The Chalice of Death: Three Novels of Mystery in Space Read online

  He heard Kausirn’s cold steely voice saying insistently, “No! He’s bluffing us! He has to be bluffing!”

  The last six Terran ships winked into being, spitting death. The invader fleet rippled outward in disorganized retreat. Suddenly Navarre’s subradio phones brought over the sound of a single agonized scream.

  The sky was full of ships, now—twenty-two Terran ships, of which four were mere shells, and six more were so weighted with defense-screens that they were practically useless on offense.

  “Well, Kausirn? Do we have to bring out the real fleet, now?”

  No response.

  Navarre wondered about the scream he had heard. “Kausirn?”

  A new voice said suddenly, “The Lyrellan is dead. This is Admiral Garsignol of Kariad. By virtue of the authority vested in me by the Oligocrat Marhaill, I surrender to you the eighteen surviving Kariadi ships.”

  A moment later another voice broke into the channel, speaking in Joran. The nineteen Joran ships were likewise surrendering. They saw resistance was futile.

  It was over at last, Navarre thought, as he stared from the window of his office in the city of Phoenix, on Earth, looking outward at the thirty-seven alien vessels the battle had yielded.

  Victory was sweet.

  Earth now had forty-three ships of first-class tonnage, plus four more half-finished ones, and twelve more belonging to the Polisarch of Morank. The Polisarch would never miss his ships, Navarre thought. And Earth needed them.

  Fifty-nine ships. That comprised a major armada in itself; hardly a hundred worlds in the universe could muster fleets of such size. Earth would be safe during the time of rebuilding. There would be no Second Empire, merely the free world of Earth.

  Earth numbered barely twelve thousand, now. But time would remedy that. The ancient legend had spoken truth: the Chalice indeed held the key to immortal life. Earth, reborn phoenix-like from its ashes of old, had once again won its place in the roll of worlds.

  Navarre looked out the broad window at the brightening hillside. The sun was rising; the city was stirring busily with the coming of day. He opened the window and let the air of Earth wash through the room, bright, clean, fresh. It was a time for beginning, he thought. In the days to come, a thousand million worlds would have cause to remember the name of the planet they had once forgotten.

  Earth.

  Starhaven

  Chapter One

  It was a secluded part of the beach, and the corrugated metal shack was set some distance back from the shimmering tideless sea, close to a grove of green and purple trees. Inside the shack, the man who called himself Johnny Mantell lay on his thin cot. He groaned in his sleep, then abruptly awakened. With Mantell, there was no dim half-world of drowsy transition. At once he was awake and thoroughly alive.

  Alive—but for how long?

  He stepped to the washstand that he’d made and looked at his face in the fragment of mirror nailed over the basin.

  The tired, thirtyish face of a man who had been on the toboggan slide to nowhere for too many years stared back at him. His eyes, alight with intelligence though they were, bore the timid, defeated look of an outcast. His face was deeply tanned from roaming the beaches in this part of the planet Mulciber, “Vacation Paradise of the Universe,” as the advertisements proclaimed on the planets of the Galactic Federation, of which Earth was the capital.

  Strange, he thought. He could see no change from the way he looked yesterday. Yet there had been a change, and a major one. Up to early this morning, he had been a beachcomber, managing to survive by selling brightly colored shells to tourists, as he had been doing for the past seven years.

  But today, the day he had to leave Mulciber, he was a different man.

  He was a fugitive from the law. He was a hunted killer.

  In his own mental image, Mantell had always thought of himself as being a reasonably law-abiding man; one who held respect for the rights of others, not out of fear but through innate decency; it was, in fact, about the last thing he had—a small measure of his self-respect that a good many of the others seemed to lack. Just an average, decent sort of Joe who never went out of his way looking for trouble, but didn’t let people push him around, either.

  But this time he was really being pushed. And there was no way to push back.

