then later, partly for your good. Please don't judge me too harshly
before I've had a chance to tell you exactly what happened."
He reached out for her and kissed her even as she came into his arms.
He had expected her to be angry, to withdraw, but instead she encircled
his strong back with a surprising fierceness. When he released her, her
eyes were shining.
"I'm glad you did that ... darling! Very glad. But we're still in
trouble."
"I know that. But we're in love, too. And you just promised to tell me
what happened."
"Well, I guess I just ... just regressed."
"You what?"
"Regressed. You know, like when I was a headstrong little brat of a
child. We all do that at times. You'll have to admit there was some
excuse for me. You weren't born in a house with a hundred rooms, with
servants always coming and going, and outside gardens with big red
and yellow flowers where you couldn't even run and hide without being
smothered, without being searched for and brought screaming and kicking
back inside.
"You don't know what it means to know you haven't a father, only
a stern, cold, black-coated man standing away off in the darkness
somewhere and watching people bow down before him.
"You don't know what it means to be told: 'You're Stephen Ramsey's
daughter. _Behave. Behave. Behave!_'"
"I scarcely ever saw my father. And when I did see him he was as cold
as one of the slabs in the big mausoleum he took so much pride in, the
big family mausoleum which only a Ramsey was permitted to visit. And
yet I think he loved me in his own cold way. I think he still does."
She fell silent for a moment and then an overpowering need to tell
Corriston more seemed to come upon her.
"I was never allowed to see young men, not even to go for a ride in the
park. Anyone of them might be a fortune seeker, because no young man,
even if he is madly in love with a girl, can quite shut his eyes to
wealth as one additional reason for loving her.
"So I never saw any young men. I wasn't permitted to even go to a
dance, or walk in the moonlight on a balcony. I wanted to go to dances,
wanted at least one young man to kiss me damned hard."
"Sure you did," Corriston said. "I understand."
"I'm going to stop right there, darling. I could tell you what it means
to be free to travel, anywhere, anywhere in the world and to see all of
the white and shining cities, and to be intoxicated by beauty, and to
know at the same time that you are not free, can never hope to be free
as other people are free."
"And that's why you ran away."
"Yes, darling, yes, and because that bodyguard was a complete fool.
He was just one of thirty bodyguards my father had hired to protect
me, year after year. But he was the biggest fool of all. He drank too
much and he talked too much. Finally I made up my mind that I would be
better off if I went on to Mars alone. My father had told me I could
come, the trip had been carefully planned down to the smallest detail.
I was to travel incognito. I was to keep to myself until I arrived at
the Station and no one was supposed to know I was even on the ship, not
even the captain. I'm quite sure he didn't know. I think the invitation
to his cabin was a complete fabrication. In fact, I'm sure it was. I
think Clakey--his real name was Ewers--was just drunk enough to make up
a crazy story like that to get me away from you.
"But I didn't want to get away from you, darling. I wanted to get away
from him. I wanted to have a few days of complete freedom before I
arrived on Mars, and perhaps after that for a day in the colony before
I joined my father. I didn't care how angry he'd be when he saw me
without a bodyguard, alone, wonderfully, gloriously alone and free for
the first time in my life. I didn't want to be Helen Ramsey at all. I
wanted to be somebody else and be completely free.
"So I went into the ladies room, darling, and I put on the strangest
kind of mask."
"Yes," Corriston said. "I know."
"You know about the mask?"
"Please go on," Corriston said. "I'd rather you didn't ask me how I
know that your father can take pride in at least one constructive
achievement. The masks are extraordinary. I've seen one."
"But how? Where? I can't believe it. I--"
"Please," Corriston said. "It isn't too important. I made a necessary
promise that I wouldn't tell you, not immediately. I'm asking you to
trust me and go on."
"Well, I secured one of those very unusual masks. From the
Gresham-Ramsey Laboratories, before we left Earth. I could go there
anytime I wanted to. All of the research technicians there are quite
old. One of them, Thomas Webb, is really quite handsome. I might have
fallen in love with him if he had been forty years younger. He showed
me just how to adjust the mask. But when I went into the ladies' lounge
I had more than just a mask. I had a complete thin plastic change of
clothing concealed under my dress. I didn't remove my dress, only
reversed my clothing so that the plastic dress covered the one I'd been
wearing."
