Chapter IV: Part 4

"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 Corriston 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."

"You'll be taking a chance, all right," Corriston said. "What would you do if the observation glass started showing small pits in the hull from a very large shower of micro-meteorites? Can the auto-controls stop those pits from spreading? I've seen a ship stippled all over in less than ten minutes. The meteor guards won't deflect micro-meteorites, and you've got to alter your velocity and angle of drive and a lot of other things fast. And what happens when your instruments start showing light spectra peculiarities that can't be measured in angstroms? Just a little oddity like that can force you to change your course, but the auto-pilot won't know a thing about it.

"And when you hit the Martian atmosphere and start firing against the direction of motion, how much good do you think limited knowledge will do you? Remember, nearly all of the journey will have been made in free fall, and in free fall the auto-controls are fairly efficient. But the instant you hit the atmosphere the slightest miscalculation in the utilization of your fuel reserves can lead to absolute disaster. I don't know what makes you tick, of course. You may get a distorted kind of pleasure from thinking of yourself as a man marked for death, the same kind of pleasure you get from killing people."

There was silence for a moment. Then Henley drew in his breath sharply and said: "Are you threatening me, Corriston?"

"Just warning you," Corriston said.

"I don't take kindly to warnings, Corriston. If you're not careful I'll put a bullet right through you."

"Do the men who hired you know how you operate, Henley?"

It was a stab in the dark, but it brought a quick, enraged reply. "How I operate is my own business. And I don't like the word 'hire.' I'd advise you not to use it again. Ramsey's uranium steal made every miner on Mars decide straight off that I was the right man to lead them. They're all in back of me, but they don't control me. I take orders from no one."

"Maybe they wouldn't be in back of you if they knew what a scoundrel you are," Corriston said.

"You may think whatever you please. I don't mind your calling me a scoundrel if it will ease your mind. Just don't use the word 'hire.'"

"I don't see why you should object to it," Corriston went on recklessly. "It protects you, in a way. It's a good word to hide behind. If the colonists knew the truth about you, I don't think you'd last very long."

"I'll last long enough to help you dig your own grave, Corriston, if you keep on with that line of talk. You're the real lucky one. I missed killing you on the Station because my aim was bad. You were an unexpected complication and you were keeping me upset. I didn't like it at all."

"Go ahead. I knew too much. Was that it?"

"Partly. I didn't know how much you knew or how much you'd guessed. But you were in a position to start a lot of high-powered stuff that could have interfered with my plans in a dozen ways. Now I happen to need you--to a limited extent. But I'm warning you again. Don't trade on your luck. Don't force me to kill you, Corriston."

"Perhaps I won't. Perhaps we can strike a compromise. As I see it, there's no need for immediate violence. Suppose you take me just a little more fully into your confidence. It can do you no harm now; and there are a few things I'm still curious about."

"All right, Corriston. What is it you'd like to know?"

"How did you manage to stay concealed on the Station when Ramsey's officers were in full command? You had considerable freedom of movement, apparently, even if you had to move with caution."

"We had everything planned in advance," Henley said. "We got to one of Ramsey's men with bribe money the miners raised, an executive officer named Stockton. We made it worth his while. We had a carefully worked out plan for smuggling Helen Ramsey off the shuttle ship and keeping her hidden until the Mars ship arrived. Stockton had everything prepared: a concealed compartment, food, made our problem more complicated. Stockton helped us get out of the quarantine cage and kept right on protecting us until we no longer needed him."

"Then you must have known about the masks. You must have known before you arrived that Ramsey's men were in complete control of the Station."

"Sure we knew, long before Earth found out. We know exactly what had taken place. You'd be surprised what a few carefully placed bribes can do. We knew that Ramsey had laid himself wide open by substituting his own men for the Station's commanding officers. We knew exactly how vulnerable he was."

"I see," Corriston said. "Ramsey was so vulnerable that any determined attack made upon him would have had a fair chance of succeeding. But you worked out a plan for striking at him in a wholly criminal way, through his daughter. Did the miners know that, Henley? Or did they just give you their backing in a general way? You probably seemed to them the kind of man who would go after Ramsey hammer and tongs."

"Suppose we just say they knew I'd find a way to make Ramsey meet all of our demands." Henley smiled thinly. "The details they left to me." He paused an instant, then went on: "Right after Helen Ramsey disappeared, I did some hard thinking. It occurred to me that she might be wearing a mask too. So I watched all of the women in the quarantine cage and when one of them slipped out I followed her."

"As simple as that!"

"It wasn't simple. The girl's disappearance on the shuttle ship had me completely baffled at first. It wasn't until we reached the Station that the mask possibility occurred to me."

"We talked about that once before, remember?"

"You were lucky then, Corriston. I tried very hard to kill you, simply because I thought you knew more about Helen Ramsey's disappearance than you actually did. In that dark cargo compartment, with time running out on me, I couldn't think very clearly. Anything more you'd like to know?"

"Yes. How many men did Ramsey succeed in substituting for the rightful officers? How many, beside the commander?"

