Even though it was probably a hot night, he left the window open. Looking for something to do, he found and read The Fine Art of Angling for Beginners. Finishing that, he tackled The Fine Art of Baseball for Beginners.
It was not yet eight. He got interested in the TV set. He got it on. He got a picture. And then he kept pummeling and picking at its switches. He got it all out of kilter and finally got it back in again. I couldn’t figure out what he found wrong with it. It was working, sound and picture.
Somewhat impatiently, he went through the whole routine again. There was a sign that said if the TV didn’t work to call the desk and he approached the phone. Then he apparently thought better of it and slumped in a chair. He addressed the set: “All right. You’re the first viewer I ever met I couldn’t fix. So just go on hiding your 3-D control. I’ll look at you anyway!”
A movie was just coming on. The title was THE FBI IS WATCHING YOU!
He sat through all manner of shootings and car chases and wrecks. The FBI wiped out all the red agents in America. It then wiped out all the Mafia in America. It then wiped out the US Congress. I could tell Heller was impressed. He kept yawning and, psychologically, that is a sure sign of tension building up and releasing.
The Washington, DC, local late news followed. Whites had been mugged. Blacks had been mugged. Whites had been raped. Blacks had been raped. Whites had been murdered. Blacks had been murdered.
There is a law in America that TV must cover everything impartially without showing bias and they had racially balanced the program up pretty well.
There had been no slightest mention of any incident in Potomac Park. There hadn’t even been a line about a Mary Schmeck, a junkie, dying on the way to a hospital—such deaths are too common to even get notice.
Heller sighed and shut off the TV.
He went to bed.
It was just past six in the morning in Turkey. I, too, turned in. But I couldn’t sleep. He had not even put a chain on his room door or locked the French doors to the balcony. He had not even placed any sort of a weapon under his pillow!
He was going to be hit. That was for certain. Somewhere on the path he was taking, Bury had it all arranged. There was no IF about it. There was only WHEN?
An idiot had me on a chain and was leading me straight to my death! Maybe I would go as anonymously and unremarked as Mary Schmeck. The thought saddened me.
PART FIFTEEN
Chapter 7
For a man about to be hit, Heller certainly was relaxed the next morning.
There was a small buzzer on my viewer which sounded when reception intensified, if you remembered to set it and I certainly had! At 2:00 PM Turkish time I was blasted out of bed by it. It was 7:00 AM in Maryland and Heller was up and taking a shower. At least he was still alive, though I was unconfident that it would be for long.
He was splashing around in the shower. His Fleet passion for cleanliness grated on my nerves. It had been just as hot in Turkey as it had been around Washington, I was sure. I didn’t have air conditioning and I was certainly more sweaty and dirty and rumpled than he had been, yet I didn’t have to take any shower! The man was clearly mad.
I went out and got a small boy by the ear and hurled him in the direction of the cookhouse and, shortly, I was back hanging over the viewer, wolfing kavun, or melon, and washing it down with kahve, the Turkish name for coffee, which is a cousin to hot jolt. I was so intent that I was gulping it down with sade and omitting mineral water swallows between sips the way you are supposed to do. The fact was forcefully called to my attention when my already raw nerves began to leap peculiarly. I dumped in the sugar and drank about a quart of water very quick. But my nerves were still jumping.
It was absolutely horrifying to watch what Heller was doing—or, more correctly, what he was not doing!
He made no baggage inspection—he simply got out a clean set of underclothes and socks from the carryall and put them on, thus denying me any real inspection of his suitcases.
Dressed, he did not look up and down the hall before he stepped into it. He gave not the slightest glance around corners before he rounded them. He did not inspect the parking lot as he passed it for new, strange cars. And he did not even look over the restaurant when he entered but, with indecent carelessness, walked over to a booth and sat down.
A teen-age girl with a ponytail came to wait on him. He said, “Where’s that elderly woman that was here last night?” Evidently the stupid idiot had formed some attachment—mother fixation no doubt!
