"And I," Kevin told them. "It's familiar, though I can't place it."
Steve felt his heart pounding. The voice was Charlie's.
* * * * *
They stood on a flat, grassy plain which stretched halfway to the
horizon and then began to undulate into low hills. And far off,
shrouded by purple mists, a range of mountains loomed distantly.
Purple mist; a purplish cast to the sky; a fiercely bright blue sun.
"What world is this?" said Kevin.
The crew of the _Frank Buck_--a hundred men--stood in a long, thin
file outside the ship. They'd balked at first, but silently, the
three anthrovacs had ferreted them out with their neutron guns, never
uttering a sound, merely motioning with the weapons. Of the other
animals Steve saw nothing, but within the corridors of the _Frank Buck_
he'd encountered a sand crawler and a desert cat, both dead.
The seconds fled, became minutes. When half an hour had passed, the
crew became restless and some of them ambled off on the grassy plain
until one of the anthrovacs herded them back. The _Frank Buck_'s Exec,
a short, wiry man, strode within the ship and came out a few moments
later, scratching his head. "I can't understand it," he said. "None of
the instruments work. I thought we could just pile back into the ship
and blast off, but apparently someone has other ideas."
Someone did.
Someone came striding across the plain, a small dot of a figure at
first. He came closer.
Steve ignored the anthrovacs, ran forward. "Charlie!" he cried.
"Charlie!"
The man was shorter than Steve, and stockier. His eyes searched Steve's
face briefly, and he said: "Should I know you?"
"Should you! I'm your brother!"
"Interesting, but quite impossible."
The words hardly registered, and Steve babbled on, "We thought you
were dead. It was Teejay here who reported back to Earth saying you'd
died on Ganymede. Now you're alive and--" Abruptly he whirled, turned
to Teejay. "You lied, damn you! Here's Charlie, see? Charlie was never
dead. But you said--"
"I said Charlie was dead." The woman met his gaze levelly. "He was. I
know a dead man when I see one. He was dead."
"But--"
"But nothing. I don't know who this is. I can't explain it. That has
nothing to do with what happened on Ganymede years ago."
"Yes? Then what did happen? Why did Charlie write once that you must
have been spawned in hell? You never did want to tell me what happened
on Ganymede, did you? Maybe Charlie can."
"That is my name, Charlie Stedman. It is the name this body has always
had, although when I do not inhabit it I assure you I am not Charlie
Stedman," the stocky man said. "You see, the original inhabitant of the
garment--the body--was destroyed. The name applied to the body as well
as the inhabiting mind. The language remained engraved in the brain
cells, and impersonal parts of the memory, too. In that sense, I am
Charlie Stedman. Does it satisfy you?"
"Hell, no," said Steve, bewildered. Mystery had been piled upon
mystery, with no solution in sight. And grim confusion turned to
grimmer anger as he faced Teejay once more. "All right, start talking.
Just how did you find Charlie? And what made him hate you like that?
Talk, damn you!"
"Okay, I will. But I don't know why Charlie hated me, and that's the
truth. I only met him once or twice and--unless it was Schuyler here.
Hey, Schuyler!"