Bolz smiled quietly to himself: not only would it not go off by accident, it would not go off at all. Contrabanding was too lucrative, he was becoming rich; he could buy an old space tub, retire from the Apparatus and smuggle to his heart’s content. “All right,” he said, “I’ll be glad to do you this favor in return for my liberty and life. You have my word on it, Officer Heller.” And he put the remote in his pocket.
They were almost ready now. The freighters were loaded with every piece of repair equipment and supplies they could salvage. They had even dismantled the line-jumper and stowed it in a hold. The thousand details were coming to an end. It was the evening of the third day.
Heller called Izzy, Bang-Bang and Twoey and told them guardedly that he had to take a trip and rang off quickly so that they would not suspect this “little trip” was forever.
According to arrangements with Prahd, an ambulance brought Cling the Lofty in the fluid container with all connections active. The Emperor was still unconscious. The tub was masked by an opaque cover and no one could see who was in it.
The tug was in the deepest recess of the overcrowded hangar.
Heller got hold of Bolz and Oh Dear. Without seeming to do so, he positioned them so they could see the fluid container with an unidentified being in it being loaded aboard the tug.
“Odur,” said Heller to the catamite, “you are a courier. I have something for you that must arrive in no other hands than those of Lombar Hisst.” He produced a triple-sealed packet.
Oh Dear stared at it, unwilling to touch it. He was stunned at this irregularity. Something from Royal Officer Heller to Hisst who was his bitterest enemy?
“Take it,” said Heller. “Do not tamper with the seals or he will suspect you have opened it. And if he suspects that, he may very well kill you when he reads it.”
“Oh, no!” shivered Oh Dear. “I don’t want to take it if it’s that dangerous!”
“Well,” said Heller, “I’m very afraid that you would find it very dangerous not to take it. If Hisst found out you had it and didn’t deliver it, then he certainly would kill you.”
Oh Dear let out a small scream. But he took hold of the packet, holding it like it was burning his fingers.
Heller pointed up to where Prahd was carefully getting the fluid tub into the tug air lock. “Also, you and Bolz should both notice the fact that a sick person is being put aboard the Prince Caucalsia with a doctor in attendance.”
The significance of it did not register with either one. But they dutifully noted it.
The Countess Krak came out of the tunnel from the villa, pushing mounds of luggage and boxes on a cart. The hangar crew who had been handling the fluid container with Prahd assisted her in loading them.
Heller, going over to give her a hand up the ladder, suddenly stopped. “What’s that yowling?”
“I don’t hear anything,” said the Countess Krak.
“Lady, what are you up to?” said Heller.
“It’s just the cat.”
“We’ve only got one cat. It can’t be making that much noise.”
“Jettero, you are cruel. You expected poor Mister Calico to go all the way off to Voltar and leave Earth forever without a lady friend.”
Heller looked at the boxes now being swung into the air lock. “A lady friend? But that sounds like more than two cats.”
“Lady friends, then. It just accidentally happened that Mudur Zengin brought down half a dozen female calico cats yesterday. There’s also a couple of males. You wouldn’t want them getting inbred, would you? But if you don’t like the yowling, maybe I can teach them to sing. Good. I knew you would agree.” And she went on up the ladder.
Heller shook his head over the cargo he was carrying. An Emperor, a cellologist and nine cats.
He walked across the jammed spaceship hangar: made for five freighters, it now held six and the tug. A knot of officers that carefully excluded Bolz was waiting for him. They were the captains of the five ships and Faht Bey.
Heller motioned for them to bring their heads in close. “Your rendezvous point is coordinates 678-N/567B/978R. Write it down. 678-N/567B/978R.” He watched while they did so. “It is a seven-week voyage. I will be five days on the way so I will land and make arrangements and then come out to the rendezvous point in space and guide you in.”
“Sir,” said one of the captains, “these coordinates are on the edge of the star Glar. I have to inform you that there is war in that area.”
“I know,” said Heller. “That is where we are going. The Confederacy is under the control of Lombar Hisst; the safest place we can go is to take sanctuary under Prince Mortiiy on Calabar.”
A shock went through them.
“We will be welcome, I think,” said Heller, “because we carry repair tools, technicians and men. Mortiiy has managed to hold out for five years. The Apparatus is the only force pressing the attack there. Calabar is an awfully big planet.”
“Sir,” said another captain, “there must be some other reason.”
“Well, yes there is,” said Heller. “I have reason to believe that if Lombar Hisst knows I have gone there, he will commit all his forces to the attack of Calabar.”
“Is there some benefit in this?” said Faht Bey.
“Yes,” said Heller. “He will not then attack Earth. You have a right to know that the reason we are going there is to save this planet.”
They looked at him doubtfully. Then one said, “Maybe you figure he will whittle down all his forces throwing them against Calabar.”
