Black Genesis

To My Lord Turn, Justiciary of the Royal Courts and Prison, Government City, Planet Voltar, Voltar Confederacy

Your Lordship, Sir!

I, Soltan Gris, late Secondary Officer of the Coordinated Information Apparatus, Exterior Division of the Voltar Confederacy (Long Live His Majesty Cling the Lofty and All 110 Planets of the Voltar Dominions), in all humbleness and gratitude am herein forwarding the second volume of my accounting of MISSION EARTH.

I am still relying on my notes, logs and strips to record everything as you requested. In this way, I hope to prove to you that my incarceration in your fine prison is well founded.

At the same time, I’m sure Your Lordship will see that nothing was my fault, especially the violence described earlier. Jettero Heller is to blame for everything that happened. Until his appearance, I was merely another Secondary Officer in the Apparatus. That I happened to be the head of Section 451 meant little. Section 451 had only one yellow dwarf star that had only one populated planet (Blito-P3) that its inhabitants called Earth.

Like many other planets, Earth was on the Invasion Timetable. It wasn’t to be conquered for another century, so there was no urgency about the scouting mission sent there. (Scouts are still used because other methods, such as reconnaissance satellites disguised as comets, work fine as general fly-by probes of systems but they can’t get air, soil or water samples of particular planets.)

That was how Jettero Heller entered my life. Heller led this particular scouting party to Earth. They slipped in, got their information and left unnoticed. And even if seen, there was no real problem. Earth governments very conveniently disclaim the existence of “extraterrestrials,” explaining away every sighting and keeping everything a secret. (Anyone who poses a threat is diagnosed by a psychiatrist, which is a profession funded by Earth governments to keep the riffraff in line.)

When Heller returned to Voltar, he filed his report and that was when all Hells broke loose.

My task as the head of Section 451 was to make sure that all such reports were altered, so that no attention was drawn to Blito-P3. The reason was the secret Apparatus base in a country called Turkey. But Heller’s report got by me and ended up before the Grand Council.

What he found was quite alarming: Earth was polluting itself at a rate that would destroy the planet well before the still-distant invasion. That meant the Grand Council would have to order a pre-emptive strike, a very unpopular idea given the costs and resources. But it was even more unpopular with my boss, Lombar Hisst. He wasn’t happy being the head of the Apparatus. He wanted to take over Voltar and the base in Turkey was the key that he would lose if he didn’t act fast.

That was how Lombar created the idea of MISSION EARTH. He convinced the Council that rather than ordering a full-scale invasion, a single agent could secretly infiltrate the planet to introduce some technology that would arrest the pollution. It was a simple and cheap idea, the Grand Council loved it and I thought the matter was done. Then Hisst gave me the first bad news. He planned to send Heller who, as an officer of the Royal Fleet, epitomized everything we despise in the Apparatus: honesty, cleanliness, discipline. The second piece of bad news was that I was to go along and sabotage Heller’s mission.

We briefed Heller at Spiteos, that dark, mountain prison that the Apparatus has secretly maintained in the Great Desert for over a thousand years. That was also where Heller met, much to my regret, the Countess Krak.

I couldn’t understand why he was interested in her. Yes, she’s tall and beautiful and from his home planet, Manco. But she was also a convicted murderess.

They drove me crazy. I was trying to get Heller ready for the mission and he was acting like some lovesick calf, showering her with gifts, cooing to her over canisters of sparklewater and plates of sweetbuns. They would sit for hours relating that stupid Folk Legend 894M about how a Prince Caucalsia fled Manco and set up some colony on an Earth island called Atlantis. That’s all they could talk about. I couldn’t take it.

Then when Heller finally got around to picking the ship for the flight to Earth, he wasn’t satisfied with one that could make the 22 1/2-light-year voyage in a safe, reliable six weeks. Oh, no! He found Tug One. Powered by the dangerous Will-be Was time drives, it would cut the trip to a little over three days. That, he said, gave him time to prepare for the mission.

But that gave me time to make my own preparations. When we got to Earth, I would have to keep track of him because I would be operating from the base in Turkey while he would be in the United States. The solution was micro-bugs that could be surgically implanted next to the audio and optic nerves. With a transmitter-receiver,

I could tap Heller’s sight and hearing. With the 831 Relayer, I could monitor Heller from 10,000 miles away.

My real genius was how I stole them and implanted them into Heller without his knowledge. They worked beautifully. I could see and hear everything Heller was doing and he didn’t have the faintest idea that it was happening. But that just goes to show what an amateur Heller is and what a professional I am!

For further assistance, Lombar Hisst gave me Raht and Terb, two Apparatus agents operating on Earth, to help implement a plan that guaranteed Heller’s quick failure. Lombar’s scheme was to give Heller the identity of the son of the most powerful man on the planet — Delbert John Rockecenter. Since there was no such offspring and since everyone knew and feared Rockecenter, as soon as Heller used the name, he would be finished!

Finally, Tug One was loaded and ready. I naturally expected a quiet lift-off, one befitting a secret mission operating on Grand Council orders.

Then I happened to look out of the ship.

People were pouring into the hangar area! Construction crews were assembling sprawling stages and soaring platforms. Lorries were pouring in with food and drink. Vans were unloading dancing girls and bands!

Heller was throwing a going-away party!

That’s when I found the I. G. Barben bottle and took the Earth-drug called “speed.”

Suddenly, everything was beautiful.

I didn’t care about the thousands of people, the five music bands or the dancing bears. I even enjoyed the fireworks display twenty miles up and the 250 spacefighters that filled the skies. I was even pleased that a Homeview video crew was beaming the festive send-off of our secret mission to billions of people around the Confederacy.

I watched in dreamlike color as a fist fight blossomed into a full-scale riot. Cakes, pastries and canisters flew. Gongs, sirens and blast signals from scores of ships, airbuses and lorries blended with screams, shouts, profanities and snarls (from the dancing bears) while two fifty-man choruses gave a stirring rendition of “Spaceward, Ho.”

I didn’t even care about the assassin that Lombar said was following me to ensure that I didn’t mess up. Besides, I wasn’t messing up. This was a party!

Heller announced it was time to leave and retired to the local pilot seat. I dutifully struggled to shut the airlock but my hands weren’t working. Heller didn’t wait. He lifted us from the pad while I dangled out of the open door until someone pulled me in and slammed it shut.

Suddenly, my euphoria was gone. I realized what had happened.

This was the most UNsecret secret mission anyone had ever heard of!

I had to find Heller and handle this!

Chapter 1

Jettero Heller was perched on the edge of the local pilot seat.

He was still in dress uniform. He had pushed the little red cap to the back of his blond head. With his left hand he was jockeying the throttle to keep the ship moving but no more.

He was holding a microphone in his right hand. He was speaking in the crisp staccato of a Fleet radio officer. “Calling Voltar Interplanetary Traffic Control. This is Exterior Division Tug Prince Caucalsia requesting permission to depart pursuant to Grand Council Order…” He rattled off the numbers and the whole order, right there on open radio band!

I was feeling irritable beyond belief already and this grated on my raw nerves. “For the sake of the Gods, get some notion of security!”

He didn’t seem to hear me. He shifted the mike to his left hand and beckoned at me urgently: “Gris, your identoplate!”

I fumbled in my tunic. Suddenly my fingers connected with an envelope!

There shouldn’t be any envelope in these pockets. All my papers had been put in spaceproof sacks before we left. Where the blazes had this envelope come from? Nobody had handed me any envelope! I felt terribly irritated by it. The thing offended me. It should not have been there!

Heller was frisking me. He found my identoplate and sat back down. He pushed it in the identification slot.

The speaker spat out, “Interplanetary Traffic Control to Exterior Division Tug Prince Caucalsia, Apparatus Officer Soltan Gris in charge. Permission authorized and granted.”

The voyage authority copy slithered out of the radio panel. Heller slid it under a retaining clip and then handed me back my identoplate.

He must have noticed I was still standing there staring at the envelope. He said, “You look bad.” He got up and unsnapped my too tight collar. “I’ll take care of you in a minute. Where’s the captain?”

He didn’t have to look very far. The Antimanco captain had been in the passageway, glaring at Heller. Obviously, the fellow resented Heller’s taking the tug up without a word to him.

“I’ll take over my ship now,” the Antimanco said in a nasty voice.

“Papers, please,” said Heller.

This irritated me. “He is the assigned captain!” I said.

“Papers, please,” said Heller, hand extended to the Antimanco.

The captain must have been expecting this. He hauled out a sheaf of documents in their spaceproof sleeves. They weren’t just his, they were those of the whole crew, five of them. They were stained and crimped and very old.

“Five Fleet subofficers,” said Heller. “Captain, two astropilots, two engineers. Will-be Was engines.” He looked at the seals and endorsements very critically, holding them very close to his eyes. “They seem authentic. But why is there no detaching endorsement from your last ship… three years ago? Yes.”

The captain snatched the documents out of Heller’s hand. There was no endorsement detaching them from their last cruise because they had turned pirate.

The small time-sight was in its slot at the astropilot’s chair. Heller laid a hand on it. “Do you know how to operate this time-sight? It’s obsolete.”

“Yes,” grated the captain and continued in a snarling monotone, “I was serving in the Fleet when they were issued. I was serving in the Fleet when they went obsolete. This whole crew has been serving in the Fleet four times as long as the age of certain Royal officers.” There was real hate in his narrow-set black eyes. Every time he had said “Fleet” he had sort of spat. And when he said “Royal officers” you could hear his teeth snap together at the end of each word.

Heller looked at him closely.

The captain then made what might have been a gracious speech if there hadn’t been so much snarling hatred in it. “As captain, I am of course at your service. It is my duty and that of my crew to see that you arrive safely at your destination.”

