Why hospital?
It zeroed in to the top of the sheet.
Wounded in rescue of battleship.
I punched,
Why mental interview?
The screen zeroed to,
Fight in hospital with male homosexual nurse.
Aha! I punched in,
Conclusion?
The machine zeroed in on,
Male nurse hospitalized.
I thought no, no, no, you (bleeping) machine. I punched,
Findings on mental condition subject.
The screen zeroed in on,
No psychotic nor neurotic signs or symptoms found on the subject of sex. Interview null.
Real disappointment.
Hastily, so as not to lose my machine time, I punched in,
Disciplinary actions of all kinds and types.
The machine said,
When?
(Bleep) machine.
Since baby.
I punched in.
Ah, now we were away! Real documents! Police report when he was seven: arrested for riding speedwheel on sidewalk; fined one credit. Another report, age twelve: arrested for driving airbus when underage; case dismissed. Another, age fifteen: arrested for illegal skydrop into parade, said done to call attention to new technique in skydropping; case dismissed. Age sixteen: arrested as stowaway on expeditionary space freighter; judge used influence to get subject appointed to Royal Academy. What a talker Heller must have been to get a judge to do something like that! Well, I knew how he’d gotten his appointment anyway. I got mine by my father bribing a Lord’s chief clerk.
There didn’t seem much hope here. And then a document flashed on,
Recommendation for court-material.
Aha! There it was. I scanned it. Heller isn’t the only fast reader around. In his very first posting after leaving the Postgraduate Corps of Engineers school, one Jettero Heller, Grade One, protested his crew being trained by electric shock; he had argued that he had never been so trained, it being frowned on to electric-shock officers for any reason, and he claimed he didn’t want “a goofed up, fried-brained crew on a mission dangerous enough without that.” He had refused all persuasions and he had slugged the training officer when he started to put the crew into the machines. He had been relieved of command and remanded to custody pending court-martial.
I eagerly watched for the transcript of the court-martial to appear. Instead, an endorsement flashed on:
The said Jettero Heller being senior by three days date of rank to the training officer, said battering does not constitute a charge of an attack upon a senior. The court-martial recommendation is cancelled. Secretary to Admiral of the 95th Fleet..
That was all. But it was enough! Or was it? It introduced a new puzzle. Why would he go nutty over Countess Krak when he was violently opposed to electric-shock training? Was he playing some deep game?
The file, (bleep) it, was otherwise blank for my uses.
“Are you through tying up our machine now?” said the criminal old clerk. “Or do you want us to move your bed up here?”
Ah, well, maybe I could use this information to chill his affair with Countess Krak.
I made one final punch,
Deletions from file
and expected a whole series of identoplate numbers to show up. Nobody can be that good. No deletion numbers showed. (Bleep)!
“Will you please get the (bleep) away from our console?” said the old clerk. “The conference is breaking up.”
PART THREE
Chapter 8
They exited from Lombar’s office, some of the cream of the Apparatus high ranks: gaunt, grayish faces, suspicious eyes, black uniforms, shabby, shabby, shabby. A general in the Army Division looks like a monument lit up for a feast day; a general of the Apparatus looks like a tramp abandoned him in a garbage can as not worth scavenging. They were stuffing papers in their cases, talking to one another out of the corners of their mouths the way felons do. There were fifteen of them. Four were Apparatus heads from other Voltarian planets, eleven were troop commanders. The military arm of the Apparatus—the one they maintain at home, that is—numbers four million guardsmen and while this is minuscule compared to the vast array of the Army Division of Voltar, it is enough to keep other parts of the government at bay. That eleven Apparatus generals had been seeing Lombar meant that something was having to be protected—something secret and sinister in the best Apparatus tradition.
I took my cap in hand, hoped for the best and walked bravely into Lombar’s office. He was standing at his desk, scrabbling around, putting some order into the scattered papers of the conference. His hands were shaking. He looked irritable. Not good signs!
Lombar looked up and saw me standing there. He scowled. “Who sent for you?” he rasped. It was pointless to say that he had. “Shut up!” I hadn’t even opened my mouth to speak. Where was the camaraderie he had shown on my last visit? But that was Lombar.
He scrabbled around some more. “Oh, yes,” he said, and dredged a file up from the mess. It was one of those his clerks prepare for him to group all related matters of one subject. He snapped a paper out of it. “The invoice. Sign it!”
The paper he hurled at me was a shipping receipt. I studied the form:
THE BELOW NAMED OFFICER HEREBY
SIGNS FOR AND ACKNOWLEDGES THE
SAFE RECEIPT OF SECRET CARGO #1,
SHIPMENT #1 FROM BLITO-P3. ALL
WARRANTED IN GOOD CONDITION
AND FULL CONTENT.
