The light went out.
He screamed in blind animal fear and slapped wildly at the panel. The switch moved again beneath his hand and the light came back on. Sobbing, he leaned against the panel, gazing in overwhelming relief out through the big front window at the good green grass and the brightness of the sky beyond.
It was some time before he could bring himself to touch that switch again. Finally he summoned up the nerve to pull it once more and stood a long while in the darkness, with thudding heart, letting his eyes grow accustomed to it.
Eventually he found he could see again, but faintly. He groped his way through the gloom of the front room and lifted his face to the sky outside, from which the faint glow came.
And this time he did not cry out.
The night sky was all around him and filled with stars. It was the bright shine of them that illuminated his little world with a sort of ghostly brilliance. Stars, stars, in every quarter of the heavens, stars. But it was not just their presence alone that struck him rigid with horror.
Like all of his generation, he knew how the stars looked from every planet owned by man. What schoolchild did not? He could glance at the stars from a position in any quarter of the human sector of space and tell roughly from the arrangement overhead where that position was. Consequently, his sight of the stars told him where he was now; and it was this knowledge that gripped him with mind-freezing terror.
He was adrift, alone on a little, self-contained world, ten miles in diameter, a pitiful little bubble of matter, in the territory of the Devils, in the unknown regions beyond the farthest frontier.
He could not remember what happened immediately after that. Somehow, he must have gotten back inside and closed the light switch, for when he woke again to sanity, the light had hidden the stars once more. But fear had come to live with him. He knew now that malice or chance had cut him irrevocably off from his own kind and thrust him forth to be the prey or sport of whatever beings held this unknown space.
But from that moment, memory of his adult life began to return. Bit by bit, from the further past, and working closer in time, it came. And at first he welcomed almost sardonically the life-story it told. Now that he knew where he was, whatever his history turned out to be, it could make no difference.
As time went on, though, interest in the man he had been obsessed him, and he seized on each individual recollection as it emerged from the mist, grasping at it almost frantically. The viseo that he kept running, purely for the sake of human-seeming companionship, played unheeded while he hunted desperately through the hazy corridor of his mind.
He remembered his name now. It was Helmut Perran.
Helmut Perran had gone from despondency to hopelessness after his dismissal from the job at the typographers. He was a confirmed alcoholic now, and with labor shortage common on an expanding planet, he had no trouble finding enough occasional work to keep himself in liquor. He nearly succeeded in killing himself off, but his youth and health saved him.
They dragged him back to existence in the snake ward of the local hospital, and psychoed a temporary cure on him. Helmut had gone downhill socially until he reached rock bottom, until there was no further for him to go. He began to come back up again, but by a different route.
He came up in the shadowy no-man’s-land just across the border of the law. He was passer, pimp and come-on man. He fronted for a gambling outfit. He made some money and went into business for himself as a promoter of crooked money-making schemes, and he ended as advance agent for a professional smuggling outfit.
Oddly enough, the business was only technically illegal. With the mushroom growth of the worlds, dirty politics and graft had mushroomed as well. Tariffs were passed often for the sole purpose of putting money in the pockets of customs officials. Unnecessary red tape served the same purpose. The upshot was that graft became an integral part of interstellar business. The big firms had their own agents to cut through these difficulties with the golden knife of credits. The smaller firms, or those who could less afford the direct graft, did business with smuggling outfits.
These did not actually smuggle; they merely saw to it that the proper men and machines were blind when a shipment that had been arranged for came through regular channels. They dealt with the little men—the spaceport guard, the berthing agent, the customs agent who checked the invoice— where the big firms made direct deals with the customs house head, or the political appointee in charge of that governmental section. It was more risky than the way of the big firms, but also much less expensive.
Helmut Perran, as advance agent, made the initial contacts. It was his job to determine who were the men who would have to be fixed, to take the risk of approaching them cold, and either to bribe them into cooperation or make sure that another man who could be bribed took their place at the proper time.
It was a job that paid well. But by this time, Helmut was ambitious. He was sick of illegality and he thought he saw a way back to Earth and the moonlight. He shot for a job as fixer with one of the big firms that dealt directly with the head men in Customs—and got it.
It was as simple as that. He was now respectable, wealthy, and his chance would come.
He worked for the big firm faithfully for five years before it did. Then there came along a transfer of goods so large and involved that he was authorized to arrange for bribes of more than three million credits. He made the arrangement, took the credits, and skipped to Earth, where, with more than enough money to cover it, he at last bought his coveted Earth citizenship.
After that, they came and got him, as he knew they would. They got him a penal sentence of ten years, but they couldn’t manage revocation of the citizenship. Through the hell of the little question room and the long trial, he carried a miniature picture in his mind of the broad white streets of Los Angeles in the moonlight and the years ahead.
But there the memory ended. He had a vague recollection of days in some penal institution, and then the mists were thick again. He beat hard knuckles against his head in a furious rage to remember.
