Silverberg Robert

The Planet Killers

The Planet Killers

by Robert Silverberg

To Leigh Brackett and Edmond Hamilton—world-wreckers without equal.

Cast of Characters

ROY GARDNER

His obligation to the Earth wasn’t nearly as important as the one he had to himself.

CHIEF KARNES

Duty was his only master and it knew neither right nor wrong.

LORI MARKS

Only her ideas were fancier than her figure.

JOLLAND SMEE

Holding the fate of the world finally cracked this man.

DAMON ARCHER

Old dull-as-dishwater Archer had some pretty scandalous plans.

TOM STEEVES

It was his friendliness that held the fate of Lurion.

Chapter I

Roy Gardner paused for a moment outside Security Chief Karnes’ office, making sure his uniform was straight. Karnes had sent for him with only an hour’s notice. That was fairly little time to get spruced up for an audience with your superior officer.

Besides which, Gardner had no idea why he was wanted. You never did, when you worked for Security. They sent you a message, or they buzzed you on the phone and said, “Karnes wants to see you,” and you hopped to it. Security Chief Karnes was not a man who enjoyed being kept waiting.

Gardner stepped into the scanning field outside Karnes’ office. The green glow bathed him for a moment, simultaneously checking his face against the master files and examining him for concealed weapons. Then the door rolled silently back.

Security Chief Karnes sat in the curve of a kidney-shaped desk, smiling pleasantly. He was a man still in his prime, no more than fifty-five. He had held his dreaded post as Chief of the Terran Security Service for fifteen years, and probably would hold it for three decades yet to come. Karnes was thin-faced and youthful-looking, with a bristly crop of copper-colored hair, and black eyes like little marbles.

“Come in, Roy,” he said with warmth.

Gardner stood stiffly at attention in front of Karnes’ desk. A quick gesture from Karnes relaxed his posture. Karnes did not insist on strict military bearing, provided nobody took it upon himself to deviate from the rules until receiving the Chief’s permission.

“Sit down, Roy. I hate to have a man stand like a ramrod while I’m trying to talk to him.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Gardner lowered himself into a webchair to the left of Karnes’ desk. The Security Chief riffled through some sheets of paper, found the one he wanted, and swung round to face Gardner.

“Roy, how much do you know about the planet named Lurion?”

“Very little, sir,” Gardner admitted. It didn’t pay to bluff knowledge with the Chief. “It’s the fourth world of the Betelgeuse system, isn’t it? Inhabited by humanoids. That’s about all I can tell you, sir.”

Karnes nodded. “The galaxy is full of worlds. You aren’t expected to know everyone of them in detail. And you’ve given the essential information here. However, there’s one additional fact about Lurion that you ought to know; and that’s why you’re here.” Karnes tapped the sheet of paper in his hand. “We’ve been studying Lurion very closely. We’ve run some probability checks with the master computer. In sixty-seven years, plus or minus eight months,” Karnes said, frowning heavily, “Lurion will launch an all-out war against the Solar System. During this war, Earth will be totally destroyed and heavy losses will be inflicted on Mars, Venus, and the other planets of this system.”

Gardner started. “Earth… destroyed?’

“So the computer says.”

“That’s a nasty idea, the destruction of Earth. If the machine’s telling the truth, that is.”

“Truth? Truth is a concept that has meaning only when you talk about time past, and sometimes not even then. We’re talking about the future. The computer says the attack will happen—if we allow it to take place. Do you think we dare risk it?”

“Oh,” Gardner said softly. He leaned back in the firm webchair, watching Karnes very carefully. Around him, the computer system of Earth Central clicked and murmured. A bright bank of cryotronic tubes glared at Gardner from the wall.

Gardner crossed one uniformed leg over the other and waited. It didn’t take a million-cryotron calculator to guess what Karnes was aiming at, but Gardner had long since learned to let Earth’s Chief of Security have his own way in presenting a situation.

Karnes rubbed his cheekbones, a gesture that accented his gaunt angularity. He said, “According to the best figures we have, there are some three billion people living on Lurion.”

“Half Earth’s current population,” Gardner said.

Karnes smiled coldly. “Ah, yes. Now, you realize that among Lurion’s three billion people there are some who will be the parents of those who will aid in Earth’s destruction sixty-seven years from now. The seeds of the conflict have already been planted. Probability says that if we sit back and do nothing, we will be destroyed. Therefore, naturally, we’ll have to take preventive measures against Lurion.”

Sweat started to roll down Gardner’s face. “What sort of preventive measures are planned, sir?”

“Total destruction of Lurion, of course.”

Gardner had seen it coming almost from the beginning of the conversation, but still the naked bluntness of the statement rocked him.

He studied his superior closely. Karnes didn’t look much like the sort of man who could order the death of a planet, Gardner thought. Karnes didn’t seem to have the necessary inner hardness, despite the precise angularity of his face and bearing. But you could never tell about people, it seemed.

Besides, Karnes wouldn’t have to do the job himself; it was merely his decision to make. He would aim the gun, but someone else would have to pull the trigger.

Gardner said, “And suppose the computer is wrong?”

Karnes shrugged. “Worlds have died unjustly before, you know. The universe is unsentimental. A minor readjustment in the metabolism of a solar furnace, a flare of energy, and a totally innocent world dies.”

“Of novas, yes. Natural causes. But this is entirely different. It’s murder, isn’t it?”

“In self-defense.”

“Self-defense before a hostile blow has been struck?” Gardner asked.

Karnes looked displeased. “Thanks to modern computer science, it’s no longer necessary to wait for the first blow to be struck. But you’re forcing me to rationalize, Roy, and I don’t want to have to do that. Let me make the situation absolutely clear: we will never know if the computer was wrong. If we destroy Lurion, there will be no war two generations hence. Therefore, we’ll have to assume for the sake of our souls that the computer is telling us the truth.”

“A tremendous assumption.”

“I know that,” Karnes said.

The Security Chief sighed. For a moment his professional guard was down, and Gardner saw beyond the mask to the inner man, burdened with guilt for the dreadful deed he had resolved to do. Pulling the trigger, Gardner thought, was perhaps not the worst of it. The man who aimed, who chose the victim, perhaps had more to justify to his soul.

“So Lurion will be destroyed.”

“Lurion must be destroyed; otherwise Earth will be. We can’t consider any alternatives to that set of statements. Either them or us, and we have to pray that we’re more worthy of surviving than they are. From what I know of Lurion,” Karnes said, “I think we are.” He smiled grimly. “All right. By now you know why I’ve called you in here. You’ve been picked for the job.”

Gardner said nothing. He stared at thé thick red carpeting on the floor of the Chiefs office.

Karnes added, “I might as well tell you that I dorft think you’re the man for the job; the computer does, though.”

Coming so quickly, the snapper nearly threw Gardner.

“Sir?”

“I didn’t think you could handle it,” Kames said. “You think too much. You’re liable to get bogged down in conceptual syllogisms when an ethical choice is handed to you. But on the other hand, you’re capable and you know how to handle yourself. I thought that your intellectual side would weigh down your active side and make you worthless for this job. But I fed your tape to the machine anyway. The machine says you’re the best man we have. Well, I defer to its judgment.”

Gardner blinked. He knew he was on the spot. He could beg off, on moral and ethical grounds, but that would accomplish nothing but the shattering of his career, Lurion had to be destroyed, in the opinion of Security Chief Karnes, and Lurion would be destroyed—if not by Gardner then by someone else.

He examined himself, wondering if he actually could do the job. He decided that he could if he sincerely felt that the future of Earth depended on it. So the computer was right, and Karnes wrong.

God help me, Gardner thought.

Out loud he said hoarsely, “All right. I accept the assignment.”

“Thanks, Gardner.”

“No thanks necessary, sir. You’re asking me to do a job. I’ll do it. Let it end there.”

“As you wish.”

Glowering across the desk at the Security Chief, Gardner asked, “How’s it going to be done, and when do I leave?”

“You’ll be in charge of a team of five,” Karnes said. “You’ll leave practically at once. Come with me and I’ll see that you get briefed on the full picture.”

In an office somewhere in the depths of the Security building, they gave Gardner the details of the project. The planet would be destroyed by a resonating circuit. It needed five separate co-ordinates. When all five co-ordinates meshed, that would be the end of Lurion.

“We ought to tell you, I guess, that there’s already been one unsuccessful attempt at the job,” Karnes said. “You represent our second try.”

“What happened to the first team?”

Karnes frowned. “We sent them out to Lurion six months ago. They were carefully-chosen, hand-picked men, of course. Only three out of the five even managed to get to Lurion alive. One man got waylaid by pirates even before he could get out of the Solar System. Another one made a slight miscalculation of his orbit. He piloted his ship square into Betelgeuse.”

“And the other three?” Gardner asked.

“They didn’t do too well either,” said Karnes. “The leader of the group was a man named Davis. He developed an addiction to khall.”

“Which is?”

“Lurioni vegetable-mash wine. I’ve tasted some. It’s potent stuff. Chalk Davis off. Then the second man contracted a Lurioni disease, went to hospital, and either died or was murdered there. We never got the full story. As for the final man of the team, he got there safely, established himself, and is waiting now for replacements. He can’t do the job alone. His name, by the way, is Jolland Smee. He’ll be your contact when you get there.”

“One man out of five. That isn’t a very good score, is it?”

“We had hoped for a better one.”

“How many teams will have to be sent out before a full complement of men reaches Lurion?”

Karnes pursed his lips together. “We try to profit by past mistakes. We hope that all four of the men we’re sending this time will make it.”

Gardner nodded. The fate of Davis interested him. Why, Gardner wondered, should a presumably sober, serious-minded Security man abruptly turn into a wino the moment he made planetfall on Lurion? An unbearable attack of conscience, maybe? That was the answer that suggested itself to Gardner, and he didn’t like it one bit.

A subaltern presented Gardner with a metal band that fit round his wrist.

“Your indicator,” Karnes said. “An ingenious bit of microminiaturization. There’s a microscopic electroencephalograph tucked inside there, tuned to five particular mental wavelengths.”

Gardner studied it. There were five little colored panels, unlit and quiescent.

“Your color is white,” Karnes said. “The moment you land on Lurion, that white panel will light up. The red panel will light, too. It’s the color of Jolland Smee. The other three panels will light up, one by one, as the other members of your team arrive.”

Gardner nodded. The wristband looked innocuous, just a bit of ornament, dull and dark now. But when all of its five panels were lit, a world wquld be doomed.

The room darkened. A screen was lowered in front. A projector hummed.

“These are the other members of your team,” Karnes said. “Study their faces carefully.”

The first face was that of Deever Weegan. His color on the indicator band was green. Weegan looked hard-eyed, fleshless, a man of stoic reserve and forbearance. His face wore a grim, mirthless smile.

“After you’ve seen their faces,” Kames said, “we’ll let you look at their psych-files and hear records of their voices. You’ll have to be able to recognize these men with your eyes closed if necessary.”

Jolland Smee was shown next. He was about forty and balding, but his face reflected a wiry toughness that did plenty to explain why he had been able to survive when the other four members of his team hadn’t.

Kully Leopold was flashed on the screen after Smee. Leopold was a round-faced, round-eyed littie man with a short, stiff red beard and twinkling eyes. He was the sort of deceptively mild-looking person that Security liked to save for the most ruthless of missions. His color on the indicator was blue.

Damon Archer completed the quintet. Yellow was his color on the indicator, but his color as a person, Gardner thought from a first look, was probably a sort of bland gray. Archer’s face showed no outstanding characteristics, no peaks on the graph at all. It was the sort of face that could be forgotten in a moment.

Well, Gardner thought, Karnes probably knows what he’s doing, or else the computer does. Archer probably had an overall competence that made up for his lack of specialties. A man who could easily be forgotten had an enormous asset on such an assignment.

“There’s your team,” Karnes said. “You’re in charge of them.”

“Why not Smee? He’s there already.”

“You’re in charge,” Karnes repeated. “If I wanted Smee to be the leader, I would have chosen him.”

“Sorry, sir.”

“The next step will be to brief you on the personalities of your colleagues. After that, we’ll have some final instructions for you. Will you be able to leave for Lurion by tomorrow night?”

A Security agent is always at his chief’s disposal. Gardner took care that there were never any entangling circumstances. “I’ll be ready, sir.”

“You have until tomorrow night, then, to think all this through and have all your second and third and fourth thoughts. We’re not forcing you to take on this assignment, Gardner.”

“I understand, sir.”

“You can back out any time you want until tomorrow night. Once you blast off for Lurion, though, you’ll be committing high treason against Earth if you. decide to change your mind.”

Gardner moistened his lips. “I think I’ll be going through with it, sir.”

The briefing continued. Gardner hunched forward, committing everything that was said to memory. His life and the life of his planet would depend on how well he did his job.

Five men to destroy a world. Gardner wondered whether this mission would meet the fate of its predecessor.

Maybe. Maybe not.

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.

Chapter II

Gardner blasted off at midnight the following night. He left inconspicuously from a small spaceport maintained by Security; there was no need to go through normal channels in clearing him for departure. Security had its own means.

The ship was a medium-sized one, with room for five passengers. It was slated to be the getaway craft after the job was done. The other members of his team were under instruction to derrick their ships and land on Lurion by dropsuits.

As he traveled, Gardner went over the plan again and again, getting used to it. The murder of an entire world was not an easy thing to assimilate. But he had been shown the computations; he had seen the data. Earth’s existence was threatened. A deadly configuration was taking shape on Lurion: the beginning of a power-lust that would lead inevitably to world-smashing war.

Lurion was the fourth “and only inhabited” world of the Betelgeuse system, a smallish planet swinging on a somewhat eccentric orbit half a billion miles from its brilliant sun. At the end of his lonely journey, Gardner came out of warp-drive a few million miles outside Lurion’s atmosphere, shifted to planetary ion-drive, and coasted down.

It was important that the landing be a good one. He didn’t dare crumple the ship into uselessness as he landed it. If anything happened to the ship, the five Security men might well find themselves stranded on the planet they had booby-trapped.

As the craft dropped Lurionward, Gardner retraced the plan once again in his mind, reviewed the names of his team members, brought their faces to mind, re-examined the thumbnail sketches of each that Karnes had given him. Gardner had never met any of the other four in the course of his previous Security work. Security was a big outfit, and its agents didn’t go out of their way to identify themselves even to each other.

Gardner jockeyed his ship through Lurion’s thick, turbulent atmosphere. He pulled out of a dizzying landing-spin when he was still a hundred miles up, got the ship pointing in the right direction at the right moment, shifted over to automatic, and let the cybernetic brain bring him down right on the button.

At the moment of landing, the indicator on his wrist flashed white. An instant later, as soon as Jolland Smee was able to signal contact, the red panel adjoining it lit as well.

So far, so good, Gardner thought.

He peered through his fore viewscreen and saw that his ship had landed on a broad brown dirt apron at the edge of a big, bustling spacefield. The field was bright in the yellowish-red sunlight. Spaceship hulls stuck up skyward here and there over the field in seeming random distribution. Maintenance crews toiled busily over some; others looked as though they had endured decades of neglect.

Unstrapping himself from the protective cradle, Gardner made his way aft to the cargo rack. His suitcase was stored there, the all-important suitcase. Gardner pulled it down delicately. Inside it were the jewels and loupe that went with the false identity Security had provided him with. The sonic generator was also in the suitcase. The jewels were worth at least a million, but Earth Central hadn’t minded the expense; the budget could stand such things. It was the sonic generator that counted. It was more important than any quantity of bright-colored baubles.

Grasping the handle firmly, Gardner carried the suitcase down the catwalk. The Lurioni air was warm and mild, with a faintly pungent ozone tinge. Gardner made his way across the field, suitcase in hand, and toward the customs shed.

They had given him a hypnosleep training course in the chief Lurioni language. As was true of most planets that had reached the cultural stage of interstellar traffic, there were a number of languages spoken, relicts of an earlier day of nationalistic factionalism; but one generally-accepted tongue was spoken everywhere on the planet as a second language. Outsiders had only to learn the planetary language, which served as lingua franca everywhere, and which, on most worlds, was well on its way to supplanting the older languages.

The sign atop the customs shed was, therefore, written in planetary Lurioni, whose alphabet consisted of broad sweeping strokes vaguely reminiscent of Terran Arabic. Beneath the main lettering, in tiny cursives, a translation was inscribed in one of the lesser Lurioni tongues.

Gardner joined the line entering the customs shed. An eagle-faced Lurioni, swarthy and with bright gleaming eyes, pounced on him as he entered.

“Over here, please.”

“I obey,” Gardner replied in the formal Lurioni phrase.

The aliens were humanoid; that is nearly human in form. They were bipeds, mammalian, with swarthy skins capable of insulating them against the fierce radiations of distant Betelgeuse. They were a lean race; adipose tissue was at a premium on Lurion. With their seven many-jointed fingers, their long limbs, and streamlined thin bodies, they had a somewhat spidery appearance.

The Lurioni customs man looked down at Gardner from his height of nearly seven feet.

“Name, please?”

“Roy Gardner, of Earth—Sol III.” There was little point in adopting an alias.

The Lurioni made jottings on a form, scribbling busily away.

“Occupation?”

“Jewel merchant.”

At that, the Lurioni’s glittering eyes narrowed speculatively. “Hmm. So interesting. May I have your papers, please?”

Obligingly, Gardner handed over the little leather-bound booklet that contained his Terran passport and the Lurioni jewel peddler’s permit that Security had obtained for him.

The alien opened the booklet and scrutinized the documents carefully. It was all a formality, of course. Finally the customs official said, “I’ll have to examine your baggage, of course. It’s the government regulation, you understand.”

“Of course,” Gardner said mildly.

“Please step through with me.”

The Lurioni led him to an inner room, bare and dank. What looked like religious icons were mounted on each of the damp, green-painted walls. The alien indicated that Gardner should place his lone suitcase on a wobbly bench in the middle of the room. Gardner complied.

“Open the suitcase, please.”

Gardner thumbed the clasps and the suitcase popped open. The alien brushed methodically through Gardner’s personal effects in a bored, matter-of-fact way, without showing any great curiosity. Finally he gestured to the littie pouch of jewels.

“These?”

“My merchandise,” Gardner said.

He undid the drawstring and let a few gems roll out onto his palm: three uncut blue-white diamonds, a tri-colored tourmaline, a large pale star sapphire, a glittering opal. The assortment Security had provided for him was a curious mixture of the precious and the semiprecious. Reaching deeper into the pouch, Gardner produced three garnets, a large emerald, a ruby.

The same jewels were usually found in the crusts of all Earth, but each planet’s gems had a special characteristic of their own that made them desirable to connoisseurs; hence the interstellar jewel trade.

The customs man checked each stone off against the list on Gardner’s invoices, nodded, and pointed to the generator that lay inconspicuously wrapped in the corner of the suitcase.

“And what’s this?”

Gardner stiffened, trying to conceal his momentary discomfort. The generator was harmless-looking enough; that was why no attempt had been made to conceal it from the Lurioni.

“That… that’s a sonic generator,” he said. “I use it to test gems to see… ah… if… if they’re genuine.”

And, he thought, it happens to be a vital link in a chain of generators that will split this planet into so much sand.

“An interesting device,” the alien said casually, tossing the wrapper over it.

“And very useful,” Gardner said.

“No doubt.”

The Lurioni made a fluttering motion with his seven-fingered hands, indicating dismissal.

“All right, jewel merchant. Your papers seem to be in order. Put your pebbles away. You may pass through.”

The alien’s eyes glittered meaningfully. Gardner caught the hint. He scooped up the gems to replace them in the pouch, and carefully allowed one of the diamonds to slip through his fingers.

It bounced loudly on the smooth floor.

“You seemed to have dropped one of your stones,” the Lurioni remarked dryly.

Gardner shook his head emphatically. “Are you sure?” he asked, grinning. “I didn’t hear anything drop.” He did not look toward the floor.

The alien matched the grin, but there was nothing warm about it. “I guess I was mistaken, then,” the Lurioni said. “Nothing dropped. Nothing at all.”

As Gardner left, he glanced back warily and saw the Lurioni stoop and hastily snatch the diamond up. Gardner smiled. He had acted perfectly in his assumed character. Rule One, he thought. A smart jewel merchant will always bribe the customs men when he arrives in a strange place. They expect it as their due.

Suitcase in hand, documents carefully stored in his inner breast pocket, Gardner made his way out of the customs enclosure and into the crowded spaceport terminal. Ignoring the beckoning hands of salesmen and hustlers and pushers,

Gardner went straight forward, heading toward the taxi stand.

Security had arranged through the consular service to have a room available for him in a mediocre Lurioni hotel. It was a small room in a crowded section of the metropolis, because they did not want him to attract undue attention. Jewel merchants were traditionally secretive; they did not rent majestic suites.

A low, snub-nosed taxi was idling at the stand. Gardner signaled to the driver, who opened the door for him with grudging courtesy.

“Where to?”

“Nichantor Hotel,” Gardner said.

The cab left the curb and purred smoothly along the wide road that led from the spaceport to the city. Gardner sat back, relaxing.

“Earthman, aren’t you?” the cabbie asked.

“That’s right.”

“Haven’t seen many of your kind coming through this way lately. You’re the first Earthman in weeks, you know. You take a liner?”

“Private ship,” Gardner said.

It wasn’t surprising that few Earthmen landed on Lurion nowadays, he thought. For the past year, ever since the computer’s projected data had revealed that Lurion would destroy Earth if it were not first destroyed itself, Earth Central had kept a careful, if subtle, check on passports issued for travel to Lurion. No Earthman whose death would be a major loss was allowed to go there: the passport applications in such cases were politely refused, with the explanation that “current conditions” did not permit large-scale travel to Lurion. But there were few such cases.

On the other hand, it was necessary to have a goodly number of Earthmen on Lurion to provide protective camouflage for the Security team. If all the Earthmen on Lurion were suddenly to leave en masse, it would be extremely awkward for the five members of the destroying team.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No, Gardner thought. This was the only way.

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

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

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

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

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

“A moment, Earthman.”

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

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

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

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

Chapter III

After refreshing himself with a quick vibrobath, Gardner donned a fresh tunic, checked his room for spy devices and left, carefully locking and sealing his door. The seal insured that nobody would be able to enter and prowl through his belongings while he was gone, a natural precaution for a jewel merchant, and a sensible one for someone carrying the sonic generator. Harmless though the device looked to a layman, there were those on Lurion who might conceivably be able to guess its dread purpose.

The room sealed, Gardner rode down in the ancient lift-shaft, getting off at the second floor, where, a sign told him, the hotel dining room was located. It Was after the normal Lurioni dinner hour,, and the restaurant was practically deserted. An elderly Lurioni, surprisingly potbellied for one of his race, sat in one corner sleepily shoving yellowish noodles into his mouth. At another table, a bleak-faced Trigonian sipped juice. Two waiters lounged in the back, obviously waiting for the last customers to clear out so they might go off duty.

One came shambling over to Gardner and dropped a grease-specked menu in front of him. The dishes were listed by their Lurioni names, with no attempt at an explanation of their contents.

Gardner picked one out at random and said, “What do they make this Varr Kinash out of?”

The waiter shrugged. “It is good. You will like it.”

“Yes, but what’s it made of?”

“Meat with vegetables.”

