Space Station 1
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?"
It was a stab in the dark, but it brought a quick, enraged reply. "How
I operate is my own business. And I don't like the word 'hire.' I'd
advise you not to use it again. Ramsey's uranium steal made every miner
on Mars decide straight off that I was the right man to lead them.
They're all in back of me, but they don't control me. I take orders
from no one."
"Maybe they wouldn't be in back of you if they knew what a scoundrel
you are," Corriston said.
"You may think whatever you please. I don't mind your calling me a
scoundrel if it will ease your mind. Just don't use the word 'hire.'"
"I don't see why you should object to it," Corriston went on
recklessly. "It protects you, in a way. It's a good word to hide
behind. If the colonists knew the truth about you, I don't think you'd
last very long."
"I'll last long enough to help you dig your own grave, Corriston,
if you keep on with that line of talk. You're the real lucky one. I
missed killing you on the Station because my aim was bad. You were an
unexpected complication and you were keeping me upset. I didn't like it
at all."
"Go ahead. I knew too much. Was that it?"
"Partly. I didn't know how much you knew or how much you'd guessed. But
you were in a position to start a lot of high-powered stuff that could
have interfered with my plans in a dozen ways. Now I happen to need
you--to a limited extent. But I'm warning you again. Don't trade on
your luck. Don't force me to kill you, Corriston."
"Perhaps I won't. Perhaps we can strike a compromise. As I see it,
there's no need for immediate violence. Suppose you take me just a
little more fully into your confidence. It can do you no harm now; and
there are a few things I'm still curious about."
"All right, Corriston. What is it you'd like to know?"
"How did you manage to stay concealed on the Station when Ramsey's
officers were in full command? You had considerable freedom of
movement, apparently, even if you had to move with caution."
"We had everything planned in advance," Henley said. "We got to one of
Ramsey's men with bribe money the miners raised, an executive officer
named Stockton. We made it worth his while. We had a carefully worked
out plan for smuggling Helen Ramsey off the shuttle ship and keeping
her hidden until the Mars ship arrived. Stockton had everything
prepared: a concealed compartment, food, made our problem more
complicated. Stockton helped us get out of the quarantine cage and kept
right on protecting us until we no longer needed him."
"Then you must have known about the masks. You must have known before
you arrived that Ramsey's men were in complete control of the Station."
"Sure we knew, long before Earth found out. We know exactly what had
taken place. You'd be surprised what a few carefully placed bribes can
do. We knew that Ramsey had laid himself wide open by substituting his
own men for the Station's commanding officers. We knew exactly how
vulnerable he was."
"I see," Corriston said. "Ramsey was so vulnerable that any determined
attack made upon him would have had a fair chance of succeeding. But
you worked out a plan for striking at him in a wholly criminal way,
through his daughter. Did the miners know that, Henley? Or did they
just give you their backing in a general way? You probably seemed to
them the kind of man who would go after Ramsey hammer and tongs."
"Suppose we just say they knew I'd find a way to make Ramsey meet
all of our demands." Henley smiled thinly. "The details they left to
me." He paused an instant, then went on: "Right after Helen Ramsey
disappeared, I did some hard thinking. It occurred to me that she might
be wearing a mask too. So I watched all of the women in the quarantine
cage and when one of them slipped out I followed her."
"As simple as that!"
"It wasn't simple. The girl's disappearance on the shuttle ship had me
completely baffled at first. It wasn't until we reached the Station
that the mask possibility occurred to me."
"We talked about that once before, remember?"
"You were lucky then, Corriston. I tried very hard to kill you, simply
because I thought you knew more about Helen Ramsey's disappearance than
you actually did. In that dark cargo compartment, with time running out
on me, I couldn't think very clearly. Anything more you'd like to know?"
"Yes. How many men did Ramsey succeed in substituting for the rightful