She gave a bright little laugh. My eyes bugged. The Countess Krak laughing?
The deputy commander got himself and his troops out of there. They went, whispering to one another, glancing back over their shoulders at her, just plain scared!
The Countess Krak swept up a pile of debris and dumped it in a box. She pushed the box along toward the escalator. She was humming! No words. Just the tune of some little ballad.
Her crew and workmen seemed to be finishing up for they were working at double, triple speed. Their eyes kept flicking toward her as they sped about polishing the place up. They were terrified at this change in her.
I myself was too frightened to go near her. I supposed her wits had flipped. There was no telling what she would do next! As they say in the high country beyond Kabar, “Lepertiges do not change their fangs.”
Frankly, I was too scared to approach her, urgent as my business was. Lombar was clear up in the high tower; the Countess Krak was right here!
Her crew was practically finished. I drew off to one side after a while. The movement must have attracted her attention.
She came waltzing over to me. “Oh, Soltan,” she said, “I am so glad to see you!” And she gave me a bright smile.
The Countess Krak smiling unnerved me. There was a big padded chair, a fairly new one, close by the wall. It had a new glowplate over it. A low table was in front of it and a matching chair was on the other side. A newly created cozy nook. I stumbled back against the big chair and sat down in it abruptly.
She had turned and was facing the whole room. She clapped her hands together to attract attention. The more than forty men hastily turned to face her.
“I think,” said the Countess Krak, “that this is enough for today. You have done very well. You are all sweaty now, so you should go wash your clothes and take baths. And then, because you have been up since the middle of the night,” she paused and smiled brightly, “you can have the rest of the day off!”
You could have created the same effect by leveling a blastcannon at them. It had never happened before in the modern history of Spiteos. They looked at each other. They looked to the door to see if execution squads were waiting. They looked at her. They had worked for years for the Countess Krak. They didn’t understand this. She lightly laughed. “Well, run along!” In terror they plunged en masse to the exit ramp and vanished.
She turned around and came walking toward me. Halfway across her smile vanished and her eyes blazed!
I knew it. I knew this change was not there to stay. She was still the Countess Krak! I braced myself for a blow.
She seized my arm and yanked me out of that chair like a cargo hook had grabbed me. She hurled me to one side.
Then she did a very idiotic thing. She took off her headcloth and carefully wiped the seat of the chair where I had been sitting. Just as if I had gotten it dirty!
She looked at me severely. “That is not your chair! This,” and she swept her hand toward the small ensemble of two chairs and the table, “has been set up for Jettero!”
Then she softened, made some minute arrangements in the position of the table and adjusted some books and a language machine. And then she patted the chair.
She was all mellow again when she walked over to the area where I was picking myself up. But there was a bit of calculation in her eyes, too.
“I’ve just remembered, Soltan, that you’ll be going back to Blito-P3, too. You’re Jettero’s handler, aren’t you?”
Well, she could figure that out from the language courses I’d laid out and that I was making Heller’s appointments. I mumbled something about this being the case.
“And you’re in full charge of preparing him and running some mission he is on?”
I nodded.
She smiled. She has very beautiful white teeth. I was very conscious of those teeth. She gently took my arm—ignoring my flinch—and guided me over to a bench and sat me down on it.
“You need a language brushup,” she said.
I tried to get up nerve to tell her my English and Italian and Turkish and half a dozen other languages were in perfect shape. But my mouth didn’t seem to want to talk. Too dry.
She walked sedately over to the racks and got down a hypnohelmet and came over to me with it. I offered no slightest resistance. After all, I’d spent weeks in these things. She patted my head comfortingly and then slid the helmet over it. From her coverall pocket she took a recorded strip.
“It’s just a little accent check,” she said, smiling gently.
She slid the strip into the slot and turned the helmet on.
There was the familiar buzz. I was out like a turned-off glowplate.
I came to. I was a trifle surprised to see that a half-hour had gone by. She was piling some books onto the table and neating up the chair some more. She saw I was out of it. She picked up a book and came over.
When the helmet was unstrapped and off, she patted me on the head again. “Now,” she said, “read this and we’ll see how your accent is. First, Virginian.”
I thought this was pretty silly. There was nothing wrong with my accent in commercial English. She sensed resistance. “Now, Jettero will be talking Virginian. It’s a city or something, isn’t it? On some planet named ‘Earth.’ And you must be able to understand him. Read.” And she pointed her finger at the page.
I read aloud, “Obedience is the mother of success, the wife of safety.”
Then, “The fear of some divine and supreme powers keeps men in obedience.”
She clapped her hands like a child. “Oh, that is very good, Soltan. You read it in perfect Virginian.” I wondered how in Hells she knew it was perfect “Virginian.” Had she been studying English?
She pointed her finger down the page, “Now, Soltan, read this in New England.”
I read, speaking a bit nasally, “He who takes his orders gladly, escapes the bitterest part of slavery—doing what one does not want to do.”
“Ah, splendid, splendid, Soltan!” She yanked the book away. “Truly perfect New England.”
Now, I myself had not been able to notice any real difference. I had imitated what they call “Americans” before and you just speak through your nose. I felt sort of funny.
