The car slid to a stop before the administration building and the android opened the door.
"This way, sir," he said.
Only a few chairs in the lobby were occupied and most of those by humans. Humans or androids, thought Sutton. You can't tell the difference until you see their foreheads.
The sign upon the forehead, the brand of manufacture. The telltale mark that said, "This man is not a human, although he looks like one."
These are the ones who will listen to me. These are the ones who will pay attention. These are the ones who will save me against any future enmity that Man may raise against me.
For they are worse than the disinherited. They are not the has-beens, they are the never-weres.
They were not born of woman but of the laboratory. Their mother is a bin of chemicals and their father the ingenuity and technology of the normal race.
Android: An artificial human. A human made in the laboratory out of Man's own deep knowledge of chemicals and atomic and molecular structure and the strange reaction that is known as life.
Human in all but two respects — the mark upon the forehead and the inability to reproduce biologically.
Artificial humans to help the real humans, the biological humans, carry the load of galactic empire, to make the thin line of humanity the thicker. But kept in their place. Oh, yes, most definitely kept in their right place.
The corridor was empty, and Sutton, his bare feet slapping on the floor, followed the android.
The door before which they stopped said:
THOMAS H. DAVIS
(Human)
Operations Chief
"In there," the android said.
Sutton walked in and the man behind the desk looked up and gulped.
"I'm a human," Sutton told him. "I may not look it, but I am."
The man jerked his thumb toward a chair. "Sit down," he said.
Sutton sat.
"Why didn't you answer our signals?" Davis asked.
"My set was broken," Sutton told him.
"Your ship has no identity."
"The rains washed it off," said Sutton, "and I had no paint."
"Rain doesn't wash off paint."
"Not Earth rain," said Sutton. "Where I was, it does."
"Your motors?" asked Davis. "We could pick up nothing from them."
"They weren't working," Sutton told him.
Davis' Adam's apple bobbed up and down. "Weren't working. How did you navigate?"
"With energy," said Sutton.
"Energy…" Davis choked.
Sutton stared at him icily.
"Anything else?" he asked.
Davis was confused. The red tape had gotten tangled. The answers were all wrong. He fiddled with a pencil.
"Just the usual things, I guess." He drew a pad of forms before him.
"Name?"
"Asher Sutton."
"Origin of fli…Say, wait a minute! Asher Sutton!"
Davis flung the pencil on the pad, pushed away the pad.
"That's right."
"Why didn't you tell me that at first?"
"I didn't have a chance."
Davis was flustered.
"If I had known…" he said.
"It's the beard," said Sutton.
"My father talked about you often. Jim Davis. Maybe you remember him."
Sutton shook his head.
"Great friend of your father's. That is…they knew one another."
"How is my father?" asked Sutton.
"Great," said Davis, enthusiastically. "Keeping well. Getting along in years, but standing up…"
"My father and mother," Sutton told him, coldly, "died fifty years ago. In the Argus pandemic."
He heaved himself to his feet, faced Davis squarely.
"If you're through," he said, "I'd like to go to my hotel. They'll find some room for me."
"Certainly, Mr. Sutton, certainly. Which hotel?"
"The Orion Arms."
Davis reached into a drawer, took out a directory, flipped the pages, ran a shaking finger down a column.
"Cherry 26-3489," he said. "The teleport is over there."
He pointed to a booth set flush into the wall.
"Thanks," said Sutton.
"About your father, Mr. Sutton…"
"I know," said Sutton. "I'm glad you tipped me off."
He swung around and walked to the teleport. Before he closed the door, he looked back.
Davis was on the visaphone, talking rapidly.
III
Twenty years had not changed the Orion Arms.
To Sutton, stepping out of the teleport, it looked the same as the day he had walked away. A little shabbier and slightly more on the fuddy-duddy side…but it was home, the quiet whisper of hushed activity, the dowdy furnishings, the finger-to-the-lip, tiptoe atmosphere, the stressed respectability that he had remembered and dreamed about in the long years of alienness.
The life-mural along the wall was the same as ever. A little faded with long running, but the self-same one that Sutton had remembered. The same goatish Pan still chased, after twenty years, the same terror-stricken maiden across the self-same hills and dales. And the same rabbit hopped from behind a bush and watched the chase with all his customary boredom, chewing his everlasting cud of clover.
The self-adjusting furniture, bought at a time when the management had considered throwing the hostelry open to the alien trade, had been out-of-date twenty years ago. But it still was there. It had been repainted, in soft, genteel pastels, its self-adjustment features still confined to human forms.
The spongy floor covering had lost some of its sponginess and the Cetian cactus must have died at last, for a pot of frankly Terrestrial geraniums now occupied its place.
The clerk snapped off the visaphone and turned back to the room.
"Good morning, Mr. Sutton," he said, in his cultured android voice.
Then he added, almost as an afterthought, "We've been wondering when you would show up."
"Twenty years," said Sutton, dryly, "is long-time wondering."
"We've kept your old suite for you," said the clerk. "We knew that you would want it. Mary has kept it cleaned and ready for you ever since you left."
"That was nice of you, Ferdinand."
"You've hardly changed at all," said Ferdinand. "The beard is all. I knew you the second that I turned around and saw you."
"The beard and clothes," said Sutton. "The clothes are pretty bad."
"I don't suppose," said Ferdinand, "you have luggage, Mr. Sutton."
"No luggage."
"Breakfast, then, perhaps. We still are serving breakfast."
Sutton hesitated, suddenly aware that he was hungry. And he wondered for a moment how food would strike his stomach.
"I could find a screen," said Ferdinand.
Sutton shook his head. "No. I better get cleaned up and shaved. Send me up some breakfast and a change of clothes."
"Scrambled eggs, perhaps. You always liked scrambled eggs for breakfast."
"That sounds all right," said Sutton.
He turned slowly from the desk and walked to the elevator. He was about to close the door when a voice called:
"Just a moment, please."
The girl was running across the lobby…rangy and copper-haired. She slid into the elevator, pressed her back against the wall.
"Thanks very much," she said. "Thanks so much for waiting."
Her skin, Sutton saw, was. magnolia-white and her eyes were granite-colored with shadows deep within them.
He closed the door softly.
"I was glad to wait," he said.
Her lips twitched just a little and he said, "I don't like shoes. They cramp one's feet too much."
He pressed the button savagely and the elevator sprang upward. The lights ticked off the floors.
Sutton stopped the cage. "This is my floor," he said.