The Chalice of Death (25 page)

An announcer's oily voice said, “This was the scene as Leroy Marchin got his in the Crystal Casino shortly after one-thirty today. Marchin, returning to Starhaven from self-imposed exile, after having made an unsuccessful attempt on the life of Ben Thurdan last year, entered the casino alone.”

The audio pickup relayed the brief, bitter conversation between Marchin and the robot that spoke with Thurdan's voice. Then the drawing of blasters was shown, then the exchange of shots.…

And a final closeup of Marchin's seared body.

“Death Commissioner Brian Varnlee was on hand to certify that Marchin died of suicide,” said the smooth-voiced announcer. “Meanwhile, on other news fronts, a report has reached Starhaven that …”

Mantell looked away, sickened. “That's all it is,” he said darkly. “Just suicide. And no one seems to care. No one gives a damn that a man was shot down in public this afternoon.”

Myra was staring at him anxiously. “Johnny, that's the way Starhaven works. It's our way of life and we—we don't question it. If you can't bring yourself to accept Ben's laws, you'd better get off Starhaven fast—because it'll kill you to stay here.”

He moistened his lips. He wanted to reply to her, to make some kind of protest.

But something strange was happening to him; some as yet unidentifiable dark fear was welling up into his consciousness from the hidden depths of his brain. He weaved uncertainly and gripped the table with both hands, tight. He shuddered involuntarily as tides of pain swept up over him, racking him again and again.

He heard Myra's anxious exclamation—“Johnny! What's happening? What's wrong?”

It was a moment before the pain had subsided enough for him to speak. “Nothing's wrong,” he murmured Weakly. “Nothing.”

But something
was
wrong. In one wild sweep the last seven years rose accusingly before him, from the day of his dismissal from Klingsan Defense to the day he had fled, a hunted murderer in a stolen ship, from the shores of Mulciber.

Those memories arrayed themselves in a solid column—and the column suddenly toppled and fell, shattering into a million pieces.

Starhaven spun around him. His palms ached as he squeezed the cold table top to keep from tumbling to the floor. Dimly he sensed Myra grasping his numbed hands, saying things to him, steadying him. Doggedly he fought to catch his breath.

It was all over in a second or two more. He sat back exhausted, bathed in sweat, his head quivering and his skin cold.

“What happened, Johnny?”

He shook his head. In a harsh voice he said, “I don't know what it was. It must have been some after-effect of the psychprobing. Harmon said he had miscalibrated and there might be after-effects. For a second—Myra, for a second I thought I was someone else!”

“Someone else?”

He shrugged, then laughed sharply. “Too many drinks, probably. Or else not, enough. I guess I better have another one.”

He ordered another rye and downed it hastily. The raw liquor soothed him a little. Nervously, he gathered up the fragments of the identity that had shattered a moment before and pasted them together. Once again he was Johnny Mantell, ex-beachcomber, late of Mulciber in the Fifth Octant of the galaxy, and now of Starhaven, home of galactic criminal outcasts.

Faint wooziness clung to him, but the spell, whatever it had been, was past. At least, for now.

“I feel a lot better,” he said. “Let's get some fresh air.”

Chapter Nine

The rest of Mantell's week of indoctrination passed pleasantly enough. He was finding out how Starhaven ran, and though it was hard for him to admire every aspect of the place, he had to admit without reservations that in building it Thurdan had achieved something astonishingly close to a miracle.

Mantell saw Myra often, though perhaps not as often as he would have liked to see her. Their meetings always seemed to be held at arms' length; invisible but tangible veils blocked any real communication between them, Mantell realized. Things were being kept back. There was something she was not telling Mantell because she would not tell him, and something he was not telling her because he did not know it himself.

The unsettling thing that had happened to him in the Pleasure Dome bar happened twice more during that week. Twice more he experienced the sudden cold sweat, the sudden swaying dizziness, the sudden feeling that he was someone else, that the life he had lived was not that of a beachcomber on Mulciber.

