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Title: Space Station 1

Author: Frank Belknap Long

Release date: October 23, 2015 [eBook #50290]
Most recently updated: October 22, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SPACE STATION
1 ***

SPACE STATION 1

by FRANK BELKNAP LONG

ACE BOOKS
A Division of A. A. Wyn, Inc.
23 West 47th Street, New York 36, N. Y.

SPACE STATION 1
Copyright 1957, by A. A. Wyn, Inc.

All Rights Reserved

Printed in U. S. A.

[Transcriber's Note: Extensive research did not uncover any evidence
that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

INTRIGUE IN EARTH'S OUTER ORBIT
Tremendous and glittering, the Space Station floated up out of the Big
Dark. Lieutenant Corriston had come to see its marvels, but he soon found
himself entrapped in its unsuspected terrors.
For the grim reality was that some deadly outer-space power had usurped
control of the great artificial moon. A lovely woman had disappeared;
passengers were being fleeced and enslaved; and, using fantastic disguises,
imposters were using the Station for their own mysterious ends.
Pursued by unearthly monsters and hunted with super-scientific cunning,
Corriston struggles to unmask the mystery. For upon his success depended
his life, his love and the future of Earth itself.

CAST OF CHARACTERS
CORRISTON

He saw all the sights of the Space Station ... in fact, he saw too much....

HAYES

His decision would mean the beginning or the end for a world.

CLAKEY

This bodyguard needed special protection himself.

CLEMENT

Sometimes it seemed as if he were leading a double life.

HENLEY

With him for a friend one didn't need an enemy.

HELEN RAMSEY

Her father had made her a virtual prisoner.

1
It was a life-and-death struggle—cruel, remorseless, one-sided. Corriston
was breathing heavily. He was in total darkness, dodging the blows of a
killer. His adversary was as lithe as a cat, muscular and dangerous. He had a
knife and he was using it, slashing at Corriston when Corriston came close,
then leaping back and lashing out with a hard-knuckled fist.
Corriston could hear the swish of the man's heels as he pivoted, could judge
almost with split-second timing when the next blow would come. He was
bleeding from a cut on his right shoulder, and there was a tumultuous
throbbing at his temples, an ache in his groin.
The fact that he had no weapon put him at a terrifying disadvantage. He had
been close to death before, but never in so confined a space or in such close
proximity to a man who had certainly killed once and would not hesitate to
kill again.
His determination to survive was pitted against what appeared to be sheer
brute strength fortified by cunning and a far-above-average agility. He
began slowly to retreat, backing away until a massive steel girder stopped
him. He was battling dizziness now and his heart had begun a furious
pounding.
He found himself slipping sideways along the girder, running his hands
over its smooth, cold surface. To his sweating palms the surface seemed as
chill as the lid of a coffin, but he refused to believe that it could trap him
irretrievably. The girder had to end somewhere.
The killer was coming close again, his shoes making a scraping sound in
the darkness, his breathing just barely audible. Corriston edged still further
along the girder. Inch by inch he moved parallel to it, fighting off his
dizziness, making a desperate effort to keep from falling. The wetness on
his shoulder was unnerving, the absence of pain incredible. How seriously
could a man be stabbed without feeling any pain at all? He didn't know. But
at least his shoulder wasn't paralyzed. He could move his arm freely, flex
the muscles of his back.

How unbelievably cruel it was that a ship could move through space with
the stability of a completely stationary object. How unbelievably cruel at
this moment, when the slightest lurch might have saved him.
The girder was stationary and immense, and in his tormented inward vision
he saw it as a strand in a gigantic steel cobweb, symbolizing the grandeur of
what man could accomplish by routine compulsion alone.
In frozen helplessness Corriston tried to bring his thoughts into closer
accord with reality, to view his peril in a saner light. But what was
happening to him was as hard to relate to immediate reality as a line half
remembered from a play. See how the blood of Caesar followed it, as if
rushing out of doors to be resolved if Brutus so unkindly knocked or no....
But the killer wasn't Brutus. He was unknown and invisible and if there had
been any Brutuslike nobility in him, it hardly seemed likely that he would
have chosen for his first victim a wealthy girl's too talkative bodyguard and
for his second Corriston himself.
The killer was within arm's reach again when the barrier that had trapped
Corriston fell away abruptly. He reeled back, swayed dizzily, and
experienced such wild elation that he cried out in unreasoning triumph.
Swiftly he retreated backwards, not fully realizing that no real respite had
been granted him. He was free only to recoil a few steps, to crouch and
weave about. Almost instantly the killer was closing in again, and this time
there was no escape.
Another metal girder stopped Corriston in midretreat, cutting across his
shoulders like a sharp-angled priming rod, jolting and sobering him.
For an eternity now he could do nothing but wait. An eternity as brief as a
dropped heartbeat and as long as the cycle of renewal and rebirth of worlds
in the flaming vastness of space. Everything became impersonal suddenly:
the darkness of the ships' between-deck storage compartment; the Space
Station toward which the ship was traveling; the Martian deserts he had
dreamed about as a boy.
The killer spoke then, for the first time. His voice rang out in the darkness,
harsh with contempt and rage. It was in some respects a surprising voice,
the voice of an educated man. But it was also a voice that had in it an accent
that Corriston had heard before in verbal documentaries and hundreds of

newsreels; in clinical case histories, microfilm recorded, in penal
institutions, on governing bodies, and wherever men were in a position to
destroy others—or perhaps themselves. It was the voice of an unloved,
unwanted man.
The voice said: "You're done for, my friend. I don't know what the Ramsey
girl told you, but you came looking for me, and it's too late now for any
kind of compromise."
"I wasn't looking for a deal," Corriston said. "If it's any satisfaction to you,
Miss Ramsey told me nothing. But I saw a man killed; and I couldn't find
her afterwards. I think you know what happened to her. Knife me, if you
can. I'll go down fighting."
"That's easy to say. Maybe you didn't come looking for me. But you know
too much now to go on living. Unless you—wait a minute! You mentioned
a deal. If you're lying about the Ramsey girl and will tell me where she is, I
might not kill you."
"I wasn't lying," Corriston said.
"Hell ... you're really asking for it."
"I'm afraid I am."
"It won't be a pleasant way to die."
"Any way is unpleasant. But I'm not dead yet. Killing me may not be as
easy as you think."
"It will be easy enough. This time you won't get past me."
Corriston knew that the conversation was about to end unless something
unexpected happened. And he didn't think there was much chance of that.
Had he been clasping a metal tool, he would have swung hard enough to
kill with it. But he wasn't clasping anything. He was crouching low, and
suddenly he leapt straight forward into the darkness.
His head collided with a bony knee and his hands went swiftly out and
around invisible ankles. He tightened his grip, half expecting the knife to
descend and bury itself in his back. But it didn't. The other had been taken
so completely by surprise that he simply went backwards, suddenly, and
with a strangled oath.

Instantly Corriston was on top of him. He shifted his grip, releasing both of
the struggling man's ankles and remorselessly seizing his wrists. He raised
his right knee and brought it savagely downward, again and again and
again. A cry of pain echoed through the darkness. The killer, crying out in
torment, tried to twist free.
For an instant the outcome remained uncertain, a see-saw contest of
strength. Then Corriston had the knife and the struggle was over.
Corriston made a mistake then of relaxing a little. Instantly, the killer rolled
sideways, broke Corriston's grip, and was on his feet. He did not attempt to
retaliate in any way. He simply disappeared into the darkness, breathing so
loudly that Corriston could tell when the distance between them had
dwindled to the vanishing point.
Corriston sat very still in the darkness, holding on tightly to the knife. His
triumph had been unexpected and complete. It had been close to
miraculous. Strange that he should be aware of that and yet feel only a dark
horror growing in his mind. Strange that he should remember so quickly
again the horror of a man gasping out his life with a thorned barb
protruding from his side.
It had begun a half-hour earlier in the general passenger cabin. It had begun
with a wonder and a rejoicing.
Tremendous and glittering, the Space Station had come floating up out of
the Big Dark like a golden bubble on an onrushing tidal wave. It had
hovered for an instant in the precise center of the viewscreen, its steep,
climbing trail shedding radiance in all directions. Then it had descended
vertically until it almost filled the lower half of the screen, and finally was
lost to view in a wilderness of space.
When it appeared for the second time, it was larger still and its shadow was
a swiftly widening crescent blotting out the nearer stars.
"There it is!" someone whispered.
It had been unreasonably quiet in the general passenger cabin, and for a
moment no other sound was audible. Then the whisper was caught up and
amplified by a dozen awestruck voices. It became a murmur of amazement
and of wonder, and as it increased in volume, the screen seemed to glow
with an almost unbelievable brightness.

Everyone was aware of the brightness. But how much of it was subjective
no one knew or cared. To a man in the larger darkness of space, a dead sea
bottom on Mars, or a moon-landing ship wrapped in eternal darkness on a
lonely peak in the Lunar Apennines may glow with a noonday splendor.
"They said a space station that size could never be built," David Corriston
said, leaning abruptly forward in his chair. "They quoted reams of statistics:
height above the center of the Earth in kilometers, orbital velocity, relation
of mass to maneuverability. The experts had a field day. They went far out
on a limb to convince anyone who would listen that a station weighing
thousands of tons would never get past the blueprint stage. But the men
who built it had enough pride and confidence in human skill to achieve the
impossible."
The girl at Corriston's side looked startled for an instant, as though the
ironclad assurance of so young a man was as much of a surprise as his
unexpected nearness, and somehow even more disquieting older.
She was certainly somewhat older than he was—about three or four years.
She was an exceptionally pretty girl, her fair hair fluffed out from under a
blue beret, her ship's lounge jacket a youth-accentuating miracle of casual
tailoring that would have looked well on a woman of any age. She had the
kind of eyes Corriston liked best of all in a woman: longlashed, observant,
and bright with glints of humor.
She had the kind of mouth he liked too—a mouth which suggested that she
could be, by turns, capricious, level-headed, and audaciously friendly with
strangers without in any way inviting familiarity. There was a certain
paradoxical timidity in her gaze too. It was manifesting itself now in an
obvious reluctance to be startled too abruptly by space engineering talk
from a young man who had taken her companionability for granted and
who was obviously given to snap judgments.
She brushed back the hair on her right temple, her brown eyes upraised to
study Corriston more closely.
He hoped that she would realize upon reflection that she was behaving
foolishly. He had taken a certain liberty in talking to her as he would have
talked to an old acquaintance in a long-awaited meeting of minds. On the

big screen a space station that couldn't be built was sweeping in toward the
ship with eighty-five years of unparallelled scientific progress behind it.
First had come the Earth satellites, eight of them in their neat little orbits.
They had used low-energy fuels, had kept close to the Earth, and no one had
seriously expected them to do more than record weather information and
relay radio signals. For fifteen years they could be seen with small
telescopes and even with the unaided eye on bright, cloudless nights in both
hemispheres.
First had come these small, relatively unimportant artificial moons and
then, on a night in October 1972, the first space platform had been
launched. Soon the sky above the Earth was swarming with radar warning
platforms, a dozen men to operate them, and carrier-based jets equipped
with formidable atomic warheads.
Nevertheless, how could anyone have known that in another twenty years
interplanetary space flight would become a war-averting reality? How could
anyone have known that by the year 2007 there would be human
settlements on Mars and by the year 2022 the actual transportation to Mars
of city-building materials?

2
Corriston was beginning to feel uncomfortable. He wished that the girl
would say something instead of just continuing to stare at him. She seemed
to be interested in his uniform. She appeared to be gazing at him
interrogatively, as if she wanted to know more about him before promising
anything.
He wondered what her unconscious purpose was. Did she see in him the
quiet, determined type who was all set to accomplish something important.
Or was she regretting he wasn't the hard-living, cynical type who had been
everywhere and done everything?
Well, one way to find out was to be himself: a man average in every way,
but with a hard core of idealism in his nature, a creative mind and enough
independence and self-assurance to give a good account of himself in any
struggle which brought his central beliefs under fire or placed them in long-
range jeopardy.
And so Corriston suddenly found himself talking about the Station again.
"Not many people have grasped the importance of it yet," he said. "One
station will service our needs, instead of fifty-seven, one tremendous central
terminal and re-fueling depot for all of the ships. Do you realize what that
could mean?"
Abruptly there was a startling warmth in the girl's eyes, an unmistakable
look of interest and encouragement.
"Just what could it mean?" she asked.
"Any kind of steady growth across the years leads to centralization, to
bigness. And that bigness becomes time-hallowed and magnified out of all
proportion to its original significance. The Space Station is no exception. It
started with the primitive Earth satellites and branched out into fifty-seven
larger stations. Now it's tremendous, a single central station that can impose
its influence in ship clearance matters with an almost unanswerable
finality."

A shadow had come into the girl's eyes. "But not completely without checks
and balances. The Earth Federation can challenge its supremacy at any
point."
"Yes, and I'm glad that the challenge remains a factor to be reckoned with.
As matters stand now the Station's prestige can't be implemented with what
might well become the iron hand of an intolerable tyranny. As matters
stand, the Station is actually a big step forward. People once talked of
centralization as if it were some kind of indecent human bogey. It isn't at
all. It's simply a fluid means to an end, a necessary commitment if a society
is to achieve greatness. If the authority behind the Station respects scientific
truth and human dignity—if it remains empirically minded—I shall serve it
to the best of my ability. No one knows for sure whether what is good
outbalances what is bad in any human institution, or any human being. A
man can only give the best of himself to what he believes in."
"Sorry to interrupt," an amused voice said, "but the captain wants you to
join him in a last-minute celebration: a toast, a press photograph—that sort
of nonsense. A six hour trip, and he hasn't even been introduced to you. But
if you don't appear at his table in ten minutes he'll throw the book at me."
Corriston looked up in surprise at the big man confronting them. He had
approached so unobtrusively that for an instant Corriston was angry; but
only for an instant. When he took careful stock of the fellow his resentment
evaporated. There was a cordiality about him which could not have been
counterfeited. It reached from the breadth of his smile to his gray eyes
puckered in amusement. He was really big physically, in a wholly genial
and relaxed way, and his voice was that of a man who could walk up to a
bar, pay a bill and leave an everlasting impression of hearty good nature
behind him.
"Well, young lady?" he asked.
"I'm not particularly keen about the idea, Jim, but if the captain has actually
iced the champagne, it would be a shame to disappoint him."
Corriston was aware that his companion was getting to her feet. The
interruption had been unexpected, but much to his surprise he found himself
accepting it without rancor. If he lost her for a few moments he could

quickly enough find her again; and somehow he felt convinced that the big
man was not a torch-carrying admirer.
"I'll have to stop off in the ladies' lounge first," she said. She had opened her
vanity case and was making a swift inventory of its contents. "Two shades
of lipstick, but no powder! Oh, well."
She smiled at the big man and then at Corriston, gesturing slightly as she
did so.
"We've just been discussing the Station," she said. "This gentleman hasn't
told me his name—"
"Lieutenant David Corriston," Corriston said quickly. "My interest in the
Station is tied in with my job. I've just been assigned to it in the very
modest capacity of ship's inspection officer, recruit status."
The big man stared at Corriston more intently, his eyes kindling with a
sudden increase of interest. "Say, I wonder if you could spare me a few
minutes. When my friends ask me I'd like to be able to talk intelligently
about the terrific headaches the research people must have experienced
right from the start. The expenditure of fuel alone...."
"See you in the Captain's cabin, Jim," the girl said.
She moved out from her chair, her expression slightly constrained. Was it
just imagination, or had the big man's immoderate expansiveness grated on
her and brought a look of displeasure to her young face? Corriston couldn't
be sure, and his brow remained furrowed as he watched her cross the
passenger cabin and disappear into the ladies' lounge.
"I'm Jim Clakey," the big man said.
Corriston reseated himself, a troubled indecision still apparent in his stare.
Then gradually he found himself relaxing. He nodded up at the big man.
"Sit down, Mr. Clakey," he said. "Ask me anything you want. Security
imposes some pretty rigid restrictions, but I'll let you know when you start
treading on classified ground."
Clakey sat down and crossed his long legs. He was silent for a moment.
Then he said: "You know who she is, of course."
Corriston shook his head. "I'm afraid I haven't the slightest idea."

"She isn't traveling under her real name only because her father is a very
sensible and cautious man. You'd be cautious too, perhaps, if you were
Stephen Ramsey."
Clakey's gaze had traveled to the ladies' lounge, and for an instant he
seemed unaware of Corriston's incredulous stare.
"You mean I've actually been sitting here talking to Stephen Ramsey's
daughter?"
"That's right," Clakey said, turning to grin amiably at Corriston. "And now
you're talking to her personal bodyguard. I'm not surprised you didn't
recognize her, though; very few people do. She doesn't like to have her
picture taken. Her dad wouldn't object to that kind of publicity particularly,
but she's even more cautious than he is."
The door of the ladies' lounge opened and two young women came out.
They were laughing and talking with great animation and were quickly lost
to view as other passengers changed their position in front of the
viewscreen.
The door remained visible, however—a rectangle of shining whiteness only
slightly encroached upon by dark blue drapes. Corriston found himself
staring at it as his mind dwelt on the startling implications of Clakey's
almost unbelievable statement.
"Biggest man on Mars," Clakey was saying. "Cornered uranium; froze out
the original settlers. They're threatening violence, but their hands are tied.
Everything was done legally. Ramsey lives in a garrisoned fortress and they
can't get within twenty miles of him. He's a damned scoundrel with
tremendous vision and foresight."
Corriston suddenly realized that he had made a serious psychological
blunder in sizing up Clakey. The man was a blabbermouth. True, Corriston's
uniform was a character recommendation which might have justified candor
to a moderate extent. But Clakey was talking outrageously out of turn. He
was becoming confidential about matters he had no right to discuss with
anyone on such short acquaintance. Corriston suddenly realized that Clakey
was slightly drunk.
"Look here," Corriston said. "You're talking like a fool. Do you know what
you're saying?"

"Sure I know. Miss Ramsey is a golden girl. And I'm her bodyguard ...
important trust ... sop to a man's egoism."
An astonishing thing happened then. Clakey fell silent and remained
uncommunicative for five full minutes. Corriston had no desire to start him
talking again. He was appalled and incredulous. He was debating the
advisability of getting up with a frozen stare and a firm determination to
take himself elsewhere when the crazy, loose-tongued fool leapt
unexpectedly to his feet.
"She's taking too long!" he exclaimed. "It just isn't like her. She'd never
keep the captain waiting."
As he spoke, another woman came out of the ladies' lounge. She was small,
dark, very pretty, and she seemed a little embarrassed when she saw how
intently Clakey was staring at her. Then a middle-aged woman came out,
with a finely-modeled face, and a second, younger woman with haggard
eyes and a sallow complexion who was in all respects the opposite of
attractive.
"She's been in there for fifteen minutes," Clakey said, starting toward the
lounge.
"It takes a good many women twice that long to apply makeup properly,"
Corriston pointed out. "I just don't see—"
"You don't know her," Clakey said, impatiently. "I may have to ask one of
those women to go in after her."
"But why? You can't seriously believe she's in any danger. We both saw her
go into the lounge. She made the decision on the spur of the moment and no
one could have known about it in advance. No one followed her in. You
were sitting right here watching the door."
But Clakey was already advancing across the cabin. He was reeling a little,
and a dull flush had mounted to his cheekbones. He seemed genuinely
alarmed. Corriston was about to follow him when something bright flashed
through the air with a faint swishing sound.
A startled cry burst from Clakey's lips. He clutched at his side, staggered,
and half-swung about, a look of incredulous horror in his eyes.

Corriston's mouth went dry. He stood very still, watching Clakey lose all
control over his legs. The change in the stricken man's expression was
ghastly. His cheeks had gone dead white, and now, as Corriston stared, a
spasm convulsed his features, twisting them into a horrible, unnatural
caricature of a human face—a rigidly contorted mask with a blanched,
wide-angled mouth and bulging eyes.
A passenger saw him and screamed. His knees had given way and his huge
frame seemed to be coming apart at the joints. He straightened out on the
deck, jerking his head spasmodically, propelling himself backwards by his
elbows. Almost as if with conscious intent, his body arched itself, sank level
with the floor, then arched itself again.
It was as though all of his muscles and nerves were protesting the violence
that had been done to him, and were seeking by muscular contractions alone
to dislodge the stiff, thorned horror protruding from his flesh.
He went limp and the barbed shaft ceased to quiver. Corriston had a nerve-
shattering glimpse of a swiftly spreading redness just above Clakey's right
hipbone. The entire barb turned red, as if its feathery spines had acquired a
sudden, unnatural affinity for human blood.
Corriston started forward, then changed his mind. Several passengers had
moved quickly to Clakey's side and were bending above him. Someone
called out: "Get a doctor!"
Corriston turned abruptly and strode toward the ladies' lounge. Brushing
aside such scruples as he ordinarily would have entertained, he threw open
the door and went inside.
He called out: "Miss Ramsey?" When he received no answer he searched
the lounge thoroughly. There was no one there. He was thinking fast now,
desperately fast. He hadn't seen her come out and neither had Clakey. He'd
seen four women come out: three young women and an elderly one. None
of them faintly resembled the girl he'd been talking to.
The first young woman had emerged almost immediately. He remembered
how intently Clakey had been watching the door. Clakey had sat down to
discuss the Station with him, and in less than two minutes the first young
lady had emerged. Then neither of them had taken their eyes from the door
for five or six minutes. The second young lady had apparently known

someone in the crowd. She had seemed annoyed by Clakey's persistent stare
and had disappeared quickly. The elderly woman had looked her age. Her
walk, her carriage, the lines of her face had borne the unmistakable stamp
of genteel aging, and the dignity inseparable from it. The last woman had
been the drab creature.
Corriston had a poor memory for faces and he knew that he couldn't count
on recognizing any of them—except perhaps the elderly woman—if he saw
them again.
It was good that he could smile, even at his own inanities. It relieved
tension. Almost instantly the smile vanished. His aspect became that of a
man in deadly danger on the brink of a hundred foot precipice, a man
completely in the dark and yet grimly determined not to go over the edge or
take a single step in the wrong direction.
Where, he asked himself, do women ordinarily go when they vanish into
thin air? Wasn't it pretty well established that ghosts were likely to follow
the path of least resistance and fulfill obligations entered into in the flesh?
The captain's cabin! The captain would be disappointed if she failed to
appear at least briefly at his table; and she had promised to do so. It was a
wild, premeditated assault on the rational, but putting the irrational aspect
of it aside, it was also realistic and reasonable. If by some incredible
miracle she had eluded Clakey's vigilance and actually slipped from the
lounge, she would almost certainly have gone straight to the captain's cabin.

