I must have spent too much time gloating. She was speaking again. "Soltan, I know you are the handler for Mission Earth. You made that very plain back at Spiteos when you brought Jettero to me to language-train. A mission handler also handles mission expenses. I know that your boss, Lombar Hisst, thinks this is a pretty important mission. He told me so when I left. He said I was being sent to make sure the person on the mission was happy and not too overworked. And I know from the secret documents you showed me, His Majesty thinks it is very important, too. So I can't imagine their skimping on finance for it!"
His Majesty indeed! If she only knew: Those "Royal Proclamations" that guaranteed her and Heller a happy life back on Voltar were mere forgeries I had created to trick her. I had to get her off the subject.
Inspiration struck. "Actually, Countess, they don't use money on this planet very much. They have a thing called credit cards." Oh, man, was I going to mess Heller up!"The thing for you to do is get yourself a whole stack of credit cards and use them all you want. Just buy, buy, buy! That's the way it's done. So when you get to New York, use credit cards and buy anything you please. Load yourself up!"
"Credit cards?" she said. "That means 'money' cards. Oh, is THAT what they use instead of this gringy paper?"
"Exactly," I said. "Hardly any money actually changes hands. It's all done with CREDIT cards." I pulled a sheaf of the (bleeped) things out of my pocket and showed her.
"Ah, that's why you don't have any money!"
"True! That's too true!" I said with complete sincerity.
"Strange planet," she said. "You mean, you just take one of these cards and they give you anything you want? Weird."
"You can repeat that with fanfares," I said with a trace of bitterness. I took them all back and put them in my pocket.
She was thoughtful. "But I don't have any of these cards. I'll have to do something. I can't let Jettero see me like this." She sighed. She stood up. "Well, thank you for the briefing, anyway. You're a true friend, Soltan." And she patted me on the shoulder.
I flinched but I covered it up quickly. She must not suspect I had just conned her into ruining Heller utterly. I glanced at my watch. "Oh, Heavens!" I said. "We'll miss the plane!"
What a relief it would be to have her off my hands!
Chapter 3
I got the taxi and we got her to the airport with the huge cases, hypnohelmet cartons and grip. Using the taxi driver and a porter, I got the luggage and her to the check-in counter. There was excess baggage, of course-$329! I had told her I didn't have any money. But I was up to it.
When they gave her her boarding pass, I led her over to a waiting-room seat and seated her. Then I went back to the counter. By the simple mechanism of giving the clerk a twenty-dollar bill for himself personally, I got the baggage marked Paid Excess through to New York.
She was looking around her at the several passengers who were waiting. Even if they were in cloaks and veils, the women were not badly dressed. White silk and gold brocade were visible through slits in the outer covering.
She looked down ruefully at herself. The comparison was not favorable. I suppressed my mirth. She did look pretty awful in that dingy cloak and hood with the holes in it. And the veil was gray with age. Oh, she'd force Heller to foot the bill for clothes, all right!
The echoey P. A. system was calling her flight, in Turkish and then in English, "Passengers now boarding THY Flight 19 for Istanbul. Gate One."
Afyon is just a little airport with only one plane a day and one gate, but since it reopened some years back, they like to do things big city style.
"That's your plane," I said urgently. Just being around her was a pretty nerve-wracking experience. If she guessed what I was putting her up to, she was quite capable of stamping me into the waiting-room floor.
"Wait," she said. "Haven't you forgotten something, Soltan?"
I looked down. I was still holding her flight envelope.
"Here," I said. "Here is the rest of your ticket and your baggage and excess check. The gate is right over there...."
"All right," she said, taking them and also pulling the boarding pass out of my other hand. "But I'm told New York is the biggest city on the planet. And although I am sure that everybody would know Jettero by this time, maybe he is using a different name like you did with me. And I don't even have his address!"
Oh, my Gods, how could I overlook that! If she couldn't find him they might send her straight back to point of origin.
