PART SEVENTY-EIGHT
Chapter 1
It was the last week in August in New York. The weather had been warm, even hot, but a cool sunset breeze was blowing across the landscaped terrace of the condo, rustling the leaves of shrubs.
The Countess Krak was sitting in a garden chair, petting Mister Calico and watching Jettero Heller at the umbrella’d table as he brought his combat engineer log up to date.
“Jettero,” said the Countess Krak, “do you know the date?”
“I was just going to ask you,” he said, looking up, pen held thoughtfully against his nose. “Was it Tuesday or Wednesday when they finally let me out of the Army?”
“I’m not talking about that, dear,” said the Countess Krak. “It lacks just three days to the date you said it would take war vessels to arrive here on Earth if they started the same night you brought the Emperor out of Palace City.”
“It was Wednesday,” said Jettero and busily made an entry.
“The ships might not have started the same night,” said the Countess, “but they could have left within the next twenty-four hours.”
“Was it at the new mayor’s reception that Bury gave me the news about the last refinery being decontaminated? Or was it at the engagement party?”
The Countess Krak sighed. What a trial that engagement party had been! Madison Square Garden, three bands and a symphony orchestra, five chorus lines from Broadway shows. And Babe Corleone, despite Jettero’s instructions, had stepped up to the microphone and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, it is my pleasure to announce the main engagement: My son, Jerome Terrance Corleone, is going to up and marry no less a personage than the Countess Krak. How about that?”
And afterwards, when bands were playing and thousands were dancing, Mamie Boomp, who had come up from Atlantic City, said to her, “She really got the intelligence services screwed up about your sailor. Almost every delegate at the UN knew him at the Gracious Palms as a mysterious prince and then they found out he was really Rockecenter’s son, which was fine, but when she made that announcement a while ago it threw them in a spin. They approached the Crown Prince of Saudi-Yemen, thinking I might be able to shed some light on it, and I set them straight. It’s obvious that Rockecenter was secretly married to Babe Corleone. That made them happy. I like to keep these genealogical matters straight.”
That wasn’t the only genealogical matter that had been gotten straight. Jettero had had Professor Stringer revise Babe’s family tree and put Prince Caucalsia at the head of it. She had been bowled over and would have accepted it even without the thick album of evidences he had put together for her, tracing the descendants of the Manco refugees through Atlantis, to the Caucasus and finally to Aosta in the Alps where Babe came from. And it was true that she had the same blood type, a bit different from the usual lines of Earth, that Krak, from Manco, had. Jettero had given Babe the tiara with the Manco arms that he had had made at Tiffany’s and Babe had worn it in public ever since. It was one of the reasons the press referred to her constantly as “Queen Babe.”
But it was the TV crews and cameras that worried the Countess Krak. With all the exposure they were getting, if Lombar Hisst had a single agent operating on Earth, he would have no trouble whatever in finding Jettero. And all during the weeks that followed Krak’s arrival in New York this last time, she had had more than an uneasy feeling that they were going to get hit and hit hard.
“Well,” said Jettero. “I think that brings it up to date. Babe will address the UN next week and get nuclear bombs outlawed. Congress in its fall session will decriminalize drugs and take the profit out of the scene. The fuel situation is handled and will gradually phase over. The atmosphere is cleaning up and the poles are stable. It’s been a lot of work to clean up this planet, but I think it’s nicely on its way.”
“I don’t like it,” said the Countess Krak.
“What? It’s a very nice planet. A little goofy with its fake psychiatry and psychology, but now that Rockecenter interests aren’t organizing and financing them to keep the people down, even that may someday come straight.”
“I didn’t mean I didn’t like the planet,” said the Countess Krak. “I don’t like the situation. We’re sitting ducks.”
“Well, I must say,” said Heller, “that you’re a very pretty duck. Don’t you think so, Mister Calico?”
The Countess Krak was just drawing her breath to tell him she wished she had his iron nerve when Balmor, the butler, came to the terrace. “Sir,” he said, “that special phone in your study keeps buzzing and buzzing. I know you told me not to answer it but I think, sir, it needs attention.”
PART SEVENTY-EIGHT
Chapter 2
It was Faht Bey on the viewer-phone. He looked very agitated. He was calling from the Turkish base.
“Sir,” he said, “I think you better come over here at once.”
“What’s the matter?” said Heller. “Has Prahd’s patient taken a turn for the worse?”
