His perplexity encouraged me. They don’t educate the Fleet in civilian legal procedures. But what I said was true.
I plunged on. “Legally, you cannot raise the dead. Legally, you can get no papers or status for the dead. Legally, you can’t marry the dead! And the only evidence you have is that newspaper clipping—and it is not legal evidence!”
What I wasn’t telling him was that at the slightest hint that a Spiteos prisoner would be released to the world, that prisoner would be killed. In fact, Heller was lucky himself to know of Spiteos and still be alive: it was only permitted because Lombar had thought he would soon be gone to Blito-P3 and the Grand Council’s familiarity with his name. He was luckier than he knew!
He was hesitating. If I could get him off this planet, he would never again be in a position to worry about the Countess Krak. I added a brilliant stroke.
“I am trained in these things and you are not,” I said. “If you leave as soon as possible on this mission, I give you my solemn oath that when you return, I will help you in this. I will guide you through it. And without my help, you could not possibly free her and restore her to the world.”
It was a safe oath. He would never come back. I wondered why I was suddenly feeling sick at my stomach. The blow, probably.
He looked at me. He was perplexed, doubtful. He said, “I will think it over.”
I saw that that was all I could get. I still was afraid of him. My hand still gripped the butt of my gun.
I got out of there as quickly as I could! I had found myself defenseless in the face of death. It was terrifying!
PART NINE
Chapter 2
Outside, in the dimness of the hangar, I tried to move my arm. It was totally unresponsive. It would swing and dangle but the elbow and wrist would not bend at my command. The fingers would not flex. I felt I was done for!
Considerations that the mission was again stalled, that I was under threat of death from Lombar, that I could lose my paychecks and be cashiered and wind up as a gutter bum in Slum City were all acute enough. But they momentarily took second place to this arm.
One doesn’t get personal care or disability in the Apparatus. When one is injured or becomes physically incapable of doing his job, that’s it. He isn’t retired. If he has held a security-sensitive post, he isn’t dropped. He is simply shot in the head and the body dumped in any handy ditch.
The sensation of being hemmed in by a pack of wild beasts and having no chance of defending myself was pushing me toward panic. If I could not draw and fire a gun, I was at the total mercy of any Apparatus personnel I chanced to meet. I knew too many who would like to see me out of the way.
I disguised the disability as best I could and crept toward my airbus.
It was late afternoon, work in the area had slacked off, there were not many about.
My driver had apparently had a hard day running around on Heller’s errands. Ske was sprawled out in the back, taking a nap. I stood there for a moment, looking at him through the open window. I was on the verge of opening the door and telling him to take me somewhere when a new thought stayed my left hand.
I had no money!
Obviously, I needed physical attention from a doctor. I vividly recalled the abrupt departure of the prostitute practitioner when he found I had no credits.
If Ske had been running errands, then he had money on him. With my left hand I silently opened the door. Without making the vehicle tilt, I leaned over him.
With practiced lightness I went through his uppermost two tunic pockets.
Luck!
My trained fingers drew out a ten-credit note!
I backed up, ready to leave.
“Wait a minute!” said Ske in a plaintive voice, “that ain’t my money! It was the deposit on the comedy cop uniforms! I’ve got to return it to Officer Heller!”
He was lying. He always lies. I hoped that he hadn’t noticed my right arm was disabled. He might attack me. I backed away so that I was well clear of him.
My problem now was where to find a doctor. I must not get one that could report this disability. I was racking my wits about it when my attention was drawn to a transport spaceship.
A huge, wheeled gantry was standing outside the hangar, gripping the vessel in its launch claws. The tall ship rose about four hundred and fifty feet as it sat on its tail. It was black, old, dented and shabby. An Apparatus troop carrier! When they were fueled or repaired or whatever else they did to them in the hangar, their gantries were pushed out into the leaving zone. This was usually done toward sunset: the ship’s crew was brought from barracks and put aboard and were supposed to spend the night readying their craft for takeoff in the dawn.
This one was outward bound for some planet of the Confederacy. She would have about fifty crew. Before sunrise, anywhere from two to five thousand Apparatus guard troops would be paraded out there and then file aboard to be packed like corpses into the personnel racks for the voyage. That ship would be gone for months and, with luck, within those months I, too, would be gone.
They would have a health officer on board!
It was my best bet. I would get him to fix this arm and no one would be the wiser.
I approached the gantry. The monstrous vessel loomed above me. There was a guard at the personnel loading air lock, a bored specimen. He blocked my way.
“I must inspect the vessel prior to its departure,” I said and fished with my left hand for my identoplate.
The guard didn’t bother to look at it. I entered the air lock. The stink of an Apparatus vessel hit me. Getting it ready for a voyage didn’t include washing its interior: weightlessness can bring nausea and this vessel probably had troop vomit left over from its maiden voyage centuries before.
