guard you knocked out, Lieutenant. You're a very hot-headed young man.
That's _really_ a court-martial offense, but perhaps we can smooth it
over if you're telling the truth now. You were in the position of a man
imprisoned for a crime he didn't commit. If he can prove his innocence,
the law is very lenient. He can escape and still get a full pardon,
even a pardon with apologies. It's a different matter, of course if he
_kills_ a guard to escape. You didn't."
Corriston was tempted to say, "I think perhaps I tried to, sir," but
thought better of it. He'd ask Clement later why the guards who had
been sent down into the Selector compartment had failed to find him.
It wasn't important enough now to waste a second thought on, but just
out of curiosity he would ask.
He didn't have to. After Clement had departed the executive officer
told him. "They made a pretty thorough search for you," he said. "Or so
they claimed. But they had been drinking heavily--every one of them.
Maintaining discipline can be a terrible headache at times. There's a
lot of objectivity about the commander and he doesn't try to crack down
too hard. He knows what it means to be out here for months with nothing
to break the monotony. Hell, if we could send for our wives more often
it wouldn't be so bad."
Corriston's palms were cold. He stood very still, wondering how long it
would take the commander to return with the news he wanted to hear.
"The question is whether life is really worth living without a woman to
talk to," the executive officer went on. "Just to lie relaxed and watch
a pretty girl move slowly around a room. It does something for you."
Corriston wished the man would keep quiet. Under ordinary circumstances
he could have sympathized heartily. He couldn't now. There was only one
girl he wanted to see walk around a room, and she might just as well
have been at the opposite end of space.
She wasn't walking around a room now. She was lying helplessly sprawled
out, waiting for rescue to come. It had to come soon, it had to. The
commander wouldn't just go down alone after her. He'd be accompanied by
a half-dozen executive officers who would know exactly how to bundle
her into a stretcher and carry her to the sick bay.
But what if a killer just happened to be crouching in one of the
corridors, waiting for the stretcher to pass? A killer with a poisoned
barb....
Corriston couldn't stand still. He walked back and forth across the
control room while the executive officer continued to talk. He paid no
heed at all.
Corriston heard a footfall as he paced. He turned and saw that
Commander Clement had returned. He was standing in the doorway with a
strange look on his face.
Corriston felt bewildered, unable to quite believe that Clement was
really back. It was like a dream that had suddenly turned real, a
looking glass reversal with a strange quality of distortion about it.
It was real enough. Clement entered and shut the door behind him, very
firmly and carefully, as if he wanted to make sure that Corriston would
not attempt to escape.
He walked slowly forward, looking at the executive officer as if
Corriston had no place at all in his thoughts.
"Everything he told me was a lie," Clement said. "Everything. There
was no girl. The compartment was locked; so was the emergency door
leading down to the Selector. The ladder was standing against the wall
in the Selector compartment. Miss Ramsey could not have been in the
compartment--not at any time. There was nothing to indicate it. She
just wasn't there."
Corriston moved toward him, his face white. "That's a lie and you know
it. What have you done with her? You'd better tell me. You can have me
court-martialed, but you can't stop me from talking. I can prove she
was there. The grate--"
"The grate? What are you talking about? There was no ripped-out grate.
The grate was in place. I feel very sorry for you, Lieutenant. But I
can't let sympathy stand in the way of my duty. In some respects you're
very rational. You can think logically and clearly ... up to a point.
But the shock weakness is there. It's very serious when you start
having actual hallucinations."
The executive officer had drawn his gun. He was holding it rather
loosely in his hand now, triggered and ready for any dangerous or
suspicious move on Corriston's part.
There was nothing in Clement's gaze as he swung about to refute the
dark mistrust that had come into the executive officer's eyes. He
seemed intent only on bolstering that mistrust by driving even deeper
nails into Corriston's coffin.
"I'm afraid we'll have to continue to regard Lieutenant Corriston as
dangerously unstable," he said. "Keep your gun on him when you take him
back to the Ward. Don't relax your vigilance for an instant."
