The Chalice of Death: Three Novels of Mystery in Space

  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 appealing. 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 Starhaven.

  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 room screen 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 Starhaven.” 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 believe 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 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. “Liar! 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 all 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 he 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 you!”

  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 every 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 sub-hypnotically, 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 Mulciber 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 defense-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 you 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 scrabbling 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 law-breaker. 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, Whitestone.”

  “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.”