The lead assassin pilot was standing there in his garish and deadly dress with an angry face and a shaking gun!
Faht Bey was running around flapping and perspiring.
I came in through the entrance from my office. I instantly drew my own blastick. You never go unarmed amongst such people in the most peaceful times and this looked like war!
Faht Bey saw me. He screamed, “Officer Gris! By the sacred Devils! Order these assassin pilots to desist!”
I hadn’t said a word. But the lead assassin pilot shouted at me. “You have no authority over us!” And one of his copilots trained a gun on me!
“Officer Gris!” wailed Faht Bey. “They claim they are going to shoot technicians one by one until they find the culprit!”
The five Antimancos were off to the side. I fingered the star which hung around my neck. Maybe I could get them to charge the assassin pilots.
I realized I might be in the line of fire. I said hastily, “What’s this all about?” Better temporize.
“Sabotage and attempted murder!” shouted the lead assassin pilot. I thought, a fine one he was to be talking about murder. That was his trade.
He turned his slate-hard eyes on me. “Maybe you had a hand in this!”
“You’d better tell me what ‘this’ is,” I said, putting a bold face on it and hoping my voice didn’t quaver.
He pointed a red glove at the technicians. “One of those (bleepards) messed up our ships!” His face was as red as the explosion insignia on his collar. “They rigged it with cross wires! If we had pressed a gun trigger to do our duty, our own ship would have blown up! That’s murder and willful destruction of Apparatus property!”
I could see why he was mad. He wouldn’t be able to do his duty and shoot down the tug. But I walked over to the technicians.
“What do you know about this?” I said severely.
They were chalk-faced. The repair chief said, “Nothing! Those two gunships are locked! We are never allowed aboard.”
I turned to the assassin pilot. “There, you see? They didn’t do it.”
He stamped up close to me. “Then WHO did?” He grabbed my tunic front. “You? Yes. You’ll be riding in that tug. You could be trying to save your own neck at government expense!”
My blastick was accidentally against his stomach. He backed up. “Threatening me, are you?” He caught sight of the Antimancos standing in a group in front of the tug. “Maybe you ordered them to do it!”
The Antimanco captain came forward. Bless Captain Stabb! “I haven’t received any orders from Officer Gris.”
The assassin pilot turned on him. “You’d lie even if you did! You’re the ones that will be riding in that tug if we have to shoot it down! And now you are going on a trip!”
Captain Stabb said, “The ship is disabled for outer space. It can only travel on its auxiliaries within the solar system. It is bugged and you can find it. So what’s the scream?”
Bless him!
“Then,” said the assassin pilot, “I have no choice but to shoot technicians one by one until I get the answer. And if I finish with them and still no clue, I’ll start on your crew!”
Faht Bey screamed, “Officer Gris! They’ll paralyze the base if they shoot all the technicians! You won’t be able to move with that tug if they shoot your tug crew! Please, by the fervent Gods, THINK OF SOMETHING!”
Well, I could see he had a point there.
Captain Stabb said, “The only one that isn’t here now that was here when the two cannon ships arrived was that Royal officer!”
Inspiration came to me!
I said to the assassin pilot, “Oh, this wasn’t done just today? Have you inspected your guns since you arrived?”
“No, why should I? My target is that tug. It hasn’t moved!”
“You only inspected your ships when you thought they might be called into action by the movement of the tug?” I said.
“Yes!” the assassin pilot snapped at me.
“Oh,” I said. “That accounts for everything! Now, that Royal officer is really a Crown inspector so I didn’t think anything of it. But I observed him enter and leave both of your cannon ships shortly after you came.”
“What?” screamed the assassin pilot. “And you didn’t report it?”
“Well, he’s a Crown inspector. Has orders to shoot all of you. He was snooping into everything, all your private affairs. And I knew you’d inspect everything before you flew.”
“That Royal officer? The tall one with the blond hair?”
“And blue eyes,” I said. “The very one.”
I turned to the assembled hangar and base personnel. I said loudly, “I am very sorry that a crime of sabotage by that Royal officer put you all in danger of your lives. But you can relax. Obviously he did it. So that is all there is to it. You’d better remember to shoot him on sight if you see him again. He is a threat to your lives.”
“The Royal officer,” they whispered.
“That god (bleeped) Royal officer,” said the assassin pilots.
“You can always count on a blasted Royal officer to make trouble!” said Captain Stabb.
Having established unanimous agreement that Heller ought to be killed on sight, I smiled at them. “Now that we have decided upon our course of action if he ever shows up again at this base, shall we get back to work?”
They drifted off.
The cream of the jest was, I was right. I was quite certain it had been Heller. That his action might have included his saving my life as well did not enter into it.
After that phone call, there was some chance he might show up here. Well, I’d taken care of that. Whatever else happened, he would never leave this planet alive. That was for sure!
Those angry and vengeful faces were a balm to my suffering! Now somebody else besides me and Lombar were frothing at Heller!
PART TWENTY-TWO
Chapter 4
In the crew salon in the tug, Captain Stabb gazed on me admiringly. “You sure handled that to perfection, Officer Gris.” And his little black button eyes gleamed with good comradeship.
