“Hey,” he yelled back to her down the long passage, “Where’d you put it?”
“Just inside the air lock.” Her voice was very distant, distorted in transmission.
“I’ll ask the sentry,” he yelled back.
Views of all parts of the air lock. Then a determined spin of wheels and the air lock door.
Whatever I expected to happen, I didn’t expect the result!
The screen flashed blue white! Total overload!
The hangar sounds roared up to a din.
And Heller’s voice: it almost caved in my eardrums! “WHERE’S THE RIFLE?”
The sound came out of the speaker like a physical blow!
It almost made the roof of my room blow off!
I fought my way to the controls. I turned every manual knob I could see down to nearly off!
The hangar noises still sounded like a battle. The screen was still white!
I tried to think in the midst of the uproar.
There was a new uproar, local. Feet were pounding up the stairs.
I had everything as low as I could get it!
I grabbed the 831 ten-thousand-mile Relayer, snatched it out of the line and turned it off.
Suddenly I had the most beautiful clear picture of the hangar you ever wanted to see. Brilliant in the minutest detail! And that hangar is dimly lit!
The sentry was trotting back toward the ship. He was carrying a blastrifle. “Snelz had it taken over to have it polished for the review.” His voice was clear and natural. I even recognized which guardsman it was by voice tone alone!
Jet took it, “Thanks, guardsman.”
What quality!
It was just as if he were right here in the room!
There was something else coming in the room. Meeley finished pounding my door down and planted herself before me, fists on hips, furious.
“You get that rifle out of my house this instant!” Oh, Meeley was mad! “You know I don’t allow rifles or explosives! Especially in your hands, Gris!” Oh, she was mad.
“It’s the Homeview,” I pleaded timidly. “I had it up too high!”
“Humph!” said Meeley and slapped me in the face. She flounced out. The door banged shut so hard it almost knocked the wall down.
I rubbed the sting off my cheek and turned back to the viewscreen.
It was dead.
There was no sound.
Spurk ought to be shot! His equipment was inconsistent, sporadic! He should have said so in the directions. But then, I remembered, I hadn’t read them.
I turned all manual volumes full on and then in despair, added the 831 Relayer. You had to be an electronics technician to run this stuff!
I had my picture and sound back, fuzzy and poor.
Then it hit me. That (bleeped) tug was totally painted with absorbo-coat paint! No known waves could get through it. And I was actually activating the respondo-mitter and audio-respondo-mitter through a waveproof ship!
There was nothing like absorbo-coat on Earth. So it was all right!
I watched the Countess going through a manual of arms I had never seen before. It included giving the rifle butt a kick that sent it spinning into the air on one side and then a kick with the other boot that sent it spinning on the other side. Fleet Marine stuff, I guessed.
They got to spinning the rifle back and forth between them. I couldn’t follow it, it was going so fast. I found myself wishing the safety was off.
They were laughing. Finally the Countess caught the rifle and came to present arms. “So I’m all ready for the review.”
What review? I puzzled. Certainly the Countess Krak was not going to be in any review!
Heller said, “I can leave at noon, day after tomorrow.”
She became sad. He put his arm around her and they wandered to the salon. They sat down on a couch, side by side.
All of a sudden the Countess put her arms around him and her head on his chest and started crying quietly.
After a while, she said, “I’m going to miss you so.”
He held her close. His voice was attempting encouragement. “I’ll do the mission very, very fast. Honest I will.” After a little he said, “Mainly, I’m concerned about you.”
Suddenly he held her away from him. There was a catch in his voice but a bitter determination, “If anybody harms you while I am gone, I will kill them!”
She was still crying. But she nodded at him and then said, “That goes both ways!”
A chill hit me. They hadn’t said it very loudly. But there was a firm intention in it that meant exactly what it said. If anyone hurt the other, the offender was dead.
I didn’t want to look or listen anymore. I hastily shut the equipment off.
