“Right away; we’ve set up screens and controls for them in here; did that right at the start.”
“Good.” He raised his voice. “Chief! Captain Hurtado, Lieutenant Mortlake; do-bizzo. We’re going to fill the ventilation system with snoopers, now.”
PHIL NOVAES LOOKED at his watch. It was still 0130, the damned thing must have stopped, and he was sure he’d wound it. Holding his wrist to catch the dim light from above he squinted at the second-hand. It was still making its slow circuit around the dial. It must have been only a few seconds since he had looked at it last.
“Herk, let’s get the hell out of here,” he urged. “They aren’t coming out at all. It’s been an hour since the last two went in.”
“Thirty-five minutes,” Herckerd said.
“Well, it’s been over an hour since the other three went in. Something’s gone wrong; we’ll wait here till hell freezes over…”
“We’ll wait here a little longer, Phil. We still have fifty million in sunstones to wait for, and we want to get those Fuzzies and shut them up for good.”
“We have better than fifty million already. All we’ll get’ll be a hole in the head if we stay around here any longer. I know what’s happened, those Fuzzies have gone out some other way; they’re running around loose, packing sunstones…”
“Be quiet, Phil.” Herckerd reached to his shirt pocket to turn on his hearing aid and put his head to the ventilation duct opening. “I hear something in there.” He snapped off the hearing aid, listened, and snapped it on again. “It’s ultrasonic, whatever it is. Probably vibration in the walls of the duct. Now just take it easy, Phil. Nobody knows there’s anything happening at all. Grego’s the only man in Company House that can open that vault, and he won’t open it for a couple of weeks, at least. All the stones from Evins’s office were put away yesterday. It’ll take that long before anybody knows they’re gone.”
“Suppose those Fuzzies got out somewhere else. My God, they could have come out right in the police area.” That could have happened; he wished he hadn’t thought of it, but now that he had, he was sure that was what had happened. “If they did, everybody in the building’s looking for us.”
Herckerd wasn’t listening to him. He’d turned off his hearing aid, and was squatting by the intake port, peeling the wrapper from a chewing-gum stick and putting the wrapper carefully in his pocket. Another piece of foolishness; no reason at all why they couldn’t smoke here. He listened with his hearing aid again. The noise, whatever it was, was louder.
“There’s something in there.” He pulled the goggles down from his cap and took out his infrared flashlight.
“Don’t do that,” Herckerd said sharply.
He disregarded the warning and turned the invisible light into the duct. There was something moving forward toward the opening; it wasn’t a Fuzzy. It was a bulbous-nosed metallic thing, floating slowly toward him.
“It’s a snooper! Look, Herk; somebody’s wise to us. They have a snooper in the duct…”
“Get the stones in the box! Right away!” Herckerd ordered.
“Ah, so there was something went wrong!”
He snapped the suitcase shut, shoved it into the box on the contragravity lifter, and fastened the lid, then snapped the hook of his safety-belt onto one of the rings on the lifter. There was a crash behind him, and when he turned, Herckerd was holstering his pistol. Then he, too, snapped his safety-strap to the lifter, and pulled loose the two poles with hooked and spiked tips, passing one over and slipping the thong of the other over his wrist.
“Full lift,” he said. “Let’s go.”
He fumbled for a second or so at the switch, then turned it on. The whole thing, lifter, box, and he and Herckerd, were pulled up from the ledge and swung out into the shaft.
“What did you have to shoot for?” he demanded, pushing with his boathook-like pole. “Everybody in the place heard you.”
“You want that thing following us?” Herckerd asked. “Watch out; watermain right above!”
Maybe the snooper was just making a routine inspection; maybe Herckerd had finally panicked, after all his pretense of calmness. No. Something had gone wrong. Those damned Fuzzies had gone out the wrong way, somebody’d found them… There were more pipes and conduits and things in the way; he remembered the trouble they’d had getting past them on the way down. He and Herckerd had to push and pull with their poles and for a moment he thought they were inextricably stuck, they’d never get loose, they were wedged in here… Then the lifter was rising again, and he could see the network of obstructions receding below, and the white XV’s on the sides of the shaft had become XIV’s, so they were off the fifteenth level. Only five more levels and a couple of floors to go.
