The sudden barrage of guns helped her. With handspan measures she located the plugged-up hole. She couldn’t get the rock out! She reached into her pocket. Nothing! She had no tools!
A stone! There was one lying ten feet away.
She sprang for it. It was heavy. She struggled back to the hole with it. She raised it over her head. She bashed at the rock.
The stone broke!
She seized a falling splinter of it.
The flickering fire of the barrage made it possible to see. She found a sharp edge in the splinter and used it for a pry.
The plug came out!
She could hear Jet’s voice yelling urgently to her. Something new was happening.
She fished into the hole. The envelope was still there! It was stuck. She made it roll tighter and drew it out.
Jet’s voice was shouting at her. She could not hear what he was saying above the din.
She shoved the envelope inside her shirt and raced for the ladder.
Up she began to climb!
Yes, there was more gravity than she was lately used to.
She got halfway to the top. Another fifteen feet to go.
THE ROAR OF ANOTHER SHIP!
She glanced back and up.
A FLYING CANNON AGAINST THE MOON!
A blast of fire went by her!
The ladder swung as though struck by a mighty hammer!
She held on.
She scrambled higher on the ladder.
A second blast of fire!
Her hands tore loose!
Something had her by the wrist!
With a mighty yank, Jet snapped her into the airlock!
With two kicks of his feet he freed the ladder hooks. The ladder fell away.
“Rise maximum!” he shouted at the tug, now on automatic.
He slammed the airlock door and spun its wheel.
They were rising violently fast.
He bent for an instant over the Countess Krak. She grinned at him. “That was a great trapeze act. But I don’t think we ought to keep it in the show. I got them. But what was that?”
“A flying cannon,” said Jet. “It must have been hidden somewhere. Its fire directors centered on the ladder. Your boots are scorched. Are your feet all right?”
“A bit warm.”
“I hope their fire control followed the ladder down, what there was left of it.”
The Countess Krak was picking herself up. “We got what we came for. Let’s get out of here.”
“We can’t. We can outmaneuver that thing but we can’t outrun it. I can’t open up the Will-be Was main drives or he’d zero in on the turbulence before we were out of range.” He yelled to the tug. “Where is he now?”
“We’re just passing a hundred miles altitude, sir. His detectors are lashing about much lower. But that’s a two-hundred-mile-range gun, sir.”
“Blast,” said Heller.
“I don’t have any guns, sir,” said the tug. “I can’t blast.”
“Shut up,” said Heller and pushed the switch off automatic.
He settled into the local-pilot seat. “Hold on,” he yelled back to the Countess Krak.
He dived the tug like a plummet. He was watching his screens. He was locating the exact position of the lethal ship and keeping his own silhouette away from its view of the moon.
He had the flying cannon dead ahead. He was jinking, to confuse its fire direction.
Suddenly he spun the tug exactly backwards to his assailant.
He hit the lever for traction towing beams.
The flying cannon was in his grip. He began to swing it like a pebble in a sling. It helped out by gunning its own engines in the same direction.
Round and round the other ship swung in a huge circle.
Suddenly Heller let it go.
He reversed the tug.
The flying cannon plummeted to the desert floor.
Sand flew, a crash resounded and the distant scream of rending metal faded away.
Heller’s hand seized the local radio and turned it on.
A bedlam of voices was coming over it on battle frequency. He was listening to see if any more defense craft would be launched.
Then suddenly a voice rang out: “That was the Chief! All available rescue units, head for that crash! Urgent! Urgent! Lombar Hisst is wrecked three miles south of Camp Kill! Urgent! Urgent!”
“Well, what do you know!” said Heller. And then he looked sadly at the Countess Krak. “We’re for it. I’ve slammed down the mighty Lombar Hisst.”
“Oh, good!” cried the Countess Krak. “Hurray!”
“No, dear,” said Jet. “It didn’t burn and he probably isn’t dead. As he is spokesman to the Emperor, our chances of getting those documents signed now are exactly zilch.”
PART SIXTY-EIGHT
Chapter 3
They were vaulting again into the sky, too fast and too far for any retaliation from the ground. Heller anxiously watched his screens to see if turbulence foretold any intercepting spacevessels in sight.
The Countess Krak fished the proclamations out of her shirt. She opened the envelope and looked at them. The one would honor Jettero for his successful conclusion of the mission and promised him safe employment on Royal staff hereafter: he had already lived three times as long as the normal life expectancy of a combat engineer. It was time to get him into a safer post while he was still alive. The other restored her citizenship and rights: without it she would remain a nonperson, subject to execution at a whim and with no penalty; without it she could not hope to marry. It even restored the Krak estates on Manco, once so vast but long since lost by legal chicanery.
