 cabin for an instant. Then another shell
exploded, and another, and another. Corriston felt light and
dangerously dizzy. It was amazing that he had not been hurled to the
floor, still more amazing that he could have remained for so long
motionless in just one spot.

Then, abruptly, the bombardment ceased. There was no sound at all in
the cabin, just a silence so absolute that the roaring in Corriston's
ears was like the sound made by an angry sea beating against vast stone
cliffs in a world that had ceased to exist.

There were no longer any exploding white stars coming from the cruiser.
It was dwindling into the blackness of space, giving up the battle,
conceding defeat. It became thinner and thinner. Suddenly only the reef
remained. Where the cruiser had been there stretched only empty space.

Corriston turned from the viewport. He crossed the cabin to the cot,
swaying a little, but only from dizziness, and sat down and drew the
girl on the cot close to him. He held her tightly, saying nothing.


13


Corriston was still sitting on the cot when the door opened and the
commander and two executive officers came into the cabin.

He was not too surprised, for it had been somehow almost impossible for
him to believe that the commander could have been killed. A scoundrel's
luck and a drunkard's luck were often very much the same thing.

If the commander had succeeded in quickly putting out the fire he rated
a medal, he was a man for all of that.

And apparently the commander _had_ succeeded in putting out the fire,
or he would not now be facing Corriston with a grimly urgent look on
his mask.

Helen Ramsey was staring at him almost as if she were seeing him as he
really was for the first time. Did she know that he was wearing a mask?
There was no possible way she could know, he told himself, except by
intuition. The masks were good. Having worn one herself she ought to
know how good they were. She ought not even to suspect the commander
unless--

Corriston had no time to finish the thought.

"Get up, both of you," the commander said, gesturing with his braided
right arm. "The Mars ship has just berthed. We've got to go aboard
before there's any question as to the obedience of the crew. The
captain has been taken off, but we're keeping some of the crew."

"You--you put out the fire, Commander?"

"Naturally. I'm not quite the incompetent you think me, Lieutenant."

"I'm quite sure of that, Commander," Corriston said. "Do we take
anything with us?"

"You'll get all the extras you need on Mars," the commander said.
"Stephen Ramsey isn't likely to want to see his daughter go about in
rags."

Corriston decided that the wisest thing he could do was to take the
commander at his word in every important respect; for the moment,
at any rate. There was the little matter of a killer still at large
somewhere on the Station, and the quicker they were in space the safer
Ramsey's daughter would be. Not just in space as the Station was in
space, but much further out in the Big Dark.

"All right, Commander," he said. "Let's get started."

Getting started took very little time. A great thankfulness came upon
Corriston when he saw the smooth dark hull of the Mars ship looming
high above him, a thousand foot long cylinder of inky blackness against
a glimmering wilderness of stars.

The ship was berthed securely beneath a towering network of telemetric
aerials, on a completely circular launching platform that was like a
saucer in reverse, with a contractable metal ramp leading up to the
wide-open, brightly lighted boarding port at its base.

There were steps on the ramp, but Corriston knew that when the
structure was drawn back into the ship it would collapse like a house
of cards, folded back upon itself.

Helen Ramsey ascended first. Corriston made certain that she would by
getting in the commander's way with a convincing show of accidental
clumsiness. He pretended to stumble as he began the ascent, to be all
hands and feet.

The commander swore softly and Corriston was quite sure that he had
not been deceived. But there was very little that he could do about it
under the circumstances. He had to let Ramsey's daughter climb the ramp
first and she was almost at the top before Corriston started up.

Corriston was halfway to the top, and the commander and the impatient,
tight-lipped executive officers were just starting up, when three tall
figures emerged from the darkness at the base of the ramp.

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. We're 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 kind 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