“Well, well,” said Heller. “I am very glad to hear that, Captain Stabb. If you need my help, please do not hesitate to call on me.”

“I do not think we will require it,” said Captain Stabb. “And now, if you will please retire to your quarters, I will man this control deck and get this voyage underway.”

“Excellent,” said Heller.

Oh, I didn’t blame the Antimanco for being annoyed. Heller irritated everybody and right now, especially me! All Heller ever did was carp and pick fights!

Heller took me by the arm, “And now we’ll attend to you.”

He lead me down the tilted passageway and into my room. I had not known what he meant. I got a feeling that he was after me and that by the words “attend to you” he must mean he was going to throw me out the airlock. But I didn’t fight very much. I somehow knew that if I moved my arms, the nerves, already stretched to their limit, would snap. And besides, my hands had begun to shake and I couldn’t walk very well.

Very gently, he got me down onto the bed. I was certain he was going to pull out a knife and slash my throat, but all he did was get me out of my tunic. It is a tactic many murderers use — get the victim off guard. I tensed so hard I went into a spasm.

He pulled off my boots and then stripped off my pants. I was certain he was going to lash my ankles together with electric cuffs. He was opening a locker. He must not have been able to find any electric cuffs for he brought out a standard insulation suit and began to wrestle me into it. I would have fought him except that I was beginning to shake too hard.

He got the suit on me and tightened up its pressure around my legs and ankles. I understood now that this was how he was going to shackle me.

“Keep that suit on,” he said. “In case of fast changes in G’s the blood rushes to the legs. Also, you’ll be insulated against stray sparks.”

He began to fasten the straps that hold the body to the bed. Now I knew he had really worked it out how to trap me.

“The quick release is right there by your hand,” he said.

Then he started going around the room, touching things. I knew he was looking for something to torture me with. Didn’t he understand that the way my nerves were tightening up I was being tortured enough?

But it seemed he was only picking up my clothes and loose objects. He had my rank locket in his hand and as he stood considering, I knew he was weighing its use in strangling me. He must have decided against it for he put it in the valuables safe in the wall.

He was looking at the remains of a crushed orange tablet that lay on the edged table and then he picked up the I. G. Barben bottle. It was obvious that he was hoping it was a deadly poison he could secretly introduce into a drink. He didn’t know it was amphetamines and I had taken some to make it through that ghastly going-away party a few hours ago.

“If this is what you were taking,” he said, “I wouldn’t! My advice is to leave it alone, whatever it is. You look awful.”

He put loose objects under clamps. He looked around, vividly disappointed that he had found nothing he could use to torture me.

He moved a button rack and fastened it close to my hand. “If you get too bad, you can press the white button — that calls me. The red button calls the captain. I’ll pass the word that you’re bad off and he can have somebody keep an eye on you.”

Then he saw the envelope I had dropped outside in the passageway and he brought it in. I knew now it was secret orders he had gotten to murder me.

He dropped it on my chest and then wedged it under a strap. “Looks like an order envelope. It’s urgent color, so I’d read it if I were you.”

And then he closed the door and was gone. I knew, though, that it was only to go off and plot with the captain on how to do me in. But I couldn’t object. The way my nerves were stretching, it would be the most merciful thing anyone could do — kill me. But not with an amphetamine: no, my Gods! That would be too cruel!

Chapter 2

For all the remainder of that dreadful, awful day, easily the worst day of my life, I lay and shook. My nerves were stretched so tight they felt they would snap and slay me in the recoil!

I shook until I was too exhausted to shake anymore and still I couldn’t stop.

I couldn’t even think. My whole attention was concentrated upon the plain, physical Hells that assailed me.

They sped the ship up smoothly near to the speed of light. I could not miss noting when they shifted over to Will-be Was drives. There were calls and clangs. The warning lights glared on the cabin wall:

FASTEN GRAVITY BELTS!

Then: DO NOT MOVE! SHIFTING TO TIME DRIVE!

Do not move! Oh, if only I could stop moving; if only I could halt this writhing and sudden jerks. A red sign said:

HYPERGRAVITY SYNTHESIZERS UNBALANCED

Weights were wrenching at me.

Then a tremendous flash seemed to go through the ship. We had gone through the light barrier of 186,000 miles a second.

A sign went purple:

HYPERGRAVITY SYNTHESIZERS SHIFTING TO AUTOMATIC

Then a green sign:

HYPERGRAVITY SYNTHESIZERS BALANCED ON AUTOMATIC

It went off. Then an orange sign:

ACCELERATION NOW BALANCED AND COMPENSATED

YOU MAY UNFASTEN BELTS

YOU MAY MOVE FREELY

ALL IS WELL

I didn’t need any permission to move freely! And all was very not well! I was writhing all over the bed!

We were on time drives. The ship, this dangerous bomb they called a ship, might very well blow up. But fleetingly now and then I caught myself wishing that it would. I could not stand much more of this shaking. I was getting more and more fatigued and yet somewhere my nerves and muscles were digging up the means to shake some more!

The star-time clock on the wall had an inner dial that was now retaining Voltar time. Slowly, painfully, the hours advanced while they seemed to stand still.

Finally, taking two hundred years to do so, it indicated it was midnight on Voltar. I had taken that awful pill sixteen hours ago. Yet, still I shook.

One of the Antimancos, an engineer, came in and held a canister tube to my mouth and I drank. I had not realized anyone’s mouth could get that dry.

Then I wished I hadn’t. Maybe it would save my life and the one thing I didn’t want to do was live!

I desperately wanted to sleep as I was totally exhausted. And yet I couldn’t sleep.

As Voltar time crept all too slowly on, I became more and more depressed.

And then, although I couldn’t imagine how that could be, I got worse! My heart began to palpitate. I began to get dizzy so that the room did odd tilts: at first I thought we were maneuvering in some odd way and then discovered it must be me.

And finally I got a crashing headache.

Warp drives are much smoother than time drives. These Will-be Was engines had little jerks in them; and at each jerk, it felt like my head was going to splinter apart.

It was not until that creeping disc that marked Voltar time indicated noon the next day after departure that I began to recover. I was not well by any means. I just knew I didn’t feel quite so awful.

From time to time an engineer had stepped in. From the lack of expression on his swarthy, triangular Antimanco face, I might as well have been some engine part that needed regulating. But he did bring me more water and he brought me some food.

At thirty-six and a half hours from our departure — a bit past midnight on Voltar — just about when I had decided to sit up, there was a new flurry of lights. Glaring red, the sign said:

MIDPOINT VOYAGE

SHIFTING FROM ACCELERATION

TO DECELERATION SECURE LOOSE OBJECTS

Then: FASTEN GRAVITY BELTS

Then: DO NOT MOVE!

Then: HYPERGRAVITY SYNTHESIZERS REVERSING

There was a moment when nothing had any weight. The (bleeped)[1] I. G. Barben pill bottle and the crumbs on the table drifted up.

Then: STAND BY FOR ROOM REVERSE

The gimbaled room turned. It was very disorienting to me. Fixed objects on the walls were in the same place but everything else had reversed. The sign went purple:

HYPERGRAVITY SYNTHESIZERS SHIFTING TO AUTOMATIC

Then a green sign:

HYPERGRAVITY SYNTHESIZERS BALANCED ON AUTOMATIC

The (bleeped) I. G. Barben bottle and the dust of the pill clattered back down on the table. Then a red sign:

TIME DRIVES BEING REVERSED

There was a dreadful wrenching leap. A sort of a howl sounded through the ship. Then an orange sign:

DECELERATION NOW BALANCED AND COMPENSATED

YOU MAY UNFASTEN BELTS

YOU MAY MOVE FREELY

ALL IS WELL

Except me.

I felt like a wreck. And worse. During the brief moments of weightlessness, I had felt nauseated. I hate weightlessness. I probably never will get used to it. It does funny things to your muscles and heart operation and mine were in no condition to be tampered with.

With a feeble hand, I reached up to take the weight of a belt off my stomach and found something blocking my contact.

The envelope! It was still wedged under the gravity straps. I marvelled that my writhing had not dislodged it.

I felt confused anyway and the confusion of the arrival of this envelope hit me again.

Who could have put it in my pocket? Nobody had handed me any envelope at the departure party. Yet, here it was.

It was urgent color so I thought I had better open it.

A medallion fell out. It was one of the religious kind, a five-pointed star. On the back of each star point there was a tiny, almost imperceptible initial.

I opened the letter. It had no heading. But it did have a date-hour which showed it had been written just before departure had taken place.

It said:

Here is your crew control as promised. Each crew member is indicated by a letter on the back of a star point. These points have been matched to your individual left thumbprint and only you can work it. An outward stroke of your thumb on a star point will send an electric shock into the brain of that individual crew member. It will paralyze him temporarily.

By pressing the front of the medallion and at the same time stroking the star point of a crew member, a hypnopulse will be delivered to that individual.

Really, it should have cheered me up. I was in space with a crew of unreformed pirates and I certainly might need to paralyze them or give them a hypnotic command. Oh, I would wear the medallion all right, inside my tunic and close to the skin. Nobody would suspect. But I just wasn’t in any mood to be cheered up.

I looked at the medallion. The S on the top point could only mean Captain Stabb. I would look up the names of the rest.

I turned it over. It bore on the face the God Ahness, the one they pray to to avert underhanded actions. Then I chanced to turn the dispatch over.

There was a note on it! It was written with his left hand to disguise the writing. But it was Lombar Hisst!

It said:

You may have thought of this going-away party as a sarcastic way of showing the Grand Council the mission had actually left. You came within a dagger thickness of going too far. But as Earth has no way of knowing of the mission, the order has been stayed for now.

I felt my head spin in confusion. Lombar had been at the party!

