My driver was fumbling in his tunic. He got something out. “Look, he paid me the two credits I spent and he gave me twenty credits for all the work I did running about and all. So here’s yours.”
He was holding a five-credit note in front of my nose.
I decided instantly not to kill Heller today.
The pain in my stomach vanished!
PART SIX
Chapter 7
For two days Bawtch waited for me to break out in black spots which would then suppurate. He must have had a hole in the door he could look through, for he was his old, very assured, nasty self when he came in.
I had had no more hallucinations, only a few nightmares. I had slept most of the time. And I sure had soaked up sparklewater and gorged sweetbuns.
Bawtch put the tall stack on the desk. “I am certainly glad we can get this work stamped,” he said. “The whole section labors like mad making up papers and it is very bad for morale when they don’t get stamped in the end.”
I was feeling pretty good so I just stamped away. The whole pile was finished in an hour.
“There isn’t any more work for you,” said Bawtch with some hostility. “So when are you going to get out of here?” He must have seen I was thinking of something else. He really bored in. “Your driver took five credits over to Meeley and you’ve got your room back.”
I hastily looked into my pockets. Sure enough, the (bleeped) driver had not given me the five credits but had given them to Meeley! That meant I would have to move out of this office: I would be about and visible!
The cheer I had been feeling evaporated. The specter of Lombar seemed to loom outside the building.
“This is not your living quarters!” said Bawtch getting almost savage. He had said it so hard his side-blinders flapped.
I decided to take a hard line with him. I realized that I had, in effect, been hiding here. As I was never in my office, no one would ever look for me here. I said, “I have some strategic decisions to make. This is, after all, my office! I have a perfect right to sit here and think!”
The only answer he had was a sort of “Hmph.” He flapped out.
I found out almost immediately why Bawtch had wanted me out of the office. The contractor people! They bustled in with a few glares at me, probably thinking I had wasted part of their day, and began measuring and pounding in the toilet.
Oh, well. Nothing that minor could drive me out into the threatening daylight.
The escape plan the contractors were doing reminded me of dear Bugs Bunny. I wondered what he would do in circumstances similar to mine. I couldn’t remember any comparable strip and thinking about it unfortunately brought my thoughts to Heller and the mission.
It was not that I could do anything about any situation I was in, it was just that I really ought to be thinking about something. I am not happy with my mind idle. It threatens to dive in the direction of terror if I just let it drift.
Little scraps of the euphoric feeling of being safe on Earth had continued to touch me from time to time. This very morning I had enjoyed such a period and had completed all the administrative details of the magic mailing. Bawtch would not tamper with the orders for it would unbalance his dispatch tally slips. If I ever got to Earth, I was assured of regular couriers and intimate news and no complaints from Bawtch if the corners of his forms got wrinkled.
Feeling at a loss for occupation, I recalled the midnight dream I had had. I flinched from it a bit and then knew why. I had not done a dream analysis on it!
At first I had to resolve whether it was a dream or a hallucination.
Because there is no way to do a dream analysis on a hallucination, I decided it was a dream. I got to work.
While I worked, I made marks on a piece of paper. It is a trick I picked up from a professor of primitive ethnology. It is called “doodling.” It had nothing to do with the dream analysis.
The Devil was, of course, a father figure. This was quite visible. The whips of the patrol craft crew were phallic symbols. Ah, now I was getting somewhere. The torch the father figure had wielded was caused by (bleep) envy. It followed logically that I wanted sexual intercourse with my mother and so hated my father. There! I was done. That dream would never bother me again.
Unfortunately, even with doodles, this dream analysis had occupied no time at all. My command of psychology is too certain and swift. My mind again began to drift into my problems.
Suddenly, I was gripped by a premonition of horror to come! The patrol craft! I had been back and forth across the Great Desert several times and I had not noticed any wreck! With near terror, I wondered what had happened to the crew. If those spacers got loose, if the Fleet got word of their kidnap, the duress I had undergone at the officers’ club would be nothing!
I hit buzzers. Even though he was sullen, a clerk found me recent newssheet files and I tore through them. No faintest mention of a wrecked patrol craft!
What had happened? Had the Commander of the Second Death Battalion, whose men had been placed aboard, sold the ship and crew to smugglers? The Fleet guarded planets against smuggling. What if they intercepted their own ship? It would be enough to start a civil war and I would be in the middle of it!
I made myself fight down the surging horror. Psychology teaches you how to do that. You count slowly. That always works. But by the time I got to twenty, I leaped up and started pacing. I bumped into a workman who, in his powder blue cover suit, looked like the craftleader in the dream.
Shaking, I sat down so as to not call attention to myself and so I could press my hands on the desktop and mask their shaking.
