THEY FORBID THE STARS TO SHINE!

After seven years of beachcombing on the pleasure planet of Mulciber, ex-engineer Johnny Mantell thought he had hit rock bottom. But when he was unjustly accused of murder, he knew there was worse to come.

Johnny had to get out. And the only place for an outcast like himself was the impregnable outlaw world of Starhaven, a refuge that defied all galactic laws.

Once there, Johnny's only wish was to forget the past and be left alone. But the super-science dictator of Starhaven had other plans for him. And soon Johnny found himself in the midst of one of the most explosive struggles any world had ever known. If he failed, not only his own life would be lost, but the future of galactic civilization would be totally altered.

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CAST OF CHARACTERS

Johnny Mantel!

He was a man with a past—but he didn't quite know what it was!

Myra Butler

Hers was the most surprising reason of all for living on infamous Starhaven.

Ben Thurdan

Already the supreme ruler of his own world, he sought the gift of the gods—immortality.

Erik Harmon

He held the future of Starhaven in the palm of his hand.

Leroy Marchin

Against Thurdan's might, his only armor was his courage.

Commander Whitestone

He had launched a secret weapon no man knew how to control.

STARHAVEN

by

IVAR   JORGENSON

ACE BOOKS, INC. 23 West 47th Street, New York 36, N. Y.

STARHAVEN

Copyright, 1958, by Thomas Bouregy & Co. An Ace Book, by arrangement with Thomas Bouregy & Co.

THE SUN SMASHER

Copyright ©, 1959, by Ace Books, Inc.

Printed in U.S.A.

CHAPTER I

IT WAS' a secluded part of the beach, and the corrugated metal shack was set some distance back from the shimmering tideless sea, close to a grove of green and purple trees. Inside the shack, the man who called himself Johnny Mantell lay on his thin cot. He groaned in his sleep, then abruptly awakened. With Mantell, there was no dim half-world of drowsy transition. At once he was awake and thoroughly alive. Alive—but for how long?

He stepped to the washstand that he'd made and looked at his face in the fragment of mirror nailed over the basin.

The tired, thirtyish face of a man who had been on the toboggan slide to nowhere for too many years stared back at him. His eyes, alight with intelligence though they were, bore the timid, defeated look of an outcast. His face was deeply tanned from roaming the beaches in this part of the planet Mulciber, "Vacation Paradise of the Universe," as the advertisements proclaimed on the planets of the Galactic Federation, of which Earth was the capital.

Strange, he thought. He could see no change from the way he looked yesterday. Yet there had been a change, and a major one. Up to early this morning, he had been a beachcomber, managing to survive by selling brightly

colored shells to tourists, as he had been doing for the past seven years.

But today, the day he had to leave Mulciber, he was a different man.

He was a fugitive from the law. He was a hunted killer.

In his own mental image, Mantell had always thought of himself as being a reasonably law-abiding man; one who held respect for the rights of others, not out of fear but through innate decency; it was, in fact, about the last thing he had—a small measure of his self-respect that a good many of the others seemed to lack. Just an average, decent sort of Joe who never went out of his way looking for trouble, but didn't let people push him around, either.

But this time he was really being pushed. And there was no way to push back.

Almost ever since he had arrived on Mulciber, Man-tell had been putting off his departure, delaying because there was no special reason to go anywhere. Here, life was easy; by wading out a few yards into the quiet warm sea, all sorts of delicious fish and crustaceans could be caught by net or by hand. Nutritive fruits of many flavors grew on the trees all year round. There were no responsibilities here, except the basic one of keeping yourself alive. But it had come down to just that.

If Mantell wanted to stay alive any longer, he'd have to move fast. Right now. And to do it, he'd have to add one more criminal mark to his new record. He'd have to steal a spaceship. He knew where to go for sanctuary.

Starhaven.

Mike Bryson, one of the other beachcombers on Mulciber, had told Mantell about Starhaven. That had been years ago, back before the time the mudshark had sliced

Bryson in half while he was wading for pearl oysters, firyson had said, "Some day, when I get up the incentive, I'm going to steal a ship and light out for Starhaven, Johnny."

"Starhaven? What's that?"

Biyson smiled, screwing up his face and showing his yellowed teeth. "Starhaven's a planet of a red super-giant sun called Nestor. It's an artificial sort of planet, built twenty or twenty-five years ago by a fellow, name of Ben Thurdan." Bryson lowered his voice. "It's a sanctuary for people like us, Johnny. People who couldn't make the grade or fit in with organized society. Drifters and crooks and has-beens can go to Starhaven, and get decent jobs and live in peace. It's the place for me, and one day I'm going to get there."

But Mike Bryson never did make it, Mantell recalled. He tried to remember how long ago it had been that they had brought Bryson's bleeding body back from the beach. Three years? Four?

Mantell cradled his head in his hands and tried to think. It was hard to sort out the years. There were times when he could hardly remember the day before yesterday, and all his memories seemed like dreams. There were other times when it was all crystal-clear, when he could see all the way back across the years to the time when he had lived on Earth. He had been making the grade in society then.

As a twenty-four-year-old technician at Klingsan Defense Screens, for a while everything seemed to roll along well. Then he really got on the beam—or so he thought. Enthusiasm, energy seemed to exude from his pores. A latent inventive streak suddenly emerged in him. He knew his stuff all right; maybe too well.

Trouble was that his abounding faith in himself and in his innovations made him appear cocky, and his inventions, while basically sound, needed refinements to be practical. At the time the Klingsan plants were not geared to machine them. It would take special heavy presses of a new amalgam of metals; specially made dies as well as new electronic devices. All that represented an impressive outlay of capital. So, perhaps, if Johnny would work over his designs for a couple of years, then they could be presented to the board of directors, and . . .

Johnny, furious, told off his employers. He got another job in a similar plant, but became quarrelsome and edgy when they, too, decided not to produce his inventions. And then he thought he found the answer to his frustrations. If a drink or two would relax him in the evening, then four or six would do the job better. They did, all right. Soon he was working on a quart a day.

He drank himself right out of a job. Drank himself right off Earth, too, across the galaxy to Mulciber, where Mulciber's twin suns shone twenty hours a day and the temperature the year round was a flat seventy-seven, F. Yes, it was a tourists' paradise, right enough, and a fine place for a man like Johnny Mantell to lose what little backbone he had left, and live a dreamy, day-to-day existence, sustaining himself with neither effort nor responsibility.

And he'd been here for seven years. A blankness in time. . . .

It was early morning. The two lemon-yellow suns were up there in the chocolate sky, and little heat-devils danced over the roasting sand. Across the few yards of white sandy beach, the calm sea stretched out to the blank horizon. The tourists from Earth and the other rich worlds of the galaxy were splashing around in the wonderful water, down in the bathing area where the mud-sharks and bloater-toads and other native life forms had all been wiped out. They were diving and swimming and splashing each other with cascades of sparkling water. Some of them had nullgravs to help them float, and some paddled little boats.

Mantell had wandered into the casino bearing lus stock in trade: sea shells, pearls, other little gewgaws and gimcracks that he peddled to the wealthy tourists who frequented Mulciber's fashionable North Coast. He hadn't been in the casino more than two minutes when someone pointed at him and bellowed, "There's the man! Come here, you! Right away!"

Mantell stared blankly. The rule on Mulciber was that you didn't raise your voice much if you were a beachcomber; you minded your business and peddled your wares, and you were tolerated. You couldn't hang around the tourists if you made a nuisance of yourself, and Mantell had tried not to do that.

So all he could do was say, in a soft voice, "You want me, mister?"

The tourist was half as tall as Mantell and twice as wide—a little potbellied walrus of a man, deeply tanned and blistering in a couple of places. He was wearing a costly yangskin wrap about his bulky middle, and he was clutching a flask of some local brew in one pudgy hand. The other one was pointing accusingly at Mantell, and the little man was shouting excitedly, "There's the man who stole my wife's brooch! Fifty thousand I paid for it on Turimon, and he stole it!"

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 encéphalographie 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 reha-bilitators, 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, Mulciberl

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 II

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 Star-haven'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 metamagnetjc grapples around him, and haul him off to the Penal Keep on Thannibar IX.

Sweat dribbled down the sides of his face as he 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 land 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 hps. 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.

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 midsection.

The one with the blaster said calmly, "Please don't move, Mantell. You're on your way to Starhaven now. Well 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 land 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 psycho-probed," the man with the blaster said.

"Psychoprobed?"

"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. Psychoprobing 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 but 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 III

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 psychoprobe, 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 probe-dome 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 psych-probing 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, well 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."

"You'll learn again," Thurdan said easily. "The psych-probe gave me your biography. Seven years of beachcombing and bumming after you lost your job. Then you killed a man, stole an SP ship, and headed for here."

"I didn't kill him. I was framed."

Thurdan smiled bleakly and shrugged. "The probe says you did kill him. The probe isn't prejudiced. It just reports what happened. Go argue with your own memories, Mantell."

Mantell sat very quietly, stunned, gripping his glass hard. He could remember every detail of that brawl in the beachside café, the fat, drunken tourist yelling that he had stolen his wife's jeweled brooch, then the tourist's flabby palm slamming into his cheek . . . And, the tourist slipping and cracking his skull open before Mantell laid a hand on him.

"I honestly thought I didn't do it," Mantell said quietly.

Thurdan shrugged again. "No use arguing with the probe. But that doesn't matter here. We don't believe in ex post facto laws." Thurdan rose and walked to the tri-di mural that swirled kaleidoscopically over the surface of one wall, a shifting pattern of reds and bright greens, a flowing series of contrasting textures and hues.

He stood with his back to Mantell, powerful hands locked: a big man who had done a big thing in his life, the man who had built Starhaven.

"We have laws here," he said after a while. "This place isn't just an anarchy. You break into a man's house and steal his money, and the law entitles him to go after you and make you give it back. If you cause too much trouble, we kill you. But nothing in between. No brain-burning, no jail sentence that lets a man rot away in a living death." He turned. "You, Mantell—you could still be happily working for Klingsan Defense Screens if you hadn't felt sorry for yourself, kept hitting the bottle, gotten yourself canned. But the forces of law and order threw you out, and ruined you as a man from there on."

Mantell took another drink and frowned questioningly at Thurdan. "Don't tell me I've run into some kind of reform school, now!"

Thurdan whirled, dark eyes hooded and angry. "Don't say that. There won't be any reforming here. Drink all you please, He, cheat, gamble—Starhaven won't mind. We're not pious. A fast operator on Starhaven is a pillar of society, a good upstanding citizen. We won't preach to you here."

"You said you had laws. How does that square with what you just told me?"

Thurdan smiled. "We have laws, all right. Two of them. And only two."

"I'm listening."

"The first one is something generally known as the Golden Rule. I phrase it like this. 'Expect the same sort of treatment yourself that you hand out to others.' That's simple enough, isn't it?"

"I suppose so. And the other?"

Thurdan grinned darkly and nipped at his drink before speaking. "The second law is even simpler: 'You'll do whatever Ben Thurdan tells you to do, without argument, question, or hesitation.' Period.End of the Starhaven Constitution."

Mantell was silent for a moment, watching the big rawboned man in the glaring costume and thinking about the sort of world Starhaven was. Then he said, "That second law contradicts the first one, wouldn't you say? I mean, so far as you're concerned."

He nodded. "Oh, certainly."

"How come you rate, then? How come you can place yourself beyond the laws?"

His eyes flashed. "Because I built Starhaven," he said slowly. "I devoted my life and every penny I could steal to setting up a planet where guys like you could come and hide. In return, I get the right of absolute dominance. Believe me, I don't abuse my power. I'm no

Nero. I set things up this way because Starhaven has to be run by a single forceful leader."

Mantell's brows knit. There was, he had to admit, even though reluctantly, plenty of truth in what he was saying. It was a weird, even devilish philosophy of government—but it seemed to work, at least here on Star-haven. It hung together consistently.

"Okay," Mantell said. "I'm with you."

Thurden smiled. "You never had any choice," he said. "Here. Take this."

He handed Mantell a small white capsule. Mantell studied it. "What is it?"

"It's the antidote to the poison that was in your drink," Thurdan said. "I suggest you take it within the next five minutes, if you're going to take it at all. Otherwise it may be unpleasant."

Mantell repressed a shiver and hastily popped the capsule into his mouth. It tasted faintly bitter, and dissolved against his tongue. He felt chilled. So this was what it was like to be in the absolute grasp of one man!

Well, he thought, I asked for it. I came to Starhaven of my own free will. Here I am, and here I'll stay.

Thurdan said, "You have a week to Telax and learn the ropes here, Mantell. After that you'll have to begin earning your keep. There's plenty of work here for a skilled armaments man."

"I won't mind getting back to work."

Thurdan grinned at Mantell. "Have another drink?"

"Sure," Mantell said. He dialed and drank without hesitation. There was no better way to show that he trusted Thurdan.

CHAPTER IV

THE TWO MEN drank, and finished their drinks. Mantell could distinguish no difference between the drink he had had before and this one—but he relied on the fact that Thurdan seemed to need him, and that the big man seemed too sane to poison a man for the sheer pleasure of it.

A few moments later Thurdan jabbed a button at his desk and the girl with star-blue eyes came in. She wore a large-sleeved synthilk blouse of electric blue, buttoned high on one shoulder, and a dark skirt of some soft clinging material that accentuated her graceful walk. If the outfit was calculated to make an effect on Mantell, it accomplished its purpose.

Thurdan said, "Mantell, this is Miss Myra Butler, my secretary." And Johnny Mantell was conscious of Thur-dan's swift glance at the girl; a look that held both warmth and pride, and gave Mantell a sudden start. He thought; Lord! Thurdan's in love with her! He must be twenty years older, but I admire his taste.

"Hello," he said, smiling straight into the shining blue eyes that eclipsed even the crackling brilhant color of her blouse. Resolutely then he pulled his gaze away from hers. Watch your step, Johnny, he cautioned himself. If Thurdan is in love with her, you can land in a big bunch of trouble without half trying. Take it easy, boy, and live longer.

But on the other hand, he could never recall meeting a woman with the same magnetic appeal that Myra had for

him. It was as if he were drawn to her by powerful invisible cables. To be sure, he had known beautiful women during his earliest days on Mulciber, before all his money and self-respect had gone. But in the dreary later years of combing the beaches and hawking shells to tourists, he knew that the only kind of woman who would have anything to do with Johnny Mantell was the kind of woman that Johnny Mantell didn't want to have anything to do with.

Thurdan said, "Mantell's going to be an armaments technician, Myra. He's going to be very useful to us, I think. I want you to show him around Starhaven. Give him the number one guided tour. He has a week to get the feel of the place. You show him the sights."

"That sounds like a pretty pleasant week," Mantell said. It couldn't hurt to praise Thurdan's choice in women a little, he thought.

Thurdan ignored the remark. He took a crumpled handful of bills from his pocket and shoved them at Mantell.

"Here. Here's some walking-around money to see you through the week. You go on the regular payroll as soon as you start working."

Mantell looked at the bills. They were neatly printed, in various colors. They looked vaguely like the standard Terra-issued Galactic currency. But they weren't Galactic issues at all.

In the center, where the stylized star-cluster design is found on the high Galactic bills, and the atom-diagram symbol on the low ones, these notes had a portrait of Ben Thurdan, head and shoulders, in remarkable detail. The denominations were interesting too. Thurdan had given him two hundred-chip bills, a fifty, a twenty, and some single-chips.

"Chips?" Mantell said, puzzled.

Thurdan chuckled. "The local unit of currency. I've always thought it was appropriate on a world like Star-haven. Just so you can guide yourself, one chip equals one Galactic credit in purchasing power. A hundred cents equals one chip. Originally I was going to have blue chips, red chips, and so on, but that turned out to be too complicated. . . . Show him around, Myra."

They made their way through shining well-lighted halls, the girl slightly in the lead and Mantell behind, into a gravshaft that lowered them gracefully and smoothly to street level. They stepped outside into the fresh and pleasant air.

A car was waiting at the curb for them—a slinky dark teardrop style, in the latest model. Thurdan had obviously made his mind up that Starhaven would keep abreast of the current stream of galactic fashions, even though the planet was closed to normal trade and tourist travel.

Myra slid into the car and murmured something to the stony-faced man behind the wheel. By the time Mantell had both legs in the car, it had pulled away from the sidewalk and was under way.

Hardly any time later, it was pulling up again, outside a glittering chrome-trimmed building. Myra reached into her purse and handed Mantell a key.

"You see the building on the left?"

Mantell nodded.

The girl said, "The name of that place is Number Thirteen. It's a hotel that Ben runs. You're going to live here." "Can I afford it?"

"Don't worry about that. Your room number is 1306. Any time you're anywhere in Starhaven and you want to get here, just ask a driver to take you to Number Thirteen. They'll know the place. Do you want to take a look at your room now?"

"Later will be fine," Johnny Mantell said, disliking the thought of being away from the girl.

Myra told the driver to get going again, and they drove on, down the wide, well-designed streets. Mantell kept one eye on the girl and one on the attractive scenery outside. He was deciding that Starhaven was quite a place.

As they passed each building of note, Myra pointed it out and named it. "That's the main hospital over there. See?"

"The double tower?Looks lovely. There's everything here, isn't there?"

"What did you expect to find on Starhaven? Three poolhalls and a barroom? Just because Starhaven is a sanctuary for—for criminals, that doesn't mean we aren't civilized here."

Mantell flinched and raised his hands as if to ward off her words. "Okay! Okay! I'm sorry!"

"Thurdan built this place himself, twenty years ago," she said. "It was an uninhabited world, too cold to be of any use to anyone. He had a lot of money—never mind where he got it. He got together a crew of men like him, and together they built the shell and the inner sun. That was the beginning of Starhaven. Then they built the armaments, and suddenly there was a fortress in space where before there had been just a cold empty world. And that was the beginning of Starhaven, Mantell. Twenty million people five here now, and no one hounds them with false piety."

Mantell looked at her. After a moment he asked the question that had been nagging at him ever since he had first seen her.

"How did you happen to come here?"

It was the wrong thing to ask. He saw the anger flare on her lovely face; she started to unsheathe her claws and let her fur rise like an insulted feline. Then her anger subsided.

"I almost forgot you were new, Mantell. We never ask anybody why he's here. Your past is your own secret. Ben Thurdan knows it, and you know it. But nobody else is entitled to know anything about you except what you want to tell them."

Mantell felt his face going red. "Sorry," he said.

"That's okay. It's an understandable mistake. But just remember not to ask it any more."

"Does Thurdan know every single person on the planet?"

