Part 1

THE PRISON OF THE STARS

By STANLEY MULLEN

_To head out beyond Pluto a venturer needs more than a super-spaceship; he needs people as super-desperate and freedom-hungry as himself; people strange and daring. Wilding, the trespasser, found them on Alcatraz--the rogue asteroid ... the prison of the stars._

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories November 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

He watched rocket jets flame and change color as the supply ship put on power and drew relentlessly away from him. He saw the ship accelerate swiftly and its mirror-polished torpedo shape diminish in distance until even its flares faded like dying stars.

Abandoned, utterly alone, a man in a spacesuit is on painfully real and intimate terms with infinity. Alone in space, a man is more or less than a man. He could imagine himself the king of black space, but a king without lands, subjects or responsibilities is a poor monarch. He could pass the evil time ahead by reflecting upon his past life, although his present circumstances gave him little hope of profit from the knowledge of past mistakes and lost opportunities.

His name was Wilding, and legends about him on Venus and Mars indicate that the name suited him peculiarly. There is reason to believe that he was always more or less than a man. But when the supply ship had vanished completely, he was more alone than ever before in a lonely and anti-social life.

Around him whirled black, boundless vastness pinpointed with unfriendly stars. Even familiar constellations seemed alien and remote, luminous symbols detached from human values and emotions. Venus and Earth were invisible on the far side of the Sun, and Mars but the faintest of red lanterns hung upon the void. Great Saturn and Jupiter with their trains of inhabited moons must exist somewhere, but he took them on faith, not evidence.

Be patient, they had warned him contemptuously, dumping him from the supply ship like rubbish consigned to the human junk heap. Yes, be patient, and eventually someone might come out for him--but they had not told him how hard it would be to wait and watch the awful void of space and fire-flake star-patterns whirl about him. Patience, like his former life in the hive cities of the Solar system, had long ago ceased to exist. His senses reeled and he could only stare hypnotized at his immediate surroundings.

Wilding was as rich as Tantalus, and as tortured by the unattainable. Within sight, neatly packaged wealth circled with him about the giant radilume beacon. Many objects wrapped in reflector foil floated in and out of his ken as they found tiny orbits and worked out brief cycles of revolution about the giant atom flare which was the parent sun to the swarm of drifting particles. All the packages were rotating as rapidly as he, and light reflected from their metallic angularity made them resemble variable asteroids.

Loot like the splendors of a luxury spaceliner was in those packages. More food than had haunted the hunger-dreams of his youth on Venus. Other necessities like water, oxygen, clothing. Luxuries such as wines and liquors, entertainment tapes of canned music and visual diversions. Even supplies of drugs and medicines that could be perverted to forbidden joys. It was all his, for the moment, by right of existing in the middle of it, by the fact that no other claimant was on the spot. It dangled before his eyes--but beyond reach of anything but his imagination.

Wilding was circumscribed only by infinity. His sole problem was staying alive and sane.

Be patient, they had warned, with calloused indifference to his fate. But patience, if it still existed, was like the flickering witchlights of the supply packages, out of reach. Eventually, if it occurred to them, some convicts might come out from the prison asteroid and pick him up. They might come, if he lasted long enough and they had nothing better to do for entertainment.

For the first time in an otherwise grimly independent life, Wilding was completely dependent upon the whims of other people. He was helpless, unable to minister to his most elementary needs. His air might fail first, or he could starve to death in the midst of more food and drink than a man could debauch in a lifetime. His only hope was that the rich bait around him would attract other spoilers as desperate as himself.

He waited to be rescued.

* * * * *

Beyond a limited air supply, he could not breathe. He had no food, no water. To sustain him, besides the spacesuit and the remaining energy of his body, there was only his anger and his plan. He was an unusual man, brave and tough, even resourceful, but this time his fate was out of his hands. Even his plan was worthless unless he could live long enough to implement it.

