“Oh, yes,” Robert said without enthusiasm. “Him.”
Hank looked up. “You know about Jonathan Tarbox?”
“I know about him, all right. I’ve had to keep somebody on him for months, and now with things really tight I’ve been trying to keep tabs on him myself, and of course he spotted me.
So now I don’t know what to do. I keep hoping he’ll break a leg or something.”
“Don’t count on it,” Hank said sourly. “Those people never oblige. And Tarbox has an unassailable claim on us now, all tied up in pink ribbons. A shipment of steel pipe left Earth two days ago, four hundred miles of it, in two-yard sections. The shipment was legal, transport rentals paid, everything tidy. It just never arrived in Ironstone, and I haven’t told him yet that his pipe is a frozen puddle of iron out in the desert right now. I haven’t had the guts.”
“Don’t tell him,” Robert said. “Just get a test crew out there to analyze the contents of that puddle before you worry yourself to death.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean Tarbox is a thief,” Robert said flatly. “With full blessings of Interplanetary Oil.
That pipe was packed with more concealed hardware and junk than you could shake a stick at: machine tools, disassembled drilling equipment, nuts, bolts, extra underwear, everything else. To say nothing of five thousand pounds of candy bars.”
“Ouch,” Hank Merry said.
“Yes. So you know about candy bars on Mars.”
Hank nodded. The Hoffman Center doctors had never pinned it down precisely…something about the amount of cosmic radiation, or the Martian atmosphere components used to dilute the bottled oxygen used under the dome, or magic, or spooks, or something…but these were subtle changes in human metabolism here which involved the body’s utilization of glucose, so that the more sugar you ate on Mars, the more you wanted, craved, had to have, would do anything to get. Candy and sweets had been legally banned on Mars since the first colonists came back with a strange, insatiable craving, and everyone who employed men on Mars was watched with high suspicion to see that no one slipped any of the habit-forming stuff to the work crews on the sly, at least not while they were on Mars.
“You mean Interplanetary Oil had that pipe stuffed with all that junk?” Hank said.
“They were taking you to the cleaners,” Robert said. “Paying for the pipe weight and using it to ship about twice the weight in contraband, transport-free, with a little smuggling thrown in on the side. Unfortunately, they overloaded the heavy-transport chamber in the process. More solid volume than the chamber could handle per unit time, which is how I first got onto it.”
Hank Merry shook his head. “Robert, if you knew all this, why haven’t you tipped off Security to put the arm on this red-headed plague who’s been crawling down my throat all day?”
“Use your head,” Robert said. “Tarbox is Interplanetary Oil’s contact man. He’s a pain, but at least we know whom to watch. And we can stop them when we need to. The trouble is, there’s more to it than that. I thought at first that the Thresholders dumped all that stuff someplace—anyplace they could get rid of it fast enough—because of the overload. But as far as I can tell now, they thought they’d delivered it to Ironstone in spite of the overload.”
Robert stood up, a worried frown on his face. “Hank, there have been too many misfires lately. Something is sour and getting more sour all the time. I don’t know why, but there have been too many odd things happening. Like that very thin colonist who just turned up here from the Cygni system.”
Hank gaped at his young friend. “Now how did you know about that? The man just turned up here a few hours ago, along with three others. The medics are still trying to figure him out.”
“I’d like to figure him out, too,” Robert said, “especially because I don’t think the medics are going to succeed. And I don’t know why.”
“Want to see him?”
“The sooner the better.”
“Then let’s go,” Hank said, “because if you can figure this out, you’re a better man than I am. And this bird may not be around to see for very long.”
—6—
The man in the infirmary bed was shrunken and emaciated, so thin and wizened that he looked like a raisin that had been left out in the sun too long. His eyes were sunken deep in their sockets, and looked dangerously bright. “At least he isn’t babbling any more,” the doctor said apologetically as he led them into the sterile observation booth adjoining the room. “He was delirious when he first got here. He’s in an ice jacket now, and his temp is still up to 104 degrees, but at least he can talk. There were three of them, you know. The others are down the hall.”
“Why are you keeping them here?” Robert asked, horrified. “Surely the Hoffman Center—”
The doctor spread his hands. “These people were barely alive at all when they turned up here. They’re still in no shape to be moved anywhere, and from what this guy says, you couldn’t get him into a Threshold chamber again without a court order. Something’s funny. At first I chalked all his babbling up to fever and delirium, but he sticks to his story. Says the colony on Cygni has disappeared.
“His body metabolism is all out of whack. Like an eight-cylinder engine trying to do twelve-cylinder work. We must have fed him 14,000 calories in the past eight hours, and he’s still lost another pound of weight in that time.”
“And this was the colony on 61 Cygni IV?” Robert asked.
“That’s the one,” Hank said. “Or was. I guess. The only thing identifiable about this man is his fingerprints, but they identify him as one of the Cygni colonists. He turned up here at Ironstone in one of the starjump chambers, along with his friends. From what he says, they had to get out of there and fast…they didn’t care where to.”
Robert peered through the glass at the emaciated man lying in the ice jacket. He switched on the two-way intercom. “Can you hear me?” he asked gently.
The man reared up on one elbow. “Who’s that? What do you want?”
“I’m Robert Benedict. I work with the Thresholders.”
The man stared at him, and began shouting and gesticulating. “They stole it, clean away! Gone! And what was left, we couldn’t stay in! Hot! Lordy, it was hot.”
“Better start at the beginning,” Robert said. “I thought 61 Cygni was a paradise colony.
With about five thousand people on it by now.”
The man’s voice cracked. “It is—or it was. That’s what I’m trying to tell these idiots. They say I’m delirious.”
“What happened, Mr. Jonner?”
“Janner, Mike Janner. I don’t know what happened.” The man paused. “Did you say Benedict? Then you’ve seen Cygni. You scouted it in the beginning, didn’t you?”
Robert nodded. He had scouted 61 Cygni. He remembered clearly the balmy, temperate jungle of the fourth planet of that distant star—warm, sunny, plenty of water, dozens of edible fruits and immense grazing lands for herds of beef cattle, lambs, chickens.
After the transmatter trouble was settled, Robert had spent most of two years in the Threshold universe, scouting out habitable colony planets, an escape valve for Earth’s dangerous overcrowding. It had been an exhausting business because the Thresholders couldn’t tell one planet or star system from the next, from a human point of view. And most planets had flaws—too hot, too cold, wrong atmosphere, incompatible flora, dangerous fauna, uncontrollable bacteria, lethal viruses, one thing or another.