I forced myself to go back over the dream again. The craftleader in it had said, “Sir, we absolutely will not tell him unless we are very generously bribed.” Aha! The operative word was “bribed.” More clues. The Devil had gone away only when given counterfeit money! Bribed!
Then, with deep probing insight, gritting my teeth so as not to flinch, I realized that all those people in that dream thought I knew something I did not know. What was it?
I also knew they wanted to be bribed.
I went over it again. In a flash, I realized that the patrol crew knew something about Heller. Why not? They had spent fifteen weeks with him!
Bribed?
Yes, but I did not know if they had ever really reached Spiteos.
And furthermore I had no money to do any bribing!
I held my hands so tightly together the knuckles were bone white. That was one way to steady my nerves. I had to think!
Death Battalion. That rang a bell somewhere.
Then I remembered the part in the dream about bribing the Devil with counterfeit money.
Suddenly I laughed. My subconscious mind had been repressed by my censor. Deep in the primordial reptile brain which every sentient person has, I had worked it all out already! Because of a normal fear of erotic self-gratification, I had just not let myself know about it.
Although I had been afraid to go out, I was now more afraid to stay in.
I worked out an elaborate charade to account for my trip. I would tell Bawtch I was going hunting. This is my one extravagance: hunting trips. I like to kill small songbirds. One is likely to go anywhere to do that and nobody could trace me.
I got my hunting gear out of my office closet and with great nonchalance, sauntered out of the office, the game bag and needle blastrifle prominently displayed.
“Tell anybody who calls that I’ve gone hunting to recover my health,” I said loudly to Bawtch as I passed his cubicle.
“Good riddance,” I heard him mutter. And I knew my ruse had worked.
PART SEVEN
Chapter 1
The airbus was all cleaned out and polished up—Fleet cleaning materials. The driver had on a new uniform—he had even bathed. Heller’s influence, (bleep) him. I felt a twinge in my stomach.
“Glad you’re better,” said the driver.
I know sneers when I hear them. I said, in a cold voice, “Pro
vocation Section!”
He closed the door and off we flew. No one had been hanging around outside. I am well trained on such things. We were not being tailed. I was not in instant danger. I sat back in some relief.
I was not without resources. By a lucky fluke six months before, I had been snooping about a brawl some high Apparatus officers were having. They are infrequent as they can get pretty vulgar and scandals have to be hushed up. It had been held in an old ramshackle hotel out in the country, one that had long gone to seed. It was surrounded by acres of dead shrubs and decayed trees. I was wearing one of those tiny lapel cameras. At the time, I had been disappointed in being passed over in rank promotion and I had been shopping around to see if I couldn’t get some embarrassing blackmail that might help my career.
With an attentive eye, I had seen a furtive figure slipping off into the shrubs and I followed. And what luck! A female was waiting on a hidden bench. The furtive figure slipped behind her. I had not been able to make it out at first. But from the squabble which followed, unheard above the din of the main party, the female had been waiting for some high officer and the furtive figure wasn’t him! She threatened to report the intruder. This may have terrified him or he may just have been awfully drunk. But he proceeded to rape her. I got several shots from a nearby bush. And then, the beauty of it, he took out a knife and cut her throat and silenced her once and for all. And I got several pictures of that.
There were some other possibles that evening. I ran off the whole batch myself in a lab. The camera used was very light sensitive and the pictures were quite good.
Then ensued the laborious process of sorting out who the principals were. Apparatus face files are a little hard to come by but, after a time, I got the pictures all connected up with names.
And wonder of wonders, I identified the woman as the mistress of the Commander of the Death Battalion! The male in the rape-murder shot turned out to be the Chief of the Provocation Section!
I first established that the Commander of the Death Battalion had not himself arranged it to get rid of an unwanted female. He actually was making covert inquiries. The matter never came out in the newssheets: the Apparatus frowns on that. But he had even gone as far as the bluebottles—Domestic Police—to get a list of confirmed rape-murderers.
Accordingly, one day when I was idle, I had drifted down to the Provocation Section office. The chief’s name was Raza Torr. He had been tagged several times by the bluebottles of Flisten on suspicion of rape-murder but there was no proof. He had finally been recruited to the Apparatus and had risen to the post of Chief of Provocation. I got him alone, gave him copies of the pictures—I had many others in a secret place—and told him, “You’re perfectly safe. In the course of duty I killed the fellow who took these and have the originals. They were not entered in the master data banks. I do not want any money”—I knew he was heavily in debt and couldn’t pay and would kill if he had to—“but I only want to be your friend. And as a friendly act, I wanted you to know I have safeguarded your reputation.” He hastily shredded the pictures. As a result, I practically own the Provocation Section. Nothing else I had shot would lead to promotion and this one wouldn’t either. So I had to settle for what I could get.
