Jettero Heller’s dress uniform breast had neither silver nor copper braid. It was an almost solid mass of gold!
I lifted some of the flaps: building a bridge under severe enemy fire; mining in the orbit of Banfochon III; rebuilding the destroyed control center of Hemmerthon under enemy barrage; recovery of the derelict Genmaid; sabotage of the Rollofan transport system; mining the fortress of Montrail . . . On and on! I had to look at several more before I even found the battleship Menuchenken. Jettero Heller’s few years of service had been active ones even for a combat engineer. Behind each one of those brief entries would lie a whole lurid scene of close shaves and violent battle.
I told myself how it must have happened: a fellow gets a reputation and they keep drafting him when the odds look hopeless. And in times of perpetual war, there were lots of these. Then my estimate was soured by noting that what they call the “Volunteer Star”—a blaze of diamonds with a ruby center—was tucked with its ribbon inside the jacket. They award that for fifty perilous volunteers. They didn’t keep drafting him—he kept volunteering!
I thought I had it then: a glory hound. That was his fracture. If I could play on that . . .
“He has a lot of other citations and awards,” said the old gunner-manager. “Some of them are so valuable we keep them in the big vault. He never wears them.”
So he wasn’t a glory hound. Oh, well, there were other faults he might have that I could exploit. I wandered off to look at the walls.
He had a lot of pictures of people. I don’t know why portraitists always insist on cloud-sky backgrounds: when you see one of these three-dimensional color shots against a sky it makes it look like a little bust parked in the heavens; gives it a religious note as though everyone was being made into a goddess or godlet. I don’t like them; they make the viewer feel like he’s in the sky, too, and I don’t care for that.
There was an older woman with a gentle smile, evidently his mother. There was a tough old hawk of a man in a shabby business tunic: it was inscribed “To my dear son.” And then there was one of . . . I stopped dead. I was looking at the most beautiful female I have ever seen in my life. It was one of these trick portraits where the bust follows you with its eyes and when you lower your head it just looks sweet but when you raise it, the lips smile. Honest, this beauty took your breath away! Wow!
I had it now. This was the handle! I turned toward the gunner-manager.
“That’s his sister,” said this hope-shattering fiend. “She’s a star on the Homeview circuit. You must have seen her.”
I hadn’t. We are too busy in the Apparatus for self-indulgence like art. I wandered off to an assembled collection of press photos, all in their fake porthole frames. Jettero with classmates; Jettero being carried on the shoulders of some crew; Jettero finishing a bullet ball tournament; Jettero being introduced at a banquet; Jettero pulling a basketload of survivors into a ship. On and on. But before I could conclude I had a publicity freak on my hands, I noticed that the little other faces in the pictures were circled and their names written under the circles: they were a gallery of his friends, not Jettero. (Bleep), but you can’t succeed with just a few tries.
But there was one of Jettero alone! It was full-color, three-dimensional and gorgeous. He was sitting in the seat of a ship; it was one of these knife-edged racing craft they use in space—the kind that blow up if you just look at them.
“That’s the Chun-chu,” said the gunner-manager. “She broke the Academy interplanetary speed record and it’s never been bettered since. Jet loved that ship. It’s down in the Fleet museum and Jet’s always telling them it will still fly. But you’d have to get an order from the Lord of the Fleet just to move its position on the museum floor. They won’t let Jet go near it so he keeps this picture of it.”
They had a bag packed. It had taken them time because they’d argued amongst themselves about “Jet would want this” and “not want that.”
I was glad to get out of there. For all my prying and hopes, I had really learned nothing useful, nothing that I could use, that is. To handle someone, from an Apparatus viewpoint, you have to have his flaws. And all people have flaws. I told myself I’d keep looking.
We went on downstairs (they call them “ladders” in the club, which is silly because they’re twenty feet wide) and I was about to walk out of the lobby when I found my way blocked.
The biggest, ugliest young officer I have ever seen before or since, stood squarely in the middle of the doorway. And he had the toughest, nastiest expression on his face I never want to see again.
“Drunk,” he said. “I just want you to know that if any of this is crooked, if Jet is not all right, if anything happens to him, we have your identocopies and we have your photo. And remember what I say,” and he spoke in an even, grating voice that leaves the nerves scraped, “we will take you personally ten thousand miles up into cold, empty space; we will remove your clothes; we will push you out the air lock into vacuum. And in seconds you will be a pale pink mist!” The last three words were punctuated with hard firm taps on my chest.
“Right!” It was a roar! It was behind me! And I turned to find that about two hundred young officers were there in a sullen mob.
I am not all that brave. It scared me.
I got by the brute and ran down the steps with the bag. The airbus was there and I dived in.
With shock I saw my driver, Ske, was soaking wet. They must have thrown him in the nearby fountain.
He took off nearly vertical and fast. His hands were clenched and shaking on the controls. He could see me in his rear screen.
“It looks like they really put you through the grinder,” he said. And it’s true, I must have looked like quite a mess with cuts clotted up and bruises beginning to swell.