The P. A. blared out hollowly again. Whoever was manning that P. A. system could visibly see he had passengers stalled and not moving toward the gate-namely us!"THY Flight 19! Gate One. You'll miss your flight, Sultan Bey! Move it!"
(Bleep) being too well-known. It threw me into confusion. I didn't have a pencil. I rushed to a counter and got one. There was no paper. I dug into my pocket and pulled out a scrap. I hastily wrote Heller's Earth name and address on the back of it. I rushed back to the Countess Krak, pushed it into her hand and shoved her bodily toward Gate One.
The man there took her boarding pass and urgently pointed at the plane. Everybody else was aboard. But the Countess Krak turned. She seized me by the shoulders and right through her veil gave me a kiss on the cheek.
"Thank you, Soltan," she said. "I appreciate what you have done. You are a good man, Soltan."
She turned and raced over to the plane, and sped up the steps. At the top she turned and waved back to me. Then she vanished inside.
I stood there, very uneasy indeed. On the surface of it, getting her here, getting her scars removed and getting her on her way to see the man she loved would seem to merit appreciation. But looking only at the surface could get one into deep trouble in dealing with the Countess Krak. She had been up to something. That burst of affection was so unlike her, I knew down to the roots of my soul that it boded no good. Yes, the more I thought of it, the more certain I became. Some horrible trick was involved! I knew her too well! And to my sorrow!
The plane rumbled away to the takeoff area and then, with a roar, rushed down the runway and into the sky.
I was not out of the woods yet. She might not transfer to the international flight at Istanbul. She might have second thoughts and come back.
The taxi rushed me back to the hospital. I entered the interview room and locked the door behind me. I unlocked the cabinet and got out the viewer.
Chapter 4
There she was in the Turkish Airlines plane. She had taken off the veil. The stewardess was giving her coffee and a small, dried-out roll. She took the little tray and examined it minutely, feeling the paper, trying to read the label on the sugar cube-which was in Turkish. She didn't know that she was supposed to put the sugar cube in the coffee. A taste of the beverage did not meet with her approval. She saw a passenger ring a buzzer and get the stewardess so she tried it. The stewardess came over.
"This is awfully bitter," the Countess said in English. "Do you have some hot jolt?"
Oh, Gods. Code break! But it wouldn't have done any good to brief her. She would just have said, I'm not in the military!
The stewardess looked shocked. "We usually don't serve hard liquor on the early morning flight, ma'am."
"But this is so bitter!"
"Ah," said the stewardess, "you haven't put the sugar in." She opened a couple of cubes and dropped them in the cup. She must have thought the Countess Krak was feebleminded.
The Countess Krak studied the blunt, odd-shaped knife. She must have decided you could stir with it, for that is how she used it. Then she found the spoon still wrapped up in the napkin. She studied that. There was a pat of butter for the roll. She took some of it with the spoon and tasted it cautiously. She sipped at the coffee. Then she put everything back down on the tray. She muttered, in Voltarian, "Jettero must be starving to death on this planet!"
That was the most cheerful thought I had heard all day! I took off my cap and got out of my bearskin coat. I put the viewer on the examination couch and sat
down in a chair. I might as well make myself comfortable. I was going to make very sure this lepertige got out of Turkey.
I reached up to fondle my "rank locket" as one will. My hand met empty air!
I looked.
GONE!
I must have dropped it!
A sick feeling coursed through me. I had intended just to borrow Utanc's emerald locket to give myself the necessary air of authority when I couldn't find mine. I had intended, before this day was out, to sneak it back into her wardrobe jewel drawer. Oh, my Gods, her rage at me would make the villa utterly uninhabitable!
Wait. Where had I felt it last? I couldn't recall.
I raced out into the hall. I almost collided head-on with Prahd. "Have you found a locket?" I screamed at him.
He said, "Sssh, sssh!" He pushed me back into his office. "Don't yell so. And you've taken off your fur coat. You can't run around in public in a Voltar uniform! Here." He grabbed a white doctor's coat out of a drawer and shoved it at me.
