The shower did make me feel better. I was amazed at the amount of grime that rolled off! My head cleared up. Maybe all that dirt in my hair had been pressing down on my skull and fogging me up. It was an interesting theory. I was just about to concede that maybe the Fleet had something when a nerve shattering buzzer-gong in the laundry sent me tearing back in there to get my clothes.
I retrieved the underclothes roll. Everything was beautifully clean, beautifully flat and even several tears had been nicely mended.
For a moment I couldn’t remember where I had put the uniform roll, there were too many disk doors. I started looking.
I couldn’t find it!
With great care, I retraced my every prior action in this place. I had come in the door there and I had leaned here to rest while I tried to read signs and arrows. I opened the door I was now sure I had put the uniform roll in.
Nothing! I went tearing through the place opening every possible disk door.
Nothing!
I steadied myself down. I read the signs. And then it hit me!
I had put my uniform and boots roll in the disintegrator!
I stood there, naked, weeping quietly to myself. I had no clothes to wear but underpants!
Wait! Ske had been sent out for a General Services dress uniform! All was not defeated. I could yet triumph over Fleet supercleanliness!
With hope, I rushed back to my cubicle.
Success!
A package on the bed!
Quickly, I opened it.
What was I looking at?
I recognized the colonel’s cross. That was one rank down, but Ske, of course, could be counted on to be inaccurate.
But what were all these designs?
Lying on a dead-black cloth, the red embroidery was quite startling.
Bones, hangman’s noose, electric whips. Bones? Hangman’s noose? Electric whips? The helmet. Black! A huge phosphorescent skull!
It was the dress uniform of a colonel of the Death Battalion!
It even had the belts that represented bleeding intestines!
It was the number one terror uniform of the whole Voltarian forces!
I took a step toward the door. But then I realized Ske would carefully be gone.
Legally I could wear it as I outranked it and in theory a Secondary Executive could wear any of the Apparatus uniforms.
I was too tired. I lay down on the gimbal bed. I turned on a rest-heat light. What an awful way to start a voyage. If I could just sleep for an hour maybe some of this confusion would go away. Maybe, I thought, we would be safely in space when I awoke. Little did I know!
The lights went off. They were disconnecting the groundside cables. To Hells with it. I would just go to sleep. There was nothing, really, to a space blastoff.
Some of the tension was going out of me. I was just drifting off when a dreadful clamor brought me straight up. Pounding! Hammering! It sounded like they were ripping the ship apart!
I hastily threw a towel around my waist and rushed into the passageway. The sounds redoubled. Then I realized they were coming from the forward auxiliary engine room. That was not right. We were still in the hangar! We ought to be getting crane-lifted to a trundle dolly.
In the control deck, there was Heller. He was perched on the edge of the local pilot chair, red cap on the back of his head. He was talking over the comm system to the engine room. From what he said, it was obvious that it was just a hangar engineer in there, somebody borrowed.
“I’ll lift her off very easy, so I don’t want much drive,” he was saying.
I stared through the opened view windows. The space-particle armorplates were lowered. Heller leaned out and looked around and then yelled a “Stand clear” to some people in the hangar.
My Gods! He was about to fly this thing in the hangar! He might ram another ship or zoom through the roof! “Hey,” I yelled. “Don’t try to fly in here!”
Heller was sitting back. He gave a small laugh. “That’s what tugs are for—to move around constricted spaces. Hold on, Soltan. She’s jumpy.”
Somebody with target wands was out in front of the ship. Heller reached for throttles.
I held on!
It wasn’t even a straight run! He had to go around a crane and two spaceships and then turn again to get out the door!
There was a crash under us. I thought our bottom had fallen off. But it was just the big blocks and chocks tipping over.
He just perched there on the edge of the chair and flew her out of the hangar on warp-drives!
The target man was putting him over well away from the local landing circle but still quite close to the door.
