Zach Hughes: Gold Star

rock, adjusted the field, and lifted tons of rock as if it were an integral part of the ship. «That's just what we're gonna do,» he chuckled, as he lifted the Lady Sandy for altitude. «We're gonna throw rocks at 'em.» Chapter Ten When the armored vehicle burst up over a sand dune and the fortified position, with all of the dark, threatening laser cannon ports near the top, was just below on a flatness, Pete cut speed and swiveled the vehicle to turn quickly back behind the dune. Each second he expected to feel the first heat of the blasting, melting power of a laser. When they were safely behind the dune he stopped the vehicle. He walked on the sun-heated sand and rock to peek over the top of the rise. The concrete-and-metal vastness was silent. Heat waves shimmered from its domed top. Jan crept up to lie on the hot sand beside him. «Are you thinking about going in?» she asked. «I don't know anything else to do.» It was a large continent, and a large desert. Hundreds of miles separated them from the nearest green zone. He had no idea how to find water in the desert. He used hand-held binoculars to examine the fort. He was intrigued by what seemed to be unfinished construction, partially covered by drifted sand. «Jan, I think that either they didn't have time to finish the defenses against land assault or they're covered by sand,» he said. He led Jan back to the rusting old armored vehicle and circled the fort, pausing now and then to study the structure. On what had to be the leeward side of the prevailing winds he could clearly see the strong metal framework of unfinished construction. It was getting hot. It was midday, and the sun blazed down with an intensity which completely overwhelmed the sporadic air conditioning of the inside of the tank. It didn't take deductive reasoning to understand that their only chance was somehow to get inside the fort. He had to hope that once there they'd find a way of communicating with the Lady Sandy, or that he could close down the laser cannon so that the Lady could come searching for them out of curiosity if there were no communications gear working. He explained it to Jan. She listened, although she'd arrived at the same conclusion. She nodded when he finished. They came in following the outgoing tracks of the three vehicles which had come to the site of the 47's emergency landing. The tracks led straight toward the leeward side and ended in an area protected by standing walls. Two other armored vehicles sat in the parking area. Pete was ready with the weapons, but the other tanks did not move. Up close, the fortification was impressive. A good grade of some steel alloy had been used for the metallic supports and reinforcements. The dry air of the desert had not damaged the metal. It gleamed as if it were years old, not centuries old. Pete led the way toward the entrance of a tunnel leading away from the parking area. Sand had drifted into the tunnel's mouth, so they had to stoop, but soon the footing was cement. The end of the tunnel was closed by a solid metal door with only one slit breaking its surface. Beside the door was a closed cubicle with glass windows that had been hazed by time. Pete's fingers went to his skull. Jan was interested in the little cubicle. She heaved on the door to the cubicle, and it came open with a groan of protesting hinges. When she looked inside she went still, then she spoke in a voice full of pity. «Pete, look.» The arid desert air had preserved the thousand-year-old corpse well. Flesh had shrunk, pulling blackened, brittle, dried skin tightly over the bones. There were shreds of decaying cloth, a military-type belt at the waist, a crumpled, dried holster for the weapon which was still clasped in the dead man's bony fingers. The shattered skull told a story which had been hidden from human eyes for a thousand years. «That's a projectile weapon,» Pete said. He'd seen them in the Academy museum. A charge of explosive powder expelled a metal pellet from the muzzle. «Why did they do it?» Jan asked in an awed voice. «Why did men kill each other?» Pete bent, held his breath, although there was no hint of odor from the mummified corpse. His interest had been caught by a metal tab, about two by three inches. A shred of rotted cloth clung to a pin fastener on the back of the tab when he pulled it away. He brushed the dusty remnants of cloth away. There were a design and numbers on the card. He went to the metal door and inserted the metal tab into the slit, where it fit perfectly and activated ancient machinery. The door began to slide slowly back into the wall, creaked, grumbled, then stopped after opening just wide enough to allow him to push Jan through and follow. Sunlight streamed down from skylights to show them a large room with various corridors leading away from it. A fine dust arose as they walked. A metal desk was littered with brittle papers. Pete didn't take time to examine it. He choose the largest of the corridors and, Jan's hand in his, walked slowly toward a door at the other end, which opened to them with the use of the metal tab taken from the dead man. The large room beyond the door had been sleeping quarters. There were about fifty beds lined up along either wall in front of standing wall lockers. On a few of the beds lay the skeletons of long-dead men. There was a staleness to the air which made Jan's head begin to hurt. They tried other corridors. One led to the power room. The fort had drawn solar power through panels atop, converting it to electricity. The power plant had been built well. Glowing lights indicated that it was still functional. More exploration revealed more scattered bodies. Some, like the man in the guard shack outside the door, held weapons in their hands. «It's almost as if they killed themselves,» Jan whispered, as they stood in a little officelike room with a desk and file cabinets, looking down on a man with one of the antique pistols in his hand. Some areas of the fort, unlike the stale, sickening sleeping quarters where most of the dead lay, still had sweet, fresh air, indicating that the ventilation system was still working. Men who could construct machinery to function untended for a thousand years, Pete thought, had one hell of a technology. He found what he was looking for after an hour's search. The fire center for the fort's weapons was buried deeply at the center of the installation, entered by a series of metal ladders or an elevator which still worked, jerking into motion as Pete pushed the buttons. He didn't trust the elevator. They climbed down, down, and found a room which was closed by one of the solid metal doors, which opened at the insertion of the tab. Inside, there was fresh air. The room was free of dust, surgically clean. Glowing lights indicated power. Pete began to study the complex panels of instruments and controls. A stack of brittle instruction manuals finally had to be resorted to before, with a grunt of satisfaction, he flipped two switches and there was a low hum and then a click. «The weapons should be turned off,» he said. «Now let's see if the communications system is still working.» He sat down to read. The old, brittle pages sometimes threatened to disintegrate as he turned them. He had found what he wanted when there came a little quiver and the room seemed to move, ever so slightly. He jerked his head up. «What the hell was that?» He still didn't know all he needed to know about the controls there in that war room deep under the ground below the fort, but he had glanced at the manual for operating the outside viewers. He pressed buttons, praying that those long-dead men had not left behind a self-destruct booby trap. A view of the outside desert came onto a screen. He caused the topside cameras to swivel. Just a few yards away from the fortification a huge boulder, a mass of tons, had buried itself into the sand. It had landed with an impact powerful enough to cause that little quiver he and Jan had felt. «Meteorite?» Jan asked. «No. Plain desert stone.» He went back to the books. There was an urgency now. The language was antique, and he thanked God for having exposed himself to a study of the evolving English language while at the Academy. It was slow going. «All four of the fortified sites are linked,» he told Jan. «The central computer is on the southern continent in the other hemisphere. That's all very interesting. All we have to do is get there and turn it off and we disarm the whole series of weapons.» But meanwhile there was a huge desert boulder lying just yards away from the fort, and he was very sure that another would be falling soon. He continued to thumb the stack of manuals in an effort to find the instruction book for the communications system. The second huge boulder dropped by the Lady Sandy struck the armored-vehicle park, demolishing the three vehicles there and sending a shudder through the bedrock underneath the fort. On board the Lady, Brad Fuller cursed. «Just missed,» he said. «But I think I've got it right now.» He took the Lady off to find another rock. It was pretty tricky, trying to figure the exact landing point of an irregularly shaped boulder from sixty thousand feet up, out of the range of cannon. They'd had to waste some time leading off the short-range missiles which the old fort had fired at them. Pete had the voice communicator working. He tuned it to the frequency used between U.P. ships and began sending. «Lady Sandy, this is