The Planet Killers

  The clerk in the Hall of Records at Marsville blinked at him myopically and said, “You back so fast?”

  “Any harm in it?”

  “Just wondering if I’d see you again. You filed that asteroid claim a while back, huh?”

  Tension formed a constricting band across Storm’s chest. “That’s why I’m back,” he said. “I want to ask some questions about that claim.”

  The pale blue eyes were suddenly cold as space itself. “What kind of questions, mister?”

  Storm leaned forward. There was nobody in the room but the clerk and Storm and the recording machines. Storm said, “When I got to Earth I looked up my claim. It wasn’t in the records there.”

  “Sheesh! That ain’t possible!”

  “That’s what they said. They looked up my claim number and said somebody name of McDermott had filed a claim with that number. No record of mine.”

  “Sheesh!”

  “Yeah,” Storm said. “Sheesh. You mind running through the records and letting me see if my claim’s recorded here?”

  “Well, now, I can’t do that, mister.”

  “Oh?”

  “Nobody gets to see the records without permission from the registrar.”

  “Where do I find him?”

  “Well, you don’t, really. You just sort of wait. He’s out doing a little prospecting himself, round about Syrtis Major. Figures on being back, toward the end of the month, I’d say. He’s the man can help you.”

  Storm scowled. “Nobody else?”

  “Well, maybe the Acting Registrar might okay it—”

  It was like pulling teeth. “Where do I find him? ” Storm asked, struggling to control his temper.

  “He’s right here, mister. He’s me.”

  “You could have told me that ten minutes ago!”

  “Didn’t ask.”

  “I’m asking now. I want permission to examine the claims records in this office.”

  The man smiled. There was mischief in the blue eyes now. “Sorry,” he said. “Permission denied.”

  “ What? ”

  “That’s right. I can’t have no strangers poking through the records here. You want to talk to the Registrar, that’s your business, but he’ll tell you the same thing. Want to move along, now? Got work to do. Claims to process.”

  Storm stared at the little man, and felt himself about to erupt. He had been getting the grand runaround from the high and mighty and the low and downtrodden, and he had had about enough.

  Did the man want a bribe?

  Storm said, “Listen, I’ve got fifty bucks here that’s yours if—”

  “Skip it. I can be bought, but not that cheap.”

  The bland words touched the spark. Storm moved without really realizing what he was doing. His big hands shot out and wrapped themselves around the skinny neck.

  “Hey … choking—”

  “Dammit, I’m not taking any more!” Storm gritted. His fingers knotted tight. His arms trembled with rage, and he shook the little man violently. “We’re all alone in here,” Storm said. “I can shake your damned head off and nobody would know.”

  “Pl … please!”

  “Will you help me?”

  “Y-yes!”

  “You mean it?”

  “Y-yes!”

  Storm gave him one last shake for good measure, and let go. The little clerk backed away, fingering his throat.

  “Sheesh, mister,” he whispered hoarsely. “You coulda choked me, you know that? Sheesh!”

  Storm didn’t reply. He was trembling at his own outburst. There was tremendous strength in him, but he had always kept that strength under control, for fear of hurting someone. It would have been no trouble at all to snap the little man’s neck. Storm’s flesh crawled. The last time he had laid violent hands on anybody he had been ten years old.

  The clerk said, “Come on. I’ll show you the files. Just make it quick, though. Anybody asks you, did you see the files, you better not tell ’em I showed you.”

  “Hurry it up,” Storm said. “Trot them out!”

  The little man nodded. Still fondling his throat, he turned to one of the machines and began punching out coordinates. A screen came to glowing life.

  “What month you want?” the clerk asked.

  Storm told him. He read off the claim number on his duplicate sheet, to help him out.

  The microreel continued to turn, and claim after claim appeared on the screen. Storm examined each one in turn, as the numbers descended toward his own.

  “Okay,” Storm said. “Slow up. We’re getting close to my number now.”

