Last and least pleasant of all was Medusa, a planet with frozen seas, blinding snow, and jagged, towering peaks. Its 19-degree axial tilt gave it seasons, all right, but it was a bad to worse situation, with summer in the tropics averaging 20 degrees centigrade or less and going to the impossibly cold polar regions. Although in heavy glaciation, it was the only one of the four Warden worlds with signs of volcanic activity. There were some forests, but mostly tundra and grasslands, although it had what appeared to be mammalian life in the form of herds of odd grazing animals and some very fierce and nasty carnivores. It was a harsh, brutal world that could be tamed and lived on; still, the Exploiter Team had to agree with Warden—to
want
to go and live there, you'd have to have rocks in your head.
Four worlds, from a steaming hell to frozen tundra. Four worlds with temperature extremes that could be borne and air and water that could be used. It was incredible, fantastic—and true. And so the Exploiter Team went in, set up its mam base just off a tropical lagoon out of the most romantic travel poster—on Lilith, of course. Smaller expeditions went from there to the other three worlds for preliminary testing, poking, and probing.
Warden had been right about three of them, but his suspicion of Lilith seemed to be just the natural suspicion of somebody who sees something too good to be true. Or perhaps it was some sixth sense, developed from so many years in isolation and poking and probing into so many alien systems. Perhaps it was...
Once down, the Exploiter Teams were in effective quarantine from the military and from all commerce with the Confederacy. The initial exploration would take at least a year, during which they would be both scientists and guinea pigs, poking and probing one another as much as they poked and probed each planet. They had shuttlecraft capable of traveling between the planets if necessary and ground and air transportation to carry on their own work, but nothing interstellar. The risk was too great. Man had been burned too many times before to take such chances.
It took Lilith's snake about six months to size up the newcomers.
By the time all their machinery ceased to function it was already too late. They watched first as all the power drained out of the machinery and equipment as if being drunk by an eager child. Within forty-eight hours the machinery, the equipment—in fact, all artifacts—started to break up into so much junk. Four died as a result, and the rest watched in helpless horror as their corpses, too, rapidly began to decompose.
Within a week there was simply no sign that anything alien had ever landed. Cleared places seemed to grow over almost overnight; metal, plastics, organic and inorganic compounds—everything rotted, dissolved, and eventually was nothing more than a fine powder, quickly absorbed by the rich soil. There was nothing left—nothing but sixty-two stunned, stark-naked scientists both bewildered and scared, without even the most rudimentary instruments to help explain what the hell had happened to them.
Just a week earlier direct contact between the parties on the four planets had been resumed. A small group from each of the other three worlds had come to Lilith to share their findings and decide what to do next. They had come, talked, analyzed, filed preliminary reports with the guardian cruiser still in space nearby, then returned to their own planets, unknowingly taking with them the snake.
The science section on the cruiser immediately jumped on the problem. And with remote robot-controlled labs they finally found the one thing everybody but Warden's sixth sense had missed. The snake was an alien organism, microscopic beyond belief and acting in colonies within the cells. It was not intelligent in the sense that it possessed anything humans would recognize as thought processes, but it did seem to have an amazing set of rules it enforced on an entire planet and an incredible capacity for adjusting to new conditions and bringing them to heel. Though its life span ' was a sparse three to five minutes, somehow this microorganism operated at a time rate hundreds, perhaps thousands, of times faster than anything around it. On Lilith, it still had taken the organism six months to adapt to these new things that had been introduced to its world, and it had finally evolved enough to adapt the aliens to its comfortable, symbiotic system.
But the other planets were different—different atmospheric balances, different gravity, different radiation intensities, all sorts of great differences. It could not adapt such alien environments to its system, so it adapted to them instead. In some cases—Medusa, for one—it adapted the host organism, the people, and quickly, the animals and plants. On Charon and Cerberus it struck a balance in the hosts that was to its liking; this produced by-products of physical change not relevant to it but rather resulting from where, in those bodies, it was most comfortable.
