Starhaven

Chapter VII

Mantell saw a man die, his second day on Starhaven. It taught him not to judge by first impressions. Starhaven wasn’t entirely a pleasure-planet, a happy Utopia. There was violent death here, and evil.

He had slept late that day, ridding himself of his fatigue and weariness. At 1100 in the morning the room-phone buzzed loudly, waking him from a tortuously involved dream of Space Patrol men, fugitives, and ancient, fumbling scientists operating psychprobes.

He pulled himself out of bed, crossed the austere, simple room that had been assigned to him, and switched on the phone, rubbing sleep from his face. Slowly the pattern of colors that appeared on the visiscreen shaped itself into a meaningful configuration.

It was the face of Ben Thurdan.

Even on a visiscreen a foot square his face had a terrible brooding intensity, a dark-visaged strength. He smiled and said, “I hope I didn’t wake you, Mantell. You must be pretty tired.”

Mantell forced out a chuckle. “I guess I overslept. It’s a bad habit of mine.”

“What did you think of the Pleasure Dome?” Thurdan asked easily. Mantell’s sleep-fogged mind started to frame an answer, but before he could speak Thurdan had added the words, “. . . and Myra.”

That threw him off base. He said, “It’s a fabulous place, Mr. Thurdan. I’ve never seen anything like it anywhere. And—and Miss Butler was very helpful in explaining Starhaven to me.”

“Glad to hear that,” Thurdan said slowly. There was a long, uncomfortable moment of silence. Mantell fidgeted before the screen, acutely conscious of the great reservoir of power that lay in the man. At length Thurdan said, “Mantell, I liked you the second I saw you. You’ve got character. I like a man with character.”

Mantell wondered what the Starhaven boss was driving at. Keeping back his surprise, he said gravely, “Thank you, Mr. Thurdan.”

“Call me Ben.” The deep piercing eyes studied Mantell until his flesh began to crawl. “I trust you, Mantell. And let me tell you I don’t trust very many people on Starhaven. Suppose you do me a little favor, Mantell. Yes. A little favor.”

“If I can—Ben. What sort of favor do you mean?”

“I want you to keep your eyes open. Miss Butler— Myra—will be keeping company with you again today. Listen to things carefully, Mantell. And feel free to get in touch with me if you think there’s anything I ought to know.”

Mantell frowned and said, “I’m not sure I understand what you’re getting at. But I think I grasp the general picture.”

“Good. Stick with me, Mantell. Life can be very very good for a man on Starhaven, if Ben Thurdan is backing him.”

Thurdan grimaced in what was probably supposed to be a friendly smile, and rang off. Mantell stared at the shining surface of the blank screen for a second, trying to figure things out.

The call from Thurdan, he thought, was linked in some manner with Myra’s enigmatic words at her door just before he had left her last night. Obviously Ben Thurdan was afraid of something; an assassination plot, more likely than not—and had chosen Mantell to serve as an extra pair of eyes and ears for him.

Maybe—Mantell caught his breath—maybe he suspected that Myra herself was involved in some conspiracy against him, and had arranged for Mantell to keep company with her so he could gain her confidence and report back information.

Mantell shook his head. A tangled web was beginning to form. Too soon, he thought. He hadn’t come here to Starhaven to play power politics and get enmeshed in palace intrigues. He had just wanted a place to hide; a place where he could rebuild his battered personality and forget the Mulciber years.

He gobbled a breakfast tab and looked at his hands. They were shaking. He was playing with big trouble, and he was afraid.

Calming himself, he dialed Myra’s number. She appeared on the screen, looking awake and unafraid, and they exchanged light banter for a moment or two before Mantell explained that he had called to arrange a date for lunch with her at the Pleasure Dome.

“Meet you there in ninety minutes,” she said. “Outside the ninth-level dining hall.”

“Right.”

He broke the contact and started to dress. He killed the better part of an hour pacing tensely around his room, then went downstairs and found a cab to take him to the Pleasure Dome.

Myra met him there on time, to the minute, and once again they took the table near the window, drawing much attention from the service-robots. They had a brief, nervous lunch: chlorella steak and fried diamante potatoes, with splits of golden Livresae beer. They had replaced the freeform table with a crystal-topped affair in which strange green-hued horned fish swam proudly and serenely. Neither Mantell nor the girl said very much. Both seemed to be under a sort of cloud.

Myra said finally, breaking a long silence, “Ben called you this morning, didn’t he?”

Mantell nodded. “That man seems to have taken a liking to me. I guess something in my psychprobe chart must have impressed him.”

She laughed softly and drained her beer, all but the foam. “Something in your psychprobe chart impressed everybody who saw it, Johnny. We can’t figure out why you let yourself drift so long on Mulciber.”