SIGNED OFFICER SOLTAN GRIS,
SECTION CHIEF, SECTION 451
(BLITO-P3)
So that was what all the traffic was last night. The first freighter load in from Earth!
A wave of near nausea hit me. Supposing Jettero Heller had done his survey today instead of yesterday. I shuddered. He would have found this cargo piled up in its ready storeroom!
Somebody, one of the clerks, popped in and told Lombar, “It will be ready in a few minutes.” He popped out. What “it” was, I had no idea. But I wasn’t registering very well. Pure luck had saved this cargo from being exposed by Heller! (Bleep) him, he was too hard to control here on Voltar.
“Well, sign it, sign it!” Lombar yelled at me.
I looked at him in helpless confusion. I didn’t dare argue with him. Not Lombar Hisst!
Then he seemed to realize what was wrong. He sat down. “I forgot to tell you. You are still Section Chief of 451.” He waved aside the remarks he must have supposed I was making. Talking with Lombar is pretty one-sided. He can imagine you are talking. Eerie. “I know, I know,” he went on. “But we looked all through the personnel files and we could not find anyone suitable to relieve you as Section Chief of 451. Yes, yes, but the numbers of Academy-trained officers in the Apparatus are very few. And due to their silly codes, they can’t be trusted with honestly dishonest crooked business. So that leaves you.”
It was a very left-handed sort of compliment at best.
I did manage, emboldened by hope, to get out a remark. “That means I’m relieved as handler of Mission Earth.”
“Now you may wonder,” said Lombar, “if this relieves you as handler of Mission Earth. It doesn’t. You continue to have that, too.”
He was getting down to it now. He sat back, fiddling irritably with a pen. “You may wonder how you are going to be on Blito-P3 and handle Section 451 on Voltar. But that is very simple. You have the 451 clerical staff here on Voltar and they’ll continue under your chief clerk and they’ll simply send anything to be signed to you on Blito-P3. You’ll just send it back here, signed.
“Oh, yes, that reminds me. I don’t trust the base commander in Turkey, so you’ll supervise him, too.”
I felt like I was being pulled in several directions at once. He wasn’t mentioning the key point: Jettero Heller would be operating in what they call “The United States” and I would have to be in Turkey! He was hard enough to control face to face. How could anyone control him a third of t
he way around a planet? This I would have to solve and quick!
“No, no, no,” said Lombar as though I had spoken, which I hadn’t. “The order for the ‘goods’ will come from here in blank. You’ll sign it. The shipping form, attesting it has been shipped from Blito-P3, will be signed by you down there. And you will include with it a postdated receipt acknowledging the receipt of the shipment here. Very easy and straightforward.”
It meant I wrote an order for a shipment as though I was on Voltar, got the order filled on Blito-P3, signed an attestation it had been shipped and then signed and attested it had been received back on Voltar.
“You’re the only one whose signature we trust,” said Lombar. “So we want only your signature and identoplate on all this traffic. So sign that receipt you’re holding there and you can get back to work.”
I hadn’t even seen the shipment. I only had a hint, from the blur of trucks in the tunnel, that it had arrived.
Lombar seemed to misinterpret my confusion. “Oh, the pay. Well, I’ll see that you continue to be paid as Section Chief of 451. Then I’ll see that you are paid again as mission handler for Mission Earth.” Apparently he thought I was hung up on pay. “And then I can arrange for you to be paid as an inspector of cargoes. Three additional paychecks.” He looked searchingly at me. My confusion had not lightened one bit. “And then, of course, you’ll get your little whack out of various allocations, outfittings, padded accounts and all that. You’ll be wealthy. Well, I’m glad we settled all that.”
He certainly was jumpy. He barked into a communications box, “Is it ready yet?” and got back, “Shortly.”
I was standing there, trying to wrap my wits around these developments. I must have looked like I had been hit with a stun gun.
“No, don’t go,” said Lombar, looking at the ready folder before him. “First sign that invoice.”
What could I do? Numbly I signed and put my identoplate to the receipt for the first shipment from Blito-P3. I handed it over to him and he glanced at it, nodded and put it in the folder. It seemed to give him momentary satisfaction.
“Now,” said Lombar, fingering a second paper, “there’s this matter of a leak.”
I went chill. What had he gotten word of now? The survey? What other thing?
“I have a clipping here from the newssheets, (bleep) them. One of these days we will wipe them out. Somebody leaked Mission Earth to the press.” He flipped a page and there was the story:
FAMED COMBAT ENGINEER
the same one I had seen Heller reading. But I did not think it was much of a leak, really, for the orders were on the data circuit and, even if confidential, were available to many.
“I didn’t leak it,” I blurted.