Scowling, Gardner realized he wasn’t going to get any specific details from the Lurioni. “All right, let’s have some,” he said.

Service was abysmally slow. When the food finally came, Varr Kinash turned out to be a sort of stew; chunks of pale-looking meat and gobbets of fat were afloat on a glutinous mass of vegetables and sticky sauce. The actual flavor was much less repugnant than the appearance of the dish had promised, but Gardner was hardly pleased by his first encounter with Lurioni cuisine. Grimly, he ate his way through three-quarters of the stuff, out of sheer hunger if nothing else. But he told himself that if this were a fair sample of the local cooking, the gourmets of the universe would be losing very little through the destruction of Lurion.

When the waiter finally brought Gardner his check, the Earthman signed it, covered it with what he hoped was an adequate tip, and left. The waiters returned to lounging in the back. The plump Lurioni was still gravely devouring noodles.

It was still fairly early in the evening, with several hours yet to go before midnight. But Gardner was tired; he had already had a very active day, and there was nothing he could accomplish now that would serve him better than getting some rest.

He undressed, darkened his lights, and got into bed. But hardly had he shut his eyes and begun to doze, than he was awakened almost immediately by the annoying buzz of his door-announcer.

He sat up and blinked irritably.

“Yes?”

A high-pitched Lurioni voice said, “There’s a call for you, ser Gardner. You’ll have to take it at the main phone downstairs.”

“Thanks,” Gardner said wearily. He felt tension quicken his pulse. There was only one person on Lurion who would try to get in touch with him this evening. “I’ll be there right away,” he said, struggling out of bed and switching on the light again.

It took him several minutes to dress. When he finally opened the door, he saw a grinning Lurioni boy waiting in the hall with long arms folded in an improbable knot. He was obviously still waiting for a tip.

Persistent devil, Gardner thought. He gave the boy a coin.

The youngster took it grudgingly and stepped aside while Gardner once again locked and sealed his door. The boy was studying the mechanics of the seal with great interest.

“Will you show me where the phone is?”

“Maybe.”

Gardner scowled and surrendered another coin, muttering a few unprintable words of Terran under his breath. “This way,” the boy said.

The Earthman followed him down the narrow corridor to the lift-shaft, and they rode down to the main lobby. There, Gardner was led to a tiny alcove in a corner near the registration desk. The boy drew aside a moth-eaten cloth curtain, bowed mockingly, and departed.

The phone was of the public-communicator type that had been obsolete on Earth for more than fifty years. It lacked a visiscreen. Gardner thumbed the switch and said, “Hello?”

“Am I talking to Mr. White?”

“No—that is, yes! Yes, this is white,” Gardner said hastily, realizing that the reference was to his color on the indicator band. “Who am I talking to, please?” he asked.

“I’m a friend of yours from the old country, Mr. White. Perhaps you don’t remember me, but I’d like very much to get to see you. If we could meet, you’d realize that I had red blood in my veins.”

He accented red. Red was Smee’s color on the indicator band. So that was the confirmation.

“That would be a very good idea,” Gardner said, coming awake rapidly. “But isn’t it too late tonight? I’ll abide by yours wishes, of course.”

“Tonight would be best,” Smee said. “It’s been so long since the last time I heard a fellow countryman’s voice that I don’t think I care to wait. Would that be terribly inconvenient for you?”

“I don’t think so,” Gardner said. “I can always relax some other time. Where can we get together?”

“There’s a bar that I’m very fond of on One Thousand Six and the Lane of Light,” Smee said. “Any cab driver will be able to get you there. It’s in North City. Would you care to meet me there in… say, an hour?”

“Fine,” Gardner said. “I’ll be there.”

“How are you enjoying your stay on Lurion so far, Mr. White?”

“It’s been very instructive. Thanks ever so much for getting in touch with me tonight. I’ll be seeing you soon.”

Gardner hung up. He hadn’t bothered to arrange any identification signals with Smee. The other agent was smart enough to find some way of identifying himself, and, since the phone might very well be tapped, the less there was between them by way of signals and other cloak-and-dagger hocus-pocus, the less suspicious the Lurioni authorities were likely to be.

He went back upstairs and, before entering his room, checked the seal on his door to satisfy his curiosity. Sure enough, it had sbeen approached, probably by the same houseboy who had brought him the message.

But the seal hadn’t been tampered with; it had merely been pressed and prodded and investigated a little. There was absolutely no way to get that single giant molecule off the door without the key, and since the key happened to be Gardner’s breath he wasn’t particularly worried about being robbed. Thumbprints could be imitated, but it was a little harder to match a man’s breath. And he doubted that anyone wanted to get into his room desperately enough to pull the wall apart.

Gardner exhaled, and the patch of seal that prevented entry slid together into a globe no bigger than his fist. Putting his thumb to the conventional doorplate lock underneath, he opened it and went in.

The room was as he had left it. The Earthman checked briefly, examining the sonic generator and his wallet and the jewels. All were intact. He slipped a few bills out of his wallet and put the rest away. Then, popping an anti-fatigue tablet in his mouth to keep him going the rest of the evening, he left, locking up again and sealing the door.

“Where can I get a taxi?” he asked at the desk.

“We will have to summon one.”

Gardner waited. At length, a cab appeared in front of the hotel. It was an old model, scarred and paint-patched, but the Earthman had no choice. Wearily tipping the desk clerk, Gardner got in.

“One Thousand Six and the Lane of Light,” Gardner told the driver.

“Ten-segment extra for crossing into North City, ser Earthman.”

“All right,” Gardner said. He slouched irritatedly back in his seat. These Lurioni could bleed a man white with their endless demands for tips and bonuses and special charges.

The cab ride was jouncy and uncomfortable. They wound northward through desolate slums, then through more imposing residential areas, and finally across a massive bridge that arched across a dark, sluggish little river.

The neighborhood brightened considerably on the north side of the stream. The cab came to a halt finally in a neighborhood studded with brilliant glow-signs; the boulevard stretched brightly off into the distance as far as Gardner could see. The Lane of Light had been well named.

Paying the cabbie, Gardner dismounted and found himself at a triangular wedge of streets all intersecting at the Lane of Light. He chose the one that bore the number-sign One Thousand Six, turned left, and was confronted immediately with the leaded glass windows of a bar.

Gardner, entered and stood for a moment just within the doorway, letting his eyes grow accustomed to the dim light. He plucked the image of Smee out of his memory and searched for someone here who matched that picture of a short, tough-faced, balding man.

On his second sweep around, Gardner saw him. The register in the back of his mind clicked and instinctively said, There he is.

Smee was sitting by himself in the back corner of the bar, sipping a greenish drink. He was not looking at Gardner.

Gardner walked toward him and stood to one side of the table.

“Mind if I join you?” he asked.

Smee looked up casually from his drink, evidencing neither surprise nor warmth. “Suit yourself, friend. There’s plenty of room for both of us at this table.”

Gardner wondered whether he had been recognized. Terran espionage channels had been able to get his name to Smee, and the place where he was staying, but not necessarily a physical description. He sat down and said, “Mighty white of you, Mister.”

The other grinned. “Hello, Gardner. Glad you’re here.”

“Smee?”

“Of course.”

A Lurioni bartender appeared, fawned servilely, and inquired elaborately after the state of Gardner’s health. But behind the courteous facade was an easily visible barrier of scorn, hatred, and contempt.

“Would the noble Earthman care for a drink?”

“The Earthman would,” Gardner said. “Suppose you give me… ah…” He fumbled, not knowing what to order, and finished up lamely, “Suppose you give me the same thing my friend here is having.”

“Certainly. One khall, at once. Do you drink it cool or warm?”

A quick glance at Smee provided no helpful hint. “Cool,” Gardner bluffed.

“Your taste is excellent, ser Earthman. The drink is at its finest when cool.”

After the waiter had gone to place the order, Smee muttered, “He’s a lying scoundrel. If you had ordered it warm, he would have told you the same thing.”

“Professional courtesy?”

“Just a love of lying,” Smee said. “You’re a prince among humanoids so long as there’s a segment in your pocket; then he’ll flatter you from here to Orion. But once you run out of cash, your existence ceases to matter here.”

The drink arrived. It was served in a tall colorless glass, topped with a sprinkling of spice. Some sort of sliced fruit dangled limply over the rim. The drink-itself was deep green in color.

Gardner stared at the glass reflectively before sipping. He had read Smee’s report on the unhappy fate of his predecessor Davis. Davis had sampled khall on his first night on Lurion, too, and it had been his immediate undoing. He had even pawned his sonic generator eventually to buy more khall. Smee had redeemed the pawn at once, but by that time it was obvious that the first destruction team was doomed to failure.

Smee was watching him curiously.

“An unfortunate predilection for drinking khall was the downfall of a friend of ours,” Smee remarked in a detached, ironic way.

“I know,” Gardner said. “I was just thinking about the same thing. But I’m curious to see what stuff the vintners sell, etc. It must have been pretty potent to ruin Davis like that.”

Gardner touched the glass hesitantly to his lips and let a small amount of the beverage enter his mouth. He frowned, swirled it around critically on his tongue, finally swallowed it.

The khall was sweet on first taste, he thought, with an immediate aftertaste of sourness. It was a subtle sort of drink, but not one that Gardner would care to drink very often.

“Interesting,” he said. “But I’d hardly feel the loss if I never had any again.”

The short man smiled. “Each man has his own poison. The fondness for khall grows on you in direct proportion to the quanity you consume. Davis liked khall to a fault. It… it made him forget things.”

“I see you’re drinking it,” Gardner said. “Do you want to forget things too?”

“I’ve been here six months,” Smee said. “For six months

I’ve been in the position of a jailer who lives right in the cell with the condemned man. I won’t get forgetfulness out of a bottle that easily.” He took a deep draught of his drink, none the less, and said, “When are your friends due here?”

“One, two, and three weeks, respectively. It’ll be good to have the whole gang of us-together, won’t it?” Gardner said.

“Downright jolly.” Smee ventured a funereal grin, but replaced it immediately with a cold frown. “Have you had any trouble yet?”

“Trouble?”

“Inside, I mean.” He tapped his chest. “Inflammation of the conscience. Swollen guilt glands. That sort of trouble.”

Gardner saw what Smee meant, and shook his head.

“No. I haven’t had that sort of trouble yet. But there’s three weeks, yet, isn’t there?”

“Yes. Three weeks. At least.” Smee sipped again at his drink, and ran thick, stubby, powerful fingers through the comic fringe of fuzz on his scalp. In a muzzy voice Smee said, “Long time, three weeks, Gardner. Very long time. And maybe something will go wrong. Maybe we-both stay here another six months. Or six years. Or sixty years. Or six hundred sixty…”

Gardner suddenly made the discovery that Smee was drunk. It was a quiet sort of drunk, that didn’t show from without.

Well, who wouldn’t be? Gardner asked himself. Living for six months on a planet you’ve been told to blow up. It’s amazing that he’s as stable as he is.

Gardner wondered what he would be like if it took another six months or more before a full destruction team could be assembled. He began to hope fervently that Leopold and Archer and Weegan would get here on time, without delays that might necessitate replacement of personnel.

“Are you planning to stay on this continent?” Smee asked suddenly.

“Yes. Why?”

“Oh, nothing, I guess. Except that in the original setup, this was my area. And we can’t all be in the same place, of course. We have to be separated by the proper distances.”

“Naturally,” Gardner said. “One of us will have to move elsewhere.”

“You’re the boss. Do you want to stay here, or should I?”

Gardner puckered his lip indecisively. Smee obviously did not want to be shifted. But Gardner knew that that was unhealthy; perhaps Smee, in his six months, had developed fixed habits, had involved himself with drinking cronies and the like. For the good of the mission, Smee would have to be pried loose from any such impairers of efficiency.

“I’ll stay here,” Gardner said. “You know this planet better than I do, so it’s easier for you to move around. Take Continent East as your position.”

Smee sighed. “Very well. I’ll be there when the time comes.”

Chapter IV

A very special geographical distribution was necessary if the generator were to-produce its desired effect. Lines of force had to be drawn through the planet, pole to pole, hemisphere to hemisphere. The Five would be together only at the very end, after the generators had been activated, when they fled to safety in Gardner’s ship.

Gardner began to regret having decided to meet Smee personally. The plan was so established that there was no real need for the five conspirators to have actual personal contact. When the indicator band would glow on all five’ wrists in all five colors, the time would have come, and each man would know where he was to be and what he was to do.

Gardner looked at the rings under Smee’s deep-set, sad eyes and shivered. Six months of waiting, and Smee was still here; but how much damage had this hellishly prolonged assignment done to his soul?

“I think I’ll be going,” Gardner said. “You woke me up. I haven’t slept in a while. And we’ve covered all the ground we need to cover.”

Smee’s hand shot out and caught Gardner’s wrist with a surprisingly powerful grip.

“Why not wait? I asked you to come here for a specific reason. There’s a floor show starting in ten minutes. You may find it interesting.”

“I’d rather—”

“Please wait,” Smee said strangely. He was half cajoling, half commanding. “The floor show here is quite unique. I… find it healthy to watch it.”

“Healthy?”

“You’ll understand. I’m sure that watching it will benefit you as it does me.”

“What kind of benefit?”

“Remain and watch.”

Gardner shrugged. Smee seemed almost desperately insistent. And he was wide awake now anyway. “All right,” he said. “I’ll stay.”

Leaning back, he took another sip of the khall. He could see how Davis had grown so fond of it. Its taste was insidious, growing in intensity as one kept on drinking it, and it could easily become compulsive. Probably Gardner thought, it even had mild narcotic qualities. All in all, it was a good drink to stay away from, except when being sociable.

A few minutes passed, and then three burly-looking Lurioni appeared and began to clear to one side the tables in the front of the room. At the touch of a button, the streetfront windows were opaqued, to keep outsiders from getting free looks.

“It’s starting,” Smee murmured. “Be prepared for something nasty.”

Gardner waited tensely. A sphincter in the wall just to his right irised open. There was a silent hush in the bar.

A beam of blue light wriggled through the opening in the wall, spun dizzingly across the opposite wall in wild circles, and came to rest finally in sharp focus. A bolt of bright yellow followed, spearing into the blue. The colors twined, moved snakily along the wall, suddenly blanked out.

Then two Lurioni stepped through.

They came to the center of the floor and stood there, bathed in light, unmoving, while from the regular patrons there arose a rhythmic stamping of the feet that was the local variety of applause. Gardner noticed that Smee, too, was pounding the floor.

The Lurioni were a man and a woman wearing only the briefest of loincloths. A harsh red light shot down from the ceiling and illuminated their thin, knobby-jointed bodies. Gardner studied them with interest.

They were particularly lean specimens of their race, thin and bony, extremely tall. The man was near seven feet in height, Gardner estimated, while the woman was at least a six-footer. They stood quite still, moving not a muscle, until the stamping of feet died away.

Then the two in the center of the floor began to dance to the accompaniment of grave music that came piping from a grille set-high on one wall near the ceiling. Their motions were stiff, precise, jerky. Gardner winced a litde at the music; he had a delicate sense of pitch, and the excruciating quarter-tone intervals and the jarring, totally unpredictable discordancies affected him strongly.

The music accelerated, and so did the dancers. The offstage instruments struck a clashing chord so oddly tonal that it seemed wildly misplaced in that symphony of dissonances, and the female dancer went into an awkward pirouette.

She spun for a moment, spidery arms akimbo, one long leg drawn up so her foot touched her other knee. Then, breaking the pose, she fumbled at the belt of her loincloth. Long arms whirled. A knife flashed in the red spotlight, and a red line of blood traced itself down the golden chest of the male dancer.

Gardner caught his breath sharply. “What sort of unholy dance is this?”

Smee smiled mellowly, sitting back with his thumbs hooked into his belt. “Entertainment here runs to the morbid side,” he said. “If we’re lucky, maybe the management was able to afford to hire a kill tonight. There hasn’t been one here in weeks.” Smee took.another drink, grinning complacently.

Gardner felt cold. It seemed to him that Smee relished the weird dance taking place, that he had insisted on Gardner’s seeing it only because he wanted the company of his own kind.

The dance continued, unwinding inexorably. The unseen musicians spun out their mercilessly complicated nonmelodies, and the dancers kept pace with the tempo, moving now at a frenzied pace. Their dark bodies were glistening with sweat.

The male dancer had a knife, too, Gardner saw; it flickered momentarily in the seven-fingered hands as he struck, and a line of blood appeared between the girl’s breasts. Another tonal chord echoed in the rooml the dancers separated, gliding as if on bearings to opposite ends of the area. Polarized there, they spun in tight circles and glided back, coming together again under the red spotlight.

They passed by each other on tiptoe, taking little mincing steps, and the girl’s knife slit the man’s arm from elbow to shoulder. Each of the knife-strokes was precise, delicate, not a crude butcher-swing; Gardner guessed that none of the cuts penetrated very much deeper than the outer layers of the skin.

But even skin cuts are painful, and by now the bodies of both dancers were criscrossed and streaked with slashes. And, as Gardner looked around, he saw the patrons—Lurioni, chiefly, with a thin sprinkling of outworlders—staring eagerly at the pair, waiting eagerly for the climax of the dance.

An invisible drum began beating a numbing tattoo. A flute wailed atonally.

Blood mingled with sweat. The dancers closed, danced lightly apart, rejoined. Each time they passed one another, a cut was inflicted. They seemed to be outdoing each other in the attempt to make the delivery and placing of the wound as artistic as possible. Their faces remained as rigidly emotionless as those of masks in a museum cabinet. Gardner wondered if the dancers saw the knife coming before the moment of pain, and whether the kiss of the blade had any effect at all.

“Don’t they feel the cuts?” he asked.

“Of course not,” Smee said. “It would ruin the dance. They’re doped to the eyebrows and hardly know what’s going on. It’s the customers who feel it vicariously.”

Looking around, Gardner saw that Smee had told the truth. Total empathy had been achieved. The Lurioni patrons sat stiffly, rocking back and forth, grunting a little each time a wound was inflicted, grinning fiercely, swaying and murmuring. They seemed to be participating in some blasphemous rite. Gardner found himself falling into the wild, chaotic rhythm of the music, and nervously checked himself lest some dark impulse take hold of him.

The dancers were moving jerkily and lamely now, their former angular grace utterly transformed into a marionettelike parody. The male dancer was soaked with blood and perspiration, and he gleamed under the lights. The female had come off slightly better. Gardner suddenly realized that there was going to be a kill tonight, and that it would be the male who would die. The girl had been setting him up, taking wounds herself as a matter of ritual, but inflicting more than she took, and maintaining control at all times.

The music swung deafeningly upward. The girl, eyes agleam, moved inward, coming to life, dancing bouncily on the outer edges of her feet, lifting the knife, bending to circle and display it to the watchers, letting it sparkle in the dimmed spotlight. The hapless victim danced too, but it was the death-dance of a cocooned fly twitching at the end of his silken cord while waiting for the spider who had snared him to suck him dry.

Gardner clenched his teeth. He had seen death before, but never death administered so casually, so brutally.

The killing of an individual, he thought, is tragic murder. But the killing of a planet…

The girl came forward, knife held high, preparing now for the final moment, the climax, the moment of truth—

Then the lights went on.

Gardner felt the wrench back into reality with a painful, jarring tug. It was like being abruptly awakened, and even awakening from a nightmare can be a wrench. He knew that the impact on the others, who had been so closely bound up in the bloody little drama, must have been even more violent.

The dancers were frozen in midfloor, looking merely naked and no longer nude. Their eyes were vacant, their arms dangled limply, their shoulders slumped. Blood trickled in little runnels down their skin. They seemed totally bewildered at all around them, as though they had been transported here in the twinkling of an eye from some far-off cosmos where only the two of them had existed.

After the first frozen moment, Gardner reacted, glancing toward the door.

Four uniformed Lurioni stood there.

It’s a raid, he thought wildly. He was right. Once the immediate instant of surprise was over, the patrons of the bar came to life, jumping up, making a scrambling dash for the rear doors, the windows, any available exit they could find.

“Don’t panic,” Smee said quietly. “Come with me and we’ll get out of here.”

Gardner felt Smee’s powerful hand gripping his wrist once again, this time not holding him down but lifting him up, pulling him bodily from his seat. Gardner looked back and saw the four policemen marching into the bar, laying about them in vicious glee with heavy wooden truncheons. Half a dozen of the bar’s Lurioni patrons lay sprawled unconscious on the floor, blood welling from their scalps. The two dancers stood grotesquely together in the dance area, covered with their own^1 blood. They were holding hands, joining forces in their mute, bewildered way against the sudden and violent encroachment of the outer world.

Then Gardner felt a sharp, socket-wrenching tug on his arm.

“Come on,” Smee whispered harshly. “Don’t stand around gawking. I know the way out.”

They darted toward the rear of the bar, and Smee put his shoulder to a door that led to the kitchen. Someone had bolted the door from within, but it gave way, with a great splintering of wood, after the fourth blow from the burly little man’s shoulder. Smee rushed through, beckoning behind him for Gardner to follow.

Breathless, Gardner raced along at Smee’s heels. He heard shouting behind him, but did not stop to see who was protesting. They passed through a small, incredibly dirty kitchen, made a sharp turn, then thundered down a dark flight of stairs.

Another locked door confronted them. Smee grabbed the handle, wrenched, pushed inward. The door gave way. He yanked it open and they stepped outside.

They found themselves in a deserted-looking alley. From behind them came the sounds of shouted pain, and rising above that the keen, piercing shrieks of Lurioni laughter.

For a moment they stood still, catching their breaths. Gardner felt himself trembling from the exertion, and impatiently stiffened in a half successful attempt to regain control.

“We’re safe here,” Smee said. “But we can’t stay here. Someone from one of the adjoining buildings might see us down here and telephone the police.”

“How do we get out?”

“Just follow me.”

Smee led him along the alleyway in a direction that traveled away from the raided building. As they walked, Gardner demanded angrily, “Why didn’t you tell me that you were taking me to an illegal place? What would have happened if the police had caught us and given us some kind of truth-check? You could have wrecked the whole project.”

Smee turned around and stared at him blandly. “I assure you I had no idea we were going to be raided.”

“But you took the chance.”

“I did not. The place isn’t illegal. Besides the police never arrest anyone.”

“Huh? But why did they come busting in there, then? It looked like a raid to me.”

The short man snickered. “The police must have been bored tonight,” Smee said. “They felt like having a raid, so they had one. The place was breaking no law. Those knife-dancers are perfectly permissible.”

“What was the excuse for the raid, then?”

“Preventive discipline, I think they call it here. It means that a pack of policemen break into a place and bang people around with truncheons just to show them that there is some law on Lurion, and that they enforce it strictly.”

“That’s a lovely law enforcement system.”

“It’s the way this planet works,” Smee said. “That was why I wanted you to stay for the show.”

“You knew it was going to be raided?”

“No. I knew there was a chance of a raid. There always is, wherever you go on Lurion. I simply wanted you to see the dance, to see the forms of entertainment that pass for good clean fun on this world. You were lucky enough to see how they keep the law here, too.”

“It was risky. Suppose one of us got beaten to death by the police?”

Smee shrugged. “You risk your life every time you step outside your room. What do you want to do, hibernate until the team is complete?”