I needed something to distract me, quick. I didn’t want to think what could happen to me if they found out my real intentions.
I had information. I knew when the tug could leave.
I fled from the room.
At a message center at the corner, I got a connection to Lombar’s chief clerk and, in code, imparted the information that the scheduled departure of Mission Earth was day after tomorrow at noon.
When I started up the stairs, Meeley was blocking the way. She screamed at me, “Don’t you ever bring no more rifles into my house! Of all the tenants I have ever had, you, Soltan Gris, are easily the most . . .” It went on and on. All of it false. Her tenants were Apparatus officers. They were none of them different than any others, including me and she knew it.
Safely in my room again and the door bolted and barricaded, I caressed the bugging equipment. It certainly worked. I had no doubts at all I could run Heller from Turkey.
I got to thinking of the late Spurk. It was an awfully good thing he was dead. I was a benefactor of the race. Suppose this kind of stuff got installed in everybody! Even I shuddered at the thought.
PART ELEVEN
Chapter 5
When I got the call the next evening, even though he had told me he wanted to see me twenty-four hours before departure, I felt scared. When summoned to see Lombar, one never knew what he was being invited to: his own funeral or somebody else’s.
Sometimes he was pleasant, sometimes so agitated you felt he was going to fly apart in screaming bits.
All day I had been sort of putting the idea aside that he might send for me. I had occupied myself with last-minute bits. Heller had told me in the morning of the approximate departure time and I had to pretend I didn’t know already. All day he was busy making tests of recently refurbished or installed equipment, always at the center of a boil of contractors. It had all made me very nervous.
Food trucks had been coming and going, putting supplies aboard. When Heller asked me where the crew was and how many there would be, I couldn’t tell him as I didn’t know—Lombar hadn’t told me. So I said I would put stores aboard for the number of bunks and stamped food orders to that effect. Enough food and drink for a crew of eleven and two passengers for two years was what I put down. It was a silly purchase—he wouldn’t be around anywhere near that long. I charged it off to necessary deception.
Even before noon I had gotten sort of nervous around the ship. I tried to take refuge in a retreat to the Blixo but Bolz wasn’t aboard. I drove off on some unnecessary errands and even went to my office and stamped things for a while. But old Bawtch was making so many nasty cracks about how pleasant it would be around there shortly with me gone that I even retreated from my office.
So I was in no real shape for an interview with Lombar when, about seven that evening, two Apparatus guards loomed up outside my room door and beckoned. One always tries to read something in their faces: one notes how they are carrying their rifles—on sling or at ready. But it really tells you nothing. So, with no inkling as to the temper of the coming meeting, I found myself further unsteadied by being taken, not to his town office and not to Spiteos, but outside the city. I had no idea where we were going or why.
At length, the patrol van in which we had been rid
ing stopped and the exit panel flew up. A black bulk stood near us in an open field.
It was a type of ship called, by the Fleet, “the gun.” Its proper name is “Spacebattle Mobile Flying Cannon.” It holds two pilots, it has regular warp-drives and it carries the largest caliber blastcannon made. It has no frills, no comforts: it is just that, a gun. And that gun can wrap a whole planet into a ball of flame.
I knew this ship. Ordinarily it was hidden in the underground hangar near Spiteos. It was Lombar’s own ship. He had illegally and secretly modified a Fleet version long ago. This one, unlike the standard model, was armored so well that no ground defenses and not even a battleship could knock it down. It made it slower, it reduced its interplanetary range, but it made it the most dangerous weapon in the Voltarian Confederacy. I had heard that from time to time he took it out and flew it, usually at night, baffling normal surveillance with a perversion of return responses.
The guards simply gave me a boost up into the underbelly entrance lock and I climbed in the dark to find myself, still in the dark, in the two-man control deck. I groped to the copilot seat I knew must be there but before I could even buckle myself in, the engines throbbed and the ship took off. For all I knew, anybody could have been at the controls, even a Manco Devil!