What order had been stayed?

The date-hour showed it had been put in my pocket almost at the instant of departure. But nobody had been near me! He would never trust this to the crew. Never.

What order?

And then I knew what order he was talking about. The order he had given for some unknown person to kill me if Heller got out of hand and messed up by succeeding.

Did we have a stowaway?

My shaking began all over again.

I unfastened my belts. I had to dispose of this dispatch quickly. I made it over to the trash disintegrator. As I reached for the handle, a long blue spark snapped out and stung me.

Even the ship was striking at me!

I collapsed on a bench and wept.

Chapter 3

About twelve hours later I was not as bad off for I had gotten about eight hours sleep, and although feeling depressed, I had decided I might possibly live.

For an hour or two I had simply lain there and done nothing else but curse I. G. Barben, all I. G. Barben pharmaceutical products, all directors of I. G. Barben. I even committed blasphemy and cursed Delbert John Rockecenter, the true owner — by nominee and hidden controls — of the company!

Although I had read about the cyclic effects of the drug, biochemical words are sort of cold and detached. They do not really carry the message that you get when you meet reality in the flesh. One always has the reservation “that it might happen to others, but it won’t happen to me.” How wrong that reservation was!

Oh, I understood the correct procedure: I knew that a real speed freak, which is what a habitual amphetamine user is called in English, simply would have popped another pill and gotten his euphoria all over again. And he would have kept right on repeating the cycle until he went into total psychotoxia and they had to lock him up as incurably paranoid. Speeders have other tricks, such as injecting it or combining it with barbiturates — downers — when they can’t sleep.

But none of that was for me now! I would prove my mother wrong: she used to say, “Soltan, you never learn anything!” Well, I had learned something now I would never forget! Amphetamines had given me the most horrible day of my life!

I ran out of curse words (and that is saying something, due to my association with the Apparatus) and got up to throw the bottle in the disintegrator. But I halted. I thought, if there is someone sometime I really hate-worse than Heller or his girlfriend-murderess Krak or my Chief Clerk Bawtch — I’d give him one of these speed pills! So I dropped them in with my valuables. Then I changed my mind again. It was impossible to hate anyone that much, so I threw them out.

When I lay back down, I saw the papers that Bawtch had left. I was pretty tired of these steel-alloy walls and I thought it would take my mind off things if I did some work.

I was going through dull things like Earth (or Blito-P3) poppy crop reports, predicted yields based on predicted rainfall and predictions about predictors, a doorman at the United Nations wanting too much money for bugging a diplomat’s car, an overcharge on an assassination of an Arab sheik — dull things like that — when I came to something fascinating: Bawtch had made a mistake! Incredible! Wonderful! He was always bragging that he never did! And here it was!

The report was from the Chief Interrogator of Spiteos. It concerned one Gunsalmo Silva, the brawling American I had seen carried off the Blixo back on Voltar.

He had been questioned exhaustively. He had been born in Caltagirone, Sicily, an island near Italy. He had killed a policeman in Rome when he was fourteen and had had to emigrate hastily to America. In New York City, he had been arrested for stealing cars and had graduated from the prison with honors. Thus equipped, he had obtained honest employment as a hit man for the Corleone family of the New Jersey Mafia and had graduated to become a bodyguard of Don “Holy Joe” Corleone himself. When “Holy Joe” got “wasted,” Gunsalmo had fled back to Sicily and then, finding it “too hot,” had “taken it on the lam” for Turkey, hoping to become an “opium runner.” As our Turkish base had an order to kidnap a highly placed Mafioso — simply to update information — Gunsalmo Silva had wound up on the Blixo.

The interrogators had bled him pale for information but all he revealed consisted of the names and addresses of the heads of two Mafia families, one of which was now running the gambling in Atlantic City, and the names of four United States senators who were on Mafiosi payrolls and one judge of the Supreme Court they had blackmail on. So what’s new?

The Chief Interrogator — an Apparatus officer named Drihl, a very thorough fellow — had added a note:

A rather useless and uninformed acquisition as he was only a hit man and not privy to upper-level politics and finance. Would suggest the order, if the data required is of operational importance, be reforwarded to Blito-P3 to kidnap someone of a more informed rank.

But that wasn’t where Bawtch had made his mistake. It was in the orders endorsement section at the end, the place where I have to stamp.

It was an “unless otherwise directed” form. It said:

Unless otherwise directed, said Gunsalmo Silva shall be hypnoblocked as to his stay in Spiteos and shall then be forwarded to the Extra-Confederacy Apparatus Hypno-School of Espionage and Infiltration, trained and hypnoblocked concerning his kidnapping and returned in memory suspension for further disposition by the Base Commander on Blito-P3.

The form had a second line:

If said subject is to be discontinued — a clerical euphemism for being killed — the ordering officer is to stamp here:_________.

There was the place right there where it could be stamped!

And that careless Bawtch had not marked it urgent and had not presented it to me for stamping, even though he knew very well that if the form was not stamped in two days, the “unless otherwise directed” would go into effect. A criminal omission! Leaving a line that could be stamped unstamped was about the sloppiest bureaucracy anybody could imagine!

I hastily thumbed through the next half-dozen forms. Yes, indeed. Old Bawtch was really slipping. I knew that sour temper would do him in someday. There were seven forms here which — unless otherwise directed — ordered people to be hypnoblocked and sent elsewhere. Every one of them had a “discontinued” line which could be stamped! The old fool had missed every one of them. Him and his flapping side-blinders. Oh, it was a good thing for him I wasn’t back on Voltar. I would throw them on his desk and say in a haughty voice, “I knew you were slipping, Bawtch. Look at those unstamped, perfectly stampable lines!”

Well, maybe I wouldn’t have said that. But the incident cheered me up quite a bit. Imagine old Bawtch forgetting to give me something to stamp! Incredible!

Then a sudden thought struck me. The Prahd package! The one that contained his overcoat and duplicate identoplate and the forged suicide note. I had been so hurried that night, I’d forgotten to give it to a courier to hold and mail a week after we left. That package was still sitting there on the floor beside my office desk.

Oh, well, we can’t remember everything, can we? A mere detail. Unimportant.

I plowed on through the rest of the pile and finished them. I was disappointed that I had not consumed more time. I didn’t want to go back to sleep. I couldn’t, actually. And here I was careening through space, boxed in, in a little steel-alloy cubicle with nothing to do but think. And thinking was something I wanted to avoid just now.

I saw that the bulkhead clock had acquired a new circle. It said:

I blew up! (Bleep) Heller anyway. Making a silly mistake like that.

Keeping me not just twenty-two but another thirty-four hours in this (bleeped) box.

I was furious!

I was going back and give him a piece of my mind. The worst piece of it I could locate!

I got up. An electric arc from the table corner zapped my bare hand. I put my feet on the floor. An arc leaped off a studding and hit me in the toe. I grabbed for a steadying handrail and the blue snap of electricity almost burned my fingers. This (bleeped) tug was alive with electricity!

Somebody had laid out some insulator gloves and boots. I got them on.

I jabbed at a communicator button to the aft area. “I’m coming back to see you!” I yelled.

Heller’s voice answered, “Come ahead. The doors are not locked.”

It was time I put him in his place!

Here we were, tearing through space like madmen, only to have to wait and only because he had made a stupid mistake. Forcing the ship to go this fast could blow it up. And all for nothing!

Chapter 4

Maybe it was because I was still confused as part of the after effects of the speed or because all the wild sparks flying around got me rattled, but I had a bad time of it trying to find my way through the “circle of boxes.” I got my hands zapped, even through the insulator gloves, on two different silver rails, and to add pain to injury, I got my face too close to a doorframe and my nose got zapped.

Heller was in the top lounge with all the huge black windows.

The moment I entered, I yelled at him, “You didn’t have to go this fast!”

He didn’t turn around. He was half-lying in an easy chair. He had on a blue insulator suit and hood and he was wearing blue gloves.

He was idly playing a game called “Battle.” He had it set up on an independent viewing screen and his opponent was a computer.

“Battle,” in my opinion, is a silly game. The “board” is a three-dimensional screen; the positions are coordinates in space; each player has fourteen pieces, each one of which has special moves. It presupposes that two galaxies are at war and the object is to take the other player’s galaxy. This itself is silly: technology is not up to two galaxies fighting.

Spacers play it against each other, by choice. When they play it against a computer, they almost always lose.

I looked at his back. He was a lot too calm. If he only knew what I had in store for him, he wouldn’t be so relaxed! So far as games went now, they were all stacked against him. He would be a couple dozen light-years from his nearest friend. He was one and we were many. I had him bugged. And he even thought this was an honest, actual mission. The idiot.

Suddenly, with a flash, the image of the board blew out. It gave me a lot of satisfaction as he seemed to have been winning.

In a disgusted tone, he said, “That’s the third time that board has wiped in the last hour.” He shoved the button plate away from him. “Why bother to set it up again?”

He turned to me, “Your accusation about going too fast doesn’t make sense, Soltan. Without a tow, this tug just goes faster and faster. It’s what distance the voyage is, not what speed you set.”

I sat down on a sofa so I could level a finger at him. “You know I don’t know anything about these engines. You’re taking advantage of me! It won’t do!”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” he said. “I guess they don’t go into this very deeply at the Academy.”

They did, but I had flunked.

“You have to understand time,” he said. “Primitive cultures think energy movement determines time. Actually, it is the other way around. Time determines energy movement. You got that?”

I said I had but he must have seen I hadn’t.

“Athletes and fighters are accustomed to controlling time,” he said. “In some sports and in hand-to-hand combat, a real expert slows time down. Everything seems to go into slow motion. He can pick and choose every particle position and he is in no rush at all. There’s nothing mystic about it. He is simply stretching time.”

