Mission Earth Volume 4: An Alien Affair

  A flashing object!

  Another box wrench! The man was down.

  One tried to get a shotgun into action to fire into the dark garage. A spinning blur of steel! His forehead burst apart!

  A man tried to flee. Heller’s arm blurred! A spinning missile slashed his parka hood off and half his head with it.

  The last man had reached the van. He was struggling to open the door but slipped.

  Heller lunged forward at speed. He threw a wrench as he ran. It broke the driver’s wrist.

  Heller was on him. The man was hitting out with his remaining good hand. Heller brought a heavy socket wrench down on his skull! It burst like a melon!

  Then there was only the whisper of falling snow.

  Heller looked into the back of the van. Nobody. He stepped along the road and listened. Nothing.

  He surveyed the bodies in the snow. There were six lying there, including Benny. He went from one to another, kicking their guns aside, checking. They were all very dead.

  He went over to the garage door, put his ear up against it and listened. He kicked it a couple of times. Nothing happened.

  Heller pulled the Peterbilt hand throttle down to idle and then drove it ahead a few feet and put the brake back on. He put on his asbestos gloves again and pushed the stack up straight and, with a piece of wire, fastened it in place.

  He went back to the door again and listened. Nothing. He went to its lock. It wasn’t really closed. He took the padlock off, threw the locking bar over and pulled the door up from the bottom, leaping aside at the same time.

  Clouds of Diesel smoke billowed out. Although he was well clear of it, he fanned it away from himself. He couldn’t see into the darkness well. He turned on the tractor’s side back lights.

  There were four dead men in there!

  Their faces were blue except for patches of pink on their cheeks.

  Flurries of wind and snow were blowing into the interior. Heller approached the men more closely. They were very dead.

  He picked up some straps and coils of rope they had been carrying. One had had a curious weapon: an air gun with injector darts.

  Heller checked the trailer and Caddy out for bombs. He found nothing.

  He went outside. It was snowing even harder and very dark. He glanced at his watch. It was only 5:20 AM.

  PART TWENTY-NINE

  Chapter 2

  Heller started moving fast.

  He took the red anorak off the late Benny. He checked it for blood, found none and threw it in the cab. He went all around and recovered his wrenches. He verified he had them all. Then he cleaned them and put them back in his toolboxes in the shop.

  Then he began to drag bodies to the van. He threw the monoxide-corpses in the back and then, bending down under the van, using a screwdriver’s blade, he stabbed a hole in the exhaust muffler.

  The two with the most obvious face injuries he put in the passenger side of the van cab. He dragged the other four and put them in the back.

  He collected up all their weapons and equipment, quite a pile, and tossed them into the back of the van.

  Then he verified that he had left no evidence about.

  He stood thinking for a bit. Then he went into the shop and found a black plastic garbage sack. He went to the van and, one by one, began to remove all ID, wallets and whatever from the corpses. It was a somewhat grisly job although the blood had long since frozen. He put all items in the garbage bag. He threw the sack into the cab of the Peterbilt.

  Then he went into the shop and found some pellets. He picked up three jerrycans full of gasoline and put them in the back of the van.

  He looked the scene over again. He went and got some snow boots and pulled them on over his spikes.

  He got into the van and drove it away.

  The snow was so heavy it was very hard to see where he was going. He evidently knew. The brush was closer and closer in beside the road. He drove for quite a while. Then he stopped and got out.

  A picnic table was to his right. He walked ahead. He was at the edge of a precipice. A dark gully yawned blackly just beyond the picnic spot. Obviously, he was in some part of the recreation park near the sea, a very deserted part amongst the gullies and dunes.

  He got into the back of the van. He opened the three gasoline cans. He looked at his watch. Into each can he dropped a pellet. He recapped the cans.

  Aha! I got it. They were Voltar time-dissolvable explosion caps!

  He got in the van, put it in gear and started it ahead toward the precipice.

  He stepped out. The van went on.

  It sailed over the edge and vanished in the darkness and snow. A thud below in the blackness and then a rattle of stones. The engine quit.

