He was standing there threateningly to ensure I sat down and started stamping. “You might at least bring me some of the clerk’s hot jolt,” I said.
“The office funds are totally depleted. We heard a rumor you had been transferred elsewhere and we had a party. Then we heard you had been left on post and we had a wake. There is no jolt, hot or otherwise.”
I sat down, got out my identoplate and started to stamp. I was hungry and wondered if paper were edible. If it were, there was sure a feast here. The Apparatus rides, walks and sleeps on forms, forms, forms, nearly all of them lies.
Manifests for supplies that were personally stolen, certifications of payrolls that were never paid, sums scheduled for informers that went into the pockets of agents instead, personnel lists which falsely attested twice the number, “customer expenses” from the base chief in Turkey that were really fees of local prostitutes for himself: tons of made-out forms, the usual fare of the Apparatus.
I reduced the pile about half in half an hour. I was just about to bang my identoplate down on the next one when my attention was drawn to it simply by all the numerous currency symbols on it. I was broke. Here were all these people getting fat but not me. I stared at it: Renovations, C764.9 it said at the bottom of the figure column.
“This is local,” I said. “Renovations? For this place?”
Bawtch muttered to himself something about my having the memory of an insect. Aloud, he said, “That’s the repairs on the roof last year. This roof. The rain was coming down on our papers. The work was done. You even complained about the noise. The bill has been presented several times. You always find something else to do before you get that far down in the pile. The contractor has been on the phone twice a day for his money. Stamp it.”
“What’s this ‘Unused Allocation’ down here at the bottom?” I said. “C231.”
“I was nice enough to think, when I made the official request for funds, that you might like to get your office redone. You never said what you wanted done so it’s unused.”
I looked around. There was a little paint peeling off the walls and a water stain over only half the ceiling. “I never could see anything wrong with it.”
A cunning thought had hit me, as yet only a proton moving out of the nucleus of an idea. Contractors kicked back when it was demanded. “Get me the original authorization,” I ordered sternly. “Oh, I’ll keep stamping the rest,” I added hurriedly and only then did he move off.
I had finished the rest of the pile by the time he came back. He was wiping hot jolt off his mouth. But I had other things in mind. He had the additional, unused 231-credit slip. I took it. “I’ll handle this now.”
He carted away the tall stack of forms and I sat there looking at the two sheets. Now, first, let’s see if I could get a kickback from the contractor who had done the work. He was pretty anxious to get paid, it being so overdue.
I got him on the communicator box. “You want this roof job paid fast?” I said and gave him the number.
“Who is this?”
“Officer Gris.”
He hung up. Well, that was a dead end. Bawtch had obviously been saying things behind my back.
I sat and thought. Redecorating this place was a waste of time. Who cared about pretty walls? Something more in keeping with my profession.
I had to go to the toilet. Now, one of the privileges of being head of the section was a private toilet opening off the office. While I was in there, I looked around. It was pretty messed up with paper scraps and all. When I finished, I chanced to look out the window. And it was then that the proton moved all the way out and went bang!
The toilet window of my office is right above a five-hundred-foot straight drop down the cliff into the River Wiel. Standing on tiptoe I could even see the river edge.
I went right back and put a call through to a building contractor we had never used. And to prove we had never used him, he was over there inside of fifteen minutes.
“I am an influential executive,” I told him.
He looked around. “Oh, I can see that,” he said.
“I have an unused allocation for two hundred and thirty-one credits.”
“So little,” he said. But I knew he was just trying to act like a big contractor. They are hungry, these guys. I was, too.
“Come with me,” I said. I took him into the toilet. “Now you see this wall?” And I tapped it. “I want it to be brought forward a bit and a secret undetectable door put in it. Then behind it, I want a ladder and a hatchway to the roof.”
He inspected it and shrugged. It looked easy enough to do.
“Now you see this window?” I tapped it. “I want the glass changed to a type called silent-break.”
“Well, I can do all that. But why?”
“People are sometimes after me,” I said.
“Ah, you’re part of the Apparatus. I understand.” But he hesitated. “I still don’t get what you mean to do.”
“There’s no back door to my office,” I said. “If I were chased in here, there would be no way out. But if this job I’m asking for gets done, I can rush into the toilet, smash the window, duck through the secret door, climb the ladder and get out on the roof.”
He still looked a bit puzzled.
“If the glass is silent-break type, it gives me time to get into the secret door and out.”
He got up on the toilet bowl and looked down. “That’s a drop of five hundred feet and into a wild river!”
“Exactly,” I said. “They’ll think I made an impossible attempt. No bodies are ever recovered from that river as we in the Apparatus very well know. They won’t even look for me! But I’ll be on the roof. Now don’t bother your head about spy tradecraft. That’s my department. Can you build it?”
He said he could although the allocation would be a little tight.
“Good,” I said, “then hand me over twenty credits and you’ve got the job.”
Well, that began quite an argument. They love to haggle. But I am not too bad at that. We finally settled for ten credits kickback.
