I tried to think of something even more vicious I could do. But actually what was happening was really quite enough.
It was a beautiful day after all.
PART ELEVEN
Chapter 3
About noon, wiping his hands on a bloodstained disposable coat, Dr. Prahd Bittlestiffender came out of the hospital. But he did not come over to where I sat at the pool. He went walking along one of the curving rock paths that wound artfully under the blooming trees.
Well, I thought, he just wants to stretch. He hadn’t been two hours on that operation; he had been more than three and a half! Long-legged and a bit too tall, he went ambling along on a zigzag sort of course, looking down. Maybe the operation had been a failure, maybe he’d put an electric knife in too deep and killed Heller: an intriguing thought. As I considered it, it seemed to have more and more merit.
Coming back along the path, the young doctor suddenly stooped over and picked something up. Then he went over to where a naked wood nymph posed erotically in stone. He took a small hammer from an inside pocket and started hammering something against the wood nymph’s metal base. What in Hells was he up to? Trying to bring the wood nymph to life by rhythmic pounding? We had one too many nymphs around here already!
At last he began to wander over toward me again. He took a little spin drill and a pair of tweezers out of his inside pocket and was holding something and buffing it, wandering closer, humming. The spin drill was going screech, screech, screech; very hard on the nerves.
Near my chair, he stopped. He put the spin drill away and got out a vial of blood. With the tweezers, he immersed something in the blood and then put the vial away. What in Hells kind of hocus-pocus was this? He had me on tenterhooks to find out what had happened in the operation.
He took out a small, gold-plated, circular box. It looked like one of those which females carry perfume pats in. Then I realized it was probably part of the Zanco delivery. Firms specialize in fancy little cases that they hand out to doctors as presents for female patients: sure enough, it had an engraved Zanco on the cover.
Young Dr. Prahd popped it open and with great care, laid whatever he held in his tweezers into it, puffed up the interior padding and wiped the blood off the tweezers on it.
He held it out to me very proudly. He was like some long-legged cub animal, waiting for somebody to say, “Good barker,” and give it a pat on the muzzle. There was a microscopic bit of stone lying amidst the bloodstains.
“The piece of the arrowhead,” said young Dr. Prahd.
“You didn’t get this out of his head. I saw you pick it up, right over there.” Then suddenly it dawned on me what he was doing. Hey, there was hope for this boy. He was going to give it to Heller as the convincer. But I had no idea of letting this young fool get a good opinion of himself. Compliments are the destroyer of the race: they end striving. He could slide right out from under my thumb! I dismissed the box with a wave of my hand. “It took you long enough.” I glanced at my watch. “Two hours is not three hours and forty-five minutes.”
He looked a little crestfallen. “Well, you see, I didn’t have the patient yesterday. I could have taken the basic cells then. I had to take cells of his dermis and epidermis as well as his bone. It took half an hour to get them into a sterile base and catalyze them so as to get cell supplies to use.
“Somebody had given him one of those crude vaccinations as a child and that had to be repaired so there was no scar. Then, besides the white scar in his shoulder, I had to repair an area of blastgun burn on his back.
“Then he’d caught a finger sometime or other and the nail was slightly crooked and I had not prepared nail cells so I had to get a catalyst growth tube going for those. . . .”
He was driving me up the tree with all this. “Come on, come on, what about the respondo-mitter and the audio-respondo-mitter?”
“Well, there really had been a small crack in the front bone. Those Fleet doctors are not careful enough. It had regrown by itself with no professional attention. It had filled itself with soft bone tissue and that all had to be scraped out. He must be from Manco. Their bones are quite hard and tough. I blunted a drill. . . .”
He must have seen my impatience. He rushed on. “It made a perfect cavity for the two items. And, of course, they had to be treated and the bone cells conditioned so as not to reject them. They have tiny microscopic antennas and these have to be slotted in between the molecular cell bone joints.”
“What about that sore place he had on his eyebrow?” I demanded, thinking he might have put them into a tender spot that would require a later operation that would discover the two bugs.
He seemed puzzled. Then he remembered. “Oh, there was no tender spot. That was my fingernail.”
He saw how impatient I was getting. He rushed on. “They are in there, they will never be detected. The scars are all gone. I think I passed my test very well.”
I snorted. “There was a young trainee my uncle . . .”
“I thought Professor Slahb was your great-uncle?”
“I also have an uncle that’s a cellologist,” I said determinedly.
“This young trainee was supposed to stay around and finish his contract.” I was talking because he was in very elegant circumstances here. I didn’t want anyone to put any ideas in his head. “But he met a young widow who was rich and he knocked right off his contract, violated all his promises and went on living with her right there!”
He shook his head. “Oh, if you mean Pratia . . .”
