The Frank Belknap Long Science Fiction Novel

by Frank Belknap Long

  “Yes, I’d thought of that. It may be the answer.”

  5

  A half-hour later the kid was taken away and Corriston found himself completely alone. There are few events in human life more unnerving than the totally unexpected removal of a sympathetic listener when dark thoughts have taken possession of a man.

  The kid wasn’t forcibly removed from the cell. He left without protesting and no rough hands were laid on him, no physical violence employed. But he was not at all eager to leave, and if the guards who came for him had eyed him less severely, his attitude might have been the opposite of complacent.

  “Sorry, kid,” one of them said. “Your discharge has been postponed. Somebody on the psycho-staff wants to give you another test. I guess you didn’t interpret the ink blots right.”

  He looked at Corriston and shook his head sympathetically. “It’s tough, I know. Once you’re here waiting to be released can wear you down. I shouldn’t be saying this, but it stands to reason it might even slow up your recovery a bit. It’s easy to blame the docs, but you’ve got to try to understand their side of it. They have to make sure.”

  When the door clanged shut behind the kid, Corriston crossed to his cot, sat down, and cradled his head in his arms. The fact that he was still free to go outside and walk around the Station was no comfort at all. That kind of freedom could be worse than total confinement. He could never hope to escape from observation. The guards were under orders to watch him, and wherever he turned there’d be eyes boring into the back of his neck.

  On Earth a man under surveillance could duck quickly into a side street, run and weave about, and emerge on a broad avenue in the midst of a crowd. He could walk calmly then for a block or two, and turn in at a bar. He could drown his troubles in drink.

  There were bars on the Station, of course. But Corriston knew that if he tried to mingle with officers of his own rank on the upper levels, he’d quickly enough find himself drinking alone. He could picture the off-duty personnel edging quickly and resentfully away from him, as though he’d suddenly appeared in their midst with a big, yawning hole in his skull.

  Suddenly utter weariness overcame Corriston. He loosened his belt, elevated his legs, and relaxed on the cot.

  He was asleep almost before he could close his eyes. How long he slept he had no way of knowing. He only knew that he was awakened by a sound—the strangest sound a man could hear in space. It was as if a gnat or a mosquito had developed a sudden, avaricious liking for his blood-type and was determined to gorge itself to bursting at his expense.

  The buzzing seemed to go on interminably as he hovered between sleeping and waking. On and on and on, with absolutely no letup. Then, abruptly, it ceased. There was a faint swishing sound and something solid thudded into the hardwood directly above him.

  With a startled cry Corriston leapt from the cot, caught the iron edge of the bed-guard to keep from falling, and stared up in horror at the shining expanse of wall space overhead.

  The cell was in almost total darkness. But from the barred window opposite, a faint glimmer of light penetrated in a diffuse arc, just enough light to enable him to make out the quivering stem of the barb.

  It was a barb. This was so beyond any possibility of doubt. It had lodged in the hardwood scarcely a foot above his cot and it was still quivering.

  Cold sweat broke out on Corriston’s palms as he realized how close death had come, and how almost miraculous had been his escape. Had he raised himself to slap at the “mosquito” the barb could just as easily have buried itself in his skull.

  Corriston hesitated for an instant, his eyes on the barred window and the faint glow beyond. Then his gaze passed to the wall switch. He decided against switching on the light immediately. He stooped low and moved quickly to the window, taking care to keep his head well below the sill.

  For a moment he listened, his every nerve alert. There was no stir of movement in the darkness beyond the sill, nothing at all to indicate that someone was crouching there.

  Finally, with an almost foolhardy recklessness, he raised his head and stared out between the bars. He could see right across to the wall opposite. The wall was less than eight feet away, and the space between the wall and his cell appeared to be unoccupied. This did not surprise him.

  It was utterly silly to think that a man intent on willful murder would have lingered for any great length of time in so narrow a space. After having shot his bolt, his immediate concern would have been to get away as quickly as possible.

  No, definitely, the man was gone, and if he had more barbs to release he would choose another time and place.

  Even then Corriston did not switch on the light. He had no particular desire to examine the wood-embedded barb in a bright light. He could see it clearly enough from where he stood. It was exactly like the barb which had sealed the lips of that blabbermouth Clakey.

  Corriston went back to his cot and sat down. He told himself it would be highly dangerous to leave the cell and give the killer another chance. He had saved himself by refusing to slap a non-existent mosquito. But in the shadows of the Station there would be no mosquitoes—non-existent or otherwise. The killer would simply crouch in shadows, await his chance, and take careful aim.

  What he had to do was find Miss Ramsey, and prove his sanity. If he stayed in the cell, the shadows would continue to deepen about him, would become intolerable, and perhaps even drive him to the verge of actual madness.

  He had to convince the killer that he couldn’t be silenced easily and perhaps not at all.

  Corriston stood up. He ran his hands down his body, taking pride in its muscular solidity, its remarkable integrity under strain. He still felt lithe and confident; his physical vitality was unimpaired.

