It is easier to unleash wolves than to restrain them once they have tasted blood. Wilding hated senseless slaughter, and he held back the vindictive impulses of his ugly horde with the hand of a master.
"Did any message get through?" he asked Concor.
The Martian shook his head unhappily. "Part of one. We tried to blanket their transmitter, but—"
"That shortens our time. Don't harm our prisoners. We may need them for hostages."
Convicts went through the ship and routed out everyone in hiding. The captives were lined up and Wilding went down the line inspecting his catch. The crewmen were both angry and frightened. The officers blustered.
One of the last captives, turned out of hiding in the crew's quarters, was a girl. She limped into the straggled line-up and faced the new masters of the ship.
Wilding stared at her in astonishment. "Elshar!" he gasped. "What are you doing here?"
The girl did not answer at once. She shrugged, smiling curiously. Racial strangeness was in the angles of her face-structure. Large, luminous eyes, of deep blue, rode high on tilted cheekbones. She looked very young, with her face still pale from shock. In her dark hair and fair skin were the curious blendings of mixed blood, which often produces rare beauty. But for the twisted leg, she was perfect as one of those incredibly delicate and minute figurines carved of Martian ivory, but more human. All too human.
"I bought my freedom with the money you left for me," she explained slowly. "There was enough left to bribe the guards of the supply ship."
Caught between confusion and anger, Wilding stormed at her.
"You must have lost your mind. What could you want—"
The girl stopped him with a gesture. "Perhaps. And perhaps more than my mind. I convinced them that all I wanted was to see the place you had been taken. I did not try to convince myself. All the time I hoped something would happen. Some miracle. I ask nothing from you. Just let me stay near you—"
Tichron's laugh was a knife-thrust in the heavy stillness of the ship.
"Friend," he said enviously. "You have one woman too many."
"One is sometimes too many," Wilding said irritably. He told Elshar, "I'll decide later what to do with you. Now I'm too busy."
The girl studied him gravely. "Don't think about me. I'll be no trouble to you."
Wilding nodded and turned his attention to Concor, who already bent over the calculators.
"With a little trimming, this present orbit will take us fairly close to the asteroid," was the Martian's verdict.
"That's your department. Get us there, and don't waste any time you can help. The patrols will be converging if any message at all went through. Our margin is small enough at best."
Tichron's broad face showed astonishment. "You mean you're actually going back for the others?"
"I never had any other intention. I'll need all who want to go with me ... where I'm going."
Tichron's eyes narrowed. "Whereareyou going?"
"You'll find out when I tell the others. In time to make up your mind about going."
Alcatraz Asteroid showed suddenly against the dark backdrop of space, reflected sunlight waxing as the planes of its surface turned toward the Sun.
Airlock valves set into the savage exterior opened to let the lighter and captive supply ship into a tube leading downward to the inhabited caverns. Barely had the ship settled into cradles when Wilding went through the double doors and stared about the vaulted dockroom.
Something was wrong. By now, the convicts would know that the venture was well started, that the conquerors had returned with a prize. Curious and excited crowds should be milling about, swarming around the captured ship, greeting the venturers.
But no one was in sight.
Signalling the others to remain aboard, Wilding moved away from the ship to begin exploration. Cautiously, gun in hand, he poked through the main cavern with its stockpiled supplies, then on, investigating the nearer passages. Already out of sight of his cohorts aboard the supply ship, he halted suddenly at a hint of furtive movement among the jagged rocks.
Three men sprang up and faced him. All three were armed and ready. It was not difficult to recognize Credus and his two chief supporters.
"I'm taking over," said Credus.
"Not so easily," Wilding warned. "It's still a deadlock. I have a gun on you."
Credus shook his head slowly. "You're too good a gambler to play against such odds. You wouldn't dare shoot."
Wilding was aware of a faint sound behind him. For a moment he hoped that Grouth or Concor had disobeyed his orders and followed him. He even risked a quick glance over his shoulder to see.
