The Chalice of Death

by Robert Silverberg

  The ship’s mass-detector buzzed once, twice, and he knew that his two pursuers had detected his action and had themselves made the shift-over maneuver only seconds after he had. But Mantell hardly cared about them now. The long chase was just about over. His goal was in sight.

  Ahead of him, the massive bulk of Starhaven seemed to take up the entire sky.

  He saw it as a giant coin floating in the dark sea of space, a burnished fiery copper coin studded with rivets the size of whales. He saw it full face, head-on, seeming to float with agonizing slowness toward him.

  Behind him lay Nestor, the red super-giant sun whose faint rays barely managed to illuminate Starhaven’s surface. Starhaven had no need of Nestor’s radiation, though. It was shelled over entirely with metal, and it was completely self-sufficient powerwise.

  He locked his ship into an automatic orbit around the metal world. Consulting his mass-detectors, he saw that his pursuers were doing the same thing. But for the first time since he had started his wild flight, hundreds of light-years away on Mulciber, he felt calm and confident. He couldn’t be caught now. He had the same kind of ship as his pursuers rode, and it was operating now at full ion-drive velocity. They couldn’t do any better than that. The gap between the ships would have to remain constant. All they could do was tag along behind him, staring at his red exhaust stream.

  Mantell snapped on the communicator. After the first quick hum of contact the Space Patrol scramblers cut in, but Mantell speedily switched circuits on them, throwing his beam up into the Very High Frequencies where their scramblers could have no effect.

  He said, “Come in, Starhaven. Come in!”

  For half a minute, thirty ticking tense seconds, there was only silence. Swiveling in the pilot’s bucket-seat, Mantell peered through the rear visiscreens and saw the two snub-nosed Patrol ships hanging in there grimly, waiting for him to make some kind of mistake, waiting for him to falter.

  “Come on in, Starhaven,” he said again.

  A moment’s pause. Then:

  “This is Starhaven. Identify.”

  Mantell moistened his lips. His voice came out almost as a croak. “My name is Mantell, Johnny Mantell. I’m a fugitive from the Patrol. Two SP ships chased me down from Mulciber. They’re still on my tail. Can you give me sanctuary?”

  “We see the SP ships,” came the calm reply. “But you’re in an SP ship yourself, Mantell. Where did you get it?”

  “Stole it.” The ship went whipping around Starhaven for the fiftieth time since he had fixed it in its orbit, and behind came the hopeful pursuers. “I’m asking sanctuary. They want me on a murder rap.”

  A fake murder rap, he thought. But he didn’t tell them that.

  “Okay,” the Starhaven operator replied. Then he turned offmike for a second and muttered something inaudible to Mantell. Then he said, “Keep in your orbit, Mantell. We’ll handle your pals, and then pick you up.”

  Mantell grinned in relief and joy. “Thanks. Be seeing you soon.”

  “Yeah. Sure, Mantell.”

  He broke off contact and turned to keep his eye on the rear visiscreens. Now that he knew he was home free, he could afford to have a little fun for a moment. He jabbed buttons, cutting velocity ten per cent, just enough to seem to give the Patrolmen behind him one last fighting chance.

  They were wide awake. A double blast of energy immediately raked his screens, but his defenses held. He chuckled. Then there was a sudden burst of light from the metal-skinned planet just ahead.

  He knew what that light was. It meant that the legendary heavy-cycle guns of Starhaven were coming into play. He watched as the first of his pursuers drew a blast of energy. The Patrolman’s ship shuddered as his defense screens labored to absorb the overload, the battery of energy guns below sent up an additional blast. The total megawattage must have been enough to sink a satellite. One moment the little Space Patrol ship was there; a second later, it wasn’t.

  As for the other Patrolman, he didn’t seem minded to stay around and fight a one-man battle with the impregnable fortress that was Starhaven. He turned tail frantically and streaked for home at six gees.

  The gunners below let him run for about six seconds, no more. Then a lazy spiral of energy came barrelling up from Starhaven to engulf the fleeing ship. Suddenly Mantell was alone in the sky.

  Free. Safe.

  He hung limply to his control rack, waiting for them to pick him up.

