II.

The Birdman of Alcatraz

Death had been my family's business for three generations. If this was death, it wasn't so bad. People used to believe you went somewhere when you died. Either a place called 'Heaven', or another place known as 'Hell'. Heaven was the nice place, although descriptions of it tended to be rather vague. Hell, on the other hand, had been vividly described by nearly every religico as a place of perpetual torment.

Both terms had since faded into oblivion; the concept of Heaven disappearing completely, and Hell being superseded by the semi-mythical lost colony of Tor. Now, according to most, when you die you go to Tor. I always have a good chuckle when I hear that.

*

I awoke lying on a cold metal floor. Apparently I wasn't dead, and this certainly wasn't Tor. I could feel the throb of a starship's engines through the grey metal.

Grey metal. A bare room. A sanitary. A small bunk attached to one wall close to my left. Had I fallen off? Or had I been unceremoniously dumped there? It didn't matter. I knew where I was.

It was confirmed a moment later when the door opened and a uniformed guard stepped in.

"On your feet," he snarled. "You have a visitor."

Being the good sport that I am, I got up. My legs needed stretching anyway. I think they must have been tied at one point during my pseudo-death.

A mousy little man in grey (only his hands and face set him apart from the grey walls, even his hair was the same dull color) glided in, carrying a board and stylus. I looked him over. A clerical, I thought, not anyone in authority.

"Just a few questions," he said.

"Where am I?" I asked.

"You misunderstand," he replied. "I'm the one who is asking the questions."

"Shut up," growled the guard, "and answer the questions."

I refrained from pointing out the impossibility of his instructions. Besides, I don't like impolite people. Shut up, indeed.

"Now," said the little grey man, "what is your name?"

"Where am I?" I'm stubborn.

"Answer the question, scum," said the guard.

"Mr Braun," said the clerical, "I already know who you

are. This is just for our records. Please don't make this any harder on yourself."

What the Tor, I thought. "Viktor Braun," I replied.

"Thank you," said the man, jotting it down with his stylus. He looked up from the board. "Occupation?"

"Assassin, retired."

The guard laughed. I may be short, but I'm wiry. And I didn't like that anthropoid goon. I smiled at him.

"Doesn't your sister work on Artifact II?" I asked him.

"Why you..." he started.

The little man blocked him. "Brumus," he said, "wait outside. Mr Braun and I are going to have a little talk."

The guard, Brumus, stopped. Still fuming, he turned away and left. The door closed behind him.

"Mr Braun, Brumus' sister does work on Artifact II."

"Whoops," I said.

"'Whoops' indeed, Mr Braun. It's not a good idea to remind him of it."

"Hmm," I said.

"Now," he said, "to continue. Your home planet, Mr Braun?" He looked expectantly at me.

"No," I said simply. He sighed.

"Where is the Princess Melisande?"

"On my homeworld," I answered truthfully.

"So, it's back to that. Where is your homeworld?"

"What's your name?" I asked.

"Redding," he replied. "Where is your homeworld?"

"You're wasting your time, Redding. Where am I?" "PSS-1626," he answered.

"The Alcatraz?" I said. I had guessed as much, but still---The Alcatraz?

"Mr Braun," said Redding, "I seem to be answering all of your questions, and getting very little in return. Can't we be civil about this?"

"I want to see my lawyer," I said.

"Isn't it a little late for that?"

"I am only recently retired, Redding," I said moving toward him.

"Brumus," said Redding quietly. The door slid open.

Brumus walked in. I casually adjusted the collar of my shirt. Whistling.

"Not very convincing, scum, " said Brumus.

The fool really should learn to be more polite.

With a whoosh of expelled breath, he collapsed at Redding's feet. I don't think either he or Brumus saw my foot lash out. It felt good to know a month of leisure hadn't softened me any. I sat on the bunk.

Redding shook his head sadly. "That was not a good idea, Mr Braun."

From nowhere came two more guards. They dragged Brumus out. Redding following.

"I'll be seeing you later," he said.

I made a vulgar noise as the door slid shut.

PSS-1626, The Alcatraz, was one of the five prison ships used by the Empire. Since the holocaust which nearly destroyed Earth back in the twentieth century, death had been outlawed. Assassination was illegal on Earth, as were dangerous sports, most addictions, and so on. Even the death penalty was verboten. Criminals were given 'transportation for life', usually to a colony planet if one would take them. At first, they were sent to Beta Centauri as revenge on the infamous Hijackers who settled there. Empire Earth thought it fitting to flood the colony world Jefferson with criminals.

It wasn't until years later that they learned there was no planet Jefferson. At least not one that could support human life.

They then attempted to send the criminals elsewhere, but most of the colonies wouldn't hear of it. That's when the prison ships were built. The first and largest of them was The Alcatraz, affectionately known as 'The Flying Pen'.