“It wasn’t anything,” I said. “Now let’s get down to business.” I pulled out a Voltar Fleet grid of the planet and some US Geological Survey charts and pinpointed for him exactly where we would land.
“And then we kill him?” said Captain Stabb.
“That is not positive,” I said.
“We torture him first?”
“Captain Stabb, I really think we understand each other. But we have a problem. He has something I have to get. If we don’t get it this time, we will get it later.”
“Oh,” he grumbled to himself. Then he brightened. “But as soon as you get it, we kill him.”
“Right.”
“Right!” he said.
“Our strategy is to keep him lulled, give him no warning. Make him think we are cooperating.”
“That’s wise,” said Stabb. “Then he can be gotten in the back.”
“Right,” I said. “Now, he wants those boxes down in the hold. It might be I don’t get what I want this trip and we may have to deliver them. But if we do, I want to sabotage the shipment.”
“I thought it was sabotaged,” said Stabb.
Ah, Lombar had briefed him. “Well,” I said, “not really enough. He is very tricky and dishonest.”
“All Royal officers are,” said Stabb. “Excepting present company, of course, meaning you.”
“Well, actually,” I said, “I never made it. They sent me to the Apparatus instead.”
“You’re not a Royal officer?”
“No,” I said, telling the truth. “Just a Secondary Executive of the Apparatus.”
He reached across and pumped my hand. “You’re a good man, Officer Gris.” Warmth flowed through the crew salon.
“The problem is,” I said, “how to get Box Number 5 out of that hold.”
“The hold and floorplates are locked tight!”
“I was hoping you knew
of a way. We’re going to remove it completely.”
He thought. He called for one of the two engine subofficers. They left. They came back.
Captain Stabb said, “There’s a small engine-room escape hatch. It’s mandatory in construction. You can get one man through it. It exits into the lower hold. It bypasses all his deckplate seals. In flight, the deckplates, in theory, would not be locked. One would drop from the engine room down into the hold and out through the deckplates in case of an overheat that fused the main engine-room doors. The Fleet does silly things like that.”
A few minutes later I was in the hold. I played a light around. The boxes were all there, neatly lashed. Box Number 5 was just as I remembered it—on top.
I let them do the work. And it was a lot of work. We had to unpack the box piece by piece. It contained a lot of heavy pans, mostly. We passed these up into the engine room and out—or rather they did. Then we sawed the box up and passed the pieces out.
It was at this point I went to work. I got rid of every scrap of debris and packing that had drifted around. I retied every knot that secured the boxes. I even made Captain Stabb inspect. There was no trace of Box Number 5 left in that hold.
We got all the debris out of the ship and disintegrated it. I buried the heavy pans in the bottom of an old detention cell.
“What are you going to tell him?” said Stabb. “In case, that is, we don’t get to kill him.”
“That it was never loaded. Simplicity is best.”
“You’re a wonder,” said Stabb. “What were those things?”
“I don’t know. But I’m sure he does. And it will put an awful crimp in any plans he has.”
“You really are a wonder,” said Stabb.
I hung around for a bit. The Antimancos seemed to be taking a lot of pleasure in fixing things up so Heller’s suspicions would be lulled. They were removing the tiniest bits of dust, eradicating every smudge, inside and out. The actions were quite foreign to their natural bent—they mostly laid around and shot dice or drank. But now there was a sort of glee around them. They were creating the atmosphere which they were certain would disabuse a Royal officer of suspecting he was about to be stabbed in the back.
They couldn’t get into the rear of the ship, of course, but Heller would not expect that. But anything he could see would be shining.
“We want,” said Stabb, “a new uniform issue, all of us. We’ll look like a perfect crew. And we’ll want a new personal weapons issue, of course.”
I stamped it gladly.
All was going along well there so I went back to my secret room. I wanted to be very sure that Heller wasn’t laying any booby traps for us at his end.
But Heller was simply having breakfast in his suite and having a second chocolate sundae while he read a G-2 manual entitled The Handling of the Trained Spy. The interference was off, for a change, as it often was in the morning. The diplomats didn’t seem to want to relive their youth under the carbon arc at that time of the day.
He was on a chapter named “The Case Officer’s Dilemma.” He was eating his sundae so I got a chance to read some of it without still-framing it on the second viewer. It seemed that spies often had personal intentions of their own. These included their reasons for being spies in the first place. They wanted personal revenge or wealth for their own purposes. And the case officer, which is their term for a handler, had to accommodate these personal ambitions and take advantage of them where possible.
Well, that was all kindergarten stuff. Naturally a spy had personal ambitions. It didn’t mention that the case officer might have them also. Take my case: wealth and power covered it.
Then he was onto a subsection. It was entitled “Love, The Case Officer’s Worst Enemy.” It seemed that love was a very dangerous thing. When you sent a spy to some country, away from a lady love, he would sometimes just give the job a brushoff or turn in any old thing in order to get home.
It also covered the danger of a spy falling in love with an enemy agent and turning into a double agent. But that was of no interest to me.
I got to pondering this dangerous thing called love. In my own case, there was no menace in that direction. Utanc would simply never talk to me again, that was certain. And my heart was heavy about it.