Two yards behind him stood Tichron, aimed blaster in hand. On Tichron's face was an expression of unholy glee, his lips curled up to expose wolfish fangs. Tichron held the balance, and knew it.
"Start bargaining," he suggested.
"I'll deal with you," said Credus quickly. "I have the girl, Amyth. She's yours ... if...."
Tichron licked dry lips. His cold eyes questioned Wilding.
Wilding groaned. "I've nothing to offer but a fair deal—"
Tichron's trigger finger tightened. A thin beam flicked from the blaster. Sound and light jarred the caverns....
V
Echoes of the blast died away in the distance. For a fragment of time, the curious tableau held, then thought and perception began again. Wilding, his face bleak, was amazed that he still lived.
At such range, a miss was impossible. But where Credus had stood was an untidy heap of smoldering cloth and calcined rags of flesh.
Dazed by concussion, the survivors of Credus' party stared at the grinning Tichron.
"I'm playing along with Wilding," he told them. "The one thing nobody ever thought to offer me is a fair deal. I guess I'm just curious."
Still over aimed guns, the two groups faced each other as the strain mounted between them.
"Go on, shoot," urged Wilding. "The odds are even now. You can kill both of us, but we will take you with us. You have one second to drop your guns or start shooting."
Indecision tortured the pair briefly, but their nerve failed. Weapons clattered on the floor.
"What are you going to do with us?" one asked unhappily.
"Nothing, if you do as you're told. Where is everyone?"
The men talked willingly enough. As soon as the lighter had left, Credus took over. Weapons were confiscated, all the women were seized and taken to the lower caverns as hostages. Of the others, some had followed Credus willingly, the rest had been threatened into obedience. Except for his trusted cohorts, all convicts were ordered out of the way pending the return of the lighter. If Wilding's project succeeded, Credus wanted no one to interfere with his idea of snatching it away for his own use.
Wilding snapped commands. The women were to be brought to the main caverns at once. All others who wished to leave Alcatraz were to assemble there without delay. Alarm had gone out during the taking of the supply ship. Probably the patrol cruisers were already converging upon the asteroid, so time was short.
Half an hour later, Wilding stepped before the thronged convicts to address them. A hush fell as he looked grimly into the sea of faces, pale from their sunless quarters and from excitement.
"I can't promise you freedom," he warned. "What I have in mind may not be freedom at all to your way of thinking. All I offer is a hard, dangerous life, and possibly a short one. I'll need strong men and women for what I have in mind if we reach our destination. And competent technicians, first, to see that we get there. If we make it, you'll have a fighting chance at a new way of life. Life totally different from any you may have known before."
"How many can go?" Tiny asked soberly.
Wilding shrugged. "All who will want to, probably ... when they've heard my plan. It may be crowded, but for a short distance the lighter and supply ship can carry all of you. And at the moment, the trip to the asteroid belt is only a ferry run. Shorter than it will be for a long time again."
He told them, then, of his plan. He told them of the fabulous treasure he had stumbled upon in a derelict spaceship, and how he had invested his treasure trove in a new-type spaceship bought and assembled secretly, and hidden among the asteroids.
Like many others, Wilding had dreamed of leaving the Solar System and plunging beyond the space barrier to find a new home among the stars. Unlike some, he had tried to implement his dream, turning the loot of his crime career to that purpose. But to head out beyond Pluto, a venturer needs more than a spaceship. He needs other people as desperate and as venturesome as himself to join his attempt. He needs a hardy crew to get to the nearer stars, and once there, a people strong and daring enough to seize a strange new world and colonize it.
Originally, Wilding had planned a raid on Alcatraz to pick up a likely complement of tough souls, but the authorities had short-circuited his scheme by sending him there. An opportunist and a realist, he had adjusted his plan to the circumstances.