Gardner shook his head. “No, no, you’re right. It’s good to see what sort of a world this is.”

“I keep going,” Smee said. “I need constant reassurance. But every day I prove to myself again that this planet is evil; that nothing worthwhile will be destroyed when this planet is destroyed.” He shouldered his way out of the alley and into the street. “I wish I didn’t have to keep thinking about it. But you don’t snuff out a world as calmly as you’d cap a candle.”

“I know,” Gardner said hollowly. “I’m learning that a hundred times a day.”

A light late-evening drizzle was falling, now; the air was warm and muggy, and his clothing clung stickily to his skin. But, inside, Gardner felt chilled. Smee looked completely sober now.

“We’d better not see each other again,” Smee said. “Not until the time comes. We’ll only depress each other otherwise.”

“All right. Not until the time comes.”

“I’ll leave for Continent East at the end of the week.”

“Don’t rush about it,” Gardner said. “Good night, Smee. And thanks for letting me see that show tonight. It makes me feel easier about what we have to do.”

“Good night,” Smee said.

Chapter V

They parted, going in separate directions. Smee trudged off wearily to the left and Gardner headed the Other way. After a while he paused, standing alone in the rainy Lurioni night. The night was moonless, and the mugginess even hid the stars behind a purplish haze.

Oddly, the strange exhibition of sadism and vicarious cruelty that he had just witnessed had calmed and soothed, rather than upset “him. It was the kind of unmitigatedly evil entertainment that he had hoped to find flourishing on Lurion.

Gardner knew he was groping for rationalizations, for reasons that would justify the destruction of Lurion. Actually, it was sheer, softheadedness, of course; no reason was necessary, said Karnes, beyond that of mere-common-sense precaution. The computer said that Lurion, if left unchecked, would destroy Earth in the course of time. Therefore Earth was acting out of the most basic law of self-preservation in reaching out to destroy Lurion. It was simple precaution.

But precaution was an abstraction, and Gardner operated best from concretes. He wanted to be able to see himself as an executioner, not as a cold-blooded amoral murderer.

Okay, he thought. A world that thrives on this sort of senseless cruelty deserves everything that it’s going to get.

But the answer was dissatisfying. False piety, a mocking voice within him said.

He kept walking, stiff-legged, stiff-minded, trying not to think.

The city’s name was City, a surprising bluntness for the usually devious Lurioni. Gardner’s hotel was situated in South City. He was in North City, now.

He realized that the night was not moonless after all, but that the three tiny, splinter-sized moons had merely been obscured by the haze. Now he could make them out, dotted in vaguely equilateral triangle in the sky, looking like stray teeth that someone had hurled up into the heavens. They cast a feeble and confusing light, as Gardner made his way through the untidy streets. He wanted to walk, to keep walking in this stiff, mechanical, unthinking way, to walk the tension and fear completely out of his system. Only then, when he was calm once again, could he find a cab and return to his hotel on the other side of the city.

He had no idea which way he was going. The streets were silent now, completely empty. It was nearly two hours past midnight. The anti-fatigue tablet he had taken before coming out to meet Smee was wearing off now, and Gardner was beginning to feel tired. But he kept on walking.

He turned into a street lined on both sides with grubby little residential dwellings, illuminated only by dim glow-lights across the street, and abruptiy someone hit him from behind.

It was a light, glancing blow, and Gardner had spent a hundred hours learning how to recover almost instantly from a surprise attack. He let his left knee go limp, dissipating the force of the blow, but before he could turn, another blow descended, and this one nearly knocked him sprawling. Only his special training saved him. He took two wild staggering steps forward, halted as if about to pitch forward face-first, and managed to recover his balance. He danced two or three more steps, then turned around.

A pair of young ugly-looking Lurioni stood behind him, their long arms folded. They were grinning in happy amusement.

“Hello, Earthman,” one of them said.

They seemed to be boys, though it was hard to tell the age of a Lurioni without long practice. Gardner sized them up immediately as the local equivalent of juvenile delinquents.

They were wearing open jackets flamboyantly ornamented with strips of silk. The rain had soaked them to the skin; evidently they had been prowling in search of strangers for hours. Gardner noticed little metal needles puncturing the skin of their cheeks—a symbol of their toughness, he figured. He decided to find out exactly how tough they really were.

“W-what do you want with me?” he asked in a timid, stammering voice.

“Got any money, Earthman?”

Gardner let an expression of abject fear and utter capitulation crawl across his face. “I don’t understand. You want to rob me?”

The Lurioni boys laughed contemptuously. “Rob you? Hah! Who ever said anything about robbing you, Earthman? We wouldn’t do a cruel thing like thatl”

“Oh, well, then…”

“We just want your money!”

Gardner blinked bewilderedly. He hoped that he had successfully put over an appearance of complete futility.

“Hit him,” one of the boys whispered to the other. The smaller of the two advanced boldly toward Gardner, grinned cheerfully at him, and struck him in the stomach. Gardner tightened his stomach-muscles and rode with the blow, following the Security-taught techniques, but he allowed an agonized grunt to escape, and his face became a crumpled mask of pain.

“Please,” he whimpered. “Please, don’t hit me again.”

“Hand over your cash, or we’ll give you a lot more, Earthman.”

“Sure,” Gardner wheezed. “You can have my money. Just don’t hit me again,-that’s all I ask.”

He started to reach into his right-hand pocket, but the taller boy said quickly, “Uh-uh, friend. Keep your hands out of your pockets. Tell us which one the money’s in, and we’ll take it out for you.”

“It’s in the right-hand one,” Gardner said.

“Get the money,” the tall boy commanded.

Gardner poised tensely, plotting out the precise pattern of muscle stress and counter-stress that he was going to bring into play. The younger boy was slipping a hand into the Earthman’s pocket. The spidery hand closed on Gardner’s billfold and started to draw it out. Gardner counted silently; this maneuver called for perfect timing, or else he might find himself lying in the gutter with his head kicked in.

Thousand one… thousand two… thousand three… now!

Gardner turned suddenly at a right angle. The motion pulled the flap of his pocket tight shut, trapping the boy’s hand at the wrist. Gardner grabbed the imprisoned wrist, ripped the hand from the pocket, arched his back, bent his knees, and flipped.

The lightweight Lurioni went catapulting into the air heels first, described a short arc, and crashed into his companion somewhere amidships. Gardner launched himself forward and was on them the next second, taking advantage of their astonishment.

His powerful arms straddled their shoulders and he pushed them to the ground. Instantly, he had one hand clamped on each throat. He tightened his grip until they began to have trouble with their breathing. The glared up at him, a mixture of hate and terror in their cold eyes.

“I think I’ll strangle you,” Gardner remarked casually. “One with each hand.”

He increased the force of his grip on the throats, kneeling at the same time on their chests. They kicked and flailed their arms, clawing at his face desperately, but to no avail. By the dim light of the streetglows he could see their faces growing mottled. The urge to throttle them to death was strong, but Gardner resisted the easy temptation.

After a moment he released his hold on their throats. They had stopped resisting now. He rose from them; they remained on the ground, making hoarse gasping sounds. Gardner backed a step or two away from them.

“Stay right where you are until I’ve turned the corner,” Gardner ordered brusquely. “You understand me? If either of you gets up, I’ll let you both have it with my blaster.”

He patted his pocket meaningfully. The blaster was pure bluff, but they had no way of knowing that. They made no sign of moving.

He edged away, facing them, only once stealing a glance behind him to make sure that no new adversary might be sneaking up on him. The vanquished pair remained flattened against the wet pavement until Gardner had reached the end of the street.

“All right,” Gardner called to them. “You can get up now. Start running in the other direction, fast as you can.”

They rose. Gardner heard them interchange hot words; they were angry at each other for the failure of their little prank, obviously.

Suddenly the older boy produced a bright curved knife from somewhere in his jacket. The younger boy sprang backward, but not quickly enough; the tall one thrust the knife into his companion’s belly and ripped upward with a killer’s practiced hand. Gardner gasped as the tall boy coolly watched his companion crumple; then the killer turned and trotted away.

A pleasant planet, Gardner thought.

He did not go to the assistance of the boy who had been knifed. There was never any percentage in helping thine enemy to wax strong and smite you. For all he knew, an attempt at help would only bring him a knife-thrust for his troubles. All things considered, he was lucky to have come out of the encounter in one piece.

His earlier qualms were almost completely dissipated now. This was an ugly, brutish world. For the first time, Gardner actually found himself impatient for the completion of the mission.

He began to walk rapidly toward a wide boulevard several blocks distant. He had no further desire to stroll aimlessly in this deserted neighborhood, and perhaps to have to fight for his life every block or two.

He had lost all sense of his direction. He had no idea where he was now in relation to the Lane of Lights, although he could not be more than half a mile from it. Reaching the boulevard, he found it described as Admiral Knairr Parkway; it was more brightly lit than the other streets, and there was still some vehicular traffic. Frowning, Gardner peered into the street, hoping to catch sight of a passing taxi.

Then he saw a box much like a fire-alarm box near him. Translating the Lurioni inscription, he read To Summon Hired Vehicle, Press This Key.

Gardner pressed it. An acknowledging red light went on. He waited.

Some fifteen minutes passed. The light rain continued to drizzle down, and he was getting thoroughly soaked, but there was no help for it. Grimly he stood guard by the taxi call-box, and finally a cab pulled up.

A Lurioni stuck his head out of the front window. “You rang for me?”

hYes.”

Gardner started to enter the cab, but the door remained locked. The cabbie said, “Stand fast there, you! Let me scan you first!”

A hand-scanner buzzed, and only after the taxi driver was satisfied did he allow Gardner to enter. Sinking back in the cushioned interior, Gardner said, “What was that for?”

“The scanning?” The cabbie laughed. “After midnight I’m not required to give a ride to anyone carrying a weapon, Earthman. It’s the law.”

“And if I had been carrying a weapon?”

“I would have driven on. I’ve been in this business twenty years, and I’m not minded toward suicide. Where to, Earth-man?”

“Nichantor Hotel, South City.”

The cabbie swore. “That’s a long trip for such an hour.”

“I can’t help it. That’s where I’m staying.”

For one uneasy moment, Gardner thought that the cabbie was going to dump him out and leave him to his own devices, but, to the Earthman’s great relief, the cab began to move.

They traveled in silence. When, nearly an hour later, the cab came to a halt in front of the hotel, the cabbie turned round and said, “Four units-twenty, ser Earthman.”

“It only cost me three and ten to make the trip in the other direction,” Gardner muttered, suspecting he was being fleeced.

“Double charge after midnight,” the cabbie retorted. The door was locked, and would remain locked until Gardner paid. Reluctantly, Gardner surrendered a five-unit piece and the door opened.

“May you sleep well, ser Earthman.”

“Thanks,” Gardner growled.

He entered the hotel, going past a drowsy-looking night clerk, and went up to his room. He stripped off his soggy clothes and spread them out to dry. Then, for the second time that evening, he climbed into bed and closed his eyes.

But sleep, which had taken him so quickly that first time hours before, now refused to come. Gardner lay awake, staring up at the ceiling, listening to the distant trickle of water in the pipes, hearing the creak of a bed on the floor above him, the faint cough of his neighbor on the other side of the thin wall.

The night’s events remained with him: the meeting with Smee, the dance, the raid, the encounter in the streets, the interchange of words with the taxi driver. It had been a very long evening, and an instructive one. He felt he understood Lurion. It was a world in which all of Earth’s faults had been carried to an extreme of brutality, selfishness, and evil, and where the virtues of Terran civilization did not appear to have taken root. So far, in his brief time here, Gardner had seen no indication of a flourishing, -healthy art or religion or ethical structure. The architecture was chaotic and hodgepodge, the music harsh and ugly, the people coarse, brutish.

Finally Gardner slept. But he was awakened early by the sound of people moving about, of chambermaids singing ribaldly as they thumped their way down the halls, of other tenants slamming their doors as they went down to breakfast. Gardner looked at his watch and saw that he had slept only five hours.

He rose nevertheless, showered and shaved, and was out of his room within three quarters of an hour. As he affixed the seal to his door, the chambermaid wandered by and said,

“What are you doing?”

“Locking my room.”

“How am I supposed to get in and clean?”

“You aren’t,” Gardner said. “I’ll be responsible for cleaning my own room. You don’t mind that, do you?”

“Just so long as you okay it with the management, I don’t. But when they come to me and ask how come I haven’t cleaned your room, and you say nothing about locking me out—”

“Don’t worry. I’ll defend you.”

“How do 1 know? Maybe you just want to trick me out of my job?”

Gardner sighed. He handed the girl a two-unit piece as a token of his honesty, and headed for the liftshaft. Doesn’t anyone trust anybody on this accursed world! he wondered.

It didn’t look that way. He rode down to the hotel dining room and breakfasted on an uneasy collection of mangled vegetables floating in a thin, vinegary oil. It was all he could do to get the stuff down, but he managed to eat it all. He was not developing any love for Lurioni cooking. He wondered how Smee had been able to stand it for six months.

Chapter VI

After breakfast, Gardner set out to peddle his wares. If he had ostensibly come to Lurion as a jewel-merchant, he would have to work at his trade, unless he wanted to risk getting into trouble. The Lurioni authorities might just be checking on all newcomers, for unspecified reasons, and he wanted to coyer himself.

The local jewel merchants’ exchange was some five or six blocks from his hotel, which is why that hotel had been chosen for him. As in all cities on all humanoid worlds, jewel traders tended to concentrate in one crowded district, hawking their wares at each other out on the -street, exposing palmsful of pearls and rubies and emeralds to the highest bidder. Gardner carried his little pouch of merchandise in his bosom.

The jewels, he knew, would have to be very carefully managed. He had to spin his supply out to last at least the three weeks, arid possibly a good deal more. He had the usual six-month visa, but he dreaded the thought of spending an indefinite amount of time with no occupation to keep his mind away from the project.

He entered the bourse, which lined both sides of a narrow street for several blocks.. Stern-looking Lurioni police, no doubt well paid by the jewel merchants’ association here, stood guard.

The first step was to find an Earthman. Again, it was protective camouflage; a newly-arrived Terran would be expected to seek out a professional comrade from his home world.

In Gardner’s case, though, it hurt. In three weeks or so, he knew, he would be on his way safely back to Earth, while the people he might meet and befriend now would have to perish with all of Lurion. Those Earthmen now on Lurion were considered expendable according to the harsh mathematics that governed this entire operation. Three thousand souls, more or less, could not be considered important when the lives of untold generations of Earthmen hung in the balance.

Gardner found himself suddenly face-to-face with an Earthman, a man in his sixties, short, stout, prosperous-looking, who smiled genially at him.

“You’re an unfamiliar face. Welcome to Lurion. I’m Tom Steeves.”

“Roy Gardner,” Gardner said, extending a hand to take the plump, slightly clammy one of the older man.

“Just arrived?” Steeves asked.

“Yesterday.”

“For how long?”

“Six months. Or until I’ve sold what I’ve brought. I represent a private trader.”

Steeves chuckled. “You’ve got to be careful here, Gardner. These Lurioni will rob you blind if you don’t watch out. Look at these.”

The older man opened his palm, revealing three flawless-looking sapphires. Gardner bent close over them, uncomfortably aware that he was being asked to pronounce a professional opinion.

“Lovely,” he said finally. “Of course, I’d have to study them closely.”

“Of course they’re lovely,” Steeves said. “Full-blooded beauties. And phony, every one of them.”

“No!”

Steeves smiled benignly. “They’re products of the furnace of Guair bin Netali, and if I hadn’t seen them manufactured myself I wouldn’t believe they were paste. Netali is only

one of the professionals here. Watch out for his work.” Steeves restored the sapphires to his pocket, and patted his capacious stomach. “I’ve been here twenty years, Gardner. I know all the tricks of Lurioni jewel-trading. If you’re unsure, check with me first. You’ll always find me on this corner, every day of the week.”

“Thanks,” Gardner said. “I appreciate your offer. I may need some help until I know the ropes.”

He chatted with Steeves a while longer, then moved on through the bourse. He spent most of the morning investigating, chatting with the other Earthmen, learning the angles, finding out who was trustworthy and who was not. By noon, Gardner had met and exchanged greetings with several dozen fellow Earthmen. He had had a hurry-up hypno-course in the technique of jewel trading, but now he was getting a practical course in professional argot and mannerisms.

At half past noon, he found himself in the company of two Earthmen and an Ariagonid who invited him to join them for lunch. Gardner accepted; they ate at a small Ariagonid-operated restaurant a block from the exchange, where the food was downright splendid compared with the usual Lurioni slops. During the course of dinner, Gardner consummated his first deal, unloading a ruby for a good price.

“Payable in Terran currency,” he specified.

The Ariagonid, who was the purchaser, hemmed and hawed and stroked his purple wattles; the conversion rate would favor him if payment were made in his own currency. But Gardner remained adamant, whittling the purchase price down a little to ease the pressure on the Ariagonid, and the deal was closed.

“I will register the currency this afternoon,” the Ariagonid promised. “By tonight you will deliver my gem?”

“Fair enough,” Gardner said.

Glancing quickly at his two fellow Earthmen, Gardner knew he had struck a good deal. He was pleased at his bargaining success, though he knew all too well that he was simply playing out a game against time; the price he got for the jewels was an irrelevancy. All that mattered was the need to have some sort of gainful employ until the time came to leave Lurion.

At the end of the day, Gardner returned to his hotel, footsore and hoarse, but secure in the knowledge that he had firmly established his new identity. He had haggled and bought and sold most convincingly, he thought. If any observers had been trailing him, they could not fail to believe that he was a legitimate merchant of precious and semiprecious stones, nothing more.

When evening came, he remained in the vicinity of his hotel, taking special care to get indoors before the hour grew late. His life was far too precious to the project to chance it on the streets in so dangerous a city at night.

There was a bistro opposite the hotel; he spent the hours after dinner there, as he might be expected to do, sipping judicious quantities of khall and eyeing the passing crowd. Later at night, when the streets began to empty out and the neighborhood became more dangerous, Gardner would stroll back to the hotel. For a twenty-segment piece he could buy admission to the orthicon room, where a gay kaleidoscope whirled endlessly to the stupified delight of an eager audience. It was a harmless enough diversion, especially if you kept your eyes off the screen and watched with interest the efficient tactics of the numerous pickpockets moving through the room. Around eleven each night, Gardner would retire to his own room, read for a while, and go to sleep.

It was a lonely life.

On the third day, when Gardner was beginning to get bored with the routine, there was a call, late one night, from Smee.

“I just wanted to let you know that I’m leaving for Continent East tomorrow,” Smee said.

“Fine. Drop me a postcard or something when you get there.”

“How has it been, so far?”

“No complaints,” Gardner said. “You like Lurion?”

“It has its points of interest.”

“Drinking much?” Smee asked next.

“A nip or two of khall before bedtime. It helps to relax me.”

“I’m sure it does,” Smee said thoughtfully. “Well, be seeing you in a few weeks.”

“Yes. A few weeks.”

Gardner hung up the phone and emerged from the curtained alcove. One of the,ubiquitous Lurioni houseboys was staring at him quizzically. There was no privacy to be had at the telephone, of course. But Gardner was certain he had said nothing to Smee that might arouse the anxiety of a spy.

He was pleased that Smee was leaving, at any rate. He had been worried that so long as he stayed here, the little man might grow increasingly reckless. Just because he had survived six months in this city, he wouldn’t necessarily be immune to a policeman’s truncheon or the knife of a Lurioni delinquent.

The trouble with the project, Gardner thought, was that every man was indispensable. Five generators was the minimum, and one member of the team put out of commission would snarl the entire enterprise. Perhaps three or four or a dozen five-man teams would have to be sent out before the entire necessary complement could be assembled on Lurion at the same time.

The first four days had gone along smoothly enough for Gardner: up early, out to the exchange, mingle with the jewel traders, buy and sell; then back to the hotel, kill the evening in loneliness, get to sleep. It was not an exciting routine, or even a pleasant one, but it was one that he could endure. He resisted any attempt of the Earther jewel traders to form after-hours friendships with him. They were all men condemned to die at his hand, and he knew he could not allow himself to become intimate with any of them. The job was hard enough to shoulder as it was.

As he saw it, he would go along, living this way for a while. In a few days Weegan would arrive, and then Leopold, and finally Damon Archer. Then, if all were still going well, they would perform their dreadful task and leave.

But on the morning of the fourth day he saw the girl, and from then on he knew that there would be complications, much as he wanted to avoid them.

She was going out, just as Gardner arrived in the lobby. She was an Earthgirl, and she walked with a cheerful, determined stride. Gardner froze, watching her skip down the steps of the hotel and lose herself in the rapidly-moving crowd.

He thought about her all day. And, when he returned to the hotel at nightfall, after his day at the jewel exchange, he was pleasantly surprised to find her standing at the desk in the hotel lobby, tearing open an envelope she had just picked up at the mail rack.

He walked to the mail rack and made a conspicuous thing out of searching his own box for a letter. Inwardly he told himself not to be a damned fool; he had nothing to gain by this escapade but trouble. Still, he rummaged in the box, and shrugged his shoulders when he found the expected emptiness.

“Nothing for me, I guess,” he said sofdy, and’turned as though to leave. But the girl had noticed him, and she looked up, smiling.

“Hello, Earthman,” she said lightly. “Do you live here? Oh, of course, you must, if you’re looking for your mail!”

“I live here,” Gardner said.

He studied her with care. She was tall, five-seven at least, with hair dyed green and an open, wide-eyed face with cheekbones just a shade too broad. She looked very attractive. She was well dressed, in an informal way, and a notebook was slung in a litde harness over her left shoulder. Gardner guessed that she was in her middle, or perhaps late twenties. There were no rings on her slim, tapering fingers.

He realized the dangers inherent in any such encounter as this, and tried to wrench himself free. But his eyes had met hers, and he stood where he was, unable to move away from her.

“I live here too,” she said, laughing prettily. “A few days ago they told me at the desk that another Terran had moved in, but I didn’t know if you were the one.”

“I’ve been here four days.”

“Then you’re the one they told me about. It’s good to see a friendly face again.”

“Yes,” Gardner said vaguely. He knew that this was a crisis point. He had to succeed in breaking this relationship before it began, or all might be jeopardized foolishly. He said, “It was good to meet you, but I really ought to run along now. I—”

She was pouting. “You don’t have to run away from me so fast, you know. I’m not going to bite you. Honest, that’s a promise.”

Gardner forced a good imitation of a chuckle. He told himself that he was getting into trouble, very serious trouble. But perhaps” he might still work his way out of it without having to seem impolite.

“Okay, then. I appreciate your subtlety. Would you care to be bought a drink?”

“I would indeed. You’re most kind to make the offer,” she said impishly.

“There’s a little cafe across the street.”

She wrinkled her nose. She was lightly sprinkled with freckles, Gardner noticed. “That place is so terribly vulgar,” she said. “Why don’t we just go into the hotel casino?”

Gardner shrugged. Drinks in the casino were twice as expensive as across the street, for one thing. But he was bound by the rules of chivalry, now. “The casino it is, then.”

They went to the rear of the lobby and through the automatically-operated doors into the dimly-lit room. A Lurioni clad in the local equivalent of a tuxedo-andrtails came gliding unctuously up to them to ask if they were interested in gambling.

