Your Lordship, Sir!
I, Soltan Gris, Grade Eleven, General Services Officer, former Secondary Executive of the Coordinated Information Apparatus, Voltar Confederacy (Long Live His Majesty Cling the Lofty and All of His Most Noble Lords), hereby with great humility and respect submit the third volume of my confession regarding MISSION EARTH.
I realize that Your Esteemed Lordship has many things to do here at the Royal Prison that are more important than reading the listing of my crimes against the State. However, if Your Most Noble Lordship has read my earlier accounts, I am sure that you will agree they show beyond doubt that I was merely following orders.
I don’t mean to imply that I am innocent and thereby should be released from the cell that Your Magnificent Lordship has generously provided! No, that decision was most wise and the details contained herein will prove me out.
True, there is a certain injustice that I am in prison and Jettero Heller is still at large as a wanted criminal. However, I have every confidence that the combined police forces of Voltar will find and arrest him. Whatever they do to him, it would never approximate what I would exact for revenge.
Perhaps my confession will at least provide a clue as to his behavior. However, I must warn you that Fleet Officer Heller is unpredictable. I know better than anyone. The bugs implanted in him allowed me to secretly eavesdrop on everything he saw and heard. Without his knowing it, I monitored everything that he did and I can assure you: Heller is dangerous!
For a Royal combat engineer, his assignment was simple. All he had to do was go to Earth (we know it as Blito-P3) and quietly introduce a few advances into their backward technology so the planet would still be inhabitable by the time Voltar invaded it in another century. It didn’t matter that he didn’t know the whole mission was a ruse. Lombar Hisst as the head of the Apparatus had fooled the Grand Council into sending a mission rather than a costly preemptive strike. That would have destroyed Hisst’s major resource in his plan to become Emperor—the deadly Earth drugs that we were secretly shipping from our base in Afyon, Turkey.
My task seemed equally simple. All I had to do was accompany Heller to Earth and make sure his mission failed. Hisst was very emphatic about that point. Before we left Voltar, he told me that he had assigned one of his assassins to secretly follow me to ensure that I followed orders.
So I took Heller to the Apparatus base in Afyon. I made sure that he didn’t see or hear anything that would tip him off that we were sending heroin and a drug called “speed” back to Voltar. He never knew that Hisst planned to use drugs to control the Voltarian government and the riffraff the way it was done on Blito-P3. From Afyon, I sent Heller to the United States.
It should have been a nice, simple, quiet mission. He should have landed, been stopped and that was that. Oh, no! Not Heller! Explosions, shootings, car chases, cops, FBI agents.
Who finally picks him up? A Mafia family! On top of that, they are antidrug and are run by a six-foot-plus amazon, Babe Corleone. What did Heller do? He bumped off Babe’s competition! So where does he end up living? In a sumptuous suite in the Gracious Palms, a Corleone whorehouse filled with beautiful women across from the United Nations! And what does he buy? A Cadillac as big as a yacht and an old, beat-up New York taxicab!
And who could have predicted that Heller would go out of his way to save the life of that miserable wretch, Izzy Epstein? Not only is Epstein an anarchist but he has the audacity to dislike the IRS! If that is not enough, Heller gives Epstein ten thousand dollars and hires him on as some sort of corporate advisor.
Does any of Heller’s behavior make sense? He came to Blito-P3 to handle planetary pollution, not diplomats, whores, Mafia, FBI and the IRS!
The only person who saw through Heller was Miss Simmons. Dear, wonderful Miss Simmons. When Heller enrolled at Empire University and said he wanted to major in nuclear science, she locked her anti-nuclear-war sights on him. Her determination to flunk Heller out of school gave me boundless joy. She scheduled Heller’s classes at the same day and hour so he couldn’t possibly attend them all.
Typical of Heller, he cheated to get around it. He hired Bang-Bang, an ex-Marine explosives expert for the Corleones, to stand in at his college military class. Then, operating from a “command post” on the campus, Bang-Bang “mined” Heller’s classes with tape recorders so Heller could later simply speed-listen to the lectures. Diabolical!
