Death Quest

  She is unfortunately pregnant. Until the child is born, she cannot be treated professionally as the convulsion therapies would produce miscarriage which I am sure you do not want.

  To announce or even whisper her marriage would subject her to wild mental states in which she might seek to destroy herself.

  As soon as the child is born, she can be treated with professional psychiatric care. So please assist us in quietly placing her in the fully competent care of my colleague, Dr. Tremor Graves.

  If word of her marriage or condition were to leak out, even if she didn’t destroy herself, she would have to be committed to the state insane asylum for life.

  Adequate funds for her care, which is extremely expensive, running into the thousands of dollars per month and quite beyond your means, will be given Dr. Graves and yourselves from time to time, but these will be cut off if she becomes formally committed and a charge of the state.

  I know you have her welfare at heart and so does her poor, distracted husband and will realize that this is all for the best.

  Once the child is born, she can be cured by the most professional possible means and can take her rightful place in the world.

  Please do not cost her that chance.

  In professional confidence,

  AGNES P. MORELAY

  “So that’s how they kept the parents quiet,” said Heller.

  “They didn’t have to ver’ long,” said Biggs. “They was kilt in a auto accident. But this, ah think, is what you’ah lookin’ fo’ an’ which ah came to fin’.”

  He reached in and pulled out an official-looking envelope. He opened it and gave it to Heller.

  It declared that DELBERT JOHN ROCKECENTER and MARY CHARLOTTE STYLES had been joined in marriage at Elkton, Maryland, the place of instant marriages, a year before the date of birth. It was an imposing certificate, all stamped and sealed.

  Stonewall Biggs said, “So you ain’t even a bastard, Junior.”

  “Valuable,” said Heller.

  “Now ah got to go back and write that other boy’s birth certificate,” said Biggs. “We’ll jus’ call him Delbert John Rockecenter, th’ Second, if that all right with you, Junior.”

  “Fine,” said Heller.

  “An’ whahl ah’m at it, ah’ll do a duplicate of yo’ mothah’s death certificate an’ some additional copies of yo’ own. You may need them. Ah’ll bring them ovah to th’ fahm in th’ mo’ning if’n you’ll still be theah.”

  “Tha’s what the captain said,” Heller replied.

  “Now, Junior, onto othah things. Ah don’ think that chief has got much muscle in him. Do ah get a grant fo’ that new cohthouse?”

  “Only if you guarantee to build a absoloot ohriginal that George Washington slept in.”

  “Tha’s mah boy!” cried Stonewall Biggs. “Smahtest thing ah evah did was to get th’ late Tremor Graves drunk that night!”

  PART FORTY-SIX

  Chapter 7

  Since Heller now would be going back, I hastily turned to the viewer of the Countess Krak to see if Torpedo had his opportunity and could shoot her in time.

  She was sitting in the upper room of the pig building, back to the window, a perfect target for anyone outside.

  The young man had come around. He was sitting on the edge of the littered bed, his blond hair in disarray, his eyes dazed. “It’s nahce of you t’ sit up with me. Ah’m too confused to sleep. Who’d evah thought ah had a real ma and pa jus’ like pigs do!”

  “Well, listen,” said the Countess Krak, “I know it’s late at night but if you’re to get any sleep, there’s something I could do. You know football?”

  “Oh, yes, ma’am. Ah played it at the aggie college.”

  She reached into her shopping bag and pulled out the hypno-rig. “This is a new type of football helmet. It teaches you.”

  “Aw, youah kiddin’.”

  “Try it on,” and she put it on his head and threw the switch.

  Torpedo’s voice! “GOT YOU!”

  I tensely stared at the viewer. Had Krak not heard him? She didn’t turn around.

  Then suddenly I realized that the voice had not come from the speaker.

  IT WAS IN THIS ROOM!

  I whirled.

  Torpedo was standing in the open door!

  His gray, prison-pallor face was contorted with rage!

  The huge rifle was ready in his hand!

  He was frothing! “You set me up, you son of a (bleepch)! You knew the car we had was stolen! You tipped off the cops! They were laying for me at the hospital! You’re going to pay for that!

  “I had to abandon the car and walk back here all night! You’re going to get gut-shot for that!

  “But, you (bleepard), you never told me that that was the girl of the man who trapped me at the Brewster and pushed me off the elevated and collected my fee and cost me all my future with Bury. You just sent me there so he could kill me! And for that, after I shoot you, I’m going to rape your corpse and give it syph, clap and all!”

  He was raising the gun to shoot!

  The arrangements I had earlier made had been needed after all! I closed my hand on the Apparatus radio relay ring I had put on. It activated the vibration speaker I had planted on the balcony rail outside the door.

  A scream went off behind him!

