The Frank Belknap Long Science Fiction Novel Read online

  Why then had he employed a double to bargain with Henley and keep him occupied for so long a time? It didn’t matter if Ramsey had made use of doubles in the past. Probably he had, in order to protect himself in dealings with the colonists when the advantages of deception would favor him. But he would never have done so under these present circumstances—when a criminal who would stop at nothing was holding his daughter under threat of death.

  He would never have done so unless he had some very special reason that dominated his thinking to the exclusion of all else.

  Suddenly Corriston had the answer. It came to him in a lightning-swift flash of intuition, which carried with it complete credibility. It was more than a guess. Somehow he was sure; he knew. A full minute before he heard the dull rumble of the tractors as they came through the gate, and went to the window and stared down, he knew.

  He had the answer and yet what he saw eclipsed what he knew. It was a little like watching a rocket take off, hearing the roar and seeing the flames through all of its burning time, and seeing at the same time the men on the proving ground moving swiftly about, and the space-helmeted men at the controls of the rocket itself, each grimly intent on one particular task.

  Ramsey was returning into the Citadel with armed guards on both sides of him, and his daughter was walking with her head erect at his side. Five colony tractors had followed him into the Citadel and two more were just coming through the gate, moving ponderously on their caterpillar treads because each tractor weighed two tons even in the light gravity of Mars.

  Corriston did an almost unbelievable thing then. Standing quietly by the window he raised his right hand and saluted Ramsey in silent tribute to the man’s courage at the most threatening moment of his life.

  What Ramsey had done in no way lessened his guilt. But Corriston would have just as readily repeated the salute in public, without caring what anyone might think. What Ramsey had done was as clear to him now as a series of moves on a chessboard laid out in advance, but hidden from the man who was to be outwitted and outplayed.

  Ramsey had made use of a double to keep Henley occupied—no doubt with repeated, skillful evasions, a constant insistence that more proof be forthcoming, more details supplied. Perhaps a half-dozen conferences had taken place in all, extending over many hours. And while Henley was being encouraged to believe that Ramsey was being softened up and would accept all of his demands in the end, Ramsey had gone out into the desert alone, armed, furious, and determined to rescue his daughter if it cost him his life.

  Or perhaps he hadn’t gone alone. Perhaps he had taken a dozen armed guards with him. Somehow it didn’t seem important, couldn’t take away Ramsey’s moment of victory. It was a moment of victory for Ramsey even though he hadn’t played a major role for long, even though he had found his daughter already rescued and safe on his return. And Corriston had been the one to move out into the center of the board and deliver the coup de grace. He had kept a restless killer immobilized while the play was under way, and that was victory enough for any man.

  Corriston suddenly realized that neither Ramsey nor the Colonists had any way of knowing that Henley was dead. They had probably joined forces outside the Citadel for the sole purpose of rescuing him from the deadliest kind of danger. And he wasn’t helping them at all. In another minute they’d be trying to get to him with tear gas.

  It didn’t make any kind of sense, but when Corriston went down the wide central staircase he wasn’t thinking about the colonists at all. He was wondering only how Helen Ramsey would look standing alone on a strange dark headland at midnight. Then the vision dissolved and another one took its place. She wasn’t on a headland any more.

  She was standing at the door of a small, white cottage and there were a couple of kids beside her: a boy of about Freddy’s age, or maybe a little younger, and a little girl with golden curls, her hair like a crown.

  He realized suddenly that it could never be a small, white cottage. There were no small white cottages on the Station, and never could be. But the Station would be all right for a married man with kids. The kids could come and visit him, and his wife could be with him about one-fourth of the time, both on the Station and on Earth.

  What more could a happily married man ask, if the Station was so much a part of him that it was never wholly absent from his thoughts? He’d have to ask her, of course—at least a dozen times to make sure—that she really wanted that kind of man for a husband. But he knew what her answer would be even before the vision dissolved, and he was soon out in the central square between the five buildings, holding her tightly in his arms.

  From the way she kissed him he knew that she must have endured an eternity of torment just from uncertainty, just from not knowing whether he was dead or alive. For an instant he could think of nothing else but the wonder of it, the absolute reassurance which she had brought to him with her closeness, her gratefulness, the intensity of her concern.

  Across the square they could see the tractors, looking in the dazzling light like massive blocks of metal standing almost end to end. There was a great deal of movement and shouting between the buildings, and Corriston knew that in another half-minute they would no longer be alone together, that the closeness couldn’t last.

  A change was coming over her face, and he was suddenly afraid for her, afraid that when she was told the full truth about her father just the pain of knowing might make her withdraw from him, even though it could never really come between them or separate them for long.

  So there it was. He could see it in her eyes, the fear, the shadow, and because he had no way of knowing just how much she already knew he decided that only complete honesty could keep the shadow from lengthening.

