chance. Otherwise...
Somehow he couldn’t do it; not without giving the other some slight warning, not without whipping his hand to his gun with a vigor that was clear and unmistakable. In matters of crime a fair man is at a disadvantage. He can only deal with a murderer in one way.
He drew a split second ahead of Henley. He shot Henley three times, the gun blazing in his hands, and it did not seem important to him that Henley had also drawn his gun. A tight knot reached into his stomach as Henley’s gun blazed, but he kept right on firing.
Henley died missing him, not scoring at «11. That was the incredible thing. Henley, an expert shot, a genius at massacre, had missed him clearly with five shots and now he was down on the floor, clutching at his stomach, dragging himself along, while beneath his fingers a dull red stain grew.
His eyes turned glassy suddenly. He tried twice to raise himself but he fell back each time. He did not speak at all. Blood from his punctured lungs flooded up into his mouth, and with a terrible, convulsive trembling of his entire body he rolled over on his side and lay still.
Corriston’s hands began to sweat beneath the hard, cold gun. He wanted to drop the weapon, to hurl it from him, but he couldn’t somehow. He had killed Saddler in immediate self-defense. This had been a little different — a new experience, a frightening experience and he had been forced to grit his teeth even in firing, and now that it was all over he was tormented inwardly in a way that left him badly shaken.
Henley was gone now. Dead and still and forever removed from a world he had contaminated. Henley had been warped and twisted largely by circumstances outside himself; nevertheless a deadly reptile has to be crushed when it is about to strike.
Corriston looked up from the limp form sprawled out on the floor, and for a moment the tight lines of his face relaxed a little. Henley was no longer a menace; the breath of life that had sustained him had expired so completely that he had become now a kind of hollow mockery of something monstrous and distorted that could never harm anyone again.
It was Ramsey who had to be considered now, Ramsey who was in peril.
The light in the room seemed somehow a little dimmer than it had been. He turned slowly back to Ramsey, and for a moment could not quite believe what he saw.
Ramsey’s face was changing. The hollows beneath his cheekbones were deeper than they had been, and his mouth had gone completely slack, and his eyes were uprolled in a quite ghastly way, so that only the whites showed.
Slowly as Corriston stared Ramsey’s features began to come apart. The familiar, hideous pattern began to repeat itself on Ramsey’s blanched features. The mouth widened until it tinned into a shapeless, colorless gash in a face that was hardly recognizable. The nose widened and spread out, the chin receded, and the cheeks became a flattened expanse of wrinkled flesh that stubbornly refused to stop spreading.
Ramsey’s face became a pumpkin face, with slits for eyes and a hideous caricature of a mouth that seemed almost to pout as it expanded.
Suddenly Ramsey was no longer sitting upright before the desk. His body swayed and began to slump, tilting at first only a little sideways and then sliding completely from the chair to the floor.
Ramsey did not descend to the floor with violence. It was a slow, barely perceptible gliding motion of his entire body that carried him from an upright position to a prone one in less than thirty seconds. His body seemed to collapse inward upon itself, as if he had suddenly become too skeleton-thin for his clothes, as if so much vitality had been drained from him by the shot which had put an end to his life that he had given up all hope of maintaining his dignity in death.
But perhaps the man on the floor had no dignity to maintain. He wasn’t Ramsey. He was a hired substitute, an impostor, and quite obviously no man would undertake to play such a role without calculating all of the risks in advance. Perhaps he expected to die without dignity. Perhaps that was one of the risks which went with the bargain — the assumption that Ramsey might very well be killed in a violent fashion, and that anyone who stepped into Ramesy’s shoes and masqueraded as Ramsey might expect a similar fate.
Corriston felt a nerve begin to twitch violently in his cheek. Why had Ramsey kept Henley occupied in so strange a manner, talking to a nonentity, a stand-in, a double who could never bargain and come to terms unless Ramsey ordered him to do so? Had Ramsey been incapable of dealing with Henley directly, and had taken this means of complying with the ransom demands?
It seemed incredible on the face of it. Ramsey was quite obviously the kind of man who could live through any kind of private hell if he had to.
He’d have stood up to Henley no matter how great his inner torment. He’d have met the ransom demands or rejected them — and it was almost inconceivable that he would have rejected them — without for an instant losing his outward composure. And even inwardly he would have kept a tight rein on his emotions. He was not the kind of man who would hire someone else to protect him from anything that vitally concerned him, even with the masks so conveniently at hand.
Why then had he employed a double to bargain with Henley and keep him occupied for so long a time? It didn’t matter if Ramsey had made use of doubles in the past. Probably he had, in order to protect himself in dealings with the colonists when the advantages of deception would favor him. But he would never have done so under these present circumstances — when a criminal who would stop at nothing was holding his daughter under threat of death
He would never have done so unless he had some very special reason that dominated his thinking to the exclusion of all else.
Suddenly Corriston had the answer. It came to him in a lightning-swift flash of intuition, which carried with it complete credibility. It was more than a guess. Somehow he was sure; he knew. A full minute before he heard the dull rumble of the tractors as they came through the gate, and went to the window and stared down, he knew.
He had the answer and yet what he saw eclipsed what he knew. It was a little like watching a rocket take off, hearing the roar and seeing the flames through all of its burning time, and seeing at the same time the men on the proving ground moving swiftly about, and the space-helmeted men at the controls of the rocket itself, each grimly intent on one particular task.
Ramsey was returning into the Citadel with armed guards on both sides of him, and his daughter was walking with her head erect at his side. Five colony tractors had followed him into the Citadel and two more were just coming through the gate, moving ponderously on their caterpillar treads because each tractor weighed two tons even in the light gravity of Mars.
Corriston did an almost unbelievable thing then. Standing quietly by the window he raised his right hand and saluted Ramsey in silent tribute to the man’s courage at the most threatening moment of his life.
What Ramsey had done in no way lessened his guilt. But Corriston would have just as readily repeated the salute in public, without caring what anyone might think. What Ramsey had done was as clear to him now as a series of moves on a chessboard laid out in advance, but hidden from the man who was to be outwitted and outplayed.
Ramsey had made use of a double to keep Henley occupied — no doubt with repeated, skillful evasions, a constant insistence that more proof be forthcoming, more details supplied. Perhaps a half-dozen conferences had taken place in all, extending over many hours. And while Henley was being encouraged to believe that Ramsey was being softened up and would accept all of his demands in the end, Ramsey had gone out into the desert alone, armed, furious, and determined to rescue his daughter if it cost him his life.
Or perhaps he hadn’t gone alone. Perhaps he had taken a dozen armed guards with him. Somehow it didn’t seem important, couldn’t take away Ramsey’s moment of victory. It was a moment of victory for Ramsey even though he hadn’t played a major role for long, even though he had found his daughter already rescued and safe on his return. And Corriston had been the one to move out into the center of the board and deliver the coup de grace. He had kept a restless killer immobilized while the play was under way, and that was victory enough for any man.
Corriston suddenly realized that neither Ramsey nor the Colonists had any way of knowing that Henley was dead. They had probably joined forces outside the Citadel for the sole purpose of rescuing him from the deadliest kind of danger. And he wasn’t helping them at all. In another minute they’d be trying to get to him with tear gas.