"I won't," the executive officer promised.
"Good. You're not going to make any further trouble for us, are you,
Lieutenant?"
The question seemed to call for no answer and Corriston made none. He
turned slowly and walked toward the door, despairingly aware that a man
he had rather liked had fallen into step behind him and would shoot him
dead if he so much as wavered.
Just as he reached the door Clement spoke again, giving the executive
officer final instructions. "He must not be permitted to leave his
cell. Make sure of that, Simms. Post a permanent guard at the door. He
must be kept under constant surveillance. If he's the self-destructive
type, and I'm by no means sure he isn't, he may attempt to kill
himself."
9
_May attempt to kill himself. May attempt.... May attempt.... May
attempt to kill himself._ Corriston sat up on his cot, his mouth dry,
his temples pounding.
Had Clement implanted the suggestion in his mind deliberately, with
infinite cruelty and cunning? Was Clement really hoping that he _would_
commit suicide? If he took his own life Clement would stand to gain a
great deal.
But could Clement be that much of a scoundrel? Was he, in fact, a
scoundrel at all?
Corriston knew that he could not afford to succumb to panic. Only by
staying calm, by trying to reason it out logically, could he hope to
get anywhere. Not at the truth, perhaps, but anywhere at all.
Start off with a supposition: The commander was everything that he
pretended to be, an honest man with immense responsibilities which he
could not delegate to anyone else. A forthright, hot-tempered, but
completely sincere man. A little secretive, yes, but only because he
took his responsibilities so seriously.
Start off by assuming that Clement was that kind of a man. What
would he stand to gain if Corriston killed himself? The removal of
one responsibility, at the very least. It was bad for morale if an
officer had hallucinations that vitally concerned the Station itself.
But a hallucination about the wealthiest girl on Earth wasn't just
run-of-the-mill. It could not only disturb every officer and enlisted
man on the Station; it could have political repercussions on Earth.
Clement was already in trouble because of the freighter. The chances
were a Congressional Investigating Committee would be coming out.
They'd be sure to hear about Corriston. His story would be all over the
Station, on everyone's lips.
If Corriston took his own life the commander would be spared all that.
He'd have nothing to answer for. The entire affair could be hushed up.
Or could it?
Wait a minute, better give the whole problem another twirl. Even if
the Commander was a completely honest man, he wouldn't stand to gain
too much. He might even find himself in more serious trouble. And look
at it in another way: It was hard to believe that a hallucination
concerning Helen Ramsey could be much more than a gadfly irritation.
If the full truth came out, Clement could clear himself of all blame.
Would a man of integrity suggest that a fellow-officer take his own
life solely to remove a gadfly irritation? Or _any_ irritation, for
that matter?
It was inconceivable on the face of it. The first supposition was a
contradiction in terms. It did not remain valid under close scrutiny
and therefore it had to be rejected.
Supposition number two: Clement was in all respects the exact opposite
of an honest man. Clement had something dark and damaging to conceal,
was in more serious trouble than he'd allowed anyone to suspect.
Clement had some reason for not wanting the truth about Ramsey's
daughter to come out.
What would he stand to gain if Corriston took himself out of the world?
Unfortunately there were wide areas where any kind of speculation had
to penetrate an almost absolute vacuum to get anywhere at all.
The situation on Mars? Was there some as yet undemonstratable link
between Ramsey's uranium holdings and the Station itself? Was Clement
involved with Ramsey in some way? And was Ramsey's daughter a vital
link in the chain?
Had the accident to the freighter put an additional strain on the
chain, a strain so great that Clement had been forced to take
immediate, drastic action to protect himself?
Corriston tried to remember exactly what the Commander had said over
the speaking tube. He had tried to listen intently, but he had been
too agitated to make much sense out of the few brief sentences which
he had overheard. Clement had been speaking in anger and not too
coherently, and it had been a one-way conversation, with the replying
voice completely silent, or, at the very least, inaudible. But one
thing about the conversation _had_ made a strong impression on him.