Corriston said, "It was a very courageous thing for you to do."
"I'm glad you think so, darling. Because when I came out of the
lounge and saw Ewers killed, I wasn't courageous at all. I became
panic-stricken, terrified, beside myself with fear. I knew that my
father had many dangerous enemies. I knew that I was in immediate,
deadly danger. I _had_ to go on with the disguise then. I had to go
right on being somebody else. I couldn't tell anyone. I couldn't even
tell you. I had to let you think that in some strange, bewildering way
I had gone into the lounge and disappeared.
"I knew you wouldn't really believe that, not for a moment. But I
didn't know what you'd think. I _could_ have told you, I suppose, but
I was afraid it would only make the danger greater, might transfer
some of the danger to you. And I didn't know you'd go straight to the
captain and get yourself into trouble. There were rumors on the Station
that you'd been confined, put under guard. But they were only rumors.
I felt I had to see you, talk to you. I was half out of my mind with
anxiety. I bribed one of the guards to let me out of the quarantine
cage and went in search of you.
"I searched everywhere, followed passageways at random, got lost in a
maze of machinery."
"And someone followed you," Corriston said. "He followed you and tore
the mask from your face."
She looked at him with wide, startled eyes. "How did you know?"
"I was there," Corriston said. "You fainted and I took you into my
arms--for the very first time. You didn't know that, did you?"
"How could I have known? If what you say is true, I--"
Helen Ramsey did not complete what she had started to say. Had she
done so she might not have been thrown so abruptly off-balance by the
suddenly lurching deck; she would have moved closer to Corriston and
could have seized hold of his shoulders for support.
She did not fall, but she nearly did, and the lurch sent her tottering
all the way to the opposite wall. Corriston saw her collide with the
wall and sink to her knees. At the same instant his own knees collapsed.
He was lying sprawled out on the deck, too startled and shaken to go
immediately to her aid, when the second lurch came. It spun him about,
and then he was sliding. He couldn't seem to stop the sliding. He went
all the way to the opposite wall too.
For a brief instant they were together again, locked in a desperate
embrace, their legs higher than their heads. Then the deck righted
itself and the bombardment began.
It was a terrifying thing to have to listen to, and Corriston preferred
to listen to it on his feet. Slowly he arose and helped his companion
up, holding her in so tight a grip that it seemed to them that they had
been welded together and could never part.
He was glad that he could be completely sure of one thing. It wasn't
a nuclear bombardment--not yet. The cruiser was merely shelling the
Station. When the cruiser launched an atomic warhead he'd know about
it--rather, he wouldn't know. The fact that he was still alive and
aware of what was going on told him a great deal about the nature of
the bombardment.
"What is it?" Helen Ramsey whispered. "Do you know?"
"We're the catspaw in a naval attack," Corriston said. "The commander
took a very great risk."
It was incredible, but right at the moment he felt himself to be in the
scoundrel's corner. He didn't want the Station to be blown apart in the
great empty spaces between the planets any more than the commander did.
When Corriston reached the viewport and stared out, the cruiser was
following the Station far off to the side, in an obvious effort to
outmaneuver it by maintaining a parallel rather than a directly
pursuing course. But it was not escaping the swiftly turning Station's
stern rocket jets. Blinding bursts of incandescence spiraled toward it
through the void, and once or twice scored direct hits.
He saw the cruiser shudder throughout its length, and then draw back,
almost as if it were endowed with life and had nerves and arteries that
could be ripped apart.
There _were_ mechanical arteries that could easily enough be ripped.
For an instant Corriston stared with a strange kind of detachment,
freed from the terrible tension and uncertainty by his absolute
absorption in the battle itself, freed from the almost mind-numbing
sense of participating in a struggle that could end in utter disaster
for Station and cruiser alike. He knew that if the cruiser maneuvered
in too close, the puffs of flame from the Station's jets could turn
into superheated gases roaring through space, destroying everything in
their path.