He drove for a bit, guiding us into the diversionary course so we could head, undetected, for Spiteos. Then Ske said, “Officer Gris, how could they possibly have known we was from the Apparatus?”
I didn’t answer. Because we’re shabby, I thought. Because we’re dishonest. Because we’re just crooked thugs and never should be permitted to go near decent people. Because we stink. It had been a very trying day.
“Officer Gris,” said the driver when he had the airbus scooting above the floor of the Great Desert, “if you had just told me they would know we was from the Apparatus, I could have brung a blasthoser and wiped the (bleepards) out.”
Oh, fine, I thought. That was all this mission would need: two or three hundred dead Royal officers and an Apparatus Secondary Executive standing there amongst the charred remains. Maybe I belonged in another Division!
But you don’t transfer out of the Apparatus—you leave it feet first, stone dead.
I had no slightest choice except to carry out this mission to its violent, brutal end! And succeed.
PART TWO
Chapter 8
Lombar, seated in a king’s chair looted from some Royal tomb, looked agitated.
We were seated in his tower office at Spiteos, watching the weekly “freak parade.” The whole wall of glass at the office end had refraction index switches: it could be a mirror, it could be a black wall and it could be so set that we could see out but nobody could see in. It was set the last way now. Beyond it, completing the width of the rampart, was a vast, stone-walled room.
Dr. Crobe was showing off the week’s production of himself and his assistants and horrible enough it was. They made freaks and the Apparatus got a good price for the products.
Just now was a being that had feet for hands and walked on all fours with a skipping gait. It was comical, really. Especially the way it stamped after each skip. Until recently it had been a normal man. But Dr. Crobe had changed that.
Factually, the doctor was a very skilled cellologist. He had been a member of a government department—Section for Special Adaptions—that specialized in retailoring people for unique duties or habitations: harmless enough, making them see better on dark planets, walk better on heavy-grav
ity planets, breathe underwater on planets dominated by sea. But Dr. Crobe had a twist in his own skull and he perverted the technology of cellular alteration to making freaks—real abominations. The government got some protests and a senior, who might very well have been a party to it, blamed it all on Crobe. The doctor vanished from his Domestic Police cell, thanks to Lombar, and was put to work, with a staff, at making freaks for the Apparatus.
The organization, well-connected with the criminal underworld, sold them to circuses, theaters and nightclubs for fantastic prices. They were billed as denizens of newly conquered planets, which, of course, was nonsense, but the publics of the one hundred and ten worlds of the Voltarian Confederacy ate it up.
Some, of course, actually were prisoners of war, which made it quasi-legal as such prisoners have no rights and are often slaughtered off. But there never were such beings anywhere except out of the vials and tubes and vats of Dr. Crobe. As some wit in the Apparatus had said, “The evil Gods invented Dr. Crobe to give the Devils some competition.”
There must have been some truth in it. These freak parades always made me ill. Here was a woman with her breasts where her buttocks should have been; there was a being whose legs had been interchanged with his arms; then came a female with two heads; following was a thing covered wholly with hair but in half a dozen colors; and then came a monster with eyes in the place of his privates.
While Apparatus guards drove them along with whips, old Dr. Crobe, himself, stood beyond them, looking on, beaming at his handiwork. He was a funny-looking creature himself: too long a nose, too long in the arms and legs, like some weird bird. In my opinion, every cellologist I have met is not only misshapen himself but crazy.
Lombar seemed to be quite agitated. He was fiddling with his stinger, probably to hide the shaking of his hands. He didn’t seem to be paying much attention to the freak parade and so I ventured to give him some good news, thinking it would divert him.
“It’s all handled now,” I said, “but they had the whole Domestic Police out looking for Jettero Heller. I got a line on it and iced it and now they couldn’t care less.”
He didn’t answer but then he never does. But after a little he tapped a silver box beside him and pincers sprang out holding something. He took it.
“I knew you felt bad about losing your post,” he said idly. “So I arranged this.” He threw it sideways at me.
It was the gold chain and emerald insignia of a Grade Eleven officer! It bumped me up three grades! It made me the equivalent of an Army commander of five thousand troops!
“It’s now in the data banks and legal. You’ll be drawing the pay as of yesterday.”
I started to thank him but he wasn’t listening. “That ought to bring some money,” he said.
The guards had rolled a cart into the parade. Six children had been cellularly joined together so they made a ring, twisted up into pornographic positions.
The Apparatus got tons of appropriations in secret government channels but its income must be five times that in its criminal sidelines. And true, they would get a lot of money for the six-children freak, probably bill it from Blito-P3 or Helvinin-P6, maybe get a hundred thousand credits.
It reminded me I had other news. “We really ought to train this Jettero Heller up in espionage,” I said. Lombar sort of twitched at the name but he didn’t look at me nor stop me. The “trained act” parade was about to begin but there was a lull while Crobe’s staff cleared off and the next lot came on. I took advantage of the time.
“They put a lot of correspondence in his bag,” I said. “A letter from his mother, notes from friends, fan mail. He spent the whole evening answering them—it was quite a stack.
