The Planet Killers: Three Novels of the Spaceways (Planet Stories (Paizo Publishing) Book 32)

by Silverberg, Robert

  The address was something Gardner never had forgotten. The store was where he remembered it to be: the windows were just as dingy, the neons just as noisy, the sidewalk in front just as filthy. Only the old man had changed. He was now even older.

  Gardner let himself in and stood by the door. The old man peered at him out of eyes dulled and yellowed by years.

  “Yes? Repair your shoes?”

  Gardner grinned. “You mean you don’t remember me, Hollis?”

  “My name isn’t Hollis! Why do you call me …?” He paused. “Gardner?”

  “The same.”

  The old man showed brittle stumps of teeth in a broad grin. “You young devil! What brings you around here?” The grin faded immediately. “You aren’t going to turn me in, are you? Not after all these years?”

  Gardner shook his head. “Far from it, Hollis. I need a new face and I need a new passport, all in a hurry; overnight, if you can manage it.”

  “Are you serious? Have you gotten in trouble?”

  “Big trouble,” Gardner confirmed. “I had a quarrel with Karnes over procedures, and resigned my commission. He didn’t move fast enough to grab me while I was in his office, but he’s got the word out now. I’m to be picked up and detained. I know too much.”

  The oldster hobbled out from behind his bench and peered up at Gardner. “Come in back,” he said. “I’ll lock up the store. You go straight through, turn right, open the door.”

  Gardner did as he was told and found himself in a tiny but well-equipped little office, hidden away in the rear of the shop. He smiled. Security could be troublesome, but a good Security Agent could always use some of his own knowledge to evade capture.

  Hollis had been a Security Agent once, and a good one. He had been a plastic surgeon, specializing in disguising Agents for special missions. But he, too, had quarreled with Karnes over procedures, and had resigned from the Corps. Gardner had never known the exact circumstances of the quarrel, though Hollis had let it be known that it was a matter of ethics. Karnes had sent out an order for Hollis’ pickup, but Hollis had slipped through the net, changed his appearance, and set up shop in a dismal part of the city, cobbling for a living but practicing plastic surgery for the benefit of the underworld.

  Gardner had stumbled over the old man’s refuge three years before. It was his duty to report Hollis to Karnes but the old man had pleaded desperately and had finally swayed Gardner into forgetting to turn him in.

  Now it was time to let Hollis repay that favor.

  “They’ve got my passport number on the list,” Gardner said. “It’s a top-priority search. I’ve got to get off Earth fast, or I’ll never get another chance.”

  Hollis grinned. “You needn’t worry. I’ll have you fixed so well they’ll never spot you. Overnight, you say?”

  “It’s best that way.”

  “Too bad. If I had a week, I could fix you so they’d never have a chance. Alter your bone structure, change your whole physique. But I suppose I can do enough tonight to get you through. How do you want to look?”

  “The same, only different—get what I mean? I’m not handsome now. I don’t want you to give me a handsome face, but don’t disfigure me either.”

  “I could turn you into a godling, you know. No woman would resist you.”

  “I’ve got a woman already,” Gardner said. “She likes me pretty much the way I am. See if you can make the alterations without changing the basic character of the face.”

  “Hmm. See what I can do.”

  Hollis took out a pad and stylus and began to sketch out a face, keeping the sheet away from Gardner’s angle of vision. Gardner fidgeted. Fifteen minutes later, Hollis grunted his satisfaction.

  “There. Take a look.”

  The face that looked up at the paper bore no resemblance to his own. The nose was flatter, rounder; the lips were wider and fuller. The chin protruded a little in a rugged, not unattractive way.

  “It looks all right,” Gardner said.

  “I’ll alter the color of your hair, of course, and of your eyes. And you’d better grow a mustache, too. How about identifying scars?”

  “I’ve got a slash on my forearm.”

  “I’ll cover it with synthoflesh,” Hollis said. “Nobody will tell the difference. The synthoflesh will wither away in about a year. It’ll be gradual. Your lips and chin will return pretty much to what they are now. But the angle of your ears is going to stay different, and the shape of your nose. Unless you find someone who can put you back the way you were.”

