The Chalice of Death (19 page)

Mantell could only shake his head and say, “You have the wrong man, mister. I didn't steal anybody's jewelry.”

“Now you're lying, too, thief! Give me the brooch! Give it back!”

What followed after that was a confused muddle for Mantell. He remembered standing his ground and waiting for the angry approach of the little man, while a few curious tourists in the casino gathered round to see what was going on. He remembered the tourist standing in front of him, glaring up, pouring out a string of vile accusations, heedless of Mantell's protestations of innocence.

Then the tourist had drawn back his hand and slapped Mantell. Mantell had recoiled; he put up his hands to ward off another blow. Beachcombers didn't fight back when tourists played rough, but they weren't required to stand around and get pounded.

The fat little man had lunged for another blow. The stone floor was wet with some purple liquor that had been spilled. As he wound up for the roundhouse, the little man's sandaled foot caught in the puddle, twisted, and he went skidding backward, arms and legs flying, a wail of fear coming from his mouth.

He had fallen backward and cracked his head hard against a marble counter. People were bending over him, muttering and whispering to themselves. The little man's head was bent at a funny angle, and blood trickled from one ear.

“I didn't lay a finger on him,” Mantell protested. “You all saw what happened. He swung and he missed and he fell down. I never touched him.”

He turned to see Joe Harrell's face looking into his. Joe, one of the oldest beachcombers on Mulciber, a man who'd been on the beach so long he didn't remember what world he had come from. His face was stained from weed-chewing, his eyes dim and faded. But Joe had plenty of common sense.

And Joe was saying softly, “You better get going, boy. You better run fast.”

“But you saw it, Joe. You saw I was minding my own business. I didn't touch him.”

“Prove it.”

“Prove it? I got witnesses!”

“Witnesses? Who? Me? What's the word of another bum on the beach?” Harrell laughed thickly. “You're cooked, son. That lad over there is out for good, and they're going to pin it on you if you don't get out of here. An Earthman's life is important.”

“I'm an Earthman, too.”

“You
were
an Earthman, maybe. Now you're just dirt, so far as they care. Dirt to be swept away. Go on! Scram! Get out of here!”

So Mantell had scrammed, slipping out of the casino in the confusion. He knew he had a little time, anyway. The only ones in the casino who knew who he was and where he could be found were other beachcombers, like Joe, and they weren't going to talk. So there would be a little time while the police were called, and while the police were en route. Eventually the police would reach the casino and find the dead man, and would start asking questions, and a half hour or an hour later, maybe, they would get around to identifying the man suspected of killing the tourist. They would send out an order, pick him up, try him on a charge of murder, or maybe manslaughter, if he was lucky. There would be a dozen tourists ready to swear he had provoked the attack, and nobody at all to stand up for him and substantiate his plea of innocence. So he would be duly tried and found guilty of homicide in whatever degree, and he would be punished.

Mantell knew what the punishment was. He would be given his choice: Rehabilitation or Hard Labor.

Of the two, Rehabilitation was by far the worse. It amounted to a death sentence. Using complicated encephalographic techniques, they could strip away a man's mind completely and build a new personality into his brain. A simple, robotlike personality in almost all cases, but at least one which was decent and law-abiding. Rehabilitation was demolition of the individual. So far as Johnny Mantell was concerned, it would be the end; six months or a year later his body would walk out of the hospital in perfect freedom, but the mind in the head of that body would be named Paul Smith or Sam Jones, and Paul or Sam would never know that his body had once belonged to an unjustly convicted murderer.

If the verdict were first degree murder, or some other equally serious crime, Rehabilitation was mandatory. On lesser counts, like manslaughter or larceny, you had your choice. You could submit voluntarily to the rehabilitators, or you could go off to the Penal Keep on Thannibar IX for a few months or a few years, and chop up rocks the way convicts had done for aeons.

Mantell didn't care for Rehabilitation much, nor for Hard Labor—not for a crime he hadn't committed, or even for one that he had. There was one way out.

Starhaven.

It would take guts to steal a ship and pilot it halfway across the galaxy to Nestor, Starhaven's sun, but once, a long time ago, there had been a man inside the body that belonged to Johnny Mantell, and he wanted to think that the man was still there.

Actually, however, it wouldn't be too hard to swipe a ship. It had been done before by skylarking, half-tipsy tourists, but they had brought it back and declared themselves glad to pay the fine.

This time the ship would not come back. So Johnny Mantell fervently hoped.

Johnny planned to tuck in his shirttails and amble out to the spacefield and talk fast and smart to one of the boys on duty. He had kept up with technical developments and knew how to talk spaceship shop. Mulciber natives were soft-spoken, easygoing, and made it a point to be pleasant and obliging. It shouldn't be much of a trick to fast-talk himself right into a ship that had been fueled and was set to take off.

And then, so long, Mulciber!

So long to seven lousy years of beachcombing!

Legging it across the sand to the spacefield, his Mulciber memories became dreamlike again, almost as if his days here had never been, as if Mike Bryson and Joe Harrell and the little fat tourists, and all the rest were mere phantoms out of a dream.

He didn't want to be Rehabilitated. He didn't want to lose his past, even though there was nothing in it but disappointment and failure.

But as for the future—his future in the world that Ben Thurdan built—who knew what Starhaven held in store? Whatever it was, it was more promising than sticking around and waiting for the police to track him down. Starhaven was sanctuary. Sanctuary was the prime requirement for keeping alive right now, and so he would go to Starhaven.

Chapter Two

The three small ships came streaking across the dark backdrop of the skies. There was the vessel that Johnny Mantell had stolen on Mulciber, and there were the two squat little two-man Space Patrol ships that came whistling after him in eager pursuit. Across space they came, heading out of the Fifth Octant of the galaxy and into the darkness.

Mantell was not worrying too hard. The percentages lay with him—if he could somehow manage to keep ahead of his Patrol pursuers until he could reach Starhaven's orbit.

The chase had gone on for nearly two days, now—a dazzling pursuit in and out of hyperwarp, ever since Mantell had gotten away in the stolen ship. The SP men had been struggling to match velocities with Mantell's ship, clamp metamagnetic grapples around him, and haul him off to the Penal Keep on Thannibar IX.

Sweat dribbled down the sides of his face as be sat locked at his controls, feeling the frustration that all spacemen do: the curious disorientation that results when you cruise along at three point five times the speed of light and still seem utterly stationary, hung in an unbreakable motionless stasis.

That was the way it seemed to him in hyperwarp, with nothing but the grayness all around, and the two snub-nosed SP ships in formation behind him. He clung grimly to his course. They said anyone at all could operate a hyperwarp spaceship if he knew how to drive a car, and Mantell was discovering that that was true. He had guided the ship across hundreds of light-years without difficulty, without catastrophe.

Suddenly, his screen panel lit. The green blossom of light told him that he had reached the destination for which he had set the course-computer two days before. He nodded in satisfaction and jabbed down hard on the enameled red stud that wrenched him out of the grayness of hyperspace and back into the normal space-time continuum once again.

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.