The Planet Killers

  Lori managed a smile. Gardner saw the look in her eyes, and he knew what it meant.

  “Lori …”

  She nodded gently. “We can always come back here later, when you’ve done your job.”

  “All right,” Gardner said. He turned to Smee. “Stay here with us tonight. Tomorrow we’ll fly into town and arrange the sale of the farm. Lori, call the spaceport and book two reservations on that flight to Lurion.”

  “You sure this is what you want to do?” Smee asked. “You’ve got a pretty nice place here. Maybe you don’t really want to give it up.”

  “It can wait,” Gardner said. “Lurion can’t. I’ve got a job to do there. Only this time the job isn’t murder.”

  One of Our Asteroids Is Missing

  Chapter One

  The asteroid was just a rock, a big rock floating free in the long night of space. It had a purplish glitter to it. John Storm was seeing it against the distant backdrop of cheerless Mars. Tiredly, Storm punched out landing coordinates.

  I’ll go down and have a look , he thought.

  There was no point passing this one up. Even though he had been out here in the asteroid belt for a year and a half, seeking and not finding, he knew it was foolish to pass up any uncharted, unclaimed asteroid. Perhaps this one would be the ore source he wanted. Perhaps.

  The last one hadn’t. Nor the one before that. Nor any of the others. But perhaps—

  Perhaps .

  He jabbed at the keys of the ship’s computer. It wasn’t much of a computer, wasn’t much of a ship, but he couldn’t afford to be choosy. At the turn of the century the Hawthorn 113 had been the finest thing in small spacecraft. But the century had turned eighteen years ago, Hawthorn had its model 127 on the market now, and Storm knew he was lucky not to get blown to bits every time he coaxed some blast from the rattletrap rocket’s elderly tubes.

  The asteroid glittered in his viewplate. Storm smiled grimly at it, and scratched his cheek where the stubble itched, and wondered for a moment if he’d ever get to take a bath again. Then he tapped the Function key, and relays clicked somewhere in the shiny nose of his ship, and impulses spurted back toward the reaction chamber, and the old Hawthorn shuddered and bucked and dipped asteroid-ward, down and forward by spacelubberly ways of thinking.

  As his little ship matched orbits with the floating hunk of rock, John Storm clambered into his spacesuit and readied himself for landing. Names went through his mind like a litany. Cesium, tantalum, lithium. Praseodymium and neodymium. Cesium, tantalum, lithium. Praseo .

  Light metals. Reactive metals. Rare earths. An oddball bunch of ragtag elements. A few generations ago they’d been as useless as uranium was in 1875. But not any longer. They were the elements that kept the space industry going. The cesium ion-engine, powering fifty million spacecraft, for instance. How much cesium was there on Earth? Not enough to meet that hungry demand. Tantalum and niobium, for computer elements. Where did you get five hundred pounds of niobium on a day’s notice? You couldn’t, that’s all. Gallium for semiconductors? Rubidium? Lanthanum?

  The whole vast complex of Earth’s electronics industry was crying out for those obscure elements. But where could they be found? Canada’s great treasurehouse of reactive metals had been mined heavily since the middle of the 20th Century. Those deposits up in Manitoba couldn’t last forever, not at the present rate of consumption. There was cesium in Africa, beryllium in South America, but who knew when some cockeyed revolution would cut off the supply?

  Earth needed those metals. A fortune waited for the man who found a new source.

  But where? Under the Antarctic ice-shield, maybe, only Earth wasn’t that desperate yet. The other place to look was space. The asteroid belt in particular.

  And so a new band of ’49ers went to space. They weren’t looking for gold, of course. No one gave a damn about gold any more, except the jewellers and their customers. The big money was in metals with strange names.

  Gallium and tantalum and cesium and lanthanum —

  Hopeful prospectors went to space. John Storm was one of them.

  Everybody said he was crazy to go, of course.

  He was twenty-four, which made him eight years older than the 21st Century, and he had a graduate degree from Appalachia Polytech, as a mining engineer. There were plenty of jobs waiting for him. Good jobs.