What had happened?
They couldn’t have touched him while he was serving his sentence. And once he had put in his ten years, he would be a free man with the full rights of his Earth citizenship. Then let them try anything. They were a firm of colossal power, but Earth was filled with such colossi; and the Earth laws bore impartially on all. What, then, had gone wrong?
He groaned, rocking himself in his chair like a child, in his misery. But he was close to the answer, so close. Give him just a bit more time—
But he was not allowed the time. Before he could bring the answer to the front of his mind, the Devils came.
Their coming was heralded by the high-pitched screaming of a siren, which cut off abruptly as the spaceship came through the bright opaqueness of the sky, like the Sun through a cloud, and dropped gently toward the ground, its bright metal sides gleaming as if they had been freshly buffed. It landed not fifty feet from him. The weight of it sank its rounded bottom deep beneath the surface of the sod, so that it looked like a huge metal bowl turned face-down on the grass.
A port opened in its side and two bipedal, upright creatures stepped out of it and came toward him.
As they approached him, time seemed to slip a cog and move very slowly. He had a chance to notice small individual differences between them. They were both shorter than he by at least a head, although the one on Helmut’s left was slightly taller. They were covered with what seemed to be white fur, all but two little black buttons of eyes apiece. And they seemed to have more than the ordinary number of joints in their legs and arms, for these limbs bent like rubber hose when they walked or gesticulated. They were carrying a square box between them.
Helmut stood still, waiting for them. The only thought in his mind was that now he would never get to know how he had happened to be here, and he was sorry, for he had grown fond of the man he had once been, not the one he later turned out to be, as you might be fond of
a distant relative. Meanwhile, he could feel his breath coming with great difficulty and his heart thumping inside him as it had thumped that time he had first tried the switch that turned off the light.
He watched them come up to a few feet from him and set the box down.
As soon as it was resting on the grass, it began to vibrate and a hum came from it that was pitched at about middle C. It went up in volume until it was about as loud as a man saying “aaaah” when a doctor holds down his tongue with a depressor to look at his throat. When it had reached this point, it broke suddenly from a steady sound into a series of short, intermittent hums that gradually resolved themselves into syllables. He realized that the box was talking to him, one syllable at a time.
“Do not be afraid,” it said. “We wish to talk to you.”
Helmut said nothing. He wanted to hear what the box had to say, but, at the same time, a compulsion was mounting within him. It screamed that these others were horrible and unnatural and dangerous, that nothing they said was true, that he must turn and run to safety before it was too late.
They had been watching him for a long time, the box went on to tell him. They had listened from a safe distance to the viseo tapes he had run on the machine and finally translated his language. They had done their best to understand him from a distance and had failed, for he seemed to be unhappy and to dislike being where he was and what he was doing. And if this was so, why was he doing it? They did not understand. Where had he come from and who was he? Why was he here?
Helmut looked at the four little black eyes that gazed at him like the puzzled, half-friendly eyes of a bear he had seen in a zoo while he was a boy back on Earth. There was no possible way for white-furred faces to have shown expression, but he thought he read kindness in them, and the long loneliness of his stay on the sphere rose up and almost choked him with a desire to answer them. But that savagely irrational corner of his mind surged forward to combat the impulse toward friendliness.
He opened his mouth. Only a garbled croak came out.
He turned and ran.
He raced to the building and burst through the entrance. He threw himself at the panel that hid the switches, pulling it open and sliding aside the door that covered them. He reached for the red-handled switch, hesitated, and looked over his shoulder at the two creatures. They stood as he had left them. For the last time, he wavered under the urge to go back to them, to tell them his story, at least to listen to their side once—first.
But they were Devils!
The fear and anger inside him surged up, beating down everything else. He grasped the red switch firmly and threw it home.
What followed after that was nightmare.
He had been sitting for a long time in the cold hall and nobody had paid any attention to him. Occasionally, men in Space Guard uniforms or the white coats of laboratory workers would go past him into the Warden’s office, and come out again a little later. But all of these went past him as if he did not exist.
He shifted uncomfortably in the chair they had given him. They had outfitted him in fresh civilian clothes, which felt clinging and uncomfortable after the long months of running around on the sphere half-naked. The clothes, like the stiff waiting-room chair, the hall, and the parade of passing men all chafed on him and shrieked at him that he did not belong. He hated them.
The parade in and out of the office went on.
Finally, the door to the office opened and a young Guardsman stuck his head out.
“You can come in now,” he said.
Helmut got to his feet. He did it awkwardly, the unaccustomed clothing seeming to stick to him, his legs half-asleep from the long wait in the chair.
He walked through the door and the young Guard shut it behind him. The Warden, a spare man of Helmut’s age, with a military stiffness in his bearing and noncommittal mouth and eyes, looked up from his desk.
“You can go, Price,” he said to the Guard; and, to Helmut, “Sit down, Perran.”
