THE PRISON OF THE STARS
By STANLEY MULLEN
To head out beyond Pluto a venturer needs more
than a super-spaceship; he needs people as super-desperate
and freedom-hungry as himself; people strange and daring.
Wilding, the trespasser, found them on Alcatraz—the
rogue asteroid ... the prison of the stars.
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Planet Stories November 1953.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
He watched rocket jets flame and change color as the supply ship put onpower and drew relentlessly away from him. He saw the ship accelerateswiftly and its mirror-polished torpedo shape diminish in distanceuntil even its flares faded like dying stars.
Abandoned, utterly alone, a man in a spacesuit is on painfully realand intimate terms with infinity. Alone in space, a man is more orless than a man. He could imagine himself the king of black space, buta king without lands, subjects or responsibilities is a poor monarch.He could pass the evil time ahead by reflecting upon his past life,although his present circumstances gave him little hope of profit fromthe knowledge of past mistakes and lost opportunities.
His name was Wilding, and legends about him on Venus and Mars indicatethat the name suited him peculiarly. There is reason to believe thathe was always more or less than a man. But when the supply ship hadvanished completely, he was more alone than ever before in a lonely andanti-social life.
Around him whirled black, boundless vastness pinpointed with unfriendlystars. Even familiar constellations seemed alien and remote, luminoussymbols detached from human values and emotions. Venus and Earth wereinvisible on the far side of the Sun, and Mars but the faintest of redlanterns hung upon the void. Great Saturn and Jupiter with their trainsof inhabited moons must exist somewhere, but he took them on faith, notevidence.
Be patient, they had warned him contemptuously, dumping him from thesupply ship like rubbish consigned to the human junk heap. Yes, bepatient, and eventually someone might come out for him—but they hadnot told him how hard it would be to wait and watch the awful void ofspace and fire-flake star-patterns whirl about him. Patience, like hisformer life in the hive cities of the Solar system, had long ago ceasedto exist. His senses reeled and he could only stare hypnotized at hisimmediate surroundings.
Wilding was as rich as Tantalus, and as tortured by the unattainable.Within sight, neatly packaged wealth circled with him about the giantradilume beacon. Many objects wrapped in reflector foil floated in andout of his ken as they found tiny orbits and worked out brief cycles ofrevolution about the giant atom flare which was the parent sun to theswarm of drifting particles. All the packages were rotating as rapidlyas he, and light reflected from their metallic angularity made themresemble variable asteroids.
Loot like the splendors of a luxury spaceliner was in those packages.More food than had haunted the hunger-dreams of his youth on Venus.Other necessities like water, oxygen, clothing. Luxuries such as winesand liquors, entertainment tapes of canned music and visual diversions.Even supplies of drugs and medicines that could be perverted toforbidden joys. It was all his, for the moment, by right of existingin the middle of it, by the fact that no other claimant was on thespot. It dangled before his eyes—but beyond reach of anything but hisimaginatio