The Chalice of Death (31 page)

One of them was Myra. But which?

He wandered to the swirly board, where the croupier was pleading for new players. He watched the interplay of bright colors a while, placed and lost ten chips on a combination of blue-green-red-black. Red-violet-orange-green came in instead, and Mantell turned away in mild disappointment.

Looking through the crowd he saw several pink blurs who might have been Myra, or might not have been; there was no way of telling. He was patient. He and Myra had prearranged a signal, but first he had to waste some time in planting false leads for possible pursuers.

He lost five more chips in a quick interchange of Flicker, then picked up a hundred and fifty with a lucky cast on the Rotowheel. He decided enough time had gone by. He operated the prearranged signal by going to the card tables at the back of the casino and taking a seat at an unoccupied one.

Almost immediately a house girl, identifiable by the crimson ribbon she wore tied to her mask, appeared. “Looking for a partner, sir?”

“No, thanks. I'm waiting for someone.”

Mantell turned down four more offers of a game, three from men, one from another house girl. Finally a pink blur approached, and said, in the flat unmodulated voice produced by the mask effect, “I'll play with you if the stakes are in my league, stranger.”

Mantell smiled. It was Myra.

“I don't play penny ante, Miss.”

She sat down. “Put your cards out where I can see them, and start dealing.”

He dealt. He sorted out the cards and dealt a hand of pseudo-rummy, and as he dealt he murmured lightly under his breath, “Your message reached me. I think you're right. It's time to act.”

“So do we. It's inevitable that Ben will psychprobe someone and find out all about it before long. We have to strike at once.”

“When?”

She tossed three cards to the table. They were aces. “Tonight,” she said. “At midnight.”

The words seemed to reverberate through the noisy casino. Mantell's hand shook as he produced the useless fourth ace, drawing it from the cards he held in his hand and dropping it atop the ones she had laid out.

“Tonight? How will it be done?”

“I'm going to do it,” Myra said. The distortion of the scattering field robbed her voice of any emotional overtone. “Thurdan has asked me to come to his apartment tonight. We have dinner, then do some work—minor details that he doesn't have time to handle during the day. I'll come tonight—with a knife. He'll be surprised.”

Mantell dragged in the cards that lay scattered on the table and shuffled them mechanically, paying little attention to his actions.

He was staring at the electronically induced blur sitting across the table from him. He was realizing that he hardly knew the girl concealed behind it. She of the ice-blue eyes, Ben Thurdan's secretary and fiancee, who casually proposed to assassinate Starhaven's overlord tonight in his own home!

And yet Mantell knew he loved her.

“We're all prepared for the attack,” she said. “Key men are ready to take over the moment he's dead. There won't be any lapse in the possession of power. Dr. Harmon will issue the public proclamation. The head of Ben's private bodyguard corps, McDermott, is one of us too, and he'll see to it that there's no public disturbance. There'll be a force on hand to capture the control tower. By morning the provisional government will be in complete control of Starhaven—we hope without a shot being fired.”

“Very neat,” Mantell said. “And who's going to head this provisional government that's taking over? You? Harmon? McDermott?”

“No,” said Myra tranquilly. “You are.”

Mantell sat very quietly, absorbing the implications of that, filtering out the noise of the casino and letting Myra's calm words fill his mind.

“
You are
.”

Provisional Ruler of Starhaven. Johnny-on-the-spot.
You are
.

“Why me?” he asked finally. “There must be others around more—”

“No. There aren't. You're new here, Johnny. You haven't involved yourself in any feuds or made any enemies. People who would object to one leader or another will settle on you as being least objectionable, since you've had no contact with them, and so haven't aroused any anger. You—”

“How do you know I want the job?”

“You said you'd do whatever you could to help us. This will help us.”

“I'm not cut out to be a dictator.”

“You won't be. You'll simply be acting head of the provisional government, until constitutional law can be established on Starhaven.”