The Station, too, was only a pulsebeat from fiery annihilation. And a
pulsebeat could be terrifyingly brief. But the decision had been made
and there could be no turning back.
Aboard the cruiser the decision had certainly come from very high up.
Corriston turned the thought slowly over in his mind, still in the grip
of his strange detachment. Just what did "very high up" mean?
It meant--it had to mean--a conflict of personalities, the
hot-headedness or stubbornness or glory-seeking that went with every
decision made by strong-willed men.
Aboard the cruiser someone had acted. After consultation? On just an
impulse? In blind rage because the Station had ignored a warning that
had been repeated twice?
There was no way of knowing. But on the cruiser men were dying. That
was important too. Just how reckless had the decision been?
In space, military science has never been an exact science. Sonic
echoes alone can kill, and in a pressurized compartment blowups happen.
Jet-supports can be placed at the best of all possible angles and still
fly off into space. Compressed air shot out of pressure vents can turn
bone and flesh into soft oozing jelly.
The cruiser was changing its course again. It had failed, in a
maneuver, twice repeated, to draw close at almost right angles to
the Station, and had taken terrible punishment from below, above and
straight ahead.
But the cruiser was still firing. And Corriston not only saw the bursts
of flame, he felt the blasts in his eardrums, his brain and the soles
of his feet. And suddenly he saw flames darting out directly beneath
him, and knew that the Station was on fire.
Corriston knew that at any moment he could be smashed back against
a bone-crushing wall of metal; he could be pulverized, asphyxiated,
driven mad. And the fear in him--the fear that he wouldn't be able to
control--would be a two-edged sword.
There was no pain more ghastly than the final burst of agony that came
with a burst open nervous system. It was the most horrible way to die.
But even dying that way wouldn't be half as bad as watching the woman
he loved die.
Almost as if aware of his thoughts, Helen spoke to him for the first
time since he had crossed to the viewport.
"It's very strange, darling. I'm calmer now than I have ever been. I
guess it can happen if you love a man so very much that you know your
life would have no meaning if anything should happen to him. It's like
facing up squarely to the fact that you no longer have any existence
apart from him. I've done that, darling, and I'm not afraid."
There was silence in the cabin for an instant. Then another shell
exploded, and another, and another. Corriston felt light and
dangerously dizzy. It was amazing that he had not been hurled to the
floor, still more amazing that he could have remained for so long
motionless in just one spot.
Then, abruptly, the bombardment ceased. There was no sound at all in
the cabin, just a silence so absolute that the roaring in Corriston's
ears was like the sound made by an angry sea beating against vast stone
cliffs in a world that had ceased to exist.
There were no longer any exploding white stars coming from the cruiser.
It was dwindling into the blackness of space, giving up the battle,
conceding defeat. It became thinner and thinner. Suddenly only the reef
remained. Where the cruiser had been there stretched only empty space.
Corriston turned from the viewport. He crossed the cabin to the cot,
swaying a little, but only from dizziness, and sat down and drew the
girl on the cot close to him. He held her tightly, saying nothing.
13
Corriston was still sitting on the cot when the door opened and the
commander and two executive officers came into the cabin.
He was not too surprised, for it had been somehow almost impossible for
him to believe that the commander could have been killed. A scoundrel's
luck and a drunkard's luck were often very much the same thing.
If the commander had succeeded in quickly putting out the fire he rated
a medal, he was a man for all of that.
And apparently the commander _had_ succeeded in putting out the fire,
or he would not now be facing Corriston with a grimly urgent look on
his mask.
Helen Ramsey was staring at him almost as if she were seeing him as he
really was for the first time. Did she know that he was wearing a mask?
There was no possible way she could know, he told himself, except by
intuition. The masks were good. Having worn one herself she ought to
know how good they were. She ought not even to suspect the commander
unless--
Corriston had no time to finish the thought.
"Get up, both of you," the commander said, gesturing with his braided
right arm. "The Mars ship has just berthed. We've got to go aboard
before there's any question as to the obedience of the crew. The
captain has been taken off, but we're keeping some of the crew."
"You--you put out the fire, Commander?"