  The speed at which the record reel turned diminished. Each claim now remained on the screen a full five seconds. Tension mounted inside Storm as the numbers came within ten of his, five, three, one—

  “This one must be yours,” the clerk said. “I’ll stop the reel, okay?”

  A magnified claim sheet appeared on the screen. Storm looked at it, and felt sickness in the pit of his stomach, felt reality dropping away from him again.

  The claim was the same one Miss Vyzinski had showed him in the Records Office on Earth. It bore the same number as his, the same time-stamp. But it had been made out by Richard F. McDermott for an entirely different asteroid.

  “That’s not the one,” Storm said.

  “But it’s the number you gave me.”

  “It’s not the claim I filed, and you know it!” The little man was quivering, and his face was stippled with red splotches of shame or guilt or fear. “That claim’s been substituted for mine!”

  “Listen, mister, you asked me to show you the records, and I showed them. I can’t help it if they don’t look like you expected them to look.”

  Storm said, “I filed a claim. My name’s John Storm, not McDermott. I’ve got a duplicate of that claim right here. You were in this office the day I filed it. After I left here, somebody yanked that claim and substituted a phony. I wonder who that somebody could be.”

  “You looking at me, mister?”

  “Why do you say that?” Storm spat. “Start turning the reel again. Maybe my claim got misfiled somewhere.”

  Storm had the clerk roll the files back a month before the date of his claim. Nothing turned up. Grumbling every minute, the little man reeled them forward again. Storm watched, his eyes narrow and frowning, his lips firm. There was a coppery taste in his mouth, the taste of rage. It was just as he had feared. They—whoever They were—had begun at the source, had eradicated his claim at the point of filing.

  Did that mean someone else had claimed the asteroid?

  “You seen enough, mister?”

  “Keep turning,” Storm said. “Shut up and keep turning.”

  Storm watched the screen, not really knowing what he expected to find, and then something familiar whisked past his eyes, and he gasped, and snapped, “Hold it. Go back one notch, will you?”

  “Listen, mister—”

  “Go back or I’ll pull your head off, dammit!” Storm roared.

  The little man was quaking like a leaf, now. He pushed the stud and the screen flickered and the reel moved, and a magnified claim appeared on it.

  Storm eyed it, and chills raced along his spine as he saw that the claim was for an asteroid with the same number as his, the same orbital coordinates, the same everything. The asteroid—his asteroid—had been claimed about six days after the filing of his own claim. One Clyde Ellins was down as the claimant.

  So at last he knew. It was out in the open, now. He had a rival for the asteroid, not a prior claim but a subsequent one, and his title was clouded by the absence of any record of his claim. Someone had been pulling strings behind his back; he no longer had any reason to doubt that he was the victim of fraud, not simple innocent error.

  The clerk was livid with fear. Storm glowered at him and said, “Who’s this Ellins?”

  “A … a prospector, I guess.”

  “You know him?”

  “Not really.”

&nbsp
; “Where is he from? Is he still on Mars?”

  “I couldn’t rightly tell you, mister.”

  Storm advanced toward the cowering little man, and let his huge hands dangle menacingly at his sides, the fingers clenching and unclenching. “You better rightly tell me,” Storm said. “If you want to get out of here alive. How much did Ellins pay you to substitute his claim for mine?”

  “Mister, I—”

  “Out with it!”

  “You got the wrong idea. He—”

  Storm’s massive hands reached for the slender throat. But the little man had had enough choking for a while, it seemed. He flung up his hands and said, “No! Don’t! I’ll tell you what you want!”

  Storm waited. “So?”

  Thin lips worked incoherently for a moment. “He … he gave me a thousand dollars,” the clerk said hoarsely. “To throw out your claim and slip the phony in.”

  “When?”

  “About a week after you made the claim. He come right in here with the cash in his pocket, and set the whole deal up.”

  “And who is he, this Ellins?”

  “You mean you don’t know?”

  “If I knew I wouldn’t be wasting time asking you,” Storm snapped. “Who is he?”

  “Ellins? He’s the local UMC man, that’s who.” The clerk risked a snickering laugh. “Let me tell you, you’re up against the big boys. The really big boys, mister.”

