She drew off, panting, still angry. “You!” she pointed at the paralyzed cluster that was her crew. “Take him to the dispensary and get him patched up!”
An assistant trainer crept to the yellow-man’s side and felt in the mess for a heartbeat. The assistant trainer looked up. “He’s dead.”
The Countess Krak was adjusting the chin strap of her cap which had been knocked askew.
She said, “That’ll teach him not to threaten Jettero!”
Until that moment I had been only paralyzed. But when she said that, standing there fussing with her cap, standing there in the blood which now stained her new boots, a jolt of pure terror went through me.
I do not know how I got out of there. I was simply in the tubes flashing away from her.
I halted before I turned a corner to my room corridor. I tried to calm myself. I was trying to throw up and trying not to throw up. My hands were shaking. I tried to get out a chank-pop but my fingers were fluttering so I couldn’t get the top off and it fell to the floor.
Only one thought was dominating me. Somehow, some way I had to get Heller out of there. If I remained a day longer I was absolutely convinced I would be dead. If the Countess Krak had any inkling of what was planned for Heller, what she had just done to the giant would be mild for me.
I had to coax myself out of the thought that I was already dead. They say that in total fear of one’s life one can get very brilliant. I had to and I did.
Tugging at my tunic to straighten myself up, breathing as naturally as I could, I walked by the room guards and entered.
Heller had bathed and he was now lounging in a chair, feet on another one, listening to music on the Homeview.
I threw my cap on the bed and then sat down at the table. I didn’t dare open a canister or he would see my shaking hands. I can control my voice: one is thoroughly trained to do that in the Apparatus.
“Jettero,” I said, “has it occurred to you that this is a very dirty place?”
He looked at me, languidly, still listening to the music. Then he smiled. “You say that to a Fleet spacer?”
“It is not a good place to be in. You are used to the finer surroundings of life.”
He thought that over, I had his attention now: he was no longer just listening to the music.
Would this work? A desperate prayer was running off in the back of my head and I hoped it was going to the Gods.
“You factually have completed all your studies,” I said, my voice carefully matter-of-fact and calm. “There is no real reason to remain.”
Heller looked around the room. It was as though he was seeing it for the first time. The black floor, the shabby fixtures, the scarred black walls.
He looked at me. “Soltan, you are right! This fortress is uncomfortable!”
He suddenly leaped up out of his chair. He took three steps one way, turned and took three steps back, steadying himself on the bed ends the way spacers will even when groundside.
His quick action startled me. I could not quite grasp the thought processes of his decision about something. I foolishly thought I had magically gotten the mission going!
He didn’t say another thing about it all that evening. He just smiled and hummed and grinned to himself and was charming.
He even coaxed the Countess out of a bit of a cross mood she was in when the guards brought her. She felt she had made a spectacle of herself, not saying how or why. And she confessed she had ruined the new boots he had given her.
Heller simply told her there were plenty of boots where those came from and told some funny stories about spaceboots. I took it that his mind had now turned to travel. A good portent.
There was even a brighter sign. He got out the “revolts and pretenders” list covering Manco history and they soon had their heads together, canisters of green sparklewater in hand, and while the music played on, went over the material.
I was so happy at the possibility of seeing the last of Countess Krak that I almost enjoyed Manco’s history!
“See?” said the Countess Krak, a beautiful finger on a line. “There was a Nepogat! Right here:
And the handmaiden Nepogat who had forsooth suborned the princely morals was banished from the Fortress of Dar and forbidden ever to return.
“Oho!” said Heller. “It doesn’t say what princeling but do you suppose it could have been Prince Caucalsia?”
“Oh, it must have been,” said the Countess Krak. “A woman spurned can do some very nasty things.”
I didn’t follow it. They were inventing their own history.
After a while, Heller said, “Here’s a whole list of princes condemned without giving a single name. Do you suppose one of them could have been Prince Caucalsia?”
“I’m sure it was!” said the Countess Krak. “Isn’t that the right period?”
“Indeed it is,” said Heller. “So that proves it!” And they both laughed with delight.
I snickered to myself. Some engineer. I hoped I didn’t have to walk on any of his bridges if he couldn’t think any better than that.
I left them to it. I went and lay down in the filthy, cluttered closet I used for sleep, idiotically hopeful that I would shortly be out of the reach of the Countess Krak!
PART FIVE
Chapter 2
A light shined in my face. “Officer Gris! Time to get going.”
I groaned and stirred in the stinking litter of the cubicle. I looked at my watch. A half-hour before dawn?
“Time to get going,” the guard insisted.
I dug around and found my cap under some old food scraps. I stumbled after him back to my room.
The place was a jumble of sound and motion! It was full of cartons and noise! The platoon usually split itself into two watches of twelve hours each, meaning seven guards on duty at a time: but there seemed to be more than that here.