  Almost ever since he had arrived on Mulciber, Mantell had been putting off his departure, delaying because there was no special reason to go anywhere. Here, life was easy; by wading out a few yards into the quiet warm sea, all sorts of delicious fish and crustaceans could be caught by net or by hand. Nutritive fruits of many flavors grew on the trees all year round. There were no responsibilities here, except the basic one of keeping yourself alive. But it had come down to just that.

  If Mantell wanted to stay alive any longer, he’d have to move fast. Right now. And to do it, he’d have to add one more criminal mark to his new record. He’d have to steal a spaceship. He knew where to go for sanctuary.

  Starhaven.

  Mike Bryson, one of the other beachcombers on Mulciber, had told Mantell about Starhaven. That had been years ago, back before the time the mudshark had sliced Bryson in half while he was wading for pearl oysters. Bryson had said, “Some day, when I get up the incentive, I’m going to steal a ship and light out for Starhaven, Johnny.”

  “Starhaven? What’s that?”

  Bryson smiled, screwing up his face and showing his yellowed teeth. “Starhaven’s a planet of a red super-giant sun called Nestor. It’s an artificial sort of planet, built twenty or twenty-five years ago by a fellow, name of Ben Thurdan.” Bryson lowered his voice. “It’s a sanctuary for people like us, Johnny. People who couldn’t make the grade or fit in with organized society. Drifters and crooks and has-beens can go to Starhaven, and get decent jobs and live in peace. It’s the place for me, and one day I’m going to get there.”

  But Mike Bryson never did make it, Mantell recalled. He tried to remember how long ago it had been that they had brought Bryson’s bleeding body back from the beach. Three years? Four?

  Mantell cradled his head in his hands and tried to think. It was hard to sort out the years. There were times when he could hardly remember the day before yesterday, and all his memories seemed like dreams. There were other times when it was all crystal-clear, when he could see all the way back across the years to the time when he had lived on Earth. He had been making the grade in society then.

  As a twenty-four-year-old technician at Klingsan Defense Screens, for a while everything seemed to roll along well. Then he really got on the beam—or so he thought. Enthusiasm, energy seemed to exude from his pores. A latent inventive streak suddenly emerged in him. He knew his stuff all right; maybe too well.

  Trouble was that his abounding faith in himself and in his innovations made him appear cocky, and his inventions, while basically sound, needed refinements to be practical. At the time the Klingsan plants were not geared to machine them. It would take special heavy presses of a new amalgam of metals; specially made dies as well as new electronic devices. All that represented an impressive outlay of capital. So, perhaps, if Johnny would work over his designs for a couple of years, then they could be presented to the board of directors, and …

  Johnny, furious, told off his employers. He got another job in a similar plant, but became quarrelsome and edgy when they, too, decided not to produce his inventions. And then he thought he found the answer to his frustrations. If a drink or two would relax him in the evening, then four or six would do the job better. They did, all right. Soon he was working on a quart a day.

  He drank himself right out of a job. Drank himself right off Earth, too, across the galaxy to Mulciber, where Mulciber’s twin suns shone twenty hours a day and the temperature the year round was a flat seventy-seven, F. Yes, it was a tourists’ paradise, right enough, and a fine place for a man like Johnny Mantell to lose what little backbone he had left, and live a dreamy, day-to-day existence, sustaining himself with neither effort nor
responsibility.

  And he’d been here for seven years. A blankness in time.…

  It was early morning. The two lemon-yellow suns were up there in the chocolate sky, and little heat-devils danced over the roasting sand. Across the few yards of white sandy beach, the calm sea stretched out to the blank horizon. The tourists from Earth and the other rich worlds of the galaxy were splashing around in the wonderful water, down in the bathing area where the mud-sharks and bloater-toads and other native life forms had all been wiped out. They were diving and swimming and splashing each other with cascades of sparkling water. Some of them had nullgravs to help them float, and some paddled little boats.

  Mantell had wandered into the casino bearing his stock in trade: sea shells, pearls, other little gewgaws and gimcracks that he peddled to the wealthy tourists who frequented Mulciber’s fashionable North Coast. He hadn’t been in the casino more than two minutes when someone pointed at him and bellowed, “There’s the man! Come here, you! Right away!”