“So I have ordered a full investigation of potential and existing leaks. Oh, I’ll get down to this. You can’t have Apparatus business being yelled from the building tops. Somebody, somewhere leaked this to the press!” He threw it aside. “So you don’t know anything about it. Well, I didn’t think you would.”
An investigation? Oh, I better get off this planet! Investigators turn up facts and they also turn up delusions. Dangerous!
I felt like I had been hit repeatedly with stun guns. I was really standing there paralyzed.
“No, don’t go,” said Lombar. “There’s this letter from the Grand Council.”
I read it upside down. Fortunately I have a few skills. One needs them in such a dangerous environment. It was from the Grand Council. It commended the Exterior Division for so wisely choosing an experienced combat engineer like Jettero Heller. It wondered why the Grand Council had had to be informed of this by the press. It said that the Grand Council would appreciate the courtesy of being kept posted on the progress of the mission. Particularly, the Grand Council wanted to be advised the instant said Jettero Heller departed from Voltar so the Council could expedite if there were any unseemly delays.
“This means,” said Lombar, “that so long as this mission is still on Voltar, the Grand Council will be in a position to stick their noses into our business. If there is delay in getting off, we’ll have Crown inspectors all over the place looking into everything.
“Once you have this fellow out of here, we’re all right. The Grand Council can be strung along for years. They can get agents into everything on Voltar but they sure can’t get any onto Blito-P3.
“Your agent, of course, has to be language trained and prepared and it would make them suspicious if we just launched. But my advice to you is to let no dirt cool under your feet. Crown inspectors running all around could mean your neck, Soltan. Don’t delay that launching! Understood? Good.”
I was practically in a spin. Crown inspectors! But it was my decision to get away fast anyway. I felt a stab of irritation. Lombar wasn’t helping. He’d delayed the mission himself by keeping me waiting half the morning.
I was saved from Lombar’s further “help” by the entrance of a creepy-looking staff doctor carrying a tray. Lombar looked at him in sudden relief. “Oh, it’s here.”
When I passed the old criminal clerk in the anteroom, he said, maliciously, “Feel better now that you’ve had your interview?” I must have looked like a wreck.
Copy of a letter inserted in the manuscript at the date of this writing:
To My Lord, Chief Justiciary of the Voltar Confederacy, Sir!
I, Soltan Gris, late Secondary Executive of the Coordinated Information Apparatus, Exterior Division, Royal Government (Long Live Their Majesties and the Voltar Dominions), in all humbleness and haste do herewith reply to your most urgent letter.
First, thank you for the acknowledgment of the first three parts of my narrative of events in this matter. I am happy to hear that you are satisfied that I am putting down everything I know concerning it, even to the smallest detail. I am aware that it is vital and important.
Second, thank you deeply for the assurance that there remains some chance of leniency for me and I am aware that it hinges upon my truthfulness.
Third, I express my deepest gratitude for your order to the guards, reaffirmed, to keep me supplied with water, food and writing materials. I wish to inform you that daily torture continues suspended and I abase myself in thanks.
And now, as to the underlined portion of your message: Yes, I am aware that there is an arrest warrant out for one Jettero Heller, ex-Fleet Combat Engineer. No, I am sorry to say that I cannot give the Domestic Police tips or hints as to where he might be hanging out. This is not done from any impulse to protect Jettero Heller—heavens forbid. I have dreams of meeting him again so that I could kill him on sight.
I will, as you order, continue to detail the entire matter. Perhaps from these writings, some scrap can be gleaned as to his habits that would assist the Domestic Police.
All hail Your Lordship and His Court!
Your Most
Unworthy Servant
Soltan Gris
I resume my narrative.
PART FOUR
Chapter 1
I had been rushing so hard down the tubes and corridors to get to the training rooms that when I opened the door and jumped in, I thought for an instant I was in the wrong section.
The smell of soap and disinfectant was overpowering! The Apparatus steals its cleaning materials from the Army Division—they are so seldom used it is not worthwhile to buy them properly. And the Army doesn’t think anything is clean unless it stinks to the heavens of germ killers. It never occurs to anyone to steal materials from Fleet whose spaceships have to be odorless.
There is no circulating air in Spiteos. And the usual stench of these rooms, soaked as it is into the very stone, was simply being battered down by this gas attack of Army cleaning chemicals.
I peered through the fog. Fully forty people, must be Krak’s whole training crew, were spotted around the vast hall and nearby rooms. They were stripped to breechclouts and—I couldn’t believe my eyes—their personal filth had been washed off! They had buckets and brooms and sprays and mops and
they were gouging away at the centuries of litter and dirt. Bins of it were shooting down the escalator, going to only the Gods knew where.
Technicians were finishing the replacement of burned-out lights. Another team was bringing in some new chairs and desks. What a turmoil! And too unusual in Spiteos to be readily understood.