That clinched it. Pratia was the Widow Tayl’s girl-name. Clearly they had gotten way into a relationship to be on a first-name basis. “So if you think I am going to pass you now, you are mistaken! I do not know if the operation works. Further, I do not know if you will talk to anyone and give away secrets. And you have no right to stand there and demand your contract be handed over. You will get that contract when you report to me on Bli . . . at your duty station. I will be there before you.”
He looked like he was going to stutter. It’s a very good sign.
“So I have some instructions for you. Sit down!”
He swallowed hard and sat down.
I had brought from the airbus a small case. “Here are three languages. They apply to your post. One is Turkish. Another is English. The other is Italian. There are books, dictionaries and a player machine in this case. Starting here and all during your six weeks’ voyage, you will study like mad. You will land on Bl . . . at your duty station, speaking, reading and writing English, Turkish and Italian. If you pass on this case as to work ability and arrive knowing these languages, and if you have not violated secrecy—and believe me, I am having you watched every minute by unseen eyes—I will then consider handing over your contract. Do you understand this?”
“T-Turkish? It . . . it . . . whatever. Are these civilized languages? I have never heard of them!”
“Primitive tongues. Another galaxy. Do you understand?”
“Y-Y-Yes.”
“Ten days from today, at ten o’clock in the morning, Zanco will send a lorry for all this equipment. They know exactly where to deliver it. They have a pass for that place.” I had verified with the captain of the Blixo his exact blastoff time. I had spoken to him about all arrangements.
“Zanco,” I continued, “will bring an empty case for the operating table and put that one in it.”
“B-B-But it has a case! A long box.”
“Exactly.” I was taking no chances of the Widow Tayl detaining him. “You are going to bore holes in the ends and fix it to lock from within. When Zanco comes, you pretend to be showing them what to take. And you do show them and you do get that operating table packed in the case they will bring. And then you will jump into that empty case and lock it from the inside and they will deliver you to the ship.”
He gaped. But it was a masterstroke. He’d get loose from Tayl. Nobody would see him go aboard. I like things neat.
“C-Can I pad the box inside? S-So I don’
t h-h-hit my h-h-head?”
I was feeling indulgent. “Of course,” I said. I pulled out a note to Captain Bolz. It just said, “This is him. Gris.” I gave it to him.
“I guess . . . I guess there’s a lot I don’t know about secret operations,” he confessed.
There’s a lot you don’t know about beautiful widows, I muttered to myself. “Now, two more things.”
“M-More?”
“On that ship there will be a young homosexual. You are not to associate with or speak to him. You must remain unknown to him. He is an enemy spy.”
“A-and?”
“And if you are not delivered to that ship, if you do not arrive as I have said, its captain will bring a ferocious, blastgun-packing crew right here, seize you and”—I was about to say, rape the Widow Tayl but she’d be overjoyed by that—“burn down this whole estate and maim and shoot your dear Pratia on suspicion of being an enemy agent. Understood?”
He was paralyzed. Well, he’d have to get used to the operating climate. Might as well start now. I had worked out how he could make me a personal fortune. Except for that, I didn’t need him and could have shot him right where he shivered. But, as Lombar says, money talks.
I sat there smiling in a lordly way. Let him see I could also be his friend. Police psychology is the applicable branch. Crush them and then pretend friendship. But he didn’t seem to be responding. However, if I sat there long enough with lifted lips, gazing down my nose at him in a superior way, it would eventually work.
But the psychotherapy was ruined. A voice came from the house, over a loudspeaker. “Yoo-hoo, you boys,” the musical lilt of the Widow Tayl. “Don’t keep sitting out there like the dear little angels you are. Come into the house and get some lunch.”
So we went in. It was a gorgeous dining room. All done in blue and gold with little gold nymphs having a rare time of it all over the ceiling. There were soft couches at various levels. The center of the room was utterly sagging under the weight of canisters, platters of cakes and dried rare meats and fruits.
She was dressed in the filmiest of films and she had her hair piled up and held with diamonds. She looked at the two of us. “Where’s the other one?”
“He won’t come to for another three or four hours,” I said brutally.
She looked at the spread. She glanced at herself in a wall mirror. And she got a very, very sad look on her face. “Well, go ahead and eat,” she said dispiritedly. I ate. Prahd was just sitting there.
Finally he said, “Not burn down the whole estate!”
What a fool. To talk like that in front of the Widow Tayl. It was my lot to deal with fools and amateurs.
But the Widow Tayl had not heard him. She was sitting on the sofa behind him. Her eyes were dreamy. With one of her hands she was curling the hair on the back of Prahd’s neck. In the other she idly grasped a large, soft fruit.
Prahd suddenly looked at me and said, “Oh, you mustn’t doubt me. I’ll come. I’ll come!”
The Widow Tayl’s eyes went glassy. Her breathing quickened. She yelled suddenly, “And he put his red cap in . . . in . . . in . . .”
