much the same as in the other fort. There was a desk, but no papers. The dampness of the climate had penetrated, somehow. There were no dead men. There was a coating of some kind of slime on the cement floor which made walking tricky. Pete led the way down a corridor, assuming that the interior design of this installation was much the same as that of the one in the desert. The rungs of the ladders going downward toward the war room were slick, rusted. Things were different down below. There was, instead of the war room, a room which, from rotting remains of beds, from rusting metal equipment, had been a sick bay. They saw the first indication of human remains there. He was not well preserved, not preserved at all. There was only a hint of human bones in a damp, moldy pile of dust, but Pete saw the metal of a door-opening tab amid the dust, and retrieved it. The life in the subtropical fort had been lived underground. There were large rooms with the remains of many beds, food-preparation areas, recreation areas. It was Jan who discovered the closed hatch which opened to reveal another flight of metal ladders leading to a still-lower level. Pete inserted himself in front of Fuller and went down first. Halfway down he felt a hint of fresh air, cool, refreshing. It carried a slight aroma of decay and rot, but it was much better than the muggy, stale air of the upper levels. He emerged from the downshaft into a cooled area. As he stepped forward a blaze of light almost blinded him. The room was huge. The floor was fairly clean. The ceiling was high, and studded with lights. And across that room, lying in the open, between two partitions, was a huge stack of rectangular yellow bricks. «Gawd, look at that,» Tom Asher said, having followed Pete down the ladder. One by one they came down, stepped out of the downshaft, halted, eyes dazzled by enough gold to buy a man anything he ever wanted if he lived to be four hundred years old. Gold. Man's history was tinged yellow by it. From the dawn of time the metal had been coveted, fought over, traded, bought, sold, stolen. Countless men had died for gold which would amount to a tiny fraction of the hoard of roughly pressed bricks gleaming under the lights of that room far below the ground level in a thousand-year-old war fortification. Buck King, breathing hard and fast, started walking swiftly toward the stacks of gold. «Hey, hold it,» Pete yelled. «Don't touch that stuff.» King turned. «I just want to look,» he said. He was fully aware that Pete carried a saffer. He was sure, however, that Jaynes wouldn't use it. Not yet. And he had to touch, to feel, to sample the weight of one of those bricks of gleaming gold. «King,» Pete yelled, «don't—» Pete was moving forward, yelling, even as the arcs of high voltage shot out, lightninglike, from the eyes he'd noticed on the partitions which housed the gold. King bucked and danced, already dead, his body supported in its lifeless state by the force of the voltage which fried him, left a stench of burning flesh in the air as the beams cut off and what was left of Buck King fell wetly to the floor. «I tried to warn him,» Pete said. «Jesus, I tried to warn him.» Tom Asher, his mouth open in surprise, had taken a couple of steps forward. «God, if he'd only listened,» Pete said, his fingers toying with the dent in his skull. Jan went to his side. «You tried, Pete,» she said soothingly. «We'd better find the computer and turn all this stuff off,» Fuller said. «We can at least get him out of there,» Asher said. «If you wanta reach in there, you go right ahead,» Fuller said. «He ain't going nowhere.» Jan stood chewing on one knuckle, her face white. The ventilation system was slowly taking the smell of charred flesh from the air. The war room was on the lower level. The door would not open to the tab Pete had taken from the pile of human dust. Once again the cutting torch sizzled, and then they were inside. This was a much more complex place than the war room in the desert fort. «You're the expert,» Fuller said to Pete. Pete nodded. He prowled, taking a quick glance at three walls of meters, instruments, controls. Dead lights and red trouble lights told him that parts of the system were decayed. «There'll be a bunch of manuals somewhere,» he said. «I don't want to start experimenting in here without knowing what I'm doing.» Jan found a closed shelf. The manuals were old, brittle, yellowed, but readable. «This is going to take a while, if you fellows want to go exploring,» Pete said. «You guys go ahead,» Fuller said. Jarvis and Asher left the room. Pete sat on a steel cabinet and began to read. «This one links all the positions,» he said. «We were right in that.» Jan looked at Brad Fuller's expressionless face. She did not like the way he kept looking at Pete when Pete wasn't watching. There was something about the man which set her teeth on edge. «Don't want him to push the wrong button,» Fuller said, grinning at her. «There's still a lot of nuke warheads outside, and maybe some stored inside.» «No,» she said. «We don't, and he won't.» «All right,» Pete said, after an hour's examination of the various manuals. «Here's one thing I can do right now.» He walked to a control bank, checked and double-checked, then began to flip switches. «This puts the other three forts in a stand-by, or deactivated, stage.» What he didn't say was that there in the manual in the master war room were instructions for destroying all of the facilities. Built into each fort were explosive charges which had a series of fail-safes. They could be set off only from this room. The self-destruct stage in the