Robert Silverberg: The Planet Killers

Well, Earth had sixty-seven years to get the job done. Any number of teams could be sent out in that time. And there still would be time, in all those sixty-seven years. If the computer were right, Gardner thought.

But that was a very big if.

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.