The Chalice of Death (33 page)

Thurdan was staring intently through the thick plastic of the door, shielded both by that and by the bubble of force that cloaked his entire room. There was no way Mantell could possibly get inside. But if he could induce Thurdan to come out.…

He seized Myra roughly and thrust her forward. She stood there, arms outstretched to Thurdan.

“I brought her, too,” Mantell said. “She's yours. She wants to explain. There never was anything serious between her and me, Ben. Come on out of there. Don't give up Starhaven now. Don't give up everything you've built, all you've planned, just for
this
!”

Mantell saw he was getting through to him now, communicating. Thurdan's lips were fumbling for words; his deep hard eyes flicked back and forth, bewildered, confused.

Poor Ben! Mantell thought with real compassion. It was a saddening thing to watch a man like that crack open like a moldy melon.

Thurdan's hand wavered on the switch, and he grimaced to show his inner conflict. Then in a quick convulsive gesture he yanked downward sharply, cutting off the screen-field that was a barrier around the room. A long moment passed. Mantell heard him jiggling with the lock; then the door swung slowly open.

Thurdan came out.

He was walking unsteadily, swaying and faltering like a mighty oak about to fall. In a surprisingly quiet voice, in a voice that was being held in tight rein to keep it from turning into a hysterical babble, he said, “All right, Johnny. Give me the screen.”

Mantell tossed the worthless model to him. Thurdan caught it with one great hand.

“There,” Mantell said. “Go ahead. Strap it to your waist.”

Myra was sobbing gently behind him, a low steady sound. For once Mantell felt no sensation of fear, only a cold, icy calmness inside him that seemed to fill his entire body. He watched as Thurdan carefully strapped the rig around himself.

Then Thurdan said crooningly, “Come here, Myra. Here to me.”

“Just a second, Ben.” Mantell interposed himself between Thurdan and the girl. “We have to test the thing first. Don't you want to test it?”

Thurdan's eyes flashed. “What the hell is this?”

Mantell pulled out the pocket welding torch. “You can trust me, Ben. Can't you?”

“Sure, Johnny. I trust you. About as far as I can throw you!”

Suddenly sane, realizing he had been tricked into coming out of the impregnable safety of his room, Thurdan came lumbering toward the two of them, murder blazing in his eyes.

Mantell waited just a moment and then turned on the welding torch.

There was a momentary sputtering hiss as the arc formed; then the globe of light spurted out and cascaded down over him. Thurdan howled and flailed out with his arms, hitting nothing. He took one difficult last step, like a man slogging grimly forward through a sea of molasses. He was dead then, but he didn't know it.

Mantell heard a whimper. Then Thurdan fell.

He clicked off the torch. Ben Thurdan was dead at last, dead by a trick, lured and baited to his death like a great mountain bear.

Mantell looked away from the charred thing on the floor. It wasn't pretty.

“Sorry, Ben,” he said softly. “And you'll never understand why we had to do it. You never would have understood.”

Inside the room, a quick glance at the meters told Mantell that the defense screens were down all over Starhaven. Thurdan had lowered them before he finished talking to the SP Commander. For the first time in decades, the sanctuary planet lay utterly open to Space Patrol attack.

Mantell jabbed down on the communicator stud and when the operator responded with the semi-automatic “Yes, Mr. Thurdan,” Mantell said, “This isn't Thurdan. It's John Mantell. Get me back the call that was on this line a minute ago—SP headquarters on Earth. Thurdan was talking to Commander Whitestone.”

The ten-second delay of subradio communication followed, while arcs leaped across the grayness of hyper-space, meshed, locked, returned.

The vision screen brightened. The face of Whitestone reappeared on the screen.

“The fleet's on its way, Thurdan,” the SP man began immediately. “Don't tell me you've changed your mind, or—”

He stopped. Mantell said quickly, “Thurdan's dead. There's been a sort of a revolution on Starhaven, and I'm in charge. My name is—”

“
Mantell
?” The SP Commander burst in suddenly, interrupting. “You're still alive, Mantell? Then why didn't you report to us? What's been going on all this time, man?”