“Hold on, Soltan,” said Heller. He wasn’t doing any holding on himself, he was just working throttles and switches. I should have believed him!
With a swoop and a drop back, he stood the tug on its tail!
I went sailing down the passage and brought up hard against the door.
The tug didn’t. It touched without a quiver and was now vertically sitting just outside the hangar in the open air.
Heller swarmed down the now vertical rungs and offered me a hand and led me into the crew salon. The furniture had gimbaled over ninety degrees to adjust to the tug’s being upright now. He pulled out a hot jolt canister from the locker, passed it through the heat coil, pulled the tube up and handed it to me. He smiled. “You ought to leave the bubblebrew alone the night before a voyage, Soltan.”
It wasn’t a criticism, it was just the kind of chatter these Fleet guys engage in. Probably a joke. But it made me feel cross. I didn’t want the hot jolt. All I wanted was to go to my room and get at least a few minutes sleep. It was barely daylight outside.
I was just in the act of pushing the hot jolt away when a face jutted into the door.
It was Bawtch!
There he was, with his side-blinders flapping, his popeyes critical, his bony arms piled a yard high with paper!
“I couldn’t resist the extreme pleasure of seeing you off, Officer Gris,” he said. “And I brought you a going-away present. Some orders to stamp.”
“All those?” I groaned.
“No, only about a third. But you sure been busy ordering things! Buy, buy, buy! No wonder taxes are so high. The rest of this is just your neglected work: you have several weeks of reports you haven’t read and I thought it might relax you on your voyage to do some honest application to your job.”
I tried to wish him away. It didn’t work. So I carried the hot jolt back to my room and fished my identoplate out of a waterproof bag, sat down at the gimbal table and started stamping. We would soon be gone. The worst was over—I thought. I would snooze from here on out.
“The rest of this,” said old Bawtch, “I’ll just put in between these voyage clamps where you can see this undone work every time you start to lie down. Hi, what’s this?”
The room hadn’t neatly returned to horizontal. I had not stowed the gear for flight. He wasn’t looking at the weapons that had fallen out of the antiexplosion safe. He was picking the dress uniform off the floor.
“A colonel of the Death Battalion! So that’s how you see yourself, Officer Gris. How nice. How appropriate. You’ll look well in it, too. The color matches your soul exactly.”
I ignored him. I noticed from a bill, Ske had bought that uniform at my expense! I went on stamping until my arm was tired. Finally he picked up the validated and okay-to-pay orders.
“Well, I’m leaving now. I heard a rumor that these ships blow up, so have a nice voyage.” And, with the sort of evil chuckle that only Bawtch can manage, he was gone.
I finished off the hot jolt. Now if I could just stretch out and go to sleep, some hours later I would awaken, refreshed to find us hurtling through space and Voltar far behind us. What a lovely thought.
Alas, that wasn’t the way it happened. I was about to experience the most nerve-shredding departure in space history!
PART ELEVEN
Chapter 8
J
ust as I was about to lie down, I became conscious of a sort of thundering roar outside. The door to my room and air lock were open, but this wave of sound seemed to make the whole ship shake. It was exactly like a motorized army would sound if one were approaching. And then my ears were shattered by a heavy pounding close to hand.
It was too much for my nerves. I leapt up and ran to the air lock. I almost got my face knocked in as a stage section banged into the ship!
A commercial crew was working like fury erecting an eighty-foot-high, portable reviewing platform and wide steps which would reach from the ground up to the air lock!
I stared beyond this. My Gods! The hangar security fence gates to the outside world were wide open! Commercial lorries were pouring through the gap six abreast!
Already dozens of lorries were in the hangar.
Crews were unloading portable stages and bars: they were obviously converting this end of the hangar into the most gigantic entertainment tup hall anybody had ever seen! One bar was over two hundred feet long! One stage alone was thirty feet high and wide enough to take half the dancing girls on Voltar! And there were still more going up and still more lorries coming!
