Galactic Diplomat by Keith Laumer Read Free Book Online

talked, scanned the
riven landscape. “Hey!” he said. “Over there . . .”
    Retief followed Sam’s pointing glove. He studied the dark
patch against a smooth expanse of eroded rock.
    “A friend of mine came across a chunk of the old planetary
surface two years ago,” Sam said thoughtfully. “Had a tunnel in it that’d been used
as a storage depot by the Bodeans. Took out over two ton of hardware. Course,
nobody’s discovered how the stuff works yet, but it brings top
prices . . .”
    “Looks like water erosion,” Retief said.
    “Yep. This could be another piece of surface, all right.
Could be a cave over there. The Bodeans liked caves, too. Must have been some
war—but then, if it hadn’t been, they wouldn’t have tucked so much stuff away
underground where it could weather the planetary break-up.”
    They descended, crossed the jumbled rocks with light,
thirty-foot leaps.
    “It’s a cave, all right,” Sam said, stooping to peer into the
five-foot bore. Retief followed him inside.
    “Let’s
get some light in here.” Mancziewicz flipped on a beam. It glinted back from
dull polished surfaces of Bodean synthetic. Sam’s low whistle sounded in
Retief’s headset.
    “That’s funny,” Retief said.
    “Funny, Hell! It’s hilarious. General Minerals trying to sell
off a worthless rock to a tenderfoot—and it’s loaded with Bodean hardware. No
telling how much is here; the tunnel seems to go quite a ways back. And there
may be more caves around here—”
    “That’s not what I mean. Do you notice your suit warming up?”
    “Huh? Yeah, now that you mention it . . .”
    Retief
rapped with a gauntleted hand on the satiny black curve of the nearest Bodean
artifact. It clunked dully through the suit. “That’s not metal,” he said. “It’s
plastic.”
    “There’s something fishy here,” Sam said. “This erosion; it
looks more like a heat beam . . .”
    “Sam,” Retief said, turning; “it appears to me somebody has
gone to a great deal of trouble to give a false impression here—”
    Sam snorted. “I told you they were a crafty bunch.” He
started out of the cave, then paused, went to one knee to study the floor. “But
maybe they outsmarted themselves,” he said, his voice tense with excitement.
“Look here!”
    Retief looked. Sam’s beam reflected from a fused surface of
milky white, shot through with dirty yellow. He snapped a pointed instrument in
place on his gauntlet, dug at one of the yellow streaks. It furrowed under the
gouge, a particle adhering to the instrument. With his left hand, Mancziewicz
opened a pouch clipped to his belt, carefully deposited the sample in a small
orifice on the device in the pouch. He flipped a key, squinted at a dial.
    “Atomic weight 197.2,” he said. Retief turned down the audio
volume on his headset as Sam’s laughter rang in his helmet.
    “Those clowns were out to stick you, Retief,” he gasped,
still chuckling. “They salted the rock with a cave full of Bodean artifacts—”
    “Fake Bodean artifacts,” Retief put in.
    “They planed off the rock so it would look like an old beach,
and then cut this cave with beamers. And they were boring through practically
solid gold!”
    “As good as that?”
    Mancziewicz flashed the light around. “This stuff will assay
out at a thousand credits a ton, easy. If the vein doesn’t run to five thousand
tons, the beers are on me.” He snapped off the light. “Let’s get moving,
Retief. You want to sew this deal up before they get around to taking another
look at it.”
    Back in the boat, Retief and Mancziewicz opened their
helmets. “This calls for a drink,” Sam said, extracting a pressure flask from
the map case. “This rock’s worth as much as mine, maybe more. You hit it lucky,
Retief. Congratulations.” He thrust out a hand.
    “I’m afraid you’ve jumped to a couple of conclusions, Sam,”
Retief said. “I’m not out here to buy mining properties.”
    “You’re not—then