Space Station 1

9

May attempt to kill himself. May attempt... May attempt... May attempt to kill himself. Corriston sat up on his cot, his mouth dry, his temples pounding.

Had Clement implanted the suggestion in his mind deliberately, with infinite cruelty and cunning? Was Clement really hoping that he would commit suicide? If he took his own life Clement would stand to gain a great deal.

But could Clement be that much of a scoundrel? Was he, in fact, a scoundrel at all?

Corriston knew that he could not afford to succumb to panic. Only by staying calm, by trying to reason it out logically, could he hope to get anywhere. Not at the truth, perhaps, but anywhere at all.

Start off with a supposition: The commander was everything that he pretended to be, an honest man with immense responsibilities which he could not delegate to anyone else. A forthright, hot-tempered, but completely sincere man. A little secretive, yes, but only because he took his responsibilities so seriously.

Start off by assuming that Clement was that land of a man. What would he stand to gain if Corriston killed himself? The removal of one responsibility, at the very least. It was bad for morale if an officer had hallucinations that vitally concerned the Station itself. But a hallucination about the wealthiest girl on Earth wasn’t just run-of-the-mill. It could not only disturb every officer and enlisted man on the Station; it could have political repercussions on Earth.

Clement was already in trouble because of the freighter. The chances were a Congressional Investigating Committee would be coming out. They’d be sure to hear about Corriston. His story would be all over the Station, on everyone’s lips.

If Corriston took his own life the commander would be spared all that. He’d have nothing to answer for. The entire affair could be hushed up. Or could it?

Wait a minute, better give the whole problem another twirl. Even if the Commander was a completely honest man, he wouldn’t stand to gain too much. He might even find himself in more serious trouble. And look at it in another way: It was hard to believe that a hallucination concerning Helen Ramsey could be much more than a gadfly irritation. If the full truth came out, Clement could clear himself of all blame. Would a man of integrity suggest that a fellow-officer take his own life solely to remove a gadfly irritation? Or any irritation, for that matter?

It was inconceivable on the face of it. The first supposition was a contradiction in terms. It did not remain valid under close scrutiny and therefore it had to be rejected.

Supposition number two: Clement was in all respects the exact opposite of an honest man. Clement had something dark and damaging to conceal, was in more serious trouble than he’d allowed anyone to suspect. Clement had some reason for not wanting the truth about Ramsey’s daughter to come out.

What would he stand to gain if Corriston took himself out of the world? Unfortunately there were wide areas where any kind of speculation had to penetrate an almost absolute vacuum to get anywhere at all.

The situation on Mars? Was there some as yet undemonstratable link between Ramsey’s uranium holdings and the Station itself? Was Clement involved with Ramsey in some way? And was Ramsey’s daughter a vital link in the chain?

Had the accident to the freighter put an additional strain on the chain, a strain so great that Clement had been forced to take immediate, drastic action to protect himself?

Corriston tried to remember exactly what the Commander had said over the speaking tube. He had tried to listen intently, but he had been too agitated to make much sense out of the few brief sentences which he had overheard. Clement had been speaking in anger and not too coherently, and it had been a one-way conversation, with the replying voice completely silent, or, at the very least, inaudible. But one thing about the conversation had made a strong impression on him. Clement had not sounded like an honest man with nothing to conceal. On the contrary, he had sounded like a worried and guilty man.

Corriston shut his eyes and relaxed for a moment on his cot. It was an uneasy, tormenting kind of relaxation, because another thought had occurred to him.

What if Clement had not deliberately tried to plant a suicide suggestion in his mind at all? What if he had simply spoken with the malice of a not too kindly man appalled and enraged by a space-shock victim who had not only lied to him, but had given every evidence of being dangerously difficult to control.

It certainly made sense. There was nothing in the cell which might have enabled Corriston to take his own life, even had he been so inclined. Would not Clement have taken care to introduce into the cell some convenient, readily available weapon — a steel file, perhaps or even a small spool of wire?

A cold dream had begun to take possession of Corriston. Was it true then, could it possibly be true? Was he hallucinating? He had seen Helen Ramsey go into a ladies’ lounge and disappear. He had seen her a second time, and she had worn a mask. The mask was so strange that it would have made four men out of five question their own sanity. But he had knelt beside her and lifted her into his arms. He had felt the pulse at her wrist. Well? If after that she had disappeared again, was it not more of a black mark against him than if he had failed to touch her at all?

All hallucinations seem real to the insane. The realer they seem the more likely they are to be inescapably damning.

