deeper than they had been, and his mouth had gone completely slack, and
his eyes were uprolled in a quite ghastly way, so that only the whites
showed.
Slowly as Corriston stared Ramsey's features began to come apart. The
familiar, hideous pattern began to repeat itself on Ramsey's blanched
features. The mouth widened until it turned into a shapeless, colorless
gash in a face that was hardly recognizable. The nose widened and
spread out, the chin receded, and the cheeks became a flattened expanse
of wrinkled flesh that stubbornly refused to stop spreading.
Ramsey's face became a pumpkin face, with slits for eyes and a hideous
caricature of a mouth that seemed almost to pout as it expanded.
Suddenly Ramsey was no longer sitting upright before the desk. His body
swayed and began to slump, tilting at first only a little sideways and
then sliding completely from the chair to the floor.
Ramsey did not descend to the floor with violence. It was a slow,
barely perceptible gliding motion of his entire body that carried him
from an upright position to a prone one in less than thirty seconds.
His body seemed to collapse inward upon itself, as if he had suddenly
become too skeleton-thin for his clothes, as if so much vitality had
been drained from him by the shot which had put an end to his life that
he had given up all hope of maintaining his dignity in death.
But perhaps the man on the floor had no dignity to maintain. He wasn't
Ramsey. He was a hired substitute, an impostor, and quite obviously no
man would undertake to play such a role without calculating all of the
risks in advance. Perhaps he expected to die without dignity. Perhaps
that was one of the risks which went with the bargain--the assumption
that Ramsey might very well be killed in a violent fashion, and that
anyone who stepped into Ramsey's shoes and masqueraded as Ramsey might
expect a similar fate.
Corriston felt a nerve begin to twitch violently in his cheek. Why
had Ramsey kept Henley occupied in so strange a manner, talking to a
nonentity, a stand-in, a double who could never bargain and come to
terms unless Ramsey ordered him to do so? Had Ramsey been incapable of
dealing with Henley directly, and had taken this means of complying
with the ransom demands?
It seemed incredible on the face of it. Ramsey was quite obviously the
kind of man who could live through any kind of private hell if he had
to.
He'd have stood up to Henley no matter how great his inner torment.
He'd have met the ransom demands or rejected them--and it was almost
inconceivable that he would have rejected them--without for an instant
losing his outward composure. And even inwardly he would have kept a
tight rein on his emotions. He was not the kind of man who would hire
someone else to protect him from anything that vitally concerned him,
even with the masks so conveniently at hand.
Why then had he employed a double to bargain with Henley and keep him
occupied for so long a time? It didn't matter if Ramsey had made use
of doubles in the past. Probably he had, in order to protect himself
in dealings with the colonists when the advantages of deception
would favor him. But he would never have done so under these present
circumstances--when a criminal who would stop at nothing was holding
his daughter under threat of death.
He would never have done so unless he had some very special reason that
dominated his thinking to the exclusion of all else.
Suddenly Corriston had the answer. It came to him in a lightning-swift
flash of intuition, which carried with it complete credibility. It was
more than a guess. Somehow he was sure; he knew. A full minute before
he heard the dull rumble of the tractors as they came through the
gate, and went to the window and stared down, he knew.
He had the answer and yet what he saw eclipsed what he knew. It was a
little like watching a rocket take off, hearing the roar and seeing the
flames through all of its burning time, and seeing at the same time the
men on the proving ground moving swiftly about, and the space-helmeted
men at the controls of the rocket itself, each grimly intent on one
particular task.
Ramsey was returning into the Citadel with armed guards on both sides
of him, and his daughter was walking with her head erect at his
side. Five colony tractors had followed him into the Citadel and two
more were just coming through the gate, moving ponderously on their
caterpillar treads because each tractor weighed two tons even in the
light gravity of Mars.
Corriston did an almost unbelievable thing then. Standing quietly
by the window he raised his right hand and saluted Ramsey in silent
tribute to the man's courage at the most threatening moment of his life.
What Ramsey had done in no way lessened his guilt. But Corriston would
have just as readily repeated the salute in public, without caring what
anyone might think. What Ramsey had done was as clear to him now as a
series of moves on a chessboard laid out in advance, but hidden from
the man who was to be outwitted and outplayed.
Ramsey had made use of a double to keep Henley occupied--no doubt with
repeated, skillful evasions, a constant insistence that more proof be
forthcoming, more details supplied. Perhaps a half-dozen conferences
had taken place in all, extending over many hours. And while Henley was
being encouraged to believe that Ramsey was being softened up and would
accept all of his demands in the end, Ramsey had gone out into the
desert alone, armed, furious, and determined to rescue his daughter if
it cost him his life.
Or perhaps he hadn't gone alone. Perhaps he had taken a dozen armed
guards with him. Somehow it didn't seem important, couldn't take away
Ramsey's moment of victory. It was a moment of victory for Ramsey even
though he hadn't played a major role for long, even though he had found
his daughter already rescued and safe on his return. And Corriston had
been the one to move out into the center of the board and deliver the
_coup de grace_. He had kept a restless killer immobilized while the
play was under way, and that was victory enough for any man.
Corriston suddenly realized that neither Ramsey nor the Colonists had
any way of knowing that Henley was dead. They had probably joined
forces outside the Citadel for the sole purpose of rescuing him from
the deadliest kind of danger. And he wasn't helping them at all. In
another minute they'd be trying to get to him with tear gas.
