The Planet Killers: Three Novels of the Spaceways (Planet Stories (Paizo Publishing) Book 32)

by Silverberg, Robert

  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.

  But why?

  The whole thing baffled him. Why go to such lengths to secure a single small asteroid? The cartel would be lucky to break even, after they finally had secured their claim. Unless, Storm realized, there was something else on the asteroid, something that he had overlooked, something that could justify all the expense and the furious extra-legal maneuvers that the cartel was undertaking.

  He knew that he had to go out to the asteroid at once.

  The dealer in used spaceships was doing business at his accustomed place at Marsville Spaceport. He was a thick-set, jowly man in his early fifties, with the permanent bronze tan of someone who has spent decades on Mars, where the sun’s rays, feeble as they are, strike through the thin atmosphere with blazing intensity.

  He eyed Storm with a puzzled frown and said, “I’ve seen you before.”

  Storm nodded. “I sold you my ship last month. You gave me fifteen thousand. It was a Hawthorne 113.”

  “I remember.”

  “I’m back,” Storm said. “And I’m in the market for another ship. I’ll take the 113, if you’ve still got it.”

  “Sold it,” the dealer said. “Not much in stock now. There’s a 122, if you want. Cost you sixty grand, but it’s a beauty of a ship.”

  “Something a little cheaper.”

  “Got a McIntyre B-8 at twenty-seven, if you like. Needs a core job, but otherwise sound. Like to have a look?”

  Storm said, “I’ve got three thousand cash.”

  “You can’t get a nose-cone for three thou, buddy.”

  “I’ve got something else for collateral,” Storm went on. He produced his claim sheet. “I’ve got a claim on an asteroid in Sub-seven. Chock full of goodies. But for technical reasons I’ve got to make a quick trip out there and re-inspect it. If I don’t move fast, I’m likely to lose the claim. But if I hold the claim I’m a millionaire.”

  “So?”

  “Sell me a ship. I’ll give you the three thousand down and a mortgage on the rest of the ship. You name the interest rate. You can have a lien on my asteroid besides. I’ll sign all the papers you want. Just let me have the ship.”

  The dealer eyed Storm speculatively. “You must think I’m crazy, friend. I sell you a ship, and you go off to the asteroids and maybe crack it up, and I’m stuck with a lien on a claim that maybe isn’t any good? What kind of sense do you think that makes?”

  Storm began to sweat. “I was out in space for two years without an accident.”

  “So the law of averages is against you, then.”

  “Look,” Storm said, “Name your own terms. I’m a desperate man.”

  The fat man shook his head. “What good are terms? You could sign a paper agreeing to pay me ten million bucks, soon as you get back from the asteroids with your claim sewed up. Only the claim isn’t sewed up, you never come back, and I’ve got a lien against a vacuum. Uh-uh. No deal. Cash down or nothing. I got a family.”

  “Is there anyone on this lousy planet who’s willing to take a risk?” Storm asked.

  “Sure,” the fat man said. “See Charlie Byrd, at Town Hall. He’s the Mayor. He’s a gambling man. You talk to him, see what he says. Then come back here.”

  Charlie Byrd was lean and hawk-faced, without an ounce of fat anywhere on him. Storm had to search half over Marsville for him, and finally found him, supervising a drain-building project at the extreme east end of the colony. He towered over Storm; he was close to seven feet tall, Storm figured, though he couldn’t have weighed much more than a hundred sixty pounds. He was about sixty, Storm guessed.

  Storm said, “Mr. Byrd, I’ve got a proposition for you.”

  “Always ready to listen, son.”

  With sweat rolling down his cheeks, Storm lined the deal out for the tall man. Byrd listened to him, without saying a word. It was impossible to read the expression on the sharp-beaked, fleshless face. Perhaps it was amusement, perhaps boredom, perhaps irritation, perhaps contempt. Storm had never seen such an enigmatic face before.

  When he had finished, Byrd said simply, “Let’s see that claim sheet of yours.”

