Hard-Luck Diggings: The Early Jack Vance, Volume One Read Free Page A

white beard, a fine straight nose.
    Rogge darted a glance at Captain Julic who returned him a humorous shrug. Rogge turned back to the old man, now gazing leisurely up and down the glistening gray beach, out over the lambent white ocean.
    Rogge pulled his head between his bony shoulders, stepped forward. “Ah—I’m James Rogge, Superintendent,” he rasped. The old man turned, and Rogge found himself looking into wide, blue eyes, clear and guileless.
    “My name is Magnus Ridolph,” said the old man. “I understand that you’re having difficulty?”
    “Yes,” said Rogge. He stood back, looking Magnus Ridolph up and down. “I was expecting a man from the Intelligence Corps.”
    Magnus Ridolph nodded. “I happened to be passing through Starport and the Commander asked me to visit you. At the moment I’m not officially connected with the Corps, but I’ll do all I can to help you.”
    Rogge clamped his teeth, glared out to sea. At last he turned back to Ridolph. “Here’s the situation. Men are being murdered, I don’t know by whom. The whole camp is demoralized. I’ve ordered the entire personnel to go everywhere in couples—and still they’re killed!”
    Magnus Ridolph looked across the beach to the hills, low rounded masses covered with glistening vegetation in all shades of black, gray and white.
    “Suppose you show me around the camp.”
    Rogge hesitated. “Are you ready—right now? Sure you don’t want to rest first?”
    “I’m ready.”
    Rogge turned to the captain. “See you at dinner, Julic—unless you want to come around with us?”
    Captain Julic hesitated. “Just a minute, till I tell the mate I’m ashore.” He clambered up the ladder.
    Magnus Ridolph was gazing out at the slow-heaving, milk-white ocean that glowed as if illuminated from beneath.
    “Plankton?”
    Rogge nodded. “Intensely luminescent. At night the ocean shines like molten metal.”
    Magnus Ridolph nodded. “This is a very beautiful planet. So Earthlike and yet so strangely different in its coloring.”
    “That’s right,” said Rogge. “Whenever I look up on the hill I think of an extremely complicated steel engraving…the different tones of gray in the leaves.”
    “What, if any, is the fauna of the planet?”
    “So far we’ve found creatures that resemble panthers, quite a few four-armed apes, and any number of rodents,” Rogge said.
    “No intelligent aborigines?”
    Rogge shook his head. “So far as we know—no. And we’ve surveyed a good deal of the planet.”
    “How many men in the camp?”
    “Eleven hundred, thereabouts,” said Rogge. “Eight hundred at Diggings A, three hundred at B. It’s at B where the murders occur. I’m thinking of closing down the diggings for a while.”
    Magnus Ridolph tugged at his beard. “Murders only at Diggings B? Have you shifted the personnel?”
    Rogge nodded, glared at the massive column of ore that was Diggings B. “I’ve changed every man-jackin the camp. And still the killings go on—in locked rooms, in the showers, the toilets, anywhere a man happens to be alone for a minute or two.”
    “It sounds almost as if you’ve disturbed an invisible genius loci ,” said Magnus Ridolph.
    Rogge snorted. “If that means ‘ghost’, I’ll agree with you. ‘Ghost’ is about the only explanation I got left. Four times, now, a man has been killed in a locked room with no opening larger than a barred four-inch ventilator. We’ve slipped into the room with nets, screened every cubic foot. Nothing.”
    Captain Julic came down the ladder, joined Rogge and Magnus Ridolph. They turned up the hard-packed gray beach toward DiggingsA, a jut of rock breaking sharply out of the gently rolling hills.
    “The ore,” Rogge explained, “lies in a layer at about ground level. We’re bull-dozingthe top-surface off onto the beach. When we’re all done, that big crag will be leveled flat to the ground, and the little bay will be entirely filled.”
    “And Diggings B is the