In total panic I rushed to the control deck. Heller was there dropping the meteor armorplates into position to cover the front ports.
I screamed at him, “You can’t have a go-away party! That was just a joke! THIS IS A SECRET MISSION!”
He stopped working and looked at me with surprise. “But you’ve been okaying party orders. You authorized tons of them the other day. Just an hour ago I saw you stamping more!”
“Lombar will kill me!” I shouted.
“I’m sorry,” he said, and he seemed to mean it. “But you see, this ship doesn’t have a name. When she was transferred out of the Fleet she lost her designation. She hasn’t been christened. It’s about the unluckiest thing you can do to cruise around in an unchristened ship. Anybody in the Fleet can tell you that. They might blow up.”
(Bleep) his Fleet customs. But the idea of this tug blowing up was never far from my mind.
He thought it over. “It’s now going on eight! The christening will probably start around ten. We will be able to launch around noon.”
I kept shaking my head.
“I’ll tell you what we’ll do,” Heller said. “We’ll hold it down all we can. We’ll try to keep it just as sort of a family affair. All right?”
I knew I couldn’t call back my orders or stop those lorries now. And there must be hundreds of contractor men, who had worked on the ship, invited with their families. And all the hangar crews. It would be worse to try to stop it than to let it go forward. So I nodded.
“By the way,” he said. “Where’s our crew? They should be aboard by now to get things ready to launch.”
I had no answer to that. Practically sinking through the din, I climbed back down the now vertical passage to my room. It was impossible to sleep, no matter how exhausted I was. I slumped down into a chair.
I instantly got right back up. I had sat on something.
A small bottle.
Where had it come from? It hadn’t been there before, for that was where I had been sitting. I didn’t see how it could have fallen from anything.
Then I remembered with horror that Lombar had said there would be a spy on my tail all the time and I wouldn’t know who it was!
Could this be an example of it?
The bottle said:
IG BARBEN, NEW YORK
AMPHETAMINE, METHEDRINE
5 MG, 100 TABLETS
It seemed to me to be the same bottle Lombar had produced last night.
I knew quite a bit about the stuff. It stimulates the central nervous system by potentiating the effects of norepinephrine, a neurohormone which activates parts of the sympathetic nervous system. It is colloquially called “speed,” along with several other types of the drug. I had always been leery of having anything to do with it. But I was desperate. How was I going to get through the next four hours? I got out the Knife Section knife. I took a little orange, heart-shaped pill. I cut off about a third of it.
I put the bit under my tongue. Bitter. I let it dissolve and absorb through the salivary glands of the mouth.
A tremendous hot “rush” hit me. My heart began to speed up.
Ah, I felt much better. I became confident. I began to feel a little elated. Any worry about where the bottle had come from or the possibility of having a spy in my vicinity with orders to murder me vanished.
What beautiful, lovely stuff this speed was!
I realized I had better get dressed. It wouldn’t do to keep running around in underpants. I gazed at the Death Battalion colonel uniform and it looked very nice. Just the thing.
With movements that were graceful, almost in slow motion but really a bit too fast, I pulled on the skintight pants. Actually, they weren’t skintight. They were three sizes too big, but that did not matter at all. I pulled on the boots. One was too large, the other too small.
But that seemed normal.
With an almost dancing grace, I got into the tunic. It was too small. But the designs were pretty, particularly the red daggers on the back. Fastening the collar almost strangled me but that was of no concern. I was breathing too fast anyway.
The black helmet was too big but I stuffed a towel in it to keep it off my ears. The mirror showed me that the skull seemed huge but was beautiful all the same. Oh, how right everything was with the world.
I put on my rank locket as I danced some floatingly interesting steps I never had known I could do.
Then I found the uniform belts intricate but interesting. The flattened, bleeding entrails presented a problem. Did they cross from right to left or left to right? I untangled them from the rank locket a few times and at length managed to fasten them correctly.
