He certainly had the attention of every glittering luminary in that hall. The Crown nodded encouragingly.
Enormously emboldened, beautifully coached and secretly patted by an expansive Lombar Hisst, Endow plowed on. “There are simple solutions to the difficulties the planet is encountering. Planetary destruction could be arrested or retarded until the proper invasion date arrived.”
There was an audible sigh of relief from the Lord of the Fleet and a “Go on, go on,” from the Lord of the Army Division.
Lombar touched Endow’s back. It was the signal for a change of tactic. Well timed. Endow suddenly became coy. “Of course, such a plan requires several years to execute. The agent would have to establish himself as one of them; he would have to be extremely careful. So it will take time and the Exterior Division would not want to be harassed every month by demanded reports when it was actually succeeding on a long-term project.”
“Sounds good,” muttered several Lords.
“It would require special appropriations,” said Endow. “Insignificant amounts compared to a disastrous emergency campaign.”
“How much?” demanded the Lord of the Profit Division.
Lombar whispered. Endow spoke. “Two or three million credits.”
That, as much as anything, clinched it. It was such a paltry sum to them that it absolved Endow from trying to act just for the sake of personal graft. In their positions, given a chance like that, they would have invented anything and named a colossal sum. There would be little or nothing for Endow. The plan must, therefore, be totally valid.
“Well, well,” said the Crown. “Your Lordships, do you approve this plan?”
There were no dissents.
“Very well,” said the Crown. “I instruct the clerks to draw up the authority to entrust this matter to the discretion of the Exterior Division, time limits unspecified, three million credits allocated subject to readjustment. And I can report to His Majesty that a plan has been arrived at, agreed upon and is in motion.”
A whistle of relief was heard throughout the hall.
We had done it!
My Gods, Lombar had pulled it out of the fire!
I honestly don’t remember the rest of that Council meeting. I couldn’t believe my head was back on my shoulders. I couldn’t believe the Apparatus timetable was still intact. I couldn’t believe Lombar’s ambitions could now flower unimpeded. I was in a euphoric daze.
I didn’t at all anticipate, when we left that glittering hall, that within twenty-four hours I would be in a pit of blackest despair.
PART TWO
Chapter 1
The following morning, I stood in the anteroom outside Lombar’s fortress office in Spiteos, waiting for permission to enter. From the window of the crumbling tower, I could look far across the Great Desert to the green mountains at the back of Government City—two hundred miles of barren expanse, impossible to cross on foot.
Under a nearby hill, the Apparatus training camp sprawled, an ugly collection of ramshackle huts. “Camp Endurance” they called it in the directories: “Camp Kill” was what it was known by locally. It was supposed to give privation training to recruits, but actually it existed to excuse the sometimes heavy traffic to Spiteos and to serve as a reserve guard. The real complement of it was wholly made up of Apparatus guard thugs and the only recruits that ever got there were creatures not even the Apparatus could use—and they never left alive.
The towering, black basalt walls of Spiteos were supposed to have been erected by some long-gone race that had inhabited the planet a hundred and fifty thousand years ago, a race that could only work stone and had perished in a single breath of guns in the first wave of the Voltar invasion.
The myth that the castle itself was still too radioactive to be used was continued by cunningly installed detector reply screens: when planetary surveillance beams hit them, they absorbed the incoming energy and sent back the wavelengths of radiation contamination.
There was no radiation. The wavelengths Spiteos really had came from the suffering depths below me where, a mile into the ground, packed in foul cages, thousands of political prisoners were moaning out the last of their lives. The definition of “political prisoner” was “someone who might get in the road of Apparatus plans.” Some clerks had a joke definition: “Anybody Lombar Hisst doesn’t like,” but they only whispered it to closest friends and even that was unwise. I had once asked Lombar, when he was drunk, why he didn’t just kill them and have done with it and he had replied with a knowing wink, “One never knows when they might come in handy—and besides, relatives have been known to cooperate.” You could almost feel them through the rock.
It was hot.
A buzzer sawed through the air and a clerk jerked his head for me to go in.
Lombar’s Spiteos office was at the top of some worn steps. It was the whole upper part of a rampart, carefully masked from the air. Gold coverings sagged on the walls, ancient battle scenes of incalculable value. Silver urns stood about. The furniture had been looted from a Royal tomb. Every single object in the vast room was factually beyond price, looted and extorted during Lombar’s decades as head of the Apparatus. But somehow he had arranged them and used them in such a way that they seemed shabby. It was a “gift” Lombar had.
One whole wall was covered by a mirror and I was a little embarrassed now to see Lombar preening himself in front of it. He had had a gold cape made, emblazoned with Royal arms, and he wore it now, turning this way and that, looking at himself in the mirror. He finished and took it off, folding the fabric very carefully. He laid the cape away in a silver chest and spun the lock. As Your Lordship knows, it is the death penalty for a commoner to don a Royal cape.
