The grinning cupid had settled back, steady once more. In a normal voice, Pratia said, “He is really quite nice. You should see what he has.”
My tunic was crumpled up on the floor, just out of reach. I was trying to pull it to me. In a more strained voice, she said, “He was so starved.” My hand had to abandon the tunic.
The cupid was rocking again. Pratia said, “So starved . . .so starved . . . so starved . . . Oh. Oh. Oh!”
My hand almost broke its fingers on the edge of the rug. “There!” shuddered Pratia.
The cupid fell over with a crash against the floor.
The servant’s broom threw up a cloud of dust.
My hand finally reached my tunic as she said, in a more relaxed voice, “I just wanted you to know how great he is in bed.”
I was pulling on a boot. “Well, thank you for telling me,” I said. There is nothing quite so discouraging as going through this sort of thing with a woman telling you how great another man is. Wearing.
A glimpse of the servant’s surprised face through the half-open hall door should have warned me. “Oh, don’t leave!” said Pratia.
My boot flew out the window as she cried, “I haven’t told you enough yet!”
I knew Ske would be looking at his watch.
The other set of curtains at the window came down.
A murmur of voices outside told me that the servant was chatting with Ske, probably about the weather, out at the airbus.
The open window let in Ske’s distempered call, “Officer Gris! You going to be in there all day?”
The yard was very peaceful. The servant had changed his uniform. Ske was picking up my boot and cap.
I stood in the door, trying to button my tunic. Difficult since now half the buttons were gone and I was having a hard time: it kept going askew.
Ske handed me my boot and cap.
Widow Tayl’s face was at the window, smiling an enormous smile.
Young Dr. Bittlestiffender came out of the hospital and walked toward the house. Widow Tayl raced by me. She slid her arm possessively through his and looked up at him adoringly.
The young doctor shook me by the hand. “Officer Gris,” he said in an emotional voice, almost tears in his eyes, “I will never be able to thank you enough.”
She looked at me glowingly and her hand was reaching for him. She cooed at me, “Isn’t he a wonderful young thing, Soltan?”
Well, it’s nice to be appreciated, I thought, if only by the man in this case.
We flew away swiftly into the glorious morning sky.
“Why can’t you leave that nice woman alone!” snarled Ske.
If I only could, I thought, gazing down at the dwindling scene. The two were hurrying toward the room I had just lost another battle in. Soon, praise the Gods, I would be safe on Earth!
PART TEN
Chapter 8
We were flying in the direction of the Apparatus hangar. But my driver was flying very badly. He had each of his hands so wound up in bandages so hugely that he was making it an excuse not to be able to control the wheelstick.
I decided this peeve of his had gone far enough. If we really had it out, it would clear the air.
“What did you tell that doctor about me?” I said.
He flew on for a bit—if you could call it flying. “You really want to know?”
“Feel free to talk,” I said. “I won’t discipline you.”
“Well, first I said that if he was going to have much to do with you, he better watch his step.”
Fine, I thought. Really pretty good, in fact.
My driver pretended to miss his grip on the wheelstick and the airbus reeled.
My suspicions were aroused. “And what else did you say? You’re in no danger.”
He took a deep breath. Then he spoke in pure venom. “I said you were a typical officer of the Apparatus: a sadistic, mean, cheap (bleepard) that would murder his mother for a hundredth of a credit!”
I hit him!
It was a good thing the communications buzzer went off.
I braced myself against the incipient spin of the airbus and picked up the instrument.
“Officer Gris?”
My blood started to congeal. I recognized the voice of Lombar Hisst’s chief clerk. I got out an acknowledgment.
“The chief says for you to get the Hells down to the hangar right this minute. He’s waiting for you.” He hung up.
My imagination went into high gear. Had Heller escaped? Had Hisst found out about the Countess Krak? Hadn’t he liked the present I’d mailed him? Had the head of Zanco talked about the ten thousand credits?
My mind boiled with fear.