“I told you. Pressure of circumstances.”

“According to your chart, you’re the sort who pushes circumstances around to suit himself, not the other way.”

Mantell laughed cynically. “Maybe Dr. Harmon is getting senile, then. I haven’t been doing much pushing around. I’ve been getting pushed.”

“It’s puzzling, then. According to the chart there’s a real and solid core of toughness in you. Ben spotted that in a flash, the second old Harmon brought your graphs in from the lab for him to look at. That guy Mantell’s got something,” Ben said. “Ican use him.”

“I guess I hide my self-reliance well, then,” Mantell said. He was remembering the shambling unshaven figure who was himself, weaving drunkenly over the shining sands of Port Mulciber, pleadingly cadging cheap drinks from sympathetic tourists. He wondered where that alleged core of toughness had been hiding all those lost years of beachcombing.

They fell silent for another few moments, while Mantell spun conflicting thoughts in his mind. Then he said, “Last night, just before you said good night, you made a strange remark. You ”

Terror suddenly appeared on her face, altering it for a flashing microsecond into a white mask of fear. She said, “That was just—a sort of a joke. Or a hope. Ill tell you more about it some day—maybe. I asked you not to be impatient.”

“I can’t help it. That’s a lousy thing to do—I mean, dropping a lead that way and then not following through. But I won’t try to push you. I’m starting to discover that you can’t be pushed.”

“There’s a good boy,” she said. She fingered the empty split of beer and said, “I want another of these beers. Then I’ll take you up and give you the five-chip guided tour of the Dome’s other amusement areas.”

They had another beer apiece and left, Myra flashing her pass to take care of the check and the suave robot headwaiter nodding understandingly.

They moved past the barriers into the lift tube and rode upward one stop, to the tenth level. There they emerged in a hall lined with black onyx and gleaming chalcedony. Voices shrilled in noisy cacophony farther ahead down the corridor.

“There are eight casinos on this floor,” Myra said. “They operate twenty-four hours a day.”

Suddenly she turned down a narrower corridor; Man-tell followed and the corridor opened out abruptly into a room the size of the ballroom they had visited the night before.

He was blinded by myriad pinwheeling lights. Spirals of circling radiance danced in the air. Noise, gaiety, color bombarded him. Richly dressed Starhavenites were everywhere.

“Most of these people are professional gamblers,” Myra whispered to him. “Some of them practically live in here, around the clock. Last month Mark Chantal had a run of luck on the rotowheel table and played for eight days without stopping. Toward the end he had a couple of companions feeding him lurobrin tablets by the bushel to keep him awake and fed. But by the time he decided to quit he had won eleven million chips.”

Mantell whistled appreciatively. “I’ll bet the house must have hated that!”

“The house is Ben Thurdan,” Myra said. “He didn’t hate it. He was here cheering Chantal on for the last two days of the run. That’s the way Ben is.”

Mantell glanced dizzily around the crowded hall. Gaming devices of every sort were in profuse evidence, ringed round the gleaming concourse. Some of the tables were tended by robots, others by attractive young women with sweet voices and daring costumes. In the back of the big casino Mantell saw a row of card tables; sleek-faced house operators waited there, willing to take on all comers in any kind of game.

“What shall we play?” Myra asked.

Mantell shrugged. “How do I pick one game out of all this?”

“Go ahead. The rotowheel? Swirly? Or should we try our luck at radial dice?”

Mantell licked his hps and picked out a table almost at random. “Let’s start over here,” he said, indicating the green baize surface of a nearby radial dice table.

It did not seem overcrowded. Four or five smartly dressed gamblers clustered around it, studying the elaborate system of pitfalls and snares that inhibited the free fall of the dice, making alterations in the system and placing their bets.

The house man was a robot. He waited, his metal face frozen in a perpetual cynical smile, his complex circuity computing the odds as they changed from one moment to the next.

Mantell frowned thoughtfully as he stared at the board. He drew a ten-chip bill from his wallet and started to put it down. Suddenly Myra touched his arm.

“Don’t bet yet,” she murmured tensely. “There’s going to be trouble.”

Slowly, he turned to follow her gaze. He was aware that the big room had become strangely quiet. Everyone was apparently staring with keen intensity at a newcomer who had just entered.

Mantell studied him. The stranger was remarkably tall—six feet eight, at a conservative estimate—and his face was chalk-pale. A livid scar ran jaggedly across his left cheek, standing out in odd contrast against his colorless skin. He was skeleton thin and wore black-and-white diamond-checked harlequin tights and a skin-tight gray-and-gold shirt.

A glittering blaster was strapped to his side just above his left hip. He was an arresting figure, standing quietly alone near the entrance.

“Who is he?” Mantell asked.

