He slammed her against the wall so hard she bounced.
Then in a perfectly mild voice, Lombar said, “Officer Gris will tell you what to do. I don’t want to hear any more about it. Get out!”
Lombar went back to his chair and took a chank-pop. “Gods, they stink!” he said as he sprayed his face and nose. Then, relieved, he waved a hand to the door.
“Get on with it, Soltan. I don’t want to hear another word concerning it or Jettero Heller. He’s yours now.”
As I left, he was moving toward the chest where he kept the Royal robe.
PART THREE
Chapter 1
At the end of a long, black corridor of Spiteos, going toward my quarters, I thought I heard voices.
I looked quickly about: there should be guardsmen stationed around here. I couldn’t see any! The possibility of Heller having escaped shot me full of panic! I could visualize my own body being tossed off the highest tower!
Voices! I paced quickly forward, silently. They got louder. My Gods, they were coming through the closed door of my room!
I halted. I could not make them out. I took a long breath and with a textbook police entrance, I yanked the door open and leaped inside, off to the left, too fast to be shot.
Jettero Heller and the platoon commander were sitting at the table!
They were eating sweetbuns and drinking sparklewater. Heller was reading the morning newssheet and laughing about some item. There was a new Homeview on a wall shelf that had never been there before and a diddleband was playing some goofy tune.
The secret guards that were supposed to be there weren’t outside and here sat their commander taking refreshment with his prisoner! What a homey scene!
I knew right then what Lombar was up against trying to work with the Apparatus. Here was a prisoner, supposedly tightly guarded and incommunicado, completely unguarded and provided with the latest news!
The platoon commander must have read it on my face. He sprang back so suddenly his chair went flying! He came to a terrified attention and crossed his arms in an X on his breast, eyes straight ahead but glazed with fear.
“Oh, let him finish his sweetbun,” said Heller with an easy laugh. “He and I have just had a peace conference and we’re celebrating. I let him and his men know where I am at all times and they bring me the necessities of life from the Camp Endurance canteen. Amity prevails.”
But the officer knew what he might be facing from me even though he must also understand I would say nothing in front of Heller. He bolted out of the room like a hunted game animal.
Heller tapped the newssheet. “I see that the mysteriously missing Jettero Heller has been found and is now vanished again on a secret mission for the Grand Council.” It amused him. And I could see it on the paper, front page, photos of Heller and all. I could read,
FAMED COMBAT ENGINEER . . .
(Bleep) those reporters! Well, we didn’t control all the press—not yet!
Heller had tossed the newssheet down and was looking at me brightly. “Hello, hello, hello,” he said. “What’s this?” He got out of his chair to come over to me. “Been promoted, I see. Grade Eleven no less!”
Suddenly I realized why Lombar had promoted me. It made me one rank higher than Heller, easier to control him.
But if Heller had recognized that I was now his senior, he certainly didn’t show it. Grades Ten and Eleven are still relatively low and there is even a saying in the services, “Seniority amongst junior officers is like virtue amongst whores.”
He came over and pumped my hands. “Hearty congratulations. I am sure it was well deserved.” Sarcasm? I looked closely. No, just the expected cliché of the officer corps.
“This means,” said Heller, with mock solemnity, “that you owe me a dinner in the first nightclub we encounter!” Ah, yes. Traditions of the Royal Services. When one gets promoted, every other officer he meets on the first day is owed a dinner in the nearest nightclub at his expense. It’s costly and a lot of fellows just go hide that first day.
He took the gold chain off me. He went over to the brightest glowplate and held the emeralds close to his eye, turning them this way and that. “Uhuh!” he said interestedly. “You’ll be glad to know they are real emeralds.” He kept turning them and looking. “These three at the top of the number are just faintly off-color. But,” and he tapped it, “this bottom one is a truly valuable stone. It’s from the South Vose diggings. The flaw helps refraction. Lovely green. Remarkable!”
