The Planet Killers

  Thriftily, he decided against it. He’d be on Mars soon enough. Liz had waited this long for news; another few days wouldn’t be critical.

  Then he grinned. “What the hell am I being thrifty about?” he said out loud. “I’m a multi-millionaire now!”

  He began to switch the communication beam on. Then a new thought occurred: suppose someone monitored the call? Someone who knew he was a prospector, who would correctly interpret his message as word of a strike in the asteroids? He might be inviting trouble that way. Who knew what would happen? Claim-jumping, piracy—this was a pretty raw frontier, after all, 21st Century or not.

  This time Storm laughed. The relay system was completely automatic. He didn’t need to worry about snoopers. He would make the call, he decided, and to hell with the expense, to the deuce with suspicious little fears.

  He flicked on the beam.

  “To Miss Lizabeth Chase, 11735 Coolidge Lane, Greater New York 113, Appalachia, Western Hemisphere, Earth:

  “Bringing home the bacon, baby. Get ready for a celebration.

  “Johnny.

  “End of message.”

  He listened to the playback, nodded, touched the Transmit button. Off went the message toward the Mars communication satellite. It would take about four minutes to get there, Storm knew. Allow some time for a backlog of transmissions, and he could figure that within an hour the message would be on tape at one of the communication satellites orbiting Earth. Liz would have it tomorrow.

  The speed of light, John Storm thought, was a wonderful thing.

  He was travelling at a somewhat slower speed, unfortunately. But he’d get there, too, not quite as fast as the message. He was on his way.

  Mars gleamed reddish-brown in the very black sky. The little ship surged forward, and Storm waited, and slowly the importance of his find seeped into his mind and he accepted it and began quietly to laugh with glee.

  “I want to register a mining claim,” Storm said.

  “Use the machine,” the clerk told him, and pointed.

  Storm nodded and made his way to the end of the hall. On Mars, there was no room for dead weight. One clerical worker and a bunch of machines handled the work that a hundred human beings would have done on Earth.

  He confronted the machine. It wanted a filing fee, first of all. Storm put a two-dollar piece in the slot, and the machine hummed and a green light flashed and a lucite panel came sliding forward. Under the panel was a printed form. Glowing instructions told Storm to use the stylus to file his claim. Please Print , he was advised.

  Storm printed. He took more care than on any other document he could remember filling out, and in his twenty-six years he had filled out plenty. He put down his name, and his various identification numbers, and the nature of his claim, and the catalog number of his asteroid, and its orbit designation, and about fifty other things.

  There , he thought.

  He studied the filled-in form, nodded in approval, and punched a button. A yellow light flashed, the panel retracted, and an instant later a stamped copy of his claim form came rattling out on a tray. Storm jerked it free.

  The asteroid wasn’t his, yet. By the Space Act of 1997, it was possible for individuals to claim mining rights on natural orbiting bodies of less than planetary mass, with various provisos. The claiming individual had to begin mining operations within six months, or lose his claim; that was to prevent people from running around randomly claiming everything in sight. There were limitations on the number of claims any one individual (or corporation) could make. And, since space was deemed to be the property of the human race in general, it was necessary to agree to pay a whopping royalty to the United Nations in return for a grant of mining privileges.

  What he had just done was file a preliminary claim. By tight-beam relay, the claim would be forwarded to the master computer on Earth. If all went well, a formal mining grant would be forthcoming in a month or two. His claim would be checked out, first, and a certain amount of red tape was inevitable. But at least he had seen to it that no one else could claim the billion-dollar asteroid.

  Unless, he thought, someone had already claimed it. It was listed on his charts as unclaimed, but the charts were never up to date. For all he knew, someone else had been there two weeks ahead of him, and his claim was already being processed.

  It wasn’t anything Storm liked to think about. He brushed the idea from his mind, carefully put his copy of the claim form away, and left the Hall of Records.

