Space Station 1
without much personality, a sullen-faced scoundrel who was good at
obeying orders and standing ready to silence anyone Henley disliked
with a well-placed kick in the head.
But what if he did have personality after all? Suppose there were
hidden depths in him, a hidden reservoir of malice which he kept
concealed until he felt a mad impulse to start laughing or bragging or
proving to someone he disliked that he was as potentially dangerous as
Henley--perhaps even more dangerous. And suppose he decided to back
up his boasting with a quick knife thrust or a gun blast at almost
point-blank range?
It wasn't a pleasant thought, and the flicker of a match between
Stone's cupped hands did nothing to dispel Corriston's uneasiness. The
small, bright flame brought Stone's features into sharp relief for an
instant. The lips had an ugly set to them, and the eyes were slitted,
gleaming. He was making no effort to keep his hate from showing, and
the instant the match went out he lit another.
He seemed to be advancing slowly on purpose, as if aware that his
stealth and deliberation had begun to un-nerve Corriston. Corriston
felt himself stiffening, moving more closely back against the wall.
Breathing quickly, he told himself that he hadn't much time, that he
must be careful not to overreach himself.
There was another moment of silence, of stillness, while the shuffling
ceased. Then Stone was very close in the darkness, his hands cupped
about a third match, a mocking smile on his lips.
It was a blunder on his part. Before he could move again Corriston was
upon him.
There are times when a handcuffed man is at a disadvantage in a
furiously waged and uncertain struggle, but Corriston suffered no
disadvantage. For ten minutes he had been reminding himself that a blow
along the side of the neck, just under the jaw, could paralyze and even
kill if it were delivered with sufficient force.
A sharp, flat-of-the-hand blow could do it. But handcuffs were better,
and Corriston lashed out now with his manacled wrists upraised, so
that the handcuffs grazed Stone's neck twice lightly and then almost
splintered his jawbone with a rotor-blade violence.
The blow not only stunned Stone, it lifted him clear of the deck. He
staggered forward and fell heavily, his breath leaving his lungs in an
agonizing sob.
Corriston leaned back against the wall again for an instant, breathing
heavily. Then he knelt beside Stone and went through his pockets
until he found the handcuff key. It was difficult. He had to do a lot
of awkward fumbling with his fingers, and even with the key in his
possession, getting the cuffs off was far from easy. But somehow he
managed it, perhaps because he had unusually flexible fingers and knew
that if he failed, Stone would see to it that he got no second chance
this side of eternity.
He stood very straight and still in the darkness, his eyes focused on
Stone's white face. There was no need for him to strike a match. He had
taken from Stone not only the key, but a small pocket flashlight which
Stone had apparently preferred not to use.
There was something else he had taken from Stone--his gun. He held the
weapon now, very firmly centered on Stone, while he waited for him to
come to.
Ordinarily he wouldn't have cared if Stone had never opened his
eyes again; but now he had to wait and see. The ship was so large
that to explore it compartment by compartment until he found the one
in which Helen Ramsey was being held prisoner would be dangerously
time-consuming. So, if Stone recovered consciousness within fifteen or
twenty minutes and could tell him, so much the better.
If not, better wait and see. He waited, shifting his gun only a little
from weariness as the minutes dragged on, wondering if he had not made
a mistake in waiting at all.
Finally Stone stirred and groaned. Corriston bent and shook him by the
shoulders. He took firm hold of his shoulders and shook him vigorously,
feeling no pity for him at all.
He got the truth out of him by threatening him with violence, by
threatening to kill him if he kept anything back. Stone kept nothing
back. Just remembering the blow that had felled him, loosened his
tongue. But the gun helped too, the gun wedged so closely against his
ribs under his heart that he feared that if he breathed too heavily he
would breathe his last.
"I won't lie to you," he said desperately, pleadingly. "You haven't a
chance. There's a photoelectric alarm system outside the compartment,
and Jim Saddler is sitting just inside the door. He has a gun trained
on her. His orders are to shoot her dead if anyone so much as attempts
to get inside that door."
"Meaning me?"
"It means you, Lieutenant. I'm not lying; I swear it. You won't stand a
chance. Henley will be coming back in a few hours now. You'd better get
out while you're still in one piece."
Corriston was tempted to hurl Stone back against the wall and shout at
him: "It doesn't matter whether I go out of here in one piece or dead
on a stretcher. She's the only thing I care about."
But he caught himself just in time. Stone thought in the most
primitive imaginable terms. You couldn't go to a Stone Age man and say:
"My own skin doesn't mean a goddam thing to me. I'm in love. If she
dies I die. Can't you understand that? If she dies, my life will be
over."
He said instead: "All right. I guess it means I've got to get help."
"You'll never get help," Stone said, summoning from some defiant depths
within himself a little courage. "The colony is eighty-seven miles from
here. You couldn't cross the desert on foot. No one could cross it on
foot, not when the temperature drops at night to fifty below. But you'd
better not stay. He'd better head for Ramsey's citadel. That's your
only chance. It's only twenty miles from here."