"He tries to. It's impossible to know twenty million people, but he tries. Everyone who comes gets a personal welcome from him, same as you did. Only some days fifty or a hundred or five hundred show up, and they don't all get an individual drink and a handshake. Ben gives newcomers a job to do."

"You can't just do as you please?"

"Not at first. You put in a few years at an assigned job and if you're rich enough you can buy yourself off and loaf. You're in the armaments division, aren't you?"

Mantell nodded.

"The buying-off price is high there. But so is the pay. Anyone with a specialty like that is valuable property here. But someone has to drive the cabs and someone has to sell popcorn at the sensostims, and if Thurdan tells you that's your job, you do it, or else. It's the only way to make this world run."

"He seems to do a pretty fair job of making it run,"

Mantell said. "And he seems to know how to pick his secretaries, too."

"Keep me out of this," the girl said, but she was grinning. "We get off here."

The car whirred to a gentle halt. The gleaming doors telescoped open, and they got out. Mantell looked around and whistled.

They were in front of a vaulting domed building set back behind a smooth, almost unreal grassy lawn. The building seemed crowded. Sparkling lights radiated from the upper stories of the dome. It was immense, a hundred stories high or more.

"What is this place?"

"This," Myra said, "is the second most important building on Starhaven. It's second only to Thurdan's headquarters."

"What is it?"

"It's called the Pleasure Dome," she said. "Shall we go inside?"

They stepped onto a moving slidewalk and let themselves be carried up a gently sloping ramp that led into the front entrance of the vast building. Mantell found himself swept into a cavernous antechamber that was at least a hundred feet high and seemingly acres square. The enormous room was packed with people, though sound-absorbers damped their voices. The walls were decorated with highly suggestive murals fifty feet high. Pleasure Dome, Mantell thought. Of course. Starhaven was nothing but a private dream world for Ben Thur-dan, a dream world to which outsiders could be admitted on request, and this was the factory from which most of the dreams flowed.

As Mantell stood there gaping, someone jostled against him, and he felt a hand slide gently but not altogether imperceptibly into his pocket. He clamped his fingers tightly around the wrist, whirled, and brought his other hand forth to grab the pickpocket by the throat.

He was a small ratty man hah Mantell's size, with bright darting eyes and close-cropped black hair and a hooked corvine nose. Mantell tightened his grip on the pickpocket's throat and yanked his hand from his pocket. He glanced at Myra. She seemed to be laughing, as if this were all some tremendously amusing joke.

Mantell said, "Is this how they sell admission tickets to this place?"

The pickpocket looked very pale. In a whisper he said, "Let go of me, huh, fellow? I can't breathe."

"Let go of him, Johnny," Myra said. In the confusion he still managed to notice that this was the first time she had called him Johnny.

Mantell decided there was no point in strangling the little fellow. He shook the pickpocket once, just for good measure, and let him go.

Seconds later he had a blaster pointing in the vicinity of Mantell's navel.

"Okay, friend. Since subtlety didn't seem to work, I'll try a more direct approach. Hand over your cash, and be quick."

Mantell recoiled in astonishment and shock. People were milling around in the big lobby, and they were all ignoring the holdup going calmly on in their midst! Then he remembered where he was. This was Starhaven. Anything went. Coldly and reluctantly he drew his bills from his pocket.

Myra was still laughing. She put her hand over his, keeping it there for a second, and pushed the hand, money and all, back toward his pocket. With her other hand she deflected the pick-pocket's blaster.

"Put the gun away, Huel," she said. "He's new here. He just came from Thurdan. That's all the cash he has to his name."

The blaster was lowered. The runty little pickpocket grinned up at him amiably and said, "I didn't mean any harm by it, friend. It's just between pals, that's all." He winked at Myra. "Thurdan told me to do it. Just to show him the ropes."

"I thought so," she said. "You usually aren't that clumsy about getting caught."

Mantell understood the strange lesson he had been just taught. Thurdan had arranged this whole thing as a demonstration of the way the code of Starhaven worked; he wanted Mantell to see it in action.

It was perfectly all right for a pickpocket to practice his trade in public, if he wanted to—but he ran the risk of trouble if he happened to get himself caught by his intended victim. As for pulling the gun on Mantell, that was well within the Starhaven ethical code, too. You gave the same kind of treatment as you expected from others. In that sort of framework, a man- could be as brave or as weak as he chose.

On Starhaven it was healthier to be brave and quick-triggered. They came out better on the percentages, in the long run.

It all made a crazy sort of sense, Mantell thought. A world run this way might be able to hang together—if it had someone like Thurdan backing up its code.

"This Pleasure Dome," Mantell said, after the little pickpocket had faded back into the crowd. "Just what kind of place is it?"

"Everything is here, every sort of entertainment a man might want. You can eat and drink and see shows, live and tri-dis and sensostims. There's gambling on the tenth level. There's a dance hall on the twentieth. They're very obliging here."

"And why did you bring me here?"

"For a meal, mostly," the girl said. 'You've had a hard pull and you can stand some relaxation. We can dance a little, after the drinks and food, if you feel like it."

"And after the meal and the drinks and the dancing?" Mantell asked. "Won't it be too early to call it an evening?"

"Well—we'll see about that," she said.

Mantell looked at her strangely. For just a moment he wished he were a telepath—just for that moment. He wanted to know what was going on behind those radiant eyes. He wanted to know where he stood with her. And how deeply—if at all—she was involved with Thur-dan.

But he wasn't a telepath, and wishing wouldn't make him one. However, maybe the meal and some wine would get him some information.

He extended his arm to her. She took it, laughing gaily, and suddenly all the long weary years of beachcombing on Mulciber dropped away from him. He was through scrabbling for meals and cadging drinks, through fishing around in the mud at low tide to find shells to peddle to over-bloated tourists. All those things were behind him now. He was on Starhaven, and there was a pretty girl clinging to his arm.

He could hold up his head again. After seven years, he was Somebody again.

CHAPTER V

A GLEAMING slidewalk took them up twenty feet to a handsome mezzanine where a bank of liftshafts stood waiting. Mantell let the girl enter a shaft first, and followed her in. She dialed for Level Nine.

"The ninth-level dining hall is the best one," she explained. "Also the most expensive. Wait till you see it."

They zipped upward, passing the seven intermediate floors in one long dizzying swoop, and the lift tube came to a halt. A sheet of blank metal faced them— shining, highly polished, mirror-reflective. Myra reached out a hand and touched her ornate signet ring to the surface of the barrier. The door crumpled inward instantly. They went in.

A bland robot waited just inside, a sleek little machine with a single staring wide-perspective eye set in the middle of its otherwise blank face. It came rolling up as if greeting an old friend and said to the girl, "Good evening, Miss Butler. Your usual table?"

"Of course. This is John Mantell, by the way. My escort for the evening."

The robot's photonic register focused on Mantell for a moment. He heard an instant humming sound and knew that he had been photographed and permanently pigeonholed for future reference.

"Come this way, please," the robot invited.

The place was sheer luxury. Heavy red synthetic velvet draperies helped to muffle the sound. There were faint traces of aromatic scent in the air, and soft music

from an invisible orchestra could be heard, all tingling violins and shimmering cellos. After his seven years on Mulciber, Mantell felt utterly out of place. But the robot glided along in front of them, leading them to their table, and Myra at his side moved with a gliding grace that seemed almost too perfect to be natural, yet had a life and a smoothness that no robot known could match.

They stopped at a freeform table set close against the curving silver wall. A little oval window, crystal-clear, looked out on the city below. It was a city of parks and greenish-blue lakes and soaring buildings. Ben Thur-dan had built an incredible fairy garden of a world here on Starhaven, Mantell thought.

And dedicated it to crime. Mantell scowled at that, until he reminded himself that he himself was nothing but a criminal, a—a killer, no matter what he remembered of the incident. He had no right to pass judgment on Ben Thurdan. He was here and safe, and he had to be grateful for that fact.

The robot drew out Myra's chair, then his. He lowered himself to its plastic-covered seat. It clung to his body; sitting in the ingenious suspension-foam chair was like drifting in zero grav.

The violins in the background seemed to underscore the moment. Mantell sat quietly, looking at her. Those marvelous strange blue eyes held him—but that was far from all of her there was to see. It was impossible to fault Thurdan on his taste here. Myra was wide-shouldered, with flawless hps and a delicate thin-bridged nose. Her eyes flashed like gems when she spoke. Her voice was soft and well-modulated and just a httle on the throaty side.

Mantell said, "Tell me something—does every newcomer to Starhaven get this sort of treatment? Violins and fancy meals, and all?" "No."

The muscles around his jaws tightened. He sensed that he was being teased, and he didn't care for it.

"Why am I being singled out, then? I'm sure Thurdan doesn't send his—secretary out to dinner with every stray beachcomber who comes to Starhaven."

"He doesn't," she said sharply. Changing the subject clearly and emphatically she asked, "What would you like to drink?"

Mantell considered for a moment and finally ordered a double kiraj; she had vraffa, very dry. The wine steward was a robot, too, who murmured obsequiously and vanished to return with their drinks in a few seconds, bowed, and scuttled away.

Mantell sipped thoughtfully. After a moment he said. "You changed the subject on me pretty quickly. You're being mysterious, Miss Butler."

"My name is Myra."

"As you wish. But you changed the subject again. You're still being mysterious."

She laughed, reached across the table, took his hand. "Don't ask too many questions too soon, Johnny. It's a dangerous thing to do on Starhaven at any time—but don't ask questions so soon. You'll learn everything you want to know in time. Maybe."

"Okay," he said, shrugging.

He wasn't that anxious to pry, after all. Seven years of roaming the bleak shore line on Mulciber had left him detached, indifferent about many things. He had become experienced in the art of drifting along passively on the tide of events, letting things happen as they wanted to happen.

This girl had taken some special interest in him, it seemed. He decided to accept that on face value, for the moment, and let the explanations go till later.

"Starhaven's a little different from Mulciber, isn't it?" she asked suddenly, breaking into his reverie.

"Very different," he said.

"You spent seven years on Mulciber."

"You saw my psychprobe charts, didn't you? You don't need to get a verbal verification from me." He felt obscurely annoyed. They were fencing, dancing around a conversation rather than engaging in one. And it was very much like dancing at arm's length. He felt uncomfortable.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I didn't mean to rake up old wounds. Ben built this place so people like you could come here . . . and forget. Mulciber's nothing but a bad dream now, Johnny."

"I wish it were. But I spent seven years begging for nickels there. I killed a man there. You don't blot out a memory like that the way you do a bad dream." He spoke toughly, and she reacted as if he had slapped her across the face. The liquor was getting to him too fast, he thought.

"Let's forget it, shall we?" she said with forced light-heartedness. She lifted her glass. "Here's to Ben Thur-dan and the world he built. Here's to Starhaven!"

"Here's to Starhaven," Mantell echoed.

They drank, draining their glasses, and then they ordered another from the wine steward. Mantell's head was beginning to swim a little, but it was a pleasant sensation. He was aware that somewhere during the third drink Myra ordered dinner, and not much later a couple of robots laden with trays came shuffling up and began to unload. Truffles, baked pheasant, white and red wines, Vengilani crabs on shell as a side dish. He stared at the array, aghast.

She said, "Is something the matter, Johnny? You don't look so well."

"This is a fifty-credit—fifty-chip dinner. That's a little out of my orbit."

She smiled. "Don't be silly, Johnny. This is Ben's treat. I have a pass that takes care of things hke this. Dig in and don't worry about the checkl"

He dug in. He hadn't eaten that well in his life—and certainly not since August 11, 2793, a day he remembered vividly. That was the day Klingsan Defense Screens of Terra, Incorporated, had decided it could do without his scientific services.

As he ate, he thought about the events of that day. He remembered, wincing involuntarily, reporting to work two hours late and a good three sheets to the wind, and finding the pink discharge slip on his desk. He had snorted angrily and gone storming down to the executive level to see Old Man Klingsan himself. He had burst into the office of the company head, demanding to know why he was being fired.

Klingsan had told him. Then Mantell had told Klingsan three or five things that had been on his mind for a while, and by the time he was through talking he had succeeded in getting himself blacklisted from Rim to Core; there wasn't a world in the galaxy that would give him employment now.

A well-meaning friend had lined up a cheap job for him on Mulciber, far from Earth. He had shot his last ninety credits getting there from Viltuun, just in time to learn that his reputation had preceded him and he wasn't wanted on Mulciber.

But he couldn't leave without fare money. And for seven solid years he had never managed to accumulate enough cash in one chunk to pay for his transportation off that lazy, enervating semi-tropical world. Not until the day the Space Patrol came after him on a murder charge, and he'd had to get off.

"You're brooding about something, Johnny," Myra said suddenly. "I told you not to think of Mulciber any more. Try to forget it."

"I wasn't thinking of Mulciber," he lied. "I was thinking—thinking that it's perfectly permissible for me to skip out of here without paying the check. I mean, the restaurant owners don't have any legal recourse. They can't. There's no specific law against it."

"That's true enough. But you won't have any recourse, either, if they catch you and slice you up for steak. Or —if you like this place and ever want to come back— they'll simply refuse you admittance. Or they could slip you some slow poison the next time you come in here to cadge a meal."

He thought that over for a moment or two. Then a new and startling conclusion struck him. "You know something? I almost think an upside-down free-flying setup like this works out better than one based on a complex system of laws based on high moral precepts and obsolete customs. Here, the crimes cancel each other out into zeros!"

She nodded. "That's Ben's big idea. If you take a group of people, none of whom are cluttered up by morals, and enforce this kind of code on them, their collective rascality will all even out into a pretty regular, practical kind of law-observance. It's only when you start throwing virtuous people into the system that it falls apart."

Mantell frowned. He had the feeling that there was an inconsistency somewhere in her glib argument, but at the moment he was not interested in finding it.

He grinned at her. "You know, I think I'm going to like this place," he said.

CHAPTER VI

THERE WERE a few stray threads of conversation after that, but they petered out quickly and they finished eating in silence. Against the backdrop of the singing violins (not violins really, he knew, but merely tones produced by an electronic musical synthesizer somewhere in the giant building) Mantell thought, This is quite a woman! He was trying to imagine—without success—what thing she could have done that would have forced her to take refuge here on Starhaven from the galactic police system.

It was hard to figure what crime lay in the girl's past. She seemed too clean, too pure. Mantell was well aware that she was no angel; but even so, she gave the appearance of innocence, making it seem as if she always acted out of the highest motives.

Mantell didn't regard himself as a hardened criminal, either. He kept telhng himself he was just a victim of circumstances. The breaks of life could as easily have gone the other way for him, and instead of becoming a desperate wanderer on a tourist planet like Mulciber, he could have remained a skilled armaments technician back on Earth.

He scowled. He was still an armaments technician, he told himself. Only not on Earth but here on Starhaven, where nobody would plague him with cheap moralizing.

And where there was Myra.

He wondered, as he sat staring at her, how he was going to get away with it.

Obviously she was Thurdan's girl. That was an obstacle that would stop most men right away. On a planet like this, a man doesn't try to walk away with the absolute tyrant's girl if he intends to enjoy a long life. Of course, there was always the possibility that Thurdan might tire of her. . . .

Who are you kidding? he asked himself. Sure, Thurdan would tire of her. Any minute now, he thought bitterly. Who could ever tire of her?

Mantell's mood darkened. He told himself he would have to forget any intentions he might have in regard to Myra Butler. Otherwise he would be up to his ears in deep trouble, and he had been on Starhaven less than a day.

The robot servitors appeared and cleared away the remnants of the meal. There was still half a bottle of wine left, but Mantell had neither the desire nor the room for it now. He watched the robot clear the wine away with the rest of the things, and grinned.

"I never thought I'd last long enough to pass up a half-full bottle of wine," he said.

He leaned back. He felt warm and well-fed, with the taste of rare wine still on his lips.

"Where to now?" he asked.

She smiled. "Do you dance?"

"More or less. I'm a little out of practice."

"That doesn't matter. Come. The ballroom's three levels above."

Mantell felt little desire to dance just now. But she continued pleadingly, "I love to dance, Johnny. And Ben won't ever dance with me. He never will. He hates dancing of any kind."

Mantell shrugged agreeably. "Anything to oblige a lady, I always say. If you want to dance, let's go."

Together they drifted out of the dining hall and into the waiting lift tube, and up three levels to the ballroom. Mantell realized in astonishment that ninety per cent of the Pleasure Dome was still above them, even here on the twelfth level.

The ballroom was a huge arching room, magnificently decorated. Music throbbed out of a hundred concealed speakers. Glowing dabs of soft living light, red and blue and gentle violet, swung and bobbed mistily in the air just above the dancers. It was a stunning sight, a scene out of a picture book.

"For a man who doesn't like to dance, Thurdan built quite a dance hall," Mantell observed.

"That's one of Bens specialties—catering to other people's likes. It keeps the people loyal to him."

"Ben's a shrewd man," Mantell said.

"The shrewdest there ever was," agreed Myra.

They stepped out onto the dance floor. Myra glided into his arms. They began to dance.

It had been years since the last time Mantell had been on a dance floor. On Mulciber he simply hadn't thought in terms of luxuries like dancing; the struggle for life was too intense. And on Earth, he had always been too busy with less frivolous things.

But here, on this pleasure planet, he could make up for lost time.

There was a modified antigravity shield mounted beneath the gleaming dark luciphrine plastic of the dance floor. The field was on lowest modulation, not strong enough to lift the dancers from the surface of the floor but mustering enough power to cut down their weight somewhere between thirty and forty per cent, Mantell estimated.

It was more like floating than dancing. Feet glided, skimming over the floor.

Mantell felt Myra lightly against him, clinging: the bobbing swirls of living light in the air circled playfully around them, giving Myra's face sharply accented multicolored highlights of curious effect. The music beat beneath them, swelling and surging deeply. Mantell found himself moving with a grace he had never known he possessed.

It was half due to the antigrav shield, he thought, and half to Myra, feather-light in his arms.

One thing struck him as incongruous. Around him in the crowded pavilion danced the people of Starhaven, each one carrying locked within his mind the burden of some crime, each a hunted man now safe forever from the hunters.

They laughed, joked, clung to each other, just like ordinary people. Just like those who lived everyday lives within the law. Men and women having a good time, but outlaws all.

Mantell and Myra danced on. An hour, two hours perhaps, slipped by. Under the low gravity, time seemed to speed imperceptibly. Mantell hardly cared. He let the hours move past.

Finally, as the music died for the hundredth time and the couples left the floor for a short breather between numbers, Myra said, "Had enough?"

Mantell grinned at her. "Hardly."

"But I think we'd better leave now, Johnny. It's getting late."