I steadied myself down long enough to put it on. The skirt and sleeves were much too long. "The locket
I was wearing to show my rank," I said. "It's gone. Please help me look for it."
"I'm sorry," he said. "I have an operation scheduled. Just remember the places you have been and go look."
That was wise advice. I went to the operating room we had used last night. A cleaning team was in there. No, they hadn't seen a green locket.
I went to where I had stood looking through the oneway window. No, no locket on the floor.
Bright idea: I called the taxi driver on the phone. I held on while he went and looked in his cab. No, no locket.
Pleadingly, I told him to drive out to the airport and look around the floor and call back. He said he would.
I paced. Oh, Gods, Utanc would scream and rage and throw things in absolute hurricanes for days, weeks, months! It was the biggest stone in that drawer. It must be worth fifty thousand dollars at least!
That called to mind the state of my finances. Very soon those credit-card vultures would be back. I hadn't any notion how much I still owed from my trip to the U. S., but it would not be less than another half a million. No possible chance existed of getting it from the hospital or Faht Bey. As it stood now, maybe they would be satisfied just by selling off the villa and the staff. But if I bought another locket for replacement and ran up even more bills than I had, maybe they would sell me, too!
No, buying another locket was out of the question! The very thought of more bills turned my blood cold.
An hour went by. The taxi driver called back. No, there was no locket on the floor of the airport and nobody had turned one in and I now owed him another fifteen dollars! It made me feel pretty angry. Not only had he probably tipped the scales in favor of mayhem from the collectors by buying me that new wardrobe on my credit cards, he now couldn't even do a simple thing like finding a locket! But I didn't rage at him. He was the only excuse for a friend I had. I simply hung up.
Dispiritedly, I wandered back to the interview room I had been using, went in and closed the door.
The Countess had transferred at Istanbul and was on her way to Brussels for the next plane change.
Apparently, in the transit lounge, she had made some acquisitions. They have a pretty complete snack and magazine stand there and she had invested heavily. She had a lot of periodicals on her lap. She was selecting one. She had a French one called Oo La La, La Femme.
The elation I should be feeling at the realization that she was out of Turkey and that every second was taking her further away did not come.
Maybe it was the magazine which made me feel suppressed. It was a fashion magazine. I knew that she didn't read French but those huge color plates of clothes didn't need words. What they were saying to her, I did not know. But what they said to me was "Expensive!" I was a man of experience now where women's clothes were concerned!
Gradually, however, I began to cheer up. Those gorgeous color plates of weirdly posing models draped in impossibly bizarre garments were going to cost Heller a roaring fortune! A Parisienne designer doesn't look at his client's figure: he looks only at her checkbook. As he expects both to be very fat, I wondered why the models in such fashion plates were always as thin as chicken bones. Strange world, women's fashions. The French were featuring, I could make out, Le Look Garbage.
Somebody had explained all this to me once-a man on a plane. He had said the fashion designers were all homos and they hated women because they saw in them competition. So they covertly dressed them as bizarrely as possible to keep men off of them. He was probably right. Looking at these pictures made me hate homos all the more! To dress women strangely was one thing but to dress them so expensively was unforgivable!
The Countess Krak eventually threw it aside. She picked up a huge American edition of a periodical called Vague. More fashion plates. They were, strangely enough, quite different from the French. It was not that they were less bizarre, it was not that the models had any more meat on them, it was not that the (bleeping) homos had been any less industrious in trying to make women look awful and thus get the men into their own beds: they were just entirely different. The American gays were pushing The Marionette Look. The magazine was even full of little side sketches showing marionettes with their legs all tangled up and crossed and bending the wrong way and the strings strangling them.
"Dearie, I see you're studying fashions." A new voice. Krak looked sideways at her seat companion. The speaker was a blowzy blonde of about forty, with peroxided hair. "I can see it's about time!" She smiled. "I'm Mamie Boomp, heading back to the Big Apple and bright lights. Who're you?"