The dumb girl went off to ask the manager of all things! She came back. “She was just temporary. You got no idea how the help shifts around in these motel chains. What’ll y’have?”
“A chocolate sundae,” said Heller. “That’s to start. Then . . . what’s these?” He was pointing at a picture.
“Waffles?” said the girl. “They’re just waffles.”
“Give me five,” said Heller. “And three cups of hot jo— coffee.”
I made a hurried note. Although I realized it was quite plain that he was imitating the accents of the people he talked to, he had almost strayed into a Code break. When I had the platen, those could be used to hang him high!
She came with a big, gooey chocolate sundae and he demolished it. Then she came with five separate plates of waffles and spread them around and he demolished those. Then she came with three separate cups of coffee. He emptied the sugar bowl of cubes into them and demolished those.
She was hanging around, not giving him his check. “You’re cute,” she said. “It’ll be fall semester soon. You going to sign up with a local high school?”
“I’m just passing through,” said Heller.
“(Bleep),” said the girl and stalked off. She came back with his check. She had put all the items on it. She was very frosty and uppity. Even the dollar tip didn’t seem to matter. She must have been looking at his back as she left the table but her voice came through clearly. “I never get the breaks.”
Heller said to the cashier, “I understand your lamp blew out last night.”
“Which one?”
“This one,” said Heller, tapping it.
The cashier asked the manager who was fiddling around with the cigarette display. He said, “Oh, yeah. Outside fuse. But it didn’t blow. The fuse got pulled somehow.”
He bought a whole bale of daily papers and went back to his room. A golden opportunity had been missed, I realized suddenly. I cursed Raht and Terb. They were somewhere within two hundred miles of him or I wouldn’t be getting a picture. They were depending on the fact that his clothes and suitcases were bugged to keep him ranged. I could have kicked them for not demanding a receiver-typer. Yes, I knew it was illegal for them to pack around more than a small transmitter that looked like an alarm clock. But they should have said, “(Bleep) the regulations, Gris must be served!” They hadn’t. A pair of (bleepards), both of them. A golden chance to ransack his baggage had been missed! If I had that platen, I wouldn’t be going through all this!
He got out a spin brush, filled its fluid container and washed his teeth and I was so bitter about the suitcases that I almost passed over a real Code break. That spin brush might even have a Voltarian manufacturing plate on it! Not that anybody on this planet could read it, but it was still a Code break. His obsession with cleanliness was going to ruin him yet. I didn’t even own a spin brush: they cost three credits.
With suitcases dragging from each hand and the carryall under one arm and the mass of newspapers under the other, he went down to his car.
And did he carefully inspect it to see if it had been set up with bombs? No! He just put his baggage in the back, the newspapers in the front seat, started up and started off. I had turned the volume down in case there was an explosion.
He went up to US 495 and, tooling along comfortably, got onto US 95 and, at a leisurely fifty-five, rolled across the beautiful leafy green of Maryland, admiring the trees and fields and not even glancing into the rearview mirror
to see if he was tailed. That beauty he was impressed by was deceptive. I knew there was death waiting on that road!
He got into Delaware, admiring it down to the last huge barn. I didn’t know why he was looking so thoroughly at all these chicken factories with their huge signs. Snipers wouldn’t be concealed in them. Then suddenly a truck—glaringly labeled Delaware Chickens Corp.—swerved around to get ahead of him (he was dawdling), and he drove up so close to it he almost rammed it and then hung hard on its tailgate. It was a truck full of live chickens and he was looking them all over.
“So,” he muttered, “that’s what a chicken is!”
Hopeless! Absolutely hopeless!
Past Greater Wilmington Airport, he turned to the right onto the huge Delaware River Bridge. But was his mind on his business? No!
He stopped his car! Halfway across the span, disregarding traffic and horns and brake squeals, he stepped on his brakes!
A trailer-truck slewed sideways frantically and blocked all lanes!
He got out. He left his car right there in the right lane, motor running, and got out! He gave only the slightest glance to the pandemonium he had abruptly caused.
