Gold Star

come searching for them out of curiosity if there were no communications gear working. He explained it to Jan. She listened, although she'd arrived at the same conclusion. She nodded when he finished. They came in following the outgoing tracks of the three vehicles which had come to the site of the 47's emergency landing. The tracks led straight toward the leeward side and ended in an area protected by standing walls. Two other armored vehicles sat in the parking area. Pete was ready with the weapons, but the other tanks did not move. Up close, the fortification was impressive. A good grade of some steel alloy had been used for the metallic supports and reinforcements. The dry air of the desert had not damaged the metal. It gleamed as if it were years old, not centuries old. Pete led the way toward the entrance of a tunnel leading away from the parking area. Sand had drifted into the tunnel's mouth, so they had to stoop, but soon the footing was cement. The end of the tunnel was closed by a solid metal door with only one slit breaking its surface. Beside the door was a closed cubicle with glass windows that had been hazed by time. Pete's fingers went to his skull. Jan was interested in the little cubicle. She heaved on the door to the cubicle, and it came open with a groan of protesting hinges. When she looked inside she went still, then she spoke in a voice full of pity. «Pete, look.» The arid desert air had preserved the thousand-year-old corpse well. Flesh had shrunk, pulling blackened, brittle, dried skin tightly over the bones. There were shreds of decaying cloth, a military- type belt at the waist, a crumpled, dried holster for the weapon which was still clasped in the dead man's bony fingers. The shattered skull told a story which had been hidden from human eyes for a thousand years. «That's a projectile weapon,» Pete said. He'd seen them in the Academy museum. A charge of explosive powder expelled a metal pellet from the muzzle. «Why did they do it?» Jan asked in an awed voice. «Why did men kill each other?» Pete bent, held his breath, although there was no hint of odor from the mummified corpse. His interest had been caught by a metal tab, about two by three inches. A shred of rotted cloth clung to a pin fastener on the back of the tab when he pulled it away. He brushed the dusty remnants of cloth away. There were a design and numbers on the card. He went to the metal door and inserted the metal tab into the slit, where it fit perfectly and activated ancient machinery. The door began to slide slowly back into the wall, creaked, grumbled, then stopped after opening just wide enough to allow him to push Jan through and follow. Sunlight streamed down from skylights to show them a large room with various corridors leading away from it. A fine dust arose as they walked. A metal desk was littered with brittle papers. Pete didn't take time to examine it. He choose the largest of the corridors and, Jan's hand in his, walked slowly toward a door at the other end, which opened to them with the use of the metal tab taken from the dead man. The large room beyond the door had been sleeping quarters. There were about fifty beds lined up along either wall in front of standing wall lockers. On a few of the beds lay the skeletons of long-dead men. There was a staleness to the air which made Jan's head begin to hurt. They tried other corridors. One led to the power room. The fort had drawn solar power through panels atop, converting it to electricity. The power plant had been built well. Glowing lights indicated that it was still functional. More exploration revealed more scattered bodies. Some, like the man in the guard shack outside the door, held weapons in their hands. «It's almost as if they killed themselves,» Jan whispered, as they stood in a little officelike room with a desk and file cabinets, looking down on a man with one of the antique pistols in his hand. Some areas of the fort, unlike the stale, sickening sleeping quarters where most of the dead lay, still had sweet, fresh air, indicating that the ventilation system was still working. Men who could construct machinery to function untended for a thousand years, Pete thought, had one hell of a technology. He found what he was looking for after an hour's search. The fire center for the fort's weapons was buried deeply at the center of the installation, entered by a series of metal ladders or an elevator which still worked, jerking into motion as Pete pushed the buttons. He didn't trust the elevator. They climbed down, down, and found a room which was closed by one of the solid metal doors, which opened at the insertion of the tab. Inside, there was fresh air. The room was free of dust, surgically clean. Glowing lights indicated power. Pete began to study the complex panels of instruments and controls. A stack of brittle instruction manuals finally had to be resorted to before, with a grunt of satisfaction, he flipped two switches and there was a low hum and then a click. «The weapons should be turned off,» he said. «Now let's see if the communications system is still working.» He sat down to read. The old, brittle pages sometimes threatened to disintegrate as he turned them. He had found what he wanted when there came a little quiver and the room seemed to move, ever so slightly. He jerked his head up. «What the hell was that?» He still didn't know all he needed to know about the controls there in that war room deep under the ground below the fort, but he had glanced at the manual for operating the outside viewers. He pressed buttons, praying that those