  He didn’t have to wait long. His ship completed another circuit in its orbit round Starhaven, and this time he noticed a hatch opening in the bright metal skin, fifty thousand feet below him.

  On his next time around a spaceship had come forth from the hatch and was rising rapidly. On completion of one more circular swing, the Starhaven ship had matched orbit with him and was following him along quite nicely.

  Only this was no tiny Space Patrol ship. It was a monster of a spacefaring vessel, and it overhauled him with ridiculous ease. He lowered his screens and let the other ship’s metamagnetic grapples snare him without resistance; gently he was drawn “upward” into the belly of the big ship.

  A hatch in the ship closed smoothly over him. His communicator crackled into life, and a heavy, deep voice said, “Stay right where you are, Mantell, and don’t try anything. We’ll come to get you out of your ship. Open your rear airlock.”

  He nudged the control panel and the lock slid open. There was silence outside, and darkness. He became conscious of a faint hissing sound that grew rapidly stronger, and he smelled a sickly sort of sweetness in the atmosphere.

  Gas, he thought. In momentary panic he reached for the airlock control, but he debated shutting the lock for a fraction of a second and in that fraction of a second the gas robbed him of all volitional control over his muscles and nerves.

  He rose uncertainly, tottered and fell. Darkness came, then nothingness.

  Mantell awoke, feeling a cottony taste in his mouth. He was no longer wearing his space suit. He was in a cabin in the other ship, surrounded by four solemn-looking men in civilian clothes. One of them was holding a blaster pointed in the general vicinity of Mantell’s mid-section.

  The one with the blaster said calmly, “Please don’t move, Mantell. You’re on your way to Starhaven now. We’ll be entering the shell any minute.”

  Mantell shook his head, to help clear it of the effects of the gas. He felt soggy and angry. He said, “What’s the idea of all this guff? Why the gun? How come you gave me the gas? A fine reception you guys hand out to friendly visitors!”

  The man with the gun said, “We like Starhaven the way it is. We intend to keep it that way. And every stranger who wants to come here is suspect until he is qualified for residence.”

  “For all we know,” said one of the others, “this is some kind of Space Patrol deal to slip a spy into Starhaven.”

  “An SP deal that costs them two ships and four lives?” Mantell snapped hotly. “That doesn’t make sense. I’m—”

  “You’re nobody, until you’ve been psychprobed,” the man with the blaster said.

  “Psychprobed?”

  “That’s standard processing for everyone who enters Starhaven for the first time. It’s a security measure.”

  Mantell knew his face was going pale. Psychprobing was no plaything for amateurs, even the usual psychologists. Its procedure was complex and took years to master. “How can you—I mean, do you have anyone here qualified to do the job? You can mess up a man’s mind for good if your technique is off even the slightest bit.”

  The other grinned coolly. “Relax, Mantell. The head of our psychprobe is named Erik Harmon. Does that make you feel any better?”

  Erik Harmon? Mantell blinked, digging back into old memories. Harmon, here? The famous scientist who had invented and then perfected principles and techniques of psychprobing, and who had mysteriously vanished from civilization nearly twenty years before?

  “I guess he’ll do,” Mantell admitted wryly.

  The ship glided
to a feather-light landing. The steady whispering hum of the inertialess drive ceased abruptly and the landing stabilizers shot out on either side of the big ship. Mantell felt tense; a muscle throbbed in his cheek. He heard the hatch in Starhaven’s metal surface clang resoundingly shut far above him.

  The man with the blaster grinned amiably and broke the dead silence by saying, “Welcome to Starhaven, Mantell. Your first stop will be a visit with the boss. Come along and let’s get your mind looked at.”

  Chapter Three

  Five minutes later, after the landing and the skin Of the ship decontaminated by the radion grids, Mantell found himself standing outside the big vessel, in the middle of an extremely well-equipped spaceport, on what seemed to him just like any sunny afternoon on any Earth-type planet of the galaxy. It was utterly impossible to tell that Starhaven was completely encased by a metal sheath.

  Overhead the sky was blue, flecked with convincing puffy clouds, and a yellow sun glowed brightly. Even though he realized the sun was probably a deuterium-fusion synthetic of some kind, he was unable to keep from thinking of it as a real star.

