The Chalice of Death (20 page)

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.

After a little deliberation he dialed a sour choker, third strength. Almost before he was through punching out the signal, the robot bar was extending a crystal beaker three-quarters full of cloudy green liquid. Mantell took it. The bar swiveled away and went to Thurdan, who ordered a straight bourbon.

Mantell sipped and nodded in appreciation. “This is good stuff. From Muriak?”

“Synthetic—all synthetic. We don't bother smuggling liquor in any more, not when we have chemists good enough to whip up stuff like that.” Thurdan leaned back and stared intently at Mantell. Slowly he said, “According to what you told Dr. Harmon, you used to be an armaments technician before you got into trouble. That automatically makes you a very valuable individual on Starhaven, Mantell.”

He had quickly dropped the “mister.” That must be only for newcomers who had not yet qualified, Mantell guessed.

“Valuable?” Mantell asked. “How so?”

“Starhaven lives and dies by its armaments. The moment our screens show any signs of weakening, we'll have a Space Patrol armada crashing down on us from every octant of the galaxy at once. I spent billions shielding Starhaven, Mantell. It's the first absolutely impregnable fortress in the history of the universe. But even so, it's no stronger than the technicians who maintain its screens and guns.”

Mantell's hands began to quiver slightly. “It's a long time since I did anything like that,” he told Thurdan. “Seven years. I hardly remember my stuff.”