I wasn’t following him, so he picked up his button plate and hit a few.

“First,” he said, “there is LIFE.” And that word appeared at the top of the screen. “Some primitive cultures think life is the product of the universe, which is silly. It’s the other way around. The universe and things in it are the product of life. Some primitives develop a hatred for their fellows and put out that living beings are just the accidental product of matter, but neither do such cultures get very far.”

He was flying into the teeth of my own heroes: psychiatrists and psychologists. They can tell you with great authority that men and living things are just rotten chunks of matter and ought to be killed off, which proves it! Just try and tell them there is such a thing as independent life and they’d order you executed as a heretic! Which shows they are right. But I let him go on. Not too long from now, he’d get what was coming to him.

“Next,” said Heller, “there is TIME.” And he put that on the screen. “And then there is SPACE.” And he put that on the screen. “And then there is ENERGY. And then there is MATTER. And you now have the seniorities from top to bottom.”

The board now said:

“As WE are life,” he continued, “we can control this scale. Most living creatures are so much the effect of their environment that they think it controls them. But as long as you think this way, you won’t get anyplace much.

“The reason we are an advanced technology is because we can control that scale there to some degree. A technology advances to the extent it can control force. That is the formula of technical success: the ability to control the factors you see there on that screen. If you get the idea they control you, you wind up a failure.”

Oh, he was really into heresy now! Any psychologist can tell you that man is totally the effect of everything, that he can change nothing!

“So,” said Heller, “we have to understand time a bit in order to at least try to control it. Actually, the idea of controlling time is inconceivable to savages. And in defense of them, it does seem the most immutable entity there is. Nothing seems to change it ever. It is the most adamant and powerful factor in the universe. It just inexorably crushes on and on.

“The Voltarian discoveries about time made them a space power.

“Time is the thing which molds the universe, unless interfered with by life.

“Time determines the orbits of the atom, the fall of the meteorite, the rotation of the planet and the behavior of a sun. Everything is caught up in an inexorable time cycle. In fact, nothing would exist were it not for time which, below life, establishes the patterns of motion.

“It is time which says where something will be in the future.

“Fortunately, one can discover what this determination for the future is. Time has what you can call side bands — a sort of harmonic. We can read directly what time will cause to be formed, up to twenty-four hours in the future. Mathematicians have an inkling of this when they calculate object paths and positions. But it can be read directly.”

He reached down and pulled a case out of a locker. It was one of the two time-sights which he had brought aboard. He showed me where the variable knob was and had me point it at the door.

I didn’t know what I expected to see. The instrument was easy to hold, like a little camera. So I thought I would humor him and pretend to work it. The image was awful when seen through the eyepiece: it was green; it was more like a picture done on a printing machine with dots than a true picture of something. Still, I could make out the entrance to the room.

I twiddled the big knob on the side of it, not expecting more than additional dots. Then I seemed to see a shape. It seemed to be leaving the room. I looked at the door not through the machine. There was nobody there. I twiddled the knob again and got the shape back.

If you stretched your eyeballs and were good at reading dots, that image looked an awful lot like my back!

I twiddled the knob again. It made the image leave again. The image, now that I was more accustomed to it, looked defeated, all caved in! It made me angry. I wouldn’t be leaving this room, all caved in! I thrust the time-sight back at him.

He read the dial: “Six minutes and twenty-four seconds. What did you see?”

I wasn’t going to let him win anything. I shrugged. But I was cross.

“You have to have this to steer a ship running at high speeds,” he said. “It tells you in advance whether you have run into anything and you can, in now, steer to avoid doing that. Life can alter things.”

I determined right then to change leaving this room, caved in. “None of this excuses running these engines flat-out just to get there so we can wait!”

“Oh, yes,” said Heller, recollecting what we were supposed to be talking about. “The Will-be Was engines.

“Now, in the center of a Will-be Was there is an ordinary warp-drive engine just to give power and influence space. There is a sensor, not unlike this time-sight, but very big. It reads where time predetermines a mass to be. Then the engine makes a synthetic mass that time incorrectly reads to be half as big as a planet. The ordinary power plant thrusts this apparent mass against time itself. According to the time pattern, that mass, apparently HUGE, should not be there. Time rejects it. You get a thrust from the rejection. But, of course, the thrust is far too great as the mass is only synthetic. This causes the engine base to be literally hurled through space.

“You can feel a slight unsteadiness in the ship. A jumpiness. That’s because the drive is operating intermittently. As soon as it is hurled, it then sends another false message to time and is hurled again.

“Unfortunately, on a ship this light, having so little mass, the cycle just keeps on adding up. The sensors read the new time determination, the synthetic mass is again slammed against time, time rejects it. ‘Will-be,’ says the mass synthesizer. ‘Was,’ insists time. Over and over. And the speed simply tries to rise up to infinity. There’s no friction except an energy wake, no real work to do, so fuel efficiency is good.

“The ship travels in the opposite direction to which the core drive in the Will-be Was converter is pointed. So steering is done by moving the direction of the small internal engine.

“As you are travelling far, far faster than the speed of light, the visual image of an obstruction can’t reach you in time and you have to guide the vessel by spotting future collisions. You see yourself collide, using the time-sight, with some heavenly mass in the future, so you change your course in the present and you don’t collide. Life can control such things.

“Battleships have big time-sights geared to their speed. But this one is manual and has to be adjusted.”

With a pop, the screen blew out. That startled me. I said, “You should shield those engines so they don’t spray power all over the ship!”

“Oh, these sparks aren’t from the engine room. We’re travelling so fast that we are intercepting too many photons — light particles from stars. We’re also crossing force lines of gravity you wouldn’t ordinarily detect, but at this speed, it kind of makes us into an electric motor. We are picking up incidental charge faster than we can use it or shed it.”

“You were going to fix that!” I had him there.

He shrugged. Then he brightened. “You want to see it?”

Before I could protest, he reached over and hit the buttons that turned the whole black surround of walls into a viewscreen which gave the exterior scene of space we were in!

Suddenly, I was just perched on a chair and floor that existed like a platform in space.

I almost fainted.

I have seen a high-speed boat going through a lake, throwing up enormous fans of spray and leaving a vast turbulence of writhing wake. Turn that yellow-green[2] and make it three-dimensional and that was what I was looking at.

Horrifying!

The energy shedding flared out in twisting, terrifying sworls to every side!

Behind us, for what might be a hundred miles, the collisions of tortured particles still churned!

“My Gods!” I yelled. “Is that why Tug Two blew up?”

He seemed to be admiring the churning Hells around us. It took him a bit to notice I had spoken.

“Oh, no,” he said, “I don’t think that was why she blew up. Could have been, but not really likely.”

He was punching some buttons on the small independent viewscreen he had been playing the game on. “I was calculating what my ability to jump and my rate of fall would be on Blito-P3. The figures are still in the bank, so I’ll use the gravity of Earth to show you.”

The Hells around us roared on. The small screen lit up. “Our average speed of this trip is 516,166,166 miles a second. Our top speed at midvoyage when we changed over to decelerate was 1,032,885,031 miles per second. This is pretty small, really, as the trip is only about twenty-two light-years. Intergalactic travel, where one goes at least two million light-years, attains speeds much greater than that. It’s the distance that determines the speed, you see.

“There’s not much dust and not many photons between galaxies, so you don’t get all this electronic wake like you do inside a galaxy where there’s lots of energy.” He looked at the horrible wash. “Pretty, isn’t it.”

He recalled himself to his task. “Anyway, my theory is that Tug Two never blew up because of that stuff.”

Heller hit some more buttons. “Anyway, I was figuring what my jump and fall on Blito-P3 would be, so we’ll use Earth gravity as the amount for G. Also, I set our ship up for Earth G, as it will be operating there and I wanted to get used to it.

“This ship has gravity synthesizers, of course. You couldn’t ride in it at these speeds if it didn’t. Our acceleration has been 42,276,330 feet per second per second. You have to have that much constant acceleration to attain these speeds. A body can tolerate no more than two or three G’s for any period of time. Actually, if you experienced four to six G’s longer than six seconds, you could expect restricted muscular activity because of apparent increased body weight; you would lose peripheral vision and gray out; then you would lose central vision, black out and go unconscious because the blood would be pulled from the head to pool in the lower parts of the body.

“At this acceleration the gravity synthesizers are handling an awful lot more than that. I think Tug Two blew up because her gravity synthesizers failed.”

“Well,” I said, refusing to be impressed. “How many gravities are they handling?”

“To counteract the acceleration, this equipment is handling…” He pointed at the screen.

It said:

1,289,401.409 G’s!

I tried to get my heart back down out of my throat. It meant my body, in the absence of synthesizers, would weigh 1,289,401.409 times what it normally did, due solely to acceleration and, now, deceleration!

“So,” said Heller, “I don’t think Tug Two blew up at all. I think the gravity synthesizers failed and her crew simply went splat! She may be somewhere in the universe now, still hurtling along as plasma. They only knew she disappeared. That’s why I didn’t bother with the problem. I hope the contractors did a good job on the gravity synthesizers. We were pushed to leave so fast that I didn’t get too much chance to test the new installation.”

He smiled reassuringly as the screen spark-flashed and blew out. “So don’t be worried about the tug blowing up. It won’t. It’s we who would go bang, not the tug.”

Heller put the button plate down. “As to arrival time, we would have found it easy to keep. But one has to be able to read screens very well to land in an area one has never seen before.

“Captain Stabb is just a bit nervous. He’s a bit of a grouch like some old subofficers and he’s gotten too careful.” He shrugged. “He wants to see a place in daylight before he goes in for the first time, that’s all. So he’ll hang up about five hundred miles and study it in daylight for hours and when he’s sure there aren’t sudden traffic movements and that the base isn’t a trap, he’ll take it in, in the first darkness.

