Birthright

insignia, its oft-repaired hatches, and its two sloppily efficient tenants. It was no newcomer to space, this ship that had known a dozen owners and ten times that many worlds. If sound could travel through the vacuum, the ship would doubtless have sputtered as it glided around the tiny red world. For decades now, each takeoff had been a death-defying challenge, each landing a death-inviting proposition. The ship's exterior was covered with the grime and soot of more than one hundred worlds, which may well have been what held it together. It was prone to periods of deafening and body-wrenching vibrations, which was one of the few ways its occupants knew it was still functioning.

They sat before a viewing screen, unkempt, unshaven, unshod—and unhappy. One was tall and gaunt, with hollow cheeks and deepset, brooding blue eyes; the other was of medium height, medium weight, and nondescript hair color, and was named Allan Nelson. “Has the damned thing even got a name?” asked Milt Bowman disgustedly as he gazed at the screen. “Not to my knowledge,” grunted Nelson. “Just Zeta Cancri IV.” “We named the last one after you, so we'll christen this one Bowman 29,” said Bowman, jotting it down on his star chart. “Or is it 30?”

Nelson checked his notebook. “Bowman 29,” he said at last. He glanced at the screen and muttered, “Some world.”

“Three billion worlds in the damned galaxy,” said Bowman, “and they decide that they've got to have this one. Sometimes I wonder about those bastards. I really do.” “Sometimes they must wonder about us,” said Nelson grimly. “I didn't see them beating off volunteers for Zeta Cancri IV.”

“You mean Bowman 29.”

“Well, whatever the name, there can't be more than a couple of hundred idiots around who'd open the damned place up.”

He was wrong. There were only two: Bowman and Nelson. The Republic, vast as it was, couldn't spare anyone else, for Man had traveled too far too fast. In the beginning, when Sol's planets were first being explored, Man's footholds were mere scientific outposts. Later, as the planets were made habitable, the outposts became colonies. Even after the Tachyon Drive was developed, the handful of planets Man conquered were simple extensions of Earth. But things soon got out of hand, for planets, with planetary civilizations, were a far cry from outposts and colonies. They were the permanent homes of entire populaces, with environments that had to be battled and tamed, urbanized and mechanized. And, before Man was quite ready for it, there were fourteen hundred such planets. It didn't sound like a lot, but precious few of them were even remotely similar to Earth, and Man needed all eleven billions of his population just to keep things running smoothly. More than a third of the planets—those with alien life forms—were under martial law; this required an

unbelievably huge standing army. Another four hundred planets were used for scientific research and

mining, which required twenty more agricultural worlds to supply them with food and water. Another three hundred and fifty were just being settled, and required massive efforts on the part of their populations to replace jungles, swamps, deserts, mountains, and oceans with human cities. But fourteen hundred worlds represented only the most insignificant portion of the galaxy. Man hungered for more, and so he remained fruitful and multiplied. He sought out still more worlds, explored them, populated them, tamed them.

This was where the Pioneer Corps came in. Unlike the pioneers of old, the dispossessed and downtrodden who sought the freedom that new land would bring them, the Pioneer Corps was composed of experts in the field of terraforming—opening up planets and making them livable. Highly skilled and meticulously trained, the men and women of the Pioneers were civilian adjuncts of the Republic's Navy. Their relationship to the Republic was somewhat akin to government contractors, in that they were not officially under the direct command of the government, but were free agents whose membership in the Corps enabled them to receive lucrative contracts from the Republic. Frequently their jobs consisted of nothing more than adapting alien dwellings to human needs. Sometimes they were required to kill off a hostile alien population, and occasionally they were forced to exterminate nonhostile populations as well. Among their ranks were engineers who, with the aid of the Republic's technology, could turn streams into rivers and lakes into oceans, who could thoroughly defoliate a planet twice the size of Jupiter, who could change the ecology of an arid world and turn it into a planetary oasis.