“No, Prahd says there is no change. It’s something else. I’ve got some news from home and I think you better come over here and do the interrogation yourself.”
Heller looked at the sweating face. The Emperor wasn’t dead. It was too soon by three or four days for even a scout vessel to get here from Voltar. Obviously Faht Bey didn’t want to discuss it on the viewer-phone because other members of the base there could be monitoring.
“All right,” he said. “Expect me.”
He went back to the terrace. “Dear,” he said to the Countess Krak, “I’m going to take a Mach 3 to Turkey.”
“I knew it!” said the Countess Krak. “Something has happened.”
“Nothing has happened. It’s just that Faht Bey wants me there for a talk.”
“I’ll get packed. I’m coming with you.”
“That’s my pleasure,” said Heller.
Shortly after dawn in Afyon, Turkey, Heller, the Countess Krak and Mister Calico debarked from the Air Force plane and got into the waiting Daimler-Benz.
Having left the Countess and the cat at the villa, Heller was shortly afterward sitting across the desk from Faht Bey in his office.
“Thank Gods you got here,” said Faht Bey. “I think we’re in for trouble.” And he passed to Heller a demand dispatch from the Apparatus General Staff.
“It’s the Blixo,” said Faht Bey. “She came in last night.”
“But the ship must have left a couple days before I made my call on Voltar,” said Heller. “Nothing had happened there at the time the Blixo departed. And she wouldn’t have picked up anything in passage. She’s just a freighter.”
“Well, Gris had couriers that traveled on the Blixo. Two catamites that alternated. This one is Odur: we’ve got him in detention and he’s scared to death. He had that dispatch for Gris: at the time, nobody on Voltar suspected that Gris was no longer here. You better read it.”
Heller sighed. A demand order for information was not much to be alarmed about. He read it:
APPARATUS GENERAL STAFF
Captain
Maulding
Secretary
to the
General
Staff
OFFICIAL
Heller leafed over to the next sheet:
EXTERIOR DIVISION
CHIEF OF APPARATUS
LOMBAR
HISST
Chief
of Apparatus
OFFICIAL
“Well,” said Heller, “you have been holding incoming freighters, but as of this moment, since not enough time has elapsed for him to know they will not return, he isn’t aware of any curtailment of shipment. This planning—”
“You better talk to the man we’re holding in the next room, sir.” Faht Bey pushed a buzzer.
Captain Bolz was brought in by two guards. His hairy chest was heaving with indignation.
“Bolz,” said Faht Bey, “this is Royal Officer Jettero Heller, a combat engineer of the Fleet operating on his own cognizance and therefore officially. You had better tell him what you told us.”
“I got plenty to say!” roared Bolz. “As a blasted Royal officer, I know you can have me exterminated, but I’m going to have my say anyway! I come in here, innocent as a virgin, doing my duty as an Apparatus freighter captain, two days ahead of schedule after a competent passage and what do I find? A whole base wearing Fleet insignia! An order putting my ship under detention! I think you’ve all gone crazy!”
“Quite likely,” said Heller. “And I am sorry for any inconvenience. Now, what was this information you had?”
Bolz lost a lot of his glare. He looked down at his big feet and shifted them uncomfortably. “Well, these fellows here know well enough that I was carrying contraband Scotch whisky and they probably already told you. A captain that never gets paid has to have a little profit—”
“The information,” said Heller firmly.
“Well, I didn’t have room for a cargo of IG Barben amphetamines once I had the whisky aboard, so I left them in the storeroom here.”
“And when you arrived on Voltar somebody noticed it?” said Heller.
“The amphetamines were on the manifest,” said Bolz, “but they weren’t aboard. I happen to know that Hisst always checks the drug shipments against the manifests, because every time I try to pinch a little cargo, he has appeared personally to scream.”
“Then there has already been a cessation of shipment,” said Heller, looking back at the Apparatus General Staff order. “Now, where is this catamite?”
Faht Bey led the way down the tunnels and they came at length to the detention cell.
There sat Oh Dear, his pretty, made-up face streaked with tears. He recognized, from Voltar press photos of yesteryear, Jettero Heller. “Oh,” he sobbed. “A Royal officer. I have one request before you kill me: take the magic mail card back so they don’t kill my mother.”