My driver was grinning evilly. “You drive!” I yelled at him. “Get this wreck up to five hundred and now!” That’s the way you have to treat riffraff. I was just paying the penalty for becoming friendly with him.
No, that wasn’t it. It had all started when Heller had come on the scene. Heller corrupted everyone! He was a scourge!
And now, in all probability Heller had done something that had pulled Hisst down on me. Oh Gods, would I be glad when I had Heller off this planet and totally under my control!
What in the name of Devils had Lombar found out? What did he want?
When we landed at the hangar, I did not need the directions of the guard. There was a bilious yellow “contractor” truck sitting just inside the door. It said:
VERMIN & INSECTS
on its side. That would be Lombar. He was taking the cover of an exterminating company. He often did and it went along with his conviction that all riffraff should be done away with and, besides, he was clever. All incoming spacecraft from other worlds were supposed to get a disinfection and it permitted access to all parts of a ship without exciting suspicion.
Tug One was bustling with workers and the amount of noise was deafening. One more truck and one more crew added to it would go wholly unnoticed. But what did Lombar intend?
I scuttled over to the bilious yellow van. I had been observed from inside. The door snapped open and I was forcefully yanked within.
Lombar was sitting in the dimness on a stool. He was garbed in a bilious yellow cover suit. His flaming amber eyes glared out from under the brim of an exterminator’s helmet.
“It’s a (bleeped) good thing you sent me that ‘present’!” he snarled. “For days I’ve been considering taking you off this assignment!”
I was trembling. And this upset me more. That is the trouble with Lombar: he is not consistent. He’d forbidden me to take bribes and yet, while he must realize, despite my deception, that I had taken one, he was leaving me on because I had violated his orders . . . no, no. I was simply confused and thinking in a confused way. And it was also unjust. If he just knew all the good work I’d been putting in . . .
“You reported,” Lombar said, “that certain boxes were going aboard and I myself saw some being loaded. You are going to lead us to those boxes!”
Somebody shoved a bilious yellow cover suit at me. It said:
KILL ’EM EXTERMINATORS
on the back. I hastily struggled into it.
I saw that there were three others in the back of the van. I knew two of them. One was named Prii, an expert on opening and closing anything so that no one would know it had been touched. The second was Bam, the top-rated saboteur of the Apparatus—quite famous actually amongst the top criminals of the Confederacy. The third one was a plump scientist I did not know: but that is not unusual—the Apparatus has literally thousands of scientists in its employ, experts on the most minute trivia one has ever heard of. They, too, were in bilious yellow cover suits and helmets.
Lombar was peeking through a can’t-see-in side window. He was looking in the direction of the hangar offices. “Hah, the contractor has arrived.”
I peeked. A fancy aircar had landed and a very fat man in a very fancy suit was making his way somewhat anxiously to the office.
“Now, you little fat (bleepard),” muttered
Lombar as though to the distant contractor, “Get into your act!”
Shortly, a guard ran from the office.
Heller was working with a group of men. He had a little hull-sounding device in his hand that tests the absorption quality, the thickness of plates and security of joints. Swinging from a rope, he was going all along the side of the hull, verifying each plate. It’s what they do both before and after a new coating. He was working very quickly, tapping himself along with hull shoes, quite an athletic feat, actually. The others were recording his reads and adjusting his and their own ropes. He had his little red racing cap on the back of his head and the figures he was giving were being uttered in a continuous stream, hearable above the din.
The guard, pretty clumsy, clambered up on a staging below Heller and, yelling at the top of his voice, got attention. Heller called for a young engineer who took over Heller’s hull-sounding device and, much more slowly, began to do what Heller had been doing.
Heller slipped down his rope. He hit the pavement and trotted toward the office.
“Now fall for it, you (bleeped), rotten snob,” said Lombar as though giving orders to the distant Heller.
The newly arrived contractor was showing Heller a blueprint. Heller glanced back at the tug as though unwilling to interrupt his work. But the contractor kept at him. Heller shrugged.
