Gardner blinked. He knew he was on the spot. He could beg off, on moral and ethical grounds, but that would accomplish nothing but the shattering of his career. Lurion had to be destroyed, in the opinion of Security Chief Karnes, and Lurion would be destroyed—if not by Gardner then by someone else.
He examined himself, wondering if he actually could do the job. He decided that he could if he sincerely felt that the future of Earth depended on it. So the computer was right, and Karnes wrong.
God help me , Gardner thought.
Out loud he said hoarsely, “All right. I accept the assignment.”
“Thanks, Gardner.”
“No thanks necessary, sir. You’re asking me to do a job. I’ll do it. Let it end there.”
“As you wish.”
Glowering across the desk at the Security Chief, Gardner asked, “How’s it going to be done, and when do I leave?”
“You’ll be in charge of a team of five,” Karnes said. “You’ll leave practically at once. Come with me and I’ll see that you get briefed on the full picture.”
In an office somewhere in the depths of the Security building, they gave Gardner the details of the project. The planet would be destroyed by a resonating circuit. It needed five separate co-ordinates. When all five coordinates meshed, that would be the end of Lurion.
“We ought to tell you, I guess, that there’s already been one unsuccessful attempt at the job,” Karnes said. “You represent our second try.”
“What happened to the first team?”
Karnes frowned. “We sent them out to Lurion six months ago. They were carefully-chosen, hand-picked men, of course. Only three out of the five even managed to get to Lurion alive. One man got waylaid by pirates even before he could get out of the Solar System. Another one made a slight miscalculation of his orbit. He piloted his ship square into Betelgeuse.”
“And the other three?” Gardner asked.
“They didn’t do too well either,” said Karnes. “The leader of the group was a man named Davis. He developed an addiction to khall. ”
“Which is?”
“Lurioni vegetable-mash wine. I’ve tasted some. It’s potent stuff. Chalk Davis off. Then the second man contracted a Lurioni disease, went to hospital, and either died or was murdered there. We never got the full story. As for the final man of the team, he got there safely, established himself, and is waiting now for replacements. He can’t do the job alone. His name, by the way, is Jolland Smee. He’ll be your contact when you get there.”
“One man out of five. That isn’t a very good score, is it?”
“We had hoped for a better one.”
“How many teams will have to be sent out before a full complement of men reaches Lurion?”
Karnes pursed his lips together. “We try to profit by past mistakes. We hope that all four of the men we’re sending this time will make it.”
Gardner nodded. The fate of Davis interested him. Why, Gardner wondered, should a presumably sober, serious-minded Security man abruptly turn into a wino the moment he made planetfall on Lurion? An unbearable attack of conscience, maybe? That was the answer that suggested itself to Gardner, and he didn’t like it one bit.
A subaltern presented Gardner with a metal band that fit round his wrist.
“Your indicator,” Karnes said. “An ingenious bit of microminiaturization. There’s a microscopic electroence-phalograph tucked inside there, tuned to five particular mental wavelengths.”
Gardner studied it. There were five little colored panels, unlit and quiescent.
“Your color is white,” Karnes said. “The moment you land on Lurion, that white panel will light up. The red panel will light, too. It’s the color of Jolland Smee. The other three panels will light up, one by one, as the other members of your team arrive.”
Gardner nodded. The wristband looked innocuous, just a bit of ornament, dull and dark now. But when all of its five panels were lit, a world would be doomed.
The room darkened. A screen was lowered in front. A projector hummed.
“These are the other members of your team,” Karnes said. “Study their faces carefully.”
The first face was that of Deever Weegan. His color on the indicator band was green. Weegan looked hard-eyed, fleshless, a man of stoic reserve and forbearance. His face wore a grim, mirthless smile.
“After you’ve seen their faces,” Karnes said, “we’ll let you look at their psych-files and hear records of their voices. You’ll have to be able to recognize these men with your eyes closed if necessary.”