  He had really known all along that he would be leaving the cell. On Earth you could dodge into a narrow alley between tall buildings or lean on a stroller platform and be carried underground so fast that your pursuers would be left blank-faced. If he stayed alert he could do the same thing on the Station, even though there were no moving pavements to leap upon. Quite possibly he could even slip out unnoticed. They might not even be watching the cell door because he had behaved himself so well up to now. Psycho-cases were permitted to roam, but if they stayed in their cells precautions would naturally be relaxed in their favor.

  Corriston now was about to develop a sudden, unanticipated impulse to roam. The fact that he was completely sane gave him an edge over the space-shocked recruits. There is nothing quite so terrifying to a man who doubts his own sanity than the thought that unseen eyes are keeping tabs on him. He feels guilty and acts guilty and almost invariably his caution deserts him.

  Corriston was quite sure that he could carry it off, even if he felt eyes boring into his back the instant he left the cell. He’d simply bide his time and seize the first opportunity which presented itself.

  Actually, it was easier than he’d imagined it could be. He simply opened the cell door, walked out; and there was no one in sight to observe him. So far, so good. The corridor outside was completely deserted, and when he reached the end of it there was still no one.

  He turned left into a large, square reception room and crossed it without hurrying, his shoulders held straight. Photoelectric eyes? Yes, possibly, but he had no intention of letting the thought worry him. If he were being watched mechanically, there was nothing he could do about it and somehow he didn’t think that he had crossed any photoelectric beams. Certainly no doors had swung open or closed behind him, and photoelectric alarm system without visible manifestations could be dismissed as a not too likely possibility.

  When Corriston emerged in the glass-encased, wide-view observation promenade on the Station’s Second Level, he was no longer alone. On all sides men and women jostled him, walking singly and in pairs, in uniform and in civilian clothes, or hurrying off in dun-gray, space-mechanic anonymity.

&
nbsp; The promenade was crowded almost to capacity and yet the men and women seemed mere walking dots scattered at random beneath the immense structures of steel and glass which walled them in. A feeling of unreality came upon Corriston as he stared upward. He deliberately moderated his stride, as if fearful that a too rapid movement in any one direction might send him spinning out into space with a glass-shattering impetus which he would be powerless to control.

  It was an illogical fear and yet he could not entirely throw it off, and he did not seriously try. It was not nearly as important as the possibility that he might be being followed. There was no one behind him who looked in the least suspicious, and no one in front of him either. But how could he be completely sure?

  The answer was that he couldn’t. He had to trust his instincts, and so far they had given him every assurance that he was moving in a free, independent orbit of his own, completely unobserved.

  And then, quite suddenly, he ceased to move at all.

  Something quite startling was taking place throughout the length and breadth of the observation promenade. The men in uniform were exchanging alarmed glances and departing in haste. The civilians were crowding closer to the panes. They were collecting in awestruck groups of blinding light crisscrossed high above their heads.

  They were all looking in one direction, but a few of them had been taken so completely by surprise that they stood motionless in the middle of the promenade. Corriston was one of the motionless ones, but his eyes were quick to seek out the nearest viewpane.

  At first he thought that a gigantic meteor had appeared suddenly out of the stellar dark and was rushing straight toward the Station with a velocity so great as to be almost unimaginable.

  Then he realized that it wasn’t a meteor. It was a spaceship. And it wasn’t rushing straight toward the Station. It had either bypassed or encircled the Station and passed beyond it, for it was now heading out into space again. He could see the long, bright trail left by its rocket jets, the diffuse incandescence in its wake.

  6

  An officer with two stripes on his shoulder was standing almost at Corriston’s elbow. He hadn’t turned to depart, and for some reason he seemed reluctant to do so. The space-ship’s erratic course seemed to absorb him to the exclusion of all else.

  He started swearing under his breath. Then he saw Corriston and a strange look came into his face. He looked at Corriston steadily for a moment, then looked quickly away.

  Corriston edged slowly away from him and joined the nearest group of civilians. They were all talking at once and it was hard to understand precisely what they were saying. But after a moment a few enlightening fragments of information greatly lessened his bewilderment.

  “That freighter was preparing to land at the Station, but for some reason it couldn’t make contact. It never even began to decelerate.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I asked one of the officers—that gray-haired man over there. He was plenty worried. I guess that’s why he talked so freely. He’d had some kind of dispute with the captain, apparently. He told me that trouble developed aboard that freighter when it was eight or ten thousand miles away. An emergency message came through, but for some reason the captain kept it pretty much to himself.”

  Watching the freighter’s hull blaze with friction as it went into a narrow orbit about Earth, Corriston tried hard to make himself believe that the particular manner of a spaceman’s departure was simply one, tragic aspect of a calculated risk, that men who lived dangerously could hardly expect to die peacefully in their beds. But it was a rationalization without substance. In an immediate and very real sense he was inside the freighter, enduring an eternity of torment, sharing the agonizing fate that was about to overtake the crew.

  Nearer and nearer to Earth the freighter swept, completely encircling the planet like a runaway moon with an orbital velocity so great the eye could hardly follow it.