  Storm handed it over. Byrd studied it for a moment and handed it back.

  “It looks okay,” Byrd said. It seemed to Storm as though Byrd had put a wee stress on the verb: “It looks okay.” All he had to do, Storm thought bleakly, was to call the Records Office and check on the claim, and discover that it was not officially recorded, and that would be the end of it. Storm would have to walk to his asteroid, if he wanted to get there at all.

  A long moment passed, as perhaps Byrd considered whether or not to check on the claim, and it occurred to Storm that Byrd did suspect it, and was deciding whether or not to take the chance anyway.

  Finally Byrd said, “You need about twenty thousand, is that right?”

  “Yes.”

  “How do you feel about usury, son? Are you against it on philosophical grounds?”

  “Right now I just want the money,” Storm said.

  “Well, all right. I’ll loan you twenty thousand. The rate of interest is fifteen percent per annum or fraction thereof. When you pay me back, you give me $23,000, any time within the next year. Okay?”

  “Anything you say,” Storm agreed.

  “Now, as to collateral. You’ll sign over the ship, of course. That goes without saying. But there’s also some extra risk in it for me. You’ll sign a paper agreeing to pay me back out of future mining royalties on this or any other claim you may make. The first $20,000 that comes out of your claim is mine, in case you default on the loan, plus interest. Agreed?”

  “Agreed.”

  Byrd smiled for the first time. “You know something, son? We’re both a couple of damned fools. You’re an idiot for agreeing to be soaked like this. And I’m a worse idiot for lending you money on a claim that most likely won’t pan out. But we got ourselves a deal. Give me half an hour and I’ll get it all drawn up.”

  Storm nodded. “The quicker the better,” he said.

  The ship he got was a Hawthorne 117, a one-man ship, even tinier than the one he had gone out in the first time. It was a compact little gleaming bullet, not much more than twenty feet long. There was enough room in it for a man, and the blast tubes, and the fuel racks, and hardly anything else.

  Storm didn’t care. He wasn’t looking for a luxury liner, just now.

  The mortgage was duly made out, and title to the ship was transferred to him. It struck him that he was getting off cheaply, that 15% interest was more than reasonable considering the risks Charlie Byrd was running in making the loan. The thought occurred to him that it was more like philanthropy than usury, despite what looked like a high interest rate, and he quietly blessed the hawk-faced man.

  Of course, Charlie Byrd didn’t really know how dismal Storm’s prospects were. Byrd thought there was a claim in existence. He wasn’t aware that UMC workmen were busily jumping that claim right now, and that Storm was about to poke his nose into trouble.

  Storm checked out the controls of his ship, running the tedious tests that were required by law. One after another, the green safety lights buzzed their responses. It wasn’t too hard to operate a little ship like this: a little tougher than driving an automobile, but not much. An automobile’s computer brain did about 98% of the work. The spaceship’s computer would take care of only some 95% of the responsibility. Even so, the pilot’s area of control was not very broad.

  Storm studied his charts. During all the weeks since he had made his
big find, his asteroid had been moving across space toward Mars at a rapid clip, and the distance he would have to cover was very much less than it had been on the first trip. It was still something more than an overnight jaunt, but not much of a journey by space standards. A little 117 like this carried enough fuel to get it out to Jupiter and back, provided you made the trip in slow orbit and didn’t have a very hefty appetite. Hopping into the asteroid belt was no trick at all.

  Storm activated his communication channels.

  “Request blastoff clearance,” he said crisply.

  “Tower here,” came a bored female voice. “When are you blasting, 117?”

  “Whenever you give the word. Immediately or sooner, if possible.”

  “There’s a Brewster AV-11 blasting downrange,” came the tower voice. “Give him three minutes’ clearance and you can go.”

  “Right.”

  Storm waited. He had never known that three minutes could last so long. They were Martian minutes, of course, fractionally longer than those of Earth, but that tiny difference alone couldn’t account for their endlessness.