But he could hear voices, from loudspeakers, all around:
“Cars P-18, P-19, P-20; fourteenth level, fourth floor, location DA-231.”
“Riot-car 12, up to thirteen, sixth floor…”
He swore at Herckerd. “Sure, it’ll be a month before they find out what’s happened!”
“Shut up. We get out of the shaft two floors up, to the left. They have the shaft plugged at the top.”
“Yes, and walk right into them,” he argued.
“We’ll lift into them if we keep on here; we’ll have a chance if we get out of this.”
They worked the lifter around the central clump of water and sewer and ventilation mains, pushing away from it and then hooking onto handholds and drawing the lifter into a lateral passage, floating along it for a hundred feet before Herckerd could get at the lifter controls and set it down. Then he unsnapped his safety-strap and staggered for a moment before he found his footing.
It was a service-passage, wide enough for one of the little hall-cars, or for a jeep; maintenance workers used it to get at air-fans and water-pumps. They started along it, towing the lifter after them, looking to right and left for some means of egress. There should be other vertical shafts, but they would be covered, too.
“How are we going to get out of this?”
“How the hell do I know?” Herckerd retorted. “How do I know we’re going to get out at all?” He stopped for a moment and then pointed to an open doorway on the left. “Stairway; we’ll go up there.”
They crossed to it. From somewhere down the bare, dimly-lighted passage, an amplified voice was shouting indistinguishable words. The passage connected with another, or a hallway. They couldn’t go ahead; that was sure.
“We can’t get the lifter through.” He knew it, and still tried; the lifter wouldn’t go through the narrow door. “We’ll have to carry the suitcase.”
“Get the box off the lifter,” Herckerd said. “We can’t carry that suitcase ourselves; they’d catch us in no time. Get the suitcase out of it.”
The box, four feet by four by three, with airholes at the top, had been necessary when they had the Fuzzies to carry; they didn’t have to bother with them now. He opened it and lifted out the suitcase. No; they couldn’t carry that, not and do any running. It was fastened with screws to the contragravity-lifter. Herckerd had his pocket-knife out, with the screwdriver blade open, and was working to remove the brackets.
“Well, where’ll we go… ?”
“Don’t argue, goddamit; get to work. Is there any extra rope ladder in that box? If there is, we’ll use it to tie the suitcase on…”
Over Herckerd’s shoulder, he saw the jeep enter the passage from the intersecting hall a hundred feet away. For an instant, he was frozen with fright. Then he screamed, “Behind you!” and threw himself through the open doorway, stumbling to the foot of a flight of narrow steel steps and then running up them. A pistol roared twice just outside the door, and then a submachine gun let go, a ripping two-second burst, a second of silence, and then another. Then voices shouted.
They got Herckerd. They got the sunstones, too. Then he forgot about both. Just get away, get far away, get away fast.
There was a steel door at the head of the stairs. Oh, God, ple
ase don’t let it be locked! He flung himself at it, gripping the latch-handle.
It wasn’t. The door swung open, and he stumbled through and closed it behind him, hearing, as he did, voices coming up from below. Then he turned, in the lighted hallway beyond.
There was a policeman standing not fifteen feet away, holding a short carbine with a thick, flaring muzzle, a stunner. He crouched, grabbing for his pistol. Then the blunderbuss muzzle of the stunner swung toward him at the policeman’s hip. He had the pistol half drawn when the lights all went out and a crushing shock hit him, shaking and jarring him into oblivion.
THE OPERATION-COMMAND ROOM was silent. When the voice from the screen speaker ceased, there was not a sound for an instant. Then there was a soft susurration; everybody in the place was exhaling at once. Grego found that he had been holding his own breath. So had Harry Steefer; he was exhaling noisily.
“Well, that’s it,” the Chief said. “I’m glad they took Novaes alive, anyhow. It’ll be a couple of hours before he’s able to talk.” He picked up his cigarette pack, shook one out for himself and offered it.
Moses Herckerd wouldn’t do any talking; he’d taken a dozen submachine gun bullets.
“What’ll we do with the sunstones?” the voice from the screen asked.
“Take them to the gem-vault; we’ll sort them over tomorrow or when we have time.” He turned to the open screens to city police and Colonial Constabulary. The non-coms who had been on them were replaced by Ralph Earlie and Ian Ferguson, respectively. “You hear what was going on?” he asked.