The fruit in her hand was clenched into an explosion of soft white meat. “OHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!”
I was glaring. (Bleep) her. She was thinking of Heller. She had dressed and primped and laid out this huge lunch THINKING ABOUT HELLER!
I attacked a sweetbun like it had bit me!
I’d show HIM!
PART ELEVEN
Chapter 4
Late in the afternoon, Heller came out of the gas. Prahd gave me the signal and I made Ske shift the airbus to the confined space just outside the hospital door—a thing he cursed over, as landing on some shrubs scratched his paint. But I was taking no chances on the Widow Tayl seeing Heller again. She might remember what he looked like: it would be out security.
I whisked Heller through the hospital door and into the airbus and we took off at once.
The recorder was still locked to his wrist. It was running and with ten hours of strip capacity, would keep right on running and recording for some time. So I was saying nothing. Just before he had come out of the hospital door, I had thrown a towel over his arm, so it was not getting any pictures: there would be no views of where he had been.
He was still groggy. He had a cuplike dressing over his right temple and several more at different places on his body. Prahd had told him they contained “heal-fast” fluid, that they wouldn’t come loose if he showered. Prahd had given him a small vial of solvent and in twenty-four hours, Heller could apply it and the cups would come off: the spots would be a light pink for another day, but Prahd had given him another vial of false-skin coating which would eradicate even that. Heller had received the data and vials with a minimum of attention. He seemed to want to go back to sleep.
I was very anxious to see how this equipment worked. The whole success of the Earth operation depended upon it. I had the rest of the items of one whole set with me. My hopes were high but there was a bit of anxiety, too.
At the hangar, fortunately, most of the contractor crews had gone for the day and nobody wanted to see him. I passed him into the air lock of the tug: he seemed to be heading for the rooms in back.
With speed—which Ske objected to—I rushed through the evening sky and soon arrived at my rooming house. I grabbed the box containing the rest of the set and went zooming up the stairs. Meeley was on her hands and knees on a landing trying to scrub the floor and I almost knocked her flat. She swore at me with surprising violence but I ignored her.
Locking my door, I swept some empty canisters off a table and hastily began to set up the equipment. With hands quivering with eagerness, I got the activator-receiver going. I was only twenty miles from the Apparatus hangar and this thing was good, the late Spurk had said, for two hundred miles.
I turned on the separate receiver-viewscreen.
Nothing!
Not even a crackle!
I turned up the activator-receiver until it was practically shooting blue streams!
Nothing.
I turned up the receiver-viewscreen.
Nothing!
(Bleep) Spurk! He must have been lying! It served him right to get himself killed!
I sat back. I thought. Then it occurred to me that the whole rig might just be underpowered. So I picked up and added the 831 Relayer to the setup. It was supposed to boost the signal between the activator-receiver and the receiver-viewscreen so strongly that they could be ten thousand miles apart!
Nothing.
I boosted every manual gain knob I could find!
Wait. I heard something in the viewscreen speaker. A faint rhythmic sound.
I looked at the viewscreen. I thought I must have turned the power up too high. Maybe a component was burning in it. It was a blurred, wavery pink.
I counted the rhythmic sound. It was going at about eighteen times a minute. Hard to recognize. The quality was poor.
Suddenly I had it! The sound was breathing! The dim pink was faint light coming through the eyelids. Heller was asleep! If it was Heller.
Well, it had gotten something. But Gods, with every manual gain at maximum and even the 831 Relayer on the line, it was only doing twenty miles! I despaired of ever using this in Turkey when Heller was in the Americas.
I sat back, wondering what to do now. With this rig so poor, Heller could just waltz around the United States as free as a bird; I wouldn’t know what he was doing! I wouldn’t be able to use information gained on this channel to sabotage his intentions. Awful thought!
For some time I sat there glooming. I was almost ready to give it up when I heard footsteps coming from the speaker. Very faint, hard to recognize as footsteps. They were a bit louder now. They stopped.
A voice: “Honey, are you all right?” It was so fuzzy, I couldn’t recognize it from voice quality. But it must be the Countess Krak. Yes, as I glanced at my watch, the guard would have changed.
The viewscreen image came on gra
dually. Faint, furry. It was the Countess Krak. She was in uniform, her helmet was off. Her face was very big. A poor picture.
She looked concerned. She was touching the heal-fast capsule. “Did you fall? Did you have an accident?”
“Oh, hello, darling. I must have fallen asleep again.” Bad quality, barely able to tell it was Heller’s voice. “No, no. Don’t be alarmed. It’s nothing. I just had a lot of identifying marks removed by a cellologist.”
“You WHAT?”
“Yes. Soltan came and got me and I kept an appointment.”
There was horror on her face. “They put you under gas? You were out?”