Planet Run
By Keith Laumer & Gordon R. Dickson)
Chapter One
The sun was warm on his face. Through his closed eyelids, it gleamed a hot orange—like a sunrise fog on a world called Flamme, long ago. And Dulcia, the first Dulcia, came toward him, smiling through the wreaths of mist . . .
Something tickled his cheek; he brushed at it. Damned flowerflies! He’d have to start up the repellor field; didn’t like the damned thing. Made a man’s bones itch, like a couple of hours under high R, de-leading tube linings . . . The glory of his memory dimmed. A grim little note of uneasiness struck discordantly through the dream. There had been something he had been trying to put out of his mind, lately . . .
The tickle came again, and the dream vanished. His eyes flew open and he squinted up at a slim, blond, long-legged young girl in a brief pink sunsuit, leaning over his garden chair with a long, feathery grass stem in her hand.
“Dammit, Dulcie, you’re getting too old to go around like that,” he growled.
“No, I’m not, Grandpa! I’m just getting old enough. You should have seen Senator Bartholomew’s face when I went to the door—”
“Is that fool back again?” Captain Henry closed his eyes. But the feeling of uneasiness was stronger, suddenly. Fat Bartholomew—Senator Bartholomew now—was not quite a fool. Or at least he had not been a fool forty years ago as a young man. Henry, already aging at that time, had almost liked him then—sometimes.
Now of course he had become a “Senator”—and taken up the prissy modern manners of movement and speech that went with the political image. Still . . . the uneasiness moved stronger than ever in Henry.
“Send him on his way, girl,” Henry said. “You know better than to interrupt my nap—”
“He says it’s awfully important, Grandpa.”
“Important to him, not me! I’ve already told him what I think of his politics, his business methods, his brains, and his taste in liquor . . .”
There was a sound of affected throat-clearing. Henry looked around. A tall, broad-bellied man with a now-flaccid face, but with the same angry black eyebrows Henry remembered from forty years ago, had come up behind the girl.
“I thought I’d better make my presence known, Captain,” the Senator said.
“You wouldn’t have heard anything I haven’t told you to your face, Bartholomew,” Henry snapped. “What’s it this time? Not the same old proposition?”
Bartholomew grunted, took the chair Dulcie offered him. For a moment the girl moved between Henry and the sun—and for a second he was back in the dream of her great-grandmother and the lambent mists of Flamme. Then she moved out of the light and he was back in the present of hard reality—and Senator Bartholomew.
Henry looked at the middle-aged man with harsh distaste. Bartholomew was perspiring in a fashionable narrow-shouldered jacket of shiny green material with short sleeves showing elaborate cuffs with large, jeweled links. A three-inch campaign button lettered ELECT THE STATISTICAL AVERAGE was pinned prominently to his breast pocket. His lower lip was thrust out aggressively, frowning at the old man.
“I was hoping you’d reconsidered, Captain Henry. Since you didn’t answer my call—”
“If I’d had anything new to say I’d have managed to dodder to the phone. I’m not bedridden—yet!”
Bartholomew pulled off his maroon beret, fanned at himself with it. “This is a matter of planetary importance, Captain! Corazon is a promising world. Surely you’re not going to allow personal considerations—”
“Like hell I’m not!” Henry growled. “I’ve put in my time on the Frontier Worlds, one hundred and fifteen years of it! I’ve had ten good years of retirement—up until you started pestering me . . .”
“Pestering is hardly the word, Captain Henry! I’m offering you a magnificent opportunity! You’ll have the finest of equipment—”
“I prefer the sunshine—I know, you’ve put a roof over your town to keep the fresh air out, but I like it—”
“All I’m asking is that you take the Rejuve Treatment just once more—at my expense—”
Henry looked across at the plump citizen.
“Your expense, eh? Hah! I’ve had the treatment three times. I’m a hundred and thirty-five years old—and I feel every month of it. You know what a fourth Rejuve would do to me.”
“But I’ve seen your last medical report. You’re in excellent condition, for your age! The treatment wouldn’t make you an adolescent again—but it would restore you to full vigor . . .”
“I’d look young—for a few months. I’d fade like yesterday’s gardenia after the first year, and I’d be senile in three. After that, it wouldn’t matter whether I made the fourth year or not.” He leaned back and closed his eyes. “That’s it, Senator. You’ll have to find another errand boy.”
“You’re not considering this matter in depth, Captain! A new world to be opened for homesteading—the first in sixty years! This errand, as you call it, would require only a few months of your time, after which you’d not only have the satisfaction of having made a valuable contribution to the development of the frontier, but you’d bank a tidy fortune as well!”
