Space Station 1

The attack took place so quickly that it was over almost before it started. The commander and the executive officers didn’t have a chance. One of the emerging men had a gun, and he shot the commander in the stomach with it at almost point-blank range.

The commander sank down, clutching at his stomach, bent nearly double. Even from where Corriston was standing, he could see the blood trickling down his right leg. The terrible dark wetness directly over the wound was of course invisible, completely concealed by the commander’s tightly laced arms.

The startled, badly frightened officers turned and tried to get away. But they didn’t get far. The man who had shot the commander picked them off like clay pigeons, one by one, as they fled.

His two companions did not even seem to be armed. They just stood quietly watching the executive officers die. They died on the launching platform and on the smooth deck beyond, two of them simply dropping in their tracks, a third sprawling grotesquely, and the last staggering on for a few paces. There were four executive officers, and not one escaped. It was butchery, pure and simple, cruel, savage beyond belief.

Helen Ramsey was already on the ship, and there was no possible way for him to get her off.

The thought that he was himself in the deadliest kind of danger never even crossed his mind.

The killer returned his gun to its holster very slowly and deliberately, and then he took it out again. It was a very strange gesture, when every passing second must have been of vital importance to him, but it revealed something very unusual about the man. He evidently liked to feel that he had completed one job and packaged it to his entire satisfaction, before going on to another.

It was that more than anything else which jolted Corriston into complete awareness, and made it impossible for him to doubt the reality, the utter horror, of what had taken place. The killer had gestured to his companions, and he was coming up the ramp.

He came slowly up the ramp, and for the first time Corriston saw his face. It was not a face that he would ever forget or ever want to forget. It was the face of the man he had grappled with in the dark and seen once in the light. But now his features were turned away. It was exactly the kind of face which Corriston had pictured him as having, except that it was just a little uglier looking. The slant of the cheekbones even crueler, harsher, the eyes more venomously narrowed, the mouth an uglier gash.

“All right, Lieutenant,” he said, gesturing with the gun. “Go on ahead. Go on board. Were going to need you to help pilot this ship to Mars.”

14

THE SILENCE in the chart room was like the hush that comes over a desert when hurricane winds have died down, or like the stillness of a rocky coast when waves have ceased to pound, and dangerous rocks stand out with all of their saw-edged teeth exposed.

It was extraordinary how, at the point of a gun, a man could think and act almost automatically, and postpone making any decision at all. It wasn’t cowardice; Corriston was quite sure of that. He felt only anger, deep, relentless, all-consuming. Sweat oozed in droplets from his brow, but it was the heat and the tension which made his skin stream with moisture. There was no immediate fear in him at all.

He’d kept fear at bay by refusing to let his mind leap ahead. Only the gun at his back mattered, and just why it should have mattered so much was the only thing that puzzled him.

It did not occur to him that what some men dread most is the fear of dying too abruptly, without foreknowledge and with just a second’s glimpse of something cold and deadly before the final blackout. A gun had that land of power.

The man with the gun had asked Corriston a great many questions, urgently practical questions that dealt with cold statistics concerning zero-gravity, solar radiation, space drift and the length of time it would take to reach Mars if a single pilot took full advantage of the automatic controls and never allowed himself to become reckless.

Corriston had replied to the best of his ability and knowledge, and the other had accepted his answers with a quiet grunt of satisfaction. It was only after that, when the silence had lengthened almost unendurably between them, that the more personal questions came.

The killer jabbed the gun more firmly against Corriston’s spine and asked in a cold, flat voice: “Do you know who I am, Corriston? Have you any idea?”

Corriston stared out the viewport for a moment without replying, his face deathly pale. "I don’t know your name,” he said. “Probably that’s not too important. I do know that you’re a cold-blooded murderer, and that killing-gives you pleasure. I am very tired. I wish you wouldn’t question me any more.”

“Do you think you can pilot this ship to Mars, tired as you are?”

Corriston nodded.