  His hands moved slowly up over her face, and he drew her chin up and said, very gently: “There’s something I’d like to say now, about your father. Without his help Henley would have finished what he started out to do. There are different ways of paying off a debt, and your father—”

  She raised her hand as if to put a stop to his words. “Darling, I know he’s in serious trouble. Don’t try to spare me; there’s no need to. There will be a trial and we both know what the outcome will be. He’ll never walk out of the courtroom a free man. But he’s not afraid…and neither am I. These last few, terrible hours have changed him. He’s not ashamed now to admit that he loves me. All the hardness, the coldness, is gone.”

  Something in her voice stilled the questions he wanted to ask. She seemed to sense what was in his mind, for she said quickly. “I don’t think father has any enemies now on Mars. He’s going to give the colonists back their land. Not because he has to, but because he wants to. They came to his assistance when they could have used the way he cheated and robbed them as an excuse for not helping him at all. There are few men who wouldn’t feel grateful, who wouldn’t be shaken by remorse. But I think it goes deeper than that. Even now I’m not completely sure, but I think he knows it’s the only way he can free himself from the prison he’s been building around himself since I was a little girl.”

  She was silent for an instant, while the pain in her eyes seemed to deepen. Then she said, “I can’t leave him now, darling. Not right away. It would be too cruel a blow.”

  Ahead now Corriston could see three of the colonists coming toward him. They were less than forty feet away. “I think I know how it is,” he said. “When you’ve been through too much, you just go dead inside. You can feel sympathy for someone very close, like your father. But that’s about all.…”

  “Darling, that’s not what I mean. We’ll be apart, but just for a little while. It will be so short a time we won’t even miss it later on…two or three weeks, at most. And this time you won’t have to wonder about me at all.”

  Corriston noticed then for the first time that her hair had been blown in all directions by the wind. He remembered how, on their first meeting, it had been disarranged in much the same
way. She’d been wearing a beret then, and just the casual tilt of her hat had done the fluffing. But wind or no wind, he’d always like the way her hair looked, the gold in it, and the way it set off the great beauty of her face.

  “I’d be more than unreasonable if I tried to pick flaws in a promise like that,” he said.

  “You can never go home again,” someone had once said. You can never go home because people change and places change with them, and familiar scenes take on an aspect of strangeness as the old, well-loved landmarks fade.

  But in space, the landmarks are as wide and deep as the gulfs between the stars, and it is not too difficult for a man to return to a steel-ribbed Gibraltar in space and experience again the emotions he felt when he first sighted it, and hear again the long thunder-roll of the ships berthing and taking off.

  The ship which was bringing Corriston back had begun to loom up behind the telemetric aerials with her bow slanting forward. She had almost berthed, and, standing with his face half in shadow, Commander Clement watched the landing lights flashing on and off and wondered just what he would say to the young lieutenant he’d never met—the very famous lieutenant who would be emerging from the boarding port and descending the ramp any minute now.

  He told himself that it ought to be something very simple and direct, accompanied by a friendly handclasp and a nod. “Welcome back, Lieutenant. Welcome back. I guess you know how I feel about the scoundrels who kept us from meeting the first time.”

  Yes, just a few words and a friendly handclasp would be best. No salutes either given or returned. No stiff-necked salutes, and damn the regulations for once. It was truly a very great occasion.

  MARS IS MY DESTINATION

  Originally published in 1962.

  1

  I’d known for ten minutes that something terrible was going to happen. It was in the cards, building to a zero-count climax.

  The spaceport bar was filled with a fresh, washed-clean smell, as if all the winds of space had been blowing through it. There was an autumn tang in the air as well, because it was open at both ends, and out beyond was New Chicago, with its parks and tall buildings, and the big inland sea that was Lake Michigan.

  It was all right…if you just let your mind dwell on what was outside. Men and women with their shoulders held straight and a new lift to the way they felt and thought, because Earth wasn’t a closed-circuit any more. Kids in the parks pretending they were spacemen, bundled up in insulated jackets, having the time of their lives. A blue jay perched on a tree, the leaves turning red and yellow around it. A nurse in a starched white uniform pushing a perambulator, her red-gold hair whipped by the wind, a dreamy look in her eyes.

  Nothing could spoil any part of that. It was there to stay and I breathed in deeply a couple of times, refusing to remember that in the turbulent, round-the-clock world of the spaceports, Death was an inveterate barhopper.

  Then I did remember, because I had to. You can’t bury your head in the sand to shut out ugliness for long, unless you’re ostrich-minded and are willing to let your integrity go down the drain.

  I didn’t know what time it was and I didn’t much care. I only knew that Death had come in late in the afternoon, and was hovering in stony silence at the far end of the bar.

  He was there, all right, even if he had the same refractive index as the air around him and you could see right through him. The sixth-sense kind of awareness that everyone experiences at times—call it a premonition, if you wish—had started an alarm bell ringing in my mind.

  It was still ringing when I raised my eyes, and knew for sure that all the furies that ever were had picked that particular time and place to hold open house.

  I saw it begin to happen.

  It began so suddenly it had the impact of a big, hard-knuckled fist crashing down on the spaceport bar, startling everyone, jolting even the solitary drinkers out of their private nightmares.

