"Wait!" I said.
They had all walked out, including the guards.
It was a frame-up!
Oh, what cunning (bleepards) they were! The probability of Doctor Crobe doing something else was an absolute certainty. I knew the man! What a murderous revenge that assassin pilot had taken. This could get me killed very dead in the most legal possible way. And right when I was in triumph everywhere. Low blow.
Crobe crouched there eyeing me with his glittery black eyes, probably wondering what to turn me into. I hoped it wasn't a spider. I dislike spiders.
I thought. Crobe crouched.
I remembered the expression on the assassin pilot's face when he glanced at me in leaving.
I saw a safety line in a coil, hanging above a bunk.
INSPIRATION!
I got the safety line. I wrapped it round and round Crobe's ankles. I wrapped it round and round his legs. I wrapped it round and round his body, pinning his arms to his sides. I wrapped it round and round his neck and head. I tied it with a triple knot and fused the ends. Not even a ghost could get out of that.
Speedily, I raced to my room.
From my safe I took fifty thousand Turkish lira, amounting to about five hundred U. S. dollars.
I raced back. I found the construction superintendent.
"I want to make a deal," I said. I showed him the money.
His eyes bugged, as I knew they would.
"You are going to build me a cell the like of which nobody ever heard of, and when you do, you get this."
He made a grab. I was too quick for him. "When done and when tested," I said.
"A few thousand on account," he said.
I peeled off ten thousand lira. I gave them to him. "The rest when you execute the plan."
He took the bills. "Where's the plan?"
A small detail I had overlooked. So we sat down near the cocooned Crobe and I drew the plan.
You can get carried away with these things. Once I began to draw I didn't really know when to stop. I kept thinking of other ways he could get out.
But finally we had it and, if I say so myself, it was a masterpiece.
At the very end of the detention corridor there was a big cell which had never been used. It was all the way back. Across the corridor, before you got to it, I would place a sheet of blastproof steel, heavily embedded in the stone of the walls. It would have a bulletproof viewport in it. The door through it would be openable only by combination lock.
Beyond that would be the normal cell bars and their door.
Between these two impenetrable barricades I would place a beam alarm system, so that if anybody got in it would ring and clang all over the place.
Now, there was a chance that Crobe might get persuasive to a guard, as he had already done. So I would leave no way whatever to communicate through these barriers. This required a new ventilation hole be drilled straight up to the air to come out, masked behind a rock, on the mountainside.
The possibility existed that Crobe might try to climb up it, so it would have spikes to gouge anyone who made such an attempt. And furthermore, it would have explosive charges in it, with crisscrossing trip wires, that would blow anyone to bits if they attempted to crawl up it. I would also put saw rays across the outside and inside entrances. In that way, Crobe could communicate to nobody in the cell block, would have air but couldn't get out.
Now for food. I designed a device which went through a maze with fifteen turnings. When you put something on a tray, it would float way up on antigravity pulses and then slide on antigravity rollers through all those turnings. More-it would have fifteen sealed doors that any tray would have to go through. Each door would have a living-presence detector on it and if anything live tried to squeeze through, the door would remain shut.
So far so good.
The light in the place would not hook up to any part of the base. Independent units, powered by the sun at the air-shaft entrance, would be the only power.
Now for the cell itself. It was pretty large, as it was designed to hold about fifteen prisoners. So these stone ledges would have to go. Crobe would have to be forced to study, so in their place I would put tables and shelves for books.
Crobe's sanitation was awful so I designed sprayers and a drain so the whole area could be washed down simply by tripping a remote button, only the bookshelves shutting automatically.
As long as I was designing, I also put in a toilet and running water, though I suspected Crobe would never touch it. However, he could not complain to the Voltar sanitation department that he had been left without facilities.
I then put in a bed. And that was the masterpiece. If Crobe got too active and went raging around, the next time he lay down, clamps would shut and hold him in bed until somebody could come in and gas him.