"Just breaking out of here to go back to the familiar worlds would be useless. We need not freedom to go back to our old lives, but a new kind of freedom. None of us can ever fit into the neatly standardized social structures in the planets and moons we call our homes. We need new settings where the adventurous man is not an anachronism. We must start fresh and make a world over to our specifications. It will not be a safe world, but it will never be as dull as those into which we cannot fit.
"Who will go with me?"
Dead silence fell as Wilding finished. Even the most hardened convicts exchanged dubious glances as if Wilding's words had given them new perspectives on themselves and each other. Discussion started as a murmurous trickle, increasing quickly to a flood of confused sound.
"What about those who don't go?" someone asked.
"I don't know," admitted Wilding. "Probably the authorities will abandon the asteroid as a prison. They may remove all who stay behind to some safer preserve. The stay-behinds are no concern of mine. Make up your minds. As soon as the stores are aboard, we are leaving. Any delay will be fatal, since the lighter and supply ship must get away before the patrol ships can mine the likely orbits and establish a spaceblock. There are no formalities, nothing to sign. Just be aboard if you are going along...."
To the casual eye, the asteroid belt seemed as empty as the rest of space. True, some suspiciously feeble stars altered the familiar patterns of constellations, and several larger asteroids were clearly visible by their own reflection of sunlight. But for the most part the debris of a long-ago shattered planet was so widely distributed in its orbital ring around the sun that only a trained astrogator could realize the near approach to it.
Nearing the end of their long deceleration, the two ships seemed to hang, unmoving, in blank space. Mass-detectors and proximity alarms warned frequently of meteoric fragments, but the pair of fugitive ships had so far encountered nothing of formidable or even interesting size. Matter in the asteroid belt is so scattered, and most units so small, that the odds are heavily against even accidental collision. Finding one particle in a shower of dust motes is a matter of instruments and mathematical calculators, not luck.
Pursuit was inevitable, but still invisible. Patrol ships were certainly converging to hunt down the fugitives, but they were still beyond range of the instruments. Wilding was satisfied by the progress of his venture, though still under strain. There had been trouble getting away from Alcatraz. Many convicts, though willing enough to attempt escape, objected to joining his further plans. A determined few had rioted and tried to seize the escape vessels for a mad dash back to the familiar moons and planets of men. The riots had been brief and bloody, though abortive.
Wilding avoided contact with his fellow fugitives. Grouth and Concor had taken over technical management of the ships. Tiny and Tichron were organizing the personnel. Amyth and Elshar, discovering a mutual curiosity, were inseparable, and Wilding had seen neither of them during the voyage. He felt, uneasily, that their long discussions might be concerned with settling something in regard to him. And now that the machinery of his great dream was actually in operation, he found himself oddly depressed. When there is no immediate occupation for hands or brain, the way of a leader is hard and lonely.
Brooding in his synthetic solitude, he wrestled with his greatest opponent—himself. Black doubts crept into his soul. He longed for crisis and the need for action.
It would come soon enough, he realized. Reaching the hidden spaceship with his cargoes of human raw material was only the first step in an endless obstacle course. Before personnel and materials could be transferred to the starship and the ship itself made ready for deep space, time would pass. Already the facts of the break-out from Alcatraz must be known. A network of fast patrol cruisers was slowly but surely closing in upon him. A getaway in the face of such opposition would be touch and go at best. At worst, it would mean a quick, inglorious end to his venture.
Troubled, he sought out Concor in the control room.
The Martian grinned at him, gestured toward the view-screen showing space ahead. "Any moment now. The charts of this part of the Belt are not too reliable. We're shaping our orbit now, and if the figures are right, we'll overhaul your asteroid—"
Mass-detector alarms set up a demoniac clangor.
Grouth came into the control room. "Right on the nose," he said.
A point of light swam into visibility on the view-screen. It grew swiftly, steadily, first in intensity, then in size, until it bulked large, filling up the field of the screen.
Weak with relief, Wilding ordered the ship set down.