I held out my hand. He said, “Oh, kickbacks can’t be paid until the finance office pays the bill. There’s rumors about you people.” He smiled, still friendly. “I’ll get on the job right away and in six months you’ll have your ten credits.”
I couldn’t cancel the order. It would have been too obviously just a chance to gouge some money.
He left.
Somewhat bitterly, I sat back down at my desk and out of spite wouldn’t stamp the original bill from the other contractor. That would show them! An officer has to have some pride. Even in the Apparatus.
PART SIX
Chapter 4
Several times I half made up my mind to go down to the hangar to see what was going on with Heller. Each time I got a pain in my stomach.
But pain or no pain, I was hungry and one of those times I made it out to my airbus.
I was amazed to see the driver had everything out and was cleaning the vehicle up. Unheard of. He had never done it before. He had also spread my gear around on the parking plot to air and get the garbage smell out. Until he saw me, he was whistling away.
“You going down to see Heller?” he said.
The pain hit me. After a moment I shook my head. It occurred to me that I could send him down. But Heller had already undoubtedly overpaid him and he had just been lying about the two credits. There was no relief to be found there. I was in no shape for a fight.
I forbade him to go near the hangar. Heller had sent him on an errand to Fleet for cleaning supplies. Who knows what other messages Heller would send to Fleet? I had a feeling I really ought to die and get it over with for it was only a matter of time before the sky fell in on me. They’d catch Krak. Or Lombar would realize we weren’t gone. Or the Crown inspectors would show up. There wasn’t a thing I could do about any of it. To Hells with the ladder to the roof. I ought to just dive out the toilet window and get it over with.
I went back
inside. There are quite a few rooms to Section 451, what with all the files. I never found out how many personnel it really had due to the padded list and Bawtch’s and other high-up rake-offs. But in this main room there were forty-one clerks shuffling papers. I knew some of them and knew about others. But I didn’t speak to them and they never speak to me. I wandered back into my own office.
My stomach hurt. I gloomed.
Maybe it was because I was hungry and thirsty. I had had only one sip of hot jolt the dawn before, and now that I thought of it, I had not eaten or drunk anything the day before that. Forty-eight hours, really. My stomach hurt too much. I began to have an odd sort of hallucination. I actually commenced to believe I was sitting in the caves of the offices in Turkey on Blito-P3. I had my own desk. Some of the personnel were there, smiling, friendly. I was stamping manifests of freighter cargo and every time my identoplate went down on one, the clerks would all applaud and say how great that was. Everything was going well. I was far, far away from Voltar. A beautiful Turkish girl, a dancer, came in through the door and began to dance slowly and suggestively toward me, her lips and eyes inviting. She also had her hands full, money in one and FOOD, delicious Turkish baklava, in the other.
I opened my mouth to speak to her in Turkish. And then, with a shock, I came to my senses. I had actually seen the girl! I had heard the coins clink! I had smelled the food!
I knew I was going crazy.
How I knew this was very simple. But I had better explain it. While I didn’t do well in the Royal Academy, when I went to the Apparatus schools I was a whiz, especially in languages.
Of course, they have very good teachers there. They have to. They must teach about four hundred languages just to cover the one hundred and ten planets of the Voltar Confederacy. Although Voltarian, imported from the home galaxy, is standard in the schools everywhere, the work of the Apparatus takes one too often into the back country where Standard Voltarian is unknown. And then there are at least ten thousand languages of enemy planets or planets marked for invasion.
They have a cunning system of gradual approach. It graduates upwards from child’s blocks to primers and then higher. In the case of Blito-P3, the route for English is blocks, “kindergarten primers,” comic books, technical books.
The comic book I chose was one called Bugs Bunny. Actually, I recall with a smile the first error I made. I thought the actor named Bugs Bunny was the true shape and behavior of the people of Earth where I had not yet been. How my professor laughed! He pointed out that the true shape and behavior of Earth people was to be found in the same comic book. He was called “Elmer Fudd.”
But Bugs Bunny, I must say, has a way with him. He is cunning. And he certainly can handle people. So it was obvious to me that they knew how to handle people on Earth. And when some of the scientists around the school told me there was not much difference between Earth’s comic books and their technical books, I took the hint. One can choose his own technical subjects for reading so I chose a subject they call, down there, “psychology.”
It is a government monopoly but it is taught in their universities. They claim everybody is evil. They say sentient beings are animals and have no soul. And while this last is unique to Earth and is not believed on any other planet anywhere, I so often fervently hope that I will never live another life anywhere that I was eager to accept it. And naturally, like Lombar, I believed everybody was evil.
So here I had a real gold mine. I read and read those textbooks. Like Bugs Bunny does, the psychologist teaches you how to get around everybody.
It is really due to this extensive study that I owe my remarkable ability to handle people.
I was diffident about writing this down in this work for two reasons: people will think I am a nut; and it is really the trade secret on which I operate in the Apparatus on Voltar. Even primitives have secret wisdoms.