  Heller began to run with a distance-eating pace. The snow was falling so thickly and it was so black that I would have been lost in seconds. But I had no hope that he would get lost. Not Heller with that built-in compass brain of his.

  He had gone some distance. He made his watch wink the time. He went a little further and then looked back.

  The faintest sort of greenish flash, hardly visible in this snow. And then a faint WHOOSH!

  Three seconds, three-fifths of a mile away.

  Was he kneeling in the snow? He was speaking in Voltarian. “O God of voyagers, thank you for deliverance this day. I know it is your way to test the souls of spacers with such trials to make them more worthy in a future life. But, O God of voyagers, did you have to make the natives of this planet so combative to an effort to land and give them help? I think you overdid it just a little bit on Blito-P3. All Hail.”

  He shifted to English. “Forgive me, Jesus Christ, for rubbing out some of your people. I don’t think I gave them time to turn the other cheek. Please accept these souls from their funeral pyre and find it in your heart not to give them more than they deserve. Amen.”

  He stood up.

  Heller turned on a pocket light. A pencil of windblown snow. His footprints on the back trail were filling so rapidly they would be totally gone in minutes. Satisfied, he turned the light off and went speeding on his way.

  Ah, now at last I could see something. And hear something, too. The tractor lights and the tractor engine.

  He slowed down and made a wide sweep, very silent, scouting the place for any more unwanted visitors. Satisfied, he closed in.

  PART TWENTY-NINE

  Chapter 3

  The falling flakes, turned bluish in the tractor lights, made a curtain all around that waved this way and that, stirred by puffs of wind. The bitter cold turned his breath white around his face mask.

  He looked at his watch. It flashed that it was 6:15 AM.

  Heller rapidly got to work.

  He dug up an opaque silver plastic car cover and put it over the Caddy. Then he went and got a spray can of black paint from the semi and on both sides of the cover, working very fast and being very neat, he put SUICIDE RHODES in big letters.

  I was mystified. There was no such driver listed in the starting lineup copy I had.

  He played a blowtorch on some snow, made it into mud and splashed the result on the tractor and trailer license plates where it froze instantly. You couldn’t read them!

  I hadn’t realized the Peterbilt was rented until he addressed the outer label on the door: Big Boy Leasing, Rig 89. He splashed muddy water on that and sort of glued some snow on it. He likewise obscured the label and number on the trailer. Then, with the blowtorch, he got more water and put soap in it and made the cab windows and screen translucent except for a couple small clear holes and the wiper area. He was going incognito!

  He got in and backed the tractor king plate into the big receiver at the trailer’s front end, where it went clang as it slid in. He got out and pushed in the king pin to lock the trailer on. Then he cranked up the trailer stand. He connected the trailer’s electrical connection to the tractor and the trailer’s rear lights went on. He fitted the air line ends together and gave them a locking twist. He rev
erified the Caddy chocks and turnbuckles.

  He pulled the trailer out of the garage and went back and forth a couple times, testing the trailer’s air brakes.

  He ran around then and locked everything up and put a nearly invisible thread along each door. He was learning, but he just wasn’t suspicious enough in his nature to make a good spy even now. He should have done that before those hoods had gotten in! A real spy has to be downright paranoid all the time. Heller would never learn. In espionage, insanity is mandatory. Heller was crazy, of course, but not in the right direction.

  The big rig plowed its way through the snow. He got to a bigger roadway and, though it earlier had been snowplowed, it was again inches deep. But the snow for the moment had let up.

  He was converging now with mobs and traffic from New York and the going was much slower. Cars jammed full of people, people jammed into blankets and coats, all hurrying along to be able to get parking space or a seat for the big race.

  Heller topped a small rise. From it the speedway was plainly visible. He went a bit further, looking for something through his windscreen peephole. He finally centered on Pit One. It could be seen because of the angle of a distant open gate. He got off to the side of the road and stopped hundreds of yards short of what should have been his destination.

  He pulled the Diesel down to idle. Mobs and mobs of people and cars were passing on the road to his left. A big sign ahead said PARKING $20, with an arrow.