  Mantell stared blankly. The rule on Mulciber was that you didn’t raise your voice much if you were a beachcomber; you minded your business and peddled your wares, and you were tolerated. You couldn’t hang around the tourists if you made a nuisance of yourself, and Mantell had tried not to do that.

  So all he could do was say, in a soft voice, “You want me, mister?”

  The tourist was half as tall as Mantell and twice as wide—a little potbellied walrus of a man, deeply tanned and blistering in a couple of places. He was wearing a costly yangskin wrap about his bulky middle, and he was clutching a flask of some local brew in one pudgy hand. The other one was pointing accusingly at Mantell, and the little man was shouting excitedly, “There’s the man who stole my wife’s brooch! Fifty thousand I paid for it on Turimon, and he stole it!”

  Mantell could only shake his head and say, “You have the wrong man, mister. I didn’t steal anybody’s jewelry.”

  “Now you’re lying, too, thief! Give me the brooch! Give it back!”

  What followed after that was a confused muddle for Mantell. He remembered standing his ground and waiting for the angry approach of the little man, while a few curious tourists in the casino gathered round to see what was going on. He remembered the tourist standing in front of him, glaring up, pouring out a string of vile accusations, heedless of Mantell’s protestations of innocence.

  Then the tourist had drawn back his hand and slapped Mantell. Mantell had recoiled; he put up his hands to ward off another blow. Beachcombers didn’t fight back when tourists played rough, but they weren’t required to stand around and get pounded.

  The fat little man had lunged for another blow. The stone floor was wet with some purple liquor that had been spilled. As he wound up for the roundhouse, the little man’s sandaled foot caught in the puddle, twisted, and he went skidding backward, arms and legs flying, a wail of fear coming from his mouth.

  He had fallen backward and cracked his head hard against a marble counter. People were bending over him, muttering and whispering to themselves. The little man’s head was bent at a funny angle, and blood trickled from one ear.

  “I didn’t lay a finger on him,” Mantell protested. “You all saw what happened. He swung and he missed and he fell down. I never touched him.”

  He turned to see Joe Harrell’s face looking into his. Joe, one of the oldest beachcombers on Mulciber, a man who’d been on the beach so long he didn’t remember what world he had come from. His face was stained from weed-chewing, his eyes dim and faded. But Joe had plenty of common sense.

  And Joe was saying softly, “You better get going, boy. You better run fast.”

  “But you saw it, Joe. You saw I was minding my own business. I didn’t touch him.”

  “Prove it.”

  “Prove it? I got witnesses!”

  “Witnesses? Who? Me? What’s the word of another bum on the beach?” Harrell laughed thickly. “You’re cooked, son. That lad over there is out for good, and they’re going to pin it on you if you don’t get out of here. An Earthman’s life is important.”

  “I’m an Earthman, too.”

  “You were an Earthman, maybe. Now you’re just dirt, so far as they care. Dirt to be swept away. Go on! Scram! Get out of here!”

  So Mantell had scrammed, slipping out of the casino in the confusion. He knew he had a little time, anyway. The only ones in the casino who knew who he was and where he could be found were other beachcombers, like Joe, and they weren’t going to talk. So there would be a little time while the police were called, and while the police were en route. Eventually the police would reach the casino and find the dead man, and would start asking questions, and a half hour or an hour later, maybe, they would get around to identifying the man suspected of killing the tourist. They would send out an order, pick him up, try him on a charge of murder, or maybe manslaughter, if he was lucky. There would be a dozen tourists ready to swear he had provoked the attack, and nobody at all to stand up for him and substantiate his plea of innocence. So he would be duly tried and found guilty of homicide in whatever degree, and he would be punished.

  Mantell knew what the punishment was. He would be given his choice: Rehabilitation or Hard Labor.