“You’re not going to be killed,” said Heller with a trace of disgust. “All I want from you is any other information you might have had for Gris.”
“Where is Gris?”
“Apparently dead,” said Heller.
“Not really?” said Oh Dear. “Oh, what utterly marvelous news. Oh, I just can’t wait to tell Too-Too! We’ll have a celebration party! I’ll buy ribbons—”
“The information,” said Heller.
“That the General Staff dispatch was very urgent,” said Oh Dear, “and that I was to keep Gris up day and night to compile it and that I was to return with it.”
Faht Bey said to Heller, “That means at least three months until they hit. Six weeks going back, six weeks for the Apparatus invasion fleet to arrive here. Add the time it takes them to assemble and board.”
Heller said to Oh Dear, “Is that everything you had?”
“There was a message that Gris was assured he’d be the next Chief of the Apparatus only if there was no halt in drugs.”
“A promotion?” said Heller. “But Hisst is the Chief of Apparatus.”
“Well, you see, the plan is that Hisst will be moving up to Emperor. Any time now. And that’s all I had, I swear it.”
He was too shaking-scared not to be believed.
As Heller left he saw the Countess Krak at the end of the corridor. She was coming out of the cell that still held Utanc—Colonel Gaylov.
“Dear,” said Heller, “your woman’s intuition seems to have been right. The Apparatus has a plan on foot to use its own forces to smash this planet. Hisst is crazy insane.”
“Then we’ve got to get off it right away,” said the Countess. “We and you-know-who must not be here when they crack it up.”
“And waste all the work I’ve been doing for a year?” said Heller. “This is a nice planet.”
“Opinions differ,” said the Countess Krak. “Psychology, psychiatry, perversions beyond belief and a population that doesn’t even raise its voice when some nut like Rockecenter is ruining it. It’s not worth saving, Jettero. We’d better get a move on.”
“We’ve got time,” said Faht Bey. “It will take more than three months for them to make the voyages and hit the place.”
Heller shook his head. “How long ago did you stop the first freighter?”
“Oh, that’s been about four weeks now,” said Faht Bey.
“Then they will know for sure, within a couple weeks, that it didn’t come back. But it was Bolz that triggered it. You haven’t got three months. You may not even have five days.”
“What are we going to do?” said Faht Bey. “When they find out we stopped the drugs, they’ll slaughter us to a man and go right on with their invasion. We won’t have anything left to stand on even if they miss us.”
“Steady, steady,” said Heller. “I admit this is quite a problem. We’ve got to make sure Prahd’s patient is secure, we’ve got to move this base and we’ve got to safeguard this planet.”
“What?” said the Countess Krak. “Try to stand off the whole Apparatus fighting force? Please, Jettero, please. Don’t try to save this planet!”
“I’ll come up with something,” said Heller. “And make no mistake. Whatever else happens, I am going to make every effort to save this planet.”
“Oh,” said the Countess Krak in a voice of despair, looking at the set expression on Heller’s face.
None of them knew that none of their estimates were correct. Just four days short of arriving, an Apparatus Death Battalion was approaching with orders to find any hostile influence at the base and destroy it. That happened to include, at that instant, every Voltarian on Earth excepting only the Blixo, its crew, Captain Bolz and Oh Dear. This was no major invasion, not yet, but it could be the preliminary of mass slaughter. Lombar would go crazy for revenge against the planet for getting in the way of his ambitions.
The wings of death hovered over Earth.
PART SEVENTY-EIGHT
Chapter 3
In the coolness of the patio at the villa, Jettero Heller paced up and down. His mood of grimness did not match the tinkle of the fountain.
For weeks the Countess Krak had been after him to give some serious thought to their plight but had made no penetration in his easygoing attitude. She was learning something about trying to live with a personality like his: with peril a constant companion, a combat engineer took joy in life when he could and tended to shrug off dangers he considered minor. But once he conceived that something should be done about a situation, his dedication to getting it handled was a little awe-inspiring.
She had thought he would simply shrug and leave the planet to its fate. His carefree attitude did not carry over into his suddenly confronted tasks.
She sat on the fountain’s edge, hopeful that at any moment he would simply turn and say, “You’re right. It is too much for us. We’ll just put the Emperor in the tug and go someplace nobody ever heard of.”
He turned all right. But he didn’t say that. He said, “What do we know of Prince Mortiiy?”