“Not at the moment,” Gardner said. “We’d just like a table in the back, and something to drink.”

“Of course, ser Earthman. Come with me.”

They were led to a nook at the rear, behind the gaming tables. It might have been romantic, secluded as it was, but the lighting in the ceiling was defective, and buzzed annoying-ly; besides, the place had the sour reek of the foul Lurioni beer. They settled into the alcove facing each other. “Do you drink khallT he asked.

She nodded. “I’ve sampled a little. But you have to understand that I haven’t had the opportunity to do much social drinking on Lurion. That’s why I practically shanghaied you just now.”

Gardner grinned and ordered two khalls. While they waited for the liquor to arrive, he said, “Now tell me what such a handsome piece of womanflesh is doing all by herself on a nasty world like this.”

“I’m a graduate anthropology student, working on my doctoral thesis,” she said.

“I never would have guessed it! What’s your field of special interest?”

She said, as the waiter deposited the drinks on the table, “My thesis is called Abnormal Cruelty on Civilized Worlds.”

“You’ve certainly come to the right place for that. How long have you been here?”

“Four months.” She chuckled. “Here we are getting into a complicated discussion, and we don’t even know each other’s names. I’m Lori Marks.”

“Roy Gardner.”

“North American?”

“Yes. So are you.”

“Very north,” she said. “I’m Canadian. Bom in Ottawa. And you’re from the northeastern part of the United States, or else you’re trying to fool me with a phony accent.”

“I’m not. I’m a Massachusetts boy.”

She giggled. “Massachusetts seems so insignificant when you’re umpteen light-years away. So does Ottawa, fpr that matter. Or the whole hemisphere. They all seem to blur into one.” Sipping her drink, she said, “And what do you do, Roy? Don’t tell me you’re an anthropologist working on the same thing I am, or I’ll absolutely have a fit.”

Gardner smiled genüy. “No chance. I’m a dealer in precious gems.”

“Really!” Her eyes went wide with disbelief. “Really,” he said. “Is it so improbable?”

“It’s just… well, funny, that’s all.”

“How so, funny?”

“Funny because I always pictured a jewel merchant as a little shrunken sort of man with a squint in his eyes from peering through his loupe. You just don’t look the part, dammit! You look more like… well, an adventurer, or a spy, or something romantic. Anything but a trader in precious gems.”

Gardner tried to keep from wincing. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Remind me to shrink next time I see you. And some day remind me to tell you what I think anthropologists ought to look like.”

She giggled delightedly. “Touché.”

The conversation, which had become almost giddy, slackened for a moment. Gardner looked at the girl thoughtfully. She was young, pretty, intelligent, lively, unmarried.

And she was condemned to death.

Gardner felt his throat grow dry. He lifted the glass to his lips and took a long, deep pull of the fiery khall. He looked away, suddenly, so she would not see the pain on his face.

Chapter VII

An hour later, and two additional rounds of khall, and Gardner had his hand across the table, holding hers. He was forcing himself to take the khall one sip at a time, letting his body metabolize it before he allowed any more into his system. Otherwise he ran the risk of becoming maudlin, sentimental, and, perhaps, overly talkative. The combination might be fatal.

He eyed the girl closely, thinking of her and her thesis. It was a promising enough topic for research, and there was no doubt that she had come to the perfect world for studying cruelty. And then the thought returned that in three weeks—no, now only two weeks and a couple of days, now—he was going to kill this girl and the three billion Lurioni she was so assiduously studying.

“How long are you planning to stay on Lurion?” he asked, trying to sound merely formally curious, with ho deeper motive.

“Oh, another month or so, I guess.” Gardner winced. A whole month!

She went on, “My visa’s up in two months, you see, but I’ve observed about all the cruelty I want to observe on any one planet. These people have perfected it astonishingly well. You’d be surprised how many happy marriages there are on Lurion with one partner a sadist and the other a masochist.”

“That sounds like a pretty sensible arrangement,” Gardner said. Then, returning to the earlier subject, “So you’re leaving in a month, eh? Guess I’ll be on Terra afore ye, in that case. I’ll be going back in two, two and a half weeks.”

Her eyes brightened. “You can’t imagine how much I envy you. Frankly, I’m sick of this place. If I could get passage back, I’d leave with you, or even earlier. But all the ships out are booked solid for a month. I’ve been checking.”

“And no luck, huh?”

She shook her head. “There isn’t a berth to be had on any ship.”

Gardner felt the dull thudding of his heart beneath his breastbone. She could leave with me, he thought, but the hopeful thought died at once. There was no room for more than five on his little ship, and members of his team had to have priority. Besides, it would be a flat violation of security to take her with him. Terran civilians were not to be evacuated.

She’s expendable, Gardner told himself savagely. Earth Central would never have approved her passport if she had any value to anybody. The fact that she’s young and full of life and wants to live doesn’t matter to the computer. She’s here, and so she’ll have to die with the rest of them.

He gripped the glass he was holding tightly, then released it for fear he would smash it. Getting involved with her was a monstrous mistake; he had known that at the start, and yet he had allowed himself to glide into this tete-a-tete. And now he would have to contend with sticky emotions all the way from here to the end. It made a difficult job practically impossible.

She noticed his mood. “You look pale, Roy. Is something the matter?”

“No, nothing,” he said quickly. “There just isn’t enough alcohol in me yet, that’s all.”

He took a hefty slug of khall and stared broodingly at the swirling greenish liquor that remained in the glass. Khali was cheap. Gordon wondered if his predecessor, Davis, who was probably still wandering some foul back alley of Lurion in a drunkard’s rags, had also met a girl on Lurion. The khall helped to numb the guilt, all right. Not much, but enough.

“You really can’t be feeling all right,” Lori insisted. “You keep staring into your glass that way, or else off into space. Why don’t you tell old Aunt Lori the trouble? Maybe I can help.”

Her hand touched his and, irritably, he snatched it away. “There isn’t any trouble!” he snapped. “Don’t start meddling with—”

He stopped, seeing the shocked, hurt expression on her face, and realized the depth of his boorishness. “I’m sorry, Lori,” he said softly. “That was a miserable thing to say. You were just trying to help me, and I almost yelled your head off.”

“It’s all right, Roy. We all lose our tempers sometimes. Especially when strangers try to butt into our personal problems. Forgive me?”

“I’m the one who needs to be forgiven,” he said.

They patched it up, but Gardner knew he had stung her deeply. He forced himself to look cheerful, to prevent any further inquiries. But, within, he told himself, She’s just a lonely kid on an ugly world, and I had to go and be nasty to her.

“You are a strange one,” she said.

He grinned. “I’m still sober, that’s the real trouble. And so are you. Let’s see if we can’t do something about the situation.”

He called the waiter over and ordered yef another round of khall, and another one when they had finished that. He realized that neither of them had as much as mentioned the thought of dinner, and now it was past the dinner hour. Another insidious effect of khall, he thought with curious clarity. It’s a high-calorie drink, the kind that bamboozles you out of your appetite, but doesn’t nourish you in place of the food you’re skipping.

He got very carefully and meticulously crocked during the next hour, maintaining an iron control over himself all the while. His face felt fuzzy, his hearing was not as acute as it was when he was sober, and he knew that if he stood up he would have some difficulty co-ordinating his movements. But yet he was still his own master. He had had just enough khall to numb the burgeoning guilt growing within him, but not enough to cause him to say or do anything indiscreet.

Lori was considerably less careful. By the time the hour had passed, she was volubly prattiing about her oedipus complex; her very real fear of becoming a spinster schoolteacher in some small college’s anthropology department; her feeling of loathing and repugnance for Lurion and all that happened there. In short, she tossed at Gardner her entire self.

“So you see, I figured it was better to come here first and get a good stiff dose of ugliness, and then I could use Lurion as a sort of yardstick when I moved on to other planets, on my list.”

Gardner nodded gravely. Had he been a little more sober, he would have cut the conversation short before it was too late, before she had given so much of herself that it would be impossible for him ever to make the cold decision that would kill heir.

He sat quietly, listening, until she talked herself out. Perhaps the khall was losing its hold on her, for she smiled suddenly, reddened, and said, “I’ve been talking an awful lot of drivel, haven’t I?”

“On the contrary. It’s all been most fascinating, Lori.”

“But I’ve been hogging the conversation. I’ve hardly let you say a thing. And now you know every littie thing I’ve done since I was seven, and I really don’t know anything more about you than your name, your trade, and where you’re from I”

Gardner smiled lighdy. “Perhaps that’s just as well. I’ve had a horribly dull life. It would only bore you if I went into all the dreary details.”

She seemed to accept that as being reasonably sincere. They finished their drinks. Lori looked at the time and said, with a little gasp, “Oh, dear, its getting terribly late!”

“For both of us. In this place you just can’t sleep past daybreak.”

Gardner took her back upstairs; her room was two floors below his own. They stood for a moment outside her door.

“Goodnight, Roy. And thanks for spending the evening with me. It’did me good to see a Terran face again.”

“The pleasure was mine, Lori. Goodnight.”

He was standing so close to her that a kiss seemed to be in order. But it was a light one, a delicate grazing of lips and no more, a gentle thank-you-for-an-evening’s-company. She opened the door, staggered inside, nearly toppled on the bed, waved to him somewhat giddily, and closed the door. She hadn’t invited him in, and Gardner hadn’t been looking for an invitation. He smiled at her through the closed door, and went up the winding stairs to his own room.

As usual, the seal had been tinkered with. No surprise, that; the management and all the hotel employees knew that he was a jewel merchant, and they were dead set on robbing him before he left the hotel. But, unfortunately for them, there just wasn’t any way for them to penetrate that seal.

Gardner broke it with a quick blast of air—the signal was unaffected by the quantity of alcohol fumes on his breath—entered, and sealed the door carefully from inside.

He slept soundly, waking just after dawn with a ferocious hangover. Triphammers kept exploding behind his forehead, as he made his way muzzily to the washstand and gobbled down a pill. The pill eased the throbbing considerably, but his head continued to ache. Lori was not in the hotel dining room for breakfast when he arrived. Gardner wondered if she were sleeping late, and debated going up to her room to pay her a visit. But he decided against that, and went straight to the jewel exchange from the dining room.

That evening, when he returned from his day’s commerce, she was in the lobby again. She smiled graciously at him as he entered.

“Hello, Roy. Sleep well last night?”

“I slept fine. It was waking up that hurt.”

She grinned. “I know what you mean.”

“I missed you at breakfast,” Gardner said. “You sleep through all the racket the chambermaids make?”

“It’s easier to juggle hot coals,” she said. “No, I was up and out early, at the crack of dawn. I went down to the produce markets at sunup to watch the cockfights they stage down there.”

Gardner’s eyebrows rose. “I’m impressed. You couldn’t have had more than four hours’ sleep.”

“It’s the natural resiliency of youth,” she said lightly. “But I’m starting to feel it now. I’m crumbling around the edges, if you know what I mean.”

Gardner invited her into the casino for a drink; this time, they limited themselves to one apiece, then went on into the dining-room for dinner, and spent the rest of the evening in the hotel lounge talking to each other.

The next day, when Gardner arrived at the jewel exchange for his day’s trading session, he saw Tom Steeves heading toward him. Steeves, the veteran of twenty years of jewel trading on Lurion, had made several attempts to get friendly with Gardner, but the Security man had warded Steeves off as politely as possible, not wanting to get entangled in a friendship with a man he had to kill.

But this morning Steeves would not be shaken off. “Are you free for lunch today, Roy?”

“Yes, I am… uh…why?” Gardner asked, wishing he had had the good sense to offer a defensive excuse.

Steeves smiled jovially. “I’m having lunch with a couple of interesting fellows, and I’m looking around for company. I’d very much like you to join us, Roy. I think it would be well worth your while.”

There was something almost cajoling in Steeves’ tone, as if the stout, middle-aged jewel merchant were pleading with Gardner to say yes.

Frowning, Gardner asked, “What sort of fellows do you mean? Are they in the jewel line?”

“Not exactly. They’re… well, philosophers, for lack of a better word. Two young Lurioni.”

The idea of Lurioni philosophers seemed Unlikely to Gardner, unless it was a philosophy of evil that Steeves’ friends expounded. But the Security man felt strangely moved by Steeves’ insistence. Wondering whether he were making another major tactical error, he accepted Steeves’ invitation and agreed to meet the older man at noon.

It was a hectic morning. Gardner threw himself into his trading with such energy that he surprised himself; it was almost as if this really were his life’s focus, this trading of stones and amassing of money. At noon, he found Steeves waiting at the prearranged street corner.

“The restaurant is a few blocks from here,” Steeves said. “It’s quickest to walk. My friends will meet us there.”

As they made their way through the narrow, crowded streets, Steeves said, “Well, Gardner, you’ve been on Lurion close to a week now. What do you think of the place, eh?”

“You want me to be blunt?”

“I want you to be honest.”

Gardner shrugged. “It’s a hellhole, the most unmitigatedly evil planet I’ve ever seen; a world where the prime commandment seems to be Hate thy neighbor.”

“You seem to have sized the place up pretty quickly,” Steeves said. “It doesn’t take long, does it?”

“Not at all.”

“Yet I’ve been here twenty years,” the older man remarked. “I’m almost used to it. And you know something, Gardner? It doesn’t bother me any more. My first couple of months on Lurion, I kept thinking that this planet was the pinnacle of savagery. I hated it here. But gradually I began to understand why Lurion was the way it was, and I stopped hating.” He laughed self-consciously. “You think I’m a fat old fool, eh, Gardner?”

“I didn’t say—”

“Of course not. But you’re new here, and you can’t possibly believe that anyone could learn to tolerate Lurioni ways. And maybe I am a fat old fool. Maybe living here so long has dissolved my brain. Here’s the restaurant.”

They turned in the doorway of a small, dimly-lit place with only a scattering of patrons. Two Lurioni were sitting at a table to the left of the door, and they rose the moment Steeves and Gardner entered. They looked young, and there was something about their eyes—a gentleness, a sadness, that

Gardner had not observed before on this planet. He felt uneasy and troubled, and told himself that once again his curiosity had led him into risks. Meeting Lurioni socially was unwise, considering the nature of his assignment.

Steeves said, “Roy Gardner, meet Elau Kinrad and Irin Damiroj.” As they all sat, Steeves said to the two Lurioni, “Mr. Gardner is new to Lurion. He’s only been here a few days, and he told me just now that he despises Lurion.”

Before Gardner could say something that would fake the sting from Steeves’ truthful remark, Damiroj said softly, “Your attitude is quite understandable, ser Gardner. We despise our culture ourselves.”

The conversation was interrupted by the arrival of the waiter. After they had ordered, Steeves said to Gardner, “Kinrad and Damiroj are what you’d call progressive Lurioni. They’re active in philosophical circles here.”

“I wasn’t aware that there were philosophical circles on Lurion,” Gardner said.

Kinrad smiled. “It is a recent development, say, of the past three years. That is, our organization dates only from three years past. Previously there were always a few of us, isolated, generally unaware of the existence of any others like themselves. Usually their fate was suicide. Damiroj and I hope to counteract this.”

Gardner was silent while they explained, speaking alternately, with Steeves bridging the occasional linguistic gaps. They began with a brief history of Lurion, a poor planet to begin with, badly cheated by nature; its soil was barren and devoid of many useful heavy elements, and its climate was treacherous and unstable from pole to pole. Dank hot seasons were succeeded by blood-freezing cold ones.

There was only one race of Lurioni, but there had been many nations, each toiling along at a bare subsistence level-Marginal life had given rise to a counsel of despair; on a world like Lurion, it was each man for himself. War had been frequent, usually for the basest imperialistic motives.

Some fifteen hundred years ago, the scattered nations of Lurion had finally begun to amalgamate. First came the alliances and ententes; then, the beginning of linkage between the alliances. Until finally Lurion had attained its present confederate form of government, with one central authority, one main language; but with considerable autonomy in the confederated nations. With such a shaky union, Lurion entered the era of interstellar space travel and established communications with most of the other planets.

But the old ways of fear and greed had remained. A planet-wide religion, conceived in ancient pre-technological days, still survived, though transformed and secularized; it was a free-enterprise kind of religion which counseled each man to do evil lest evil be done to him first.

“Our world is not an attractive one,” Kinrad admitted. “Our laws are archaic, our ethics brutish, our art debased, our commerce rapacious. There are those on Lurion who even agitate for war with other worlds.”

“No!” Gardner said.

“Alas, yes,” Damiroj replied mournfully. “We hope this will not come to pass. But in the meantime we work quietly, privately, in hopes of influencing our countrymen. And Earth-men like ser Steeves are invaluable to us.”

Steeves grinned. “I’ve become sort of father-confessor to the outfit, you might say. I try to show them how they can work for the betterment of life here. And I help out with cash. We’re trying to get men into the government, you see, and that takes money, for we have to bribe bigger and better than the politicos if we ever hope to abolish the bribe system at all. So I contribute. Maybe now you can see what I’m driving at, Gardner.”

“I see it; this is a pitch for funds.”

“Exactly.”

“But what makes you think I’ve got loose cash? And anyway, why should I give a damn about the Lurioni way of life?” Gardner asked.

Steeves did not flinch. “Even if you gave a couple of coppers, it would help. And I know you give a damn about Lurion, Gardner. Just in these few days, I’ve been able to size you up as a man who’s got social conscience. You aren’t just a money-grubber like most of our colleagues. You’re intelligent. You understand that we’ve got to help the Lurioni to help themselves, or else civilization is going to stay on the backstabbing level here forever. Which makes Lurion undesirable for us. And which might lead to war, for all we know. So that’s why I brought you along to meet these friends of mine. I thought—”

“No,” Gardner said hoarsely. He rose from the table, though his meal was only half-finished. “You’ve got the wrong man. I’m not interested in contributing to anything. Let Lurion solve its own problems.”

Pale, shaky, he bolted from the restaurant, while the others gaped in astonishment. Out in the street, Gardner stopped, wiping the sweat from his forehead. He was weak and shaky. The meeting had been a fiasco. Nothing could be more dangerous to his mission than getting mixed up with a bunch of Lurioni radicals.

He made his way to a sidewalk pub.

“Khali,” he muttered.

He gripped the drink tightly and gulped it down. It was essential that he blot this luncheon from his mind, as soon as possible.

Chapter VIII

That day and the next, Gardner saw a good deal of Lori—too much, he admitted bitterly. He was a deeply troubled man. The smiling, gentle faces of Kinrad and Damiroj haunted him, carrying along the damning knowledge that Lurion was not wholly black, that there were those sincerely determined to help the world outgrow its ruthless past. And the involvement with Lori left him equally worried.

They spent most of their time in the hotel casino or in the lobby, since Gardner steadfastly refused to try to lure her to his room, and carefully avoided any opportunity of entering hers.

As they sat together at the casino table, Gardner wondered just what she thought of him. That he was a queer one, certainly; either that or a man of an unbreakably puritan frame of mind, someone who simply didn’t care for the joys of the flesh. What other reason could there be for his failure to attempt the establishment of an intimate liaison with her?

She was wrong on both counts, Gardner thought, but he didn’t dare let her find that out. There was no way of avoiding her company, but he was aware of the mortal dangers of letting their relationship get any more intense than mere friendship.

On the last night of the week, Gardner suggested that she let him take her on a field trip. “You probably haven’t been to this place,” he said, “and you ought to take it in before you leave Lurion. It’s way out in North City, but it’s worth the trip.”

“You’ve got my curiosity aroused.”

“Does that mean you’ll go?”

It did. After dinner that night, Gardner summoned a cab, and they traveled into North City, to the bar on One Thousand Six and the Lane of Lights, the place where he had met Smee.

Gardner uneasily half-expected to meet Smee there again, despite the definite instruction Smee had received to leave the city and go to his action post. But, to Gardner’s relief, Smee did not seem to be in the bar. He hoped Smee had actually moved on without a hitch to his permanent locale.

“You’ll see cruelty at its most refined tonight,” he promised her, as they entered.

Inwardly, Gardner hoped that there would again be a raid, with all the ruthless violence of the last one. He hoped the knife-dancers would be out in full glory. He wanted another reassuring demonstration of the foulness of this world.

They took a table at the back, where he had sat with Smee. Gardner looked around, checking on the location of that door through which he and Smee had made their escape the last time.

“What time does the show start?” Lori asked. “About an hour after midnight, I guess. We’ve got lots of time yet.”

They ordered khall from the scornfully obsequious waiter. In the past few days Gardner and Lori had sampled a few of the other Lurioni drinks, but had found them all equally unpalatable.

As they sipped their drinks, Lori said, “Can I have a preview of what I’m going to see? It always helps when I’m prepared to evaluate what’s taking place.”

Gardner told her, in detail. She listened in silence, her eyes wide and startled. When he had finished, she coughed a little and said sarcastically, “That sounds very lovely. I’m going to have the most lurid doctoral thesis ever written when I get back to Earth. I guess I could fill a whole book with the sins of Lurion.”

When I get back to Earth, she had said. Gardner felt a pang, but shrugged it off. “It ought to make for exciting reading,” he said. “Provided your examiners like exciting reading, that is.”

“They don’t. It’s not the number of instances of cruelty I cite that measures how thorough a job I’ve done; it’s my evaluation that matters.”

“Quality, not quantity, of observation.”

“Exactly.”

The evening passed slowly. Gardner fought a rousing inner battle to keep sober. He won, but it was far from easy. It was so simple to bathe the brain in khall and cease to think, cease to brood. But the thought of Davis kept him temperate—Davis, the sober Security man who had turned into a shambling rummy in less than two weeks on Lurion.

Shortly after midnight the familiar hush fell over the place. The tables were cleared away, the front windows opaqued. The wall sphinctered open.

“It’s beginning,” Gardner murmured.

The dancers appeared. They were different from last time’s, and this time there were three of them instead of a pair: two men and a woman. Sharp, harshly dissonant music began to grind in the background, piped in from the hidden rooms elsewhere in the building, and the dance started.

Gardner took a quick glance at Lori. She was watching, fascinated, leaning forward on the edge of her seat, as the dancers began their stylized motions.

Back and forth, up and down,- now rapidly, now slowly, with a slash of the knife at each pass, until blood trickled down oiled skins, the dance went on. Fifteen minutes passed, twenty, thirty. Gardner split his attention between the dancers and Lori and the front door, knowing that he would have to move fast in the event of another raid.

But there was no raid. The dance, this time, was permitted to wind through to its conclusion. Feeling a curious chill, Gardner watched detachedly as the two male dancers advanced stiffly on the female, swung round her in a grotesque goose step, raised their knife-hands at the same time and, suddenly, simultaneously, transfixed her with both their blades.

Lori was taking notes at a fantastic rate. “Sexual symbolism?” he heard her mutter, as she scribbled.

Gardner gasped. The female was crumpling daintily to the floor, and the hypnotized audience was drumming its heels in lusty applause, yet Lori had not lost her composure. Gardner was astonished. It was a remarkable display of scientific zeal, not to mention sheer toughness of mind.

A riot of light bathed the floor as attendants dragged off the corpse of the female dancer. Suddenly, a new light struck Gardner’s eyes, a sharp, insistent flash of green.

He glanced down at the indicator band on his wrist. The green panel was pulsating brightly.