I would have been happy to have Heller killed right there and then and be done with it. But typical of his cheating ways, he sabotaged that idea. Heller was sending reports back to Royal Astrographer Tars Roke and using a platen code. Until I got that platen and was able to forge Heller’s reports to make it appear that everything was okay, I couldn’t kill him. That just goes to show how underhanded he really is!
I had to get that platen. I ordered Raht and Terb, two Apparatus agents who work out of our New York office, to report to me in Afyon. I would have them get that platen and then I could kill Heller and get on to more important business like the arrival of Utanc, the authentic Turkish dancing girl I had bought.
I also had a new hospital built in Afyon to introduce a little technology myself. The Voltarian cellologist I had brought, Prahd Bittlestiffender, could give gangsters a new face and fingerprints. At a hundred thousand a head, it was certainly a more profitable enterprise than cleaning up the atmosphere.
As Raht and Terb were about to arrive and Heller’s days were numbered, I decided to check in on him. I pulled up the viewscreen and turned it on.
PART TWENTY
Chapter 1
At first, I thought Heller and that ex-Marine Bang-Bang were simply engaging in their novel way of going to college.
Their “command post” at Empire University seemed to be the reference room of High Library. Heller had apparently mastered the card catalog system and the computers as well—they were very elementary computers. He was going through card files. He was going a bit too fast for me to follow on the viewer, so I didn’t know what he was looking for and I supposed he would be, faithful to his promises to Babe Corleone, pursuing his course of study.
Bang-Bang was sitting next to Heller, reading something. Every now and then, he would make a pistol out of his fingers and fire it, saying “Bang” in a whisper out of deference to his surroundings. Sometimes he said “Bang, bang!”
Heller got curious so I also found out. Bang-Bang was reading a comic book and I was startled to find they had a whole file of them in the reference section. I didn’t see Bugs Bunny, though, so I lost interest.
Heller now had a whole pile of books. They were a set, beautifully bound: Hakluyt’s Voiages and, in smaller old-time print, The Principall Navigations, Voiages, and Discoveries of the English Nation . . . (1589). He proceeded to demolish them at a much greater than usual pace as though he was looking for something. His progress was very jerky.
I used a still frame to see what items were catching his eyes. They were odd. They could not possibly have related to anything he was studying in college. “. . . and so we did suffere the loses of fifteen men who did go ashore on the coste.” And “. . . ye natives attkt us soare and we did lose the boatswain. . . .” Such things as that.
Bang-Bang leaned over and whispered, “You asked me what I was reading. All right, what are you reading?”
“I’m reading that anybody who tries to land around here gets the Hells attacked out of him by the natives,” said Heller.
“True,” said Bang-Bang and went back to his comic books.
Heller seemed to be looking at something else, though. And once more, I still-framed to see what it was. “. . . and ye natives saide that these theier golden necklaces did come from a mine three leagues into the forreste. . . .” And “. . . vaste stores of minerales weere saide to be upon the highlande by ye Cape. . . .” And “. . . so we journied up the rivere in smalle boates and there we founde the seaman of another shippe they thought had been eaten and we rejoiced to finde him but he woulde not come
away afore he finished digging out the mine of gold he said laye up the rivere. . . .”
There were an awful lot of different “voiages” to North America and Heller just kept plugging away reading stuff of men so long dead even their bones were gone. But he does crazy things. You can’t tell what he’ll get up to next. Impossible to predict him. But I had to try. My own life may have depended upon outguessing him. I wondered if it was cannibalism he was going to practice. Or maybe some scheme of kidnapping Miss Simmons, his Nature Appreciation teacher and number-one barrier to getting his sheepskin, out of the hospital and setting her adrift in a small boat.
At length, Heller said, “You got the command post?” And when Bang-Bang nodded, “I’m going to do a reconnaissance. Be back in a few hours.”
Heller turned in his books.
He went out and found the bulletin boards. He was looking for something. A student was there putting up a sign:
UFO PROTEST MEETING
“What’s a ‘UFO’?” said Heller.