Henry opened one eye. “Why not send that Statistical Average candidate of yours? If he’s good enough to be a Planetary Delegate to the council, he ought to be able to handle a little assignment like this.”
“You’re speaking frivolously of grave matters. Our candidate, as representative of the median of Aldoradon society, is an eminently suitable choice, embodying the highest concepts of democratic government.”
“You can skip the campaign speech. I don’t vote the Average Man ticket . . .”
Bartholomew’s veined nose darkened. He drew in a breath through flared nostrils. “As to the venture we’re discussing,” he said harshly, “your . . . ah . . . specialized knowledge will outweigh other considerations.” Bartholomew’s shifting gaze fixed meaningfully on Henry.
Henry looked at him through narrowed eyes; for a second he caught sight of his own face reflected in a polished metal chair-back. It was like a battered carving in ancient oak. “Just what specialized knowledge do you have in mind?”
Bartholomew twisted his mouth in a smile-like grimace, spread his hands. “Why, Captain, you’re an old-timer, you know the space lanes, the curious mores of distant worlds. You could face up to the ruffians one would encounter out on Corazon, brazen it out, and take what you wanted. And I think you’d know what to go after,” he added, eyeing the toe of his sandal.
“You do, eh?” Henry studied the other’s face. “I’ve got twenty good years left to sniff the flowers; what would make me leave that to get my neck broken in a Run?”
“Are you interested in aluminum oxide, Captain?” Bartholomew asked casually.
The uneasiness was suddenly back—but not just uneasiness any longer. It was like an ice-cold cramp in his stomach.
“—In the form known as corundum,” Bartholomew was adding.
“Just what’re you getting at, Senator?” Henry said harshly.
It was Bartholomew’s turn to sit silent. His glance went to the girl sunning herself by the poolside a few yards distant. Henry grunted softly.
“It’s time for my lunch, Dulcie,” he called. She looked up, glanced at Bartholomew’s face, then rose and went off across the lawn.
“All right,” said Henry, without inflection.
Bartholomew hitched his chair forward, got out a dope stick, and—as an afterthought—offered one to Henry. Henry waved it grimly aside.
“Ever since its discovery over a century ago, Corazon’s been a closed world, Captain.” The visitor puffed perfumed smoke past Henry. “Under close quarantine. But you were there once . . .”
“Sure. On a free-lance prospecting trip—before the Quarantine Service ever heard of the world. What about it?”
“Why . . .” Bartholomew’s eyes fixed on the glowing tip of his dope stick, “just that your trip may or may not have been legal. You spent several months on the planet.”
“So?”
“And you found something.”
“You asking me or telling me?”
“Telling you, Captain,” Bartholomew said flatly. “And I’ll tell you something more. Corundum takes many forms. It makes an excellent commercial abrasive; it also appears in more attractive guises—known as ruby—emerald—sapphire, oriental topaz, amethyst, and others.” Bartholomew’s voice was a purr now. “There’s an excellent market for natural gemstones, Captain; stones like the ones I saw your great-granddaughter wearing last month when my boy Larry took her to the graduation ball . . .”
He paused. Henry looked back at him expressionlessly, waiting. Bartholomew’s voice held a rasping note now. “I know a great deal about your career, Captain—everything, in fact. I’ve made it my business to find out, these last few weeks.” He puffed out smoke, enjoying the moment. Henry watched him, waiting.
“You’ve always lived modestly here—” Bartholomew waved a hand at the garden, the pool, the old fashioned glass-walled house—”But you were a wealthy man once. And ‘once’ is the word.”
“Is it?” asked Henry, completely without inflection.
“That’s right,” said Bartholomew briskly. “You lived off your principal instead of your interest, Captain. Any businessman can tell you what a mistake that is. Now what you’ve got left is this property, barely enough income for an old man sitting in the sun, and the credit backed by the assessed valuation of those gemstones you were incautious enough to let the girl wear. I know to the penny what that assessed valuation is.”
“What’s this got to do with the price of wamba-pears?” growled Henry.
“Just—that those gemstones represent your great-granddaughter’s inheritance,” said Bartholomew.
“What’s it to you? I won them free and clear.”
“Did you?” said Bartholomew. “I agree you don’t owe a cent—if you did I’d know about it. But own them—” His eyes narrowed in their folds of fat. “I happen to know you went back to Corazon at least twice—after the planet was placed under quarantine.”
Henry did not move. He smiled a wintry smile.
“That was quite a while ago—if I did. Over a hundred years.”
“There’s no statute of limitations where possession of contraband is concerned. Your later Navy service won’t affect it, either. And that last visit’s essentially a matter of record. A hundred and four years ago, wasn’t it, to be precise? And you got back just one week too late to be here when your wife died—”
Henry sat suddenly forward in his chair. His eyes locked with the Senator’s.
