I got out. I trotted straight up the steps.
Raza Torr had been in the act of going home. He froze. He seemed to have turned bone white but it was hard to tell in the dim light.
I decided I had better put him at his ease. “Met any nice girls lately?” I said conversationally.
My former escort was behind me. They must have had burglars or troubles lately as he was holding a gun in his hand.
Raza Torr, in a sort of strangled voice said, “I’ll take care of this.”
I led the way. I knew the place inside out now. I went to the civilian costume area. Raza Torr followed. The escort had vanished.
“I want a speedwheel suit,” I said. “The street kind. Something plain.”
Raza Torr seemed to have recovered. Probably, I thought, he had had a hard day. He was a naturally nervous fellow. But he doesn’t always have good sense. He walked over to the rack and got down a speedwheel suit: they are shiny, made of slick body-armor material. This one had flaring scarlet flame patterns painted all over it; it could be seen from a mile off and hurt the eyes even then.
“No, no,” I said. I went to the rack and found a plain black one in my size. It had some accident blood caked on the collar but one can’t be choosy and I was in a hurry.
“Now a helmet,” I said and went over to that rack. Again he got in my way and tried to give me a rider helmet with a flame plume and no visor. I pushed it aside and got a no-plume black visor one.
“Now a tri-knife,” I said. I led the way over to the weapons section and finally found one. They are a great knife. Criminals use them when they want to do a particularly gory murder. They are thin as a needle when their ten-inch blade goes in. When it hits bottom, the blade springs into a narrow fan, becoming three razor-edged blades. When you pull it out, a lot of guts come with it. They even have a ring in the hilt so you can yank back. Some knife fighters say they are too hard to draw out of a stabbed body, but that is just quibbling.
“Gods,” said Raza Torr. “Who you going to kill?”
“I doubt I’ll return these,” I said.
“I doubt you will either,” he said. I ignored the unjustified slur on my honesty. I was too intent on my project.
Back at my airbus, I directed my driver on a circuitous course to the outskirts of Slum City. Night had come. Real evening traffic had not yet started up. People in other cities were at their suppers. Not too many people in Slum City would have suppers to be at.
Although they are poor in Slum City, they are not inactive. The dilapidated and decayed structures do contain spots of liveliness. These pinpoints of brilliance seemed to deepen, rather than brighten, the intense gloom. Fifty square miles of deprivation are strung around a fetid lake. Nobody had any record of when Slum City had been built and even when constructed it was probably old at once.
There was a tale that Lombar used to set fires down here to while away his youth. I doubted the story. Lombar was more efficiently destructive than that and he certainly hated any slum. Someday, he had once mentioned to me, all this would be swept down, the population annihilated. It looked like it was overdue for the treatment.
I saw what I wanted. It was one of the bright spots. Youths hang out in dens in Slum City. They sometimes have orchestras, pretty bad ones. Tup is about a twentieth of a credit per canister, pretty bad tup.
Around this place there would be speedwheels.
I directed my driver to set down well away from the lights of a bluebottle station. It was in what once might have been a park. I made him turn out the lights so that not even he could see what I was doing.
I scrambled around, got off my uniform and got into the speedwheel suit. I put on the black-visored helmet. I left all identification and normal Apparatus weapons with my uniform. I took with me only the tri-knife and a small wad of counterfeit bills. I told my driver to wait right where he was, showing no lights, until I returned.
With very silent feet I raced in the direction of the orchestra. I stopped well clear of the flaring lights. A lot of youths were dancing.
A quick survey discovered a speedwheel of the more powerful type. It was deep in the shadows. I jimmied the lock. It was so easy, the guy deserved to lose it!
I pushed it well away and then, when safe from any detection, I went zipping down what they sarcastically call a boulevard in Slum City, the speedwheel crushing through the garbage. The fetid stink of the lake was almost solid in the night wind.
The district to which I was proceeding with speed was known for its fornication machines, electric thrillers and head plumbers. In ten minutes the dimly lit signs began to flick by. I slowed down.
Painted in bad lettering anywhere there was a bare space on a building were directions to Irrigate Your Rotting Bowels, to visit Titillation Palace and to announce that Electric Penis Stimulation Is Done Here. Finally, even dingier than the rest, I found a building which, amongst other signs, bore a badly scrawled floor label, Mental Doctor; Brain Examination; Physiological Nerve Specialist; Hypnotist; Bowels Purged. See Dr. Cutswitz Before It Is Too Late. There was my man.
I hesitated only because it was a little bit close to a bluebottle watch post. In fact, the police stand was only about thirty feet from the door of Dr. Cutswitz. It was handy for them because the police probably referred people they picked up to Dr. Cutswitz. But it was a bit public for me.