  Marsville still had a raw, unfinished look. Almost fifty years had passed since the first expedition of humans had set foot on Mars, and the colony itself was twenty years old. It sprawled haphazardly under a series of interlinked geodesic domes, and the air, while thin, tasted almost like Earth’s to one who had not breathed Earth air for a while. Most of Marsville was built of corrugated tin shacks. Architecture would have to wait a while longer.

  Storm’s first call, after the all-important business of staking his claim, was Marsville Spaceport.

  “When’s the next liner for Earth?” he asked.

  “Three days.”

  “Martian days?”

  “You bet,” was the unsmiling answer. “We got no other kind of days around here, pal.”

  “Got room for another passenger?”

  “I suppose we might. Cash on the line, though. You can’t get home on credit.”

  “Don’t worry,” Storm told him. “I bought my ticket before I left Earth. Here.”

  He presented the wrinkled document. The colonist looked at him coldly but with respect.

  “Smart one, eh? Not one out often buys himself a round-trip ticket.”

  “I did,” Storm said quietly.

  “Prospector?”

  “Yes.”

  “Lost your shirt, eh?”

  Storm shrugged. “It wasn’t so bad.”

  The colonist chuckled. “I see them come, and I see them go. Young ones and not so young. A bunch of damn fools. No offense meant, y’understand.”

  “Of course not,” Storm said. “Why’d you come to Mars?”

  Storm was favored with a yellow-toothed grin. “It was a place to go, something to do. Ten thousand people up here and seven billion down there. I figured I had a better chance here. Not to get rich. I didn’t come here to get rich, and I didn’t. Just to live.”

  “You like it here?”

  “I bought a one-way ticket, and I’m not sorry.” The cold eyes centered on Storm’s. “I guess you want to sell your ship, eh?”

  “I guess I do.”

  “Fellow over there, he’ll give you the best deal. Tell him Jerry Burke sent you. He won’t rob you.”

  Storm pocketed his validated ticket and crossed over to see the dealer in used ships. It didn’t pay to try to pilot a one-man or two-man ship from Earth to Mars or back again. It was a whole lot cheaper to take a commercial space-liner out to Mars, buy an old heap of a used two-manner, and sell it again after exploring the asteroid belt.

  Half an hour of haggling and Storm had sold his ship. All in all, he was pleased with the deal. He had paid twenty thousand for it, and sold it for fifteen. That was only two and a half thousand a year for the use of the ship, not bad at all. And a tax deduction, too, for the depreciation. He smiled at that. In the bracket he was going to be in, tax deductions would be important!

  But now he was stuck in Marsville for three days—three Martian days, the colonist had told him with a kind of provincial arrogance. Each Martian hour was only a minute and a half longer than an Earth hour, but oh, how fussy they were about their extra 37 minutes a day!

  He took a look around town. He saw the shacks, and the hopefully marked-out places where the civic buildings would rise, and the tool dumps and all the rest. It was only ten years since women had been allowed to settle here, making Marsville a true colony. The first Mars-baby was six years old—the first one that had survived babyhood, anyway.

  Six Earth years, of course. Storm smiled at that. The Martian yea
r was 1.88 Earth years long, so of course the first Mars-baby was not yet four years old, Mars-fashion. Well, he couldn’t object. It was their planet, after all.

  There were no real native Martians. Nothing lived in the wind-swept red deserts except stunted, scrubby little plants and a few animals somewhat less impressive than mice. The “Martians” were the Earth-born colonists. Storm wondered what Mars would be like a couple of generations from now, when it began to diverge from the mother world. It would be interesting to watch, he thought.

  But right now Mars held no fascination for him at all. He was itching to get home. There was no help for it, though. Here he was, marooned on Mars, and there he stayed, three solid Martian days, until the big Earthbound liner was ready to leave.

  It could have been worse, he figured. The liner made only one round trip a month. He had showed up almost at the best possible time.

  Almost. And finally, with a roar and a blaze, the ship broke free of Mars’ feeble grasp, and carried John Storm and a hundred other passengers back to the mother world.