  The time ticked away. Storm stared through his narrow port. Red Martian sand, scarred by frequent jet-blasts, stretched out ahead of him. Behind him, invisible now, lay the gleaming geodesic dome of Marsville. He wondered if he’d ever see Mars again, let alone Earth. Out there on the asteroids, if the UMC men ever got hold of him, it would be no great problem to dispose of him for keeps. All they had to do was open his faceplate, let his atmosphere whoosh out, and point him on an orbit toward the Sun. They’d have no further problems with rival claims, then. They wouldn’t even need to bother going through with the business of shifting the asteroid.

  And poor old Charlie Byrd would be out twenty thousand dollars, Storm thought.

  For an instant he wondered whether it might be smarter to give up, to forget his dreams of glory and go back to Earth. One man couldn’t fight a cartel. He had sixty years of estimated life-span ahead of him, he had Liz waiting—maybe—and he had a good job for the asking. Why look for trouble?

  “You have clearance, 117,” came the brassy voice from the control tower. “Blast within twenty seconds.”

  Storm shrugged away all defeatist thoughts. He was on his way, and there was no turning back now.

  He punched keys. Somewhere in his little ship, computer elements flashed in their bath of liquid helium, and completed the job of activating the ship. Storm hunched back against his acceleration couch, and waited for the big fist to smash into him.

  The moment of lift-off came.

  Storm relaxed, letting the mounting g’s flatten him, and the tiny ship rose unsteadily on a tongue of flame, hovered for an instant, and arced up at an increasing pace. Storm closed his eyes. The die was cast, now. All he needed to do was sit tight, and the ship would carry him to his asteroid, and from there he’d just have to play it by ear.

  Mars became a dwindling red dot in the rear periscope. He watched it for a while, and then lost interest in what lay behind him. It was what was ahead that counted.

  Chapter Eight

  Seeing the asteroid again was almost like coming home.

  They hadn’t meddled with its orbit yet. Storm came upon the precious little rock just where his ship’s computer said it would be. He cut in the manual controls, and brought the ship down. Instead of matching orbits at first, he put himself in a moving orbit around the asteroid, and peered at it from a distance of a hundred miles.

  He didn’t have to worry about being detected. Spaceships don’t make any noise, not out in space where nothing carries sound waves. And his tiny ship was no more visible from the asteroid at a hundred miles than a gnat would have been.

  It wasn’t hard to see the activity going on down on the asteroid. With his scanners on fine, he could plainly make out the work area. A crew was busy on the side of the asteroid facing Jupiter, and even at a hundred miles up Storm could make out pretty clearly what they were doing.

  They were putting in a rocket installation.

  There was a big ship in parking orbit around the asteroid, and it was emblazoned boldly enough with the UMC monogram. On the surface of the asteroid itself, Storm saw what looked like ants, and knew that they were work-trucks and crawlers, unloaded from the mother ship.

  He circled the asteroid in his orbit a couple of dozen times, scanning the whole surface of the asteroid to make sure the intruders were gathered all in one place. Although he still had no strategy for coping with them, he knew he had to remain unnoticed as long as possible.

  There was no sense in making a direct challenge. A fool might march up to the UMC men and order them off, but Storm was no fool. He knew how quickly and quietly they would dispose of him if he tried anything like that. He was armed with a gun, but they probably outnumbered him fifty or sixty to his one, and he suspected they had guns, too.

  About the best he could hope for was to get a series of three-dee camera shots showing the men at work. It wouldn’t be much, but the pictures would help bolster his contention that UMC had whisked the asteroid out of his possession by sheer craftiness. He didn’t think he’d get far in court against UMC’s battery of lawyers, but at least he’d make the giant cartel look silly as it tried to explain why they were building a rocket installation on an asteroid they had already claimed.

  He knew what would happen. They would wiggle out of it somehow, and the asteroid would be theirs. Then, all smiles and blandness, they’d come around to him and say, “Would you like to work for us, Mr. Storm? That job offer is still open.” And he’d disappear forever into the maw of the UMC organization, all dreams of fortune exploded.