  “It will blast out a meteor pit as wide as the Grand Canyon if it explodes on land,” someone at Corriston’s elbow said. “I wouldn’t care to be within a hundred miles of it.”

  “Neither would I. It could wipe out a city, all right—any city within a radius of thirty miles. This is really something to watch!”

  The freighter had encircled Earth twice and was now so close to its blue-green oceans and the dun-colored immensity of its continental land masses that it had almost disappeared from view. It had dwindled to a tiny, glowing pinpoint of radiance crossing the face of the planet, an erratically weaving firefly that had abandoned all hope of guiding itself by a light that was about to flare up with explosive violence and put an end to its life.

  The freighter was invisible when the end came. It was invisible when it struck and rebounded and channeled a deep pit in a green valley on Earth. But the explosion which followed was seen by every man and woman on the Station’s wide-view promenade.

  There were three tremendous flares, each opening and spreading outward like the sides of a funnel, each a livid burst of incandescence spiraling outward into space.

  As seen from the Station the flares were not, of course, so tragically spectacular. They resembled more successive flashes of almost instantaneous brightness, flashes such as had many times been produced by the tilting of a heliograph on the rust-red plains of Mars under conditions of maximum visibility.

  It takes an experienced eye to interpret such phenomena correctly, and among the spectators on the promenade there were a few, no doubt, who were not even quite sure that the freighter had exploded.

  But Corriston had no doubts at all on that score. The full extent of the tragedy would be revealed later by radio communication from Earth.

  There was a long silence before anyone spoke. The group around Corriston seemed paralyzed by shock, unable to express in words how blindly hopeful they had dared to be, or how fatalistic from the first. There were a few moist eyes among the women, an awkward, almost reverent shuffling of feet.

  Then the young man at Corriston’s elbow cleared his throat and said in a barely audible whisper: “It didn’t come down in the sea.”

  “I know,” Corriston said. “It came down in North America, close to the Canadian border.”

  “In the United States?”

  “Yes, I think so. We can’t be sure. It’s too much to hope there was no destruction of human life after an explosion of that magnitude.”

  Corriston suddenly realized that he was behaving like a man who had taken complete leave of his wits. He was drawing more and more attention to himself when he should have been bending all of his efforts toward making himself as inconspicuous as possible.

  Fortunately the agitation of everyone on the promenade was helping to remedy his blunder. His wisest course now was simply to recede as an individual, to move silently to the perimeter of the group and just as silently vanish.

  He was confident that he could accomplish it. He began elbowing his way backwards until there were a dozen men and women in front of him. He let himself be observed briefly as a grim-lipped spectator who had taken such an emotional pounding that he could endure no more. Suddenly he saw his chance and took it. There was another small group of civilians close to the group he had joined, and he ducked quickly behind them, using their turned-away backs as a shield. He edged toward a paneled door on his right, his only concern for the moment being a comparatively simple one. He must get away from the crowded promenade as swiftly as possible.

  He reached the door, swung the panel wide, and stepped into the long, brightly-lighted compartment beyond without a backward glance. Almost immediately he perceived that he had committed an act of folly. The compartment was a promenade cafeteria and it was crowded with an overflow of agitated men and women discussing the tragedy in heated terms.

  Keep cool now. None of these people are interested in you. Keep cool and keep on walking. There’s another door and you can be throug
h it in less than a minute, Corriston told himself.

  There was a pretty waitress behind the long counter, and as he came abreast of her she smiled at him. For an instant he hesitated, eyed the stool opposite her, and fought off an incongruous but almost irresistible impulse to sit down. Quick warmth and sudden sympathy. Yes, he could do with a bit of both, Corriston thought.

  It was sheer insanity, but he did sit down. He eased himself into the stool and ordered a cup of coffee.

  “Something with it?” the waitress asked. “A sandwich, or—”

  “No, no, I don’t think so,” Corriston said quickly. “Just the coffee.”

  The waitress seemed in no hurry to depart. “It was pretty terrible what happened. Wasn’t it?”

  “Did you see it?” Corriston asked.

  “I saw most of it. I saw the ship go past the Station and start to explode. I saw that black wing, or whatever it was, drop off. Then someone started shouting in here and I came back. They say it crashed on Earth.”

  “That’s right,” Corriston said, telling himself that he was a damned fool for wanting to look at her hair and hear her friendly woman’s voice when every passing second was adding to his danger.

  “You saw it crash?”

  Corriston nodded. “I just came from the promenade.”

  “That was a crazy thing to ask you. How excited can you get? I saw you come through that door. You looked kind of pale.”

  “I still feel that way,” Corriston said.

  The waitress then said a surprising thing: “I wonder what it is about some men. You just have to look at them once and you know they’re the sort you’d like to be with when something terrible happens. You know what I mean?”

  “Sure,” Corriston said. “Any port in a storm.”

  The waitress smiled again. “I don’t mean that, exactly. Please don’t think I’m handing you a line. There’s just something…comfortable about you. You go all pale when something bad happens to other people. That’s good; I like that. It means you can feel for other people. You’re a gentle sort of guy, but I bet you can take care of yourself and anyone you care about. I just bet you can.”