Chapter I: Front Matter

SPACE-TRAP AT BANYA TOR

By W. J. MATTHEWS

Exciting entertainment, these telecasts of dashing
pirates, gorgeous victims and the always stupid Space
Patrol, but Jeff Thorne, famed Derelict of Mars, was
grimly bent on stopping them--in all their ghastly reality!

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Planet Stories Spring 1948.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

The three patrolmen leaped to their feet, saluting as they arose. Bannerman, the Superintendent, extended a hearty fist.

"Welcome, General Wheelwright," he exclaimed, clicking his polished heels.

"Glad to be aboard, gentlemen," rasped the Inspector-General of the Planet Patrol, returning the salute. His broad chest, scaled from throat to belt with the medals of twenty worlds, tinkled musically as he rumbled the brusque greeting. "At ease. Resume your game. Bannerman, a word with you, if you please."

As the Superintendent closed the black door behind them, he glanced apprehensively at his superior. The big man had slumped in limp exhaustion into the office chair before Bannerman's desk.

"Well, sir?" Bannerman finally asked. "Chain Lucas?"

"No," replied the General, hardly lifting his head. "Not yet." He stared fixedly at his glittering boots, cool runnels of light glancing along their polished curves.

"Senator Chanler is dead."

"Dead? Old Scrooge?" Bannerman's startled incredulity was tempered by a sudden enthusiasm he made no great effort to conceal. "Who poisoned him?" he inquired.

"Come now, Bannerman," replied Wheelwright, repressing a wan smile. "I grant you he was a parsimonious fool, but at least we managed to skin our appropriations through his committee one way or another."

"Skinned is certainly the word for it, sir," agreed Bannerman shortly.

"I'm afraid we'll remember Scrooge with regret," Wheelwright gloomily rejoined. "What the new Senator on the committee will do to the appropriation will ground half our ships."

"I had hoped for a relief," sighed Bannerman. "Who's the new man?"

"Chanler's daughter, Iris," replied Wheelwright. "Yes, yes, I know," he added testily as Bannerman's jaw fell open. "The girl's a reigning beauty, famous on half a dozen worlds. The World Council appointed her to fill the Senator's unexpired term. Just the usual courtesy, of course, but she flew back from Venus and threw herself wholeheartedly into the job."

"Has she long to serve?"

"She hadn't, but she knows publicity. Had enough of it, Lord knows. She ran for the next term and was re-elected."

"But she's wealthy in her own right, they say. Surely she didn't inherit Chanler's parsimony with his office?"

"Of course not, Bannerman. She's famous for her easy way with money, and her Chanler's daughter. Notorious, if you like. But the girl's a featherbrain, a romantic. Devotee of these gangster telecasts glorifying crime." Wheelwright's snort was eloquent of his disgust.

"I know. We get them here, too. Same old Formula Number One, the Robin Hood motif. Clean-living space-hawk raiding the lanes, confounding the stupid Planet Patrol, scattering his loot to the poor. Very true to life."

"It was corn five hundred years ago," scowled Wheelwright. "But it drags them in today." He pounded the arm of his chair. "Who believes crime does not pay when they can see for themselves on a hundred scanner-screens that it does pay, and handsomely? Of course it's fiction and they know it, but it tends to build up a subtle disrespect for law and the Patrol in their minds. What ruined the old Congress but the popular conception of them as a bunch of hick yokels stumbling over a job too big for their provincial minds? These gangster things run in cycles, of course, but I'd like to see this one run out right now."

"True enough, sir," nodded Bannerman, soberly. "I've noticed their effect on the inner worlds. And you feel they influence the new ... Senator?"

"I'd bet on it," growled Wheelwright. "When she was appointed, I slipped in operatives. You know how those household groups talk. And we know she had prejudices long before Chanler died. We've had to hold up two or three of her interplanetary junkets on that toy yacht he gave her, for her own safety, of course, but she's not forgotten. And she lived for years with Chanler's groans on the waste and inefficiency of the Patrol."

"Has she his power?"

"With her looks? More. She can block our whole appropriation or pare it to the bone."

"And you think she might?" Bannerman was grimly serious.

"She talks of cutting us down, trimming off the fat, she calls it. Back to the efficiency of the old pioneering days when men were men and rockets were really rockets." He grinned wryly. "Between the screens and Chain Lucas, she thinks it all a big, exciting game staked against the daring outlaw. Romantic," he added.

Bannerman cursed. "I wonder how romantic those poor women thought it was when they were tied up to the 'Orion's' dice bar and beaten to death with iron bars? Or the seven we found cut to pieces in the wreck of the 'Pantagruel?' And the pretty ballad of the 'Stargazer,' her whole crew and most of the passengers pushed through airlocks into the void?"

"Horror retailed from eighty million miles troubles no one," replied Wheelwright. "She's a wild and reckless girl drunk with her own beauty and this new power, Bannerman. Undisciplined, she means to discipline us. She'll push us fifty years back down our own trail. We can't risk it, Bannerman."