"Naturally. I'm not quite the incompetent you think me, Lieutenant."
"I'm quite sure of that, Commander," Corriston said. "Do we take
anything with us?"
"You'll get all the extras you need on Mars," the commander said.
"Stephen Ramsey isn't likely to want to see his daughter go about in
rags."
Corriston decided that the wisest thing he could do was to take the
commander at his word in every important respect; for the moment,
at any rate. There was the little matter of a killer still at large
somewhere on the Station, and the quicker they were in space the safer
Ramsey's daughter would be. Not just in space as the Station was in
space, but much further out in the Big Dark.
"All right, Commander," he said. "Let's get started."
Getting started took very little time. A great thankfulness came upon
Corriston when he saw the smooth dark hull of the Mars ship looming
high above him, a thousand foot long cylinder of inky blackness against
a glimmering wilderness of stars.
The ship was berthed securely beneath a towering network of telemetric
aerials, on a completely circular launching platform that was like a
saucer in reverse, with a contractable metal ramp leading up to the
wide-open, brightly lighted boarding port at its base.
There were steps on the ramp, but Corriston knew that when the
structure was drawn back into the ship it would collapse like a house
of cards, folded back upon itself.
Helen Ramsey ascended first. Corriston made certain that she would by
getting in the commander's way with a convincing show of accidental
clumsiness. He pretended to stumble as he began the ascent, to be all
hands and feet.
The commander swore softly and Corriston was quite sure that he had
not been deceived. But there was very little that he could do about it
under the circumstances. He had to let Ramsey's daughter climb the ramp
first and she was almost at the top before Corriston started up.
Corriston was halfway to the top, and the commander and the impatient,
tight-lipped executive officers were just starting up, when three tall
figures emerged from the darkness at the base of the ramp.
The attack took place so quickly that it was over almost before it
started. The commander and the executive officers didn't have a chance.
One of the emerging men had a gun, and he shot the commander in the
stomach with it at almost point-blank range.
The commander sank down, clutching at his stomach, bent nearly double.
Even from where Corriston was standing, he could see the blood
trickling down his right leg. The terrible dark wetness directly
over the wound was of course invisible, completely concealed by the
commander's tightly laced arms.
The startled, badly frightened officers turned and tried to get away.
But they didn't get far. The man who had shot the commander picked them
off like clay pigeons, one by one, as they fled.
His two companions did not even seem to be armed. They just stood
quietly watching the executive officers die. They died on the launching
platform and on the smooth deck beyond, two of them simply dropping in
their tracks, a third sprawling grotesquely, and the last staggering
on for a few paces. There were four executive officers, and not one
escaped. It was butchery, pure and simple, cruel, savage beyond belief.
Helen Ramsey was already on the ship, and there was no possible way for
him to get her off.
The thought that he was himself in the deadliest kind of danger never
even crossed his mind.
The killer returned his gun to its holster very slowly and
deliberately, and then he took it out again. It was a very strange
gesture, when every passing second must have been of vital importance
to him, but it revealed something very unusual about the man. He
evidently liked to feel that he had completed one job and packaged it
to his entire satisfaction, before going on to another.
It was that more than anything else which jolted Corriston into
complete awareness, and made it impossible for him to doubt the
reality, the utter horror, of what had taken place. The killer had
gestured to his companions, and he was coming up the ramp.
He came slowly up the ramp, and for the first time Corriston saw his
face. It was not a face that he would ever forget or ever want to
forget. It was the face of the man he had grappled with in the dark and
seen once in the light. But now his features were turned away. It was
exactly the kind of face which Corriston had pictured him as having,
except that it was just a little uglier looking. The slant of the
cheekbones even crueler, harsher, the eyes more venomously narrowed,
the mouth an uglier gash.
"All right, Lieutenant," he said, gesturing with the gun. "Go on ahead.
Go on board. We're going to need you to help pilot this ship to Mars."
14
The silence in the chart room was like the hush that comes over a
desert when hurricane winds have died down, or like the stillness of a
rocky coast when waves have ceased to pound, and dangerous rocks stand
out with all of their saw-edged teeth exposed.
