door, the guard became instantly curious. He unlocked the cell and came in, his eyes narrowed in anger... anger, but not suspicion. His gun remained on his hip as he walked up to Corriston and stood directly facing him, well within grappling range.
“Well, what do you want to talk to me about?” he demanded. “Better make it brief. I’m not supposed to talk to you at all”.
“I’m sorry to hear that”, Corriston said. “You’ve got no idea how depressing it is to be locked up in a narrow cell with absolutely no one to talk to”.
“You don’t like it, eh? Well, you brought it on yourself”. Corriston caught the man about the waist and brought his right fist down three times on his curving back. Each blow was a powerful one, slanting downward toward the kidney.
Then Corriston hit the guard directly in the small of the back, with an even more punishing blow. The cumulative effect was instantaneous. The guard collapsed and sank down like a suddenly deflated balloon, the breath whistling from between his teeth.
Corriston watched him sink to the floor and straighten out. Forewarned as he was, he was still appalled by the almost instant, shocking change in the man’s expression. For the second time the guard’s features began to come apart. The entire upper portion of his face seemed to sink inward and broaden out, and the flowing began, the incredible refusal of his forehead and nose to remain in close proximity to his mouth.
One eye closed completely; the other remained open in a wide and almost pupilless stare. The chin receded and the lips became a puckered gray orifice that looked like some monstrous fungus growth sprouting from the middle of a gargoyle face. The individual features became paler and paler as they spread, and suddenly there seemed to be no color left in the face at all. It had turned completely waxen.
It was a horrifying thing to watch.
Corriston knelt, opened the man’s shirt and stared intently at the exposed throat, something he had not done the first time in the cafeteria. The first time he had simply knelt and searched under the shirt with his hand for a heartbeat which had surprised him by its steadiness. He was quite sure now that the heart was beating firmly and steadily.
Even the peculiar appearance of the throat did not alarm him. But it most certainly did interest him. Far down on the Security Guard’s throat, just above his breastbone, were a row of small hooks partly embedded in his flesh. The hooks were very tiny indeed, and their brightness was obscured by a thin film of sweat. Corriston removed the moisture with a quick flick of his thumb and continued to stare, as if he could not quite believe his eyes.
Finally he wedged his fingers under the base of the mask, and ripped it from the guard’s face.
Under the mask, the face had a perfectly natural look. The features were relaxed and vacuous, but there was no flowing, no unnatural distortion at all. And it was quite a different face — the face of a man who had worn a disguise and was now so completely a stranger to Corriston that he might just as well have been any one of the Station’s thirty-seven Security Guards.
Corriston could see where the hook attachments had gone into the flesh in at least thirty places on the man’s face: on his brow, his cheekbones, on both sides of his face clear down to the base of his neck. The tiny punctures made by the hooks were faintly rimmed with blood, perhaps because Corriston had tom the mask away too abruptly. Undoubtedly the skin had been anaesthetized, the hooks inserted skillfully by someone familiar with just what should be done to prevent scarring.
He hoped that the guard would not carry tiny scars on his face for the rest of his natural life. He arose and examined the mask. He had a complete false face.
The thing was ingenious beyond belief. It was no mere Halloween assemblage of papier-mache flimflammery, but an elaborate and flexible mask of very thin plastic, or possibly metal. A prosthetic mask — if one could use that term in connection with a mask. It was certainly more complex in structure than any prosthetic leg or arm he had ever seen on a handicapped man, or would ever be likely to see.
He had a pretty good idea as to how it worked. A general idea. Apparently when the hooks were attached to the muscular structure of the human face underneath, every aspect of the wearers face would be instantly controlled and altered to conform to the configuration of the false face. In that sense the mask could be said to actually mold itself to the wearers face and transform it into a completely new and different face.
And yet, in some subtle way, the emotions felt by the owner of the real face would be conveyed to the mask, so that it would express with different features very much the same kinds of emotion.
Ingenious was scarcely the word for it. It was a miracle of technological science, almost beyond belief. But he could not doubt the reality of what he saw, for he held the evidence in his hand. No hallucination could possibly be that real.
The way the mask’s surface coloration could change when the wearer’s emotions changed was perhaps the most amazing miracle of all. He had seen the guard’s color come and go, had watched him redden with anger and then grow pale.
It could only mean that there was some mechanically symbiotic, emotion-sensitive electronic coating or skin surface, or series of tubes on the inner surface of the mask, which could simulate actual blood flow much like a network of tiny heat regulators. This network would be so responsive to the slightest change in body temperature that the mask would alter its color the instant the wearer experienced fright or grew uncontrollably angry. What made it seem logical and even likely was the fact that caloric changes do occur in just such a fashion in the human body with every shift from anger to grief or from pain to shock.
There was nothing simple about the inner surface of the mask. It was a maze of complicated gadgetry concentrated in less than eight inches of space, perhaps thirty or forty separate mechanisms in all, some as tiny as the head of a pin, and others about one inch in width.
When the wearer became unconscious, the mask seemingly lost its integrity. The gadgets either stopped functioning or ceased to function properly and the false face became a dissolving, hideous caricature; that bore little or no resemblance to the human countenance in repose, or even to the human countenance convulsed with sudden shock.
How incredibly blind he had been in failing to suspect the existence of a mask when the guard’s face had grown unnatural and ghastly in the cafeteria. He had taken it for granted that it was the man himself who had changed.
Fortunately he was spared now from making the same mistake twice, and he took full advantage of the fact. He knelt again and began the by no means easy task of removing the uniform. He had to lift him up and turn him over twice and each time the man groaned and stirred a little. He seemed on the verge of coming to, but Corriston shut his mind to the possibility until the last of the man’s garments had been tossed in a pile on the floor.
He quickly took off his own uniform then, and carefully and methodically arrayed himself as a guard, taking care to leave the coat unbuttoned at the throat and even going so far as to draw on the heavy woolen socks and attach to his wrist the guard’s metal identification disk.
An audacious thought Occurred to him, but he dismissed it at once. He could not attach the mask to his own face. It would have required the administrations of an expert, or, at the very least, someone familiar with the thing who knew exactly how it was supposed to be hooked into place. He had no way of knowing and he recoiled instinctively from the thought of hooks, however tiny, marring the skin on his face.
No, he’d have to get along without the mask. No one on the lower levels knew him by sight, with the one ugly exception of a killer he’d never seen clearly enough to recognize in return. And in the guard’s uniform he might even succeed in deceiving the killer if he moved quickly enough to give the man only a brief glimpse of him as he crossed the wide-view promenade.
10
CORRISTON stared down at the still unconscious guard, lying stretched out unclothed on the floor of the cell, then he turned, patting the guard’s gun which now nestled in its transferred holster on his angular, bony hip.
Well, there were perhaps even worse ways of ending up, and it was certainly a destiny almost universally shared.
He walked out through the open door of the cell without a backward glance.