  Donovan, the personnel man from Universal Mining, was the first to tell him he was crazy to go. Donovan had interviewed Storm on the Appalachia campus in June of 2016, waving job offers around. He was a short, florid man with fantastic eyebrows, thin lips and a grim-set jaw, but he was kindly at heart.

  “Start in August,” he told Storm. “We need engineers at our installation in Tierra del Fuego. It’s $16,000 base pay, plus maintenance allotments.”

  “Will you hold the job for me for two years?”

  “Why?”

  “I’m going to go prospecting,” Storm told him. “If I don’t get anywhere in two years, I’ll come back and go to work for you. But first I want to go.”

  “Don’t be crazy,” Donovan told him bluntly. “You don’t want to be a sourdough, Storm. We’ve got this nice neat job all ready for you.”

  “Will it wait two years?”

  “Why throw away two years of advancement? Man with your talents, he can be making twenty grand in two years. Stock options and all the rest. Why—”

  “If I find what I’m looking for, twenty grand will seem like pennies,” Storm said doggedly.

  Donovan’s eyebrows fluttered like flags in the wind. His jowls shook in bewilderment. “You know how many guys are out there poking around the asteroids now? I don’t mean corporation expeditions, I mean solos? Hundreds! You know how many find anything?”

  “I mean to try.”

  “Half of them get killed out there, Storm. You don’t want to get killed. You’ve got a girl, don’t you?”

  “What about her?”

  “Marry her. You’re how old? Twenty-four? What are you waiting for? We’ll give you a good house to live in. Settle down, draw your paycheck, have kids. Leave the asteroids to the dopes.”

  Storm laughed. “Settle down in Tierra del Fuego, huh? Why not on Mars?”

  “You ought to see our installation down there,” Donovan said. “We’ve got the whole place climate-rigged. You wouldn’t know you were in Patagonia. It’s paradise down there. Outdoor swimming ten months a year. You take my advice, let us send you down there for a look. Just a look, and we’ll pay your way back and forth. Smell the air. The perfume of the flowers. You’ll love it down there. And there’s plenty of room for advancement. Someone like you, with your drive, your brains, you’ll be moving up all the time.”

  It was all very poetic, Storm thought, and all very tempting. But not for him. Not yet. First he had to look to the stars, and then he could accept the split-level home in Tierra del Fuego, the stock options, and all the rest.

  “Will you hold the job for me for two years?” he asked.

  “You must be out of your head,” Donovan said.

  Storm’s friends thought so too, though they were less blunt about it. They had been all through college and graduate school with him, and they knew the career situation as well as he did. When the Universal Mining Cartel offered you a job, you took it. You didn’t go helling around in the asteroids first.

  “Prospecting is for crackpots,” his friend Ned Lyons told him. “You know what the odds are!”

  “I’m going to try it. If that makes me a crackpot, so be it.”

  “Be reasonable, Johnny. They’re giving you a job, Liz is ready to marry you, only a lunatic would go to the asteroids, and you—”

  “I’m a lunatic,” Storm said. “Okay?” He leaned forward, tensely curving his thick, strong fingers. There was golden hair sprouting like fine wire on the backs of his hands. He was a big, blonde man, thick-shouldered and powerful. He liked to think he had Viking blood in him, and he was probably right. “Look,” Storm said, “if I go with U
niversal and stick with them I can make lots of money, right? A senior mining engineer gets about forty grand, and that’s not bad, is it?”

  “Damned right it isn’t.”

  “Okay. Suppose I go to the asteroids and hook onto a million dollars’ worth of cesium? Invest that million at four percent and I’ve got the same forty grand—and my freedom. I don’t have to live in Patagonia, and I don’t have to jump when UMC tells me to jump. I can do independent research, write books, just loaf if I like.”

  “It’s a gamble, Johnny.”

  “It’s a damned big gamble. But it’s worth it. Two years of my life against independence.”

  Of course, it was two years of someone else’s life, too. There was Liz to consider, and Storm had considered her. They had been over it a hundred times, a thousand times, and he had probed her viewpoint until he was sure she meant it. She wanted him to go, and she would wait. Two years.