“We got most of it,” Ferguson said, and Earlie said, “You got them, and you got the stones back, but just what did happen?”
“They had a contragravity-lifter; they used it to get up one of the main conduit shafts, and then they got into a maintenance passage on the fourteenth level down. One of our jeeps caught them; Herckerd tried to put up a fight and got shot to hamburger; Novaes ran up a flight of stairs and came out in a hall right in front of a cop with a sono-stunner. When he comes to, we’ll question him and check his story with the Fuzzies,” he said. “How are you doing at Mortgageville?”
“We have the place surrounded,” Ferguson said. “They might get out on foot; they won’t in a vehicle. We have three Navy landing-craft loaded with detection equipment circling overhead, and Casagra has a hundred Marines along with my men.”
“I can’t help on that, at all,” the Mallorysport police chief said. “I have all my men out making raids, and if you don’t need that blockade around Company House any more, I want the men who are there. We have Ivan Bowlby, Spike Heenan and Raul Laporte, and we’re pulling in everybody that’s ever had anything to do with any of them, or Leo Thaxter. We don’t have Thaxter, yet. I suppose he’s at Mortgageville, along with the Evinses, waiting for Herckerd and Novaes to bring in the loot. And we have Hugo Ingermann, and this time he can’t talk himself out. We got Judge Pendarvis out of bed, and he signed warrants for all of them; reasonable grounds for suspicion and authority to veridicate. We’re saving him for last; we’ve just started on the small-fry.”
There wasn’t any question in his mind that Leo Thaxter was involved in the attempt on the gem-vault. Whether Bowlby or Heenan or Laporte had anything to do with it was more or less immaterial. They could be questioned, not only about that but about anything else, and anything they admitted under veridication was admissible as evidence against them, self incriminatory or not.
“Well, I’m going over and see what they’ve been getting from the Fuzzies,” he said. “There ought to be quite a little, by now.” He glanced up at the screen from Steefer’s office; half a dozen people were there now, and he was surprised to see Jack Holloway among them. He couldn’t have flown in from Beta Continent since this had started. “I’ll call back, or have somebody call, later.”
Crossing the hall, he joined the group who were interviewing the five Herckerd-Novaes-Evins-Thaxter Fuzzies. Juan Jimenez was there, so were a couple of doctors who had been working with Fuzzies at the reception center. So was Claudette Pendarvis. Jack Holloway met him as he entered, and they shook hands.
“I thought there might be something I could do to help,” he said. “Listen, Mr. Grego, you’re not going to bring any charges against these Fuzzies, are you?”
“Good Lord, no!”
“Well, they’re sapient beings, and they broke the law,” Holloway said.
“They are legally ten-year-old children,” Judge Pendarvis’s wife said. “They are not morally responsible; they were taught to do this by humans.”
“Yes, faginy, along with enslavement,” Ahmed Khadra said. “Mandatory death by shooting for that, too.”
“And I hope they shoot that Evins woman first of all; she’s the worst of the lot,” Sandra Glenn said. “She’s the one who used the electric shock-rod on them when they made mistakes.”
“Mr. Grego,” Ernst Mallin interrupted. “I don’t understand this. These Fuzzyphones are simple enough for any Fuzzy to operate; all they need to do is hold the little pistol-grip and the switch works automatically. Diamond can talk audibly, but he simply cannot teach any of these other Fuzzies to use it. You don’t have your hearing aid on, do you? Well, listen to this.”
Diamond used his Fuzzyphone; he spoke quite audibly. When he gave it to any of the others, all they produced was, “Yeek.”
“Let me see that thing.” He took it from Diamond and carried it over to the desk; rummaging in the top middle drawer, he found a little screwdriver and took it apart. The mechanism seemed to be all right. He removed the tiny power-unit and exchanged it for a similar one from a flashlight he found in the Chief’s desk. The flashlight wouldn’t light. He handed the Fuzzyphone to Mallin.
“Give this to one of the others, not Diamond. Have him say something.”
Mallin handed the Fuzzyphone to one of the pair whom Lansky and Eggers had captured in the vault, and asked him a question. Holding the Fuzzyphone to his mouth, the Fuzzy answered quite audibly. Three or four of the humans said, “What the hell?” or words to that effect.