  He whirled!

  He was standing on the door end of the runner rug.

  I reached down and grabbed my end and yanked.

  With a flip he went forwards.

  He staggered.

  He hit the balcony rail.

  With a clatter he went over and fell fifteen feet to the ground!

  I wasted no time.

  I grabbed up my things and jammed them in a suitcase.

  I snatched up my viewers.

  I scrabbled around. I couldn’t find my gun! The (bleep) must have stolen it or I had dropped it earlier in the day.

  No time now to search.

  I streaked out of the room.

  Running like mad, I got to the manure truck.

  I threw my things into it. I jumped under the wheel. I jimmied the ignition. It started.

  I tore out of there, horse biscuits flying behind me in the wind!

  Had I had my gun, I might have shot him. But I certainly would not have touched anything he touched, so using his rifle was out. In retrospect, as I drove, I thought it might have been smarter to have gone over to him on the pavement and stamped his head in. But again, I hadn’t wanted to touch him. Yes, I was doing right. Just get out of there and fast!

  I thought I was safe. The motel proprietor would never suspect anyone would steal this manure truck. He probably wouldn’t even notice it was gone until much later in the day, for he never seemed to be around. And if the police stopped me I could say it was a Federal commandeer of transport.

  So I felt safe as I drove in to an all-night trucker’s station to the north of Lynchburg and filled up with gas and oil.

  I was just pulling out of the island when I chanced to look back.

  Here came Torpedo! Wild-haired and wild-eyed, insane for revenge, he was driving an old Toyota subcompact!

  I stepped on it!

  With screaming wheels I went tearing up Route 29.

  I was outdistancing him!

  Charlottesville, Culpeper, Warrenton, Arlington. In the dawn I was rocketing around the Capital Beltway of Washington, DC.

  Anxiously stopping again for gas, I looked behind. I thought I had lost him. For the next hour, I drove more sensibly. I was on the John F. Kennedy Memorial Highway and just passing Elkton, Maryland, when—BLAM! SCREEYOW!—an elephant slug hit the car top and went ricocheting away!

  Oh, after that I drove!

  The prospect of not only being dead but raped and not only being raped but infected totally gave me a very heavy foot upon the throttle.

  The New Jersey Turnpike is usually fast, but it was too slow for me that awful day.

  I had almost come abreast of Staten Island when the
horrible realization came to me that I had no place to go!

  Torpedo knew my phone number at Miss Pinch’s. And furthermore my welcome at that apartment would be very violent.

  Driving in that stinking truck, my head spun in a quandary. Then Apparatus training took over. Go to the least expected place. Go to the place where one might get protection.

  HIS MOTHER!

  She would defend me, that was for sure! She hated her son.

  The Goethals Bridge lay just ahead. I turned off the New Jersey Turnpike onto it. I went down the Staten Island Expressway like a fired cannonball. I got across the dizzy heights of the Verrazano Narrows Bridge and was shortly speeding up the Queens Expressway.

  Rounding corners on two wheels, I rocketed toward safety. I slammed on the brakes before the house and leaped out of the steaming car. I raced up the steps and pounded on the door.

  The hulking monster of a woman recognized me. I crowded past her into the hall. In a voice I was carefully keeping from sounding hysterical, I told her that her son was after me with intent to kill.

  She nodded, seeming to understand. She went up the stairs and was gone a bit. Then she leaned over the banister and beckoned. I went up.

  Apparently, the room at the top of the stairs had once been Torpedo’s. He had painted bars on the windowpane. The bedstead was cold iron. A portrait, a photograph, hung on the wall. The man in it had a crooked, leering face. It was autographed:

  To Torpedo, my best con,

  J. Q. Cortikul, P.h.D.

  His prison psychologist!

  Mrs. Fiaccola pointed to the closet and indicated I should enter it.

  A POUNDING OF FEET ON THE STAIRS!

  TORPEDO!

  “Where is the son of a (bleepch)?” he was screaming and I realized he had seen the car.

  “Torpedo!” she said. “You want a kill. You’re going to get one!”

  His mother was beckoning him up to the room. Her right hand was obscured in the folds of her skirt.

  He was snarling and agitated. But he was obeying.

  Firmly, she pushed him into the room and made him sit down on the bed.

  She made a shushing signal with her left hand and then used it to gesture at the closet. “He’s in there,” she said. My hair stood on end!

  His mother lifted her right hand. She was holding his leopard, the sawed-off shotgun!

  She pushed it vertical at his chest as though to force him to take it.

  He reached out to grab the breech.

  With a quick movement, his mother lowered it so that the barrel was against his chin from below.

  SHE PULLED BOTH TRIGGERS!

  The noise was deafening!