A slam-bang opening of the main door halted any further conversation. The Countess Krak went flying off in that direction. I got up and went over to see what this was all about.
What? It was one of Snelz’s guards with a big package for her. I was in time to catch a flash of the label, something about:
TO A DAZZLING STAR
She took the package. She seemed confused. Upset. Embarrassed. “For me?” she asked.
“That’s what he said, Countess.”
In a sort of a daze she put it on her desk and tore it open. Then she just stood there, staring down. At length she said, “Ooooo!” and put her hand to her breast. She was cooing!
I got into a position so I could see what it was. A bomb? So she could break out?
She lifted something up. She ran over to a mirror and held it against her. She said, “Oooo!” and ran back to the package and got something else and then ran to the mirror. . . .
The card slipped off. It was signed “Jet.”
Oh, my Gods! He was giving her clothes! Now giving an unmarried woman clothes means just one thing: a pass! Trouble, I thought, you have my address!
The package, when it all got sorted out, contained three skintight, elastic cover suits, the very latest fashion. One was shimmering black, one was bright scarlet and one was gleaming silver. Each had a matching pair of elastic ankle boots with small flowers on them and each had a matching headband with flowers to match the boots. Extremely feminine stuff. For the Countess Krak?
I got it. All he had heard of my dissertation on her, possibly, was that she had no clothes!
(Bleep) him. And (bleep) Snelz! The platoon commander must have sent a guardsman all the way to the city at dawn. Heller, sleeping so peacefully when I left, must have be
en right behind me out that door!
She was waltzing around in the center of the room, holding the silver one against her.
Then she rushed back to the desk and found his card and pressed it to her chest.
I looked at my watch. Ouch, were we overdue for instruction this morning! I started to hurry out.
“No, no!” cried the Countess Krak. “Give me twenty minutes before you bring him down. I have to bathe again and get dressed!”
Right that moment I got a horrible premonition that all this was going to wind up in catastrophe. I do wish now I had learned to obey my hunches. They were right!
PART FOUR
Chapter 2
In my room I found Jettero Heller lounging in an easy chair, eyes half closed, idle beyond belief. The furthest thing from his mind appeared to be Mission Earth. Some supplementary reading I had given him lay in a neglected pile. Soft but plaintive music was coming over the Homeview and some female singer was on the screen. Love songs!
Now if there is anything that hurts my sensitive ears it is a high-pitched echo orchestra and the quavering, sobbing soprano of a love balladess. Furthermore, they paint their faces black for “unrequited love” and by means of tubes beside their eyes they shed red tears—tears of blood. And the melodies are all down scale:
And so faded my glow
Into the sorrow
That took me in tow
To the deep pits of woe
And with my last breath
I’ll still cry for death
And grave clothes to use
as my trousseau.
Sickening!
So this was Heller’s idea of charging out and getting the job done!
In a flash of insight, I realized what I was up against. Love! There are warnings in the standard espionage texts: they give a lot of biological tables stressing that it is irrational; they go over a lot of examples of how even Royal houses have been destroyed because the practical marriage orders were flouted by young princes and princesses who stupidly fell in love with somebody else; they don’t tell you how to use it but they warn against pairing a male and female agent. They say there’s no way to thwart it short of shooting somebody. Well, the professors might not be able to use it, but I could. I owed my rise in the Apparatus to being cunning.
I was cunning now. In a very sweet voice, I said, “You had better get cleaned up. In . . .” and I ostentatiously looked at my watch, “. . . twenty minutes you have an appointment in the training rooms with the Countess Krak.”
Holy Gods! He came out of that chair like he’d been catapult-launched.
He had washed his white exercise suit the night before but in this airless cubicle it wasn’t dry and he frantically rigged a heat fan. He rushed about, showered, dried and combed his hair and dressed and all in about eight minutes. Then, of course, we had to wait three or four minutes and he sat there fidgeting. I turned off the Homeview: I couldn’t take any more echo orchestra and down-scale love ballads—they came through to me more like funeral dirges and if I didn’t get Heller off this planet, there was going to be one more—mine.
Still a minute early, we arrived outside the training rooms. He went through the door.
I was about to follow him when a hand stopped me. It was the Countess Krak’s training assistant, a very ugly brute. “Message just came, Officer Gris. You’re wanted at the central guard office at Camp Endurance.”
What now? In some alarm I made sure two guardsmen were posted outside the door and went tearing off.
It always takes time to get through the tunnel and it was almost an hour later when I arrived at the Camp Endurance guard office.
The filthy Apparatus duty officer looked over his sheets in some mystery. “Oh, yes. There was a general call for you . . . wait. It is logged as just before dawn. Good Devils, Officer Gris! Didn’t they find you this morning? I am sorry, Officer Gris, but it’s for the fortress internally and we didn’t get more than the general recording of it. . . .”
I cut him off. “I answered that call hours ago! Cancel it.”
“But we’re not sending it out!” he said. “It was for the internal . . .”
In brand-new alarm, I realized I had been fooled! The Countess Krak! She had wanted me out of the way. What were they planning? A breakout?