"Eight, including the commander. His real name was Henry Hervet. Five were executive officers, two were security guards. They're all dead now."

Corriston's mouth went dry. "Including the one who sold out and helped you?"

"Yes, Stockton was the first to die. He was dead before the others tried to board this ship. I made sure of that. He was too greedy for his own good."

"You got back the money you gave him, I suppose."

"Naturally. Money is of very little value to a dead man."

Corriston had gone very pale. There was dread in his eyes when he asked: "And the real Commander Clement? What happened to him? Where is he now?"

"Stockton told me that after a mask was made of his face he was imprisoned somewhere on the Station," Henley said. "Clement and seven others. Ramsey gave Hervet strict orders not to kill them. I don't know where Clement is now, but I can make a pretty good guess. He has probably been released and is in full command of the Station again."

Henley stood very still for a moment, very straight and still, and Corriston could feel the gun nudging the small of his back again.

"I may as well tell you now that I'm going to have to lock you in, Corriston," Henley said. "When I turn the key on this room your sole responsibility will be right here with the controls. You'll have to sleep and eat here, and I don't intend to bring you any fancy meals. You'll hear a knock on the door three times a day. You'll get a tray with some food on it.

"You'll have to decide for yourself how much sleep you can afford to take. And remember this: I'll be keeping a careful check on every navigational move you make. Not a too accurate check, perhaps, but I'll know enough. If you throw the ship off course I'll find out about it, and I'll want to know why. Be ready with your answers and make sure they carry weight. Any more questions, Corriston?"

Corriston shook his head. "No. The quicker you get out of here the better I'll feel."

"All right, I'll leave you now. It's naturally to my benefit to try to see things from your point of view. And just in case you're worrying about Helen Ramsey--don't. Nothing is going to happen to her, provided you stay in line. If you want me don't hesitate to buzz. That's what the intercom is for."

Corriston looked around once when Henley was on his way to the door. The man hadn't turned away from him. He was backing toward the door, his lips tight, his eyes mocking, coldly derisive.

"Did you think I'd give you a chance to catch me with my guard down, Corriston? If you did, you're a bigger fool than I thought you. This gun stays with me, and it's going to be centered on you every time I open this door. Remember that, Lieutenant."

The journey to Mars was a long wait. It was a standing and a waiting, with a hundred corrective power maneuvers to be checked at every hour of the day and night. It was sleep without rest and rest without sleep, and it was a battle against dizziness and the despair which can come to a pilot when a panel starts flickering a red danger signal in the utter loneliness of interplanetary space.

The ship was never too hot, never too cold, for the temperature was kept stable by thermostat-controlled radiation shutters and the air was kept pure with the aid of carbon filters. But to Corriston the air conditioning system with all of its elaborate controls seemed only to point up and emphasize the lack of stability elsewhere, both inside and outside the ship.

There were so many things that could go wrong--tragically, dangerously, fatally wrong. For no reason at all, for instance, a recently inspected filter or gasket could go completely bad, and a "no juice" blow up threaten. Or a magnetic guidance tape could jam and stop recording, and the ship could deviate a hair's breadth from its prescribed path and forget to swing completely back again.

Eventually a correction might be made, but if you failed to correct it in time, that one tiny deviation could spell disaster. With every day out there were more details to check, while obstacles mounted and it was impossible ever to quite catch up with what you had to do, and go on with complete confidence to the next task.

Worst of all, Corriston was denied all opportunity to see or speak to the woman he loved.

* * * * *

The trip to Mars took fourteen days. And in all that time Corriston did not once see Helen Ramsey. He saw only Henley, heard only the deep drone of the engines, and at times, when he was close to despair, the dull, steady beating of his own heart.

The door to his prison would open and a tray of food would be pushed forward into the compartment. Then the door would close quietly again, and he would be alone.

In some respects he was imprisoned in a way that was almost too unbelievable for the human mind to grasp. The walls of his cell were the constellations, the barriers to his freedom space itself.

The chartroom was a cell too, but it had no real confining power over him. He could walk out of the chart room simply by unlocking the viewport and swinging it wide open. He could walk out into the larger prison of space--and die in five seconds with his lungs on fire.

On the thirteenth day Mars loomed out of the inscrutable darkness ahead like some great accusing eye that had fastened itself on the ship with a malignance all its own. It filled one-fifth of the viewport, rust-red over most of its surface, but also pale blue in patches, a blue which shaded off into a kaleidoscope of colors that seemed to hover chiefly like the shifting, almost hueless cloudiness of a hot summer haze.

On the morning of the fifteenth day, the ship, decelerating under sidethrusts from its powerful retardation rockets, cut off its engines and, free-coasting through a landing ellipse of seventy degrees, landed safely on Mars.

It landed in the open desert, twenty miles from Ramsey's citadel, and eighty-seven miles from the first Martian colony. But Corriston received no praise at all for his navigational skill.

Five minutes after the engines ceased to throb a blow on the head felled him, a brutal blow from behind.

"Tie him up," Henley said. "We're not killing him, not just yet."

"But I don't see why--" a cold voice started to protest.