headquarters fort had a delay which could be programmed up to two hours. That one was the biggie. Down underneath the fort, put there by desperate, determined men a thousand years ago, was the most terrible weapon ever invented by man. They were all walking atop, sitting right on top of, a planet buster which would, upon detonation, turn a beautiful planet into molten stone and metal and asteroid-sized chunks. He spent a few minutes on the section which detailed how to deactivate and dismember the planet buster. That, however, could be done later. There was a possibility, in that climate, that the wiring belowground had long since corroded away, but sooner or later someone, Pete hoped under his own direction, would have to bring that thing up and break it down into harmless components and destroy it piece by piece. Next he found the bank which shut off all of the central fort's weaponry, and the few remaining laser cannon which were operational went dead as their charges slowly seeped away, power cut off. It was amazing to Pete to think that so much of the fort's weaponry was still in an operational mode. He went to work on finding the source of power and control for the guard beams in the gold storeroom. It took half an hour. He was ready to deactivate when a frantic shout came in through the hole burned in the war-room door. It was Jarvis. «Brad, Jaynes, you guys better get out here, and I mean on the double.» Turning off the beam could wait. Pete leaped to his feet. Jan followed him out the hole in the door. As she stuck her head through she saw Tom Asher strike Pete on the skull with a piece of pipe. She heard a sickening thud, realized in an agonized instant that the blow had fallen directly on the weak spot in Pete's head. She started to scream, and was seized by Jarvis Smith. Asher jerked the saffer from Pete's belt as he fell, crouched, the weapon pointed at Brad Fuller. «Fuller,» Asher said, «you've got about fifteen seconds to decide if you're in or out.» «Tom, you know the two of you together aren't smart enough to bring this off,» Brad said. «Now point that weapon some other way before I take it away from you and jam it down your throat.» «He's with us,» Jarvis Smith said. «I told you he would be.» «You jerks jumped the gun,» Fuller said. «You didn't give Jaynes enough time to deactivate the guard beams on the gold.» Asher looked uncertain. He lowered the saffer. Jan pulled away from Smith and fell to her knees beside Pete. He was breathing deeply and evenly. When she lifted an eyelid his eye was rolled back, showing white. She was surprised at her reaction. Pete could be hurt badly, having been struck on that area of his skull where the old injury had left a depression, but she was no longer concerned about whether or not the blow had done permanent damage. She was angry. There was a deep faith in her that Pete would survive the blow, but atop that faith was a seething rage at the men who were responsible. «The way we figure it,» Jarvis said, «they can have an accident, Brad.» «That's the way you figured it, huh?» Fuller said. He'd been thinking of some way to tie the death of the Jaynes couple into the destruction of their ship. It had been hit by laser fire. The problem was that a laser burns a human body in a way that no other heat does. If they tried to fake it and a fleet ship investigated, that would be too risky. The dry desert air where the 47 was wrecked would preserve the bodies well. The guard beams. The high voltage had gotten Buck King. «Okay,» he said, «pick Jaynes up and bring him along, Jarvis. Tom, you bring the woman.» Smith bent over Pete. «He's coming around,» he said. «Okay,» Brad said, changing plans. «Bring him back into the war room.» Pete had caught a flicker of movement as he walked out the door. He had seen the upraised arm, the dark object in the hand. From the time of his accident he'd had a deathly fear of being hit on the head. The depressed spot on his skull wasn't actually weaker than the surrounding areas of bone. The doctors had done a fine job of grafting in bone, but there were times when he had nightmares of feeling things impacting on his skull, and he always carried a vivid memory of the months of totally debilitating headaches. It was that fear of being struck on the head which, in all probability, had saved his life. Just a flicker of movement, an awareness, and he was throwing his feet out from under him to begin to fall flat on his face as the piece of pipe came down and made a thudding impact. The blow was still severe enough to cause him to fall endlessly into blackness. He became aware of movement. His head was as large as the world, and there was pain which cut through the blackness and jerked his eyes open. He groaned. He allowed someone to steer him to a metal chair. He tried to see. Jan's face, taut, pale, swam before his eyes. «Jan?» Jan took his hands in hers, squeezed. «Can you hear me, Pete?» He moaned with the pain of the sound. «Yes,» he said. «Jaynes,» Brad Fuller said, «what we want you to do is turn off the voltage of those guard beams. Do you hear me?» «I hear you,» Pete said, with great effort. «Move him over to the console,» Fuller said. Pete tried to struggle against the hands on his arms, but a part of him was far away, unable to come back. He slumped into the dust of a decayed cushion. In front of his eyes lights glowed on a tall panel. «They're going to kill us, Pete,» Jan said. «Shut her up,» Fuller ordered. Pete heard a meaty, slapping sound. He turned. Smith had struck Jan across the mouth. The sound and the look of
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