Robert Silverberg - Guardian of the Crystal Gate

It started very simply, with the routine note on my desk, saying that the Chief had a job for me. Since there’s generally some trouble for me to shoot ten or a dozen times a year, I wasn’t surprised. The surprises came later, when I found that this particular job was going to draw me a hundred trillion miles across space, on a fantastic quest on a distant planet. But that came later.

It began quietly. I walked in, sat down, and the Chief, in a quick motion, dropped a diamond in front of me on his desk.

I stared blankly at the jewel. It was healthy-sized, emerald-cut, blue-white. I looked up at him.

“So?”

“Take a close look at it, Les.” He shoved it across the desk at me with his stubby fingers. I reached out, picked up the diamond—it felt terribly cool to touch—and examined it.

Right in the heart of the gem was a thin brown area of clouding, marring the otherwise flawless diamond. I nodded. “It looks—like a burnt-out fuse,” I said, puzzled.

The Chief nodded solemnly. “Exactly.” He opened a desk drawer and reached in, and grasped what looked like a whole handful of other diamonds, “Here,” he said, “Enjoy yourself.” He sent them sprawling out on the desk; they rolled across the shiny marbled desktop. Some went skittering to the floor, others dropped into my lap, others spread out in a gleaming array in front of me. There must have been forty of them.

The Chief’s eye met mine. “Each one of those diamonds,” he said, “represents one dead man.”

I coughed. I’ve had some funny cases since joining the Bureau, but this was the fanciest hook the Chief had used yet. I started scooping up the diamonds that had fallen to the floor. They were of all sizes, all cuts—a million dollars’ worth, maybe. More, maybe.

“Don’t bother,” the Chief said. “I’ll have the charwoman pick them up when I leave. They’re not worth anything, you know.”

“Not worth anything?” I looked at the ones I had in my hand. Each was marred by the same strange brown imperfection, that fuse blowout. I closed my hand, feeling them grind together.

“Not a cent. For one thing, they’re all flawed, as you can easily see. For another, they’re all synthetics. Paste, every one of them. Remarkably convincing paste, but paste all the same.”

I leaned back in my chair, put my hands together, and said, “Okay. I’m hooked. Put the job on the line for me, will you?” I was thinking, This is the screwiest one yet. And I’ve had some corkers.

“Here’s the pitch, Les.” He drew out a long sheet of crisp onionskin paper, and handed it to me. Neatly typed on it was a list of names and addresses. I ran down the list quickly without hitting any familiar ones.

“Well? Who are they?”

“They’re missing persons, Les. They’ve all disappeared in this city between—ah—” He took the list back—“27 November, 2261, and 11 February of this year. The list totals sixty-six names. And those are just the ones we know about.”

“And the diamonds?”

“That’s where this Bureau comes in,” he said. “They only send us the screwy ones, as you’ve no doubt discovered by now. In each disappearance case listed on this sheet, one of those burnt-out diamonds was found in the room the missing man was last seen in. In every case.”

I frowned and scratched an ear reflectively. “You say there’s a tie-in with the diamonds, Chief?”

He nodded. “One burnt-out diamond in exchange for one man. It’s a recurrent pattern of correlation. Those men are going some-where, and those diamonds have something to do with it. We don’t know what.”

“And you want me to find out, eh?” I asked.

“That’s only part of it.” He moistened his lips. “Suppose I tell you where you fit into the picture, and let you decide what you want to do yourself. I can’t force you, you know.”

“I haven’t turned down a case since I’ve been with the Bureau,” I reminded him.

“Good.” He stood up. “Let’s see you keep that record intact, then. Because we’ve just found one of these diamonds that isn’t burnt out!”

The vault swung open, and the Chief led the way in. He was a short, blocky little man, hardly impressive-looking at all. But he knew his job perfectly—and his job was to maneuver muscleheaded underlings like myself into positions where they were just about committed to risk life and limb for the good old Bureau without knowing quite what they were going into.

I was in that uncomfortable position now. It wasn’t going to be easy explaining this gambit to Peg, either, I thought.

He crossed the shadowy floor to an inner safe, deftly dialed the combination, and let the door come creaking open. He drew out a little lead box.

“Here it is,” he said.

I reached for it, in my usual melon-headed manner, but he drew it back quickly out of my grasp. “Easy,” he said. “This thing is dangerous.” Slowly, terribly slowly; he lifted the top of the box just a crack.

A pure, silvery beam of brightness shot out and lit up the whole room.

“It must be a beauty,” I said.

“It is. Diamonds like these have lured sixty-six men to what we assume is their death, in the last three months. This particular one hasn’t had a chance to go into action yet.”

I took the box from him. It was hard to resist the temptation of lifting the top and staring at that wonderful diamond again, but I managed. I wanted to find out all the angles of the job before I got involved.

“One of our cleaning-women found the stone yesterday, right after I left. She called me at home. At first I thought it was one of the ones I was working with—one of the burnt-out ones. But from the way she described it, I knew it was something special. I had her box it up this way at once. No one’s seen it yet, except in little peeks like the one I just gave you.”

He tapped the box. “I’ll tell you my theory,” he said, “and you can take it from there.” His voice ricocheted around unpleasantly in the silent vault. “This diamond is bait, in some way. The things have been appearing, and men have been doing something with them; I don’t know what. But the diamonds are directly connected with this wave of disappearance.”

I started to object, but he checked me.

“Okay, Les. I know it sounds crazy. How would you like to prove otherwise?”

“You’re a sneaky one,” I told him, grinning. Then the grin vanished as I stared at the little lead box. “I’ll do it,” I said. “But make sure that Peg gets the pension, will you?”

“Don’t worry,” he said, matching my grin. “She’ll get every penny she deserves—after I get through grabbing, of course.” He started to lead the way out of the vault. I followed, and he closed the door be-hind me.

“You take that diamond along with you,” he said, indicating the box. “Play with it. Do anything you like. But come back with a solution to this vanishing business. Here,” he said. “Take a few of these burnt-out ones too.”

“Yeah. Peg might like them,” I said. “ They’ll look swell with black.”

I turned to go. As I reached the door, something occurred to me, and I paused.

“Say—I think I’ve found a hole in your theory. How come that charwoman didn’t disappear when she found the diamond?”

He smiled. “Take another look at the list I gave you, Les. All the names on it are men’s names. Whatever this is, it doesn’t affect women at all.”

“Hmm. Thought I had you there, for a minute.”

“You ought to know better than that, Les.”

Peg didn’t like the idea one little bit.