  “I won’t guarantee what I’ll do after the two years,” she told him gravely, and she could be very grave when she wanted to be, hazel eyes solemn as the tomb. “But I’ll wait the two years. That’s a promise.”

  “You’re sure you want to?”

  She smiled. “I want you ,” she said. “But I know I can’t have you unless I let you go there first. Otherwise, every time you looked up at the stars—no. No. I wouldn’t be able to spend the rest of my life knowing I had kept you back. Women are always trying to keep their men back, settling for the sure thing and the easy life. I won’t. Go. I wish I could go with you.”

  “I wish you could too. But it’s something I’ll have to do alone.”

  “I know. Only … Johnny—”

  “Liz?”

  “Find your treasure fast, will you? Find it right away and come home?”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” he promised softly.

  He hadn’t been able to do very well. His time was nearly up, now. Part of the bargain he had made with himself was that he would stay two years to the day, no more. He didn’t want to join the ranks of the aimless drifters who wandered the spaceways forever, always in search of the big strike. The sane man has to know when to give up.

  Storm didn’t like the idea of giving up. Somewhere out here, he knew, there was commercial-grade ore. Once there had been a planet between Mars and Jupiter, and some unimaginable catastrophe in the inconceivable past had blown that planet to flinders, and there was every reason to think that the fragments of that world—the asteroids—were rich in light metals. There had already been some remarkable strikes to prove it.

  Storm’s luck hadn’t been very good. It was a year before he found anything worth spitting at, and even that was only a scratchy handful of lepidolite, lithium ore. Not in a commercial grade, not in a commercial quantity.

  On he went, from one forlorn drifting rock to another, burrowing here, scrabbling there. Some asteroids were pure granite or basalt, chunks of mountains in orbit around each other, while others held traces of something worthwhile. Only traces. Then came the time he came across something remotely promising, a tiny asteroid that held swirls of lepidolite and pollucite and spodumene and half a dozen other interesting ores. Not enough to repay the cost of shipping to Earth, but enough to give him hope of finding something more to his needs.

  Some rough computations told him the approximate part of the asteroid belt where he thought other asteroids of the same general makeup might be found. He headed there, nosing from one to the next.

  Now this one. Eight miles in diameter, glinting purplish in reflected light from Mars. Storm left his tiny ship in a parking orbit, a hundred feet up, and descended by flexible titanium rope. The ship seemed to hover directly overhead, though actually it was still moving, following the asteroid’s own orbital rotation exactly and so maintaining the same relative position.

  Storm dropped the last five feet to the surface of the asteroid. On an asteroid so small, it wasn’t a good idea actually to land your ship. The shock of blastoff would kick the asteroid a little way out of its orbit, and lead to complications that were best avoided.

  He looked around. The skyline, such that it was, was jagged and unfriendly. Low hills, but sharp-edged. The stars gleamed brightly beyond the horizon. With no atmosphere, there was no twinkle, of course, and each star was like a hard jewel riveted in the firmament.

  Storm began to roam, to gather his ore-samples. He was skilled enough in his trade to be capable of intuitive guesses, and wise enough not to trust them. Even so, an irrepressible feeling of excitement grew in him this time. He had felt the same sort of excitement the first time he had gathered ore samples on an asteroid, but that had only been a wild, irrational, and doomed hope that he would be first time lucky. Now, after nearly two years of steady disappointment, the sensation of imminent success came alive in him again.

  He nearly ran back to the ladder with his samples. Running, on an asteroid practically without gravity, might have been risky. It wouldn’t have taken much of a push to jolt him out into space, where he could flounder forever without getting back to his ship or solid ground.

  With controlled strides, he got to the ladder, and stamped his foot hard. The equal and opposite reaction sent him shooting up, feather-light, even lighter. When he was twenty feet off the ground, he reached out, grinning, and snared a loop of his ladder, and clambered quickly the rest of the way into the hatch of his ship.

