The Paradox Men

by Charles L. Harness

  There was a more immediate question—what did the relief crew want with him? He welcomed the chance to meet them, but he wanted to be the one to ask questions. He felt off-balance.

  What if one of the crew had known the true Dr. Talbot? And, of course, any of the eleven might be an I.P. in occupational disguise, warned to be on the lookout for him. Or perhaps they didn’t want him along on general principles. After all, he was an uninvited outsider who might disturb the smooth teamwork so necessary to their hourly survival.

  Or possibly they had invited him in for a little hazing, which he understood was actually encouraged by the station psychiatrist for the relief of tension in new men, so long as it was done and over before they came on station.

  As he left the catwalk for the narrow corridor, he heard music and laughter ahead.

  He smiled. A party. He remembered now that the incoming shift always gave themselves a farewell party, the main features of which were mournful, interminable and nonprintable ballads, mostly concerning why they had left Terra to take up their present existence—new and unexpurgated holographic movies of dancing girls clothed mainly with varihued light (personal gift of the Minister for Space), pretzels and beer.

  Only beer, because they had to check into the station cold sober. Two months later, if their luck held, they’d throw another party on the Phobos, and the Phobos crew would join in. Even the staid, blunt Andrews would upend a couple of big ones in toasting their safe return.

  But not now. The outgoing festivities were strictly private—for sunmen only. No strangers were ever invited. Even an incoming station psychiatrist was excluded.

  What then? Something was wrong.

  As he stood poised to knock on the door, he found himself counting his pulse. It throbbed at one hundred fifty and was climbing.

  16

  The Eskimo and the Sunmen

  ALAR STOOD AT the door, counting out the rapid rise of his pulse, considering what he might have to face on the other side. His knuckled hand dropped in an instinctive motion toward a non-existent saber pommel. Weapons were forbidden on the Phobos. But what danger could there be in such self-commiserating good fellowship? Still, suppose they tried a little horseplay and yanked at his false beard? While he hesitated, the music and laughter died away.

  Then the ship lurched awkwardly, and he was thrown against the door. The Phobos had nosed into Solarion Nine and was sealing herself to the entry ports. A wild cheer from within the mess rose above his crash against the door.

  Whether they hailed the survival of the station or their own imminent departure he could not be sure. There was something mocking and sardonic about the ovation that led him to suspect the latter. Let the old shift do their own cheering.

  “Come in!” boomed someone.

  He pushed the door aside and walked in.

  Ten faces looked at him expectantly. Two of the younger men were sitting by the holograph, but the translucent cube that contained the tri-di image was dark. It had evidently just been turned off.

  Two men were returning from a table laden with a beer keg, several large wooden pretzel bowls, beer mugs, napkins, ash trays and other bric-a-brac, and were headed toward the dining table nearest the Thief. At the table, six men were in the act of rising. The missing eleventh face was probably the psychiatrist—absent by mutual understanding and consent.

  The party was over, he sensed uneasily. This was something different.

  “Dr. Talbot,” said the large florid man with the booming voice, “I’m Miles, incoming station master for the Nine.”

  Alar nodded silently.

  “And this is my meteorologist, Williams—MacDougall, lateral jet pilot—Florez, spectroscopist—Saint Claire, production engineer…”

  The Thief acknowledged the introductions gravely but noncommittally, down to young Martinez, clerk. His eyes missed nothing. These men were all repeaters. At some time in the past they had all oozed cold sweat in a solar station, probably most of them at different times and in different stations. But the common experience had branded them, welded them together and cast them beyond the pale of their earthbound brothers.

  The twenty eyes had never left his face. What did they expect of him?

  He folded his hands inconspicuously and counted his pulse. It had leveled off at one-sixty.

  Miles resumed his rumble: “Dr. Talbot, we understand that you are going to be with us for twenty days.”

  Alar almost smiled. Miles, as a highly skilled and unconsciously snobbish sunman of long experience, held in profound contempt any unit of time less than a full and dangerous sixty days’ shift.

