Space Station 1
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