I had come in very slow. So I spun back and went into an alley. Beside me, a lot of building blocks were quite broken and edged as the wall ascended to the desired floor. There was also a window up there and it was lighted.
With catlike agility, I went up the wall and through the window. I was in a hall.
There were people about. Further down the hall a woman came out of a door and went into another door. Of course, she did not see me. I am good at that.
I slid along the passageway and found the door of Dr. Cutswitz. There was a light inside.
Boldly, I entered.
PART NINE
Chapter 4
The guy was lying on a mechanical fornicator. He was too interested to notice that somebody had come in. I reclosed the door—noisily. He bounced up off the machine, fastened his pants and said, “I was just trying out a new model to see if it should be recommended to my customers.”
He was lying. The machine was all scuffed up and worn out. He was wearing side-blinders and it reminded me of Bawtch. He looked like he had soaked himself a year or two in oil and, from the smell of him, it must have been rancid.
I looked around his office. It was very dirty. There were five tiers of shelves along two walls. They had transparent jars on them, hundreds of transparent jars. Each jar contained something in a discolored fluid. I flinched. They were human brains.
He waved his arm toward them. “My very best customers,” he said pleasantly. His voice sounded like it had been greased. “I am sure that we can satisfy your needs.”
I told him my name was Ip—that being about the commonest name on Voltar. I told him that I had a friend who had a problem and that I wanted some advice for my friend.
He sat me down in a reclining chair. He sat down on a stool beside me.
I told him my friend didn’t have any metal bits in him or broken bones and that my friend didn’t suffer from battle shock or neurosis. But my friend had had a dreadful thing happen to him: he had tried to draw his gun to shoot in self-defense, only to find his arm and hand refused to obey him. And then less than an hour later it vanished. That my friend was in a dangerous line of work and couldn’t afford not to be able to draw his gun and shoot people.
He was very sympathetic. He patted my hand—leaving a smear of grease on it. He got up and went to a closet and came out holding a hypnohelmet. A label had been scratched off the back of the helmet but it could still be read:
STOLEN FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF VOLTAR
“I think,” he said, “that your friend must have been hypnotized. Just put this helmet on and we’ll see if we can’t learn more, Citizen Ip.”
T
his seemed reasonable. The helmet fit well. He buckled the strap under my chin and turned on the current.
Immediately I could hear his voice like a shadow in the background. He was asking something and my mouth seemed to be answering. I did not pay much attention to it. It went on for a very long time. I seemed to be in other times and other places. My mouth kept on talking.
Then suddenly, just as if it was in this same room, a voice seemed to say, loud and clear: “You are now going to hear some orders. These orders are something over which you have no control.
“Think of the name Jettero Heller. Think of what he looks like.
“The first order is that anytime you contemplate hurting or harming Jettero Heller in any way, you will get a sick feeling in your stomach.
“The second order is that if you actively plan or agree to commit physical alteration or damage to Jettero Heller, you will become violently sick at your stomach.
“The third order is, if you plan or connive in hurting Jettero Heller’s career, you will have nightmares and a Manco Devil will appear and you will go crazy.
“The fourth order is, if you ever seek to poison or strike or draw a weapon of any kind on Jettero Heller, your arm will instantly experience total paralysis.
“When you awaken I will give you something to read. It will have the word obedience in it. The moment you read that, these orders will go deep into your consciousness and through your body. You will be totally incapable of resisting them and you will obey them utterly from here to eternity.
“You will now forget and banish from consciousness everything I have said to you but it will continue in total effect. Forget, forget! You have no knowledge of where these orders came from. Forget, forget!”
The words were brilliantly clear.
Through the visionary fog there was a face. The face of the Countess Krak!
That day in the training room! That day she had cleared everyone out and told me it was an “accent review.” The day she had given me that book, afterwards, that had the word obedience several times on the pages.
It was like a sun had supernova’d in my skull!
The hypnohelmet was turned off. I was wide awake.
The Countess Krak!
(Bleep) her! (Bleep) (bleep) her!
She, and she alone, out of some stupid impulse to protect Heller, had consigned me to weeks and weeks of purest Hells! And all because I was just doing my simple, normal duty!
The strange illness that turned on each time I even casually thought of harming Heller!
The Manco Devil in the nightmare! The fleeing from the scene to the mountains! The paralysis of my arm! My whole inability to carry out this mission! To even be my normal self!
All was explained!
The effects were gone!
The orders no longer held!
(Bleep) you, Countess Krak!
Aha, you wait and see now what happens to that (bleeped) Heller.