Helmut lowered himself clumsily into the armchair across the desk from the Warden as the young Guardsman went out the door. The Warden stared at him for a moment.
“Well, Perran,” he said, “you deserve to congratulate yourself. You’re one of our lucky ones.”
Helmut stared back at him, numbly, for a long time. Then, abruptly, it was like being sick. Without warning, a sob came choking up in his throat and he laid his head on the desk in front of him and began to cry.
The Warden lit a cigarette and smoked it for a while, staring out the window. The sound of Helmut’s sobs was strained in the silence of the office. When they had dwindled somewhat, the Warden spoke again to Helmut.
“You’ll get over it,” he said. “That’s just the conditioning wearing off. If you didn’t break down and cry, you’d have been in serious psychological trouble. You’ll be all right now.”
Helmut lifted his head from the desk.
“What happened to me?” he asked, his throat hoarse. “What happened?”
The Warden puffed on his cigarette. “You were assigned to one of our Mousetraps,” he answered. “It’s a particularly hazardous duty for which criminals can volunteer. Normally, we only get men under death sentence or those with life terms. You’re an exception.”
“But I didn't volunteer!”
“In your case,” said the Warden, “there may have been some dirty work along the line. We are investigating. Of course, if that turns out to be the case, you’ll be entitled to reparation. I don’t suppose you remember how you came to be on the Mousetrap, do you?”
Helmut shook his head.
“It’s not surprising,” said the Warden. “Few do, although, theoretically, the conditioning is supposed to disappear after you capture a specimen. Briefly, you were given psychological treatment in order to fit you for existence alone in the Mousetrap. It’s necessary, because usually our Baits live their life out on the sphere without attracting any alien life. You were one of the lucky ones, Perran.”
“But what it it?” asked Helmut. “What is it for?”
“The Mousetrap system?” the Warden answered. “It’s our first step in the investigation of alien races with a view to integrating them into human economy. We take a sphere like the one you were on, put a conditioned criminal on it, and shove it off into unexplored territory where we have reason to suspect the presence of new races. With luck, the alien investigates the sphere and our conditioned Bait snaps the trap shut on him. Lacking luck, the Mousetrap is either not investigated or the aliens aren’t properly trapped. Our conditioned man, in that case, blows it up—and himself along with it.
“As I say, you were lucky. You’re back here safe on Kronbar, and we’ve got a fine couple of hitherto undiscovered specimens for our laboratory to investigate. What if those creatures had beaten you to the switch?”
Helmut shuddered and covered his eyes, as if, by doing so, he could shut the memory from his mind.
“The Guard Ship was so long coming,” he muttered. “So long! Days. And I had to watch them all that time caught in a force-field like flies in a spider web. I couldn’t go away without stepping out of the building and being caught myself. And they kept talking to me with that little box of theirs. They couldn’t understand why I did it. They kept asking me over and over again why I did it. But they got weaker and weaker and finally they died. Then they just hung there because the force-field wouldn’t let them fall over.”
His voice dwindled away.
The Warden cleared his throat with a short rasp. “A trying time, I’m sure,” he said. “But you have the consolation of knowing that you have performed a very useful duty for the human race.” He stood up. “And now, unless you have some more questions—”
“When can I go home?” asked Helmut. “Back to Earth.”
The Warden looked a trifle embarrassed. “Your capture of the aliens entitles you to a pardon; and of course you have Earth Citizenship—but I’m afraid we won’t be able to let you leave Kronbar.”
“Why not?” he croaked.
“Well, you see,” said the Warden, leading the way to a different door than the one through which Helmut had entered, “these specimens you brought back seem to be harmless, and
inside of a month or two we’ll probably have a task force out there to put them completely under our thumb. But we’ve had a little trouble before, when we’d release a Bait and it would turn out later that the aliens had in some way infected him. So there happens to be a blanket rule that successful Baits have to live out the rest of their life on Kronbar.” He opened the door invitingly. “You can go out this way, if you want. Private entrance. It leads directly to the street.”
Slowly, Helmut rose to his feet and shambled over to the door. For one last time a vision of moonlight on the bay at Santa Monica mocked him. A wild scheme flashed through his head in which he overpowered the Warden, stole his uniform and bluffed his way to a Guard Patrol ship, where he forced the crew to take him either to Earth, or, failing that, out beyond the Frontier to warn the white-furred kin of the two alien beings he had killed.
Then the scheme faded from his mind. It was no use. The odds were too great. There were too many like the Warden. There were always too many of them for Helmut and those like him. He turned away from the Warden, ignoring the Warden’s outstretched hand.
He went out the door and down the steps into the brilliant daylight of Kronbar.
Kronbar, the Bright Planet, so-called because, since it winds an eccentric orbit around the twin stars of a binary system, there is neither dark nor moonlight, and the Sun is always shining.
The Star Road Page 23