  He pulled off his helmet, but didn’t bother with the rest of his spacesuit just then. Into the analysis hopper went the ore samples.

  The verdict came soon enough.

  There was ore here. Marketable ore.

  The way it looked, he had a whole damned planet full of marketable ore.

  Jackpot!

  Chapter Two

  Storm was a little puzzled by the letdown, but not really surprised at all. Two years of steady disappointments had ground down his spirits, so that now, with unbelievable success his for the grasping, he had no real way to react to it. He was tired, and two years of loneliness had drained away his emotions, so all he could do was grin faintly and be mildly pleased that he would not be going home empty-handed.

  I’m a millionaire , he told himself. But the idea failed to sink in.

  I won my gamble, I can laugh in Donovan’s fat face now .

  No reaction. No tingle down the spine, no wild laughter, no whoops of glee. He found himself taking it as a matter-of-factly as though he had found a lost dime, not an asteroid chock-full of valuable minerals.

  Storm shrugged and told himself that the reaction would come later. He could jubilate afterward. Right now there was work to do, and plenty of it.

  He allowed himself a frugal meal—there wasn’t much left on board, anyway—and then went down the ladder again, to run some tests. He needed data on the asteroid’s mass and density, on its chemical makeup, on a lot of things. Oh, most of it could come later, he knew, but he wanted to find out at least approximately what he had.

  Eight hours later, he knew, more or less. And the immensity of it dazed him even more; It was simply too big a find to react to emotionally at all.

  The asteroid, it seemed, was a solid chunk of reactive ores. There was lepidolite here, chock-full of lithium and run through with gallium as well. There was beryl ore. There was cesium-bearing pollucite. There were half a dozen other valuable ores, formed in who knew what caldron untold billions of years before. Storm had been on field trips to Manitoba, of course, had seen the astonishing conglomeration of ores in places like Bernic Lake, the dazzling jumble of exotic metals stirred helter-skelter through the earth. Well, this was Bernic Lake all over again, he thought, uprooted and sent spinning through space!

  There was no point wasting time estimating the cash value of all this. Millions? Billions? Who could tell? He was rich, that was all he knew. Or would be, as soon as he could file his claim to the incredible rock.

  And that was the next order of business: filing the claim.

  Mars was ninety million miles away. That was almos
t as great a distance as the gap between Earth and the Sun, but at the moment Mars was the closest heavenly body to John Storm. It was another seventy million miles on to Earth, at the moment, though the figures changed constantly as Mars, Earth, and this nameless asteroid continued to whirl along their respective orbits.

  Mars would be John Storm’s first stop. He had the orbits on his side, since Mars and the asteroid would be approaching one another all the time he was en route, while Earth would be heading the other way. When he was ready to leave Mars for Earth, Earth would be coming round the other side of her orbit, which would save him some time there. Hopping from planet to planet is a little more complex than taking a jet from New York to San Francisco. New York and San Francisco, at least, stay put.

  Storm checked out the location and orbit of the asteroid, “his” asteroid, now, and reeled in his ladder and punched out fresh coordinates for Mars. There was no blaze of light as he blasted out of his parking orbit, just the invisible cloud of ions from the cesium engine. It was pleasant to think that every time a spaceship blasted off, the universe’s supply of cesium diminished ever so slightly, hiking the value of the ore that he had just discovered.

  Acceleration built up. Storm was in a hurry now, and he had the computer plot a maximum-velocity course. The gravity-drag bashed him back into his acceleration couch like a giant fist, but he didn’t mind, because the faster a start he got, the quicker he would get to Mars, and that meant the quicker he’d get home. Home to Liz.

  He was tempted to relay a message to her now. All he had to do was beam it ahead to Mars, and the communication satellite there would catch it and flick it on to Earth. “Coming home with the bacon,” he could say. “Everything 100% successful!”

  These days it cost $50 to beam a message from Mars to Earth. With his dwindling funds, he had been able to send word to Liz only four or five times a year, the same mixture of discouragement and affection each time. It would cost an extra $25 to relay the message from the asteroid belt to Mars.