He looked at his watch. It was nearly midnight. He realized for the first time how tired he was. All in this same day he had run a race with the SP ships, undergone a painful psychprobing, and now spent hours with Myra. It had been a full schedule.

"Where do we go now?" he asked. "The gambling den? The bar?"

She shook her head lightly. "We go home," she said. 'It's close to my bedtime."

The music began again, a lilting fast dance, and the crowds of pleasure-seekers coasted back onto the dance floor. Mantell made way through the throng, holding tightly to Myra's hand. He was able to get back to the liftshaft without too much trouble; they rode down and out into the brightly floodlit plaza outside the Pleasure Dome.

As if from nowhere the slinky teardrop car that had conveyed them to the Dome appeared. They got in.

"Take us to my place," Myra instructed the driver.

The trip was over almost before it had begun. They pulled up in front of a handsome apartment building. Myra got out; Mantell followed.

The doors of the building swung back at their approach. He escorted her up the liftshaft and as far as the door of her apartment.

She touched her thumb lightly to the doorplate and the door started to roll back. She said, "I won't ask you in, Johnny. It's late, and—well, I can't. Please understand, won't you?"

He smiled. "Okay. It's been a swell night, and I won't press my luck further. Good night, Myra. And thanks for everything."

"I'll be seeing you, Johnny. Don't worry about that."

He frowned and started to object, "But Ben------------- "

"Ben may not be with us too much longer," she whispered in a strange tone. "A lot depends on you. We're counting on you more than you can imagine."

"What? You—T

"Remember what I said about asking too many questions too soon," she warned. "Good night, Johnny."

"Good night," he said, bewildered. She smiled enigmatically and then he found himself staring at the outside of her door, alone, well-fed and feeling warm inside.

The car was waiting downstairs when he emerged. It was after midnight, and the sky was dotted with convincing stars. Thurdan had not spared expense in making Starhaven a wonderland world come true.

He climbed into the car. The driver looked human, but from the rigid forward set of his head he might just as well have been a robot.

"She's a remarkable woman, isn't she?" Mantell said to the man. "Miss Butler, I mean."

"Yes, sir."

Mantell smiled. The driver wasn't much of a conversationalist, obviously. He said, "Take me home, to Number Thirteen."

"Yes, sir."

Relaxing, Mantell watched the buildings slip by on either side. He was tired now, and anxious to reach his room. He was more than tired: he was exhausted. It had been a fantastic day.

CHAPTER VII

MANTELL saw a man die, his second day on Starhaven. It taught him not to judge by first impressions. Starhaven wasn't entirely a pleasure-planet, a happy Utopia. There was violent death here, and evil.

He had slept late that day, ridding himself of his fatigue and weariness. At 1100 in the morning the room-phone buzzed loudly, waking him from a tortuously involved dream of Space Patrol men, fugitives, and ancient, fumbling scientists operating psychprobes.

He pulled himself out of bed, crossed the austere, simple room that had been assigned to him, and switched on the phone, rubbing sleep from his face. Slowly the pattern of colors that appeared on the visiscreen shaped itself into a meaningful configuration.

It was the face of Ben Thurdan.

Even on a visiscreen a foot square his face had a terrible brooding intensity, a dark-visaged strength. He smiled and said, "I hope I didn't wake you, Mantell. You must be pretty tired."

Mantell forced out a chuckle. "I guess I overslept. It's a bad habit of mine."

"What did you think of the Pleasure Dome?" Thurdan asked easily. Mantell's sleep-fogged mind started to frame an answer, but before he could speak Thurdan had added the words, ". . . and Myra."

That threw him off base. He said, "It's a fabulous place, Mr. Thurdan. I've never seen anything like it any-

where. And—and Miss Butler was very helpful in explaining Starhaven to me."

"Glad to hear that," Thurdan said slowly. There was a long, uncomfortable moment of silence. Mantell fidgeted before the screen, acutely conscious of the great reservoir of power that lay in the man. At length Thurdan said, "Mantell, I liked you the second I saw you. You've got character. I like a man with character."

Mantell wondered what the Starhaven boss was driving at. Keeping back his surprise, he said gravely, "Thank you, Mr. Thurdan."

"Call me Ben." The deep piercing eyes studied Mantell until his flesh began to crawl. "I trust you, Mantell. And let me tell you I don't trust very many people on Starhaven. Suppose you do me a little favor, Mantell. Yes. A little favor."

"If I can—Ben. What sort of favor do you mean?"

"I want you to keep your eyes open. Miss Butler— Myra—will be keeping company with you again today. Listen to things carefully, Mantell. And feel free to get in touch with me if you think there's anything I ought to know."

Mantell frowned and said, "I'm not sure I understand what you're getting at. But I think I grasp the general picture."

"Good. Stick with me, Mantell. Life can be very very good for a man on Starhaven, if Ben Thurdan is backing him."

Thurdan grimaced in what was probably supposed to be a friendly smile, and rang off. Mantell stared at the shining surface of the blank screen for a second, trying to figure things out.

The call from Thurdan, he thought, was linked in some manner with Myra's enigmatic words at her door just before he had left her last night. Obviously Ben Thurdan was afraid of something; an assassination plot, more likely than not—and had chosen Mantell to serve as an extra pair of eyes and ears for him.

Maybe—Mantell caught his breath—maybe he suspected that Myra herself was involved in some conspiracy against him, and had arranged for Mantell to keep company with her so he could gain her confidence and report back information.

Mantell shook his head. A tangled web was beginning to form. Too soon, he thought. He hadn't come here to Starhaven to play power politics and get enmeshed in palace intrigues. He had just wanted a place to hide; a place where he could rebuild his battered personality and forget the Mulciber years.

He gobbled a breakfast tab and looked at his hands. They were shaking. He was playing with big trouble, and he was afraid.

Calming himself, he dialed Myra's number. She appeared on the screen, looking awake and unafraid, and they exchanged light banter for a moment or two before Mantell explained that he had called to arrange a date for lunch with her at the Pleasure Dome.

"Meet you there in ninety minutes," she said. "Outside the ninth-level dining hall."

"Right."

He broke the contact and started to dress. He killed the better part of an hour pacing tensely around his room, then went downstairs and found a cab to take him to the Pleasure Dome.

Myra met him there on time, to the minute, and once again they took the table near the window, drawing much attention from the service-robots. They had a brief, nervous lunch: chlorella steak and fried diamante potatoes, with splits of golden Livresae beer. They had replaced the freeform table with a crystal-topped affair in which strange green-hued horned fish swam proudly and serenely. Neither Mantell nor the girl said very much. Both seemed to be under a sort of cloud.

Myra said finally, breaking a long silence, "Ben called you this morning, didn't he?"

Mantell nodded. "That man seems to have taken a liking to me. I guess something in my psychprobe chart must have impressed him."

She laughed softly and drained her beer, all but the foam. "Something in your psychprobe chart impressed everybody who saw it, Johnny. We can't figure out why you let yourself drift so long on Mulciber."

"I told you. Pressure of circumstances."

"According to your chart, you're the sort who pushes circumstances around to suit himself, not the other way."

Mantell laughed cynically. "Maybe Dr. Harmon is getting senile, then. I haven't been doing much pushing around. I've been getting pushed."

"It's puzzling, then. According to the chart there's a real and solid core of toughness in you. Ben spotted that in a flash, the second old Harmon brought your graphs in from the lab for him to look at. That guy Mantell's got something,' Ben said. 1 can use him.'"

"I guess I hide my self-reliance well, then," Mantell said. He was remembering the shambling unshaven figure who was himself, weaving drunkenly over the shining sands of Port Mulciber, pleadingly cadging cheap drinks from sympathetic tourists. He wondered where that alleged core of toughness had been hiding all those lost years of beachcombing.

They fell silent for another few moments, while Mantell spun conflicting thoughts in his mind. Then he

said, "Last night, just before you said good night, you

made a strange remark. You             "

Terror suddenly appeared on her face, altering it for a flashing microsecond into a white mask of fear. She said, "That was just—a sort of a joke. Or a hope. Ill tell you more about it some day—maybe. I asked you not to be impatient."

"I can't help it. That's a lousy thing to do—I mean, dropping a lead that way and then not following through. But I won't try to push you. I'm starting to discover that you can't be pushed."

"There's a good boy," she said. She fingered the empty split of beer and said, "I want another of these beers. Then I'll take you up and give you the five-chip guided tour of the Dome's other amusement areas."

They had another beer apiece and left, Myra flashing her pass to take care of the check and the suave robot headwaiter nodding understandingly.

They moved past the barriers into the lift tube and rode upward one stop, to the tenth level. There they emerged in a hall lined with black onyx and gleaming chalcedony. Voices shrilled in noisy cacophony farther ahead down the corridor.

"There are eight casinos on this floor," Myra said. "They operate twenty-four hours a day."

Suddenly she turned down a narrower corridor; Man-tell followed and the corridor opened out abruptly into a room the size of the ballroom they had visited the night before.

He was blinded by myriad pinwheeling lights. Spirals of circling radiance danced in the air. Noise, gaiety, color bombarded him. Richly dressed Starhavenites were everywhere.

"Most of these people are professional gamblers," Myra whispered to him. "Some of them practically live in here, around the clock. Last month Mark Chantal had a run of luck on the rotowheel table and played for eight days without stopping. Toward the end he had a couple of companions feeding him lurobrin tablets by the bushel to keep him awake and fed. But by the time he decided to quit he had won eleven million chips."

Mantell whistled appreciatively. "I'll bet the house must have hated that!"

"The house is Ben Thurdan," Myra said. "He didn't hate it. He was here cheering Chantal on for the last two days of the run. That's the way Ben is."

Mantell glanced dizzily around the crowded hall. Gaming devices of every sort were in profuse evidence, ringed round the gleaming concourse. Some of the tables were tended by robots, others by attractive young women with sweet voices and daring costumes. In the back of the big casino Mantell saw a row of card tables; sleek-faced house operators waited there, willing to take on all comers in any kind of game.

"What shall we play?" Myra asked.

Mantell shrugged. "How do I pick one game out of all this?"

"Go ahead. The rotowheel? Swirly? Or should we try our luck at radial dice?"

Mantell licked his hps and picked out a table almost at random. "Let's start over here," he said, indicating the green baize surface of a nearby radial dice table.

It did not seem overcrowded. Four or five smartly dressed gamblers clustered around it, studying the elaborate system of pitfalls and snares that inhibited the free fall of the dice, making alterations in the system and placing their bets.

The house man was a robot. He waited, his metal face frozen in a perpetual cynical smile, his complex circuity computing the odds as they changed from one moment to the next.

Mantell frowned thoughtfully as he stared at the board. He drew a ten-chip bill from his wallet and started to put it down. Suddenly Myra touched his arm.

"Don't bet yet," she murmured tensely. "There's going to be trouble."

Slowly, he turned to follow her gaze. He was aware that the big room had become strangely quiet. Everyone was apparently staring with keen intensity at a newcomer who had just entered.

Mantell studied him. The stranger was remarkably tall—six feet eight, at a conservative estimate—and his face was chalk-pale. A livid scar ran jaggedly across his left cheek, standing out in odd contrast against his colorless skin. He was skeleton thin and wore black-and-white diamond-checked harlequin tights and a skin-tight gray-and-gold shirt.

A glittering blaster was strapped to his side just above his left hip. He was an arresting figure, standing quietly alone near the entrance.

"Who is he?" Mantell asked.

"Leroy Marchin. Everyone thought he left Starhaven more than a month ago. He shouldn't be here. Oh, the idiot! Stay here."

She started across the floor toward the other. Ignoring her order, Mantell followed him. The silence in the room shattered, finally, as a croupier began his droning chant once again. Myra seemed to have forgotten all about Mantell, now that Marchin, whoever he was, had arrived.

As Mantell drew near the pair he heard Marchin say,

"Hello, Myra." His voice was deep but without resonance; it sounded hollow.

"What are you doing here?" Myra demanded. "Don't

you know that Ben------- ?"

"Ben knows I'm here. The robots outside tipped him off ten minutes ago by remote wave."

"Get out of here, then!"

"No," Marchin said. "I'm hoping Ben will show up here in person. That way I have an even chance of getting in the first shot."

"Leroy—" Her tone rose in shrill urgency. "You can't—"

"Get away from me," Marchin interrupted brusquely. "I don't want you near me when the shooting starts."

He looked terribly pale and tired, but there was no fear on his face. With exaggerated casualness he stepped past Myra and Mantell, crossed the floor to the roto-wheel table, and calmly put a hundred-chip bill down when the croupier called for bets.

Mantell turned to Myra and said, "What's this all about? Who is he?"

She was taut with nervousness. "He—tried to ldll Ben, once. It was a conspiracy that didn't succeed. He and Ben built Starhaven together, in the early years, but Marchin was always pushed aside. Ben had to run this place as a one-man enterprise."

The suspense was becoming numbing. Mantell said, "Why did he come here?"

"He's been in hiding. I guess Ben flushed him out and Leroy decided to fight it out with him here in the casino. Oh--!"

Again the hall became silent. This time it was a silence markedly more profound than the last.

A robot entered the hall, moving on silent caterpillar treads—a square-built robot, stocky, at least eight feet tall. Mantell watched as Marchin turned round to face the robot. People who had been standing within ten or twenty feet of the pale man melted quietly away. Mantell was aware that Myra was trembling uncontrollably.

"Hello, Roy," the robot said. It was speaking in Ben Thurdan's own voice, thanks to the use of some kind of electronic remote-wave hookup.

Marchin's eyes blazed as he glared angrily at the robot.

"Damn you, Thurdan! Why didn't you come here yourself? Why did you have to send a robot here to do your filthy job for you?"

"Too busy to bother with such trivial things in person, Roy," was the calm reply. "And there's less doubt of the outcome this way."

Marchin drew his blaster. An instant later the house lights dimmed as though because of a sudden power drain, and a flickering transparent glow sprang up a-round the robot.

"Force screen," Myra muttered. "Marchin doesn't stand a chance."

Mantell nodded. A robot could wear a force screen, though a human being couldn't. A human being needed air to breathe, and a force screen blocked out everything —light and air as well as dangerous radiation. It was tremendously expensive to equip a robot with a force screen, but evidently Ben kept one around for jobs like this.

Marchin's finger tightened on the firing stud. A burst of flame leaped across the gap, bathing the robot in fire but actually merely splattering impotently against the impassable barrier that was the force screen.

The metal creature, unharmed by the deadly blast, waited impassively. Almost a minute slipped by while Marchin hopelessly continued to direct his fire at the barrier that shielded the robot's patient bulk. Then, seeing he was accomplishing nothing, Marchin cursed vividly and in a quick bitter gesture hurled the blaster across the room at the stiffly erect robot.

The weapon clanged off the creature's chest and fell to one side.

The robot laughed. The laugh was unmistakably the laugh of Ben Thurdan.

Marchin howled an imprecation, and began to run.

For a moment at first Mantell thought he was going to try to dash out the door, but that was not Marchin's intention, apparently. Instead he ran straight toward the robot in a mad suicidal dash.

He traveled ten feet. Then the robot lifted one ponderous arm and discharged a bolt of energy from grids in its fingers. The flare caught Marchin in the chest with such impact that it lifted him off the ground and hurled him backward the whole distance he had covered in his dash.

He tottered, clawed at his throat, and staggered into a swirly screen at a table behind him. He fell and didn't get up.

Its work complete, the robot about-faced and vanished without another word. From somewhere in the ceiling came the sound of light music, and the tension dissolved. The croupiers began to chatter again; the jingle of falling chips could be heard. It was as if everyone in the room was determined to pretend that nothing at all had taken place in the casino just now.

Two attendants appeared and removed the charred, blasted corpse. Mantell watched them until Myra tugged at his arm and pulled him back to the radial-dice table.

He felt a hard knot of fear in his stomach. He had just had another sample of the way Ben Thurdan governed Starhaven. Ben Thurdan was no man to cross.

CHAPTER VIII

THE KILLING put finish to any pleasure he might have had from gambling that afternoon.

Myra, oddly, was outwardly unmoved, except for a certain paleness and tenseness of face. It puzzled him for a while. Evidently, at sometime in the past, she had known Marchin well. Yet she seemed callously unmindful of his fate.

After a while he realized the reason. She was used to the phenomenon of killing. Death—violent death—was nothing uncommon on Starhaven.

They gambled for perhaps an hour more; Mantell's mind was only faindy focused on what he was doing, and in a short time he had contrived to lose half his slim bank-roll on the rotowheel and at radial dice. Luckily Myra did well at swirly, and recouped most of their losses. But Mantell's heart was hardly in the sport now. He waited for Myra to collect her swirly wirinings. Then, as she started across the room to the magneroulette board, he tugged on her sleeve and said, "No. No more games for now. Let's get out of here."

"Where?"

"Anywhere. I need a drink."

She smiled, understanding. Together they cut their way through the crowd, which was noisy now with a kind of desperate gaiety, heading for the entrance. A thick crowd of new arrivals was flocking into the casino as they left; evidently they had been attracted by reports of the excitement, no doubt filtering all through the Pleasure Dome now. Mantell and Myra had to fight their way out of the casino like fish swimming upstream in rapid current.

"Gambling is the number one industry of Starhaven," Myra said when they emerged at the lift shafts and stood wiping away some of the perspiration their exit had induced. "The working day starts around noon for most of the professionals. It gets heaviest at four or five in the afternoon, and continues all night."

Mantell mopped away perspiration without making any reply. He was not interested in small talk just now. He was thinking of a tall, gaunt, pale man named Leroy Marchin, who had been gunned down in full sight of five hundred people, without arousing more than polite comment here and there.

They rode upward and Myra led the way to a bar somewhere on the middle levels of the building. It was a dim place, smoky with alcohol vapors, fit only by faint and sputtering inert-gas light tubes.

Mantell found an empty table far to the rear, ornate and encrusted with possibly authentic gems. A vending robot came over and they dialed for their drinks.

He ordered straight rye, preferring not to drink anything fancy this time. Myra was drinking clear blue wine out of a crystal goblet. Mantell gulped his drink and had another.

Looking up, he spotted a tri-di video set mounted in the angle between the wall and the ceiling, back of the bar. He peered at it. He saw the drawn, weary face of Leroy Marchin depicted on the screen in bright harsh unreal colors.

"Look up there," he said.

Myra looked. The camera suddenly panned away from the figure of Marchin to show the entire casino as it had looked at the moment of the duel. There was the robot, massive, smugly supreme; there, facing it, Marchin. And he saw clearly in the vast screen his own lean face, staring at the scene uncomprehendingly. Myra was at his side. She was gripping his arm tensely in the shot; he didn't remember that, but he supposed it must have actually been that way. He had been too absorbed in the duel to notice.