“Too bad. I planned a predawn arrival because I thought you’d want to be up and on the job early. You probably have things to do at the base.

“But it all has its advantages. I’ll be able to look this so-called base over, too. I’ll tell you what. Right now you look pretty shaky. Why don’t you go get some more sleep and when we’re hanging above that area in daylight, say about noon, come back here and have some lunch with me and you can show me the various points of interest.

Right now, if I were you, I’d get some more rest. You don’t look good, you know.”

I didn’t even tell him to please turn off that awful churning wake that still surrounded us at every hand.

I cursed feebly to myself.

I was walking out that (bleeped) door just like that (bleeped) time-sight had shown — shoulders slumped and all caved in!

Chapter 5

As noon approached, I felt infinitely improved. We had come down out of time drive smoothly. We were now on auxiliaries, barely running. I had had a marvelous long sleep and as seventy-six hours had now passed since I had taken that (bleeping) speed, it was out of my bloodstream.

I had watched some Homeview comedies in the crew’s salon and had even had a dice game with one of the engineers — he had lost half a credit to me.

But what made it really good was Stabb. He had seated himself in the captain’s chair and when the dice game was over, he put his huge mouth near my ear. He whispered, “I been watching you, Officer Gris, and if I read the signs right, we’re going to get a crack at that (bleeping) (bleepard) Royal officer, ain’t we?”

I felt good enough to be witty. I whispered back, “I heard you very extinctly.”

He laughed. It’s a bit awesome to see an Antimanco laugh: their mouths and teeth are so big in proportion to their triangular faces. It was an uproarious laugh. In fact, it was the first time any of them had laughed and it so startled the off-duty pilot that he burst in to see if something was wrong.

The captain whispered to him and he whispered to the off-duty engineer and they both went off to whisper to their mates and very shortly there was a lot of pleased laughing in the forward end of the ship.

Captain Stabb took me by the hand as I was leaving. “Officer Gris, you’re all right! My Gods, Officer Gris, you’re all right!”

So when I went back to have lunch with Heller, I was feeling great.

Heller was in the upper lounge. He had laid out a tray of sparklewater and sweetbuns and he waved me to a seat.

He had the starboard viewscreens on to see the exterior view. We were hanging in the sun, five hundred miles above our base, just a hundred miles inside the Van Allen belts. And there, way below, was Turkey!

The ship was really on its side. Spacers are crazy. They don’t really care whether they are right side up or down. It was a bit disconcerting to me to have a vertical tray and sit on a vertical seat. It always makes me feel like I’ll fall for sure. The gravity synthesizers of course take care of it all but nevertheless I was very careful with my canister. It is such moments that make me glad I am not a spacer!

Regardless, I felt good and I actually enjoyed the sparklewater. When I had finished my lunch, life looked pretty good. We had all but arrived, had not blown up and the gravity compensators had held.

I noticed Heller had out all the computer papers I had given him on Voltar and several books and charts. I also saw the “delete” notice which said Lombar had removed all cultural and such material from the Earth data banks.

“I’ve been identifying these seas by local names,” he said. “But you better verify them for me.”

The day below was bright and almost cloudless. It was just past the middle of August in local seasons so it was somewhat dry and the only slight haze in some places was dust.

I was glad to know that he didn’t know everything. “That sea at the bottom,” I said, “below western Turkey, the bright blue one, is the Mediterranean. Just above Turkey there is the Black Sea — although as you can see for yourself, it isn’t black. Over to your left, there, the one with all the little islands in it, is the Aegean Sea. And that little landlocked one in northwest Turkey, is the Sea of Marmara: that city you see at the top of it is Istanbul, once known as Byzantium and before that, Constantinople.”

“Hey, you really know this place.”

I was pleased. Yes, I really knew this place. And, factually speaking, while he might know engineering and space flight, he didn’t know a ten-thousandth of what I knew about my own trade: covert operations and espionage. He would learn that to his sorrow in due course.

But I said, “Just to the left of the center of Turkey, there is a large lake. See it? That’s Lake Tuz. Now look to the west of it and slightly south and you’ll see another lake. That’s Lake Aksehir. There’s some more lakes just southwest of it. See them?”

He did. But he said, “Point out Caucasus.”

Oh, my Gods, here we went on that stupid theme. “Over there, just east of the Black Sea, there’s an arm of land that comes down and joins Turkey. That’s Caucasus. Way over on the horizon is the Caspian Sea and that bounds Caucasus on the east. But you can’t go in there. That’s communist Russian country. Georgia and Armenia are right there on the Russian side of the border. But Caucasus is out of bounds. Forget it. I’m trying to show you something.”

“Very pretty planet,” said Heller irrelevantly. “You mean nobody can go into the Caucasus?”

I let him have it. “Listen, northeast of Turkey and clear to the Pacific Ocean on the other side of this planet, that’s all communist Russia! They don’t let anybody in, they don’t let anybody out. They are a bunch of mad nuts. They’re run exclusively by a secret police organization called the KGB!”

“Like the Apparatus?” he said.

“Yes, like the Apparatus! No! I mean you can’t go there. Now will you pay attention?”

“That’s awful,” he said. “A piece of the planet that big being run by secret police. And it’s such a pretty planet. Why does the rest of the planet let them get away with something crazy like that?”

“Russia stole the secrets of atomic fission and it’s a thermonuclear power and you have to be careful of them because they’re so crazy they could blow up the whole planet.”

He was busy writing on a pad and, unlike him, was saying the words as he wrote: “Russia crazy. Run by KGB secret police like Apparatus. Could blow up the world with stolen thermonuclear power. Got it.”

I finally had his attention. “Now get off this Caucasus fixation and pay attention.”

“So poor Prince Caucalsia even lost his second home! The Russians got it!”

I raised my voice. “Look west from Lake Tuz in a straight line across the top of Lake Aksehir and about a third of that distance further west. That is Afyon. That’s the landmark!”

Well, I had gotten him unfixed from that stupid Folk Legend 894M! He obediently reached for a control panel and the whole scene swooped up at us. I felt I was falling and grabbed hold of my seat.

“Oho!” said Heller, staring at the enlarged scene. “Hello, hello, hello! Looks just like Spiteos!”

Actually, I sometimes wondered if that was why this base long ago had been chosen by the Apparatus. But I said, “No, no. Just coincidence. Its name is Afyonkarahisar.”

“What’s that mean in Voltarian?”

I wasn’t going to tell him the real meaning: Black Opium Castle. I said, “It means ‘Black Fortress.’ The base rock rises 750 feet. The ramparts on top of it are the remains of a Byzantine fort which replaced the original built by the Arzawa, a tribe of an ancient people called the Hittites.”

“It would probably be blacker if it wasn’t for that factory near it pouring out white dust.”

“That’s the cement plant. Afyon is a town of about seventy thousand people.”

He pulled back the scene to get a wider view and sat there admiring it. There were still some white streaks of snow on the taller mountains around Afyon. The tiny outlying villages were a patchwork. None of the savage winds which came down from the high plateau were felt from such a height as this. Turkey is a pretty brutal country for the most part.

“What’s all this yellow and orange?” He was looking at the vast panorama of flowers which blanket the valleys. And before I could stop him he twisted the controls and we were looking at them very close. It made me feel awful, like I’d fallen five hundred miles. Spacers are really crazy.

“Flowers?” said Heller.

“The yellow ones in the fields near the road are sunflowers. They are huge. They produce a vast number of seeds in the center which people love to eat. It’s a food crop.”

“Wow,” he said. “There’s enough square miles of them! But what are those smaller ones in the other fields? The ones with various colored petals, dark centers and gray-green leaves?”

He was looking at Papaver somniferum, the opium poppies, the stuff of deadly sleep and dreams, the source of heroin — the real reason the Apparatus had this base. He was too close for comfort. Afyon is the opium growing center of Turkey, perhaps the world.

“They sell them in the flower markets,” I lied. He was such a child at a game he didn’t know. “Now, what I wanted to point out was the actual base. Pull that view wider. Good. Now draw a line from that lake there. Got it? Through Afyonkarahisar. Now, right on that line is a mountain. Got it?”

He had. I continued, “The top of that mountain is an electronic simulation. It doesn’t exist. But the wave scanners they use on this planet — and any they will develop — react on it normally. You just land straight through it and you are into our hangars.”

“Pretty good,” he said.

“It’s quite old, really,” I said. “Rock disintegrator crews came in here several decades ago from Voltar and built it and the subterranean base. It’s quite extensive. Last year we enlarged it.”

He seemed impressed, so I said, “Yes, I had a hand in its extension. I added a lot of burrows and twists and turns. You can emerge in several places quite unexpectedly. But I had a real master to work from.” “Oh?” he said.

I checked myself. I had almost said Bugs Bunny. He wouldn’t understand. I hurried on. “Center in on that mountain and nearby you will see a satellite tracking station. Got it? Good. Now, at the end of that canyon, you see that square block building? Good. That’s the International Agricultural Training Center for Peasants. All right, now do you see that new earth there in the north of the canyon? That is an archaeological dig in an old Phrygian tomb and those houses around it are where the scientists live.”

“Well?” he said.

I wanted to startle him. He wasn’t the only bright one in the universe. “The satellite engineers, the whole school staff, all the scientists at the dig — they’re all us!” “Well, I never! Really?”

I knew I had him. “Turkey is so crazy to get modernized, has been for over half a century, that a lot of our work is even state and internationally funded by Earth!” “But how do you get papers? Identoplates and so on?” “Listen, these are very primitive people. They breed heavily. They have disease and babies die. Typical riffraff. So for over half a century, when a baby is born, we’ve made sure the birth is registered. But when it dies, we’ve made sure the death isn’t registered. The officials are corrupt. That gives us tons of birth certificates, more than we could ever hope to use.

