Starhaven

Chapter VIII

The killing put finish to any pleasure he might have had from gambling that afternoon.

Myra, oddly, was outwardly unmoved, except for a certain paleness and tenseness of face. It puzzled him for a while. Evidently, at sometime in the past, she had known Marchin well. Yet she seemed callously unmindful of his fate.

After a while he realized the reason. She was used to the phenomenon of killing. Death—violent death—was nothing uncommon on Starhaven.

They gambled for perhaps an hour more; Mantell’s mind was only faindy focused on what he was doing, and in a short time he had contrived to lose half his slim bank-roll on the rotowheel and at radial dice. Luckily Myra did well at swirly, and recouped most of their losses. But Mantell’s heart was hardly in the sport now. He waited for Myra to collect her swirly wirinings. Then, as she started across the room to the magneroulette board, he tugged on her sleeve and said, “No. No more games for now. Let’s get out of here.”

“Where?”

“Anywhere. I need a drink.”

She smiled, understanding. Together they cut their way through the crowd, which was noisy now with a kind of desperate gaiety, heading for the entrance. A thick crowd of new arrivals was flocking into the casino as they left; evidently they had been attracted by reports of the excitement, no doubt filtering all through the Pleasure Dome now. Mantell and Myra had to fight their way out of the casino like fish swimming upstream in rapid current.

“Gambling is the number one industry of Starhaven,” Myra said when they emerged at the lift shafts and stood wiping away some of the perspiration their exit had induced. “The working day starts around noon for most of the professionals. It gets heaviest at four or five in the afternoon, and continues all night.”

Mantell mopped away perspiration without making any reply. He was not interested in small talk just now. He was thinking of a tall, gaunt, pale man named Leroy Marchin, who had been gunned down in full sight of five hundred people, without arousing more than polite comment here and there.

They rode upward and Myra led the way to a bar somewhere on the middle levels of the building. It was a dim place, smoky with alcohol vapors, fit only by faint and sputtering inert-gas light tubes.

Mantell found an empty table far to the rear, ornate and encrusted with possibly authentic gems. A vending robot came over and they dialed for their drinks.

He ordered straight rye, preferring not to drink anything fancy this time. Myra was drinking clear blue wine out of a crystal goblet. Mantell gulped his drink and had another.

Looking up, he spotted a tri-di video set mounted in the angle between the wall and the ceiling, back of the bar. He peered at it. He saw the drawn, weary face of Leroy Marchin depicted on the screen in bright harsh unreal colors.

“Look up there,” he said.

Myra looked. The camera suddenly panned away from the figure of Marchin to show the entire casino as it had looked at the moment of the duel. There was the robot, massive, smugly supreme; there, facing it, Marchin. And he saw clearly in the vast screen his own lean face, staring at the scene uncomprehendingly. Myra was at his side. She was gripping his arm tensely in the shot; he didn’t remember that, but he supposed it must have actually been that way. He had been too absorbed in the duel to notice.

An announcer’s oily voice said, “This was the scene as Leroy Marchin got his in the Crystal Casino shortly after one-thirty today. Marchin, returning to Starhaven from self-imposed exile, after having made an unsuccessful attempt on the life of Ben Thurdan last year, entered the casino alone.”

The audio pickup relayed the brief, bitter conversation between Marchin and the robot that spoke with Thurdan’s voice. Then the drawing of blasters was shown, then the exchange of shots. . . .

And a final closeup of Marchin’s seared body.

“Death Commissioner Brian Varnlee was on hand to certify that Marchin died of suicide,” said the smooth-voiced announcer. “Meanwhile, on other news fronts, a report has reached Starhaven that . . .”

Mantell looked away, sickened. “That’s all it is,” he said darkly. “Just suicide. And no one seems to care. No one gives a damn that a. man was shot down in public this afternoon.”

Myra was staring at him anxiously. “Johnny, that’s the way Starhaven works. It’s our way of life and we— we don’t question it. If you can’t bring yourself to accept Ben’s laws, you’d better get off Starhaven fast—because it’ll kill you to stay here.”

He moistened his lips. He wanted to reply to her, to make some kind of protest.

But something strange was happening to him; some as yet unidentifiable dark fear was welling up into his consciousness from the hidden depths of his brain. He weaved uncertainly and gripped the table with both hands, tight. He shuddered involuntarily as tides of pain swept up over him, racking him again and again.

He heard Myra’s anxious exclamation—“Johnny! What’s happening? What’s wrong?”

It was a moment before the pain had subsided enough for him to speak. “Nothing’s wrong,” he murmured weakly. “Nothing.”

But something was wrong. In one wild sweep the last seven years rose accusingly before him, from the day of his dismissal from Klingsan Defense to the day he had fled, a hunted murderer in a stolen ship, from the shores of Mulciber.

Those memories arrayed themselves in a solid column —and the column suddenly toppled and fell, shattering into a million pieces.

Starhaven spun around him. His palms ached as he squeezed the cold table top to keep from tumbling to the floor. Dimly he sensed Myra grasping his numbed hands, saying things to him, steadying him. Doggedly he fought to catch his breath.

It was all over in a second or two more. He sat back exhausted, bathed in sweat, his head quivering and his skin cold.

“What happened, Johnny?”

He shook his head. In a harsh voice he said, “I don’t know what it was. It must have been some after-effect of the psychprobing. Harmon said he had miscalibrated and there might be after-effects. For a second—Myra, for a second I thought I was someone else!”

“Someone else?”

He shrugged, then laughed sharply. “Too many drinks, probably. Or else not enough. I guess I better have another one.”

He ordered another rye and downed it hastily. The raw liquor soothed him a little. Nervously, he gathered up the fragments of the identity that had shattered a moment before and pasted them together. Once again he was Johnny Mantell, ex-beachcomber, late of Mulciber in the Fifth Octant of the galaxy, and now of Starhaven, home of galactic criminal outcasts.

Faint wooziness clung to him, but the spell, whatever it had been, was past. At least, for now.

“I feel a lot better,” he said. “Let’s get some fresh air.