  I wondered why he was hiding like that. For hiding it was. Nobody would recognize the Caddy or see who was in the cab. He must suspect somebody was after him.

  Heller took a hamburger out of the sack and pushed it into a miniature microwave oven in the panel. After a moment he took it out, heated. He looked at it. There was nothing wrong with it I could see but he put it down. He seemed upset.

  He was watching Pit One through the windscreen peephole. He shifted and looked at the grandstand lights and then at the enthusiastic crowd flooding along to the left of the Peterbilt. He seemed to be trying to figure something out. Plainly, he was worried.

  Well, if he thought something odd was on schedule for this coming race, believe me, he was right!

  He laid the hamburger aside and got out the sack of IDs. They were mostly Italian names—Cecchino, Fiutare, Rapitore, Laccio, Scimmiottare, Cattivo, Ladro, Pervertire and Serpente. One wasn’t Italian: Benny Heist. What was peculiar was that every one of them had a US passport, up to date, and every one of them had five one-thousand-dollar bills except Heist, who had fifty-five thousand! There was a hundred Gs plus small bills in those wallets!

  Heller went back to Benny Heist’s. He said, “You could have shot me as I drove up, Benny. Or did you find your gun was jammed or what? What did you intend to do and why? And what did that have to do with this race?”

  He threw them back in the garbage bag and put it under his seat. He didn’t eat his hamburger.

  It was just past 7:00 AM. The excited crowds were thickening. It was still dark. It began to snow again.

  Heller closed his eyes. Maybe he was taking a rest. He’d need it before this day was out, I vowed. I had not even begun on him yet!

  PART TWENTY-NINE

  Chapter 4

  At 7:30 AM, Heller turned on his radio: “. . . crowds. From Manhattan, from Queens, from Brooklyn and as far away as New Jersey, they are pouring to this race. Route 495 is jammed, State 25 is crammed and State 27 is slammed with cars and buses. Somehow the overloaded Sunrise Highway is being kept open.

  “Despite the storm, the Army has flown in snowplows from as far away as Fort Bloomindales. But as fast as highways are swept, there is more snow.

  “Several of the drivers and their crews are here. There is no sign yet of that idol of America, the Whiz Kid. He will be Car 1. He has been assigned Pit One.

  “Ah, here is Jeb Toshua. He is 101 years old. Jeb, how does this snowstorm stack up to you?”

  “Well, Jerry, I can’t reckamember a storm this bad since way back in ’65 or was it ’75. No, maybe it was ’82. Let’s see, I lost my cat. . . .”

  “Thank you, Jeb,” said the sportscaster hastily. “There’s a lot of money, not on just the race but also on the weather: will it be clear or will it be snowing at flag time?

  “Hey, here is Killer Brag, the top bomber driver of Georgia. Killer, what do you have to say about this race?”

  “It’s the craziest lot of racing commissioners in history. It’s snowing and the god (bleeped) commission won’t change bomber rules and let us use chains and spikes. The (bleepers) . . .”

  “Thank you, Killer Brag. The crowds are still coming. There’s a busload, the Jackson High School Marching All Girls Virgin Band. There seems to be an awful lot of them. . . .”

  Eight o’clock. The snow had let up. It was lighter. The crowds, as I could see from my hill, still converged upon the speedway. Long Island trainloads were being bused the last lap of the journey. Snowplows were spraying geysers of white off the roads. One was working on the track to clear it.

  Eight-thirty. A new, ominous wall of gray black clouds was rolling in. It began to snow twice as hard as it had.

  The radio said, “According to local meteorologists, brought to you through the courtesy of the Florida Chamber of Commerce, there are two weather fronts at work here today. One is icy cold, sweeping in from Manhattan with temperatures of minus ten degrees. The other is battling it with heavy snow pushed north by the warm and sultry breezes of Miami Beach, Florida. It is eighty-two on a beautiful, tropical morning at Hialeah where the most beautiful girls in Florida watch the thoroughbreds run. The two embattled fronts are bashing at each other right above Spreeport, Long Island. We pause for this commercial from Tropical Airways. . . .”

