He was born on Venus, in the most slippery part of Skid Road in Old Castarona. His father was a renegade Earthman who married a mutant swamp-girl from the edge of the Tihar Forest. Childhood in such surroundings is a tonic to the adventurous spirit, and Wilding must have had spirit to survive at all. Of necessity, his mother taught him to steal. His father taught him to kill, by killing his mother in a drunken frenzy. From neighbors and rivals, he learned most of the anti-social trades, and he was an apt pupil.
His mind was uncluttered, free of the commonly accepted ideas of morality, without normal inhibitions. He killed and stole, but casually according to his needs and ambitions. Crime, except for profit, would have seemed immoral to him. Periodically he was caught and sentenced, which was according to the rules of the game; but no prison could ever hold him long. Even for frontier Venus, he acquired a potent reputation, both for crime-without violence, and as an escape artist. When he moved on to other planets and began piratical raids along the spaceways, he gave the security patrols some evil moments.
It was not inevitable that he be trapped and stopped dead by being sent to Alcatraz Asteroid. With luck, he might even have made his pot and retired to wealth and respectability. But his feet must have been slippery from Skid Road, for he slipped, stepped out of character and killed just once from a motive of, from his point of view, sheer stupidity. Protecting Elshar, a crippled slave-girl, from a cruel beating at the hands of a Martian slaver, he struck out in a passion against injustice. For this final murder, he was sentenced as an incorrigible. A man should hold to his pattern....
Wilding waited, unconscious, slowly dying, and time passed. A lot of time. For the dwellers in The Rock did not share his impatience. It was off-season for the supply ship, and a far more interesting caper was in progress than the routine pickup of a dying man in a spacesuit. A series of interesting brawls and murders was drawing to a suspenseful conclusion. Nobody wanted to miss anything or anybody, until the situation died out literally in a sprawl of charred and mutilated bodies.
So Wilding knew nothing about it when the lighter eventually came out. His body was blue, puffed and more dead than alive, the spark-blue eyes glazed and sightless. He could not see the small craft circle and draw in the supplies with magnetic nets. He was unaware of the skyhooks that reached out to haul him through the airlock into the lighter, and was too far gone to care. For a man attempting death and rebirth, he had a good start on the first half of his project.
Pangs of returning sensation brought him sharply conscious and reminded him of his plan. If he were to be the first man ever to escape from Alcatraz Asteroid, he must start at once by establishing his place in a dangerous and hard-bitten society. He began his task by opening his eyes. Blistered and stiffened lids responded slowly.
The cubicle was dim and murky, air stale but cool. Grunting, he tried to sit up. Someone bent over him.
A woman's face blocked further view. The face was old and wise and ugly; the woman huge and muscular, a graying Amazon who might be a good foot taller than Wilding when she straightened up. Sound boomed from her as if from a cracked bell, and most of the cracks showed on her weathered skin. She was mildly drunk, her breath poisonous with mushroom beer.
"What's new in Venusport?" she asked.