The Prison of the Stars

Beyond a limited air supply, he could not breathe. He had no food, no water. To sustain him, besides the spacesuit and the remaining energy of his body, there was only his anger and his plan. He was an unusual man, brave and tough, even resourceful, but this time his fate was out of his hands. Even his plan was worthless unless he could live long enough to implement it.

Wilding swore grimly and silently, and waited. Even as men in ordinary circumstances measure such things, it was a long time. The initial velocity of his spin had begun to slow from occasional collision with one item or another of his useless wealth. One by one, the stars around him seemed to flicker and go out. For even the eternal stars exist only in the mind of man.

He waited so long that the darkness of deep space seemed to seep into his spacesuit. With that darkness, part of it, came fear, which is in itself the lesser death. He was weightless and nauseated, almost too weak to fight the fear. Hunger and thirst had weakened him. He wanted to scream, but brain and muscles did not respond in the oxygen thin atmosphere of the suit. Limply, he retched, lungs churning for air.

He swore again, faintly, dubiously. If this were the end, there seemed no point to anything that had gone before. His mind veered back to Mars, to the strange girl, Elshar, and what he had done for her. He wondered again why he had interfered. She was nothing to him, could never be anything. Love was not the emotion she roused in him.

Not love, not even desire. Not anything he could name unless it was fear. He pushed the thought of her from his mind.

He had felt fear before. He should know that sensation. He was feeling it now. But he had always dealt with fear by using it to put an edge on his soul. One could not deal with this situation so easily. A man should not die like this. A poor man in sight of wealth, a starving man in sight of food, a suffocating man in the midst of sealed tanks of oxygen. Anger roared in him. He called out to the dark gods of space to have done with their torture....

Following numerous orbits between Jupiter and Mars are the uncounted asteroids. Some of these fragments of a long-vanished planet are named, and even most of the lesser fry are catalogued by numbers. One of them, since the earliest days of space travel and interplanetary survey, has three official numbers, two names, and at least a dozen colorful nicknames.

It is on the IPS spacemaps, named and numbered, but by interplanetary treaty it is marked in red letters: Restricted! Warning! Do Not Land!

This asteroid, commonly known as the Pelican, is the Alcatraz Island of space. It is a prison for the most hardened and hopeless of convicts. Outside of official circles, few people have ever heard of it and fewer still dwell there. No spaceships ever set down, and none blast off from its scarred and pitted surface. The few inhabitants form a highly exclusive social group, their numbers limited by highly specialized requirements for membership.

The original Alcatraz was a small island in San Francisco Bay, on Earth, used as prison for only grade-A malefactors. In Spanish, the word means Pelican, and those curious birds formerly made the tiny bare rock their roosting ground. More curious birds roosted there since; but by now, with the very existence of the city of San Francisco a myth, the island has been returned to the pelicans and other fauna of the sea, sky and ground. Only some spiders and lowly insects inhabit the ruins of prison buildings, and birds and seals have the pinpoint of barren rock to themselves.

One knows by historical conjecture what happened to the prison and the nearby city. But even toward the close of the Twenty-First Century, the most optimistic would not claim that humankind has advanced beyond the need for prisons, and something drastic must still be done with the aristocrats of crime.

Expansion across space, with more worlds to conquer and loot, more races to exploit, and new frontiers of fabulous treasure to plunder, did nothing to improve the moral tone of humanity. A new and savage breed of criminals sprang into existence to meet these exciting conditions. It was raw, blind butchery at first, then racketeers of genius brought general looting into an organized and systematic bleeding of the body economic and generalized corruption of the body politic. After much bloodshed, the end result was the new Alcatraz, a prison preserve on Penguin Planetoid, familiarly known as The Rock.

The Rock is literally that. Bare rock, not even spherical, but large for an asteroid. It is a rogue asteroid, which means that its orbit is highly eccentric and comes nowhere near that of the other asteroids and rarely comes near that of any planet. It is a world to itself. It is not pushing licensed irony too far to state that its inhabitants are rogues whose orbits, from the standpoint of society, are also eccentric. Alcatraz Asteroid is a prison for the most incorrigible of lifers.

Only the rarest criminals qualify for such a sentence, but once sentenced, the trap closes on him for good. There is no reprieve, no parole, no pardon, and no escape. Few men ever enter the maze of caverns that honeycomb Alcatraz' forbidding interior, but those few stay. They live and die out of sight and out of touch with the worlds of reality. The Rock is the end of the line.

Outraged authority forgets a man sent to Alcatraz. His record, and everything concerning him is destroyed. Both offense and existence are blotted out, which makes an unintentionally sporting offer, for if a convict should ever escape there is no previous count against him. Such a man could consider himself returned from the dead, or reborn. No escape from the Rock had been legally anticipated, and none had actually occurred. Such escape is a practical impossibility, even with no warden and no guards--for none are needed.

Newcomers arrive in the supply ship, which never lands. Like the packaged supplies, condemned prisoners are dumped overboard through a freight airlock and left twirling in space about a giant radilume flare moving in an orbit closely paralleling that of the prison asteroid. Man and supplies may twirl indefinitely, and the man may even die unless his fellow exiles are in a good mood, or are curious enough to put out in the space-lighter provided with a severely limited store of fuel and seine in the take to the prison caverns of Alcatraz.

Men have died like that, sometimes because the old hands were too disinterested to investigate in time, or again because the old inhabitants were too involved at the moment with minor feuding and treacheries to care.