Pete Jaynes. We're inside the fort that you're dropping rocks on, Lady Sandy. We have turned off the fort's weapons. Come in, Lady Sandy.» «I read you, Jaynes,» Fuller answered. «Lady Sandy.» Pete said, «our ship is disabled. It is safe for you to land near the fort.» Fuller looked at his partner, chewing thoughtfully on his lower lip. Jarvis was thinking, too. «Okay, Jaynes,» Fuller sent. «We'll be right down.» Buck King glowered at Tom Asher. «Too bad the machines didn't get them,» he said. Asher rubbed his chin. «Brad, is it smart to go down and pick them up?» «No way out of it,» Fuller said. «Damned if I know how things kept running so long on this planet, but they did. He's got voice communications. He might have or be able to rig blink capacity. I wanta tell you jokers something. Not many people know it.» He paused. «When I was a kid I spent three years in the mines out around Arcturus. They say we live in a civilized society, and I guess we do. You spend three years on a mining gang, and you begin to doubt it.» «How'd you get a job on a tug with a record?» Asher asked. «I was sixteen,» Fuller said. «I got sent out by a hanging judge on a frontier planet, a no-good ball of sand and rock not fit for settlers. When I finally got an appeal back to New Earth they brought me out of the mines. Judge there said I'd had a raw deal, that minors should be sent to correctional training for nonviolent crimes, not to the mines. The judge said I'd paid my debt and wiped the slate clean.» «What's the point?» King asked. «The point is this, meathead,» Fuller said. «The mines ain't civilized. Our society is too humane to have direct capital punishment, but by God they've got it indirectly. The average life span in the mines is five years. I was young and strong and some of the older guys took pity on me. But I know what it's like. I know what some of you are thinking, that we can just go down and wipe Jaynes and his wife out and we've got a planet. I'm telling you that we've got to be damned sure he hasn't sent a stat back down the range.» King grinned. «But you're open to suggestion if he hasn't, huh?» Fuller looked out a viewport. The planet was green and beautiful outside the desert areas. «Let's just see how it stacks up when we get down there. No one makes a move unless I say so, you got it?» He patted his saffer. «As captain of a U.P. tug, enforcing orders or protecting life, I don't face the mines if I burn a couple of jokers. You understand?» «Let's get on with it,» King said. «Jaynes,» Fuller said into the communicator, «how about picking me out a good landing spot?» Pete and Jan made their way out to the entrance, past the huge boulder which had demolished the three armored vehicles and narrowly missed the entrance to the tunnel. They watched the Lady Sandy lower slowly, getting larger and larger to the eye. She landed in a swirl of dust. A hatch opened and a man in a spacesuit peered out. He saw Pete and Jan without helmets, ducked back inside. A few minutes later they began to come out, one at a time, without the suits. Brad Fuller stuck out his hand. «Nice to see the man behind the voice I've been hearing,» he said, with a smile. They shook hands one by one, Jan extending her hand, too. «What have we got here?» Fuller asked, the formalities over. «A hard site, missile-launching silos, laser guns,» Pete said. «Everything's turned off now. A few very dead people inside.» «No one alive, huh?» Buck King asked. «I'd say they starved,» Pete said. «A few shot themselves. Listen, what we need to do is use your ship to hop around to the other sites and turn off the automatic defenses before one of them discovers one last weapon—» Buck King looked up at the hot, glaring sky nervously. Brad Fuller was thinking the situation over carefully. It looked as if there were only six people alive on the planet. Two of them stood in the way of Fuller's being a very wealthy man. He was wondering how he could be sure whether or not Jaynes had communicated with the home worlds via Blinkstat. He wasn't quite ready to ask a direct question. «Jaynes,» Fuller said, «do you think we ought to call in some help? Maybe get a ship of the line out here to take out these fortifications?» «I thought about that,» Pete said. «I could have sent a stat via the altered mode back to NE793, but God only knows when a ship will come out to 793, much less get around to reading the tape.» Buck King looked at his partner with a hidden grin. «I'd like to look this place over,» Jarvis Smith said. «Who wants to come?» «I'll go,» Asher said, nodding toward King. «All right, but make it quick,» Fuller said. The three men went into the tunnel. The door to the fort had stuck in its half-opened position. «I don't know whether I want to get involved in messing around with those other strongpoints or not,» Fuller said. «Whoever built these places, they were pretty warlike people. We saw what they did to your ship with computer-controlled equipment a thousand years old. No telling what we might run into.» Pete wondered if Fuller had intended giving him the information that Fuller knew Pete's recorded claim to the planet had been destroyed. He had noted that as per regulations, only the captain of the Lady Sandy was armed. Pete's own APSAF matched Fuller's weapon. But there were four of them. And the stakes were high. Pete was not a misanthrope, but he wasn't all that blinded by man's innate goodness, either. Men were capable of stealing, of killing if the rewards were worth the risk. However, he couldn't bring himself to believe that a smiling, seemingly capable, old-line tug man would stop at nothing to gain an entire planet. And there was still Rimfire. Pete admitted that his stupidity in making that one last run over the fort had cost him his immediate chance to rescue Rimfire from the limbo in which she hung. In retrospect, that last run was probably the most costly mistake he'd made in his life. Fuller and his men had the only available transportation. If, Pete knew, Fuller were as sharp as he looked, he'd have already made his own claim to the planet on the Lady's permanent tapes. Pete knew that he wasn't in the best of positions. He stood to lose a planet. However, he could rely on the long arm of U.P. justice. No man in his right mind would risk having the fleet looking for him for a crime against space laws. He hoped that Fuller was a wise man. If so, Pete was halfway prepared to offer the other group a deal, up to half the rewards for claiming a planet. Perhaps Fuller would be sensible enough to realize that half of a planet split four ways was preferable to endless court battles and delay. «We have to be sure that the fortifications have no further weapons,» Pete said. «There are thirty people out there on the Rimfire. We have to turn off the master computer, and then go get Rimfire.» Fuller was instantly alert, although his lazy, relaxed, slumped posture did not change. «You know where she is?» «Yes. Within range of the missiles. That's why we had to clear them out.» «You been in communication with them?» Fuller asked. Pete hesitated just a split second too long before saying, «Yes.» «Okay. I guess we go close down the master computer and then go get her,» Fuller said. «Maybe I'd better go inside and take a look here, so I'll have a better idea of what we're up against.» «Pete,» Jan said, when they stood alone outside the old fort, «will you think I'm dumb if I say those men scare me?» He put his arm around her. The desert heat had caused her to perspire. Her tunic was wet. «It's all right, honey,» he said. «Did you see the way he looked when you said you'd been in communication with the Rimfire?» «What do you mean?» «Well, dear, you never were a good liar.» «Better than that,» he said. She shook her head. «He knew.» «Let's go in,» he said. He went to a room he'd seen just off the buried war room, a room of files and bookcases. They encountered King and Asher on the way down, exchanged small talk about the size and age of the place. Then Pete was browsing through the books and files. He found the commanding officer's logbook in the drawer of a desk. He called out highpoints to Jan as he scanned it. The fortifications had been built in the middle days of the war against Zede II. Time of construction, cost, weaponry, personnel, all were duly recorded. Pete, however, was more interested in the later days. He skipped over pages of routine daily reports. «Listen to this,» he said. He read the date first, a day in old Earth's August, just under a thousand years in the past. « 'Fleet away at 0800 this date. Incoming reports state that U.P. Strike Force 88 cleared route junction'—he gives a number here. We'd have to find a chart to know what area he was talking about. He goes on to write that—well, here are his words. 