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.”
The Frank Belknap Long Science Fiction Novel Page 10