It was a true masterpiece, as I have said. I looked at it proudly.
"It's going to take about a week to build," said the construction superintendent.
I blinked. What was I going to do with Crobe for a week?
I could not bring myself to change a single line of the plan. "Four days," I said.
"Four days and an additional ten thousand lira," he said.
I groaned. No, I couldn't possibly change this plan. It was too good. Well, who cared. I could always draw more lira.
"Go ahead," I said. "Only start at once."
I dragged Crobe into one of the many unoccupied cells. I pushed him onto a ledge. I laid my weapons handy.
And, amidst the buzzing of drills and the clang of metal in the cell block, for the next four days I stayed right there and guarded Crobe.
Oh, the arduousness of duty in the Apparatus!
All he did for four whole days was lie in his lashings and glare.
Chapter 4
Oh, was I glad when at last I could pay the construction superintendent his remaining money for a completed job. I almost parted with the lira with joy.
Four days of glares had gotten me down.
Getting four guards to stand with blastrifles pointed at the still-cocooned Doctor Crobe's head, I worked rapidly.
I got a huge case of spacecraft emergency rations– who knew how long he would be in there mucking about-and threw it into the middle of the cell floor.
Reviewing his language equipment, I made sure it was adequate to teach even an idiot English. I put it on the cell table.
Then, as I had before, I realized there still might be inadequate incentive for him to learn the language. He had exhibited interest in the first two texts. Accordingly, I unearthed whatever I could spare on the subjects of psychology and psychiatry. It was pretty juicy stuff. It included Governmental Psychology, all about man being a lousy, stinking, (bleeping) animal that was so depraved and writhing with unconscious passions he was totally incapable of rational thought and had to be policed with clubs at every turn; Irrational Psychiatry, all about how to cure people by killing them; Psychology of Women, or How to Trick Your Wife and Mistress into Getting into the Bed of Your Best Friend; Child Psychology, all about the techniques of turning children into perverts; The Psychiatrist on the Couch, giving seventy-seven unusual ways to engage in sex with animals; Dr. Kutzman's famous text, Psychiatric Neurosurgery, all about how to end every possible brain function; and Psychiatric Stew, which authoritatively told one what to do with people when they have been turned into vegetables by the latest techniques approved by the Food and Drug Administration. I included lots of other even more vital texts, all standard and accepted material of the professions. They could not fail to entice Crobe into reading English like mad.
I checked the cell carefully. There was no possible way to get out or to get in and there was no way anyone outside it could speak with anyone in it, and vice versa.
I went back, and with the guards standing ready, I burned the knot apart with a small disintegrator and began to unwind the safety line off his head. I got down to his mouth.
Crobe said, "I'll have the law on you for this!"
>
I was utterly amazed! Here I had saved his life. I had even become a claimant for him and put my own life at risk.
Then I understood: Crobe might be a doctor but he didn't know anything about law. He did not know, for instance, that I could now kill him without his thereafter being able to sue me. Further, if he knew so little about law, he didn't know ranks or how important I was. I recognized that I had better get a book and show him before I unwrapped anything else.
There was a crew library near to hand. I went in. I looked. There was a long shelf utterly covered with dust. Nobody had looked at these books for decades. I blew and when I was through coughing I read the titles.
It was all one series of volumes! More than forty of them, very thick. The title of the set was Voltar Confederacy Combined Compendium Complete, including Space Codes, Penal Codes, Domestic Codes, Royal Proclamations, Royal Orders, Royal Procedures, Royal Precedence, Royal Successions Complete with Tables and Biographies, Court Customs, Court History, Royal Land Grants, Rights of Aristocracy, Planetary Districts of 110 Planets, Local Laws, Local Customs, Aristocratic Privileges and Various Other Matters. Impressive!
I realized it would scare Crobe half to death. I promptly put the whole set on a cart and wheeled it to the new cell and stuffed it into the shelves. Why engage in chitchat? Let him find his own reasons he was being so ungrateful!
