He got himself another shot of white mule and as he sipped it, deeply sighed, “Ah, well, there he sits, deprived utterly of real professional help.”
“Well, didn’t the psychoanalysis make him sane?” I said.
“Oh, that it did,” said Crobe. “He just won’t talk. He doesn’t even say anything when they come in each day and lift him up to clean away the excrement and urine. Sane as can be. Just obstinate.”
I looked through the spaced vertical bars, but Hisst was just sitting there on the floor, yellow eyes glinting in the glowlight. He did look obstinate.
I found I was drinking another shot of white mule. I felt a sudden surge of confidence. I was willing to wager anything that Lombar Hisst would talk. I was sure he was simply waiting for an investigative reporter to come in so that he could tell the real truth about his role in Mission Earth.
I put down the canister, missing the table. I put out my hand to say goodbye but unfortunately knocked a jug of white mule over. It lay there gurgling but Crobe was examining my palm, muttering that it was significant there was no hair on it.
“Thank you for your time, Doctor Crobe,” I said. “I must be going now.”
“Pay the receptionist,” said Crobe, “but if you (bleep) her, that will be extra. However, I do not advise it. It is not that most of these receptionists at Bellevue have syphilis, since they associate with psychologists, it is that you would be departing from my professional Earth psychiatric advice. You realize that Heller came to grief solely by not following my prescription and refusing to have his limbs shortened. So don’t descend down his disastrous trail. You are clearly oral erotic, a textbook case of Freud, and your only chance of mental recovery lies in finding, as any Earth psychiatrist would verify, some good-looking boy and doing it constantly. Good day. Next patient, please!”
XIX
The guard seemed a little surprised to see me. He came forward and locked Crobe’s door. “Well, you got out of that alive,” he said.
I gestured at the other door. “Open it!” I said.
“You mean you’re going into the same room with Inmate 69,000,000,202? It says here on the record that he used to be prone to violence. See, right here on the back of the card it says, ‘Warning: he almost killed a cleaning steward once.’”
I looked at the date. It was almost seventy years ago. “Since that time,” I said grandly, “he has had decades of standard psychoanalysis.”
“What’s that weird smell?” said the guard. “Oh, it’s your breath. You didn’t drink anything he gave you, did you? Maybe I should rush you over to the hospital and have your stomach pumped!”
“Don’t infer a Crown inspector doesn’t know his business,” I said haughtily. “Open the other door!”
He shrugged, applied his opening plate and I walked in. I looked back and glared at the guard, for he was standing there with stungun ready. He shook his head, but leaving the door ajar, he walked off about thirty paces.
I looked back into the room. It was quite dark. The fumes of the spilled jug were seeping through the slotted bars making the whole place reek. Crobe was just lolling over there, drinking from a canister, more white mule.
Lombar Hisst was sitting very still. I had not realized what a very big man he was: even with his haunches on the floor, I saw the yellow eyes were level with my shoulder as I walked up to him. I stood in the path of his gaze.
Suddenly he looked straight at me.
In a perfectly normal voice, he said, “Could I have one of those puffsticks?”
Accommodatingly, glad of the time it gave me to phrase my first questions, I reached into my pocket and got out a box. I extended it.
He took one, still sitting there in quite a mannerly way. He put it in his mouth.
“Could I have a light?” he said.
I reached in my pocket again and found a firestick.
I squeezed its shaft.
It flamed.
I extended it close to the end of Hisst’s puffstick.
SUDDENLY HE SEIZED MY WRIST!
The power was bone-crunching!
With his other hand he grabbed the shaft of the falling firestick.
With a roar quite like a lepertige he surged to his feet!
He threw me with a twist, as though I were a doll, straight against the far wall!
I had not hit before he grabbed a cover from the bed.
He touched the flaming shaft to it and it burst into flame!
He swished the blanket as though it were a whip and rushed up to the bars!
He screamed as he flogged fire through the bars, “I’m sending you to HELL, you hear? I’m sending you straight down to HELL NINE, DIRECT!”
He was hitting the bars with the flaming blanket!
Gouts of fire were flying off and spraying into Crobe’s room.
“You and your psychoanalysis!” shrieked Hisst. “I’ve waited decades just for this!”
Crobe had sprung up, clutching a jug of white mule to his bony breast. He added his screeches to the din. “Keep those blasted angels on your own side of the bars!”
A gout of fire was racing now across Crobe’s floor, eating puddles of spilled white mule, spouting tongues of blue.
