The Planet Killers

Chapter II

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 configuration 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 littie 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 Earth, 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.

According to present figures, there were some three thousand Terrans on Lurion, all of them private citizens there of their own accord. Diplomatic relations had not yet been established between Earth and Lurion, which saved Karnes from the additional guilt of knowing that he had destroyed fellow members of the civil service.

The three thousand included students, tourists, writers, and more than a hundred jewel merchants. The Lurioni were eager purchasers of almost every sort of bauble. Choosing that as his profession would help to make Gardner that much less conspicuous as he waited for the arrival of the other members of his team.

The entire project had been planned very carefully. Of course, the first team had had the benefit of careful planning too. And where were they? Gardner knew he would have to be sure to avoid their mistakes.

The three remaining members of his team, Leopold, Weegan, and Archer, were scheduled to arrive on Lurion at intervals of approximately one week, each at a different spaceport on a different continent. Gardner had the arrival times of each man etched carefully into his memory. He didn’t dare entrust any detail of the project to paper. So far as history was concerned, Lurion’s violent death was going to be attributed to natural causes, and woe betide Gardner if the Lurioni, the Terran people themselves, or any other race of the galaxy got wind of exactly what was taking place.

The murder of a planet was the most damning crime a race could commit. No matter that the murder was being committed solely to rid the galaxy of a potential plague spot. The act itself was infamous. Discovery of it would mean the end of Earth’s dominion in the universe. More than that, it might mean the end of Earth itself if the other planets of the galaxy chose to mete out to Earth what Earth had taken upon itself to mete out to Lurion.

Five generators were to be set up at specified spatial intervals to resonate with the same deadly note. The moment those five generators were attuned to each other, Lurion would crumble in on itself and would be no more.

It was simpler, Gardner thought, to declare all-out war. But a war required a real, not merely a potential provocation, and Terra preferred not to let itself be cast in the role of the aggressor.

* Or Lurion might be disposed of subtly by dropping a fission bomb into Betelgeuse to trigger a nova. But Betelgeuse was far too huge a star to toy with so casually. The consequences might not be so easy to deal with.

No, Gardner thought. This was the only way.

The cab came to a halt in front of a dark, gloomy-looking building designed very much in the ponderous style of Terran twenty-first century architecture.

“Here we are,” the cabbie said. “That’ll be half a unit for the trip.”

Pulling out a fistful of shiny Lurioni coins, Gardner counted out half a unit, added a ten-segment piece to it by way of tip, and climbed out of the cab. Gripping the handle of his suitcase tightly, he entered the lobby of the hotel.

It had the atmosphere of a first-rate, second-class hotel. The lobby chairs looked old and comfortably overstuffed: the Lurioni on duty at the desk wore the eternally frozen mask of hotel desk-clerks all over the civilized galaxy.

“You have a reservation for me,” Gardner said. “Roy Gardner, Earthman.”

“A moment, Earthman.”

The clerk scowled over his reservation forms. At last he looked up. “Yes. Your room is ready. The boy will show you to it.”

It was on the fifth floor, a-curious three-sided room, with the entrance at the base of the triangle. Lurioni architecture seemed to utilize the layout of triangular rooms, back-to-back to form larger squares. The room was small, not very well lit, and its air smelled stale.

When the bellboy had left, Gardner sat down tiredly in the chair next to the bed. He glanced at the indicator on his wrist. The red panel and the white were lit. Next week Weegan would arrive, then Leopold the week after, and finally Archer three weeks hence. That would complete the team. That would seal Lurion’s doom.

Until Archer’s arrival, there was nothing to do but wait.