_Let him think that_, a voice within Corriston warned. Let him think
that I'll head for the citadel. Otherwise he may attempt to get word to
Ramsey somehow. I can tie him up and leave him in a state of shock, but
if he thinks I'm heading for the colony, even a state of shock may not
stop him. Saddler may come down here looking for him. Once he's freed,
if he thinks I'm heading for the Colony....
Corriston said: "Damn you, Stone, I ought to kill you. I ought to put a
bullet through your heart right now. I don't know why I can't. It's a
weakness in me."
"I'd kill _you_, Corriston, if _I_ had the chance. But I'm glad you
have that kind of a weakness."
Corriston stared at him incredulously. "You're certainly outspoken. You
were pleading for your life a moment ago--going soft, as you'd put it.
Now you're talking realistically, analyzing your own motivations and
mine."
"I'm not quite as dumb as you think me, Corriston."
"All right. Let's say you're not dumb. Few people are, when it comes to
a matter of life or death. That's beside the point right now. I've got
to tie you up. Where can I find some rope?"
"It would be much simpler to lock me in a vacant compartment."
"All right. Then I'll lock you in one of the compartments. You can
pick your own compartment. I'd advise you not to waste my time. Pick
your own compartment and I'll slide the bolt fast on the outside."
Stone showed no disposition to put up an argument. Corriston kept the
gun pressed into the small of his back and he seemed to realize that
his life hung by a thread.
They found a compartment that was small and dark, and into it Stone
walked at gunpoint, offering no protest, and answering the questions
Corriston put to him readily enough.
"You'll find all the equipment you need at the end of this passageway,"
Stone said. "Activate the third door on your left. Anything else you'd
like to know?"
Corriston shook his head. He walked out of the compartment backwards,
keeping his gun trained on Stone until he was in the corridor. Then he
swung the door shut and shot the bolt home.
He had no trouble at all in finding the equipment he knew he'd need,
thanks to Stone's generosity. Stone could afford to be generous, he
reflected bitterly. The Henley combine still held all of the trump
cards.
He cursed the time it took him to equip himself for a near-suicidal
crossing of eighty-seven miles of Martian desert. He would travel on
foot, after nightfall, and in freezing cold. The compartment in which
he labored was a basal compartment, and set in the massive bulkhead,
against which he leaned with his bootstraps still unlaced, was an
airlock opening directly on the Martian plain.
He collected the smaller articles first, setting them down in a row on
a long metal bench directly opposite the airlock: three compasses, each
weighing perhaps twenty ounces; a cathode ray compass; a non-magnetic
compass and a sun compass. The sun compass would perhaps prove the most
valuable until darkness fell. The sun, shining down with brilliance
from the clear Martian sky, could throw a directional kind of shadow,
enabling a man on foot to take fairly accurate bearings without the use
of sighting and viewing instruments.
To the compasses on the bench he added five map coordinates and a
Lambert conformal projection chart.
Food concentrates came next: four shining aluminum cubes, four inches
by four inches, which would go into the knapsack on his back. Then a
canteen, already filled with sterilized water from the ship's central
water supply system.
Next, he took from the locker the right kind of clothing: a tubeflex
inner suit with a warm lining and a heavy outer suit equipped with heat
lamps.
Oxygen masks next--oxy-respirators, to be exact. One to attach to the
face and one to hold in reserve as a spare. They covered only a third
of the face, but that third had everything to do with a man's staying
alive and vigorous in the thin air of Mars. When night fell, and the
cold descended, oxy-respirators were not enough. Then you had to pull
down the entire front of your helmet and stagger on with your sight
impaired, for in a cold that was almost beyond endurance, helmets had a
way of clouding over from time to time.
The clouding over of the vision plate was not too important. It could
be constantly wiped clean. But if his brain started "clouding over"
too....
He dismissed the possibility from his mind. He was clothed now, fully
clothed, and ready to depart.
He started moving toward the airlock, feeling and looking like a giant
beetle of the tropics, feeling awkward, cumbersome and insecure. His
boots were weighted, and the bulge of the oxygen tank on his shoulder
made him look almost hunchbacked in the cold light glimmer that turned
the bulkhead into a mirroring surface as he advanced.
He manipulated the airlock and it opened with a slow, steady droning
and then he was passing through it, still moving awkwardly....
At last! He was out on the Martian desert in bright sunlight, staring
up at the clear blue sky.
The first few miles were not difficult at all. He walked away from
the ship with his shoulders held straight, the cumbersome feeling
dissipated by the lightness of his stride in the incredibly light
gravity.
The air pressure about him was less than seventy millimeters of
mercury. The thought sprouted in his mind that he was the god Mercury
striding along with winged shoes, and for the first five miles his
weighted boots did seem to develop wings.
Then the temperature began slowly to drop. The sun sank lower. Its
brightness diminished, and his cheeks began to tingle with the cold.
There was a slight wind blowing over the desert, raising dust flurries
on the summits of the tallest dunes, causing the gray patches of crust
lichen, which were scattered widely over the plain, to change color as
their threadlike surfaces were ruffled by the breeze.
Far in the distance he could see a "canal," one of those strange