She chilled. Calabar was writhing in the toils of raw, red war. What he inferred was even worse! But she said, managing a calm voice, “Nothing good, I’m afraid.”
“Good, bad, what does it matter?” said Heller. “I need information.”
He was asking her because she had lately been entertaining him with bits of Royal history she had read in the books Gris had left in her cell during her captivity. Suddenly she grasped an opportunity to discourage him from some mad course that could end in their destruction. He wouldn’t believe her unless he saw it himself in print. “Wait right there,” she said. “I’ll get the books.”
She returned in minutes with the latest supplement of the Compendium she could find. It was only a year old. She fluttered pages. There it was and she showed him, reading aloud:
MORTIIY, ex-Royal Prince. Proclaimed rebel.
Denied succession by Royal Proclamation.
Banished from Royal family.
“So you see, Jettero,” said the Countess when she finished reading, “if you are thinking of taking His Majesty to Calabar and joining the rebel forces you’d seal his fate. Mortiiy would simply kill him.”
“Mortiiy is not a madman,” said Heller.
“He’ll do until one comes along,” said the Countess. “He is no longer in line for the succession. The whole fighting force of the Apparatus, as we heard when we were on Voltar, is engaged in a full-scale attack to wipe him out.”
Heller did not answer her. Instead he went to see Captain Bolz, who was sitting in his ship under heavy guard.
Bolz looked up the instant Heller appeared. “No sense talking to me,” he said. “I’m not going to join the (bleeped) Fleet and neither will my crew. We’re sensible people. We belong in the Apparatus and we are going to stay there!”
“I am sure,” said Heller, “that, with your smuggling, you find it far too profitable. But I’m not asking you to join. All I’m asking you to do is take back a cargo to Voltar.”
“WHAT?” said Bolz. “So all this talk about no more drugs was just wind.”
“It will take several days to get your cargo here from New York, so if you will promise to sit quietly and give no trouble, you can go home with it and you won’t be in any trouble at all.”
“That’s fair,” said Bolz.
Heller went immediately to Faht Bey’s office. He put in a long-distance call to the president of IG Barben and you could almost see the sweat spurting back out of the phone when the man realized who he was talking to.
“Now hear me carefully,” said Heller. “I want a ton of tablets made. They will be composed of fifty percent antihistamine and fifty percent methadone. They will be shaped and packaged and marked as amphetamines and you will get them to the airport in Afyon, Turkey, by jet within four days.”
“A ton?”
“Correct,” said Heller. “See to it.”
The antihistamine, he knew from his studies, would give a semblance of reaction like amphetamines; the methadone would counteract heroin. If Lombar ran out of drugs, let the Lords withdraw more easily with that. He doubted anyone would detect the difference. It bought time.
He wrote a dispatch to Bolz telling him to be on the lookout for it, load it up when it came and go home. And he wrote the dispatch with an ink that would fade to nothing in a couple of days.
He found Faht Bey. “How many freighters do you have that will operate?”
“We got the old ones running. Two more have been stopped here. Five freighters.”
“Good. That’s enough. Disassemble the base and load it and all personnel. Break your neck and be ready to go as soon as possible.”
“It will take days,” said Faht Bey.
“I hope not,” said Heller. “If we do this right and we are quick, we can save this planet.”
PART SEVENTY-EIGHT
Chapter 4
There seemed, suddenly, to be a thousand details to what had looked like a simple undertaking. Family connections who had been unaware of extraterrestrial husbands and domestic connections who had never known who their employers really were had to be cared for somehow, at least decently set up in life. Faht Bey remarked that the Apparatus would simply have killed them and then hastily said he was just commenting, when he saw Heller’s look.
The New York office had to be shut down and its personnel hauled back.
Heller found out from Prahd that there was now a lot of trained Earth staff, including doctors, and that made up Heller’s mind. He phoned Mudur Zengin at the Piastre National Bank.
“Make up papers,” Heller said, “transferring amounts which have been scheduled for ‘company maintenance, Afyon’ over to ‘hospital and disease-eradication use.’ Make them up so they stay in effect pending any cancellation from me.”
“That’s an awful lot of money for health,” said Zengin.
“We’re earmarking a good chunk of it for drug rehabilitation,” said Heller.
“That’s a big job,” said Zengin.
“Right. Maybe we can undo some of the damage that’s been done. Would it be asking too much to fly the papers down here?”