  Chapter Three

  The Hall of Records in Greater New York was a good deal more imposing than its counterpart on Mars. It was a towering skyscraper on the banks of the Hudson, the tallest building in the suburb of Nyack. John Storm had lost no time getting there. The spaceport was another hundred miles to the north, just beyond the last outlying fringes of the city. Storm had phoned Liz to let her know he was home, and they had agreed to meet at the Hall of Records.

  “Is it true?” she had kept asking. “Did you really find something out there?”

  “I really did,” he said. “Look, it’s too big to tell you about this way. Come meet me, and I’ll give you the whole story.”

  She hadn’t arrived yet. Storm waited none too patiently on an endless line on the thirtieth floor of the Hall of Records, moving up a painful notch at a time. His muscles were no longer adjusted to Earth gravity, and he felt his body sagging against the unaccustomed pull. The space liner had had artificial Earth grav, and when he stepped aboard it felt at first as though there were magnets on the soles of his shoes.

  He reached the front of the line, finally. There were no machines here, not with seven billion Earthmen needing jobs. A thin, bespectacled, harried-looking face peered from behind the wire cage at Storm.

  “Validation of mining claim,” Storm said. He slipped the copy of the form he had filled out on Mars through the wicket. “Would you check that, please?”

  “Certainly, sir.” Vague, gray noises. A pallid hand took the form, laid it face down on a glowing scanner plate. Storm tapped his fingertips on the counter. This was the moment he had been losing sleep over for days. His application was being scanned, somewhere in the depths of the vast computer that handled mining claims. Suppose his claim was rejected, for some reason or other? Suppose someone else had filed a prior claim on the asteroid? Suppose—

  The clerk was frowning. A strip of tape came clicking out of the machine. Storm could not read the words on it.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” the clerk was saying. “There’s no record of any such claim having been made on Mars.”

  The quiet, impersonal words hit Storm like a sledgehammer in the teeth.

  “ What? What did you say?”

  “No record of this claim being filed on Mars.”

  “That’s impossible!” Storm blurted. “Look, here’s the duplicate! It’s been stamped, hasn’t it? That means the claim was recorded and transmitted to Earth!”

  “I’m sorry, sir. The computer says it hasn’t.”

  “Hasn’t been transmitted?”

  “Hasn’t been filed, sir. I’m very sorry. Next, please?”

  “Hold it!” Storm bellowed, and heard people muttering angrily behind him on line. His hands trembled and his face grew red. He had been prepared for almost any eventuality, but not something like this. “You mean to tell me that the claim filed got lost on way to Earth?”

  “No, sir. Claims never get lost. The transmittal process is automatic and failure-proof. If the claim was filed at all on Mars, there’ll be a record of it in the files here. No record, no claim. I’m very sorry, sir. Would you please move along, now?”

  “But what about this copy I’ve got here? It’s got a claim number on it! Can’t you check and—”

  “I have checked, sir.” The wan figure behind the counter looked at Storm reproachfully, almost apologetically, and tapped a bell. It tinkled gently. Storm turned, half expecting to be collared by guards and roughly shown the gate. Instead, a slick, supervisory-looking woman appeared. She seemed young, thirty at the outside, but Storm saw the brittle, thorny glint in her eye and knew she was going to mean just more trouble for him.

  “Yes?” she asked. “Is there any difficulty?”

  “There sure is,” Storm said. “I’m trying to check on this mining claim. The fellow here buzzed the computer, and got told no claim was ever filed.”

  “But you filed one?”

  “Of course I did! Here’s the slip,” Storm said. He felt the forces of bureaucracy gathering round him, and there was a tightness at his throat. “There’s been some kind of error in the computer, that’s all. Or maybe the chap there punched the wrong button. Here. Take a look.”

  She glanced at Storm’s document and flashed a smile as warm as a glacier’s core. “Of course, Mr.… ah … Storm. If you’ll come with me, we’ll investigate. We can’t settle the matter right out here in the hall, you know.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Only to my office, Mr. Storm. Just across the hall.”

  “I’m supposed to meet someone here. A young woman. I told her I’d be—”

  “It’ll take only a moment or two, Mr. Storm. Please. Come with me.”