  Storm felt a moment of something close to panic. UMC was trying to beat him out of his claim? UMC was the Universal Mining Cartel, the same outfit that had offered him a job in Patagonia, two years ago. It was a hydra-headed, multi-continent organization, one of the new business units that had come into being after the repeal of anti-trust legislation in the United States thirty years back.

  The Cartel was vast and all-powerful. If anybody could get into the master computer files to obliterate somebody’s records, UMC could do it. If anybody could finger a man for assassination, and come within an ace of doing it, it was UMC. If anybody could grab a free-lance’s mining claim and get away with it, it was UMC.

  But why, Storm wondered?

  His asteroid, valuable though it was, was only a drop in the bucket of the Cartel’s overall wealth. Why should they go to all this trouble to grab it? UMC wasn’t that hard up for raw materials that they had to pull stuff like this.

  Storm said, “Where’s Ellins now? Still on Mars?”

  The clerk shrugged. “He was here a few days ago. Outfitting a new expedition, I think. Haven’t seen him around all week, though.”

  “Are you telling me the truth?”

  The little man cowered. “Yes! Yes! Sheesh, are you gonna slam me again?”

  Storm shook his head. “No,” he said emptily. “It isn’t worth it.” He paced round the record room for a moment, wondering what to do now. UMC had foxed him out of his claim, and there didn’t seem to be anyway around it. He couldn’t prove he had ever had a claim on the asteroid. If he tried to trot the little clerk forward as proof that skulduggery had taken place, UMC would see to it that the man’s throat was cut before he could testify. Storm realized dully that there was no legal way he could fight UMC’s billions.

  They had him.

  There was nothing much he could do except give up his claim, return to Earth, and—oh, this hurt!—meekly accept a job with another branch of the same UMC that had just done him out of his wealth.

  No , Storm thought. I’ll fight! I’ll fight with all I have!

  The office door opened. Storm whirled, half expecting to find UMC men bearing down on him. But the figure in the doorway was simply that of a prospector. He was a man a few years older than Storm, with a slouch-shouldered, weather-beaten look about him. As he came down the long room, he threw a faint grin at the clerk, and smiled at Storm in a friendly way. He seemed unaware that there had been any sort of tension in the room before his arrival.

  He looked at the clerk and said, “Hi, Jimmy. Who’s your friend?”

  “Prospector named Storm,” the clerk said. He rubbed his throat again, perhaps to hide the bruises that were beginning to show there.

  The newcomer turned to Storm and put out a calloused hand. “Name’s Fletcher,” he said easily. “Sam Fletcher. Been working the asteroids seven years, now, and I finally got me some luck. How’s that, Jimmy? I struck it rich at last. Let’s have a claim sheet.”

  Storm said, “Whereabouts you hit it?”

  “Belt Sub-seven,” Fletcher said. “Found me an asteroid full of lithium. Just a little chunk, mind you. But it’s real stuff. I’ll clear maybe a hundred thou on it.”

  “I was in Sub-seven a while back,” Storm said tightly.

  “Find anything?”

  “Yes,” Storm said. “But there’s some trouble on my claim, it seems. I’m trying to get it straightened out.”

  Fletcher looked up and laughed. “Trouble, huh? Well, I sure hope it wasn’t your claim I saw them fooling around with yesterday.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just a sec,” Fletcher said. “Let me get this thing filled out and I’ll tell you about it.”

  Storm waited tensely while Fletcher painstakingly wrote out the claim form. At length, the prospector looked up. “On my way back from Sub-seven,” he said, “I passed this asteroid, this little one. Eight, ten miles across, maybe. And there was this big UMC ship there. They’re hitching rocket tubes to the asteroid. I think they figure on moving it into another orbit.”

  “UMC? You’re sure about that?”

  “Well, I didn’t stick around to have tea with ’em. But I saw the insignia on the ship, anyway. They’re jumping somebody’s claim, I guess. You’d think those guys had enough money already, without pulling a stunt like this.”

