The Invaders Plan

by Ron Hubbard

  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 Iknew. "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 good-bye. 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 469-98BRYheading for Apparatus hangars from Camp Endurance." He had read the numbers on the communicator disc. He thrust it at me. I fumbled for my identoplate and pressed it on the disc; 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 is 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 assorted 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.

  Heller took a pair of gloves from his pocket and handed me one of them, putting his own on.

  The hoist hook was resting on the floor. I went into shock as I understood. Heller put his foot on it and took hold of a handle on the upper plate. It was a huge hook. There was plenty of room to put more than one foot on it. He expected meto step onto that hook!

  I had seen high riggers do it on gantries. But never in my days had it ever occurred to me to ride a hook!

  Heller was gesturing at me, his attention elsewhere. It was nothing to him to ride a hook. Life around a combat engineer, I groaned to myself. I put on the glove, put my foot near his, seized a hand bar and closed my eyes tight.

  "Take her to the top!" shouted Heller in that peculiar ear-splitting voice.

  Up we went! I left my stomach on the hangar floor. With nothing under us or around us but one steel hook, with nothing above us but screaming cables, we were zipped to the top of the hangar. We stopped suddenly, the spring of the cables making us bounce.

  I cautiously opened one eye and closed it again. Heller had one foot over empty space. I grabbed the hand ring with my other hand.

  "Look over there," said Heller. And then h
e must have seen that I wasn't looking. "Hey, open your eyes. It's only five hundred feet down." They say never look down. I couldn't help it. I was horrified at the amount of empty space and the hardness of that concrete far below.

  "We've got to find a mission ship," said Heller. "Look them over." I cursed the security which forbade me to tell him we should just be going by regular freighter.

  "How big a ship will the hangars take on Blito-P3?" said Heller, nonchalantly swinging in the air.

  I blurted the answer, "Five freighters, a couple combat ships."

  "Then it will take a big ship," said Heller. He was looking down upon the whole expanse of the Apparatus space vessels now groundside. From this vantage point, a few were still hidden beyond others.

  "Take her to the right!" shouted Heller to the cab that was just behind us now.

  The hook swooped horrifyingly to the right. Heller could now see between several of the ships that had formerly blocked his view.

  "Freighters. Transports. Some old model war vessels." He turned to me. "Where'd the Apparatus get these ships? Some temple rummage sale?"

  "We're not the Fleet," I managed to get out.

  "That,"said Heller, "you definitely are not! I've got to think this over." Can't you think it over down on the ground? I silently pleaded. The hook was still swinging. He seemed to be determined to hang way up here in thin air and think. I got desperate. "We're supposed to take a freighter."

  "Oh, no, no, no," said Heller. "Six weeks or more on the way. And no mission operating ship there. I've got to change your mind." You've changed it, I silently said. Anything, but get me back on the ground. He was still hanging there, thinking. "This stuff is all a pile of scrap," he said. "It just won't do. And a freighter won't do either. You certainly agree that we should have a proper mission ship." My hand was so sweaty it was slipping inside the engineer glove. My other one had already slipped! I screamed, "Yes. Yes! We need a proper ship! I agreeeeeee!" Heller turned and waved a hand at the crane operator just behind us. Then he signalled, palm down.

  We plummeted! The cables screamed! We dropped five hundred feet so fast my foot came off the hook!

  The steel heel banged into the hangar floor. Heller had stepped off just before it hit and stood there very composed. I reeled away and sat down on the concrete. I couldn't make my legs function.

  Heller didn't seem to notice. He was sort of surveying the hangar floor around us, looking at a big empty space. "Aha!" he said.

  His voice went racketing up to the crane cab. "Thank you and very well done, crane master!" The operator waved back.

  "Come on," said Heller, trotting away.

  Where the Hells was he going now? I gathered myself up and gazed after him. What was he up to? I desperately tried to think of some way to get this back under control. My neck was out a mile and a half. My prisoner was running around like a celebrity, without a single guard to back me up. He might take it into his head to go anywhere! But I had no ideas. I couldn't get even an inkling of what was really in his mind. If Lombar got wind of any of this . . .

  Helplessly and hopelessly, I followed Heller back to the airbus.

  Chapter 3

  We took off again. It was still very early and the intercity air traffic had not even gotten thick yet. The sun was still so low that the shadows on the ground were like long black fingers. I had no slightest idea where we were headed.

  "This thing well fuelled?" Heller called back to my driver.

  "For any place but the Royal Officers' Club," said the driver. I shook my head at him. Heller mustn't know about that. He sure did break down discipline around him: my driver had opened up a canister of sparklewater and was sipping it, admiring the view.

  "Give me back my glove," said Heller. I handed it over. He was about to put it in his pocket when he felt that the cuff was damp.

  We were at about twenty thousand feet and he was flying at about five hundred miles an hour. There was even some light traffic up this high now. But he took his hand off the wheelstick and began to fly with his knee! He rolled back the glove cuff, blew into it to turn it wrong side out, took out his redstar engineer's rag and wiped the glove dry. "You must have been nervous," he said consolingly. "I keep forgetting you might not be used to certain things." Heller turned the cuff back, blew the glove right side out and put it and the rag in his pocket. "Well, don't you worry, Soltan. We'll get something nice and safe to travel in." Not very reassuring when the pilot is flying with one toe, one knee and, while admittedly very relaxed, is paying no slightest attention to whizzing traffic at his flight level. The overdriven airbus felt like it was about to shatter!