They looked so beautiful with all their scrolls and seals and, on one, even the signature of Cling the Lofty. She did not know they were forgeries done by Gris’ office. But no matter how clever they were, they would not appear in the Royal log at Palace City and anyone presenting them would be seized and executed instantly. Gris had covered his own tracks well: he had even ordered the forgers executed.
“Look at these,” said the Countess Krak. “Aren’t they worth some risk?”
Jet turned from his screens. He read the papers and looked them over carefully. He saw nothing wrong. But still, they had come from Gris. “Very nice,” he said. “We can hang them on the wall of a cave while we hide out.”
“Oh, Jettero, our whole future depends on our bringing this off. I must insist we make an effort to get them signed.”
“WHAT?” he said. “After crashing Lombar Hisst? Right this minute he must be turning the planet upside down to find us!”
“Jettero, he had no slightest way of knowing it was us. To him it was just a strange ship.”
“I doubt it. The illusion I used was of a tug.”
“But he doesn’t even know you’re home. Gris is dead. How could he guess?”
“I’ll bet there’s an alarm out right this instant.”
“I doubt it very much,” said the Countess Krak. “And an alarm of that kind wouldn’t reach the palace. The guards there are Royal. They have no traffic with ordinary police matters.”
“Wait a minute!” said Heller. “You are suggesting I go straight to the palace?”
“While I was in that cell, I had time to read the Compendium on protocol. A Royal officer always has the right of audience with the Emperor.”
“Lady, it may say so but I doubt a Royal officer has called on His Majesty in the last ten thousand years.”
“But it’s right in the regulations. You could tell them to look it up.”
“You mean I simply walk in there,” said Heller, “and say, ‘Here, Your Majesty. Wake up! Sign on the dotted line’?”
“You’ve got your dress uniform. You wore it the day you left Voltar for Earth. You’ve even got your Fifty Volunteer Star.”
“Oh, no! Look at the time of night!”
“People are always rushing up to an Emperor with bad news. You have a perfect right to rush in and say, ‘Hello, hello! Goo
d news! I knew Your Majesty was personally interested in Mission Earth. Well, ho, ho, it’s all done. Sign here!’ And even if the word is out for us, if we move awfully fast we can get it done before Palace City hears. And we’d be safe.”
“Wow!” said Heller. “You’re crazier than a combat engineer! Forget it!”
“Jettero, as your future dutiful and obedient wife, I must put my foot down firmly and insist we go ahead!”
“Oh, Lords, Gods and devils!” said Heller. “If this is obedience, I’ll take a tyrant any time!” He laughed. “But I’ll show you I’m not a male chauvinist pig. If you’re willing to take the risk, I’ll give it a try. But I want it entered in the log: ‘I’m only doing this because I want desperately to marry the girl I love.’”
“Oh, Jettero.” She threw her arms about his neck and kissed him.
The tug said, “Sir, Red Warning. You’re in a power dive.”
PART SIXTY-EIGHT
Chapter 4
Palace City lies just south of a mountain. The mountain contains a black hole of undetermined age. The black hole gives power to the palaces and defenses. It also puts the city, because it warps the space, thirteen minutes in the future.
Looking down on it all, especially at night, there was exactly nothing to be seen but a sort of mist.
In all the ages since it had been built, Palace City had never fallen to outside attack. Although sometimes it had changed hands due to a palace coup, it was considered impregnable, impervious to being breached.
Emperors and courtiers were used to living with the time stress: the compensation was that the place could never fall, even from riots and civil commotion. The only danger that existed was the faint chance that someday the black hole itself might suddenly reach term and itself explode with unthinkable violence. But they could live with this: the topmost government was so safe, the Emperor was so secure that only a madman would contemplate an overthrow of the realm. Revolutionaries were doomed from the start. People like Prince Mortiiy were rightly, by normal standards, looked upon as insane: even if they won a planet or two, they could never overthrow the whole government so long as Palace City held.
This was the problem the ambitious Lombar Hisst had confronted when he heard the angels telling him he should be Emperor. The only possible way to seize the government was through a coup d’état, working from within Palace City.
And Lombar Hisst was very near to the total completion of his goal. The weapon had been drugs. And as of this night, when Jettero Heller and the Countess Krak hovered above the mist, they did not know that every single member of the Grand Council was hooked. It had begun innocently enough: the court physicians had gullibly welcomed a means to stimulate the declining energies of Lords with small amounts of amphetamines. Then, when nervous symptoms arose, they were only too happy to accept, with a touch of blackmail here and there, the balm of opium. And from opium it went to heroin. Uppers and downers had done their work. Lombar Hisst controlled the supply.