'Cargo consigned to charge of Fleet Admiral Arlen P. Dunking gross weight twenty metric tons aboard two armored cruisers.' « «What cargo?» Jan asked. «He doesn't say,» Pete said, turning pages. «The fleet left, if I remember my history right, just a few days before the climactic battle. Strike Force 88 caught a big enemy fleet in normal space and destroyed it, then went after the Zede planets.» He scanned pages of routine, day-to-day events in the logbook. Then he leaned forward, his heart pounding. «I think I know what the cargo was. Listen. He writes that—'shortage of rations forced a halt to the work. Miners quartered inside the fort pending the arrival of supplies.' This was a mining planet.» «I didn't see any signs,» Jan said. «The centuries would have wiped out a lot of it,» he said, «and they may have had the mines concealed.» «What would they be mining?» «What would you guess?» He grinned. «What was in short supply, so short that they had to use obsolete rockets instead of blink-drive weapons?» «Gold,» she said. «Ruuight.» He read on. «It got rough,» he said. «He writes that men were sick and dying of starvation. Here, he states that he sent several tanks off across the desert, with very little hope of them reaching a food-growing area. All but five of them.» Jan shuddered. «Poor men.» «The writing gets weak, wavery here toward the last. He's desperate. He says that many are already dead. He says that some men are committing suicide rather than suffer the hunger, the slow death.» He was silent. «Then what?» Jan asked. «I am very weak,» Pete said. «There are only five of us left alive. I had to shoot Sergeant John F. Market for the heinous crime of cannibalism. Again, there has been no communication from—» He looked up. «It ends there. The writing is very weak, a scrawl that trails off.» «And the tanks never made it across the desert,» Jan said. «It would be interesting to know how they found this planet,» Pete said. «I can guess. In the heat of combat, with an enemy ship near, ships sometimes took random blinks, risking that rather than a sure death under the enemy's weapons. Maybe a Zede ship was under attack and popped off and ended up here. When they found that the planet had more than the usual amount of gold-yielding ore—» «This is quite a place,» Brad Fuller said, as he entered the room. He looked around. «Find out what and why?» He waved a hand at the books. «It was a Zede II Group warbase,» Pete said. «My guess is that it was sort of a final retreat for some of the Zede brass, in case things went wrong.» «Well, they never made it,» Fuller said. «I guess we've seen enough. Hardware is interesting. Computers surprisingly good for the time. I guess we're ready if you folks are.» Pete had made up a quick lie because he remembered Jan's statement that Fuller and his men frightened her. To know that there was gold on Jan's Planet, enough gold to warrant the construction in wartime of some very expensive bases, changed the situation. A war had been fought for gold, and, in reality, nothing much had changed since man killed man and then destroyed entire planets. Gold, more than any other thing, brought out the worst in men. Chapter Eleven The position of the southern continent was near the southern tropical zone. When the Lady Sandy made a test run over the area, only three of the short-range missiles had to be led off into space. Then they were approaching at an altitude calculated to draw harmless fire from the laser cannon. A few feeble flashes told them that at least five of the cannon were still operational. Visual examination showed that subtropical growth had taken over the fortification, almost hiding it from the air. Many long-range missiles sat in their silos. Vines grew over the launching pads of the short-range weapons, and the climbing, persistent growth had clogged ports of many of the laser cannon. One entire side of the fort was buried under an age-old avalanche of green. After some testing, Fuller brought the Lady Sandy down on the bank of a stream which ran nearby, in an area of low, soft growth in what was, apparently, an often-flooded area. It was about half a mile to the fort. They set out, Fuller assuming the leadership, hacking his way at times through dense growth. It took well over two hours to reach the missile silos. It was, for Jan, an eerie feeling to look down into the pits to see the rounded, rusting nose of a missile and to know that there, within a few feet, was a nuclear weapon. Armored vehicles were covered with green growth which had sprung up through the paving of a parking lot. The tunnel entrance, similar to the entrance to the fort in the desert of the large, eastern continent, had to be cleared. Once Tom Asher was almost bitten by a reptile which had a deadly look. Pete used his saffer on the snake, watched it become motionless. This time there was no dead guard in the guardhouse from whom to take an entry tab. The metal door was closed, rusted. The feel of ruin was everywhere, for the subtropical climate had not been as kind to man's creations as the arid atmosphere of the eastern desert. Asher and King went back to the ship for a cutting torch. While they were gone, Pete scouted the fort, climbing atop it with the aid of the clinging vines which had found root holds in the seemingly impervious cement. He was eager to see what was inside. Around the fort, trees with fruit and nuts abounded. The men in this installation would not have died of starvation. It seemed unlikely that such a variety of fine-looking fruit would all be poisonous to man. Only the very peak of the fort's dome was free of vegetation. From that vantage point he could look off toward the river. Some trees grew taller than the fort, but he could see that the jungly woodland stretched onward and outward beyond vision, rising into a range of low, forested hills to the north. King and Asher were cutting through the door when he came back down. They were through within half an hour, cutting a hole large enough to crawl through. Fuller entered first, followed by Jan and then Pete. The large room beyond the door was much the same as in the other fort. There was a desk, but no papers. The dampness of the climate had penetrated, somehow. There were no dead men. There was a coating of some kind of slime on the cement floor which made walking tricky. Pete led the way down a corridor, assuming that the interior design of this installation was much the same as that of the one in the desert. The rungs of the ladders going downward toward the war room were slick, rusted. Things were different down below. There was, instead of the war room, a room which, from rotting remains of beds, from rusting metal equipment, had been a sick bay. They saw the first indication of human remains there. He was not well preserved, not preserved at all. There was only a hint of human bones in a damp, moldy pile of dust, but Pete saw the metal of a door-opening tab amid the dust, and retrieved it. The life in the subtropical fort had been lived underground. There were large rooms with the remains of many beds, food-preparation areas, recreation areas. It was Jan who discovered the closed hatch which opened to reveal another flight of metal ladders leading to a still-lower level. Pete inserted himself in front of Fuller and went down first. Halfway down he felt a hint of fresh air, cool, refreshing. It carried a slight aroma of decay and rot, but it was much better than the muggy, stale air of the upper levels. He emerged from the downshaft into a cooled area. As he stepped forward a blaze of light almost blinded him. The room was huge. The floor was fairly clean. The ceiling was high, and studded with lights. And across that room, lying in the open, between two partitions, was a huge stack of rectangular yellow bricks. «Gawd, look at that,» Tom Asher said, having followed Pete down the ladder. One by one they came down, stepped out of the downshaft, halted, eyes dazzled by enough gold to buy a man anything he ever wanted if he lived to be four hundred years old. Gold. Man's history was tinged yellow by it. From the dawn of time the metal had been coveted, fought over, traded, bought, sold, stolen. Countless men had died for gold which would amount to a tiny fraction of the hoard of roughly pressed bricks gleaming under the lights of that room far below the ground level in a thousand-year-old war fortification. Buck King, breathing hard and fast, started walking swiftly toward the stacks of gold. «Hey, hold it,» Pete yelled. «Don't touch that stuff.» King turned. «I just want to look,» he said. He was fully aware that Pete carried a saffer. He was sure, however, that Jaynes wouldn't use it. Not yet. And he had to touch, to feel, to sample the weight of one of those bricks of gleaming gold. «King,» Pete yelled, «don't—» Pete was moving forward, yelling, even as the arcs of high voltage shot out, lightninglike, from the eyes he'd noticed on the partitions which housed the gold. King bucked and danced, already dead, his body supported in its lifeless state by the force of the voltage which fried him, left a stench of burning flesh in the air as the beams cut off and what was left of Buck King fell wetly to the floor. «I tried to warn him,» Pete said. «Jesus, I tried to warn him.» Tom Asher, his mouth open in surprise, had taken a couple of steps forward. «God, if he'd only listened,» Pete said, his fingers toying with the dent in his skull. Jan went to his side. «You tried, Pete,» she said soothingly. «We'd better find the computer and turn all this stuff off,» Fuller said. «We can at least get him out of there,» Asher said. «If you wanta reach in there, you go right ahead,» Fuller said. «He ain't going nowhere.» Jan stood chewing on one knuckle, her face white. The ventilation system was slowly taking the smell of charred flesh from the air. The war room was on the lower level. The door would not open to the tab Pete had taken from the pile of human dust. Once again the cutting torch sizzled, and then they were inside. This was a much more complex place than the war room in the desert fort. «You're the expert,» Fuller said to