Never In a Thousand Years

Coincidence, was this — a trail leading through many centuries — and pointing to but one man?


Excerpt
"Ridiculous!" Graden swept his fingers through his mane of iron-gray hair, his faded eyes bright with anger. "You're wasting my time with a pack of coincidences."
The younger man's voice remained controlled and even. "I can show you plenty more evidence down at Central Archives."
"What kind of evidence?" Hart zipped open his brief case, taking out a file of thin plastic photocopy sheets. "I don't blame you for doubting me. I didn't believe it myself at first. Down at Archives we correlate records from almost every inhabited world. I'd been working on the land titles of Anrac —"
"Where's that?"
"A planet way out toward the Rim. I noticed that a man called Eltro Xilden owned half the main city. He claimed his father bought the property when the place was being evacuated a hundred years ago."
"Evacuated, you said? Why was it evacuated?"
"Anrac orbits one of the suns of a widely separated binary. It was settled three centuries ago, just after the system had been surveyed. Plenty of mineral deposits there— they built up a big population. Then they found out the orbit of the second sun brought it in on a long ellipse, with a close approach about every two thousand years. During the last century, it came close enough to Anrac to boil the seas, and for ninety years the place was deserted. Someone called Eltro Xilden bought all the property he could lay his hands on while the planet was being evacuated—bought it for next to nothing. Now the present Eltro Xilden must be worth billions from his holdings there — mines, any buildings that survived the heat, land around the starport — in fact, the best part of the city."
Graden snorted. "So the father was far-sighted and the son was equally shrewd. What of it?"
"Let me go on. One of the team who made the original survey of the Anrac system three hundred and fifty years ago was also a man called Eltro Xilden."