  We were to the north of the main Fleet base. Below us an isolated plateau rolled up. The airbus was shaking so hard my vision was jittered and I couldn't see what it was.

  "Here we are," said Heller and made what would be ranked in any book as a crash landing.

  The dust settled. We were sitting before a low administration building, white and decorated with antique blastguns. It was very quiet. Nobody seemed to be around. Behind the building was a huge and seemingly endless fence. On it was a gigantic sign, EMERGENCY FLEET RESERVE Heller bounced out and I followed him up the building steps. There was a hall, a lot of empty desks, some unposted bulletin boards and plenty of echoes.

  Apparently knowing where he was going, Heller trotted to the end of the hall and, without knocking, burst into a tomblike room.

  A grizzled old space officer was sitting in a gravity chair, working on some lists, nursing a canister of hot jolt with his left hand. The unlighted sign on the front of the desk said, Commander Crup He looked up, a thundercloud scowl on his face. And then he burst into pure radiance. "Jettero!" He leaped up. They came together like colliding spaceships, pounding each other on the back. They laughed. The commander backed off, "Let me look at you! I haven't seen you for a year!" Suddenly he caught sight of me. His scowl came back. "A 'drunk'!" How do they always know?

  Heller whipped out the orders: the Grand Council authorization and his own. He handed them to the commander. That worthy looked hard at me. "He's all right," said Heller. "Commander Crup, meet Officer Gris." But Crup didn't offer to shake hands. He read the orders. He relaxed a bit.

  "Well, what can we do for you, Jet?"

  "Just on a shopping tour," said Heller. "Can I have permission to overfly the place?"

  "Better than that," said Crup. "I'll come along with you." He gathered his cap and a case full of papers and outside we went.

  The scene which had been so lonely before was now a bit populated. Six tough, scowling Fleet marines were standing around the airbus, fingering their electric daggers. My driver was sitting a bit white-faced and alert in back.

  "It's all right, sergeant," said Crup. "This is Jettero Heller." The biggest Fleet marine relaxed and smiled. He gave the single-arm salute of marines casually. "What you doing in 'drunk' company?" I held my breath.

  If Heller were to tell these tough brutes he had been held prisoner and was in actual fact under guard, I am sure they would have slaughtered me and the driver.

  "I'm in disguise," said Heller with a perfectly straight face.

  For some reason they thought this extremely funny.

  "Sergeant," said Crup, as we piled into the front seat, "call perimeter defense and tell them this airbus has permission to overfly." Heller took off, jumped the fence and, very low and slow, began to fly along. I had seen this place from high altitude and had often wondered what it was. What must be fifty square miles of black-hulled spaceships, sitting on their tails, stretched before us, the long morning shadows making it appear they were even more numerous. They were tall, they were short, they were broad, they were thin. What an assemblage!

  I promptly destroyed what little tolerance I had gained from Commander Crup. "Emergency Fleet Reserve," I said. "This looks more like a boneyard!" Crup withered me. He wasn't going to answer at first and then pride got the better of him. "These ships are notscrap! They have the status
of 'suspended activation.' When vessels are still serviceable but have been outmoded they are added to the Emergency Fleet Reserve!"

  "But I don't see any men, no crews," I said.

  "There are retired officers and superannuated spacemen aplenty that could be summoned up to man these ships," said Crup. "And believe me, in time of planetary emergency, the Fleet would be thankful to have them." Heller changed the subject. "Hey, there's the old Juba!I didn't know they had retired the five thousand spacer class, any of them!" I looked in that direction. It was a huge black monster, covered with dust. It looked like a Commercial City office building. But I didn't get any time to admire it as Heller barely flicked its antennas with our undercarriage.

  Rows and rows of ships, thousands and thousands of them. We cruised along, Heller looking. I wished he'd put more of his attention on flying.

  "If you could tell me what you want," said Crup, "maybe I could help. What kind of a mission is it?" Untrained as he was, I thought Heller would blurt it out. But he said, "Kind of a peculiar one. I'll just keep on looking." We had gotten to the far perimeter. "See that old baby over in the corner there, Soltan?" It was a monster's monster. It was built of cubes apparently added on at random until they were mountain high. A more dilapidated spaceship I have never seen.

  "That," said Heller, "is the Upward Strike.You are looking at the last of the original intergalactic battleships. She was part of the force which attacked Voltar, an immigration ship. A hundred and twenty-five thousand years old. She must be sunk into the ground thirty feet by now."

  "I thought you said all these ships were operational," I quipped.

  Crup sneered at me. "She is equipped with the original time drives that made immigration possible between galaxies. Academy cadets studying engines are brought here to see her."

  "It was my weak subject," I said lamely. I did recall now there had been such tours. I had always been on punishment drill.

  I was jolted out of it by a yell from Heller. "There she is! There she is! There she is! Oh, you baby!"