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 IX

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 metalhc 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 111 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. Thnrdan 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 Star-haven defenses. It was awesome.

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

"Genius is right," Thurdan said. "Lome 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?"

"Lome 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. Thur-dan 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."

"Marchin, you mean?"

"Yes. He was one of my original colonists on Star-haven. But we never got along well, Marchin and 1.1 saw the conflict between us shaping for years, and yet I held my hand and let him strike first. I was stronger, as it turned out." He shook his big head sadly. "Well, enough of that. I've got a job for you, Mantell. A very special job."

"What land of job?" Mantell asked.

Thurdan said, "According to your psychprobe charts, you were a damned good defense-screen man—once. Every indication was that you'd hit the top before you were through. You fouled up that chance, but unless either Harmon or his machine is way off the beam, you still have plenty of stuff in you. Johnny, you can have a second chance to be top dog in your job, and do me a big favor at the same time. Here we can fight together. For I've found out—never mind how—that there's a scheme under way to assassinate me."

"Assassinate—you?" Mantell gasped, incredulous. "B-But what-? Who could-?"

"Never mind the details, or who wants me murdered. That's for me to worry about, not you. But the fact remains that they have a chance to succeed before I can identify and stop them."

"But Marchin didn't succeed."

"Marchin was different. I had him tagged every minute. Right now, I tell you I'm in constant danger. Oh, I'm well protected, all right, but not well enough for this. So, my friend, I'm going to turn an entire laboratory over to you, with your pick of the whole scientific staff. The sky's the hmit for you, Johnny"—and Thurdan's piercing eyes seemed to impale Mantell's as the absolute ruler of Starhaven paused impressively—"all I'm asking you to do for me is to accomplish the impossible. I want you to build me a personal defense screen. And get onto it at once!"

CHAPTER X

"I WANT YOU to do the impossible for me," Thurdan had told him. And, Mantell reflected soberly, that was pretty close to the truth.

He stood silently looking down at the huge man in the relaxing cradle who had built Starhaven. The personal defense screen was the goal of every defense outfit and of every planet in the galaxy, but so far even the basic working principles had eluded everyone's grasp. The problem was a horribly complex one: there had to be an arrangement which would selectively block off blaster energy while still admitting air, and although this could be accomplished within the realm of technological possibility, there were all the additional fillips that made the thing impossible. The unit had to be made small enough for a man to carry it about with him; then there was the necessity of somehow grounding the diverted energy, as well as providing for a steady and unstoppable power flow.

And, Mantell thought, even if all these problems were to be solved, such a screen would be useless. Round and round, and no answer without new problems. If a screen could be devised that was portable and efficient, as a perfect defense against energy weapons, its only effect would be to make energy weapons obsolete. Then, perhaps, the old, crude weapons of the ancient past would be reborn. And if so, there would be the problem of how to devise a screen that would block off knives and bullets and acid and still not cut off air and food.

"Well?" Thurdan said.

"You hit the nail square," Mantell said. "A screen like that is damned close to being an impossibility."

"So was building Starhaven," Thurdan shot back immediately. "But I built it! I don't know a damned thing about electronics, but I found men who did know. I found the best men in their fields, and they laughed when I showed them my rough plans for Starhaven. But I didn't listen to them. I told them to go ahead and do what I was paying them to do. I never take 'impossibles' for answers, Mantell."

Mantell shrugged. "I didn't say I wouldn't try. I'm just not promising delivery until I know I can do it."

"Fair enough," Thurdan said. "Don't promise anything. Just deliver. I don't want to die, Johnny."

Mantell caught the undertone in Thurdan's voice as he spoke the last words, and it was a startling revelation of the big man's character. For behind the bold voice, the resounding tones of command, there lay fear of the unknown, of death, just as in every other human being. Ben Thurdan didn't want to die. He didn't want to lose the world and private empire that he had planned and brought into being.

Well, Mantell considered, you can't blame him for that.

"There's one other thing I want to talk about, Mantell." The fear was gone from Thurdan's voice. "It's the matter of Miss Butler."

Mantell tensed. "What does she—?"

"I asked her to accompany you around during your first few days on Starhaven, Johnny. To help you out until you got your footing here, you understand. But right now, let's avoid any future conflict by getting things clear at the beginning. Myra isn't available. I'm marrying her just as soon as I get this problem solved."

"I—I never—" Mantell stammered.

"You never—what?" Thurdan snapped. "You called her place at three o'clock the other morning. I don't know what you had to say to her at three o'clock in the morning, but I can pretty well guess. So keep your hands off. There are plenty of women on Starhaven, and if you're interested, I'll see that you have your pick. But you don't have Myra!"

Mantell met Thurdan's eyes, and flinched. There wasn't any arguing with the strength he saw there. If Thurban had kept tabs on him to the extent of monitoring his phone, then lying to him was pointless. Even possibly suicidal.

He said, "Thanks for warning me, Ben. I wouldn't want to cross you."

"No," Thurdan said quietly. "It wouldn't be wise even to consider it."

Mantel! spent another hour listening to Thurdan daydream out loud about Starhaven. Thurdan showed him a small room not far from his which was to be Mantell's office, introduced him to three or four lab workers, technicians and scientists who would be responsible to him and who would supply him with any materials he might need in his research. As a last item, Thurdan handed him five hundred chips as pocket money, by way of a starting salary.

"From now on you'll draw your pay off the standard payroll here," Thurdan told him. "You'll be getting five hundred a week. That ought to keep you comfortable for a while."

"I imagine I can manage on five hundred. I scrounged for pennies for seven years."

Thurdan smiled grimly. "The penny-scrounging days are all done with now, Mantell. This is Starhaven. Things are different here."

They returned to the roof landing stage, boarded the waiting aircab, and Thurdan drove him back to the center of the city. Mantell watched the big broad-shouldered figure vanish into the doorway of his office. Then he turned and walked away.

He was thinking of Myra.

It was funny, Mantell reflected. From now on he would be getting five hundred a week, and for that he was supposed to figure out a way of preserving Ben Thurdan's life. But so long as Thurdan lived, Myra was his.

As Mantell stood there considering that, she came out of another office on the floor. They nearly collided. Backing off, they laughed.

"Hello, Johnny," she said—a little coolly, he felt. "I thought you were out in the control tower with Mr. Thurdan."

"I was. We just got back five minutes ago. He's in his office."

"Oh. I'll have to see him, then. Some urgent messages—"

She started away, but before she had taken three steps Mantell strode after her and caught her by the arm. Then he remembered that hidden photon-absorbers in the ceiling were probably soaking up every bit of this scene. Or perhaps Thurdan was watching it directly. He was as close to omniscient as a human being could be.

"What is it, Johnny?"

Mantell hesitated. "I—I just wanted to say so long, that's all. I suppose I won't be seeing much of you, now that—now that I'll be working at the tower. My week of loafing is all used up." His voice came haltingly; he was sure she knew what he was trying to say. Thurdan had probably warned her to keep away from him, too. Thurdan never missed his bets.

"Sure, Johnny. It was swell," she said.

She disengaged her hand from his grasp gently but emphatically, turned on a wholly mechanical and unconvincing smile, then clicked it off again like the closing of a camera shutter. She walked through the faintly glowing barrier-beam into Thurdan's office. Mantell stood looking after her. He shook his head and turned away.

He gravshafted downstairs, caught a passing cab and drove to his hotel room. As he entered the lobby of Number Thirteen, the robot attendant that guarded the place slid forward holding out a package.

"Mr. Mantell, this just came for you. It was delivered by special courier."

"Thanks," Mantell said abstractedly. He took the package and made his way to the lift tube. The package was bound in a plain plastic wrapper; it was about the size of a book. He frowned, wondering who might be sending him books.

Upstairs he threw the package on the bed, depolarized the window, stared out at Starhaven, stared up at the synthetic sky and at the synthetic sun, and at the synthetic clouds circling under the metal skin.

Starhaven, he thought. Property of Ben Thurdan, Esq., lord and master of a world of fugitives. And Mantell was the hope he had to avoid death.

Mantell tried to picture Starhaven without Thurdan. The entire planet revolved around his whims; he was an absolute monarch, even though an enlightened one. The social system he had evolved here worked—though whether or not it would work with any other man at its helm was a highly debatable point.

And what would happen if Thurdan died? Probably the whole delicate fabric of the Starhaven system would come tumbling in chaotically on itself, ending a unique experiment in political theory. It was easy to foresee a mad scramble for power; the man who grabbed possession of the control tower would rule unchallenged— until another assassin struck him down.

Suddenly Mantell went cold all over. If anybody were to gain control of that tower, it would be John Mantell! His research laboratory was close to the central control room, and it was safe to consider that he would become a close associate of Thurdan during the course of his work.

New, strange ideas occurred to him.

After a while he turned away from the window and glanced at the package lying forgotten on his bed. He snatched it up and held it to his ear. There was no sound of a mechanism within. Cautiously, he opened it.

It had felt like a book, and it was a book—the old-fashioned bound land, not a tape. Inscribed in dark letters on its jacket was its title: A Study of Hydrogen —Breathing Life in the Spica System.

Some land of joke? he wondered. He opened the book to the title page.

A folded slip of paper lay nestling between the flyleaf and the title page. Mantell frowned and drew it out, unfolded it, read it.

A moment later the slip flared heatlessly in his hand, became an ash, and was gone, drawn quickly into the circulating system of the room along with all other molecule-sized fragments of debris that happened to be in the air.

It had been a very interesting message, printed in square anonymous vocotype capitals, standard model. It said:

TO JOHN MANTELL-

IF YOU ARE INTERESTED IN DISCUSSING THURDAN, VISIT THE CASINO OF MASKS IN THE PLEASURE DOME DURING THE NEXT SEVEN DAYS, BETWEEN THE HOURS OF NINE AND TEN IN THE EVENING. NO DANGER TO YOU.

CHAPTER XI

THREE DAYS LATER, Mantell paid a visit to the Casino of Masks.

The decision cost him three days of agonizing inner conflict. His first reaction to the anonymous note had been one of immediate anger; he did not want any part of any conspiracy against the life of Thurdan, at least not yet.

But then he recalled Myra's strange words that first night, and started to think of the various possibilities Thurdan's death might hold for him. He began to consider the idea more seriously.

The book contained no further clues. He made a detailed examination of it and concluded it had simply been a dummy, a vehicle for the message, and he destroyed it rather than risk getting into a situation where he would be forced to explain what he was doing possessing so unlikely a volume. He had no hint of the sender. The wrapping had been utterly anonymous.

He had a week to make up his mind about going to the Casino of Masks.

During the first two days he spent most of his time in his newly outfitted lab, putting himself through an intensified refresher course in defense-screen logistics. It was astonishing how readily the old knowledge sprang brightly into the front of his mind again after so many years. He sketched out a few speculative preliminary functions toward the possible design of Thurdan's personal defense screen.

Mantell's sketches were simply trial hypotheses, wild

shots in the dark, but it seemed to him that he saw a few stray glimmers of light ahead. It might take months or years of work before anything useful eventuated, but he could perceive a possible line of attack, and that was a big chunk of the battle already won.

During those first days in the laboratory Mantell had little contact with Thurdan and none at all with Myra Butler. When he thought of her it was only as a girl of a dead romance, of a moment's affair. There was a brief sad ache, nothing more. He hadn't known her long enough for anything more, and in any event, he had become well conditioned to disappointment in his life.

He buried himself in his work; it was an exciting experience to rediscover techniques and patterns of thought he believed he had forever lost. He met his fellow armament technicians; Harrell, Bryson, Voriloinen, and six or seven others. Most of them were brilliant and wayward eccentrics who had fallen afoul of the law in one fashion or another, and who had fled to Starhaven, where by Thurdan's wisdom, technicians of all kinds were given a warm and eager welcome.

The technician named Bryson gave Mantell an uneasy moment one day. Bryson was a small man with rounded shoulders and fingers stained permanent ochre by nicotine; he walked with a kind of shuffle. He was in Man-tell's laboratory one morning observing and helping out, and it occurred to Mantell to ask, by way of conversation, where Bryson had acquired his impressive skill in electronics.

Bryson smiled and said, "Why, I used to work at Kling-san Defense Screens, on Earth. Before my trouble, that is, I mean."

Mantell was holding a packet of junction transistors.

He started violently, dropping them. They scattered everywhere. "Klingsan, you said?"

Bryson nodded. "You've heard of them?"

"I worked there once, too," Mantell said. "From '89 to '93. Then they sacked me."

"That's odd," Bryson said in a curious voice. "I was there from '91 to '96, and I thought I knew everyone in the armaments department. I should have known you, then. But I don't. I don't remember any Mantell there, not at all. And you don't look familiar, either. Did you go under the name of Mantell while you were there?"

"Yes." Puzzled, Mantell shrugged and said, "Hell, that was more than seven years ago. Nobody's memory is perfect. Anyway, maybe we worked in different departments."

"Maybe," Bryson agreed vaguely.

But Mantell felt troubled. He tried to remember a Bryson at Klingsan, and couldn't. Neither anyone of that name, nor anyone who resembled the little man with the stained fingers. That was odd, because if they had been there at overlapping times they would most certainly have worked in the same department, since they had the same skills.

Something, Mantell thought, is very wrong.

But he pushed it to the back of his mind, storing it back with his fife on Mulciber and his brief few days with Myra and all the other things he wasn't particularly anxious to think about, and returned to his waiting workbench.

He lost himself once again in his work. Another problem had to be settled. He wrestled with it for a while, and by late afternoon his decision was made. He had to find out. . . .

That night he went to the Casino of Masks.

There were eight separate gambling casinos on the tenth level of the Pleasure Dome, each with its own individual name and its own circle of regular clientele. The casino Myra had taken him to was known as the Crystal Casino, largest and most popular of the group, the casino of widest appeal. Others, farther along the gleaming onyx hallway, were smaller; in some, the stakes ran dangerously high, highly dangerous.

The Casino of Masks was farthest from the lift shaft. Mantell identified it solely by the hooded statue mounted before its entrance.

The time was exactly nine. His throat felt dry; tension gripped him like a constricting fist. He stretched out a hand, poked it as far as the wrist through the barrier beam that operated the door. The door slid back and he entered.

He found himself in darkness so complete that he was unable to see his hand held before his face, or even the watch on his arm. In all probability, he thought, he was getting a black light scanning from above, just to make sure he was not on the Casino's proscribed list.

After a moment a gentle robot voice murmured, "Step to the left, into the booth, sir."

Obediently he stepped to the left.

"Welcome to the Casino of Masks, good sir," another robot voice said.

He wished he had had the chance to find out from Myra or someone else exactly what this Casino of Masks was like, but it was too late for that now.

His unseen mentor said, "You may now receive the mask. Please turn."

Turning, Mantell saw a dim red light begin to glow, and by its light he perceived a triangular slotted mask lying in a lucite case; above it, in a mirror, he saw his image.

"Lift the mask from its case and slip it over your head," he was instructed. "It will afford complete protection of privacy from any recognition."

With tense fingers he lifted the mask and donned it. The next instruction followed: "Activate the stud near your right ear."

He touched the stud. And suddenly the image in the mirror gave way to a blurred figure of the same height. Just a blur, a wavering blotch in the air, concealing him completely.

Mantell remembered now: he had heard of these masks. They scattered light in a field surrounding the wearer, allowing one-way vision only. They were ideal for those who desired anonymity, as in this casino.

"You are now ready to enter the Casino," the robot said blandly.

He extended his hand, or rather the blur that was his hand. Within the field, of course, he saw no blur, but looking over his shoulder he caught the mirror's view of himself and smiled.

The booth opened, and he stepped out into the Casino of Masks.

Mantell stood at the entrance, adjusting to the situation. It seemed to him that he wore nothing, and indeed he felt a faint chill. But as he looked across the long halL seeing no people but only gray blurs here and there he knew he was utterly anonymous.

He wondered how the conspirators were going to a-chieve contact with him, cloaked as he was. Or whether there were any conspirators at all.

From the first he had considered the possibility that this was all some elaborate hoax of Thurdan's making.

Well, for that eventuality he was prepared; he would simply tell Thurdan that he was conducting an unofficial investigation, answering the summons in the book because he hoped to unmask the conspirators. He looked around.

The Casino was equipped with all the usual standard games of chance, but there were also a great many card tables in the back. It seemed logical, Mantell thought. He imagined that bluffiing games, such as poker, would be the order of things here. No involuntary facial manifestations could give away strategy here.

But he did not want to get involved in a card game. Instead he drifted across to the rotowheel table. It was as good a place to begin as any.

The table was crowded. It was almost completely surrounded by gesticulating blurred figures, busily placing their bets for the next turn.

In the center of the huge round table was a metal wheel whose enameled surface was covered with numbers. The wheel would swing free and halt at random, and when it halted a beam of light from above would focus sharply on it, singling out a number.

The man who played the winning number was entitled to collect the numerical value of that number from every other player: if he won on number Twelve, everyone present at the table handed in twelve chips to go to him, and paid the house the amount of his own losing number as well, as a forfeit. It was possible to win or lose heavily on the rotowheel in a matter of minutes.

Mantell edged into the crowd. There were some sixty people at the wheel. When he was close enough to bet, he put his money on Twenty-Two.

"You don't want to do that, mister," advised a tall blur at his side. The stranger's voice was as metallic and anonymous as his face; the vocal distortion was a side-effect of the scattering-field, and was a further concealment of the mask.

"Why not?" Mantell asked.

"Because Twenty-Two just came up last time around."

"The wheel doesn't remember what number won last time," Mantell snapped.

"Go ahead, then. Throw your dough away."

Mantell left his chips where they were. A few minutes later the croupier called time and the wheel started to swing. Around. . . . around. . . .

. . . And came to rest on Forty-Nine. Shrugging, Mantell added forty-nine chips to the twenty-two out there already, and watched while the croupier swept them away. The lucky winner, face an impassive blur behind which was probably an unashamed grin of pleasure, moved forward to collect. His take, Mantell computed, would be nearly three thousand chips. Not bad at all.

Mantell stayed at the board about fifteen minutes, and in that time managed to lose two hundred and eighty chips without much difficulty. Then he cashed in on Eleven—he was playing cautiously by then—and came a-way with winnings amounting to about five hundred chips.

There was, surprisingly, no clock in the Casino, and he had carelessly left his wristwatch back in his room. He had no way of knowing what time it was, but he estimated that it was still short of ten o'clock by some minutes.