Jolland Smee was shown next. He was about forty and balding, but his face reflected a wiry toughness that did plenty to explain why he had been able to survive when the other four members of his team hadn’t.
Kully Leopold was flashed on the screen after Smee. Leopold was a round-faced, round-eyed little man with a short, stiff red beard and twinkling eyes. He was the sort of deceptively mild-looking person that Security liked to save for the most ruthless of missions. His color on the indicator was blue.
Damon Archer completed the quintet. Yellow was his color on the indicator, but his color as a person, Gardner thought from a first look, was probably a sort of bland gray. Archer’s face showed no outstanding characteristics, no peaks on the graph at all. It was the sort of face that could be forgotten in a moment.
Well, Gardner thought, Karnes probably knows what he’s doing, or else the computer does. Archer probably had an overall competence that made up for his lack of specialties. A man who could easily be forgotten had an enormous asset on such an assignment.
“There’s your team,” Karnes said. “You’re in charge of them.”
“Why not Smee? He’s there already.”
“You’re in charge,” Karnes repeated. “If I wanted Smee to be the leader, I would have chosen him.”
“Sorry, sir.”
“The next step will be to brief you on the personalities of your colleagues. After that, we’ll have some final instructions for you. Will you be able to leave for Lurion by tomorrow night?”
A Security agent is always at his chief’s disposal. Gardner took care that there were never any entangling circumstances. “I’ll be ready, sir.”
“You have until tomorrow night, then, to think all this through, and have all your second and third and fourth thoughts. We’re not forcing you to take on this assignment, Gardner.”
“I understand, sir.”
“You can back out any time you want until tomorrow night. Once you blast off for Lurion, though, you’ll be committing high treason against Earth if you decide to change your mind.”
Gardner moistened his lips. “I think I’ll be going through with it, sir.”
The briefing continued. Gardner hunched forward, committing everything that was said to memory. His life and the life of his planet would depend on how well he did his job.
Five men to destroy a world. Gardner wondered whether this mission would meet the fate of its predecessor.
Maybe. Maybe not.
Well, Earth had sixty-seven years to get the job done. Any number of teams could be sent out in that time. And there still would be time, in all those sixty-seven years. If the computer were right, Gardner thought.
But that was a very big if .
Chapter Two
Gardner blasted off at midnight the following night. He left inconspicuously from a small spaceport maintained by Security; there was no need to go through normal channels in clearing him for departure. Security had its own means.
The ship was a medium-sized one, with room for five passengers. It was slated to be the getaway craft after the job was done. The other members of his team were under instruction to derrick their ships and land on Lurion by dropsuits.
As he traveled, Gardner went over the plan again and again, getting used to it. The murder of an entire world was not an easy thing to assimilate. But he had been shown the computations; he had seen the data. Earth’s existence was threatened. A deadly configura
tion was taking shape on Lurion: the beginning of a power-lust that would lead inevitably to world-smashing war.
Lurion was the fourth “and only inhabited” world of the Betelgeuse system, a smallish planet swinging on a somewhat eccentric orbit half a billion miles from its brilliant sun. At the end of his lonely journey, Gardner came out of warp-drive a few million miles outside Lurion’s atmosphere, shifted to planetary ion-drive, and coasted down.
It was important that the landing be a good one. He didn’t dare crumple the ship into uselessness as he landed it. If anything happened to the ship, the five Security men might well find themselves stranded on the planet they had booby-trapped.
As the craft dropped Lurionward, Gardner retraced the plan once again in his mind, reviewed the names of his team members, brought their faces to mind, re-examined the thumbnail sketches of each that Karnes had given him. Gardner had never met any of the other four in the course of his previous Security work. Security was a big outfit, and its agents didn’t go out of their way to identify themselves even to each other.
Gardner jockeyed his ship through Lurion’s thick, turbulent atmosphere. He pulled out of a dizzying landing-spin when he was still a hundred miles up, got the ship pointing in the right direction at the right moment, shifted over to automatic, and let the cybernetic brain bring him down right on the button.
