Heller took a pair of gloves from his pocket and handed me one of them, putting his own on.
The hoist hook was resting on the floor. I went into shock as I understood. Heller put his foot on it and took hold of a handle on the upper plate. It was a huge hook. There was plenty of room to put more than one foot on it. He expected me to step onto that hook!
I had seen high riggers do it on gantries. But never in my days had it ever occurred to me to ride a hook!
Heller was gesturing at me, his attention elsewhere. It was nothing to him to ride a hook. Life around a combat engineer, I groaned to myself. I put on the glove, put my foot near his, seized a hand bar and closed my eyes tight.
“Take her to the top!” shouted Heller in that peculiar ear-splitting voice.
Up we went! I left my stomach on the hangar floor. With nothing under us or around us but one steel hook, with nothing above us but screaming cables, we were zipped to the top of the hangar. We stopped suddenly, the spring of the cables making us bounce.
I cautiously opened one eye and closed it again. Heller had one foot over empty space. I grabbed the hand ring with my other hand.
“Look over there,” said Heller. And then he must have seen that I wasn’t looking. “Hey, open your eyes. It’s only five hundred feet down.”
They say never look down. I couldn’t help it. I was horrified at the amount of empty space and the hardness of that concrete far below.
“We’ve got to find a mission ship,” said Heller. “Look them over.”
I cursed the security which forbade me to tell him we should just be going by regular freighter.
“How big a ship will the hangars take on Blito-P3?” said Heller, nonchalantly swinging in the air.
I blurted the answer, “Five freighters, a couple combat ships.”
“Then it will take a big ship,” said Heller. He was looking down upon the whole expanse of the Apparatus spacevessels now groundside. From this vantage point, a few were still hidden beyond others.
“Take her to the right!” shouted Heller to the cab that was just behind us now.
The hook swooped horrifyingly to the right. Heller could now see between several of the ships that had formerly blocked his view.
“Freighters. Transports. Some old model war vessels.” He turned to me. “Where’d the Apparatus get these ships? Some temple rummage sale?”
“We’re not the Fleet,” I managed to get out.
“That,” said Heller, “you definitely are not! I’ve got to think this over.”
Can’t you think it over down on the ground? I silently pleaded. The hook was still swinging. He seemed to be determined to hang way up here in thin air and think. I got desperate. “We’re supposed to take a freighter.”
“Oh, no, no, no,” said Heller. “Six weeks or more on the way. And no mission operating ship there. I’ve got to change your mind.”
You’ve changed it, I silently said. Anything, but get me back on the ground. He was still hanging there, thinking. “This stuff is all a pile of scrap,” he said.
“It just won’t do. And a freighter won’t do either. You certainly agree that we should have a proper mission ship.”
My hand was so sweaty it was slipping inside the engineer glove. My other one had already slipped! I screamed, “Yes. Yes! We need a proper ship! I agreeeeeee!”
Heller turned and waved a hand at the crane operator just behind us. Then he signaled, palm down.
We plummeted! The cables screamed! We dropped five hundred feet so fast my foot came off the hook!
The steel heel banged into the hangar floor. Heller had stepped off just before it hit and stood there very composed. I reeled away and sat down on the concrete. I couldn’t make my legs function.
Heller didn’t seem to notice. He was sort of surveying the hangar floor around us, looking at a big empty space. “Aha!” he said.
His voice went racketing up to the crane cab. “Thank you and very well done, crane master!” The operator waved back.
“Come on,” said Heller, trotting away.
Where the Hells was he going now? I gathered myself up and gazed after him. What was he up to? I desperately tried to think of some way to get this back under control. My neck was out a mile and a half. My prisoner was running around like a celebrity, without a single guard to back me up. He might take it into his head to go anywhere! But I had no ideas. I couldn’t get even an inkling of what was really in his mind. If Lombar got wind of any of this . . .
Helplessly and hopelessly, I followed Heller back to the airbus.
PART FIVE
Chapter 3
We took off again. It was still very early and the intercity air traffic had not even gotten thick yet. The sun was still so low that the shadows on the ground were like long black fingers. I had no slightest idea where we were headed.
“This thing well fueled?” Heller called back to my driver.
“For any place but the Royal Officers’ Club,” said the driver. I shook my head at him. Heller mustn’t know about that. He sure did break down discipline around him: my driver had opened up a canister of sparklewater and was sipping it, admiring the view.
“Give me back my glove,” said Heller. I handed it over. He was about to put it in his pocket when he felt that the cuff was damp.
We were at about twenty thousand feet and he was flying at about five hundred miles an hour. There was even some light traffic up this high now. But he took his hand off the wheelstick and began to fly with his knee! He rolled back the glove cuff, blew into it to turn it wrong side out, took out his redstar engineer’s rag and wiped the glove dry. “You must have been nervous,” he said consolingly. “I keep forgetting you might not be used to certain things.”