“I am going to let you in on a secret. I am taking you to where you can hear something that will convince you.” It was Lombar’s voice from the pilot seat. At least it wasn’t a Manco Devil. But, on the other hand, a Manco Devil might be more trustworthy.
We were gaining in altitude. One of the twin moons of Voltar was just rising, spreading a greenish hued and long-shadowed light across the ground below. As we turned, the beams struck through the heavy-armored windscreen and eerily lit the control deck. Yes, it was Lombar. He was wearing no helmet so we must not be going far.
He seemed in a friendly if somewhat covert mood. “I found the leak, you know. The one to the press the night Heller was seized. I had a man being followed. He didn’t suspect it. It took a lot of work but we finally saw him and a reporter bump into each other on the street. They didn’t pass anything but it was enough. “The reporter was Blat Mortif. He wasn’t the one who wrote the article but, of course, reporters have friends. You’ll never guess who leaked it. The Knife Section man that acted the part of the Fleet orderly, the one that was so clumsy he let Heller break his wrist. Of course, he denied it. But you can’t trust anybody these days. They’re all against us, plotting, plotting, plotting.
“So last night we had Blat Mortif picked up and he denied everything so we had to pick up his wife. He finally broke down. So the Knife Section man, the reporter and his wife were all executed. I knew you were concerned about it so I thought I had better tell you. One has to get rid of traitors and people who talk too much. They’re riffraff anyway.”
I not only had not been concerned, I had completely forgotten about it. Further, I knew of many ways the press could have learned of Heller’s mission: even Fleet Intelligence knew. And also, the press had never mentioned any kidnapping. I wondered why Lombar was telling me. But then Lombar lives in a secret world of his own.
We were not flying very fast. We were not very high. He had not even turned on internal air. The green, long-shadowed moonlight turned the world below into a weird panorama.
Abruptly, Lombar, a sort of greenish shadow close by, began a sort of singsong lecture, like an Academy professor. “Any successful revolution or successful coup d’etat requires that the revolutionaries possess an operating or supply base beyond the reach of the forces they seek to overthrow. Without such a base, one cannot overthrow an existing regime.”
Yes, yes. That was elementary. If a revolutionary did not have a point beyond the knowledge or control of the regime they were attacking, a place from which they could secretly operate, a revolution normally failed. Textbook.
“You,” said Lombar, dropping his professorial role and becoming harsh, “are now in full control of that base and its supplies. You must not fail in your duty to me.”
I was a little heartened. I thought I knew now what this eerie and secret night ride was all about: a briefing to me as a mission handler that could not be overheard. I knew already that Blito-P3 was the unwitting and secret base outside the control of Voltar. I had always thought it an amusing role for a stupid and primitive planet. It had always been a source of private amusement to me. The dumb twits.
Lombar’s hands darted to the automatic position switches and there was a series of clicks which cut in the complex navigational systems of “the gun” so that she would go to and hold on exact coordinates. Freed of flying, he leaned back.
The gun steadied down, the engines dropped to an inaudible pitch. I knew where we were now.
Only a few miles away and a few thousand feet below lay Palace City. Visibly, it is simply a hole in the landscape. The mountain behind it and the vast array of palaces are enwrapped in the effects of a gigantic space warp. The black hole in the mountain makes it invisible and this in turn causes Palace City to be invisible. Shielded against unwanted radiation, the whole area is thirteen minutes in the future.
It is utterly impregnable. Nobody can attack it. It simply isn’t there. For nearly a hundred and twenty-five thousand years, it had defied all assaults. You can’t shoot up a not-there-in-now.
Many stellar empires hide their central government on asteroids to put them out of reach of enemy and popular attack. It has its points but you can trace ships to it. Voltar’s Emperor could not be touched by any combat means ever evolved. It made the Voltarian Confederacy one of the strongest governments in any galactic history.