Clement had not sounded like an honest man with nothing to conceal. On
the contrary, he had sounded like a worried and guilty man.
Corriston shut his eyes and relaxed for a moment on his cot. It was
an uneasy, tormenting kind of relaxation, because another thought had
occurred to him.
What if Clement had not deliberately tried to plant a suicide
suggestion in his mind at all? What if he had simply spoken with the
malice of a not too kindly man appalled and enraged by a space-shock
victim who had not only lied to him, but had given every evidence of
being dangerously difficult to control.
It certainly made sense. There was nothing in the cell which might have
enabled Corriston to take his own life, even had he been so inclined.
Would not Clement have taken care to introduce into the cell some
convenient, readily available weapon--a steel file, perhaps or even a
small spool of wire?
A cold dream had begun to take possession of Corriston. Was it true
then, could it possibly be true? Was he hallucinating? He had seen
Helen Ramsey go into a ladies' lounge and disappear. He had seen her
a second time, and she had worn a mask. The mask was so strange that
it would have made four men out of five question their own sanity. But
he had knelt beside her and lifted her into his arms. He had felt the
pulse at her wrist. Well? If after that she had disappeared again, was
it not more of a black mark against him than if he had failed to touch
her at all?
All hallucinations seem real to the insane. The realer they seem the
more likely they are to be inescapably damning.
Could a warped mind hope to escape from such a dilemma? Was there any
possible way of making sure? No, not if he had actually cracked up. But
supposing he hadn't. Suppose he had just passed for an instant over the
borderline, as a result of strain, of abnormal circumstances, and was
now completely rational again. In that case, proof would help. Proof
could convince him that at least a part of what had happened had been
real, that he had not been hallucinating continuously for days.
If he could prove conclusively that he had not been hallucinating when
he had climbed through the grate, Helen Ramsey's presence beyond the
grate would be pretty well established. Even an insane man does not
abandon all logic when he performs a complicated act. He is not likely
to ascend a ten foot wall and climb through a grate in pursuit of a
complete illusion.
Oh, it _could_ happen.... Possibly it had happened many times in
hospitals for the incurably insane. But somehow he could not believe
that it had happened in his case. Right at this moment he was certainly
not in an abnormal state of mind. How could he be when he was able to
think so logically and consistently?
Being sane now, or at least having the firm conviction that he was
sane, would enable him to retrace what had happened step by step. What
he were to retrace it in reality ... until he came to the grate? If
the grate had been ripped out, the torment and uncertainty in his mind
would vanish. He would be free then to move against Clement, to unmask
and expose him for the scoundrel he was.
Free? The very thought was a mockery. He was free for twenty feet in
either direction, free to shout and summon the guard. But beyond
that....
Corriston sat up straight. Free to summon the guard. Free to summon a
man he had dropped to the floor with two quick, decisive and totally
unexpected blows. But if he did summon the guard, what then? Could
he be doubled up with cramps--the old prisoners' dodge? "Get me to a
doctor. I think I'm dying."
Hell no, not that. It was mildewed even on the face of it. The guard
wouldn't be that much of a fool. He'd whip out a gun, and slash
downward with it at the first suspicious move on the part of a man he
hated.
Was there any other way? Perhaps there was ... a quite simple way. Why
couldn't he simply ask the guard to step into the cell and request
permission to talk to him? He would plead urgency, but do it very
casually, arouse the man's curiosity without antagonizing him too
much. No need to be crafty, await some unlikely opportunity, or
anything of the sort.
Simply overpower the man--straight off, without any fuss.
It had happened before, but that very fact would make the guard
contemptuous, more than ever convinced that the first time he hadn't
really been taken by surprise at all. His pride would make him want
to believe that. He was the kind of man who could rationalize a
humiliating defeat and blot it completely from his memory.
It not only worked, it worked better than he could have dared hope.
When he spoke a few words through the door, the guard became instantly
curious. He unlocked the cell and came in, his eyes narrowed in
anger ... anger, but not suspicion. His gun remained on his hip as he
walked up to Corriston and stood directly facing him, well within
grappling range.
