Gold Star

situation over carefully. It looked as if there were only six people alive on the planet. Two of them stood in the way of Fuller's being a very wealthy man. He was wondering how he could be sure whether or not Jaynes had communicated with the home worlds via Blinkstat. He wasn't quite ready to ask a direct question. «Jaynes,» Fuller said, «do you think we ought to call in some help? Maybe get a ship of the line out here to take out these fortifications?» «I thought about that,» Pete said. «I could have sent a stat via the altered mode back to NE793, but God only knows when a ship will come out to 793, much less get around to reading the tape.» Buck King looked at his partner with a hidden grin. «I'd like to look this place over,» Jarvis Smith said. «Who wants to come?» «I'll go,» Asher said, nodding toward King. «All right, but make it quick,» Fuller said. The three men went into the tunnel. The door to the fort had stuck in its half-opened position. «I don't know whether I want to get involved in messing around with those other strongpoints or not,» Fuller said. «Whoever built these places, they were pretty warlike people. We saw what they did to your ship with computer-controlled equipment a thousand years old. No telling what we might run into.» Pete wondered if Fuller had intended giving him the information that Fuller knew Pete's recorded claim to the planet had been destroyed. He had noted that as per regulations, only the captain of the Lady Sandy was armed. Pete's own APSAF matched Fuller's weapon. But there were four of them. And the stakes were high. Pete was not a misanthrope, but he wasn't all that blinded by man's innate goodness, either. Men were capable of stealing, of killing if the rewards were worth the risk. However, he couldn't bring himself to believe that a smiling, seemingly capable, old-line tug man would stop at nothing to gain an entire planet. And there was still Rimfire. Pete admitted that his stupidity in making that one last run over the fort had cost him his immediate chance to rescue Rimfire from the limbo in which she hung. In retrospect, that last run was probably the most costly mistake he'd made in his life. Fuller and his men had the only available transportation. If, Pete knew, Fuller were as sharp as he looked, he'd have already made his own claim to the planet on the Lady's permanent tapes. Pete knew that he wasn't in the best of positions. He stood to lose a planet. However, he could rely on the long arm of U.P. justice. No man in his right mind would risk having the fleet looking for him for a crime against space laws. He hoped that Fuller was a wise man. If so, Pete was halfway prepared to offer the other group a deal, up to half the rewards for claiming a planet. Perhaps Fuller would be sensible enough to realize that half of a planet split four ways was preferable to endless court battles and delay. «We have to be sure that the fortifications have no further weapons,» Pete said. «There are thirty people out there on the Rimfire. We have to turn off the master computer, and then go get Rimfire.» Fuller was instantly alert, although his lazy, relaxed, slumped posture did not change. «You know where she is?» «Yes. Within range of the missiles. That's why we had to clear them out.» «You been in communication with them?» Fuller asked. Pete hesitated just a split second too long before saying, «Yes.» «Okay. I guess we go close down the master computer and then go get her,» Fuller said. «Maybe I'd better go inside and take a look here, so I'll have a better idea of what we're up against.» «Pete,» Jan said, when they stood alone outside the old fort, «will you think I'm dumb if I say those men scare me?» He put his arm around her. The desert heat had caused her to perspire. Her tunic was wet. «It's all right, honey,» he said. «Did you see the way he looked when you said you'd been in communication with the Rimfire?» «What do you mean?» «Well, dear, you never were a good liar.» «Better than that,» he said. She shook her head. «He knew.» «Let's go in,» he said. He went to a room he'd seen just off the buried war room, a room of files and bookcases. They encountered King and Asher on the way down, exchanged small talk about the size and age of the place. Then Pete was browsing through the books and files. He found the commanding officer's logbook in the drawer of a desk. He called out highpoints to Jan as he scanned it. The fortifications had been built in the middle days of the war against Zede II. Time of construction, cost, weaponry, personnel, all were duly recorded. Pete, however, was more interested in the later days. He skipped over pages of routine daily reports. «Listen to this,» he said. He read the date first, a day in old Earth's August, just under a thousand years in the past. « 'Fleet away at 0800 this date. Incoming reports state that U.P. Strike Force 88 cleared route junction'—he gives a number here. We'd have to find a chart to know what area he was talking about. He goes on to write that—well, here are his words. 