  The whole of Torpedo’s jaw and head hit the ceiling!

  His mother wiped off the triggers with the hem of her skirt. She curled his dying fingers around the guard.

  She then opened a drawer and got out some gun cleaning materials and put them on the bed.

  Then she stood back. “Ever since you been out of the Federal pen,” she said to the dead body, “you talk psychology, psychology, psychology. So I read up. Now you got some psychology, you no-good, filthy, rotten philanderer of corpses! I hope the devil makes you read psychology the rest of infinity!”

  She turned to me and beckoned me out of the closet. “You witnessed it. He was cleaning his gun and it went off, wasn’t he?”

  I nodded numbly.

  “So that’s the end of my no-good, carrion-(bleeping) (bleep) of a son. And a pleasure it is to see him lying there dead even without the twenty-five thousand insurance I now get.”

  Only then, at that very moment, was the brutal truth borne in upon me.

  Torpedo had failed.

  I personally would now have to handle the whole situation.

  The fate of Earth, of Rockecenter, of Lombar and the entire Voltar Confederacy depended upon one haggard and worn frail reed, Apparatus Officer Soltan Gris.

  And it was more vital than ever to remove the vicious Countess Krak.

  As I went out into the night, I shook my fist at the sky. “By all the stars, by all the Gods and Demons of the firmament,” I cried. “In spite of what you are doing to me, I must prevail! Do what thou wilt, I shall still terminate that awful woman!”

  A deadly oath.

  I meant it!

  PART FORTY-SEVEN

  Chapter 1

  I did not have too much money. I could not go back to Miss Pinch’s and endure those women.

  I drove to midtown Manhattan and abandoned the manure truck on a side street. Lugging my bag and viewers, I made my way to a hotel I had noticed at times in the past. It was a wino hangout, shabby and dirty, the lobby littered with collapsed human wrecks. The very place to hide out, for here they didn’t even bother to sort the living from the dead.

  I got a room with a cracked window, cracked washbasin and cracked floor. Cockroaches swarmed, thriving on the remains of a soiled carpet.

  I should have been exhausted, but I was not. I had too much to do.

  Despite the lateness of the hour, I got out pad and pen and sat down at the rickety table. One must be orderly, one must do things by the textbook. I must be careful and precise, for only in that way was I ever going to bring about the demise of the Countess Krak.

  I wrote down the Apparatus fundamental musts:

  1. PREPARE A BASE BEFORE YOU ATTACK

  2. HANDLE YOUR TROOPS BEFORE YOU ATTACK

  3. PLAN BEFORE YOU ATTACK

  4. GATHER WEAPONS BEFORE YOU ATTACK

  5. PINPOINT OBJECTIVES BEFORE YOU ATTACK

  6. TIME EVERYTHING

  I knew you had to do these things in exact order. Geniuses, long since, have worked these things out. If an organization such as the Apparatus has the prime duty of undermining a civilization, it must be thorough. One must make the maximum amount of trouble for the maximum number of people for the minimum number of reasons. That rule holds good for governments, for governmental organizations and for government officers and agents. Even on Earth, which is primitive about such things, the FBI and others adhere to these maxims totally. So I knew I was being wise.

  So I took up number five first. That was the easy one. The primary objective was the Countess Krak. I knew that very well from long and bitter experience.

  As to number one, I had my base in this hotel room.

  As to number six, I looked at my watch and carefully noted the hour, minute and second and put them down.

  Suddenly I realized that I was not taking these in perfect order. I got a grip on myself. I should be working on number two, handling the troops.

  The only troops was me. I fully realized that now. Bury and Torpedo and even Madison had failed me. I was entirely on my own.

  What was the matter with the troops?

  Venereal disease. What with goats and dogs and Torpedo, this was obviously the case. While there was no sign of it, in every text you read on military matters it is a problem. Good.

  Determined to do things right this time, I let first things be first. Even when they were second on the list.

  To handle the troops required rest. I carefully noted the time as required in number six and went to bed.

  Bright and early I got up, brushed the cockroaches off my clothes and dressed.

  Marching with bitter determination, I made my way to a phone kiosk in the lobby and looked up VD clinics. There was one close by. I made an appointment and was promptly there.

  I was the first in and I got quick service. I laboriously filled out a card. A young doctor, without looking at it, sat down in the interview room where I had been placed. He said, “All this is in confidence. You can talk freely. What symptoms have you noticed?”

  “None,” I said. “It is simply inevitable.”

  “What have your contacts . . . you know . . . been?”

  And here I could give him real information. “I have been in contact with a horrible blond woman, a fiend in human form, that treats life as if it were chaff. It is all
her fault. She is five feet nine and a half inches tall. She hypnotizes everybody!”