While he stood to one side considering which game he should attempt next, a gong sounded suddenly, and the place became quiet. He saw a robot ascend a platform in the center of the hall.

"Attention, please! If the gentleman who recently lost a copy of the book entitled A Study of Hydrogen-Breathing Life in the Spica System will step forward, we will be able to return his book to him at this platform. Thank you."

The crowd buzzed in puzzled amusement, sensing some sort of joke, but not being sure just what it was. This, Mantell realized, was his message, and it had probably been read off every night during the past week, just in case he had decided to attend.

He paused for a moment, decided that since he had come this far he might as well go through with the rest of it, and made his way forward through the crowd of gaily laughing blurred figures to the dais.

He confronted the robot. "I own the missing book," he said. "I'm very anxious to have it returned."

"Of course. Will you come this way, sir?"

Mantell followed the robot back through the crowd to an alcove near the entrance. They paused there.

"To your left, sir," the robot said.

A door opened to his left and he stepped through. He entered a booth similar to the one in which he had donned his mask. Only there was a pink blur waiting for him in this one, holding out a copy of a yellow-bound book which looked very familiar.

The blur held the book up so he could see it and said in a mechanical distorted voice, "Is this the book you lost, sir?"

Mantell nodded stiffly. "It is. Thanks very much for returning it. I was very worried about it."

He stared at the blur, trying vainly to peer behind it and perceive the identity of the other. It was impossible. The waves of light danced mockingly before him, obscuring the face behind them.

He reached out to take the book, but it was gently drawn back out of his reach.

"Not yet, sir," the other said. "One question first. Have you read this book?"

"No—uh—I mean, yes, I have," he said, realizing the other was referring to the message between the pages, rather than to the text of the work itself. "Yes, I've read it."

"And are you interested in the subject with which it deals?"

He was silent for a moment, knowing that the "subject" she was talking about could only be the death of Ben Thurdan.

"Yes," he said finally, "I am. But—who are you?"

"You'll see. But I must have absolute assurance of secrecy in this matter."

He looked down at himself and felt sweat running down inside his shirt. "All right. I'll vow secrecy, if that's what you want."

The blur opposite moved slightly, lifting one hand to nudge the activating stud on the right side of the mask. Mantell heard a click—and then the unmasked face of a girl appeared before him. He gasped.

Almost immediately she clicked the studs again, and Mantell saw the delicate features, the star-blue eyes he knew so well, fade into a blurred veil of gray light—and Myra Butler became once more as distantly anonymous as any of the other Casino pleasure seekers.

It took him a moment to recover from the double shock of seeing Myra revealed for that brief instant and of finding that she was part of the conspiracy against Ben Thurdan. Then pieces of a puzzle began slowly to form into a pattern. He stared steadily at the blur before him.

"Is this a joke?" he asked hoarsely.

"Hardly. It's been in the planning stage for a long time. Too long, maybe. But we have to gain strength first, before we can take over."

"Aren't you afraid to speak so openly in this booth?" Mantell asked, looking around nervously. "Ben seems to have spies everywhere. There might be a pipehne to—

"No," she said. "This booth's all right. The manager of the Casino here is one of us. There isn't any danger."

He sat down limply on the bench in the booth. "Okay. Tell me about this thing, then, as long as I'm here. When do you plan to do it?"

Blurred pink lines that might have been soft shoulders lifted in a gentle shrug. "We haven't set the exact time yet. But we're certain of one thing: We must get rid of Thurdan."

Mantell didn't ask why. He said, "But you're taking a big chance, aren't you? How do you know I won't go running to Ben and tell him all about it? I'm sure he'd be highly interested."

"You won't do it," she said.

"How do you know?"

"Your psychprobe patterns. You won't betray us, Johnny. I saw your charts and I know the sort of a person you are, even if you don't know yourself. I picked you as one of us from the minute you were probed."

He sat looking at his fingers and thought about it. He realized that in this the probe had told the truth: it was almost as impossible for him to betray to Thurdan what Myra was telling him as it would be for him to grow wings. She was taking no risk with him.

"How about Marchin?" he asked. "Was he part of this thing, too?"

"No. Marchin knew about us, but he had his own plans. He stayed aloof. That was because he planned to rule the way Ben rules. Alone."

"And what does your group plan to do?"

"To set up a civilized form of government on Star-haven," was the steady reply. "To set up a democracy, instead of a tyranny."

"But tyranny sometimes works out. Ben is doing a good job of running his planet," Mantell said. "You can't deny that."

The blur that was Myra Butler moved from side to side, as if shaking her head in disagreement.

She said, "I won't try to argue with your statement. Certainly, Ben has Starhaven running on an even keel. But what would happen if he should die today?" She didn't wait for an answer. "I—we know very well what would happen. There would be a fierce scramble for power that would turn this planet into a raging madhouse of civil strife and death. And that's why we have to kill him and take over the planet ourselves. And nothing less than killing would work; he's too strong a man to be willing to take part in any other form of government than dictatorship. Ben can't just be deposed; he has to be put away permanently."

"I see the logic there. Ben himself is all right as a ruler, but the chances are that the next boss of Starhaven won't be so enlightened. So you get rid of the boss and the boss system now, and prevent the terrible destructive struggle for the throne before it can begin."

"You've got the idea. Well? Are you with us?"

Mantell hesitated. He was thinking of the giant named

Ben Thurdan, who feared dying, and he was thinking also of Myra, and of many possibilities.

There was no longer any doubt in his mind.

"Of course I'm with you!" he said.

She sighed. "Thank God you said that, Johnny. I would have hated to kill you, Darling!"

CHAPTER XII

KNOWING of the existence of a plot against Ben Thurdan's life didn't keep Mantell from working hard and long on his defense-screen project, even though he was conscious of the irony that success in his research would spell the end of all hopes for an assassination. He was definitely on the track of something, and he didn't necessarily have to turn it over to Thurdan when he had worked it out. And there would be some use for his personal defense screen, whether it was Thurdan or someone else—himself, perhaps—who benefited from it.

He withdrew almost completely into his laboratory. Myra had warned him not to see her again until everything was settled, and the promise of seeking her later took away most of the pain of not seeing her now.

They met briefly, twice more, in the Casino of Masks during the following week. They identified each other by a prearranged sign and spent a few hours at the tables. But it was a short and unsatisfying contact.

The second time he met her there, Mantell asked her again what was delaying them. His feeling was that they should strike at the first available opportunity. Ben had feed lines of data extending almost everywhere in Star-haven, and the longer they held back and polished their plans, the greater was Thurdan's chance of discovering their identities and killing both the conspiracy and themselves.

"It'll come soon, Johnny," she told him. "It's like a jigsaw puzzle. All the pieces have to be where they belong, to fit exactly and make the picture complete before the game is over."

Mantell slumped down in his seat, shoulders hunched. "I guess you know what you're doing," he said, frowning. "But I don't like this waiting. I'm getting impatient, and Ben's bound to find out before long."

She laughed, and the effect of the mask flattened the laugh into something strange. "You're impatient? Johnny, we've been living with this thing for years. You've only been on Starhaven a few weeks!"

After that, he stopped asking questions. Instead he plunged into his laboratory work with furious energy— the energy of seven years of idleness, dammed up and now rushing down the spillway.

He designed cumbersome defense screens that would be too massive for an elephant, and built them, and then refined and reduced them down, down—until, on one model that might be almost the proper size, the field winked out altogether, lacking sufficient strength. And he had to start all over again. He didn't mind that. Failure at this stage was only to be expected; success was not immediately to be hoped for. And he was working again, doing something, and that was enough.

Hardly a day went by without a call from Thurdan. Mantell learned that Starhaven was going through a period of peace, untroubled by the universe outside, and so Thurdan rarely visited the lab tower in person except when making routine checks.

Until the day of the Space Patrol raid. In a sudden instant, the peace and security of Starhaven was faced with abrupt destruction.

Yet the raid had been going on for almost a full hour before Mantell knew anything about it. His first hint that something was wrong came when the door of his laboratory opened as he bent low over his workbench, squinting over microminiaturized positronic dispersers and trying to coax them into their proper positions in the template he was building.

Startled, he glanced back over his shoulder and saw Ben Thurdan striding heavily into the room.

"Hello, Ben. Why the big rush?"

Thurdan's craggy face was tense. "Bombardment. A fleet of Patrol ships chased some fugitive here, and they're blasting us. Come with me and I'll show you something, Mantell. Come on!"

Mantell had to half-run after him down the hall to the central control room.

"What about the fugitive?" he asked, remembering his own arrival. "Did he get in okay?"

"He's here. An assassin."

Despite himself Mantell flinched. "What?"

"Killed the President of the Dryelleran Confederation, then lit out for here."

"Did you take him in?"

"Of course. We take everyone in. Harmon's psychprob-ing him now. But he brought a Patrol armada behind him. They've got some new land of heavy-cycle gun that I've never heard of before. If you listen you can pick up the sound."

Mantell listened. He heard a dull boom, and it seemed to him that the floor shook just a little. A moment later the boom was repeated.

"That's it," Thurdan said. "They're blasting at our screens."

He sat at the control console, in the big chair specially constructed to hold his weight, and switched on the visiscreens. Mantell saw the image take shape almost at once: a thick cloud of Patrol ships orbiting beyond Starhaven's metal skin, wheeling like stallions and discharging incredible bolts of radiant energy.

But now Thurdan was grinning. He emanated all the confidence and joy of an invincible warrior about to enter battle. His thick strong fingers rattled over the controls.

"Our defensive screens can soak all that stuff up, can't they?" Mantell asked uneasily.

"Most of it. Theoretically, they have unlimited capacity—but those boys up there are really pouring it on!" Thurdan pointed to a bank of meters whose quivering indicators swung dizzily up into the red area that meant overload and dropped back as Starhaven's enormous power piles drained away the dangerous excess. And again the Patrol ships slammed down their fierce bolts of force, and still the Starhaven defenses negated them.

"We've got to stay on the defensive for a few minutes, still," said Thurdan. "The load on our screens is too great to give us time to throw out a return blast. But we'll fix 'em! Watch this."

Mantell watched.

With strong staccato thrusts of his fingertips over the control boards, Thurdan brought the defense-screens of Starhaven out of synchronized equilibrium, establishing instead a shifting cycle-phase relationship.

"The screens are alternating now," he grunted. "Give me the differential."

Mantell squinted up at the dials, found the columns he wanted, and fed the figures rapidly to Thurdan. The big man made delicate adjustments, making mental computations that astonished Mantell.

Finally he sat back, grinning satanically. Sweat was pouring from every pore of his skin.

A chime sounded outside the room. Thurdan muttered, "See what they want, Johnny."

Mantell darted to the door and opened it. A handful of the defense-screen technicians stood there, pale, puzzled-looking.

Harrell said, "What's going on in here? The screens are phasing like crazy!"

"Close to overload," Bryson said.

Mantell smiled. "Ben's in charge," he said simply. "Come on in and watch."

He led them to where Thurdan sat staring broodingly into his vision plates, watching the cloud of orbiting Patrol Ships. There must have been hundreds of them out there, each one smashing every megawatt it could muster into the tough metal hide of Starhaven.   •

"They've been planning this attack for a year," Thurdan said half to himself, as he made compensating adjustments to absorb the ferocious onslaught. "Waiting for a chance to get this fleet out there and break Star-haven open, once and for all. And they're so sure they're going to do it, too—the poor fools!" Then he laughed. "Mantell, are you watching?"

Mantell nodded tensely, too absorbed to speak. He heard the other technicians murmur behind him.

"Here we go, then," Thurdan said grimly.

His right index finger jabbed sharply down on a projecting green stud of the control panel. The building shook. A violet flare of energy leaped into sight on the vision screen.

And where, a second ago, eleven Space Patrol ships had been arrayed in fighting formation, now there were none.

Thurdan chuckled. "They didn't expect that, I'd bet! They thought it was impossible to take this heavy an attack and still return fire! But I'm giving them their own juice back twice as hard!"

His finger came down again.

A flank of the Patrol attackers melted into nothingness.

Mantell saw what the strategy was: Thurdan was firing in the millionth-of-a-second pauses between each phase of the synchronized screens, squirting out a burst of energy in the micromoment when Starhaven was left unguarded. But the force of the beam coming up from the planet served as a screen itself, keeping the metal-shielded world from harm.

Again and again Thurdan's finger came down heavily on the firing stud, until the sky was cleared of ships. The angry cloud of buzzing, energy-spitting gnats that had been plaguing Starhaven was wiped out.

All except one, Mantell saw. One Space Patrol ship remained. He waited for Thurdan to spear it with a burst.

Instead he spoke into a microphone: "Get our ships up there, and grapple that one on. I want that ship. I want to study those guns."

He flicked away a stream of sweat from his forehead, rose, yawned and stretched. Again Starhaven had triumphed.

An hour later, Mantell was in Thurdan's office in central Starhaven when four of his private corpsmen brought in the crew of the captured SP ship.

At the moment Thurdan was expounding to him the virtues of his screen setup, with what Mantell considered was excusable pride. The big man had just given an awesome demonstration of skill, and Mantell had told him so. He felt sincerely impressed; and there was no reason why Thurdan shouldn't know it.

"A hundred and eighty-one ships they lost," Thurdan said. "Over five hundred Patrolmen dead, and at a cost of billions of credits to the Galactic Federation."

"And without a single Starhaven casualty," Mantell pointed out.

"That's only part of it!" Thurdan exclaimed. "We soaked up enough power in that raid to run Starhaven for a year. I've ordered the three auxiliary generators shut down indefinitely, until we're able to use up the trapped power surplus. We—"

The door chimed.

Myra appeared from the inner office and crossed to the door smoothly, saying, "I'll see who it is, Mr. Thurdan."

A moment later she reappeared.

"Well?" Thurdan growled.

"The captive SP men are here, under guard."

A scowl of surprise and annoyance darkened Thur-dan's face. "Captive SP men?" he repeated. "Captives? Who said anything about prisoners? Myra, tell me—who brought in the SP ship?"

"Bentley and his crew."

"Get Bentley on the phone, fast."

Myra nodded and punched out the number. Mantell, at once side of Thurdan's desk, was trying to stare away from her, trying not to admire her liquid grace of movement. He knew Thurdan was still keeping close check on him.

The screen swirled colorfully and a face that Mantell recognized appeared. It belonged to the man who had brought him to Starhaven long ago.

Thurdan said, "Who issued orders authorizing you to take prisoners, Bentley?"

"Why, nobody, sir. I thought-------- "

"You thought! In the future, just don't attempt to think, Bentley. Leave that to me. It doesn't look good on you. Starhaven isn't a jail. We don't want prisoners here. You understand that?"

"Yes, sir."

"Good. Next time you happen to capture a ship, jettison any SP man you find aboard." "Yes, sir."

Thurdan broke contact, whirled, and stared at Mantell. "Johnny, there's a bunch of SP men outside the office. Have them killed. Then report back to me."

He said it in a cool, even tone of voice. There was none of the anger in it that he had displayed when talking to the unfortunate Bentley.

"Have them killed." Just like that.

"What are you waiting for, Mantell?"

The room was very silent. "Killing's a little out of my

line, Ben. I'm a research man. I can't murder a group of

innocent SP men, just because you don't---------- "

Thurdan's fist came up faster than Mantell's eyes could flicker. Fireworks exploded in his head, then he crashed hard into the wall. He heard Myra gasp. He realized Thurdan had opened the fist at the last second and had merely slapped him. But even so, he felt as if he had been poleaxed.

His head rocked. He wobbled unsteadily away from the wall, making sure he was keeping well out of firing range of those fists.

Thurdan said, "I thought you were loyal, Johnny. I gave you an order. You stopped to argue. That doesn't go on Starhaven. I told you about that. See that you remember it from now on."

Mantell nodded. His jaw throbbed fiercely where Thurdan had slapped him.

"Yes, Ben."

"Make sure you mean it! Now get out of here and dispose of those SP men. Come back here when you've done the job. That's an order!"

His voice had regained the cool, level quality of his normal conversation by the time he finished speaking. There was nothing insane or paranoiac about Ben Thurdan, Mantell saw. Thurdan was simply the boss, and aimed to keep things that way.

Behind him, Myra was looking expressionlessly out the window.

"Okay, Ben," Mantell said hoarsely. "I'll take care of it right away."

CHAPTER XIII

MANTELL stepped out into the anteroom where four pale SP men waited, standing stiffly at attention, guarded by Thurdan's private corpsmen. The corpsmen recognized him and nodded curtly.

"Thurdan wants these men put out of the way," Man-tell said, in a dry, harsh voice.

The head corpsman said, "Locked up, you mean?"

"No. Killed. Destroyed."

"But Bentley said-------- "

"Those are orders!" Mantell scowled. "Thurdan just gave Bentley the devil because he brought in these prisoners," he said. He glanced at the SP men, who were registering as little emotion as possible. "Come on. Take them down the hall. We can shove them down the disposal unit there."

Mantell shuddered inwardly at his own calmness. But this was Ben Thurdan's way. This was Starhaven.

The corpsmen pushed the four SP captives roughly along, down the brightly lighted hall toward the empty room at the end of the corridor. They were herded inside.

"Okay, Mantell," the corpsman said. "You're in charge. Which one goes first?"

As Mantell hesitated, a tall SP man stared at him strangely and said to the corpsman, "Just a second. Did you say Mantell?"

"Yeah."

Mantell moistened his lips. Perhaps the fellow was from Mulciber, and knew about him. "Johnny Mantell?" he went on.

"That's me," Mantell snapped. "What's the matter with

you?"

"I thought I recognized you," said the SP man casually. "I'm Carter, Fourteenth Earth Platoon. What the hell are you doing in this outfit? And on Thurdan's side? When I knew you you were a lot different."

"I—" He stopped. "What do you mean, you knew me? Where?"

"In the Patrol, of course!" "You're crazy!"

"It was five years ago, when we were serving in the Syrtis Insurrection." The way he said it, it sounded like self-evident truth. "You couldn't have forgotten that so soon, Johnny!"

"What are you trying to get away with?" Mantell asked roughly. "Five years ago I was a stumblebum on Mulciber. Seven years ago I was doing the same thing. Also one year ago. I don't know who you are or what you're trying to pull, but I never was in the Patrol. For the last seven years I've been running away from the SP —until I wound up on Starhaven."

The SP man was shaking his head incredulously. "They must have done something to you. Same name, same face—it has to be you!"

Mantell realized he was shaking with uneasiness. "You're just stalling for time," he said. He glanced at the corpsman leader. "Ledru, get going with this job."

"Sure, Mantell."

The Patrolman who had given his name as Carter was staring at him aghast, then looked at the disposal unit. "You're just going to shove us down that thing? Alive? But we're Patrolmen, Johnny! Just like you!"