“Not at all,” said Zengin. “I’ll come myself.”
Krak got hold of Heller. “That Russian spy colonel is still sitting there in his cell. You were holding him in case they needed more when they tried Gris. Remember?”
“Well, he hasn’t got a country anymore,” said Heller. “He can’t be very dangerous. Put a hypnohelmet on him and suppress his memory of the base and let him go.”
“It’s not that simple,” said the Countess. “There’s the two little boys he corrupted. They’re caving in, nobody can do a thing with them. I had an idea. France has been exporting an awful lot of drugs.”
“What’s that got to do with Colonel Gaylov?” said Heller. “He was also exporting heroin. From here. To keep the international KGB network running.”
“Well, those that commit crimes like that,” said the Countess Krak, “will often turn completely around and campaign against such deeds. What I want to do is send Colonel Gaylov to France with the two little boys.”
“You must be awfully mad at France. They’d corrupt the whole nation!”
“No, I don’t think so,” said the Countess. “You see, I’ve been talking to the colonel and he’s absolutely spinning with the glory of it.”
“Of what?”
“To show up in France and use the old KGB network to convince everybody he’s the reincarnation of Joan of Arc. I didn’t even touch the helmet. He’s sure he can be the greatest Joan of Arc that ever lived!”
Heller gave her a sizable draft on the Grabbe-Manhattan Bank in Paris, to be paid out to Gaylov, month by month for years.
When she put him and the two boys on the plane the following morning, there was a holy gleam in ex-Utanc’s eye. Standing there in a silver traveling gown, he/she said, “You are an angel and I bless the day I met you. I can in truth say that I was visited by the Lord of Hosts on high. France is about to become the holiest and most drugless place on Earth.” And they were gone.
Handling Babe was not quite as happy an occasion for Heller.
He got her on the phone and said, “Mrs. Corleone, I’m terribly sorry to have to cancel out on the wedding you had planned for the cathedral next month.”
Babe, startled, said, “She’s left you?”
“Oh, no,” said Heller. “It’s just that things got pretty urgent.”
“Oh, I get it. You’re going to pull a fast justice of the peace before those nine months and the stork catches up with you. Well, all right, son, Mama understands. Just don’t forget to name the baby Giuseppe after ‘Holy Joe’ if it’s a boy, or Alma Maria after me if it’s a girl. And get that beautiful countess into bed and resting as soon as you’re hitched and you leave her alone until she delivers. You hear me now, Jerome, and don’t interrupt. You’re not doing me out of a grandchild, do you hear?”
“Yes, Mrs. Corleone.”
“And can this ‘Mrs. Corleone’ stuff. You can’t soft-soap your own mother. Get that girl to the justice of the peace quick, you hear me?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“All right, then. And come back when the coast is clear and she can be seen in public again. You’re a dear boy, Jerome, but you sure as hell take a lot of guidance. Keep your nose clean, kid.” There was an audible sniff. “I got to run off now, something’s in my eyes. Bye-bye, son.”
Heller’s own eyes, as he hung up, were wet. He doubted that he would ever see her again.
PART SEVENTY-EIGHT
Chapter 5
Regulations required that an installation on a foreign planet could not be abandoned without being destroyed. There were many reasons for this: included amongst them was the misuse of such a base for piracy and smuggling.
Jettero Heller, as a competent combat engineer, did a competent job of setting it up. He used metal-disintegrator mines. These, inserted near connection boxes and along conduits, would cause an atomic shift of heavier metals to silica: with a surge of enormous heat from the converted atoms, every piece of metal that comprised the hangar area would become sand. This meant that the tension-beam boxes would go and the twist and stresses in the rocks that had been restrained through a thousand earthquakes would no longer be braked. The result would be a furious flash of fire and then a wall collapse. It would simply appear that an earthquake had caused the mountain to collapse into an unsuspected fissure.
He attached the fuses to a central firing box and this he triggered to a remote control.
“Bolz,” he said to the captain of the Blixo, “I am going to have to trust you. You will not join the Fleet. Your cargo will not arrive until the day after we are gone. When you have loaded and exited spaceward, your last act must be to push this button.” And he gave him the very small box.
“What will happen?” said Bolz.
“Well, don’t experiment,” said Heller. “The Blixo had better be up there a couple miles when you do it. Every piece of metal in this hangar will disintegrate. A human body contains a lot of iron and anybody standing around will also become sand. So don’t leave anybody in here.”
