the passengers had left, he stationed officers in the three main
passageways and I went through the ship from bow to stern. I went into
every stateroom and into every intership compartment. No one could
have kept just a little ahead of me or behind me, dodging back into a
compartment the instant I'd vacated it. They would have been instantly
spotted by one of the officers.
"The Captain wasn't to blame at all for what happened later ... when I
tried to convince the commanding officers here that I was completely
sane."
"I see. He must have really liked you."
"I guess he did. And I liked him."
The kid nodded. "And the murderer's still at large. That makes it rough
for the sixty odd passengers they're holding in quarantine. How long do
you think they'll hold them in the Big Cage?"
"As long as they can. They'll keep them under close guard and increase
their vigilance every time there's a suspicious move in the cage.
They'll be screened perhaps a dozen times. But most of them are
influential people. Most of them have booked passage on the Mars' run
liner that's due here next week. They can't hold them forever. They'd
start pulling wires on Earth by short wave and there'd be a legislative
uproar.
"Suppose they refuse to let them send messages?"
"They won't refuse. I'm sure of that."
The kid was thoughtful for a moment. Then he said: "Tell me more about
Ramsey. Just what do you think is happening on Mars?"
"No one knows exactly what is happening," Corriston said. "But to the
best of my knowledge the overall picture is pretty ugly. The original
settlers have their backs to the wall with a vengeance. Now there are
armed guards at their throats. Ramsey has taken over. He has resorted
to legal trickery to freeze them out.
"There are perhaps fifty important uranium claims on Mars and Ramsey
has consolidated all of the holdings into a single major enterprise. To
say that he's cornered the market in uranium would be understating the
case. He has taken possession by right of seizure, and the colonists
can't get to him. They're living a hand-to-mouth existence while he
lives in a heavily guarded stronghold behind three miles of electrified
defenses."
The kid nodded again. "Yes, that's the picture when you unscramble
it, I guess. But most of it is kept hidden from the general run of
tourists."
"Naturally. Ramsey has the power to keep it under wraps."
"Do you think the colonists had anything to do with Clakey's murder
and Miss Ramsey's disappearance? Or I guess I should say Henry Ewers'
murder."
"Clakey, Ewers--his name doesn't matter. I'm convinced that he was Miss
Ramsey's bodyguard."
"But you haven't answered my question."
"I can't answer it with any certainty. Did the colonists hire a killer
and book passage for him on the ship? It's difficult to believe that
the kind of men who colonized Mars would resort to murder."
"But there are a few scoundrels in every large group of men. And what
if they became so desperate they felt they had to fight fire with fire?"
"Yes, I'd thought of that. It may be the answer."
5
A half-hour later the kid was taken away and Corriston found himself
completely alone. There are few events in human life more unnerving
than the totally unexpected removal of a sympathetic listener when dark
thoughts have taken possession of a man.
The kid wasn't forcibly removed from the cell. He left without
protesting and no rough hands were laid on him, no physical violence
employed. But he was not at all eager to leave, and if the guards who
came for him had eyed him less severely, his attitude might have been
the opposite of complacent.
"Sorry, kid," one of them said. "Your discharge has been postponed.
Somebody on the psycho-staff wants to give you another test. I guess
you didn't interpret the ink blots right."
He looked at Corriston and shook his head sympathetically. "It's tough,
I know. Once you're here waiting to be released can wear you down. I
shouldn't be saying this, but it stands to reason it might even slow
up your recovery a bit. It's easy to blame the docs, but you've got to
try to understand their side of it. They have to make sure."
When the door clanged shut behind the kid, Corriston crossed to his
cot, sat down, and cradled his head in his arms. The fact that he was
still free to go outside and walk around the Station was no comfort
at all. That kind of freedom could be worse than total confinement.
He could never hope to escape from observation. The guards were under
orders to watch him, and wherever he turned there'd be eyes boring into
the back of his neck.
On Earth a man under surveillance could duck quickly into a side
street, run and weave about, and emerge on a broad avenue in the midst
of a crowd. He could walk calmly then for a block or two, and turn in
at a bar. He could drown his troubles in drink.
