Starhaven

Chapter XVI

At 10:45 he left her. Thurdan was expecting her to arrive at his place in less than an hour, and she had to pick up her brief case and then go to central headquarters for the papers he wanted. In seventy-five minutes Thurdan would be dead, Mantell thought. The seconds dragged by interminably.

Myra had asked him to arrive at Thurdan’s apartment at about ten minutes past midnight, to help her with the body. Until then, he was simply to stay out of trouble. He passed half an hour in a bar not far from the Pleasure Dome, a small place with poor lighting and worse liquor. A girl was dancing in the back, accompanying herself by singing in a nasal drone. When she finished her song a thin pockmarked man circulated and passed the hat among the patrons of the bar.

Mantell tossed in a single-chip note. The pock-marked man thanked him effusively and moved on. Mantell ordered a beer and sipped it reflectively. The minutes were crawling.

After a while he got tired of the bar, and left. He paced the Starhaven streets for nearly another half hour. He had already consumed the greater part of the seventy-five minutes he had to waste.

Now it was eleven thirty-five.

He found another bar, stopped in long enough to buy himself a second beer, drank hah of it and left. He was feeling less calm with each passing minute. She was so slim and small, he thought, and Thurdan so powerful-Eleven forty.

Eleven forty-five. She would be just about arriving at his apartment by now. Mantell flagged down an aircab and in a tension-tightened voice gave the robodriver a street not far from the address of Thurdan’s private dwelling.

Eleven fifty.

He stood alone beneath a flickering street lamp, waiting for the minutes to pass. Eleven fifty-two.

Eight minutes to go. Then seven. Mantell started to walk toward the building. He was thinking: A month ago I was just a bum, wandering around the beaches, and now I’m on my way to help out in the assassination of the ruler of a world! It was almost like moving in a dream, except that this was real.

He reached the building at eleven fifty-seven. Three minutes. Of course, there was no positive assurance that Myra would act precisely on the dot of twelve. They had not bothered to synchronize watches too precisely, and in any event there might be unforeseen delays of a moment or two before she would strike. He prayed the blade would be sharp, her aim true.

A robot sat behind a desk in the lobby of Thurdan’s building and surveyed him owlishly as he passed through the main doors. “Yes, please?”

“I’m visiting Mr. Thurdan,” Mantell said. “Sorry, please. Mr. Thurdan is very busy on important government matters, and cannot be interrupted.” Mantell glanced at his watch. Eleven fifty-nine.

The tension was mounting. “This is most urgent,” he said.

At this very moment Myra might be unsheathing the weapon. The robot grinned obstinately, blocking his path.

“Mr. Thurdan is not to be disturbed,” the robot said.

Mantell shrugged and drew the blaster he carried inside his jacket. He fired once, aiming for the robot’s neural channel. The smile remained fixed idiotically on the metal face and the voice continued, locked now in an endless monotone.

“Mr. Thurdan is not to be disturbed Mr. Thurdan is not to be disturbed Mr. Thurdan is not to be disturbed Mr. Thurdan is not to be—”

Mantell fired again. The robot sagged and toppled to the deep wine-red carpet, quivered once, subsided, and lay there in a useless chrome-plated heap. It was just scrap, now, its delicate cryotronic brain hopelessly shorted out.

Midnight.

The elevator seemed to take little short of forever to climb the forty-eight storeys to Thurdan’s penthouse. Mantell counted seconds, waiting, watching the clock hands moving.

Twelve-of-one. He had plenty of time. Myra had told him to be there at ten past twelve.

He stepped through the lift tube door on the forty-eighth level and found himself in an endless brightiy hghted corridor. Unsurprisingly, there was a robot patrolling the area; Thurdan was not a man to take many chances. His apartment, like Starhaven itself, was well guarded—but always subject to attack from within.

The robot turned and shouted a quick “Halt” at him.

Mantell knew that this one had its response channels set for guard duty; it wouldn’t be as slow on the draw as the defunct lobby attendant had been.

He slid into an alcove, hoping the robot wasn’t equipped with range perceptors keen enough to smell him out where he crouched. Or with a portable force screen, as the one who killed Marchin had been.

Metal feet clattered down the hallway.

“Halt! You are ordered to appear from hiding! Mr. Thurdan does not wish to be disturbed!”

The robot steamed on past Mantell without seeing him. He emerged from the alcove and fired once, blasting through its spinal column, paralyzing • it and blocking its motor responses. Then, ducking in front of it, he shorted out its brain and put a stop to its impotent whirrings.