The ships were long cylinders, The Alcatraz over one kilometer in length, with the cells surrounding the axial shaft. At either end of the ship were the control sections and the engine room. The Captain/Warden and his staff lived and worked up front, usually never even seeing the prisoners. Obviously, or I wouldn't have been in the position I was.

The guards were another story altogether. It was discovered that alth ough Jefferson was a deadly world, there were two asteroids circling Beta Centauri at one-hundred-twenty and two-hundred-forty degrees in the same orbit. No one knew who placed these asteroids in those positions, nor who had hollowed them out. Speculation was rampant, but one thing was sure: they had breathable atmospheres inside.

Each asteroid, or asterworld as they were first called, was discovered independently by criminals sent from the Empire. Artifact I was settled by one of the many ships of prisoners. No one could be sure which one it was, nor did anyone really care, The convicts didn't keep records. It may have been any number of ships.

But Artifact II was a different matter. It was settled by the only ship ever sent out carrying female prisoners. It became the most famous and most expensive brothel in the human universe.

When the Empire discovered its prisoners on the Artifacts, it offered them parole, this in an attempt to make up for the 'cruel and unusual punishment'. The women of Artifact II elected to remain where they were. The men of Artifact I were given jobs as guards on the new prison ships.

They came for me a while later. Neither of the guards who escorted me was Brumus. Maybe I'd killed him. I hoped not. It would better if he just carried the memory as a reminder to be more polite.

In the center of the axial shaft was an elevator. There was no other way to go forward or aft in the ship. Just another security measure. We went forward, toward the control room.

My guards and I left the elevator before we reached the Warden's chambers. Apparently I wasn't to see him then. Or maybe ever. The guard station was our destination.

I was led into the station and through to the back. They left me in a room only slightly smaller than my cell, but equally drab. I seated myself on the bunk. I was only to wait a few moments.

Redding entered, followed by a white-smocked man and my drinking companion from Earth. Somehow I was not surprised to see him. I greeted him cheerily.

"Hello," I said. "So, how do you like space travel?"

He smiled. "I must confess, Hash," he said. "I lied to you. I was born on Neverland."

"A lovely planet," I said.

"Yes," he said, "it is. Is your homeworld as nice?"

"Oh, certainly." I smiled. "Equally as lovely."

"Maybe I could persuade the Captain to take us there," he said. "If you'll just give me the coordinates..."

"Hmm," I said, "let's see." I paused, controlling my amusement very nicely. "Sol referenced, they are four-six-two, oh-seven-nine, two-oh-point-three-six."

He was writing them down as I spoke. It wasn't until the last coordinate that he realized.

"Funny," he said. "Very funny. That's Neverland."

"Space is just so confusing sometimes," I giggled. "I will never get the hang of astrogation. Sorry."

"If you're not," he said, "you will be. Soon. Redding."

Redding nodded to the white-smock, who opened a small case. Inside was a hypo and three phials of a colorless liquid. The Neverlander looked on.

"Do you know what we have here?"

"I couldn't imagine." Actually, I have a vivid imagination.

"Diogenine," he said. "You've heard of it?"

"Truth serum," I mused. "Good stuff. Too bad it won't work on me."

"Nice try," he said. "No one is immune."

"Oh well," I said, "Suit yourself. You won't find out anything you don't already know."

"We'll see."

The hypo was prepared. I considered putting up a fight, but why bother? I was in a room in the heart of guard territory. I'd just end up bruised, or worse. But, I was curious.

"To whom do I owe this experience?" I asked. "I may someday wish to return the favor."

He laughed. "A certain Laird," he said, "who shall remain nameless, arranged all this." He made a sweeping gesture.

MacFie, then. I guess he wanted Melisande dead, not just gone. Redding pushed up my sleeve and swabbed antiseptic on the inside of my arm. The white-smocked medico (I hoped) injected me with the serum.

Diogenine is an extract of the Neverland Ninroot. Depending on the purity of the extract, it is classed as an hypnotic, a narcotic, or an aphrodisiac. I hoped they used the correct solution. I was on an all-male ship, after all. He was right about one thing, though. No one was immune to the drug. I would tell the truth.

I could only infer when the drug took effect. There are no symptoms one could notice, except the inability to lie.

My 'friend' began his questions.

"Who are you?"

It was the standard first question. Just a test, really.

"Viktor Braun," I answered. The drug doesn't dim the ability to think. I was aware of everything I said, and its implications.

"Who am I?"

"I don't know," I answered. I didn't. That was all that was needed for the test questions. A negative answer and a positive answer. I hadn't lied. I couldn't lie.

"My name is Johns," he said. It wasn't a question, so I didn't say anything.

