and the door slid open. The Counselor stepped inside. His mouth was already open, saying something. Sten leaped, both hands clubbed high above him. The blow caught the Counselor on the side of his head, slamming him into the wall. The Counselor slid down the panel and thumped to the floor. He didn’t move. His mouth was still open. Sten began to shake.
But suddenly, he felt calm; he’d eliminated all the possibilities now. He could do only one thing. He stooped over the unconscious Counselor and riffled quickly through his pockets. Sten found and pocketed the man’s card. If he used that instead of his own, it might take Control a little longer to track him down. It’d also give him entry into areas forbidden by Sten’s Mig card.
Sten turned and looked around the three bare rooms. Whatever happened next, it would be the last time he’d ever see them. Then he ran out the door, heading for the slideway, the spaceport, and some way off Vulcan.
He felt out of place the moment he stepped off the slideway. The people had begun to change. Only a few Migs were visible, conspicuous in their drab coveralls. The rest were richer and flashier: Techs, clerks, administrators, and here and there the sparkle of strange offworld costumes.
Sten hurried over to a clothes-dispensing machine, slid the Counselor’s card into the slot and held his breath. Would the alarms go off now? Were Sociopatrolmen already hurrying to the platform?
The machine burped at him and began displaying its choices. Sten punched the first thing in his size that looked male, and a package plopped into a tray. He grabbed it and pushed his way through the crowd into a rest area.
* * * *
Sten carded his way into the spaceport administration center, trying to look as if he belonged there. He had to do something about the Counselor’s card soon. Everywhere he went, he was leaving a trail as wide as a computer printout sheet
Nearby, an old, fat clerk was banging at a narcobeer dispenser. “Clotting machine. Telling me I don’t have the clotting credits to . . .”
Sten ambled up to him, bored but slightly curious. The man was drunk and probably so broke that the central computer was cutting him off.
“It’s sunspots,” Sten said.
The clerk bleared up at him. “Think so?”
“Sure. Same thing happened to me last off-shift. Here. Try my card. Maybe a different one will unjam it.”
The clerk nodded and Sten pushed a button and the man’s card slid out. He took it and inserted the Counselor’s card. A minute later the clerk was happily on his way, chugging a narcobeer.
Three hours later they grabbed him. The clerk was sitting in his favorite hangout, getting pleasantly potted when what seemed like six regiments of Sociopatrolmen burst in. Before he had time to lower his glass, he was beaten, trussed, and on his way to an interrogation center.
In front, the chief Sociopatrolman peered victoriously at the clerk’s ID card. Except, of course, it wasn’t his. It was the Counselor’s.
* * * *
Sten could feel it as soon as he entered the spaceport Visitors’ Center. Even on the run, there was a sense of — well, what it was exactly, he couldn’t tell. But he thought it might be freedom.
He moved through the exotic crowd — everything from aliens and diplomats to stocky merchantmen and deep-space sailors. Even the talk was strange: star systems and warp drive, antimatter engines and Imperial intrigue.
Sten edged past a joygirl into a seedy tavern. He elbowed his way through the sailors and found an empty space at the bar. A sailor next to him was griping to a buddy.
“The nerf lieutenant just ignores me. Can you believe that? Me! A projector with fifteen damned years at the clotting sig-board.”
His friend shook his head. “They’re all the same. Two years in the baby brass academy and they think they know it all.”
“So get this,” said the first man. “I report blips and he says no reason there should be blips. I tell him there’s blips anyway. Few minutes later we hit the meteor swarm. We had junk in our teeth and junk comin’ out our drive tubes.
“Pilot pulled us out just in time. Slammed us into an evasion spiral almost took the captain’s drawers off.”
Sten got his drink — paying with one of his few credit tokens — and moved down the bar. A group of sailors caught his eye. They were huddled around a table, talking quietly and sipping at their drinks instead of knocking them back like the others. They were in fresh clothes, cleanshaven, and had the look of men trying to shake off hangovers in a hurry.
They had the look of men going home. “Time to hoist ‘em,” one of them said.
In unison, they finished their drinks and rose. Sten pushed in behind them as they moved through the crowd and out the door.
* * * *
Sten huddled in the nose section of the shuttle. A panel hid him from the sailors. They lifted off from Vulcan, and moments later Sten could see the freighter through the clear bubble nose as the shuttle floated up toward it.
The deep-space freighter — an enormous multisegmented insect — stretched out for kilometers. A swarm of beetlelike tugs towed still more sections into line and nudged them into place. The drive section of the freighter was squat and ugly with horn projections bristling around the face. As the shuttle neared the face, it grinned open.
Just before it swallowed him, Sten thought it was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.
* * * *
He barely heard the judge as the man droned on, listing Sten’s crimes against the Company. Sten was surrounded by Sociopatrolmen. In front of the judge, the Counselor loomed, his head nearly invisible in plastibandages, nodding painfully as the judge made each legal point.
They had found Sten in the shuttle, huddled under some blankets, stolen ship’s stores stacked around him. Even as he messaged Vulcan for someone to pick Sten up, the captain kept apologizing. He had heard stories.
“We can’t help you,” he said. “Vulcan security sends snoopers on every freighter before it clears, looking for people like you.”
Sten was silent.
“Listen,” the captain went on, “I can’t take the chance. If I tried to help and got caught, the Company’d pull my trading papers. And I’d be done. It’s not just me. I gotta think of my crew . . .”
Sten came awake as a Sociopatrolman pushed him forward. The judge had finished. It was time for sentencing. What was it going to be? Brainburn? If that was it, Sten hoped he had enough mind left to kill himself.
Then the judge was talking. “You are aware, I hope, of the enormity of your crimes?”
Sten thought about doing the Mig humility. Be damned, he thought. He didn’t have anything to lose. He stared back at the judge.
“I see. Counselor, do you have anything of an ameliorative nature to add to these proceedings?”
The Counselor started to say something, and then abruptly shook his head.
“Very well. Karl Sten, since you, at your young age, are capable of providing many years of service to the Company and we do not wish to appear unmerciful, recognizing the possibility of redemption, I will merely reassign you.”
For a moment, Sten felt hopeful.
“Your new work assignment will be in the Exotics Section. For an indeterminate period. If — ahem — circumstances warrant, after a suitable length of time I will review your sentence.”
The judge nodded, and touched the INPUT button on his justice panel. The Sociopatrolmen led Sten away. He wasn’t sure what the judge meant. Or what his sentence was. Except his mind was intact, and he was alive.
He turned at the door, and realized, from the grin on the Counselor’s face, he might not