Time and Again by Clifford D. Simak Read Free Book Online Page B

bent, the whole thing was twisted out of kilter. Even if you could start the engines, the ship would never handle. Even with the tubes O.K., you couldn't set a course. Give it any drive and it would simply corkscrew."
    Anderson cleared his throat. "What would have happened to Sutton if he'd been in it when it struck?"
    "He would have died," said Clark.
    "You are positive of that?"
    "No question of it. Even a miracle wouldn't have saved him. We thought of that same thing, so we worked it out. We rigged up a diagram and we used the most conservative force factors to show theoretic effects…"
    Adams interrupted. "But he must have been in the ship."
    Clark shook his head stubbornly. "If he was, he died. Our diagram shows he didn't have a chance. If one force didn't kill him, a dozen others would."
    "Sutton came back," Adams pointed out.
    The two stared at one another, half angrily.
    Anderson broke the silence. "Had he tried to fix it up?"
    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."
    Adams nodded. "That's right. A secret system in a galaxy that held few secrets from Man any time he wanted to go out and take the trouble to solve them.
    "We've run into all sorts of weird things, of course. Planetary conditions that, to this day, we haven't licked. Funny, dangerous life. Economic systems and psychological concepts that had us floored and still give us a headache every time we think of them. But we always were able, at the very least, to see the thing that gave us trouble, to know the thing that licked us. With Cygni it was different. We couldn't even get there.
    "The planets are either cloud-covered or screened, for we've never seen the surface of a single one of them. And when you get within a few billion miles of the system you start sliding." He looked at Clark. "That's the right word, isn't it?"
    "There's no word for it," Clark told him, "but sliding comes as close as any. You aren't stopped or you aren't slowed, but you are deflected. As if the ship had hit ice, although it would be something slicker than ice. Whatever it is, it doesn't register. There's no sign of it, nothing that you can see or nothing that makes even the faintest flicker on the instruments, but you hit it and you slide off course. You correct and you slide off course again. In the early days, it drove men mad trying to reach the system and never getting a mile nearer than a certain imaginary line."
    "As if," said Adams, "someone had taken his finger and drawn a deadline around the system."
    "Something like that," said Clark.
    "But