long-dead men had not left behind a self-destruct booby trap. A view of the outside desert came onto a screen. He caused the topside cameras to swivel. Just a few yards away from the fortification a huge boulder, a mass of tons, had buried itself into the sand. It had landed with an impact powerful enough to cause that little quiver he and Jan had felt. «Meteorite?» Jan asked. «No. Plain desert stone.» He went back to the books. There was an urgency now. The language was antique, and he thanked God for having exposed himself to a study of the evolving English language while at the Academy. It was slow going. «All four of the fortified sites are linked,» he told Jan. «The central computer is on the southern continent in the other hemisphere. That's all very interesting. All we have to do is get there and turn it off and we disarm the whole series of weapons.» But meanwhile there was a huge desert boulder lying just yards away from the fort, and he was very sure that another would be falling soon. He continued to thumb the stack of manuals in an effort to find the instruction book for the communications system. The second huge boulder dropped by the Lady Sandy struck the armored-vehicle park, demolishing the three vehicles there and sending a shudder through the bedrock underneath the fort. On board the Lady, Brad Fuller cursed. «Just missed,» he said. «But I think I've got it right now.» He took the Lady off to find another rock. It was pretty tricky, trying to figure the exact landing point of an irregularly shaped boulder from sixty thousand feet up, out of the range of cannon. They'd had to waste some time leading off the short-range missiles which the old fort had fired at them. Pete had the voice communicator working. He tuned it to the frequency used between U.P. ships and began sending. «Lady Sandy, this is Pete Jaynes. We're inside the fort that you're dropping rocks on, Lady Sandy. We have turned off the fort's weapons. Come in, Lady Sandy.» «I read you, Jaynes,» Fuller answered. «Lady Sandy.» Pete said, «our ship is disabled. It is safe for you to land near the fort.» Fuller looked at his partner, chewing thoughtfully on his lower lip. Jarvis was thinking, too. «Okay, Jaynes,» Fuller sent. «We'll be right down.» Buck King glowered at Tom Asher. «Too bad the machines didn't get them,» he said. Asher rubbed his chin. «Brad, is it smart to go down and pick them up?» «No way out of it,» Fuller said. «Damned if I know how things kept running so long on this planet, but they did. He's got voice communications. He might have or be able to rig blink capacity. I wanta tell you jokers something. Not many people know it.» He paused. «When I was a kid I spent three years in the mines out around Arcturus. They say we live in a civilized society, and I guess we do. You spend three years on a mining gang, and you begin to doubt it.» «How'd you get a job on a tug with a record?» Asher asked. «I was sixteen,» Fuller said. «I got sent out by a hanging judge on a frontier planet, a no-good ball of sand and rock not fit for settlers. When I finally got an appeal back to New Earth they brought me out of the mines. Judge there said I'd had a raw deal, that minors should be sent to correctional training for nonviolent crimes, not to the mines. The judge said I'd paid my debt and wiped the slate clean.» «What's the point?» King asked. «The point is this, meathead,» Fuller said. «The mines ain't civilized. Our society is too humane to have direct capital punishment, but by God they've got it indirectly. The average life span in the mines is five years. I was young and strong and some of the older guys took pity on me. But I know what it's like. I know what some of you are thinking, that we can just go down and wipe Jaynes and his wife out and we've got a planet. I'm telling you that we've got to be damned sure he hasn't sent a stat back down the range.» King grinned. «But you're open to suggestion if he hasn't, huh?» Fuller looked out a viewport. The planet was green and beautiful outside the desert areas. «Let's just see how it stacks up when we get down there. No one makes a move unless I say so, you got it?» He patted his saffer. «As captain of a U.P. tug, enforcing orders or protecting life, I don't face the mines if I burn a couple of jokers. You understand?» «Let's get on with it,» King said. «Jaynes,» Fuller said into the communicator, «how about picking me out a good landing spot?» Pete and Jan made their way out to the entrance, past the huge boulder which had demolished the three armored vehicles and narrowly missed the entrance to the tunnel. They watched the Lady Sandy lower slowly, getting larger and larger to the eye. She landed in a swirl of dust. A hatch opened and a man in a spacesuit peered out. He saw Pete and Jan without helmets, ducked back inside. A few minutes later they began to come out, one at a time, without the suits. Brad Fuller stuck out his hand. «Nice to see the man behind the voice I've been hearing,» he said, with a smile. They shook hands one by one, Jan extending her hand, too. «What have we got here?» Fuller asked, the formalities over. «A hard site, missile-launching silos, laser guns,» Pete said. «Everything's turned off now. A few very dead people inside.» «No one alive, huh?» Buck King asked. «I'd say they starved,» Pete said. «A few shot themselves. Listen, what we need to do is use your ship to hop around to the other sites and turn off the automatic defenses before one of them discovers one last weapon—» Buck King looked up at the hot, glaring sky nervously. Brad Fuller was thinking the