There were bars on the Station, of course. But Corriston knew that if
he tried to mingle with officers of his own rank on the upper levels,
he'd quickly enough find himself drinking alone. He could picture the
off-duty personnel edging quickly and resentfully away from him, as
though he'd suddenly appeared in their midst with a big, yawning hole
in his skull.
Suddenly utter weariness overcame Corriston. He loosened his belt,
elevated his legs, and relaxed on the cot.
He was asleep almost before he could close his eyes. How long he
slept he had no way of knowing. He only knew that he was awakened by
a sound--the strangest sound a man could hear in space. It was as if
a gnat or a mosquito had developed a sudden, avaricious liking for
his blood-type and was determined to gorge itself to bursting at his
expense.
The buzzing seemed to go on interminably as he hovered between sleeping
and waking. On and on and on, with absolutely no letup. Then, abruptly,
it ceased. There was a faint swishing sound and something solid thudded
into the hardwood directly above him.
With a startled cry Corriston leapt from the cot, caught the iron edge
of the bed-guard to keep from falling, and stared up in horror at the
shining expanse of wall space overhead.
The cell was in almost total darkness. But from the barred window
opposite, a faint glimmer of light penetrated in a diffuse arc, just
enough light to enable him to make out the quivering stem of the barb.
It _was_ a barb. This was so beyond any possibility of doubt. It had
lodged in the hardwood scarcely a foot above his cot and it was still
quivering.
Cold sweat broke out on Corriston's palms as he realized how close
death had come, and how almost miraculous had been his escape. Had he
raised himself to slap at the "mosquito" the barb could just as easily
have buried itself in his skull.
Corriston hesitated for an instant, his eyes on the barred window and
the faint glow beyond. Then his gaze passed to the wall switch. He
decided against switching on the light immediately. He stooped low and
moved quickly to the window, taking care to keep his head well below
the sill.
For a moment he listened, his every nerve alert. There was no stir of
movement in the darkness beyond the sill, nothing at all to indicate
that someone was crouching there.
Finally, with an almost foolhardy recklessness, he raised his head and
stared out between the bars. He could see right across to the wall
opposite. The wall was less than eight feet away, and the space between
the wall and his cell appeared to be unoccupied. This did not surprise
him.
It was utterly silly to think that a man intent on willful murder would
have lingered for any great length of time in so narrow a space. After
having shot his bolt, his immediate concern would have been to get away
as quickly as possible.
No, definitely, the man was gone, and if he had more barbs to release
he would choose another time and place.
Even then Corriston did not switch on the light. He had no particular
desire to examine the wood-embedded barb in a bright light. He could
see it clearly enough from where he stood. It was exactly like the barb
which had sealed the lips of that blabbermouth Clakey.
Corriston went back to his cot and sat down. He told himself it would
be highly dangerous to leave the cell and give the killer another
chance. He had saved himself by refusing to slap a non-existent
mosquito. But in the shadows of the Station there would be no
mosquitoes--non-existent or otherwise. The killer would simply crouch
in shadows, await his chance, and take careful aim.
What he had to do was find Miss Ramsey, and prove his sanity. If he
stayed in the cell, the shadows would continue to deepen about him,
would become intolerable, and perhaps even drive him to the verge of
actual madness.
He had to convince the killer that he couldn't be silenced easily and
perhaps not at all.
Corriston stood up. He ran his hands down his body, taking pride in its
muscular solidity, its remarkable integrity under strain. He still felt
lithe and confident; his physical vitality was unimpaired.
He had really known all along that he would be leaving the cell. On
Earth you could dodge into a narrow alley between tall buildings
or lean on a stroller platform and be carried underground so fast
that your pursuers would be left blank-faced. If he stayed alert he
could do the same thing on the Station, even though there were no
moving pavements to leap upon. Quite possibly he could even slip out
unnoticed. They might not even be watching the cell door because he
had behaved himself so well up to now. Psycho-cases were permitted to
roam, but if they stayed in their cells precautions would naturally be
relaxed in their favor.