Heller turned the cuff back, blew the glove right side out and put it and the rag in his pocket. “Well, don’t you worry, Soltan. We’ll get something nice and safe to travel in.” Not very reassuring when the pilot is flying with one toe, one knee and, while admittedly very relaxed, is paying no slightest attention to whizzing traffic at his flight level. The overdriven airbus felt like it was about to shatter!
We were to the north of the main Fleet base. Below us an isolated plateau rolled up. The airbus was shaking so hard my vision was jittered and I couldn’t see what it was.
“Here we are,” said Heller and made what would be ranked in any book as a crash landing.
The dust settled. We were sitting before a low administration building, white and decorated with antique blastguns. It was very quiet. Nobody seemed to be around. Behind the building was a huge and seemingly endless fence. On it was a gigantic sign:
EMERGENCY FLEET RESERVE
Heller bounced out and I followed him up the building steps. There was a hall, a lot of empty desks, some unposted bulletin boards and plenty of echoes.
Apparently knowing where he was going, Heller trotted to the end of the hall and, without knocking, burst into a tomblike room.
A grizzled old space officer was sitting in a gravity chair, working on some lists, nursing a canister of hot jolt with his left hand. The unlighted sign on the front of the desk said:
COMMANDER CRUP
He looked up, a thundercloud scowl on his face. And then he burst into pure radiance. “Jettero!” He leaped up. They came together like colliding spaceships, pounding each other on the back. They laughed. The commander backed off. “Let me look at you! I haven’t seen you for a year!”
Suddenly he caught sight of me. His scowl came back. “A ‘drunk’!” How do they always know?
Heller whipped out the orders: the Grand Council authorization and his own. He handed them to the commander. That worthy looked hard at me. “He’s all right,” said Heller. “Commander Crup, meet Officer Gris.” But Crup didn’t offer to shake hands. He read the orders. He relaxed a bit.
“Well, what can we do for you, Jet?”
“Just on a shopping tour,” said Heller. “Can I have permission to overfly the place?”
>
“Better than that,” said Crup. “I’ll come along with you.” He gathered his cap and a case full of papers and outside we went.
The scene which had been so lonely before was now a bit populated. Six tough, scowling Fleet Marines were standing around the airbus, fingering their electric daggers. My driver was sitting a bit white-faced and alert in back.
“It’s all right, sergeant,” said Crup. “This is Jettero Heller.”
The biggest Fleet Marine relaxed and smiled. He gave the single-arm salute of Marines casually. “What you doing in ‘drunk’ company?”
I held my breath.
If Heller were to tell these tough brutes he had been held prisoner and was in actual fact under guard, I am sure they would have slaughtered me and the driver.
“I’m in disguise,” said Heller with a perfectly straight face.
For some reason they thought this extremely funny.
“Sergeant,” said Crup, as we piled into the front seat, “call perimeter defense and tell them this airbus has permission to overfly.”
Heller took off, jumped the fence and, very low and slow, began to fly along. I had seen this place from high altitude and had often wondered what it was. What must be fifty square miles of black-hulled spaceships, sitting on their tails, stretched before us, the long morning shadows making it appear they were even more numerous. They were tall, they were short, they were broad, they were thin. What an assemblage!
I promptly destroyed what little tolerance I had gained from Commander Crup. “Emergency Fleet Reserve,” I said. “This looks more like a boneyard!”
Crup withered me. He wasn’t going to answer at first and then pride got the better of him. “These ships are not scrap! They have the status of ‘suspended activation.’ When vessels are still serviceable but have been outmoded they are added to the Emergency Fleet Reserve!”
“But I don’t see any men, no crews,” I said.
“There are retired officers and superannuated spacemen aplenty that could be summoned up to man these ships,” said Crup. “And believe me, in time of planetary emergency, the Fleet would be thankful to have them.”
Heller changed the subject. “Hey, there’s the old Juba! I didn’t know they had retired the five thousand spacer class, any of them!”
I looked in that direction. It was a huge black monster, covered with dust. It looked like a Commercial City office building. But I didn’t get any time to admire it as Heller barely flicked its antennas with our undercarriage.
Rows and rows of ships, thousands and thousands of them. We cruised along, Heller looking. I wished he’d put more of his attention on flying.
“If you could tell me what you want,” said Crup, “maybe I could help. What kind of a mission is it?”
Untrained as he was, I thought Heller would blurt it out. But he said, “Kind of a peculiar one. I’ll just keep on looking.”
We had gotten to the far perimeter. “See that old baby over in the corner there, Soltan?”
It was a monster’s monster. It was built of cubes apparently added on at random until they were mountain high. A more dilapidated spaceship I have never seen.