3
Corriston left the ladies' lounge faster than he had entered it. He shut the
door firmly and stood for an instant staring at the passengers who had
gathered in an even tighter knot around Clakey and were making it difficult
for an alarmed young ship's doctor to get to him. He was quite sure in his
own mind that Clakey would not need the assistance of a doctor.
Then he turned and headed for the captain's cabin. Anyone could have
gotten in. The door was ajar and there was no one guarding it. He threw the
door wide and everything was just as he'd expected to find it: It was
completely empty.
No guests at all to welcome Corriston to the big, empty cabin. Then he saw
that there was another door opposite.
Corriston was getting scared, really scared. There was an odd, detached,
whimsical feeling at the surface of his mind, but it cloaked something
distinctly sinister. He had more than half-expected the captain to be absent
from his cabin. But something about the silence and the emptiness chilled
him to the core of his being.
With an effort he shook the feeling off. He didn't know where the inner door
led to. He hesitated for an instant, realizing that the mere existence of a
second door could complicate his search to the point of futility. If it led to a
second cabin—well and good. But if it didn't....
He strained his ears to catch the sound of voices. There were no voices. He
could have simply crossed to the door and looked beyond it. But the state of
his nerves, and an odd habit he had of being precise and cautious under
tension, made him explore the other possibilities first.
The door might conceivably be a trap. A trap does not have to be contrived
in advance with some clearly defined purpose in mind. Circumstances can
take a door or a window and turn it into a trap. A glove or a weapon left
lying about can be picked up by an innocent man and snare him most
damnably by seeming to point up his guilt.

What purpose did the inner door serve? Did it open on a corridor leading
back to the general passenger cabin? If it did, it wouldn't be a trap; it would
simply have "blind alley" stamped all over it.
Corriston suddenly realized that he was succumbing to a crazy kind of
inaction. The door could lead almost anywhere, and if he had any sense at
all he'd go through it fast.
Go through it he did, in six long strides. He'd been right about one thing—
the blind alley part. He found himself, in not quite total darkness, in what
was unquestionably an intership passageway. There was just light enough
for him to make out the shadowy walls on both sides of him. Rather they
were like metal bulkheads that gave off just enough reflected light for him
to see by.
He wouldn't have considered ten or twelve seconds spent with a pocket
flash a waste of time. But he had no pocket flash. The best he could do was
stretch out both of his arms to determine just how far apart the bulkheads
were. They were less than six feet apart.
Well, no sense in measuring the walls. A girl he'd talked to and liked
instantly had vanished in a dark world, and he knew now that there was
more than mere liking in the way he felt about her. He didn't dare ask
himself how much more, not in so confined a space and with his chances of
finding her again dwindling with every second that passed.
The passageway ended in a blank wall, less than forty feet from its
beginning. Corriston saw the wall and was advancing toward it when he
suddenly realized that the deck itself wasn't continuous. In his path, and
almost directly underfoot, a companionway entrance yawned, so
unexpectedly close that another short step would have sent him plunging
into it. He saw the faint light reflected on its circumference and halted just
in time to avoid a possibly fatal fall.
He knelt and stared down into a spiraling web of darkness. He could see a
faint glimmer of light on metal and knew that he was bending above either
a circular staircase or a companionway ladder. It turned out to be a
staircase. Down it he went, moving cautiously, holding on to the supporting
guide rail as he descended deeper and deeper into the darkness.

The darkness became almost absolute when the stairs ended. For a moment,
at least, what appeared to be utter blackness engulfed him. Then gradually
his vision became more effective. He could make out the faint outlines of
stationary objects, of depths beyond depths, of crisscrossing lines and
angles.
In utter darkness the glint of metal often seemed to draw the eyes like a
magnet, to make itself known even without illumination. But there seemed
to be a faint glow far off somewhere. He couldn't be sure, but light there
should have been if—as he more than half-suspected—he was in one of the
ship's below-deck ballast or storage compartments.
The deck beneath his feet was straight and level and cluttered with no
impediments. He moved forward warily, testing every step until a wall of
metal stopped him. He halted abruptly, felt along the barrier and became
aware that it was studded with small bolts and was just a little corrugated.
Exhibit A: one supporting metal beam, rough and slightly uneven in texture.
Abruptly he reached the end of it and found himself underway again, still
moving cautiously to avoid unseen pitfalls. He had not progressed more
than a dozen feet when he heard the scrape of footsteps other than his own,
and someone moved up close to him and blocked his way in the darkness.
For an instant the wild thought went through his mind that the someone was
the captain. But he had seen and talked with the Captain and that self-
contained, blunt-spoken man wasn't nearly as big physically as the path-
blocker seemed to be.
The someone did not speak. But Corriston could sense the enmity flowing
from him, the utter refusal to budge an inch, the determination to make his
nearness a deadly threat in itself. Then the someone moved back a step. The
far-off light could hardly have been an illusion, because for the barest
instant Corriston could dimly make out the huge bulk of the man and the
glint of the knife in his hand.
Two big men in the space of half an hour! The first had ceased to draw
breath and the second was his killer. Corriston was suddenly sure of it. He
knew it instinctively.
Then began the struggle which had almost robbed Corriston of his life, the
cruel, one-sided, impossible-to-win struggle in total darkness.

And Corriston had won it.

Now almost in disbelief, Corriston looked down at the knife he had taken
from the loser, telling himself that it was impossible that so much could
have happened in so short a time and that he could still be alive at the end
of it.
The wound in his shoulder was no longer painless, but it had ceased to
bleed profusely, and his exploring fingers convinced him that the knife had
severed no more than a superficial ligament. He strained his ears in the
sudden quiet, listening for a possible return of his adversary. He did not
think that the defeated man would attempt a second attack. But there was no
telling what he might or might not do. Probably he'd ascended the
companionway by now and was mingling with the other passengers.
The final link in Corriston's search had snapped. Even while battling for his
life, he had felt close to the vanished girl. The man who had killed Clakey
had been at least a link, a link that, short of Corriston's total defeat, might
have been seized upon with physical violence and made to yield up its
secret.
Now Corriston found himself wondering if the defeated man had been
telling the truth. Had the link been non-existent from the first? Was the
killer as completely in the dark as he was as to the whereabouts of Ramsey's
daughter?
It was difficult to believe that the man had been lying. Despite his hatred
and denials he had offered Corriston a deal: "Tell me where the girl is and I
may not kill you." The deal part had been a lie, of course. He would have
gone on and attempted to kill Corriston anyway. But his plea for
information, that tentative, cunning feeler in the dark had seemed genuine.
What had been the man's purpose in killing Clakey? Why had Clakey been
murdered in the general passenger cabin, in plain view of the other
passengers? Because the killer had seen the girl go into the lounge and
thought she was still there? And because he wanted free and instant access
to her, with Clakey out of the way? It was the only answer that made sense.

The killer must have known that Clakey was in Ramsey's employ and had
been guarding Ramsey's daughter. Why then had he been unable to take
advantage of his crime in any way? Apparently neither he nor a possible
confederate had succeeded in what almost certainly had been a pattern of
violence directed at Ramsey through his daughter—a plan obviously
worked out in advance, ready to be put into operation the instant a
promising opportunity presented itself.
Into Corriston's mind flashed an ugly picture of the girl pinioned by strong
arms and with a handkerchief pressed to her face. She had ceased to
struggle and was being spirited quickly away. The picture became even
more intolerable when he saw her held captive in a cabin difficult to locate,
at the mercy of men without compassion.
But for some reason he'd never cease to be thankful for, it hadn't happened
that way. Something had gone wrong with the plan, and the killer didn't
even know when and why and how she had vanished. Sharing Corriston's
frustration, he had been struggling simply to save himself, to keep Corriston
from identifying and exposing him. The fury he'd displayed was not
difficult to understand.
Corriston found himself becoming more confident again, less dominated by
despair. The change in his mood surprised him but he seized upon it
gratefully and started building on it. There was only one logical next move.
He must find the captain quickly and enlist his help. He must take the
master of the ship fully into his confidence. With every gift of persuasion at
his command, he must make the captain see how the danger of Ramsey's
daughter was mounting and would continue to mount with every minute
that she remained unfound.
He still felt dizzy, and his head was aching a little, but he moved quickly
through the darkness, his faculties heightened by an intensity of purpose
which enabled him to find the companionway without colliding with
obstacles or taking a wrong turn. Up the stairway he climbed, still clutching
the knife, prepared for a possible second encounter with its original owner.
An attempt to regain the knife by trickery and stealth would not have
surprised him. In fact, it was not at all difficult for him to picture a silent
form flattened against the stair-rail, waiting for just the right moment to
come hurtling toward him out of the darkness. For a moment, as he

ascended, the strain became almost unendurable. Then the darkness
dissolved above him, and he was advancing toward the captain's cabin
through the narrow passageway which he had spanned with his arms spread
wide.
He did not stop to span it this time. He emerged into the cabin and stood for
an instant blinking in the sudden light. The cabin was still deserted. It was
anybody's guess where the captain had gone or when he would be returning,
and Corriston decided not to wait. He walked to the door, opened it and
stepped out into the general passenger cabin.
No one saw him immediately. There were several passengers fairly close to
him, but they were being attentive for the moment to the words and gestures
of a tall, dignified looking man with observant brown eyes, a ruddy
complexion, and gold braid on his shoulders. The tall man was Captain
John Sanders.
"I'd be a hypocrite and a liar if I said there was no justification for alarm,"
Sanders was saying, in a voice loud enough to carry to where Corriston was
standing. "Strict regulations prescribe that sort of thing. But it's no way for
a captain to keep the respect of his passengers."
Corriston felt himself stepping forward before he even thought about it. But
he halted abruptly when the captain said: "There's a murderer on the loose
aboard this ship. You may as well accept that fact right now. Each of you
has to be on his guard. It's only right and proper that you should keep your
eyes and ears open, and stay worried. If you do, our chances of catching up
with him before the ship berths should be reasonably good."
The captain paused, then went on quickly: "We'll get him eventually. You
can be sure of that. He'll never get past the inspection each of you will have
to undergo when we reach the Station. But if we catch him before we reach
the Station, you'll be spared an investigative ordeal distinctly on the rugged
side."
Corriston was suddenly aware that he was being stared at. Everyone was
staring at him.
"My God!" the Captain cried out, staring the hardest of all. "Where did you
get that wound? Who attacked you? And what were you doing in my
cabin?"

Corriston walked up to the Captain and said in a voice that trembled a little.
"May I talk to you privately, sir? What I have to say won't take long."
"Why not?" Sanders demanded. "That uniform you're wearing makes it
mandatory. All right, come back into my cabin."
They went back into the cabin. The captain shut the door and turned to face
Corriston with a shocked concern in his stare.
"You've had it rough, Lieutenant. I can see that."
"Plenty rough," Corriston conceded. "But it's not myself I'm worried about."
"Did you know that a man has just been murdered?"
"I know," Corriston said.
"With a poisoned barb. A Martian barb. It's a plant found only on Mars. We
have him stretched out on a table in the sick bay now. But he isn't sick; he's
a corpse. Tell me something, Lieutenant, did you just tangle with the man
who did it?"
"I think so," Corriston said. "In fact, I'd stake my commission on it."
"I see. Well, you'd better tell me about it. Tell me everything."
Corriston told him.
The captain was silent for a long moment. Then he said, "But we've no Miss
Ramsey on the passenger list. And I certainly didn't invite her to drink a
toast with me in my cabin. Are you sure of your facts, Lieutenant?"
Corriston's jaw fell open. He stared at the captain in stunned disbelief. "Of
course I'm sure. Why should I lie to you?"
"How should I know? It's unfair to ask me that. If Ramsey's daughter was
on this ship, you can rest assured I'd have known about it. After all,
Lieutenant—"
"But she was on board and you didn't know. Isn't that obvious? Look, she
was traveling incognito. The trip to the Station takes only five hours.
Perhaps in so short a trip—"
"No 'perhaps' about it. I'd have known."

"But she is on board, I tell you. I talked to her. I talked to Clakey. Don't
make me go over the whole thing again. We've got to find her. Ramsey's
enemies would stop at nothing. I'm afraid to think of what they might do to
his daughter!"
"Nothing will happen to his daughter. She's on Earth right this minute in her
father's house, as safe as any girl that wealthy can ever be. Lieutenant, listen
to me. I've got a great deal of respect for that uniform you're wearing. Don't
make me lose it. When you come to me with a story like that—"
"All right. You don't believe me. Will you check the passenger list, just to
be sure?"
"I'll do more than that, Lieutenant. I'll assemble all of the passengers and
check them off personally. I'll give you an opportunity to look them over
while I'm doing it. Later you can ask them as many questions as you wish.
There'll be a murderer among them, but that shouldn't disturb you too much.
You've already met. Perhaps you can identify him for us. Ask each of the
men who made a non-existent Miss Ramsey disappear and the one who
turns pale will be our man."
Suddenly the captain reddened. "I'm sorry, Lieutenant, I didn't mean to be
sarcastic. But a murder on my ship naturally upsets me. I'll be completely
frank with you. There's a very remote possibility that Miss Ramsey actually
is on board without my knowledge. She hasn't had much publicity. I believe
I've only seen one photograph of her, one taken several years ago. But
you've got to remember that a captain is usually the first to get wind of such
things. It comes to him by a kind of grapevine. She's a golden girl—actually
the goldenest golden girl on Earth."

4
Now Corriston was in a steel-walled cell and the captain's voice seemed
only a far-off echo sympathizing with him.
And it was an echo, for the captain was gone and he would probably never
see him again. It was all very simple—that part of it—all very clear. The
captain had faithfully kept his word. The captain hadn't let him down. But
any man can end up a prisoner when everyone disbelieves him and he has
no way of proving that he is telling the truth.
It was hard to believe that a day and a night had passed, and that the
Captain had kept his word and gone ahead with the roll call. It was even
harder to believe that he, Corriston, was no longer on the ship, but in a
sanity cell on the Space Station, and that the ship was traveling back toward
Earth.
He shut his eyes, and the events of the past thirty hours unrolled before him
with a nightmare clarity, and yet with all of the monstrous distortions which
a nightmare must of necessity evoke.
Darkness and time and space. And closer at hand the frowns of forthright,
honest men appalled by mental abnormality in a new recruit, an officer with
a steel-lock determination to keep the truth securely guarded and safe from
all distortion.
There had come the tap on his shoulder and a stern voice saying: "You'd
better come with us, Lieutenant." He had just told the captain the whole
horrible story. He had not been believed.
"Tell me about it," said the recruit in the bunk opposite Corriston. "It will
help you to talk. Remember, we're not prisoners. We mustn't think of
ourselves as prisoners. We can go out and exercise. We can walk around the
Station for a half-hour or so. We've only got to promise we'll come back and
lock ourselves in. They trust us. It could happen to anyone.
"Space-shock. Not a fancy word at all. I'm getting over it; you've a certain
distance to go. Or so they say. But we're still in very much the same boat

and talking always helps. Talk to me, Lieutenant, the way you did last
night."
Corriston looked at the pale youth opposite him. He had close-cropped hair
and friendly blue eyes, and he seemed a likeable enough lad. He was
Corriston's junior by several years. But there was an aura of neuroticism
about him that made Corriston uneasy. But hell, why shouldn't he get it off
his chest. Talking just might help.
"It's true," Corriston said. "Every word of it."
"I believe you, Lieutenant. But quite obviously they didn't. Why not strike a
compromise. Say I'm one-tenth wrong in believing you and they're nine-
tenths right in not believing you. That means there may be some little quirk
in what happened to you that doesn't quite fit into the normal pattern. Put
that down to space-shock—a mild case of it. I'm not saying you have it, but
you could have it."
The kid was grinning now, and Corriston had to like him.
"Okay," he said. "You can believe this or not. The captain lined all of the
passengers up and checked them off by their cabin numbers. I didn't see her.
Do you understand? She just wasn't there! I thought I recognized two of the
women who had come out of the ladies' lounge, but I couldn't even be sure
of that. One of the two denied ever having stepped inside the lounge, and
the other was vague about it."
"I see."
"The captain really sailed into me for a moment, lost his temper completely.
'A fine officer you are, Lieutenant. It's painful to be on the same ship with
the kind of officers the training schools turn out when the Station finds
itself short of personnel. Is the Station planning to trust ships' clearance to
hallucinated personnel?
"'All right, you talked to a girl—some girl. She didn't even tell you she was
Ramsey's daughter; Clakey told you. And he's dead. Not only is he dead, he
wasn't listed on the passenger list as Clakey at all. His name was Henry
Ewers. I don't know what you believed, Lieutenant. I don't care what you
think you saw. You tangled with someone and he stabbed you. He was real
enough ... obviously the man who killed Ewers. But you let him get away,
so even that isn't too much to your credit.'"

"If I had been you," the kid said, "I've had knocked him down."
"No." For the first time Corriston smiled. "To tell you the truth, the captain
is a good guy. He's one of those blunt, moody, terribly human individuals
you encounter occasionally, men who speak their minds on all occasions
and are instantly sorry they did. You have to like them even when they seem
to insult you."
"He made up for it then?"
"I'll say he did. He knew that when we landed the officials would be
breathing right down my neck. He wanted to give me every chance. So he
kept the officials away from me until I'd convinced myself Ramsey's
daughter just couldn't be on board.
"He let me look at every piece of luggage that was taken off the ship. He
had some cargo to unload and he let me inspect that too, every crate. Most
of the crates were too small to conceal a drugged and unconscious girl—or
any girl for that matter. The ones that weren't, he opened for me and let me
look inside.
"He let me watch every passenger leave the ship. Then, when all of the
passengers had left, he stationed officers in the three main passageways and
I went through the ship from bow to stern. I went into every stateroom and
into every intership compartment. No one could have kept just a little ahead
of me or behind me, dodging back into a compartment the instant I'd
vacated it. They would have been instantly spotted by one of the officers.
"The Captain wasn't to blame at all for what happened later ... when I tried
to convince the commanding officers here that I was completely sane."
"I see. He must have really liked you."
"I guess he did. And I liked him."
The kid nodded. "And the murderer's still at large. That makes it rough for
the sixty odd passengers they're holding in quarantine. How long do you
think they'll hold them in the Big Cage?"
"As long as they can. They'll keep them under close guard and increase
their vigilance every time there's a suspicious move in the cage. They'll be
screened perhaps a dozen times. But most of them are influential people.
Most of them have booked passage on the Mars' run liner that's due here

next week. They can't hold them forever. They'd start pulling wires on Earth
by short wave and there'd be a legislative uproar.
"Suppose they refuse to let them send messages?"
"They won't refuse. I'm sure of that."
The kid was thoughtful for a moment. Then he said: "Tell me more about
Ramsey. Just what do you think is happening on Mars?"
"No one knows exactly what is happening," Corriston said. "But to the best
of my knowledge the overall picture is pretty ugly. The original settlers
have their backs to the wall with a vengeance. Now there are armed guards
at their throats. Ramsey has taken over. He has resorted to legal trickery to
freeze them out.
"There are perhaps fifty important uranium claims on Mars and Ramsey has
consolidated all of the holdings into a single major enterprise. To say that
he's cornered the market in uranium would be understating the case. He has
taken possession by right of seizure, and the colonists can't get to him.
They're living a hand-to-mouth existence while he lives in a heavily
guarded stronghold behind three miles of electrified defenses."
The kid nodded again. "Yes, that's the picture when you unscramble it, I
guess. But most of it is kept hidden from the general run of tourists."
"Naturally. Ramsey has the power to keep it under wraps."
"Do you think the colonists had anything to do with Clakey's murder and
Miss Ramsey's disappearance? Or I guess I should say Henry Ewers'
murder."
"Clakey, Ewers—his name doesn't matter. I'm convinced that he was Miss
Ramsey's bodyguard."
"But you haven't answered my question."
"I can't answer it with any certainty. Did the colonists hire a killer and book
passage for him on the ship? It's difficult to believe that the kind of men
who colonized Mars would resort to murder."
"But there are a few scoundrels in every large group of men. And what if
they became so desperate they felt they had to fight fire with fire?"

"Yes, I'd thought of that. It may be the answer."

5
A half-hour later the kid was taken away and Corriston found himself
completely alone. There are few events in human life more unnerving than
the totally unexpected removal of a sympathetic listener when dark
thoughts have taken possession of a man.
The kid wasn't forcibly removed from the cell. He left without protesting
and no rough hands were laid on him, no physical violence employed. But
he was not at all eager to leave, and if the guards who came for him had
eyed him less severely, his attitude might have been the opposite of
complacent.
"Sorry, kid," one of them said. "Your discharge has been postponed.
Somebody on the psycho-staff wants to give you another test. I guess you
didn't interpret the ink blots right."
He looked at Corriston and shook his head sympathetically. "It's tough, I
know. Once you're here waiting to be released can wear you down. I
shouldn't be saying this, but it stands to reason it might even slow up your
recovery a bit. It's easy to blame the docs, but you've got to try to
understand their side of it. They have to make sure."
When the door clanged shut behind the kid, Corriston crossed to his cot, sat
down, and cradled his head in his arms. The fact that he was still free to go
outside and walk around the Station was no comfort at all. That kind of
freedom could be worse than total confinement. He could never hope to
escape from observation. The guards were under orders to watch him, and
wherever he turned there'd be eyes boring into the back of his neck.
On Earth a man under surveillance could duck quickly into a side street, run
and weave about, and emerge on a broad avenue in the midst of a crowd.
He could walk calmly then for a block or two, and turn in at a bar. He could
drown his troubles in drink.
There were bars on the Station, of course. But Corriston knew that if he
tried to mingle with officers of his own rank on the upper levels, he'd
quickly enough find himself drinking alone. He could picture the off-duty

personnel edging quickly and resentfully away from him, as though he'd
suddenly appeared in their midst with a big, yawning hole in his skull.
Suddenly utter weariness overcame Corriston. He loosened his belt,
elevated his legs, and relaxed on the cot.
He was asleep almost before he could close his eyes. How long he slept he
had no way of knowing. He only knew that he was awakened by a sound—
the strangest sound a man could hear in space. It was as if a gnat or a
mosquito had developed a sudden, avaricious liking for his blood-type and
was determined to gorge itself to bursting at his expense.
The buzzing seemed to go on interminably as he hovered between sleeping
and waking. On and on and on, with absolutely no letup. Then, abruptly, it
ceased. There was a faint swishing sound and something solid thudded into
the hardwood directly above him.
With a startled cry Corriston leapt from the cot, caught the iron edge of the
bed-guard to keep from falling, and stared up in horror at the shining
expanse of wall space overhead.
The cell was in almost total darkness. But from the barred window
opposite, a faint glimmer of light penetrated in a diffuse arc, just enough
light to enable him to make out the quivering stem of the barb.
It was a barb. This was so beyond any possibility of doubt. It had lodged in
the hardwood scarcely a foot above his cot and it was still quivering.
Cold sweat broke out on Corriston's palms as he realized how close death
had come, and how almost miraculous had been his escape. Had he raised
himself to slap at the "mosquito" the barb could just as easily have buried
itself in his skull.
Corriston hesitated for an instant, his eyes on the barred window and the
faint glow beyond. Then his gaze passed to the wall switch. He decided
against switching on the light immediately. He stooped low and moved
quickly to the window, taking care to keep his head well below the sill.
For a moment he listened, his every nerve alert. There was no stir of
movement in the darkness beyond the sill, nothing at all to indicate that
someone was crouching there.