Pete. Pete nodded. He prowled, taking a quick glance at three walls of meters, instruments, controls. Dead lights and red trouble lights told him that parts of the system were decayed. «There'll be a bunch of manuals somewhere,» he said. «I don't want to start experimenting in here without knowing what I'm doing.» Jan found a closed shelf. The manuals were old, brittle, yellowed, but readable. «This is going to take a while, if you fellows want to go exploring,» Pete said. «You guys go ahead,» Fuller said. Jarvis and Asher left the room. Pete sat on a steel cabinet and began to read. «This one links all the positions,» he said. «We were right in that.» Jan looked at Brad Fuller's expressionless face. She did not like the way he kept looking at Pete when Pete wasn't watching. There was something about the man which set her teeth on edge. «Don't want him to push the wrong button,» Fuller said, grinning at her. «There's still a lot of nuke warheads outside, and maybe some stored inside.» «No,» she said. «We don't, and he won't.» «All right,» Pete said, after an hour's examination of the various manuals. «Here's one thing I can do right now.» He walked to a control bank, checked and double-checked, then began to flip switches. «This puts the other three forts in a stand-by, or deactivated, stage.» What he didn't say was that there in the manual in the master war room were instructions for destroying all of the facilities. Built into each fort were explosive charges which had a series of fail-safes. They could be set off only from this room. The self-destruct stage in the headquarters fort had a delay which could be programmed up to two hours. That one was the biggie. Down underneath the fort, put there by desperate, determined men a thousand years ago, was the most terrible weapon ever invented by man. They were all walking atop, sitting right on top of, a planet buster which would, upon detonation, turn a beautiful planet into molten stone and metal and asteroid-sized chunks. He spent a few minutes on the section which detailed how to deactivate and dismember the planet buster. That, however, could be done later. There was a possibility, in that climate, that the wiring belowground had long since corroded away, but sooner or later someone, Pete hoped under his own direction, would have to bring that thing up and break it down into harmless components and destroy it piece by piece. Next he found the bank which shut off all of the central fort's weaponry, and the few remaining laser cannon which were operational went dead as their charges slowly seeped away, power cut off. It was amazing to Pete to think that so much of the fort's weaponry was still in an operational mode. He went to work on finding the source of power and control for the guard beams in the gold storeroom. It took half an hour. He was ready to deactivate when a frantic shout came in through the hole burned in the war-room door. It was Jarvis. «Brad, Jaynes, you guys better get out here, and I mean on the double.» Turning off the beam could wait. Pete leaped to his feet. Jan followed him out the hole in the door. As she stuck her head through she saw Tom Asher strike Pete on the skull with a piece of pipe. She heard a sickening thud, realized in an agonized instant that the blow had fallen directly on the weak spot in Pete's head. She started to scream, and was seized by Jarvis Smith. Asher jerked the saffer from Pete's belt as he fell, crouched, the weapon pointed at Brad Fuller. «Fuller,» Asher said, «you've got about fifteen seconds to decide if you're in or out.» «Tom, you know the two of you together aren't smart enough to bring this off,» Brad said. «Now point that weapon some other way before I take it away from you and jam it down your throat.» «He's with us,» Jarvis Smith said. «I told you he would be.» «You jerks jumped the gun,» Fuller said. «You didn't give Jaynes enough time to deactivate the guard beams on the gold.» Asher looked uncertain. He lowered the saffer. Jan pulled away from Smith and fell to her knees beside Pete. He was breathing deeply and evenly. When she lifted an eyelid his eye was rolled back, showing white. She was surprised at her reaction. Pete could be hurt badly, having been struck on that area of his skull where the old injury had left a depression, but she was no longer concerned about whether or not the blow had done permanent damage. She was angry. There was a deep faith in her that Pete would survive the blow, but atop that faith was a seething rage at the men who were responsible. «The way we figure it,» Jarvis said, «they can have an accident, Brad.» «That's the way you figured it, huh?» Fuller said. He'd been thinking of some way to tie the death of the Jaynes couple into the destruction of their ship. It had been hit by laser fire. The problem was that a laser burns a human body in a way that no other heat does. If they tried to fake it and a fleet ship investigated, that would be too risky. The dry desert air where the 47 was wrecked would preserve the bodies well. The guard beams. The high voltage had gotten Buck King. «Okay,» he said, «pick Jaynes up and bring him along, Jarvis. Tom, you bring the woman.» Smith bent over Pete. «He's coming around,» he said. «Okay,» Brad said, changing plans. «Bring him back into the war room.» Pete had caught a flicker of movement as he walked out the door. He had seen the upraised arm, the dark object in the hand. From the time of his accident he'd had a deathly fear of being hit on the head. The depressed spot on his skull wasn't actually weaker than the surrounding areas of bone. The doctors had done a fine job of grafting in bone, but there were times when he had nightmares of feeling things impacting on his skull, and he always carried a vivid memory of the months of totally debilitating headaches. It was that fear of being struck on the head which, in all probability, had saved his life. Just a flicker of movement, an awareness, and he was throwing his feet out from under him to begin to fall flat on his face as the piece of pipe came down and made a thudding impact. The blow was still severe enough to cause him to fall endlessly into blackness. He became aware of movement. His head was as large as the world, and there was pain which cut through the blackness and jerked his eyes open. He groaned. He allowed someone to steer him to a metal chair. He tried to see. Jan's face, taut, pale, swam before his eyes. «Jan?» Jan took his hands in hers, squeezed. «Can you hear me, Pete?» He moaned with the pain of the sound. «Yes,» he said. «Jaynes,» Brad Fuller said, «what we want you to do is turn off the voltage of those guard beams. Do you hear me?» «I hear you,» Pete said, with great effort. «Move him over to the console,» Fuller said. Pete tried to struggle against the hands on his arms, but a part of him was far away, unable to come back. He slumped into the dust of a decayed cushion. In front of his eyes lights glowed on a tall panel. «They're going to kill us, Pete,» Jan said. «Shut her up,» Fuller ordered. Pete heard a meaty, slapping sound. He turned. Smith had struck Jan across the mouth. The sound and the look of pained surprise on her face drove the pain far back in his mind and left his head reasonably clear. «Turn off the power to the beams, Jaynes,» Fuller said. He had his saffer pointed at Pete's head. It didn't take deductive reasoning to understand. A planet, a planet of gold, was the prize. To men like Fuller and the others, two lives would not stand in the way. He felt a wave of overwhelming sadness. The time aboard the poor old 47 had been the happiest time of his life. Before Rimfire went missing and put dreams of wealth into his head he'd been blissfully content just to look forward to years and years of life on a tug with Jan. And now it was all going to end. No wealth. That didn't matter. No Jan. That's what mattered. Thinking of being dead was not as painful to him as thinking of being deprived of that girl he'd found in a spacer's whorehouse on Tigian. «Show me which switches to push,» Fuller said. Why should he cooperate? They were going to kill him and kill Jan. He felt a wave of dizziness, almost fell from the chair. «Quit faking it, Jaynes. Either you show me how to turn off the beam or your wife gets it now,» Fuller said. «All right,» he said, holding onto the edge of the console with both hands to steady himself. Pete Jaynes had never been a fatalist. It was the pain in his head, the dizziness. He couldn't think. He could only grieve over the loss of the woman he loved. And a slow anger fought with the pain in his head, grew into a devastating force. He saw in his mind a sinister thing buried far underground, down into the planet's bedrock. The killer. The planet destroyer. He was too weak. He hurt too much. There were three of them and there was nothing he could do to save Jan. She was going to be killed and he was going to be killed and that was something he couldn't accept without protest. «Jaynes, you've got five seconds,» Fuller said, in a tone of voice which convinced Pete. «Okay,» he said. He took a deep breath. The step he was about to take was a final, irrevocable step. Once activated, there was no stopping the process which would result in Jan's beautiful planet being reduced to space rubble. The makers had obviously reasoned that if the situation was desperate enough to activate the planet buster there would be no need to make a change in plans. The device was