Heller came back over to me and hung the chain around my neck and pumped my hands again, smiling, really glad to see me promoted. Then he went back to the table. “Have some sparklewater? There’s plenty more in your cupboard now.”
I finally grasped what had happened. Those (bleeped) junior officers at the club had put a roll of money in that bag they had packed for him. I’d glanced through it but it must have been hidden in an athletic suit or something. I felt a chill. What more had I missed?
Casually I strolled around the far side of the table. He was sitting down now. He was wearing a shiny white, thin flying suit and a pair of ankle-high hull boots. I let my eyes drift over him without appearing to search. Then I saw it: a short blastick, the 800-kilovolt type that would tear a wall apart. They are about six inches long and he had it shoved just inside the top of his right boot.
I went over to a mirror, pretending to inspect some of my face patches that obscured the damage suffered at the club. I could watch him in the mirror. From the litter of papers and canisters he picked up a short red rod. Another weapon! I planned exactly which way I would dodge, how I would dive at him.
“They put this whizzer in my bag,” said Heller, holding it up. “They must have thought I was in trouble. You ever see one of these?” And he tossed it to me!
I fumblingly caught it. “They’re quite recent,” he continued in an interested voice. “You hold them carefully by the bottom ring and they send up a flare you can see for five thousand miles! Fact. Blow your hand off if you aren’t careful.”
He was finishing off his canister of sparklewater. “They sent a blastick and a thousand credits: must have taken up a collection. But I’ve got a lot of money on account at the club and the manager will pay them back.”
I felt a surge of contempt. The dumb fool. With a thousand credits he could have literally bought his way out of Spiteos and if he had had any sense he could have blown his way out with that blastick. And here he was laying it all in the open. And he hadn’t even guessed what was in store for him. On the subject of intrigue he didn’t have two brain cells to click together. What a stupid (bleepard)!
Watching him cheerfully sipping sparklewater and idly skimming the sports page, my contempt began to be tinged with pity.
“We’ve got lots to do today,” I said. “You’ve got two appointments, one with the Countess Krak and the other with Dr. Crobe.”
“Hey, look at this!” and his nose was buried in the sports page. “Timbo-chok just beat Laugher Girl in a five-lap free-for-all at Mombo Track! Well, well! That Laugher Girl was the fastest car at Mombo. Who’d have thought it possible? Let’s see, here, who was driving . . . ?”
PART THREE
Chapter 2
The interior of ancient Spiteos is a labyrinth of windowless black stone. Above ground level it is mainly a deserted hulk but huge with rooms and vaults and tunneled passageways. The original inhabitants of the planet believed in fortress security—but it had availed them not at all when our forefathers came.
When we left the room, we were already pressed for time. I had to make a stop at the armory—to get a dummy-loaded, dud blastick to secretly exchange for the one he was now carrying. And Countess Krak was notorious for not wanting to be kept waiting: her reaction to anyone being late could be deadly.
Accordingly, I was not pleased at all when Jettero Heller insisted on walking. I supposed he wanted the exercise—athletes are a trifle loony on the subject—and, obedient to my orders not to arouse his suspici
ons, I had to acquiesce. So we avoided the first stage of tubes and began a wandering course through the upper reaches of Spiteos, a badly lit stroll through endless mazes of dust.
He was wearing the hull boots. Now, these boots have peculiar soles: they alternate bars of powerful magnets with ridges of a coarse fiber. To walk on a metal wall or deck, the magnet bars are left down—and they are very handy in weightless space and could undoubtedly save your life. But when walking on stone or nonmagnetic surfaces, one simply clicks one’s heels together in a certain way and the magnets draw up, leaving one walking on the rough fiber ridges.
But Jettero Heller was walking on stone floors and steps and he had left the magnets down! Clickety-clack, clatter, clatter! Loud! He sounded like a tank!
It got on my nerves. All he had to do was click his heels and the magnets would draw up and leave him walking silently.