“No, no!” screamed Crobe. “You’re getting angels all over me!”
Lombar still lashed the bars with fire.
I found my legs and sprinted for the door.
The guard was racing up. As I exited, I hit him.
The stungun flew into a snowbank.
In a tangle of arms and legs, the guard and I went pinwheeling down the path away from the hut.
Lombar raced out.
He was wrapping the flaming blanket around him.
Spurts of blue fire were following him out of the door.
Suddenly there was an awful roar!
The jugs of white mule had blown up!
The whole roof of the hut blew wide in a geyser of red and blue.
And there went Crobe sailing skyward!
Just as the roar of the explosion died, I heard Crobe’s voice. In tones of exultation the doctor cried, “Look, I’m flying! I’m flying! I WAS AN ANGEL AFTER ALL!”
Abruptly, high in the air, carrying his white mule bomb, Crobe exploded with a tremendous BANG!
Lombar Hisst, wrapped in the burning blanket, was racing toward the far point of the cliff.
He reached the edge. He was still running. He tried to spring up in the air.
He was bellowing, “I’M GOD! I’M THE REAL GOD! MOVE OVER, YOU (BLEEPARD), SO I CAN RULE THE UNIVERSE!”
He went plunging, a blazing fireball, two thousand feet down toward the water, a spectacular arc.
He struck a piece of floating ice in a final gout of bursting flame!
He slid off to be crushed in the thundering surf against the cliff, a charred and roasted nothing, ground to pieces in the cold, green sea.
Crobe and Lombar Hisst were very, very dead.
XX
I promised Neht I’d hush the matter up.
I did not tell him I would not put it in this book. I am an investigative reporter. I have learned fast at my trade. Lying to get access is a key technique of that profession—with cheating here and there and a dash of misrepresentation. For what are lies to the riffraff when I can bring the truth to you, dear reader? You should be grateful to me for becoming so adept at my chosen profession. Bob Hoodward, I assure you, could not have practiced better.
And so I sailed off southward with Shafter at the controls. I was going to make one last visit to Hightee Heller: I had to check something very vital to these revelations.
With a stopover at a northern hostel so I could recover from a mysterious headache and spots before my eyes, and where I could also dress the next morning in something more suitable than singed snow clothes, we came at last to the landing target of Hightee Heller’s home in Pausch Hills.
I did not wait for any attendant to appear. I knew the place now and so just walked in.
I sa
w a butler shortly, a very big man, sitting in a hall polishing silver. I said, “Inform Hightee that Monte Pennwell is here to talk with her.”
He went off and so I wandered. I was looking for, perhaps, a correspondence room where she would have her letters: just a few moments alone with her personal files might be very rewarding.
The door to the art salon was open. I saw another door to a room beyond it: that might be the correspondence room. An investigative reporter must not even heed the meaning of privacy. I glanced over my shoulder. No one was watching me. I began to cross the art salon.
Here was where Hightee Heller kept many of her gifts. People sent them to her from all over, even today. It was a sort of museum but I wasn’t interested in that.
I was just passing a table in the middle of the vast room when my eye chanced to catch the writing on a card. I stopped right there!
Somebody had taken the interplanetary shipping wrappers off. The card said:
HAPPY HIGHTEE HELLER DAY
With Love
Jettero
IT WAS THE SAME BOX I HAD SEEN HIM CARRYING ON MANCO!
Apparently it had been delayed in shipment from that planet.
I hastily glanced around. Any clue was worth investigating. No one was in sight. I stepped to the table.
Evidently a footman had prepared it so that all Hightee had to do was remove the ribbon and top cover, making it easy for her to receive and examine whatever it was.
The box itself was quite large: it was covered in a crinkly gold paper the like of which I had never seen before. The ribbon was two inches wide and ended in a huge rosette. Very foreign looking.
It took me only an instant to remove the ribbon and the cover.
I took some packing paper out and then didn’t know what I was looking at. There was a horizontal round ring suspended five inches above a wider base. From the ring, each separately wrapped in paper, hung a dozen figurines, apparently made of glass.
In the center of the base was set a green rectangular box but the rest of the base was blue and totally transparent. Taped to the bottom of that base and partially seen through it was a slip of paper, printed, with writing on it, like an invoice from a store.
THE LETTERING!
Had I seen it before?
Oh, any clue was welcome.
I MUST HAVE THAT PIECE OF PAPER!
To get it, I had to remove the strange device from the box.
I started to lift it. I had underestimated its weight from the ease with which Heller had carried it.