Hours later, in a spacesuit, he was overseeing removal of the camouflaging which had turned the hidden ship into an irregular rock protuberance. Gangs of workmen swarmed over the savage surface of the asteroid, clearing away staging, loading supplies, and putting the ship in readiness for take-off.
Doubts forgotten, Wilding threw himself into the work. He was in his glory. Everything was working smoothly. Too smoothly. The work of trans-shipping was approaching completion when disaster struck.
Tiny came out to him with word that Grouth and Concor wanted him in the control room of the giant spacer christenedStarship I. Her face was very grave.
"It was a good try," she whispered as they entered the control room.
Wilding did not need to ask the trouble. Grouth's and Concor's faces told him everything.
"The patrol cruisers?"
Grouth nodded. "I've made contact with them."
Wilding whistled. "As close as that!"
"Closer. Evidently, they've been there some time. Waiting for more ships to tighten up their blockade. They've mined all major orbits and are just completing the network of ships. You couldn't sneak a mouse through."
"Any chance to run the blockade?"
Grouth shook his head glumly. "Too late for that."
"Shall we tell the others?" asked Tiny. "No use of their wasting their labor now—"
"Not just yet," said Wilding. "Finish the loading. We may be able to bluff our way out."
"They'll be coming in after us soon," warned Concor. "Then it'll be a choice of surrender or being blasted out with atomic torpedoes."
Wilding sighed unhappily. "We'll surrender ... if it comes to that. But they won't try anything like that until they've tried to bargain with us for the hostages. Stall them along. When the ship is loaded, seal it up and take-off. We'll meet them in space and try to run a bluff with the hostages...."
"It won't work," prophesied Grouth gloomily. "You can't make a deal with the Security Patrol."
Privately Wilding agreed. But he said, "We can try."
The final processes of loading and stowing seemed to drag endlessly. At last it was accomplished and word given to close up the ship.
It was a grim and silent company in the control awaiting the blast-off. Grouth, Concor and Tiny were morose, already disheartened by the knowledge of defeat. Amyth and Elshar stood close to Wilding, both smiling enigmatically. He found their presence irritating, but said nothing. Only Tichron seemed untouched by the atmosphere of failure. He studied Wilding curiously, and even attempted to joke.
"Not that it matters now," he said. "But I've wondered why you were willing to include me on your expedition. Don't you know that I'm a chronic trouble-maker?"
Wilding smiled thinly. "Of course I knew that. But I wanted someone like you in my new world. Every healthy society needs some kind of trouble-maker. It stimulates growth."
Atomic motors roared into life, and the ship rose steadily up and out from the asteroid. As it moved toward the patrol cruisers, Wilding ordered the speed held to low levels, lest its seeming flight provoke action from trigger-nervous gunners aboard the patrol ships.
Tension grew as the range shortened.
A spreading, soundless flash of light flowered against the vaulted darkness of space. An atomic shell fired by the nearest cruiser. Just a warning, this time.
"Make contact," Wilding commanded. "We'll have to talk to them now."
The view-screen swirled with color as Grouth worked at the keyboard. Squirming colors cleared and a three dimensional image appeared. A man in the silver gray uniform of Security Police. It was like speaking with him face to face.
"The first shot was a warning," he said gravely. "Just hold your present course and do not attempt to change your speed."
"Warning of what?" Wilding demanded wryly. "Aren't you out of bounds? What right have you to interfere with our course or speed?"
The officer went white. "My orders are to stop you at all costs," he said. "If you surrender, and the hostages are unharmed, you will all be returned to prison without further punishment."
Wilding stared at the policemen insolently. "Not so fast," he protested. "Since when are people sent off to prison without even a trial? And for a trial, you must prefer some kind of charge. What is the charge against us?"
The officer's face went from white to red. "Jailbreak will do for the first charge," he stormed angrily. "After that, we'll see. You're all known criminals, or you'd never have been in Alcatraz."