Corriston now was about to develop a sudden, unanticipated impulse to
roam. The fact that he was completely sane gave him an edge over the
space-shocked recruits. There is nothing quite so terrifying to a man
who doubts his own sanity than the thought that unseen eyes are keeping
tabs on him. He feels guilty and acts guilty and almost invariably his
caution deserts him.
Corriston was quite sure that he could carry it off, even if he felt
eyes boring into his back the instant he left the cell. He'd simply
bide his time and seize the first opportunity which presented itself.
Actually, it was easier than he'd imagined it could be. He simply
opened the cell door, walked out; and there was no one in sight to
observe him. So far, so good. The corridor outside was completely
deserted, and when he reached the end of it there was still no one.
He turned left into a large, square reception room and crossed it
without hurrying, his shoulders held straight. Photoelectric eyes? Yes,
possibly, but he had no intention of letting the thought worry him. If
he were being watched mechanically, there was nothing he could do about
it and somehow he didn't think that he had crossed any photoelectric
beams. Certainly no doors had swung open or closed behind him, and
photoelectric alarm system without visible manifestations could be
dismissed as a not too likely possibility.
When Corriston emerged in the glass-encased, wide-view observation
promenade on the Station's Second Level, he was no longer alone. On
all sides men and women jostled him, walking singly and in pairs,
in uniform and in civilian clothes, or hurrying off in dun-gray,
space-mechanic anonymity.
The promenade was crowded almost to capacity and yet the men and women
seemed mere walking dots scattered at random beneath the immense
structures of steel and glass which walled them in. A feeling of
unreality came upon Corriston as he stared upward. He deliberately
moderated his stride, as if fearful that a too rapid movement in
any one direction might send him spinning out into space with a
glass-shattering impetus which he would be powerless to control.
It was an illogical fear and yet he could not entirely throw it off,
and he did not seriously try. It was not nearly as important as the
possibility that he might be being followed. There was no one behind
him who looked in the least suspicious, and no one in front of him
either. But how could he be completely sure?
The answer was that he couldn't. He had to trust his instincts, and so
far they had given him every assurance that he was moving in a free,
independent orbit of his own, completely unobserved.
And then, quite suddenly, he ceased to move at all.
Something quite startling was taking place throughout the length
and breadth of the observation promenade. The men in uniform were
exchanging alarmed glances and departing in haste. The civilians were
crowding closer to the panes. They were collecting in awestruck groups
of blinding light crisscrossed high above their heads.
They were all looking in one direction, but a few of them had been
taken so completely by surprise that they stood motionless in the
middle of the promenade. Corriston was one of the motionless ones, but
his eyes were quick to seek out the nearest viewpane.
At first he thought that a gigantic meteor had appeared suddenly out
of the stellar dark and was rushing straight toward the Station with a
velocity so great as to be almost unimaginable.
Then he realized that it wasn't a meteor. It was a spaceship. And it
wasn't rushing straight toward the Station. It had either bypassed or
encircled the Station and passed beyond it, for it was now heading
out into space again. He could see the long, bright trail left by its
rocket jets, the diffuse incandescence in its wake.
6
An officer with two stripes on his shoulder was standing almost at
Corriston's elbow. He hadn't turned to depart, and for some reason he
seemed reluctant to do so. The space-ship's erratic course seemed to
absorb him to the exclusion of all else.
He started swearing under his breath. Then he saw Corriston and a
strange look came into his face. He looked at Corriston steadily for a
moment, then looked quickly away.
Corriston edged slowly away from him and joined the nearest group of
civilians. They were all talking at once and it was hard to understand
precisely what they were saying. But after a moment a few enlightening
fragments of information greatly lessened his bewilderment.