At the moment of landing, the indicator on his wrist flashed white. An instant later, as soon as Jolland Smee was able to signal contact, the red panel adjoining it lit as well.
So far, so good , Gardner thought.
He peered through his fore viewscreen and saw that his ship had landed on a broad brown dirt apron at the edge of a big, bustling spacefield. The field was bright in the yellowish-red sunlight. Spaceship hulls stuck up skyward here and there over the field in seeming random distribution. Maintenance crews toiled busily over some; others looked as though they had endured decades of neglect.
Unstrapping himself from the protective cradle, Gardner made his way aft to the cargo rack. His suitcase was stored there, the all-important suitcase. Gardner pulled it down delicately. Inside it were the jewels and loupe that went with the false identity Security had provided him with. The sonic generator was also in the suitcase. The jewels were worth at least a million, but Earth Central hadn’t minded the expense; the budget could stand such things. It was the sonic generator that counted. It was more important than any quantity of bright-colored baubles.
Grasping the handle firmly, Gardner carried the suitcase down the catwalk. The Lurioni air was warm and mild, with a faintly pungent ozone tinge. Gardner made his way across the field, suitcase in hand, and toward the customs shed.
They had given him a hypnosleep training course in the chief Lurioni language. As was true of most planets that had reached the cultural stage of interstellar traffic, there were a number of languages spoken, relicts of an earlier day of nationalistic factionalism; but one generally-accepted tongue was spoken everywhere on the planet as a second language. Outsiders had only to learn the planetary language, which served as lingua franca everywhere, and which, on most worlds, was well on its way to supplanting the older languages.
The sign atop the customs shed was, therefore, written in planetary Lurioni, whose alphabet consisted of broad sweeping strokes vaguely reminiscent of Terran Arabic. Beneath the main lettering, in tiny cursives, a translation was inscribed in one of the lesser Lurioni tongues.
Gardner joined the line entering the customs shed. An eagle-faced Lurioni, swarthy and with bright gleaming eyes, pounced on him as he entered.
“Over here, please.”
“I obey,” Gardner replied in the formal Lurioni phrase.
The aliens were humanoid; that is nearly human in form. They were bipeds, mammalian, with swarthy skins capable of insulating them against the fierce radiations of distant Betelgeuse. They were a lean race; adipose tissue was at a premium on Lurion. With their seven many-jointed fingers, their long limbs, and streamlined thin bodies, they had a somewhat spidery appearance.
The Lurioni customs man looked down at Gardner from his height of nearly seven feet.
“Name, please?”
“Roy Gardner, of Earth—Sol III.” There was little point in adopting an alias. The Lurioni made jottings on a form, scribbling busily away.
“Occupation?”
“Jewel merchant.”
At that, the Lurioni’s glittering eyes narrowed speculatively. “Hmm. So interesting. May I have your papers, please?”
Obligingly, Gardner handed over the little leather-bound booklet that contained his Terran passport and the Lurioni jewel peddler’s permit that Security had obtained for him.
The alien opened the booklet and scrutinized the documents carefully. It was all a formality, of course. Finally the customs official said, “I’ll have to examine your baggage, of course. It’s the government regulation, you understand.”
“Of course,” Gardner said mildly.
“Please step through with me.”
The Lurioni led him to an inner room, bare and dank. What looked like religious icons were mounted on each of the damp, green-painted walls. The alien indicated that Gardner should place his lone suitcase on a wobbly bench in the middle of the room. Gardner complied.
“Open the suitcase, please.”
Gardner thumbed the clasps and the suitcase popped open. The alien brushed methodically through Gardner’s personal effects in a bored, matter-of-fact way, without showing any great curiosity. Finally he gestured to the little pouch of jewels.
“These?”
“My merchandise,” Gardner said.