This section specializes in framing. When the government decides it wants to get somebody, it hands it over to the Provocation Section. They infiltrate gangs and encourage them to do ridiculously foolhardy crimes for which they can be arrested and executed. They get prostitutes to compromise fellows who might be dangerous and feed the scandal to the newssheets and destroy their lives. In other words, pretty standard police work. The bluebottles also do this kind of thing but not on the scale of the Apparatus which is mostly political.
Down on the River Wiel, where it spreads out onto mud banks, there is a sprawling, dilapidated expanse of warehouses. Some say they used to be fish warehouses when the river still had fish in it. Some are used by large businesses. And the public does not know that right in the middle of that muddle lies the Provocation Section, very masked.
My airbus flew along the turbulent brown river and then ducked into the tunnel leading to the section. I debarked and ran up the rickety stairs to the chief’s office.
He saw who it was and looked a bit hunted. I had used his services a time or two. He would not feel threatened. “I see you been promoted,” said Raza Torr, a bit sourly. He was a very slithery sort of fellow, keeps one hand hidden in a drawer when he talks to you.
And yes, I was wearing my promotion. My driver had suggested I sell it or get false stones put in it and sell the real ones but Lombar would have noticed, the way he sometimes yanks you close to him. It is far better to starve than to attract unwanted attention from Lombar Hisst. Starvation is less painful!
I greeted him quite affably. “Been meeting any nice girls lately?” It was a friendly thing to say. Anything to put him at his ease.
But, actually, he’s not a very friendly fellow. His hand went deeper in the drawer.
“What do you want?”
“Oh, just the run of the place for a bit.”
Sourly he buzzed for a clerk. “Give him what he wants,” said Raza Torr.
I followed the clerk. Behind me I heard the drawer slam. Raza Torr said, “(Bleep)!” He must have hurt his finger.
I knew exactly what I wanted. One of the favorite ploys of the Provocation Section consists of planting counterfeit money on people. It is a pretty good counterfeit. The casual public would never detect it. But a trained store clerk and every cashier with a detection machine can spot it at once. They usually just say to wait a moment while they get some change, step on a floor button connected to the Finance Police and in a couple minutes the passer is picked up, taken to the Finance Prisons and after some torture and a brief trial, is executed. It is really a nice, smooth operation and the State is rid of some malcontent or critic or rival. There is real power in those counterfeit bills!
We walked through the endless rows of costumes of every type and size, past the boot department and past many another accumulation of riches. They mostly get them from morgues, accidents and battlefields. They seldom clean them up and the stench is a bit strong even in the Apparatus. We went by the personal effects drawers, thousands of square yards of them containing every imaginable item from every imaginable place, mostly taken from the dead, all vital to make a Provocation Section agent seem authentic. I peeked in the wallet drawers as sometimes real money is left in them but some clerk had been there before me.
We walked two hundred yards through the weapons area where every criminal kind of crazy weapon conceivable can be found. They use them to equip “revolutionary forces” that will then attempt some crazy coup. Most of the weapons explode and that’s that. Quite clever, really. Only the knives can be trusted and even then you better look in the handles to make sure there is no explosive charge that triggers when the knife touches flesh.
Finally and at last we came to their “Bait Office.” It contains safes full of fakes: fake stones that will get somebody arrested, fake gold, fake identoplates that trigger a police alarm when used, even fake certificates that are sometimes handed out to real graduating students who might cause upset somewhere. All highly intelligent material.
And money! I stood right in front of the vast vault and gestured to the Bait Office clerk to open it. My escort said, “Give him what he wants.” And they opened it.
Truly, the stuff looks beautiful. “Toilet paper” is the Apparatus slang term for it. And looking into that vast vault and at those piles and piles of lovely golden notes, one can get quite euphoric even if he knows it’s all counterfeit.
Actually, I was so money-starved I sort of overdid it. I picked up quarter-notes and then threw them down as too petty. I picked up ones. Safe enough as who looks hard at a one.
But not too thick a pack as I had just so much room in my pockets. I grabbed some packs of fives, then tens, then twenties, fifties and hundreds. I ran out of pocket room.
&
nbsp; “You must be trying to get a whole platoon killed off,” my escort said.
I thought that was a good idea, too.
Finally, I tried to seal my pockets. I couldn’t. So I got rid of most of the ones.
The Bait Office clerk was presenting his board for my identoplate. I waved him off. “Very secret operation.”
“It’ll start an investigation done on that scale,” said the Bait Office clerk.
“The chief said to give him what he wants. Must be somebody in disguise. Right?” The escort was backing up Raza Torr. Wise fellow.