It was extraordinary how, at the point of a gun, a man could think and
act almost automatically, and postpone making any decision at all. It
wasn't cowardice; Corriston was quite sure of that. He felt only anger,
deep, relentless, all-consuming. Sweat oozed in droplets from his
brow, but it was the heat and the tension which made his skin stream
with moisture. There was no immediate fear in him at all.
He'd kept fear at bay by refusing to let his mind leap ahead. Only the
gun at his back mattered, and just why it should have mattered so much
was the only thing that puzzled him.
It did not occur to him that what some men dread most is the fear of
dying too abruptly, without foreknowledge and with just a second's
glimpse of something cold and deadly before the final blackout. A gun
had that kind of power.
The man with the gun had asked Corriston a great many questions,
urgently practical questions that dealt with cold statistics concerning
zero-gravity, solar radiation, space drift and the length of time it
would take to reach Mars if a single pilot took full advantage of the
automatic controls and never allowed himself to become reckless.
Corriston had replied to the best of his ability and knowledge, and the
other had accepted his answers with a quiet grunt of satisfaction. It
was only after that, when the silence had lengthened almost unendurably
between them, that the more personal questions came.
The killer jabbed the gun more firmly against Corriston's spine and
asked in a cold, flat voice: "Do you know who I am, Corriston? Have you
any idea?"
Corriston stared out the viewport for a moment without replying, his
face deathly pale. "I don't know your name," he said. "Probably that's
not too important. I do know that you're a cold-blooded murderer, and
that killing gives you pleasure. I am very tired. I wish you wouldn't
question me any more."
"Do you think you can pilot this ship to Mars, tired as you are?"
Corriston nodded.
The pressure of the gun barrel diminished. "I am very glad--for your
sake. I suppose I might as well tell you my name. It's Henley, Richard
Henley. We'll be seeing a lot of each other before this trip is ended,
but you'll find that I'm not a particularly talkative man. When I have
something important to say, though, I won't leave you in any doubt as
to what I want done. Right now I must warn you that I would just as
soon kill you as not."
"You're lying," Corriston said. "If you killed me now you'd never get
to Mars. You need me and you know it."
"Corriston."
"Yes."
"Don't assume too much. There are practical advantages in keeping you
alive but a wrong move on your part could outweigh them. I'd have a
fair chance of getting to Mars without your help. I know more than you
think about spatial navigation. And the automatic controls are far
from unreliable. Without them it would take at least five men to pilot
a ship this size to Mars. With their aid a single experienced pilot
should be able to accomplish it. I'm pretty sure you've had enough
officer training school to qualify as a pilot. A ship's inspection
officer has to be able to navigate a ship; I've checked on that. But
you're certainly no expert, and if you force my hand I'll take my
chance with the auto-controls and my own limited knowledge."
"You'll be taking a chance, all right," Corriston said. "What would you
do if the observation glass started showing small pits in the hull from
a very large shower of micro-meteorites? Can the auto-controls stop
those pits from spreading? I've seen a ship stippled all over in less
than ten minutes. The meteor guards won't deflect micro-meteorites,
and you've got to alter your velocity and angle of drive and a lot of
other things fast. And what happens when your instruments start showing
light spectra peculiarities that can't be measured in angstroms? Just
a little oddity like that can force you to change your course, but the
auto-pilot won't know a thing about it.
"And when you hit the Martian atmosphere and start firing against
the direction of motion, how much good do you think limited knowledge
will do you? Remember, nearly all of the journey will have been made
in free fall, and in free fall the auto-controls are fairly efficient.
But the instant you hit the atmosphere the slightest miscalculation in
the utilization of your fuel reserves can lead to absolute disaster. I
don't know what makes you tick, of course. You may get a distorted kind
of pleasure from thinking of yourself as a man marked for death, the
same kind of pleasure you get from killing people."
There was silence for a moment. Then Henley drew in his breath sharply
and said: "Are you threatening me, Corriston?"
"Just warning you," Corriston said.
"I don't take kindly to warnings, Corriston. If you're not careful I'll
put a bullet right through you."
"Do the men who hired you know how you operate, Henley?"