“For all we know,” said one of the others, “this is some land of Space Patrol deal to slip a spy into Starhaven.”
“An SP deal that costs them two ships and four lives?” Mantell snapped hotly. “That doesn’t make sense. I’m—”
“You’re nobody, until you’ve been psycho-probed,” the man with the blaster said.
“Psychoprobed?”
“That’s standard processing for everyone who enters Starhaven for the first time. It’s a security measure.”
Mantell knew his face was going pale. Psychoprobing was no plaything for amateurs, even the usual psychologists. Its procedure was complex and took years to master. “How can you—I mean, do you have anyone here qualified to do the job? You can mess up a man’s mind but good if your technique is off even the slightest bit.”
The other grinned coolly. “Relax, Mantell. The head of our psychprobe is named Erik Harmon. Does that make you feel any better?”
Erik Harmon? Mantell blinked, digging back into old memories. Harmon, here? The famous scientist who had invented and then perfected principles and techniques of psychprobing, and who had mysteriously vanished from civilization nearly twenty years before?
“I guess he’ll do,” Mantell admitted wryly.
The ship glided to a feather-light landing. The steady whispering hum of the inertialess drive ceased abruptly and the landing stabilizers shot out on either side of the big ship. Mantell felt tense; a muscle throbbed in his cheek. He heard the hatch in Starhaven’s metal surface clang resoundingly shut far above him.
The man with the blaster grinned amiably and broke the dead silence by saying, “Welcome to Starhaven, Mantell. Your first stop will be a visit with the boss. Come along and let’s get your mind looked at.”
Chapter III
Five minutes later, after the landing and the skin of the ship decontaminated by the radion grids, Mantell found himself standing outside the big vessel, in the middle of an extremely well-equipped spaceport, on what seemed to him just like any sunny afternoon on any Earth-type planet of the galaxy. It was utterly impossible to tell that Starhaven was completely encased by a metal sheath.
Overhead the sky was blue, flecked with convincing puffy clouds, and a yellow sun glowed brightly. Even though he realized the sun was probably a deuterium-fusion synthetic of some kind, he was unable to keep from thinking of it as a real star.
As for the planet’s metal skin, there was no sign of it. Most likely it was ten or twelve miles, perhaps as much as twenty, above ground level, and artfully disguised to look like an authentic sky. The engineers who had built this world, Mantell thought, had really known their stuff, regardless of which side of the law they had happened to- operate on.
“You like the setup?” Mantell’s guide asked. He seemed to take a personal pride in it.
“It’s pretty convincing. You wouldn’t know there was a roof overhead.”
The other chuckled. “Oh, you know it all right, any time the Space Patrol decides to come after us. But they haven’t made a dent in thirty years, ever since Ben Thurdan built Starhaven.”
Just then a landcar came squirreling silently across the field to meet them. It drew up almost at Mantell’s feet, a small tear-shaped bubble of a car whose driver waited patiently for Mantell and his cicerone to climb in. Mantell took one look back and saw that a gantry crane had been wheeled up alongside the big Starhaven ship; they were removing the tiny SP vessel from the hold of the monster that had picked him up in space.
He moistened his lips nervously. The idea of submitting to a psychprobe didn’t amuse him very much, even with Dr. Erik Harmon himself doing the probing.
“Where are we heading?” he asked.
“To Ben Thurdan’s headquarters. That’s where all new arrivals get processed.”
Mantell sat back silently as the car weaved its way through heavy traffic in a busy-looking city. He found himself wondering what kind of industries a world like Starhaven could have—a planet that was populated exclusively by criminals.
By criminals like me, he thought.
A sudden guilt-feeling racked him as he mentally retraced the trail that had brought him to Starhaven, to this dead-end, renegade planet, the outcast world among the other law-abiding worlds of the galaxy. He tried to tell himself that he was innocent, that they had kicked him around unjustly, that he had been handed a raw deal.
But he could hardly convince himself, any more. It had been so long since he had been a respected member of society that he had almost started believing the things they said about him.
Well, he had plenty of time to get used to the idea of being a criminal. Starhaven was a sanctuary, but nobody ever left it. Nobody with any sense, anyway. This was the one place in the galaxy where a wanted man could live in blissful safety.
The car pulled up outside an impressive-looking office building that loomed big over the other buildings in the vicinity. Mantell was escorted upstairs in a gravshaft, accompanied by men with drawn blasters. They were taking no chances.
“Do you go through this rigmarole with every new arrival?” Mantell asked.
“Every one, without exception.”
A door rolled back smoothly on photon-impulse bearings, and Mantell saw a welcoming committee ready for him. Three people sat expectantly inside an office that was furnished as if for the use of the President of the Galactic Federation.
One of the three was a thin man in a white smock, old, tired-looking, his face a parchment of tiny crevices and canyons. That would have to be Erik Harmon, “The Father of the Psychprobe.” To the right of the scientist stood a tall, fiercely glowering man in dramatic purple synthilk shirt and bright yellow tights; he was bald and looked about forty, but he was probably older. He seemed to radiate power. Obviously, Mantell thought, this must be Ben Thurdan, Starhaven’s founder and guiding genius.
And next to him was a girl with hair the color of Thurdan’s shirt and eyes the color of blue-white diamonds or blue-white suns. She was a highly decorative addition to the office furniture.
Thurdan said, “You’re John Mantell, eh? You come here looking for sanctuary?” His voice, not unexpectedly, was a resounding booming basso.
Mantell nodded. “That’s right.”
Thurdan gestured to Dr. Harmon, who stood poised on the balls of his feet like a withered prune about to take flight. “Erik, suppose you take Mr. Mantell into the lab and give him the full probe treatment.” He looked sharply at Mantell and said, “Of course you understand that this is a necessary precautionary measure. Part of our regular routine, Mr. Mantell.”
Mister—to an ex-beachcomber who hadn’t been called anything but “Hey, you,” in seven years! Mantell nodded easily and said to Thurdan, “I understand.”
“Good. Harmon, let’s go, eh?”
Harmon beckoned to Mantell, and he followed the old man, accompanied by the gunmen. As Mantell passed through the golden actuator beam of the door, he heard Thurdan’s low-pitched rumble, apparently replying to some unheard comment of the girl’s: “Oh, sure. . . . But it’s exactly those who look ‘all right’ that we have to watch out for.”
The girl said audibly, “I hope we don’t have to kill this one, Ben. I think I like him.”
Then the door scissored shut behind him, choking off the conversation.
Mantell entered a well-furnished laboratory. Sitting bulkily in the center of the room was the familiar spidery mass of a Harmon psychoprobe, while flanking it was a standard-model electro-encephalograph and some other equipment that Mantell was unable to recognize, and which probably included some new gadgets of Harmon’s.