Finally, with an almost foolhardy recklessness, he raised his head and stared
out between the bars. He could see right across to the wall opposite. The
wall was less than eight feet away, and the space between the wall and his
cell appeared to be unoccupied. This did not surprise him.
It was utterly silly to think that a man intent on willful murder would have
lingered for any great length of time in so narrow a space. After having shot
his bolt, his immediate concern would have been to get away as quickly as
possible.
No, definitely, the man was gone, and if he had more barbs to release he
would choose another time and place.
Even then Corriston did not switch on the light. He had no particular desire
to examine the wood-embedded barb in a bright light. He could see it
clearly enough from where he stood. It was exactly like the barb which had
sealed the lips of that blabbermouth Clakey.
Corriston went back to his cot and sat down. He told himself it would be
highly dangerous to leave the cell and give the killer another chance. He
had saved himself by refusing to slap a non-existent mosquito. But in the
shadows of the Station there would be no mosquitoes—non-existent or
otherwise. The killer would simply crouch in shadows, await his chance,
and take careful aim.
What he had to do was find Miss Ramsey, and prove his sanity. If he stayed
in the cell, the shadows would continue to deepen about him, would
become intolerable, and perhaps even drive him to the verge of actual
madness.
He had to convince the killer that he couldn't be silenced easily and perhaps
not at all.
Corriston stood up. He ran his hands down his body, taking pride in its
muscular solidity, its remarkable integrity under strain. He still felt lithe and
confident; his physical vitality was unimpaired.
He had really known all along that he would be leaving the cell. On Earth
you could dodge into a narrow alley between tall buildings or lean on a
stroller platform and be carried underground so fast that your pursuers
would be left blank-faced. If he stayed alert he could do the same thing on
the Station, even though there were no moving pavements to leap upon.

Quite possibly he could even slip out unnoticed. They might not even be
watching the cell door because he had behaved himself so well up to now.
Psycho-cases were permitted to roam, but if they stayed in their cells
precautions would naturally be relaxed in their favor.
Corriston now was about to develop a sudden, unanticipated impulse to
roam. The fact that he was completely sane gave him an edge over the
space-shocked recruits. There is nothing quite so terrifying to a man who
doubts his own sanity than the thought that unseen eyes are keeping tabs on
him. He feels guilty and acts guilty and almost invariably his caution
deserts him.
Corriston was quite sure that he could carry it off, even if he felt eyes
boring into his back the instant he left the cell. He'd simply bide his time
and seize the first opportunity which presented itself.
Actually, it was easier than he'd imagined it could be. He simply opened the
cell door, walked out; and there was no one in sight to observe him. So far,
so good. The corridor outside was completely deserted, and when he
reached the end of it there was still no one.
He turned left into a large, square reception room and crossed it without
hurrying, his shoulders held straight. Photoelectric eyes? Yes, possibly, but
he had no intention of letting the thought worry him. If he were being
watched mechanically, there was nothing he could do about it and somehow
he didn't think that he had crossed any photoelectric beams. Certainly no
doors had swung open or closed behind him, and photoelectric alarm
system without visible manifestations could be dismissed as a not too likely
possibility.
When Corriston emerged in the glass-encased, wide-view observation
promenade on the Station's Second Level, he was no longer alone. On all
sides men and women jostled him, walking singly and in pairs, in uniform
and in civilian clothes, or hurrying off in dun-gray, space-mechanic
anonymity.
The promenade was crowded almost to capacity and yet the men and
women seemed mere walking dots scattered at random beneath the
immense structures of steel and glass which walled them in. A feeling of
unreality came upon Corriston as he stared upward. He deliberately

moderated his stride, as if fearful that a too rapid movement in any one
direction might send him spinning out into space with a glass-shattering
impetus which he would be powerless to control.
It was an illogical fear and yet he could not entirely throw it off, and he did
not seriously try. It was not nearly as important as the possibility that he
might be being followed. There was no one behind him who looked in the
least suspicious, and no one in front of him either. But how could he be
completely sure?
The answer was that he couldn't. He had to trust his instincts, and so far
they had given him every assurance that he was moving in a free,
independent orbit of his own, completely unobserved.
And then, quite suddenly, he ceased to move at all.
Something quite startling was taking place throughout the length and
breadth of the observation promenade. The men in uniform were
exchanging alarmed glances and departing in haste. The civilians were
crowding closer to the panes. They were collecting in awestruck groups of
blinding light crisscrossed high above their heads.
They were all looking in one direction, but a few of them had been taken so
completely by surprise that they stood motionless in the middle of the
promenade. Corriston was one of the motionless ones, but his eyes were
quick to seek out the nearest viewpane.
At first he thought that a gigantic meteor had appeared suddenly out of the
stellar dark and was rushing straight toward the Station with a velocity so
great as to be almost unimaginable.
Then he realized that it wasn't a meteor. It was a spaceship. And it wasn't
rushing straight toward the Station. It had either bypassed or encircled the
Station and passed beyond it, for it was now heading out into space again.
He could see the long, bright trail left by its rocket jets, the diffuse
incandescence in its wake.

6
An officer with two stripes on his shoulder was standing almost at
Corriston's elbow. He hadn't turned to depart, and for some reason he
seemed reluctant to do so. The space-ship's erratic course seemed to absorb
him to the exclusion of all else.
He started swearing under his breath. Then he saw Corriston and a strange
look came into his face. He looked at Corriston steadily for a moment, then
looked quickly away.
Corriston edged slowly away from him and joined the nearest group of
civilians. They were all talking at once and it was hard to understand
precisely what they were saying. But after a moment a few enlightening
fragments of information greatly lessened his bewilderment.
"That freighter was preparing to land at the Station, but for some reason it
couldn't make contact. It never even began to decelerate."
"How do you know?"
"I asked one of the officers—that gray-haired man over there. He was
plenty worried. I guess that's why he talked so freely. He'd had some kind of
dispute with the captain, apparently. He told me that trouble developed
aboard that freighter when it was eight or ten thousand miles away. An
emergency message came through, but for some reason the captain kept it
pretty much to himself."
Watching the freighter's hull blaze with friction as it went into a narrow
orbit about Earth, Corriston tried hard to make himself believe that the
particular manner of a spaceman's departure was simply one, tragic aspect
of a calculated risk, that men who lived dangerously could hardly expect to
die peacefully in their beds. But it was a rationalization without substance.
In an immediate and very real sense he was inside the freighter, enduring an
eternity of torment, sharing the agonizing fate that was about to overtake
the crew.

Nearer and nearer to Earth the freighter swept, completely encircling the
planet like a runaway moon with an orbital velocity so great the eye could
hardly follow it.
"It will blast out a meteor pit as wide as the Grand Canyon if it explodes on
land," someone at Corriston's elbow said. "I wouldn't care to be within a
hundred miles of it."
"Neither would I. It could wipe out a city, all right—any city within a radius
of thirty miles. This is really something to watch!"
The freighter had encircled Earth twice and was now so close to its blue-
green oceans and the dun-colored immensity of its continental land masses
that it had almost disappeared from view. It had dwindled to a tiny, glowing
pinpoint of radiance crossing the face of the planet, an erratically weaving
firefly that had abandoned all hope of guiding itself by a light that was
about to flare up with explosive violence and put an end to its life.
The freighter was invisible when the end came. It was invisible when it
struck and rebounded and channeled a deep pit in a green valley on Earth.
But the explosion which followed was seen by every man and woman on
the Station's wide-view promenade.
There were three tremendous flares, each opening and spreading outward
like the sides of a funnel, each a livid burst of incandescence spiraling
outward into space.
As seen from the Station the flares were not, of course, so tragically
spectacular. They resembled more successive flashes of almost
instantaneous brightness, flashes such as had many times been produced by
the tilting of a heliograph on the rust-red plains of Mars under conditions of
maximum visibility.
It takes an experienced eye to interpret such phenomena correctly, and
among the spectators on the promenade there were a few, no doubt, who
were not even quite sure that the freighter had exploded.
But Corriston had no doubts at all on that score. The full extent of the
tragedy would be revealed later by radio communication from Earth.
There was a long silence before anyone spoke. The group around Corriston
seemed paralyzed by shock, unable to express in words how blindly hopeful

they had dared to be, or how fatalistic from the first. There were a few
moist eyes among the women, an awkward, almost reverent shuffling of
feet.
Then the young man at Corriston's elbow cleared his throat and said in a
barely audible whisper: "It didn't come down in the sea."
"I know," Corriston said. "It came down in North America, close to the
Canadian border."
"In the United States?"
"Yes, I think so. We can't be sure. It's too much to hope there was no
destruction of human life after an explosion of that magnitude."
Corriston suddenly realized that he was behaving like a man who had taken
complete leave of his wits. He was drawing more and more attention to
himself when he should have been bending all of his efforts toward making
himself as inconspicuous as possible.
Fortunately the agitation of everyone on the promenade was helping to
remedy his blunder. His wisest course now was simply to recede as an
individual, to move silently to the perimeter of the group and just as silently
vanish.
He was confident that he could accomplish it. He began elbowing his way
backwards until there were a dozen men and women in front of him. He let
himself be observed briefly as a grim-lipped spectator who had taken such
an emotional pounding that he could endure no more. Suddenly he saw his
chance and took it. There was another small group of civilians close to the
group he had joined, and he ducked quickly behind them, using their
turned-away backs as a shield. He edged toward a paneled door on his right,
his only concern for the moment being a comparatively simple one. He
must get away from the crowded promenade as swiftly as possible.
He reached the door, swung the panel wide, and stepped into the long,
brightly-lighted compartment beyond without a backward glance. Almost
immediately he perceived that he had committed an act of folly. The
compartment was a promenade cafeteria and it was crowded with an
overflow of agitated men and women discussing the tragedy in heated
terms.

Keep cool now. None of these people are interested in you. Keep cool and
keep on walking. There's another door and you can be through it in less
than a minute, Corriston told himself.
There was a pretty waitress behind the long counter, and as he came abreast
of her she smiled at him. For an instant he hesitated, eyed the stool opposite
her, and fought off an incongruous but almost irresistible impulse to sit
down. Quick warmth and sudden sympathy. Yes, he could do with a bit of
both, Corriston thought.
It was sheer insanity, but he did sit down. He eased himself into the stool
and ordered a cup of coffee.
"Something with it?" the waitress asked. "A sandwich, or—"
"No, no, I don't think so," Corriston said quickly. "Just the coffee."
The waitress seemed in no hurry to depart. "It was pretty terrible what
happened. Wasn't it?"
"Did you see it?" Corriston asked.
"I saw most of it. I saw the ship go past the Station and start to explode. I
saw that black wing, or whatever it was, drop off. Then someone started
shouting in here and I came back. They say it crashed on Earth."
"That's right," Corriston said, telling himself that he was a damned fool for
wanting to look at her hair and hear her friendly woman's voice when every
passing second was adding to his danger.
"You saw it crash?"
Corriston nodded. "I just came from the promenade."
"That was a crazy thing to ask you. How excited can you get? I saw you
come through that door. You looked kind of pale."
"I still feel that way," Corriston said.
The waitress then said a surprising thing: "I wonder what it is about some
men. You just have to look at them once and you know they're the sort
you'd like to be with when something terrible happens. You know what I
mean?"
"Sure," Corriston said. "Any port in a storm."

The waitress smiled again. "I don't mean that, exactly. Please don't think I'm
handing you a line. There's just something ... comfortable about you. You
go all pale when something bad happens to other people. That's good; I like
that. It means you can feel for other people. You're a gentle sort of guy, but I
bet you can take care of yourself and anyone you care about. I just bet you
can."
The waitress flushed a little, as if afraid that she had said too much. She
turned and walked slowly toward the coffee percolator at the far end of the
counter.
He was glad now that he had ordered the coffee. The coffee would help too.
He suddenly felt that he was under observation, that hostile eyes were
watching him. But it was no more than just a feeling; and coffee and
sympathy might drive it away.
How blindly, stupidly foolish could a guy be? Corriston thought. If he had
any sense at all he wouldn't wait for the coffee. He'd get up quickly and
head for the door at the other end of the cafeteria. He'd either do that, or
swing about abruptly and attempt to catch the silent watcher by surprise.
Corriston decided to wait for the coffee.
The waitress looked at him strangely when she returned. She set the coffee
down before him and started to turn away, her eyes troubled. Then,
suddenly, she seemed to change her mind. She leaned close to him and
whispered: "You'd better leave by the promenade door. That man over there
has been watching you. I know him very well. He's a Security Guard."
Corriston nodded and stared at her gratefully for a moment. He was more
relieved than alarmed. It was far better to have a Security Guard watching
him than a killer with a poisoned barb. He wasn't exactly happy about it, but
he was confident he could elude the agent.
The waitress' eyes were suddenly warm and friendly again. "Space-shock?"
she asked.
"So they claim," Corriston said. "I happen to think they're mistaken."
He started sipping the coffee. It was hot but not steaming hot. He could
have tossed it off like a jigger of rye but he had some quick thinking to do.
"Tell me," he said. "Just where is that guard sitting?"

"At the other end of the counter," the waitress replied, the anxiety coming
back into her eyes. "He's close to the door. You'd have to go past him.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I think you want to get away from him. So you'd
better go the way you came—by the promenade door."
"That's not too good an idea, I'm afraid," Corriston said. "He'd follow me
and get assistance on the promenade. What's beyond the other door? Where
does it lead to?"
"It opens on a corridor," the waitress said quickly. "If you can get past him
you might have a better chance that way. There's nothing but a corridor with
two side doors. One opens on an emergency stairway that goes down to the
Master Sequence Selector compartments."
She seemed to take pride in her knowledge. Due to a space-shocked guy's
difficulties, the Master Sequence Selector had become an important secret
shared between them. Corriston wondered if she knew that the Selector
functioned on thirty-two separate kinds of automatic controls.
If he ever got the chance, he'd come back and tell her exactly how grateful
he was. Right at the moment one consideration alone dominated his
thinking. If he could get past the guard he could hide out in an intricate
maze of machinery. Even if they sent a dozen guards down to look for him
it would take them some time to locate him. He could hide-out and gain a
breathing spell.
The waitress had a very small hand. Abruptly Corriston clasped it and held
it for an instant, his fingers exerting a firm, steady pressure. "Thanks," he
said.
Corriston swung about without glancing toward the end of the counter. He'd
pass the guard quickly enough; there was no sense in alerting the man in
advance. As for recognizing him, that would be no problem at all. You
couldn't mistake a Security Guard no matter what kind of clothes he wore.
Corriston took his time. He walked slowly, refusing to hurry. A man under
surveillance should never hurry. He should be casual, completely at his
ease, for there is no better way of keeping an observer guessing.
He kept parallel with the long counter, his shoulders swaying a little with
the assurance of a man who knows exactly where he is going. Presently the

entire length of the counter was behind him, and he was less than a yard
from the door.
He hadn't glanced once at the counter. He didn't intend to now. One quick
leap would carry him through the door and beyond it, and to hell with
recognizing the guard. When it was touch and go and odd man out, you
altered your plan as you went along.
He'd seen a girl disappear when everyone said it didn't happen. Confined to
a psycho-ward, he had simply walked out, eluded a killer, and watched a
ship explode on the green hills of Earth. He'd survived all that, so how
could one lone Security Guard stop him now?
He was preparing to leap, when something got in his way—a shadow—a
shadow for an instant between himself and the door, and then a dark bulk
stepping right into the shoes of the shadow and filling it out.
The Security Guard was not at all the kind of person he'd expected him to
be. He was not a big ape, not even a muscular-looking man. He had simply
seemed big for the instant he took to fill the place of his shadow. He was a
man of average height, average build. He blocked the doorway without
bluster, looking very calm and relaxed. Only his eyes were cold and
accusing and dangerously narrowed as he surveyed Corriston from head to
foot.
"I'm afraid you'll have to go back to the ward now," he said. "You picked a
bad time to take a turn about the Station. Ordinarily you'd be privileged to
do so. That's part of the therapy. But you picked a very bad time."
"I'm beginning to realize that," Corriston said. "I couldn't help it, though. I
had no way of knowing that freighter was out of control. I'm afraid you've
made a mistake, too, though. I'm not going back to the cell."
Corriston had been watching the man's right arm. Suddenly it went back
and his fist started rising, started coming up fast at an angle that could have
sent it crashing against Corriston's jaw.
Corriston had no intention of letting that happen. He side-stepped quickly
and delivered a smashing blow to the pit of the guard's stomach. The blow
was so solid that it doubled the guard up. His knees buckled and he started
to fold.

Corriston didn't take the folding for granted. A second blow caught the man
squarely on the jaw and a third thudded into his rib section. For an instant
he looked so dazed that Corriston felt sorry for him.
He was still half-doubled up when he sank to the floor and straightened out.
He straightened out on his side first, and then rolled over on his back and
stopped moving. His lips hung slackly, his eyes were wide and staring.
The look on his face gave Corriston a jolt. It was a very strange look. The
fact that his features had become slack was not startling in itself, but there
was something unnatural, unbelievable, about the way that muscular
relaxation had overspread his entire countenance. His features were putty-
gray and they seemed to have no clearly defined boundaries.
His nose, eyes, and forehead looked as if the ligaments which held them
together had snapped from overstrain or had been severed by a surgeon's
scalpel ... severed and allowed to go their separate ways without
interference.
In fact, there was no real expression on the man's face at all—no
recognizably human expression—not even the stuporous look of a man
knocked suddenly unconscious.
There was agitation now in the cafeteria, a hum of angry voices, a rising
murmur that was coming dangerously close. Corriston shut his mind to it.
He knelt at the guard's side and swiftly unbuttoned the unconscious man's
heavy service jacket. He felt around under the jacket until he was satisfied
that he could move on through the doorway with a clear conscience. The
guard's heart was beating firmly and steadily. There was a reassuring
warmth under the jacket as well, a complete absence of clamminess.
Suddenly the guard groaned and started to roll over on his side again.
Corriston didn't wait for him to complete the movement. He arose quickly
and was through the door in four long strides.
He preferred not to run. He was not so much fleeing as seeking a security
he was entitled to, a reasonably safe port in a storm that was threatening to
take away his freedom by blanketing him in a dark cloud of unjust
suspicion and utter tyranny.
The corridor was as deserted as he'd hoped it would be. With no one to get
in his way or sound an alarm, he had no difficulty at all in locating the

emergency passageway which descended in a rail-guarded spiral to the
Master Sequence Selector. He kept his right hand on the safety rail as he
moved downward into the darkness. For the first time he felt extremely
tired.

7
The drone of machinery in a high-vaulted, metal-walled compartment
awakened Corriston. It was for the most part a steady, low, continuous
sound. But occasionally it ceased to be a drone, in a strict sense, and
became high-pitched. It became a shrill, almost intolerable whine,
impinging unpleasantly on his eardrums and preventing him from going to
sleep again.
For interminable minutes he lay stretched out at full length in the lidded,
coffinlike rag bin into which he had crawled, a lethargic weariness
enveloping him like a shroud. Above his head steel-blue surfaces
crisscrossed, vibrating planes of metal and wire intricately folded back upon
themselves.
After a moment, when the steady drone was well in the ascendency again,
he sat up and stared about him. He had a throbbing headache and there was
a dryness in his throat which made swallowing difficult.
He was certainly not an exceptional man in regard to such matters. During
moments of crises he could remain fairly calm and self-possessed but the
aftermath could be killing.
He felt now as if all of his nerves had been squeezed together in a vise. He
looked at his wrist watch and was amazed to discover that he had slept for
eight hours. If a search had been made for him, he had no reason to
complain about his luck. He hadn't even closed the lid of the bin. But
perhaps the oil-stained waste he had drawn over himself had given them the
idea that he was just more waste underneath.
Perhaps the guards didn't give a damn whether they found him or not. It was
quite possible. On a low official level a cynical desire for self-comfort
could dominate the thinking of a man.
It was quite possible that the guards who had been sent down to search for
him—or one of the guards, at least—had been angry at his superiors. Just a
quick look and to hell with it—that must have been his attitude.