  “I doubt that I will.”

  “All right, then. Lie down on the table. Get your shirt off while I’m preparing the anesthetic.”

  Gardner waited, tensely, while the old man bustled busily about, getting things ready. He wondered if it would be painful; he wondered if he would ever get used to a different face looking back at him from mirrors. Then the anesthetic cone descended over his face, and he ceased to wonder.

  His next sensation was the sound of Hollis’ voice saying warningly, “Don’t move.”

  Gardner opened his eyes. His face ached, his head throbbed.

  “Don’t try to talk, either,” Hollis said. “I finished an hour ago, but you’ve got to let things set. Here, take a peek.”

  Hollis held a mirror in front of his face. Gardner stared into the glass and saw blue eyes staring back. His eyes had been brown. Brown hair now was orange-red. His nose was different, his chin jutted, his mouth was broader. It was a stranger’s face. Yet, somehow, he knew it was his own.

  “It’s ten o’clock in the morning,” Hollis told him. “I’ve been working on you all night, snipping muscles, beaming you with quickheal, rearranging, grafting synthoflesh. Look at your arm.”

  Gardner picked up his arm. The long white scar along the inside of his forearm, a relic of an old sporting accident, was gone. Hollis had matched the old skin perfectly. Even the hair growing on his arm matched. It was all an even red now.

  “I’ve treated your follicles so that your head and body hair will grow in red for about a year,” Hollis said. “After that, it’ll gradually return to its old color. You’ll have to figure out some explanation for your neighbors, but you’ve got time to worry about that.” Hollis reached behind him and picked up a sheaf of documents. “By the way here are your papers. Your name is Gregory Stone, now. I faked a complete background for you. Make sure you study it till you’re letter-perfect. I guess it’s safe for you to talk, now. The incisions ought to be healed by this time.”

  As cautiously as though made of sand, he rose to a sitting position and looked down at himself. “You’ve made me a lot heavier,” he said.

  “There’s twenty pounds of synthoflesh around your middle,” Hollis said. “You’ll absorb it rapidly enough. But just for now it makes quite a difference in your physique.”

  “You’re a magician, Hollis!”

  “Just a craftsman,” Hollis murmured. “I didn’t do anything to you that any other plastic surgeon couldn’t have done. I simply did it quicker and better, that’s all.”

  “When will I be fully healed?”

  “Go easy for a day or so. Don’t shave and don’t get into any horseplay. After that, you’ll be fine. And the only way they can identify you is by your retinal index. I can’t change that. But nobody’s going to check your index unless you provoke them to. There’s no reason for anyone to suspect you of being Roy Gardner.”

  “Unless Karnes decides to take eyeprints of everybody leaving Earth for the next couple of months.”

  Hollis shrugged. “If he does that, you’ll be caught. But it would cost him practically his entire budget to do it. Are you worth it?”

  “I might be,” Gardner said grimly. “But there’s no use worrying about it now. You can’t get into my eyes to change things. How much do I owe you?”

  “Seventy credits.”

  “Don’t be silly. This job is worth at least a thousand, Hollis!”

  The old man smiled. “Seventy
credits represents my operating expenses. The rest of the fee would be recompense for skills. In your case, Gardner, the labor is on the house. You’ll need your money, wherever it is you’re going. I haven’t forgotten that I was indebted to you when you walked in last night. Go, now. And remember—your name is now Gregory Stone.”

  By noon, Gregory Stone was on line at the branch office of the Bureau of Emigration. He had spent some time locked in a public washroom, studying the papers Hollis had forged while he slept. Gregory Stone was a year older than Roy Gardner, had been born not in Massachusetts but in Maine, and he had worked on a public-owned farm all his life. Hollis had supplied a convincing-looking employment certificate.

  All of Roy Gardner’s funds had been deposited in a new account, opened by Gregory Stone and made transferable to the Central Bank of Herschel. Roy Gardner no longer existed. The heavy-set redhaired man who had filled out the application was Gregory Stone.