There lay the nothingness, surrounded all about by a moonlit landscape. It always made me nervous. It wasn’t wholly that that mountain could blow up someday when its mass imbalanced too far, it was that it represented such awesome might within its secret glove.
Lombar was fiddling with the gun’s fire controls. Even a weapon as heavy as this ship carried was of no avail here. But his twitching fingers increased my unease.
“See that?” said Lombar. And I was thankful when he took his hand off the weapon triggers and gestured. Of course, there was nothing to see. “The Lords there in their fine robes are plotting against me.”
I could agree with that. The Apparatus must make them quite nervous at times even though they thought of it as their own tool.
Lombar swept his hand in a wider gesture. “The people of this and every other Voltarian planet are just lying in wait to rise up and kill me.”
Oh, I could surely agree with that. The way the Apparatus hated them and abducted them and slaughtered them, they undoubtedly were lying in wait.
Lombar sighed, an executive with many burdens. “So, I know you will agree, Soltan, that the only possible solution is to seize control of Palace City and the power of the throne. And then, with that, properly use the authority to slaughter the people.”
I knew these were his plans. I had always thought them a bit drastic.
He must have sensed my reservations. “I am the only one brilliant enough and strong-willed enough to take over. The Lords are weak. The people are riffraff. It is my duty.”
He nodded, firmly agreeing with himself. Then, “So the problem is to take over Palace City.”
Nobody had ever done it. It was considered impossible.
Lombar was fishing in his tunic pocket. “But we have our supply base on Blito-P3. And we have our weapons.”
He took out a bottle of pills and dropped it on the gun control ledge in front of him. I knew the bottle. Its label said:
IG BARBEN, PHARMACEUTICAL
NEW YORK
The eerie Voltar moonlight glinted on the label so far from home. Methedrine, a powerful amphetamine.
He took out a cellophane package of white powder. Turkish heroin. By its number, part of the last Blixo shipment, now safely stored in Spiteos. The moonlight made it greenish, like dried venom.
He gestured to them with his hand. “Thes
e are our artillery.” He smiled. “And violent ammunition it is. The higher nervous systems of Voltar populations react to it five times over and above the Earth reaction.”
He turned to me, his face very serious. “So that is why you must keep Blito-P3 under control. You must keep the ammunition coming. These weapons take a while to work. Months, years. We can keep firing and we can wait.
“Above all, we must maintain our monopoly. Chemists here might learn to synthesize this. In producing heroin, the basic morphine is very garish to grow and easy to spot. But still there is a danger we could lose the monopoly before we have addicted the Lords and robbed the people of their will to resist. I have other plans to handle this here, but you are going to make sure the Blito-P3 base is secure to us.”
A pleading note crept into his voice. All this meant much to him, Lombar, the slum-raised sewer rat, any Lord rank far beyond his reach. “When I am Emperor, you, Soltan, will be the head of the Apparatus.”
It made me uneasy. Just to listen to this talk could bring torture and execution. And the eerie moonlight made it worse.
Then he got serious. “This upstart (bleepard) Heller threatened all that. By a stupid fluke, he got into the scene. He doesn’t even suspect what he threatens. But whatever happens, you must make certain that he does not succeed in tampering in any way with Blito-P3!”
The mention of Heller had brought out his aggressiveness. He glared at the invisibility of Palace City. “Those blundering idiots down there are stupid enough to place their confidence in Heller! Little do they know that I can outfight, outfly a dozen Hellers!”
Before I could get truly alarmed, he began to laugh. It didn’t have any amusement in it. He turned to me and patted my knee. “That was a terrific trick, Soltan. Ah, you are a sly one. I can choose men well. Only you would ever have thought of loosing that rotten whore on him, the Countess Krak!”
I went cold. He knew!
“Clever, clever. Keeping him under control by using a murdering prostitute. Almost as good as some of the things I work out. There was every chance she’d kill him. Too bad she hasn’t.” He laughed over it.