Wilding swore grimly and silently, and waited. Even as men in ordinary circumstances measure such things, it was a long time. The initial velocity of his spin had begun to slow from occasional collision with one item or another of his useless wealth. One by one, the stars around him seemed to flicker and go out. For even the eternal stars exist only in the mind of man.

He waited so long that the darkness of deep space seemed to seep into his spacesuit. With that darkness, part of it, came fear, which is in itself the lesser death. He was weightless and nauseated, almost too weak to fight the fear. Hunger and thirst had weakened him. He wanted to scream, but brain and muscles did not respond in the oxygen thin atmosphere of the suit. Limply, he retched, lungs churning for air.

He swore again, faintly, dubiously. If this were the end, there seemed no point to anything that had gone before. His mind veered back to Mars, to the strange girl, Elshar, and what he had done for her. He wondered again why he had interfered. She was nothing to him, could never be anything. Love was not the emotion she roused in him.

Not love, not even desire. Not anything he could name unless it was fear. He pushed the thought of her from his mind.

He had felt fear before. He should know that sensation. He was feeling it now. But he had always dealt with fear by using it to put an edge on his soul. One could not deal with this situation so easily. A man should not die like this. A poor man in sight of wealth, a starving man in sight of food, a suffocating man in the midst of sealed tanks of oxygen. Anger roared in him. He called out to the dark gods of space to have done with their torture....

* * * * *

Following numerous orbits between Jupiter and Mars are the uncounted asteroids. Some of these fragments of a long-vanished planet are named, and even most of the lesser fry are catalogued by numbers. One of them, since the earliest days of space travel and interplanetary survey, has three official numbers, two names, and at least a dozen colorful nicknames.

It is on the IPS spacemaps, named and numbered, but by interplanetary treaty it is marked in red letters: _Restricted! Warning! Do Not Land!_

This asteroid, commonly known as the Pelican, is the Alcatraz Island of space. It is a prison for the most hardened and hopeless of convicts. Outside of official circles, few people have ever heard of it and fewer still dwell there. No spaceships ever set down, and none blast off from its scarred and pitted surface. The few inhabitants form a highly exclusive social group, their numbers limited by highly specialized requirements for membership.

The original Alcatraz was a small island in San Francisco Bay, on Earth, used as prison for only grade-A malefactors. In Spanish, the word means Pelican, and those curious birds formerly made the tiny bare rock their roosting ground. More curious birds roosted there since; but by now, with the very existence of the city of San Francisco a myth, the island has been returned to the pelicans and other fauna of the sea, sky and ground. Only some spiders and lowly insects inhabit the ruins of prison buildings, and birds and seals have the pinpoint of barren rock to themselves.

One knows by historical conjecture what happened to the prison and the nearby city. But even toward the close of the Twenty-First Century, the most optimistic would not claim that humankind has advanced beyond the need for prisons, and something drastic must still be done with the aristocrats of crime.

Expansion across space, with more worlds to conquer and loot, more races to exploit, and new frontiers of fabulous treasure to plunder, did nothing to improve the moral tone of humanity. A new and savage breed of criminals sprang into existence to meet these exciting conditions. It was raw, blind butchery at first, then racketeers of genius brought general looting into an organized and systematic bleeding of the body economic and generalized corruption of the body politic. After much bloodshed, the end result was the new Alcatraz, a prison preserve on Penguin Planetoid, familiarly known as The Rock.

The Rock is literally that. Bare rock, not even spherical, but large for an asteroid. It is a rogue asteroid, which means that its orbit is highly eccentric and comes nowhere near that of the other asteroids and rarely comes near that of any planet. It is a world to itself. It is not pushing licensed irony too far to state that its inhabitants are rogues whose orbits, from the standpoint of society, are also eccentric. Alcatraz Asteroid is a prison for the most incorrigible of lifers.

Only the rarest criminals qualify for such a sentence, but once sentenced, the trap closes on him for good. There is no reprieve, no parole, no pardon, and no escape. Few men ever enter the maze of caverns that honeycomb Alcatraz' forbidding interior, but those few stay. They live and die out of sight and out of touch with the worlds of reality. The Rock is the end of the line.