And to you!
Every Hells any planet ever heard of would be a lovely place compared to the Hells you two will be in now!
PART NINE
Chapter 5
For a seething half-hour I just sat there.
Gradually I became aware of Dr. Cutswitz. He had let me be. He had removed the hypnohelmet long since and he was sitting over on a bench across the room just watching me. He saw now that I had fully come around.
I wanted to get out of there and get about my business. I reached into my pocket and got out a counterfeit five-credit note. He was no trained cashier. Might as well get him killed off by his friends the bluebottles.
I extended the note.
He smiled. “I am afraid that is not quite enough, Officer Gris.”
I froze. How could he know my name? I had no identification on me!
“Not five credits,” he said pleasantly. “I think five thousand credits would be more accurate.”
I was thinking fast. “I don’t have money like that.”
“Oh, I think you could get it. You could give me all you have on you right now. And then give me the rest in installments—say, during the next week.”
“You know nothing but my name!”
“Oh, and perhaps a few things more. Like twenty dead Fleet spacers in a dungeon. I think the Fleet would dearly love to know about them.”
I pretended to sag. Listlessly, I put the riding helmet on and dropped the visor. Then, as though hopeless, I took the rest of the counterfeit money out. I got up and walked over to him. He stood. He reached out his hand.
There was nothing wrong with my arm now and never would be again.
The hand that was extending the money to him did a small jerk.
A ten-inch tri-knife snapped out of my sleeve into my palm.
The (bleeped) fool was still smiling, thinking he had won.
I lunged. Ten inches of steel went through his heart.
Abrupt surprise shot into his eyes. And the knowledge he was dead.
I yanked the knife back, stepping aside. The blade inside him turned into three parts. Guts and a gush of blood rushed out of him, splatting on the floor.
He fell in it face down.
I prodded him. He was dead. Very messily dead.
The bills had flown sideways. I picked them up and wiped the bloodstains off the shiny paper by rubbing them on the back of his coat. I put them in my pocket.
Then I ransacked the room and found the recording strips he had made on a hidden machine. I destroyed them.
He had uttered no sound. I had been silent. I went to the door and opened it a crack.
For an instant I thought I saw someone at the lower end of the hall, someone who had abruptly stepped out of sight. A witness?
Footsteps were coming down the hall from the other direction. It was a woman. She was middle-aged. She looked like she worked in this building.
I stepped out in front of her. I was holding the bloody knife. She stopped. I handed it to her hilt first.
“Quick,” I said in a low urgent voice. “Take this and run down to the bluebottle station and show them that Dr. Cutswitz has been murdered.”
She would have screamed. But a low, secret sort of voice prevents that when used right. Her eyes went round and glazed.
She grabbed the hilt of the knife and rushed off, heading for the police station just below.
Another flick of movement in the shadows down the hall. Had I been observed?
Well, who cared? It would do them no good. I had the riding helmet on and the black visor down. I sped to the window. Nobody followed.
I went down the wall like an agile insect, I mounted the speedwheel.
A call for an arrest van blasted out at the police station. To Hells with them. I silently rolled the speedwheel to the other end of the alley, into another street. I made no noises with the vehicle. It was two blocks away when I opened it up to a roar.
They would arrest the woman, of course. The police principle of “the least work consists of arresting the handiest person” would be in full play. It was a solved crime on their books. Be neat, I always say. Leave no loose ends.
I dropped the speedwheel at the den, putting it exactly where it had been before. I even locked it up again.
Shortly after, I slipped into the airbus. My changing clothes woke my driver up. We flew away on quiet wings. As we passed over the River Wiel, I dropped the suit and helmet into the raging water below.
That night I lay in my room. I planned and planned. What would happen to Heller and Krak now was all their own doing. I had never felt so deadly before in my whole life. I told myself, Hells have no Demon as full of hate as a man covertly hypnotized. And no Demon would have dared make up such ugly and varied plans as I made that night.
Heller was totally at my mercy now and I intended to make the very vengeful most of it!
PART NINE
Chapter 6
I was up with the dawn. I loftily did not comment on my driver’s petty tribulations about the costume refund—Helle
r, it seems, had forgiven him but the driver, of all things, felt guilty! I swept into the office where the early arriving Bawtch was sucking his early morning jolt: I took it right out of his hand and finished it! I didn’t even stand there to enjoy his surprise.
Climbing down the stairs into the hidden rooms in the basement, I made my way to the secret forgery unit. Every Apparatus section has its own forgery unit—one couldn’t run without one. Such actions are usually reserved for the framing of resistive or dissident citizens: few would be brave enough to make forgeries of the type I planned.