Mantell jabbed down on the communicator stud and when the operator responded with the semi-automatic “Yes, Mr. Thurdan,” Mantell said, “This isn’t Thurdan. It’s John Mantell. Get me back the call that was on this line a minute ago—SP headquarters on Earth. Thurdan was talking to Commander Whitestone.”
The ten-second delay of subradio communication followed, while arcs leaped across the grayness of hyper-space, meshed, locked, returned.
The vision screen brightened. The face of Whitestone reappeared on the screen.
“The fleet’s on its way, Thurdan,” the SP man began immediately. “Don’t tell me you’ve changed your mind, or—”
He stopped. Mantell said quickly, “Thurdan’s dead. There’s been a sort of a revolution on Starhaven, and I’m in charge. My name is—”
“Mantell?” The SP Commander burst in suddenly, interrupting. “You’re still alive, Mantell? Then why didn’t you report to us? What’s been going on all this time, man?”
Stunned, Mantell looked up at the image in the vision screen. When he spoke, his voice came out as a harsh croaking whisper:
“What did you say? How do you know me?”
“Know you? I picked you for this job myself, Mantell! We probed eveiy member of the Patrol until we found one who could adapt well enough.”
The floor seemed to quake under Mantell. He took a hesitant step backward, groped for what had been Thurdan’s chair, and sank numbly into it.
“You say I’m in the Patrol?”
“A member of the Fourteenth Earth Patrol, Mantell,” was the calm and utterly believable reply. “And we chose you to enter Starhaven bearing a false set of memories. It was a brand-new technique our espionage system had developed in order to get you past Thurdan’s psychprobing.”
“This can’t be true.”
“We invented a wholly fictitious background for you and instilled it subhypnotically, with a posthypnotic command implanted that would enable you to revert to your true identity twenty-four hours after you had been subjected to Thurdan’s psychprobe.”
“Johnny, what’s he talking about?” Myra asked in a wondering voice.
“I wish I knew,” Mantell said hollowly.
“What’s that, Mantell? You’re in complete charge of Starhaven now, you say? Fine work, boy! The fleet will arrive in less than an hour to take care of the job of mopping up.”
“You don’t seem to understand,” Mantell said in a flat, dead voice. “Something went wrong. I never recovered my—my true identity, as you say. I don’t know anything about this business of my being an SP man. So far as I know I was a beachcomber on the planet Mul-ciber for seven years, and before that I was a defense-screen technician on Earth.”
“Yes, yes, of course that’s so—that’s the identity pattern we established—though you were a trained defense-screen man originally, of course. But—”
“But I don’t remember anything about the SP!” Mantell protested. “Only my own memories are real!”
The SP man was silent a long moment.
Finally he said, “They assured me the treatment would be a success—that you would recover your original identity once vou were past Thurdan’s psychprobes.”
“I didn’t.”
“That’s easily fixed. We’ll have our psychosurgeons restore your original identity just as soon as you’re back on Earth.”
Mantell shook his head dizzily, trying to comprehend the magnitude of this thing Whitestone seemed to be telling him.
The room, Myra, the image of Whitestone, Starhaven itself, finally the universe—all took on a strange semblance of utter unreality, like the purplish glow objects get when one stares at them just the right way through a prism. Mantell seemed to be moving in a world of dreams—of nightmares.
Myra was very close to him, almost touching him.
“Is this true?” she asked. “Or is it just some SP trick?”
“I don’t know,” Mantell murmured. “Right now I don’t know anything at all.”
Whitestone said, “It appears that the project was a success, at any rate. Whether you’re in full possession of your self-awareness or not, the fact remains that your mission has been fulfilled, Mantell. Starhaven’s screens are down. Within an hour an SP squadron will be there, cleaning out the universe’s sorriest hell-hole. Thanks to you, Mantell.”
“I’m not so sure of that,” Mantell said heavily, weighing each word and releasing it individually, syllable by syllable.
“What did you say?”
Without answering, Mantell sank back tiredly in the chair, and a torrent of images flooded through his mind.
The days at Klingsan Defense on Earth; the long weary years on Mulciber, years of scrabbhng for crusts of bread and cadging drinks.
Now this faded little man in a Space Patrol uniform was trying to tell him that all this was unreal, that the memories in his mind were artificially implanted memories, placed there by skilled psychosurgeons solely for the purpose of getting an SP man through the defenses of Ben Thurdan’s fortress, Starhaven.
Well, perhaps they were.
Perhaps.
But to Mantell, they were real. To him, this was the life he had lived. That suffering he remembered was real. It had actually happened to him.
And Starhaven was real.
The SP—that, he thought, was a vague dream, a shining bubble of unreality, a hated enemy.
Where had it begun? Had he actually killed a man on Mulciber and fled to Starhaven in a stolen SP ship? Or had he been released from some point in space after they had fixed up his mind, and had two dummy remote-operated ships been rigged to “pursue” him to Starhaven?
A moment of choice faced him. He knew he could go back to Earth, and there have Mulciber and all its attendant bitterness peeled from his mind like the outer skin of an onion, and emerge fresh, clean, once again an honored member of the Space Patrol.
Or he could stay here. With Myra.
“Mantell, are you all right?” Whitestone’s image demanded loudly from the screen. “Your face has turned utterly white.”
“I’m thinking,” Mantell said.
He was thinking of Ben Thurdan’s dream, and of what the Patrol would do to Starhaven once they had finally penetrated its defenses. Twenty million fugitives would be carted off to justice at last; honor and decency would be restored to the galaxy.
But was that the only way?
What, he thought, if Starhaven were to be allowed to continue as it was, as a sanctuary for criminals—but run by Myra and himself, neither of whom was a lawbreaker. Suppose—suppose they were gradually to transform Ben Thurdan’s metal fortress into a planet for rehabilitation—without the knowledge of those subtly being rehabilitated.
That seemed like a better idea to Mantell than opening the planet up to the SP. Much better.
Very quietly he said, “You’d better tell that fleet of yours to turn right around and head for home, White-stone.”
“Eh? What’s that?”
“I’m suggesting that you might as well’ save the government a lot of lost time. Because when that fleet gets here, they’ll discover that Starhaven is just as impregnable as ever. I’ve decided to stay here, Whitestone. I’m putting the screens back up again. And Starhaven doesn’t want anything further to do with the galaxy.”
“Mantell, this is madness! You’re an SP man, a native of Earth! Where’s your loyalty! Where’s your sense of honor, Mantell?”
Mantell smiled broadly. “Honor? Loyalty? I’m Johnny Mantell of Starhaven, late of the planet Mulciber, before that a drunk and disorderly employee of Klingsan Defense Screens. That’s what my memory tells me, and that’s who I am. And I’m not letting Starhaven fall into the hands of the SP.”
He moistened his dry hps and managed a grin. White-stone stared incredulously at him and started to say something. ManteU reached up and broke the contact; the face dissolved into an electronic whirl of colors, and was gone.