I discovered then the package of accouterments: red metal bands, with spikes, that covered the knuckles of each hand; a red sackful of lead that one hung on the right wrist; the ceremonial silver dagger stained with blood and beautifully enscrolled, Death to Everybody, the battalion motto. I hung it on the belt.
The mirror seemed to be in a euphoric state with the gorgeous image that it shined back. What splendid taste Ske had!
I happened to see my watch and was surprised to discover that it had taken me an hour to dress. So I hastily floated up the passageway, hardly touching the rungs at all.
The review platform was securely in place at the air lock. I stepped out upon it and gazed over the pleasant scene.
All of the platforms and bars had been erected, even a series of dressing rooms for dancing girls. Tup trucks were unloading vast quantities of drinkables.
Banner crews were stringing huge expanses of bunting across doors and anything else.
I counted five bands unloading instruments and setting up on stages. And over there were two fifty-member choruses, one from the Fleet Marines, another from the Fleet base. There was certainly going to be plenty of music. Well, I always like music.
A lot of contractors who had worked on the ship were beginning to drift in. Hundreds of workers and their families. And maybe relatives. Ah, yes. And hangar crews were also drifting over. And there! Crews of Apparatus ships in the hangar were coming from the barracks. They were all early! But beautiful people. All of them.
Ah, yes. And transports of Fleet officers and spacers, unloading in showers of powder blue. Well, welcome, welcome. Fine branch of the service, Fleet.
And here came our crew! They slipped off an Apparatus police van. They hastily grabbed their spacebags. They held them on their shoulders in such a way nobody could see their faces. They came slinking up the eighty feet of steps. Five ex-pirates, still under a death sentence.
I stepped over by the air lock to welcome them. I knew the racial type. Antimancos: their heads are a bit narrow at the top and then swell out on each side to make the face a sort of triangle bottomed by a wide, savage sort of jaw. Their complexions are very swarthy; they average
about three hundred pounds and six foot eight. There is a lot of hate in their very small, narrow-set eyes. The Antimancos feel the universe does not appreciate them. I would show them I did!
Expansively, I said, “I am Officer Gris. I have been waiting for you.”
Maybe it was the way I said it, but the one in the lead, probably the captain, stared at my welcoming hand and then at my clothes and backed up so quickly he almost knocked the rest of them back down the steps. Then he sort of steeled his nerve, uttered a low command and rushed past me through the air lock and vanished into the ship. Inside I could hear what sounded like swear words from them.
I pondered it. I looked at my welcoming hand. There was nothing wrong with it if you disregarded the red, spiked metal knuckles. There was nothing wrong with my uniform either. Quite sharp, really, especially the hangman’s nooses.
Feeling quite benign, I again surveyed the vast scene below.
There was Snelz walking about, lining up a full company of men. Dear Snelz. Always a comfort to have him around.
Wait! Euphoria or no euphoria, what was Snelz doing with a company of men? He only rated a platoon. I looked closer. Even though Snelz was five hundred feet away, the red of the captain’s locket glowed in the morning sun!
With a wave of total certainty, I knew it must have been Snelz who had told Lombar about the Countess Krak! How else would he have gotten promoted? SNELZ WAS THE SPY!
I backed up. Somebody was behind me. I turned and got a foggy view of Heller’s face. “Snelz got promoted!”
Heller laughed. “Yes, I know. I gave him five hundred credits to buy his next rank. He deserved it.”
I felt sort of spinny. If the spy wasn’t Snelz, then who was supposed to kill me?
Heller looked strange to me. He had changed to his Fleet dress uniform. He had a round, flat-topped, brimless cap on his head, slanted a bit to the right and held in place with a gold chin strap. His skintight, waist-length tunic was gleaming with gold citation scrolls against the dark blue. His fifty-mission star was blinding on his chest. A wide red stripe went down the outside of each leg. In his Fleet dress uniform, Heller made a picture that would cause the girls to really faint.