“Also, the country is waist-deep in poverty and workers go abroad by the hundreds of thousands and they register overseas and this even gives us foreign passports. “Once in a while — they have a thing called the draft for the Army — one of our birth certificates gets drafted. So an Apparatus guardsman answers the call and does his tour in the Turkish army. The Turkish army runs the country so we even have officers in Istanbul. Naturally, we choose people who look somewhat like Turks but this country has dozens of races in it so who notices?”

“Brilliant,” said Heller. And, in fact, he was impressed. “Then we kind of own this little piece of the planet.”

“Pretty much,” I said.

“I wish you controlled some of the Caucasus,” he said. “I’d really like to look it over.”

He was hopeless. I smiled indulgently. “Well, tonight we’ll be groundside and you can catch a ride into Afyon and look over our little empire anyway.” I wanted to really test those bugs that Prahd had implanted in him.

“Good,” he said. “Thanks for the conducted tour. I really appreciate it.”

We almost parted friends. On his side, anyway. The poor sap. He might be an expert in his own field. But not in mine. I really had him where I wanted him, over a score of light-years from home and friends and into an area we controlled. He had no Fleet pals here! And I had friends by the thousands!

He might as well get used to Earth. He would never leave it, even if I let him live!

Chapter 6

We slipped down secretly through the darkness toward our base on Planet Earth. I had formulated my instructions. I had them all ready to issue the moment we landed.

That afternoon, I had taken time to think it all over and review policy.

It is a sound maxim in covert operations that when you find you are acting on the orders of an insane person, you take complete stock of your own position in the mess. I had found that, without any slightest doubt, Lom-bar Hisst was a paranoid schizophrenic, compounded by pronounced megalomania, confirmed by aural hallucinations, complicated by probable heroin addiction and consolidated with a consumption of amphetamines: in other words, stark, staring mad. Nuts. Executing any of his commands could be very dangerous.

So I did a little resume of position. I even did it in the proper resume form. I wrote:

1. Lombar Hisst needed drugs on Voltar to undermine and overthrow the Voltar government and take power.

1-a. Blito-P3 was the only known source of such drugs.

1-b. The Earth base existed to keep the drugs coming.

2. Delbert John Rockecenter, by nominee, ownership and other means, controlled the pharmaceutical companies of the planet.

2-a. Delbert John Rockecenter, through his banks and another means, controlled, amongst the rest, the Government of Turkey.

2-b. Delbert John Rockecenter’s wealth depended upon oil and the control of all Earth’s energy sources.

2-c. Delbert John Rockecenter could go broke if anyone monkeyed with his energy monopoly.

2-d. Conclusion of 2: If the pharmaceutical monopoly passed into other, less criminal hands, we could be out on our stinking ear!

3. From the viewpoint of Earth, Jettero Heller’s presence here would be extremely beneficial.

3-a. Earth would have cheap and abundant fuel.

3-b. As economic stresses are caused by scarce fuel, then Heller’s technical assistance would, as a side benefit, abruptly end the raging inflation and bring about wide prosperity.

3-c. If Heller changed the fuel type, the air would clean up.

3-d. If Heller did not succeed, the planet would be liable to self-destruct from pollution.

3-e. If word got to the Grand Council that Heller had failed, it would launch an immediate and bloody invasion, costly to Voltar and fatal to Earth, just to prevent the present inhabitants from rendering the target worthless with their filthy housekeeping.

3-f. If Heller succeeded, the threatened invasion would go back on schedule to be undertaken a hundred years from now per the original Invasion Timetable.

3-g. In a hundred years, during which it had abundant and practical fuel, the planet could probably raise itself to a higher technological level and the type of “invasion” Earth would experience then is known as a “PC Type Invasion,” meaning “Peaceful Cooperation” wherein Voltar would just want some bases and would minimally interfere in the planet’s internal affairs. There would be no blood or destruction and everybody would be happy.

3-h. Jettero Heller’s presence on Earth was a Godsend both to Earth and Voltar.

4. Soltan Gris had evidence that Lombar Hisst had put an unknown assassin close to one Soltan Gris.

4-a. If said Soltan Gris did not carry out the orders of said Lombar Hisst, said assassin would emphatically terminate the life of said Soltan Gris with malice aforethought and ferocity!

CONCLUSION: Carry out the exact orders of Lombar Hisst cleverly, painstakingly and with enormous care! And with no questions whatever!

If I do say so myself, it was a brilliant resume of the situation. It covered not only the essentials but every salient point of any importance. A masterpiece!

So down we slid, undetected by the crude surveillance equipment of the primitive planet’s military forces. They have what we call “bow and arrow”-type radar. Easily nullified.

We went through the electronic illusion of the mountaintop right on target. And I will say this, pirate or not, Captain Stabb was a good spaceship handler. We came down on the trundle dolly with only a severe jolt.

The ship vibrated as the trundle dolly moved us over to the side, into a bay within the mountain, clearing the landing target for other arrivals and take-offs.

I patted Captain Stabb on the back. We were fast friends now. “A good groundfall,” I said. “Couldn’t have done it better myself.”

He beamed at me.

“Now, what I want you to do,” I said, “is warn, as a friend, any Apparatus people you meet, that this bird we’re carrying is actually a Crown agent armed with secret orders to execute anybody he finds anything out about. Just tip them off they’d take their life in their hands if they talked to him.”

Oh, Captain Stabb went for that! The moment the airlock was opened, all three hundred pounds of him were down the landing ladder like an earthquake to spread the word while he pretended to be concerned only with clearing us in. A real jewel.

A door swung open down the passageway and Heller climbed up the rungs. “Any objection if I wander around?”

“None, none,” I said cheerfully. “You can even absorb some local color. Here’s a slip so they’ll hand you appropriate clothes at the Garb Section, right down that passageway over there. And why not take a spin around town? It’s early yet. Here’s a transport authorization slip: you can hook on to one of the trucks. Lots of people speak English in Turkey, so that’s okay. You haven’t any papers yet, but nobody will bother you. Just say you’re a new technician at the satellite tracking station. Feel free, have fun, live it up!” I added in commercial English with a gay laugh.

I watched him as he went smoothly down the ladder and disappeared into the Garb Section tunnel. He was just a stupid baby at this game, but after all, I had been a professional for a long time.

My baggage was all ready. I barked for a hangar handler and in minutes I had a motor dolly loaded up and was on my way.

There is one flaw in the Blito-P3 hangar. Earthquakes are common and severe in Turkey and this big of a space disintegrated out of solid rock needs an awful lot of pressure-beam supports. They turn off the cone ones when ships arrive and depart and then they turn them on again. I had not been down here for nearly a year and I had forgotten about them. I was right in the path of one when they were turned back on and it almost knocked me flat. Perhaps this made me a little more exacting and severe than I would have been, for truthfully, I was awfully glad to be out of that (bleeped) tug!

I stopped by the Officers’ Section and grabbed me a trench coat.

Using the exit through the “archaeological workman’s barracks,” I ordered up a “taxi,” piled in my baggage and had the Apparatus driver take me directly to the base commander’s office. It is in a mud hut near the International Agricultural Training Center for Peasants. It seems to be accepted that he is its superintendent. That excuses all the traffic in and out of his place, for peasants come there to be trained — in how to raise a lot more opium for a lot less price.

The Turks are actually Mongols. The word Turk is really a corruption of their original name, “the T’u-Kin,” which is Chinese. They invaded Asia Minor in about the tenth century, Earth time. But they don’t look Chinese and they invaded and commingled in an area that already had hundreds of other racial types, so it is very simple to find, in the Voltar Confederacy of a hundred and ten planets, vast numbers of people who can pass for Turks.

The base commander was one of these. His real name was Faht, so he calls himself Faht Bey — the Turks put “Bey” after their names for some reason. He had grown pretty plump on his easy post. He had a fat wife and an oversized old Chevy car and western-style over-stuffed furniture that would take his weight and he was pretty comfortable. He was wanted for a mass murder on Flisten and any thought of being relieved as base commander scared him into waves of shaking fat.

Obviously, the sudden news of my arrival, of which he had had no warning word, had perspired ten pounds off him in the last hour since the ship had called in for permission to land.

He was at the door when I came in. He was mopping his face with a huge silk handkerchief and bowing and trying to open the door wider and quivering all at the same time.

Ah, the joys of being an officer from headquarters! It scares the daylights out of people!

His wife got through the door with a tray bearing both tea and coffee and almost spilled them. Faht Bey was trying to wipe off a seat for me with his handkerchief — which only greased the chair up.

“Officer Gris,” he quavered in a high-pitched voice. “I mean Sultan Bey,” he quickly added, using my Turkish name. “I am delighted to see you. I trust you are well, that you have been well, that you will be well and that everything is all right!” (By the last he really meant, “Am I still base commander or are you carrying orders to have me disposed of?”)

I put his mind at ease at once. I threw down my orders. “I have been appointed Inspector General Overlord of all operations related to Blito-P3 — I mean Earth! At the slightest hint that you are not doing your job, cooperating and obeying me implicitly, I will have you disposed of.”

He sat down so hard in his overstuffed office chair, it almost collapsed. He looked at the orders. He was ordinarily quite swarthy. Now he was gray. He opened his mouth to speak but no words came out.

“We can dispense with formalities,” I said. “Get on your phone. Make three calls into Afyon right away. Your usual contacts, the cafe bartenders. Tell them that you have just received a secret tip that a young man, about six feet two in height, blond hair and passing himself off as a satellite technician, is actually an agent of the United States Drug Enforcement Agency, the DEA, and that he is here prying around and not to talk to him.”