"Well, what do you want to talk to me about?" he demanded. "Better make
it brief. I'm not supposed to talk to you at all."
"I'm sorry to hear that," Corriston said. "You've got no idea how
depressing it is to be locked up in a narrow cell with absolutely no
one to talk to."
"You don't like it, eh? Well, you brought it on yourself."
Corriston caught the man about the waist and brought his right fist
down three times on his curving back. Each blow was a powerful one,
slanting downward toward the kidney.
Then Corriston hit the guard directly in the small of the back, with
an even more punishing blow. The cumulative effect was instantaneous.
The guard collapsed and sank down like a suddenly deflated balloon, the
breath whistling from between his teeth.
Corriston watched him sink to the floor and straighten out. Forewarned
as he was, he was still appalled by the almost instant, shocking change
in the man's expression. For the second time the guard's features began
to come apart. The entire upper portion of his face seemed to sink
inward and broaden out, and the flowing began, the incredible refusal
of his forehead and nose to remain in close proximity to his mouth.
One eye closed completely; the other remained open in a wide and almost
pupilless stare. The chin receded and the lips became a puckered gray
orifice that looked like some monstrous fungus growth sprouting from
the middle of a gargoyle face. The individual features became paler and
paler as they spread, and suddenly there seemed to be no color left in
the face at all. It had turned completely waxen.
It was a horrifying thing to watch.
Corriston knelt, opened the man's shirt and stared intently at the
exposed throat, something he had not done the first time in the
cafeteria. The first time he had simply knelt and searched under the
shirt with his hand for a heartbeat which had surprised him by its
steadiness. He was quite sure now that the heart was beating firmly and
steadily.
Even the peculiar appearance of the throat did not alarm him. But it
most certainly did interest him. Far down on the Security Guard's
throat, just above his breastbone, were a row of small hooks partly
embedded in his flesh. The hooks were very tiny indeed, and their
brightness was obscured by a thin film of sweat. Corriston removed the
moisture with a quick flick of his thumb and continued to stare, as if
he could not quite believe his eyes.
Finally he wedged his fingers under the base of the mask, and ripped it
from the guard's face.
Under the mask, the face had a perfectly natural look. The features
were relaxed and vacuous, but there was no flowing, no unnatural
distortion at all. And it was quite a different face--the face of a
man who had worn a disguise and was now so completely a stranger to
Corriston that he might just as well have been any one of the Station's
thirty-seven Security Guards.
Corriston could see where the hook attachments had gone into the
flesh in at least thirty places on the man's face: on his brow, his
cheekbones, on both sides of his face clear down to the base of his
neck. The tiny punctures made by the hooks were faintly rimmed with
blood, perhaps because Corriston had torn the mask away too abruptly.
Undoubtedly the skin had been anaesthetized, the hooks inserted
skillfully by someone familiar with just what should be done to prevent
scarring.
He hoped that the guard would not carry tiny scars on his face for the
rest of his natural life. He arose and examined the mask. He had a
complete false face.
The thing was ingenious beyond belief. It was no mere Halloween
assemblage of papier-maché flimflammery, but an elaborate and flexible
mask of very thin plastic, or possibly metal. A prosthetic mask--if one
could use that term in connection with a mask. It was certainly more
complex in structure than any prosthetic leg or arm he had ever seen on
a handicapped man, or would ever be likely to see.
He had a pretty good idea as to how it worked. A general idea.
Apparently when the hooks were attached to the muscular structure of
the human face underneath, every aspect of the wearer's face would be
instantly controlled and altered to conform to the configuration of
the false face. In that sense the mask could be said to actually mold
itself to the wearer's face and transform it into a completely new and
different face.
And yet, in some subtle way, the emotions felt by the owner of the
real face would be conveyed to the mask, so that it would express with
different features very much the same kinds of emotion.
Ingenious was scarcely the word for it. It was a miracle of
technological science, almost beyond belief. But he could not doubt
the reality of what he saw, for he held the evidence in his hand. No
hallucination could possibly be _that_ real.