When they stand in gantries, their passageways are vertical. I had to climb and it was difficult with only one hand to hold to the bars. And even this was complicated by the many switchovers caused by branching passages. Any crew or ship officers’ cubicles would be way up toward the nose. It was easy to get lost inside these gigantic, fat-bellied things. The direction arrows were mainly filthed into obscurity and the signs and labels could not be read. I struggled along and then was glad to hear a distant sound far above me.
It was a song. Far from getting the ship ready, some of the crew were sitting up there somewhere, probably in their eating room, indulging themselves in a singing weep.
There was the throb of a hand air organ. It was beginning the chords of a new song. Spacers, I have always maintained, are not normal people. And the spacers of the Apparatus are insane.
They were beginning a song called, “The Spacer’s Lot.” It is a dirge! Why do they always sing dirges before they start a voyage? Hangovers?
It didn’t make me feel a bit better to be climbing to the sad, sad melancholy of that tune. I was struggling as it was! The lament echoed down as though sung in a tomb!
To planets of the dead,
And stars that have no light,
We cruise throughout this endless space,
Encased in darkest night.
I missed a rung and almost fell two hundred feet.
The eyes that do not miss us,
The hands without caress,
The hardened hearts behind us,
Spare no slightest warmth to bless.
I tried to hurry my ascent. The awful dirge was depressing me.
The Forces of the firmament,
Enfold us as our home.
The lost, the (bleeped), the outcast,
Cruise darkest space alone.
I almost fell again. The echoing walls made the song more deep and awful. Maybe if I got there quick, they would shut up. I was feeling bad enough already.
Shun space, you groundbound creature!
Suck in your planet’s breath!
Hold safe to stable gravity!
For we of space live DEATH!
I stuck my head precariously in the compartment door. It was the end of the song and they all s
at there weeping, about twenty of them.
“Is there a doctor aboard?” I asked in general.
A big, tough ape, probably wanted on half the planets for numerous crimes, turned his tearful eyes to me and then pointed silently across the passageway. The hand air organ was starting up again.
I made out a sign, very smudged:
HEALTH OFFICER. DO NOT OPEN.
With a one-handed effort, I undid the seal cogs and stumbled into the room. A blast of decayed meat and tup fumes hit me. Somebody was snoring on the gimbal bed. With some difficulty, I woke him up.
Bleary-eyed, this doctor was representative of the profession, not the way they like to be seen in song and story but the way they really are: a stinking wreck.
“My arm,” I said. “It suddenly has become paralyzed!”
“Well, buy a new one,” he said and tried to turn over and resume snoring.
With some struggle I got him to sit up. “I have money,” I said.
That reached him. He got professional.
“I want you to tell me what’s wrong with it,” I said.
I got off my gunbelt and somehow managed to get out of my tunic, all without the slightest aid from him. He started to examine the wrong arm and I had to direct his attention.
With a lot of yawns and some time out to get another drink of tup, he asked some questions and prodded. The questions were mainly a hopeful, “Does that hurt?” when he poked.
He had some sort of machine and he made me stand in front of it. I hoped he was looking but I heard him drinking more tup.
“No slugs, no bone breaks, no burns,” I heard him mutter. Then, with a shrug, he indicated I could get back into my jacket.
He was looking at me rather peculiarly. “Well,” he said, “I know what’s wrong with it now.”
I was just finishing buckling my gunbelt. His fingers were sort of twitching. I got out the ten-credit note. I intended to ask if he could change it for this action he was doing never cost more than two credits.
He took the note and put it in his pocket.
He gave a tremendous yawn and then he said, “The diagnosis is, you can’t use your arm.”
With that, he showed every sign of getting back onto his gimbal bed. I blocked him. “You’ll have to do better than that!”
The doctor looked at me, very bored. “You want a technical term? All right: you had temporary hysterical paralysis of the upper articulation muscles.” And he started to climb back onto his bed.
I shouted, “That doesn’t handle anything!”
“There’s nothing to handle,” he said. “You apparently did not notice that you used your arm perfectly normally when you put your coat and belt back on.”
I stared. I looked down. I swung the arm. I flexed my fingers. There was nothing wrong with it! I could use it perfectly normally!
Once more he started to get back on the bed. “Wait, wait! What could cause that?”
“The machine showed you had no slugs in your head or foreign matter pressing the nerves of the spine. So there is no cause.”
I made my voice sound deadly. “You better tell me how such a condition could come about!”
He saw plainly that he was not going to be able to get back on that gimbal bed unless he either moved me out of the way or said something I would accept.
The doctor shrugged. “Hysteria? Battle shock? You’re an officer, so no electric shock can be used on you. A lot of things can cause it.”
“Such as?” and I continued to block his way back to bed.
He looked vague. “Neurotic predisposition which then precipitated into a temporary manifestation? Hypnotism?”
“You’ve got to do more than this!” I said.
“For only ten credits? I’m no Slum City head plumber.”
“That’s five times the usual fee!” I said.
“You were five times as worried,” he said. And he pushed me aside and lay down and shortly was snoring once more. A true professional.
PART NINE
Chapter 3
Back at the airbus, I walked around it several times, thinking. It was almost dusk. Every now and then I would flex my arm and fingers. They were working perfectly.