Faht Bey was on that phone like a shot.

The local natives are very friendly with us. They overlook everything. They cooperate one hundred percent. They, and even the commander of the local army barracks, think we are really the Mafia. It puts us in all the way.

Faht Bey finished and looked up like an obedient dog,

“Now,” I said, “call two local toughs, give them the description and tell them to find him and beat him up.”

Faht Bey tried to protest. “But the DEA is always friendly with us! We have every agent they got in Turkey on our payroll! And, Sultan Bey, we don’t want no dead bodies in any alleys in Afyon! The police might hear of it and they’d have to go to work and they wouldn’t like that!”

I could see why they needed an Inspector General Overlord!

But Faht Bey was just quavering right on. “If you want somebody killed, why don’t you just do the usual and take him up to the archaeological dig…”

I had to shout at him. “I didn’t say kill him! I just said to beat him up. He’s got to learn it’s an unfriendly place!”

That was different. “Oh, he ain’t really a DEA man!”

“No, you idiot. He’s a Crown agent! If he learns anything, it could be your head!”

Oh, that really was different! Worse. But he made the call.

When he finished, he nervously drank both the tea and the coffee his wife had set out for me. It was nice to know how thoroughly I could upset him. I gloated. It was so different from Voltar!

“Now, are my old quarters ready?”

This upset him further. I finally got it out of him. “That dancing girl you had there got to playing around with anybody and she gave the (bleep) to four guards and stole some of your clothes and ran off.”

Well, women always were unfaithful. And factually, there aren’t any real dancing girls left in Turkey. They’ve all emigrated elsewhere and what remains are just the bawds in the big city, not real belly dancers. “Get on that phone to our contact in the Istanbul Sirkeci quarter and have him ship one in on the morning plane.”

Faht Bey’s wife came in with some more tea and coffee. Now that important things were cared for, I sat down and drank some of the coffee. It was as thick as syrup to begin with and the heaps of sugar in it made it almost solid.

The base commander was through so I said, “Are Raht and Terb here?”

He bobbed his head. “Raht is. Terb is in New York.”

I produced Lombar’s now-sealed orders to Raht. “Give these to Raht. Have him on the morning plane to the U.S. Give him plenty of expense money as he’s going to Virginia to get something ready.”

“I don’t know if I can get him a seat,” said Faht Bey. “Turkish airlines…”

“You’ll get him a seat,” I said.

He bobbed his head. Yes, he would get him a seat.

“Now,” I said, “speaking of money, here is an order.” I threw it on the desk. It was a pretty good order. I had typed it myself on the tug’s administrative machine. It said:

I had even forged a signature and identoplate stamp nobody could read. It would never go back to Voltar. Voltar doesn’t even know these Blito-P3 funds exist. Clever.

It made him blink a bit. But he took it and put it in his files and then, because I was holding out my hand, went into the back room where he kept his safe.

“Ten thousand Turkish lira and ten thousand dollars United States will do for a start,” I called after him.

He brought them out and laid the wads in my hand and I stuffed them in the pocket of my trench coat.

“Now,” I said, “open that top drawer of your desk and take out the Colt .45 automatic you keep there and hand it over.”

“It’s my own gun!”

“Steal another off some Mafia hit man,” I said. “That’s where you got this one. You wouldn’t want me to violate Space Code Number a-36-544 M Section B, would you? Alien disclosure?”

He did as he was told. He even added two extra loaded clips. I checked the weapon out. I had seen the gun there a year ago when I was snooping in his desk looking for blackmail data. It was a U.S. Army 1911A1.

But a year ago I didn’t have the rank I had now. That he had taken it off the Mafia was pure guess. But sure enough, it had three notches filed into the butt plate.

I wanted to reassure him. No sense in making him too panicky. I cocked and spun the .45 expertly and pulled the trigger. There was no bullet under the firing pin, of course. And the barrel had wound up pointed at his stomach, not his head. The gun just went click. “Bull’s-eye!” I said in English, laughing.

He wasn’t laughing. “Timyjo Faht,” I said, using his Flisten police-blotter name, and speaking in a mixture of Voltarian and English, “you and I are going to get along just fine. So long, of course, as you do everything I tell you, break your (bleep) to see to my creature comforts and keep your nose clean. There’s nothing illegal you can do that I can’t do better. So what I want around here is respect.” He also speaks English. He also deals with the Mafia. So he got my point.

I gave the Colt .45 another twirl and put it in my trench coat pocket just like I’d seen an actor called Humphrey Bogart do in an old Earth film last year.

I went back to my waiting “taxi.” I got in. In American, I said, “Home, James, and step on it!”

For, in truth, I was home. This was my kind of country. Of all the places in the universe I’d been, this was the one place that really appreciated my type. Here, I was their kind of hero. And I loved it.

Chapter 7

I rode through the sultry night, the air like soft, black velvet on my face. To the right and left of me the sunflowers flashed along in the headlights. And beyond them, nicely obscured from the casual passing tourist, were the vast expanses of Papaver somniferum, the deadly opium poppies, the reason the Apparatus had settled here in the first place.

It is an interesting story as it sheds some insight on how the Apparatus works, and tonight, when we found ourselves held up by a procession of badly tail-lit carts, I went over it.

Long ago, an Apparatus cultural and technical survey crew, made up of a subofficer and three Apparatus peoplographers, had been interrupted by the outbreak of what they call, on Earth, World War I. They had missed their pickup ship, were unable to get to the rendezvous and thereafter had dodged across this border and that, taking advantage of the turmoils of war. They had gotten into Russia when it was writhing with revolution and had fallen south through the Caucasus and, from Armenia, had crossed the border into Turkey.

They had hidden out on the slopes of Buyuk Agri, a 16,946-foot peak known otherwise as Mount Ararat. They put their call-in signal there in the hopes that its steady radio beep and the prominence of the mountain would eventually bring an Apparatus search ship.

But the war came to an end and still no rescue ship, so, pretty chilled with altitude and privation, they slogged their way westward, vowing amongst them not to stop until they found warmer weather. It must have been a bitter trip as the high plateau of eastern Turkey is no garden spot. But they made it, assisted by the fact that Turkey, which had been in the war on the wrong side, was in the chaos of defeat and victor dismemberment. They came at length to Afyon. It was warmer. And before them they saw the remarkable tall black rock and fortress, Afyonkarahisar. They put their call-in signal up in the ruins and made shift to survive, hiding in the war-ripped countryside. They could actually speak Turkish by this time and the land abounded with deserters.

Nineteen hundred twenty, Earth date, came. A huge Greek expeditionary force was approaching Afyon to grab a big slice of Turkey. The Turkish general, Ismet Pasha, not only checked the Greek army but actually defeated the invaders twice and in the very shadow of Afyonkarahisar.

Caught up in all this, the Apparatus subofficer and the three peoplographers chose sides, took uniforms and weapons from the dead and actually fought in the second battle as Turkish soldiers.

The following month somebody in the Apparatus, probably looking for an excuse for a vacation, noticed they had a cultural and technical survey team missing. It was not a very important survey — it was the twenty-ninth Blito-P3 had had in the last several thousand years. The Timetable did not call for an invasion of that planet for another hundred and eighty years or more but this Apparatus officer got permission and a scoutship and was probably surprised to find the call-in beeping away on the top of Afyonkarahisar. So the Apparatus squad was finally rescued after nearly seven years.

This survey team subofficer, probably himself looking for a sinecure, came back with a wonderful idea.

Old Muhck, Lombar’s predecessor, had listened.

It seemed that during World War I, the rest of the world had begun to adopt a Russian idea called “passports”; it had failed utterly to save the Russian government from revolution and was silly, so, of course, the other governments were avidly taking it up. In the predictable future, and long before the invasion was scheduled, it would be pretty hard to infiltrate Blito-P3.

Old Muhck was fairly competent. He knew very well that the Apparatus would be called upon to furnish pre-invasion commotion someday. This consists of people in various countries to run around hysterically in the streets screaming, “The invaders are coming! Run for your lives!”; power plant operators who blow up the works; army officers who order their troops to flee; and newspaper publishers who come out with headlines, Capitulate to the Invader Demands Before It Is Too Late! That sort of thing. Standard tradecraft.

But there was a clincher on the idea: finance!

Now, every intelligence organization has the primary problem, when working inside enemy lines, of finding money to do so. Voltarian credits are no good and can’t even be exchanged. Intelligence is costly and robbing banks calls attention to oneself. Imported gold and diamonds in such quantities can be traced. Getting hold of enemy money to spend is rough!

The subofficer had a piece of news. A country on Blito-P3, the United States of America, had passed a piece of legislation called “The Harrison Act” in 1914 and was pushing it into heavy effect by this date of 1920, Earth time. It regulated the traffic of narcotics, namely opium. So, of course, the price of opium was going to go sky-high. And that’s what they raised around Afyon. It was the world center for it!

As “Turkish veterans” on the winning side, they had an “in.” And what an “in”! They were war heroes and revolutionary pals with the incoming regime of Mustafa Kemal Pasha Ataturk!

So old Muhck, operating on the principle that governs all Voltar, really (“There’s lots of time if you take it in time”), authorized the project. The cost was small. He probably had some people he didn’t want around but to whom he owed favors. And the Blito-P3 base was born.

Up to Lombar’s tenure, nobody had thought much about the base. It just ran on as a local, almost unsupervised operation. Then Lombar, assisted by Muhck’s old age and, some say, some judiciously introduced poison, took over the Apparatus. This was in the early 1970s, Earth time.

Lombar, casting about for ways and means to accomplish his own ambitions, had his attention drawn to this obscure base by a report that the United States of America, a country he was now aware existed on Blito-P3, had decided that most of the opium which was slipping past Rockecenter’s control was coming from Turkey. And they undertook to pay huge sums to Turkey to stop growing opium.