In espionage one has to cultivate a soft tread. A good agent practices and prides himself on being able to walk with total silence on anything, even gravel. The success of a mission—yes, and even his life—may depend on how silently he can move about.
Heller was not only walking with the subtlety of a tank column, but every ten or fifteen paces he would do a little extra skip, a real loud snap of metal on stone. Deafening!
He seemed much interested in the walls themselves and now and then would rap them with a ring he wore. “These ancients sure could build,” he commented many times.
So clickety-clack, clank, we toured the long passages, wandered through huge, deserted halls and banged our way down filthy steps.
The dust was irritating to my nose and I sneezed repeatedly. I was getting a little tired—I am not one to do much exercising. “Look,” I said, “we’re going to be late and the Countess is going to rip our heads off. Surely you’ve had enough exercise for the day.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s all just so interesting. Did you know these ancients had no metal tools? Nobody knows how they fashioned these chambers or even how they got rid of the rubble. We couldn’t do it today unless we used disintegrators. Do you realize there are no seams? No joints. All just hollowed out with no decent tools.”
He clatter-clanked on for a while. “I wonder why the Voltarians thought they had to wipe those ancients out. They couldn’t have been much of a menace.”
Oh, I thought, you and Lombar will never get along. Unless one wipes out the riffraff and excess baggage, one gets an awful lot of problems—problems like we have now. If we let every conquered people live, we would have even more trouble than we’ve got. Yes, I could imagine an argument between Lombar and Heller. It would end in a dead Heller! I’d better keep them separated if I was ever to get this Heller to Blito-P3!
Praise the Gods, we finally got to the armory. Heller walked on down the passage a ways examining walls. I stepped up to the armory counterdoor and matched my identoplate to the lock. It swung open.
The old cretin that was custodian of the place came hobbling up to the counter, scowling and hostile. We don’t get along. “What are you bothering me for today?” he rasped.
In the Apparatus we have a sign language we do when there’s a chance of being overheard. Giving the armory clerk some nonsense cover talk, and with my back to Heller, I signaled for an 800-kilovolt blastick, specifying a dummy load. It was not much trouble for the old cretin—they ship blasticks with a dud cartridge in the chamber to protect the firing electrodes—but you’d thought I was asking for a battleship, the way he frowned and snarled. All he had to do was walk ten feet to a shelf and pick one off it, open it to be sure it had a dummy cartridge in it, hand it over and push my identoplate on the receipt. He did and slammed the upper door in my face. I had also wanted a stun gun but his action seemed too final.
Heller was feeling the wall from high up to floor level. “Aha!” he said. “Ground level.”
It was my opening. I was about to do something that, had he been trained in espionage, he would have been alert to.
“How do you know?” I challenged.
“Half a degree,” he said. “Temperature difference. The outside ground is right about here, just below waist level.”
“Half a degree?” I scoffed. “Nobody can tell half a degree of temperature with his hand.”
“Can’t you?” he said, seeming much surprised. “The outside, at this time of day, is in sunlight; these walls are about three feet thick at this level. But the conduction of heat up here,” and he reached way up, “is half a degree above floor level.”
I knew he would do it, the fool. He reached for my hand and made me pat the wall up high and then put my palm against a point close to the floor. “It’s a matter of training,” he said.
Yes, a matter of training. Naturally, I was overbalanced by the way he moved my hand; I stumbled against him. Using my other hand with an expert smoothness, all in a split second, I eased his blastick out of his boot top, shook the dud duplicate out of my sleeve and into the boot. I straightened up and, in doing so, put the live blastick in my breast pocket. He was now “armed” with a dud weapon. The pickpockets of the Apparatus are excellent teachers.
“I couldn’t tell the difference,” I said, “but then you’re the expert at such things. Come along, we’re late. The Countess will be furious!”
“All right,” he said. “But just a moment. Let me finish this.”