He undid the drawstring and let a few gems roll out onto his palm: three uncut blue-white diamonds, a tri-colored tourmaline, a large pale star sapphire, a glittering opal. The assortment Security had provided for him was a curious mixture of the precious and the semiprecious. Reaching deeper into the pouch, Gardner produced three garnets, a large emerald, a ruby.
The same jewels were usually found in the crusts of all Earthlike worlds, but each planet’s gems had a special characteristic of their own that made them desirable to connoisseurs; hence the interstellar jewel trade.
The customs man checked each stone off against the list on Gardner’s invoices, nodded, and pointed to the generator that lay inconspicuously wrapped in the corner of the suitcase.
“And what’s this?”
Gardner stiffened, trying to conceal his momentary discomfort. The generator was harmless-looking enough; that was why no attempt had been made to conceal it from the Lurioni.
“That … that’s a sonic generator,” he said. “I use it to test gems to see … ah … if … if they’re genuine.”
And , he thought, it happens to be a vital link in a chain of generators that will split this planet into so much sand .
“An interesting device,” the alien said casually, tossing the wrapper over it.
“And very useful,” Gardner said.
“No doubt.”
The Lurioni made a fluttering motion with his seven-fingered hands, indicating dismissal.
“All right, jewel merchant. Your papers seem to be in order. Put your pebbles away. You may pass through.”
The alien’s eyes glittered meaningfully. Gardner caught the hint. He scooped up the gems to replace them in the pouch, and carefully allowed one of the diamonds to slip through his fingers.
It bounced loudly on the smooth floor.
“You seemed to have dropped one of your stones,” the Lurioni remarked dryly.
Gardner shook his head emphatically. “Are you sure?” he asked, grinning. “I didn’t hear anything drop.” He did not look toward the floor.
The alien matched the grin, but there was nothing warm about it. “I guess I was mistaken, then,” the Lurioni said. “Nothing dropped. Nothing at all.”
As Gardner left, he glanced back warily and saw the Lurioni stoop and hastily snatch the diamond up. Gardner smiled. He had acted perfectly in his
assumed character. Rule One , he thought. A smart jewel merchant will always bribe the customs men when he arrives in a strange place. They expect it as their due .
Suitcase in hand, documents carefully stored in his inner breast pocket, Gardner made his way out of the customs enclosure and into the crowded spaceport terminal. Ignoring the beckoning hands of salesmen and hustlers and pushers, Gardner went straight forward, heading toward the taxi stand.
Security had arranged through the consular service to have a room available for him in a mediocre Lurioni hotel. It was a small room in a crowded section of the metropolis, because they did not want him to attract undue attention. Jewel merchants were traditionally secretive; they did not rent majestic suites.
A low, snub-nosed taxi was idling at the stand. Gardner signaled to the driver, who opened the door for him with grudging courtesy.
“Where to?”
“Nichantor Hotel,” Gardner said.
The cab left the curb and purred smoothly along the wide road that led from the spaceport to the city. Gardner sat back, relaxing.
“Earthman, aren’t you?” the cabbie asked.
“That’s right.”
“Haven’t seen many of your kind coming through this way lately. You’re the first Earthman in weeks, you know. You take a liner?”
“Private ship,” Gardner said.
It wasn’t surprising that few Earthmen landed on Lurion nowadays, he thought. For the past year, ever since the computer’s projected data had revealed that Lurion would destroy Earth if it were not first destroyed itself, Earth Central had kept a careful, if subtle, check on passports issued for travel to Lurion. No Earthman whose death would be a major loss was allowed to go there: the passport applications in such cases were politely refused, with the explanation that “current conditions” did not permit large-scale travel to Lurion. But there were few such cases.
On the other hand, it was necessary to have a goodly number of Earthmen on Lurion to provide protective camouflage for the Security team. If all the Earthmen on Lurion were suddenly to leave en masse, it would be extremely awkward for the five members of the destroying team.