1) "'This is an unusual situation,' the Speaker said. 'You see, the person you are after—the person that we are sending you to find—is known only by certain objects here. They are the only traces, the only means of identification. Without them—'
'What are they?'
He came toward the Speaker. The Speaker moved to one side. 'Look,' he said. He drew a sliding wall away, showing a dark square hole. 'In there.'
Conger squatted down, staring in. He frowned. 'A skull! A skeleton!'
'The man you are after has been dead for two centuries,' the Speaker said. 'This is all that remains of him. And this is all you have with which to find him.'
For a long time Conger said nothing. He stared down at the bones, dimly visible in the recess of the wall. How could a man dead centuries be killed? How could he be stalked, brought down?
Conger was a hunter, a man who had lived as he pleased, where he pleased. He had kept himself alive by trading, bringing furs and pelts in from the Provinces on his own ship, riding at high speed, slipping through the customs line around Earth.
He had hunted in the great mountains of the moon. He had stalked through empty Martian cities. He had explored—
The Speaker said, 'Soldier, take these objects and have them carried to the car. Don’t lose any part of them.'"
2) "Reinhart watched, tense and rigid. For a moment nothing happened. 7–6 continued to show. Then—
The figures disappeared. The machines faltered. New figures showed briefly. 4–24 for Centaurus. Reinhart gasped, suddenly sick with apprehension. But the figures vanished. New figures appeared. 16–38 for Centaurus. Then 48–86. 79–15 in Terra’s favor. Then nothing. The machines whirred, but nothing happened.
Nothing at all. No figures. Only a blank.
'What’s it mean?' Reinhart muttered, dazed.
'It’s fantastic. We didn’t think this could—'
'What’s happened?'
'The machines aren’t able to handle the item. No reading can come. It’s data they can’t integrate. They can’t use it for prediction material, and it throws off all their other figures.'
'Why?'
'It’s—it’s a variable.' Kaplan was shaking, white-lipped and pale. 'Something from which no inference can be made. The man from the past. The machines can’t deal with him. The variable man!'"
3) "Between the three people lying in the grove of dead trees and the City was a barren, level waste of desert, over a mile of blasted sand. No trees or bushes marred the smooth, parched surface. Only an occasional wind, a dry wind eddying and twisting, blew the sand up into little rills. A faint odor came to them, a bitter smell of heat and sand, carried by the wind.
Erick pointed. 'Look. The City—There it is.'
They stared, still breathing deeply from their race through the trees. The City was close, closer than they had ever seen it before. Never had they gotten so close to it in times past. Terrans were never allowed near the great Martian cities, the centers of Martian life. Even in ordinary times, when there was no threat of approaching war, the Martians shrewdly kept all Terrans away from their citadels, partly from fear, partly from a deep, innate sense of hostility toward the white-skinned visitors whose commercial ventures had earned them the respect, and the dislike, of the whole system.
'How does it look to you?' Erick said.
The City was huge, much larger than they had imagined from the drawings and models they had studied so carefully back in New York, in the War Ministry Office. Huge it was, huge and stark, black towers rising up against the sky, incredibly thin columns of ancient metal, columns that had stood wind and sun for centuries. Around the City was a wall of stone, red stone, immense bricks that had been lugged there and fitted into place by slaves of the early Martian dynasties, under the whiplash of the first great Kings of Mars."