The time was twelve-oh-five. Mantell sprinted down the corridor toward Thurdan’s suite.

And stopped outside. And hstened.

And heard the sound of sobbing. It was Myra. In an agony of remorse, he wondered?

Twelve-oh-six.

Thurdan lay six minutes dead now. Mantell knew what his job was now: to go inside, to snap Myra out of the state of shock she probably had gone into after the killing. He pushed against the door, and to his surprise it gave readily. She had left it open for him.

He flung the door open and burst into Thurdan’s apartment. The suite seemed to stretch in every direction. Rare and costly draperies cloaked the oval windows; rich thick rugs brocaded the floor. This was the suite of a czar, of a possession-hungry potentate. Paintings filled the wall space.

The sound of sobbing grew louder. Mantell ran toward it.

He heard Myra shouting to him—“Johnny! Johnny! No!”

But by then it was too late.

He blundered into the room and in virtually the same instant two hundred forty pounds of irresistible force crashed into him. The drawn blaster he had been clutching went clattering across the room; he reeled back, struggling for balance.

Ben Thurdan was still alive.

The living room was brightly lighted. With terrible clarity Mantell saw the huge disordered desk, the crumpled papers on its top stained with blood. Myra entered.

Her face was tear-streaked and blotchy; her upper Hp was spHt, and a dab of blood oozed from it. One whole side of her face was Hvid and swoUen where she had received a ferocious blow. She was sobbing hysterically, her whole body quaking with each outcry.

A jagged red line ran some six inches across the front of his shirt at the chest, beginning below the left clavicle and ending just above his left breast. Mantell saw it was only a flesh wound.

He understood what had happened. Somehow Myra had failed in her attempt, scratching Thurdan where she should have torn.

“Are you in this thing too, Mantell?” Thurdan bellowed in monumental rage. Even coatless, and in his ripped shirt, he was a figure of terrifying authority. Sweat poured down his hairless scalp. “You’re all against me, then? Harmon and Polderson and Ledru and McDermott and Myra—and even you, Mantell. Even you.”

He advanced slowly toward Mantell. They were both unarmed. Myra’s knife, that was to have finished Thurdan, was nowhere in sight, and the blaster Mantell had carried now lay out of reach. Mantell knew that Thurdan needed no weapon. He could tear him to pieces barehanded.

He backed up, moving warily to keep from stumbling. As he stared at Thurdan’s grim face he was astonished to see tears starting to form in the fierce eyes—tears of rage, probably. Learning that your closest associates had banded together to betray you is something that even the strongest of men cannot take without a sharp emotional pang.

“All of you wanted to kill me, didn’t you?” Thurdan said slowly. “I didn’t do enough for you. I didn’t build Starhaven practically with my own two hands, and take you all in when you came running. That wasn’t enough, so you decided to try to kill me. But you won’t kill Ben Thurdan! You won’t!”

Mantell tried desperately to signal to Myra to scramble across the room and seize the blaster where it lay. But she was too dumb and dazed with shock to understand the meaning of his gestures. She lay on a sofa, aims wrapped over her eyes, shaking violently, a pale huddled figure.

Thurdan reached out for him. He ducked, swept in under his mighty fumbling paws, and landed a solid punch on the jutting jaw. It was like hitting a boulder. Thurdan didn’t seem to feel the blow, though Mantell’s arm rippled with pain at the contact.

Thurdan’s hands clutched at his shoulder; he twisted and slipped away.

“The blaster, Myra—get the blaster!” he called harshly. “Pick it up!”

That was a mistake.

Thurdan nicked a hasty glance over his shoulder, saw the blaster where it lay not more than three feet behind him, and scooped it up in one huge paw. In the same motion he hurled it through the open window, far out into the night.

Now it was bare hands against bare hands, and that sort of conflict could have only one conceivable finish.

Mantell edged back as far from Thurdan’s reach as he possibly could. His breath was coming hard and thick.

“Kill me, will you?” he demanded. “I’ll show you! I’ll show all of you!”

Thurdan charged forward, caught Mantell around the middle with one great hand, and hurled him like a toy across the room. He crashed numbingly into a table laden with fine pottery. Mantell rolled over, trying to get up and failing, and waited for Thurdan to pounce and finish him off.

But he didn’t pounce. He stood over him, rocking unsteadily, face contorted by some deep inner stress. He made no attempt to touch the fallen Mantell, who lay looking up.

Finally Thurdan said, “I built Starhaven—and I can destroy it too!”

Wildly he laughed and swung away, ranning down the hall and out into the darkness.