  Gregory Stone slid the papers across to the clerk, a different clerk in a different branch from the one where Gardner had tried to apply the day before. The clerk, smiling as fixedly as the other one had, went through the routine motions in a flurry of hands and elbows. The applicant underwent an uneasy moment as the clerk checked the passport number against a list by his side, but there were no difficulties. A clatter of rubber stamps finally validated the departure permit.

  “We wish you success in your ventures, Mr. Stone. Your papers are in order.”

  “Thanks,” Gardner-Stone said mechanically.

  He wandered away, into the section where flight arrangements were made. The next voyage to Herschel, he learned, would depart in five days. It was a four-stop affair, with Herschel the end of the line. Travel time, six weeks one way. He filled out the form, requesting a single one-way passage, and waited while the robot brains checked to see if there still was room aboard. There was. He was assigned a compartment.

  “You have three days to make final payment, Mr. Stone,” the clerk informed him.

  “I’ll make it right now,” he said.

  He wrote out a check drawn against Gregory Stone’s new bank account, countermarked it with Gregory Stone’s new thumbprint, and handed it across. The check was validated. Five minutes later, Gardner walked out of the building with a set of cleared papers and a paid-in-full ticket to Herschel in his pocket.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The Seedlings were coming up. It was a wonderful feeling to stand there, with the full golden light of the sun splashing down, looking at the little greenish-yellow sprouts pushing their heads up. Gardner and Lori had only cultivated enough acreage to support themselves this first year. Later, when there were five or six grown children to help out, they would cultivate all five hundred acres of his land, and perhaps buy more. There was plenty of room. Their nearest neighbor, here on Herschel, was twelve miles to the east.

  “Smell the air,” Lori said. “Clean, fresh.”

  “Like wine.”

  “Yes. Like wine.”

  Gardner smiled. They had been on Herschel ten months, but it seemed like only a few weeks. He thought back to those hectic last few days on Earth when he was holed up in that hotel, never going out for fear of Karnes, wondering where Lori was, waiting for those five endless days to come to their end.

  They had, finally. And, as Gregory Stone, he had boarded the spaceship without incident. They had given him a bunk in the bachelor quarters, but on the third day out he had caught the eye of a handsome young single woman. He flirted with her for nearly half an hour before he identified himself. Lori was red with shame.

  That would be a memory to cherish forever, Gardner thought: Lori blushing beet-red from forehead to ankles at the way he had trapped her.

  They had formed a solid couple, and there had been a shipboard marriage, and Mr. and Mrs. Gregory Stone had moved into the married peoples’ quarters as soon as a cabin became vacant after the ship’s first stop. And then there had been the day when Herschel hung in the viewplates, all green and gold and blue and brown.

  It was a good life, Gardner thought, full of fresh air, hard work, and love. Earth seemed like a bad dream, the interlude on Lurion a worse one. Gardner subscribed to the telex service and scanned every word every day, waiting for the day when he would read of the dreadful disaster that had befallen Lurion of the Betelgeuse system. But the news never came. Had he missed it, Gardner wondered? Or was Karnes still having trouble getting his team of five in position?

  It wasn’t easy. There had to be five, and they had to synchronize the activation of their generators. And if one of them had an attack of conscience at the critical moment, they would all have to begin again.

  Gardner tried to forget about Lurion and what Earth planned to do to it. Earth and Lurion were both very far away, invisible, both of them, in the nightly glory of Herschel’s sky. The only reality that mattered was right here.

  Gardner stood with his arm around Lori, looking out over their land. It was midmorning, the sun still not yet at its zenith. The excitement of spring crackled in the air.

  A helicopter droned overhead, suddenly.

  “Looks like we’re getting company,” Gardner said.

  Lori frowned. “I wonder who. We saw the Tompkinses last week, and we’re supposed to go over the hill to the Vreelands on Fourday. So …”

  “Maybe it’s a traveling salesman,” Gardner suggested.