It made sense in another way. They wouldn't suspect the bin because the bin
was so conspicuous and obvious a hiding place. The Purloined Letter sort of
thing. Crawl into an empty coffin at a funeral and no one will give you a
second glance. All dead men look alike.
The Master Sequence Selector compartment was a coffin, too—a big, all-
metal coffin arching above him and hemming him in. If he hoped to get out
of it alive, he'd have to do more than just beat on the lid with his fists.
Almost instantly he was ashamed of his thoughts. He had been extremely
lucky so far. The funeral was over, the sod firmly in place. They would not
be likely to dig him up on suspicion, and he could stay buried until he
starved to death.
The worst would be over when they found him. The thirst torment would be
the worst, but if it became unbearable he would still have the choice of
surrendering himself.
Quite possibly he would die of thirst. Quite possibly he could shout his
lungs out and still remain trapped. If a search had been made and they had
failed to find him, sullen anger might have tempted them to do an
unthinkable thing. They might have locked the door of the compartment so
that the corpse would have no opportunity of escaping prematurely and
making them look like fools.
Corriston was just starting to climb out of the bin to investigate the truth or
falseness of that utterly demoralizing possibility when he heard the sound.
It was a very peculiar sound, three or four times repeated, and he heard it
clearly above the low drone of the Selector's automatic controls.
He stood up in the bin, straining his ears. It came again, louder this time. It
was only a short distance away and it was a voice sound, unmistakably a
voice sound.
He climbed out of the bin, grasped a metal rod that projected from one of
the cross-beams, and descended cautiously to the base of the Selector. The
droning increased for an instant, rising to a whine so high-pitched that he
could no longer hear the voice.
He started moving around the edge of the Selector, keeping well within its
shadow, watching shafts of dull light move backwards and forwards across
the floor. He hardly expected anyone to leap out at him. The voice had not

seemed quite that near; in fact, he was by no means sure that it had come
from the compartment at all. But if not from the compartment, where?
He found out quickly enough. There was a square, windowlike grate a few
feet from the Selector's automatic control panel, set high up on the wall. A
faint, steady glow came from it.
Corriston paused for an instant directly below the glow, measuring the
distance from the floor to the aperture with his eyes. He strained his ears
again, waiting for the whine to subside. It continued shrill, but suddenly he
heard the voice again, heard it above the whine.
There was stark terror in the voice. It was despairing and desperate in its
pleading, and it seemed to Corriston that he would remember it until he
died. He thought he recognized the voice, but he couldn't be sure.
It was perhaps merciful that he couldn't, for the grate was at least ten feet
above the floor and had he known beyond the faintest shadow of doubt that
it was Helen Ramsey's voice, his inability to reach her would have been
fiendish torment.
He hoped only one thing—that he had to reach that voice in time.
First of all he had to stay calm. Even a calm man could not hope to scale a
ten-foot wall with his bare hands, but an agitated man would have no
chance at all. Something to stand on! A box—anything!
A box would help, a ladder would be better. But what were his chances of
finding a ladder in the Selector compartment? Not good at all. Still, he
could search for a ladder. Quickly now. No time to waste, but don't lose
your head. Take thirty seconds, a good long thirty seconds to look around
for a metal ladder. There just might be one standing somewhere against the
wall.
There was! Not one ladder, but two, leaning against the wall directly
opposite the glimmering front section of the Selector.
It was amazing how desperation could change a man. In the great moments
of danger and desperation small, neurotic concerns ceased to matter.
He was sure now. He had recognized the voice beyond any possibility of
doubt. The ladder scraped against the wall and swayed a little, and for an

instant he feared it might slide out from under him. He paused to make sure,
and then went swiftly on up until his head was level with the grate.
He grasped the heavy grillwork with both hands and raised himself higher.
He could see clearly through the grill into the compartment beyond now.
The entire compartment was visible from where he stood. It was small and
square and dimly lighted by an overhead lamp, and there was a paneled
door leading into it.
Close to the door a man was standing. Corriston couldn't see his face. He
was half-turned away from the wall opposite him, and the girl who was
struggling to escape from him was more than two-thirds concealed by his
massive shoulders.
He was holding her in a tight, merciless grip. He had locked one hand on
her wrist and was preventing her from moving either backwards or
forwards. It was costing him no effort. He simply stood very straight and
still while she struggled vainly to free herself.
Immense strength seemed to emanate from him, complete assurance and a
coldly calculating kind of brutality which appeared to be slowly
undermining her will to resist. Her struggles became less frantic second by
slow second, and that she was about to stop struggling altogether was
evident from the way her right arm had begun to dangle and her body to
sag.
The man was holding her by the left wrist in a left-handed grip. He was
cruelly twisting her wrist and suddenly she cried out again in pain and
despairing helplessness.
The blood started mounting to Corriston's temples. He began tugging at the
grate with both hands, exerting all his strength in a desperate effort to
dislodge it. It began to move a little, to become less firmly attached to the
wall. He could feel it moving under his hands, rasping and creaking as it
loosened inch by inch.
He was covered with sweat. Already in his mind he had killed the man, and
Helen Ramsey was tight in his arms, happy and alive.
The man did not seem to hear the rasp of the grate coming loose. He neither
turned nor raised his head. His free hand had gone out and across the girl's
face. But if he had struck her on the face, she gave no sign. She did not

recoil as if from a blow and there was something strange about the
movement. It was as if the man had reached out to tear something from the
girl's face—a veil or a mask.
His hand whipped back empty but his fingers were oddly twisted, as if he
had clawed at something that had failed to come free.
Corriston pulled back his shoulders and his posture on the ladder grew more
erect. He knew that his exertions might send the ladder toppling but it was a
risk he had to take.
The grate was freely movable now. He could move it backwards and
forwards, six or eight inches each way; but he still could not rip it
completely free.
He kept on tugging, his neck cords bulging, the ladder swaying
dangerously. The grate could be moved upward now, just a little. No, it was
finally coming completely loose. He could move it in all directions and
even push it outward at right angles to its base.
Twice he heard Helen Ramsey cry out again, and her screams became a
goad that turned his wrists to steel. With a sudden, convulsive wrench he
twisted the grate sideways. It came loose in his hands. It was so surprisingly
light that an incongruous rage surged up in him. It was cruelly perverse,
intolerable, that he should have been so long delayed by a thin sheet of
metal that hardly seemed to have any weight at all.
He swung about on the ladder and let the grate drop. It struck the floor a
few feet from the Selector and rebounded with a clang loud enough to wake
the dead. The ladder swayed again, and he had to grab the edge of the
aperture quickly and with both hands to keep himself from toppling.
He pulled himself forward through the aperture on his stomach, taking care
not to dislodge the ladder. His temples were pounding and his palms sticky
with sweat. He did not look down until he was completely through,
dreading what he might see.
He passed a hand over his eyes. It was unbelievable, but he had to believe
it. The man was gone and the girl was now alone in the compartment.
Had the man fled in sudden fear, knowing that Corriston would be
consumed with a killing rage that would make him a more than dangerous

adversary? Corriston didn't think so. The man had looked quite capable of
putting up a furious struggle. More likely he had disappeared to keep
himself from being recognized, or because he had accomplished his
purpose.
Blind, embittered anger again boiled up in Corriston. Had the man waited,
he would have rejoiced and been less angry. He would have taken a calm,
deep breath and slowly set about the almost pleasant task of killing him.
He felt cheated, outraged. Then his concern for Helen Ramsey made him
forget his rage. Had she been felled with a blow, or had she simply fainted?
He started down, then hesitated.
The ladder first. Before he descended it was necessary to make sure that the
ladder would be in the same compartment with him, set firmly against the
wall, directly under the aperture. If he were prevented from leaving the
compartment by the corridor door, he might find himself needing the ladder.
Without it he might be descending into a trap that could close with a clang
and abruptly imprison him.
Getting down into the compartment was the worst part, just putting the
ladder into place and not knowing how badly hurt she was.
What if she's dead? he thought. What if he killed her with a single blow? He
looked strong enough. He could have killed her. God, don't let me think of
that. I mustn't think it.
His feet touched the floor. He let out his breath slowly, turned and crossed
the floor to where she was lying. He went down on his knees and lifted her
into his arms. She lay relaxed in his arms, face up, quiet, her lips slightly
parted.
He looked down into her face, and for a moment his mind went numb,
became still, so that there was no longer a whirling inside his head—only a
chilling horror.
She seemed to have two faces. One was shrunken and almost torn away, a
shredded fragment of a face. But enough of it remained for him to see the
shriveled flesh of the cheeks, the puckered mouth, the white hair clinging to
the temples. It was the face of an old woman but so fragmentary that it
could not even have been called a half-face. And even though it had been
almost ripped away, it seemed still to adhere firmly to the face to which it

had been attached, and to blend with it, so that the features of both faces
intermingled in a quite unnatural way.
Not quite, though; Helen Ramsey's face was sharper, more distinct—all of
the features stood out more clearly. And when Corriston's stunned mind
began to function normally again, he realized that the old woman's face was
—had to be—a plastic mask.
It took him only an instant to remove the ghastly thing from features which
he could not bear to see defaced.
He had to pry it loose, but he did so very gently, exactly as a sculptor might
have pried loose a life mask from the face of a recumbent model.
He held it in his hand and looked at it, and a little of the horror crept back
into his mind.
It was the merest fragment, as he had thought. Thin, flexible, a tissue-
structure of incomplete, aged features, and with an inner surface that was
very rough and uneven, as if something had been torn from it.
He could have crumpled it up in his hand, but he did not do so. With a lack
of foresight which he was later to regret—a lack which was to prove tragic
—he simply flung it from him, as though its ugliness had unnerved him so
that he could no longer endure the sight of it.
Helen Ramsey was a dead weight in his arms, and for a moment he feared
that she had stopped breathing. So great was his fear, so paralyzing, that his
hand on her pulse became rigid, and for a moment he could neither move
nor think.
Then he felt the slow beat of her pulse and a great thankfulness came upon
him.
He knew then that he must get help as quickly as possible. He eased her
gently to the floor, walked to the door and locked it securely. Then he
returned to her and took her into his arms again. He spent several minutes
trying to revive her. But when she did not open her eyes, did not even stir in
his arms, he knew that he could not wait any longer.

8
An inexorable kind of determination enabled Corriston to get to the
Station's central control compartment, and confront the commander, when
the latter, absorbed by matters of the utmost urgency, had triple-guarded his
privacy by stationing executive officers outside the door.
Commander Clement was a small man physically, with a strangely bland,
almost cherubic face. But his face was dark with anger now—or possibly it
was shock that he was experiencing—and the heightened color seemed to
add to his dignity, making him look not merely forcibly determined, but
almost formidable. His white uniform and the seven gold bars on each
epaulet helped a good deal too. It was impossible to determine at a glance
just how great was his inner strength, but Corriston knew that he could not
have gotten where he was had he not possessed unalloyed resoluteness.
He was standing by a visual reference mechanism which looked almost
exactly like a black stovepipe spiraling up from the deck. There was a
speaking tube in his hand, and he was talking into it. He seemed completely
unaware that he was no longer alone.
Had Corriston been less agitated he would have felt a little sorry for the
officer who had admitted him. The officer had been so impressed by
Corriston's gravity and the earnestness with which he had pleaded his case
that he had stepped forward and opened the door without question,
assuming, no doubt, that Clement would look up instantly and see Corriston
standing just inside the doorway.
Now the door had closed again, Clement hadn't looked up, and the officer
was going to be in trouble. But Corriston had no time and very little
inclination to worry about that. What Commander Clement was saying into
the speaking tube had a far stronger claim on his attention.
"It's the worst thing that could have happened," Clement was saying. "We
can't just brazen it out. It's going to mean trouble, serious trouble. What's
that? How should I know what happened? When you're carrying a certain
kind of cargo a thousand things can go wrong. The ship went out of control,

that's all. The first radio message didn't tell me anything. The captain was
trying to cover up to save himself. He didn't even want me to know.
"You bet it can happen again. We've got to be prepared for that, too. But
right now—"
Commander Clement saw Corriston then. His expression didn't change, but
it seemed to Corriston that he paled slightly.
"That's all for now," he said, and returned the speaking tube to its cradle.
He looked steadily at Corriston for a moment. A glint of anger appeared in
his eyes, and suddenly they were blazing.
"What do you mean by coming in here unannounced, Lieutenant?" he
demanded. "I gave strict orders that no one was to be admitted. If I didn't
know you were suffering from severe space-shock...."
"I'm sorry, sir," Corriston said quickly. "It's very urgent. I think I can
convince you that I am not suffering from space-shock. I've found Miss
Ramsey. She's been badly hurt and needs immediate medical attention."
The Commander looked as if a man he had thought sane was standing
before him with a gun in his hand. Not Corriston, but some other, more
violent man. For a moment longer he remained rigid and then his hand went
out and tightened on Corriston's arm.
"By heaven, if you're lying to me!"
"I would have no reason to lie, sir. It proves I'm not a space-shock case. But
that's unimportant now. She's safe for the moment. No one can get to her. I
bolted the door on the inside. Unless—"
Corriston went pale. "No, there's no danger. I drew the ladder up and
returned it to the Selector compartment. Then I threw the lock on the
emergency door."
"Start at the beginning," Clement said. "If she's in danger well get to her.
Take it easy now, and tell me exactly what happened."
Corriston went over it fast. He said nothing about the mask. Let Clement
find that out for himself.

Commander Clement walked to the door, threw it open and spoke to the
executive officer who was stationed outside. The officer came into the
control room.
"Stay with Lieutenant Corriston until I get back," Clement said. "He's not to
leave. He understands that."
He turned back to Corriston. "I'm afraid you'll have to consider yourself still
under guard, Lieutenant. I have only your word that you found Miss
Ramsey. I believe you, but there are some regulations even I can't waive."
"It's all right," Corriston said. "I won't attempt to leave. But please hurry,
sir."
Commander Clement hesitated, then said with a smile: "I knew about the
guard you knocked out, Lieutenant. You're a very hot-headed young man.
That's really a court-martial offense, but perhaps we can smooth it over if
you're telling the truth now. You were in the position of a man imprisoned
for a crime he didn't commit. If he can prove his innocence, the law is very
lenient. He can escape and still get a full pardon, even a pardon with
apologies. It's a different matter, of course if he kills a guard to escape. You
didn't."
Corriston was tempted to say, "I think perhaps I tried to, sir," but thought
better of it. He'd ask Clement later why the guards who had been sent down
into the Selector compartment had failed to find him. It wasn't important
enough now to waste a second thought on, but just out of curiosity he would
ask.
He didn't have to. After Clement had departed the executive officer told
him. "They made a pretty thorough search for you," he said. "Or so they
claimed. But they had been drinking heavily—every one of them.
Maintaining discipline can be a terrible headache at times. There's a lot of
objectivity about the commander and he doesn't try to crack down too hard.
He knows what it means to be out here for months with nothing to break the
monotony. Hell, if we could send for our wives more often it wouldn't be so
bad."
Corriston's palms were cold. He stood very still, wondering how long it
would take the commander to return with the news he wanted to hear.

"The question is whether life is really worth living without a woman to talk
to," the executive officer went on. "Just to lie relaxed and watch a pretty girl
move slowly around a room. It does something for you."
Corriston wished the man would keep quiet. Under ordinary circumstances
he could have sympathized heartily. He couldn't now. There was only one
girl he wanted to see walk around a room, and she might just as well have
been at the opposite end of space.
She wasn't walking around a room now. She was lying helplessly sprawled
out, waiting for rescue to come. It had to come soon, it had to. The
commander wouldn't just go down alone after her. He'd be accompanied by
a half-dozen executive officers who would know exactly how to bundle her
into a stretcher and carry her to the sick bay.
But what if a killer just happened to be crouching in one of the corridors,
waiting for the stretcher to pass? A killer with a poisoned barb....
Corriston couldn't stand still. He walked back and forth across the control
room while the executive officer continued to talk. He paid no heed at all.
Corriston heard a footfall as he paced. He turned and saw that Commander
Clement had returned. He was standing in the doorway with a strange look
on his face.
Corriston felt bewildered, unable to quite believe that Clement was really
back. It was like a dream that had suddenly turned real, a looking glass
reversal with a strange quality of distortion about it.
It was real enough. Clement entered and shut the door behind him, very
firmly and carefully, as if he wanted to make sure that Corriston would not
attempt to escape.
He walked slowly forward, looking at the executive officer as if Corriston
had no place at all in his thoughts.
"Everything he told me was a lie," Clement said. "Everything. There was no
girl. The compartment was locked; so was the emergency door leading
down to the Selector. The ladder was standing against the wall in the
Selector compartment. Miss Ramsey could not have been in the
compartment—not at any time. There was nothing to indicate it. She just
wasn't there."

Corriston moved toward him, his face white. "That's a lie and you know it.
What have you done with her? You'd better tell me. You can have me court-
martialed, but you can't stop me from talking. I can prove she was there.
The grate—"
"The grate? What are you talking about? There was no ripped-out grate.
The grate was in place. I feel very sorry for you, Lieutenant. But I can't let
sympathy stand in the way of my duty. In some respects you're very
rational. You can think logically and clearly ... up to a point. But the shock
weakness is there. It's very serious when you start having actual
hallucinations."
The executive officer had drawn his gun. He was holding it rather loosely in
his hand now, triggered and ready for any dangerous or suspicious move on
Corriston's part.
There was nothing in Clement's gaze as he swung about to refute the dark
mistrust that had come into the executive officer's eyes. He seemed intent
only on bolstering that mistrust by driving even deeper nails into Corriston's
coffin.
"I'm afraid we'll have to continue to regard Lieutenant Corriston as
dangerously unstable," he said. "Keep your gun on him when you take him
back to the Ward. Don't relax your vigilance for an instant."
"I won't," the executive officer promised.
"Good. You're not going to make any further trouble for us, are you,
Lieutenant?"
The question seemed to call for no answer and Corriston made none. He
turned slowly and walked toward the door, despairingly aware that a man he
had rather liked had fallen into step behind him and would shoot him dead
if he so much as wavered.
Just as he reached the door Clement spoke again, giving the executive
officer final instructions. "He must not be permitted to leave his cell. Make
sure of that, Simms. Post a permanent guard at the door. He must be kept
under constant surveillance. If he's the self-destructive type, and I'm by no
means sure he isn't, he may attempt to kill himself."

9
May attempt to kill himself. May attempt.... May attempt.... May attempt to
kill himself. Corriston sat up on his cot, his mouth dry, his temples
pounding.
Had Clement implanted the suggestion in his mind deliberately, with
infinite cruelty and cunning? Was Clement really hoping that he would
commit suicide? If he took his own life Clement would stand to gain a great
deal.
But could Clement be that much of a scoundrel? Was he, in fact, a
scoundrel at all?
Corriston knew that he could not afford to succumb to panic. Only by
staying calm, by trying to reason it out logically, could he hope to get
anywhere. Not at the truth, perhaps, but anywhere at all.
Start off with a supposition: The commander was everything that he
pretended to be, an honest man with immense responsibilities which he
could not delegate to anyone else. A forthright, hot-tempered, but
completely sincere man. A little secretive, yes, but only because he took his
responsibilities so seriously.
Start off by assuming that Clement was that kind of a man. What would he
stand to gain if Corriston killed himself? The removal of one responsibility,
at the very least. It was bad for morale if an officer had hallucinations that
vitally concerned the Station itself. But a hallucination about the wealthiest
girl on Earth wasn't just run-of-the-mill. It could not only disturb every
officer and enlisted man on the Station; it could have political repercussions
on Earth.
Clement was already in trouble because of the freighter. The chances were a
Congressional Investigating Committee would be coming out. They'd be
sure to hear about Corriston. His story would be all over the Station, on
everyone's lips.

If Corriston took his own life the commander would be spared all that. He'd
have nothing to answer for. The entire affair could be hushed up. Or could
it?
Wait a minute, better give the whole problem another twirl. Even if the
Commander was a completely honest man, he wouldn't stand to gain too
much. He might even find himself in more serious trouble. And look at it in
another way: It was hard to believe that a hallucination concerning Helen
Ramsey could be much more than a gadfly irritation. If the full truth came
out, Clement could clear himself of all blame. Would a man of integrity
suggest that a fellow-officer take his own life solely to remove a gadfly
irritation? Or any irritation, for that matter?
It was inconceivable on the face of it. The first supposition was a
contradiction in terms. It did not remain valid under close scrutiny and
therefore it had to be rejected.
Supposition number two: Clement was in all respects the exact opposite of
an honest man. Clement had something dark and damaging to conceal, was
in more serious trouble than he'd allowed anyone to suspect. Clement had
some reason for not wanting the truth about Ramsey's daughter to come out.
What would he stand to gain if Corriston took himself out of the world?
Unfortunately there were wide areas where any kind of speculation had to
penetrate an almost absolute vacuum to get anywhere at all.
The situation on Mars? Was there some as yet undemonstratable link
between Ramsey's uranium holdings and the Station itself? Was Clement
involved with Ramsey in some way? And was Ramsey's daughter a vital
link in the chain?
Had the accident to the freighter put an additional strain on the chain, a
strain so great that Clement had been forced to take immediate, drastic
action to protect himself?
Corriston tried to remember exactly what the Commander had said over the
speaking tube. He had tried to listen intently, but he had been too agitated to
make much sense out of the few brief sentences which he had overheard.
Clement had been speaking in anger and not too coherently, and it had been
a one-way conversation, with the replying voice completely silent, or, at the
very least, inaudible. But one thing about the conversation had made a

strong impression on him. Clement had not sounded like an honest man
with nothing to conceal. On the contrary, he had sounded like a worried and
guilty man.
Corriston shut his eyes and relaxed for a moment on his cot. It was an
uneasy, tormenting kind of relaxation, because another thought had
occurred to him.
What if Clement had not deliberately tried to plant a suicide suggestion in
his mind at all? What if he had simply spoken with the malice of a not too
kindly man appalled and enraged by a space-shock victim who had not only
lied to him, but had given every evidence of being dangerously difficult to
control.
It certainly made sense. There was nothing in the cell which might have
enabled Corriston to take his own life, even had he been so inclined. Would
not Clement have taken care to introduce into the cell some convenient,
readily available weapon—a steel file, perhaps or even a small spool of
wire?
A cold dream had begun to take possession of Corriston. Was it true then,
could it possibly be true? Was he hallucinating? He had seen Helen Ramsey
go into a ladies' lounge and disappear. He had seen her a second time, and
she had worn a mask. The mask was so strange that it would have made
four men out of five question their own sanity. But he had knelt beside her
and lifted her into his arms. He had felt the pulse at her wrist. Well? If after
that she had disappeared again, was it not more of a black mark against him
than if he had failed to touch her at all?
All hallucinations seem real to the insane. The realer they seem the more
likely they are to be inescapably damning.
Could a warped mind hope to escape from such a dilemma? Was there any
possible way of making sure? No, not if he had actually cracked up. But
supposing he hadn't. Suppose he had just passed for an instant over the
borderline, as a result of strain, of abnormal circumstances, and was now
completely rational again. In that case, proof would help. Proof could
convince him that at least a part of what had happened had been real, that
he had not been hallucinating continuously for days.