The Warden Diamond was, sadly, quarantined while scientists looked for a cure. Removing some of the unlucky victims in isolation chambers did not work: something linked the organisms to the Diamond, and they died when removed from the system, killing their hosts in the process, since the organisms resided in the hosts' cells and took over, really, rearranging things to suit themselves. Without their managers, the cells rapidly went berserk, causing an ugly and painful, although mercifully swift, death.
Oddly, those on one of the planets could still move in-system to the others, the organism having mutated so much inside them that it no longer even recognized Lilith as its home and, having struck a comfortable balance, having no further reason to change.
Humans
could
live and work and build on the Warden Diamond, but once there they could never leave.
That did not stop the scientists, of course, and they came and set up their colonies, although doing so was difficult on Lilith, where nothing not native to the planet seemed to be allowed. They came prepared and they came to study and uncover the secrets of the Warden Diamond. After two centuries their descendants were still at it, joined occasionally by others— but very little progress had been made. The planets, the organism, even the changes defied them. That only spurred them on all the more.
But it wasn't the scientists who were to settle the Diamond, but the antisocials. Early on, when the magnitude of the problem was realized, came the idea of setting up the four worlds as the perfect prison.
The misfits were sent there in droves—all those whose connections could avoid the psych boys, who had genius or some sort of talent that would be destroyed by reeducation, political prisoners from countless worlds—all sent there rather than killed or mentally altered in the hope that some future successful rival would remember they didn't kill or psych the deposed but exiled them. Male, female, it didn't matter. The best antisocials, the political-criminal elite. And there they lived and bore their children and died, and their children lived and bore
their
children, and so on.
So these worlds were run, dominated in fact, by a criminal elite imprisoned forever and with little love for or feeling of kinship with the masses of the Confederacy. Nonetheless, they had commerce. The organism could be killed, sterilized out, in a complex process, on unmanned ships. So other criminal geniuses, those not yet caught or in charge of governments, could establish caches of money, jewelry, precious art, and stolen goods of all types on the Warden worlds with no fear that the Confederacy could touch them.
At the same time the strongest, the smartest, the most ruthless of the exiles clawed their ways to the top of these four strange worlds, until they controlled them and their own trade. Lilith, where nothing physical could be stored, was the perfect place for storing such information as special bank account numbers, official secrets even the Confederacy had to be kept ignorant of, things of that sort—the kind of information one never put into a computer because all computers are vulnerable to a genius technician. No matter how foolproof the machine, the foolproof system was devised by someone and could therefore be broken by someone else.
So these great criminal kings—the Four Lords of the Diamond, alien now from their -ancestral race, geniuses all yet bitterly exiled nonetheless—had the secrets, the stolen goods, the blackmail of the Confederacy, and their influence extended throughout the Confederacy even though they were forever barred from seeing it.
Then the Four Lords are selling us out, the young man sighed. Why not simply destroy all four worlds? Good riddance anyway, I'd say.
So would I, Commander Krega agreed. Only we can't. We let them go on too long—they're politically invulnerable. Too much wealth, too much power, too many secrets are there. There is simply no way to get them any more—they have the goods on just about anybody who would be high up enough to make those decisions.
The young man cleared his throat. I see, he responded a little disgustedly. So why not place agents on those worlds? Find out what's what?
Oh, that was tried from the first, Krega told him. It didn't work, either. Consider—we're asking someone to exile himself permanently and allow himself to be turned, equally permanently, into something not quite human. Only a fanatic would agree to that—and fanatics make notoriously poor spies. The Four Lords are also not exactly easy marks, you know. They keep track of who's coming in, and their own contacts here tell them just about everything they want to know about any newcomers. We might sneak one agent, one really good agent, in on them—but a lot? Never. They'd quickly catch on and just kill the lot, innocent and guilty alike. They also are supremely confident of human psychology—the agent is going to have to be
damned
good to get away with such an assignment. Anybody with that much on the ball is also going to realize that he is trapped there and that he'll have to live there, on the Four Lords' worlds, until he dies. Loyalty conies hard, but even the most loyal and committed agent is going to have the brains to see which side his future bread will be buttered on. So he switches sides. One of the current Lords is in fact a Confederacy agent.
