Gold Star

pained surprise on her face drove the pain far back in his mind and left his head reasonably clear. «Turn off the power to the beams, Jaynes,» Fuller said. He had his saffer pointed at Pete's head. It didn't take deductive reasoning to understand. A planet, a planet of gold, was the prize. To men like Fuller and the others, two lives would not stand in the way. He felt a wave of overwhelming sadness. The time aboard the poor old 47 had been the happiest time of his life. Before Rimfire went missing and put dreams of wealth into his head he'd been blissfully content just to look forward to years and years of life on a tug with Jan. And now it was all going to end. No wealth. That didn't matter. No Jan. That's what mattered. Thinking of being dead was not as painful to him as thinking of being deprived of that girl he'd found in a spacer's whorehouse on Tigian. «Show me which switches to push,» Fuller said. Why should he cooperate? They were going to kill him and kill Jan. He felt a wave of dizziness, almost fell from the chair. «Quit faking it, Jaynes. Either you show me how to turn off the beam or your wife gets it now,» Fuller said. «All right,» he said, holding onto the edge of the console with both hands to steady himself. Pete Jaynes had never been a fatalist. It was the pain in his head, the dizziness. He couldn't think. He could only grieve over the loss of the woman he loved. And a slow anger fought with the pain in his head, grew into a devastating force. He saw in his mind a sinister thing buried far underground, down into the planet's bedrock. The killer. The planet destroyer. He was too weak. He hurt too much. There were three of them and there was nothing he could do to save Jan. She was going to be killed and he was going to be killed and that was something he couldn't accept without protest. «Jaynes, you've got five seconds,» Fuller said, in a tone of voice which convinced Pete. «Okay,» he said. He took a deep breath. The step he was about to take was a final, irrevocable step. Once activated, there was no stopping the process which would result in Jan's beautiful planet being reduced to space rubble. The makers had obviously reasoned that if the situation was desperate enough to activate the planet buster there would be no need to make a change in plans. The device was set for a two-hour delay. That was adjustable. Pete decided, first, to shorten the time, then felt that wave of sadness. He left the timer at two hours. He looked at Jan. Silent tears had streaked her cheek. Her lip was starting to swell. His fingers shook as he lifted the cover of the first protected switch. He pushed it with a solid flick, began to go through the sequence he'd read only once in the manual. He had that kind of mind. He was low on deductive reasoning, so he'd compensated for it by developing his memory. He had been so impressed by the mere fact that men had been so desperate that they could coldly provide for the destruction of a planet that the sequence was burned into his brain. It took six steps. He had gone through five of them. Lights were blinking. He took a deep breath, took one last look at Jan, and pushed the final button. There was a sizzling sound from the tall panel. Smoke burst out. There was crackling and popping and then a small explosion which buckled the metal front of the panel. He didn't know if that had been programmed by the builders of the fort, but it had happened. The entire panel which contained the instrumentation for activating the planet buster was dead. Fuller let out a curse as the panel burned and destroyed itself. He would have to change his plans again. He'd intended only to have Jaynes show him how to turn off the guard beams which protected the gold, then turn them back on. Mr. and Mrs. Pete Jaynes would then have joined Buck King in a charred heap. «Is the damned thing off?» Jarvis asked. «Yes,» Pete said, praying that it was not. The ventilation system still worked. Other panels in the war room showed ready lights. Fuller needed time to think, but the gold was blinding him. He could picture it in his mind. He could see it, solid banks of it, stacked over head-high, tons and tons of it. There had to be a safe way of getting rid of the Jayneses, but he could think of that later. Maybe he could simply take them back to the Stranden 47 and make them start walking. The desert would do the job. «Let's go see that gold,» Tom Asher said. He pushed Jan ahead of him out the door. Pete tried to leap to his feet. The sudden movement sent blackness into his skull, and he slumped. «Hold it, Tom,» Fuller said. Asher seized Jan's arm and pulled her to a stop. «Let's just finish him off,» Jarvis said. «Not here, you dumb bastard,» Fuller yelled. «I don't know about you two,» Asher said, «But I'm having a look at that gold.» Fuller rolled his eyes. They had a planet and those idiots were able to think only of a few tons of gold. «Bring Jaynes,» he told Jarvis. Pete felt himself being lifted. His legs were wobbly, but after a few steps he could walk with Smith's support. He made it as far as the main room where the gleaming gold was stored. The lights still functioned, blazing into glare as they entered the area. «Man,» Jarvis said, letting Pete slump weakly to the floor, «I'm gonna buy me a space yacht and hit every high-class whorehouse in the galaxy.» Tom Asher was moving toward the gold. Pete forced his eyes to focus. Smith, too, was mesmerized by the golden gleam. He took two or three running steps and was side by side with Asher when they walked into the beam and the force of the killing voltage