If he could prove conclusively that he had not been hallucinating when he
had climbed through the grate, Helen Ramsey's presence beyond the grate
would be pretty well established. Even an insane man does not abandon all
logic when he performs a complicated act. He is not likely to ascend a ten
foot wall and climb through a grate in pursuit of a complete illusion.
Oh, it could happen.... Possibly it had happened many times in hospitals for
the incurably insane. But somehow he could not believe that it had
happened in his case. Right at this moment he was certainly not in an
abnormal state of mind. How could he be when he was able to think so
logically and consistently?
Being sane now, or at least having the firm conviction that he was sane,
would enable him to retrace what had happened step by step. What he were
to retrace it in reality ... until he came to the grate? If the grate had been
ripped out, the torment and uncertainty in his mind would vanish. He would
be free then to move against Clement, to unmask and expose him for the
scoundrel he was.
Free? The very thought was a mockery. He was free for twenty feet in either
direction, free to shout and summon the guard. But beyond that....
Corriston sat up straight. Free to summon the guard. Free to summon a man
he had dropped to the floor with two quick, decisive and totally unexpected
blows. But if he did summon the guard, what then? Could he be doubled up
with cramps—the old prisoners' dodge? "Get me to a doctor. I think I'm
dying."
Hell no, not that. It was mildewed even on the face of it. The guard
wouldn't be that much of a fool. He'd whip out a gun, and slash downward
with it at the first suspicious move on the part of a man he hated.
Was there any other way? Perhaps there was ... a quite simple way. Why
couldn't he simply ask the guard to step into the cell and request permission
to talk to him? He would plead urgency, but do it very casually, arouse the
man's curiosity without antagonizing him too much. No need to be crafty,
await some unlikely opportunity, or anything of the sort.
Simply overpower the man—straight off, without any fuss.
It had happened before, but that very fact would make the guard
contemptuous, more than ever convinced that the first time he hadn't really

been taken by surprise at all. His pride would make him want to believe
that. He was the kind of man who could rationalize a humiliating defeat and
blot it completely from his memory.
It not only worked, it worked better than he could have dared hope. When
he spoke a few words through the door, the guard became instantly curious.
He unlocked the cell and came in, his eyes narrowed in anger ... anger, but
not suspicion. His gun remained on his hip as he walked up to Corriston and
stood directly facing him, well within grappling range.
"Well, what do you want to talk to me about?" he demanded. "Better make
it brief. I'm not supposed to talk to you at all."
"I'm sorry to hear that," Corriston said. "You've got no idea how depressing
it is to be locked up in a narrow cell with absolutely no one to talk to."
"You don't like it, eh? Well, you brought it on yourself."
Corriston caught the man about the waist and brought his right fist down
three times on his curving back. Each blow was a powerful one, slanting
downward toward the kidney.
Then Corriston hit the guard directly in the small of the back, with an even
more punishing blow. The cumulative effect was instantaneous. The guard
collapsed and sank down like a suddenly deflated balloon, the breath
whistling from between his teeth.
Corriston watched him sink to the floor and straighten out. Forewarned as
he was, he was still appalled by the almost instant, shocking change in the
man's expression. For the second time the guard's features began to come
apart. The entire upper portion of his face seemed to sink inward and
broaden out, and the flowing began, the incredible refusal of his forehead
and nose to remain in close proximity to his mouth.
One eye closed completely; the other remained open in a wide and almost
pupilless stare. The chin receded and the lips became a puckered gray
orifice that looked like some monstrous fungus growth sprouting from the
middle of a gargoyle face. The individual features became paler and paler as
they spread, and suddenly there seemed to be no color left in the face at all.
It had turned completely waxen.
It was a horrifying thing to watch.

Corriston knelt, opened the man's shirt and stared intently at the exposed
throat, something he had not done the first time in the cafeteria. The first
time he had simply knelt and searched under the shirt with his hand for a
heartbeat which had surprised him by its steadiness. He was quite sure now
that the heart was beating firmly and steadily.
Even the peculiar appearance of the throat did not alarm him. But it most
certainly did interest him. Far down on the Security Guard's throat, just
above his breastbone, were a row of small hooks partly embedded in his
flesh. The hooks were very tiny indeed, and their brightness was obscured
by a thin film of sweat. Corriston removed the moisture with a quick flick
of his thumb and continued to stare, as if he could not quite believe his
eyes.
Finally he wedged his fingers under the base of the mask, and ripped it from
the guard's face.
Under the mask, the face had a perfectly natural look. The features were
relaxed and vacuous, but there was no flowing, no unnatural distortion at
all. And it was quite a different face—the face of a man who had worn a
disguise and was now so completely a stranger to Corriston that he might
just as well have been any one of the Station's thirty-seven Security Guards.
Corriston could see where the hook attachments had gone into the flesh in
at least thirty places on the man's face: on his brow, his cheekbones, on both
sides of his face clear down to the base of his neck. The tiny punctures
made by the hooks were faintly rimmed with blood, perhaps because
Corriston had torn the mask away too abruptly. Undoubtedly the skin had
been anaesthetized, the hooks inserted skillfully by someone familiar with
just what should be done to prevent scarring.
He hoped that the guard would not carry tiny scars on his face for the rest of
his natural life. He arose and examined the mask. He had a complete false
face.
The thing was ingenious beyond belief. It was no mere Halloween
assemblage of papier-maché flimflammery, but an elaborate and flexible
mask of very thin plastic, or possibly metal. A prosthetic mask—if one
could use that term in connection with a mask. It was certainly more

complex in structure than any prosthetic leg or arm he had ever seen on a
handicapped man, or would ever be likely to see.
He had a pretty good idea as to how it worked. A general idea. Apparently
when the hooks were attached to the muscular structure of the human face
underneath, every aspect of the wearer's face would be instantly controlled
and altered to conform to the configuration of the false face. In that sense
the mask could be said to actually mold itself to the wearer's face and
transform it into a completely new and different face.
And yet, in some subtle way, the emotions felt by the owner of the real face
would be conveyed to the mask, so that it would express with different
features very much the same kinds of emotion.
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 had berthed at the Station
the dangerous character of its cargo could not have escaped detection. We
have every reason to believe that it intended to berth at the Station. Its
signals to the Station, before some undeterminable shipboard accident sent
it out of control, confirm this. We must therefore assume complicity of a
double nature: by the freighter's commanding officer, Captain James
Summerfield, and by someone in a position of high command on the
Station."

After that, there was no silencing the slow, relentless events on Earth.
A week after the tragedy, a U. S. Marine corporal stationed at Port Forrestal,
Wisconsin, put through a late afternoon phono-view call to his wife. His
face on the screen was haggard with strain, and he seemed not to want to
meet his wife's gaze.
"We've been ordered out into space," he said.
"You mean they're sending you out to take over the Station?"
"They're sending out five thousand United States Marines," the corporal
said. "We all knew it was coming. We expected it when that Governmental
Investigating Committee was turned back."
"But it doesn't make sense. I can't understand it. Why should the
Commander of the Station refuse to permit a Governmental Investigating
Committee to land?"
"We don't know. He must have something to conceal, and you can be pretty
sure it's an ugly something. When that freighter disaster got into every daily
press conference of the high brass I knew this was coming. I felt it in my
bones."
"But what will happen if the Commander refuses to let even the Marines
land? What will happen then?"
"We may have to open fire on the Station," the corporal said. "If the Station
is in criminal hands we'll have no alternative."
"You talk as if you were in command."
"I guess every soldier talks like that when his life is in jeopardy. But I'm
glad I'm not a five-star general. If I had to make a decision like that—"

But it wasn't a general who made the crucial decision. It was Admiral John
Hayes, Commander of the Eighth Spatial Naval Division, acting on behalf
of fifty-seven nations.
He stood in the bridge room of a United States naval cruiser of massive
tonnage, staring out through a wide-view observation port at the Station's

glimmering immensity. The cruiser and the Station were moving at almost
the same speed, fifteen thousand miles an hour. But now the cruiser was
moving just a little faster than the Station, and Admiral Hayes was growing
impatient.
Maneuvering into an orbital position almost directly abreast of the Station
had been difficult. Commander Hayes' nerves were badly frayed; and he
was not a man who could endure too much frustration. He had signaled the
Station twice and received no reply. During that time, both the Station and
the Cruiser had completely encircled the Earth at an interval of just a little
under two hours.
He turned suddenly from the viewport, his lips set in tight lines. He stared
for an instant in silence at the young officer at his side, his mind groping for
an argument which would completely justify what he had already decided
he must do.
But Lieutenant Commander Kenneth Archer spoke first, saying quietly:
"You have no choice, sir."
Hayes' features relaxed a little. It was good to know that he had support
from a man whose judgment he respected. For an instant the awful
aloneness which went with supreme command weighed less heavily upon
him.
"It's absolute defiance, open rebellion," Hayes said. "I'm forced to assume
that the Station is in criminal hands. We'll never know, probably, just what
happened on board that freighter. But we do know that accidents occur. For
every thirty ships that berth securely, one meets with some kind of
navigational mishap. The damage isn't always irreparable. More often than
not, in fact, it's quite minor. Usually it means only a delay in berthing, a
navigational shift, a circling back for another try. But apparently that
freighter really had it. So it gave the show away. Commander Clement must
be in league, hand in glove, with whoever is interested in smuggling
unauthorized uranium shipments through to Earth for his own personal
profit. And to hasten his immediate profit that someone apparently found it
to his advantage to trigger a little of the shipment into highly fissionable
material on Mars."
"You know as well as I do who the someone is, sir," Archer said.

"I guess we both know. But right now my only concern is with the Station.
If they ignore my third order to stand by for boarding I'll have to open fire.
The Station's stolen property just as long as it remains in criminal hands.
You can't get a desperate criminal to surrender your property unless you
convince him his own life is in danger. I've got to try my best to convince
Commander Clement I mean business without destroying the Station."
"You'll damage it to some extent, sir. How bad do you think it will be?"
"I don't know. I don't intend to launch an atomic warhead. But I can't stop
short of that if he stays stubborn. I've no way of knowing what his breaking
point will be. But I do know that if he keeps control of the Station he'll be in
a position to wipe out New York or London."
"But you'll make your intentions unmistakably clear before you open fire,
sir?"
"Yes," Hayes said, wearily. "Yes ... of course I will."

11
Corriston took a deep breath and let it out slowly. So far luck had favored
him. Now he felt as though he were walking through a deadly jungle where
all the animals had suddenly turned friendly. The teeth they bared at him
were smiling. The grins were their masks. But the commander didn't
pretend at all ... whoever the commander really was!
And then that single question began to gnaw at Corriston like some rat
feeding on his flesh: Where was the real Clement now? Was he alive? Was
he accessible? Or was he dead?
Corriston's mental processes were now governed by the most evanescent of
impressions: the depth of the shadows on both sides of the corridor; his own
shadow lengthening before him; the drone of machinery deep within the
Station; the muffled beating of his own heart. Suddenly he was at the end of
the corridor and approaching the main control room, his face as grim as
death.
Violence he had determined upon, but it would be a very brief, a very
effective kind of violence. It takes only a second to rip a mask from a man's
face.
Something was happening just outside the main control room door. The
three executive officers guarding the door had moved eight or ten paces
down the corridor, and the door itself was standing ajar. The executive
officers had their backs turned to Corriston and were making no attempt to
conceal their agitation. They were very pale, at least, one of them was. Two
had their backs completely turned, but Corriston caught a brief glimpse of
the third man's profile, and it seemed completely drained of color, as if the
mask had stopped mirroring emotion artificially and had allowed the
wearer's actual pallor to seep through.
Corriston glided quickly to the door, passed through it and shut it very
quietly behind him.
The commander had his back turned too. He was standing before the
viewport, staring out into space.

But the commander did seem dazed, did seem stunned. Corriston could tell
by his posture, by the way he held his shoulders, by the utter rigidity of his
neck.
Then he saw it, the long cylindrical hull touched by a pale glimmer of
starlight, the circular, glowing ports, the massive, atomic-projectile
launching turrets at its base. He saw it through the viewport, saw it past the
commander's stiffening shoulders—an American war cruiser of formidable
tonnage and armed with sufficient fire power to shatter a small moon.
All right, let the Big Dark contain it for a moment, poised out there, ready
for any contingency. Right at the moment a scoundrel must be unmasked in
a very stark way. Whatever trouble he had brought upon himself, he must
be made to face it now without the mask.
Corriston unholstered his gun and walked toward the commander across the
deck. He came up behind him and thrust the gun into the small of his back.
"Turn around," he ordered. "Don't make any other move. Just turn slowly
and face me. I want to take a good look at your face."
If the commander was startled, he didn't show it. Perhaps the war cruiser
had dealt him such a crushing blow that he was no longer capable of
experiencing shock. Or his control may have been extraordinary. Corriston
had no way of knowing and it didn't concern him too much.
He was chiefly interested in the commander's eyes. He had never before
seen eyes quite so piercing in their stare or narrowed in quite such an ugly
way.
The commander spoke almost instantly and his voice had a steel-cold rasp.
"Well?" he said.
Just a few words—just the shortest possible question he could have asked.
Corriston said: "You're wearing a mask, aren't you, commander?"
The impostor's expression did not change, but his hand went instinctively to
his throat.
"Remove your tie and unbutton your collar," Corriston said.
The man made another quick gesture with his hand in the direction of his
throat. But it seemed involuntary, protective, for he did not touch his collar.

Corriston shifted his weapon a little, moving the barrel upward until it
pressed very firmly against the commander's breastbone. He reached out
and unbuttoned the commander's collar with his free hand, very quickly and
expertly.
He was staring at the tiny hooks at the base of the mask when something
happened which made him regret that he had not followed his original
intention of instantly ripping the mask from the man's face.
The door opened and the three executive officers came into the control
room. For an instant they seemed neither to see nor understand the
situation. They must have seen Corriston, but the fact that he was wearing a
guard's uniform may have given them the idea that he had every right to be
there. The gun was concealed from view and the commander was standing
very quietly by the viewport and quite obviously incapable of making any
move, simply because the slightest move would have endangered his life.
So the executive officers went right on talking for an instant, half to
themselves and half to the commander, just as if Corriston had not been
present at all.
"If that cruiser lands, Ramsey's goose is cooked and ours is too," a tall
officer said. "The instant that freighter crashed I knew they'd find out
quickly enough how the ships had been carrying smuggled uranium. I knew
that under pressure, half of our captains would talk ... and the crews, too.
All the government would have to do is check and they'd find out that we're
Ramsey's men, all of us. They might even now know about the masks."
"Why not about the masks?" another officer joined in. "Ramsey paid for the
research that went into them, didn't he? Big tycoon ... fingers in a dozen
pies. When the secret's out, and he puts them on the market, he'll make
important money out of it. But we'll be in prison with just our own faces
staring back at us from a steel wall."
"Don't worry about that. Ramsey won't profit from the manufacture of
masks. He won't even profit from the false uranium clearance we gave him.
If that cruiser is allowed to land he'll be in prison with us."
"Better think that over, Commander. You refused to let the Governmental
Investigating Committee land. If a single soldier sets foot on the Station
we're done for. It's not too late to do something about it. That cruiser can

only berth by overtaking us. If we change our orbit fast and start blasting at
them with our rear adjusting rockets they'll have to keep their distance?"
"Aren't you forgetting something? A single atomic warhead could blow the
Station apart."
"We've got to risk that. They'll think a long time before they'll go that far.
The Station's not expendible. If we change our orbit we can still make
contact with the Mars ship that's due to berth in an hour. We've got to get
back to Mars and whatever protection Ramsey can give us. We'll have his
daughter with us. He'll be so glad to see her he'll go out on a limb to protect
us."
"He'd go out on a limb anyway; He'd have to in order to save himself. But
sure, we'll take the girl. No harm in that. He knows she's here and will be
expecting her. He'll thank us for taking things so quickly in hand. If that
crazy lieutenant had made his story public that cruiser would have been out
there anyway—perhaps even sooner. They'd have wanted to know on Earth
why anyone would want to harm Ramsey's daughter, something we don't
know ourselves."
Corriston decided then that he'd kept silent long enough. He returned his
gun to its holster, and walked up to the three executive officers, completely
ignoring the commander.
He heard the commander threaten him in a low tone, heard him say words
which would have caused some men to pause in fear. But Corriston did not
turn.
There was stunned disbelief in the eyes of the three men facing him. He
spoke quickly, knowing that he had only a moment before the commander
would see that he was seized and restrained. He had to make sure that the
three would hear him out, that the commander would not be instantly
obeyed. Perhaps he couldn't make sure, but at least he could try.
"I'll make a bargain with you," he said. "I've done reckless things but I'm
not a complete fool. You're going to prevent that cruiser from berthing and I
won't be able to interfere. I'm just one man against several hundred. All
three of you are armed. If I started shooting I'd get perhaps two of you—no
more. Then you'd kill me. I haven't even the advantage of surprise. I gave
that up because I can't believe you're complete fools either.

"First, I want to see Helen Ramsey. I want you to let me talk to her. And
when the Mars' ship berths, I want to go to Mars with her. I've something to
offer in return."
One of the officers stared at him, tightened his lips and stared harder. "Good
God!" he muttered. "Good God! A bargain. You must be out of your mind.
What could you possibly offer? If you had a gun trained on us—"
"A witness in your defense," Corriston said. "A witness who will stand up in
court and swear that you did try to protect Helen Ramsey, that you saved
her from a very great danger. You may think that you do not need a witness
now, but before the year is out Ramsey will be on trial for his life. His
wealth won't save him. They know too much about him now. That freighter
explosion killed too many people. The public outcry will be too great.
"If you stay on Mars you'll be hunted down like wild animals. They'll get
you in the end and you know it. You'll be brought back to Earth; you'll stand
trial."
Corriston paused for the barest instant, knowing that the commander too
was listening, knowing from the absence of sound and movement behind
him that his words were being weighed. "I think you know that I would not
break my word. I'll stand up in court and defend you under oath. I'll be
speaking the simple truth. You did save Helen Ramsey from a very great
danger; you probably saved her life. That is sure to weigh in your favor
with any impartial judge and jury. You won't get the death penalty; I can
promise you that."
It was the commander who spoke first. He said, very quietly. "He's right, of
course. Completely right."
One of the officers nodded. "There's no reason why we shouldn't let him
talk to the girl. We can decide later whether we like his offer."
"We're going to like it," the commander said, coming around in front of
Corriston. "He has more sense than I would have given him credit for."
"So have you, commander," Corriston said, and meant it.
The commander's eyes were still hostile, unfriendly, but the cold rage had
gone out of them.

"All right," he said. "Let him see the girl now. Make sure a guard is
stationed at the door. Keeping that cruiser from berthing won't be easy.
They'll keep the Station under fire with small projectiles, even if they don't
attack us with atomic warheads. They'll risk some damage just to throw a
scare into us."
The officer next to Corriston nudged his arm. "All right," he said. "But
remember this when you talk to her. She doesn't know the truth about us.
She doesn't even know we're wearing masks. We'd like it better if you didn't
say anything about it."
"Whether she knows it or not isn't too important," Corriston said. "I suppose
you wouldn't care to tell me what you've done with Commander Clement
and the other officers."
"No, we wouldn't care to tell you. Anything more?"
"I guess not," Corriston said. "Take me to her."

12
He was staring at her across a shadowed room, with the pale glimmer of a
cabin viewport above her right shoulder, a very small port that looked like a
full moon glimmering high in the sky through a sea of mist.
Her face was very white and she was staring back at him as if he had come
suddenly out of nowhere.
She hesitated only an instant and then walked straight toward him, walked
right up to him and touched him gently on the face.
"I'm so glad," she said.
She drew back then and looked at him and smiled. "I was afraid you were in
trouble because of me," she said, "some terrible kind of trouble, and I
couldn't help you at all. I kept blaming myself for everything foolish that I
had ever done, going way back to the day when I broke my first doll,
deliberately and spitefully, because I was a very headstrong little girl."
"I'm afraid I've always been pretty headstrong myself," Corriston said. "But
being a boy, I naturally couldn't break dolls. I just wrecked the family's
peace of mind."
"We all go through life with a great deal of foolish luggage," she said. "And
sometimes you have an impulse to just drop everything—and run away."
"I can understand that," Corriston said. "But did you have to run away quite
so fast? It's hard to believe it was for anybody's good, including your own."
"It might have been," she said. "It might have been for my good and then
later, partly for your good. Please don't judge me too harshly before I've had
a chance to tell you exactly what happened."
He reached out for her and kissed her even as she came into his arms. He
had expected her to be angry, to withdraw, but instead she encircled his
strong back with a surprising fierceness. When he released her, her eyes
were shining.
"I'm glad you did that ... darling! Very glad. But we're still in trouble."

"I know that. But we're in love, too. And you just promised to tell me what
happened."
"Well, I guess I just ... just regressed."
"You what?"
"Regressed. You know, like when I was a headstrong little brat of a child.
We all do that at times. You'll have to admit there was some excuse for me.
You weren't born in a house with a hundred rooms, with servants always
coming and going, and outside gardens with big red and yellow flowers
where you couldn't even run and hide without being smothered, without
being searched for and brought screaming and kicking back inside.
"You don't know what it means to know you haven't a father, only a stern,
cold, black-coated man standing away off in the darkness somewhere and
watching people bow down before him.
"You don't know what it means to be told: 'You're Stephen Ramsey's
daughter. Behave. Behave. Behave!'"
"I scarcely ever saw my father. And when I did see him he was as cold as
one of the slabs in the big mausoleum he took so much pride in, the big
family mausoleum which only a Ramsey was permitted to visit. And yet I
think he loved me in his own cold way. I think he still does."
She fell silent for a moment and then an overpowering need to tell Corriston
more seemed to come upon her.
"I was never allowed to see young men, not even to go for a ride in the
park. Anyone of them might be a fortune seeker, because no young man,
even if he is madly in love with a girl, can quite shut his eyes to wealth as
one additional reason for loving her.
"So I never saw any young men. I wasn't permitted to even go to a dance, or
walk in the moonlight on a balcony. I wanted to go to dances, wanted at
least one young man to kiss me damned hard."
"Sure you did," Corriston said. "I understand."
"I'm going to stop right there, darling. I could tell you what it means to be
free to travel, anywhere, anywhere in the world and to see all of the white
and shining cities, and to be intoxicated by beauty, and to know at the same

time that you are not free, can never hope to be free as other people are
free."
"And that's why you ran away."
"Yes, darling, yes, and because that bodyguard was a complete fool. He was
just one of thirty bodyguards my father had hired to protect me, year after
year. But he was the biggest fool of all. He drank too much and he talked
too much. Finally I made up my mind that I would be better off if I went on
to Mars alone. My father had told me I could come, the trip had been
carefully planned down to the smallest detail. I was to travel incognito. I
was to keep to myself until I arrived at the Station and no one was supposed
to know I was even on the ship, not even the captain. I'm quite sure he
didn't know. I think the invitation to his cabin was a complete fabrication. In
fact, I'm sure it was. I think Clakey—his real name was Ewers—was just
drunk enough to make up a crazy story like that to get me away from you.
"But I didn't want to get away from you, darling. I wanted to get away from
him. I wanted to have a few days of complete freedom before I arrived on
Mars, and perhaps after that for a day in the colony before I joined my
father. I didn't care how angry he'd be when he saw me without a
bodyguard, alone, wonderfully, gloriously alone and free for the first time
in my life. I didn't want to be Helen Ramsey at all. I wanted to be somebody
else and be completely free.
"So I went into the ladies room, darling, and I put on the strangest kind of
mask."
"Yes," Corriston said. "I know."
"You know about the mask?"
"Please go on," Corriston said. "I'd rather you didn't ask me how I know
that your father can take pride in at least one constructive achievement. The
masks are extraordinary. I've seen one."
"But how? Where? I can't believe it. I—"
"Please," Corriston said. "It isn't too important. I made a necessary promise
that I wouldn't tell you, not immediately. I'm asking you to trust me and go
on."

