The Ladder in the Sky by John Brunner

taking over your ship and setting up as pirates.”
    Was it starting before they’d lifted for space?
    Ogric wished profoundly that he could simply turn the lot of them back on the ground and go somewhere else for his workers. But he was in government service, and under orders to supply willing labor for the Vashti mines, so he’d have to make the best of it.
    “All right!” he said, making up his mind. “Hold the rest of the intake in the hold where they’re being fed. Close off all the corridors leading out of the workers’ quarters. Get Lieutenant Balden to sort out the zombie, the man who started it, and anyone else he thinks, or you think, might put us in the picture, and have them up in my cabin in half an hour. And get the workers calmed down. And send a man to the port commandant with my compliments and tell him I’ll be late for dinner. Got that?”
    “Aye, sir,” the master-at-arms said, and doubled away.

    “He’s a what?” the intellectual lieutenant said, sounding rather bored, when the master-at-arms came panting with the message.
    “Sold to a devil, they say. And they’re so scared of him they’d rather go back to starvation than ship to Vashti with him even with their contracts worth twenty thousand.”
    A horrifying memory clicked in the lieutenant’s mind. He straightened up as though he had been kicked at the base of the spine and stared wildly around for Zethel. But there was no sign of the big man.
    Sold to a devil? And supposed to be dead? It couldn’t really be the original of the story. But if even the government authorities of Berak had taken the notion seriously enough to clear out the thieves’ quarter and thus risk spreading some thousands of the criminal class all over their city, then who could say what the illiterate superstitious might not make of it? He had to swallow hard before he could trust his voice; then he barked at the master-at-arms to come with him back to the ship and show him where the trouble was.
    The corridors in the workers’ quarters were lined with anxious faces peering out of the doors. Some of the bolder ones had emerged despite the threat of men armed with gas-guns at every intersection, and were warily eying each other as though none of them was sure who the “dead man” really was.
    Lieutenant Balden halted nervously, looking down the corridor where the trouble had begun. In a low voice he spoke to the master-at-arms.
    “Tell them I’m coming to put this thing right,” he said. “Promise them there’ll be no trouble.”
    The master-at-arms shouted the message ringingly down the corridor. It had no visible effect, except that some of the men and women in the passage drew back into nearby rooms. A dry feeling in his throat, the lieutenant allowed the master-at-arms to lead him forward.
    Before the last door in the corridor they pasued. “I think he’s still in here,” the master-at-arms said, leaning on the panel and sliding it aside. “Yes. That’s him.”
    “Him?” the lieutenant echoed in surprise. He stepped forward involuntarily. Yes, it was definitely the pale-haired, old-young man he had seen at the examination hut. And come to think of it, there had been a dead look in his eyes.
    He choked the idea off firmly. Glancing around the cabin, he saw gear belonging to about four or five other people scattered on the bunks. And one other person besides the pale-haired young man—a girl, about the same age, with plain untidy brown hair cut irregularly short, her freshly scrubbed face rather attractive and heavily freckled across the nose and cheekbones, her mouth full and almost pouting. She was taking garments out of the bag in which they had been issued to her and stowing them in a locker, as calm as could be.
    The pale-haired young man, on the other hand, was doing nothing at all but staring into space.
    “You!” Balden said. “Are you the cause of all this trouble? Are you the man that everyone’s saying is possessed of a