Wilding laughed suddenly. "You're not making sense. You can charge us with jailbreak, even arrest us. But you can't make your charge stick in court. If we were in Alcatraz, you know there are no records in existence of criminal charges against us, so you have no right to say that we're known criminals. We can sue you for saying so publicly. As for the jailbreak charge, you may have a few witnesses among the convicts still on Alcatraz. But you know how unreliable such witnesses are in court. Any good lawyer can break down an eyewitness identification—"
The patrol officer licked his lips, his eyes took on a hard, metallic sheen. "We'll let the lawyers argue about it. Over your corpses if you try to evade arrest. I have my orders to stop you and take you back, alive if possible, dead if necessary. You have taken hostages, so a kidnapping charge will hold. If they are killed, the charge will be murder. Suit yourself about details."
One after another, armed patrol cruisers moved in to take up positions in the formation ringed about the doomedStarship I. On every side, batteries of atomic cannon covered every possible route of escape.
"What are you going to do?" asked Tiny, her voice hopeless.
An expression of sour triumph crossed the face of the man on the screen.
"You have five minutes to decide," he told them. "By then, if you haven't surrendered and let a prize crew come aboard, we have orders to blow you out of space." He stopped talking and his image vanished back into the writhing colors.
"Show them the hostages," suggested Tichron viciously. "Then tell them to keep their distance or you'll blow up our atomic fuel. They're bluffing."
"I don't think so," Grouth contended. "We could find out by threatening to kill the hostages, one by one."
Wilding glanced round the circle of faces. All were pale, set into lines of strain and bitterness.
"No," said Wilding. "The decision is mine, and I've made it. We won't have unnecessary killing. You can't found a new world on other people's corpses. If it were to cost even one innocent life, I wouldn't want that responsibility. We'll have to surrender and start planning all over again...."
"Shall I set the surrender signal?" Grouth asked.
Wilding nodded. For some reason, his eyes sought Elshar's face. She was smiling. It startled Wilding that her approval meant so much to him. He was not in love with her, and never had been. The sight of Amyth close beside Elshar was enough to prove that to him. Any world, new or old, without Amyth would have been dust and ashes to him. His feeling about Elshar was completely different, almost as if she were a child for whom and to whom he was responsible. But her face now was that of a judge, benign and sad and incredibly world-wise. And her smile was almost a benediction.
The girl moved forward suddenly. Her voice was clear and oddly confident.
"Don't signal anything," she ordered. "There is another way out. Wilding has won the right to it for all of you."
Elshar turned fondly to Wilding and put her hand on his arm.
"You don't understand, of course. Because of me you lost your freedom. You thought all along that you were my guardian angel. In your own way, you tried to be kind and good and understanding. The truth is that I am your guardian angel, one of them."
Puzzlement in his face seemed to amuse her. She went on very quickly. "I know you have wondered about me, about my race. You always sensed some strangeness in me, but not even you dreamed how much there was of strangeness. I come of an alien race, not even of your Solar System. There are many such races inhabiting planets of various stars in your galaxy. Most of them have developed far beyond your people in science, in culture, in social organization.
"For centuries these peoples have watched you and wondered. Many factors in your culture disturbed us, but these matters were unimportant as long as you were restricted to your own system. We dreaded the time when you would conquer the atom and attempt space travel. By the time that happened, we were prepared. A cordon of ships established a barrier just beyond your outermost planet, and it was deemed advisable to isolate you until your culture was found fit to expand to other stars.
"Certain ones among us were chosen to venture into your worlds as judges and observers. I was one of these, and mine was a special mission. As bait, I was to select one man to be a test case. That man must be one who typified all of the qualities most disturbing to us. I chose Wilding, or perhaps by interfering in my behalf, he chose me. Our problem was to see how one of the worst human products of your culture would respond to increasing responsibility. In the final analysis, Civilization is merely the response to expanding responsibilities.