Those last three words rocked Mantell. He knew the reputation of the Patrol well enough, knew they would pull any kind of trick at all to achieve their ends. That was why Thurdan didn't want them kept prisoners; SP men on Starhaven would be potentially dangerous, behind bars or not.

But there was something in the Patrolman's tone that rang of sincerity.

Impossible! Those seven stark years on Mulciber burned vividly in Mantell's memory—too vividly for them to have been only dreams.

"Is the disposal ready?" he asked in a stony voice.

Ledru nodded. He signaled to his men and they grabbed one of the SP boys.

The one named Carter said, "You must be out of your head, Mantell, to do this. They did something to you."

"Shut up," Mantell said. He looked at the cold-faced corpsman chief. He thought: They say I committed murder on Mulciber. I say I didn't, but they found it on my psychprobe charts. Even if I did, it was in a fight—it was manslaughter, nothing worse. This is cold-blooded murder!

But Thurdan must be watching, he thought. "Ledru," he said, pointing at Carter, "put this one down the hole first." "Sure."

At Ledru's gesture the corpsmen released the man they held and moved toward Carter.

Suddenly the strange thing that had happened to Mantell three times already on Starhaven happened a-gain. He experienced that feeling of unreality, the conviction that all his past life was a mere hallucination. It came bursting up within him. He swayed.

Sweat poured down his body. The floor seemed to melt.

The corpsmen were dragging the struggling Carter toward the open disposal hatch, and Mantell knew he couldn't watch, that he had to get out of the room and get away from this thing that was happening.

He turned and ran to the door. He threw it open and lunged blindly out into the hall.

From behind him he heard a prolonged cry of sheer terror, as the last SP man hurtled through the disposal trap, out into endless space.

Then there was only silence that seemed deafeningly loud. . . .

Unreasoningly, Mantell started to run up the corridor, the hollow sounds of his own footsteps seeming to pursue him. At last out of breath, lungs gasping, he leaned against the cool, yielding wall to rest. Ahead of him, the bright, straight corridor stretched endlessly until walls, floor and ceding seemed to meet together in the far distance.

The words of the SP man, Carter, kept drumming mechanically in his brain. "Five years ago when we were serving together in the Syrtis Insurrection. . . . Five years ago when we. . . ." He pressed his palms over his ears, trying to shut out their persistent echo.

"Lies! All lies!" Mantell heard himself shout. It had been only an SP trick, a last-minute attempt to escape the doom that Thurdan had decreed for the Earth prisoners.

Leaning there, still sucking air into his burning lungs, a strange hallucination came over him. For an instant he seemed transported, as in a dream, to another world, another time. He was crawling through the blood-red yambo forest floor on his stomach and elbows, the long nozzle of the blaster held before him, attached by a flexible tube to the magna-energy tank strapped to his back. Somewhere ahead, hidden by the twisted scarlet trunks, lay the secret spacefield they had to capture. Suddenly the entire forest came alive with scarlet-skinned Syrtians, their fanglike tusks glittering. He pressed the activator button of his blaster. Then abrupdy the entire forest and himself along with it seemed to dissolve into nothingness. With recurrent flashes of consciousness, he remembered being dragged by his legs, and much later, a tall man grinning down at him, saying they'd secured the spacefield. . . .

He shook his head, shutting his eyes; his respiration steadying down. . . . And another vision rose before him, clearer and more real than the first one.

He was on the warm golden sands of Mulciber. On the broad raised walk before him, he looked up at the patronizing smug faces of the tourists. A fat man dressed in a loose chiton-like garment of red and yellow checks, laughed, pointed, and threw out some coins. Mantell knew what they were waiting to see; knew the show he was expected to put on.

So he raced, sand flying, on his hands and knees, scrabbling hungrily into the sand for the coins, while his ears burned with the laughter of the Earth tourists. . . .

"Five years ago when we were serving in the Syrtis Insurrection . . ."

A hallucination! A he! Mulciber was true; that was a direct recall. But that fight for the spacefield in the blood-red yambo forest? Only a dream, a fantasy that had no relation to actuality.

"Five years ago when we . . ."

The recurrent words and the deep voice kept up its measured, mechanical beat, like a pounding drum inside his head, interminably, torturingly.

And at last, as Mantell still stood there, doubt, like a hungry rodent, started gnawing at his mind. A hallucination? Yes. But whose? Carters—or his own?

He shook uncontrollably and sobbed. Once again, compulsively, he started to run, hearing only the pound of his feet against the floor, seeing nothing, not knowing where he was heading.

He ran into something hard and rebounded, halfstunned. He looked up, thinking he had collided with the wall or with a door. He hadn't.

He stared up into the sculptured face of Ben Thur-dan. It looked as bleak and as baleful as it had at the moment of the SP attack. He reached out and grasped Mantell's shoulder with an iron grip.

"Come on in my office a second, Mantell. I want to talk to you."

Numb inside, and chilled, Mantell faced Thurdan across the width of his office. The door was locked and sealed. Myra stood far off near the window, staring palely at him, then at the glowering Thurdan.

Thurdan said, "I didn't like the way you were talking when you went out of here, Mantell. I couldn't trust you. It was the first time I felt that way about you."

"Ben, I—"

"Keep quiet. I didn't trust you and I couldn't allow four SP men to run around Starhaven unchecked. So I used this"—he indicated a switch-studded control panel behind his desk—"and monitored your conversation all the way down into the room at the end- of the hall."

Mantell tried to look cool. "What are you trying to say, Ben? The Space Patrol men are dead, aren't they?"

"They are. No thanks to you. Ledru and his men finished the job while you were dashing away at top speed up the hall. But listen to this."

Thurdan flipped a switch and a recorder unit came to life on playback. Mantell heard Carter's voice say, "In the Patrol, of course! Five years ago, when we were serving in the Syrtis Insurrection! Don't tell me you've forgotten that so soon, Johnny!"

Thurdan clicked the playback off and said, "What was that all about?"

"It's a trick," Mantell said calmly, blotting out his

inner panic and confusion. "The Patrol is good at that,

as you ought to know. He was trying to confuse us all

and perhaps escape. And you-------- "

"I don't necessarily believe what an SP man says," Thurdan broke in. "You were psychprobed when you got here, and the probe said you had lived on Mulciber. It didn't say anything about your being in the Space Patrol." Thurdan's dark eyes narrowed and bored high-intensity holes through Mantell. "But just suppose maybe the psychprobe was wrong, though."

"How could that be?"

Thurdan shrugged. "Maybe the SP has discovered ways of planting fake memories good enough to fool a psychprobe. Or maybe my operator deliberately altered the readings for some reason of his own. Or he just bungled it out of sheer old age." Thurdan turned to Myra and said, "Send in Dr. Harmon."

A few moments passed, and then the spare figure of Harmon appeared at the door, withered-looking, mumbling to himself. He looked ancient.

He was ancient, Mantell thought—well over a hundred, certainly. Even modern techniques of gerontology weren't able to keep a man young and hale past eighty-five or so, and Harmon looked his age.

He said, "Something the matter, Ben?"

Thurdan glared at him. "Maybe or maybe not. I'm not sure. It seems one of the SP men Bentley captured today recognized Mantell here; claimed to have served with him five years ago!"

"Served with . . . but that's impossible, Ben. I probed Mantell myself. He hadn't been off Mulciber in seven years. That's what his chart says. And surely if I had seen anything about the Space Patrol there, don't you think I would have told you?"

"You're an old man, Erik. You were old when you ran into that vivisection scandal and had to come here, and you haven't been getting any younger since. Maybe you didn't do a very good job of probing Mantell. Maybe you overlooked some facts here and there."

Harmon went chalk-white and began to sputter incoherent angry phrases.

Annoyed, Mantell said, "Look here, Ben. Just because an SP man pulls a crazy desperate stunt to keep himself alive a few minutes more, that's no—"

"Shut up, Johnny. That SP man sounded convincing to me. I want to clear this business up to my own satisfaction right here and now."

Harmon said, "But how can you---------- ?"

Thurdan snapped, "Harmon, set up your equipment. We're going to probe Mantell again."

There was an instant of dead silence in the room.

Myra and Mantell reached the same conclusion at the same split second, and looked at each, other in that identical second, eyes wide with horror.

Mantell knew the consequences of his getting probed again. This time, they would discover the conspiracy against Thurdan. That hadn't been in his mind the last time Harmon had peered in it.

But now it was, and it would be curtains for Mantell and Myra the moment the delicate needles of the probe hit the surface of his cerebrum.

Myra reacted first. She came forward and gripped Thurdan's thick arm with her hand.

"Ben, you're not being fair. Johnny was just probed a few weeks ago. You're not supposed to probe a human

being twice in the same month—if you do, you can dam-

age his brain. Isn't that right, Dr. Harmon?"

"Indeed it is, and             "

"Quiet, both of you!" Thurdan paused a moment, listening to the obliging silence, then said, "Mantell's a valuable man to me. I don't want to lose him. But Starhaven's policy has always been to play the close ones, never to take unnecessary risk. If that SP man was telling the truth, Mantell's a spy—the first one ever to get past the gate! Erik, get your machine set up for the probe."

Harmon shrugged. "If you insist, Ben." "I do."

Harmon started for the door. Thurdan called after him, "Get Dr. Polderson in to take the reading."

Polderson was Harmon's chief assistant. The old scientist turned and looked up, bitter-faced. "I'm still capable of handling the machine myself, Ben."

"Maybe you are—or maybe you aren't. But I want somebody else to take the reading on Mantell. Is that understood?"

"Very well," Harmon said with obvious reluctance, after a brief pause.

Mantell could see what the old man had at stake— his professional pride. Well, he would be vindicated, of course, Mantell thought. Polderson's reading would coincide with the one Harmon had taken on his arrival, in all but one trifling detail—that detail being the conspiracy.

Mantell's hands were shaking as he walked through the passageway from Thurdan's office to the psychprobe laboratory.

It would be over soon. Everything.

The laboratory looked very much the same as it had the other time. There was the couch, the psychprobing paraphernalia, the rows of books and the mysterious gadgetry. Only one thing was new: Polderson.

Dr. Harmon's right-hand man was a cadaverous youngster with deep-set, dark brooding eyes and the outgoing gaiety of a decomposing corpse. He peered at Mantell with some curiosity.

"Are you the subject?" he asked in a grave voice.

"I am," Mantell said hesitantly. Behind him, walking in the shuffle of the extremely old, came Harmon. Thurdan and Myra had remained behind, in the other office.

Polderson intoned, "Would you kindly lie down on this couch for the psychprobe reading? Dr. Harmon, is the machine ready?"

"I want to make a few minor checks," the old man muttered. "Have to see that everything's functioning as it ought to be. This must be a perfect reading. Absolutely perfect."

He was puttering around in back of the machine, doing something near a cabinet of drugs. Mantell watched nervously.

Harmon looked up, finally, and, crossing the room, smiled a withered smile, clapped Polderson affectionately on the back and said, "Do a good job, Polderson. I know you're capable of it."

Polderson nodded mechanically. But when he turned his attention back to fastening Mantell into the machine, his eyes seemed to have lost their former intense glitter, and now were vague and dream-veiled.

Dr. Harmon was grinning. He held up one hand for Mantell to see.

Strapped to the inside of his middle finger was the tiny bulb of a pressure-injection syringe. And Polder-son, shambling amiably about the machine, had been neatly and thoroughly drugged.

CHAPTER XIV

MANTELL climbed obediently onto the couch and permitted Polderson to strap him in. He placed the cold probe-dome on Mantell's head. Harmon hovered nearby, smiling to himself, watching.

Suddenly the old doctor leaned over and whispered something in Polderson's ear. The first few words were inaudible to Mantell, but he caught the conclusion: "—see to it that his probe-chart is identical to the earlier one in all respects. You understand that? Identical!"

Polderson nodded dimly. He crossed the room, opened a pressure-sealed file drawer, and thoughtfully examined a foho that probably contained the record of Mantell's last probing, while Mantell watched curiously and wondered exactly what was going on.

Polderson seemed satisfied after a few moments' scrutiny. He nodded his head in content, closed the file, and turned back to the machine.

Mantell, waiting for the probing to begin, suddenly heard the sound of voices.

Myra was saying, "Ben, I tell you it's cruel to probe

him a second time! He might lose his mind, for all you

know! He might------ "

Mantell heard the sound of a slap, and winced. Then Thurdan threw open the lab door and bellowed, "Harmon/ I thought I told you to have an assistant conduct the psychprobel"

"I'm so doing," Harmon said mildly. "Dr. Polderson here is performing the actual probe. I'm merely supervising the mechanics of the work."

"I don't want you anywhere near Polderson or near Mantell or near the machine while this is going on," Thurdan snapped. "I want an absolutely untinkered response."

Sighing, Harmon nodded and moved away. He said, "Then let's all wait in your office. It's bad to have so many people in here while a probe is going on."

And he moved slowly and with considerable display of wounded dignity past Thurdan into the passageway. Thurdan turned and followed him, closing the door. Mantell was alone with Polderson—and the machine.

Polderson's lean fingers caressed the keyboard of the psychprobe as if he were fondling a loved one. In a drug-shrouded voice he murmured, "Relax, now, relax. You're much too tense. You have to ease up a little. Ease up, I tell you."

"I'm eased," Mantell lied. He was stiff with tension. "I'm as eased as I'm going to get."

"Loosen up, please. You're much too tense, Mr. Mantell. Much too tense. There's really no danger. None at all. The probe is a scientific instrument, totally harmless, that merely—"

Wham!

For the second time since he had come to Starhaven Mantell felt as if his skull had been cleft in two. He rocked under the impact of the probe, clung feebly to consciousness for an instant, and let go.

When he woke he found himself staring up into the face of Ben Thurdan.

The smiling face of Ben Thurdan.

Thurdan said in surprisingly gentle tones, "Are you up, Johnny?"

Mantell nodded groggily.

"I guess I owe you an apology, Mantell," Thurdan said. "Polderson just snowed me your new psychprobe chart. The reading's the same as it was when Harmon took it. That SP man was talking nonsense."

"You could have saved me a headache," Mantell said. His skull was spinning on a dizzy orbit. "I told you all along I wasn't an SP man."

"I couldn't accept that, Johnlly. I have to make sure— have to! Do you see that, Johnny?"

"Sort of. But I hope you're not going to probe me any time somebody says some crazy thing about me."

Thurdan chuckled warmly. "I think I can trust you now, Johnny."

"I hope so, Ben."

Mantell looked around and saw other figures in the room: Polderson, Dr. Harmon, Myra. His head began to stop whirling just a little. The effects of the psychprobe were diminishing.

"And I owe you an apology, too, Erik," Thurdan was saying to Harmon. "Don't ever say Ben Thurdan can't back down when he's wrong. It takes a big man to admit he's made a mistake. Eh, there?"

Harmon smiled, showing yellowed teeth. "Right you are, Ben. Right you are!"

Thurdan turned and left. Myra followed him.

Harmon said, "All right, Polderson. Thanks for your help. I'll take care of the lab now, and you can go."

"Certainly, Dr. Harmon."

Polderson left also. Mantell was alone with the old scientist.

"We had a close escape that time," Harmon said, •leaning close to him and whispering confidentially. "Would you care for a drink, Mr. Mantell?"

"Please. Yes."

A closet in the far corner of the laboratory divulged a small portable bar. Harmon dialed two sour chokers, took them from the bar as they came filtering out, and brought them across the room. He handed one to Mantell, who took it and sipped thirstily.

After a moment Mantell said, "What did you mean, we had a narrow escape?"

"Those of us who stood to risk exposure if Thurdan ever saw a true psychprobe chart of your mind."

Mantell blinked in surprise. "You mean—you're one of us?"

Harmon nodded smilingly. "I was the first. Then came Myra and the others. It would have been all over for us if Thurdan had seen your true psychprobe, knowing what you now know."

"How did you keep him from seeing it?"

"I slipped Polderson a hypnodrug while he was beginning to set up the machine. The rest of it was simple; I merely ordered him to see only those things I wanted him to see. He took your probe. There was no mention of—ah—us—on it."

Suddenly Mantell sat bolt upright. "What about that Space Patrolman's story, though? Was it just a wild hoax, or was there any truth in it? I mean, about his knowing me back when—"

Harmon shook his head vigorously. "No. Your first psychprobing and this one said the same thing: you spent the last seven years on Mulciber. Unless new techniques for misleading the psychprobe have been invented, that's the truth, Mantell."

He nodded. That was one bit of reality he had salvaged from all this, then.

He climbed off the couch, feeling his feet rocking beneath him. "And—was there anything in what Myra said to Ben—about a second psychprobing being likely to damage my mind?"

"Such a thing has been known to happen," Harmon admitted. "But it didn't, in this particular case. Let's be thankful for that."

Relieved, Mantell straightened out his rumpled clothing and followed Harmon down the corridor back toward Thurdan's office. Ben was sitting behind his desk. He looked every bit as massive seated as he did when standing. Mantell wondered how big Thurdan really was. Six feet six, probably, and two hundred seventy pounds. Probably Ben would be a rough man to tangle with in a fight, even figuring his age at sixty or so.

"Feeling better?" Thurdan rumbled.

"A little. Not much."

Mantell flopped into a beckoning foam cradle and tried to scrub the throbbing out of his forehead with his fingertips. Every beat of his pulse, every contraction of his heart seemed to echo noisily through the caverns of his skull.

"May I leave?" Harmon asked. "I'm very tired myself.

I'd like to------ "

"Stay here," Thurdan said, in that smooth, level voice that was so terribly unanswerable. "You're a scientist, Erik. I want you to hear what Mantell's going to tell us. You may be interested. Johnny, suppose you tell

Myra and Dr. Harmon what you've been working on in the lab for the past few weeks."

Mantell moistened his hps and looked straight at Harmon. "I've been developing a personal defense screen," he said. "Invisible field and body-size. The kind of shield a man could wear and be absolutely invulnerable while he had it on."

Myra tossed an interested glance his way. He saw that Thurdan was knuckling the portfolio he had sent him on the previous day, outlining the progress of his work so far.

Harmon looked more than a little impressed. In his feather-light voice he asked, "Is such a thing possible— this personal screen?"

"Tell them, Johnny."

"I didn't think it was possible, either," Mantell said. "Until I built one."

"What? You have succeeded?"

"It's not finished yet," Mantell added hastily. "It

won't be for a week or more, at least. But when I'm done

with it, it will------ "

"It's going to keep me safe," Thurdan broke in. "At last." He peered intensely at the three figures ringing his desk. "You see? You see what Johnny is doing for me —and yet I was willing to run the risk of damaging his brain rather than let a possible threat to Starhaven's security go unchecked."