Deever Weegan had just arrived on Lurion.

“Is there something wrong, Roy?” Lori asked. “You look so pale all of a sudden.”

“I’m not used to public bloodshed, that’s all,” he said in a hoarse voice. “After all, I’m not an anthropologist, you know.”

His fingers were quivering. He looked at the firm green light again.

Three fifths of the chain that would destroy Lurion had been forged.

Chapter IX

They left the bar without incident, hailed a cab, and returned to the hotel. As ever, Gardner made his goodnights as quick as possible.

In his room, he stared for a long while at the green band on the indicator. Weegan was here, somewhere. So now only Kully Leopold and Damon Archer remained to complete the link.

The days of the next week passed smoothly. Gardner had developed into a skilled trader of jewels by this time; he kept his stock moving around, buying some jewels, selling others, appearing active at all times. He rented a visi-screen and had it installed in his hotel room, ostensibly for the benefit of customers who might have some need to get in touch with him.

At least, that was the reason he gave to the management in answer to their persistent inquiries. But in truth he had no interest in receiving calls from clients. He anticipated calls from the newly-arriving members of his team and, aside from finding it awkward and incovenient to do his communicating in an open alcove in the hotel lobby, he preferred to see their faces as he spoke. He was something more than a figurehead leader; it was part of his job to see that each of the other four was alert, stable, and ready to do his share of (he job when the time came.

Gardner wondered what might happen if one of them weren’t ready. Himself, for instance. Doubt loomed large in his mind. But he told himself that he would find the strength he needed, when he needed it.

He saw Lori frequently during that week, too. She gallantly insisted on paying her share of their entertainment costs, as if tacitly acknowledging the fact that Gardner was not getting full measure from her. Gardner made the proper protests, but allowed her finally to win the argument.

And at the end of the second week, the blue panel on his indicator flashed into glowing life. Kully Leopold had arrived, one day prematurely. The pattern was taking shape. Four out of five were present, scattered over the planet. Only Damon Archer, the anchor man on the team, was yet to be heard from, and he would be arriving in another week.

It was necessary that the team members spaced their arrivals. There was a regular pattern of coming and going between Lurion and Earth, just as there was between Earth and every other world of the civilized galaxy. The five team members would not be noticed if they entered Lurion one at a time.

And, since their landings were scheduled for five different spaceports on five different continents, it was unlikely that the sonic generator each one was carrying would cause much excitement, unless the customs officials at such widely separated points bothered to compare notes on strange devices.

Smee had arrived with a tourist group six months earlier. His generator had been accounted for as a souped-up camera, which it had been redesigned to resemble. Gardner’s generator had gone through customs as a jeweler’s apparatus. The others each had their alibis too. The Security planning had been excellent. Only the human factor in the plan was variable.

The day after Kully Leopold had landed, Deever Weegan called Gardner. The hotel management gave Weegan the number of Gardner’s private room visi-screen, and the call reached him there.

Gardner stared at the image in the screen, comparing the flinty face he saw with the photo of Weegan he had been shown back on Earth in Karnes’ office.

“You’re Gardner, aren’t you?”

“Right. Weegan?”

The man in the screen nodded. “Of course.”

Weegan had an ascetic look about him, Gardner thought. The man’s eyes were so stony they seemed almost to glitter; his cheekbones jutted sharply beneath each ear, and his thin, bloodless lips were set in an austere line. Gardner wondered if the inner man were as coldly bleak as the exterior.

Gardner said, “What’s on your mind, Weegan? You’re set up all right where you are, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Well, then?”

“I’m simply checking.”

Gardner blinked. “Checking on me?”

“Checking on the project in general,” Weegan said blandly. “I’m anxious for its success.”

Gardner gasped and went pale. He scowled into the visual pickup. Was Weegan out of his mind, talking of “the project” so loosely over a public communicator?

“The sale of gems is going well,” Gardner said icily, stressing each word. “I imagine we’ll all return to Earth as rich men.”

Weegan hesitated momentarily. He seemed to recognize the mistake he had made.

“Oh, of course,” he said. “Are the other members of the corporation prospering?”

“I believe so,” Gardner said. “Dudley and I were in contact the other day, and he said that vegetables were getting set for a rise. Also mining shares. Better check with your stockbroker about it. And Oscar told me his wife is better.” He glared tightly at Weegan. Catch wise, you idiot, he implored silently. Don’t ask a foolish question now.

“I’m glad to hear it,” Weegan said. Gardner let out his breath in relief. The other went on, “Well, we’ll be in touch again soon, won’t we?”

“In ahont a week, I think. Is that soon enough?”

“No. Nit i*’ll have to do,” Weegan said. “I’ll be looking forward to it.”

“Right.”

Weegan broke the contact.

Gardner sat back and stared at the dying swirl of color on the screen for a moment, letting some of the blood seep back into his face, letting the butterflies in his stomach settle down into place.

The idiot, he thought.

Weegan had nearly collapsed the whole show. If Gardner hadn’t managed to shut the thin-faced man up in time, Weegan might easily have gone prattling right on, inquiring after Smee and Leopold and the not-yet arrived Archer, linking the five of them neatly in one breath. Weegan’s blunder might not have wrecked the project, but anything that tended to link the team was dangerous.

The deaths of five Security agents could be important to nobody but those agents. But if the Lurioni discovered what the generators were capable of doing, they wouldn’t be content merely to devise unpleasant deaths for the five plotters. They would plaster news of the conspiracy all over the known universe. Earth’s name would soon become something to spit at, a curse.

Naturally, Earth would deny that there was any official connection with the Five, but who would be naive enough to believe that? Five men don’t decide on their own initiative to destroy a planet.

Shuddering, Gardner cursed Weegan, cursed Karnes, cursed the computer whose inexorably clicking relays had gotten them into this unholy business in the first place. And a new thought occurred to him.

The computer, presumably, had had a hand in choosing the first, the unsuccessful team. Well, Gardner thought, the computer had been eighty percent wrong that time; only Smee, out of the five men who were sent out, had the stuff to survive.

So now another team had been despatched, of whom at least one—Weegan—had the possibly fatal flaw of failing to reason out the consequences of his words. And one other, at least—Gardner—was given to serious interior misgivings about the validity of the whole project.

That made at least two of the computer’s four new selections who weren’t perfecdy fitted for the job; and Gardner hadn’t even met the other two, yet.

It wasn’t a very good score.

Suppose, Gardner asked himself, suppose the computer’s accuracy in making long-range predictions was equally miserable?

Suppose the computer was all cockeyed about the anticipated Lurioni invasion of Earth?

Suppose he was actually murdering a world that meant no harm? Or that could be redeemed by less violent means?

Sudden perspiration popped out all over him. He shivered for one dreadful moment, and then, just as suddenly, he was past the conflict-point and secure in his belief.

Lurion was an abysmal world. It was a hateful, coldblooded, nasty place.

It was the sort of world on which you didn’t turn your back on anyone. And even then, rear-view vision was a useful precaution.

Unquestionably, the planet was beyond any redemption.

For the first time in an uncomfortably large number of days, Gardner was able to smile, confident that the computer was right, that he was right, and that the job he was doing was right.

And then he heard Lori Marks’ voice outside in the corridor, calling to him, and his newly-found complacency was shattered in an instant.

She knocked softly. “Roy? Roy, do you mind if I come in?”

“Just a minute, Lori. I’ll have to unseal the door.” Sweat started to course down Gardner’s body again. This was going to be the test of his resolve, coming up now. This was the first time she had ever come to his room.

He breathed on the doorseal and it curled into a ball. A moment later he was smiling at Lori, and she was smiling back.

“I hope I’m not disturbing you.”

“Not at all. I was just wondering if I ought to go down and find out if you were around.”

She was holding some typewritten sheets in her hand. Gardner glanced inquiringly at them. She held them forward and said, “I’ve been typing up my notes on that horrid dance we saw, and I’ve just finished. I wondered if you would care to check them through for accuracy.”

“Be happy to,” Gardner said. What else could he have told her?

But he could see easily that she hadn’t come up to his room simply for the purpose of letting him verify her anthropological observations. She was wearing a clinging, low-cut synthilk blouse that seemed more calculated toward a session of biology, not anthropology. There was something keenly expectant about her manner. And, for the first time since he had known her, she was wearing perfume. It was a subtle, musky flavor that had an alien scent about it.

He closed the door behind her. She made herself at home immediately, sitting down in the chair next to the bed. She looked around the room with evident interest, and flushed guiltily when Gardner let her know by a glance that he was watching her.

She said apologetically as she handed him the typed sheaf of notes, “I hope you won’t have too much trouble with the spelling. My machine is out of kilter, and I had to rent one of the local voice-writers. It’s good and efficient, but phonetically it’s a nightmare.”

“I’ll manage,” Gardner said.

The first page was headed, Notes Toward an Analysis of the Sadistic Element in Lurioni Entertainment Forms. Gardner skimme<f through the first paragraph or two of her notes, and allowed himself to appear to be reading the rest. Actually, his mind was occupied with the making of decisions and the formulating of a plan.

This relationship had to be brought to a crux at once. She had made the overt gesture, with this flimsy and transparent maneuver to get inside his room. The display of cleavage, the dab of perfume—all these, he knew, were calculated to force him to a point of commitment toward her.

Well, the time had come to setde the matter. If he delayed any further, he would be knowingly jeopardizing the success of the mission.

By the time he had finished his cursory scanning of the notes, he had made up his mind. The break would have to be complete and absolute.

“Well?” she asked. “No comment?”

Jolted back to consideration of the notes, he smiled weakly and said, “Ah… hmm. Nice and accurate, I’d say.” His eyes leaped over the blocks of words and paragraphs, searching for something he could seize on and criticize. “I think it’s a bit lacking in real sparkle,” he went on. “You don’t fully convey the nastiness of the situation. Get me?”

She nodded. “I thought so too, when I read them back. Got any suggestions?”

“Focus it more sharply on the people watching, the thing. Not us, but the others, the Lurioni patrons, the ones busy empathizing with the dancers. There’s practically a psychic bond there. The killing, when it comes, is participated in vicariously by the whole audience. That’s the really nasty part of the business.”

“You’re right,” she said. “I’ll add that when I’m preparing my submission.”

Rising, she wandered around the room, and paused to peer curiously at the sonic generator, which Gardner had never bothered to hide, since the total effectiveness of a doorseal made furtiveness unnecessary.

“What’s this gadget?” she asked.

Gardner sucked in his breath sharply. “That’s… that’s a thing I use in testing jewels. It enables me to make sure they’re genuine.”

“Oh? Would you show me how it works?” she asked innocently. “I’d be terribly interested.”

Gardner’s face drooped. “It uses up a lot of power,” he said. “Anyway, it’s after working hours I’d just as soon not bother, unless you insist.”

She shrugged. “I guess it isn’t all that important, if it would mean a bother.”

“I’ll let you see how it works some other time,” Gardner said, relieved. It was not for a moment that he realized the grim double-meaning of his words.

But Lori had already lost interest in the sonic generator. She crossed the room and boldly sat down on the bed next to him.

Gardner no longer had any doubt. Her intention in coming up here was almost embarrassingly obvious. Gardner felt a fleeting sense of guilt about what he was going to do, but banished the sensation. There was to be no more guilt about this.

As she snuggled close to him he edged away, forcing himself to ignore her warmth and softness.

“Roy, don’t always keep running away from me,” she murmured.

Gardner moved away still further, then stood up and said in a brittle voice, “Would it be too melodramatic, Lori, if I said I had something very important to tell you?”

“No, of course not, Roy. Tell me anything you want.” Her eyes were half-closed and a little dreamy. Gardner took a deep breath.

“I’m married,” he said

It was a flat lie.

“I have a wife and family back on Terra,” he continued, “and it happens that I’m very devoted to them. And before our relation gets any more awkward than it’s already become, Lori, I feel you ought to know that I’m very much in love with my wife.”

The girl looked steamrollered. The blow had fallen on her with crushing impact. The dreaminess vanished-, from her eyes, to be replaced with a catlike look of insult and injury.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” she said softly. “For my sake, not yours.”

“I understand. If… if circumstances had been otherwise, Lori, well… maybe… you know what I’m trying to say. But as it is…”

Go on, he thought savagely, sound fumbling and shamefaced and sincere. If you’re going to lie to this kid, at least do a convincing job of it.

She stood up, facing him steadily, making the task easier for him. Impulsively, he gripped her hand tightly. He had never felt like such a heel in his life.

He told her, “I don’t think we ought to see each other any more. I’m only going to be on Lurion another week, and it would be easier for both of us.”

“Of course, Roy.” Her eyes had the glitter that told of tears just barely being held in check, but there was a surprising curtness in her voice that both pleased and puzzled him. He had feared that she might go to pieces completely at the news that he was “married” but he hadn’t expected her to come up with this sudden reserve of strength.

“Good-by,” he said.

“So long, Roy. And, I’m sorry if I misunderstood things.”

She picked up her notes, smiled bleakly at him, and left. She closed the door quietly behind her. Moving mechanically, Gardner replaced the doorseal, then stared unseeingly at the dirty black streaks against the dingy green of the walls.

It was easier now, he thought. There had been a clean break. When the time came to act, he wouldn’t be entangled in the bands of a personal relationship.

If he could only manage to keep out of her way for the next week.

Suddenly the yellow panel of his indicator band pinged into brightness. Gardner looked at it dazedly for a moment, not understanding.

The yellow could mean only one thing. Damon Archer was on Lurion, the fifth man in the chain. And he was a week ahead of schedule.

Tensely, Gardner took down the khall bottle he now kept on his dresser, and poured himself a drink with quivering hands. If Archer were here, and the indicator band testified that he was, then Lurion’s remaining time could be numbered in hours, not in days.

But why was Archer here so early?

Chapter X

Drink in hand, Gardner walked to the window. He had a fairly good view. He stared out over the city. A garish kaleidoscope of lights and colors greeted his eye, so brilliant that it quite obscured the light of the three tiny moons above.

The instructions engraved on his memory now sprang vividly to life. He could practically hear Karnes intoning, “When all five members of the team have made their duly scheduled arrivals, you shall proceed at once to place the destruction plan into operation. Any delay at this point may result in failure.”

Gardner frowned. “… their duly scheduled arrivals.” But Archer was a week ahead of, schedule. It implied some alteration in the plan. He could not act until…

The visi-screen chimed three times, interrupting his stream of thought. It was the signal for a long-distance communication.

Gardner set his drink down carefully out of the range of the visual pickup and, pulling himself hurriedly together, activated the set.

Colors swirled aimlessly for a moment, a random stream of reds and yellows and blues. Quickly, they coalesced into a face.

It was Smee.

“Yes?” Gardner asked.

The alien operative smiled apologetically. The smile was a little loosened as though Smee had been drinking heavily and lost control of his facial muscles.

“I hope I’m not disturbing you, Mr. Gardner.”

“No… no. What’s on your mind?”

Smee’s eyes were little dark beads. “I suppose you’re aware,” he said, “that your friend has arrived on Lurion?”

“Yes, I know that,” Gardner snapped impatiently. “He got here early. What of it?”

The impatience in Smee’s face was suddenly mirrored by the sharpness of his tones. “Six months is a long time, Mister Gardner. Now that your friend is here, when do we—”

“Soon, Smee. You’ll get the word.”

“When?”

“I’m not sure,” Gardner said. “There may be some last-minute instructions from the home company, and I don’t want to close the deal in haste. Got that?”

Smee sighed heavily. “You’re the boss. But I can’t take much more of this.”

“I know exactly what you mean.”

“Okay, then,” Smee said. “Let’s see that the deal does get closed, Gardner. And let’s not have to wait too long, either.” He broke the contact.

Nerves jangled, Gardner snatched at his drink and took a healthy gulp. Then he turned away, wincing as the fiery drink hit his stomach.

He couldn’t blame Smee at all for being impatient. The little man had been living on Lurion for six months, which was a hellishly long time for anyone, particularly if you were someone waiting patiently for a chance to destroy the planet. Smee’s only thought at this moment had to be that the team was now complete.

It was an understandable attitude. But Gardner couldn’t work that way. For one reason or another, Archer had arrived on Lurion early; and, until Gardner knew the reason for the change in schedule, he couldn’t give the blowup order. For all he knew, Archer was carrying a stay of execution for Lurion. He had to wait till he heard from him.

And then what do I do? Gardner wondered.

If there were no reprieve, it would be up to him at last to give the order to activate the sonic generators.

Gardner finished the drink and set the glass down. Then, acting with methodical precision, he corked the half-full bottle on the table, carried it to the disposal chute, sighed regretfully, and let it drop.

Whatever happened now, he wanted to make sure that he would be sober.

He paced round the room, hands tightly clenched into fists, feeling the frustration of knowing that there was absolutely nothing he could do now but wait. Archer was somewhere on Lurion; Archer knew the name of the hotel where Gardner was registered. Gardner could not contact Archer, it had to be the other way around. Gardner waited.

Fifteen minutes later, the visi-screen emitted a double buzz. Gardner sprang toward it, yanking down the activating switch. He felt coldly apprehensive as he watched the swirling colors take on form and coherence.

The face that appeared was bland, mild, undistinguished and unmemorable in any way. Weak, watery-looking eyes stared outward, not attempting to look straight forward but shying diffidently off to one side. It was Damon Archer. He was smiling uncertainly. His chin was weak, his hair a mousy brown, his lips thin.

“Hello,” he said- in a voice that matched his physical appearance. “I’m Damon Archer.”

“I know.”

“You’re Gardner.”

“That’s right,” Gardner said. “I knew you were here, of course. I suppose you’re getting in touch with me about the matter of your early arrival.”

“Yes, that’s it.”

Gardner frowned suspiciously. The plan called for Archer to be on the planet’s northernmost continent, a good thousand miles from here, but he had made a local call. Something must be very wrong.

“Where are you now?” Gardner asked.

“I’m at the spaceport. I’ve just checked through customs, and—”

“What? But your assignment from the Company specified that—”

“I know, Mr. Gardner,” Archer cut in with uncharacteristic sharpness. “But there’s been a slight alteration in schedule. I’ll have to see you immediately. I want to talk privately with you before we go ahead with anything that’s been planned.”

Gardner tensed. He said, “All right, I suppose. How soon can you be here?”

“Within the hour.”

“I’ll be expecting you,” Gardner said.

About forty-five minutes later, Gardner opened his door in response to a sharp triple knock, and admitted Archer. Archer was taller and a little leaner than Gardner had anticipated, but otherwise the man had a curiously nondescript quality that Gardner found morbidly fascinating. Archer was a blank, a cipher, a nothing.

Once inside the door, Archer looked quickly all around the room, noting the sonic generator in its place on the dresser, the pouch of jewels, the drinking-glass with its murky little residue of khall. Then he gestured to the doorseal that Gardner had replaced on the inside of the door.

“Do we need that here?”

“It protects us,” Gardner said. “I keep it up all the time.”

“I’d appreciate it if you’d remove it while I’m here,” Archer said. He shivered lightly and looked shame-faced. “It’s… ah—a sort of phobia of mine. Modified claustro, you see.”

Gardner shrugged. “I guess we’ll be safe enough in here without it.”

He hid the generator and the jewel pouch carefully in the closet, then removed the seal from the room door and affixed it over the closet door. Archer’s request struck him as curious; the man seemed too ordinary, too washed-out. to have any Dhobias. But it was his right as a guest to ask for the seal’s removal, and Gardner saw no point in insisting on keeping it there.

“I’d offer you a drink,” Gardner said, “but there isn’t any left.”

Archer flicked a glance at the drinking glass on the table. He said softly, “You needn’t worry. I never touch alcohol.”

“You’re a wise man,” Gardner said. He leaned forward, “Now, then. You’ve arrived a week early. May I ask how come? Also why you’re here, instead of at your assigned post?”

“May I speak freely in here about the nature of… ah… the project?” Archer asked, eyeing the dirty walls furtively.

“If you must,” said Gardner. “I’ve checked for spy devices. This room’s safe, unless there are some ears in the hallway. Wait.”

He rose and rapidly crossed the room, yanking the door open. The corridor outside was deserted. And there had not been time for any eavesdroppers outside the door to have hidden themselves.

Gardner closed the door. “It looks clear. Say what you want to say.”

Archer folded his legs and tapped the suitcase he had carried with him.

“My generator is in here. Yours, I think, is in that closet. Are all five members of the team here on Lurion now?”

“Look at your indicator band!” Gardner said, surprised at the question.

“Of course.” Archer laughed hollowly. “All five are here, aren’t they? Now, my instructions from Earth Central require me to have a full recapitulation of the nature of our mission from your lips before we can act.”

“What the hell for?” Gardner asked, bristling. “Just to give my mouth some exercise?”

Archer smiled apologetically, holding up one hand to stay Gardner’s outburst. “As, pardon me, a check on your stability.”

“What?”

“Karnes has had some misgivings about you. The computer has been called into use again. It revealed that your attitude was likely to deteriorate progressively, and that if we waited the allotted three weeks of the project, the probability was high that you would no longer be capable of carrying out your part.”

Gardner’s jaws tightened. What Archer was saying cut deep. “So you were sent early because they wanted to get the project taken care of before I blow my trolley completely, eh?”

Archer shrugged. “It was thought advisable to speed up (he schedule. And now I must have a complete verification of your comprehension of the project.”

Still simmering, although everything Archer had said so far had the ring of truth, Gardner muttered, “What do you want me to tell you?”

“A recapitulation of the nature of our mission,” Archer said.

“Okay. Here’s your summary: we’ve been sent here as a team with the assignment”—Gardner lowered his voice—“of destroying Lurion. It takes five of us to do it, each equipped with a sonic generator that will set up a resonating vibratory pattern when tuned in at the proper geographic locality. I’m in charge.”

“Who picked you for the job?”

“Karnes. Chief of Security at Earth Central. I was picked with the aid of the computer, of course.”

Archer nodded. As if rehearsing a catechism, he asked, “And why is it considered necessary to destroy Lurion?”

“Computer prognostics have it that militaristic forces on Lurion will organize and launch a destructive attack on Earth some time within the next two generations or so. We have to strike first.”

Archer sat back, smiling quietly. “All right. You’ve got it all down well enough. Just one thing remains to be settled.”

“Which is?”

“Are you willing to carry out your share of the assignment?”

Gardner was silent a moment, staring at the bland face opposite him. He moistened his lips.

“Yes,” he said finally. “I’m ready and willing.”

“Okay, then. I guess we can proceed.”

“I’ve passed the test?”

“You have. And now you’re in charge again. When’s the event due to take place?”

“As soon as you get up north where you belong,” Gardner said. “There’s no other reason for delay, now. Give me a call when you reach your assigned position, and I’ll transmit the initiating signal.” Gardner realized now that he had no more doubts, no hesitation whatever about bringing the project to its culmination.

“Very well, then. Now that we’ve got everything cleared up, I’ll leave at once,” Archer said. He rose, tugging his jacket-snaps together and sealing them. Gardner watched him, brows furrowed.

The visi-screen chimed again, the long-distance chime this time.

Gardner activated it and a round, bearded face appeared; it was that of Kully Leopold, the only member of the team Gardner had yet to hear from.

“I guess I’ll be going now,” Archer said, a little hurriedly.