"Well, I secured one of those very unusual masks. From the Gresham-
Ramsey Laboratories, before we left Earth. I could go there anytime I
wanted to. All of the research technicians there are quite old. One of them,
Thomas Webb, is really quite handsome. I might have fallen in love with
him if he had been forty years younger. He showed me just how to adjust
the mask. But when I went into the ladies' lounge I had more than just a
mask. I had a complete thin plastic change of clothing concealed under my
dress. I didn't remove my dress, only reversed my clothing so that the
plastic dress covered the one I'd been wearing."
Corriston said, "It was a very courageous thing for you to do."
"I'm glad you think so, darling. Because when I came out of the lounge and
saw Ewers killed, I wasn't courageous at all. I became panic-stricken,
terrified, beside myself with fear. I knew that my father had many
dangerous enemies. I knew that I was in immediate, deadly danger. I had to
go on with the disguise then. I had to go 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 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
officers? How many, beside the commander?"
"Eight, including the commander. His real name was Henry Hervet. Five
were executive officers, two were security guards. They're all dead now."
Corriston's mouth went dry. "Including the one who sold out and helped
you?"
"Yes, Stockton was the first to die. He was dead before the others tried to
board this ship. I made sure of that. He was too greedy for his own good."
"You got back the money you gave him, I suppose."
"Naturally. Money is of very little value to a dead man."
Corriston had gone very pale. There was dread in his eyes when he asked:
"And the real Commander Clement? What happened to him? Where is he
now?"

"Stockton told me that after a mask was made of his face he was imprisoned
somewhere on the Station," Henley said. "Clement and seven others.
Ramsey gave Hervet strict orders not to kill them. I don't know where
Clement is now, but I can make a pretty good guess. He has probably been
released and is in full command of the Station again."
Henley stood very still for a moment, very straight and still, and Corriston
could feel the gun nudging the small of his back again.
"I may as well tell you now that I'm going to have to lock you in,
Corriston," Henley said. "When I turn the key on this room your sole
responsibility will be right here with the controls. You'll have to sleep and
eat here, and I don't intend to bring you any fancy meals. You'll hear a
knock on the door three times a day. You'll get a tray with some food on it.
"You'll have to decide for yourself how much sleep you can afford to take.
And remember this: I'll be keeping a careful check on every navigational
move you make. Not a too accurate check, perhaps, but I'll know enough. If
you throw the ship off course I'll find out about it, and I'll want to know
why. Be ready with your answers and make sure they carry weight. Any
more questions, Corriston?"
Corriston shook his head. "No. The quicker you get out of here the better I'll
feel."
"All right, I'll leave you now. It's naturally to my benefit to try to see things
from your point of view. And just in case you're worrying about Helen
Ramsey—don't. Nothing is going to happen to her, provided you stay in
line. If you want me don't hesitate to buzz. That's what the intercom is for."
Corriston looked around once when Henley was on his way to the door. The
man hadn't turned away from him. He was backing toward the door, his lips
tight, his eyes mocking, coldly derisive.
"Did you think I'd give you a chance to catch me with my guard down,
Corriston? If you did, you're a bigger fool than I thought you. This gun
stays with me, and it's going to be centered on you every time I open this
door. Remember that, Lieutenant."
The journey to Mars was a long wait. It was a standing and a waiting, with
a hundred corrective power maneuvers to be checked at every hour of the
day and night. It was sleep without rest and rest without sleep, and it was a

battle against dizziness and the despair which can come to a pilot when a
panel starts flickering a red danger signal in the utter loneliness of
interplanetary space.
The ship was never too hot, never too cold, for the temperature was kept
stable by thermostat-controlled radiation shutters and the air was kept pure
with the aid of carbon filters. But to Corriston the air conditioning system
with all of its elaborate controls seemed only to point up and emphasize the
lack of stability elsewhere, both inside and outside the ship.
There were so many things that could go wrong—tragically, dangerously,
fatally wrong. For no reason at all, for instance, a recently inspected filter or
gasket could go completely bad, and a "no juice" blow up threaten. Or a
magnetic guidance tape could jam and stop recording, and the ship could
deviate a hair's breadth from its prescribed path and forget to swing
completely back again.
Eventually a correction might be made, but if you failed to correct it in
time, that one tiny deviation could spell disaster. With every day out there
were more details to check, while obstacles mounted and it was impossible
ever to quite catch up with what you had to do, and go on with complete
confidence to the next task.
Worst of all, Corriston was denied all opportunity to see or speak to the
woman he loved.

The trip to Mars took fourteen days. And in all that time Corriston did not
once see Helen Ramsey. He saw only Henley, heard only the deep drone of
the engines, and at times, when he was close to despair, the dull, steady
beating of his own heart.
The door to his prison would open and a tray of food would be pushed
forward into the compartment. Then the door would close quietly again, and
he would be alone.
In some respects he was imprisoned in a way that was almost too
unbelievable for the human mind to grasp. The walls of his cell were the
constellations, the barriers to his freedom space itself.

The chartroom was a cell too, but it had no real confining power over him.
He could walk out of the chart room simply by unlocking the viewport and
swinging it wide open. He could walk out into the larger prison of space—
and die in five seconds with his lungs on fire.
On the thirteenth day Mars loomed out of the inscrutable darkness ahead
like some great accusing eye that had fastened itself on the ship with a
malignance all its own. It filled one-fifth of the viewport, rust-red over most
of its surface, but also pale blue in patches, a blue which shaded off into a
kaleidoscope of colors that seemed to hover chiefly like the shifting, almost
hueless cloudiness of a hot summer haze.
On the morning of the fifteenth day, the ship, decelerating under sidethrusts
from its powerful retardation rockets, cut off its engines and, free-coasting
through a landing ellipse of seventy degrees, landed safely on Mars.
It landed in the open desert, twenty miles from Ramsey's citadel, and
eighty-seven miles from the first Martian colony. But Corriston received no
praise at all for his navigational skill.
Five minutes after the engines ceased to throb a blow on the head felled
him, a brutal blow from behind.
"Tie him up," Henley said. "We're not killing him, not just yet."
"But I don't see why—" a cold voice started to protest.
"Damn you, Stone, I know what I'm doing. Keep your thoughts to
yourself."

15
Corriston sat very straight and still in the darkness, his back against cold
metal, his eyes on the distant glow of the heating lamp. He could see the
lamp through a wide panel opening in the bulkhead directly opposite him.
Wherever his eyes fell there was the glimmer of light on metal. But the
warmth of the lamp would have left him close to freezing had it not been
supplemented by the heating units inside his heavy clothing.
He didn't know how he was going to free himself. His hands were securely
handcuffed and the sharp metal was biting into his flesh. Turning and
twisting about did him no good at all.
He didn't know how he was going to free himself, but he refused to give up
hope. There had to be a way.
You could begin on one of your captors, on a human being with a great deal
to lose or gain. You could try to penetrate his armor, sound out his human
weaknesses. Or you could set to work on the handcuffs at your wrists,
struggling in an almost hopeless attempt to draw your hands through them
in some way or get them unlocked without a key.
He decided to try the first way. He raised his voice. "Stone?" he called out.
"Can you hear me?"
There ensued a silence. Then Stone's voice came back loud and clear. "Sure,
I can hear you. What do you want?"
"I'd like to talk to you," Corriston said.
"About what?"
"About you. What are you getting out of this? You've nothing to lose by
being frank with me. Henley would never believe anything I might say."
"You're right about that," Stone said. "But why should I talk to you? I'll tell
you something that may surprise you. Keeping you alive was Henley's idea.
He figured we might need you. He figured that if Ramsey wouldn't listen to
us he might listen to you—a Space Station officer. He figured we might

need you to convince Ramsey we're not bluffing. Someone who knows
we're not bluffing. Someone who knows we'd kill his daughter before we
gave him a third chance to make up his mind and hand over the dough."
"A third chance? I thought—"
"You think too much, Corriston. I'll spell it out for you. Henley is on his
way now to give Ramsey his first chance. He may succeed or he may not. If
he doesn't succeed he'll come back and take you to the fortress with him.
That will be Ramsey's second chance. He won't get a third."
"I see," Corriston said. "But I asked you a question you didn't answer. How
much do you stand to get out of this? What is your split, your percentage?
Don't tell me; I'll guess. Henley is promising you fifteen or twenty thousand
dollars. But how much ransom do you think he'll get from Ramsey? Two
million, at least. Possibly twenty million. Does that kind of split satisfy you,
Stone? Remember, when that ransom is paid, every law enforcement
agency on Earth goes into operation. It starts off in a quiet suite of offices,
with just one owl-faced little guy shuffling some papers.
"It starts off that way, but in the space of one hour you're a man marked for
destruction. The military goes into action. From Earth to Mars your
photograph is televised. Ten thousand trained experts are thrown into the
operation. You've suddenly become important, an accessory to the
kidnapping of the wealthiest girl on Earth.
"How does that set with you, Stone? They'll get you in the end. No, I'll
qualify that. They'll get you unless Ramsey gives you a split of at least a
million dollars. With a million dollars you'd have a one in five chance of
covering your tracks, of hiding out indefinitely. But Ramsey won't give you
anything like that kind of a split. You know that as well as I do. He'll have
to cover his own tracks and he'll need all of the two million—or twenty
million—for himself. Or most of it.
"I'm not telling you anything you don't know. Your real interest lies in
preventing that kidnapping before it's too late. He's getting ready to double-
cross you, Stone. It was in the back of his mind all the time. He's looking
out only for himself."
"I don't think so," Stone said. "My split, since you brought the matter up, is
half a million. He's demanding six million in ransom. That's twelve times

what I'm getting and what Jim Saddler is getting. But I've no complaints.
He organized and planned everything.
"I'll be honest with you. That doesn't mean a damn thing to me. I'm no good
when it comes to taking a risk like that, but does that mean he's better than I
am? Do you think I'd string along with him if I believed that for a moment?
"Hell, no. I'm using him, don't you see? I'm letting him take the big gamble,
and I stay in the background ... doing practically nothing. So if I clear a half
million, what have I to complain about?"
"Nothing, I suppose," Corriston said.
"You're damned right. But I don't think I like the way you said that. There's
something in your voice that I don't like."
"That's too bad," Corriston said.
"Maybe you think I don't mean what I said. Is that it?"
Corriston tightened his lips. He could hear Stone's footsteps coming toward
him through the darkness. They were heavy steps, advancing slowly, with a
slight shuffling sound. They paused twice and then came on again, and the
silence between pauses seemed almost crushingly thick.
Corriston suddenly realized that he knew almost nothing about Stone. He
had taken the man pretty much for granted, a killer's accomplice 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 blue-green
declivities in the terrain which looked from the air like an actual waterway,
and had deceived—or bewildered—three generations of men.
Despite the increasing cold, Corriston did not moderate his stride. He let his
thoughts dwell on the most imaginative of the canal speculations. It had
been proven completely false, but its originality fascinated him. Long ago,
the theory held, there had been volcanic activity on Mars. Great faults or
fissures had opened up in the planet's crust, and when the coming of spring
thawed the polar ice caps, curtains of fog swirled equatorward, filling those
natural crevices with swirling rivers of mist.
Corriston stopped walking for a moment, shifting the weight of his
equipment slightly, easing a too heavy drag on his right shoulder. He made
sure that the thin flexible tube which connected his oxygen mask with the
small tank on his back was securely clipped into place at both ends, tested
the harness buckle which supported supplies which were as necessary to
him as breathing, and took a turn up and down the sand, stamping, shaking
himself, to make absolutely certain that nothing vital had been jarred loose.
Then he was under way again, moving along at a steady pace over the rust-
red desert, the ship now lost to view far behind him, his mind leaping ahead
to the very great dangers which he was determined to face and overcome so
long as one slender thread of hope remained.

16
It might have been almost any sleepy little town on Earth, picked at random
from a train window—a dust bowl town with a prairie name: Hawk's Valley,
Buzzard's Gulch, and the like. It might have been, but it wasn't.
The buildings were thinner, of more precarious construction, and each had
been built to house three or more families. They were at unusual angles on
sloping ledges where the soil was firm enough to resist overnight erosion
from winds of hurricane force, and in many places their prefabricated metal
foundations were pierced and supported by shafts of solid rock.
Without modern technology at its most advanced, the town could never
have been built. Yet in the streets of the town there was a village rudeness
of construction which no pioneering effort could quite efface: a wide main
street that gleamed red in the sunlight on which three caterpillar tractors
stood stalled, their guard rails caked with yellow mud; a pool of stagnant
black water with a wooden plank thrown haphazardly across it; a discarded
fuel container upended against a half-rusted away metal cable, and the
remnants of an hydraulic actuator overgrown with hardy lichens that had
colored it yellow and ash gray. And here and there, projecting from the
tumbled sand, were spiny cactus-like growths.
Yet it was not too small a town. Its inhabitants numbered eight thousand,
two-thirds of them men. There were ninety-seven children. It was not too
small a town, and now, in each of the houses, a new day was beginning.
At least thirty men and a few women had collected about the haggard-eyed
desert straggler. Every one of them hung on his words. Every one of these
people had been ruined by Ramsey's rapacious greed. Their past
accomplishments were destroyed; their futures were non-existent. They
lived in a terrorized state, from hand-to-mouth, indifferent now to any more
wrongdoing that could be visited upon them. The fires of their hatred for
Ramsey gave them the basic energy to go on existing.
Out of grinding desperation they had turned to Henley, had given him a free
hand, even when most, in their heart-of-hearts, knew he was a scoundrel.

The fact was that he was the only man among them not so cowed as to be
actively enraged against Ramsey. He promised that the mines would be
given back to the people. And, having nothing, they believed everything.
They came from everywhere in the colony, and from every trade and
profession. Who was this man? And was he friend or foe?
The crowd grew slowly. Despite the shouts and the sudden stir of
excitement which had greeted the speaker on his arrival, there was no
headlong rush to surround him. The colonists emerged from their lodgings
and converged calmly upon the square, some having the look of tradesfolk
concerned with a possible interruption of business, and others seemingly
intent only on what the stranger might have to say.
It was unusually warm for so early an hour, the temperature well up in the
mid-forties, and there was no need for the heat-generating inner garments,
only for oxygen masks and heavy outdoor clothing and the careful
avoidance of too much muscular exertion in the absence of weighted shoes.
This is madness, Corriston told himself. I am in no condition to convince
these people, to make them understand. I should have rested first. Three
hours' sleep would have helped. I should have asked for food.
Corriston felt suddenly tongue-tied. Words were failing him when he
needed them most. His speech became halting and confused. He had been
talking for twenty minutes—twenty minutes at least—but suddenly he was
quite sure that he hadn't succeeded in convincing anyone that he was
speaking only the simple truth.
He looked at the faces before him a little more intently and saw what he had
not noticed before: everyone was waiting for him to go on; everyone
seemed to be hanging on his words.
Had he misjudged them after all? Or had he misjudged his own capacity to
be persuasive, to talk with conviction when his very life hung in the
balance?
There could be no doubt on that score. His life did hang in the balance.
They'd make short shift of him if they thought he was on Ramsey's side.
"It isn't Ramsey I'm concerned about," he heard himself saying. "I'm
pleading with you to face up to the truth about yourselves. You trusted

Henley because you were desperate. You couldn't put your trust in a weak
or indecisive man. You needed a tool with a cutting edge. That I can
understand. But you picked the wrong man. Henley doesn't want to see
justice done. He doesn't want to help you at all. He wants to help himself at
your expense, to help himself in a vicious, brutal way."
"That's a lie," someone in the crowd said. "Henley's a good man."
Corriston freed himself from his dust-caked coat. He shrugged it off and let
it drop to the sand. Then he straightened his oxygen mask and went on: "It's
not a lie. It's the simple truth."
He wondered why he had shrugged off his warmest garment. It was cold, he
was shivering, and it had been a ridiculous thing to do. Had he intended it
as a challenge? In a crazy, confused, subconscious way, was he offering to
fight anyone who disagreed with him.
He suddenly realized that he was a little drunk. Not on alcohol, but on a
slight excess of oxygen. He fingered the gauge on his mask, cutting down
the tank inflow, cursing himself for his delay in doing so.
Had he convinced anyone? He looked at the faces about him and was
astonished by their impassivity. Few of the men or women before him
seemed either angry or disturbed. They just seemed to be quietly listening.
Suddenly he realized that he was completely in error. They were convinced,
persuaded, almost completely on his side. Their silence was in itself
revealing, just as the hush which precedes an avalanche can be convincing,
or the stillness which precedes a storm at sea.
They were waiting for him to go on.
He talked for thirty more minutes and then there was a long silence,
punctuated only by the harsh breathing of a few men who seemed to
disagree.

17
Corriston knew that the few who disagreed were prepared to make trouble,
but he was not prepared for the violence which ensued.
Fights broke out in the crowd, singly and in groups. The colonists with
strong convictions took issue with the few who disagreed. And the few who
disagreed had strong convictions, too.
Two men about the same in height were suddenly down on the ground
raining fisticuffs at each other.
"Damn you, Reeves, I'll break your jaw. From the first minute I saw Henley
I knew he was a scoundrel."
"Yeah, and who else but a scoundrel could hold his own with a rat like
Ramsey. We can call the turn on him if he goes too far."
There was an explosion of cursing and Corriston could see five more men
fighting, moving backwards as they exchanged blows toward the periphery
of the crowd.
There was nothing he could do to stop the fighting. He was close to
exhaustion, hardly able to stand. He desperately needed food and rest—a
long rest flat on his back.
Suddenly he realized that he had victory within his grasp. Most things
worthwhile in life called for a decisive effort of will. He decided suddenly
that he couldn't just let the fighting go on. He had to take a firm stand
himself, had to convince everyone that he was prepared to fight for his
convictions.
He moved forward into the crowd. He grabbed one doubter by the shoulder,
held fast to him for an instant, and then sent his fist crashing into the
astonished man's jaw.
The doubter folded in complete silence. Corriston stepped back from him
and said in a voice loud enough to carry to the rim of the crowd: "I don't

care how many of you I have to take on. Every word I've said is the truth. If
you can only settle it by killing me, you may as well start trying."
There was a silence then. Even the sound of the breeze rustling the
garments of the colonists, stirring little flurries of sand along the main
street, seemed to become muted. Far off between the houses a clock struck
the time. It seemed very loud in the stillness.
It amazed Corriston a little, even in his exhausted state, how determinedly a
challenge like that could be accepted at face value. He was quite sure that
he had won a victory; that nine-tenths of the colonists were on his side. But
everyone remained silent, everyone drew back in tight-lipped silence while
the issue was put to the test.
A tall man with a lean, lantern-jawed face approached Corriston and said:
"I'm going to tell you exactly what I think. Henley isn't an easy man to
understand. He keeps his thoughts to himself and he may have had his own
special reasons for pulling the wool over your eyes. He's looking out for our
best interests; I'm sure of that. But what good would it do me to knock you
down to prove it?"
"No good at all," Corriston said. "But try knocking me down if you want
to."
"I'm not going to try," the lantern-jawed man said. "I think you're lying.
That's all I have to say."
Corriston watched him disappear in the crowd and shook his head. He felt
like a man with a fly swatter in his hand. He had won a victory and yet if he
failed to swat a few flies no one would believe that he was telling the truth.
Finally he got his chance. A thickset, dark-browed man with a trouble-
seeking aspect came up and hurled insults at him in a markedly offensive
way.
Corriston hit him three times. The first blow doubled him up, the second
dropped him to his knees; the third flattened him out on the sand.
Corriston stepped back and surveyed the crowd. Their response now was
overwhelmingly favorable.
It wasn't a complete victory. There were still doubters, still arguments going
on, still a hatred for Ramsey that overflowed and made a mockery of the

few voices raised in his defense.
And Corriston was glad that not too many voices were raised in Ramsey's
defense. He had not come to plead Ramsey's cause, and he wanted all of the
colonists to know that. He only asked that a truce be declared, an end to the
fierce, immediate hatreds, while a scoundrel was attacked by men who had
been lied to, cheated and betrayed. He moved still further forward into the
crowd, prepared to fight again if he had to, prepared to back up his
arguments with the simple, primitive and direct use of his fists.
He swayed suddenly and realized that he was at the end of his endurance,
and now would in all probability make a complete fool of himself. He
would commit the unforgivable folly of issuing a challenge that he couldn't
back up.
He shook his head violently, trying to clear it, but his dizziness increased.
The landscape about him began to pinwheel and he saw the streets of the
colony through a wavering yellow mist. The store fronts danced, the rusting
and discarded machinery on a side street began to move and come to life, to
clatter and waltz about.
A woman moving toward him seemed to grow in height, her oxygen mask
widening out, overspreading her face. For a moment she seemed like an
impossible ballet figure in a danse macabre, pivoting about on her toes as a
caterpillar tractor came rushing toward her through the thin air of Mars.
Then two colonists were supporting him, holding him tightly by the elbows,
refusing to let him collapse. It was outrageous, because he wanted to
collapse. He wanted to sink down, to let sleep wash over him, to forget all
of his troubles in merciful oblivion.
But the two colonists were very stubborn. They refused to let him collapse.
He only wanted to go to sleep, to forget all of his troubles, but the two
colonists were like doctors in a hospital, very stern, very patient, and
seemingly determined to keep him on his feet.
Somehow they must have failed. They must have failed because when he
became fully conscious again he was lying between cool white sheets, and a
woman in a white nurse's uniform was bending over him. By straining his
eyes he could see two men who looked like doctors standing just beyond
her.

The two men appeared to be discussing him, but when he struggled to a
sitting position and stared hard at them they came toward him with
reassuring smiles, and one of them said: "Take it easy, now. You're going to
be all right."
"I ... I must have passed out," he stammered. "I was ready to pass out before
I started talking. Is this a hospital? I guess it is. I should have come here
immediately. Forty hours in the desert and I arrive half-delirious and make a
fool of myself."
"Take it easy," one of the doctors said. "You didn't make a fool of yourself.
Quite the contrary."
Oh, brother, he thought. They're lying to me to spare me, or something. "I
have a vague recollection of not being able to stand, of talking my head off
and then collapsing and making a complete fool of myself, of
accomplishing nothing at all. I swung hard at two or three people. I knocked
one man down, flat on his back. But that was a crazy thing to do. It's no
way to win the confidence or respect of anyone."
"Look," one of the doctors said, taking firm hold of his shoulder and
shaking him gently. "Don't go reproaching yourself. You've got nine-tenths
of the colony behind you."
"You mean—"
"Sure, you convinced almost everyone. And that was a miracle in itself,
considering how close to collapse you were. You were running a high fever.
You were dehydrated. Your skin was as dry as a parched lichen. Yet you
stood there and convinced them. That's the gospel truth."
"They've chosen you as their leader," the second doctor said. "They're going
after Henley before it's too late. They feel exactly as you do about Ramsey's
daughter. Not about Ramsey perhaps—but about the kidnapping of a
helpless girl. None of them have any liking for Henley now."