* * * * *

Outraged authority forgets a man sent to Alcatraz. His record, and everything concerning him is destroyed. Both offense and existence are blotted out, which makes an unintentionally sporting offer, for if a convict should ever escape there is no previous count against him. Such a man could consider himself returned from the dead, or reborn. No escape from the Rock had been legally anticipated, and none had actually occurred. Such escape is a practical impossibility, even with no warden and no guards--for none are needed.

Newcomers arrive in the supply ship, which never lands. Like the packaged supplies, condemned prisoners are dumped overboard through a freight airlock and left twirling in space about a giant radilume flare moving in an orbit closely paralleling that of the prison asteroid. Man and supplies may twirl indefinitely, and the man may even die unless his fellow exiles are in a good mood, or are curious enough to put out in the space-lighter provided with a severely limited store of fuel and seine in the take to the prison caverns of Alcatraz.

Men have died like that, sometimes because the old hands were too disinterested to investigate in time, or again because the old inhabitants were too involved at the moment with minor feuding and treacheries to care.

Wilding was tough, and took a long time dying. There was time enough to die innumerable deaths, and even to reconstruct the patterns of a lifetime in his asphyxiating brain....

He was born on Venus, in the most slippery part of Skid Road in Old Castarona. His father was a renegade Earthman who married a mutant swamp-girl from the edge of the Tihar Forest. Childhood in such surroundings is a tonic to the adventurous spirit, and Wilding must have had spirit to survive at all. Of necessity, his mother taught him to steal. His father taught him to kill, by killing his mother in a drunken frenzy. From neighbors and rivals, he learned most of the anti-social trades, and he was an apt pupil.

His mind was uncluttered, free of the commonly accepted ideas of morality, without normal inhibitions. He killed and stole, but casually according to his needs and ambitions. Crime, except for profit, would have seemed immoral to him. Periodically he was caught and sentenced, which was according to the rules of the game; but no prison could ever hold him long. Even for frontier Venus, he acquired a potent reputation, both for crime-without violence, and as an escape artist. When he moved on to other planets and began piratical raids along the spaceways, he gave the security patrols some evil moments.

It was not inevitable that he be trapped and stopped dead by being sent to Alcatraz Asteroid. With luck, he might even have made his pot and retired to wealth and respectability. But his feet must have been slippery from Skid Road, for he slipped, stepped out of character and killed just once from a motive of, from his point of view, sheer stupidity. Protecting Elshar, a crippled slave-girl, from a cruel beating at the hands of a Martian slaver, he struck out in a passion against injustice. For this final murder, he was sentenced as an incorrigible. A man should hold to his pattern....

* * * * *

Wilding waited, unconscious, slowly dying, and time passed. A lot of time. For the dwellers in The Rock did not share his impatience. It was off-season for the supply ship, and a far more interesting caper was in progress than the routine pickup of a dying man in a spacesuit. A series of interesting brawls and murders was drawing to a suspenseful conclusion. Nobody wanted to miss anything or anybody, until the situation died out literally in a sprawl of charred and mutilated bodies.

So Wilding knew nothing about it when the lighter eventually came out. His body was blue, puffed and more dead than alive, the spark-blue eyes glazed and sightless. He could not see the small craft circle and draw in the supplies with magnetic nets. He was unaware of the skyhooks that reached out to haul him through the airlock into the lighter, and was too far gone to care. For a man attempting death and rebirth, he had a good start on the first half of his project.

Pangs of returning sensation brought him sharply conscious and reminded him of his plan. If he were to be the first man ever to escape from Alcatraz Asteroid, he must start at once by establishing his place in a dangerous and hard-bitten society. He began his task by opening his eyes. Blistered and stiffened lids responded slowly.

The cubicle was dim and murky, air stale but cool. Grunting, he tried to sit up. Someone bent over him.