There was no reply to that. Thurdan was sweating. He seemed to be under some tremendous strain. His powerful fingers toyed with the crystal knickknacks on his desk.

"All right," he said finally, his voice knifing through the tense silence. "You can go. All of you. Leave me alone."

In the face of a dismissal like that, there was nothing to do but leave. Mantell and Myra and Harmon filed silently out of Thurdan's office without looking back, and without a word once they reached the outer corridor. Mantell had already had one experience with Thurdan's concealed audio pickups in the hall.

Myra and Harmon vanished in opposite directions down the corridor, heading toward their respective offices. Mantell caught the lift tube down and left the building. A cab lurked outside, and he engaged it and took it back to Number Thirteen.

He wanted to rest. The probing had left him thoroughly exhausted.

He reached the room a few minutes later, feeling soggy and bedraggled. He showered; the brisk play of ions on his skin refreshed him and left him clean. He swallowed a fatigue tab and sprawled out on the bed, utterly worn out from the strain and from the probing.

It had been a close thing, he thought.

Only Harmon's fast work had saved them this time —and there was no way of telling how soon it would be before some accident would put information of the conspiracy into Thurdan's hands.

That woidd be the end. Ben was quick and ruthless, and he would spare no one in order to keep Starhaven under his domination.

And—Thurdan had to die. Mantell felt an ungrudging admiration for the colossal old tyrant, but Myra and her group had logic on their side. Thurdan had to be put away now, before a number of contenders to the throne arose and made the task of continuing the peace of Starhaven impossible.

Mantell half-dozed. Some time passed, and he was barely conscious of its passing. Then the door chime rang twice before he climbed wearily off the pad and answered it.

One of the house robots stood outside in the hallway, smiling mechanically at him. It held a package in its rubberized grips.

"Mr. Mantell? Package for you."

"Thanks very much," Mantell said limply. He took the package from the robot and shut the door.

The package was the size and shape of a book. He knew by now that it must contain another message; this seemed to be the approved way of contacting people on a world where one man held access into all electronic means of communication.

He unwrapped it. The book, bound in attractive quarter-morocco, was called • Etiology and Empiricism, by one Dr. F. G. Sze. Opening it, Mantell found a folded note inserted between pages 86 and 87.

Withdrawing the note, Mantell unfolded it. It said:

J.M.-

AFFAIRS REACHING A CRISIS. WE CANT RUN MORE RISKS. MEET ME CASINO OF MASKS TONIGHT TO DISCUSS B.T. IMMEDIATE ACTION. I'LL BE THERE AT 9 SHARP.

DON'T BE LATE, DARLING.

M.B.

Mantell stared at the note, reading it again and again, his eyes coming to rest each time on the "darling" at the end, looking so impersonal and yet so meaningful in the capitalized vocotype.

Then the note began to wither. In an instant it was but a pinch of brown dust in his hand, and then not even that.

CHAPTER XV

THE CASINO OF MASKS was thronged that night as Man-tell threaded his way into the main hall. He found himself confronted with hundreds of shadowy faceless figures, people of uncertain line and undeterminable identity.

One of them was Myra. But which?

He wandered to the swirly board, where the croupier was pleading for new players. He watched the interplay of bright colors a while, placed and lost ten chips on a combination of blue-green-red-black. Red-violet-orange-green came in instead, and Mantell turned away in mild disappointment.

Looking through the crowd he saw several pink blurs who might have been Myra, or might not have been; there was no way of telling. He was patient. He and Myra had prearranged a signal, but first he had to waste some time in planting false leads for possible pursuers.

He lost five more chips in a quick interchange of Fhcker, then picked up a hundred and fifty with a lucky cast on the Rotowheel. He decided enough time had gone by. He operated the prearranged signal by going to the card tables at the back of the casino and taking a seat at an unoccupied one.

Almost immediately a house girl, identifiable by the crimson ribbon she wore tied to her mask, appeared. "Looking for a partner, sir?"

"No, thanks. I'm waiting for someone."

Mantell turned down four more offers of a game, three from men, one from another house girl. Finally a pink blur approached, and said, in the flat unmodulated voice produced by the mask effect, "I'll play with you if the stakes are in my league, stranger."

Mantell smiled. It was Myra.

"I don't play penny ante, Miss."

She sat down. "Put your cards out where I can see them, and start dealing."

He dealt. He sorted out the cards and dealt a hand of pseudo-rummy, and as he dealt he murmured lightly under his breath, "Your message reached me. I think you're right. It's time to act."

"So do we. It's inevitable that Ben will psychprobe someone and find out all about it before long. We have to strike at once."

"When?"

She tossed three cards to the table. They were aces. "Tonight," she said. "At midnight."

The words seemed to reverberate through the noisy casino. Mantell's hand shook as he produced the useless fourth ace, drawing it from the cards he held in his hand and dropping it atop the ones she had laid out.

"Tonight? How will it be done?"

"I'm going to do it," Myra said. The distortion of the scattering field robbed her voice of any emotional overtone. "Thurdan has asked me to come to his apartment tonight. We have dinner, then do some work-minor details that he doesn't have time to handle during the day. I'll come tonight—with a knife. He'll be surprised."

Mantell dragged in the cards that lay scattered on the table and shuffled them mechanically, paying little attention to his actions.

He was staring at the electronically induced blur sitting across the table from him. He was realizing that he hardly knew the girl concealed behind it. She of the ice-blue eyes, Ben Thurdan's secretary and fiancee, who casually proposed to assassinate Starhaven's overlord tonight in his own home!

And yet Mantell knew he loved her.

"We're all prepared for the attack," she said. "Key men are ready to take over the moment he's dead. There won't be any lapse in the possession of power. Dr. Harmon will issue the public proclamation. The head of Ben's private bodyguard corps, McDermott, is one of us too, and he'll see to it that there's no public disturbance. There'll be a force on hand to capture the control tower. By morning the provisional government will be in complete control of Starhaven—we hope without a shot being fired."

"Very neat," Mantell said. "And who's going to head this provisional government that's taking over? You? Harmon? McDermott?"

"No," said Myra tranquilly. "You are."

Mantell sat very quietly, absorbing the implications of that, filtering out the noise of the casino and letting Myra's calm words fill his mind.

"You are."

Provisional Ruler of Starhaven. Johnny-on-the-spot

You are.

"Why me?" he asked finally. "There must be others

around more----- "

"No. There aren't. You're new here, Johnny. You haven't involved yourself in any feuds or made any enemies. People who would object to one leader or another

will settle on you as being least objectionable, since

you've had no contact with them, and so haven't aroused

any anger. You     "

"How do you know I want the job?"

"You said you'd do whatever you could to help us. This will help us."

"I'm not cut out to be a dictator."

"You won't be. You'll simply be acting head of the provisional government, until constitutional law can be established on Starhaven."

He considered that. The time was nine forty-five. In two hours and fifteen minutes, Ben Thurdan would be dead. And Johnny Martell, late of Mulciber, former defense-screen technician, general drifted and man-about-the-beach, would rule the iron world of Starhaven.

It was a fast rise, he thought.

The revolution would be quick too. By morning it would be over.

"Let's get out of here," he said. He started to rise from the table. She caught his arm and tugged him back into his seat.

"Not yet," she said. "We haven't finished our game." She dealt out the cards.

Some twenty minutes later they decided it was safe to leave the Casino, and they repaired to the entrance, shed their masks. They met outside the Casino in the onyx corridor. Myra was wearing a clinging blue spray-on tunic that outlined her soft figure revealingly.

Tonight, Mantell thought, she would see Ben Thurdan for the last time. Tomorrow she'll be mine.

They stepped out into the cool Starhaven night, strolling the broad plaza that fronted the Pleasure Dome. Overhead the sky was black, except for the mirror-bright moon and the sharp-focused stars. Ben Thurdan had put the moon and the stars up there deliberately, to cloak the artificiality of Starhaven. Mantell knew that they were simply lens projection that crossed the metal sky each night on a carefully computed schedule, and vanished by "morning." It was like a giant planetarium—a planetarium the size of a world.

A faintly chill rain-laden wind was blowing down on them out of the east as they stood together in the darkness, thinking of tomorrow and the tomorrows yet to come. Thurdan's weather engineers were shrewd planners. There was nothing synthetic seeming about Star-haven's weather. When it rained, it rained wet.

"Ben's a great man," Myra said softly, apropos of nothing, after a while. "That's why we have to kill him. He's big—too big for Starhaven. As Caesar was too big for Rome."

"You loved him, didn't you?"

"I loved Ben, yes. For all his cruelty and his ruthless-ness, he was something special, something unique. Something a little more than a man."

"Do we have to talk about him?" Mantell asked.

"If it hurts you, I won't. But I'm trying to square things with my own conscience, Johnny. Ben has to die —now. Or else there'll be hell on Starhaven when he dies naturally, and that day will have to come someday too. But still-"

It was strange, hearing her talk of conscience on this planet where conscience seemed to be a forgotten myth. Mantell turned to face her.

"Can I pry, Myra?"

"Into what?"

"You never told me why you came to Starhaven. Is it going to be a secret from me forever?"

She glanced sharply up at him. "Do you really want to know?" she asked.

He was silent for a moment, thinking. How terrible could her secret be, he wondered? Would it be some crime so ghastly it would drive a wedge between them forever, something that was better left untold?

He made up his mind. Nothing should be left untold. "Yes," he said. "I want to know."

"It wasn't because I committed any crime, Johnny. I'm one of the few people on Starhaven who isn't a fugitive from the law in some way."

His eyes widened. "You're not--------- "

"No. I'm no fugitive."

"Then how did you come here?" he asked, bewildered. "And why?"

She was silent a moment. "Eight years ago," she said finally, speaking as if from a great distance away. "Ben Thurdan left Starhaven for the first time since he had built it. He took a vacation. He travelled incognito to the planet of Luribar IX, and he spent a week at a hotel there. He met me there."

"You're from Luribar?"

She nodded. "My family helped to colonize it a century and a half ago. Ben took me dancing—once. He was so terribly clumsy I laughed at him. Then I saw I had hurt him. Imagine, hurting a powerful giant of a man like that! He was next to tears. I felt I had to apologize. He's never gone on a dance floor again, with me or with anybody else. But he left Luribar the next night, to return to Starhaven. He told me who he was and what he was, and asked me to come with him to Starhaven."

"And you did."

"Yes."

"Oh," Mantell said, after a while.

He glanced up at the star-speckled bowl of the night, thinking of Ben Thurdan who had put those stars up there and who had built an iron shell around this planet, and who was soon going to be dead.

Then he turned to Myra.

She seemed to flow into his arms.

CHAPTER XVI

AT 10:45 he left her. Thurdan was expecting her to arrive at his place in less than an hour, and she had to pick up her brief case and then go to central headquarters for the papers he wanted. In seventy-five minutes Thurdan would be dead, Mantell thought. The seconds dragged by interminably.

Myra had asked him to arrive at Thurdan's apartment at about ten minutes past midnight, to help her with the body. Until then, he was simply to stay out of trouble. He passed half an hour in a bar not far from the Pleasure Dome, a small place with poor lighting and worse liquor. A girl was dancing in the back, accompanying herself by singing in a nasal drone. When she finished her song a thin pockmarked man circulated and passed the hat among the patrons of the bar.

Mantell tossed in a single-chip note. The pock-marked man thanked him effusively and moved on. Mantell ordered a beer and sipped it reflectively. The minutes were crawling.

After a while he got tired of the bar, and left. He paced the Starhaven streets for nearly another half hour. He had already consumed the greater part of the seventy-five minutes he had to waste.

Now it was eleven thirty-five.

He found another bar, stopped in long enough to buy himself a second beer, drank hah of it and left. He was feeling less calm with each passing minute. She was so slim and small, he thought, and Thurdan so powerful-Eleven forty.

Eleven forty-five. She would be just about arriving at his apartment by now. Mantell flagged down an aircab and in a tension-tightened voice gave the robodriver a street not far from the address of Thurdan's private dwelling.

Eleven fifty.

He stood alone beneath a flickering street lamp, waiting for the minutes to pass. Eleven fifty-two.

Eight minutes to go. Then seven. Mantell started to walk toward the building. He was thinking: A month ago I was just a bum, wandering around the beaches, and now I'm on my way to help out in the assassination of the ruler of a world! It was almost like moving in a dream, except that this was real.

He reached the building at eleven fifty-seven. Three minutes. Of course, there was no positive assurance that Myra would act precisely on the dot of twelve. They had not bothered to synchronize watches too precisely, and in any event there might be unforeseen delays of a moment or two before she would strike. He prayed the blade would be sharp, her aim true.

A robot sat behind a desk in the lobby of Thurdan's building and surveyed him owlishly as he passed through the main doors. "Yes, please?"

"I'm visiting Mr. Thurdan," Mantell said. "Sorry, please. Mr. Thurdan is very busy on important government matters, and cannot be interrupted." Mantell glanced at his watch. Eleven fifty-nine.

The tension was mounting. "This is most urgent," he said.

At this very moment Myra might be unsheathing the weapon. The robot grinned obstinately, blocking his path.

"Mr. Thurdan is not to be disturbed," the robot said.

Mantell shrugged and drew the blaster he carried inside his jacket. He fired once, aiming for the robot's neural channel. The smile remained fixed idiotically on the metal face and the voice continued, locked now in an endless monotone.

"Mr. Thurdan is not to be disturbed Mr. Thurdan is

not to be disturbed Mr. Thurdan is not to be disturbed

Mr. Thurdan is not to be--------- "

Mantell fired again. The robot sagged and toppled to the deep wine-red carpet, quivered once, subsided, and lay there in a useless chrome-plated heap. It was just scrap, now, its delicate cryotronic brain hopelessly shorted out.

Midnight.

The elevator seemed to take little short of forever to climb the forty-eight storeys to Thurdan's penthouse. Mantell counted seconds, waiting, watching the clock hands moving.

Twelve-of-one. He had plenty of time. Myra had told him to be there at ten past twelve.

He stepped through the lift tube door on the forty-eighth level and found himself in an endless brightiy hghted corridor. Unsurprisingly, there was a robot patrolling the area; Thurdan was not a man to take many chances. His apartment, like Starhaven itself, was well guarded—but always subject to attack from within.

The robot turned and shouted a quick "Halt" at him.

Mantell knew that this one had its response channels set for guard duty; it wouldn't be as slow on the draw as the defunct lobby attendant had been.

He slid into an alcove, hoping the robot wasn't equipped with range perceptors keen enough to smell him out where he crouched. Or with a portable force screen, as the one who killed Marchin had been.

Metal feet clattered down the hallway.

"Halt! You are ordered to appear from hiding! Mr. Thurdan does not wish to be disturbed!"

The robot steamed on past Mantell without seeing him. He emerged from the alcove and fired once, blasting through its spinal column, paralyzing • it and blocking its motor responses. Then, ducking in front of it, he shorted out its brain and put a stop to its impotent whirrings.

The time was twelve-oh-five. Mantell sprinted down the corridor toward Thurdan's suite.

And stopped outside.And hstened.

And heard the sound of sobbing. It was Myra. In an agony of remorse, he wondered?

Twelve-oh-six.

Thurdan lay six minutes dead now. Mantell knew what his job was now: to go inside, to snap Myra out of the state of shock she probably had gone into after the killing. He pushed against the door, and to his surprise it gave readily. She had left it open for him.

He flung the door open and burst into Thurdan's apartment. The suite seemed to stretch in every direction. Rare and costly draperies cloaked the oval windows; rich thick rugs brocaded the floor. This was the suite of a czar, of a possession-hungry potentate. Paintings filled the wall space.

The sound of sobbing grew louder. Mantell ran toward

it.

He heard Myra shouting to him—"Johnnyl Johnnyl Nor

But by then it was too late.

He blundered into the room and in virtually the same instant two hundred forty pounds of irresistible force crashed into him. The drawn blaster he had been clutching went clattering across the room; he reeled back, struggling for balance.

Ben Thurdan was still alive.

The living room was brightly lighted. With terrible clarity Mantell saw the huge disordered desk, the crumpled papers on its top stained with blood. Myra entered.

Her face was tear-streaked and blotchy; her upper Hp was spHt, and a dab of blood oozed from it. One whole side of her face was Hvid and swoUen where she had received a ferocious blow. She was sobbing hysterically, her whole body quaking with each outcry.

A jagged red line ran some six inches across the front of his shirt at the chest, beginning below the left clavicle and ending just above his left breast. Mantell saw it was only a flesh wound.

He understood what had happened. Somehow Myra had failed in her attempt, scratching Thurdan where she should have torn.

"Are you in this thing too, Mantell?" Thurdan bellowed in monumental rage. Even coatless, and in his ripped shirt, he was a figure of terrifying authority. Sweat poured down his hairless scalp. "You're all against me, then? Harmon and Polderson and Ledru and McDermott and Myra—and even you, Mantell. Even you."

He advanced slowly toward Mantell. They were both unarmed. Myra's knife, that was to have finished Thurdan, was nowhere in sight, and the blaster Mantell had carried now lay out of reach. Mantell knew that Thurdan needed no weapon. He could tear him to pieces barehanded.

He backed up, moving warily to keep from stumbling. As he stared at Thurdan's grim face he was astonished to see tears starting to form in the fierce eyes—tears of rage, probably. Learning that your closest associates had banded together to betray you is something that even the strongest of men cannot take without a sharp emotional pang.

"All of you wanted to kill me, didn't you?" Thurdan said slowly. "I didn't do enough for you. I didn't build Starhaven practically with my own two hands, and take you all in when you came running. That wasn't enough, so you decided to try to kill me. But you won't kill Ben Thurdan! You won't!"

Mantell tried desperately to signal to Myra to scramble across the room and seize the blaster where it lay. But she was too dumb and dazed with shock to understand the meaning of his gestures. She lay on a sofa, aims wrapped over her eyes, shaking violently, a pale huddled figure.

Thurdan reached out for him. He ducked, swept in under his mighty fumbling paws, and landed a solid punch on the jutting jaw. It was like hitting a boulder. Thurdan didn't seem to feel the blow, though Mantell's arm rippled with pain at the contact.

Thurdan's hands clutched at his shoulder; he twisted and slipped away.

"The blaster, Myra—get the blaster!" he called harshly. "Pick it up!"

That was a mistake.

Thurdan nicked a hasty glance over his shoulder, saw the blaster where it lay not more than three feet behind him, and scooped it up in one huge paw. In the same motion he hurled it through the open window, far out into the night.