  Of the two, Rehabilitation was by far the worse. It amounted to a death sentence. Using complicated encephalographic techniques, they could strip away a man’s mind completely and build a new personality into his brain. A simple, robotlike personality in almost all cases, but at least one which was decent and law-abiding. Rehabilitation was demolition of the individual. So far as Johnny Mantell was concerned, it would be the end; six months or a year later his body would walk out of the hospital in perfect freedom, but the mind in the head of that body would be named Paul Smith or Sam Jones, and Paul or Sam would never know that his body had once belonged to an unjustly convicted murderer.

  If the verdict were first degree murder, or some other equally serious crime, Rehabilitation was mandatory. On lesser counts, like manslaughter or larceny, you had your choice. You could submit voluntarily to the rehabilitators, or you could go off to the Penal Keep on Thannibar IX for a few months or a few years, and chop up rocks the way convicts had done for aeons.

  Mantell didn’t care for Rehabilitation much, nor for Hard Labor—not for a crime he hadn’t committed, or even for one that he had. There was one way out.

  Starhaven.

  It would take guts to steal a ship and pilot it halfway across the galaxy to Nestor, Starhaven’s sun, but once, a long time ago, there had been a man inside the body that belonged to Johnny Mantell, and he wanted to think that the man was still there.

  Actually, however, it wouldn’t be too hard to swipe a ship. It had been done before by skylarking, half-tipsy tourists, but they had brought it back and declared themselves glad to pay the fine.

  This time the ship would not come back. So Johnny Mantell fervently hoped.

  Johnny planned to tuck in his shirttails and amble out to the spacefield and talk fast and smart to one of the boys on duty. He had kept up with technical developments and knew how to talk spaceship shop. Mulciber natives were soft-spoken, easygoing, and made it a point to be pleasant and obliging. It shouldn’t be much of a trick to fast-talk himself right into a ship that had been fueled and was set to take off.

  And then, so long, Mulciber!

  So long to seven lousy years of beachcombing!

  Legging it across the sand to the spacefield, his Mulciber memories became dreamlike again, almost as if his days here had never been, as if Mike Bryson and Joe Harrell and the little fat tourists, and all the rest were mere phantoms out of a dream.

  He didn’t want to be Rehabilitated. He didn’t want to lose his past, even though there was nothing in it but disappointment and failure.

  But as for the future—his future in the world that Ben Thurdan built—who knew what Starhaven held in store? Whatever it was, it was more promising than sticking around and waiting for the police to track him down. Starhaven was sanctu
ary. Sanctuary was the prime requirement for keeping alive right now, and so he would go to Starhaven.

  Chapter Two

  The three small ships came streaking across the dark backdrop of the skies. There was the vessel that Johnny Mantell had stolen on Mulciber, and there were the two squat little two-man Space Patrol ships that came whistling after him in eager pursuit. Across space they came, heading out of the Fifth Octant of the galaxy and into the darkness.

  Mantell was not worrying too hard. The percentages lay with him—if he could somehow manage to keep ahead of his Patrol pursuers until he could reach Starhaven’s orbit.

  The chase had gone on for nearly two days, now—a dazzling pursuit in and out of hyperwarp, ever since Mantell had gotten away in the stolen ship. The SP men had been struggling to match velocities with Mantell’s ship, clamp metamagnetic grapples around him, and haul him off to the Penal Keep on Thannibar IX.

  Sweat dribbled down the sides of his face as be sat locked at his controls, feeling the frustration that all spacemen do: the curious disorientation that results when you cruise along at three point five times the speed of light and still seem utterly stationary, hung in an unbreakable motionless stasis.

  That was the way it seemed to him in hyperwarp, with nothing but the grayness all around, and the two snub-nosed SP ships in formation behind him. He clung grimly to his course. They said anyone at all could operate a hyperwarp spaceship if he knew how to drive a car, and Mantell was discovering that that was true. He had guided the ship across hundreds of light-years without difficulty, without catastrophe.

  Suddenly, his screen panel lit. The green blossom of light told him that he had reached the destination for which he had set the course-computer two days before. He nodded in satisfaction and jabbed down hard on the enameled red stud that wrenched him out of the grayness of hyperspace and back into the normal space-time continuum once again.