  “I have requested the privilege,” returned the Thief gravely. “I hope you haven’t decided that I’ll be in the way.”

  “Not at all.”

  “The Toynbeean Institute has long been anxious to have a professional historian prepare a monograph—”

  “Oh, we don’t care why you’re coming, Dr. Talbot. And don’t worry about getting in our way. You look as though you have sense enough to stay clear when we’re busy and you’ll be worth your weight in unitas if you can keep the psych happily occupied and out of our laps. You play chess, I hope? This psych we have is an eskimo.”

  He couldn’t remember having heard the term “Eskimo” applied to a sunman before, and he was astonished that he understood its meaning, which seemed to spring to mind unbidden, as though from the mental chamber that contained his other life. He had made no mistake in deciding to board the Phobos. But for the moment he must pretend ignorance.

  “Chess—Eskimo?” he murmured with puzzled politeness.

  Several of the men smiled.

  “Sure, Eskimo,” boomed Miles impatiently. “Never been in a solarion before. Has the sweat he was born with. Probably fresh out of school and loaded down with chess sets to keep our minds occupied so we won’t brood.” He laughed suddenly, harshly. “So we won’t brood! Great flaming faculae! Why do they think we keep coming back here?”

  Alar realized that the hair was crawling on his neck and that his armpits were wet. And he knew now what common brand had marked these lost souls and joined them into an outré brotherhood.

  As the real Talbot had surmised that night at the ball, every one of these creatures was stark mad!

  “I’ll try to keep the psych occupied,” he agreed with plausible dubiousness. “I rather like a game of chess myself.”

  “Chess!” murmured Florez, the spectroscopist, with dispassionate finality, turning from Alar to stare wearily at the table. His complete absence of venom did not mute his meaning.

  Miles laughed again and fixed Alar with bloodshot eyes. “But we didn’t invite you here simply to ask you to get the psych out of our hair. The fact is, all ten of us are Indians—old sunmen. And that’s unusual. Generally we have at least one Eskimo in the bunch.”

  The big man’s hand flashed into his pocket and two dice clattered along the table toward the Thief. There was a sharp intake of breath somewhere down the table. Alar thought it was Martinez, the young clerk. Everyone pressed slowly on either side of the table toward their guest and the white cubes that lay before him.

  “Will you please pick them up, Dr. Talbot?” demanded Miles.

  Alar hesitated. What would the action commit him to?

  “Go on,” Martinez said, impatient and eager. “Go on, sir.”

  The Thief studied the dice. A little worn, perhaps, but completely ordinary. He reached out slowly, gathered them into his right hand. He raised his hand and opened his fingers so that they rested side by side on his palm almost under Miles’s nose.

  “Well?”

  “Ah,” Miles said. “And now I suppose I should inform you of the significance of what you’ll soon do for us.”

  “I’m very interested,” Alar replied. He wondered at the form the ritual was about to take. That it was a ritual of immense import to the men he did not doubt.

  “When we have a genuine Eskimo, Dr. Talbot, we ask him to throw the dice.”
/>
  “You have your choice, then? I believe the psychiatrist would qualify, wouldn’t he?”

  “Huh,” grunted the incoming station master. “Sure, the psych’s an Eskimo, but all psychs are poison.”

  “I see.” Alar closed his fist over the cubes.

  “Martinez could do the honors, too, for that matter. Martinez has served only two shifts and he hasn’t really crowded his luck too far to disqualify him. But we don’t want to use him if we can help it.”

  “So logically I’m it.”

  “Right. The rest of us are no good. Florez is next lowest with five shifts. This would be his sixth—utterly impossible, of course. And so on up to me, with full ten years’ service. I’m the Jonah. I can’t roll ’em. That leaves you. You’re not really an Eskimo—you’ll be with us only twenty days—but several of us old timers have decided it’ll be legal because you resemble an old friend.”