Could a warped mind hope to escape from such a dilemma? Was there any possible way of making sure? No, not if he had actually cracked up. But supposing he hadn’t. Suppose he had just passed for an instant over the borderline, as a result of strain, of abnormal circumstances, and was now completely rational again. In that case, proof would help. Proof could convince him that at least a part of what had happened had been real, that he had not been hallucinating continuously for days.

If he could prove conclusively that he had not been hallucinating when he had climbed through the grate, Helen Ramsey’s presence beyond the grate would be pretty well established. Even an insane man does not abandon all logic when he performs a complicated act. He is not likely to ascend a ten foot wall and climb through a grate in pursuit of a complete illusion.

Oh, it could happen... Possibly it had happened many times in hospitals for the incurably insane. But somehow he could not believe that it had happened in his case. Right at this moment he was certainly not in an abnormal state of mind. How could he be when he was able to think so logically and consistently?

Being sane now, or at least having the firm conviction that he was sane, would enable him to retrace what had happened step by step. What he were to retrace it in reality... until he came to the grate? If the grate had been ripped out, the torment and uncertainty in his mind would vanish. He would be free then to move against Clement, to unmask and expose him for the scoundrel he was.

Free? The very thought was a mockery. He was free for twenty feet in either direction, free to shout and summon the guard. But beyond that...

Corriston sat up straight. Free to summon the guard. Free to summon a man he had dropped to the floor with two quick, decisive and totally unexpected blows. But if he did summon the guard, what then? Could he be doubled up with cramps — the old prisoners dodge? “Get me to a doctor. I think I’m dying”.

Hell no, not that. It was mildewed even on the face of it. The guard wouldn’t be that much of a fool. He’d whip out a gun, and slash downward with it at the first suspicious move on the part of a man he hated.

Was there any other way? Perhaps there was... a quite simple way. Why couldn’t he simply ask the guard to step into the cell and request permission to talk to him? He would plead urgency, but do it very casually, arouse the man’s curiosity without antagonizing him too much.

No need to be crafty, await some unlikely opportunity, or anything of the sort.

Simply overpower the man — straight off, without any fuss. It had happened before, but that very fact would make the guard contemptuous, more than ever convinced that the first time he hadn’t really been taken by surprise at all. His pride would make him want to believe that. He was the kind of man who could rationalize a humiliating defeat and blot it completely from his memory.

It not only worked, it worked better than he could have dared hope. When he spoke a few words through the door, the guard became instantly curious. He unlocked the cell and came in, his eyes narrowed in anger... anger, but not suspicion. His gun remained on his hip as he walked up to Corriston and stood directly facing him, well within grappling range.

“Well, what do you want to talk to me about?” he demanded. “Better make it brief. I’m not supposed to talk to you at all”.

“I’m sorry to hear that”, Corriston said. “You’ve got no idea how depressing it is to be locked up in a narrow cell with absolutely no one to talk to”.

“You don’t like it, eh? Well, you brought it on yourself”. Corriston caught the man about the waist and brought his right fist down three times on his curving back. Each blow was a powerful one, slanting downward toward the kidney.

Then Corriston hit the guard directly in the small of the back, with an even more punishing blow. The cumulative effect was instantaneous. The guard collapsed and sank down like a suddenly deflated balloon, the breath whistling from between his teeth.

Corriston watched him sink to the floor and straighten out. Forewarned as he was, he was still appalled by the almost instant, shocking change in the man’s expression. For the second time the guard’s features began to come apart. The entire upper portion of his face seemed to sink inward and broaden out, and the flowing began, the incredible refusal of his forehead and nose to remain in close proximity to his mouth.

One eye closed completely; the other remained open in a wide and almost pupilless stare. The chin receded and the lips became a puckered gray orifice that looked like some monstrous fungus growth sprouting from the middle of a gargoyle face. The individual features became paler and paler as they spread, and suddenly there seemed to be no color left in the face at all. It had turned completely waxen.

It was a horrifying thing to watch.

Corriston knelt, opened the man’s shirt and stared intently at the exposed throat, something he had not done the first time in the cafeteria. The first time he had simply knelt and searched under the shirt with his hand for a heartbeat which had surprised him by its steadiness. He was quite sure now that the heart was beating firmly and steadily.

Even the peculiar appearance of the throat did not alarm him. But it most certainly did interest him. Far down on the Security Guard’s throat, just above his breastbone, were a row of small hooks partly embedded in his flesh. The hooks were very tiny indeed, and their brightness was obscured by a thin film of sweat. Corriston removed the moisture with a quick flick of his thumb and continued to stare, as if he could not quite believe his eyes.