Bolz looked at the remote. “It doesn’t have a safety catch.”
“Why should it?” said Heller. “You’ll find it pretty hard to push. It won’t go off by accident. But my order to you is don’t delay in leaving here. And when you do, push it.”
Bolz smiled quietly to himself: not only would it not go off by accident, it would not go off at all. Contrabanding was too lucrative, he was becoming rich; he could buy an old space tub, retire from the Apparatus and smuggle to his heart’s content. “All right,” he said, “I’ll be glad to do you this favor in return for my liberty and life. You have my word on it, Officer Heller.” And he put the remote in his pocket.
They were almost ready now. The freighters were loaded with every piece of repair equipment and supplies they could salvage. They had even dismantled the line-jumper and stowed it in a hold. The thousand details were coming to an end. It was the evening of the third day.
Heller called Izzy, Bang-Bang and Twoey and told them guardedly that he had to take a trip and rang off quickly so that they would not suspect this “little trip” was forever.
According to arrangements with Prahd, an ambulance brought Cling the Lofty in the fluid container with all connections active. The Emperor was still unconscious. The tub was masked by an opaque cover and no one could see who was in it.
The tug was in the deepest recess of the overcrowded hangar.
Heller got hold of Bolz and Oh Dear. Without seeming to do so, he positioned them so they could see the fluid container with an unidentified being in it being loaded aboard the tug.
“Odur,” said Heller to the catamite, “you are a courier. I have something for you that must arrive in no other hands than those of Lombar Hisst.” He produced a triple-sealed packet.
Oh Dear stared at it, unwilling to touch it. He was stunned at this irregularity. Something from Royal Officer Heller to Hisst who was his bitterest enemy?
“Take it,” said Heller. “Do not tamper with the seals or he will suspect you have opened it. And if he suspects that, he may very well kill you when he reads it.”
“Oh, no!” shivered Oh Dear. “I don’t want to take it if it’s that dangerous!”
“Well,” said Heller, “I’m very afraid that you would find it very dangerous not to take it. If Hisst found out you had it and didn’t deliver it, then he certainly would kill you.”
Oh Dear let out a small scream. But he took hold of the packet, holding it like it was burning his fingers.
Heller pointed up to where Prahd was carefully getting the fluid tub into the tug air lock. “Also, you and Bolz should both notice the fact that a sick person is being put aboard the Prince Caucalsia with a doctor in attendance.”
The significance of it did not register with either one. But they dutifully noted it.
The Countess Krak came out of the tunnel from the villa, pushing mounds of luggage and boxes on a cart. The hangar crew who had been handling the fluid container with Prahd assisted her in loading them.
Heller, going over to give her a hand up the ladder, suddenly stopped. “What’s that yowling?”
“I don’t hear anything,” said the Countess Krak.
“Lady, what are you up to?” said Heller.
“It’s just the cat.”
“We’ve only got one cat. It can’t be making that much noise.”
“Jettero, you are cruel. You expected poor Mister Calico to go all the way off to Voltar and leave Earth forever without a lady friend.”
Heller looked at the boxes now being swung into the air lock. “A lady friend? But that sounds like more than two cats.”
“Lady friends, then. It just accidentally happened that Mudur Zengin brought down half a dozen female calico cats yesterday. There’s also a couple of males. You wouldn’t want them getting inbred, would you? But if you don’t like the yowling, maybe I can teach them to sing. Good. I knew you would agree.” And she went on up the ladder.
Heller shook his head over the cargo he was carrying. An Emperor, a cellologist and nine cats.
He walked across the jammed spaceship hangar: made for five freighters, it now held six and the tug. A knot of officers that carefully excluded Bolz was waiting for him. They were the captains of the five ships and Faht Bey.
Heller motioned for them to bring their heads in close. “Your rendezvous point is coordinates 678-N/567B/978R. Write it down. 678-N/567B/978R.” He watched while they did so. “It is a seven-week voyage. I will be five days on the way so I will land and make arrangements and then come out to the rendezvous point in space and guide you in.”
“Sir,” said one of the captains, “these coordinates are on the edge of the star Glar. I have to inform you that there is war in that area.”
“I know,” said Heller. “That is where we are going. The Confederacy is under the control of Lombar Hisst; the safest place we can go is to take sanctuary under Prince Mortiiy on Calabar.”