“Leroy Marchin. Everyone thought he left Starhaven more than a month ago. He shouldn’t be here. Oh, the idiot! Stay here.”

She started across the floor toward the other. Ignoring her order, Mantell followed him. The silence in the room shattered, finally, as a croupier began his droning chant once again. Myra seemed to have forgotten all about Mantell, now that Marchin, whoever he was, had arrived.

As Mantell drew near the pair he heard Marchin say, “Hello, Myra.” His voice was deep but without resonance; it sounded hollow.

“What are you doing here?” Myra demanded. “Don’t you know that Ben—?”

“Ben knows I’m here. The robots outside tipped him off ten minutes ago by remote wave.”

“Get out of here, then!”

“No,” Marchin said. “I’m hoping Ben will show up here in person. That way I have an even chance of getting in the first shot.”

“Leroy—” Her tone rose in shrill urgency. “You can’t—”

“Get away from me,” Marchin interrupted brusquely. “I don’t want you near me when the shooting starts.”

He looked terribly pale and tired, but there was no fear on his face. With exaggerated casualness he stepped past Myra and Mantell, crossed the floor to the roto-wheel table, and calmly put a hundred-chip bill down when the croupier called for bets.

Mantell turned to Myra and said, “What’s this all about? Who is he?”

She was taut with nervousness. “He—tried to ldll Ben, once. It was a conspiracy that didn’t succeed. He and Ben built Starhaven together, in the early years, but Marchin was always pushed aside. Ben had to run this place as a one-man enterprise.”

The suspense was becoming numbing. Mantell said, “Why did he come here?”

“He’s been in hiding. I guess Ben flushed him out and Leroy decided to fight it out with him here in the casino. Oh—!”

Again the hall became silent. This time it was a silence markedly more profound than the last.

A robot entered the hall, moving on silent caterpillar treads—a square-built robot, stocky, at least eight feet tall. Mantell watched as Marchin turned round to face the robot. People who had been standing within ten or twenty feet of the pale man melted quietly away. Mantell was aware that Myra was trembling uncontrollably.

“Hello, Roy,” the robot said. It was speaking in Ben Thurdan’s own voice, thanks to the use of some kind of electronic remote-wave hookup.

Marchin’s eyes blazed as he glared angrily at the robot.

“Damn you, Thurdan! Why didn’t you come here yourself? Why did you have to send a robot here to do your filthy job for you?”

“Too busy to bother with such trivial things in person, Roy,” was the calm reply. “And there’s less doubt of the outcome this way.”

Marchin drew his blaster. An instant later the house lights dimmed as though because of a sudden power drain, and a flickering transparent glow sprang up a-round the robot.

“Force screen,” Myra muttered. “Marchin doesn’t stand a chance.”

Mantell nodded. A robot could wear a force screen, though a human being couldn’t. A human being needed air to breathe, and a force screen blocked out everything —light and air as well as dangerous radiation. It was tremendously expensive to equip a robot with a force screen, but evidently Ben kept one around for jobs like this.

Marchin’s finger tightened on the firing stud. A burst of flame leaped across the gap, bathing the robot in fire but actually merely splattering impotently against the impassable barrier that was the force screen.

The metal creature, unharmed by the deadly blast, waited impassively. Almost a minute slipped by while Marchin hopelessly continued to direct his fire at the barrier that shielded the robot’s patient bulk. Then, seeing he was accomplishing nothing, Marchin cursed vividly and in a quick bitter gesture hurled the blaster across the room at the stiffly erect robot.

The weapon clanged off the creature’s chest and fell to one side.

The robot laughed. The laugh was unmistakably the laugh of Ben Thurdan.

Marchin howled an imprecation, and began to run.

For a moment at first Mantell thought he was going to try to dash out the door, but that was not Marchin’s intention, apparently. Instead he ran straight toward the robot in a mad suicidal dash.

He traveled ten feet. Then the robot lifted one ponderous arm and discharged a bolt of energy from grids in its fingers. The flare caught Marchin in the chest with such impact that it lifted him off the ground and hurled him backward the whole distance he had covered in his dash.

He tottered, clawed at his throat, and staggered into a swirly screen at a table behind him. He fell and didn’t get up.

Its work complete, the robot about-faced and vanished without another word. From somewhere in the ceiling came the sound of light music, and the tension dissolved. The croupiers began to chatter again; the jingle of falling chips could be heard. It was as if everyone in the room was determined to pretend that nothing at all had taken place in the casino just now.

Two attendants appeared and removed the charred, blasted corpse. Mantell watched them until Myra tugged at his arm and pulled him back to the radial-dice table.

He felt a hard knot of fear in his stomach. He had just had another sample of the way Ben Thurdan governed Starhaven. Ben Thurdan was no man to cross.