“Sit down, sit down,” said Lombar, waving to a chair. He was smiling and relaxed.
I had been feeling pretty good. Suddenly I was terrified!
The stinger lay neglected on a bench. He was being courteous, even jovial.
What did he want?
“Have a chank-pop,” he said, and extended a gold box of them toward me.
I could feel my heart almost stop beating. My legs wouldn’t hold me up and I sagged into the chair.
He shoved the box at me urgently and I managed to reach out and take a chank-pop and somehow get the top off. The lovely scent made a gentle explosion on my face, cooling it, waking me up.
Lombar settled on a broad, soft bench, still smiling. “Soltan,” he began—and my terror soared; he had never before used my name and never, never would a superior use one’s familiar name. I knew something awful lay in the instant future!
“Soltan,” repeated Lombar in a fond tone of voice, “I have good news for you. A sort of a celebration present after our great win yesterday.”
I couldn’t breathe. I knew it was coming.
“As of this morning,” said Lombar, “you are relieved from post as Section Chief of 451.”
My Gods, I knew it. His next words would condemn me to the cells—after torture!
My face must have gone very white for he became all the more jovial. “No, no, no,” he laughed. “Don’t be afraid, Soltan. I have something much more interesting for you. And if you carry it out well, why, who knows, you might become Chief Executive of the Apparatus. Even Lord of the Exterior.”
Ah, yes. I was very, very right. I was in trouble! Desperation made me find my voice. “After . . . after my slip-up?”
“Why, Soltan,” said Lombar, “you couldn’t have helped that. Heller’s report went on entirely different channels, completely out of your hands, utterly beyond your possible reach.”
He was right. With no copies made, I was never alerted and able to call upon the Shadow Section to help me retrieve the original report and replace it with my altered version. But that wasn’t going to save me now!
He got off the bench and I thought he was going over for his stinger or maybe, worse, to push the buzzer for an arrest guard. But he just looked himself over in the mirror. “We needed that acci
dent,” he said, “to sort of jolt things together. The Grand Council has given us an order and we are going to fulfill it.”
Lombar wandered back and patted me on the shoulder. I couldn’t help flinching, it was so automatic. “Soltan, I am appointing you the handler of the special agent we are going to put on Blito-P3.”
Now I understood. A handler runs an agent in the field, guides him, tells him what to do. Day by day, even hour by hour, a handler is responsible for everything that agent does. If anything goes wrong, the handler is routinely executed.
But a condemned man, especially a condemned man, tries to fight for his life. “But . . . but they only allocated three million credits to the whole project. One ship crash would wipe that out. . . .”
“Pish, pish,” said Lombar. “Endow can run a three-million-credit allocation up to hundreds of millions. A little overrun here, a bit of teasing good news there, a threat somewhere else and any allocation can become a staggering fortune. No, you won’t have any money troubles. None at all. Why, it would cost them trillions to stage a premature, off-schedule invasion. And one that would fail.”
He wandered over to the mirror again. “I thought I was very clever, really. I anticipated the report. I pulled a vast potential allocation within reach. I have a means now of covering ten times the space traffic to Earth and no questions asked, no more dodging the detection screen here. Marvelous. All I have to tell them is that we’re staying in communication with the special agent—and you, of course.”
“You mean I’m going to Earth?” I said idiotically. That was obvious. You can’t handle such an agent from Voltar. I was rattled. I had even overlooked the obvious demand for applause. “I was stunned by your clever recovery,” I said lamely. “I couldn’t believe our luck in getting out of it. It was all due to you.”
That made him smile again. For a moment he had started to frown. So I got bold enough to say something else. “We . . . uh . . . we don’t have any agents of that caliber.”
“Oh, we have a few agents on Earth. You know that. I was thinking of giving you two of them—Raht and Terb—to help out. They’re a couple of the finest killers I have ever seen! Now how’s that? Feel better?”
I could see that execution order for a failed mission as plain as though I held it in my hand. Might as well make my fight now. “Chief Executive, neither one of them knows geophysics from soup. And I . . . well, I almost failed those courses at the Academy.”
Lombar laughed. Very pleasantly. He was amused. This was certainly a different Lombar than I had ever known. “But you did take those courses. You know the big words. Soltan, you just have to get used to the idea that I am really your best friend.”
Now I was for it. There was more. I knew there was more.
He extended the gold box to me again. “Have another chank-pop.”
I could barely get the top off. But it was a good thing I did or what he said next would have otherwise made me faint.
“Have no qualms about the special agent. I have already decided upon him.” He looked to see if he had my full attention. “His name is Jettero Heller!”
There was a long, long silence in the room while I strove to get my wits around it. For seconds I thought I was having delusions, hearing wrong names. But Lombar just stood there smiling.