I had no idea of what he was talking about. He put out his foot and for a moment of heart failure I thought he had detected the weapons switch. But no. He gave the floor a single hard kick. The magnet bars went CLANK! Then he clicked his heels together in the action that makes the metal draw up above the fiber ridges. Praise the Gods, that would be the end of all his clanking.
But we didn’t move on. With a gesture that further detained me, he drew out a large sheet of paper and one of those constant-flow engineer pens. He put the paper on a smooth wall spot and began to draw.
His hand was moving so fast it was just a blur. I had never seen an engineer doing a field sketch before; I realized why their pens had to flow such volume. But I was too impatient to be very impressed.
In a few moments, he flipped the paper at me and put the pen away.
I was looking at a complete, fully measured sketch of the above-ground interior of Spiteos! The distances, floor heights and now, even the ground level were marked in! And it was all beautifully done, almost as good as you get from a draftsman after a week of work.
“Give it to your boss,” said Heller. “I doubt it’s ever been surveyed before. Archeological curiosity.”
“Hey,” I said, “how can you be so sure of these measurements? You didn’t have any tape.”
“Echo-sounding,” he said and lifted his foot. “Sound travels at a certain speed. When you make a sound where you are, you can mark the length of time it takes to echo back . . .”
“Nobody can measure fractions of seconds that fast,” I protested, annoyed.
“Maybe not, but my watch can.”
Then I realized that while he was sketching, his watch had been close to his ear; it must have recorded and converted every one of those louder skip-pops he’d made.
Marvelous enough. Highly skilled. But it annoyed the Devils out of me. He was clever, true, to map the place. He could have used it to sabotage the fortress or escape. But after all that work, he had simply tossed it at me and told me to give it “to the boss,” not only giving himself away but also threatening trouble for myself!
He simply did not belong in this game. He understood nothing whatever about internal politics either.
“Just a minute,” he said. And he stepped close to me. “One of those false-skin patches has come loose.” He reached to my face and adjusted it. “Whoever put you through the grinder did a pretty good job of it. Does that hurt?”
I seethed inwardly. “Nobody put me through the grinder,” I lied automatically. “It was an airbus collision.”
“First time I ever knew an airbus had knuckles,” he lau
ghed. “You ought to enter that vehicle in the planetary fisticuffs tournament.” He adjusted another false-skin patch. “Was it your boss?”
I might have felt angry but I didn’t. The thought of Lombar being handed this sketch of Spiteos came back. What if this Heller took a notion to survey the below-ground levels of this secret fortress? The labyrinth which penetrated a mile deep! The fifty thousand more or less falsely imprisoned souls in their cages, the unburied dead! The torture chambers! He’d seen a tiny portion of what lay below but not . . .
With a wave of apprehension I wondered if Heller had noticed the passageway to the hangar, the below-ground parking place that held Lombar’s personal warship, specially equipped, illegally armed with enough firepower to blow Voltar’s defenses into dust.
Had he seen that some of the rooms we had passed through were fully readied storerooms? Ledges cleaned and waiting for their priceless “goods”? Empty enough just now, but within a few months . . .
Oh, if Lombar knew I’d been letting Heller survey this, he would not use knuckles!
The pain of another false-skin patch being moved jolted me out of it. “No!” I yelled, “Lombar didn’t hit me!” I shoved Heller violently away from me.
“I’m sorry I hurt you. The patches were coming off with your sweat.” And he did look contrite. “It’s been a long, hot walk.”
But that wasn’t what was making me sweat. It was realizing I’d been criminally negligent in not grasping that he had been surveying and knowing what that could bring down upon me.
Heller was so stupid, so without guile. I very much began to doubt I’d get him off this planet before he fouled up utterly. He could get us both killed!
And thinking of being killed reminded me we had kept the Countess waiting for over an hour. And you weren’t late when you had an instruction appointment with the Countess Krak. Not if you wanted to survive, that is.
I pushed him down the passageway toward the training rooms. Being Heller’s handler was enough to reduce life expectancy just from worry alone!