* * * * *

The Superintendent stared thoughtfully at his superior. He tapped his desk gently with the long Mercurian dagger used as letter-opener. "What do you propose, sir? You're not here for nothing."

"You can put that away," said Wheelwright, with some reluctance. "We're not romantic, Bannerman. We'll find a better way."

"Seizing Chain Lucas?"

"A month ago it might have helped. Now, frankly, taking him might do more harm than good."

"His reputation, I suppose."

"Exactly. I suppose he is the prototype of those telecasts we spoke of a moment ago, a daring buccaneer attacking on sight under our very noses, raiding but not killing, the most romantic of them all. Should we get him, the cleverest lawyers of the System would fight to defend him and we'd end up defending our own system against them all. They'd have our blood for persecuting the Robin Hood of the star-ways."

"Robin Hood!" sneered Bannerman. "If they could see Banya Tor!"

"Exactly," agreed Wheelwright, grimly. He leaned forward, tapping Bannerman's desk with a lean forefinger, his grey brows fierce over his bright dark eyes. "The one place Lucas slipped his men, let them kill for the sheer piratical joy of killing. We had nothing sure before, but on Banya Tor he spun his own death-rope. Nothing has been touched, as ordered?"

"Nothing, sir. The air-dome is still smashed where he drove his ship through as the Patrol came down from the hills. The ... the bodies are still just as his butchers left them. Frozen."

Wheelwright leaned back, clasping his knee in its black and silver hose. His eyes fell. "I can't quite feature it. Perhaps he thought he could clean up the asteroid afterward; perhaps his crew just got tired playing Robin Hood. Anyway, letting off steam at Banya Tor is going to cut short Chain Lucas' career before many days are out. I've seen things on the runs we don't talk about, Bannerman, but those women hanged in their own dresses over fires...." He shuddered violently. Bannerman nodded.

"And the necklaces of hands and eyes Lucas hung on others before his men dismembered them by inches," he added grimly.

"Exactly." General Wheelwright bit his lip. "The man's cracked, mad. How many more atrocities we've found are actually his rather than the work of lesser pirates we may never know. But to all the worlds he is still the wild, free spirit of Adventure. Knowing nothing of Banya Tor."

"As you ordered," pointed out Bannerman. Wheelwright agreed.

"I have my reasons, Bannerman. Knowing nothing of all this, suppose this Chanler woman could be taken to Banya Tor and shown exactly as he left it in his flight the true horror of this pirate raid, the real nature of piracy, the nature of the tin Robin Hood?"

Bannerman gaped aghast. "You planned that?"

"From the first weak call for help. I reached there about as soon as the Patrol ships and ordered the whole story on ice."

"You can prove to her it _was_ Lucas?"

"Easily. They were there three or more days, loafing on solid ground, letting themselves go on the poor devils of the little colony. When the Patrol came in answer to a stolen radio signal, they had time only to fight and run, leaving everything. Two of his trusted lieutenants, known men, Revere and Pahboard, were found dead after the long-range firing when we seized the domes. We can pin it on him with a deadly certainty, Bannerman. We'll tar him with the blackest truth the System has ever seen. Sir Galahad will ride for a little time, perhaps, but he'll ride the calculating fiend we've known him and not the gallant adventurer these cheap telecasts make him out to be. And we'll fling the certain truth in Iris Chanler's painted face to do it!"

Bannerman was gravely sober. "Have you considered the consequences, sir? The girl has been carefully reared. She's wealthy, spoiled, but only a girl. In her revulsion from the ghastly sight you plan to thrust on her, might she not turn on us in reaction? Fling the blame on us for letting him commit the horrors she couldn't deny?"

General Wheelwright lifted an admiring forefinger. "Now that's the way I like to hear my officers talk, Bannerman. Consider all the angles, all the consequences. Follow no set plan blindly." He nodded in stern commendation. "Knowing the woman, I anticipated your thought. The Patrol will not lead her blindly by the hand into Banya Tor, Bannerman. She will be steered there purely by chance, by a man not known to be of our force. A man above suspicion, above reproach, perhaps I might say above the law itself. Thorne."

He grinned wolfishly. "Call him in, Bannerman. You know his private line."

Bannerman shook his head. "With your permission, sir, I'd rather not. Even those men out there know him only as the richest man alive. That is his value."

Wheelwright was not impressed. "You know best, then I know him as a sot who stumbled on a Vadirrian cache and came out of the desert with more wealth than any man from here to the outer rings. The whole System knows him as no more, but for us it is sufficient that he secretly is a captain in the Patrol and ready to do our bidding. The Chanler woman and a party of her chattering friends are not an hour behind me on the incoming Martian liner for Vulhan City. Take me to Thorne and we shall spread our nets for the magpie if we have to use half his new-found wealth to do it!"

* * * * *

"My first assignment!" snorted in Geoffrey Thorne as he stood watching the dancers twirling about the huge white ballroom in the Government House. "Escorting some snaggletoothed bandylegs to a desolate little asteroid just to quease her fat little stomach. It's enough to turn my own."