set for a two-hour delay. That was adjustable. Pete decided, first, to shorten the time, then felt that wave of sadness. He left the timer at two hours. He looked at Jan. Silent tears had streaked her cheek. Her lip was starting to swell. His fingers shook as he lifted the cover of the first protected switch. He pushed it with a solid flick, began to go through the sequence he'd read only once in the manual. He had that kind of mind. He was low on deductive reasoning, so he'd compensated for it by developing his memory. He had been so impressed by the mere fact that men had been so desperate that they could coldly provide for the destruction of a planet that the sequence was burned into his brain. It took six steps. He had gone through five of them. Lights were blinking. He took a deep breath, took one last look at Jan, and pushed the final button. There was a sizzling sound from the tall panel. Smoke burst out. There was crackling and popping and then a small explosion which buckled the metal front of the panel. He didn't know if that had been programmed by the builders of the fort, but it had happened. The entire panel which contained the instrumentation for activating the planet buster was dead. Fuller let out a curse as the panel burned and destroyed itself. He would have to change his plans again. He'd intended only to have Jaynes show him how to turn off the guard beams which protected the gold, then turn them back on. Mr. and Mrs. Pete Jaynes would then have joined Buck King in a charred heap. «Is the damned thing off?» Jarvis asked. «Yes,» Pete said, praying that it was not. The ventilation system still worked. Other panels in the war room showed ready lights. Fuller needed time to think, but the gold was blinding him. He could picture it in his mind. He could see it, solid banks of it, stacked over head-high, tons and tons of it. There had to be a safe way of getting rid of the Jayneses, but he could think of that later. Maybe he could simply take them back to the Stranden 47 and make them start walking. The desert would do the job. «Let's go see that gold,» Tom Asher said. He pushed Jan ahead of him out the door. Pete tried to leap to his feet. The sudden movement sent blackness into his skull, and he slumped. «Hold it, Tom,» Fuller said. Asher seized Jan's arm and pulled her to a stop. «Let's just finish him off,» Jarvis said. «Not here, you dumb bastard,» Fuller yelled. «I don't know about you two,» Asher said, «But I'm having a look at that gold.» Fuller rolled his eyes. They had a planet and those idiots were able to think only of a few tons of gold. «Bring Jaynes,» he told Jarvis. Pete felt himself being lifted. His legs were wobbly, but after a few steps he could walk with Smith's support. He made it as far as the main room where the gleaming gold was stored. The lights still functioned, blazing into glare as they entered the area. «Man,» Jarvis said, letting Pete slump weakly to the floor, «I'm gonna buy me a space yacht and hit every high-class whorehouse in the galaxy.» Tom Asher was moving toward the gold. Pete forced his eyes to focus. Smith, too, was mesmerized by the golden gleam. He took two or three running steps and was side by side with Asher when they walked into the beam and the force of the killing voltage flared, causing the muscles of their bodies to spasm in a wild dance of death. Brad Fuller let out a surprised yell. And at that moment Jan shoved him with all her might. He'd leaned forward involuntarily as his two companions began to jerk and crackle, as the stench of burning flesh came, once again, to his nostrils. The shove sent him to his knees, and Jan was running for the dark entrance of a corridor as he turned. Pete used all his reserve strength to throw himself at the bigger man, to put his arm over Fuller's weapon arm. The saffer's charge sparkled against the cement floor. Pete was unconscious again even before Fuller's fist slammed into his chin. Jan had gained the dimness of the corridor and was running knees high, arms pumping. She felt a surge of hope. Pete, bless him, had tricked them, had taken two more of them, leaving only one. She reached the ladder shaft and climbed with all her strength, had put one landing behind her when Smith pounded down the corridor. She could hear the clatter of his boots on the rungs of the metal ladder as she climbed. She'd had no plan when she made her move. She had acted instinctively, taking advantage of the surprise of the death of the two men. Now she had a picture in her mind. The big room where the dust of several men lay amid the rotted ruins of beds. She reached the door. It had been, thank God, left open. She skidded as she turned in and ran to the nearest pile of molded, rotting rubble. What she wanted wasn't there. She heard running footsteps in the corridor outside as she scurried from molding pile to molding pile. Then, at last, she saw what she was looking for. One of those ancient projectile weapons lay amid the fragmented bones of a human hand. She seized it. She knew little about weapons, nothing about antique weapons. She did not know that the pistol was an automatic, that a round was in the chamber, moved there by the automatic action when its owner had, a thousand years past, ended his suffering. Fuller spotted the door, wheeled into it, came to a skidding stop. The woman stood a few feet away by a moldering pile of bed and human bones, pointing one of the old handguns at him. He had to laugh. It was a brief, throaty chuckle. «What the hell good do you think that thing is going to do you?» he asked, moving slowly toward Jan. «We won't know until I pull the trigger, will we?» Jan asked. She was surprised by the calmness in her voice. «It might blow up in your face,» Fuller said, still walking. «We'll see,» Jan said. He was about five paces away. She had the muzzle of the old weapon pointed directly at his face. She pulled. The trigger did not move. Fuller, seeing the movement of her hand, seeing her eyes go wide, laughed again. She pulled harder, and Fuller's laugh was driven from him by the impact of a thousand-year-old slug of metal which struck him high on the bridge of the nose. Jan let the old gun fall to the floor, It struck with a metallic clang. Fuller had been blown backward by the impact of the heavy slug. He fell to lie on his back, his face a study in death, mouth wide in surprise, blood covering his open eyes. Jan screamed. She screamed just twice, then bit on one knuckle, edged past the body, ran to the ladder shaft. Pete heard the shot echo throughout the room. The sound galvanized him into effort. He was on his hands and knees when Jan came running to him to throw herself down and put her arms around him. «Fuller?» Pete croaked. «Dead,» she said. «We've got to get out of here,» he said. He told her, then, what he had done and watched her eyes go wide. «Oh, no.» «They were going to kill us. I couldn't let them live.» «I understand.» He had noted the time of activation. Less than ten minutes had passed. «Can you walk?» Jan asked. «I think so.» He got to his feet and fought the dizziness. A man just didn't get a blow to the head and recover immediately and do heroic things. He walked with his arm across Jan's shoulder for support. The ladder shaft was torture. He dragged himself up rung by rung, Jan below him, encouraging him. She had not had time to think that her beautiful planet was going to be destroyed. She could think only of Pete, and the fact that they were both alive. When at last Pete struggled out into the open air the freshness of it seemed to help. They were still a long way, through the undergrowth, from the Lady Sandy. The way had been marked as Brad Fuller had hacked away jungle growth. But the going was slow. Pete's head ached, but he was able to keep going. The dizziness came and went. They broke through into the flood zone, covered by low, rank growth. The Lady was there, of course. Pete broke into a staggering run, the growth whipping at his legs. Inside, breathing hard, fighting to keep from blacking out again, he checked his watch. «We made it,» he said. There was just under an hour left. He could blink the tug far away to safety in mere seconds. The generator was at full charge, all systems operative. «Pete, isn't there anything we can do?» Jan asked, as he seated himself and began preparations for a quick blink. «Maybe. If there's time.» He'd kept himself on his feet with that hope, that faint, long-shot hope. He'd been thinking of that device down deep in the earth under the old fort. It had been man's last, great achievement in the use of the nuclear fusion. The trigger was a hydrogen bomb. The energy released by the fusion of a light chemical element to form nuclei of heavier elements was relatively minor, exploding so far underground. What happened with that explosion, however, was not minor. The fusion energy triggered an intricate reaction which released the bonding molecular energy of medium-heavy elements with a force which spread and could not be contained, not even by the core and crust of a planet. The planet buster had been such a terrible weapon that following the war against the Zede II group, a lot of money had been spent finding a way to counter it. There was, of course, no way to stop the reaction once it had been triggered, but U.P. scientists had found a way to disarm a planet buster before the hydrogen trigger exploded. For a long, long time, all ships of the line had been equipped with