Part 2

Von Ulrich had hoped that Barton's basketball would be found and when it was found, he insisted on being carried through the interconnecting airlock into the spheroid that looked on the outside like a dead piece of slag.

The ship's medical officer, a man young and rather stiff, was shocked at first to see Barton lying there, but he had a ready explanation as he used his stethescope. "Must have sprung a leak and let in preserving frigidity."

"But then how did the leak repair itself and the temperature return to normal?" Von Ulrich asked as he studied Barton's smooth, unaged face.

"Dead," the medical officer said, and he dropped the stethescope back into his case.

Von Ulrich gripped the husks of his hands together to keep them from rattling, and he smiled slowly. "Barton didn't like death much."

Zeiger the medical officer looked puzzled. "You know this man?"

"A little. I tried to know him better but a war intervened. His name is Harry Barton and he was assigned to duty in this basketball fifty-three years and about four months ago."

Zeiger turned away as though to hide an embarrassed reaction.

"You think I speak out of some mental senility, Zeiger? You know this man isn't dead."

"He has to be dead."

"Not Barton. He would hardly approve of your diagnosis. He never cared much for diagnosis anyway. This is Harry Barton, and I've preserved--for personal reasons--his file. I have it with me. You want to check his fingerprints? You'll find it's the same man who was assigned to duty here fifty-three years ago."

"There's no heart-beat," Zeiger insisted, but not very enthusiastically.

"Better give Barton a more thorough check," Von Ulrich said.

* * * * *

Barton's heart was beating all right. Once every thirty-seven hours and fourteen seconds. Regularly, strongly, very slowly, but without a tremor. The electroencephalograph registered brain waves of regular rhythm, but of quite low amplitude. But with a frequency slowed to a point so far below normalcy that it took a week to establish recognizable delta, theta, alpha and higher frequency wave-forms. Using the electronic stroboscope to induce changes in brain-wave reaction by flicker got results. But the frequency didn't change. When they forced Barton's eyes open and used the stroboscope, a slight change in theta rhythm signified some irritation, but it was mild.

"Barton never hated anybody," Von Ulrich said.

It was slow work though, testing Barton's reactions. It was five days after the stroboscopic stimulation before the termination of the brain reactive crescendo. Another week before theta rhythm returned to normal.

"... so I finally decided," Von Ulrich told Zeiger, "that Barton was unique--he was the impossible. The absolutely self-sufficient human being, needing nothing but himself. I was getting older and I figured there was a chance I might not get back and the war threat and so forth. I was worried about leaving Barton. But only for one reason."

Von Ulrich explained his concern about what might have happened if Barton's autonomic nervous system had lost its identification with the time factor that had conditioned it.

"I figured Barton was absolutely self-sufficient, except for the time factor. He had to have something outside himself relatively to which his organs could function in a necessary regularity."

Zeiger poured himself another shot of rum and drank it quickly.

"So he's still here," Zeiger said. "We'll have to take him to the Martian Base for observation."

"Why not leave him here? Barton has a perfect service record. He's never missed an alarm."

"But in this condition--"

"Let's see." Von Ulrich set off an alarm. Barton moved, but it took him almost a week to move a few inches.

"That's too slow," Zeiger insisted.

Von Ulrich said, "I'll turn in a complete report on Barton. If the authorities want to have him removed, all right. But maybe they won't. Maybe they'll decide they have a laboratory here for the study of a human being that's more important than whatever's being absorbed by those recorders. Barton is the thing to watch. I call him the 'Adaptable,' because I believe he can adapt to anything, fit himself into any situation, any kind of environmental circumstance, if he's not interfered with too much, if he's given even a slight chance. You see he altered his metabolism in order to relate to a different, highly personalized time. And he hasn't aged much either. God knows how long he will live, Zeiger, with such a slowed metabolism. And not only that--who knows what unique kind of personalized time he's developing there inside himself? Who knows if we can even make a human comparison?"

"But how did he set this new arbitrary time of his? The heart beating every thirty-seven hours and fourteen seconds?"

Von Ulrich looked through the spaceport, and then pointed when the pressure suit drifted past with the long-dead Collins perfectly preserved in it and still looking out through the face plate.

"That way," Von Ulrich said. "Collins is our little human satellite out there, and he rotates around the basketball once every thirty-seven hours and fourteen seconds."

"Well I'll be damned," Zeiger said.

"Of our time, that is," Von Ulrich said. "But our time doesn't mean anything to Barton now."