18
Corriston walked out into the central square and stood there. For a moment
no one said a word. One of the doctors was there with him. He'd had a
sandwich and coffee before leaving the hospital and his nerves felt steady
and his voice was pitched low.
"I don't know a single one of these men, Dr. Tomlinson," he said. "I spent a
week in the colony four years ago, but I just don't see anyone I recognize.
I'm afraid you'll have to introduce me around."
It took a full hour to really get acquainted, to plan what had to be done, to
check over the tractors, the ammunition supplies, the equipment of each and
every man.
They had to cross eighty-seven miles of desert to a heavily guarded cave
and then move on perhaps to Ramsey's fortress. They had to be prepared for
any eventuality.
The morale was good. Corriston could sense the grim determination in
every man, the faith in their mission, the anger. It cheered him.
He walked around between the tractors, listening to stray bits of talk,
getting better acquainted with everyone as the minutes sped by.
He took out his watch and looked at it and decided that time was running
short.
Give each and every man twenty minutes, he thought. Then we get rolling.
Thirty caterpillar tractors and two hundred and ten men. And in the ship are
two men holed up—possibly three now—with all the portable fighting
equipment of a two thousand ton spaceship at their disposal. And if Henley
has returned—
Suddenly Corriston found himself sweating in the silence, despite the cold,
despite the hoar frost that was beginning to collect on the rim of his oxygen
mask. There was a split second of shouting from one of the tractors and
then it started up, with a coughing and spitting that drowned out the human
voices.

All along the wide, rust-red street other tractors came to life. In the thin air
of Mars, in the pale sky, a single blue cloud hung suspended.
It was wispy thin, incredibly thin, a hollow mockery of a cloud. But the
scene below would have been less remarkable had the sky remained
cloudless, for then Mars would have seemed completely unlike Earth and
the human drama less compelling.
There was something tremendous in the forward march of the tractors, in
the clatter and the rising dust, the shouts of the men at the controls and the
women who ran swift-footed along the sand to urge them to greater
fortitude. The women knew that endurance would be needed, for twenty-
first century weapons of warfare could destroy a hundred tractors and
spatter the desert with blood before retaliation could become complete and
justice be fully satisfied.
So the women did not weep or lament. They ran parallel with the tractors,
urging their men onward, stifling their own inner fears in the greatness of
the moment.
Corriston waited for the last tractor to come abreast of him before he leapt
aboard it. There was the smell of acrid grease in the air, a smell of burning.
The mechanical parts set up a dull rumbling, and as Corriston swung
himself aboard, a voice said: "I'm Stanley Gregor. If I had any sense I
wouldn't take part in this. I came to Mars with the second expedition. I'm
sixty-two years old but somehow today I feel young. There's no longer any
doubt in my mind that Henley is a scoundrel. Why we trusted him I don't
know. I'm here to do my part in rectifying an error."
"Sure," Corriston said, settling down at the side of a big, awkward-looking
man with red hair. "Sure, I understand. Take it easy. We're all in this
together."
"We've got eighty-seven miles of desert to cross. It's going to be tough.
Have you seen the fortress Ramsey built to protect himself?"
"No," Corriston said.
"There are twenty-five square miles of fortified defenses—photoelectric eye
installations. They spot you when you're a half-mile away. Try to storm
those installations even with a dozen armed tractors, and you'll be
pulverized into dust. Try to storm them on foot with the most formidable of

energy weapons, and you'll be electrocuted. You'll hang suspended on
barbed wire. Think that over, Lieutenant."
"I've thought it over," Corriston said. "We won't have to storm the fortress
unless they've taken Ramsey's daughter there, or if Ramsey himself is in
danger. And if he is in danger, he'll welcome our help. We're going to the
ship first and there are only two men on the ship."
"But they've got plenty of ammunition, haven't they? They've got the ship's
military installations. Anyway you slice it, it's a dangerous gamble."
"I never thought it was anything else," Corriston said.

19
Corriston woke up to the hum of human voices, the soft whisper of the
wind, the gentle stirring of sand. He awoke to coldness and brightness, to
sunlight that dazzled him with its brightness.
Corriston remembered then. Not everything at once, but just the first thing.
There were no guideposts. That was always the first thing to remember
when you woke up from a brief, twenty-minute sleep on Mars.
In islands scoured by trade winds and bright with blown sea spray a man
does not talk of traveling east or west, and even familiar streets are no
longer given names or marked by intersections. A man talks instead of
walking into the wind, of setting his course by the north star, of moving
straight into the teeth of the gale or huddling for shelter beneath a high
chalk cliff where all directions converge in a hollow drumming that has
neither beginning nor end. It was that way on Mars. It would always be that
way, it could never change.
Just lie very still and listen, listen to the voices of men who are risking their
lives to help you. Listen and be grateful; listen and be proud.
All at once Corriston realized that an amazing discussion was going on.
They were discussing an eleven-year-old boy who had done an absolutely
crazy thing. He had followed his father into the desert by concealing
himself in one of the tractors, behind a liquid-fuel cylinder, and was now a
member of the 210 man rescue team.
"Mars is no place for a kid. Dr. Drever ought to be ashamed of himself. If a
man has children—well, Mars is simply no place for children."
"That's right. A boy of eleven needs companions his own age to help him
over the growingpain hurdles. He needs a backyard to play in. When I was a
kid I had a bike of my own, a bull terrier pup, a collection of butterflies, a
stamp collection and a simply amazing talent for roughing up my clothes.
"Mars is the worst of all possible worlds for a kid like Freddy. We're buoyed
up by the bigness and the newness and the strangeness of everything. The

mile-high granite cliffs don't really belong to a planet smaller than Earth.
But they're here and we accept them. We pit our technical brilliance—or
lack of it—against the rugged grandeur of the mountains and the plains and
we can take even the sandstorms in our stride. But to bring a kid here—"
"Drever is a widower. He quite naturally didn't want to put his son in an
orphanage. Besides, there are thirteen other young kids in the Colony."
"That doesn't excuse it. There are plenty of childless single men."
"How many of them could step into Drever's shoes and grow to his stature
as the first really great medical specialist on Mars? You're forgetting the hell
he had to go through just to pass the preliminary screening. It's rugged for a
man of his attainments. They not only insist that he be good; they want him
to be the best."
"That's true enough, I suppose. And now that he's here he probably couldn't
be replaced. Experience of a very special sort does things for a man. And to
a man, if you like."
"I'm simply stressing that Mars is simply not a place for a kid of Freddy's
age. When he goes roaming he gets his lungs choked with dust. He couldn't
ride a bike on Mars—if he had a bike. Worst of all, he has no kids of his
own age to play with. And now he comes on a trip like this. Does he hope to
rescue the Ramsey girl all by himself?"
Corriston got up then. The three men who had been discussing Dr. Drever's
son stood by the smoldering embers of a burnt out campfire. They were
kindly looking men but a certain narrow-mindedness was stamped on the
faces of at least two of them.
Corriston shrugged off his weariness and walked up to them. "Nonsense!"
he said.
A startled look came into the eyes of the oldest, a grizzled scarecrow of a
man whose beard descended almost to his waist. He was a Martian
geologist, and a good one.
"Eh, Lieutenant. I was just going to ask you. Shouldn't we get started?"
"We should and we will," Corriston said. "But a good many men collapsed
from the cold this morning. If we don't arrive at that ship in force, we may
live to regret it. Where's Freddy? Have you seen him?"

The grizzled man raised his arm and pointed: "Over there," he said. "His
coming along was just about the craziest thing I ever heard of."
Corriston walked across the churned up sand to where Freddy sat perched
like a disconsolate gnome on a metal-rimmed food container shaped like an
old-fashioned water barrel.
Dr. Drever's son was almost twelve, but he was small for his age and
Corriston had seen boys of nine who were much huskier looking.
Corriston had no way of knowing that on Earth, shoulder to shoulder with
other schoolboys, Freddy had never thought of himself as particularly
small. It was only on Mars, all alone with his father and other grownups,
that he had felt even smaller than he actually was. He had felt like a dwarf
child.
"Why did you do it, Freddy?" Corriston asked. "Your father is very upset
and worried."
Freddy looked up quickly and just as quickly lowered his eyes again.
"I had to come," he said. "I had to."
"But why?"
"I don't know."
"I see."
Corriston stared at him for a long moment in silence. Then he said: "I think
perhaps I understand, Freddy. Just suppose we say you succumbed to an
impulse to roam. The exploring urge can be overwhelming in a boy of your
age. It usually is. If you were on Earth right now you'd be dreaming about
exploring the headwaters of the Amazon. You'd be dreaming about birds
with bright, tropical plumage and butterflies as big as dinner plates."
Freddy looked up again, not quite so quickly this time. There was wonder
and admiration in his stare. "How did you know?" he gasped.
"I guess I was pretty much like you, Freddy—once," Corriston said.
"Gee, thanks," Freddy said.
"Thanks for what?"

"Thanks for understanding me, Lieutenant Corriston."
Corriston walked out between the tractors and raised his voice so that
everyone within earshot could hear him.
"We're starting again in ten minutes," he said. "Better have another cup of
coffee all around."

20
The sand had been blowing for forty minutes. It was a flying avalanche, a
flailing mace. Even inside the tractors it set up an almost intolerable roaring
in the eardrums, and when it struck the wind-guards head on the battered
vehicles shook. For five or six seconds they would rumble on and then
come to a jolting halt. Often they would start up again almost immediately
but equally often they would remain stalled for several minutes, and at
times there were more stalled tractors than moving ones across the entire
line of advance.
The pelting never ceased, never let up even for a moment. Minute after
minute the sand came sweeping down in red fury, tons upon tons of it, in
great circular waves from high overhead and in jet velocity flurries close to
the ground. In that assault of billions upon billions of spinning particles the
brightly colored lichens which covered the Martian plains were uprooted,
lifted high in the air, and carried for dozens of miles, flying carpets so small
they scarcely could have supported the tiniest of elves.
For three hours the sandstorm continued to rage in fury, and then, abruptly,
the wind died down, the last flurry subsided, and the colonists got under
way again. And just for a change a few of them descended from the tractors
and advanced on foot, keeping a little ahead of the swaying vehicles.
Dr. Drever, a tall, stooped man with graying temples but surprisingly
youthful eyes accelerated his stride a little and fell in with the scarecrow
geologist who was walking at Corriston's side.
"We can't be far from the ship now," he said. "I wish there was some way I
could send Freddy back. If I thought you could spare a tractor and one man
to accompany him...."
"Freddy will be all right," Corriston said. "You don't know what it means to
a kid like Freddy to ride through a sandstorm in the company of grownups.
He had to prove something to himself, and I think he's done it."
The stillness was almost unnatural now, and Corriston could see that most
of the men were becoming uneasy about it. The desert seemed too bright

and far too quiet. It was one of those mysterious, brooding silences that are
a menace to start with. You think of unsuspected pitfalls, hidden traps.
Imagination leaps ahead of reality and leaves an insidious kind of
demoralization in its wake.
"I'm not surprised that all the animal life on Mars went underground," the
scarecrow geologist said, and it seemed a strange thing for him to have
mentioned at that moment, when the stillness was so absolute and the
thoughts of everyone should have been on the ship, which had to be very
near now.
"Yes, and what a vicious, horrible kind of animal life it is," Drever said, as
if he too welcomed the opportunity to talk irrelevantly, perhaps to relieve
his inner tension.
"They're a very primitive form of life, really," the geologist said. "They look
like large gray snakes, but they're actually more like worms. Worms with
sucker disks instead of mouths. When once they've' attached themselves it's
almost impossible to dislodge them. You've seen marine worms on Earth
often enough, I'm sure. They come in all shapes, sizes and colors, but there
are one or two species that look quite a bit like lamprenes in miniature.
Lamprenes are usually about three feet in length. But some of the very old
ones grow to eight feet or longer. Their natural prey is a small running
lizard—the galaka—as you know."
"All right," Corriston said, a little of his raw-nerve exasperation returning.
"Now I suppose you're going to tell us exactly how they kill their prey."
"I don't have to tell you how they kill men," Macklin said. "You know as
much about that as I do. You've been on Mars before. You've seen at least a
few of the victims. You know exactly how they come up under a man when
he's asleep, puncture his clothes and attach themselves. He doesn't just get
nipped; the lamprene can seldom be pulled off that quickly. And when two
or three of them attack you, it can be pretty horrible. They're more than just
vampires; they sting. The poison is as deadly as aconite. It works a little
slower, but almost immediately the victim starts to degenerate, his nerves
first, and, then...."
"All right, now I've heard an expert confirm it. I'd be grateful if you'll just
shut up."

"Lieutenant, I told you—"
"Never mind, Doctor. I'm asking him to shut up."
In silence they continued on, the tension between them increasing almost
intolerably, their nerves becoming more and more frayed. And then, finally,
it seemed to them that they could see the ship, and the great cliff wall
surrounding it through the slight haziness left by the sandstorm and the
vaguer haziness which distance imposes, could see the tumbled, flat slabs of
rock that radiated out from it in all directions across the desert.
But it was hard to be sure it was really the ship. It was perhaps only one of
the many desert mirages which were far more common on Mars than they
were on Earth. A man who has once looked at the bright, scarred face of a
cliff wall in the Martian sunlight will remember it even in his dreams and
no mirages are really necessary. He is certain to see it a second and a third
time, like an after-image so indelibly imprinted on the retina of the human
eye that its recurrence becomes inevitable.
And yet, the running man could not have been a mirage. He was much
nearer than the ship appeared to be, and he was falling and getting up and
falling again in so frenzied a way that his movements bore the unmistakable
stamp of reality.
Corriston came to an abrupt halt. For an instant he simply stared, watching
the distant figure fall to the sand for the fourth time and drag himself
forward over the sand, his shoulders heaving convulsively.
For an instant Corriston could not have moved if he had wanted to. The
scarecrow and Drever were standing too close to him, so that the shoulders
of the three men formed a compact unit, and their arms were in each other's
way to such an extent that no real freedom of movement was possible.
Corriston had almost to disentangle himself by sheer physical effort.
Disentangle himself he finally did, turning completely about and shouting
to the colonists behind him.
"Get to that man as quickly as possible!" he ordered. "There's no time to be
lost. Try to tear the lamprenes off him, but watch out for your hands. Don't
let them coil around you, watch out for the disks. Get them off if you can. If
you can't, bring him here. Carry him slung between you."

Two men left the line of march and started off across the desert, walking
very rapidly but not breaking into a run. Corriston had forgotten to warn
them that running with their weighted shoes would be difficult, and would
only delay them, and he was glad that they had thought of it themselves.
He turned back to the scarecrow, who was staring in white-lipped horror at
what must have seemed to him an unbelievable occurrence—a man
attacked by lamprenes when he had been talking about lamprenes only an
instant before.
But Corriston knew that it was a common enough occurrence, not to be in
any way coincidental. No one who slept in the desert for any length of time
could hope to avoid an attack if he failed to take the necessary precautions.
And even with precautions the death toll was high; almost as high, perhaps,
as cobra fatalities in India.
Corriston turned abruptly, his lips white. "If a man is attacked by just one
lamprene, and it's pulled off quickly, how much chance has he?"
It was Drever who answered him. "Not much, I'm afraid. The poison gets
into the blood stream and acts quickly. You can't get it out with a suction
disk the way you sometimes can with a snake bite. It's a nerve poison and it
spreads very fast. And there's no way of neutralizing it, no serum injection
that does any good. Of course, there have been a few recoveries."
Corriston swung about and stared out across the desert again. The two
colonists had reached the stricken man now and were attempting to tear the
lamprene—or lamprenes—from his flesh. They were bending over him, and
it was hard to tell for a moment whether they were succeeding or not. Then,
abruptly, one of them rose and made a despairing gesture, unmistakable
even from a distance of five hundred feet.
The next few minutes were like a nightmare that has no clear beginning or
end. They brought the man back and laid him down on the sand. The man
was Stone.
It was Drever who got the lamprene off. He did it with an electric torch,
taking care to manipulate the jet of fire in such a way that it scorched only
the head of the creature and not Stone's exposed flesh.
Corriston bent then, and gripped Stone firmly by the shoulders and shook
him until a look of desperate pleading came into his eyes. He forced himself

not to feel pity, seeing in Stone's closeness to death a threat that could have
but one outcome if the man refused to speak at all.
"Where's Helen Ramsey?" he demanded. "Where is she, Stone? We're not
likely to do anything more for you if you don't tell us."
"I—I don't know," Stone muttered. "Saddler ... double-crossed Henley. I
guess ... he wanted her for himself. I don't know where he's taken her. I'm
telling you the truth. You've got to believe me."
"All right," Corriston said, easing Stone back on the sand. "I believe you.
Take it easy now. They've got the lamprene off."
He stood very still, waiting for his heart to beat normally again, telling
himself that Saddler had taken an almost suicidal risk in leaving the ship on
foot with no certain refuge in mind. By taking along a helpless girl, he was
making himself a target for the rage and relentless enmity of men who
would never rest until they had tracked him down.
There could be no sanctuary for him anywhere. If he escaped Henley's
vengeance, the colonists would capture him in a matter of days. But
Corriston wasn't thinking in terms of days. He was thinking in terms of
minutes, hours. He stared at the empty stretch of desert ahead, trying
desperately to control the despair that was welling up inside him. How long
a head start did Saddler have? Had he left the ship only a few minutes, or
hours before?
He'd have to ask Stone one more question. Like a fool he'd put off asking it,
dreading the thought of what Stone's answer might be. But now he had no
choice. He must ask, and risk knowing that pursuit could not be
immediately undertaken by one man, that Saddler was miles away across
the desert, hiding out in some remote and inaccessible cave and that
tracking him down and putting a bullet through his heart would have to be a
joint undertaking.
It was a cruelly frustrating possibility. It increased Corriston's rage, his
bitterness. The hate within him seemed suddenly violent enough to destroy
anyone or anything. He preferred to go on alone, in relentless pursuit of
Saddler and if it took days to track him down....
It was Freddy's voice that brought him back to reality, startling and sobering
him. Freddy was coming toward him between the tractors, shouting at the

top of his lungs.

21
Corriston couldn't quite catch what the lad was shouting at first. Something
about the dunes and the ship and footprints. Then he caught the name of
Helen Ramsey and his mouth went dry and for an instant he couldn't seem
to breathe. Freddy was shouting that he had found Helen Ramsey.
Dr. Drever started and leapt quickly to his feet, his eyes darting with an
understandable solicitude toward the small figure coming toward them
across the sand. He moved quickly to place himself directly in front of
Stone, as if fearing it would be bad for Freddy to see a man so close to
death. Then the full significance of Freddy's words seemed to dawn on him,
and his solicitude for his son was replaced by a larger concern, a wider
sympathy.
"You talk to him, Corriston," he said. "You've been living through a short
stretch of hell. If he's really found her—"
Corriston needed no urging. He swayed a little forward, steadied himself
and broke into a run, meeting Freddy almost midway between the nearest
tractor and the hollow where Drever was crouching.
Freddy's eyes seemed almost too large for so young a face, large and
immensely serious. But along with the seriousness Corriston could sense
something else, a taper glow of excitement burning bright.
Freddy had gone exploring. As he told Corriston about it, the words seemed
to flow from him as if they had a mysterious life of their own, and were
somehow reshaping Freddy, making him over into a grown man with a
heavy stubble of beard and eyes that had looked on far places and a
thousand brilliant suns.
Freddy had found Helen Ramsey by following her footprints in the sand.
Corriston let Freddy tell it in his own words, shaken by doubts for a
moment, but finally convinced that the lad couldn't possibly be making any
of it up.

"There wasn't a footprint anywhere near the ship, Lieutenant Corriston. The
sandstorm covered them over. I looked everywhere just to be sure. I mean
there wasn't any prints that could have been made by a woman leaving the
ship with a man. The sand was trampled in a few places, because about ten
minutes ago Mr. Macklin and two other men started looking too. But that
was all.
"I remembered then that the sand sometimes stays nearly smooth close to
very high dunes, even in a storm. There's a—a windbreaking buffer zone
where the dunes keep the sand from piling up. I asked Mr. Macklin about
that once and he told me. I got to thinking that if I just wandered off I could
be back again before anyone missed me."
Freddy turned and gestured toward the ship. "You can see the dunes from
here. Not the ones right behind the ship. Those two bigger ones over there
... that sort of look like the humps on a camel. I guess nobody would have
been crazy enough to go looking for prints that far away from the ship. But
if I hadn't done it I wouldn't have found her. That's for sure."
Corriston said: "You're so much the opposite of crazy, Freddy, that I'm
afraid you're trying to spare me. It's hard to hurt someone you like, but I've
got to have the truth."
His hand tightened on Freddy's shoulder. "Do you understand, Freddy? I
must know. Don't lie to spare me. Is she all right?"
Freddy looked up at him, troubled, uncertain. "I think she is. She's lying
down near the bottom of the dune, right where it slopes up again toward
another dune. It's like one, big, hollow dune. I didn't see her move. I guess
she must have fainted. He's there, too, lying face down in the sand halfway
up the dune, like he was hurt...."
"All right," Corriston said. "Now you'd better stay here with your father."
"Can't I go back with you? I was afraid to climb down to her alone. I was
afraid he'd catch me and kill me, and then no one would ever know I'd
found her. He'd be warned and try to get away—"
"It was the right thing to do, the level-headed thing," Corriston said. "You
couldn't have used better judgment."
"Then it's all right if I go back with you?"

Corriston shook his head. "No, Freddy. I'd rather you didn't. Don't you
understand? You've done more than your share. Now it's my turn."
Freddy tightened his lips and stared for a moment at the glitter of sunlight
on the caterpillar tread of the nearest tractor. Finally he said, "All right,
Lieutenant Corriston. If it's an order."
"It's an order, Freddy."
Corriston gave Freddy's shoulder a pat. Then, after the briefest pause, he
said: "There's no substitute for the kind of fast-thinking resourcefulness
you've just displayed, Freddy. In a dozen years you'll be heading an
expedition and it won't be the kind that gets bogged down after the first
thousand miles. You can take my word for that."
He turned then and walked toward the ship. In a moment he had passed the
ship and was moving out into the desert beyond, and Freddy wondered how
a man could remain so calm in an affair of life and death such as this. It was
just as well, perhaps, that he could not see Corriston's face as he moved still
further away from the ship into a loneliness of desert and sky.