“Never mind my wife, Bartholomew,” he growled.
“What’s the matter, Captain?” Bartholomew spread his white, slablike hands. “You couldn’t have known she needed you. Or could you? Of course it was a pity, your getting back with the gemstones that would have paid for the operation that might have saved her—just one week too late. But there’s no need to let your conscience bother you . . . though I suppose it’s hard, having a great-granddaughter around who’s the image of the wife you let die—”
Henry moved. It was a small move—simply a little shifting forward of his weight onto the left elbow and the right fist as they rested on the arms of his chair. But Bartholomew shut up suddenly. His sagging face had tightened.
“Easy, Captain . . .” he muttered.
“Never mind my wife,” repeated Henry, tonelessly.
“Of course . . .” Bartholomew wet his lips. Henry sat slowly back in his chair. Bartholomew breathed deeply once more and his voice strengthened.
“It doesn’t matter, anyway,” he said, “—about your—about anything that happened after you came back. It’s Corazon, and your illegal trip there I’m talking about. You’re still a hero, Captain, still the first and greatest of the old star-frontiersmen. The Quarantine Service wouldn’t do anything to you, personally. But those gemstones would be confiscated, if someone whispered in their ears to run lattice comparison tests between them and other, sample minerals from Corazon itself.”
He stopped speaking, flicked his eyes at Henry. Henry stared back; his upper lip twisted.
“And you’d do the whispering, is that it?” Henry said. The other man did not answer, letting silence speak for him. “I don’t get it. You could hire an army of hard cases, if you wanted to back somebody in the Run on Corazon next month.”
Bartholomew nodded, shortly.
“In spite of the fact that every slum in the Eastern arm has its quota of gun handlers, you want me—a worn-out old space-hulk—because you think I know something!”
“I know damned well you know something!” said Bartholomew suddenly and viciously. “My God, man, there’s a fortune to be made! I’ll supply everything you need. With my financing your entry, you’d be able to stake your claim successfully—and you’d legally own those deposits of stones you found more than a hundred years ago!”
Henry laughed suddenly, a mirthless, barking laugh that made the other stare at him.
“I see,” Henry said. “What kind of split did you have in mind?”
“In view of the risk—and the heavy initial expense—”
“How much?”
“ . . . And under the circumstances of my knowledge of your past—90 percent for me, and a full 10 percent for yourself.” Bartholomew smiled ingratiatingly, puffed at his dope stick.
Henry gripped the arms of his chair with gnarled hands, shoved himself to his feet.
“Get out!” he said.
Bartholomew’s heavy jowls paled. He dropped the dope stick, scrambled hastily to his feet.
“You don’t talk to me that way—” he began.
Henry took a step forward. His throat felt as if it was on fire, and there was a gathering haze, a blurring before his eyes. The pulse of his blood pounded like a tom-tom in his skull.
Bartholomew stumbled backward. Two . . . three steps, but then he stopped. The soft fat of his face hardened. He had been a tall man in his younger years—although even then he had lacked half a head of Henry’s massive height and a full third of Henry’s fighting weight.
“You’d kill me if you thought you needed to, wouldn’t you, Captain?” he said thinly, his eyes narrowing in their cushions of fat. Close to him, Henry checked himself, fought down the rage that burned in him.
“Don’t try me on that, Bartholomew,” he said hoarsely.
“Oh, I believe you.” The Senator laughed harshly. “But since there’s just the two of us here, let me tell you something. I’m capable of killing, too, if it comes to that. —I’ll go!” he added hastily, as Henry took another step forward. “But think it over,” he went on, talking rapidly as he backed away. “I still know what I know about you, the gemstones, and Corazon; and the time for you to enter the Run is getting shorter every day. Think about that great-granddaughter of yours—and what it would be like for her to be just another penniless young girl, with no hope of what she’s grown up to expect—except possibly a wealthy marriage—”
“Like your young whelp Larry, I suppose!” roared Henry, rolling forward.
Bartholomew turned and fled. For a few steps Henry pursued him; then he stopped, and breathing hard, let the other man go. He turned and stumped back toward the pool, stared down through the clear water at the multicolored grotto of the mineral spring that fed it.
“Gemstones,” he muttered; and then—”Dulcie!”
. . . And not even he could have said for sure if it was the girl who had left them a few moments earlier, or his long-dead love, of whom he thought as he spoke.
* * *
“You should have seen the Senator, Uncle Amos!” Dulcia said. She poured coffee into Henry’s cup, passed the decanter of brandy to the small, turkey-necked man who drained his glass, exhaled noisily, refilled it.
“Huh! Wish I’d been there!” He winked at the girl, tugged at one end of a stained white moustache. “The Senator’s used to getting what he goes after. Guess it’s the first time anybody’s ever turned him down flat.”