It didn't make any kind of sense, but when Corriston went down the wide
central staircase he wasn't thinking about the colonists at all. He was
wondering only how Helen Ramsey would look standing alone on a strange
dark headland at midnight. Then the vision dissolved and another one
took its place. She wasn't on a headland any more.
She was standing at the door of a small, white cottage and there were
a couple of kids beside her: a boy of about Freddy's age, or maybe a
little younger, and a little girl with golden curls, her hair like a
crown.
He realized suddenly that it could never be a small, white cottage.
There were no small white cottages on the Station, and never could be.
But the Station would be all right for a married man with kids. The
kids could come and visit him, and his wife could be with him about
one-fourth of the time, both on the Station and on Earth.
What more could a happily married man ask, if the Station was so much
a part of him that it was never wholly absent from his thoughts? He'd
have to ask her, of course--at least a dozen times to make sure--that
she really wanted that kind of man for a husband. But he knew what her
answer would be even before the vision dissolved, and he was soon out
in the central square between the five buildings, holding her tightly
in his arms.
From the way she kissed him he knew that she must have endured an
eternity of torment just from uncertainty, just from not knowing
whether he was dead or alive. For an instant he could think of nothing
else but the wonder of it, the absolute reassurance which she had
brought to him with her closeness, her gratefulness, the intensity of
her concern.
Across the square they could see the tractors, looking in the dazzling
light like massive blocks of metal standing almost end to end. There
was a great deal of movement and shouting between the buildings, and
Corriston knew that in another half-minute they would no longer be
alone together, that the closeness couldn't last.
A change was coming over her face, and he was suddenly afraid for her,
afraid that when she was told the full truth about her father just the
pain of knowing might make her withdraw from him, even though it could
never really come between them or separate them for long.
So there it was. He could see it in her eyes, the fear, the shadow,
and because he had no way of knowing just how much she already knew
he decided that only complete honesty could keep the shadow from
lengthening.
His hands moved slowly up over her face, and he drew her chin up and
said, very gently: "There's something I'd like to say now, about your
father. Without his help Henley would have finished what he started out
to do. There are different ways of paying off a debt, and your father--"
She raised her hand as if to put a stop to his words. "Darling, I know
he's in serious trouble. Don't try to spare me; there's no need to.
There will be a trial and we both know what the outcome will be. He'll
never walk out of the courtroom a free man. But he's not afraid ... and
neither am I. These last few, terrible hours have changed him. He's not
ashamed now to admit that he loves me. All the hardness, the coldness,
is gone."
Something in her voice stilled the questions he wanted to ask. She
seemed to sense what was in his mind, for she said quickly. "I don't
think father has any enemies now on Mars. He's going to give the
colonists back their land. Not because he has to, but because he wants
to. They came to his assistance when they could have used the way
he cheated and robbed them as an excuse for not helping him at all.
There are few men who wouldn't feel grateful, who wouldn't be shaken
by remorse. But I think it goes deeper than that. Even now I'm not
completely sure, but I think he knows it's the only way he can free
himself from the prison he's been building around himself since I was a
little girl."
She was silent for an instant, while the pain in her eyes seemed to
deepen. Then she said, "I can't leave him now, darling. Not right away.
It would be too cruel a blow."
Ahead now Corriston could see three of the colonists coming toward him.
They were less than forty feet away. "I think I know how it is," he
said. "When you've been through too much, you just go dead inside. You
can feel sympathy for someone very close, like your father. But that's
about all...."
"Darling, that's not what I mean. We'll be apart, but just for a little
while. It will be so short a time we won't even miss it later on ...
two or three weeks, at most. And this time you won't have to wonder
about me at all."
Corriston noticed then for the first time that her hair had been blown
in all directions by the wind. He remembered how, on their first
meeting, it had been disarranged in much the same way. She'd been
wearing a beret then, and just the casual tilt of her hat had done
the fluffing. But wind or no wind, he'd always like the way her hair
looked, the gold in it, and the way it set off the great beauty of her
face.
"I'd be more than unreasonable if I tried to pick flaws in a promise
like that," he said.
"You can never go home again," someone had once said. You can never go
home because people change and places change with them, and familiar
scenes take on an aspect of strangeness as the old, well-loved
landmarks fade.
But in space, the landmarks are as wide and deep as the gulfs between
the stars, and it is not too difficult for a man to return to a
steel-ribbed Gibraltar in space and experience again the emotions he
felt when he first sighted it, and hear again the long thunder-roll of
the ships berthing and taking off.
The ship which was bringing Corriston back had begun to loom up behind
the telemetric aerials with her bow slanting forward. She had almost
berthed, and, standing with his face half in shadow, Commander Clement
watched the landing lights flashing on and off and wondered just what
he would say to the young lieutenant he'd never met--the very famous
lieutenant who would be emerging from the boarding port and descending
the ramp any minute now.
He told himself that it ought to be something very simple and direct,
accompanied by a friendly handclasp and a nod. "Welcome back,
Lieutenant. Welcome back. I guess you know how I feel about the
scoundrels who kept us from meeting the first time."
Yes, just a few words and a friendly handclasp would be best. No
salutes either given or returned. No stiff-necked salutes, and damn the
regulations for once. It was truly a very great occasion.