"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 C
orriston 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."
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