A shock went through them.
“We will be welcome, I think,” said Heller, “because we carry repair tools, technicians and men. Mortiiy has managed to hold out for five years. The Apparatus is the only force pressing the attack there. Calabar is an awfully big planet.”
“Sir,” said another captain, “there must be some other reason.”
“Well, yes there is,” said Heller. “I have reason to believe that if Lombar Hisst knows I have gone there, he will commit all his forces to the attack of Calabar.”
“Is there some benefit in this?” said Faht Bey.
“Yes,” said Heller. “He will not then attack Earth. You have a right to know that the reason we are going there is to save this planet.”
They looked at him doubtfully. Then one said, “Maybe you figure he will whittle down all his forces throwing them against Calabar.”
“That he will,” said Heller. “Unless something happens to sour my relations with the Fleet and Army, neither one will cooperate in what they will consider to be an insanity—full-scale war just to get hold of me. But I don’t want to seem to have such a grandiose idea of my own importance. I happen to have something Hisst wants very badly. He’ll come for us, all right, and unless by some fluke he gets Fleet and Army help, he’ll shatter himself against the hundred-thousand-foot peaks of Calabar.”
“Well, we’ve all wanted to get out of the Apparatus and be free men again,” said another captain, “and we’re willing to work for the chance. But how will Hisst know that you have gone to Calabar?”
“That’s why we didn’t seize the Blixo,” said Heller. “I just gave the courier on it a letter to Lombar Hisst. I told him what I have. And I told him we would be waiting for him on Calabar. He’ll go crazy and throw in everything he’s got. And, without help from the other services, that will be the end of Lombar Hisst.”
They grinned suddenly. They rushed off to their ships.
One by one Heller watched them as the spaceships shot up into the night.
Heller waved a hand to the captain of the Blixo, “Be sure you have a good passage to Voltar!” he shouted. He went into the tug’s air lock, closed it and sent the Prince Caucalsia spaceward ho!
PART SEVENTY-EIGHT
Chapter 6
Captain Bolz smiled and scratched his hairy chest. The hangar and base, empty now of everything except the Blixo, had ceased to exist as an extension of Apparatus authority. He had his own plans.
In his cabin he got dressed in Western clothes. He put a wad of Turkish lira in his wallet. A frightened Oh Dear stared at him.
“We’re supposed to wait for our cargo and go,” said Oh Dear. “I’m certain Officer Heller is right. If I don’t deliver this and Hisst finds I have not, I’ll be dead.”
“To hells with Officer Heller,” said Bolz. “They left that Daimler-Benz in the yard of the villa. Even that old driver with the funny laugh is still hanging around. I’m going out there, stop him from stealing the car and go on up to Istanbul and see my friend the widow.”
Bolz stopped to give his mate orders to pick up the cargo when it arrived by air and load it and then, with a jaunty air despite his bulk, went out and found Ters who, for a consideration, was shortly rolling him in luxury through the night to Istanbul.
Throughout the entirety of the next day, a frightened Oh Dear waited. He hardly concerned himself with the arrival of the cargo when it was brought in by the mate and crew from the airport in the afternoon. Oh Dear conceived that Bolz might be deserting and this would leave him captainless and unable to get back to Voltar. He didn’t speak a single Earth language: he saw himself stranded.
Dusk came, the light vanishing above the electronic illusion. No Bolz. If he had been there, they could leave in an hour.
The upper hole in the mountain went black. The hours dragged. Oh Dear began to be afraid of the hangar. It was so empty that his footfalls as he paced scared him with their echoes. He began to get the idea that the place was peopled now with ghosts.
Midnight came and went. One o’clock took forever to arrive. The digitals of his watch seemed to be motionless and refusing to move onward toward two. Then it became two and then two-thirty.
A loud sound somewhere made Oh Dear scream.
It was Bolz.
He had brought a truckload of counterfeit Scotch. He got his crew out and they got it aboard.
Bolz was himself pretty drunk and considerably smeared with lipstick.
It was three o’clock in the morning when the captain finally began to mount the ladder to the air lock as the last one aboard.
There was an abrupt roar overhead.
Wonderingly, thinking a freighter might have come back, Bolz got down off the ladder and stared up at the hole through the mountaintop.
He froze.
The black tail of a warship was sliding in!