“He’s the ideal choice,” said Lombar when I didn’t comment. “The Grand Council will believe reports signed by him. I’m told he is very competent, in a stupid sort of way. He has no training as a spy. He knows nothing of how the Apparatus is organized or works. You and he are both Academy graduates and potential friends—you talk his language.”
I got my wits working again. “But Jettero Heller is a bright engineer. He’s been to a ton of postgraduate schools. He’s way above my level. I’m all confused. If he has no spy training, if he knows nothing of the Apparatus . . .”
“Have another chank-pop,” said Lombar, extending the box. And as I nervously took it, I knew there was more to the news.
“Ready?” said Lombar.
I stared at him fixedly.
“Mission Earth,” said Lombar, “must be designed and run to fail.”
I was beginning to get it.
“The last thing we want,” said Lombar, “is an Earth invaded by and conquered by the present Voltarian government. We have our own plans of conquest for that planet. You know that and I know that. Ours will take place a long time before the official invasion. We are not the least bit interested in Blito-P3 having clean air. There are lots of planets. Blito-P3 has other uses and those uses will be made of it long before any oceans flood. For that matter, who the Devils cares about air?”
I was getting it now. I also got that Lombar, coming from Staphotten, a planet which has a low oxygen level, cared little about air anyway.
Lombar laughed at my dawning comprehension. It must have been very obvious. “You see, you don’t give me credit for being as bright as I am.”
Cunning was the word for it, I thought. But I am ashamed to say that I replied, “Oh, yes I do.”
“Oh, no, you don’t,” said Lombar. “Jettero Heller must be set up to fall flat and the sooner the better. With Raht and Terb to assist and you to run it, that will be very easy to do.”
I didn’t quite like the compliment. He noticed it.
“You’re going to have to be very clever,” said Lombar, a little urgently. “Jettero Heller, (bleep) his looks and skill, will not be an easy person to fool. But you are going to make sure that he fails utterly, absolutely and quietly.
“His first reports,” continued Lombar, “will be his actual reports. By that time, we will have his style. Then all you have to do is keep him from progressing or getting into mischief and we will send in ‘Jettero Heller reports’ to our heart’s content, all forged.”
One cloud remained. “He won’t take our kidnapping of him lightly,” I said. “He may refuse to cooperate.”
“I’ll admit the kidnapping looked like a mistake but really, it fits beautifully.” He was getting into his tunic.
He went to the door and beckoned. “Come along and watch a master handle things.”
So I followed to begin MISSION EARTH, the mission that was carefully planned to fail.
I felt horrible.
PART TWO
Chapter 2
Descending into the bowels of Spiteos was, to some, like taking a trip to the infernal regions that some religions promise to the (bleeped).
But I had always regarded it on a par with entering a monstrous den of wild animals. So I lagged behind Lombar long enough to draw a blastick from the armory. The guards are themselves criminals; I was dressed in the common gray uniform of the General Services, without rank badges; I had no status in this place: one could not only be attacked by desperate inmates, one could also be struck down and robbed by guards.
We plummeted down the tubes, the noisome stench of the place already gagging me. We exited at negative level 501. The smell was awful: they sometimes do not dispose of the remains of prisoners who have died, leaving them in the cell until it is needed for someone else—or just pitching the newcomer in with them.
A long hall with moldy wire walls stretched out before us. Behind the highly charged mesh, a few sunken eyes peered at us. In the higher levels there were the secret laboratories of the Apparatus, but here, in some of the cages, were evidences of scientific work: deformed, distorted shapes of abandoned experiments, still alive, hideous, forgotten.
Lombar, black-garbed in the uniform of a general, strode along, twitching his stinger, looking neither to right nor left, deaf to the moans and pleas which marked our passage.
We turned a corner and came into a small room, dimly lit with a green light-plate. At the far end of it was an even stronger cage, not tall enough to stand in. Lombar threw a switch and the door swung open.
Jettero Heller was stretched at length upon a cold stone ledge. In the dim light I could see that he still wore the once-white sport pants but someone had taken
his sweater and shoes. The stab wound of the paralysis dagger had not been tended and dried blood caked his shoulder. His wrists were bound together with a pair of electric cuffs, the kind that continually sting. There were no eating dishes about so he probably had not been fed—and how long had he been here? Four days?
My Gods, I thought, how could one ever expect him to forgive such treatment?
One would have expected him to look degraded. But not so. He was simply lying calmly on the stone ledge, very relaxed and composed.
“Well, well,” said Jettero Heller calmly. “The drunks arrive at last.” It was the Fleet’s contemptuous name for the Apparatus: our insignia was supposed to be a club, a fat paddle with a handle upside down. But the Fleet chooses to believe it is a bottle. Therefore, they call us “drunks,” and this infuriates the Apparatus.