Space Station 1
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.
The killer? You can't get rid of him, can you? He keeps coming back
into your mind. The killer had not tried to spare Helen Ramsey. He had
killed her bodyguard and ripped a mask from her face. No attempt at
protection there. But Clement could not have known about that. He had
evidently been searching for Helen Ramsey himself. The news that she
had been found had startled him, had given him a visible jolt.
Corriston did not think that the pattern would dissolve. A few of its
features were becoming too clear now, the implications too inescapable.
There was something going on that was ugly at the core of it, and the
coming of the killer had simply brought it out into the open. Not too
much into the open as yet perhaps, but the handwriting on the wall had
at least become almost readable. Perhaps the accident to the freighter
had also helped to bring it into the open. In some obscure way
everything seemed to dovetail: Ramsey; the situation on Mars; Clement
and the freighter; a twice disappearing Helen Ramsey; and an accusation
of space-shock which was completely false and unjustified. Each seemed
to hover just above the center of a very definite pattern.
And so did the masks! The masks in particular. Think, think hard about
the masks and what the very existence of such masks on the Station
implied.
The masks could only have been designed to cover the darkest deceit, to
cover the most terrifying treachery.
How many officers and enlisted men on the Station were wearing masks?
How many? And why? Was _every_ officer on the Station wearing one? If
the masks were thought necessary, if their employment had been made
mandatory, there could be only one explanation.
Every officer and every enlisted man was masquerading. The Station was
officered and manned by--a word he'd never liked from a dictionary of
obsolete American slang came unbidden into his mind--_Phonies!_
The thought staggered him. For a moment he rejected it as
inconceivable, outside the bounds of reason. But it remained on the
perimeter of his consciousness and would not be dislodged. It came back
and set itself down where its dominance over his mind could not be
contested.
What else _could_ it mean? Masks have only one purpose: to enable the
wearer to avoid being recognized.
Quite obviously the phony officers could be wearing masks for only
one reason: to conceal their real identities while they manned the
Stations, carrying on the tasks of the men they had displaced.
Carrying on the tasks of the rightful officers, but with a difference.
And that difference would almost certainly be criminal activity on a
wide and daring scale.
The only question remaining to be answered was how high did that
activity ascend? Did it ascend to the very top, to Commander Clement
himself?
Fortunately, the violence of space is a controlled violence, and
determined men can slip through it with tools and building materials.
They can base themselves on zero-gravity construction rafts and take
refuge in pressurized crevices, go floating along steel girders five
hundred feet in length until there has been assembled the greatest
of all miracles--a manned Space Station a thousand feet in diameter
encircling Earth at a distance of fifteen hundred miles.
The Station had not been built in space, it had been built on Earth
section by section. However, the final task of putting it together had
been left to the floating men in their fishbowl helmets, the suicide
brigade with their incredible vacuum equipment and remote control
welding arms.
Fifty-seven sections had been built on Earth over a period of five
years, thirty-four in the Eastern United States, the rest in scattered
localities from Chicago to the Gold Coast. They had all been sent up
by step rockets into the same narrow orbit around Earth. They were
fifty-seven sections "crash landing" in a total vacuum, weightless and
yet with sufficient mass and inertia to keep them in close proximity
until the great task could get under way.
The assembled Station was cone-shaped, and it had been a colossal
undertaking to keep it from developing stress defects over a third of
its bulk during the early constructional stages. Under the guidance of
experts, the problem had been solved, but at a tragic price.
Assembling the Station had cost the lives of fifty-three men, for
there is no easy way to bring together, join, seal and make safe
tons of metal and plastic, intricate machinery and equipment, plus a
thousand-and-one small, incidental contrivances fifteen hundred miles
above the emergency-alert systems and hospital facilities of Earth.
Some of the men who had lost their lives had been blown out of
transport rocket tubes by mistake. Some had missed their footing too
close to a welding operation that had been halted too late. Some had
floated into capsules full of nitric oxygen gas under high pressure
and had failed to veer away in time. Still others had tugged too
strenuously at heavy girders and the slow, but crushing inertia of an
enormous, backward-swinging beam in free fall had ripped their space
suits asunder and fractured their spines.
There were five thousand ways of dying in space. But the sacrifice, the
terror, the tragic toll seemed immeasurably remote now, for the roar of
the incoming and outgoing ships made the Station a gigantic reality so
completely in the present that it seemed to have no past.
Spinning always on its axis, substituting centrifugal force for
the gravity tug of Earth, the Station was a complete world, a
self-contained macrocosm so immense that the magnetic-shod mechanics
who inspected it in relays, the passenger-carrying shuttle rockets from
Earth that came and went, and even the thousand-foot ships that berthed
for re-fueling and clearance seemed hardly to encroach at all on its
vast central bulk.
And yet, it was something quite apart from the Station's bigness which
came under worldwide scrutiny when the freighter crashed and was
splintered into fragments, channeling a fiery crater in the earth and
causing the most disastrous accidental death toll in United States
history.
The news was flashed to the four corners of the earth, and almost
simultaneously a flight of United States military jets took off from
the Lake Superior airport to explore the wreckage.
The first message from the flight commander, Lieutenant Colonel
Hackett, came five hours later. It was tense, grim and it minced no
words. "Wreckage radioactive. Main cargo uranium in a rough ore state.
Explosion and subsequent intense radioactivity apparently caused by an
auxiliary cargo of highly unstable uranium isotopes. If the freighter