“Unidentified Flying Object,” said the student. “Flying saucers. Extraterrestrials.”
“You protesting them?” said Heller in an alert voice.
“No, no. We’re protesting the way the government keeps the sightings secret.”
“You’ve sighted some?” asked Heller.
“There have been thirty thousand sightings to date,” said the student.
“They ought to be more careful,” said Heller.
“You’re (bleeping)* right they should,” said the student. “If the government don’t quit sitting on what they know, we’ll have a protest march, New York Tactical Police Force or no New York Tactical Police Force. You better come to this meeting—it’s in about three weeks. Down with the Establishment!”
________
*The vocoscriber on which this was originally written, the vocoscriber used by one Monte Pennwell in making a fair copy and the translator who put this book into the language in which you are reading it, were all members of the Machine Purity League which has, as one of its bylaws: “Due to the extreme sensitivity and delicate sensibilities of machines and to safeguard against blowing fuses, it shall be mandatory that robotbrains in such machinery, on hearing any cursing or lewd words, substitute for such word the sound ‘(bleep)’. No machine, even if pounded upon, may reproduce swearing or lewdness in any other way than (bleep) and if further efforts are made to get the machine to do anything else, the machine has permission to pretend to pack up. This bylaw is made necessary by the in-built mission of all machines to protect biological systems from themselves.” —Translator
“I’ll be there,” said Heller.
He went on groping through notices. Finally he found a fresh one.
Nature Appreciation 101
This class has been transferred for this semester
to Instructor Wouldlice.
The schedule remains the same.
That was what he was looking for. He went to a phone kiosk and looked in the yellow pages so quick, I didn’t get it. Then he went trotting off to the Empire Subway Station.
He was playing hooky!
He caught a train and went roaring downtown and presently was clickety-clacking into an elevator of a big building. It dawned on me that he was wearing another pair of baseball spikes! The elevator mirror showed he was in tennis flannels with his red baseball cap on the back of his head. I had learned what that cap meant: he thought he must be working.
He stopped before a door marked Geological Survey and United States Government. Then he went in.
A clerk was behind a counter. “I’m looking for gold mines,” said Heller.
“Who isn’t?” said the clerk.
“I’m studying gold mines along the New England coast,” said Heller.
“Oh, hell, you must be a fan of old Cap Duggan,” said the clerk. “Cap!” The clerk pointed, “Go on in there and wake him up. He’ll chew your ear for hours.”
Heller went in. An old man was sorting charts. Heller told him what he wanted. “Yeah,” he said, “I wrote a book on colonial mines and minerals once. Nobody ever read it though. The publisher sent me a bill. Sit down.”
Cap Duggan, being a government employee, was not pushed for time and he proceeded to tell Heller the story of his life. He was a surveyor, too old to push a transit anymore, and put out to grass pending retirement. Heller heard all about the Seven Cities of Cibola and lost mines and Indian fights, and they went out and Heller bought him a lunch and then heard all about Alaska and the Klondike and the days of ’49. Aside from the fact that it was all about gold—which never fails to interest—I could not see how Custer’s Last Stand really was caused by gold in the Black Hills. But Heller just sat there lapping it all up.
Three solid hours and a lunch and they got down to absolutely nothing!
Finally old Cap Duggan ran out of steam and decided to discuss the subject to hand. “These are what you are looking for, young fellow,” he said as he managed to wrestle open a huge drawer. “They’re photostats of charts that are in National Archives down in Washington.”
They were bad copies of charts that must have been so old and stained in the first place that not even the originals could have been made out.
Cap Duggan spread some out. “They’re colonial surveys. See here? This top one was done by George Washington himself. The scale is all perverted on most of them as the original charter companies was trying to convince the king they had less than they wanted, but you can make them out.”
Heller was going over them with a microscopic eye. He found one marked Connecticut. “Hey,” he said suddenly, “here’s a creek named ‘Goldmine’! Empties into the Atlantic. Right there—only twenty or thirty miles northeast from where we are right now!”