She was lying in a wind-scoured hollow beneath a seventy-foot dune, her
head resting on one sharply-bent elbow, a look of utter exhaustion on her
face. Her eyes were closed, and even from where he stood Corriston could
see that she was breathing heavily. He could see the slight rise and fall of
her bosom, the trembling vibration of her oxygen mask. She was
completely alone.
He stood for an instant absolutely motionless on the summit of the dune,
staring down at her, noticing in alarm the hollow contour of her cheeks on
both sides of the oxygen mask, and the slight tinge of gray that had crept
into her countenance. Then he started downward. Almost instantly the sand
rose like an unsteady sea on all sides of him, and a warning signal sounded
in his brain.
He could connect it with no cause. Beneath him stretched only the wind-
scoured inner surface of the dune, dazzling his eyes with its brightness,
mirroring the sunlight like a burning glass. For a moment the brightness

deceived him, and he did not realize that there were shadowed hollows
directly beneath him, dark fissures in the tumbled sand wide enough to
conceal a crouching man. He did not even see the shadow creeping toward
him over the sand. Only the dazzle for an instant and the gleam of sunlight
on Helen Ramsey's tousled hair.
Then, suddenly, he was aware of the danger, fully awake and aware. But
realization came too late. Abruptly, without warning, a knife blade flashed
in the sunlight and he felt an agonizing stab of pain just below his left
kneecap.
A dark shape rose before him, and then dissolved into the shadows again,
darting downward and sideways as it disappeared. Corriston threw himself
backwards and froze into immobility, thrusting his elbows deep into the
sand behind him, using that moment of surprise forced upon him by his
assailant to lower his eyes and seek him out.
He saw Saddler's face clearly for an instant, saw the gleaming knife and the
hand holding it, and the wavering outline of the man's crouching body
three-fourths in shadow. He heard Saddler mutter: "I'm done for, Corriston.
But I'll get you first."
It all seemed to happen in slow motion. Corriston's hand went to his hip, but
with a nightmare feeling of retardation and his fingers seemed to move
without any assistance from the motor centers of his brain. Then even more
slowly he was facing the hollow with the gun in his clasp, and the weapon
was exploding into the shadows, filling the hollows and windy places with
reverberating echoes of sound.
There was complete silence after that. No groans, no outcry—nothing but
silence. It went on for so long that Corriston could not shake off a numbing
sense of unreality. Surely only a dream could have had so violently unreal a
beginning, so terrible an outcome. Then he looked down, and saw the blood
on his leg where the knife had grazed it, and knew that it could not have
been a dream.
He was still facing the hollow, with two bullets left in his gun. But he knew
that he would not have to fire again. Saddler was lying on his back on the
sand, his eyes wide open, his jaw hanging slack. There was a spreading red
stain on his chest and a rim of blood around his lips. The wind which was

blowing across the crest of the dune seemed suddenly to turn malevolent,
striking out at the dead man with a sudden, downsweeping gust, ruffling his
hair and making him seem to be still enveloped in violence.
Corriston felt his throat muscles contract. He forced himself to bend over
and search for a heart beat he knew he wouldn't find, remembering the other
times when the outcome had been less fatal, when only a man's face had
changed.
As his palm rested for an instant above the dead man's heart, the stirring of
the sand immediately beneath him seemed to increase, to become a loud
and continuous rustling sound that filled him with a vague sense of disquiet.
He could not quite dismiss from his mind a feeling that he was still in
danger, that in some strange, almost terrifying way Saddler was still a
menace, and that the terrible reality of his death had not destroyed all of the
hatred and savage violence which had forced Corriston to kill him in self-
defense.
Suddenly Corriston realized that what he heard was not the wind stirring the
sand at all, but something quite different. It was closer to him than the
sloping rim of the dunes, and it was accompanied by movements directly
under his hand, a sudden tightening of the dead man's skin, a contraction
more pronounced than could have been produced by the abrupt onset of
rigor mortis, however freakishly violent or premature.
The rustling continued for perhaps ten more seconds. Then, abruptly, it
stopped and the heads of two lamprenes came into view, moving slowly
across Saddler's unstirring flesh until their writhing mouth parts were less
than two inches from Corriston's outspread hand.
The sight of them brought an instant of terror, an awareness of peril so acute
that Corriston's breath caught in his throat. His hand whipped back and he
leapt to his feet with a convulsive shudder.
It was suddenly very still on the dune again. Corriston stood for a moment
with his body rigid, fearing to look downward, his mind filled with a
growing sense of panic.
Had Helen Ramsey been attacked by lamprenes too? No, no, she was all
right; she had to be. Everything confirmed it, her quietness, her steady

breathing, the simple fact that her eyes had been closed and not opened
wide in torment.
He descended the dune like a man ploughing in frantic haste through a
snowdrift, sinking to his knees and floundering free again, lurching
backward and sideways, sliding a third of the way.
She was all right when he got to her. He dropped down beside her and lifted
her into his arms, and for an instant there was complete silence between
them. She just looked at him, looked up into his face steadily and calmly, as
if she could read his mind and had the good sense to realize there could be
no more certain way of reassuring him. Then her arms tightened about him.
"Darling," she whispered. "Darling, darling...."
Corriston started fumbling with his oxygen mask and suddenly he had it off.
He held his breath and more slowly helped her free her lips so that he could
kiss her. Their lips met and the kiss was longer and more intense than any
they had ever before shared.

A half hour later the tractors were in rumbling motion again, their
destination Ramsey's Citadel. And Corriston had a plan. He knew that it
was riddled with risks and that he was perhaps quite mad to think that it
might succeed. But the fact that Helen Ramsey was now completely safe
and had dropped off into a brief, outwardly untroubled sleep at his side
made him feel reckless to the point where a cautious, level-headed man like
Drever could only stare at him and shake his head.
There was a swaying and a creaking all about them, the slow, steady rumble
of caterpillar treads, and Drever had almost to shout to make himself heard.
He stood directly opposite Corriston, supporting himself by a guard rail,
and watching the desert through the weather-shield change color in the
wake of the heavy vehicle's heaving, churning, torpedo-shaped rear-end.
"Stone's been unconscious now for an hour," Drever said, dividing his gaze
between Corriston, and the loosely strapped-in, sleeping girl at his side,
both swaying with the swaying tractor. "We can't count on getting any more

information out of him. I can't wake him up. Drugs would be dangerous. I
don't think he'll live, but we can't deliberately kill him to get him to talk."
"I know that," Corriston said.
"But he's the only one who knows why Henley is staying so long at the
Citadel. He should have been back hours ago. He left before you escaped
from the ship. For all we know, he may be dead. Ramsey may have lost his
head and had him shot, although that seems unlikely. Ramsey would go to
any length to save his daughter. But we've no way of knowing whether he
believed Henley's story or not. Anything could have happened. Henley may
have attacked Ramsey."
"I've a feeling that he's still at the Citadel," Corriston said. "I'll have to
gamble on that—the one-in-five chance that for some reason the
negotiations have been prolonged. He may be lying dead in the desert
somewhere. He may have been attacked by lamprenes. As you say, anything
could have happened. But when I make up my mind to do something I
usually go through with it. It's just a matter of plain common sense. You
don't toss aside a decision you've given a great deal of thought to just
because the arguments against it are weighty, too."
"I see. So you're still determined to walk right up to the gate and tell them
you're Stone."
"Why not? They've never laid eyes on Stone and they don't know me from
Adam. I won't be wearing this uniform. I'll tell them that Henley's expecting
me, that he left orders for me to join him if he failed to come back at a
specified time. I'll watch the guard's face and change my story a little—if I
have to—as I go along."
"It's a very long gamble. I hope you realize that."
"It's either that or no gamble at all. And we've got to gamble. We're holding
at least two high cards and a joker. Henley has had the ground shot right out
from under him. He's completely alone, and the only thing he has left to
gamble with is his nearness to Ramsey, his ability to terrify Ramsey by
making him believe that his daughter's life is still in danger. Ramsey has to
be told that Helen has been freed, has to be warned in time, before he does
anything foolish.

"Don't you see? With that threat hanging over him, Ramsey would never let
us get within fifty yards of the Citadel, let alone walk through the gates.
And if Henley finds out that we've got Helen, he'll know that he has nothing
left to gamble with except that desperate bluff. And he may doubt his ability
to win with a bluff. That would be the worst tragedy of all. He may turn on
Ramsey in blind rage, and kill him. He gets a horrible, pathological pleasure
out of killing. I've told you how he went berserk on the Station."
Drever nodded, and, quite suddenly and unexpectedly, the look of stubborn
opposition was gone from his eyes.
"I guess you're right, Lieutenant. You can't always tell how the cards will
fall."
"You can never tell," Corriston said. "And there are some games where the
important moves can only be made by just one player, and he usually has to
be something of a reckless fool."

22
Corriston left the tractor a hundred and seventy yards from the gate, well
hidden behind a hundred foot dune. The other tractors had come to a halt a
much greater distance from the Citadel, and were spread out across the
desert in a slightly uneven, double line.
He walked slowly forward across the rust-red sand, with a feeling in his
bones that he was going to be lucky. Yet he knew that he'd have to be
convincing, or he wouldn't stand a chance. If there was more than one guard
at the gate he might never get inside. With luck he might be able to
convince two guards—even three—but never four or five, for you couldn't
forge words into persuasive enough weapons to disarm the suspicion of that
many observant men. Not the kind of men who would be guarding Ramsey,
at any rate.
The massiveness of the fortified gate shook his confidence a little as he
drew near to it. It was at least fifty feet in height, a solid oblong of inches-
thick steel with a desert-mirroring surface. He could see his own reflection
as he advanced, but it did nothing to reassure him.
He knew what he'd have to do, of course. Walk right up to the gate and trust
to luck that he could find some way of announcing his presence without
getting himself killed. How did you gain entrance to an impregnable
fortress? Surely there had to be some way by which a man could gain
admittance without being instantly shot down as a hostile intruder.
He was surprised by the simplicity of the answer. There was no need for
him to press a bell or a buzzer, to manipulate a mechanism of any sort.
There was not even any need for him to proclaim his arrival by shouting.
The gate swung inward without a sound, and in the shadows cast by its
moving bulk two figures silently materialized. They were guards, heavily
armed, one tall with shaggy brows and piercing dark eyes, the other a wiry
little man with reddish hair, his expression peculiarly bland and non-
committal.

It was the little man who said: "All right, come inside. We've been
expecting you."
It was impossible, but true. There was nothing threatening in the way the
words were uttered, just calm acceptance, just the matter-of-fact
indifference of a man who has a duty to perform and doesn't care what
happens afterwards.
But it would have perhaps been better if Corriston had not moved so
quickly forward, for almost instantly the second guard barred his passage
and laid a firm hand on his arm.
"Hold on. Just a minute," the tall guard said. "You're Peter Stone, aren't
you?"
With a quick pretense of anger Corriston jerked his arm free and looked the
guard up and down. "Naturally I'm Stone. Who in hell did you think I was."
"Sorry," the guard said, shrugging. "Don't take it out on me. I just had to be
sure."
"Well, you're sure now. I guess you know why I'm here."
The guard nodded. "Ramsey just phoned down about you. Your friend is
with him now. See that big gray building, the one on the left with the
shuttered windows? There's a guard stationed at the door, but he won't stop
you. He has his orders. Climb two flights of stairs and go down the long
corridor on the third floor. Ramsey and your friend are in the last room on
the left."
Corriston drew a deep breath, wondering if the guard had noticed the
tightening of his facial muscles. He turned away from the gate slowly,
staring out over the interior of the fortress, letting his emotions of the
moment take complete possession of him.
He had entered as if by magic a world apart, a small, shutin world of
massive magnificence, of undreamed of material power and wealth. There
were five buildings within the encircling wall of the fortress, each
monumental in architectural sweep. Each was a citadel alone and apart,
monuments to man's creative genius erected by one man with a
determination to make himself unique.

It was a folly almost beyond belief, a terrifying distortion of human
creativeness that could lead only to ultimate disaster and defeat.
But greedy and cruel and ruthless as Ramsey undoubtedly was, there still
burned in him a little of the spark that had created Athens in white marble.
Had it not been so, he could not have even commissioned men of creative
genius to transport to Mars the materials for such a project and have taken
pleasure in its completion.
"Your friend got here two hours ago," the tall guard said. "They've been
talking ever since. He came down to the gate once and said we should let
you in, you and another man. Saddler, I think his name was. I see he's not
with you."
"No, Saddler is not with me," Corriston said.
"What happened to him?"
"The big gray building with the shuttered windows, you said. If the guard
tries to stop me, what do I say."
"I told you he had his orders."
Corriston looked up at the massive gate swinging shut behind him. For
good or ill, he was completely trapped, completely at the mercy of the
armed guards inside the citadel.
They hadn't taken his gun away from him, but, nevertheless, he was
trapped. What chance would one armed man have against seventy-five or a
hundred guards? They were keeping out of sight, all but the two at the gate.
But at any moment they could converge upon him and shoot him down.
They could choose their own moment, precisely as a research medical man
could choose his own moment to experiment upon a laboratory animal,
knowing that the creature was safe in its cage and couldn't possibly get
away.
Corriston's lips tightened and from a shadowed corner of his mind came a
determination to brush all that aside, to ignore it completely. The guards at
the gate might very well be telling the truth. It stood to reason that Ramsey
would have remained secretive about his daughter. Kidnappers do not like
to have their ransom demands discussed too openly. If Ramsey had been a
complete fool he would have gone down to the gate and taken the guards

completely into his confidence, but Corriston could not believe that Ramsey
was that much of a fool.
In all probability Henley had threatened Ramsey and provoked him almost
beyond endurance. There had arisen the questions of how the ransom was to
be paid, the girl set free.
Damn it, Corriston thought, the thing for me to do now is to go straight
toward that building and straight up the stairs to the third floor and straight
down the corridor until I'm confronting Ramsey face to face. I'm Peter
Stone. I'm one of the two men who helped Henley kidnap the girl and I've
come to help Henley convince Ramsey. I've come to help him really put the
screws on Ramsey. I can improvise from that point on.
He moved away from the guards without looking back. Within the citadel
there was silence, stillness, the five massive buildings cutting a rampart of
pure, fragile design across the sky. There was a strange kind of perfection
about the interior of the citadel. It was akin, somehow, to the perfection of
solitude and even the sky seemed hushed, expectant, remote from reality, as
if awaiting the unfolding of some impossible event, some terrifying drama
of violence and retribution that could take place nowhere else.
But Corriston's reason told him that to believe any such thing would have
been the height of folly. The sky inside the citadel was just as real, just as
cloud-flecked and palely blue as the sky outside, and the notion that
architecture or scenery of any kind could influence events was absolute
nonsense. Things would happen exactly as he willed them to happen,
provided nothing stood in the way of immediate drastic action and the kind
of luck which had saved him at the gate continued to smile upon him.
The big gray building with the shuttered windows continued to occupy most
of his attention, and he walked very resolutely toward it, his eyes on the
glimmer of pale light which marked its wide doorway. He was still fifty feet
away when he saw the guard, standing very quietly just inside the door with
his hand on his gun holster.
Corriston's lips tightened, but he did not moderate his stride. He had a reply
ready if the guard challenged him. He preferred to believe that he would not
be challenged, but he had no intention of taking anything for granted.

He continued on until he reached the doorway and then he stopped abruptly.
He waited for the guard to say something, but the man did not speak at all.
He simply stared quietly at Corriston for an instant, and then stepped
quickly back into the shadows. Corriston went on past him, and advanced
along the wide corridor that stretched before him.
The wide central staircase that circled up did not seem appropriate to a
building that was not a residence and Corriston found himself wondering if
Ramsey had turned the other four buildings into similarly unusual
expressions of his own strong-willed orientation to reality.
The buildings had undoubtedly been designed as administrative units of an
industrial empire—a beginning empire in a new world. An empire
predatory, avaricious, merciless. Yet Ramsey had seemingly allowed his
desire for a home to gain dominance here, had allowed the emotions
common to all men to influence his taste in interior architecture in at least
one of the buildings.
Chalk up that much to Ramsey's credit. In that respect at least, he was
superior to Henley. In that respect at least a man of good will could take
sides, all apart from the personal issues involved. Henley was a predatory
vulture on all counts, his talons constantly spread, constantly crimson-
tipped. Ramsey was a vulture too, but in the depths of his mind he knew it.
Part of the agony was shared by him, and in one desperate, despairing part
of his personality he had tried to be creative.
Corriston ascended the staircase swiftly, casting one brief glance at some
murals and then ignoring them. The second floor landing stretched away
into shadows, bisected by a wide corridor dimly lighted by overhead lamps.
The second floor had an administrative building aspect and so did the third
floor, which seemed in all respects its exact duplicate.
Corriston's excitement grew as he mounted the stairway. He felt like a man
poised on the brink of a precipice with no assurance that he would not be
hurled to his death; a man aware that tragedy would not strike him like a
thunderbolt at any moment; and yet also like a man who thought and felt
differently from the trapped and the desperately despairing.
He felt very confident, very sure of himself, and it seemed to him that there
was no danger that he could not surmount, and deep within him there was

something that exulted in the thought and kept him moving steadily
upward.
The third floor was like the second, its long central corridor dwindling away
into shadows. Down it he moved cautiously, remembering what the guard at
the gate had said. The third floor, the last door on your left.
Ramsey was in conference. But it wasn't a conference of industrial
associates planning a division of spoils. Ramsey was talking to a killer
under duress.
Corriston was half way down the corridor when he heard the shot. It rang
out in the stillness with a terrible clarity, sending echoes reverberating
throughout the building, stopping Corriston in his tracks.
For an instant the silence remained absolute, as if the shot had somehow
silenced all life within the building. Even Corriston's breathing was affected
by it, so that for an instant he remained like a man horror-blasted into
immobility, frozen, a statue with waxen features and widely dilated eyes.
Then, abruptly, he ceased to be a statue. He broke into a run, heading for the
door from which the shot had come.
He came to the door and saw that it did not slide open on a panel. It was
massive, with a knob jutting out from it, and when he grasped the knob it
swung inward instantly and soundlessly and he found himself in a large,
blank-walled room brightly illumed by three circular overhead lamps.
Ramsey was sitting stiff and straight before a desk that was cluttered with
reference files, manuscripts in folders, pens, pencils and other writing
materials. His face was drained of all color, and his eyes were wide and
staring. He was looking directly at Corriston, and yet he did not seem to see
Corriston.
He did not appear to be staring at anything in particular, that small,
shrunken, unimpressive-looking little man with graying temples and a look
of blank incomprehension in his eyes that chilled Corriston to the core of
his being.
Shaking, wishing that the eyes would close or brighten with relief, or do
anything but remain so stonily indifferent, Corriston moved closer to the
desk.

He saw at once that Ramsey was close to death. He had been shot in the
chest. There was a dull red stain on his chest, and even as Corriston stared it
widened, a butterfly pattern of red, like a Rorschach seen through the eyes
of a homicidally inclined psychotic.
Suddenly Ramsey moved. He caught hold of the desk edge, and swayed a
little, but his eyes remained filmed, blankly staring.
Corriston was bending above him when a familiar voice said: "He's done
for. Nothing you can do for him. We had an argument and he lost his head.
He just couldn't see it my way. So I made a mistake and shot him. It was a
mistake, all right. I lost my head. Now I've got nothing to lose by killing
you."
Corriston raised his eyes slowly. He had one chance in a hundred perhaps.
He knew it; he sensed it. Henley had somehow managed to stay out of sight
for an instant. The room was very large. There were shadows in it, and
Henley had apparently flattened himself against the wall behind the desk, in
deep shadow.
But now he was standing very straight and still behind the desk, ignoring
the shuddering form of the man he had shot, little dark deathheads dancing
in his eyes.
Henley's nearness did not bother Corriston. Death at ten feet could be no
more final than death at a hundred yards.
Only one thing bothered him. Events could move fast when you were close
to a killer.
He didn't intend to let them move fast. Not for him, at any rate. He let his
eyes rest for an instant on the gun in Henley's hand, his thoughts racing. He
knew that he'd be as good as dead if he made a single concession.
Don't let him know that the gun worries you. Pretend that the odds are even,
even though he's got the drop on you.
Corriston said: "How do you know he's fatally wounded? The wound's three
inches below his heart. You're taking a hell of a lot for granted. You just
said you made a mistake in shooting him. If he's rushed to a hospital that
mistake may not be your last. You'll have a chance to go to work on him
again."

Henley shook his head, his lips tightening. "Don't be a fool. He'll be dead in
five minutes."
"I'm not being a fool," Corriston said. "What will you stand to gain by
shooting me and letting him die? You've got his daughter, but a dead man
won't be able to ransom her."
For a moment, nothing happened. Henley had made no attempt to draw his
gun, and he did not draw it now. He stood very quietly staring at Corriston,
breathing heavily, a strange, withdrawn look in his eyes.
Perhaps he was thinking over what Corriston had said. Corriston wondered
about that for an instant, and then dismissed it from his mind. You did not
take anything for granted when you were standing that close to a killer.
It was probably too late to save Ramsey. But for the first time he was
standing very near to Henley with a weapon beneath his hand. If he drew
his gun instantly and shot Henley through the heart Ramsey might have a
chance. Otherwise....
Somehow he couldn't do it; not without giving the other some slight
warning, not without whipping his hand to his gun with a vigor that was
clear and unmistakable. In matters of crime a fair man is at a disadvantage.
He can only deal with a murderer in one way.
He drew a split second ahead of Henley. He shot Henley three times, the
gun blazing in his hands, and it did not seem important to him that Henley
had also drawn his gun. A tight knot reached into his stomach as Henley's
gun blazed, but he kept right on firing.
Henley died missing him, not scoring at all. That was the incredible thing.
Henley, an expert shot, a genius at massacre, had missed him clearly with
five shots and now he was down on the floor, clutching at his stomach,
dragging himself along, while beneath his fingers a dull red stain grew.
His eyes turned glassy suddenly. He tried twice to raise himself but he fell
back each time. He did not speak at all. Blood from his punctured lungs
flooded up into his mouth, and with a terrible, convulsive trembling of his
entire body he rolled over on his side and lay still.
Corriston's hands began to sweat beneath the hard, cold gun. He wanted to
drop the weapon, to hurl it from him, but he couldn't somehow. He had

killed Saddler in immediate self-defense. This had been a little different—a
new experience, a frightening experience and he had been forced to grit his
teeth even in firing, and now that it was all over he was tormented inwardly
in a way that left him badly shaken.
Henley was gone now. Dead and still and forever removed from a world he
had contaminated. Henley had been warped and twisted largely by
circumstances outside himself; nevertheless a deadly reptile has to be
crushed when it is about to strike.
Corriston looked up from the limp form sprawled out on the floor, and for a
moment the tight lines of his face relaxed a little. Henley was no longer a
menace; the breath of life that had sustained him had expired so completely
that he had become now a kind of hollow mockery of something monstrous
and distorted that could never harm anyone again.
It was Ramsey who had to be considered now, Ramsey who was in peril.
The light in the room seemed somehow a little dimmer than it had been. He
turned slowly back to Ramsey, and for a moment could not quite believe
what he saw.
Ramsey's face was changing. The hollows beneath his cheekbones were
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.

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