Clark shook his head. "Not a mark to show he did. There would have been no use in trying. Sutton didn't know a thing about mechanics. Not a single thing. I checked on that. He had no training, no natural inclination. And it takes a man with savvy to repair an atomic engine. Fix it, not rebuild it. And this setup would have called for complete rebuilding."
Shulcross spoke for the first time, softly, quietly, not moving from his awkward slouch.
"Maybe we're starting wrong," he said. "Starting in the middle. If we started at the beginning, laid the groundwork first, we might get a better idea of what really happened."
They looked at him, all of them, wondering what he meant.
Shulcross saw it was up to him to go ahead. He spoke to Adams:
"Do you have any idea of what sort of place this Cygnian world might be? This place that Sutton went."
Adams smiled wearily. "We aren't positive. Much like Earth, perhaps. We've never been able to get close enough to know. It's the seventh planet of 61 Cygni. It might have been any one of the system's sixteen planets, but mathematically it was figured out that the seventh planet had the best chance of sustaining life."
He paused and looked around the circle of faces and saw that they were waiting for him to go on.
"Sixty-one," he said, "is a near neighbor of ours. It was one of the first suns that Man headed for when he left the Solar system. Ever since it has been a thorn in our sides."
Anderson grinned. "Because we couldn't crack it."