"Where is Melisande?" he asked.

That was it, the real test. I found myself telling him. "At my mother's," I replied. So far, so good.

He mumbled something under his breath. I could see him beginning to fume. "Where is your mother's?" he asked, leaning close over me.

"On my homeworld," I answered, smiling. He didn't like that.

"Where can I find your homeworld?"

"Go to Tor," I said.

Johns was not pleased. Redding looked embarrassed.

"Give him another dose," he said. The medico fumbled with the hypo.

I just barely felt the prick of the needle, but my head swam.

"Now," said Johns. "Let's see just how funny you are, I want Melisande, Braun. Where is she?"

"Go to Tor." It was better than I had expected. I was having the time of my life, what with the diogenine coursing through me, and Johns turning redder and redder.

"How can he fight it?" he asked Redding. "He's got enough of the stuff in him to keep him flying for days."

"Maybe he is immune," replied Redding, "like he said."

"Impossible," snapped Johns. The medico nodded in agreement.

Impossible is right, I thought. I just sat there waiting for more questions.

"Give him another dose."

"It might kill him," pointed out the medico.

"I don't care," grumbled Johns. "Give it to him."

The medico hesitated, then emptied the last phial into me. I think my head swelled to the size of a small planet. Or was it a pulsar? Something throbbed.

"What are the coordinates of the planet?" asked Johns. "The one where we can find the Princess Melisande?"

Somewhere out of the depths I heard my voice. Four-six-two, oh-seven-nine, two-oh-point-three-six, it said. I wished the throbbing would go away.

"Get him out of here," said Johns. "Put him on ice until MacFie's ready to pick him up. The bastard is immune."

I was a celestial body in empty space. I pulsated, expanding with each throb. Structure stretched, warped; a bubble's surface-tension stressed to the limit. Beyond. I burst. The universe winked out. But I was the universe.

A starship circled a planet. I was the starship. No... I was aboard the starship. I sent a lander down to the surface. It died. The atmosphere was poison. After all those years. We had no home. I debated thawing out Kurt and Ursula. Who were Kurt and Ursula? I didn't know. I decided to leave them in suspension. I refroze the rest of my crew, and left orbit. On to Procyon.

Three hundred years later I awoke to an alarm in my ears. We circled a planet. This time I sent a probe down to the surface. The planet checked out. I began awakening my crew. We landed and set up our colony. We called it Tor.

A week after we were settled in we discovered we were not alone. Tor had been settled two hundred years earlier by the Empire. We were on one side of the planet, they were on the other. If Earth found us, we were finished.

So we hid ourselves by not hiding ourselves. As the Earth colony grew, we assimilated ourselves in its population. In a short time we controlled all positions of power.

We achieved independence from the Empire, finally after all those centuries. But Tor was still hidden. Under everyone's noses. Only we of the Betty, and our descendants, would know that Tor existed.

It suited my sense of humor.

I awoke in a room aboard The Alcatraz, a klaxon disturbing my sleep. I lay on a table with a sheet pulled up to my neck. There was another table to my right. On it was Brumus, the guard I had incapacitated. He was wired to a bank of electronics. As I looked at him, the lights went out. His life support shut down, his body convulsed.

Emergency lights came on, but not his life support. So it goes. I promised myself I would send his sister my condolences. It was the least I could do. I knew she wouldn't need financial assistance; not working on Artifact II.

I slid from beneath the sheet, and stood. The room spun. I didn't know how long I had lain there, but the massive dose of diogenine had almost worn off.

The Flying Pen lurched as I reached the doorway. Someone had activated the drive. We were accelerating. The door slid shut behind me, trapping me out on the narrow catwalk. It seemed as if the axial shaft went on forever below me. I was just beneath officer country, and the elevator was stopped above me, out of reach. It didn't matter. There was no power to move it.

We were still accelerating. The prison ships weren't designed for speed. She'd shake apart if the acceleration continued.

The ship lurched again. I was thrown to the catwalk, my head hanging off the edge. Three-hundred-odd triads of red lights glowed below me, merging into a rosy glow at the vanishing point nearly a kilometer away. I felt sick.

Rolling over onto my back, I saw it. The elevator had broken loose and shifted when the ship lurched. A crack ran from the catwalk above me up through the wall into the crew sections. I could see sparks flying and hear men screaming.

We must have hit something, I thought.

No, that wouldn't account for the acceleration. If anything, we should have stopped. Could we have been attacked? And, if so, by whom?

A piece of wastepaper fluttered past me and whooshed through the crack. That settled it. The ship had been breached, and was losing pressure.

I'm not ashamed to admit I was frightened. I'd never seen explosive decompression, and had no desire to experience it first hand. It was lucky the ship was accelerating. If the only breach was forward, it would be all right. But I had to get down to the lower levels. How, I didn't know.