"_That freighter was preparing to land at the Station, but for some
reason it couldn't make contact. It never even began to decelerate._"
"_How do you know?_"
"_I asked one of the officers--that gray-haired man over there. He was
plenty worried. I guess that's why he talked so freely. He'd had some
kind of dispute with the captain, apparently. He told me that trouble
developed aboard that freighter when it was eight or ten thousand
miles away. An emergency message came through, but for some reason the
captain kept it pretty much to himself._"
Watching the freighter's hull blaze with friction as it went into a
narrow orbit about Earth, Corriston tried hard to make himself believe
that the particular manner of a spaceman's departure was simply one,
tragic aspect of a calculated risk, that men who lived dangerously
could hardly expect to die peacefully in their beds. But it was a
rationalization without substance. In an immediate and very real sense
he was inside the freighter, enduring an eternity of torment, sharing
the agonizing fate that was about to overtake the crew.
Nearer and nearer to Earth the freighter swept, completely encircling
the planet like a runaway moon with an orbital velocity so great the
eye could hardly follow it.
"It will blast out a meteor pit as wide as the Grand Canyon if it
explodes on land," someone at Corriston's elbow said. "I wouldn't care
to be within a hundred miles of it."
"Neither would I. It could wipe out a city, all right--any city within
a radius of thirty miles. This is _really_ something to watch!"
The freighter had encircled Earth twice and was now so close to its
blue-green oceans and the dun-colored immensity of its continental land
masses that it had almost disappeared from view. It had dwindled to a
tiny, glowing pinpoint of radiance crossing the face of the planet,
an erratically weaving firefly that had abandoned all hope of guiding
itself by a light that was about to flare up with explosive violence
and put an end to its life.
The freighter was invisible when the end came. It was invisible when
it struck and rebounded and channeled a deep pit in a green valley on
Earth. But the explosion which followed was seen by every man and woman
on the Station's wide-view promenade.
There were three tremendous flares, each opening and spreading outward
like the sides of a funnel, each a livid burst of incandescence
spiraling outward into space.
As seen from the Station the flares were not, of course, so tragically
spectacular. They resembled more successive flashes of almost
instantaneous brightness, flashes such as had many times been produced
by the tilting of a heliograph on the rust-red plains of Mars under
conditions of maximum visibility.
It takes an experienced eye to interpret such phenomena correctly, and
among the spectators on the promenade there were a few, no doubt, who
were not even quite sure that the freighter _had_ exploded.
But Corriston had no doubts at all on that score. The full extent of
the tragedy would be revealed later by radio communication from Earth.
There was a long silence before anyone spoke. The group around
Corriston seemed paralyzed by shock, unable to express in words how
blindly hopeful they had dared to be, or how fatalistic from the
first. There were a few moist eyes among the women, an awkward, almost
reverent shuffling of feet.
Then the young man at Corriston's elbow cleared his throat and said in
a barely audible whisper: "It didn't come down in the sea."
"I know," Corriston said. "It came down in North America, close to the
Canadian border."
"In the United States?"
"Yes, I think so. We can't be sure. It's too much to hope there was no
destruction of human life after an explosion of that magnitude."
Corriston suddenly realized that he was behaving like a man who
had taken complete leave of his wits. He was drawing more and more
attention to himself when he should have been bending all of his
efforts toward making himself as inconspicuous as possible.
Fortunately the agitation of everyone on the promenade was helping to
remedy his blunder. His wisest course now was simply to recede as an
individual, to move silently to the perimeter of the group and just as
silently vanish.
He was confident that he could accomplish it. He began elbowing his
way backwards until there were a dozen men and women in front of him.
He let himself be observed briefly as a grim-lipped spectator who
had taken such an emotional pounding that he could endure no more.
Suddenly he saw his chance and took it. There was another small group
of civilians close to the group he had joined, and he ducked quickly
behind them, using their turned-away backs as a shield. He edged
toward a paneled door on his right, his only concern for the moment
being a comparatively simple one. He must get away from the crowded
promenade as swiftly as possible.
He reached the door, swung the panel wide, and stepped into the long,
brightly-lighted compartment beyond without a backward glance. Almost
immediately he perceived that he had committed an act of folly. The
compartment was a promenade cafeteria and it was crowded with an
overflow of agitated men and women discussing the tragedy in heated
terms.
_Keep cool now. None of these people are interested in you. Keep cool
and keep on walking. There's another door and you can be through it in
less than a minute_, Corriston told himself.