"Damn you, Stone, I know what I'm doing. Keep your thoughts to yourself."

15

Corriston sat very straight and still in the darkness, his back against cold metal, his eyes on the distant glow of the heating lamp. He could see the lamp through a wide panel opening in the bulkhead directly opposite him. Wherever his eyes fell there was the glimmer of light on metal. But the warmth of the lamp would have left him close to freezing had it not been supplemented by the heating units inside his heavy clothing.

He didn't know how he was going to free himself. His hands were securely handcuffed and the sharp metal was biting into his flesh. Turning and twisting about did him no good at all.

He didn't know how he was going to free himself, but he refused to give up hope. There had to be a way.

You could begin on one of your captors, on a human being with a great deal to lose or gain. You could try to penetrate his armor, sound out his human weaknesses. Or you could set to work on the handcuffs at your wrists, struggling in an almost hopeless attempt to draw your hands through them in some way or get them unlocked without a key.

He decided to try the first way. He raised his voice. "Stone?" he called out. "Can you hear me?"

There ensued a silence. Then Stone's voice came back loud and clear. "Sure, I can hear you. What do you want?"

"I'd like to talk to you," Corriston said.

"About what?"

"About you. What are you getting out of this? You've nothing to lose by being frank with me. Henley would never believe anything I might say."

"You're right about that," Stone said. "But why should I talk to you? I'll tell you something that may surprise you. Keeping you alive was Henley's idea. He figured we might need you. He figured that if Ramsey wouldn't listen to us he might listen to you--a Space Station officer. He figured we might need you to convince Ramsey we're not bluffing. Someone who _knows_ we're not bluffing. Someone who knows we'd kill his daughter before we gave him a third chance to make up his mind and hand over the dough."

"A _third_ chance? I thought--"

"You think too much, Corriston. I'll spell it out for you. Henley is on his way now to give Ramsey his first chance. He may succeed or he may not. If he doesn't succeed he'll come back and take you to the fortress with him. That will be Ramsey's second chance. He won't get a third."

"I see," Corriston said. "But I asked you a question you didn't answer. How much do you stand to get out of this? What is your split, your percentage? Don't tell me; I'll guess. Henley is promising you fifteen or twenty thousand dollars. But how much ransom do you think he'll get from Ramsey? Two million, at least. Possibly twenty million. Does that kind of split satisfy you, Stone? Remember, when that ransom is paid, every law enforcement agency on Earth goes into operation. It starts off in a quiet suite of offices, with just one owl-faced little guy shuffling some papers.

"It starts off that way, but in the space of one hour you're a man marked for destruction. The military goes into action. From Earth to Mars your photograph is televised. Ten thousand trained experts are thrown into the operation. You've suddenly become important, an accessory to the kidnapping of the wealthiest girl on Earth.

"How does that set with you, Stone? They'll get you in the end. No, I'll qualify that. They'll get you unless Ramsey gives you a split of at least a million dollars. With a million dollars you'd have a one in five chance of covering your tracks, of hiding out indefinitely. But Ramsey won't give you anything like that kind of a split. You know that as well as I do. He'll have to cover his own tracks and he'll need all of the two million--or twenty million--for himself. Or most of it.

"I'm not telling you anything you don't know. Your real interest lies in preventing that kidnapping before it's too late. He's getting ready to double-cross you, Stone. It was in the back of his mind all the time. He's looking out only for himself."

"I don't think so," Stone said. "My split, since you brought the matter up, is half a million. He's demanding six million in ransom. That's twelve times what I'm getting and what Jim Saddler is getting. But I've no complaints. He organized and planned everything.

"I'll be honest with you. That doesn't mean a damn thing to me. I'm no good when it comes to taking a risk like that, but does that mean he's better than I am? Do you think I'd string along with him if I believed that for a moment?

"Hell, no. I'm using him, don't you see? I'm letting him take the big gamble, and I stay in the background ... doing practically nothing. So if I clear a half million, what have I to complain about?"

"Nothing, I suppose," Corriston said.

"You're damned right. But I don't think I like the way you said that. There's something in your voice that I don't like."

"That's too bad," Corriston said.

"Maybe you think I don't mean what I said. Is that it?"

Corriston tightened his lips. He could hear Stone's footsteps coming toward him through the darkness. They were heavy steps, advancing slowly, with a slight shuffling sound. They paused twice and then came on again, and the silence between pauses seemed almost crushingly thick.

Corriston suddenly realized that he knew almost nothing about Stone. He had taken the man pretty much for granted, a killer's accomplice without much personality, a sullen-faced scoundrel who was good at obeying orders and standing ready to silence anyone Henley disliked with a well-placed kick in the head.

But what if he did have personality after all? Suppose there were hidden depths in him, a hidden reservoir of malice which he kept concealed until he felt a mad impulse to start laughing or bragging or proving to someone he disliked that he was as potentially dangerous as Henley--perhaps even more dangerous. And suppose he decided to back up his boasting with a quick knife thrust or a gun blast at almost point-blank range?

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 without 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.