a magnetic beam which could penetrate miles of solid rock to disrupt the initial fusion action and prevent detonation. The problem was that when Pete was at the Academy there'd been talk of discontinuing the practice of making the neutralizer mandatory equipment for fleet ships. The chances of Rimfire's having a neutralizer were slim. She was an X&A ship. But X&A ships, going into the unknown, went prepared. Weaponry on an exploratory ship matched, and often exceeded, that of a ship of the line. He had fifty-two minutes. He punched in the coordinates for Rimfire's position, and the Lady Sandy blinked. Jan had been busy. She treated the knot on Pete's head, cleaned it, sterilized it. The skin was broken and blood had clotted his hair. The Lady came into normal space a few hundred yards from the shadowy outline of Rimfire. «Get me headache pills,» Pete told her. He had some thinking to do. He'd planned how to get into the same never-never zone with Rimfire previously, had had it worked out, but he wanted to be sure. Jan was alive, and soft-warm. He wanted to be with her forever, but not frozen in time and space like Rimfire. He took the powerful drug, and his head felt much better almost immediately. «We need to talk this over, Jan,» he said. «Pete, I don't want to see my planet destroyed.» «It's risky, Jan. We can blink back, call in some of the bright scientists from New Earth. Rimfire's not going anywhere.» «Please,» she said. «It means that much to you?» «Not if you think it's too risky,» she said. «But we were rich, Pete. We had a planet of our own. Didn't you like that?» «I did.» «I'll leave it up to you.» Forty-nine minutes. He talked it, using spoken thoughts to get it straight in his mind. «Okay. Rimfire programmed a blink in the normal mode. Something, perhaps the size of her generator, the power, something, caused her to vector off onto that generator harmonic which matched the blink mode of ships of a thousand years ago. Her computer was programmed to bring her back into normal space from the normal mode, and didn't function in the altered mode.» She knew what he was doing. He was merely thinking aloud. But the chronometer was ticking off precious seconds. «The computer says this will work. In effect, I program a mixed blink. If I just programmed a blink in the old mode we'd come back into normal space right past wherever it is that Rimfire is hung up. What we have to do is program some delay into the blink, so that we'll exist in the same, whatever, frame, time and space, whatever, that Rimfire exists in.» Jan nodded. «We haven't tried that yet, you know.» «Pete.» «Okay, okay.» He punched instructions. «Hang on.» He felt the slide, the exit of his internal organs and tubings. His heart seemed to beat outside of his body, and once again he felt, in that timeless, endless eon of waiting, a great pity for the crew of Rimfire. He'd been looking at Jan's face when he pushed the blink button. If he had to spend eternity frozen in some strange state, he wanted to spend it looking at her. After a few thousand years, during which he had time to review his entire life, time to remember every moment with Jan, he saw her eyes blink and it was over. He breathed. «It works.» Thirty-five minutes. He talked as he made preparations. «What I did was program two sets of exit instructions,» he said. «First, the blink was programmed standard-mode, but with the generator tuned old-mode. That left us hung up.» «Wow,» Jan said. «I relived my whole life.» «It's not bad, except for that feeling of being outside of one's body,» Pete said. «But I also programmed a switch to old mode which, after a delay in tuning the generator—that went on while we were feeling timeless—» «Evidently doesn't affect a computer,» Jan said. «Evidently not.» So it worked. Now came the ticklish part. He told her what he expected of her. «We're going to have to actually make hull contact with Rimfire while we're hung up in time,» he said. That meant a series of tiny blinks. It didn't matter to either the generator or the computer how short the blinks were. The process was the same. He moved the Lady Sandy a few hundred yards closer to the shadow of Rimfire, measured carefully. Each blink was the same. Each took an eternity. «It's almost like psychotherapy,» Jan said, as they readied for another small blink which would cut the distance between the ships down to mere feet. «I can go back to the womb. I can remember every sensation, every word I've ever said or read, everything anyone has said to me.» «I spent a few thousand years going over our first month together,» Pete said. He had calculated it carefully. There was no time to wait for the Lady's generator to charge fully. Twenty-one minutes. He would make two more of the eternity blinks, hanging in limbo for a time which proved, in real space, to be only seconds. The next-to-the-last blink put the tug's metal side mere inches from the shadowy metal cliff of Rimfire's portside. In normal space it would have been simple. He would merely have snaked a cable over, and the field of the generator would have traveled down the cable to lift Rimfire back. However, to exist where Rimfire had solidity, he was in a state of frozen time, unable to blink an eye, much less control a cable. It had to be a hull contact. And since no one had ever blinked a ship into actual hull contact he had a few nightmare visions inspired by that man-made sculpture out in deep space, a ship fused, sharing a molecular bone with a stone asteroid. Nineteen minutes. Within a few seconds there could very well be another frozen sculpture in space, or in near space, a shadow of two ships, a huge X&A ship and a stubby tug blended together forever and ever, molecules intermixed, flesh become a mixture of metal and all the elements which went into the construction of the two ships. He used a precious few seconds kissing Jan. She felt, then, her first fear. Until that time she'd had total confidence. The kiss, the way he clung to her, told her that there was, indeed, danger. «You know,» Pete said, releasing her, sitting down, his fingers poised over the blink button, «I've dreamed about this moment from the first day I set foot on a tug. I've envisioned latching onto a big, rich ship. I've repeated a phrase a million times in my mind. Lord, how I'd like to be able to say to this ship, 'Captain, do you accept a Lloyd's?' « «I know, darling,» she said. «I know.» «And here I'm about to latch onto the most expensive, most valuable ship ever built, pull her out of trouble, and I'm not even going to be able to talk.» «It's all right,» she said. «We'll have a planet.» If it worked. If Rimfire had a neutralizer. If it wasn't already too late. «Ready?» «Hold my hand.» He squeezed her hand hard, pushed the button. A metallic, clanging thud was in his ears, remaining there for eons. All of his vital organs, all that was within him, his life force, his everything, seemed to flow up his arm and blend where their flesh made contact with all that was Jan. Chapter Twelve Captain Dean Richards, having reviewed all he had ever been exposed to in the way of mathematics, amused himself for a few thousand years figuring exactly how far his hand had moved. He'd started it toward his forehead to brush back his hair a few eternities past and it had moved exactly .0000000 0001211 millimeters. It would be interesting to calculate, in units of near infinity, how long he'd feel the tickle of the lock of hair. Tiring of that, Richards began at the beginning again. He knew the first moment of sensation. He was in the womb. He could feel the thump-thump of his mother's heart, hear the singing sound of blood in his tiny, forming veins. After a few times through a lifetime, things were revealed which had been lost in the haste or excitement of the moment in actual life. He found that he could concentrate on things he had seen with peripheral vision only and create almost a new set of lifetime awareness. The brain was, he had found, a most marvelous organ. He was astounded by the things it had stored, things which he hadn't even noticed at the time. Lord, what an educational tool! He could review, word by word, thought by thought, every book he'd ever read. He could extend theory. He was a mental superman, but he was helpless. And then the damned ship's alarm system clanged and clanged and Julie Rainbow was looking up at him with wide eyes. «Object in hull contact, sir,» Julie said. He had not fully recovered. He was still living an interesting, forgotten segment of his life. And things were happening too fast. The alarm was clanging and people were leaping to stations and a voice came at him from the bulkheads and all the metal in the ship. «Captain,» the voice said, «do you accept a Lloyd's?» «What in holy hell?» Dean Richards said. Chapter Thirteen He had to say it. He just had to say it. He'd just undergone an eternity of closeness with Jan which was unlike any other experience of his life, their souls, everything that was them blended and aware at the point of contact, their closely held hands. And he'd lived his life again, knew that with the knowledge he'd accumulated in deep, word-by-word study of every book he'd ever read he could breeze through any exam the Academy could throw at him and then teach the professors a thing or two. All that, and he still had to say, «Captain, do you accept a Lloyd's?» He sent the question through the cable communications system and it reverberated in the hull