  Muir, of course. It was fantastic. The Thief aroused himself as though from a heavy dream. The dice felt cold and weightless in his numbing fist. And his heart beat was climbing again.

  He cleared his throat. “May I ask what happens after I roll the dice?”

  “Nothing—immediately,” replied Miles. “We just file out, grab our gear, and walk up the ramp into the station.”

  It couldn’t be that simple. Martinez’s mouth was hanging open as though his life depended on this. Florez was hardly breathing. And so on around the table. Even Miles seemed more flushed than when Alar had entered the room.

  He thought furiously. Was it a gamble involving some tremendous sum that he was deciding? The sunmen were bountifully paid. Perhaps they had pooled their earnings and he was to decide the winner.

  “Will you hurry yourself, por favor, Dr. Talbot?” said Martinez faintly.

  This was something bigger than money. Alar rattled the dice loosely in his hand and let them go.

  And in the act a belated warning seemed to bubble up from his fogged preamnesic life. He clawed futilely at the cubes but it was too late. A three and a four.

  He had just condemned a solarion crew—and himself—to death.

  Alar exchanged glances with Martinez, who had suddenly become very pale.

  A solarion dies once a twelvemonth, so a sunman on a two-month shift has one chance in six of dying with it. Florez couldn’t make the throw because this would be his sixth shift, and by the laws of chance, his time was up.

  One in six—these madmen were positive that a roll of the dice could predict a weary return to Terra—or a vaporous grave on the sun.

  One chance in six. There had been one chance in six of throwing a seven. His throw would kill these incredible fanatics just as surely as if he cut them down with a Kades. These ten would walk into the solarion knowing that they would die, and sooner or later one of them would subconsciously commit the fatal error that would send the station plunging down into the sunspot vortex, or adrift on the uncharted, unfathomable photosphere. And he would be along.

  It seemed that everyone, for a queer unearthly hiatus, had stopped breathing. Martinez was moving pallid lips, but no sound was coming out.

  Indeed, no one said anything at all. There was nothing to say.

  Miles thoughtfully thrust an enormous black cigar into his mouth, pushed his chair back to the table, and walked slowly from the room without a backward glance. The others followed, one by one.

  Alar waited a full five minutes after the footsteps had died away toward the ramp that led up into Solarion Nine, full of wonder both at his stupidity and at the two tantalizing flashes from his other life.

  His death was certain if he followed them into the solarion. But he couldn’t hang back now. He recalled the Mind’s prediction. It had been a calculated risk.

  His main regret was that he was now persona non grata to the crew. It would be a long time before he learned anything from these fanatics—probably not before one of them destroyed the station. But it couldn’t have been helped.

  He stepped into the corridor, looked toward the ramp a dozen yards away and sucked in his breath sharply. Four I.P.’s favored him with stony stares, then, as one man, drew their sabers.

  Then a horrid, unforgettable giggle bit at his unbelieving left ear.

  “Small solar system, eh, Thief?”

  17

  Reunion Near Sol

  VISITORS ARE NOT allowed in this portion of the morgue, madame. There’s nothing here but unclaimed bodies.” The gray-clad slave attendant barring her way bowed unctuously but firmly.

  The only sign of Keiris’s impatience was a faint dilation of the nostrils. “There are one thousand unitas in this envelope,” she said quietly, indicating the packet fastened beneath her cape clasp. “I will need only thirty seconds within the cubicle. Unlock the door.”

  The slave eyed the envelope hungrily and swallowed nervously. His eyes studied the hall behind the woman.

  “A thousand unitas isn’t much. If I got caught, it would mean my life.”

  “It’s all I have.” She noted with alarm the man’s growing firmness.

  “Then you can’t go in.” He folded his arms before his chest.

  “Do you want your freedom?” demanded Keiris abruptly. “I can tell you how to get it. You need only take me alive. I am Madame Haze-Gaunt.”

  The slave gaped at her.