  Storm glanced across at the claims clerk. The little man shrugged and looked away. Clenching his fists, Storm said, “Have you sold your ship yet, Fletcher?”

  “Yep. Why, you interested?”

  Storm nodded. “I need a ship in a hurry.”

  “You wouldn’t have wanted mine. I just about limped home in it. You go down to the spaceport, see the man there, he’ll fix up something for you. Hey, you in that much of a hurry?”

  Storm didn’t answer. He was already on his way out of the room.

  Chapter Seven

  On his way over to the spaceport, Storm tried to fit together the pieces of the story as he had learned it so far. What he knew added up to trouble, and the trouble kept getting bigger every minute.

  He had a rival for his asteroid. Obviously.

  The rival was the sprawling Universal Mining Cartel. That in itself was practically enough to make him want to throw in the towel now, because nobody had ever defeated UMC in any sort of dispute.

  UMC wanted his asteroid badly. So badly that the whole business became suspicious, in fact. By and large, UMC didn’t need to descend to petty theft, and to do a free-lance prospector out of an asteroid claim amounted to petty theft by UMC’s financial standards. It couldn’t possibly be worth it for them to go to all this complicated schemery just to steal a few hundred million dollars’ worth of commercial ore.

  Item: they had bribed the claims keeper on Mars.

  Item: they had somehow obliterated Storm’s records from the master computer on Earth, which must have cost them a pretty penny.

  Item: they were even now, according to Fletcher, hitching up a rocket installation that would blast Storm’s asteroid into a different orbit.

  That was the worst blow of all, Storm thought. As matters stood now, he had at least some title to the asteroid, even though it was thoroughly clouded. There was his duplicate copy of the original claim, which would have to be argued away in court. There was the undeniable fact that his records had somehow been wiped from the computer. He could make out a case that the asteroid was his. Chances were a thousand to one against his being able to best UMC in a court fight, but at least he had some sort of case.

  He wouldn’t even have a fragment of a case if UM
C moved his asteroid. Mining claims in space were dependent wholly on orbital location. The absolute position of asteroids, and of all other heavenly bodies, for that matter, keeps changing every instant. But the orbits, the paths of travel, remain constant.

  So the only way of tagging an asteroid is by orbit. But orbits are not immutable. An orbit can be changed, simply by applying a deflecting force.

  The orbit of a thousand-pound space satellite can be altered simply by firing a small jet. The orbit of the Earth itself can be altered too, given enough muscle-power.

  And as for a tiny asteroid only eight miles in diameter—

  It didn’t take much, really. One good swift kick from a bank of rockets would do it. Stir up a thrust of a few thousand tons and permanent changes in the asteroid’s orbit could be effected. Keep the thrust going for a while, and you could push the asteroid anywhere you wanted—clear out to Pluto, if you felt like footing the fuel bill.

  Of course, it was expensive. Hitching that much thrust up to an asteroid wasn’t done for dimes. You had to make sure you were putting your installation in a part of the asteroid strong enough to take the kick, or otherwise you might just smash your asteroid to pebbles. So there had to be some engineering work ahead of time, and probably some structural reinforcements. Then, too, the rockets cost money, because you needed pretty big ones for the job. And there was labor, too, at the usual high rates for space work.

  Moving an asteroid into a new orbit might cost as much as ten or twenty million dollars, or perhaps more, if you wanted to ice things by carrying the asteroid far from its original orbit. Say, forty million for the job. A lot of money for John Storm to spend, but only pennies by the standards of an outfit like UMC.

  Even if the job cost a hundred million, or five hundred million, UMC could swing it, Storm knew. They would move his asteroid into some different orbit, “discover” it, and file a brand-new claim, unencumbered by Storm’s rival title. He could squawk to Doomsday without establishing any claim to the asteroid, once it was moved. True, there was now at least one witness to the moving job, but he could be bought off. Everybody, Storm thought coldly, could be bought off. UMC could bribe half the population of Earth if they felt they had to.