of the Lady. Then he clicked on the voice communicator. «Identify,» Rimfire sent. «U.P.S tug Ramco Lady Sandy.» Pete said. «This is Captain Dean Richards, U.P.S. Rimfire. I see no reason to understand your question.» «You did seconds or eternities ago, Captain,» Pete said. Dean Richards brushed the lock of hair back from his forehead. Yes, the man was right. But now Rimfire was functioning perfectly. «Captain Richards,» Pete said, «we can talk about that later. This is a vital question. Do you have a planet-buster neutralizer on board?» Richards was still trying to clear his head. «That, sir, is service business, not yours,» he said. Fifteen minutes. Pete's fingers flew. He felt the strange, eerie tug, knew that suspended, timeless feeling. He passed it going over the little he'd ever read about planet busters and neutralizers. Then they were back in normal space again. «Captain Richards,» he said, «you have an empty generator.» He was angry. Seconds were ticking away. Jan's beautiful planet was just under fourteen minutes away from destruction. «You can't blink. Answer my question or I'll blink you back and leave you there until I can get messages back to New Earth and get a fleet ship out here.» «That is classified information,» Richards said. «My God, man, a planet's going to blow up,» Pete shouted into the communicator. «I can explain everything later.» «Yes, we have a neutralizer.» «How long will it take to get it activated and to do the job?» «Hold one,» Richards said. Paul Victor, rubbing his eyes in puzzlement, had come into the control room. Richards put the question to him. «Activate in two minutes,» Paul said. «In position, five minutes to do the job. Maybe a little more if there's a great deal of heavy metal in the planet's crust.» «Get it going,» Richards said. He'd let the whole exchange be broadcast to the tug which was in hull contact with the Rimfire. Even as he gave the order he felt the Rimfire blink. The tug had moved him. More alarms sounded. He checked visuals and saw a water planet quite close. Ten minutes. «The buster is immediately under the fortified position directly below,» Pete said. «We have nine minutes and twenty seconds and counting.» Paul Victor looked up quickly. He'd started warming the neutralizer. It had one minute and thirty seconds to go before it was ready. He spoke into the communicator. «Young man,» he said, «it's going to be close. I'd suggest that you be prepared to blink us to hell out of here.» «Just neutralize that thing,» Pete said. «Neutralizer activated,» Paul said. Pete looked at the chronometer. Six minutes, thirty seconds. Jan was at his side, tense, her hand on his shoulder, her eyes on the visuals to get, she felt, what might be her last look at her beautiful planet. She'd seen Pete punch in a blink coordinate. She knew that he was ready to blink both ships out of the range of the devastating explosion. «There's a planet buster down there, all right,» Paul Victor said, as he sent the neutralizing beam out and down to flash through the planet's crust. «And there's one hell of a lot of heavy metal.» He had six minutes and five seconds to kill the capacity to react in a hydrogen warhead. «It will be very, very close,» Paul said. «Keep the tug skipper posted,» Richards told him. «It's old,» Paul said, «but it's alive. Good, strong reading. Going down slowly.» Jan reached for Pete's hand, praying at the same time. She was careful not to hold the hand which was poised over the blink button. There was just enough charge left in the Lady's generator to lift both ships to safety. Four minutes. Three. Two. At sixty seconds, Pete began to count down. «Lady Sandy,» Paul Victor said, «we're not going to make it. I'm sorry.» «Forty-nine,» Pete counted. «Forty-eight.» He'd lost it all. No Lloyd's on the Rimfire. No planet. And one hell of a lot of explaining to do. «Fusion potential coming down,» Paul said tensely, watching the clock, hearing the tug captain's countdown. «Thirty,» Pete counted. «Twenty-nine.» «Get us out of here,» Dean Richards said. «Now.» «Twenty-five. Twenty-f—» He jerked to attention, his finger jabbing at the blink button at the same time. The damned thing had gone off early. He saw it clearly, saw it in full Tri-D color on the viewer, saw the old fortification tremble and buckle upward, and as his finger hit the blink button and the viewer went black he saw just a beginning burst of fire dissolve the domed roof of the fort. «We lost it all, honey,» he said, the ship back in normal space. «Lady Sandy, where are we?» Dean Richards asked. Rimfire's computer was working. He'd have coordinates within seconds, but his viewers showed nothingness, blackness. Pete, in a dull voice, gave Rimfire the coordinates of the position. He'd blinked back to the midpoint beacon, back toward the galaxy and the New Earth range. He felt drained. His head hurt. With all the renewed knowledge in his head he couldn't imagine how he'd explain all of the events of the past few hours to a service inquiry board. They'd have a ball with just one aspect of it, how he and Jan came to be in command of the Ramco Lady Sandy. All the proof, all the evidence, was flying outward from a central point in fragments and molten lava. No planet. No salvage contract. No job. He stood, pulled Jan into his arms. He had that. Yes, he had that. «Sir,» the voice said on the communicator, «I'd like to know your name.» Pete gave it. «Captain Jaynes,» Richards said, «we're beginning to piece things together a bit over here. I have many questions. I'd like to suggest that you suit up and enter Rimfire through the hatch just astern of you.» It was, Pete knew, not a suggestion. It was an order. He wasn't about to go anywhere without Jan. They suited up. The cold of space is a tangible thing. It can crystallize metal. It can make itself felt through the best-insulated spacesuit, if only psychologically. They moved along the Lady's hull clinging to safety lines, magnetic shoes clomping on the hull. Line at his waist, Pete pushed himself, floating, from the Lady's stern, contacted the hull of the Rimfire feet-first, pulled Jan across. Two efficient service ratings helped them out of their suits once the airlock had filled, led them forward to the control room. All of Rimfire's officers were congregated there. Julie Rainbow was at her post. Pete accepted the outstretched hand of the Rimfire's captain, introduced Jan, shook hands with the other officers. «Well,» Pete said, feeling very, very tired, «there's a lot of explaining to do.» Richards smiled, waved them to a seat. «I think we already have a few of the answers, Captain.» Rimfire's crew had been working during the period of time it took Pete and Jan to cross over and enter the X&A ship. «I want to confirm one thing, first,» Richards said. «May I look at your watch?» Pete's wristwatch was standard service issue. He held his arm out, crooking his wrist so that Richards could see the face. Richards whistled and help up his own wrist, but Pete had already checked the control-room chronometer. «Captain,» Richards said, «in view of this I think we can have a little talk, later, about that Lloyd's contract you mentioned. My engineer, Mr. Victor, tells me that some abnormality in our generator got us caught up in subspace. Is that your opinion?» «Captain,» Pete said, «it's a long story, and I'll be happy to tell it to you. I have only one request. Well, two. First, we'd love a cup of good service coffee, and I'd like your word that you'll listen to the entire thing before you start asking questions. It seems that all the proof of what is going to seem like a bunch of wild lies went up with our planet.» Julie Rainbow was already in motion. She had two steaming mugs of coffee within seconds. «You said your planet,» Richards prompted, as Pete sipped. «Captain,» Julie Rainbow said, «excuse me.» Richards looked at her with one raised eyebrow. The girl was never going to learn not to interrupt. It seemed ages ago and only days ago that he'd told her— «Captain,» Julie persisted, «that planet. It's still there.» Jan leaped to her feet. Julie nodded. «I just put the long-range detectors on it.» Rimfire's detectors were vastly superior to the detectors on board a tug. «I wanted to see what a planet buster did, and it's still there.» Jan had spilled coffee when she leaped to her feet. It didn't matter. She put her mug down and started doing a little dance of joy. She pulled Pete to his feet and hugged him. «It's still there,» she whispered. «It's still there.» «Captain,» Pete said, «before I start talking, can we check out Jan's Planet visually? What's on that planet will answer a lot of questions.» «I don't want to risk a blink with the Rimfire, not until I know what the hell happened,» Richards said. Pete turned to the computer, and even as Richards started to protest, his fingers flew. «It's all right. I'll explain later. It's a simple matter of tuning the generator. I didn't take time to do that. I just programmed instruction.» And with that, even as Paul Victor lunged at him, he pressed the blink button, and they all froze, felt the eerie, old mode, and were back in space within visual of a beautiful blue-and-white water world, one of the most beautiful sights in the universe, a life-zone planet. «There was a nuclear blast,» Paul Victor said, after examining instruments. «Either it was too weak to trigger the buster, or the buster malfunctioned.» There was a crater at the site of the old