There was a pretty waitress behind the long counter, and as he came
abreast of her she smiled at him. For an instant he hesitated, eyed
the stool opposite her, and fought off an incongruous but almost
irresistible impulse to sit down. Quick warmth and sudden sympathy.
Yes, he could do with a bit of both, Corriston thought.
It was sheer insanity, but he _did_ sit down. He eased himself into the
stool and ordered a cup of coffee.
"Something with it?" the waitress asked. "A sandwich, or--"
"No, no, I don't think so," Corriston said quickly. "Just the coffee."
The waitress seemed in no hurry to depart. "It was pretty terrible what
happened. Wasn't it?"
"Did you see it?" Corriston asked.
"I saw most of it. I saw the ship go past the Station and start to
explode. I saw that black wing, or whatever it was, drop off. Then
someone started shouting in here and I came back. They say it crashed
on Earth."
"That's right," Corriston said, telling himself that he was a damned
fool for wanting to look at her hair and hear her friendly woman's
voice when every passing second was adding to his danger.
"You saw it crash?"
Corriston nodded. "I just came from the promenade."
"That was a crazy thing to ask you. How excited can you get? I saw you
come through that door. You looked kind of pale."
"I still feel that way," Corriston said.
The waitress then said a surprising thing: "I wonder what it is about
some men. You just have to look at them once and you know they're the
sort you'd like to be with when something terrible happens. You know
what I mean?"
"Sure," Corriston said. "Any port in a storm."
The waitress smiled again. "I don't mean that, exactly. Please don't
think I'm handing you a line. There's just something ... comfortable
about you. You go all pale when something bad happens to other people.
That's good; I like that. It means you can feel for other people.
You're a gentle sort of guy, but I bet you can take care of yourself
and anyone you care about. I just bet you can."
The waitress flushed a little, as if afraid that she had said too much.
She turned and walked slowly toward the coffee percolator at the far
end of the counter.
He was glad now that he had ordered the coffee. The coffee would help
too. He suddenly felt that he was under observation, that hostile eyes
were watching him. But it was no more than just a feeling; and coffee
and sympathy might drive it away.
_How blindly, stupidly foolish could a guy be?_ Corriston thought. _If
he had any sense at all he wouldn't wait for the coffee. He'd get up
quickly and head for the door at the other end of the cafeteria. He'd
either do that, or swing about abruptly and attempt to catch the silent
watcher by surprise._
Corriston decided to wait for the coffee.
The waitress looked at him strangely when she returned. She set the
coffee down before him and started to turn away, her eyes troubled.
Then, suddenly, she seemed to change her mind. She leaned close to him
and whispered: "You'd better leave by the promenade door. That man over
there has been watching you. I know him very well. He's a Security
Guard."
Corriston nodded and stared at her gratefully for a moment. He was
more relieved than alarmed. It was far better to have a Security Guard
watching him than a killer with a poisoned barb. He wasn't exactly
happy about it, but he was confident he could elude the agent.
The waitress' eyes were suddenly warm and friendly again.
"Space-shock?" she asked.
"So they claim," Corriston said. "I happen to think they're mistaken."
He started sipping the coffee. It was hot but not steaming hot. He
could have tossed it off like a jigger of rye but he had some quick
thinking to do.
"Tell me," he said. "Just where is that guard sitting?"
"At the other end of the counter," the waitress replied, the anxiety
coming back into her eyes. "He's close to the door. You'd have to go
past him. Maybe I'm wrong, but I think you want to get away from him.
So you'd better go the way you came--by the promenade door."
"That's not too good an idea, I'm afraid," Corriston said. "He'd follow
me and get assistance on the promenade. What's beyond the other door?
Where does it lead to?"
"It opens on a corridor," the waitress said quickly. "If you can get
past him you might have a better chance that way. There's nothing but a
corridor with two side doors. One opens on an emergency stairway that
goes down to the Master Sequence Selector compartments."
She seemed to take pride in her knowledge. Due to a space-shocked guy's
difficulties, the Master Sequence Selector had become an important
secret shared between them. Corriston wondered if she knew that the
Selector functioned on thirty-two separate kinds of automatic controls.