“Stick around,” Gardner told him. “Let’s both hear what our friend Leopold has to say.” He returned his attention to the visi-screen. “You are Kully Leopold, aren’t you?”

“That’s right. And I wanted to find out whether there’s been any change in—Heyl He’s leaving!”

Gardner whirled and was surprised to see Damon Archer, suitcase in hand, fumbling annoyedly with the intricate Lurioni doorlatch. A’ number of seemingly irrelevant but actually interrelated facts suddenly fit themselves together in Gardner’s mind. -

“Where are you going, Archer?” he demanded.

“I’m—” Archer got the door open at last and, without bothering to finish the sentence, started to slip out.

Chapter XI

Gardner moved rapidly. He jumped forward, getting between the door and its jamb before Archer could slam it in his face. Reaching out into the hallway, he grabbed the fleeing Archer by the shoulder and spun him back into the room; the door slammed shut.

“What’s your hurry?” Gardner demanded. “I told you to stick around.”

Instead of answering, Archer crashed a fist into Gardner’s midsection. Gardner gasped and doubled up, but as Archer confidently brought his fist round for another blow, Gardner grabbed it suddenly, pivoted, and flipped Archer over his shoulder.

The thin man shot backward, landing heavily against the wall with a sharp crack. He scrabbled to his feet, but by that time Gardner was on top of him. Archer’s eyes were glaring desperately; his mild face had come to life in a startling way. He strained to roll over, clawed at Gardner’s arms, tried to force the weight of the heavier man off him.

He succeeded. Archer was thin, but he seemed to have the tensile strength of beryllium steel. He forced Gardner off him, and then sprang up. Archer was quick on his feet. He ducked back and lunged at Gardner. Gardner left his guard open, rolled with a soft punch under the heart, and sent Archer rocking backward toward the wall with a stiff jolt to the chin.

Gardner followed it up with a barrage of light punches and a swift crack across Archer’s exposed throat. It was dirty fighting, no denying it, but such niceties didn’t matter now.

Archer gagged and started to topple. Gardner caught him, slapped him twice, just to loosen him up, then thumped his skull hard against the wall. Archer’s eyes glazed and closed.

Puffing for breath, Gardner turned back to face the visi-screen. Leopold, who had watched the entire encounter, peered out of the screen, eyes wide in the puzzled oval face.

“That was Archer, wasn’t it?” Leopold asked. “What in blazes is happening?”

“I don’t know,” said Gardner, nursing bruised knuckles. He glanced at the unconscious Archer. “But he made me take the doorseal down, and then he maneuvered me into dictating what amounted to a full confession of… of the Company’s trade secrets. And then when yo.u called he tried a quick getaway. I’m going to look through his suitcase. Suppose you call me back in about ten minutes, eh?”

Gardner,broke the contact. He didn’t think it would be very wise to have the contents of Archer’s suitcase sent out over public beam.

Archer was still unconscious. Good, Gardner thought, Working hastily, he slit the suitcase open with a penknife and looked inside.

Much clothing. A small package containing the sonic generator. And…

Gardner dragged a little device out from where it nestled between two layers of shirts, and peered grimly at it. A pocket recorder! One of those devilish little subminiaturized devices that could record for an hour on a single reel, one that picked up a good clear signal even when hidden in a suitcase.

Gardner depressed a stud and heard a tinny simulacrum of his own voice say, “Okay. Here’s your summary: we’ve been sent here as a team of five with the assignment of destroying Lurion. It takes five of us to do it, each equipped with a sonic generator that…”

Smiling coldly, he set the tape back to its beginning and

pressed the erase stud. Checking again, he found that the tape was now blank. He tossed the little recorder down on the bed.

Then he drew a glass of cold water and tossed it in Archer’s face. The man on the floor shook his head, sputtered, coughed, and opened his eyes.

Gardner knelt next to him. “I’ve just played back that tape you made,” he said. “Who are you working for, Archer?”

Archer looked dazed. His head lolled to one side. I don’t know what you’re talking about, Gardner.”

“Don’t bluster your way clear. It won’t do you any good. Who paid you to wiggle a confession out of me?”

“Don’t be crazy. First you attack me like a wild man, then you insinuate—”

Gardner slapped him. The big man’s eyes blazed. “I suppose you were making that tape for yourself as a souvenir of this mission!”

Archer made no reply. After a moment’s silence, Gardner said, “If you’re really a Security man, you know that we don’t draw the line at torture if we think the means is justified by the end. I’d hate to have to act uncivilized, Archer, but—”

Archer grinned confidently. “You wouldn’t torture me. I’ve seen your psych report. You’re soft inside, Gardner. You try to talk tough, but your mind is just a mass of doubts and contradictions and softbellied evasions—”

Gardner slapped him again, to shut him up. “Who’s paying you?”

“No one, yet,” Archer said quietly. “But I imagine the Confederacy of Rim Stars will be interested in the way Earth lives up to its high ethical pronouncements. Don’t you think so?”

And Archer rose abruptly from his sitting position. His foot lashed out at the squatting Gardner. The heavy boot caught Gardner square in the chest and he toppled over, more stunned with surprise than injured. The attack had been wholly unexpected.

As Gardner came dizzily to a half-sitting position, he saw

the other man open the door—this time Archer had no trouble with the latch—and race out into the hallway. Gardner gasped for breath, feeling a dull throbbing under his breastbone where Archer had kicked him. He forced himself up.

Gardner made his way into the corridor, pausing only to lock his door. Even in emergency, it was’wrong to leave the room open to any plunderer who might choose this moment to come along.

By the time Gardner had finished locking up, Archer had disappeared into the lift-shaft. Cursing, Gardner streaked down the hallway just in time to see the lift begin to lower itself groundward. Gardner pounded impotently on the door, to no avail.

Other residents of the hotel, their early-evening slumbers disturbed by the fighting and chasing about, now began to open their doors and give vent to their complaints, loudly and in a variety of languages. Gardner ignored their protests. There was still a chance he might catch the fugitive Archer, after all.

Remembering how slowly the lift-shaft operated, Gardner made for the stairs. The staircase was poorly lit, a deepening spiral illuminated only by a sputtering glowlamp near each landing. Gripping the bannister tightly, Gardner sprang down_ two and three steps at a bound, half expecting to come fetching up against the curved Lurioni blade of some lurking looter crouching spiderlike on the staircase, waiting for just such an occurrence.

But he reached the lobby unhindered. The desk clerk looked up, blinking.

“Did an Earthman just leave the lift-shaft?” Gardner demanded.

“Why… yes… that is…”

Gardner did not pause for details. Negotiating the steps of the hotel in one sprawling leap, he landed upright on the street and looked around.

It was late, only an hour till midnight, and the streets were far from crowded. That made it that much harder for

Archer to escape. Gardner caught sight of the fleeing spy, half a block away, and gave pursuit.

Archer moved swiftly, but Gardner had the benefit of the same kind of training, and kept pace. That was all, though; the half-block gap between them remained constant, and no expense of effort on Gardner’s part seemed to close it. Archer turned down a twisting side street; Gardner followed. But at any moment the fugitive might think to duck into one of the numerous doorways, and then he could lose himself forever.

Obviously Archer was panicking, or he would have evaded Gardner minutes ago. Gardner pressed forward dodging round the few passersby.

But there seemed no hope of catching him—unless there were help.

On a sudden impulse, Gardner shouted, “That man’s a thief! Stop him! Stop that thief!”

A massive Lurioni, rounding the corner in front of Archer, heard the outcry and looked quizzically at the approaching man. Gardner waved frantically and called, “Yes, that’s himl Catch the thief!”

The Lurioni extended one broad hand and Archer ran squarely into it. The Earthman rebounded, turned, saw Gardner gaining on him.

Gardner watched Archer fumble in his pocket, as if hoping to bluff the Lurioni with a weapon. The alien’s reaction was swift and decisive. Producing the short, wickedly curved Lurioni blade that no free citizen seemed to be without, the tall being stepped forward, passed the knife with blinding rapidity from one hand to the other several times, and deftly plunged it into Archer’s breast.

Gardner stopped short, ten feet away, panting for breath. The Lurioni was smiling benignly.

“The thief has been stopped.”

“You killed him!”

“What better way to stop a thief?”

Archer was on his knees, now, writhing in his last agonies. His face was a blank mask of pain; his hands clutched at the hilt of the blade, but his efforts to remove it only drove it in deeper. He had been slashed from belly to breastbone. Great gouts of blood welled out, trickling across the pavement into the gutter. Already, smelling the blood, inquisitive dog-like creatures were beginning to gather.

The dying man muttered something incoherent, stretched his limbs taut, held the spreadeagle for a moment, and went limp.

“He is dead,” the Lurioni said calmly. “I have undertaken blood-guilt for you, Earthman.”

“I didn’t ask you to kill him, only to stop him from getting away.”

“You said he was a thief. A thief’s life is forfeit, is it not? I have saved the government money.”

On this planet all lives are forfeit, Gardner thought. He stared down at the grotesquely twisted form lying sprawled on the pavement. Several strollers had paused on the far side of the street to watch. There was no sign of a Lurioni policeman anywhere.

The killer stooped and casually wrenched his blade free from the body. Looking down at Gardner from his enormous height, the Lurioni said, “This was no affair of mine. You must buy me free of it.”

“How much do you want?”

“A thousand Units,” the Lurioni replied immediately. “It* is the usual price.”

Gardner scowled, wondering if he ought to try to haggle. He decided against it. The money meant nothing to him, and the sooner he extricated himself from this nightmarish incident, the better. He took out his wallet and surrendered ten hundred-unit notes.

“Is that all?” he asked.

“You must pronounce the formula. Say, ‘I take upon myself the blood-guilt for the man slain at my request by Binnachar dur Sliquein.’ ”

“I take upon myself the blood-guilt for the man slain at my request by Binnachar dur Sliquein,” Gardner repeated. “Is that all?”

“That is all. I am absolved.”

“What about me, though? What happens to the body, now?”

Binnachar shrugged elaborately. “What concern is that of yours or mine? The man was a thief; you said so yourself. Since he is an Earther, he probably will not have relatives here to seek for his body. Leave him for the Carrion-pickers.”

“But the police?”

“The death of thieves does not interest the police.” Binnachar knelt again and wiped his blade clean on Archer’s jacket after which he replaced the knife in his own tunic. “I am grateful to have been of service to you, ser Earthman. A pleasant night to you.”

Gardner remained where he was for a moment, still shaken by the swiftness, the brutality of the incident.

And no one seemed to care. Perhaps that was the worst of it. The knot of watchers was gone; Binnachar dur Sliquein, having received his blood-fee and having been absolved of blood-guilt, had probably already begun to forget the incident; the police had never even shown up on the scene. The only ones at all interested were the animals that clustered in the gutter, sipping the warm blood that runneled from the gash in Archer’s breast. No doubt when they tired of drinking the blood, they would devour the body. Gardner shuddered.

The longer he remained here, he knew, the greater was his chance of finding trouble. Turning, leaving the body where it lay, he retraced his steps until he reached the hotel.

The desk clerk woke once again from his slumber to ask, “Did you find him?”

“Yes,” Gardner said.

He rode upstairs.

To his relief, he saw that no one had attempted to enter his room during his brief absence. He sank down wearily on the bed, bitterly regretting the fact that he had thrown away the khall bottle. He needed a drink badly. He was shaken to his core.

The computer had failed again, he thought. And this time it had failed in a way that threw doubt on the validity of any of its predictions. Somehow it had managed to send out one who was rotten within, who had chosen to betray Earth instead of work for Earth’s safety. How could such a thing happen? Security agents went through fine screening. Those chosen for this particular assignment were screened even more thoroughly. And yet Archer had passed through the net, a traitor.

The computer, Gardner thought, is only a machine. It takes the facts as given to it, weaves in a dollop of random variables, and produces a prediction. But it can’t see into the human brain. It had proved unable to peer behind the bland exterior of Damon Archer and detect the traitor lurking within. Archer had fooled the computer; or, rather, the computer had failed to predict his behavior accurately. It had similarly bungled the first expedition to Lurion.

There was no escaping the fact now, Gardner thought. The computer’s judgment could not be trusted. It had failed on a short-range prediction, the reliability of one man; how could its word be accepted for such a mighty extrapolation as the coming galactic war?

Gardner realized dully that he was on the edge of turning traitor himself: traitor to Security, traitor to Earth, traitor to the computer; all this, but, perhaps, not a traitor to himself.

Very carefully, Gardner took the dead man’s recorder and touched the playback stud. The reel had been completely erased. But there were ways, he had heard, of compelling an erased tape to yield some of its secrets. Just to be absolutely certain, Gardner opened the mechanism, worried out the tiny reel of tape, and shredded it between thumb and forefinger. Then he stuffed it thoughtfully in the disposal chute, following it a moment later with the crushed casing of the recorder itself.

So much for Archer’s spying, he thought.

The visi-screen bleeped. It was Leopold, calling back, no doubt. Gardner still felt shaky. He was on the threshold of an imDortaif decision, and he didn’t want to talk to anyone till the decision was complete. But he couldn’t very well ignore the screen.

Gardner activated the set. Yes, it was Leopold. The bearded man looked agitated. “What happened?”

“He was making a tape of our conversation,” Gardner said. “I guess he was planning to peddle it to some third party after the project was complete.”

“The little worm,” Leopold muttered. “Where did he go?”

“He woke up, knocked me over, and made a break for it. About three blocks from here he ran into a Lurioni with a long knife.”

“Dead?”

Gardner nodded. “I left him in the street. He won’t be making any little deals.”

“But what about—?”

“The project?” Gardner’s face darkened. “I don’t know. I don’t know at all, right now. Just stay in touch with me, and I’ll keep you posted on the developments.”

“Will do.”

The screen went blank. Gardner pounded one fist into the palm of his other hand.

Assuming he still wanted to go through with the project, there would have to be a replacement for Archer. And perhaps a second replacement would be needed. Smee, cracking slowly under the psychological strain of the assignment, was obviously on the verge of a complete burnout. He might not last out the time it would take to get Archer’s replacement to Lurion.

Gardner put his head in his hands. Killing a planet was no matter for weak men.

He wondered about Archer. No doubt Archer had had some grand idea of collecting damning and unchallengeable evidence and peddling it. “The Confederacy of Rim Stars,” Archer had said. Yes, that loose linkage of second-rate worlds would pay well for anything that might tear down Earth’s interstellar prestige.

But Archer had panicked guiltily, and now he would do no betraying. His act might yet save a world, Gardner thought.

Weary, his head throbbing, Gardner rose and pushed Archer’s suitcase into the closet, slapping the seal on the closet door. They’d have to rip up the walls before they found it.

What to do now? Send back to Earth for replacements? Continue as scheduled? No, Gardner thought.

He remembered Steeves and his two earnest young Lurioni “philosophers.” He had to have another talk with Steeves. Then, perhaps, he could frame his decision. Meanwhile, he would have to stall off Smee, Leopold, and Weegan on the matter of asking for a replacement for Archer.

Gardner restored the room to a semblance of order. Then, knowing that the best thing he could do now was to get some sleep, he began to undress.

Chapter XII

There were calls from Smee and Weegan in the morning, wanting explanations of the delay. As clearly as he dared, Gardner told them the story: that Archer was dead, and that they would all have to hang fire until a replacement arrived. He let them infer that he had already sent the coded distress signal to Earth that would get a replacement on his way.

Weegan took the news philosophically enough. He hadn’t been on Lurion long enough for the assignment to have gotten under his skin.

But Smee was expectably agitated. “I can’t take much more of this, Gardner. Any day now I’m going to blow my stack. If there’s any more delay…”

Gardner calmed him, avoiding Smee’s eyes as he assured him soothingly that everything would proceed on schedule, that in a very short time the project would be completed. Smee seemed to accept the balm, although reluctantly. Gardner realized that Smee could not be counted on much longer.

There was no sign of Lori in the dining room when Gardner finally got off the screen and could go down for breakfast. After eating, Gardner repaired to the jewel exchange and looked around for Steeves.

Since the abortive luncheon date, Steeves and Gardner had seemed to avoid each other by unspoken mutual consent. The abrupt end of the little meeting had been too embarrassing.

Gardner reddened now in memory as he approached Steeves’ trading area.

“Steeves, can I talk to you for a moment? Not on business.”

The older man frowned. “What is it?” he said impatiently.

“It’s about that lunch we had, I want to say I’m sorry for charging out that way. I was… upset.”

“Well? What of it?”

“I’ve been thinking things over, Steeves. I’d like a chance to meet those two again.”

“Why? Planning to peddle them to the government?”

“You know I’m not an informer,” Gardner said sharply. “I want to talk to them again. I think I might be able to make them an offer of support. A considerably larger offer than you might expect me capable of.”

Steeves was thoughtfully silent. At length he said, “All right, Gardner. Tonight, at my place. The address is 623 Thuurin Square. But I warn you, if this is sonie kind of trick—”

“I’ll see you tonight. And thanks for giving me the second chance.”

Gardner walked rapidly away.

The day passed slowly. Gardner made, broke, remade his decisions a hundred times. He remembered how Karnes had said, “I might as well tell you that I don’t think you’re the man for the job. But the computer does, though.” Chalk up another error for the computer. Karnes, with his merely human abilities, had been a shrewder judge of character.

He left the exchange early and returned to the hotel. A close, dank fog hung low over the city, blanketing the streets; and a warm, muggy rain was starting to fall. It was the kind of weather, Gardner thought, that caused rot—of clothing and of men’s souls.

The visi-screen was bleeping when he walked in. Quickly Gardner activated it.

It was Smee again.

This time Smee looked more upset than ever. His face was pale and shiny with sweat, and the few strands of his hair seemed glued to his scalp by perspiration. His hands, just visible in the lower corner of the screen, were quivering visibly.

“What is it?” Gardner asked. “Are you going to keep calling me every couple of hours?”

Smee’s face was piteous. “Listen, Gardner,” he said in a hoarse whisper, “I’m coming apart at the seams. I can’t take it any more.”

“You’ve lasted this long, Smee. Can’t you hang on a little while longer?”

“It’s been six months of hell. I… I nearly killed myself half an hour ago.”

“Smee!”

Gardner wanted to reach out into the screen, seize the other man by his thick shoulders, and shake him back into sanity. Smee’s head was bowed, his eyes downcast and weary-looking.

“I’m fighting it, Gardner. I want to do my part in the project. But, dammit, can’t you understand what this sort of life is doing to me?”

“Look, Smee, the replacement for Archer will be here soon,” Gardner lied. “A few days…”

“Weeks!”

“But the man is coming. Take hold of yourself, Smee. Don’t wreck everything for the rest of us. Try to hang on a little while longer.”

“It’s hard, Gardner.”

“Try.”

“I’ll… try.”

Gardner smiled. “Good man. Ease up, now. Call me again, if you have to. Remember, it’ll all be over soon.”

“I hope so,” Smee said. His voice was a harsh, doleful croak.

After the screen had cleared, Gardner sat back, anxiously knotting his hands together. He was dripping wet, as much from his own state of tension as from the mugginess of the weather.

Tonight, he thought, would see the tale told. Either he would throw up the project entirely, or he would proceed as ordered. In the latter instance, he would have to ask for replacements: a replacement for Archer and probably one for Smee. The man might possibly hold together for the weeks it would take for a new agent to arrive, but it was doubtful. Smee was going to pieces in a hurry. He would be no good for anything except a pension, whenever he did get off Lurion. No executioner, Gardner thought, should be required to hold the gun at his victim’s head for six, almost seven, solid months before pulling the trigger.

Someone knocked unexpectedly at the door.

Gardner glanced up, startled. “Who is it?”

“Lori. I want to talk to you, Roy.”

He opened the door. The girl looked tense and distraught. She was dressed in prim, unseductively severe clothes, in sharp contrast to the way she had looked the last time she had knocked on his door.

“Aren’t you going to invite me in, Roy?”

“I… suppose so.” He held the door open uncertainly. “But… I thought we had agreed not to see each other any more after last night, Lori.”

“That was our agreement. And maybe I shouldn’t have broken it. But, I think you owe me some explanations, Roy. That’s why I’m here.”

He remained standing, and so did she. “What sort of explanations?”

Her eyes did not meet his. “It was the wrong thing for me to do, I know,” she said in a hollow voice. “Call it schoolgirl jealousy, call it whatever you want. But I went to the Customs Office this morning and checked your immigration records.”

Gardner felt as though he had been butted in the stomach. But he said nothing.

Lori went on, in the same remote tone, “I told them I wanted to know if you were married. They didn’t like the idea of showing me your papers, but when I told them how you… you had…” She paused. “When I told them, and gave them some money besides, they were willing to let me look. Your entrance papers say you’re not married. Why did you tell me you were, Roy? Did you want that badly to get rid of me?”

Gardner was dumbfounded. He said lamely, “I never thought you’d check the records, Lori.”

“It’s terrible of me to come in here and accuse you like this. The ladylike thing to do would be to swallow my pride and forget the whole affair. But, Roy, how could you lie to me that way?”

“I had to.”

“To preserve your precious bachelorhood? I wasn’t going to entrap you forever,” she said bitterly. “You didn’t have to think I would spin a web around you and suck your blood.”

“It wasn’t anything like that,” Gardner said thickly. “I have… had… professional reasons for not wanting to get emotionally involved with’ anybody on Lurion.”

“Professional reasons?”

He nodded helplessly. The girl stared strangely at him. Quietly she said, “I wonder just what your profession is.”

“I’m a jewel-trader. You know that.”

“I’m not so sure. The hotel people whisper a lot about you, you know. They say you have strange friends, that you get visi-screen calls from distant continents. And last night there was a fight in your room.”

“How do you know that?”

“I came up here late last night just to tell you how sorry I was to have caused you trouble, you know. I still thought you were a married man. I heard the sound of a struggle going on in here. There was another man, and he said something about the Confederacy of Rim Stars paying highly for information he could give them, and you were talking about torture, and Security, and then there was the sound of furniture breaking…” She stared at the floor. “I was frightened. I ran away. And then, did you know, this morning they found the dead body of an Earthman named Archer a few blocks from here? He had been knifed. He was the man you were fighting with in your room, wasn’t he? Roy, what are youT

Gardner felt a knot of tension tightening in his belly. The girl’s face, frightened, accusing, hovered before him. He knew that what he was about to do violated all precepts of Security. Yet he had to do it. He had to unburden his soul of the massive weight it bore.

“You want the truth?” he said. “All right. I’ll give you the truth. But you’ll have to keep it locked up in your own skull. No one will believe you if you blab it, anyway.”

“Roy, I don’t understand.”

“Quiet, and listen to me.” Gardner’s face was set in a stern mask. “Archer, the dead man, was part of a team of five men sent out by Earth Central to do a job here on Lurion. Then Archer sold out, or was planning to as soon as he had a confession from my lips. He didn’t get it.”

“What kind of job?” Lori asked.

“We were sent here to destroy Lurion.”

The girl’s eyes widened for a moment, then focused on him in a bewildered glare.

“What?”

He told her. Speaking slowly, dragging each word out from where he had hidden it so long, Gardner told her about Karnes and about the assignment. And why he had felt it necessary to pretend he was married. His heart felt lighter with each word of the bizarre confession.