That's what I like about American travellers. Very direct. No beating around the bush.
"I'm supposed to be Joy Krackle," said the Countess Krak. "How do you do?"
"Well, I'm doing quite all right, thank you, after a star tour of the hot spots of the Middle East. I'm a famous singer. The Arabs loaded me with loot and I'm on my way back to God's Country to spend it. Jesus Christ, I don't think I'll get in another bed for a year! But, honey, you look like you got caught in a camel crash."
"Really?"
"Yeah, them clothes," said Mamie Boomp with a contemptuous wave at Krak's cloak. "Where'd you get such rags?"
"I was held captive for three years in a fortress," said the Countess Krak. "They stole all my clothes."
"No (bleep)?" said Mamie. "Jesus Christ, them (bleeped) Arabs will do anything. Much as a girl's life is worth to leave the U. S. of A. these days. I can see you need some coaching if you let them get away with that! You got to keep your wits about you. Same thing almost happened to me in Morocco. But I told the king, I said, 'Listen, Buster, if you don't come across with a few diamonds, I'll not just amputate your (bleeps), I'll cut off your American aid.' He can't exist without American aid so he just filled my pockets up with the old glitter and let me go. Look, here's one of them yet!"
She showed Krak a huge diamond ring, nestling amongst many others on her puffy hand. "Diamonds are a girl's best friend," she added.
"Are emeralds and rubies also very valuable on this planet?" said the Countess.
"You said it, baby. Mind if I help you with that fashion mag and show you what really puts the beasts in heat?"
Suddenly a chill like the Arctic wind coursed through me. I abruptly had a vivid recollection! The Countess Krak's sudden burst of affection! The completely out-of-character kiss on my cheek!
Sleight of hand! She was an expert at it. She had trained magicians by the score! All she had to do was unhook the clasp with one hand and catch it as it fell into the other!
Conviction! The Countess Krak had the emerald locket!
It all added up. She had made sure in her hypnotic implant that I would let her take away anything she wanted! She had been so concerned about her appearance when she first met Heller.
I knew exactly what she intended to do now. She would land in New York. She would buy a truckload of cl
othes. And she would pay for them with the locket! With Utanc's fifty-thousand-dollar locket that I could not hope to replace!
Oh, it was true she was a criminal! I immediately believed her police record down to the last dot! A thief!
Chapter 5
Torn between rage and despair, I was an unwilling participant in that flight.
Fashions, fashions, fashions. Clothes, clothes, clothes. Up the snow-banked Danube far below, fashions, fashions, fashions and clothes, clothes, clothes. Across the Alps and Germany and through the Brussels change, fashions, fashions, fashions and clothes, clothes, clothes. Across the tip of England and above Atlantic storms, fashions, fashions, fashions and clothes, clothes, clothes. They even neglected their lunch-the Countess Krak because she couldn't figure how to eat it and Mamie Boomp because she was getting too fat and could no longer get into some of her fashions, fashions, fashions and clothes, clothes, clothes.
They had taken time out now and then to exchange theatrical experiences. They had both been on the stage. And I also had to suffer through some items from Countess Krak that would have been flagrant Code breaks if Mamie Boomp had not gotten the idea that Atalanta was Atlantic City and Voltar was a place just outside of Peoria, Illinois.
At length, Mamie said, "Now that we have got it all laid out even down to the organdy sea-green negligees, dearie, I still get the sneaking hunch you're not entirely happy about it. You got some problem you ain't telling Mamie?"
"Well, yes," said the Countess Krak. "I'm going to meet my man, you see. He's been on this planet for months all by himself. He's the handsomest, most gorgeous man you'd ever hope to see. You get some idea when I tell you that his sister is considered one of the best-looking women in the whole Confederacy."
"Ah, yah," said Mamie Boomp. "One of them 'you all' southern belles."
Mission: Earth Fortune of Fear Page 3