  Actually the violence hadn’t quite reached that stage. But it was a safe bet that it would in another ten or twelve seconds. And when it did there was no chain or big double lock on Earth that could keep it from terminating in bloodshed.

  The tipoff was the way it started, as if a fuse had been lit that would blow the place apart. Just two voices for an instant, raised in anger, one ringing out like a pistol shot. But I knew that something was dangerously wrong the instant I caught sight of the two men who were doing the arguing.

  The one whose voice had made every glass on the long bar vibrate like a tuning fork was a blond giant, six-foot-four at least and built massive around the shoulders. His shirt was open at the throat and his chest was sweat-sheened and he had the kind of outsized ruggedness that made you feel it would have taken a heavy rock-crushing machine a full half hour to flatten him out.

  The other was of average height and only looked small by contrast. He was more than holding his own, however, standing up to the Viking character defiantly. His weather-beaten face was as tight as a drum, and his hair was standing straight up, as though a charge of high-voltage electricity had passed right through him.

  He just happened to have unusually bristly hair, I guess. But it gave him a very weird look indeed.

  I don’t know why someone picked that critical moment to shout a warning, because everyone could see it was the kind of argument that couldn’t be stopped by anything short of strong-armed intervention. Advice at that point could be just as dangerous as pouring kerosene on the fuse, to make it burn faster.

  But someone did yell out, at the top of his lungs. “Pipe down, you two! What do you think this is, a debating society?”

  It could have turned into that, all right, the deadliest kind of debating society, with the stoned contingent taking sides for no sane reason. It could have started off as a free-for-all and ended with five or six of the heaviest drinkers lying prone, with bashed-in skulls.

  The barkeep made a makeshift megaphone of his two hands and added to the confusion by shouting: “Get back in line or I’ll have you run right out of here. I’ll show you just how tough I can get. Every time something like this happens I get blamed for it. I’m goddam sick of being in the middle.”

  “That’s telling them, John! Need any help?”

  “No, stay where you are. I can handle it.”

  I didn’t think he could, not even if he was split down the middle into two men twice his size. I didn’t think anyone could, because by this time I’d had a chance to take a long, steady, camera-eye look at the expression on the Viking character’s face.

  I’d seen that expression before and I knew what it meant. The Viking character was having a virulent sour grapes reaction to something Average Size had said. It had really taken hold, like a smallpox vaccination that’s much too strong, and his inner torment had become just agonizing enough to send him into a towering rage.

  Average Size had probably been boasting, telling everyone how lucky he was to be on the passenger list of the next Mars-bound rocket. And in a crowded spaceport bar, where Martian Colonization Board clearances are at a terrific premium, you don’t indulge in that kind of talk. Not unless you have a suicide complex and are dead set on leaving the earth without traveling out into space at all.

  Now things were coming to a head so fast there was no time to cheat Death of his cue. He was starting to come right out into the open, scythe swinging, punctual to the dot. I was sure of it the instant I saw the gun gleaming in the Viking character’s hand and the smaller man recoiling from him, his eyes fastened on the weapon in stark terror.

  Oh, you fool! I thought. Why did you provoke him? You should have expected this, you should have known. What good is a Mars clearance if you end up with a bullet in your spine?

  For some strange reason the Viking character seemed in no hurry to blast. He seemed to be savoring the look of terror in Average Size’s eyes, letting his fury diminish by just a little, as if by allowing a te
nth of it to escape through a steam-spigot safety valve he could make more sure of his aim. It made me wonder if I couldn’t still get to them in time.

  The instant I realized there was still a chance I knew I’d have to try. I was in good physical trim and no man is an island when the sands are running out. I didn’t want to die, but neither did Average Size and there are obligations you can’t sidestep if you want to go on living with yourself.

  I moved out from where I was standing and headed straight for the Viking character, keeping parallel with the long bar. I can’t recall ever having moved more rapidly, and I was well past the barkeep—he was blinking and standing motionless, as white as a sheet now—when the Viking character’s voice rang out for the second time.

  “You think you’re better than the rest of us, don’t you? Sure you do. Why deny it? Who are you, who is anybody, to come in here and strut and put on airs? I’m going to let you have it, right now!”

  The blast came then, sudden, deafening. They were standing so close to each other I thought for a minute the gun had misfired, for Average Size didn’t stiffen or sag or change his position in any way and his face was hidden by smoke from the blast.

  I should have known better, for it was a big gun with a heavy charge, and when a man is half blown apart his body can become galvanized for an instant, just as if he hasn’t been hit at all. Sometimes he’ll be lifted up and hurled back twenty feet and sometimes he’ll just stand rigid, with the life going out of him in a rush, an instant before his knees give way and there’s a terrible, welling redness to make you realize how mistaken you were about the shot going wild.

  The smoke thinned out fast enough, eddying away from him in little spirals. But one quick look at him sinking down, passing into eternity with his head lolling, was all I had time for. Pandemonium was breaking loose all around me, and my only thought was to make a mad dog killer pay for what he had done before someone got between us.