The very last Lord had been hooked months ago. It was now thoroughly extended to everyone in Palace City. All Hisst had to say was “no bag for him” and very shortly the noncompliant officer or Lord was signing, ordering and doing exactly what he was told.
The whole thing had been very smoothly done. Medical journals sang the praises of “the new miracle drugs.” The grip was now extending outward to the populations.
Earlier that very night, Lombar Hisst had been at Spiteos doing inventories and allocations of speed, heroin and opium, for it was at Spiteos that these bulk drugs were received from Earth. Lombar Hisst, thanks to a law that forbade the growth or manufacture of the lethal commodities in the Confederacy, had a total monopoly.
The crown itself was inches from his grasp and each night he heard the angels sing and urge him on. Mad already, Lombar Hisst himself was on drugs. Slum-rat born, he saw nothing insurmountable to his ascension to the throne of Voltar. Such a thing had happened many times on Earth: it was his model. That it had never before happened in the Confederacy was a matter he could brush aside. With drugs he could do anything and he was winning all the way. Palace City now danced to his slightest whim. All Voltar awaited him tomorrow. And every planet of the whole one hundred and ten would soon be his.
That was the actual scene which lay below the tug that night. And Heller and Krak knew nothing of it.
But despite the reputation of combat engineers for foolhardy risks and forlorn hopes, Heller was going about this one in an orderly way.
Amongst the things he had gotten from old Atty was a collection of ship identifications of retired craft that were still listed as being in active, if reserve, service. He had thought he might need them to move about freely without reporting in or alerting others to the fact that he was home.
Hovering at a height of a hundred miles, inside the defense perimeter of the planet, he plugged in a repeating signal: Survey Ship Wave, Making Tests. Stand Clear. He had not used it over Spiteos but he would use it now. A survey ship could be testing almost anything from the concentration of moonlight to the potentials of an earthquake. Such ships were quite common in the sky; they often stayed still and people kept away from them.
Having then accounted for the fact that a vessel was hovering above Palace City, should his presence be detected, he went to his aft dressing room and got into his full-dress uniform. He then donned, over it, a technician’s coverall. He picked up a pair of two-way-response radios and went back to the flight deck.
The Countess handed him the proclamations and he slid them inside his tunic. He slipped into the local-pilot seat. “Here goes everything on one roll of the dice,” he said and pushed at the controls.
Down they went. Up came the mist of warped space.
There was a moment of giddiness and nausea and they were through. The cat let out a yowl; he didn’t like it.
Abruptly, to their left, loomed the mountain. They were thirteen minutes in the future.
Jet listened tensely to see if there had been a Palace City alarm. His speakers were silent.
He looked ahead of them. The night-lit palaces sprawled on down the slopes; circles of lights marked the parks. He oriented himself exactly.
Then, carefully, he eased the tug over onto a shoulder of the mountain and gently landed.
He pointed straight ahead through the open pilot ports. “You see that tower down there, straight ahead?”
The Countess Krak singled out the black silhouette of the structure about half a mile away.
“That’s their alert system,” said Heller. He handed her one of the tiny radios. “Keep this on. When you hear me say ‘Now!’ push the firing pin on the dash. I’ll only do it if something happens to me.”
“Oh, dear,” she said, “I hope it doesn’t come to that.”
“I trust it won’t. Now, you sit tight. You’ve got the hardest part—waiting.”
“If you step out there,” she said, “won’t you get a dose of radiation from the black hole?”
“Negligible, but keep the airlock closed after I leave and open it quick when I come back. This sort of operation has a lot of running in it if things get unstuck.”
“Shouldn’t you give me a blastrifle or something in case I have to cover your retreat?”
“You’d only attract fire. The defenses of this place internally are heavy beyond belief and, frankly, I think they must be getting awfully slack to let a survey ship land without a challenge. But the place has the liability of being sort of out of communication and, for the moment, they probably think, if they detected us at all, that somebody called us for some reason. If anybody calls you except me, say nothing. They’ll think the crew has left the ship and is checking cables or reflectors or something. Just sit tight.”
She watched him open the airlock outer door and drop to the ground. She began to realize that the risks might be pretty great. She had a sudden panic that she might not see him again.
He went past the front of the tug, turned back and waved and
then melted into the night.
PART SIXTY-EIGHT
Chapter 5
Over the rocks and down the hill in blackness, Jettero Heller headed for the alert tower. The ground he was covering was very tumbled and hard to cross: there were no paths, for nobody ever came this way. The real entrances to Palace City were a mile or more away, over on the perimeter of the eastern side.
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