."

"There's a greatness in you, Ash," she told him. "You will be a god to many people."

He stood silently and felt the loneliness of eternity closing in upon him. There was no greatness, as she had said, only the loneliness and bitterness of a man who stood alone and would stand alone forever.

LI

Sutton floated in a sea of light and from far away he heard the humming of the machines at work, little busy machines that were dissecting him with their tiny fingers of probing light and clicking shutters and the sensitive paper that ran like a streak of burnished silver through the holders. Dissecting and weighing, probing and measuring…missing nothing, adding nothing. A faithful record not of himself alone but of every particle of him, of every cell and molecule, of every branching nerve and muscle fiber.

And from somewhere else, also far away, from a place beyond the sea of light that held him, a voice said one word and kept repeating it:

Traitor.