Real terror gripped me at the thought of what Lombar would do to me if Heller got loose! I grabbed a tunnel zipbus that didn’t zip fast enough to satisfy me. I raced through the fortress and back to the training rooms. Gods knew what I would find!
I burst in.
It was the most peaceful scene you ever saw. Heller was sitting in the chair she’d gotten for him; the recorded strip player was on the table running, putting out quiet roars; the Countess Krak was sitting in the other chair. She was dressed in the silver elastic suit; her hair was tied with the silver ribbon with flowers on it; her feet, relaxed, were cased in the silver ankle boots: I will say she looked heart-stoppingly beautiful. She had her elbows on the other side of the table and her chin was cupped in her palms. She was looking at him adoringly.
I sidled over, pretty mad, really. “That was a cute trick you pulled,” I hissed, too low for Heller to hear.
She turned her face to me. Her eyes were a smoky blue and shining. She had a half smile on her lips. Utterly relaxed, she whispered back, “Isn’t he beautiful?”
I was disgusted. But then, I thought, even a female lepertige probably falls in love from time to time. I went out in the passageway: I really couldn’t stand to look at them. To me, the situation was too dangerous.
Using my communications disk, I got an underground line to the Section 451 office in Government City. My chief clerk there—an old criminal named Bawtch—didn’t sound very happy that I had been retained as Chief of the Section. He told me they had been shuffling papers perfectly all right and hoped I didn’t have any orders: he said they didn’t need any disorders right now. It wasn’t really insolent; that’s just the way Bawtch is. He soured on life some seconds after he was born and has made a profession of deteriorating ever since.
I did find out that some new texts and paperbacks had come in on the just-arrived freighter from Earth as well as recent issues of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, a couple of newssheets they print on that planet. I told him to put the lot on the Spiteos shuttle and he sighed and hoped I wouldn’t be calling again soon.
I dawdled around, made some notes on what I was supposed to get going. Then I went back in to see how the language lessons were progressing.
What? They were no longer at the table! I stepped further inside and there they were in the middle of a big training platform.
She was teaching him unarmed combat? My orders were that no espionage tactics . . . Then I checked myself. They weren’t doing unarmed combat. Heller was showing her the latest dance routines! The “Shatter” had been popular in the last few months. The male lunges out and the female flips away; the female lunges and the male rolls away: back and forth, somewhat athletic but kind of monotonous. They had a timing ticker, used to coordinate acrobats, and it was going to a dance beat. Heller was showing her the foot positions and the arm reaches.
She had killed a guard just reaching toward her. And here it was happening. In sort of like the frozen state where you watch an inevitable accident about to occur, I stood there and watched this. Sooner or later he was going to touch her on a reach. . . .
He did! I expected sudden death.
“Oh,” she said, “I have been here so long I am all out of date. Let’s see: when you lunge, I am supposed to roll, not just stand there like a ninny and get hit!”
He lunged again and once more she didn’t roll and his hand touched her shoulder. The Countess Krak being clumsy? Hard to teach? Never!
And he finished the lunge by taking her in his arms and holding her close to him. And they just stood there.
And then he kissed her!
I expected fireworks. But the only fireworks was a sort of invisib
le glow that I could practically feel clear over where I was. She dropped her head back and looked up at him. “Oh, Jet,” she whispered.
I came out of my daze. This would never, never do. I clapped my hands together three times sharply. I had to do it again, louder, before they took any notice of me.
They finally walked over, holding hands, looking at each other like a couple of kids sharing some secret.
“We’re due,” I said severely, “for our appointment with Dr. Crobe. Come along right now, Heller!”
PART FOUR
Chapter 3
The biological section occupied a complex series of old stone vaults and rooms about a hundred feet below ground level. Unlike the rest of the fortress and despite the black stone, the place was glaringly lit. I never have been all the way through that section: it is too repulsive; but it consists of libraries, operating rooms, freeze banks and vast compartments of vials, vials, vials and tanks, tanks, tanks. If Spiteos smells bad, it is nothing compared to the biological section: they have a habit of spilling cultures which putrefy and leaving around discarded flesh and body parts that rot. It is about as sanitary as a sewer.
In the first library an old crone was pottering about, shifting files and noisily snuffling back the snot which trickled onto her upper lip. I waved one hand at an upper shelf, the other at Heller and yelled at her, “Blito-P3.” She is quite deaf, being over a century-and-a-half old, but she heard me. She moved to get a rickety ladder and so I left Heller standing there while I went off to find the chief cellologist.
Dr. Crobe was in a rear operating room. The moment I entered he held up a filthy hand not to be disturbed. I had to stop and watch.
He had a poor wretch strapped down on an operating table and was finishing up some work. The man, who had probably been a perfectly normal person a few weeks ago, was getting the last touches needed to make a circus freak.
By means of reorganizing and grafting cells, Crobe had replaced the poor (bleepard’s) arms and legs with big tentacles from some sea creature. Bone had been grafted above the eyes to make a protrusion over each one. Crobe was checking the growth and rooting of a “tongue” taken from some insect-eating animal, a tongue that could be flicked out half a yard, as though the new monstrosity lived on flying bugs.