Huh? .
Krega nodded. Or was, I should say. Probably the best infiltrator in the business, knew all the his and outs, and found the Diamond not threatening but fascinating. The Confederacy bored him, he said. We dropped him on Lilith just to worm his way into the hierarchy—and he sure did. In spades. Only we received almost no information from him while feeding him a great deal—and now he's one of the enemy. See what I mean?
You have a tough problem, the young man sympathized. You don't have any reliable people on the Warden worlds, and anybody capable of doing what has to be done winds up on the other side. And now they're selling us out to an alien force.
Exactly. Krega nodded. You see where this puts us. Now, of course, we
do
have some people down there. None are a hundred percent reliable, and an of them would slit your throat in an instant if doing so was in their best interests. But we find occasional inducements—small payoffs of one sort or another, even a little blackmail on ones with close relatives back in the Confederacy—that give us a little edge. A little, but not much, since the Four Lords are pretty ruthless when it comes to what they perceive as treason. Our only advantage is that the worlds are still fairly new to us and so therefore relatively sparsely settled. There is no totalitarian control on any of them, and there are different systems and hierarchies on each.
The young man nodded. I have the uneasy feeling that you are leading up to something—but I must remind you of what you told me about past agents, and also that, even kicking and screaming, I'd be but one man on one world.
Commander Krega grinned. No, it's not quite like that at all. You're a damned good detective and you know it. You've tracked down and upset rocks in places nobody else looked at twice; outmaneuvered and outguessed sophisticated computers and some of the best criminal minds ever known, even though you are still quite young. You are the youngest person with the rank of Inspector in the history of the Confederacy. We have two different problems here. One, we must identify this alien force and 'trace it back to its origin. We must find out who they are and where they are and what their intentions are. Even now it may be too late, but we must act as if it were not. Two, we must neutralize their information conduit, the Four Lords. How would you do it?
The young man smiled thoughtfully. Pay the Four Lords more than the aliens do, he suggested hopefully. Put 'em to work for us.
Impossible. We already thought of that, the commander responded glumly. It's not profit—they have more than they need. And it's not power—that, too, they have
in
abundance. But we have cut them off forever from the rest of the universe, trapped them there. Before, they could do nothing—but now, with an alien force as then* ally, they can. I'm afraid such people are motivated by revenge, and
that
we cannot give them. We can't even commute their sentence, short of a scientific breakthrough—and nobody has more people working on that angle than they do. No, making a deal is out. We have no cards.
Then you need somebody good down there on each world, looking for clues to the aliens. There has to be some sort of direct contact: they have to get their information out and their little play-toys, like that fancy robot, programmed and in. An agent might turn traitor, but if he was a volunteer he wouldn't be motivated by revenge and would sure as hell feel closer to humanity than to some aliens of unknown appearance and design.
Agreed. And it would have to be the very best for all four. Someone who could survive, even prosper under their conditions while having the ability to collect enough data and get it out. But how do we buy the time we also need?
The young man grinned. Easy. At least easy to say—maybe nearly impossible to do. You kill all four Lords. Others would take their places, of course, but in the interim you'd buy months, maybe years.
That was our thinking, Krega agreed. And so we ran it through the computers. Master detective, loyal, willing to volunteer, and with an Assassin's License. Four needed, plus a coordinator, since they all would have to be put to work simultaneously and would obviously have no likely reason or means to 'contact one another. Plus for insurance, of course, spares that could be sent in if something happened to one or more of the originals. We fed in all these attributes and requirements and out you popped.