'Cargo consigned to charge of Fleet Admiral Arlen P. Dunking gross weight twenty metric tons aboard two armored cruisers.' « «What cargo?» Jan asked. «He doesn't say,» Pete said, turning pages. «The fleet left, if I remember my history right, just a few days before the climactic battle. Strike Force 88 caught a big enemy fleet in normal space and destroyed it, then went after the Zede planets.» He scanned pages of routine, day-to-day events in the logbook. Then he leaned forward, his heart pounding. «I think I know what the cargo was. Listen. He writes that—'shortage of rations forced a halt to the work. Miners quartered inside the fort pending the arrival of supplies.' This was a mining planet.» «I didn't see any signs,» Jan said. «The centuries would have wiped out a lot of it,» he said, «and they may have had the mines concealed.» «What would they be mining?» «What would you guess?» He grinned. «What was in short supply, so short that they had to use obsolete rockets instead of blink-drive weapons?» «Gold,» she said. «Ruuight.» He read on. «It got rough,» he said. «He writes that men were sick and dying of starvation. Here, he states that he sent several tanks off across the desert, with very little hope of them reaching a food-growing area. All but five of them.» Jan shuddered. «Poor men.» «The writing gets weak, wavery here toward the last. He's desperate. He says that many are already dead. He says that some men are committing suicide rather than suffer the hunger, the slow death.» He was silent. «Then what?» Jan asked. «I am very weak,» Pete said. «There are only five of us left alive. I had to shoot Sergeant John F. Market for the heinous crime of cannibalism. Again, there has been no communication from—» He looked up. «It ends there. The writing is very weak, a scrawl that trails off.» «And the tanks never made it across the desert,» Jan said. «It would be interesting to know how they found this planet,» Pete said. «I can guess. In the heat of combat, with an enemy ship near, ships sometimes took random blinks, risking that rather than a sure death under the enemy's weapons. Maybe a Zede ship was under attack and popped off and ended up here. When they found that the planet had more than the usual amount of gold-yielding ore—» «This is quite a place,» Brad Fuller said, as he entered the room. He looked around. «Find out what and why?» He waved a hand at the books. «It was a Zede II Group warbase,» Pete said. «My guess is that it was sort of a final retreat for some of the Zede brass, in case things went wrong.» «Well, they never made it,» Fuller said. «I guess we've seen enough. Hardware is interesting. Computers surprisingly good for the time. I guess we're ready if you folks are.» Pete had made up a quick lie because he remembered Jan's statement that Fuller and his men frightened her. To know that there was gold on Jan's Planet, enough gold to warrant the construction in wartime of some very expensive bases, changed the situation. A war had been fought for gold, and, in reality, nothing much had changed since man killed man and then destroyed entire planets. Gold, more than any other thing, brought out the worst in men. Chapter Eleven The position of the southern continent was near the southern tropical zone. When the Lady Sandy made a test run over the area, only three of the short-range missiles had to be led off into space. Then they were approaching at an altitude calculated to draw harmless fire from the laser cannon. A few feeble flashes told them that at least five of the cannon were still operational. Visual examination showed that subtropical growth had taken over the fortification, almost hiding it from the air. Many long-range missiles sat in their silos. Vines grew over the launching pads of the short-range weapons, and the climbing, persistent growth had clogged ports of many of the laser cannon. One entire side of the fort was buried under an age-old avalanche of green. After some testing, Fuller brought the Lady Sandy down on the bank of a stream which ran nearby, in an area of low, soft growth in what was, apparently, an often-flooded area. It was about half a mile to the fort. They set out, Fuller assuming the leadership, hacking his way at times through dense growth. It took well over two hours to reach the missile silos. It was, for Jan, an eerie feeling to look down into the pits to see the rounded, rusting nose of a missile and to know that there, within a few feet, was a nuclear weapon. Armored vehicles were covered with green growth which had sprung up through the paving of a parking lot. The tunnel entrance, similar to the entrance to the fort in the desert of the large, eastern continent, had to be cleared. Once Tom Asher was almost bitten by a reptile which had a deadly look. Pete used his saffer on the snake, watched it become motionless. This time there was no dead guard in the guardhouse from whom to take an entry tab. The metal door was closed, rusted. The feel of ruin was everywhere, for the subtropical climate had not been as kind to man's creations as the arid atmosphere of the eastern desert. Asher and King went back to the ship for a cutting torch. While they were gone, Pete scouted the fort, climbing atop it with the aid of the clinging vines which had found root holds in the seemingly impervious cement. He was eager to see what was inside. Around the fort, trees with fruit and nuts abounded. The men in this installation would not have died of starvation. It seemed unlikely that such a variety of fine-looking fruit would all be poisonous to man. Only the very peak of the fort's dome was free of vegetation. From that vantage point he could look off toward the river. Some trees grew taller than the fort, but he could see that the jungly woodland stretched onward and outward beyond vision, rising into a range of low, forested hills to the north. King and Asher were cutting through the door when he came back down. They were through within half an hour, cutting a hole large enough to crawl through. Fuller entered first, followed by Jan and then Pete. The large room beyond the door was