“Diamond, you not need talk-thing to make talk like Big One,” he said. “You make talk like Big One any time. You make talk like Big One now.”
“Like this?” Diamond asked.
“How does he do it?” Mrs. Pendarvis demanded. “Their voices aren’t audible, at all.”
“You think the power-unit gave out, and he just went on copying the sounds he was accustomed to make with the Fuzzyphone?” Mallin asked.
“That’s right. He heard himself speak in the audible range, and he just learned to pitch his voice to imitate his own transformed voice. I’ll bet he’s been talking audibly for weeks, and we never knew it.”
“Bet he didn’t know it, either,” Jack Holloway said. “Mr. Grego, do you think he could teach other Fuzzies to do that?”
“That would be kind of hard, wouldn’t it?” Mallin asked. “Does he really know, himself, how he does it?”
“Mr. Grego!” the police sergeant, who was still keeping half an eye on the communication screen, broke in. The Chief wants to know if you want to go to the gem-vault and check the contents of that suitcase.”
“Has anybody else checked it?”
“Well, Captain Lansky has, but…”
“Then lock it up in the vault; I don’t have to do that. The Nifflheim with it. I’ll check it tomorrow. I’m busy, now.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
“YOU THINK FOUR-FIFTY a carat would be all right?” Victor Grego was asking.
Bennett Rainsford picked up the lighter from the table in front of him and carefully relit a pipe that didn’t need relighting. Now that he’d come to know him, he found that he liked Victor Grego. But he still had to watch him. Grego was the Charterless Zarathustra Company, and the company was definitely not a philanthropic institution.
“Sounds all right to me,” Jack Holloway agreed. “You didn’t pay me any more than that when I was prospecting, and I had to dig them myself.”
“But four-fifty, Jack. The Terra market price is over a thousand sols a carat.”
“This isn’t Terra, Ben. Terra’s five hundred light-years, six months ship-time, away. I think Mr. Grego’s making us a good offer. All we need to do is bank the money; the company’ll do the rest.”
“Well, how much do you think the Fuzzies will get out of it, a month?”
Grego shrugged. “I haven’t seen it, myself. I’ll take Jack’s word for it. What do you think?”
“Well, it depends on how much equipment you use, and what kind. If it’s anything like the diggings I used to work, you’ll get about a sunstone to the ton.”
“We can move and process an awful lot of tons of flint in a month, and from Jack’s description I’d say we’ll be working that deposit for longer than any of us’ll be around. You know, Governor, instead of the Fuzzies getting handouts from the Government, they’ll be paying the Government’s bills before long.”
And that would have to be watched, too; it mustn’t be allowed to become a source of political graft. Inside a month, now, the elections for delegates to the Constitutional Convention would be held. Make sure the right men were elected, men who would write a Constitution which would safeguard the Fuzzies’ rights for all time.
Victor Grego, he was beginning to think, could be counted on to help in that.
LESLIE COOMBES HELD his glass while Gus Brannhard poured from the bottle, and said, quickly, “That’s enough, please,” when about fifty or sixty cc of whisky had been added to the ice. He filled the glass the rest of the way with soda, himself.
“And Hugo Ingermann,” he said, disgustedly, “is completely innocent.”
“Well, innocent of the Fuzzy business and the attempt on the company gem-vault,” Brannhard conceded, pouring into his own glass. When Gus mixed a highball, he always left out both the ice and the soda. “It’s probably the only thing he ever was innocent of, in his whole life. But he isn’t getting away scot-free.” Brannhard took a drink from his glass, and Coombes shuddered inwardly; the man must have a collapsium-plated digestive tract. “While we were interrogating this one and that one about the Fuzzy-sunstone business, we got a lot of evidence, all veridicated, to connect him with Thaxter’s shylocking and Bowlby’s call-girl agency and Heenan’s prize-fight fixing and Laporte’s strong-arm mob. I’m after him with a shotgun; I’m just filling the air all around him with indictments, and some of them are sure to hit. And even if I can’t get him convicted of anything, he’ll be disbarred, that’s for sure. And this Planetary Prosperity Party of his is catching fire, leaking radiation, blowing up and falling apart all around. Everybody’s calling it the Fuzzy-Fagin Party, and everybody who had anything to do with it is getting out as fast as he can.”
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