“That he will,” said Heller. “Unless something happens to sour my relations with the Fleet and Army, neither one will cooperate in what they will consider to be an insanity—full-scale war just to get hold of me. But I don’t want to seem to have such a grandiose idea of my own importance. I happen to have something Hisst wants very badly. He’ll come for us, all right, and unless by some fluke he gets Fleet and Army help, he’ll shatter himself against the hundred-thousand-foot peaks of Calabar.”
“Well, we’ve all wanted to get out of the Apparatus and be free men again,” said another captain, “and we’re willing to work for the chance. But how will Hisst know that you have gone to Calabar?”
“That’s why we didn’t seize the Blixo,” said Heller. “I just gave the courier on it a letter to Lombar Hisst. I told him what I have. And I told him we would be waiting for him on Calabar. He’ll go crazy and throw in everything he’s got. And, without help from the other services, that will be the end of Lombar Hisst.”
They grinned suddenly. They rushed off to their ships.
One by one Heller watched them as the spaceships shot up into the night.
Heller waved a hand to the captain of the Blixo, “Be sure you have a good passage to Voltar!” he shouted. He went into the tug’s air lock, closed it and sent the Prince Caucalsia spaceward ho!
PART SEVENTY-EIGHT
Chapter 6
Captain Bolz smiled and scratched his hairy chest. The hangar and base, empty now of everything except the Blixo, had ceased to exist as an extension of Apparatus authority. He had his own plans.
In his cabin he got dressed in Western clothes. He put a wad of Turkish lira in his wallet. A frightened Oh Dear stared at him.
“We’re supposed to wait for our cargo and go,” said Oh Dear. “I’m certain Officer Heller is right. If I don’t deliver this and Hisst finds I have not, I’ll be dead.”
“To hells with Officer Heller,” said Bolz. “They left that Daimler-Benz in the yard of the villa. Even that old driver with the funny laugh is still hanging around. I’m going out there, stop him from stealing the car and go on up to Istanbul and see my friend the widow.”
Bolz stopped to give his mate orders to pick up the cargo when it arrived by air and load it and then, with a jaunty air despite his bulk, went out and found Ters who, for a consideration, was shortly rolling him in luxury through the night to Istanbul.
Throughout the entirety of the next day, a frig
htened Oh Dear waited. He hardly concerned himself with the arrival of the cargo when it was brought in by the mate and crew from the airport in the afternoon. Oh Dear conceived that Bolz might be deserting and this would leave him captainless and unable to get back to Voltar. He didn’t speak a single Earth language: he saw himself stranded.
Dusk came, the light vanishing above the electronic illusion. No Bolz. If he had been there, they could leave in an hour.
The upper hole in the mountain went black. The hours dragged. Oh Dear began to be afraid of the hangar. It was so empty that his footfalls as he paced scared him with their echoes. He began to get the idea that the place was peopled now with ghosts.
Midnight came and went. One o’clock took forever to arrive. The digitals of his watch seemed to be motionless and refusing to move onward toward two. Then it became two and then two-thirty.
A loud sound somewhere made Oh Dear scream.
It was Bolz.
He had brought a truckload of counterfeit Scotch. He got his crew out and they got it aboard.
Bolz was himself pretty drunk and considerably smeared with lipstick.
It was three o’clock in the morning when the captain finally began to mount the ladder to the air lock as the last one aboard.
There was an abrupt roar overhead.
Wonderingly, thinking a freighter might have come back, Bolz got down off the ladder and stared up at the hole through the mountaintop.
He froze.
The black tail of a warship was sliding in!
Plain upon it was the symbol that looked like a fanged snake. And some letters!
THE 243RD DEATH BATTALION!
The hulk, too big for this hangar, came down with bristling guns. It hit the floor with a thud.
A hundred black-uniformed men poured out of the six locks, blastrifles ready!
Bolz, too shocked to move, was instantly seized.
A squad raced into the Blixo.
Shortly the whole crew of the freighter and Oh Dear were being prodded down the ladder to the hangar floor.
Bolz couldn’t register what was happening. He had no way of knowing this was the battalion that had been sent by Lombar to “search out any traitors that were confederates of Heller’s or took his orders and exterminate them.” For the Blixo had left a couple days before the order had been issued by the crashed Lombar Hisst.
A man in a black uniform with scarlet gloves, taller than Bolz, loomed over him. “I am Colonel Flay of the 243rd Death Battalion. Who are you and where is everyone here?”
“I am . . . I am . . . Captain Bolz of the Blixo, this ship. I have an urgent cargo of drugs for Voltar.”
An officer yelled from the Blixo’s air lock, “Colonel, this ship is carrying contraband drink!”
The colonel glared at Bolz. “A smuggler!”
“I’m captain of an Apparatus freighter!”
