Robert Silverberg: Starhaven

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 encéphalographie 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 reha-bilitators, 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 sanctuary. Sanctuary was the prime requirement for keeping alive right now, and so he would go to Starhaven.

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 Star-haven’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 metamagnetjc grapples around him, and haul him off to the Penal Keep on Thannibar IX.