Chapter 4

Now Corriston was in a steel-walled cell and the captain’s voice seemed only a far-off echo sympathizing with him.

And it was an echo, for the captain was gone and he would probably never see him again. It was all very simple--that part of it--all very clear. The captain had faithfully kept his word. The captain hadn’t let him down. But any man can end up a prisoner when everyone disbelieves him and he has no way of proving that he is telling the truth.

It was hard to believe that a day and a night had passed, and that the Captain had kept his word and gone ahead with the roll call. It was even harder to believe that he, Corriston, was no longer on the ship, but in a sanity cell on the Space Station, and that the ship was traveling back toward Earth.

He shut his eyes, and the events of the past thirty hours unrolled before him with a nightmare clarity, and yet with all of the monstrous distortions which a nightmare must of necessity evoke.

Darkness and time and space. And closer at hand the frowns of forthright, honest men appalled by mental abnormality in a new recruit, an officer with a steel-lock determination to keep the truth securely guarded and safe from all distortion.

There had come the tap on his shoulder and a stern voice saying: “You’d better come with us, Lieutenant.” He had just told the captain the whole horrible story. He had not been believed.

“Tell me about it,” said the recruit in the bunk opposite Corriston. “It will help you to talk. Remember, we’re not prisoners. We mustn’t think of ourselves as prisoners. We can go out and exercise. We can walk around the Station for a half-hour or so. We’ve only got to promise we’ll come back and lock ourselves in. They trust us. It could happen to anyone.

“Space-shock. Not a fancy word at all. I’m getting over it; you’ve a certain distance to go. Or so they say. But we’re still in very much the same boat and talking always helps. Talk to me, Lieutenant, the way you did last night.”

Corriston looked at the pale youth opposite him. He had close-cropped hair and friendly blue eyes, and he seemed a likeable enough lad. He was Corriston’s junior by several years. But there was an aura of neuroticism about him that made Corriston uneasy. But hell, why shouldn’t he get it off his chest. Talking just might help.

“It’s true,” Corriston said. “Every word of it.”

“I believe you, Lieutenant. But quite obviously they didn’t. Why not strike a compromise. Say I’m one-tenth wrong in believing you and they’re nine-tenths right in not believing you. That means there may be some little quirk in what happened to you that doesn’t quite fit into the normal pattern. Put that down to space-shock--a mild case of it. I’m not saying you have it, but you could have it.”

The kid was grinning now, and Corriston had to like him.

“Okay,” he said. “You can believe this or not. The captain lined all of the passengers up and checked them off by their cabin numbers. I didn’t see her. Do you understand? She just wasn’t there! I thought I recognized two of the women who had come out of the ladies’ lounge, but I couldn’t even be sure of that. One of the two denied ever having stepped inside the lounge, and the other was vague about it.”

“I see.”

“The captain really sailed into me for a moment, lost his temper completely. ‘A fine officer you are, Lieutenant. It’s painful to be on the same ship with the kind of officers the training schools turn out when the Station finds itself short of personnel. Is the Station planning to trust ships’ clearance to hallucinated personnel?

“‘All right, you talked to a girl--some girl. She didn’t even tell you she was Ramsey’s daughter; Clakey told you. And he’s dead. Not only is he dead, he wasn’t listed on the passenger list as Clakey at all. His name was Henry Ewers. I don’t know what you believed, Lieutenant. I don’t care what you think you saw. You tangled with someone and he stabbed you. He was real enough ... obviously the man who killed Ewers. But you let him get away, so even that isn’t too much to your credit.’”

“If I had been you,” the kid said, “I’ve had knocked him down.”

“No.” For the first time Corriston smiled. “To tell you the truth, the captain is a good guy. He’s one of those blunt, moody, terribly human individuals you encounter occasionally, men who speak their minds on all occasions and are instantly sorry they did. You have to like them even when they seem to insult you.”

“He made up for it then?”