I was trying to sort out what the meat-chopper had said.
Learned as I was in Earth psychology, I knew very well that he was wrong about “neurotic predisposition.” I am not neurotic. That left hypnotism. But aside from language training, I had not been hypnotized.
Certain it was that I was at severe risk. What if this happened again? Just when I was about to shoot somebody down, my arm didn’t work! The thought made my hair prickle.
I did not dare go near an Apparatus practitioner. Any drilling into my unconscious might reveal too much. The practitioner would report that I was blabbing State secrets and that would be the end of me!
What else had that (bleeped) meat-slicer said? Ah, that he was no “Slum City head plumber.” That was the clue. I had seen their signs. I made up a plan quickly, calling on my skilled talents in this sort of thing.
I went around to the door to get in.
My driver said, “How am I going to explain to Officer Heller when I can’t return that costume deposit?”
I hit him. I used my left hand as I couldn’t trust my right. But I hit him.
I got in. “Take me to the Provocation Section at once!” I ordered.
We flew through the dusk over Government City, darted down to water level at the River Wiel and shortly zoomed into the tunnel of the shabby warehouses.
I got out. I trotted straight up the steps.
Raza Torr had been in the act of going home. He froze. He seemed to have turned bone white but it was hard to tell in the dim light.
I decided I had better put him at his ease. “Met any nice girls lately?” I said conversationally.
My former escort was behind me. They must have had burglars or troubles lately as he was holding a gun in his hand.
Raza Torr, in a sort of strangled voice said, “I’ll take care of this.”
I led the way. I knew the place inside out now. I went to the civilian costume area. Raza Torr followed. The escort had vanished.
“I want a speedwheel suit,” I said. “The street kind. Something plain.”
Raza Torr seemed to have recovered. Probably, I thought, he had had a hard day. He was a naturally nervous fellow. But he doesn’t always have good sense. He walked over to the rack and got down a speedwheel suit: they are shiny, made of slick body-armor material. This one had flaring scarlet flame patterns painted all over it; it could be seen from a mile off and hurt the eyes even then.
“No, no,” I said. I went to the rack and found a plain black one in my size. It had some accident blood caked on the collar but one can’t be choosy and I was in a hurry.
“Now a helmet,” I said and went over to that rack. Again he got in my way and tried to give me a rider helmet with a flame plume and no visor. I pushed it aside and got a no-plume black visor one.
“Now a tri-knife,” I said. I led the way over to the weapons section and finally found one. They are a great knife. Criminals use them when they want to do a particularly gory murder. They are thin as a needle when their ten-inch blade goes in. When it hits bottom, the blade springs into a narrow fan, becoming three razor-edged blades. When you pull it out, a lot of guts come with it. They even have a ring in the hilt so you can yank back. Some knife fighters say they are too hard to draw out of a stabbed body, but that is just quibbling.
“Gods,” said Raza Torr. “Who you going to kill?”
“I doubt I’ll return these,” I said.
“I doubt you will either,” he said. I ignored the unjustified slur on my honesty. I was too intent on my project.
Back at my airbus, I directed my driver on a circuitous course to the outskirts of Slum City. Night had come. Real evening traffic had not yet started up. People in other cities were at their suppers. Not too many people in Slum City would have suppers to be at.
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Although they are poor in Slum City, they are not inactive. The dilapidated and decayed structures do contain spots of liveliness. These pinpoints of brilliance seemed to deepen, rather than brighten, the intense gloom. Fifty square miles of deprivation are strung around a fetid lake. Nobody had any record of when Slum City had been built and even when constructed it was probably old at once.
There was a tale that Lombar used to set fires down here to while away his youth. I doubted the story. Lombar was more efficiently destructive than that and he certainly hated any slum. Someday, he had once mentioned to me, all this would be swept down, the population annihilated. It looked like it was overdue for the treatment.
I saw what I wanted. It was one of the bright spots. Youths hang out in dens in Slum City. They sometimes have orchestras, pretty bad ones. Tup is about a twentieth of a credit per canister, pretty bad tup.
Around this place there would be speedwheels.
I directed my driver to set down well away from the lights of a bluebottle station. It was in what once might have been a park. I made him turn out the lights so that not even he could see what I was doing.
I scrambled around, got off my uniform and got into the speedwheel suit. I put on the black-visored helmet. I left all identification and normal Apparatus weapons with my uniform. I took with me only the tri-knife and a small wad of counterfeit bills. I told my driver to wait right where he was, showing no lights, until I returned.
With very silent feet I raced in the direction of the orchestra. I stopped well clear of the flaring lights. A lot of youths were dancing.
A quick survey discovered a speedwheel of the more powerful type. It was deep in the shadows. I jimmied the lock. It was so easy, the guy deserved to lose it!
I pushed it well away and then, when safe from any detection, I went zipping down what they sarcastically call a boulevard in Slum City, the speedwheel crushing through the garbage. The fetid stink of the lake was almost solid in the night wind.