  Whatever lies the Floridians were telling about Florida, it only served to emphasize the brutality of the weather that was going on here. Sheets of white snow blanketed down upon a completely frozen landscape. Traffic churned the roads into slush which instantly froze again into dirty ice. When I stuck my nose and binoculars out of the van window, both froze up promptly and I had to hang the glasses outside to keep them usable. I was looking for my snipers. I should be able to see them from this height. But the snow curtained everything.

  The crowds weren’t heading for Florida. Wrapped into mobile mountains, they were converging here at Spreeport to see the Whiz Kid race.

  Heller was trying to see Pit One. Even the hole in his snow-covered windshield kept closing and he had to heat the glass behind it to see at all.

  It was creeping on toward nine. The radio said, “. . . and still the crowds come. No sign of the Whiz Kid as yet. The other drivers have been having a meeting with the officials. Ah, here’s Hammer Malone. How did the meeting go, Hammer?”

  “God (bleep) it, it’s going to snow off and on all day. You can’t keep that god (bleeped) track clear. We got to have chains and spikes to race at all. And the god (bleeped) officials won’t suspend the rules. The race is off!”

  Loudspeakers in front of the grandstand: “Ladies and gentlemen, we are sorry to have to announce that the drivers have refused to race without chains and spikes. The officials will not change the bomber . . .”

  A roaring surge of anger! From the radio, audible in the open air. Ten thousand people howling in outrage! Berserk!

  Loudspeakers: “Ladies and gentlemen, please be calm. Please be calm, ladies and gentlemen. . . .”

  Snarls, batterings!

  Then a hasty voice on the loudspeaker: “The officials have just this minute reached a new finding. They will suspend all rulings concerning chains, spikes and wheels! The race will go on!”

  Heller muttered, “That’s all I’ve been waiting for.”

  The snow let up momentarily. Through his peephole he watched two huge vans punching their way through the gate. They turned and drew up behind Pit One. They both had signs:

  JIFFY-SPIFFY GARAGE, NEWARK, NJ

  Men were spilling out of the vans!

  I h
ad a sinking feeling. He had Mike Mutazione’s people as his pit crew! And what else?

  Heller reached for a full-visored racing helmet. He pulled the dark shade down. He put the semi in gear and, creeping along the heavily trafficked road, made his way to the gate.

  At the guard point he slid down his window. He was holding up a NASCAR card and a ten-dollar bill. The security man sucked in his breath. Heller hastily said, “Don’t yell who it is.”

  The guard shut his mouth, took the bill and Heller was through. He pulled up behind Pit One.

  Mike opened his door. “Hell of a rush, kid, but we made it. We been working all night for three nights. And I got a great pit crew for you.”

  Heller handed Mike the garbage sack. “Hide this for me, will you, Mike?”

  I had another disappointment. It had been in my mind to sort of slide in and pick up that sack. Now I wouldn’t know where it was! But what was this?

  Mike’s crew was unloading huge tanks of oxyacetylene and putting them in padding. What were they going to do? Start the world’s most active welding shop?

  And another thing, as Heller glanced around I could see from bulges in their heavy tank suits that this crew was armed!

  Mike said to Heller, “Why didn’t you let the family bet on you? We worked like hell on the wheels. You’re sure to win now.”

  The cover had come off the Caddy. It was visible from the grandstand. A surging cheer went up from the massive crowd.

  When he could be heard again, Heller said, “I don’t really know, Mike. This is just too crazy a race. Let’s get the wheels on.”

  It was snowing again, undoing all the previous snowplow work. The crew had the Caddy off the trailer. They pushed it to pit position. It had a huge black 1 on it outlined in gold, and WHIZ KID. The crew was fixing straps across the area where the windscreen was missing.

  Three officials, wrapped to their crowns, came up. “You’re late,” said the first one.

  Heller said, “Please satisfy yourselves there is no gasoline tank in, under or around the car and then certify that.”

  The crew was lifting the Caddy’s right side with a hydraulic jack. The inspectors numbly did as they were told.