“That,” said Heller, “is the Upward Strike. You are looking at the last of the original intergalactic battleships. She was part of the force which attacked Voltar, an immigration ship. A hundred and twenty-five thousand years old. She must be sunk into the ground thirty feet by now.”
“I thought you said all these ships were operational,” I quipped.
Crup sneered at me. “She is equipped with the original time-drives that made immigration possible between galaxies. Academy cadets studying engines are brought here to see her.”
“It was my weak subject,” I said lamely. I did recall now there had been such tours. I had always been on punishment drill.
I was jolted out of it by a yell from Heller. “There she is! There she is! There she is! Oh, you baby!”
“What?” said Crup. “Where?”
“There! There!” cried Heller, pointing and diving us down toward a landing.
“Oh, no!” said Commander Crup. “Jettero! As I love you, boy, you don’t want that!”
I finally credited that what they were looking at was what they were looking at.
It was a pygmy amongst these monsters. It was the ugliest, dustiest thing I ever hope to see. It was standing on its tail. It looked like a headless old woman with two arms outstretched, her black dress reaching the ground. It was only about a hundred and ten feet tall. It was fat beyond belief. All around it were graceful, swept-curve cruisers and patrol craft, any one of them preferable to this horrible looking little blob.
Heller was out and literally stroking its side in ecstasy. “Oh, you darling,” he was saying. “Oh, you wonderful beauty!” Then he was eagerly beckoning to Crup to bring the keyplates to open the entry lock.
Crup was shaking his head sadly.
I arrived by Heller and looked up at this mess. “What is it?” I said.
“Oh, don’t you see?” said Heller. “It’s Tug One! It was the Flagship of the Tug Section!” He was vibrating like a kid that has just gotten his most heartfelt birthday present. He must have read my face correctly. “Soltan, it’s all engines! It’s nothing but engines! Like any tug, it has the engines of the biggest battleship in space. It’s the fastest thing in this universe!”
Oh, here we go, I thought. Speed. I’ve got your fracture now, race champion Heller. It’s speed.
He still thought I didn’t understand. “You know those motor locomotives on the highways, the kind that pull half a dozen trailers after them? Well, if you detached the motor locomotive and ran it with no trailers, it would be the fastest vehicle they’ve got. Well, it’s the same way with a tug! It’s just battleship engines with a skin around them. Fast! Open the spacelock, Commander! Let him see!”
“I think there’s a watchman in this sector that you know, Jet,” said Crup. He took out a little board and pressed some buttons, giving our sector location. And then he got a ladder and clambered way up to open the door.
Dust! Dust and darkness. But Heller was up that tall ladder and into her in a flash, dragging me along. First he went down. I dimly perceived a large stateroom and lots of knobs and rails: they were all black-crusted, horrible looking. There were several cabins. We climbed upward on the crisscross ladders that work when the vessel is vertical or horizontal. Dust! We got to a flight deck that was crammed with controls, all coated with filth.
Heller had finally gotten out a light; there was apparently no current in the ship. He opened a door and we entered a small engine room crammed with ordinary drives. “These are her auxiliaries. You use them for atmosphere maneuvering and speeds less than light.” He was checking boxes and panels rapidly. “They seem to be set up all right.”
We dropped down and he opened a door into a second engine compartment and as he flashed his light around, I found myself looking at the most monstrous engines I have ever seen. Actually, I had never connected with anything like them. They certainly were battleship-sized drives but other than that, I couldn’t classify them.
Heller seemed happier and happier. He swarmed down a catwalk and opened a door at the back of the main engine room. I was looking at very strange, huge metal drums.
“These are her tractor beam generators!” he said. “They are some of the most powerful ever built! These are what she fastens onto things with and pulls.”
We went out a side door. He shined his light again into the large cabin. Aside from everything being black-stained I couldn’t see much. What a dirty ship!
We went back outside. An old, old spacer was just creakily getting off a triwheeler. The watchman Crup had called. He saw Jet drop off the tall entrance ladder and peered carefully. Then he said, “Oh, my Gods!”
He and Heller flew together and pounded each other. “Atty!” Jet was saying.
Finally, the old man—he must have been a hundred and seventy if he was a day—drew back. He w
iped a tear from his eye with the back of his hand. “Oh, Jet, lad. It’s good to know you’re still alive!” Jet introduced me and the old fellow said, “I was Jet’s engine repair chief when he made the record run at the Academy.”
Crup said, “Jet’s thinking of taking out Tug One.”
Old Atty went rigid. “Jettero Heller, you know as well as I do why she’s a-lying here to rot.”
“I know I used her sister ship with success. And she did just fine!” said Heller defensively.
“Ah, yes. The speed,” said old Atty sadly. “Jet, you know why Tug One is lying here?”