When he was finished, she forced a little lopsided smile and said, “And I was studying cruelty on Lurion! I could have stayed at home and done a better job.”

He shook his head. “Look at it through the computer’s eyes. From the data given, the computer determined that there would be nothing cruel about what Earth would do to Lurion. We would be killing three billion people, destroying an entire culture. But we would be removing a filthy plague spot from the universe. We would be saving Earth and we would be protecting the rest of the civilized galaxy.”

“It would be murder in cold blood,” she said numbly.

“Yes. To save Earth the agony and destruction involved in acting in hot blood when Lurion springs its war on us.”

“But are you God? Once you take this power on yourself, to destroy whole worlds, where does it stop? Suppose you decide that Argonav is evil next, and then Simulor, and then Hannim? Do you go around blasting one planet after another, in the name of saving Earth and civilization?”

“Look at it from the viewpoint of the computed data. Lurion is rotten through and through. Eventually some of that rottenness is going to flare up into a galactic war. Fifty billion people may die—fifty billion, not just three billion. The economies of hundreds of worlds may be disrupted. A dozen future generations will have their birthrights mortgaged to pay for the havoc Lurion will cause. And, the computer says, the probability is extremely high that Earth herself will be destroyed in a surprise attack, as the opening salvo in the war. To avoid all this, I was sent here… to destroy Lurion.”

“But I would have died tool” Lori exclaimed, realizing the fact all at once.

Gardner nodded. “That’s why I’ve been trying to keep away from you. It was a mistake for me ever to get entangled with you. You couldn’t have been saved if the project had gone off as scheduled.”

“But now there’ll be a delay, you say, because this man Archer is dead. You’ll have to send for a replacement, and by the time he gets here my ship will have left. But then Lurion will be destroyed when that fifth man gets here.”

“I have another man going, breaking down under the strain. He’s been here too long, you see. So I would have to replace him. More delay. And by the time the replacements finally did get here, most likely it would be my turn to have a breakdown, and then…” Gardner clenched his fists. “But all this doesn’t matter. There isn’t going to be any project. Lurion won’t be destroyed.”

“Lurion won’t—”

“At least, not by me.” Gardner smiled, feeling the strength of his decision now. “The computer has made some big mistakes already. It let Archer get past, and Archer was a traitor. It approved me, even though I wasn’t really the right kind of person to act as executioner. It bungled the whole first batch it sent out. I can’t trust the computer’s judgments any more. Certainly I can’t give the order to destroy a world on the basis of them.”

“But, what are you going to do, Roy?”

“I’m not sure. But I’ve found a group, an underground organization of Lurioni, who are working to change the ways of society here. I’m seeing some of them tonight, to find out just what their program is. Then I’ve got to return to Earth. I’ve got to find out whether the existence of that group was known, whether it was fed into the computer with the original data on Lurion.”

“What difference will that make?”

Gardner leaned forward anxiously. “If the group didn’t get computed in, it meant that the extrapolation of Lurion’s future is faulty. I’ll demand a new computation before any drastic steps are taken. On the other hand, if the computer did know about these people, and extrapolated that they would have no effect on the general trend…” Gardner shrugged. “In that case, I guess Lurion will have to die.”

Chapter XIII

Steeves’ house was a tall old building, one of a group of identical tall, narrow buildings that bordered a tiny grassy square in a quiet part of the city. Steeves lived on the top floor. Lori and Gardner rode up in a creaking lift-shaft.

They were slightly early, but the two Lurioni, Kinrad and Damiroj, had already arrived. They rose politely as Gardner and Lori entered.

“Miss Lori Marks,” Gardner said. “An anthropologist from Terra. A very close friend of mine.”

“Pleased,” Kinrad said.

“A pleasure,” said Damiroj.

Their manners, thought Gardner, were very refined. He was willing to bet that these two had been off Lurion, had picked up their cultured ways on some more genteel world.

There was a frosty little moment of uncertainty. The two Lurioni, doubtless remembering the peculiar behavior of Gardner at their last meeting, were slow to-begin a conversation. Steeves broke up the rigidity by offering drinks; he served, instead of the ubiquitous khall, a sort of local brandy that Gardner found interesting. The apartment was small but well furnished, with objects from a number of worlds arranged tastefully. Steeves had prospered in his twenty years on Lurion, no doubt of that.

Gardner smiled disarmingly and said, “I guess I ought to begin with apologies for my queer behavior the last time we met.”

They tried to shrug the incident off, but Gardner insisted. “I was very upset, that day. I wasn’t thinking clearly. I’ll have to ask you to forgive me, and to forget all that took place.”

Steeves said, “Then you really are interested in our group, Gardner?”

“Yes. But I’ve got to have more information. And there’s some information I’d better give you. It’s time to drop some of the masks. I’m not really a jewel merchant. I’m a secret agent of the Terran Security Corps.”

The Lurioni looked startled. Steeves reared back and exclaimed, “What?”

“Yes. Lurion is under very close observation by Earth, and I’m one of the observers. You understand that this is absolutely secret, not to go beyond this room.”

“Of course.”

“Very well, then. Let’s put it that Earth is extremely disturbed by the probable course of events on Lurion. Bluntly, Earth thinks the pattern is pointing toward war. But we hope to avoid this war by sponsoring groups such as yours that can alter the course of events on Lurion. Have I begun to make myself clear?”

Kinrad, Damiroj, and Steeves looked utterly floored by Gardner’s announcement. Steeves muttered, “We had no idea. I thought you were a private merchant.”

“Has anyone of an official capacity ever approached you as I’m doing now? Anyone from Earth, I mean.”

“No.” Steeves said. “We’ve only mentioned the matter to a couple of other Earthmen, close friends of mine. You were the first outsider I chose.”

“A lucky choice,” Kinrad said.

Gardner nodded. His hopes rose. If this group were really unknown, then it couldn’t have been taken into account when the computer had worked up its Lurioni extrapolation. Which meant there might still be a chance to avert the holocaust of total destruction.

Gardner said, “I’ll be returning to Earth soon, reporting to my superiors. Can you give me some idea of your program of action? How big is your group anyway?”

“We have five hundred members on three continents,” Damiroj said. “The number is growing, slowly but constantly.”

“And just what are your aims?”

It was Kinrad, the more articulate of the two, who leaned forward to speak. “Lurion is in, shall we say, a primitive stage of culture, speaking not technologically but in terms of interpersonal relationships. Our plan is to infiltrate positions of responsibility here, and gradually to bring about change.”

“We have several men in local legislatures,” Damiroj said. “Others have received judgeships. Soon we shall elect delegates to the central congress. Perhaps before long we will have a few men on the High Committee.”

“Several religious leaders have joined us,” Kinrad went on. “As we progress, we hope to gather support from influential men of business. Enlightenment is spreading. Perhaps it will take us two or three generations before our influence is felt. But it will be felt if we have support! And Lurion will change! We will break up the power blocs, the hate-mongering ones who lead us. We will reduce the competition of everyday life, the competition that turns us into beasts. We will bring the long-overdue cultural change that will transform this world!”

Eyes bright with the fervor of crusaders, Kinrad and Damiroj paused in their outburst. Gardner felt his own heart pounding. This was what could save Lurion, this upsurge from within, so unsuspected by the computer who had ordered this planet’s destruction!

This time Gardner did not rush out abruptly, as he had before. But he knew that he could leave at once. He had heard what he had hoped to hear.

He stayed on for an hour more, listening to the grandiose plans unfolding. Finally, when the time came to leave, he assured the two Lurioni that he would do everything in his power to aid their cause, and thanked Steeves profusely for having arranged the meeting.

“You’ll never know what you’ve done,” Gardner said.

And indeed Sleeves would not. But he had saved one world from destruction and another from a monstrous load of guilt if, Gardner thought, he could succeed in getting Security to order a recomputation of the probabilities. That might not prove so easy.

“Well?” Lori asked, outside in the square. “What do you think of them?”

“They’ve got a lot of enthusiasm, Lori. They know what needs to be done, and they’re going to do their damndest to do it.”

“Do you think they’ll succeed?”

Gardner shrugged. “The culture pattern of Lurion is thousands of years old. You can’t eradicate that much viciousness overnight. But the important thing is that someone will be trying to db it.”

He hailed a cab. Lori said, “What are you going to do now?”

He shrugged. “Return to Earth and put the case before my superiors.”

“Will you go alone?”

“I’ll take Smee,” he said. “He’ll never hold out here. No sense having him wait any longer. And…”

“Yes?”

“What about you, Lori? Will you go back to Earth with me? Or do you want to stay out of this whole thing? You’ve got your research to finish.”

“It can wait.”

“I might get in trouble on Earth. They might put me away for safekeeping. I know too much. So do you. It’s risky to go with me.”

“I’ll go.”

“And afterward?”

She gestured ambiguously. “I might finish my thesis. Or I might not. Let’s not worry about that now.”

In the morning, he put through a call to Smee. The conversation was brief; Gardner said that he had received word from Earth to hold the project up indefinitely, pending new considerations. “I’m going back to Earth at once. I thought you might like to come with me. It may be months before the go-ahead comes through.”

“What will you do with Weegan and Leopold?”

“They’ll stay here,” Gardner said. “They can wait a while. I know you can’t.”

“When will you pick me up?”

“Later today. I’ll land at Norivad Spaceport and have you paged.”

Gardner called Weegan and Leopold next, and informed them of the change in plans. They were both surprised and more than a little troubled by the prospect of a delay, but they agreed to stay on.

Packing was quick. Gardner unsealed the closet and took out Archer’s generator. It had been modified somewhat, to the form of a twin-turreted microscope. He stuffed it into his own luggage, sealed everything up, and went down to Lori’s room to see how she was progressing. Shorüy after noon, they checked out of the hotel and took a cab to the spaceport.

There was a brief delay while he identified himself, passed through Customs, and claimed his ship. Thankfully, his papers were all in order, though it took a small bribe to squeeze through the Customs shed without a full-scale inspection.

He and Lori trooped out onto the field. He found his ship, thumbed open the hatch, and they entered. He radioed the control tower, got blastoff clearance, pressed down on the blasting key. The ship rose, bobbed for a moment on its Jetstream, and soared into the stratosphere. Gardner navigated along a tight arc, never more than two hundred miles from the ground, as he shot along toward Norivad, the city where Smee was stationed.

“Request landing clearance,” he called, giving his identification data.

The spaceport at Norivad was very much like the one Gardner had left behind. He brought the ship down smoothly on an outjutting flange of the spacefield and asked the control tower to page his passenger for him. Ten minutes later Smee appeared, riding out from the terminal in a small truck. A porter unloaded his two pieces of baggage. Smee came aboard, looking like an old man, bent, roundshouldered, his face withered, his eyes dreary.

“I don’t understand,” Smee muttered, as he settled down inside the ship. “They let me rot here for seven months, and then they call the whole thing off. As if I was a robot. As if I didn’t have feelings.”

Gardner did not look. Smee was shattered, crushed under the toll of his assignment. And the shattering had been for nothing… maybe.

“Why did they change their minds?” Smee asked.

“Some new information came to light. Information that made Lurion out to be a better place than it looks on first glance.”

“Lurion is hell,” Smee said thickly. “It should be destroyed.”

“So the computer says. But there’s new data to be considered. We can’t go blowing up worlds that might be salvaged.”

But Smee had lived with the thought of destruction for too long. It had seared channels into his brain. Now he could only shake his head and repeat, “It should be destroyed.”

Gardner felt a surge of pity, and he did not dare tell the other man that it was on his account that the project had been postponed. Smee would have only asked why the planet had not been blown up first, with the recomputation to come later. Gardner wondered whether the efficient medicos of Security would be able to repair this empty hulk of a man who had been sacrificed for nothing.

He concentrated on his piloting. Some hours later, the tiny vessel hung three quarters of a billion miles from Betelgeuse and three hundred million miles from Lurion. It was the conversion-point. Gardner jabbed down hard on the controls and the ship flicked out of normal space and into warp.

He wondered what kind of reception would be waiting for him on Earth.

Chapter XIV

Gardner stood at the entrance to the concentric series of offices that led inward to Security Chief Karnes’ office. He felt uncertain and tired. It was only hours since he had landed on Earth; Lori had gone to a hotel, Smee to the Security medical department. Gardner had not warned anyone of his return.

He was not in uniform, and he was conscious of his shabby, travelworn appearance as he presented himself at the front reception desk. The clerk, a recruit Security man, glanced up suspiciously.

“Yes?”

“I’d like to see Chief Karnes.”

“The Chief is in conference, sir. Do you have an appointment? I could ring him if—”

“No, I don’t have an appointment,” Gardner said wearily. “But he’ll see me if you tell him who I am. Ring him up and tell him Agent Gardner is here to see him and make a report.”

The receptionist frowned quizzically. “Very well. He’ll be free to take calls in half an hour. If you don’t mind waiting…”

“I do mind waiting,” Gardner said icily. “Call him now.”

“But—”

“Call him, you ninny, and don’t sit there yammering nonsense at me!” Gardner snapped.

Cowed, the receptionist shrank back into his cubicle and began plugging in phone-jacks. Gardner heard him talking to one clerk after another; Karnes was not an easy man to approach without an appointment. But at last he heard the receptionist say, “Agent Gardner is out here. He says he has a report to make.”

Karnes’ reply was loud and anguished enough for Gardner to hear it clearly. The receptionist poked his neck out and said, “Excuse me, but is that Agent Roy Gardner?”

“Yes, it is. Just back from Lurion.”

The receptionist relayed the information to Karnes. A moment later the youngster looked up dazedly at Gardner and said, “The Chief will see you immediately, Agent Gardner.”

The double doors opened and Gardner strode through. He knew his way; he had only been in Karnes’ office a handful of times, but the way to the Chief’s office was something no Security man ever forgot.

He came finally to the end of the long series of interlocking hallways and made the sharp left turn that put him in the vestibule of Karnes’ office. The scanning field bathed him for an instant; then the door rolled quickly back.

Karnes was standing at his desk when Gardner walked in: the first time in Gardner’s memory, and perhaps in all of recorded history, that Karnes had not been seated when a subordinate entered the room. Karnes’ thin face was frozen in an expression of shock and perplexity. His fleshless lips moved for a moment impotently before the Security Chief was able to get out the words:

“What the deuce are you doing here?”

“Reporting back to request a recomputation, sir,” Gardner said evenly.

Karnes sank limply into his chair and fixed hard, narrow eyes on Gardner. “Without orders? Without asking permission? Gardner, have you gone insane? What about the project?”

“Perhaps the project is better canceled, sir. I couldn’t give the order to proceed. There’s some additional information about Lurion that has to be figured into the computation before we can act.”

“This is incredible, Gardner,” Karnes said darkly. “You stand there to tell me that you abandoned your post and returned to Earth merely to let me know that you don’t think the computer was right? I—”

Gardner recklessly interrupted him. “Sir, I’ve been in the Corps long enough to know the consequences of what I’ve done. But I had to. The computer is wrong!”

“The computer spent three years formulating its decision, Gardner! We scoured Lurion for data, fed every relevant fact we could find into the programming.”

Gardner’s jaws clenched. “The computer was capable of sending out a traitor to take part in the project, though. It’s far from infallible.”

“What are you saying?”

“Your man Damon Archer. He showed up at my hotel with a hidden recorder and took down a full discussion of the project. Then he bolted. Luckily, he was stopped. But he was planning to sell that tape to the Confederacy of Rim Stars. Doesn’t speak well for the computer, does it, to pick such a man?”

Karnes’ face clouded even more. “Archer was screened as thoroughly as anybody we’ve ever selected for an assignment.”

“Exactly, sir. And still the computer made a mistake about him!”

The point should have been a telling one, but Karnes shrugged it off. “You should have requested a replacement for him. Under no condition should you-have come all the way back to Earth.”

“Archer wasn’t the only lemon. Smee was rapidly going psycho. I brought him back with me too.”

“In other words,” said Karnes, holding himself jn check with deadly calm, “you’ve smashed the entire project. Only Leopold and Weegan are still on Lurion. Or have you subverted them too?”

“They’re still there, but I gave them orders to hold things up. You see, sir, while I was waiting for the group to assemble, I met some of the Lurioni. I became involved with a group that’s dedicated to upsetting the present way of life there, to get into government and change things. There are over five hundred of them, and they’re growing more influential every day. It would be wrong to destroy the planet while there’s still hope for it, sir. If this group gets proper support—if we nurture it along—it ought to be possible to salvage Lurion without the need to blow it up. That is—”

“That’s enough, Gardner,” Karnes said in a low voice.

“But, sir—”

“Listen to me, Gardner. It’s close to five years since we first began to realize we had to destroy Lurion. Ever since that moment every man in the top levels of government here has lived with a weight of responsibility on his back. We’ve checked and rechecked. There’s no room for error. The war drive on Lurion is unstoppable. It’s going to reach a head in sixty-seven years and the top will blow off—unless we stop things right now.

“You say Smee cracked up after only six months. How about us, Gardner? We’ve been living with this thing for years! Wrecking a world isn’t something you undertake lightly. We’ve checked, rechecked, doublechecked. We reached our decision.

“You were picked to implement this decision. If you remember, I didn’t think you were the right man. The computer overruled me. And instead of carrying out your task, you’ve acted in a direcdy contrary way.”

“Then you were right about me, and the computer was wrong!” Gardner shouted triumphantly. “If the computer can be wrong about me and wrong about Archer, what makes you so sure that it’s right about Lurion?”

“That’ll be enough,” Karnes barked. “Our decision has been taken. The project will continue as—”

“But all I ask is that you run a recomputation with the new data! It can’t take more than a year. Can’t you spare a year when the life of a whole world is at stake? The recomputation may change everything. It—”

“The project will continue as scheduled,” Karnes repeated inexorably. “Replacements will be sent to Lurion for Archer, Smee, and yourself. You are relieved of your position on this project, and your rank will be reduced to—”

“Reduced to nothing,” Gardner said. “I resign my commission on the spot. You’ll get the official notice by registered mail in the morning. I don’t want any part of this filthy organization!”

Saluting ironically, he spun on his heel and stalked toward the door. The panels rolled back obediently as he approached them.

“Gardner! Come back here! That’s an order, Gardner, do you hear me?”

“I don’t have to obey orders any more, sir.”

“Gardner!”

Without looking back, he stepped through the doorway, and it closed behind him. He began to walk rapidly down the long corridor. Voices sounded behind him, but he kept on going, through passageway after passageway, out to the front desk finally, past the goggle-eyed reception clerk, into the waiting lift-shaft.

Down. Out into the street.

Only when the fresh air reached him did he begin to think again. His mind had been numb all the way down, concentrating only on getting out of the building as quickly as possible.

Karnes had refused to listen. The project would continue as ordered. And he had resigned his commission. Like a string of firecrackers, the events had followed each other in explosive speed.

In no more than five minutes he had destroyed a career that had taken years to build.

He felt hollow and lost. But he knew he had done the right thing. That alone was a consolation.

In all conscience he could not have proceeded with the destruction project. Nor could he continue to associate himself with the organization that would be responsible for Lurion’s murder.

He had cut himself adrift, but at least his hands were clean.

Whatever happened now would be no guilt of his. He had tried.

A taxi glided up to the curb. Gardner stepped in and gave the driver the address of the hotel where he and Lori had registered earlier that day.

Lori was reading when he came in. She put away her book immediately and ran to him, eyes bright, smiling with anticipation. Her smile faded as she saw the expression on his face.

“What happened, Roy?”

He shook his head and dropped dispiritedly into a chair. “The damned obstinate fool,” he muttered bitterly. “Wouldn’t Karnes see you?”

“Oh, he saw me all right. He damned near had a fit when he heard I was waiting outside. I bet nobody ever got shown into Karnes’ office so fast. But then he wouldn’t listen to me.”

“What do you mean?”

Scowling Gardner said, “I told him everything. About Archer, about Smee, about the Lurioni underground. And all he did was chew me out for having left my position without permission. The project is going to continue as scheduled. He won’t even consider the idea of ordering a recomputation.”

“No, Roy! That’s horrible!”

“There’s more,” Gardner said. “He removed me from the project and started to demote me. So I resigned. I tossed in my commission.”

“Of course. What else could you have done? You couldn’t have remained attached to them after all this, could you?”

“No, but now I’m in a mess. I don’t have any other livelihood, and it isn’t easy for Security Agents to get jobs. People tend to distrust us. When I put down on the application, ‘Former Security Agent,’ they suddenly decide that the vacancy has been filled by a prior applicant due to apply at a later date. So Earth is closed to me. Besides, I’m walking around with a lot of top-secret classified information in my hold. Karnes may decide that I’m too dangerous to stay at liberty. The safest thing for them to do is to lock me up until after the Lurioni blowup, or maybe even indefinitely. To keep me quiet, you see.”

Lori pounded her fists against her thighs in anger. “But this is all outrageous! Aren’t they human? Can’t they at least order the recomputation instead of arresting you and blowing up a world? How can they dare to take such a responsibility?”

Gardner said quietly, “That’s the attitude I had until a little while ago. But now I understand Karnes and his bunch better. They’ve been living with this thing for five years, now. They’ve already gotten numb to the guilt. Their minds are frozen in the thought that Lurion has to be destroyed. It’s a dreadful thing to do, and they know it. But if they order the recomputation, and find out that they don’t have to destroy the planet, then all their suffering and guilt of the last five years was wasted; don’t you see? And they’ve reached the point where they’d rather blow Lurion up than admit that they were operating on insufficient data.”

He stared dumbly at the textured pattern of red and green whorls in the carpet. Lori said, “Roy, what are we going to do now?”

“Wei I’m going to become a victim of the Preventive Detention laws. You’re going to finish your thesis and get your degree in anthropology.”

“Don’t be stupid. Are you just going to sit here and let them arrest you?”

“What else is there for me? The cleanest thing would be to go back to Lurion and wait there for the blowup. But I’m not cut out for suicide. So I’ll rot in a jail instead. It’s the price I’ll pay for being an Earthman. We’ll all share the guilt of this Lurion thing.”

“No, Roy. Can’t we escape altogether, go off to some distant planet, some colony-world where we can buy land and just live and farm and forget this whole nightmarish thing?”

Gardner looked up. “Why should you get yourself mixed up in this?”

“Maybe I love you,” she said. “Or maybe I’m just an idiot. But I want to go with you wherever you go. And I don’t want you to sit by and let yourself be locked up.”

Gardner managed a faint smile. “Are you certain that this is what you want, Lori?”

“Yes.”

“What about your thesis, your doctorate?”

“What do those things matter? A lot of typed paper, a diploma, a title. They’re just substitutes for being alive, for being in love.”

“Get your doctorate. Marry some rich banker, the owner of a spaceKne, a jetpolo player. You’ve got looks, brains—”

“I don’t want any rich bankers. I want you, Roy.”

He was silent a long while, his eyes closed, his face bleak. At length he said, “I’ve got some money saved up. Security men get paid pretty well. It would be enough to take two people about nine hundred light-years on a one-way ticket and still leave a little over for living expenses.”

“I have money too, Roy. Not much, but it’s at least three thousand credits.”

“How fast can you lay your hands on it?”

“Within an hour. I don’t think the bank will make trouble about a withdrawal.”

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll go down to the Bureau of Emigration and pick out a planet and get my passport validated while you’re taking your money out. When I get back, you can go and do the same thing. We’ll leave on the first available ship.”