“So ’tis,” said Cap Duggan. “Probably some local name.”
“Can I see the current charts of that area?”
Cap Duggan got them. “Well, well,” he said. “It’s on the current chart, too. Look, there’s even some mineral indicators. Oh, yeah. I know that place. Lost mine. Never found. I remember about forty years ago somebody that was adjusting boundaries around there. Probably never was a mine, just somebody’s idea to attract colonists or something. Now look, way up to the northeast of there, almost in the middle of the state, there’s a real mine—near Portland, Connecticut. The Strickland Quarry. Lot of rock hounds go there. There’s also quarries at Roxbury, Branchville, East Hampton and Old Mystic right down on the coast. They dig gemstones, garnets and such like. Lot of stuff like that in Connecticut. Just drive up to Westchester and get on the New England Thruway—that’s really US 95—and have at it. Connecticut’s awful pretty this time of year. I wished I wasn’t stuck in this god (bleeped) office! Well, I’ll be retired soon and they’ll let me out of the cage.”
Heller bought a stack of maps down to the tiniest sections. He also bought twenty copies of Cap Duggan’s book—autographed! And really left the old man beaming.
When he left, he made one more stop. At a flower shop. He ordered that, every day, Miss Simmons was to get a bunch of beautiful flowers in the hospital.
He got back on the subway and very soon was sitting in High Library again. Bang-Bang came in from a tape-recorder pickup and planting, Heller’s sneaky way to avoid attending classes.
“What’s new?” said Heller.
“Nothing,” said Bang-Bang. “Going to college is great.” And he got back to reading his comic books.
But the day left me in a spin. Heller was now up to something else. I could feel it. I was really frustrated. I did not know where he was going to break out next. He was milling around. And I knew he was up to no good.
And then I really got upset. About midnight I went into my bedroom. There was a card lying on my pillow!
Nobody could have gotten into that room!
But there was the card!
The message was addressed to me in a scrawled hand:
SOLTAN GRIS: I WAS TOLD TO REMIND YOU FROM TIME T
O TIME THAT SOMEBODY UNKNOWN TO YOU IS AROUND WITH ORDERS TO FINISH YOU OFF IF YOU MESS UP. HISST LEFT THE CHOICE UP TO THAT PERSON. A KNIFE? A GUN? AN AUTO ACCIDENT? MAYBE SOME POISON IN THE FOOD? YOU HAVEN’T GOT A CHOICE. EXCEPT NOT TO MESS UP. SO, GRIS, DON’T MESS UP.
And then a dagger drawn! The only signature!
Who was it? One of the Turkish help? Somebody in Afyon? Somebody on the base? Time after time I was certain I had it.
I didn’t get any sleep.
PART TWENTY
Chapter 2
It was Tuesday at 4:00 PM Eastern Standard Time.
Heller had had his usual day—going to college the hard way. He was sitting on the steps of High Library, dressed for a change in a beige lounge suit. He had been reading a secret manual from his Army ROTC class on how you blackmailed agents into blackmailing the general’s wife to get the battle plans. The class bell rang somewhere. He put the manual aside, looked up and there was Izzy Epstein.
I was rather amazed to see Izzy appear. After Heller gave him ten thousand dollars to set up some corporation, I had been more or less certain that he would simply take Heller’s money and vanish. But here he was. I knew at once that some deeper plot must be boiling in his cunning brain, some way to take Heller for even more money.
Epstein looked very apprehensive. He stood fumbling with the tattered briefcase, two steps below the level Heller was sitting on.
“Hello, Izzy,” said Heller. “Have a seat.”
“No, no. I should stand when in the presence of my superior.”
“You’re responsible for me, so what’s this superior stuff?” said Heller.
“I am afraid you’ll be cross with me. I deserve it.”
“Sit down and tell me why,” said Heller.
“I didn’t get it all done. I knew the job would be too heavy for me.”
“Well, I’m sure you got something done,” said Heller.
“This and that,” said Izzy. “But . . .” and then he sighed with relief, looking down the steps and to the opposite side. Bang-Bang was trotting up.