Now it was bare hands against bare hands, and that sort of conflict could have only one conceivable finish.

Mantell edged back as far from Thurdan's reach as he possibly could. His breath was coming hard and thick.

"Kill me, will you?" he demanded. "I'll show you! I'll show all of you!"

Thurdan charged forward, caught Mantell around the middle with one great hand, and hurled him like a toy across the room. He crashed numbingly into a table laden with fine pottery. Mantell rolled over, trying to get up and failing, and waited for Thurdan to pounce and finish him off.

But he didn't pounce. He stood over him, rocking unsteadily, face contorted by some deep inner stress. He made no attempt to touch the fallen Mantell, who lay looking up.

Finally Thurdan said, "I built Starhaven—and I can destroy it too!"

Wildly he laughed and swung away, ranning down the hall and out into the darkness.

CHAPTER XVII

MANTELL slowly pulled himself to his feet and stood frozen a moment, shaking away the pain. His back felt numb. Thurdan's sudden flight left him utterly bewildered. He turned to Myra.

"Did you see that? He just ran out!"

She nodded faintly. Her left eye was nearly puffed closed, he saw. She drew a tattered robe around herself. She was making a visible effort to regain control over her nerves.

"Come on," she said. "There's a private landing port out on the balcony. That's probably where he went."

"What----- ?"

She didn't wait to explain. She headed off in the direction Thurdan had gone, and Mantell had no choice but to follow.

They passed through a darkened hallway into a large sitting room whose balcony doors hung open, swaying back and forth in the night breeze. Myra pointed to something just beyond the balcony.

"There he goes!"

An aircar had just taken off, using the balcony as a landing stage; a fiery streak against the blackness indicated its direction. Two more cars were parked on the balcony landing strip. Evidently Thurdan kept them there for emergency use.

"He's heading for the control tower," Mantell said. "Like Samson bringing down the temple—he's going to lift the screens and bring all Starhaven down to ruin around him!"

Hastily they leaped into one of the waiting aircars and Mantell flipped on the engine. The car sprang away from the balcony. He managed to prod the engine into highest gear within moments after take-off, and they soared out over Starhaven.

The city, far below them, looked tiny and almost insignificant.

Myra huddled against him for warmth. She was still quivering, and not entirely from the cold of the night.

Mantell kept his eyes on the course. "What happened before I got there?" he asked.

She said, "Everything went as scheduled . . . until I drew the knife. I . . . hesitated. Just a fraction of a second too long. Ben saw what I was doing. I managed to strike anyway, but he dodged just in time and I only scratched his skin. And then—then he knocked the knife out of my hand and hit me. I thought he was going to kill me. Then you came."

"And what about Harmon and all the others? Are they still waiting?"

"I guess so. We allowed for something like this to happen. They were waiting to hear from me. I was supposed to give the signal before we made the announcement of Ben's death. And now—"

"Now everything's changed," Mantell said.

The dark windowless bulk of the control tower loomed up in the blackness ahead; he saw the smoking exhaust of Thurdan's aircar, and brought the vessel down on the landing stage nearby.

They sprang from the car and plunged through the entrance into the control tower itself, Mantell half-dragging Myra behind him. His hand encircled her wrist tightly; there was no time to waste now.

"He must be in his little control center room," Mantell guessed. "Lord knows what he's doing in there!"

"How do we get there? I don't know my way around this building."

"Come this way," he snapped. "The lift tubes are over here."

But the first lift tube they tried did not respond; it had been shut down for the night. So had the second, and so had the third.

"I don't have any idea how to get them started again," he told her.

They raced around the level, circling it completely in search of a functioning lift. The thought of running wildly upstairs through the darkened tower was hardly appeahng. At last they found a single lift tube that was in operation.

They took it.

They emerged in the corridor, just outside Mantell's defense-screen laboratory; not far down the hall was Ben Thurdan's private control room, the nerve center of Star-haven.

And the light was on in there.

Mantell released his grip on Myra's wrist and dashed down the hall, leaving her behind. Thurdan was in there, and he had the door locked and the small roomscreen barrier turned on, so it was impossible to enter. He had barricaded himself.

But it was possible to hear what he was saying. The visiscreen was on, and through the plexilite door-window Mantell could see that Thurdan was talking to a gray-faced man in the uniform of the Space Patrol.

"I'm Ben Thurdan, Commander. You heard me, Thurdan. You know who I am. I'm calling direct from Star-haven." Thurdan looked wild, half-mad almost. The iron reserve of poise had crumbled away completely.

The SP man looked skeptical. "Is this some kind of joke, Thurdan? Your foolishness doesn't interest me. One of the days you'll find we've broken through your defenses, and—"

"Shut up and let me talk!" Thurdan roared like some wounded animal in anguish. "I'm offering you Starhaven on a plutonium platter, Commander Whitestone! You say you have a fleet? All right, send your damned fleet— I'm dropping the screens! I'm surrendering. Can you understand that, Whitestone?"

The figure in the screen raised eyebrows curiously and

peered out at the wild-looking, sweating, half-naked

Thurdan. "Surrendering, Thurdan? I find it hard to be-

lieve that----- "

"Damn you, I mean it! Send a fleet!" As he stood with his face pressed against the panel, listening and watching, Mantell heard Myra approaching behind him.

"What's going on in there?" she asked. "Thurdan has cracked up completely. Right now he's busy surrendering Starhaven to Commander Whitestone of the Space Patrol. He's inviting them to send out a fleet, and he's promising to drop the screens when the fleet gets here."

"No! He can't be serious!"

"I think he is," Mantell said. "He would never be able to understand the reasons why you tried to kill him tonight. He thinks the conspiracy was the ultimate betrayal of everything he's worked for in Starhaven—and it threw him off his trolley!"

"We have to stop him!" Myra said determinedly. "If

the Patrol ever gets in here they'll carry everyone in

Starhaven off to the prison keeps for brainwashing.

People who have been law-abiding citizens for twenty

years are going to suffer. The place will be destroyed--------- "

"If we could only get in there and stop him—but he's got a barrier-screen around the room."

"Screens can be turned off. You're supposed to be a barrier-screen expert, Johnny. Can't you think of something?"

"No," he said. 'Yes. Yes. I can. Wait here, will you? And scream good and loud if Thurdan comes out of that room before I get back."

"What are you------ "

"Never mind. Just wait here. And sing out if he opens that door!"

Mantell raced hurriedly down the hall to his laboratory, punched his thumb savagely into the doorplate, and kicked the door open when his print released the lock. The light switched on automatically.

He began to rummage through his cluttered workbench for that unfinished pilot model, for which he had once had such high hopes, and which he had never dreamed would be put to a use such as this. . . .

Ah! There it was.

He snatched it up, out of the tangle of punch-coils and transistors in which it lay. Glancing around the room, he found a pocket welding torch, the only instrument within sight that could serve as an effective weapon. He gathered these things up, turned, ran out and back up the corridor to the place where Myra stood waiting for him.

"Did anything happen while I was gone?"

"He's still talking to that SP man," she told him. "I've been trying to listen. I think Whitestone finally believes Ben's serious."

"Okay. Watch out."

Mantell hammered loudly on the plexiplate door with his fists, while the conversation within came to an end and the screen went dead.

"Ben!" he yelled. "Ben Thurdan!"

Thurdan turned and blinked through the panel at him. Mantell called his name again, and yet again.

"What do you want?" Thurdan growled. "Liarl Betrayer! You'll die with all the rest of them!"

"You don't understand, Ben! I'm with you! I'm on your side! It's all a big mistake. You have to trust me. Look! I've brought you the personal defense screen, Ben."

He held up the model—the useless, unfinished, unworkable model. "I finished it tonight," he said desperately. "I was working on it ah evening. Then I ran the final tests. It's a success! You can strap it around your waist and no weapon can touch you."

"Eh?" Thurdan grunted suspiciously. "I thought you said it would take a week to finish it."

"I thought so, too. But I worked at nights. It's finished now."

Thurdan was staring intently through the thick plastic of the door, shielded both by that and by the bubble of force that cloaked his entire room. There was no way

Mantell could possibly get inside. But if be could induce Thurdan to come out. . . .

He seized Myra roughly and thrust her forward. She stood there, arms outstretched to Thurdan.

"I brought her, too," Mantell said. "She's yours. She wants to explain. There never was anything serious between her and me, Ben. Come on out of there. Don't give up Starhaven now. Don't give up everything you've built, all you've planned, just for this!"

Mantell saw he was getting through to him now, communicating. Thurdan's lips were fumbling for words; his deep hard eyes flicked back and forth, bewildered, confused.

Poor Ben! Mantell thought with real compassion. It was a saddening thing to watch a man like that crack open like a moldy melon.

Thurdan's hand wavered on the switch, and he grimaced to show his inner conflict. Then in a quick convulsive gesture he yanked downward sharply, cutting off the screen-field that was a barrier around the room. A long moment passed. Mantell heard him jiggling with the lock; then the door swung slowly open.

Thurdan came out.

He was walking unsteadily, swaying and faltering like a mighty oak about to fall. In a surprisingly quiet voice, in a voice that was being held in tight rein to keep it from turning into a hysterical babble, he said, "All right, Johnny. Give me the screen."

Mantell tossed the worthless model to him. Thurdan caught it with one great hand.

"There," Mantell said. "Go ahead. Strap it to your waist."

Myra was sobbing gently behind him, a low steady sound. For once Mantell felt no sensation of fear, only a cold, icy calmness inside him that seemed to fill his entire body. He watched as Thurdan carefully strapped the rig around himself.

Then Thurdan said crooningly, "Come here, Myra. Here to me."

"Just a second, Ben." Mantell interposed himself between Thurdan and the girl. "We have to test the thing first. Don't you want to test it?"

Thurdan's eyes flashed. "What the hell is this?"

Mantell pulled out the pocket welding torch. "You can trust me, Ben. Can't you?"

"Sure, Johnny. I trust you. About as far as I can throw youl"

Suddenly sane, realizing he had been tricked into coming out of the impregnable safety of his room, Thurdan came lumbering toward the two of them, murder blazing in his eyes.

Mantell waited just a moment and then turned on the welding torch.

There was a momentary sputtering hiss as the arc formed; then the globe of light spurted out and cascaded down over him. Thurdan howled and flailed out with his arms, hitting nothing. He took one difficult last step, like a man slogging grimly forward through a sea of molasses. He was dead then, but he didn't know it.

Mantell heard a whimper. Then Thurdan fell.

He clicked off the torch. Ben Thurdan was dead at last, dead by a trick, lured and baited to his death like a great mountain bear.

Mantell looked away from the charred thing on the floor. It wasn't pretty.

"Sorry, Ben," he said softly. "And you'll never understand why we had to do it. You never would have understood."

Inside the room, a quick glance at the meters told Mantell that the defense screens were down all over Starhaven. Thurdan had lowered them before he finished talking to the SP Commander. For the first time in decades, the sanctuary planet lay utterly open to Space Patrol attack.

Mantell jabbed down on the communicator stud and when the operator responded with the semi-automatic "Yes, Mr. Thurdan," Mantell said, "This isn't Thurdan. It's John Mantell. Get me back the call that was on this line a minute ago—SP headquarters on Earth. Thurdan was talking to Commander Whitestone."

The ten-second delay of subradio communication followed, while arcs leaped across the grayness of hyper-space, meshed, locked, returned.

The vision screen brightened. The face of Whitestone reappeared on the screen.

"The fleet's on its way, Thurdan," the SP man began immediately. "Don't tell me you've changed your mind, or—"

He stopped. Mantell said quickly, "Thurdan's dead. There's been a sort of a revolution on Starhaven, and I'm in charge. My name is—"

"Mantell?" The SP Commander burst in suddenly, interrupting. "You're still alive, Mantell? Then why didn't you report to us? What's been going on all this time, man?"

Stunned, Mantell looked up at the image in the vision screen. When he spoke, his voice came out as a harsh croaking whisper:

"What did you say? How do you know me?"

"Know you? I picked you for this job myself, Mantell! We probed eveiy member of the Patrol until we found one who could adapt well enough."

The floor seemed to quake under Mantell. He took a hesitant step backward, groped for what had been Thurdan's chair, and sank numbly into it.

"You say I'm in the Patrol?"

"A member of the Fourteenth Earth Patrol, Mantell," was the calm and utterly believable reply. "And we chose you to enter Starhaven bearing a false set of memories. It was a brand-new technique our espionage system had developed in order to get you past Thurdan's psychprobing."

"This can't be true."

"We invented a wholly fictitious background for you and instilled it subhypnotically, with a posthypnotic command implanted that would enable you to revert to your true identity twenty-four hours after you had been subjected to Thurdan's psychprobe."

"Johnny, what's he talking about?" Myra asked in a wondering voice.

"I wish I knew," Mantell said hollowly.

"What's that, Mantell? You're in complete charge of Starhaven now, you say? Fine work, boy! The fleet will arrive in less than an hour to take care of the job of mopping up."

"You don't seem to understand," Mantell said in a flat, dead voice. "Something went wrong. I never recovered my—my true identity, as you say. I don't know anything about this business of my being an SP man. So far as I know I was a beachcomber on the planet Mul-ciber for seven years, and before that I was a defense-screen technician on Earth."

"Yes, yes, of course that's so—that's the identity

pattern we established—though you were a trained de-

fense-screen man originally, of course. But----------- "

"But I don't remember anything about the SP!" Mantell protested. "Only my own memories are real!"

The SP man was silent a long moment.

Finally he said, "They assured me the treatment would be a success—that you would recover your original identity once vou were past Thurdan's psychprobes."

"I didn't."

"That's easily fixed. We'll have our psychosurgeons restore your original identity just as soon as you're back on Earth."

Mantell shook his head dizzily, trying to comprehend the magnitude of this thing Whitestone seemed to be telling him.

The room, Myra, the image of Whitestone, Starhaven itself, finally the universe—all took on a strange semblance of utter unreality, like the purplish glow objects get when one stares at them just the right way through a prism. Mantell seemed to be moving in a world of dreams—of nightmares.

Myra was very close to him, almost touching him.

"Is this true?" she asked. "Or is it just some SP trick?'

"I don't know," Mantell murmured. "Right now I don't know anything at all."

Whitestone said, "It appears that the project was a success, at any rate. Whether you're in full possession of your self-awareness or not, the fact remains that your mission has been fulfilled, Mantell. Starhaven's screens are down. Within an hour an SP squadron will be there, cleaning out the universe's sorriest hell-hole. Thanks to you, Mantell."

"I'm not so sure of that," Mantell said heavily, weighing each word and releasing it individually, syllable by syllable.

"What did you say?"

Without answering, Mantell sank back tiredly in the chair, and a torrent of images flooded through his mind.

The days at Klingsan Defense on Earth; the long weary years on Mulciber, years of scrabbhng for crusts of bread and cadging drinks.

Now this faded little man in a Space Patrol uniform was trying to tell him that all this was unreal, that the memories in his mind were artificially implanted memories, placed there by skilled psychosurgeons solely for the purpose of getting an SP man through the defenses of Ben Thurdan's fortress, Starhaven.

Well, perhaps they were.

Perhaps.

But to Mantell, they were real. To him, this was the life he had lived. That suffering he remembered was real. It had actually happened to him.

And Starhaven was real.

The SP—that, he thought, was a vague dream, a shining bubble of unreality, a hated enemy.

Where had it begun? Had he actually killed a man on Mulciber and fled to Starhaven in a stolen SP ship? Or had he been released from some point in space after they had fixed up his mind, and had two dummy remote-operated ships been rigged to "pursue" him to Starhaven?

A moment of choice faced him. He knew he could go back to Earth, and there have Mulciber and all its attendant bitterness peeled from his mind like the outer skin of an onion, and emerge fresh, clean, once again an honored member of the Space Patrol.

Or he could stay here. With Myra.

"Mantell, are you all right?" Whitestone's image demanded loudly from the screen. "Your face has turned utterly white."

"I'm thinking," Mantell said.

He was thinking of Ben Thurdan's dream, and of what the Patrol would do to Starhaven once they had finally penetrated its defenses. Twenty million fugitives would be carted off to justice at last; honor and decency would be restored to the galaxy.

But was that the only way?

What, he thought, if Starhaven were to be allowed to continue as it was, as a sanctuary for criminals—but run by Myra and himself, neither of whom was a lawbreaker. Suppose—suppose they were gradually to transform Ben Thurdan's metal fortress into a planet for rehabilitation—without the knowledge of those subtly being rehabilitated.

That seemed like a better idea to Mantell than opening the planet up to the SP. Much better.

Very quietly he said, "You'd better tell that fleet of yours to turn right around and head for home, White-stone."

"Eh? What's that?"

"I'm suggesting that you might as well' save the government a lot of lost time. Because when that fleet gets here, they'll discover that Starhaven is just as impregnable as ever. I've decided to stay here, Whitestone. I'm putting the screens back up again. And Starhaven doesn't want anything further to do with the galaxy."

"Mantell, this is madness! You're an SP man, a native of Earth! Where's your loyalty! Where's your sense of honor, Mantell?"

Mantell smiled broadly. "Honor? Loyalty? I'm Johnny Mantell of Starhaven, late of the planet Mulciber, before that a drunk and disorderly employee of Klingsan Defense Screens. That's what my memory tells me, and that's who I am. And I'm not letting Starhaven fall into the hands of the SP."

He moistened his dry hps and managed a grin. White-stone stared incredulously at him and started to say something. ManteU reached up and broke the contact; the face dissolved into an electronic whirl of colors, and was gone.

Mantell felt very tired, suddenly.

Am I right? he thought. Should I do this?

Yes, he answered himseh.

It had been a busy day. Thunder boomed in the sky outside. That meant it was nearly two in the morning —for, at two, thunder sounded over Starhaven, and then the nightly rains came, refreshing the planet, sweeping away the staleness of the day and leaving everything clean and bright and new.

Myra was smihng at him.

He reached forward and tugged down the master switch; instantly, meters and dials leaped into jiggling life. Once again, Starhaven was surrounded by an impassable network of force-shields; once again, they were protected from the outside.

And within the shield, Mantell thought, the greatest experiment in criminal reform in the history of the universe was about to begin. On a planet without law the galaxy's most hardened criminals would be converted into useful citizens—segregated from the rest of the galaxy. Starhaven would become a giant prison barred in both directions, ManteU thought.

The rain started to fall, pattering hghtly down. Mantell pulled Myra close against him for a moment.

Then he released her. There was time for that later. "You'd better get in touch with the rest of the Provisional Government of the Republic of Starhaven and let them know that Ben's dead," he told her. "We have plenty of work to do."