He considered that. The time was nine forty-five. In two hours and fifteen minutes, Ben Thurdan would be dead. And Johnny Martell, late of Mulciber, former defense-screen technician, general drifter and man-about-the-beach, would rule the iron world of Starhaven.

It was a fast rise, he thought.

The revolution would be quick too. By morning it would be over.

“Let's get out of here,” he said. He started to rise from the table. She caught his arm and tugged him back into his seat.

“Not yet,” she said. “We haven't finished pur game.” She dealt out the cards.

Some twenty minutes later they decided it was safe to leave the Casino, and they repaired to the entrance, shed their masks. They met outside the Casino in the onyx corridor. Myra was wearing a clinging blue spray-on tunic that outlined her soft figure revealingly.

Tonight, Mantell thought, she would see Ben Thurdan for the last time. Tomorrow she'll be mine.

They stepped out into the cool Starhaven night, strolling the broad plaza that fronted the Pleasure Dome. Overhead the sky was black, except for the mirror-bright moon and the sharp-focused stars. Ben Thurdan had put the moon and the stars up there deliberately, to cloak the artificiality of Starhaven. Mantell knew that they were simply a lens projection that crossed the metal sky each night on a carefully computed schedule, and vanished by “morning.” It was like a giant planetarium—a planetarium the size of a world.

A faintly chill rain-laden wind was blowing down on them out of the east as they stood together in the darkness, thinking of tomorrow and the tomorrows yet to come. Thurdan's weather engineers were shrewd planners. There was nothing synthetic seeming about Starhaven's weather. When it rained, it rained wet.

“Ben's a great man,” Myra said softly, apropos of nothing, after a while. “That's why we have to kill him. He's big—too big for Starhaven. As Caesar was too big for Rome.”

“You loved him, didn't you?”

“I loved Ben, yes. For all his cruelty and his ruthlessness, he was something special, something unique. Something a little more than a man.”

“Do we have to talk about him?” Mantell asked.

“If it hurts you, I won't. But I'm trying to square things with my own conscience, Johnny. Ben
has
to die—now. Or else there'll be hell on Starhaven when he dies naturally, and that day will have to come someday too. But still—”

It was strange, hearing her talk of conscience on this planet where conscience seemed to be a forgotten myth. Mantell turned to face her.

“Can I pry, Myra?”

“Into what?”

“You never told me why you came to Starhaven. Is it going to be a secret from me forever?”

She glanced sharply up at him. “Do you really want to know?” she asked.

He was silent for a moment, thinking. How terrible could her secret be, he wondered? Would it be some crime so ghastly it would drive a wedge between them forever, something that was better left untold?

He made up his mind. Nothing should be left untold. “Yes,” he said. “I want to know.”

“It wasn't because I committed any crime, Johnny. I'm one of the few people on Starhaven who isn't a fugitive from the law in some way.”

His eyes widened. “You're not—”

“No. I'm no fugitive.”

“Then how did you come here?” he asked, bewildered. “And why?”

She was silent a moment. “Eight years ago,” she said finally, speaking as if from a great distance away. “Ben Thurdan left Starhaven for the first time since he had built it. He took a vacation. He travelled incognito to the planet of Luribar IX, and he spent a week at a hotel there. He met me there.”

“You're from Luribar?”

She nodded. “My family helped to colonize it a century and a half ago. Ben took me dancing—once. He was so terribly clumsy I laughed at him. Then I saw I had hurt him. Imagine, hurting a powerful giant of a man like that! He was next to tears. I felt I had to apologize. He's never gone on a dance floor again, with me or with anybody else. But he left Luribar the next night, to return to Starhaven. He told me who he was and what he was, and asked me to come with him to Starhaven.”

“And you did.”

“Yes.”

“Oh,” Mantell said, after a while.

He glanced up at the star-speckled bowl of the night, thinking of Ben Thurdan who had put those stars up there and who had built an iron shell around this planet, and who was soon going to be dead.

Then he turned to Myra.

She seemed to flow into his arms.

Chapter Sixteen

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 briefcase 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 pockmarked 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 half 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 stories 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 brightly lighted 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!”