  As for the planet’s metal skin, there was no sign of it. Most likely it was ten or twelve miles, perhaps as much as twenty, above ground level, and artfully disguised to look like an authentic sky. The engineers who had built this world, Mantell thought, had really known their stuff, regardless of which side of the law, they had happened to operate on.

  “You like the setup?” Mantell’s guide asked. He seemed to take a personal pride in it.

  “It’s pretty convincing. You wouldn’t know there was a roof overhead.”

  The other chuckled. “Oh, you know it all right, any time the Space Patrol decides to come after us. But they haven’t made a dent in thirty years, ever since Ben Thurdan built Starhaven.”

  Just then a landcar came squirreling silently across the field to meet them. It drew up almost at Mantell’s feet, a small tear-shaped bubble of a car whose driver waited patiently for Mantell and his cicerone to climb in. Mantell took one look back and saw that a gantry crane had been wheeled up alongside the big Starhaven ship; they were removing the tiny SP vessel from the hold of the monster that had picked him up in space.

  He moistened his lips nervously. The idea of submitting to a psychprobe didn’t amuse him very much, even with Dr. Erik Harmon himself doing the probing.

  “Where are we heading?” he asked.

  “To Ben Thurdan’s headquarters. That’s where all new arrivals get processed.”

  Mantell sat back silently as the car weaved its way through heavy traffic in a busy-looking city. He found himself wondering what kind of industries a world like Starhaven could have—a planet that was populated exclusively by criminals.

  By criminals like me, he thought.

  A sudden guilt-feeling racked him as he mentally retraced the trail that had brought him to Starhaven, to this dead-end, renegade planet, the outcast world among the other law-abiding worlds of the galaxy. He tried to tell himself that he was innocent, that they had kicked him around unjustly, that he had been handed a raw deal.

  But he could hardly convince himself, any more. It had been so long since he had been a respected member of society that he had almost started believing the things they said about him.

  Well, he had plenty of time to get used to the idea of being a criminal. Starhaven was a sanctuary, but nobody ever left it. Nobody with any sense, anyway. This was the one place in the galaxy where a wanted man could live in blissful safety.

  The car pulled up outside an impressive-looking office building that loomed big over the other buildings in the vicinity. Mantell was escorted upstairs in a gravshaft, accompanied by men with drawn blasters. They were taking no chances.

  “Do you go through this rigmarole with every new arrival?” Mantell asked.

  “Every one, without exception.”

  A door rolled back smoothly on photon-impulse bearings, and Mantell saw a welcoming committee ready for him. Three people sat expectantly inside an office that was furnished as if for the use of the President of the Galactic Federation.

  One of the three was a thin man in a white smock, old, tired-looking, his face a parchment of tiny crevices and canyons. That would have to be Erik Harmon, “The Father of the Psychprobe.” To the right of the scientist stood a tall, fiercely glowering man in dramatic purple synthilk shirt and bright yellow tights; he was bald and looked about forty, but he was probably older. He seemed to radiate power. Obviously, Mantell thought, this must be Ben Thurdan, Starhaven’s founder and guiding genius.

  And next to him was a girl with hair the color of Thurdan’s shirt and eyes the color of blue-white diamonds or blue-white suns. She was a highly decorative addition to the office furniture.

  Thurdan said, “You’re John Mantell, eh? You come here looking for sanctuary?” His voice, not unexpectedly, was a resounding booming basso.

  Mantell nodded. “That’s right.”

  Thurdan gestured to Dr. Harmon, who stood poised on the balls of his feet like a withered prune about to take flight. “Erik, suppose you take Mr. Mantell into the lab and give him the full probe treatment.” He looked sharply at Mantell and said, “Of course you understand that this is a necessary precautionary measure. Part of our regular routine, Mr. Mantell.”

  Mister—to an ex-beachcomber who hadn’t been called anything but “Hey, you,” in seven years! Mantell nodded easily and said to Thurdan, “I understand.”

  “Good. Harmon, let’s go, eh?”