Plain upon it was the symbol that looked like a fanged snake. And some letters!
THE 243RD DEATH BATTALION!
The hulk, too big for this hangar, came down with bristling guns. It hit the floor with a thud.
A hundred black-uniformed men poured out of the six locks, blastrifles ready!
Bolz, too shocked to move, was instantly seized.
A squad raced into the Blixo.
Shortly the whole crew of the freighter and Oh Dear were being prodded down the ladder to the hangar floor.
Bolz couldn’t register what was happening. He had no way of knowing this was the battalion that had been sent by Lombar to “search out any traitors that were confederates of Heller’s or took his orders and exterminate them.” For the Blixo had left a couple days before the order had been issued by the crashed Lombar Hisst.
A man in a black uniform with scarlet gloves, taller than Bolz, loomed over him. “I am Colonel Flay of the 243rd Death Battalion. Who are you and where is everyone here?”
“I am . . . I am . . . Captain Bolz of the Blixo, this ship. I have an urgent cargo of drugs for Voltar.”
An officer yelled from the Blixo’s air lock, “Colonel, this ship is carrying contraband drink!”
The colonel glared at Bolz. “A smuggler!”
“I’m captain of an Apparatus freighter!”
“In those clothes? Answer me. Why weren’t we challenged? Where is the personnel of this base?”
“They’ve gone!” quavered Bolz.
“Gone where?”
“We don’t know!” screamed Oh Dear, who was being held by a Death Battalion soldier. “I am a courier to Lord Endow!”
“Ha!” said Colonel Flay. “Traveling with a smuggler? Bend that pretty fellow over a rifle and make him talk.”
“No! Look at my identoplate—”
Two soldiers grabbed either end of a rifle. Another grabbed Oh Dear’s head, a fourth grabbed his feet. The first two held the rifle horizontally in the middle of his back. The second two pulled. Oh Dear’s spine began to crack. He screamed.
“Tell me where the others have gone!” roared Flay.
“We don’t know!” shrieked Oh Dear. “Look at my ID!”
An officer fished in Oh Dear’s pockets. He looked at the identoplate he found. “This just says he’s a clerk in Section 451. That’s this planet. He’s no courier.”
“Make him talk!” said Flay.
They pulled on Oh Dear harder.
“You better talk! You know where they have gone well enough. Don’t lie again. TALK!”
Oh Dear went into a high-pitched keening as his spine stretched and cracked. He was able to get out, “I have a dispatch. I have a dispatch. I have a dispatch! I must get it through!”
“To hells with your dispatches,” said Flay.
Oh Dear had fainted.
Flay gave a signal and soldiers grabbed Bolz. One of them pulled his head back with a handful of hair and another hit him in the body with a fist. Bolz grunted with the force of it.
“Where have they gone?” demanded Flay.
“They did not tell us!” cried Bolz.
The colonel snapped his fingers and an officer put a light in his hand. Flay walked up to Bolz and shined the light in his eye. “Are you lying to us?”
Bolz writhed, trying to get away from the light. The only thing which was registering with him was that this colonel might discover that he intended to keep this base for his own use.
“His pupillary reaction,” said Flay, “shows that he is lying! Hit him!”
The blow echoed through the hangar.
“Once more,” said Flay, “I am going to ask you politely and then we will really get to work on you. Where has this base crew gone?”
“I DON’T KNOW!” screamed Bolz.
“Hit him!” said the colonel.
It was the last order he ever issued in this life.
The blow hit the button remote in Bolz’s pocket.
There was a searing flash throughout the hangar!
The Death Battalion, the warship, the Blixo, the crew, Captain Bolz and Oh Dear glowed, suddenly outlined in incandescence. They shifted color upward from red to yellow to violet. They went black. They turned to silica, momentarily holding shape, then they became molten glass.
No one in the base was left alive.
The wall boxes that held the beams in place turned into sand which, under the ferocity of heat, turned to liquid dribble.
And then with a shuddering roar, the walls of the hangar twisted and began to cave in.
The slide of rock went on for quite a while.
Fantastic heat fused the inside of the mountain.
Then there was nothing left of the Earth base.
And buried there, because of the delay and self-interest of Bolz, lying under the pile of shuddering glass which had been Oh Dear and under the countless tons of boiling silica above it, was the ash of the dispatch which had been designed to stave off an invasion of Earth.
It would never be delivered.