Barrington Bayley - The Star Virus

He looked around him for approbation, receiving it in an applause of chuckles and sniggers.

Captain Shone laughed out loud. “You’re surprised too often, old pal,” he remonstrated to Rodrone. “You want to be more flexible. If old John Theory was here, now, nothing would faze him.” He took a swig and spluttered. “There was a mind for you.”

Rodrone swung around, his puzzlement forgotten in the face of a fresh surprise. Suspicion flowered into certainty almost as soon as it was born.

“You knew him!”

“Of course I did.”

So that was it. The weirdness of the crew was totally explicable now. Shone had been personally acquainted with Clave’s distant ancestor, a man whose very family name had changed because of his scientific contributions, and who had lived two hundred years before. With that one datum, everything clicked into place.

Now he knew what sort of a ship he had bought passage on. These were men who would take cargoes on the long hauls across hundreds of light-years, where the time-dilation effect ensured that they could never return to the generation from which they departed. They were the most abandoned of men. They were called deadliners, because their utter removal from the warmth of human society gave them a close affinity with death. They no longer had the ordinary reasons that made a man want to stay alive; they had nothing but their existence in this mausoleum of a freighter.

It was not long before the deadliners grew tired of the lens and wandered off together, leaving Shone asleep at the control desk.

Rodrone sat moodily for a few minutes, then felt restless. The atmosphere of the deadliner ship made him more agitated than usual. He got up and explored sternwards.

The Stator was in complete silence. The galleries echoed his footsteps and the walls felt rusty to his touch. Near to where he believed the propulsion unit and power plant to be, he saw a yellow light and heard the murmur of voices.

The crew of the Stator were sitting on the floor of a small room, playing cards. One wall of the room was covered with the control mechanisms of a nuclear reactor of some antiquity, to judge by its design. The attitude of the deadliners was one of intense concentration. Rodrone had never seen them so quiet.

Pim laid down a card on the pack and moved a counter forward on a board by his side. “Check,” he said.

Someone got up and pulled a handle on the wall. Rodrone watched incredulously. He knew what the deadliner was doing: he was withdrawing one of the damper rods.

Jermy looked up as he entered. “You come to join us?”

“What’s the game?”

“Brag. Half skill, half chance.”

Rodrone nodded to the wall. “And what about the reactor? It’s a pretty dangerous thing to include in a game of cards. What sort is it?”

“It’s a fast one. It becomes a bomb without the moderators.”

He swallowed. There was no need to ask how that figured.

Pim noticed his discomfort. “Whassamatter? We were playing when you came aboard.”

“What? You mean you played this mad game aground on Stundaker?”

“Sure.”

“But you might have taken half the spaceground with you!”

“The whole of it, mate. This is a fair old reactor we’ve got here. Well, shall I deal you a hand?”

Rodrone sat down as Jublow shifted over to make room. “Yeah, what the hell…”

As the game progressed, Rodrone picked up the details. It was a game in which there were no gains, only one ultimate loss. As the scores mounted, so the reactor’s moderating rods were withdrawn; the idea was to win by beating all other opponents while the scores were still low enough to come out alive, and that needed both skill and luck.

The deadliners called the game Brag, but a better name would have been Dare. In a showdown, the scores of all the hands were added, and the leading player who forced the showdown could rarely be sure of what the others held.

It was rather like a game of pistol roulette Rodrone had once seen, where each player took a chance that the heat charge he fired at his head was not the one in five that was actually live. But in this game, no one put down any money. The stakes were purely negative… and why shouldn’t they be, Rodrone thought. In a sense, these men were dead already.

There was one final grisly touch of murder, to prevent the game from becoming spurious. A player in a winning position who lost his nerve and tried to back out paid a forfeit, by being locked in the cavity behind the reactor’s shielding. Rodrone did not know if there were currently any bodies there.

He played cautiously and well, but the others were experts. One by one the rods moved out, occasionally one being pushed back in as the score momentarily dropped. Suddenly he was aware of someone standing in the entrance. Clave had also been attracted by the light. He stepped in, taking in the scene with one glance around. “Brag, eh? I’m good at it.”

There was hardly a word spoken as he took a place and accepted a hand. Did the youngster realize what he had walked in on? Rodrone started to voice a warning, but the heavy dead ethic of the deadliners fell down on him like a stifling blanket, damming the impulse.

To judge by the quick and easy way in which Clave ran up a good score, he had not given a thought to what the stakes were. The deadliners became very tense. Rodrone could almost see them thinking “this is it.”

After about half an hour, however, the significance of the manipulations of the reactor controls gradually seeped in on Clave. He studied his hand, still sinister of aspect and smiling, but, Rodrone knew, very thoughtful.

This must be it, Rodrone told himself. Apart from the fact that Clave ran up a high score without knowing what he was doing, they don’t scale down to account for there being two extra players.

“Yeah,” said Clave, slightly breathless-sounding. “Well, this has gone far enough.” He laid down his cards.

“You can’t do that, mister,” Krat, the melancholiac, informed dourly.

“But dammit—” Clave glanced at the radiation meter, which was glowing brightly. “Just look at it already.”

“It’s hot in there,” Jermy agreed. Briefly he explained about the forfeit.

Clave gave Rodrone a wild look. “Are you in on this?”

“It’s the rules, Clave!” Rodrone said in a tortured voice. Clave jumped up. “You’re not putting me in there—” In an instant the others were on him. Clave’s hair swung around his shoulders as they lifted him off his feet. Rodrone leaped forward to put a stop to it, but he was cuffed back.

Then it was done. A thick section of wall swung open. A narrow passage opened up behind it, and into this Clave was stuffed, between the two reactor casings. The heavy door slammed shut.

Rodrone was in a state of stunned horror. The deadliners stood around silently, shifty-faced and avoiding one another’s glances.

Then they suddenly broke out into one of their spontaneous dancing sessions, thumping the floor with enthusiastic exertions. From somewhere musical intruments were produced, and three of their number filled the room with surprisingly expert swing music from a now forgotten era. Energetically, they all danced. Jublow danced, his huge hunched shoulders twisting back and forth and his red neck straining. Even Jermy joined in, snakelike, his back crouched and his face intent and deadpan. All their faces seemed corpselike, out of place with the convulsions of their bodies.

Rodrone left, sickened, and made his way back to the control gallery. Shone had woken up, and was staring blearily into nothing.

Limply Rodrone sat down. “That death-wish gang of yours has just killed Clave,” he said dully.

“Killed him? How?”