The Pioneer Corps numbered some 28,000 members, but the Republic, still suffering growing pains and testing its sleeping muscles, dreamed in terms not of hundreds but millions of worlds, and thus the Corps was spread very thin. And as the Republic's needs became more specialized, so did the tasks of the Pioneers.

One such need was for energy. All the worlds of the Republic had long since converted to total atomic technologies, and there could be no turning back. But the supplies of radium, plutonium, uranium, and their isotopes, even on newly discovered worlds, barely met their needs. Solar power conversion plants were erected by the tens of millions, but Man had not yet found an economical method of conserving that power. And, since almost half of the Republic's commerce depended on interstellar travel, new energy sources headed man's list of priorities. Then Zeta Cancri IV was discovered. A tiny but massive world, its very high rotational speed combined with the exotic elemental makeup of its core to form enormous magnetic fields of fantastic energy. Ions injected into these fields were accelerated to speeds manyfold higher than those found in Man's most powerful cyclotrons. The interaction of the planet's electrical and magnetic fields, plus the formation of different ions from the vaporization of the surface elements, created almost ideal conditions for nuclear transformations.

In other words, random sections of Zeta Cancri IV's surface tended to go Bang with absolutely no warning.

The brilliant visual displays Bowman and Nelson saw from their ship were merely the end result of fission reactions on the planet's surface. The lower-atomic-number atoms were built up to higher nonstable molecules by these nuclear transformations—and then all hell broke loose. What were highly specialized laboratory conditions on Earth were simple natural phenomena on Zeta Cancri IV. A continuous series of atomic explosions rippled the surface, exposing even more virgin material to the electrical and magnetic

forces. The explanation may have been simple, but the realities were awesome.

The Republic was inclined to waste men and money with passionate abandon, but it couldn't tolerate a waste of energy such as occurred daily on Zeta Cancri IV, so Bowman and Nelson had been contacted and offered the job of making the planet safe for a select group of 235 “miners,” skilled scientists who would find some way to put all that wasted energy to better use. The men had made a bid, the Republic had not even bothered to haggle, and the job was contracted. The explosions, as it turned out, weren't the only little detail the Republic had failed to mention. The gravity was nothing to write home about either. Only the most powerful of the Republic's mining ships would be able to land on the planet without being crushed to a pulp ... and that was in winter. In summer they would melt before they got within twenty miles of the planet's surface. For along with the explosions and the gravity, the climate was no bargain either. The planet moved in an elliptical orbit that took thirty-three years to complete. In winter it was a third of a billion miles from its huge binary parent, but by summertime it would be within 150 million miles. And atthat distance, nothing the Republic had yet developed could withstand the heat. Thus, even if they were successful in opening the planet up, it could only be “mined” for a few years at a time, and would then have to be abandoned until it had again moved a sufficient distance from Zeta Cancri. And, to top it off, the atmosphere was totally unbreathable. “Except for these little difficulties,” said Bowman, who had been cataloging them aloud, “the job's a cakewalk.”

“Yep.” Nelson grinned. “Can't figure out why the government felt it had to force two million dollars on us. Almost like a paid vacation.”

“Well,” said Bowman, sipping a cup of coffee, “any ideas?” “Most of them relate to the guys who sold us this bill of goods,” said Nelson. He sighed. “At least it's only springtime. We've got a little time to mull the problem over.” “Think anything could be alive down there?” asked Bowman. Nelson shook his head. “I doubt it like all hell. Still, there's no way to be sure without landing. In which case,” he added, “there probably still won't be any life, including us.” “Very comforting,” said Bowman. “I appreciate the Republic's confidence, but I'm beginning to wish that they had bestowed it elsewhere. We can't land on the damned planet, we can't find any friendly natives to do our work, and we can't chart those goddamn explosions.” “The explosions are the tricky part, all right,” agreed Nelson. “If it weren't for them, we might actually get the job done.”

“If it weren't for them, there wouldn't be any job,” grunted Bowman. “I've had the computer working on them for the better part of three hours, and they're absolutely random. You could get two in the same spot an hour apart, or you might go half a