So when I saw that Turkish girl, I knew exactly what had happened: I was experiencing “psychogenic hallucination based on fulfillment-denial.”
From this, I naturally understood that I wanted to get the Hells out of here. It came as a flash.
However, although I now had the proper label and understood it completely, I still sat there thinking from time to time I was at the Turkish base on Earth and even reached out a time or two to take some of the cakes the girl had put on the desk.
This got me to wondering how I would cope with all the paper stamping I would have to do when I was on Earth. And this led me to wonder how the bales of forms would get to Earth and back. I couldn’t imagine them coming as heavily abused freight. Bawtch would have a fit if the corners were wrinkled.
Then, as the day crept on and I got hungrier and thirstier and any hopes of eating seemed postponed at least a year until I could draw pay again—unless I lost my paychecks, which would make it five years and maybe never—I got more and more worried.
On Blito-P3, I would be cut off absolutely. I would not be able to snoop around. I would have no master console to steal time at. My fantasy of being on Earth in peaceful plenty began to have a dark core of not knowing what the Hells was going on on Voltar.
I considered what Bugs Bunny would have done in a similar circumstance. He would have approved of the caper of the toilet escape route I had just ordered. But, although my memory is superb, I could not remember a single strip that solved this uninformed situation except one where he takes a telescope on a platform he has gotten onto and, by means of many curves and levers, looks in on somebody who was chasing him in a police car. I obviously had no telescope that long.
Surmounting my hunger, I made a supreme effort and, being well endowed with wits, suddenly solved it.
Endow was the crossroads of information between the Apparatus and the Grand Council. Lombar had to take up everything with Endow. Endow had a weakness: pretty boys!
I got out my blackmail folders, local office.
I pushed buzzers. I got one to work and very shortly I had two of the Section 451 clerks in there looking slightly amused and tolerant.
These two boys were nicknamed “Too-Too” and “Oh Dear.” Their real names are Twolah and Odur. They were from Endow’s home planet, Mistin. They were promising children, doted upon by their separate mothers, spoiled rotten and totally dominated. They had entered the University of Mistin with high marks and had proceeded upon brilliant scholastic careers. They were excellent students. They fell in love, one with an elderly male professor of cellology, the other with the dean of males. They were caught. They were expelled. They were ruined. They were eminently fitted for my purpose: they were very pretty. I would shortly wipe the amusement from their girlish faces.
“You, Twolah, and you, Odur, have just been promoted.”
They liked that but were wary.
“By the powers vested in me as Section Chief, you two are appointed alternate couriers to Blito-P3. At intervals comparable to the time it takes to make a round trip to Blito-P3, you will relieve each other. One of you will bring me all the paper I have to sign and return. Then the other will do so.”
They looked uneasy. I have something of a reputation in the office. They knew this was not all. Three months of travel, followed by three months layoff, even though space travel in a freighter is not that comfortable, was a bit of a plum.
“On your off-time at home,” I said, “you will take messages to Endow personally. Any kind of a message from here you can dream up. And you will hang around for answers. And you will pretty yourselves up and display yourselves so that each one of you, by turns, becomes his beloved. And you will pump him for all current news about Blito-P3 and bring it to me.”
Too-Too minced coyly, “And what if Lord Endow refuses to slip into the trap?”
“I don’t think he will refuse. Because you are each of you going to make sure that he doesn’t. Have you ever heard of a magic mailing?”
It is tradecraft. They were trained as spies but not in the higher levels of the art. “I will explain,” I said.
“I am sure you will,” lisped Oh Dear.
“A magic mailing is a message or order which is held in place in a postal chute. It sticks there in the chute for a determined time, in this case three months. A separate card with a frequency stamped on it has to be mailed past it before the stick expires. If it is, the magic mail stays unmailed another three months. But if at any time the renewing card isn’t mailed, the magic mail drops into the post and gets delivered.”
They were getting white. Pretty. But white.
“Each time you deliver a batch of forms to me on Blito-P3, you will also deliver all the news there is on the subject from the Apparatus, the Grand Council, Endow and Lombar Hisst. IF I consider you are not making it up, that you are really diligent in doing your espionage job in your off-period here, I will give you a receipt with a frequency and you can mail it. It will hold up the magic mail.”
They were whiter and not prettier.
“Who is the magic mail to be addressed to?” said Too-Too.
“Whom does it concern?” faltered Oh Dear.
“The magic mail will be addressed to the Commander of the Knife Section on Mistin. You understand that it won’t ever be delivered if you thoroughly do your jobs.”
They got that, so I plowed on. Psychology is a wonderful thing. “You both love your mothers, don’t you?”
I knew this because there are exact states and phases in all boys and males. It says so right in the Earth textbooks. First they are oral passive, then they are oral erotic, then they are anal passive after which they become anal erotic. This is followed by what is called “latency” and finally, genitalia is arrived at. So these two boys were fixated in the development stage of anal erotic. Mothers change diapers. So, of course, it follows as day and night that they loved their mothers.
“You wouldn’t order our mothers murdered?” said Too-Too, incredulous.