Snelz was astraddle a backwards chair. He was holding a canister of hot jolt and using it to point directions to his men. They were packing the place up! They were all laughing and talking.
Heller was tying up a bundle. He was dressed in a race driver’s suit, white with red slashes. He had a red visored cap on the back of his head, the kind they wear under their helmets. He looked fresh and clean and vital: how could he manage that this early?
He saw me and picked up a canister of hot jolt from the heat pad and came over and handed it to me. He was laughing. At my bedraggled appearance?
In thick, Virginia-accented English he said, “Mah name is Rovah. Ah have a George named dawg.”
He had it wrong.
Patiently I corrected him. “It’s ‘My name is George.’ It is the dog that is named Rover.”
For some reason it sent him into a gale of laughter. Far too early to laugh that heartily. Snelz said to me, “You keeping this room? If not, we’ll pack up for you.”
Was I keeping this room? I always kept a few personal things here at Spiteos just in case. Hardly more than a ready bagful. But then it hit me. I wouldn’t need this room for ages. In fact, I never wanted to see Spiteos again! “I’m moving, too!”
“Pack him up,” said Snelz to his men.
It was amazing how much stuff had been accumulated in this short stay. The food lockers had been filled. Covers had been gotten for the beds, bath towels . . .
Heller was unhooking the Homeview. A guard took it toward a carton. “Pack ’em up, move ’em out!” said Heller. The guards all laughed and kept busy. I couldn’t understand why they were laughing until I realized Heller’s words were the first words of a song, “Spaceward Ho!”
For the first time since awakening, the joyous possibility hit me. Were we really on our way? I finished the last drops of hot jolt and then paused. Wait. Why was he packing up a Homeview? It was no good on Earth. Had he just tamely told the Countess bye-bye kid? I didn’t think so. Why should the guards laugh at the first words of that old song of the spacers? Did they know something I didn’t know? Was there something secretively amusing in He
ller’s attitude? Long service in the Apparatus teaches one to note the signs in scenes carefully. There was something wrong here.
But they now had the place all packed up. They put the cartons on dollies and shortly we were boarding a tunnel zipbus, baggage and all.
The only attention anyone was paying to me came at the various barricades where the alert guards demanded satisfaction for all the commotion. Heller, each time, just jerked a thumb at me and I presented my orders and identoplate. And well the sentries might be curious: somebody in a racing suit was not an ordinary sight at Spiteos or Camp Endurance. Heller had no security sense: if trained, he would have worn something old and shabby, more fitting to the scene. He wouldn’t be standing out like an emergency beacon! And he made it even worse by handing the sentries puffsticks and shaking their hands and telling them goodbye. They were not very good sentries, either: they laughed and made jokes with him. In espionage you don’t get yourself remembered! This guy wouldn’t last two minutes on this mission—if he was really going, which I sourly doubted.
We finally got to my airbus in the Camp Endurance departure zone. My driver had evidently been alerted and he greeted our guards like old friends. He gave Heller a grinning crossed-arm salute. Dawn was hardly breaking. What was there to grin about? My suspicion that these people were up to something deepened.
Although the driver opened the back for Heller, the engineer stepped aside. The dollies rolled up and the guards pitched the cartons and baggage into the back seat. They almost filled it!
“In you go,” said Heller and the driver scrambled in on top of the baggage!
Heller climbed into the driver’s bucket and gestured for me to run around and get into the guard’s seat up front.
He was going to drive!
No guards were getting in. There wouldn’t have been room for them anyway. They showed no signs of going off to get another airbus. I didn’t want to expose to Snelz that I didn’t know what in blast was going on. In a sort of rattled way I thought I might come back and give him further orders when I knew. “I’ll see you later,” I yelled at Snelz.
“I know,” he said.
I wondered if I was participating in a jailbreak for Heller. But I was well armed. Heller was gunning the drives—rohw, rohw, rohw. I scrambled into the guard’s bucket beside him.
The rest of Snelz’s people were all standing around grinning. They didn’t say goodbye. The airbus vaulted straight up and the group below were pinpoints in the half light of desert dawn. The red sunlight flashed blindingly in our faces as we ourselves, with altitude, made it rise.
You don’t drive airbuses this way. At least sane people don’t. Apparatus vehicles are not all that well maintained. But Heller was draped back in the seat, only one hand on the wheelstick, only one toe on the bars. “You comfortable back there?” he shot over his shoulder at my driver.
The pilot had settled himself in a nest in the boxes, only his feet were visible. Then a canister of hot jolt rose in a happy hand. Where had he gotten that? “First-rate, Officer Heller, sir.” Heller certainly broke down discipline, I thought sourly.
Heller turned to me. Now it was my chance to gain some control over this crazy departure. I said, “The Apparatus freighter terminal is just to the southwest of Government City. You’ve got lots of time. There isn’t one leaving until midafternoon.”
He looked like I had said a dirty word. “Freighter?”