Captain Henry grunted, took an old-fashioned cigar from the heavy silver box on the table. The girl held a lighter to it. The odor of tobacco mingled with the scent of wood smoke from the fireplace.
“The man’s a damned fool,” he muttered uneasily. “Rubs me the wrong way; chatters like a haki bird in molting season—and says all the wrong things.”
She filled her cup and sat down. “Why does Mr. Bartholomew want you to go to Corazon, Grandpa?”
The small man cackled. “ ‘Cause he knows damn well he’s the only man on Aldorado that can walk into that Corazon free-for-all and come out with the back of his head still on—to say nothing about grabbing off a nice chunk of real estate.”
Henry blew out a cloud of smoke, leaned back in his chair, his long legs propped on a footstool carved from the wood of the Yanda tree and upholstered with the knobbed gray hide of a dire-beast. It was a relaxed pose, but the tension shouted in the narrowing of his eyes, the set of his shoulders.
“The frontier’s finished,” he said. “Corazon’s its last dying gasp. It’s a hard world—rock and ice and tundra. No fit place for a man to live.”
“But like you said, it’s the last chance for a man with a yen for a gamble.”
“Sure—if it had been halfway habitable, it’d have been settled a long time ago—”
“I don’t know—I’ve heard the Quarantine Service run into some funny stuff out there—that’s why they set on it for a hundred years.” The small man’s dark, birdlike eyes were suddenly diamond sharp on Henry.
Henry met their stare, his own eyes as flat as a command.
“I remember,” he said, “when there were fresh green worlds for the asking right here in the Sector. That’s what’s wrong with people today—all this Statistical Average horsefeathers. A man’s got no new frontier to go out and fight for.”
“Unless,” said Amos, softly, “you want to count Corazon.”
“There’ll be plenty that’ll be after it—but not any Average Man party Nancies . . .”
“There it is—a world for the taking.” The small man put a log on the fire, resumed his seat, dusting his hands. “With the new Terraforming techniques, they’ll transform her. Thirty million square miles of real estate: farms, mines, ports; land that’ll have cities growing on it in a few years; open tundras where a man could run a million head of snow cattle; mountains and waterfalls, and rivers, and sea beaches—free to anybody that can grab and hold onto it. For a stake like that, every gambler, pirate, soldier of fortune, and con man in forty parsecs would sell his hope of a ringside seat in hell . . .”
“And Mr. Bartholomew wants Grandpa to go there?”
“Sure. I remember the first Run we was on together—out on Adobe, that was.” Amos turned to the girl. “We staked our claim to our legal hundred square miles—a burned-out slab of desert tilted up on one side to where a Bolo couldn’t climb it. I went into a nine-day crap game with it at Square-deal Mac’s place on Petreac, and ran it up to half a continent . . .” he cackled softly. “Before I lost it all on a deck cut with Mac.”
Dulcia’s eyes shone. “That sounds like you. Was Grandpa ever on another Run?”
Amos nodded his bald, freckled head. “Yep—last one was right here on Aldorado. He was a little shrewder by then; grabbed off a nice piece of land backed up to a mountain range, with forests and minerals—and facing the sea, with a natural harbor that could handle any surface liner ever built.”
“Why, Amos—that sounds like right here—Tivoli Harbor, and the Mall . . .”
He nodded. “That’s right, girl.”
She turned to her great-grandfather. “But—then you must have owned the whole town . . .”
Amos shook his head. “Nope. He was just a young fella then. It was just before his second Rejuve. There were a lot of homesteaders who lost out—left on the beach, with no money, no land, kids crying for home—all that kind of thing. He didn’t want the land; to Henry, it was a game. He gave it to ‘em. All he asked for was this little piece—and a house and a garden—whenever he got ready for it.”
“You mean all those people—Senator Bartholomew, all of them—owe their whole old Mall, and everything, to you, Grandpa? And then they—” she broke off.
“It was mostly their great-grandpas, girl,” Henry said. “These people don’t owe me anything. I got what I wanted.”
“And they’re all working so hard to elect their stupid old Statistical Average as Delegate! Why don’t they send you, Grandpa? You’ve done more for them than anybody!”
“Now, why would I want to be Delegate, Dulcie-girl? I just want to sit in the sun and rest my old bones . . .”
“You know,” Dulcia said. Her eyes went to him and fell.
He glanced sideways at her. Her eyes were large and dark; how much she resembled her great-grandmother, now, sitting there in the firelight . . .
“You’re thinking about the Aeterna treatment,” he said. “Forget it—”
“Why should I forget it! You could be young again—and stay young for years and years—nobody knows how lon...
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