Starhaven

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.