“Why can’t we go to the Bureau together?”

Gardner shook his head. “There’s time to start doing things together when we’re safely off Earth. There might be some hitches in getting my emigration visa, and we’d be smartest to avoid linking ourselves publicly until I’m cleared.”

“If you think that’s best,” Lori agreed.

They parted in front of the hotel, Lori heading for the bank, Gardner toward the towering headquarters of the Bureau of Emigration.

In the lobby of that great building, he found a private viewing booth and punched out this request for information. Data began to appear on the screen set in the wall. It was nearly half an hour before he had picked out the most attractive world.

It was called Herschel, and it was 383 light-years from Earth. Fourth planet of a warm G-type sun, gravity .96 Earthnorm, atmosphere Earthlike to four places. It had been settled three hundred years earlier by Terran colonists, had no native intelligent life, and had received full independence from Earth fifty years ago. The current population was only fifteen million, spread loosely over three fertile continents. New colonists were welcome, and received two hundred acres of land as a free homestead, with the option of buying more at low prices. Government was by representative legislature; taxes were at a minimum.

It sounded ideal. Gardner punched for a printed information form on Herschel to show to Lori. Then he began to fill out his application for an emigration permit. The Bureau would take care of the rest, notifying Herschel by ultrawave that a new colonist was on the way and securing a visa for him.

When he had completed the application, he joined a line. It inched along slowly. At any hour of the day or night, the Bureau hall was filled with Earthmen ready to try a change of luck on some distant, unspoiled world. Earth’s sphere of influence covered nearly five hundred planets of the galaxy, and nearly all of them were under-populated and welcomed newcomers.

Finally he reached the front of the line. He slipped his application across the ledge to the smiling clerk. The clerk scanned it briefly, maintaining the glossy professional smile.

Then, just before stamping out the validation, the clerk reached to his left and consulted a long sheet of green paper with many numbers typed on it. The smile wavered for a moment, but held firm.

Gardner stiffened. He knew what that sheet of paper was. A knowledge of the interior workings of Security could be helpful at times.

The clerk said urbanely, “There seems to be a minor difficulty, Mr. Gardner. Would you mind waiting for just a moment to the side here while we…”

Gardner did not choose to wait. Kames, he thought, had acted swiftly. The pickup order had gone out, and every branch Emigration Bureau already had the number of his passport, with instructions to detain him if he made any attempt to leave Earth.

He reached out swiftiy and snatched his application and passport back from the stunned clerk; then he turned and made his way quickly out of the crowded hall, before the clerk could recover and cry out for him to be seized.

Chapter XV

“They’ve got me on the list,” he told Lori in the safety of the hotel room. “That means that Karnes has already regretted letting me walk out of his office the way I did.”

Lori’s face was tight with anxiety. “Do you think they’re searching the city for you?”

“I’m sure of it. I know all about how Security runs a manhunt. They’ll have every means of transportation covered. Not even a flea will be able to get out of this city without being spotted. And they’ll flash word to the city police, too. By the time twenty-four hours has passed, there’ll be close to a million people looking for me in this city. And by the time forty-eight hours has passed, the probability is about ten to one that I’ll be holed up in the Keep for an indefinite period of preventive detention.”

“No, Roy! Isn’t there some way?”

“To escape?” Gardner smiled. “Yes, one way. But only a Security man would know about it. How fond are you of my face, Lori?”

“You mean plastic surgery?”

He nodded. “It’s the only way. I know a man, a good man. He’ll give me a new face and a new identity while I wait. Also a new passport. He’s an expert. The only trouble is, there won’t be anyone on Herschel capable of giving me back my old face. The operation is a difficult one; there aren’t likely to be skilled plastic surgeons on a frontier world. But you won’t miss my face, will you? My nose is too sharp, my eyebrows too heavy. I could use a different mouth, too. I’ve gotten so used to the official Security scowl that my lips won’t smile the right way any more.”

“It’s a good face, Roy. It’s a strong face, an honest face. It’s your face.”

“I can keep my face and go to jail, or I can get a new face and settle on Herschel with you. Which do you want it to be?”

After a pause Lori said, “That’s a silly question. But make it a face I can love, Roy. Don’t let him make you unreal. Be different, but don’t be false. Do you know what I mean?”

“I think so.” Gardner scratched his chin reflectively. “Listen, get yourself down to the Bureau and make out an application for Herschel. Put yourself down as single and no prospects; colony-worlds are always happy to get good-looking unmarried women. When you’ve got your papers in order, find out when the next ship leaves and make a reservation for one. Don’t give them any hint that you figure on having a traveling companion. When you’ve done all that, check out of the hotel room and get yourself another one somewhere else. I’ll find a room near the spaceport until blastoff time. We won’t have any contact with each other from today until the time that ship leaves for Herschel, and when we meet aboard the ship it’s going to look strictly like an accident, love at first sight.”

“Do we have to do it that way, Roy? The ship might not be leaving for a month!”

“Then we go our separate ways for a month,” Gardner said. “There’s no alternative. We have to avoid giving Security any connection between us. I know how they work, Lori.”

“All right, then,” she said hesitantly. “But I hope it won’t be a month.”

He smiled. “So do I.”

They kissed and went their separate ways again, not looking back. The separation was going to be difficult, Gardner thought, but it was essential. Security would have ways of checking back on Gardner and linking him with the girl. Smee could give them that much information. All they needed to do was check forward and discover that the girl was leaving for Herschel, and they could easily pick up her traveling companion and give him an overhauling in the Interrogation Chamber. But if she kept her own counsel, had no contact with him, then Security would be helpless.

It was late afternoon now. Twilight was descending on the city; shadows were long; and people were hurrying homeward. Gardner kept close to the buildings, moving on foot, his eyes lowered to avoid calling attention to himself. He knew he still had a little time. The pickup alarm was probably flashing all over, but Karnes would be too smart to sound a general alarm, complete with pictures in the telex and all. Because if he did that, it might prove the motive for Gardner to spill what he knew about the Lurion project. And, once Gardner spoke out, the project would be hopelessly shattered. If they went through with it, it would look strangely suspicious that Lurion should die in exactly the way the renegade Security man had predicted.

But, Gardner thought, Karnes had one ace in his sleeve: the knowledge that Gardner almost certainly would not expose the project. For, if he did that, it would be a heavy blow to Earth’s prestige; it might damage forever Earth’s reputation as an ethical world. And Gardner was still loyal to his native planet. Karnes knew that. No Security man could shuck off his loyalty overnight, however strong the provocation.

So Karnes could be sure that Gardner would not blab, at least not for a while. Soon, perhaps, the compulsion to speak out would outweigh the bonds of loyalty; but Karnes hoped to have Gardner in custody long before that.

An hour later, Gardner was halfway across the city, making his way through shabby, darkened streets that had not been repaved for generations. This was the poor quarter of the city, where the human refuse came to rest at tide’s end.

The address was something Gardner never had forgotten. The store was where he remembered it to be: the windows were just as dingy, the neons just as noisy, the sidewalk in front just as filthy. Only the old man had changed. He was now even older.

Gardner let himself in and stood by the door. The old man peered at him out of eyes dulled and yellowed by years. “Yes? Repair your shoes?”

Gardner grinned. “You mean you don’t remember me, Hollis?”

“My name isn’t Hollis! Why do you call me… ?” He paused. “Gardner?”

“The same.”

The old man showed brittle stumps of teeth in a broad grin. “You young devil! What brings you around here?” The grin faded immediately. “You aren’t going to turn me in, are you? Not after all these years?”

Gardner shook his head. “Far from it, Hollis. I need a new face and I need a new passport, all in a hurry; overnight, if you can manage it.”

“Are you serious? Have you gotten in trouble?”

“Big trouble,” Gardner confirmed. “I had a quarrel with Karnes over procedures, and resigned my commission. He didn’t move fast enough to grab me while I was in his office, but he’s got the word out now. I’m to be picked up and detained. I know too much.”

The oldster hobbled out from behind his bench and peered up at Gardner. “Come in back,” he said. “I’ll lock up the store. You go straight through, turn right, open the door.”

Gardner did as he was told and found himself in a tiny but well-equipped little office, hidden away in the rear of the shop. He smiled. Security could be troublesome, but a good Security Agent could always use some of his own knowledge to evade capture.

Hollis had been a Security Agent once, and a good one. He had been a plastic surgeon, specializing in disguising Agents for special missions. But he, too, had quarreled with Karnes over procedures, and had resigned from the Corps. Gardner had never known the exact circumstances of the quarrel, though Hollis had let it be known that it was a matter of ethics. Karnes had sent out an order for Hollis’ pickup, but Hollis had slipped through the net, changed his appearance, and set up shop in a dismal part of the city, cobbling for a living but practicing plastic surgery for the benefit of the underworld.

Gardner had stumbled over the old man’s refuge three years before. It was his duty to report Hollis to Karnes but the old man had pleaded desperately and had finally swayed Gardner into forgetting to turn him in.

Now it was time to let Hollis repay that favor.

“They’ve got my passport number on the list,” Gardner said. “It’s a top-priority search. I’ve got to get off Earth fast, or I’ll never get another chance.”

Hollis grinned. “You needn’t worry. I’ll have you fixed so well they’ll never spot you. Overnight, you say?”

“It’s best that way.”

“Too bad. If I had a week, I could fix you so they’d never have a chance. Alter your bone structure, change your whole physique. But I suppose I can do enough tonight to get you through. How do you want to look?”

“The same, only different—get what I mean? I’m not handsome now. I don’t want you to give me a handsome face, but don’t disfigure me either.”

“I could turn you into a godling, you know. No woman would resist you.”

“I’ve got a woman already,” Gardner said. “She likes me pretty much the way I am. See if you can make the alterations without changing the basic character of the face.”

“Hmm. See what I can do.”

Hollis took out a pad and stylus and began to sketch out a face, keeping the sheet away from Gardner’s angle of vision. Gardner fidgeted. Fifteen minutes later, Hollis grunted his satisfaction.

“There. Take a look.”

The face that looked up at the paper bore no resemblance to his own. The nose was flatter, rounder; the lips were wider and fuller. The chin protruded a little in a rugged, not unattractive way.

“It looks all right,” Gardner said.

“I’ll alter the color of your hair, of course, and of your eyes. And you’d better grow a mustache, too. How about identifying scars?”

“I’ve got a slash on my forearm.”

“I’ll cover it with synthoflesh,” Hollis said. “Nobody will tell the difference. The synthoflesh will wither away in about a year. It’ll be gradual. Your lips and chin will return pretty much to what they are now. But the angle of your ears is going to stay different, and the shape of your nose. Unless you find someone who can put you back the way you were.”

“I doubt that I will.”

“All right, then. Lie down on the table. Get your shirt off while I’m preparing the anesthetic.”

Gardner waited, tensely, while the old man bustied busily about, getting things ready. He wondered if it would be painful; he wondered if he would ever get used to a different face looking back at him from mirrors. Then the anesthetic cone descended over his face, and he ceased to wonder.

His next sensation was the sound of Hollis’ voice saying warningly, “Don’t move.”

Gardner opened his eyes. His face ached, his head throbbed.

“Don’t try to talk, either,” Hollis said. “I finished an hour ago, but you’ve got to let things set. Here, take a peek.”

Hollis held a mirror in front of his face. Gardner stared into the glass and saw blue eyes staring back. His eyes had been brown. Brown hair now was orange-red. His nose was different, his chin jutted, his mouth was broader. It was a stranger’s face. Yet, somehow, he knew it was his own.

“It’s ten o’clock in the morning,” Hollis told him. “I’ve been working on you all night, snipping muscles, beaming you with quickheal, rearranging, grafting synthoflesh. Look at your arm.”

Gardner picked up his arm. The long white scar along the inside of his forearm, a relic of an old sporting accident, was gone. Hollis had matched the old skin perfectly. Even the hair growing on his arm matched. It was all an even red now.

“I’ve treated your follicles so that your head and body hair will grow in red for about a year,” Hollis said. “After that, it’ll gradually return to its old color. You’ll have to figure out some explanation for your neighbors, but you’ve got time to worry about that.” Hollis reached behind him and picked up a sheaf of documents. “By the way here are your papers. Your name is Gregory Stone, now. I faked a complete background for you. Make sure you study it till you’re letter-perfect. I guess it’s safe for you to talk, now. The incisions ought to be healed by this time.”

As cautiously as though made of sand, he rose to a sitting position and looked down at himself. “You’ve made me a lot heavier,” he said.

“There’s twenty pounds of synthoflesh around your middle,” Hollis said. “You’ll absorb it rapidly enough. But just for now it makes quite a difference in your physique.”

“You’re a magician, Hollis!”

“Just a craftsman,” Hollis murmured. “I didn’t do anything to you that any other plastic surgeon couldn’t have done. I simply did it quicker and better, that’s all.”

“When will I be fully healed?”

“Go easy for a day or so. Don’t shave and don’t get into any horseplay. After that, you’ll be fine. And the only way they can identify you is by your retinal index. I can’t change that ~ But nobody’s going to check your index unless you provoke them to. There’s no reason for anyone to suspect you of being Roy Gardner.”

“Unless Karnes decides to take eyeprints of everybody leaving Earth for the next couple of months.”

Hollis shrugged. “If he does that, you’ll be caught. But it would cost him practically his entire budget to do it. Are you worth it?”

“I might be,” Gardner said grimly. “But there’s no use worrying about it now. You can’t get into my eyes to change thines. How much do I owe you?”

“Seventy credits.”

“Don’t be silly. This job is worth at least a thousand, Hollis!”

The old man smiled. “Seventy credits represents my operating expenses. The rest of the fee would be.recompense for skills. In your case, Gardner, the labor is on the house. You’ll need your money, wherever it is you’re going. I haven’t forgotten that I was indebted to you when you walked in last night. Go, now. And remember—your name is now Gregory Stone.”

By noon, Gregory Stone was on line at the branch office of the Bureau of Emigration. He had spent some time locked in a public washroom, studying the papers Hollis had forged while he slept. Gregory Stone was a year older than Roy Gardner, had been born not in Massachusetts but in Maine, and he had worked on a public-owned farm all his life. Hollis had supplied a convincing-looking employment certificate.

All of Roy Gardner’s funds had been deposited in a new account, opened by Gregory Stone and made transferable to the Central Bank of Herschel. Roy Gardner no longer existed. The heavy-set redhaired man who had filled out the application was Gregory Stone.

Gregory Stone slid the papers across to the clerk, a different clerk in a different branch from the one where Gardner had tried to apply the day before. The clerk, smiling as fixedly as the other one had, went through the routine motions in a flurry of hands and elbows. The applicant underwent an uneasy moment as the clerk checked the passport number against a list by his side, but there were no difficulties. A clatter of rubber stamps finally validated the departure permit.

“We wish you success in your ventures, Mr. Stone. Your papers are in order.”

“Thanks,” Gardner-Stone said mechanically.

He wandered away, into the section where flight arrangements were made. The next voyage to Herschel, he learned, would depart in five days. It was a four-stop affair, with Herschel the end of the line. Travel time, six weeks one way. He filled out the form, requesting a single one-way passage, and waited while the robot brains checked to see if there still was room aboard. There was. He was assigned a compartment.

“You have three days to make final payment, Mr. Stone,” the clerk informed him.

“I’ll make it right now,” he said.

He wrote out a check drawn against Gregory Stone’s new bank account, countermarked it with Gregory Stone’s new thumbprint, and handed it across. The check was validated. Five minutes later, Gardner walked out of the building with a set of cleared papers and a paid-in-full ticket to Herschel in his pocket.

Chapter XVI

The seedlings were coming up. It was a wonderful feeling to stand there, with the full golden light of the sun splashing down, looking at the little greenish-yellow sprouts pushing their heads up. Gardner and Lori had only cultivated enough acreage to support themselves this first year. Later, when there were five or six grown children to help out, they would cultivate all five hundred acres of his land, and perhaps buy more. There was plenty of room. Their nearest neighbor, here on Herschel, was twelve miles to the east

“Smell the air,” Lori said. “Clean, fresh.”

“Like wine.”

“Yes. Like wine.”

Gardner smiled. They had been on Herschel ten months, but it seemed like only a few weeks. He thought back to those hectic last few days on Earth when he was holed up in that hotel, never going out for fear of Karnes, wondering where Lori was, waiting for those five endless days to come to their end.

They had, finally. And, as Gregory Stone, he had boarded the spaceship without incident. They had given him a bunk in the bachelor quarters, but on the third day out he had caught the eye of a handsome young single woman. He flirted with her for nearly half an hour before he identified himself. Lori was red with shame.

That would be a memory to cherish forever, Gardner thought: Lori blushing beet-red from forehead to ankles at the way he had trapped her.

They had formed a solid couple, and there had been a shipboard marriage, and Mr. and Mrs. Gregory Stone had moved into the married peoples’ quarters as soon as a cabin became vacant after the ship’s first stop. And then there had been the day when Herschel hung in the viewplates, all green and gold and blue and brown.

It was a good life, Gardner thought, full of fresh air, hard work, and love. Earth seemed like a bad dream, the interlude on Lurion a worse one. Gardner subscribed to the telex service and scanned every word every day, waiting for the day when he would read of the dreadful disaster that had befallen Lurion of the Betelgeuse system. But the news never came. Had he missed it, Gardner wondered? Or was Kames still having trouble getting his team of five in position?

It wasn’t easy. There had to be five, and they had to synchronize the activation of their generators. And if one of them had an attack of conscience at the critical moment, they would all have to begin again.

Gardner tried to forget about Lurion and what Earth planned to do to it. Earth and Lurion were both very far away, invisible, both of them, in the nightly glory of Herschel’s sky. The only reality that mattered was right here.

Gardner stood with his arm around Lori, looking out over their land. It was midmorning, the sun still not yet at its zenith. The excitement of spring crackled in the air.

A helicopter droned overhead, suddenly.

“Looks like we’re getting company,” Gardner said.

Lori frowned. “I wonder who. We saw the Tompkinses last week, and we’re supposed to go over the hill to the Vreelands on Fourday. So…”

“Maybe it’s a traveling salesman,” Gardner suggested.

The helicopter hovered over an uncultivated clearing and began to descend. It bore, Gardner saw, the Herschel City crest, which meant that it was an official car being used to ferry some visitor out to the Gardner farm. It landed, and a short, stocky, balding man clambered out; then the copter took off again. Within a moment it was only a dot against the cloudless steel-blue sky.

The man began to walk toward the Gardner house. Gardner stiffened. “Good God,” he muttered hoarsely. “It’s Smee! Get the rifle, Lori!”

But before she had a chance to move, the newcomer waved cheerily and called out, “Hello, Lori! Hello, Gardnerl”

“My name is Stone. Who are you?”

Smee laughed. “I can recognize you behind the false face, Gardner. And Lori hasn’t changed at all, except to get prettier.”

Smee had changed, too. He was not the shattered hulk of a man who had come back from Lurion with them. He looked younger, stronger, more vibrant and tough than ever. Gardner felt the chill in his belly begin to sweep upward to his heart. He had never expected to see anyone from the old life again.

“Aren’t you going to invite me in?” Smee asked.

“What do you want with me?” Gardner asked tightly.

“A friendly visit and a little talk,” Smee said. “For old time’s sake.”

“We’ll talk out here. How did you find me?”

Smee grinned. “Seems that Security picked up an old crock name of Hollis. The name mean anything to you?”

“Go on,” Gardner -said. Lori, by his side, clung to him in terror.

“This Hollis used to be a Security medic, it seems. Gone into private practice. There was a tip that he was doing illegal surgery, and a couple of Agents picked him up. Under hypnosis he revealed a few of his recent clients. He told us he had changed you all around and given you the name of Gregory Stone.”

Gardner’s shoulders slumped. After eleven months, he still had not outrun Security and Karnes.

“What about you?” he asked. “You were a wreck when we left you, Smee.”

“They took me apart and put me back together,” Smee said. “Two months of round-the-clock therapy. It did wonders.”

“I see.”

“And when Karnes finally traced you down and found out you had emigrated to Herschel, he sent me out after you.”

Gardner moistened his lips. “It’s going to-take more than you to bring me back, Smee. And you aren’t even armed. You’re underestimating me.”

Smee folded his thick arms across his chest. “You aren’t under arrest, Gardner. Karnes just wanted to know if you were interested in rejoining the Corps.”

“Huh?”

“It’s a trick, Roy,” Lori murmured.

Smee shook his head. “No trick. You see, Karnes ran a recomputation on Lurion. He sent a dozen observers there to find out about this underground group of yours, and then he ran the new information into the computer. The computer said there wouldn’t be any war if the underground got control. With help, it predicted, Lurion could be swung toward decency within twenty years.”

“You’re joking!” Gardner gasped.

“You think I am? Security is turned upside down about this business. Karnes is sending his best men into Lurion to work with this underground and help them, Gardner. It’s the biggest project going.”

“What’s this matter to me?”

“Just this,” Smee said. “Karnes sends his apologies via me. If it wasn’t for you, he said, Lurion would have been blown up. But you planted the seed of doubt in him, that day when you stormed out of his office. He realized he had to make the recomputation before he did anything else. So he did. And plans were changed. And he sent me out here to ask you if you’ll reconsider, come back to the Corps, and go to

Lurion to head our unit there.”

There was a long moment of silence. At length Gardner said softly, “But I’m pretty well established here. We’ve built this farm practically with our bare hands. We like it here. We were thinking of starting a family, next year. And you come along out of nowhere, asking us to move out of Eden and sign up for another tour of duty in hell.”

“It won’t be hell forever,” Smee said. “Not if we all do our share. But you make up your own minds. I’ll be staying in town two days, till the next ship leaves. I’m going straight to Lurion from here.”

Gardner felt a lump growing in his throat. He looked out over the land, at the sprouting seedlings, at the dark hills in the distance, the trees, the rivers. He sucked a deep breath of air into his lungs.

“I don’t know,” he said slowly. “We’d be giving up a lot.”

“You were once a Security man, Gardner. You took an oath. You had a loyalty.”

Gardner nodded dreamily. He turned, looking at Lori. Her eyes were moist. She was clinging tight to paradise, too. It would be so easy to shrug shoulders, to tell Smee that Earth and Lurion could solve their problems without Roy Gardner. And then live with the shame of knowing that you had failed your world.

Lori managed a smile. Gardner saw the look in her eyes, and he knew what it meant. “Lori…”

She nodded gently. “We can always come back here later, when you’ve done your job.”

“Ali right,” Gardner said. He turned to Smee. “Stay here with us tonight. Tomorrow we’ll fly into town and arrange the sale of the farm. Lori, call the spaceport and book two reservations on that flight to Lurion.”

“You sure this is what you want to do?” Smee asked. “You’ve got a pretty nice place here. Maybe you don’t really want to give it up.”

“It can wait,” Gardner said. “Lurion can’t. I’ve got a job to do there. Only this time the job isn’t murder.”

Content

Silverberg Robert The Planet Killers

The Planet Killers by Robert Silverberg

Cast of Characters

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Chapter VII

Chapter VIII

Chapter IX

Chapter X

Chapter XI

Chapter XII

Chapter XIII

Chapter XIV

Chapter XV

Chapter XVI