  Storm scowled. He studied his keyboard for a moment, and began to pick out the programming instructions for his computer. What he wanted was a landing orbit that would set him down, neatly and quietly, on the side of the asteroid opposite the UMC camp. Eight miles of diameter wasn’t much, by planetary standards, but it wasn’t hard to lose twenty feet of spaceship on an asteroid that big.

  The ship descended.

  It spun inward, twisting through the blackness, slicing down in contracting spirals toward the surface of the asteroid. As before, Storm did not actually bring his ship down to the surface of the asteroid. A parking orbit was good enough. The ship dropped, and the canny little mind of the computer worked out the mathematics, matching the orbital rotation of the asteroid to the velocity of the ship, down to the last fraction, the final decimal.

  The little ship entered orbit.

  Storm dropped his ladder.

  He clambered down. It was good to be back, he thought. But it would be better if he knew that the asteroid was really his, as by rights it should be.

  He glanced up at his ship, and smiled. Then he looked toward the nearby horizon, and thought of what was taking place just beyond the jagged mountains that rimmed the tiny world, and his smile vanished.

  He started to work out a strategy.

  It was a fair distance, he knew, to the UMC camp: ten or twelve miles, practically halfway around the twenty-four-mile circumference of the asteroid. Under these low-gravity conditions, every step he took would be as though with seven-league boots, and he could cover the distance without any particular strain. Before he went, though, he had to figure out some way of handling the situation. He couldn’t just barge in.

  He looked around.

  He had landed near the edge of a miniature plain, bordered at the far side by the jagged mountains that ran around the equator of the asteroid, and bordered at this side by low rocky hills. The pale green light of the distant sun gave the hills a barren, forlorn appearance. Out here, the sun was so weak that he could make out a few of the stars even by daylight. Over on the other side of the asteroid, he knew, it was night, and the stars would be gleaming brilliantly, with Mars and perhaps even Earth lending color to the display.

  He nearly overlooked the mouth of the cave, when he first saw it. Storm had been roaming the plain purposelessly for ten minutes, a
nd when he saw the cave-mouth at first it seemed to be only a dark shadow against the side of the hills. But as he stared at it, the asteroid continued in its orbital motion, and the shadows shifted, and the dark round area remained where it was.

  Storm went to have a closer look.

  He strode across the plain, covering ten and fifteen feet at a bound. Almost at once he had covered the few hundred feet, and he saw that it was, indeed, the mouth of a cave he had noticed. It was about ten feet in diameter, an almost mathematically perfect circle carved into the side of the cliff. He approached it and peered within.

  All was black in there.

  Something about the cave puzzled him. It was too regular, too mathematical. Caves were usually carved by water, and there was no water on this asteroid. Of course, a stream could have run here once, hundreds of millions of years ago, in the days when this asteroid was still part of the planet that once had orbited between Mars and Jupiter. But you generally found caves in soft, water-soluble rocks like limestone. You didn’t find them in tough igneous stuff like this cliff.

  So the cave wasn’t a natural formation. But in that case—

  What the hell was it?

  Storm forgot, for the moment, the problem of the UMC rocket installation. There was a mystery here, and he needed the answer to it before he could go any further. Switching on his helmet-light, he stepped hesitantly into the utter blackness of the cave.

  The floor was smooth beneath his feet. Storm was startled to see that the walls of the cavern, above and below him, were almost glassy, as though they had been carved out by the blast of a controlled thermonuclear explosion. Somehow, a tunnel of marble-smooth regularity had been slashed into this cliff.

  Storm followed it inward, counting off his paces.

  When he was twelve paces into the cliff, the tunnel began to veer away at a right angle. It made a complete ninety-degree turn, which took it along a parallel with the outside face of the cliff. Storm’s frown deepened as he followed the tunnel another eight paces and saw it swing around again, making a second ninety-degree swerve.