I searched my level. The doors had all closed when the drive had come on, but the manual overrides worked. I went from room to room looking for an escape route, even a maintenance shaft would have done. There wasn't any. I was trapped. I sat on the catwalk, thinking.

I remembered seeing the ship's maser antenna in one of the rooms. With the antenna were its flexisteel support rods, used to mount it on the hull. I got an idea.

Years ago, when I was a child, I had seen a story called 'The Middle Terrace', set on the jungle-planet Burroughs.

The protagonist faced a similar situation. He was trapped at the edge of a deep rent in the surface of the planet, too wide to jump. He cut a strong, thin sapling long enough to reach both sides of the crevasse, and jumped. He used the sapling as a brake, dragging it down the sides of the crevasse. If he could do it, why couldn't I? So what is he was just a fictional character?

I dragged one of the support poles out into the axial shaft. It crossed with centimeters to spare on each end. Hopefully, it would be enough of a margin to account for any flexing.

I hesitated I think most would, if asked to dive into

a thousand meter hole but the sudden silence in the sections above decided me. Grasping the rod firmly in the middle, and aiming well out into the center of the shaft, I took the plunge.

The ends of the flexisteel rod caught on the edges of the catwalk, leaving me suspended over a seemingly bottomless pit. Then the rod bowed under my weight, the ends slipped free, and I fell to the next level. Only a few hundred left to go, I thought.

There were a lot of 'ifs' involved. I would make it

If I kept my grip on the rod. If the rod could stand so many shocks. If I could stand so many shocks. If I could hold it level while falling. If the ship kept accelerating.

On the way down I saw some of my fellow prisoners out on the catwalks. One yelled "It's the birdman!". I was not amused. I guess my sense of humor was slipping.

So was my grip. Although I stopped at each catwalk, my descent velocity was steadily increasing. The shocks were loosening my hold. I tried shifting my hands, but my timing was off. I only had one hand on as I hit level 206. The bar tilted, and I was falling freely.

How long would it take me to fall half a klick? I only knew I hadn't the time to figure it. The longer I waited, the less chance I had to stop myself. It wasn't as simple as straightening the bar. If one end caught, but not the other, I would probably slam into the side of the shaft. I had to time it perfectly. My confidence in my timing had already been shaken, but what could I do? I held my breath and shifted the bar.

I bounced through five levels before things smoothed out. I remembered to start breathing again. I began bracing myself for the bottom. I would hit with quite a shock, maybe break my legs. Still, that was better than breathing vacuum.

I didn't break my legs. Not quite, anyway. At least I was alive.

I looked up. The axial shaft dwindled in the distance. I could see flashes of orange at the other end. The sound of explosions echoed, mingling with screams. That must have been the prisoners on the upper levels. I knew the crew was already dead. I had gotten down just in time. But I wasn't out yet.

I have always been a bundle of useless information. I read anything I can get my hands on, especially if it is printed in a real book with actual pages, not just a tape. Somehow or another all that knowledge I've stowed away comes in handy. For instance: the prison ships were designed with the landers aft, tucked in giant cargolocks. I had no idea where I picked up that bit of information, I was just glad I had. I began looking for the cargolocks. It didn't take long. They were plainly marked, although in the dim emergencies the signs were difficult to read.

I spun the manual door-release and stepped into the bufferway. Unless the 'locks were breached, I'd have no air problems for a while. They weren't. If they had been, the other door of the buffer wouldn't have opened.

I stepped into the 'lock. My footsteps reverberated in the chamber. I could see vague shapes which were the stacked containers and tanks. Foodstuffs mostly, I assumed, maybe other supplies. Prison ships had to be fairly self-sufficient. They cruised space for years on end, approaching planets only for picking up or discharging prisoners.

I found the lander nearest the huge outer doors. It was not locked. I had no idea where The Alcatraz was when we were attacked, but I assumed we weren't too far from a habitable planet. If we were, I'd have a long, boring trip. Landers weren't built for speed.

I sat in the flight couch and fumbled for the lights. The board lit up. I checked the fuel first. If it was low, I would have to jockey another lander into position. I was in luck. The tanks were full.

I switched on the preheater. Landers are equipped with mininukes, but they have to babied along until they are up to operating temperature. There are auxiliary chemical motors that are used while waiting. I switched on the belly jets, and lifted a few centimeters from the floor of the cargolock. I taxied toward the outer door. The remote opener still worked even though the prison ship's power was down. The door slowly opened. I could see stars out in the blackness.

I didn't wait for the door to fully open. I eased the lander forward and through.

I was out of 'The Flying Pen'...

Part Three
Part Four