  Harmon beckoned to Mantell, and he followed the old man, accompanied by the gunmen. As Mantell passed through the golden actuator beam of the door, he heard Thurdan’s low-pitched rumble, apparently replying to some unheard comment of the girl’s: “Oh, sure … But it’s exactly those who look ‘all right’ that we have to watch out for.”

  The girl said audibly, “I hope we don’t have to kill this one, Ben. I think I like him.”

  Then the door scissored shut behind him, choking off the conversation.

  Mantell entered a well-furnished laboratory. Sitting bulkily in the center of the room was the familiar spidery mass of a Harmon psychprobe, while flanking it was a standard-model electro-encephalograph and some other equipment that Mantell was unable to recognize, and which probably included some new gadgets of Harmon’s.

  Two assistants gently propelled Mantell to the couch and strapped him in. Harmon lowered the metal probedome to his scalp. Its skin was cold and hard. The knowledge that an incautious twist of a lever now could cook his brains or scramble his synapses did not tend to make Mantell much more cheerful.

  Harmon’s eyes were bright with enthusiasm. He touched his clawlike old hands to the enameled studs of the control panel. He smiled.

  “Suppose you tell me a little about yourself, Mr. Mantell.”

  Mantell clenched his jaws a moment as he dug back into the old painful memories. In a tired voice he said, “I’m a former armaments technician who ran into a little trouble seven years back. I—lost my job. And then I went to Mulciber to live for a while, and it turned out I stayed there longer than I expected. I—”

  As he spoke, Harmon went on busily making adjustments in the psychprobe, staring over Mantell’s shoulder, at an image screen out of Mantell’s line of sight, where the electric rhythms of his brain were being projected by an oscilloscope.

  “I was out on the beach one morning combing for pearls when—”

  Something seemed to crash down on his head like a ten-ton foundry stamp. He felt as if the hemispheres of his brain had been split apart, as if a giant cleaver were wedged deep in his scalp, to blast off fusion bombs back of each eye.

  Slowly the tide of pain receded, leaving in its wake a numbing headache. Mantell thumbed his eyes and looked up at old Harmon, who was squinting gravely at his dials.

  “What happened?” Mantell asked.

  Harmon smiled apologetically. “A slight error in calibration, nothing more. My sincere apologies to you, young man
.”

  Mantell shuddered. “I hope nothing like that happens when you psychprobe me, Doctor!”

  Looking at him strangely, Harmon said, “But you’ve just been psychprobed. It’s been over for fifteen minutes. You’ve been asleep all this time.”

  Fifteen minutes—and he had thought it had been perhaps half a second! Mantell rubbed his aching scalp. Something was throbbing fiercely in the area just behind his eyebrows, and he longed to be able to rip off the plate of cranial bone and press his hands soothingly against the ache.

  From behind him the booming voice of Ben Thurdan said, “Is he conscious yet?”

  “He’s coming around. There was a stubborn stress-pattern I didn’t foresee, and it knocked him out for a while.”

  “You’d better practice using your foresight, then, Erik,” Thurdan warned. “You aren’t any youngster. If you pull things like this, we’ll have to let one of your technicians handle the probing. Mantell, are you steady on your feet yet?”

  “I don’t know,” Mantell said uncertainly. “Let’s see.”

  He clambered off the couch and wobbled around the laboratory for a moment or two. The shock of the psychprobing was beginning to diminish. “I guess I’m okay,” Mantell said after a moment. “The pain’s starting to fade. You know, I could have done quite well without this whole thing.”

  Thurdan grinned hollowly. “I’m sure you could. But we couldn’t have.”

  “Did I pass?”

  “For your information, you’re clean and acceptable. Come on into my office and I’ll fill you in on our general way of life here on Starhaven.”

  Still a little unsteady, Mantell followed the big man through the corridor that led from Harmon’s laboratory into Thurdan’s luxuriously appointed office. Thurdan sprawled out on a web-foam couch that had been specially designed to cradle his long powerful body, and casually gestured to Mantell to take a seat opposite.

  “Drink?” Thurdan asked abruptly.

  Mantell nodded, trying to hide his eagerness, and Thurdan nudged a sliding knob in the base of his couch. A sleek portable bar came rolling out of a corner of the room toward him. It stationed itself in front of Mantell.