  Feeling very much as though they were humoring him, as though they regarded him as some kind of crank or perhaps a criminal, Storm followed her. Her office was small, austerely furnished, depressing.

  She waved him into a seat in front of her desk. Storm began to feel he was applying for a loan at a bank, facing a particularly flinty vice-president. The placard on her desk told him that she was Miss Vyzinski. Was Miss Vyzinski in charge of the crackpot detail, he wondered?

  She studied his claim sheet for a moment. “It looks perfectly genuine,” she said.

  “It ought to. It is.”

  “Well, we’ll soon have some idea. Suppose we begin by running a recheck.”

  “Suppose we do,” Storm said grimly.

  Behind her desk was a machine very much like the one the clerk had used. Motionless, hardly even breathing, Storm watched her place his claim sheet over the glowing scanner plate. A long moment ticked by, and then a ribbon of tape extruded itself from the machine. This time Storm was able to read what it said. It said 324.

  “What does that mean?” Storm asked.

  Miss Vyzinski looked at him sternly. “It means, I’m afraid, that no such claim has been recorded.”

  “But—”

  “One moment,” she said. “I’ll run some further checks. The first thing to do is see if your claim has somehow been misfiled. It’s a one-in-a-billion possibility, but, even so—”

  “It’s worth checking,” Storm said, dry-throated.

  She punched something out on a keyboard, and put the claim sheet on the scanner again. The machine emitted a vague humming sound. While they waited, she said, as though to soothe him, “It once happened that a claim less than six months old went to the storage drum. That’s where the older claims go. There’s at least a finite chance that yours—”

  Another strip of tape emerged from the machine. Miss Vyzinski studied it.

  “No?” Storm asked.

  “No. Your claim’s not in current, and it’s not in dead storage, and it’s not in pending. That means it’s not anywhere, Mr. Storm.”

  “But … how—?”

  “Let’s attack it from another angle,” she said crisply.

  “There’s a claim number on this paper, right
? Very well. Let’s run a check and see what’s entered for this claim number, shall we? I can get a facsim.”

  “Go ahead,” Storm said hollowly. He looked down at the carpeted floor. Miss Vyzinski began efficiently to push buttons and tap keys, and Storm waited, trying to keep calm in the face of this nonsense.

  It took three or four minutes, this time. Storm wondered if Liz had arrived by now. She might be outside in the main hall, looking for him. Well, she had waited so long that another few minutes wouldn’t matter. He had to get this mess cleared up before he left Miss Vyzinski’s office.

  A yellow facsim sheet came popping out of the slot. Storm had to restrain himself from lunging across the desk and seizing it. Miss Vyzinski’s manicured fingers tugged it free.

  “It’s my claim, isn’t it?” Storm said.

  She was glancing from Storm’s paper to the new one, and frowning furiously now. “No,” she said in an odd voice. “No. It isn’t.”

  “No?”

  “Here. Look for yourself!”

  She passed the two sheets over to him. Storm studied them in rising bewilderment. They were identical in everyway, the same form even to the imprinted identifying number, six digits and four letters, in the upper left hand corner. Both had been filed from the office on Mars, on the same day. Even the time-stamp was the same, down to the last tenth of a second.

  The only thing wrong was that the claim on record wasn’t his. The sheet had been filled out in a different hand-writing, by someone named Richard F. McDermott, and he had filed a claim on an asteroid within Mars’ orbit, nowhere near Storm’s.

  “I don’t get it,” Storm said. “Are you trying to tell me that two different people filed two different claims on the same machine at the same time?”

  “I’m not trying to tell you anything, Mr. Storm. I’m simply showing you what the computer has on file. If you press me to interpret the evidence, I’d have to say that you’re attempting some kind of game. What you’ve got here looks like a perfectly valid claim form, only it can’t possibly be one. It’s some kind of clever imitation, I’d say. But I certainly don’t understand what you hoped to gain by presenting it, since this sheet itself is worthless unless there’s an original claim on file, and quite clearly there is not.”