fort, edges glazed by heat. There'd been some radiation released into the air, but nothing which would give anyone any problems. The site of the explosion itself could be cleared by an antiradiation team in a couple of months. «And now, young man,» Paul Victor said, «I want to know what you meant when you said something about tuning a generator.» «I have some questions first,» Richards said. «I think they'll all be answered as I go through it,» Pete said, grinning down at an ecstatic Jan. «Two things first.» «Coffee?» Julie Rainbow asked, coming to her feet. «Yes, thank you,» Pete said. «Then I'll record our claim to the planet on the Rimfire's permanent tapes, just to make it doubly official.» «And then maybe you'll be kind enough to tell us what the hell has been happening,» Richards said. «Be glad to, sir,» Pete said, unable to control the grin, feeling Jan at his side, soft-warm and wonderful. Chapter Fourteen The atmospace yacht Jan's Planet, cleared for approach and landing at Rimfire Spaceport, zapped down with a flair, leveling and stopping just before disastrous impact seemed imminent. She skimmed the pad, settled in front of a large, private hangar. White-clad attendants swarmed around her as the hatch opened. Directly behind her a service launch made a more sedate approach, a slow, careful landing, eased to come to rest near the Jan's Planet. Again the white-clad attendants scurried. They met halfway between the ships, a rather handsome foursome, a fleet admiral in service blue, a fleet captain, dainty, pretty even in the severe uniform, and a sportily dressed couple who came from Jan's Planet hand in hand. Captain Julie Rainbow ran a few steps forward to kiss first Jan, then Pete. Dean Richards, his temples showing a bit of distinguished gray, embraced Jan and shook Pete's hand. The four boarded Jan's Planet. Pete had given the crew time off, so there were just the four of them as the sleek yacht soared vertically and then leveled and shot into the stratosphere and into near space on a ballistic trajectory. «Good Lord,» Julie laughed, as the trajectory peaked and she felt that over-the-hump quick kiss of momentary weightlessness. «That's the first time I've done that since I was a kid in trainers.» «Pete's in his second childhood,» Jan said. «Nothing too good for real heroes,» Pete said. «First to circumnavigate the galaxy, discoverers of humpteen new life-zone planets.» Dean Richards was using the visuals. «Richardsville has grown,» he said. «Namesake of the principal city on Jan's Planet,» Pete went on. «Want me to do the kiss-me-quick again?» «I came here to see a museum,» Dean Richards said. «Don't let him kid you,» Julie said. «He came to see the city named after him and to see his godson.» «How is little Dean?» Richards asked. «Pete's ready to buy him his first ship,» Jan laughed. «Well, he's smart for a five-year-old,» Pete said. He was going down, calling for clearance. The skies of Jan's Planet were no longer theirs and theirs alone. He made one of the patented, wild, heart-stopping Jaynes landings. A ground vehicle wheeled up to the yacht. As the four boarded, Julie admired the building ahead. It was set in the center of a vast, deeply grassed plain. «You picked a spot for it, all right,» she said. The ground vehicle delivered them to an impressive entrance under a sign which said: JAYNES MUSEUM OF ANCIENT WEAPONS OF WAR. Pete and Dean fell behind as the tour of the new museum began. The curator hired by Pete, noting that the two men seemed to want to talk, directed his comments to Jan and Julie. «You made a wise decision, Pete,» Richards said, «taking the finder's fee in land.» «I didn't think so the first few years,» Pete said. «That mining contract on the eastern desert didn't hurt you.» «Nope.» «Hope you're seeing to it that they don't mess up the land.» «Sure,» Pete said. «It's a clean operation, all underground. There's the same desert up above that was there when we first saw it.» A flash of memory. Jan's Planet in his viewers for the first time, the loss of the old Stranden 47, the terrible moment when he'd seen nuclear fire burn up through the domed roof of the old fort on South America. He'd named the continents of the western hemisphere after similar landmasses on old Earth. The first few years of residence on one of their vast tracts of land on the continent he'd named North America. And, not quite so pleasant, the months of investigations which had finally resulted in confirmation of their claim to the planet, and to the salvage contract on U.P.S. Rimfire. Favorable testimony by Dean Richards and his officers had helped, and a firm friendship had resulted. «Guess you've heard that the Academy and the service are now using old-mode hangup time for pounding education into the heads of empty-headed cadets,» Richards said. «Read something about it.» He halted in front of a battered, partly melted tug. The 47, lifted from the eastern desert, had a permanent home in the museum. «Pete, I'm always pleased when we can stop off here, but I made a special trip this time,» Richards said. Pete turned, brought his mind back from the sweet, sweet days aboard that old Mule of a tug. «Department of Space and Alien Exploration suggested it,» Richards said. «You've made yourself quite a reputation with those papers on theoretical effects of blink-generator tunings.» «Ummm,» Pete said. «They've assigned me to research your theory that the pre-blink signal can be read both ways.» «Good,» Pete said. «I'll be glad to see some work done on that.» It needed someone with the power of deductive reasoning, he felt. An old Academy kick-out could only take it so far, reasoning that although subspace has dimension, of sorts, that that dimension is infinitely large or small and that there should be a way to take the short way to infinity, read the emergence of a pre-blink signal and use that signal to make blinks into previously unexplored space. By doing so, the long, tedious exploration to lay new blink routes would be eliminated. «X&A has authorized me to offer you a temporary admiralcy,» Dean said. Pete's fingers went to his skull, played there for only a second. «What in the hell for?» «To be consultant on the project. We'll use Julie's ship, the old Rimfire. I'll be project boss.» Lord, Lord, he was thinking. Admiral Peter Jaynes. He laughed. «Intrigues you, doesn't it?» Richards asked. «It does.» If it had come a few years earlier he would have leaped at it. «Like to have you and Jan aboard.» «Dean, I wish to hell I could.» «Thinking about little Dean?» «Yeah. We're away from him enough as it is. And we've just started renovation of the fort in the desert. It's the best-preserved one. Give people a chance to see the kind of things men did back when we fought wars. And we've got our first crop of wheat coming up out on the plains.» «Well,» Richards said, «I told them I wouldn't be able to pry you away.» «I'm afraid not. You'll keep me posted, I hope.» «Sure. Might be calling on you for some of that nondeductive reasoning of yours, too. You know what it will mean if you're right about this.» He knew. A ship could move through space, through any space, in galaxy or out, just as fast as the blink charge would build. No more careful probes to be sure blink lines were clear. Julie Rainbow, for example, could take the Rimfire out past the periphery, send an exploratory pre-blink signal, clear the area, and be on the fringe of another galaxy in one blink. «Well, our ladies are waiting,» Richards said. A quick, low orbit of the planet showed the two service officers how well settlement and development were going, and then they were on the launch headed back for Rimfire. The sleek atmospace yacht blinked outward, past Rimfire, even as she pointed her blink signal for the familiar blackness of intergalactic space. Jan's Planet headed inward, hit the New Earth range, and blinked to come to rest in normal space near blink beacon NE795. Nearby, a Stranden Mule kept vigil over the junction of blink routes. The two-man crew, man and wife, had a few moments of interest in a boring, three-year hitch as the pre-blink signal of the yacht came and a brief courtesy greeting was exchanged. The man-wife, with four months to go to relief, were dreaming of a holiday back on Tigian. «Every year, same time,» the tugboat man told his wife. «New yacht this time,» the wife said. «Same name.» «Yes.» The man adjusted the visuals to have the yacht in view. «Every year same thing. They say hello and then put up a privacy screen. I wonder what the hell they do over there for two weeks same time every year?» Jan came into the lounge on board Jan's Planet in a silken singlet. «Ready for coffee?» she asked. «Sounds good,» Pete said. She poured. He sighed in contentment. Two weeks. Two glorious weeks of nothing. Nothing but Jan. Little Dean was in good hands living it up on the farms. Two glorious weeks. She looked more like a Tri-D star than a girl he'd talked away from the Spacer's Rest, Lord, how many years ago? «You'd like to be out there with Dean and Julie, wouldn't you?» Jan asked, as she sat beside him and he felt the silken touch of her hip against his. «In a way. But not now. This is my time.» «And, sir, your time is my time,» she said. «Sure you don't think this is a dull way to spend a vacation?» «What do you think?» His fingers went to his skull. She reached for his hand. «I'll tell you what I think,» she said. She said it with silent, moist, pressing lips.