I went back to get Crobe. He was glaring so hard, I decided not to take a chance of completing the unwrap there. I dumped him on a cart and rolled it into the cell.
I said, "You will get out of here when you know English and decide to obey my orders!"
I picked up the loose end of the safety line and gave it a hefty yank.
He spun like a top!
Right across the floor.
His body even hummed, it was turning so fast.
I kicked the cart out of the cell.
I locked up the cell door.
I slammed the new armor-steel corridor door.
I spun the combination.
Only I knew that combination. Nobody could get in. Crobe couldn't get out.
My sigh of relief came with a gusty rush. In due time, if I needed it, I had a secret weapon I could send against Heller. At the least sign of resurgence or success in the U. S., I would launch the deadly Crobe.
Until then, he was safe and I was safe.
I looked in through the port. He had untangled himself. He was staring at the bookshelves. And just as I had hoped, his interest quickened. He was picking up Psychiatric Stew.
With a gay and jaunty step, I went upon my way.
Life had taken a new and pleasant upturn once again.
Chapter 5
After a marvelous breakfast served by Karagoz and a waiter, who crossed the floor only on their knees, it occurred to me that I had better check up on Heller and Krak just to make sure they were still failing.
With a pitcher of hot sira, I leaned back in a comfortable chair and watched the two viewers.
Heller was doing a whole bunch of figures at his desk in New York. All sorts of equations, mostly chemical. No threat there: he could do equations until the sky fell in and it wouldn't disturb the planet in the least.
I became interested in what the Countess Krak was doing. She was in the secretary boudoir and the door to the office itself was closed. The place was all festooned with cupids prancing around the wallpaper. But that wasn't what she was looking at directly. It was the cat.
She was down on her knees and she was teaching him to do backflips. He was working very hard to get them just right.
"Elegance is the watchword, Mister Calico," she was saying. "Now let's do it again. Saunter along-one, two, three, four-without a care in the world. Then FLIP! Takes the audience by surprise. Now here we go again: one, two, three, four..."
What a silly woman! She was still talking to it in Standard Voltarian and it was still an Earth cat! Couldn't possibly understand her.
And if this was all she was doing, it was certainly no threat to me.
The cat must have done a perfect flip. She petted it and Mister Calico purred.
"All right," said the Countess. "That's enough acrobatics for today. Now let's review yesterday's lesson. Go get a newspaper."
She opened the door a crack. That cat wasn't so smart after all. Had to have doors opened for it.
The cat went out into the office. It sprang up on a bar stool. A stack of newspapers was there. The cat caught the edge of one in its teeth and worried it off the bar. The paper hit the floor with a plop. The cat jumped down and again bit into the corner of it and, walking sideways, got it through the boudoir door.
The Countess closed the door. "That's fine." She knelt on the floor. "Now turn it over so I can read it."
The cat, with teeth and paws, turned the newspaper over.
It wasn't really a newspaper. It was the weekly news magazine, the National Expirer. I guess the cat liked spicy reading.
It didn't go smoothly. The Countess flinched back. She gave the cat an absent pat. She leaned forward, reading the front page story. It said:
IS MISS AMERICA SAFE
FROM WHIZ KID RAPE?
This probing question is being passionately asked today by rape experts.
After his theft of Atlantic City, the thing has raised its ugly head: Is the reigning Miss America, only just crowned this autumn at Atlantic City, now safe from threatened Whiz Kid ravishment?
Many experts predict that the Whiz Kid will not be able to curtail his ardor now that Miss America is so easily in his clutches.
Others, reviewing the measurements of Miss America, agree that no oversexed normal male would be able to resist her charms.
No less an authority than the press agent of Miss America himself stated, "We have tried to hide her photographs from his view and we have her in a narrow bed that won't take two, but predictions of an early roll in the hay are rife."