The first time it happened was in a river boat, a streamlined passenger vessel streaking upriver to the plantations to the north of Starhaven proper. Thurdan had set up vast food-producing dominions outside the rural area, and he and Myra were on their way to visit them when the attack struck. It passed quickly, though it left him shaken for the next hour.

The next attack happened two days later, at three in the morning. Mantell woke and sat upright in bed, staring into the darkness, shaking convulsively while the fit gripped him. When the most violent symptoms had exhausted themselves, he sank back, exhausted.

Then, on a wild impulse, he bolted to the phone and punched out Myra's number, hoping she would forgive him for waking her at this hour.

But he didn't wake her. She wasn't there.

The phone chimed eight, nine, ten, a dozen times in her apartment; then a robomonitor downstairs cut in, and the blank metal face told Mantell, “Miss Butler is not at home. Would you care to leave a message for her? Miss Butler is not at home. Would you care to leave a message for her? Miss Butler is—”

Mantell listened to the metallic chant for nearly a minute, held in a dreamy hypnotic grasp. Then he collected himself and said, “No thanks. I guess I don't have any messages for Miss Butler.”

He broke the contact listlessly and returned to bed. But he remained awake until morning, tossing and rolling, restless and unable to return to sleep. He kept thinking that there was only one place where Myra could possibly be at such an hour.

She had to be with Ben Thurdan.

Mantell revolved that thought in his mind for five straight hours. He realized that he was being a fool, that he had no real claim on Myra Butler, that she—like everyone and everything else on this planet—belonged to Ben Thurdan. Ben Thurdan could do what he pleased, and people like Johnny Mantell ought to be grateful for whatever Ben cared to leave over for them.

But the picture of Myra in the big man's arms haunted him and tore him away from sleep. At eight in the morning he rose and stared at his face in the mirror. A ghost's face stared back at him, haggard and almost frightening in some ways.

He found a package of defatiguing tablets and gobbled down three of them. Three tablets were the equivalent of eight hours of deep sleep.

With a hearty if synthetic night's sleep now under his belt, Mantell headed alone for the Pleasure Dome to iron some of the tensions out of his system.

During that week, he drifted. It came naturally to him. His years as a beachcomber had taught him how to kill time gracefully and skillfully. Then, on the seventh day since his arrival on Starhaven, Ben Thurdan called him at his room in Number Thirteen.

He seemed to lean forward out of the screen as he said, “Johnny, it's time to put you to work. You've had a solid week to rest up. That's about enough.”

“I'm ready any time you want to start me,” Mantell said. “It's been seven years since I last had a job. That's more than enough vacation for any man.”

Thurdan chuckled with surprising warmth. “Okay. Stay where you are and I'll pick you up right now.”

Ten minutes later Thurdan met him in an aircab and they set off northward for a distant part of Starhaven. Mantell had already learned through Myra that though the metal shell extended around the entire planet, only part of one continent had actually been settled. Starhaven was really one gigantic city of some twenty million people, which sprawled ever outward, expanding at the margins with each influx of new inhabitants. Beyond the city borders lay, to the south and east, farmland, and everywhere else the barren and empty land that had been there before Thurdan had reshaped the planet.

The aircab came to rest lightly on a landing stage atop a square, dark windowless building far to the northwest of the last outskirt of the settled area. Thurdan leaped easily from the aircab to the landing apron, with Mantell right behind.

“This is the guts and brain of Starhaven right here,” Thurdan said with a sort of pride.

A door opened trapwise not far from them. Thurdan beckoned and they descended into the upper level of the building, while the trap swung closed above them.

Men in neat laboratory outfits moved busily to and fro inside. They greeted Thurdan with respect. Thurdan introduced Mantell as a newly arrived armaments technician. Hearing himself described as anything but a derelict was a pleasant experience.

The tour began.

“Starhaven's defenses operate on two principles,” Thurdan said, as he and Mantell crawled through a narrow tunnel lined with electronic approach-perceptors. “One is that you need a protective barrier. That's why I built the metal shell. Second—and a lot more important—you need a good offense. An offensive power coupled with sturdy defense is impregnable. Starhaven has the best offensive battery in the universe—and when you measure that with our defensive screens, our energy-field, and the sheer strength of the outer shell itself, you'll understand why the Space Patrol is so helpless against us.”