  The helicopter hovered over an uncultivated clearing and began to descend. It bore, Gardner saw, the Herschel City crest, which meant that it was an official car being used to ferry some visitor out to the Gardner farm. It landed, and a short, stocky, balding man clambered out; then the copter took off again. Within a moment it was only a dot against the cloudless steel-blue sky.

  The man began to walk toward the Gardner house. Gardner stiffened. “Good God,” he muttered hoarsely. “It’s Smee! Get the rifle, Lori!”

  But before she had a chance to move, the newcomer waved cheerily and called out, “Hello, Lori! Hello, Gardner!”

  “My name is Stone. Who are you?”

  Smee laughed. “I can recognize you behind the false face, Gardner. And Lori hasn’t changed at all, except to get prettier.”

  Smee had changed, too. He was not the shattered hulk of a man who had come back from Lurion with them. He looked younger, stronger, more vibrant and tougher than ever. Gardner felt the chill in his belly begin to sweep upward to his heart. He had never expected to see anyone from the old life again.

  “Aren’t you going to invite me in?” Smee asked.

  “What do you want with me?” Gardner asked tightly.

  “A friendly visit and a little talk,” Smee said. “For old time’s sake.”

  “We’ll talk out here. How did you find me?”

  Smee grinned. “Seems that Security picked up an old crock name of Hollis. The name mean anything to you?”

  “Go on,” Gardner said. Lori, by his side, clung to him in terror.

  “This Hollis used to be a Security medic, it seems. Gone into private practice. There was a tip that he was doing illegal surgery, and a couple of Agents picked him up. Under hypnosis he revealed a few of his recent clients. He told us he had changed you all around and given you the name of Gregory Stone.”

  Gardner’s shoulders slumped. After eleven months, he still had not outrun Security and Karnes.

  “What about you?” he asked. “You were a wreck when we left you, Smee.”

  “They took me apart and put me back together,” Smee said. “Two months of round-the-clock therapy. It did wonders.”

  “I see.”

  “And when Karnes finally traced you down and found out you had emigrated to Herschel, he sent me out after you.”

  Gardner moistened his lips. “It’s going to take more than you to bring me back, Smee. And you aren’t even armed. You’re underestimating me.”

  Smee folded his thick arms across his chest. “You aren’t under arrest, Gardner. Karnes just wanted to know if you were interested
in rejoining the Corps.”

  “Huh?”

  “It’s a trick, Roy,” Lori murmured.

  Smee shook his head. “No trick. You see, Karnes ran a recomputation on Lurion. He sent a dozen observers there to find out about this underground group of yours, and then he ran the new information into the computer. The computer said there wouldn’t be any war if the underground got control. With help, it predicted, Lurion could be swung toward decency within twenty years.”

  “You’re joking!” Gardner gasped.

  “You think I am? Security is turned upside down about this business. Karnes is sending his best men into Lurion to work with this underground and help them, Gardner. It’s the biggest project going.”

  “What’s this matter to me?”

  “Just this,” Smee said. “Karnes sends his apologies via me. If it wasn’t for you, he said, Lurion would have been blown up. But you planted the seed of doubt in him, that day when you stormed out of his office. He realized he had to make the recomputation before he did anything else. So he did. And plans were changed. And he sent me out here to ask you if you’ll reconsider, come back to the Corps, and go to Lurion to head our unit there.”

  There was a long moment of silence. At length Gardner said softly, “But I’m pretty well established here. We’ve built, this farm practically with our bare hands. We like it here. We were thinking of starting a family, next year. And you come along out of nowhere, asking us to move out of Eden and sign up for another tour of duty in hell.”

  “It won’t be hell forever,” Smee said. “Not if we all do our share. But you make up your own minds. I’ll be staying in town two days, till the next ship leaves. I’m going straight to Lurion from here.”

  Gardner felt a lump growing in his throat. He looked out over the land, at the sprouting seedlings, at the dark hills in the distance, the trees, the rivers. He sucked a deep breath of air into his lungs.

  “I don’t know,” he said slowly. “We’d be giving up a lot.”

  “You were once a Security man, Gardner. You took an oath. You had a loyalty.”