But Heller, now, that was a different matter. He had been in love with the Countess Krak. In fact, he had even delayed his departure because of it. But he wasn’t following the pattern laid down in the textbook. He was not skimping his job, (bleep) him. He was plowing right along on it.
The trouble with Heller was that he was inconsistent with the textbooks. Obviously, as I looked at it, he was planning to do his job fully and then go home, whereas, by the text, he should be skimping his job and rushing home. There was just no accounting for the man at all!
I idly speculated on all the ramifications of this. If he would just slow down and poke along and skimp his job, I would have nothing to worry about.
But in any event, I at last had some kind of a solution in progress.
If all went well, he would very shortly be dead. I would forge reports on and on and the whole thing could be strung out for years.
In spite of the leaden feeling I had about Utanc, some small hope was stirring in me.
PART TWENTY-TWO
Chapter 5
In the first pitch-black dark of October second, we ascended through the optical illusion and rose far above the planet.
Ringing in my ears was the last warning from the assassin-pilot leader, “We’re tracking your bug with a temporary satellite that went up three hours ago. At the first hint that you’re leaving the vicinity of Blito-P3, up we come and down you go, on fire. We can catch you before this tug can get up to speed. And you are not armed. We will be watching you. Be smart. Don’t try anything.”
So I took no joy in the flight. I wouldn’t anyway. Space travel, even a local jump, makes me nervous.
Captain Stabb let the dark band on the surface drift along directly below us. It would be seven hours and I simply should have lain down on a gimbal bed and had a sleep. But I was too jumpy.
Unlike Heller, I am not a religious person. I knew too much about psychology to really believe in anything but crude matter. But in my childhood I had been exposed to it by the more decent people around me, and now and then I would suffer a lapse and feel some need to pray. I did tonight.
The strategy was all worked out. Captain Stabb assured me there would be no hitches. But an awful lot depended upon this. If Heller were actually to get loose and start accomplishing things, he could utterly smash Lombar’s connections, wreck the best-laid plans for Voltar and completely block, without knowing he was doing it, Lombar’s rise to the rule of all Voltar. There were tremendous stakes here. Even for me. I hardly dared speculate on what I myself would do when I became the head of all the Apparatus. For it would be an Apparatus greatly strengthened beyond even what it was now.
One thing sure. There were a lot of people I would order killed at once!
But there was one flaw in all this planning. And he was sitting down there ahead, waiting with a report to send. If that report gave me the platen . . .
I must have dozed off. Captain Stabb was shaking me by the shoulder. “I don’t think the landing is safe.”
I left my cabin and went with him to the flight deck. He pointed at the screens. He had everything turned on. Even the steel plates that cut off the eyeball-view ports were closed. Pirates take no chances.
We were about two hundred miles straight up. It was about seven in the evening of a very black autumn night.
New York lay about thirty miles to the south of our position, a vast spread of lights. One could see the planes taking off and landing at La Guardia and, further off, John F. Kennedy International Airport. The planes looked like tiny fireflies. The skyscrapers of Manhattan were clearly outlined. There was the Empire State Building! Izzy probably busy! There was the UN, and nearby, one of those high-rises must be the Gracious Palms, proba
bly busy.
To the northeast, scattered like small sheets of light on a black velvet cloth, lay Bridgeport, Danbury, New Haven and, further away, Hartford. It was a crystal clear night.
Directly below us it was black as pitch, a hole of lightlessness.
A call-in receiver was beeping in the panel. Its grid showed the signal was coming from directly below.
I looked at Stabb. I had seen nothing alarming. But he was the accomplished smuggler and pirate.
“Watch,” he said. He turned a dial to shift a screen to a different part of the spectrum. He pushed a button and let it enlarge the picture.
There was a police car sitting beside the road. The road was just east of our destination.
“Trap,” said Stabb.
I laughed. “That’s where they hang out,” I said. “They’re sheriff’s men. Deputy sheriffs. That’s a speed trap, not a trap for us.”
“You sure?”
“If that Royal officer is down below us, he has probably conned them into seeing nothing. But they won’t see anything anyway as we’re not going to blueflash. Their names are George and Ralph.”
“Devils!” said Stabb. “How’d you know that?”
“It’s safe to land. They won’t see anything.”
“On your orders,” said Stabb, giving the usual Apparatus half protest.
Down we went!
The New Haven Submarine Base radar indicated on our hull. They would get no blip back.
A hundred feet up, our pilot laid the tug horizontal. He scanned the ground with a screen. “Not even a sharp rock,” he said.
We settled into place.
The second engineer was out through the air lock like a shot. He scanned the area for living things.
A hot spot.
It was Heller!
He came walking up. He stood in the glow from the air lock. He wasn’t even disguised. He had on workman’s coveralls, dark blue. He wasn’t wearing his baseball cap and he wasn’t even wearing those deadly spikes!
I saw he had no gun in his hand. He thought he was amongst friends, the fool. So I met him at the port.
He nodded to me and to Stabb. He went down the passageway and knelt. He unlocked the floorplates to the hold.