“Of course, when he gave them to me to mail for him, I read his answers very carefully. And, Chief, he has no faintest idea of security. He simply spilled his brains all over the paper. Really stupid!
“I had to get two forgers and we spent until 2:00 AM rewriting his letters.
“He’ll never make a spy, never! He’ll put the whole mission at risk!”
Lombar didn’t say anything. The one we called Countess Krak was on now behind the glass. She was standing there in thigh-high black boots, a shabby coat and little else, twitching a long electric whip. In a dull and listless way she was bringing on the first performer of her trained act parade. She was actually a very beautiful female, statuesque, young, but she never smiled. She was an enigma even for the Apparatus. Approach her sexually and you could get killed! But she could train anything to do anything and fast. She was a genius at training. She was rumored to use electric shock and pictures but how she got her results nobody really knew.
Countess Krak had been a perfectly unsuspected government teacher, specializing in adult classes and advanced subjects. But she had a twist. There are some who say it was actually being done by the government and she just got the blame, and maybe that is true, but I think personally she just needed more money.
When the Domestic Police ran her down, she was the center of a ring of children she had recruited from the slums. These children had been taught to crack any safe and get by any alarm system. It was estimated that their total “take” was in the millions. And they might have been going yet except that she also apparently had schooled them in the techniques of silent murder with no weapons and this hallmarked their every job.
The children involved were executed but Countess Krak was simply handed over quietly to the Apparatus for their own uses. And here she had been at Spiteos for almost three years.
Her first act was a juggler who, with his feet, kept twelve objects in the air at once while spitting fire at them. The second act was two females in lepertige costumes who jetted loops of a liquid, that looked like blood, into fancy patterns in the air and appeared to catch them in their mouths. Colorful.
The third act was a fellow who could triple-somersault from a standing position and explode bangoes at each loop. He had other tricks.
There was no danger that any of these people would ever betray Spiteos. Their tongues had been cut out and they were illiterate. They brought fancy money.
But Lombar was not paying much attention. He turned to me. “Soltan,” he said, “I really don’t think you actually envision the real scope of this.”
He shoved the stinger at some switches and a big screen on the floor in front of us began to roll off views of the hundred and ten planets of Voltar. Near views, far views. Mobs in streets. Industries. Plains geometric with farms. Plains teeming with animals.
Lombar, ignoring the remaining acts, hit another switch. Views of the manors of Lords. Views of Governors’ palaces. Views of the Summer Imperial Residence. And then a long string of views of Emperors.
“Power,” said Lombar. “Authority! The right of life and death over trillions of peoples.” He shut the machine off. He turned to me. “In not too long a time, Soltan, all that will be ours. Ours completely and utterly! These are big stakes!
“The present rulers are decadent. Our planning and timetable cannot fail.”
He gestured at me with the stinger. “But there is one weak point in all this. And that weak point is Earth.”
He put his hand on my knee. “That is the key, the important key to everything. Soltan, when an instant invasion of Blito-P3 seemed imminent, I almost died. It would have been the end of everything.
“Soltan, you weren’t raised in the slums. You don’t know what a dream of power can be. You don’t understand the true necessity of wiping out the riffraff from the ghettos, purifying the blood of planets, sweeping away the weak.
“These Emperors do not know what to do with their power. It takes ambition! Yes! And merciless execution of plans. They diddle with their wars, they do nothing about their own homes! Even when they conquer a planet they do not know what to do with the riffraff in the population!
“We use evil to fight and sweep away evil! And we can and will prevail!” For a moment his eyes flared. There was madness in Lombar and sometimes i
t showed through.
He patted my knee. “But I am counting on you, Soltan. There must be no Imperial interference on Blito-P3. We care nothing for the salvage of that planet! But we need it desperately. You must keep every Voltarian interest in it nullified! Do you understand?”
He waited for no answer. The trained acts were through. He stabbed the stinger at a console. Flashing call lights went on in the other room. The glass wall turned black.
Dr. Crobe and Countess Krak came hurrying in through the anteroom and stood inside the door. They didn’t expect any applause. They never got any.
“Crobe,” said Lombar. “I’ve got a job for you. We have a special agent going to Blito-P3 and I want you to fix him up.” Crobe rubbed his hands and rubbed his nose. He liked this.
“Krak,” said Lombar, “we have this special agent to train for Blito-P3. Language.”
There was something in their attitude, some eagerness or enthusiasm that hit Lombar Hisst in the wrong place. He was suddenly on his feet and across that room like a reptile.
He grabbed Crobe by the coat and snapped his face within an inch of his own. “And (bleep) you, no tricks! No fancy eyes that see through walls! No fingers that become pistols! No telepathic brain receivers!” He had hit Crobe in the leg with each separate order. “Just an average job!” And again he hit Crobe in the leg. He heaved him away.
Lombar turned to Countess Krak. “And as for you, you perverted (bleep),” he snapped her within an inch of him, “off the high tower you go if you teach this agent one single word, one single trick of espionage!”
Mission Earth Volume 1: The Invaders Plan Page 9