“I’ll say he did. He knew that when we landed the officials would be breathing right down my neck. He wanted to give me every chance. So he kept the officials away from me until I’d convinced myself Ramsey’s daughter just couldn’t be on board.

“He let me look at every piece of luggage that was taken off the ship. He had some cargo to unload and he let me inspect that too, every crate. Most of the crates were too small to conceal a drugged and unconscious girl--or any girl for that matter. The ones that weren’t, he opened for me and let me look inside.

“He let me watch every passenger leave the ship. Then, when all of the passengers had left, he stationed officers in the three main passageways and I went through the ship from bow to stern. I went into every stateroom and into every intership compartment. No one could have kept just a little ahead of me or behind me, dodging back into a compartment the instant I’d vacated it. They would have been instantly spotted by one of the officers.

“The Captain wasn’t to blame at all for what happened later ... when I tried to convince the commanding officers here that I was completely sane.”

“I see. He must have really liked you.”

“I guess he did. And I liked him.”

The kid nodded. “And the murderer’s still at large. That makes it rough for the sixty odd passengers they’re holding in quarantine. How long do you think they’ll hold them in the Big Cage?”

“As long as they can. They’ll keep them under close guard and increase their vigilance every time there’s a suspicious move in the cage. They’ll be screened perhaps a dozen times. But most of them are influential people. Most of them have booked passage on the Mars’ run liner that’s due here next week. They can’t hold them forever. They’d start pulling wires on Earth by short wave and there’d be a legislative uproar.

“Suppose they refuse to let them send messages?”

“They won’t refuse. I’m sure of that.”

The kid was thoughtful for a moment. Then he said: “Tell me more about Ramsey. Just what do you think is happening on Mars?”

“No one knows exactly what is happening,” Corriston said. “But to the best of my knowledge the overall picture is pretty ugly. The original settlers have their backs to the wall with a vengeance. Now there are armed guards at their throats. Ramsey has taken over. He has resorted to legal trickery to freeze them out.

“There are perhaps fifty important uranium claims on Mars and Ramsey has consolidated all of the holdings into a single major enterprise. To say that he’s cornered the market in uranium would be understating the case. He has taken possession by right of seizure, and the colonists can’t get to him. They’re living a hand-to-mouth existence while he lives in a heavily guarded stronghold behind three miles of electrified defenses.”

The kid nodded again. “Yes, that’s the picture when you unscramble it, I guess. But most of it is kept hidden from the general run of tourists.”

“Naturally. Ramsey has the power to keep it under wraps.”

“Do you think the colonists had anything to do with Clakey’s murder and Miss Ramsey’s disappearance? Or I guess I should say Henry Ewers’ murder.”

“Clakey, Ewers--his name doesn’t matter. I’m convinced that he was Miss Ramsey’s bodyguard.”

“But you haven’t answered my question.”

“I can’t answer it with any certainty. Did the colonists hire a killer and book passage for him on the ship? It’s difficult to believe that the kind of men who colonized Mars would resort to murder.”

“But there are a few scoundrels in every large group of men. And what if they became so desperate they felt they had to fight fire with fire?”

“Yes, I’d thought of that. It may be the answer.”

5

A half-hour later the kid was taken away and Corriston found himself completely alone. There are few events in human life more unnerving than the totally unexpected removal of a sympathetic listener when dark thoughts have taken possession of a man.

The kid wasn’t forcibly removed from the cell. He left without protesting and no rough hands were laid on him, no physical violence employed. But he was not at all eager to leave, and if the guards who came for him had eyed him less severely, his attitude might have been the opposite of complacent.

“Sorry, kid,” one of them said. “Your discharge has been postponed. Somebody on the psycho-staff wants to give you another test. I guess you didn’t interpret the ink blots right.”

He looked at Corriston and shook his head sympathetically. “It’s tough, I know. Once you’re here waiting to be released can wear you down. I shouldn’t be saying this, but it stands to reason it might even slow up your recovery a bit. It’s easy to blame the docs, but you’ve got to try to understand their side of it. They have to make sure.”