"Wilding was a good choice. Environment and heredity made him a criminal, but he had a good mind and the primal virtue of courage. He was ambitious, a practical dreamer. Like your whole civilization, he attempted to reach worthy ends by evil means. From desperate need and because of a mystical anger, he is in revolt against his own kind, and against their culture. There was almost fatal weakness in his disregard of the precious gift of life, even of his own. He became an ideal test case.
"By his decision to give up his hopes and plans, and surrender rather than endanger a single life he has proved himself. He has won, for himself and for his race, another chance.
"There is a place where you can go. An Earth-type planet on which you can still play out your dream of building a world to your own needs and desires. It is in a parallel space-time continuum, not your familiar universe, and the way there is strange and terrible. There, you will be no menace to my people and the others, and by the time you have learned your way back, you will be civilized ... or will have destroyed yourself in the process."
Wilding fixed his eyes on Elshar as the girl finished speaking. Doubt had died out in him slowly, for her manner carried an eery conviction.
"Is all this true?" he had to ask as his mind grappled with the strangeness of her. "Can you really get us away from the cruisers, and show us how to reach this ... private world?"
"Quite true," she said softly. "I can't go with you, but I can make some ... adjustments ... in your course calculators. I can give your navigator instructions by post-hypnotic suggestion, which he will forget as soon as you reach your destination. Do you still wish to go?"
Wilding nodded quickly. He glanced upward at the view-screen where rioting colors had begun to flare and swirl. The timelimit of the patrol's ultimatum was up.
"Do whatever she tells you," he ordered Concor. Then to Grouth, "Make the connection. I'll talk to him."
Colors steadied and faded on the screen, built up an image. It was the same officer.
"You've made no surrender signals," the policeman stated.
"Hold your fire," Wilding told him savagely. "We're putting out spacecrafts with the hostages. They're alive and well. After that, I'll discuss terms."
Indecision struggled on the officer's face. But he shrugged and smiled coldly. If Wilding was willing to yield his only bargaining point, it was worth a brief concession of time. And there was nothing to lose by waiting, since the trap had already closed.
Grouth broke the connection rudely.
They waited while hostages were released, hustled into spacearmor, and put aboard the spacecrafts. Air hissed in the escape tubes.
Wilding shot an anxious glance at Elshar. She was smiling again, sadly, fondly.
"Time enough. Don't worry about the patrol ships. Everything is ready. I almost wish I could go with you. Your experiment should be ... interesting."
Concor sat at the control console. He pressed buttons, and a view of space flashed on the screen. Electronic tapes fed swiftly into the calculators, and from them to the robot controls that actually operated the ship. Light faded in the cabin. In the dimness, Wilding's hand found Amyth's and drew strength from her nearness.
He heard Elshar's voice, clear and steady. "Try not to be afraid. It is terrible, but does not last long."
Something strange was happening on the view-screen. Space and the familiar stars shifted, changing relative positions, like images flowing around flaws in a mirror. There was a moment of kaleidoscopic horror as if all the senses slipped, then adjusted to new patterns.
"This is good-bye." The sound of Elshar's voice drew his eyes to her. The girl's form wavered in his vision. She was changing. For a fragment of perception, he glimpsed something that suggested the old priest of the Pit Men. Then, something as delicate, fearful and unhumanly wise as a Martian pzintar idol. But as his mind grasped at the reality, she faded and vanished like drifting smoke.
Long afterward, it seemed that the ship descended through dense, luminous vapor. Through rifts below could be seen a patchwork of brown and green, misted with blue. It was like an unrolling map in three dimensions. Richly verdant continents, studded with tumbled mountains. A broad ocean crimsoned by the setting of a double sun. Alien stars winked on one by one in the thickening twilight, and unknown constellations made fiery symbols against the dark vaults of another space.
Wilding stared down at the planet which was their new home.
Every man has his obstacle course, never to be completed. This was his next obstacle, and overcoming it was the joy of living. He was glad that it seemed a big one.
"Ready for landing," he said. He was smiling....