A woman's face blocked further view. The face was old and wise and ugly; the woman huge and muscular, a graying Amazon who might be a good foot taller than Wilding when she straightened up. Sound boomed from her as if from a cracked bell, and most of the cracks showed on her weathered skin. She was mildly drunk, her breath poisonous with mushroom beer.

"What's new in Venusport?" she asked.

"Who in Hell cares?" demanded Wilding.

Her laugh boomed again. "He knows where he is," she jeered. "So I win my bet."

"What bet?"

The big woman drew back and let Wilding have a look at her companions. Behind the woman stood a man and a girl. A spidery Mercurian straddled Wilding's legs and massaged numbed flesh with rough efficiency.

"My bet with Grouth," explained the Amazon, indicating the Mercurian. "Not decorative, is he? Mercurian twilight men never are. But he's what passes for my husband here."

Wilding stared at her, and past her at the others. "Now I know for sure where I am," he said. "I read in a book once that there's no marriage or giving in marriage in Heaven. Since I'm obviously dead, that leaves only--"

The Amazon slapped her ample thigh and vented some more loud rumbles of laughter.

"Proves my point," she bellowed. "Grouth figured your first words would be 'Where am I?' or something else trite. You looked to me like a man who always knows where he is and how he got there, so I bet on it. Alcatraz or Hell--it's all one. Do I win?"

"Near enough," Grouth snorted unhappily. "I'll concede--"

"What stakes?" Wilding asked.

For his plan, he must have the respect and co-operation of the veteran convicts. Such an attitude must be earned, so he carefully disciplined himself to register neither shock nor surprise whatever he encountered. Even so, his hair nearly stood on end as the noisy Amazon explained.

"Our own version of Russian roulette. We load the blaster clip with alternating charges and blanks, then stick the muzzle in each other's mouth and pull the trigger to find out which load is first. Now Grouth owes me one. Not that I'll collect just yet. I like to be sure I'm through with a man before I blow his head off."

Wilding shrugged. "It should simplify divorce." With some effort, Wilding sat up and shoved the Mercurian violently from his perch. "Get off my legs...."

Grouth glared and gave an unpleasant whickering sound. "I was only trying to work enough life back into you so you could give us some news. Mortality is high among newcomers. You won't last long."

"I may surprise you," Wilding said casually. Deliberately, his eyes fixed upon each of the four, impressing their features into his memory, evaluating personalities to determine potential usefulness to his plan. Savages, as he had expected. Debased and degenerate, all of them, but intelligent. Dangerous tools, but he had sometimes worked miracles with worse.

* * * * *

The other man was a bald giant, of curious complexion, obviously not of Earth stock, very tall but so heavily built that he looked squat. Grinning, apelike, he thrust out something between a hand and a paw. Wilding took it and did not wince under the pressure.

"I'm Concor," said the bullet-head. "Martian, though origin is not important here. Welcome to our pesthole."

Wilding nodded, turning his attention to the fourth of the odd group. She was a girl, young, sullen and striking. Lips writhed in scorn as she returned his frank stare, and the play of expression on her features was light flickering from a moving swordblade. She was not beautiful, nor even pretty in any ordinary sense. Everything about her suggested metal--her skin was snow on copper, her hair curling shreds of brass, her body posture suggested the temper and resilience of steel, even the eyes quivered like heated mercury and did something as poisonous to a man's bones.

Half-caste Callistan, he thought, and not quite human.

Her voice was coldly sibilant as a needle sliding in metallic groove. "Better enjoy us while you can, Halfling. If we seem so distasteful to you, brace yourself. We're the nice people here."

"My niece, Amyth," said the Amazon, touching the girl's shoulder fondly. "I should warn you about her. She's killed three men in a year for less than you're thinking."

Wilding gave a grim chuckle. "I'll remember that. If I ever start thinking about her, I'll break both her arms first."

"We're not too formal about such things here. You take whatever you're strong and clever enough to hold. The man who wants Amyth is likely to have his hands full. Even for me, there were some other suitors, but Grouth was man enough to hold me against all comers. So don't sell him short, for all his runt-size and odd complexion."