Stunned, Mantell looked up at the image in the vision screen. When he spoke, his voice came out as a harsh croaking whisper:

“What did you say? How do you know me?”

“Know you? I picked you for this job myself, Mantell! We probed every member of the Patrol until we found one who could adapt well enough.”

The floor seemed to quake under Mantell. He took a hesitant step backward, groped for what had been Thurdan's chair, and sank numbly into it.

“You say I'm in the Patrol?”

“A member of the Fourteenth Earth Patrol, Mantell,” was the calm and utterly believable reply. “And we chose you to enter Starhaven bearing a false set of memories. It was a brand-new technique our espionage system had developed in order to get you past Thurdan's psychprobing.”

“This can't be true.”

“We invented a wholly fictitious background for you and instilled it sub-hypnotically, with a posthypnotic command implanted that would enable you to revert to your true identity twenty-four hours after you had been subjected to Thurdan's psychprobe.”

“Johnny, what's he talking about?” Myra asked in a wondering voice.

“I wish I knew,” Mantell said hollowly.

“What's that, Mantell? You're in complete charge of Starhaven now, you say? Fine work, boy! The fleet will arrive in less than an hour to take care of the job of mopping up.”

“You don't seem to understand,” Mantell said in a flat, dead voice. “Something went wrong. I never recovered my—my true identity, as you say. I don't know anything about this business of my being an SP man. So far as I know I was a beachcomber on the planet Mulciber for seven years, and before that I was a defense-screen technician on Earth.”

“Yes, yes, of course that's so—that's the identity pattern we established—though you were a trained defense-screen man originally, of course. But—”

“But I don't remember anything about the SP!” Mantell protested. “Only my own memories are real!”

The SP man was silent a long moment.

Finally he said, “They assured me the treatment would be a success—that you would recover your original identity once you were past Thurdan's psychprobes.”

“I didn't.”

“That's easily fixed. We'll have our psychosurgeons restore your original identity just as soon as you're back on Earth.”

Mantell shook his head dizzily, trying to comprehend the magnitude of this thing Whitestone seemed to be telling him.

The room, Myra, the image of Whitestone, Starhaven itself, finally the universe—all took on a strange semblance of utter unreality, like the purplish glow objects get when one stares at them just the right way through a prism. Mantell seemed to be moving in a world of dreams—of nightmares.

Myra was very close to him, almost touching him.

“Is this true?” she asked. “Or is it just some SP trick?”

“I don't know,” Mantell murmured. “Right now I don't know anything at all.”

Whitestone said, “It appears that the project was a success, at any rate. Whether you're in full possession of your self-awareness or not, the fact remains that your mission has been fulfilled, Mantell. Starhaven's screens are down. Within an hour an SP squadron will be there, cleaning out the universe's sorriest hell-hole. Thanks to you, Mantell.”

“I'm not so sure of that,” Mantell said heavily, weighing each word and releasing it individually, syllable by syllable.

“What did you say?”

Without answering, Mantell sank back tiredly in the chair, and a torrent of images flooded through his mind.

The days at Klingsan Defense on Earth; the long weary years on Mulciber, years of scrabbling for crusts of bread and cadging drinks.

Now this faded little man in a Space Patrol uniform was trying to tell him that all this was unreal, that the memories in his mind were artificially implanted memories, placed there by skilled psychosurgeons solely for the purpose of getting an SP man through the defenses of Ben Thurdan's fortress, Starhaven.

Well, perhaps they were.

Perhaps.

But to Mantell, they were real. To him, this was the life he had lived. That suffering he remembered was real. It had actually happened to him.

And Starhaven was real.

The SP—that, he thought, was a vague dream, a shining bubble of unreality, a hated enemy.

Where had it begun? Had he actually killed a man on Mulciber and fled to Starhaven in a stolen SP ship? Or had he been released from some point in space after they had fixed up his mind, and had two dummy remote-operated ships been rigged to “pursue” him to Starhaven?

A moment of choice faced him. He knew he could go back to Earth, and there have Mulciber and all its attendant bitterness peeled from his mind like the outer skin of an onion, and emerge fresh, clean, once again an honored member of the Space Patrol.

