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 on power and drew relentlessly away from him. He saw the ship accelerate swiftly and its mirror-polished torpedo shape diminish in distance until even its flares faded like dying stars. Abandoned, utterly alone, a man in a spacesuit is on painfully real and intimate terms with infinity. Alone in space, a man is more or less than a man. He could imagine himself the king of black space, but a 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 from the knowledge of past mistakes and lost opportunities. His name was Wilding, and legends about him on Venus and Mars indicate that the name suited him peculiarly. There is reason to believe that he was always more or less than a man. But when the supply ship had vanished completely, he was more alone than ever before in a lonely and anti-social life. Around him whirled black, boundless vastness pinpointed with unfriendly stars. Even familiar constellations seemed alien and remote, luminous symbols detached from human values and emotions. Venus and Earth were invisible on the far side of the Sun, and Mars but the faintest of red lanterns hung upon the void. Great Saturn and Jupiter with their trains of inhabited moons must exist somewhere, but he took them on faith, not evidence. Be patient, they had warned him contemptuously, dumping him from the supply ship like rubbish consigned to the human junk heap. Yes, be patient, and eventually someone might come out for him--but they had not told him how hard it would be to wait and watch the awful void of space and fire-flake star-patterns whirl about him. Patience, like his former life in the hive cities of the Solar system, had long ago ceased to exist. His senses reeled and he could only stare hypnotized at his immediate surroundings.