They entered a vast room walled completely about with chattering computers.

“Nothing is left to chance,” Thurdan said proudly. “Every shot that's fired by one of our heavy-cycle guns is computed precisely before we release it. And we don't miss often.”

Mantell was dazzled by the display. His eyes could hardly take in the full magnitude of the fortress Ben Thurdan had built.

A bright array of meters and dials met his eye on a higher level, and he pointed questioningly to them.

“Those are the energy flow controls,” Thurdan said. “You ought to see what happens when we're under bombardment. Every watt of energy that's thrown at us is soaked up by our screens, fed through the power lines here, and converted neatly into energy that we can use for operating Starhaven.”

“How often do these bombardments happen?”

“We haven't had a big one in years. The SP has gotten smart. For a long time we hardly needed to use our own generators at all, thanks to the free power the SP kept throwing at us. But they've wised up, and these days they only make token raids to let us know they haven't forgotten about us.”

Mantell nodded. He was definitely impressed; his days as an armaments man were not that far behind him that he could not appreciate the splendor of the Starhaven defenses. It was awesome.

He said, “Tell me, Ben—what genius designed all this?”

“Genius is right,” Thurdan said. “Lorne Faber built this for me. It took him three years to complete the designs, three years of day-and-night work. Ever hear of him?”

“Lorne Faber? I think I remember.… Ah, yes. Killed his wife, didn't he? I read about the case. Long time ago.”

Thurdan nodded. “He was a brilliant electronics man. Too brilliant, nervous, jittery, brittle. I saw it coming. His brilliance killed him, eventually. I could tell he was half out of his mind when I first met him, years back.”

“What happened to him?”

“One day he saw the ghost of his wife in a neutrino screen downstairs and took a hatchet to it,” Thurdan said. “It took days to unscramble all the short circuits.”

The tour of the building lasted nearly three hours. Mantell was dizzy by the end of it, partly from the immensity of the armament tower and partly from the forgotten knowledge that had come welling excitingly back into his mind. He remembered busy hours spent designing defense screens years before, calculating inputs, tabulating megawattage, compiling long intricate columns of resistances and amperages as he shaped his work. Had it been seven years ago? They seemed to fade into one, then lead right into the present.

They reached the topmost floor of the building. Thurdan led Mantell into a long room lined completely with vision screens. The room was similar in tone and in opulence of furnishings to Thurdan's other office back in the center of the city.

“This,” Thurdan said, “is the sanctum sanctorum. The nerve center of the whole planet. From this room I can control the entire network of defensive screens, fire any gun from any of the emplacements, broadcast subradio messages to any world of the galaxy.”

His deep voice was filled with pride. It was not difficult to see the transparent personality of the man. He gloried in this room, from which he could control an entire world of his own, and defy the universe.

He threw himself heavily into a relaxing cradle and rocked gently back and forth. “Well, Mantell.… Now you've seen it. What do you think?”

“It's incredible, Ben. Starhaven's absolutely impregnable. There's nothing like it in the galaxy.”

Thurdan's face darkened. “I'm still worried,” he said slowly, “about a serious flaw in our system. It's so serious, in fact, that so far neither I nor any of my best men have figured a way to repair it.”

Mantell stared at him, puzzled. “Flaw? Where? I'm rusty, Lord knows, but I'd swear that this is the most unassailable fortification that could possibly be built.”

A faint smile rippled across Thurdan's mouth, but his eyes were still clouded. “Your statement's true enough, as far as it goes. However, there is a weakness that, under certain conditions, could mean the end of Starhaven and of those who enjoy its sanctuary. This weakness is inside.”

“Inside?”

“Starhaven is vulnerable from within. If someone got control of this room, for instance, he could knock down the screens and hand us over to the Patrol on a silver platter. Of course, he'd have to kill me first. The man whom you saw executed in the casino the other day tried to do that.”