Wilding nodded, understanding. Women would be scarce, and men exiles would fight over them like male rats over scarce females. He had expected strange and difficult social organization in Alcatraz, even chaos, and the presence of women would be an additional cause of dissension. It might be used to his advantage.

"Who's the bull of this scrub herd?" he asked. "None of you?"

Amyth's laugh was a jangling of steel-shards. Taming her could be an interesting project, but held jagged possibilities.

"Most of us take orders from Tichron," the girl replied. "A few follow Credus, an Earthman. If you have ideas about me, you'll have to fight Tichron for the privilege."

Wilding grunted. "Small privilege. But I'd fight him anyhow. While I'm here, I rule. I lead, not follow."

"Big talk for a newcomer," she said. "When you're here a while--"

"I'm not staying. I'm Wilding. No prison can hold me."

"Alcatraz can," Concor said wearily. "We all feel like that at first. Nobody escapes. But if you want to try, count me in."

The Amazon belched beer fumes volcanically. "Me, too. And Grouth. It will be something to do. I'm Tiny. If I had another name it's down the drain years ago."

Amyth's wicked glance slashed at Wilding.

"I'll decide ... after you've fought Tichron. If you have a plan, tell us. Maybe we can use it after Tichron wrings the blood from your body and throws the husk to the Pit Men for fodder. He'll be happy to learn there's a new challenger. His blood lust is growing--"

"There are those who fan his other lusts," Grouth broke in angrily. "It's unfair to taunt a newcomer into unequal combat. Give Wilding time to find his way around--"

Warm, unfamiliar emotion writhed in Wilding. It had been so long since the occasion for it that he could scarcely recognize gratitude. He could not remember anyone's championing his rights and interests. Also, he realized, if the sullen and monstrous Mercurian stood up for him, it was a sign he was accepted. Such as they were, he had allies.

"The girl is right, Grouth," he said quietly. "Now is the time. I must fight Tichron." His eyes lashed the girl. "I have a plan--but it is not for the ears of Tichron's sluts. When I have use for your obvious talents, I'll give orders."

Amyth's eyes blazed, her face whitened beyond its odd pallor.

From the doorway came a brazen bellow of delight, drowning what she might have said.

A burly shape glided into the room. A giant Venusian, broad face as savage as that of a swamp-slug, oily body glistening like the image of a squat godling. He looked like a professional wrestler.

"I heard that," he said. "I'm Tichron." The game had started.

II

Alcatraz Asteroid was a separate world, an island of rock, wedge-shaped, eighteen miles long, and roughly the same in the circumference of its larger end. The interior was not hollow, but was honey-combed with habitable caverns like large bubbles, connected by a maze of passages. Outer levels had all been converted into a prison without guards and without bars. Life was easy, the social structure simple, idyllic or primitive depending upon the point of view.

Though not completely self-sufficient--since enlightened penology provided lavish supplies--the convict community would have gone on much the same if the rest of the Solar System had suddenly ceased to exist.

Elementary machinery for the basic trades had been provided; its use or neglect was left up to the prisoners. By artificial illumination, food could be grown in subsurface hydroponic gardens, and limited animal husbandry was encouraged. But lack of usable fuels and raw materials limited manufacturing to safely low levels, which prevented even gifted technicians from getting ideas. Potentially fissionable ores were present in the deep interior, and under pressure someone might have found ingenuity to process it. Air and water were hermetically sealed-in, automatically purified and reclaimed at need.

Convicts were self-governed, which meant a rule of claw and fang since weapons were crude and hand-made. Dwelling in caves, the prisoners returned to an archaic way of life and became cave men. Life was brutal, direct, and usually brief. Cowards rarely got there, and the weak and unfit were quickly weeded out by living conditions intolerable to endure. Survivors were a tough, rangy breed who would survive anywhere. The few women were rank weeds, not delicate flowers; if they did not thrive, they persisted. Some children were born, and those who lived grew up as sinewy, strong and poisonous as desert snakes.