Or he could stay here. With Myra.

“Mantell, are you all right?” Whitestone's image demanded loudly from the screen. “Your face has turned utterly white.”

“I'm thinking,” Mantell said.

He was thinking of Ben Thurdan's dream, and of what the Patrol would do to Starhaven once they had finally penetrated its defenses. Twenty million fugitives would be carted off to justice at last; honor and decency would be restored to the galaxy.

But was that the only way?

What, he thought, if Starhaven were to be allowed to continue as it was, as a sanctuary for criminals—but run by Myra and himself, neither of whom was a law-breaker. Suppose—suppose they were gradually to transform Ben Thurdan's metal fortress into a planet for rehabilitation—without the knowledge of those subtly being rehabilitated.

That seemed like a better idea to Mantell than opening the planet up to the SP. Much better.

Very quietly he said, “You'd better tell that fleet of yours to turn right around and head for home, Whitestone.”

“Eh? What's that?”

“I'm suggesting that you might as well save the government a lot of lost time. Because when that fleet gets here, they'll discover that Starhaven is just as impregnable as ever. I've decided to stay here, Whitestone. I'm putting the screens back up again. And Starhaven doesn't want anything further to do with the galaxy.”

“Mantell, this is madness! You're an SP man, a native of Earth! Where's your loyalty! Where's your sense of honor, Mantell?”

Mantell smiled broadly. “Honor? Loyalty? I'm Johnny Mantell of Starhaven, late of the planet Mulciber, before that a drunk and disorderly employee of Klingsan Defense Screens. That's what my memory tells me, and that's who I am. And I'm not letting Starhaven fall into the hands of the SP.”

He moistened his dry lips and managed a grin. Whitestone stared incredulously at him and started to say something. Mantell reached up and broke the contact; the face dissolved into an electronic whirl of colors, and was gone.

Mantell felt very tired, suddenly.

Am I right
? he thought.
Should I do this
?

Yes, he answered himself.

It had been a busy day. Thunder boomed in the sky outside. That meant it was nearly two in the morning—for, at two, thunder sounded over Starhaven, and then the nightly rains came, refreshing the planet, sweeping away the staleness of the day and leaving everything clean and bright and new.

Myra was smiling at him.

He reached forward and tugged down the master switch; instantly, meters and dials leaped into jiggling life. Once again, Starhaven was surrounded by an impassable network of force-shields; once again, they were protected from the outside.

And within the shield, Mantell thought, the greatest experiment in criminal reform in the history of the universe was about to begin. On a planet without law the galaxy's most hardened criminals would be converted into useful citizens—segregated from the rest of the galaxy. Starhaven would become a giant prison barred in both directions, Mantell thought.

The rain started to fall, pattering lightly down. Mantell pulled Myra close against him for a moment.

Then he released her. There was time for that later. “You'd better get in touch with the rest of the Provisional Government of the Republic of Starhaven and let them know that Ben's dead,” he told her. “We have plenty of work to do.”

Shadow on the Stars

To Randall Garrett

Chapter One

Ewing woke slowly, sensing the coldness all about him. It was slowly withdrawing down the length of his body; his head and shoulders were out of the freeze now, the rest of his body gradually emerging. He stirred as well as he could, and the delicately spun web of foam that had cradled him in the journey across space shivered as he moved.

He extended a hand and heaved downward on the lever six inches from his wrist. A burst of fluid shot forward from the spinnerettes above him, dissolving the web that bound him. The coldness drained from his legs. Stiffly he rose, moving as if he were very old, and stretched gingerly.

He had slept eleven months, fourteen days, and some six hours, according to the panel above his sleeping area. The panel registered time in Galactic Absolute Units. And the second, the Galactic Absolute Unit of temporal measure, was an arbitrary figure, accepted by the galaxy only because it had been devised by the mother world.

Ewing touched an enameled stud and a segment of the inner surface of the ship's wall swung away, revealing a soft glowing vision-plate. A planet hung centered in the green depths of the plate—a planet green itself, with vast seas bordering its continents.