Space Station 1

by Frank Belknap Long

  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 withou
t 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.