I opened my mouth to say, of course, freighter; they leave once a week on a regular run for Earth. And then I clamped my mouth shut. It was too early in the morning. My wits were not about me. I mustn’t tell Heller or anybody else who didn’t need to know that Earth had a scheduled Apparatus freight service to it. If that got out, questions would hit the Apparatus like balls of fire! From all over the government and Grand Council.
Heller had the airbus at about twenty thousand feet. He was holding it there. Dangerous. The things slide off-balance if you’re not an expert. They crash. It made me nervous.
“Well?” he prompted. “You said ‘freighter.’” And then he must have seen that I didn’t have any more to say so he did the saying. “Soltan, are you telling me the mission ship is a freighter? But that’s silly, Soltan. A freighter would take six weeks or more to crawl along to Blito-P3. And we don’t have anything to carry. Besides . . .”
I plunged, “We don’t have a mission ship.”
“Ah,” said Heller. He was thinking. He perched the cap a little further back on his head. He had the airbus hanging there like a ball balanced precariously on a finger. Didn’t he know these things crashed? The desert, getting lighter now, stretched out from Camp Endurance. Government traffic control detectors would be asking shortly what the Hells we thought we were doing. We shouldn’t be attracting attention this way. He shot over his shoulder, “You all right back there?”
A curl of puffstick smoke rose out of the nest. “First-rate, Officer Heller, sir.”
“You do have some craft in the Apparatus hangar, though,” said Heller. And he must have taken it that I had nodded. “Good. We’ll go there and look at them.”
With a blasting roar it was never made to endure, the airbus catapulted across the sky. Heller, flying with one hand and one toe, picked up the traffic control communicator. “Airbus 469-98BRY heading for Apparatus hangars from Camp Endurance.” He had read the numbers on the communicator disk. He thrust it at me. I fumbled for my identoplate and pressed it on the disk; and I had a horrible feeling that that was going to be my sole function the rest of today: presenting my identoplate! Fronting for whatever mad scheme Heller might have in mind. At least we were away from the Countess Krak!
The desert fled below us. Spiteos got smaller behind us. Way over on the horizon the place where Palace City should be seen and wasn’t, loomed as only a snowcapped mountain. Commercial City spread as a smudge, still in night, way off in the opposite direction. Government City rolled up toward us as we passed the desert-fringing mountain range.
“You ought to get this thing fixed,” said Heller. “I can’t get it above five hundred miles an hour. You ought to get this thing fixed,” he yelled back.
“Yah, I keep telling Officer Gris,” came from the languid spiral of smoke.
They were both idiots. An airbus’s safe top speed is only four hundred. It was shaking like it had palsy—and maybe it did, it was old enough. I closed my eyes. It was a trifle cruel to die just when I might possibly be getting Heller off this planet, me out of danger and him into it. The bottom fell out!
I stared down to see where my grave would be. But it was just the landing target of the Apparatus hangar field. Heller slammed us down dead center on the X.
Before us loomed the huge hangars of the Apparatus Space Section. It is a pygmy compared to Fleet hangars but it is big enough. It rises about five hundred feet, a huge, rickety structure covering a square mile. Gantries and tractor platforms lay about in various states of decay and disarray.
Black-uniformed sentries with blastguns at port came racing up. This Apparatus area is extremely secret and well guarded.
“Officer Gris and party,” shouted Heller. With a finger he indicated I should push my identoplate at the board a sergeant held aloft. “You stay here,” he yelled back at my driver. “We may not be long. Come on,” he said to me.
We piled out. The guards, disinterested now, slouched off. Odder things than a race driver came and went in this place. All in all, despite savage orders for top alertness, the Apparatus space hangar and area are glum, apathetic and shabby.
Heller was trotting briskly toward the hangar. I followed him not so briskly. I felt all this was out of my control someway. I was just an animated identoplate.
We got inside. Spaceships just arrived, spaceships waiting to go, spaceships being repaired, spaceships that wouldn’t ever go anywhere again, stood far and wide, shadowy monsters full of secrets, half-operational machinery and old bloodstains. I groaned at the idea of having to walk endlessly amongst these a
ssorted craft. It made my feet already begin to hurt.
But Heller was looking around alertly. And this was odd because you couldn’t see much past the first three ships. He spotted something. I didn’t understand his interest. It was a gigantic crane hoist used to lift heavy machinery.
The operator was in his cab way up in the air, sitting in bored idleness. Heller called to him. Now, in the Fleet, officers accustomed to serving in the gigantic barnlike spaceships develop a type of voice. It is high-pitched and cuts across the rumble of drives with startling loudness. He was using that voice. “Hello the hoist! Stand by to lift!”
Ordinarily an Apparatus man in this hangar wouldn’t take orders from his own foreman. And I was somewhat startled to see the operator, almost a speck in his high cab, give a wave back.
Invaders Plan, The: Mission Earth Volume 1 Page 23