The day subofficer from Snelz’s platoon and one other guard went over at Heller’s beckon. Shortly all four, the guards, contractor and Heller went out and climbed into the contractor’s limousine. It took off.
Lombar laughed a very nasty laugh. “Typical of a lousy, rotten Royal officer! Contractor comes up with some stupid problem, begs for help, says his draftsmen can’t get on unless he has expert guidance. And the Royal officer, he just thinks the world can’t get on without him. Conceited (bleepard)! Know all!” He raised his voice in a mimic, “‘Anybody need my Royal help?’” He snarled, “No wonder Voltar can’t get anyplace with the likes of him running things! I sure can read Heller right! Stupid snob!”
He opened the door and waved his arm to the rest of us. “Come on! Let’s get at that cargo!”
Carrying various pieces of exterminator equipment, we walked in a businesslike way over to the air lock and entered. No one paid any attention to us, not even the guards.
I unlatched and lifted the deckplates of the passageway and very shortly we were all down in the small, cramped hold. The last one in, Bam, the saboteur, dropped the deckplates down in place behind us. Prii, the open-close expert, pushed a glowlight up against the bulkhead so we could see.
There were sixteen cases lying there, quite long, quite tightly closed, all of them strapped securely in place for a voyage.
Prii got to work immediately. He took a quick series of pictures so he could restore things to exact position. Then he cast off the voyage clamps. Working with a little set of tools, he took the case tops off, stacking them to one side.
They were a very efficient team. The moment a case was opened, the scientist made a rapid tally of its content.
It was hot in the cramped hold. Tugs don’t have any carrying space except for their own stores. Lombar smelled bad, even to me, in these close confines. Maybe it was the slums sweating out of him, the slums he so despised. I was worried that Heller might come back unexpectedly. We seemed to be squatting there for hours.
“This is all there is?” Lombar said to me.
I thought. There were the two little cases somewhere else in the ship. But I knew what those were. I nodded.
But Lombar wasn’t looking at me. He answered his own question as usual. “Of course, it is. I’ve studied her blueprints and she hasn’t any other cargo space. I’ve gone over the work he has ordered and it’s just hull, controls and electronic nonsense. No guns. That’s good. She’s defenseless. Shoot her down with one blast.”
I shuddered. Not with me aboard, I hoped.
“Well? Well?” said Lombar impatiently to the scientist. He was obviously getting tired of sitting there and the scientist, like all scientists in conference with themselves, was pottering along, looking at an object, looking up thoughtfully and then making notes. They can look so confoundedly wise when all they’re really doing is thinking about a jolt break. Apparatus scientists are on the payroll to study the technology of the opposition and give opinions about it, not to do any real work.
They’d probably starve trying to earn a real paycheck.
Finally, the scientist finished. “The bulk of this stuff is just odds and ends: things you make repairs with like wires and capacitors and such. He must think he’s going to be remote from base and that the ship must be liable to breakdown. Spares and such. Just junk.”
Lombar grunted. His face said he would expect that of a (bleeped) fool like Heller.
“Now,” said the scientist, “boxes two, three, four and five are a different matter. They contain the essential parts to make a miniature heavy-metal conversion plant.”
I looked at them. Yes, it could be electrodes and metal crucible pans and small transformers and converters. They lay snugly in their packing, edges gleaming in the light, disturbed only enough to identify what they were.
“Hm!” said Lombar. “He thinks he is supposed to give them technology for cleaner fuel. So he is going to do something about fuel. I was very afraid of that!”
“Well, yes,” said the scientist, easing his plumpness down on a crossbeam. “But he isn’t being very clever. Blito-P3 already has atomic power. They use it to run steam engines. They have lots of uranium. They make it into bombs. Real nitwits, by the way.
“So if he thinks he is going to make any impression by trying to teach them to convert one heavy metal to another, he is very much paddling up the wrong sewer. They don’t need more uranium. They will ignore him.”
