“Oh, please. It’s not all that much. It takes more than a little gas to hurt me!”
“Hah, Jettero Heller. A lot you know!” She was quite cross. “You do something crazy like that the minute I turn my back! I’ve told you, where Soltan Gris is concerned, I can handle him and you can’t!” Then she suddenly changed. She cupped his face in her hands, looking at the wound cover. Her voice was full of sorrow and concern. “Oh, my poor darling. What have these beasts done to you?”
It gave me a bad moment. Would she guess what really had been done?
Heller tried to laugh her out of it. “Look,” he said, fumbling about. “The doctor gave me the tiny piece of arrowhead he took out.” He told her the story and then he opened the little gold case.
“It’s all bloody!” she said, recoiling. I grimaced. Blood meant nothing to her unless it was Heller’s.
“Of course!” said Heller. “He said he took it out of my frontal bone.” He picked it up and the fragment became absolutely HUGE on my screen. “Hmmm,” he said. “That’s funny. I thought it was an obsidian arrowhead and this is flint.”
(Bleep) Prahd for his fancy extras, I gritted.
“Could have been metamorphic,” puzzled Heller. “But obsidian and flint seldom mix.”
“Oh, Jet. You should have been more cautious. You should have made them do it here. Where I could be present. They may have said something to you while you were out. Think hard! Do you remember what they said? Any general anesthetic can act as a hypnotic.”
You and hypnotism, I snarled to myself in a wave of hate as I recalled the horrible thing she had done to me.
Heller said, “Oh, yes. I forgot. It’s still here on my wrist. Soltan let me put this on. Only I know the numbers to open it.” He busily began to undo his combination. I made a mental note that he favored an idiot’s combination—three, two, one. Ho, ho. You could learn things with this bug rig!
“It’s still running,” he said. “Here, I’ll put it on a player.” And he got a player and shortly had the strip running.
Heller was watching the Countess. And that was good because the whole thing made or broke on just this part of the project. Had I tricked her or hadn’t I? My voice, very fuzzy, came out of the speaker, “I feel a little queasy. Have you got something?” Then Prahd, “Could you hold this?” And then my, “Oh, no. The sight of blood makes me quite ill lately for some reason.”
The Countess Krak was sitting up very straight, listening intently.
Then my voice through the speaker on the ship, “Oh, my Gods, I’m going to be sick at my stomach!” Followed by the heaving sounds.
The Countess started nodding for all the world like a teacher who is approving a pupil for being exceptionally obedient. Then she relaxed. I knew I had won! She thought that the hypnotic suggestion to get sick if Heller was hurt was still securely in place.
When the picture went white, Heller said, “My wrist must have slipped off the table.” The Countess shrugged.
“I’ll speed play it through,” said Heller. But, of course, there were only clicks and snips and bubbles of beakers. He spot-checked the return to the tug.
The Countess said, “I’ll get you something to eat.”
Had I won? You can’t ever tell about females, but she apparently didn’t suspect anything underhanded had been done. I realized she had been worried about physical damage; nothing would point to anything else.
But my problems with this rig were crucial. I could not hang on Heller’s coattails and still oversee all our Earth operations.
There were some minor flaws. Peripheral vision—things in the view field but not being looked at directly—were there, if blurred. I could cope with that. But the overall visio and audio quality left so much to be desired that I was gloomy.
I thought of turning the strip on in my receiver-viewscreen and just leaving it. It had an automatic strip-feeder in it. It would record for days, maybe even weeks, untended. You just put a pile of strips in it. But then, the Countess came back in and I thought that maybe I could pick up some crucial data. After all, I knew nothing of their domestic relationship. It was really a new scene to me for they would not act naturally with me close by. What did this pair do when they were alone together? So I kept watching.
She had changed from her guard’s uniform and was wearing a blue exercise suit. She was holding a couple of steaming canisters with tubes in them—you can’t use anything else in space and it was, after all, a spaceship. “Yell up there and tell it to convert the gym to a steam bath, will you? I want to steam some of that anesthetic poison out of you.”
Heller accommodatingly yelled, “Steam bath!” And they drank their soup.
Well, I was going to find out if water and heat hurt anything. And shortly Heller stripped and walked into the steam. I sure got a lot of steam! But the extra heat and water did not change things. Spurk hadn’t flunked there. He had only flunked on range and quality, in my opinion, so far.
When Heller had showered in a bathroom, he yelled, “Gym!”
The Countess yelled from somewhere, “You put on an exercise suit! It’ll take more than steam to get the poison out.” There was still a tinge that he had been naughty.
He was shortly running on an escalator-like rig and then he was doing some backflips and generally working up a new sweat. Finally he went and showered again and put on a blue lounging suit.
She was crossing the gym toward him when he stepped down to go back to the lounge. He suddenly grabbed her and kissed her. My set viewscreen flickered. Oh ho, it did register emotion in an odd way.
He pushed her back. “Am I forgiven?”
“Oh, Jet, I’d have to forgive you anything!”
They kissed again. And then Jet held her away from him and in a cheerful voice said, “You haven’t said what you have been up to today! Maybe it was even worse than me!”
She laughed. “I’ve been drilling for the review.”
Review? Review? I thought. What review? This was news.
She had jumped back. She did a one-two foot slam, came to rigid attention and then in total mockery, did an exaggerated crossed-arm salute followed by a double foot stamp. Heller laughed with delight. “I better watch out. That Snelz will be recruiting you for keeps into the Fleet Marines! What a thing to do for such a lovely lady.”
“Oh, he says I am very good. You ought to see me with a blastrifle now!”
Heller was laughing so hard the screen jiggled.
“No!” she said. “I am very good! There’s no reason a girl can’t learn to twirl a rifle! You go get it and I’ll show you.”
Heller, still laughing, telling a few doors to open, was soon in the forward part of the ship. I was treated to a shifting view of all kinds of nooks and crannies.
“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 riding 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.