“In those clothes? Answer me. Why weren’t we challenged? Where is the personnel of this base?”
“They’ve gone!” quavered Bolz.
“Gone where?”
“We don’t know!” screamed Oh Dear, who was being held by a Death Battalion soldier. “I am a courier to Lord Endow!”
“Ha!” said Colonel Flay. “Traveling with a smuggler? Bend that pretty fellow over a rifle and make him talk.”
“No! Look at my identoplate—”
Two soldiers grabbed either end of a rifle. Another grabbed Oh Dear’s head, a fourth grabbed his feet. The first two held the rifle horizontally in the middle of his back. The second two pulled. Oh Dear’s spine began to crack. He screamed.
“Tell me where the others have gone!” roared Flay.
“We don’t know!” shrieked Oh Dear. “Look at my ID!”
An officer fished in Oh Dear’s pockets. He looked at the identoplate he found. “This just says he’s a clerk in Section 451. That’s this planet. He’s no courier.”
“Make him talk!” said Flay.
They pulled on Oh Dear harder.
“You better talk! You know where they have gone well enough. Don’t lie again. TALK!”
Oh Dear went into a high-pitched keening as his spine stretched and cracked. He was able to get out, “I have a dispatch. I have a dispatch. I have a dispatch! I must get it through!”
“To hells with your dispatches,” said Flay.
Oh Dear had fainted.
Flay gave a signal and soldiers grabbed Bolz. One of them pulled his head back with a handful of hair and another hit him in the body with a fist. Bolz grunted with the force of it.
“Where have they gone?” demanded Flay.
“They did not tell us!” cried Bolz.
The colonel snapped his fingers and an officer put a light in his hand. Flay walked up to Bolz and shined the light in his eye. “Are you lying to us?”
Bolz writhed, trying to get away from the light. The only thing which was registering with him was that this colonel might discover that he intended to keep this base for his own use.
“His pupillary reaction,” said Flay, “shows that he is lying! Hit him!”
The blow echoed through the hangar.
“Once more,” said Flay, “I am going to ask you politely and then we will really get to work on you. Where has this base crew gone?”
“I DON’T KNOW!” screamed Bolz.
“Hit him!” said the colonel.
It was the last order he ever issued in this life.
The blow hit the button remote in Bolz’s pocket.
There was a searing flash throughout the hangar!
The Death Battalion, the warship, the Blixo, the crew, Captain Bolz and Oh Dear glowed, suddenly outlined in incandescence. They shifted color upward from red to yellow to violet. They went black. They turned to silica, momentarily holding shape, then they became molten glass.
No one in the base was left alive.
The wall boxes that held the beams in place turned into sand which, under the ferocity of heat, turned to liquid dribble.
And then with a shuddering roar, the walls of the hangar twisted and began to cave in.
The slide of rock went on for quite a while.
Fantastic heat fused the inside of the mountain.
Then there was nothing left of the Earth base.
And buried there, because of the delay and self-interest of Bolz, lying under the pile of shuddering glass which had been Oh Dear and under the countless tons of boiling silica above it, was the ash of the dispatch which had been designed to stave off an invasion of Earth.
It would never be delivered.
PART SEVENTY-NINE
Chapter 1
Oh, Madison had little doubt now that he would be able to finish his job with Heller. In the foreseeable future he would have not just the Apparatus but the entire Army and Fleet on Heller’s trail.
Oh, what headlines that would make!
He was standing at an upper-story window of the Royal mansion on Relax Island, waiting for Teenie, who was unaccountably delayed. He had landed in the rear of the palace so as to stay out of sight. He was down here to tell Teenie some good news and give her some evidence.
Through the window came one of the softest and most perfume-laden breezes he had ever felt. The magnificent view of the valley below soothed his nerves. And one particular ten-acre square of the farmland down there would soothe other nerves as well: it was smoothly rippling with a flourishing crop of marijuana—Panama Red, if he recalled aright when Teenie, working a crew from her five-thousand island population, had told him what she was doing.
But no labors jarred today the tranquil scene of the terrace. A masked woman, middle-aged, an editor’s wife, was strolling along the balustrade, loosely gowned and indolent. From time to time she turned her eyes away from the view and cast glances expectantly along the front of the palace.
Ah, here came what she was looking for. A gallant young officer in a brilliant silver uniform approached her at a slow pace. He stopped, he spread his hands admiringly, he bowed
. She stopped and steadied herself against the balustrade. The young officer approached closer. He said something in a low voice and the woman laughed coquettishly. He took her arm and they began to stroll together.
Madison admired how well Teenie had taught her regiment. He knew that their lessons did not include just deportment.
And here behind them smoothly appeared a musician with a chorder-beat. But the tune he was playing and the tones had been taken from Teenie’s record collection: it sounded exactly like a romantic gypsy violin.