Lombar was actually listening to somebody. I was amazed. “Good. Good. We can forget about boxes two, three, four and five. I know somebody down there that will kill him if he tries it. So what’s box one?”
“Yes, box one. I see you noticed I gave it special attention. It’s box one that will give you trouble, Chief.”
I looked at it. It said:
Educational Aids Company.
DELIGHT YOUR STUDENTS EVEN IF THEY ARE CHILDREN
ENTERTAINMENT IS THE BACKBONE OF ENLIGHTENMENT.
“That’s just kiddie stuff!” sneered Lombar.
“Yes, I know, Chief. But I know your intense interest in not disturbing Earth fuels. And that particular kit is Elementary School Kit 13. It’s the complete set needed for laboratory bench-type lectures to atomically convert carbon up two atomic numbers to oxygen or carbon down five numbers to hydrogen. And, Chief, in a primitive fire society such as Blito-P3, hydrogen and oxygen are the primary fuels.”
Lombar was starting to swell up, glaring at the box as though it had called him names.
The scientist bumbled on. “On Earth they fire-ignite carbon and count on its consuming oxygen in the atmosphere. They dig up coal and drill for petroleum—that’s the carbon from old fossils turned liquid—and they fire-ignite it to produce heat. . . .”
“I know that!” snapped Lombar. “Get on with this educational kit!”
“Well, really it’s just the kiddie kit that directly converts the carbon. You must have seen them in school. They have a little converter and balloons on either side of it. The teacher pours the carbon, in any form, into the top scoop and the converter whirs away. The current generated by the released atoms goes up to those two silver rods and they pop and snap with a nice big electrical display and the two balloons fill up . . . you must have seen it in nursery school.”
“Yeah, yeah,” said Lombar. I wondered if he had ever gotten through nursery school. Science wasn’t his forte. But Lombar was thinking. “(Bleep) it, that thing could upset everything. Particularly one certain Earth person!”
“Precisely,” said the scientist. “And I know you don’t want to offend HIM!”
Bam suddenly got into the
conference. “So just let me fix it so when it’s used it blows up, kills Heller and a bunch of kids. Elementary solution to the elementary school!”
Lombar didn’t laugh at the joke. He started to nod. Then he changed his mind. “No,” he said thoughtfully. And then I saw the look of cunning creeping into his face, the cunning that made Lombar the genius that got him up to the top. “No,” he said again. “Bam, can you fix that converter so it will run for eight or ten hours and then break down so thoroughly nothing can fix it? No blowup. Just work for a few hours and then cease to work without any visible explanation?”
“There’s two of them in there,” said the scientist.
Bam, the expert saboteur, got the machines out and began to look into one of them. “Ah, yeah,” he said. “One element. With a tiny V-nick cut into its side, it will overload the adjacent elements. Every part would have to be replaced and there’d be nothing closer than Voltar where he could get the parts.” He went over and checked the scientist’s other box lists. “Yep, no such elements! This is easy, Chief. One tiny nick in each machine, they’ll run about seven hours and then turn into fused metal.”
“Do it,” said Lombar, grinning his first grin that I had seen today. “Both machines. The amount of embarrassment that can cause will finish him. That is, of course, if he gets through a few other things planned, which is impossible. So do it.”
Prii had already been restoring the other cases so they did not look touched, inside or out. He is an artist at it. Bam went busily to work.
Lombar jabbed me. “Go on outside and stall Heller if he comes back too quick. Oh, yes, remember that I have a briefing for you just before your departure. So be sure to report to me.”
I hastily lifted a passageway plate and crawled out. Carrying my exterminator spray rod, I strolled nonchalantly back to the truck. I got inside and took off the disguising helmet and got out of the bilious yellow suit.
Unnoticed, I slipped out of the truck and wandered over to the office and hung around.
Suddenly I saw the contractor limousine had landed. Heller bounced out. Lombar was not out of the ship! Heller looked like he was going to race back over!