  She continued swiftly. “The chancellor has offered a billion-unita reward for my capture. Enough,” she added caustically, “to buy your freedom and set yourself up as a great slave-holder. All you have to do is lock me in the cubicle behind you and notify the police.”

  Was it worth this to her? A few moments would tell.

  “But don’t cry out before you let me into the room,” she warned quietly. “If you do, I have a knife with which I will kill myself. Then you will not get the billion unitas. Instead, they will kill you.”

  The attendant gasped something incomprehensible. At last his trembling fingers got the keys from his pocket. After several false tries, he finally succeeded in unlocking the door.

  Keiris stepped inside quickly. The door locked behind her. She looked about her quickly. The tiny room, like the thousands of others on this level, contained but one thing—a cheap transparent plastic casket resting on a waist-high wooden platform.

  A strange feeling came over Keiris. It seemed to her that her whole life revolved around what she would learn in the next few seconds. Even the Mind, for all his detailing scrutiny, had probably never thought of checking the morgue. After all, the T-22 Log mentioned only two living things, both of which had been identified as Alar and Haze-Gaunt’s ape-creature.

  For the moment she avoided looking at what was inside, but instead read the printed and framed legend resting on the upper surface:

  Unidentified and unclaimed. Recovered by Imperial River Police from the Ohio River near Wheeling on July 21, 2172.

  Would it be Kim?

  Finally Keiris forced herself to look into the casket.

  It was not Kim.

  It was a woman. The body was loosely clad from toes to breasts in thin mortuary gauze. The face was pale and thin and the translucent skin was drawn tightly over the rather high cheekbones. The long hair was black except for a broad white streak streaming from the forehead.

  A key was turning in the lock behind her. Let them come.

  The door burst open. Someone, in the ungrammatical terseness of the well-trained I.P., said, “It’s her.”

  She had time for only one more look at the corpse, one more look at its armless shoulders, one more look at the knife buried in its heart—a knife identical to the one she now carried in the sheath on her left thigh.

  The meaning of the four guards at the ramp was now only too clear to the Thief. Shey had put them there. Others were undoubtedly behind him.

  Shey, then, must be Miles’s “Eskimo psych”—and with animal cunning the little man had been waiting for Alar on the Phobos ever since its arrival on the moon.

  But instead of feeling
trapped the Thief felt only elated. At least, before he died, he would have an opportunity to punish Shey.

  Shey’s present precautions would certainly have been enough to recapture an ordinary fugitive, but the same was true of the other traps that had been laid for Alar. The wolf pack was still proceeding on the assumption that methods applicable to human beings, enlarged and elaborated perhaps, were equally applicable to him. He believed now that their premise was wrong.

  The image of Keiris’s preternatural slenderness flashed before him. Yes, the time had come to punish Shey. His oath as a Thief prevented his killing the psychologist, but justice permitted other remedies, which could best be administered aboard the solarion. His pursuer had doubtless expected to capture him here and almost certainly had no intention of risking that august hide in a solarion. That was about to be changed.

  He turned slowly, bracing himself mentally for the photic blast to come.

  “Do you see this finger, Shey?” He held his right forefinger erect midway on the line joining his eyes with the psychologist’s.

  By pure reflex action Shey’s pupils focused on the finger. Then his neck jerked imperceptibly as a narrow ‘x’ of blue-white light exploded from Alar’s eyes into his.

  The next five seconds would tell whether the Thief’s gambling attempt at hypnosis by overstimulation of the other’s optical sensorium had been successful.

  “I am Dr. Talbot of the Toynbeean Institute,” he whispered rapidly. “You are the incoming psych for the solarion Nine. We’ll board together. As we approach the guards on the ramp tell them everything is all right and ask them to bring in our gear immediately.” Shey blinked at him.

  Would it really work? Was it too preposterous? Had he been insanely overconfident?

  The Thief wheeled and walked briskly toward the ramp and the watchful I.P.’s. Behind him came the sound of running feet.