I struggled to get it removed. It kept catching on the wrappings. Finally, I wrestled it over to the center of the table top, knocking the wrappings and box to the floor as I did so. But at least I had it sitting there.
I ignored the strangeness of the gadget. My task now was to lift its edge up and get at that taped paper.
There were some levers around the edge. In lifting it, I must have touched one. The thing went CLICK!
I clawed at the tape under it—what strange stuff, transparent and sticky. I had to use my fingernail.
AHA! I HAD THE PAPER!
The edge of the platform, when I released it, hit the table with a thump.
The ring began to turn!
THE THING BEGAN TO PLAY A TUNE!
I went into a panic that the noise might be overheard.
I stared at it. Then I grabbed one of the levers on the edge and yanked it.
IT PLAYED LOUDER!
The ring went faster!
The paper sleeves flew off the figurines. They were glass dancers!
They were turning in a circle now and dancing to the music.
YE GODS, BUT THAT WAS LOUD!
Frenziedly, I yanked up and down on the levers!
ANYTHING TO STOP IT!
IT WENT FASTER!
The dancers were now whirling madly.
Their glass toes, which had sounded like small bells, were now more like high-pitched gongs!
I gave one more yank at the levers.
It was too much.
The figurines suddenly flew away, sundered from the ring.
They sailed through the air.
They shattered with small tinkles on the floor!
The whole device let out a vibrating WHAM!
A yellow spring flew out of it and hit me in the face!
A voice!
The butler!
“WHAT IN BLAZES ARE YOU UP TO?”
He grabbed me by the collar!
He lugged me to the door.
He pitched me, seat first, onto the landing target!
I lit on my butt with a skid and a puff of dust.
The butler’s voice again. He was standing in the door, dusting off his hands.
“Monte Pennwell, do not land here anymore!” he said.
Actually, I had been misled: I had believed they did not have any security here. But who needed it, with that butler around!
I did not know if this was Hightee’s message. Never mind, relentless investigative reporter that I was, I had what I had come for!
I could even ignore Shafter’s amazed look.
XXI
We flew at once to the Royal Institute of Ethnology. I raced to the Department of Unconquered Planets.
I was in luck: a junior assistant professor there was familiar with my family name. I promised him advancement I knew very well I could never effect, if he would translate the paper. He was naïve enough to accept.
They have machines and dictionaries there and all sorts of contrivances for decipherment of alphabets and meanings, anything short of an outright military code.
It took him only two days and I sit now in my tower study with the translation before me. It says:
TIFFANY’S
FIFTH AVENUE
New York, New York
Customer: General Jerome Terrance Wister (Retired),
US Army Reserve
Address: 5606 Central Park West
Charge to: Grabbe-Manhattan Bank
co Israel Epstein III
President
One Antique Glass Animated Dancer Music Box
Eighteenth Century, Venetian
21,000.00
Note: No Credit Card Necessary
And the date is ONLY THREE WEEKS AGO!
ANOTHER MONSTROUS COVERUP!
With a viewer-phone call I just made ten minutes ago to the Reliable Spacetug Building Company, I learned that ten years after his return from Earth and one week after he had received Izzy Epstein’s letter, Heller commissioned the construction of an exact duplicate of Tug One, even down to the phantom duellist in its gym. He paid for it himself—and how easy that was, since, as Duke of Manco, he received one percent of its huge annual revenues, the usual remuneration for a duke but quite enough to buy ten such tugs a month. According to the old chief engineer at Reliable, now retired and garrulous with age (and who had been very proud of the job they did on it—“all gold, silver and jewels, ran like a watch”), they built it in three months (a record), loaded it with digging disintegrator tools (note that), test-flew it and then Heller “took it on a shakedown cruise that lasted three weeks.” The tug has long been the pride of the company, for it is nearly indestructible and is in service right up to today. “He uses it to jink around the Confederacy planets: a powerful man in his position has to be in a lot of places fast, and even though many think it eccentric to use those monster Will-be Was main drives just to get home for a weekend from Voltar to Manco, it makes good sense.”
Little does he know!
Probably feeling sorry for “poor Izzy” and his friends, it is vivid now that Heller went and dug him out a new Earth base, probably in one of the hills near the roadhouse in Connecticut, less than an hour’s easy drive from the Empire State Building or the condo. He’s probably got the descendants of Connecticut deputy sheriffs Ralph and George still thinking they are part of the Maysabongo Marines and drawing the corrupted payoff of their fathers as they watch the old bootlegging roadhous
e for him.