flared, causing the muscles of their bodies to spasm in a wild dance of death. Brad Fuller let out a surprised yell. And at that moment Jan shoved him with all her might. He'd leaned forward involuntarily as his two companions began to jerk and crackle, as the stench of burning flesh came, once again, to his nostrils. The shove sent him to his knees, and Jan was running for the dark entrance of a corridor as he turned. Pete used all his reserve strength to throw himself at the bigger man, to put his arm over Fuller's weapon arm. The saffer's charge sparkled against the cement floor. Pete was unconscious again even before Fuller's fist slammed into his chin. Jan had gained the dimness of the corridor and was running knees high, arms pumping. She felt a surge of hope. Pete, bless him, had tricked them, had taken two more of them, leaving only one. She reached the ladder shaft and climbed with all her strength, had put one landing behind her when Smith pounded down the corridor. She could hear the clatter of his boots on the rungs of the metal ladder as she climbed. She'd had no plan when she made her move. She had acted instinctively, taking advantage of the surprise of the death of the two men. Now she had a picture in her mind. The big room where the dust of several men lay amid the rotted ruins of beds. She reached the door. It had been, thank God, left open. She skidded as she turned in and ran to the nearest pile of molded, rotting rubble. What she wanted wasn't there. She heard running footsteps in the corridor outside as she scurried from molding pile to molding pile. Then, at last, she saw what she was looking for. One of those ancient projectile weapons lay amid the fragmented bones of a human hand. She seized it. She knew little about weapons, nothing about antique weapons. She did not know that the pistol was an automatic, that a round was in the chamber, moved there by the automatic action when its owner had, a thousand years past, ended his suffering. Fuller spotted the door, wheeled into it, came to a skidding stop. The woman stood a few feet away by a moldering pile of bed and human bones, pointing one of the old handguns at him. He had to laugh. It was a brief, throaty chuckle. «What the hell good do you think that thing is going to do you?» he asked, moving slowly toward Jan. «We won't know until I pull the trigger, will we?» Jan asked. She was surprised by the calmness in her voice. «It might blow up in your face,» Fuller said, still walking. «We'll see,» Jan said. He was about five paces away. She had the muzzle of the old weapon pointed directly at his face. She pulled. The trigger did not move. Fuller, seeing the movement of her hand, seeing her eyes go wide, laughed again. She pulled harder, and Fuller's laugh was driven from him by the impact of a thousand-year-old slug of metal which struck him high on the bridge of the nose. Jan let the old gun fall to the floor, It struck with a metallic clang. Fuller had been blown backward by the impact of the heavy slug. He fell to lie on his back, his face a study in death, mouth wide in surprise, blood covering his open eyes. Jan screamed. She screamed just twice, then bit on one knuckle, edged past the body, ran to the ladder shaft. Pete heard the shot echo throughout the room. The sound galvanized him into effort. He was on his hands and knees when Jan came running to him to throw herself down and put her arms around him. «Fuller?» Pete croaked. «Dead,» she said. «We've got to get out of here,» he said. He told her, then, what he had done and watched her eyes go wide. «Oh, no.» «They were going to kill us. I couldn't let them live.» «I understand.» He had noted the time of activation. Less than ten minutes had passed. «Can you walk?» Jan asked. «I think so.» He got to his feet and fought the dizziness. A man just didn't get a blow to the head and recover immediately and do heroic things. He walked with his arm across Jan's shoulder for support. The ladder shaft was torture. He dragged himself up rung by rung, Jan below him, encouraging him. She had not had time to think that her beautiful planet was going to be destroyed. She could think only of Pete, and the fact that they were both alive. When at last Pete struggled out into the open air the freshness of it seemed to help. They were still a long way, through the undergrowth, from the Lady Sandy. The way had been marked as Brad Fuller had hacked away jungle growth. But the going was slow. Pete's head ached, but he was able to keep going. The dizziness came and went. They broke through into the flood zone, covered by low, rank growth. The Lady was there, of course. Pete broke into a staggering run, the growth whipping at his legs. Inside, breathing hard, fighting to keep from blacking out again, he checked his watch. «We made it,» he said. There was just under an hour left. He could blink the tug far away to safety in mere seconds. The generator was at full charge, all systems operative. «Pete, isn't there anything we can do?» Jan asked, as he seated himself and began preparations for a quick blink. «Maybe. If there's time.» He'd kept himself on his feet with that hope, that faint, long-shot hope. He'd been thinking of that device down deep in the earth under the old fort. It had been man's last, great achievement in the use of the nuclear fusion. The trigger was a hydrogen bomb. The energy released by the fusion of a light chemical element to form nuclei of heavier elements was relatively minor, exploding so far underground. What happened with that explosion, however, was not minor. The fusion energy triggered an intricate