Robert Silverberg: Starhaven

Two assistants gently propelled Mantell to the couch and strapped him in. Harmon lowered the metal probe-dome to his scalp. Its skin was cold and hard. The knowledge that an incautious twist of a lever now could cook his brains or scramble his synapses did not tend to make Mantell much more cheerful.

Harmon’s eyes were bright with enthusiasm. He touched his clawlike old hands to the enameled studs of the control panel. He smiled.

“Suppose you tell me a little about yourself, Mr. Mantell.”

Mantell clenched his jaws a moment as he dug back into the old painful memories. In a tired voice he said, “I’m a former armaments technician who ran into a little trouble seven years back. I—lost my job. And then I went to Mulciber to live for a while, and it turned out I stayed there longer than I expected. I—”

As he spoke, Harmon went on busily making adjustments in the psychprobe, staring over Mantell’s shoulder, at an image screen out of Mantell’s line of sight, where the electric rhythms of his brain were being projected by an oscilloscope.

“I was out on the beach one morning combing for pearls when—”

Something seemed to crash down on his head like a ten-ton foundry stamp. He felt as if the hemispheres of his brain had been split apart, as if a giant cleaver were wedged deep in his scalp, to blast off fusion bombs back of each eye.

Slowly the tide of pain receded, leaving in its wake a numbing headache. Mantell thumbed his eyes and looked up at old Harmon, who was squinting gravely at his dials.

“What happened?” Mantell asked.

Harmon smiled apologetically. “A slight error in calibration, nothing more. My sincere apologies to you, young man.”

Mantell shuddered. “I hope nothing like that happens when you psychprobe me, Doctor!”

Looking at him strangely, Harmon said, “But you’ve just been psychprobed. It’s been over for fifteen minutes. You’ve been asleep all this time.”

Fifteen minutes—and he had thought it had been perhaps half a second! Mantell rubbed his aching scalp. Something was throbbing fiercely in the area just behind his eyebrows, and he longed to be able to rip off the plate of cranial bone and press his hands soothingly against the ache.

From behind him the booming voice of Ben Thurdan said, “Is he conscious yet?”

“He’s coming around. There was a stubborn stress-pattern I didn’t foresee, and it knocked him out for a while.”

“You’d better practice using your foresight, then, Erik,” Thurdan warned. “You aren’t any youngster. If you pull things like this, we’ll have to let one of your technicians handle the probing. Mantell, are you steady on your feet yet?”

“I don’t know,” Mantell said uncertainly. “Let’s see.”

He clambered off the couch and wobbled around the laboratory for a moment or two. The shock of the psych-probing was beginning to diminish. “I guess I’m okay,” Mantell said after a moment. “The pain’s starting to fade. You know, I could have done quite well without this whole thing.”

Thurdan grinned hollowly. “I’m sure you could. But we couldn’t have.”

“Did I pass?”

“For your information, you’re clean and acceptable. Come on into my office and I’ll fill you in on our general way of life here on Starhaven.”

Still a little unsteady, Mantell followed the big man through the corridor that led from Harmon’s laboratory into Thurdan’s luxuriously appointed office. Thurdan sprawled out on a web-foam couch that had been specially designed to cradle his long powerful body, and casually gestured to Mantell to take a seat opposite.

“Drink?” Thurdan asked abruptly.

Mantell nodded, trying to hide his eagerness, and Thurdan nudged a sliding knob in the base of his couch. A sleek portable bar came rolling out of a corner of the room toward him. It stationed itself in front of Mantell.

After a little deliberation he dialed a sour choker, third strength. Almost before he was through punching out the signal, the robot bar was extending a crystal beaker three-quarters full of cloudy green liquid. Mantell took it. The bar swiveled away and went to Thurdan, who ordered a straight bourbon.

Mantell sipped and nodded in appreciation. “This is good stuff. From Muriak?”

“Synthetic—all synthetic. We don’t bother smuggling liquor in any more, not when we have chemists good enough to whip up stuff like that.” Thurdan leaned back and stared intently at Mantell. Slowly he said, “According to what you told Dr. Harmon, you used to be an armaments technician before you got into trouble. That automatically makes you a very valuable individual on Starhaven, Mantell.”

He had quickly dropped the “mister.” That must be only for newcomers who had not yet qualified, Mantell guessed.

“Valuable?” Mantell asked. “How so?”

“Starhaven lives and dies by its armaments. The moment our screens show any signs of weakening, well have a Space Patrol armada crashing down on us from every octant of the galaxy at once. I spent billions shielding Starhaven, Mantell. It’s the first absolutely impregnable fortress in the history of the universe. But even so, it’s no stronger than the technicians who maintain its screens and guns.”

Mantell’s hands began to quiver slightly. “It’s a long time since I did anything like that,” he told Thurdan. “Seven years. I hardly remember my stuff.”

“You’ll learn again,” Thurdan said easily. “The psych-probe gave me your biography. Seven years of beachcombing and bumming after you lost your job. Then you killed a man, stole an SP ship, and headed for here.”

“I didn’t kill him. I was framed.”

Thurdan smiled bleakly and shrugged. “The probe says you did kill him. The probe isn’t prejudiced. It just reports what happened. Go argue with your own memories, Mantell.”

Mantell sat very quietly, stunned, gripping his glass hard. He could remember every detail of that brawl in the beachside café, the fat, drunken tourist yelling that he had stolen his wife’s jeweled brooch, then the tourist’s flabby palm slamming into his cheek . . . And, the tourist slipping and cracking his skull open before Mantell laid a hand on him.

“I honestly thought I didn’t do it,” Mantell said quietly.

Thurdan shrugged again. “No use arguing with the probe. But that doesn’t matter here. We don’t believe in ex post facto laws.” Thurdan rose and walked to the tri-di mural that swirled kaleidoscopically over the surface of one wall, a shifting pattern of reds and bright greens, a flowing series of contrasting textures and hues.

He stood with his back to Mantell, powerful hands locked: a big man who had done a big thing in his life, the man who had built Starhaven.

“We have laws here,” he said after a while. “This place isn’t just an anarchy. You break into a man’s house and steal his money, and the law entitles him to go after you and make you give it back. If you cause too much trouble, we kill you. But nothing in between. No brain-burning, no jail sentence that lets a man rot away in a living death.” He turned. “You, Mantell—you could still be happily working for Klingsan Defense Screens if you hadn’t felt sorry for yourself, kept hitting the bottle, gotten yourself canned. But the forces of law and order threw you out, and ruined you as a man from there on.”

Mantell took another drink and frowned questioningly at Thurdan. “Don’t tell me I’ve run into some kind of reform school, now!”

Thurdan whirled, dark eyes hooded and angry. “Don’t say that. There won’t be any reforming here. Drink all you please, He, cheat, gamble—Starhaven won’t mind. We’re not pious. A fast operator on Starhaven is a pillar of society, a good upstanding citizen. We won’t preach to you here.”