Finally he wedged his fingers under the base of the mask, and ripped it from the guard’s face.

Under the mask, the face had a perfectly natural look. The features were relaxed and vacuous, but there was no flowing, no unnatural distortion at all. And it was quite a different face — the face of a man who had worn a disguise and was now so completely a stranger to Corriston that he might just as well have been any one of the Station’s thirty-seven Security Guards.

Corriston could see where the hook attachments had gone into the flesh in at least thirty places on the man’s face: on his brow, his cheekbones, on both sides of his face clear down to the base of his neck. The tiny punctures made by the hooks were faintly rimmed with blood, perhaps because Corriston had tom the mask away too abruptly. Undoubtedly the skin had been anaesthetized, the hooks inserted skillfully by someone familiar with just what should be done to prevent scarring.

He hoped that the guard would not carry tiny scars on his face for the rest of his natural life. He arose and examined the mask. He had a complete false face.

The thing was ingenious beyond belief. It was no mere Halloween assemblage of papier-mache flimflammery, but an elaborate and flexible mask of very thin plastic, or possibly metal. A prosthetic mask — if one could use that term in connection with a mask. It was certainly more complex in structure than any prosthetic leg or arm he had ever seen on a handicapped man, or would ever be likely to see.

He had a pretty good idea as to how it worked. A general idea. Apparently when the hooks were attached to the muscular structure of the human face underneath, every aspect of the wearers face would be instantly controlled and altered to conform to the configuration of the false face. In that sense the mask could be said to actually mold itself to the wearers face and transform it into a completely new and different face.

And yet, in some subtle way, the emotions felt by the owner of the real face would be conveyed to the mask, so that it would express with different features very much the same kinds of emotion.

Ingenious was scarcely the word for it. It was a miracle of technological science, almost beyond belief. But he could not doubt the reality of what he saw, for he held the evidence in his hand. No hallucination could possibly be that real.

The way the mask’s surface coloration could change when the wearer’s emotions changed was perhaps the most amazing miracle of all. He had seen the guard’s color come and go, had watched him redden with anger and then grow pale.

It could only mean that there was some mechanically symbiotic, emotion-sensitive electronic coating or skin surface, or series of tubes on the inner surface of the mask, which could simulate actual blood flow much like a network of tiny heat regulators. This network would be so responsive to the slightest change in body temperature that the mask would alter its color the instant the wearer experienced fright or grew uncontrollably angry. What made it seem logical and even likely was the fact that caloric changes do occur in just such a fashion in the human body with every shift from anger to grief or from pain to shock.

There was nothing simple about the inner surface of the mask. It was a maze of complicated gadgetry concentrated in less than eight inches of space, perhaps thirty or forty separate mechanisms in all, some as tiny as the head of a pin, and others about one inch in width.

When the wearer became unconscious, the mask seemingly lost its integrity. The gadgets either stopped functioning or ceased to function properly and the false face became a dissolving, hideous caricature; that bore little or no resemblance to the human countenance in repose, or even to the human countenance convulsed with sudden shock.

How incredibly blind he had been in failing to suspect the existence of a mask when the guard’s face had grown unnatural and ghastly in the cafeteria. He had taken it for granted that it was the man himself who had changed.

Fortunately he was spared now from making the same mistake twice, and he took full advantage of the fact. He knelt again and began the by no means easy task of removing the uniform. He had to lift him up and turn him over twice and each time the man groaned and stirred a little. He seemed on the verge of coming to, but Corriston shut his mind to the possibility until the last of the man’s garments had been tossed in a pile on the floor.

He quickly took off his own uniform then, and carefully and methodically arrayed himself as a guard, taking care to leave the coat unbuttoned at the throat and even going so far as to draw on the heavy woolen socks and attach to his wrist the guard’s metal identification disk.

An audacious thought Occurred to him, but he dismissed it at once. He could not attach the mask to his own face. It would have required the administrations of an expert, or, at the very least, someone familiar with the thing who knew exactly how it was supposed to be hooked into place. He had no way of knowing and he recoiled instinctively from the thought of hooks, however tiny, marring the skin on his face.

No, he’d have to get along without the mask. No one on the lower levels knew him by sight, with the one ugly exception of a killer he’d never seen clearly enough to recognize in return. And in the guard’s uniform he might even succeed in deceiving the killer if he moved quickly enough to give the man only a brief glimpse of him as he crossed the wide-view promenade.