The way the mask's surface coloration could change when the wearer's
emotions changed was perhaps the most amazing miracle of all. He had
seen the guard's color come and go, had watched him redden with anger
and then grow pale.
It could only mean that there was some mechanically symbiotic,
emotion-sensitive electronic coating or skin surface, or series of
tubes on the inner surface of the mask, which could simulate actual
blood flow much like a network of tiny heat regulators. This network
would be so responsive to the slightest change in body temperature
that the mask would alter its color the instant the wearer experienced
fright or grew uncontrollably angry. What made it seem logical and
even likely was the fact that caloric changes do occur in just such a
fashion in the human body with every shift from anger to grief or from
pain to shock.
There was nothing simple about the inner surface of the mask. It was a
maze of complicated gadgetry concentrated in less than eight inches of
space, perhaps thirty or forty separate mechanisms in all, some as tiny
as the head of a pin, and others about one inch in width.
When the wearer became unconscious, the mask seemingly lost its
integrity. The gadgets either stopped functioning or ceased to function
properly and the false face became a dissolving, hideous caricature;
that bore little or no resemblance to the human countenance in repose,
or even to the human countenance convulsed with sudden shock.
How incredibly blind he had been in failing to suspect the existence
of a mask when the guard's face had grown unnatural and ghastly in the
cafeteria. He had taken it for granted that it was the man himself who
had changed.
Fortunately he was spared now from making the same mistake twice, and
he took full advantage of the fact. He knelt again and began the by no
means easy task of removing the uniform. He had to lift him up and turn
him over twice and each time the man groaned and stirred a little. He
seemed on the verge of coming to, but Corriston shut his mind to the
possibility until the last of the man's garments had been tossed in a
pile on the floor.
He quickly took off his own uniform then, and carefully and
methodically arrayed himself as a guard, taking care to leave the coat
unbuttoned at the throat and even going so far as to draw on the heavy
woolen socks and attach to his wrist the guard's metal identification
disk.
An audacious thought occurred to him, but he dismissed it at once. He
could not attach the mask to his own face. It would have required the
administrations of an expert, or, at the very least, someone familiar
with the thing who knew exactly how it was supposed to be hooked into
place. He had no way of knowing and he recoiled instinctively from the
thought of hooks, however tiny, marring the skin on his face.
No, he'd have to get along without the mask. No one on the lower levels
knew him by sight, with the one ugly exception of a killer he'd never
seen clearly enough to recognize in return. And in the guard's uniform
he might even succeed in deceiving the killer if he moved quickly
enough to give the man only a brief glimpse of him as he crossed the
wide-view promenade.
10
Corriston stared down at the still unconscious guard, lying stretched
out unclothed on the floor of the cell, then he turned, patting the
guard's gun which now nestled in its transferred holster on his
angular, bony hip.
Well, there were perhaps even worse ways of ending up, and it was
certainly a destiny almost universally shared.
He walked out through the open door of the cell without a backward
glance.
He had changed his plans completely now. The complicated structure of
the mask between his hands had so completely reassured him as to his
complete sanity, that he was no longer under a compulsion to return to
the Selector Compartment for additional proof.
All of the pieces were coming together and melting into a pattern that
remained obscure only because there was still so much about it that he
did not understand. He knew there was a killer loose on the Station,
the same one who had been loose on the ship that had taken him to the
Station. He knew about a poisoned barb that had killed one man and had
barely missed killing Corriston himself.
Dismiss the killer for the moment. There was Helen Ramsey, the
wealthiest girl on Earth. Think about Ramsey himself and what his
wealth had done to Mars. Think about the colonists on Mars, men who
had endured unimaginable hardships and privation to stake out uranium
claims which Ramsey did not want them to have. Think about the
freighter that had gone out of control.
Think about Clement. Think very _hard_ about Clement. The tragedy had
shaken him, had given him the look of a very guilty man. He had not
wanted it to happen. He had been alarmed, appalled. Yes, think about
Clement--that very secretive man.