He went over to the bridge rail and looked down at the Delaware River.
“Holy, jumping blastguns!” he said in Voltarian. Just like that!
And what was he looking at? He was looking down at the brown, roiling water. And what was there to see? Nothing but oil slicks and old floating tires and dead cats. Of course, I will admit the Delaware River is pretty big as rivers go and it looks bigger as at this point it becomes Delaware Bay and then part of the Atlantic.
The huge truck driver that had almost rammed the Cadillac now couldn’t get out because of the stacked up traffic. He came roaring at Heller, shaking his fists. I only saw him on peripheral vision. Heller wasn’t looking at him. He was looking northeast, up the river. The noise was absolutely deafening. Honking horns and angry yells and this truck driver. I had to turn down the gain.
Heller ignored the raised fists and profanity coming at him. Right into the middle of a tirade about “you (bleeped) kid,” Heller said, “Is there a city up there?”
“Jesus!” exploded the truck driver. “Where the hell are you from?”
And Heller was so intent on whatever he was thinking about, he said, “Manco.”
Then, into the middle of an “I don’t care if you’re from hell” sort of thing, Heller said, “I asked you, is there a city up this river?” Yikes! It was his piercing, high-pitched Fleet voice! I hastily lowered the gain some more.
The truck driver said, “Philadelphia, you (bleeped), ignorant . . .”
And into the middle of that, Heller pierced, “Is this their sewer?”
“Of course, it’s their god (bleeped) sewer!” screamed the enraged truck driver.
“Jesus,” said Heller in English. And he just ignored the man and the crowd and the fists and went back and got in his car and drove on.
Heller was shaking his head. “Must be a hundred million people in that town and no sewer system. POH-LLU-SHUN! Jesus!”
As I say, he wasn’t tending to business. Any passing sniper could have shot him.
But I had him now. He had actually told an Earthman where he was actually from! I started to write it down and then thought I had better reread Code Number a-36-544 M Section B. I dimly remembered it could be interpreted as “making an alien aware that a landing had taken place on his planet.” I couldn’t be sure. Had the truck driver been aware of Heller’s definitive answer? I couldn’t find the book.
When I sat down to watch again, Heller was on the New Jersey Turnpike, tooling along at fifty-five. He was relaxed once more. He had all his windows up and the air conditioning on, so it must be a hot day.
The traffic was very jammy. This turnpike is one of the most overloaded highways in the world, carrying almost triple what it was designed for and despite the high price of gasoline and cars and consequent traffic reduction, the trucks were clogging its dozen lanes. Oranges from Florida seemed to be the biggest part of what Heller was trying to flow along with.
He drove for some time and then, possibly because he thought oranges might have an odor—a trailer had evidently been strewing the road with them after a collision—he opened his window.
He sniffed.
Suddenly he shook his head as though to clear it.
He sniffed again.
Then he sneezed!
Well, of course, he sneezed. The state of New Jersey, particularly along the turnpike, has one of the highest air pollution concentrations in the world. I could have told him that. Everybody knows it.
Trucks or no trucks, he fished out a notebook and wrote some percentages of sulphur dioxide and some other symbols I don’t know, but probably all noxious.
He closed his window. And then he said to the planet in general, “You’re going to have to use hacksaws pretty soon even to get a plane to move through this stuff! How can you manage to do it so fast? This area is .06 percent up even since my survey.”
He drove for a while and then he said, “I better get busy.”
But it was miles later before he acted. And what he did made no sense at all.
He went through the lousiest tail-shaking procedure I have ever seen!
Somehow he had gotten ahead of the mobs of Florida oranges. Before him lay miles of two lanes, totally empty. It was completely flat—there is no scenery on this turnpike—it was without turns.
Despite the solemn warnings of Stupewitz and Maulin, he suddenly tramped on the accelerator and zipped the car up to ninety miles an hour! I thought, at last he’s gotten some sense! He’s trying to get away!