The story was accompanied by a full-length, half-page picture of a gorgeous, half-naked blonde showing a yard of leg enticingly.
The Countess Krak sat back on her haunches. She was staring at the photograph. "Oh, dear," she muttered. "She is beautiful. Oh, dear, and we're not even married yet!"
She suddenly folded the paper and shoved it under the edge of the rug. She said, "Cat! Call Mamie!"
There was a phone on the side table of the couch. The cat jumped up beside it. I was amazed. A cat using a telephone? But then I saw it wasn't remarkable at all. The phone was a speaker phone and all you had to do was punch a button and it came on with a dial tone. Then it had a row of call buttons on a panel beside it and all you had to do was touch one button and it automatically dialled a whole number. Anybody can do that. Just two buttons.
"President and General Manager Boomp here," came out of the phone speaker.
"Meow," said the cat. Well, at least it didn't say "Hello" in Voltarian. That would have been a Code break for sure!
The Countess gave the cat a stroke and sat down on the couch. "Hello, dear. This is Joy. You know that dinner you were inviting us to attend this week? Well, I just called to say Jettero is very, very busy and can't possibly come down to Atlantic City."
"Oh, that's too bad."
Krak said, "How are things, dear?"
"Oh, just fine," said Mamie. "That (bleeped) Mafia had all the gambling devices rigged and they were paying off only to their own henchmen and shills, but we reversed the policy and only let popular people win-pretty girls we can get good pictures of and such. You should see them flocking in."
"Well, well," said the Countess Krak. "That confirms it. We won't be down, dear. Come up to New York any time. Bye-bye." To the cat she made a gesture and it punched the disconnect button.
"Hmm," said the Countess Krak. "This requires some heavy thinking, Mister Calico. That's the end of your training for today."
She sat there for a while, staring at nothing. Then she primped her hair, smoothed out her eyebrows, straightened up the expensive lounge su
it she was wearing and went out into the office. She sat down in the chair across from Heller.
He became aware of her, looked up and smiled.
"Dear," said the Countess Krak, "exactly what are your plans for getting us home?"
I flinched. I knew what she had her mind on. Those "Royal" forgeries. Until they were presented and hers was signed, she thought she could not get married. The last thing I wanted was a push toward concluding Mission Earth! They could get me shot! I wished she realized that any effort to present those forgeries would also get her shot, but I dared not tell her.
"Oh, I'm sorry, darling," said Heller. "I guess I haven't been very exact in telling you about my planning. You see, I'm supposed to put this planet in a condition that will continue to support life.
"The first thing they need is a fuel that doesn't pollute. The oil companies are insisting that everyone burn chemical-fire fuels that smoke and get soot and poison gases into the atmosphere. Until they have and are using a better energy source, it's useless to do anything else to salvage the planet.
"Also, to do any real building or feed the populations, they need more fuel than is being made available. The inflation you run into is also because of the high cost of fuel, which monthly becomes more expensive.
"So (a) they are getting dirty and making fresh air scarce by using dirty fuel; (b) they are short on real fuel and can't build cheap sewage plants; and (c) they are unable to control their economy because they have such expensive fuel.
"So, whatever else needs fixing, they are going up in smoke unless they have and use proper technology."
"Very good," said the Countess Krak, "then what are your plans for getting us home?"
"Oh, you mean my immediate program? Well, it goes like this: (1) They won't listen to anybody who doesn't have a diploma. And in a very few months now, I should have that. (2) I am working on carburetors and fuels within this culture's own scientific-use-capability framework and should be able to produce these. (3) I need spores to clean up the particles and poison gases in the planet's atmosphere. I asked Gris for a cellologist and you say Crobe is learning English and will be here soon, so that's in train. (4) I have some other things to do to prevent continent immersion by floods. And (5) to set up anything as massive as planetary fuel conversion requires billions of dollars."
Mission: Earth Fortune of Fear Page 16
