Chapter 10

Corriston stared down at the still unconscious guard, lying stretched out unclothed on the floor of the cell, then he turned, patting the guard’s gun which now nestled in its transferred holster on his angular, bony hip.

Well, there were perhaps even worse ways of ending up, and it was certainly a destiny almost universally shared.

He walked out through the open door of the cell without a backward glance.

He had changed his plans completely now. The complicated structure of the mask between his hands had so completely reassured him as to his complete sanity, that he was no longer under a compulsion to return to the Selector Compartment for additional proof.

All of the pieces were coming together and melting into a pattern that remained obscure only because there was still so much about it that he did not understand. He knew there was a killer loose on the Station, the same one who had been loose on the ship that had taken him to the Station. He knew about a poisoned barb that had killed one man and had barely missed killing Corriston himself.

Dismiss the killer for the moment. There was Helen Ramsey, the wealthiest girl on Earth. Think about Ramsey himself and what his wealth had done to Mars. Think about the colonists on Mars, men who had endured unimaginable hardships and privation to stake out uranium claims which Ramsey did not want them to have. Think about the freighter that had gone out of control.

Think about Clement. Think very hard about Clement. The tragedy had shaken him, had given him the look of a very guilty man. He had not wanted it to happen. He had been alarmed, appalled. Yes, think about Clement--that very secretive man.

The killer? You can’t get rid of him, can you? He keeps coming back into your mind. The killer had not tried to spare Helen Ramsey. He had killed her bodyguard and ripped a mask from her face. No attempt at protection there. But Clement could not have known about that. He had evidently been searching for Helen Ramsey himself. The news that she had been found had startled him, had given him a visible jolt.

Corriston did not think that the pattern would dissolve. A few of its features were becoming too clear now, the implications too inescapable. There was something going on that was ugly at the core of it, and the coming of the killer had simply brought it out into the open. Not too much into the open as yet perhaps, but the handwriting on the wall had at least become almost readable. Perhaps the accident to the freighter had also helped to bring it into the open. In some obscure way everything seemed to dovetail: Ramsey; the situation on Mars; Clement and the freighter; a twice disappearing Helen Ramsey; and an accusation of space-shock which was completely false and unjustified. Each seemed to hover just above the center of a very definite pattern.

And so did the masks! The masks in particular. Think, think hard about the masks and what the very existence of such masks on the Station implied.

The masks could only have been designed to cover the darkest deceit, to cover the most terrifying treachery.

How many officers and enlisted men on the Station were wearing masks? How many? And why? Was every officer on the Station wearing one? If the masks were thought necessary, if their employment had been made mandatory, there could be only one explanation.

Every officer and every enlisted man was masquerading. The Station was officered and manned by--a word he’d never liked from a dictionary of obsolete American slang came unbidden into his mind--Phonies!

The thought staggered him. For a moment he rejected it as inconceivable, outside the bounds of reason. But it remained on the perimeter of his consciousness and would not be dislodged. It came back and set itself down where its dominance over his mind could not be contested.

What else could it mean? Masks have only one purpose: to enable the wearer to avoid being recognized.

Quite obviously the phony officers could be wearing masks for only one reason: to conceal their real identities while they manned the Stations, carrying on the tasks of the men they had displaced.

Carrying on the tasks of the rightful officers, but with a difference. And that difference would almost certainly be criminal activity on a wide and daring scale.

The only question remaining to be answered was how high did that activity ascend? Did it ascend to the very top, to Commander Clement himself?

Fortunately, the violence of space is a controlled violence, and determined men can slip through it with tools and building materials. They can base themselves on zero-gravity construction rafts and take refuge in pressurized crevices, go floating along steel girders five hundred feet in length until there has been assembled the greatest of all miracles--a manned Space Station a thousand feet in diameter encircling Earth at a distance of fifteen hundred miles.

The Station had not been built in space, it had been built on Earth section by section. However, the final task of putting it together had been left to the floating men in their fishbowl helmets, the suicide brigade with their incredible vacuum equipment and remote control welding arms.

Fifty-seven sections had been built on Earth over a period of five years, thirty-four in the Eastern United States, the rest in scattered localities from Chicago to the Gold Coast. They had all been sent up by step rockets into the same narrow orbit around Earth. They were fifty-seven sections “crash landing” in a total vacuum, weightless and yet with sufficient mass and inertia to keep them in close proximity until the great task could get under way.

The assembled Station was cone-shaped, and it had been a colossal undertaking to keep it from developing stress defects over a third of its bulk during the early constructional stages. Under the guidance of experts, the problem had been solved, but at a tragic price.

Assembling the Station had cost the lives of fifty-three men, for there is no easy way to bring together, join, seal and make safe tons of metal and plastic, intricate machinery and equipment, plus a thousand-and-one small, incidental contrivances fifteen hundred miles above the emergency-alert systems and hospital facilities of Earth.

Some of the men who had lost their lives had been blown out of transport rocket tubes by mistake. Some had missed their footing too close to a welding operation that had been halted too late. Some had floated into capsules full of nitric oxygen gas under high pressure and had failed to veer away in time. Still others had tugged too strenuously at heavy girders and the slow, but crushing inertia of an enormous, backward-swinging beam in free fall had ripped their space suits asunder and fractured their spines.

There were five thousand ways of dying in space. But the sacrifice, the terror, the tragic toll seemed immeasurably remote now, for the roar of the incoming and outgoing ships made the Station a gigantic reality so completely in the present that it seemed to have no past.