It wasn’t as fast as he could go. If he was trying to escape, he really should have stamped on it!
He sailed along, looking in his rearview mirror.
He was in plain view! This was no way to escape!
He clocked off three miles.
Then, still in full view, almost as if he wanted to be seen, he paid a toll and drove out through an exit gate.
He stopped. He backed the car over to the side where it could not be seen. And he just sat and watched the gate.
After a bit, he got one of the newspapers and began to read, looking up from time to time at the gate.
He found one story that fascinated him. It was in the New York Daily Scum:
REVERED REPORTER
RUBBED
_______________________
MUCKY HACK DOES
HIS LAST SPREAD
Mucky Hack, veteran investigative reporter and crime exposer of the Daily Libel, was splattered all over 34th Street last night when his specially built Mercedes-Benz Phaeton was rigged for a blitz that went BOOM!
The car was worth $89,000 according to Boyd’s, the only underwriters who would touch it. It was alleged to be a gift from IG Barben Pharmaceutical Corp. Car fans will miss its presence in the Annual Special Car Parade at Atlantic City.
Five shops were also destroyed in the blast.
Police Inspector Bulldog Grafferty, who investigated the car bombing, issued a carefully prepared statement today: “It was a valuable vehicle. The bomb rigging was extremely expert, the work of a master. Boyd’s had required the car to be guarded by Tilt and five other independent alarm systems.
“The only possible person who could have set up the blast is Bang-Bang Rimbombo.
“Bang-Bang is an ex-Marine demolitions expert left over from the last war.
“Many car bombings have been attributed to him in the past although no arrests were ever made.
“Bang-Bang is a trusted member of the notorious Corleone mob which Mucky Hack has always been exposing in his tireless reporting.
“The New York/New Jersey mob is run by the able and charming Babe Corleone, the ex of the late ‘Holy Joe’ Corleone.
“It is well known that Corleone received his gang cognomen of ‘Holy Joe’ because he would not push drugs and that Faustino ‘The Noose’ Narcotici has bee
n making steady inroads on the former Corleone territories in Manhattan.
“Thus, the motive for the rigging of the bombs by Bang-Bang exists. The expertise bears the unmistakable Bang-Bang trademark.
“Bang-Bang has not been arrested solely because he doesn’t complete his current sentence in Sing Sing until tomorrow and was still in jail at the time of the bombing.
“Several shopkeepers were arrested for permitting the car to park in that spot.
“The case, therefore, can be considered closed.”
Mucky Hack is survived by his managing editor and an old Ford.
For the life of me I could not see what he could find of interest in this story. He could read so fast that to see him sit there looking at one news item for ten minutes was baffling.
Possibly my annoyance, however, to be honest, came from the fact that he was holding the paper folded. There was a Bugs Bunny strip that was thus only half-revealed: Bugs had Elmer Fudd in a bath of carrot juice, and not being able to see the beginning of the strip, I could not fathom how Elmer had gotten there or why. Possibly Elmer had been ill? Possibly the bath had been prepared by Elmer as a trap into which he himself had then fallen? But there was no way for me to tell Heller to open up the page so I could see. It was frustrating!
Finally Heller looked at his watch. My Gods, he was wearing a combat engineer’s watch! In plain sight! I certainly put that down as a Code break. Then I was given pause: it looks like just a flat disk with a small hole in the center. Earthmen would mistake it for an identification bracelet or something like that.
He rotated his wrist, turning the watch downward and touched it. I had noticed before that he had this as a sort of nervous habit. But this is the first time I had really remarked it. It showed that he did have nerves after all.
He yawned—another nervous symptom. He looked at the toll gate area. Not one car had come through it in all the time he had been sitting there!
“So,” he said, “no Slinkerton!”
Then it came to me in a flash what he had been up to. The Fleet must have battle tactics and he was practicing one of them. He had invited pursuit to lay an ambush. But he had no weapon, so he had probably done it because of training conditioning triggered by mounting nervous tension.