"Patience, Thorne," smiled Bannerman, leaning quietly against a pillar at his side. "She's not bandy-legged."

Thorne stared, then laughed abruptly. "I needn't take your word on that, Bannerman. The General comes."

General Wheelwright, forging through the eddying swarm of dancers, glittered with gold and braid, but it was not at the great man Thorne was staring with such evident approval. At the officer's side stepped a tall, beautifully shaped woman in clinging Ionian spider-weave, her skin glowing brilliantly in the intricate patterns of the skin-tight gown. Her ebon hair, shoulder-length, bore a single brilliant jewel at the ear, but it was her eyes which held Thorne.

Grey-blue as a summer storm, they scanned him as she walked forward, a faint smile parting her lips at his open admiration. It was an approval he made no effort to conceal, for Jeff Thorne, International, honored no convention against his will, nor had he need. His vast wealth enfolded him like a mantle, and few men on Earth or Mars or any other planet took pleasure in measuring wits or steel with him. Slowly he moved forward to meet the General, the dancers parting unobtrusively before him.

Many eyes followed him, a tall, commanding figure in the heavily brocaded white silk tunic, the broad golden stripe of the International still upon the shimmering black of his close-fitting trousers. Gold sparkled on chest and shoulders and jewels in the hilt of the short, heavy sword slung at his left hip in ceremonial homage to the first Martian colonists. In honor of these, too, was the crisp white turban about the gold-shot scarlet fez, symbolizing the blood they shed and the purity of the ideals for which so many of them had died. The five moonstones of the order of Larcanston glowed sullenly red on his broad chest.

"I hoped you'd be here, Thorne," the General greeted him, as heartily as though he had not made grimly certain the young man would attend. "May I present Miss Iris Chanler, Senator to the Council. Miss Chanler, Captain Thorne." There was a chill disapproval in the General's starched tones.

As they bowed and swept away in the ensuing dance, he joined Bannerman stiffly and stood watching the gay throng with an expression as dour as he could muster.

* * * * *

Thorne and the girl swung lightly in spiraling circles, fingers interlaced, in the intricate, graceful steps of the latest Venusian Glide Roll, the dancers melting about them in light-hearted disregard of all official dignity.

"A handsome couple, sir," nodded Bannerman.

"Handsome enough," agreed Wheelwright, clasping his hands behind him and following the two with brooding, stormy eyes. "Thorne seems to know his business."

He was promptly about it. As the girl melted into his arms, following his every lead with exquisite grace, he grinned down at her upturned, challenging face.

"I almost stayed away," he admitted.

"Because of me?"

"Had you seen the picture of you I conjured up," he sighed, and she laughed.

"And mine of you," she added. "I thought of you as a wrinkled old desert rat, hearing of your fortune."

"We wrinkle easily here on Mars," he smiled. "You'll not stay long enough to know." And his eyes, sweeping her lace-sheathed body, assured her she need not fear wrinkles at the moment.

She smiled. "We sail for Triton on my yacht tomorrow. There's just time for a visit to the Battan caves before I must return to N'Yott for the opening of the fall sessions."

"Those are dangerous parts," he warned. "Your party is very small."

"We have good men," she laughed, eyeing him curiously. "You know that area?"

"If I say I do, will you construe my answer aright?" was his cool rejoinder.

She rose to the bait. "Are you afraid?"

"I have been called rash ere now."

Her eyes glowed up into his. "Should I challenge you, Captain Thorne? Beg you to accompany us?"

His lips hardened and she felt the spring-steel body stiffen. "I am not on display, Miss Chanler. Not even for you."

Her smile faded and she drew away, moving from the hall out upon a deep-niched balcony overlooking the restless Nergal Sea and the nodding Martian ships swaying on the moon-dappled roadstead. The towers of Vulhan City lay about them, dark shadows in the ultramarine of the night, for these Martian cities were not air-domed.

Her eyes sought his, not lightly. "You think I ask selfishly, Captain Thorne. You are right. But not as you think. If I ask you to accompany me for a short cruise, though it be on a flimsy pleasure-yacht, it is not to exhibit you as some glittering prize of the light social whirl I inhabit, believe me. I know your story, of course. One of my duties concerns aspects of public health and I've a bill hearing designed to relieve some of the handicaps space-sick fliers labor under. You are living proof they can overcome the handicaps of disease or drink or drugs. I speak frankly, you see. Figures and charts put the Council nodding. Your name will not."

"I see," he slowly agreed. He looked away. She had shown him the strength beneath her loveliness.

"You alone cannot abrogate the old laws forbidding t'ang addicts, cured or not, returning to Earth," he countered.

"I can try," she insisted. "I like this position, Captain Thorne, to keep it I have to earn my salary, and social legislation is the coin I pay into the treasury." She laughed, shaking her long black hair about her gleaming bare shoulders. "I have been frank with you, sir. Will you come?"

"You make it a duty," he protested. His slow smile swept her lithe beauty in the moonlight as the music rose again to draw them within the tall white palace.