The clerk at the desk peered at him sympathetically as he pressed his fingers into the checkout plate, thereby erasing the impress from the doorplate upstairs.
“It was too bad about that old fellow dying on you yesterday, wasn’t it, sir? I do hope it won’t affect your Test result.”
Hollinrede smiled blankly. “It was quite a shock to me when he died so suddenly. But my system has already recovered; I’m ready for the Test.”
“Good luck to you, sir,” the clerk said as Hollinrede left the hotel and stepped out on the flaring skyramp that led to the waiting ship.
The steward at the passenger hatch was collecting identiplates. Hollinrede handed his over casually. The steward inserted it tip-first in the computer near the door, and motioned for Hollinrede to step within the beam while his specifications were being automatically compared with those on the identiplate.
He waited, tensely. Finally the chattering of the machine stopped and a dry voice said, “Your identity is in order, Testee Derveran Marti. Proceed within.”
“That means you’re okay,” the steward told him. “Yours is Compartment Eleven. It’s a luxury job, you know. But you Testees deserve it. Best of luck, sir.”
“Thanks,” Hollinrede grinned. “I don’t doubt I’ll need it.”
He moved up the ramp and into the ship. Compartment Eleven was a luxury job; Hollinrede, who had been a frugal man, whistled in amazement when he saw it. It was nearly eight feet high and almost twelve broad, totally private with an opaquer attached to the doorscope. Clinging curtains of ebony synthoid foam from Ravensmusk VIII had been draped lovingly over the walls, and the acceleration couch was trimmed in golden bryozone. The rank of Testee carried with it privileges that the late Derveran Marti certainly would never have mustered in private life—nor Jolvar Hollinrede either.
At 1143 the doorscope chimed; Hollinrede leaped from the soft couch a little too nervously and transluced the door. A crewman stood outside.
“Everything all right, sir? We blast in seventeen minutes.”
“I’m fine,” Hollinrede said. “Can’t wait to get there. How long do you think it’ll take?”
“Sorry sir. Not at liberty to reveal. But I wish you a pleasant trip, and should you lack for aught hesitate not to call on me.”
Hollinrede smiled at the curiously archaic way the man had of expressing himself. “Never fear; I’ll not hesitate. Many thanks.” He opaqued the doorscope and resumed his seat.
At precisely 1200 the drive-engines of the Star Climber throbbed heavily; the pale green light over the door of Hollinrede’s compartment glowed brightly for an instant, signaling the approaching blastoff. He sank down on the acceleration couch to wait.
A moment later came the push of acceleration, and then, as the gravshields took effect, the 7g escape force dwindled until Hollinrede felt comfortable again. He increased the angle of the couch in order to peer out the port.
The world of Niprion was vanishing rapidly in the background: already it was nothing but a mottled grey-and-gold ball swimming hazily in a puff of atmosphere. The sprawling metal structure that was the stopover hotel was invisible.
Somewhere back on Niprion, Hollinrede thought, the atoms that once had been Testee Derveran Marti were now feeding the plasma intake of a turbine or heating the inner shell of a reactor.
He let his mind dwell on the forthcoming Test. He knew little about it, really, considering he had been willing to take a man’s life for a chance to compete. He knew the Test was administered once every five years to candidates chosen by Galaxywide search. The world where the Test was given was known only as the World of a Thousand Colors, and precisely where this world was no member of the general public was permitted to know.
As for the Test itself, by its very nature it was unknown to the Galaxy. For no winning Testee had ever returned from the World of a Thousand Colors. Some losers returned, their minds carefully wiped clean of any memories of the planet—but the winners never came back.
The Test’s nature was unknown; the prize, inconceivable. All anyone knew was that the winners were granted the soul’s utmost dream. Upon winning, one neither returned to his home world nor desired to return.
Naturally many men ignored the Test—it was something for “other people” to take part in. But millions, billions throughout the Galaxy competed in the preliminaries. And every five years, six or seven were chosen.
Jolvar Hollinrede was convinced he would succeed in the Test—but he had failed three times running in the preliminaries, and was thus permanently disqualified. The preliminaries were simple; they consisted merely of an intensive mental scanning. A flipflop circuit would flash YES or NO after that.
If YES, there were further scannings, until word was beamed through the Galaxy that the competitors for the year had been chosen.
Hollinrede stared moodily at the blackness of space. He had been eliminated unfairly, he felt; he coveted the unknown prize the Test offered, and felt bitter at having it denied him. When chance had thrown Testee Derveran Marti in his path, Hollinrede had leaped to take advantage of the opportunity.
And now he was on his way.
Surely, he thought, they would allow him to take the Test, even if he were discovered to be an impostor. And once he took it, he knew he would succeed. He had always succeeded in his endeavors. There was no reason for failure now.
Beneath the false mask of Derveran Marti, Hollinrede’s face was tensely set. He dreamed of the Test and its winning—and of the end to the long years of wandering and toil.
The voice at the door said, “We’re here, Testee Derveran. Please open up.”
Hollinrede grunted, pulled himself up from the couch, threw open the door. Three dark-faced spacemen waited there for him.
“Where are we?” he asked nervously. “Is the trip over?”
“We have come to pilot you to the Test planet, sir,” one of the spacemen told him. “The Star Climber is in orbit around it, but will not make a landing itself. Will you follow us?”
“Very well,” Hollinrede said.
They entered a lifeship, a slim grey tube barely thirty meters long, and fastened acceleration cradles. There were no ports. Hollinrede felt enclosed, hemmed in.
The lifeship began to slide noiselessly along the ejection channel, glided the entire length of the Star Climber, and burst out into space. A preset orbit was operating. Hollinrede clung to the acceleration cradle as the lifeship spun tightly inward towards a powerful gravitational field not far away.
The ship came to rest. Hollinrede lay motionless, flesh cold with nervousness, teeth chattering.
“Easy does it, sir. Up and out.”
They lifted him and gently nudged him through a manifold compression lock. He moved forward on numb feet.
“Best of luck, sir!” an envious voice called behind him.
Then the lock clanged shut, and Hollinrede was on his own.
A riotous blaze of color swept down at him from every point of the compass.
He stood in the midst of what looked like a lunar crater; far in the distance on all sides was the massive upraised fissured surface of a ringwall, and the ground beneath him was barren red-brown rock, crumbling to pumice here and there but bare of vegetation.
In the sky was a solitary sun, a blazing Type A blue-white star. That sun alone was incapable of accounting for this flood of color.
Streamers of every hue seemed to sprout from the rocks, staining the ringwall olive-grey and brilliant cerise and dark, lustrous green. Pigments of every sort bathed the air; now it seemed to glow with currents of luminous pink, now a flaming red, now a pulsing pure white.