Instead of reacting with alarm, Lombar knew exactly what would happen. The payments would fall into the hands of the Turkish politicians and they would not pass them on to the farmers and hardship would occur in the Afyon district.

And Lombar suddenly saw his chance on Voltar. For Voltar had never had any involvement with narcotics: their doctors used gas anesthetics and cellologists could handle most pains. He had reviewed drug history in the politics of Blito-P3 and found that a country named England had once totally undermined a population and overthrown the government of China using opium. From there, he planned his own advancement on Voltar.

He helped subsidize the starving farmers by buying their unwanted surplus. He increased the importance of Section 451 in the Apparatus and apparently after a couple of management failures, had found an Academy officer to take it over — namely me.

The U.S. subsidy was soon cancelled. But if the Apparatus had been “in” before, it was the hero of the day now. It was king here in Afyon and Lombar soon would be King on Voltar if he could figure out how to do it. Apparatus Earth base personnel were still the descendants of Turkish war heroes and, like every other Turkish business, they had plaster heads of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the father of modern Turkey, all over the place. Long live the revolution! Long live opium! Long live the Apparatus! And long live His Majesty Lombar, if he could turn the trick on Voltar.

My contemplation ended. Carts or no carts, we had arrived back at the mountain. And there sat my villa!

It had once belonged to some Turkish pasha, a noble of the long-departed regime and probably, before him, to some Byzantine lord and before him some Roman lord and before him some Greek lord and before him who knows: Turkey is the most ruin-strewn place on Blito-P3. Crossroads between Asia and Europe, most of the civilized Earth races you hear about had, at one time or another, colonized Turkey or run an empire from it! It is an archaeologist’s fondest dream: a land absolutely chock-a-block with ruins!

The Apparatus subofficer who founded the place had also rebuilt this villa and lived here a long time. Its maintenance was a standard piece of allocation budgets. Lombar Hisst had once even had the daffy idea of coming down here, a thing which he would never do — it’s fatal for an Apparatus chief to turn his back on Voltar — and so had increased the allocation.

It was built straight in against the mountain. It had big gateposts and walls that hid six acres of grounds and its low, Roman style house.

It was all dark. I hadn’t phoned ahead. I wanted to surprise them.

The “taxi driver” put my luggage down by the dark gate. He was a veteran Apparatus personnel, a child rapist, if I remembered.

The dim light, reflected from the dash of the old Citroen, showed me that he had his hand out.

Ordinarily, I would have been offended. But tonight, in the velvet dark, gleeful with the joy of arriving back, I reached into my pocket. The Turkish lira inflates at about a hundred percent per year. When last I handled any it was about 90 Turkish lira (£T) to the U.S. dollar. But the dollar inflates too, so I guessed it must be about one hundred and fifty to one by now. Besides, it’s what we call “monkey-money”: you’re lucky if anyone will take it outside of Turkey. And my new order gave me an unlimited supply.

I pulled out two bills, thinking they were one’s and handed them over.

He took them to his dashlight to inspect them. I flinched! I had given him two one-thousand Turkish lira notes! Maybe thirteen dollars American!

“Geez,” said the driver in American slang — he talks English and Turkish just like everybody else around here — “Geez, Officer Gris, who do yer want bumped off?”

We both went into screams of laughter. The Mafia is around so much that American gangster slang is a great joke. It made me feel right at home.

In fact, I pulled out two more one-thousand lira sheets of monkey-money. I hitched up my trench coat collar. In American, I said out of the corner of my mouth, “Listen, pal, there’s a broad, a dame, a skirt, see. She’ll be getting off the morning plane from the big town. You keep your peepers peeled at the airport, put the snatch on her, take her to the local sawbones and get her checked for the itch in the privates department and if she gets by the doc, take her for a ride out here. If she don’t, just take her for a ride!”

“Boss,” he said, cocking his thumb like he had a .45, “you got yerself a deal!”

We screamed with laughter again. Then I gave him the two additional bills and he drove off happy as a clam.

Oh, it was good to be home. This was my kind of living.

I turned to the house to yell for somebody to come out and get my baggage.

Chapter 8

I had just opened my mouth when I closed it. A far better idea had occurred to me. In the country, they go to bed the moment they can’t see: they were all asleep. There should be about thirteen staff, counting the three young boys; actually they were two Turkish families and they had been with the place since the subofficer had originally rebuilt it, maybe since the Hittites had built it for all I knew. They had far more loyalty to us than to their own government and they wouldn’t have said anything even if they noticed something odd and they were too stupid to do that — just riffraff.

They lived in the old slave quarters to the right of the gate, a building hidden by trees and a hedge. The old gatekeeper, pushing ninety — which is quite old on Earth — had died and nobody had hired a new one as they couldn’t decide whose relative should have the job.

The alleged ghazi or man-in-charge was a tough, old peasant we called Karagoz after a funny Turkish stage character. But the real boss was a widow named Melahat: the name means “beauty” but she was anything else but that, being dumpy and gimlet-eyed; she kept the rest of them hopping.

My plan was to first find something wrong. I took a hand-light out of my bag — one I had stolen from the ship. On secretly silent feet, slipping like a ghost across the cobble-paved courtyard, I faded into the trees, not even letting my trench coat whisper.

Suppressing the beam of the light with two fingers across it, I looked at the grass: it was cut. I looked at the shrubs: they were pruned. I looked at the fountains and pools: they were cleaned out and running.

Disappointed, but not giving up hope, I slid into the main house. Roman dwellings are built around a court open to the sky. The fountain in the center was keeping the place cool. The marble floor was clean with no dust. The side rooms were spotless. Of course, they were kind of bare: I had not had much in the way of funds when I had been here last; the bare Romanness of the house had been Turkified by large numbers of colorful large rugs and draperies and I had sold these to passing tourists one by one — I don’t much care for flummery anyway. The staff had tried to replace them here and there with grass mats, but even these were neat and clean. No, I couldn’t find anything wrong with the main house. (Bleep)! It spoiled the joke I was about to play.

My own room was at the back, chunked into the mountain for good reasons. I was about to pick its locks and enter when I suddenly remembered what Faht Bey had said about the whore stealing my clothes! That was it!

On silent feet — I had forgotten to change my insulator boots — I crept up to the old slave quarters. I knew it was composed of two large rooms, both opening off the center front door.

I took the Colt .45 out of my pocket and silently pulled back the slide, easing a shell under the firing pin.

I turned my hand-light up to full flare.

I drew my foot back.

Then, all in one motion, I kicked the door open, pounded the glare of the light into the room and fired the gun in the air!

Ah, you should have seen the commotion!

Thirteen bodies went straight up and came down trying to burrow under beds, blanket and floor!

“Jandarma!” I bellowed. It is Turkish for “police.” And then, just to add to the confusion, in English I yelled, “Freeze, you (bleepards) or I’ll rub you out!”

Well, let me tell you, that was one confused staff! They couldn’t see who it was against the glare of the light. They were screaming in pure terror. All kinds of Turkish words came spattering out like “innocent” and “haven’t done anything!”

And to add the sugar to the coffee, an Apparatus guard contingent, alerted by the shot, came racing up the road from the archaeological workmen’s barracks, engines roaring!

Pandemonium!

Bedlam!

Within a minute the guard contingent — they go by the name of security forces and are there to “protect any valuables dug up” — came rushing into the grounds and converged on my light.

The subofficer’s own torch hit me. He hauled up. He said, “It’s Sultan Bey!”

The gardener’s small boy at once began to throw up.

The staff stopped screaming.

I started laughing.

Somebody turned on some lights. Old Karagoz pulled his head out from under a blanket. He said, “It’s Sultan Bey all right!”

The guards started laughing at Karagoz.

A couple of the staff started laughing.

But Melahat wasn’t laughing. She was kneeling on the floor. In Turkish, she was wailing at the wall, “I knew when he came back from America and found out that whore had stolen his clothes he’d be furious. I knew it. I knew it!”

They thought I’d been to America.

One of the small boys, about eight, came crawling over and started tugging at the bottom hem of my raincoat. His name was Yusuf, I recalled. “Please don’t shoot Melahat,” he pleaded. “Please, Sultan Bey! We all pooled our money and we bought you new clothes. And we even stole some extras from tourists. Don’t shoot Melahat. Please, Sultan Bey!”

Oh, it was a great homecoming. The guard subofficer said, “I told them they better put on a gatekeeper. Serves them right.” And then he stepped close and whispered, “Thanks for the tip about that Crown agent.” And the guards drove off laughing.

I pointed the gun at the gardener. “Your grounds are in terrible shape. Get up right now and fix them.” And he scuttled out like a rocket, followed by his two helpers, both boys. I pointed the gun at the cook. “Get me something to eat and then clean up your kitchen, it’s filthy.” And he scuttled out. I pointed the gun at the head cleaning girl, “Get those rooms dusted! Right now!” And she and two small girls who help her left with speed. And then I pointed the gun at Karagoz, “Your accounts are probably in total disorder. Get me a full accounting by dawn!”

As I walked to my room, I burst out laughing. How different than Voltar.

How good it was to be home!

Here, I was power itself!

On this planet, I could get anything executed, even Heller!

Chapter 9

Melahat had followed me into my room. It is a big place. It has lots of closets. She showed me that my clothes had been replaced and were hanging there. She stood wringing her hands.

“Please,” she begged, “I told you that that girl was no good. After you went to America she just started running around with anybody. She said you hadn’t paid her and she grabbed your clothes and ran off.”

“There’ll be another one in here tomorrow,” I said.

“Yes, Sultan Bey.”

“Put her in that room that used to be used for tools.”

“Yes, Sultan Bey. Are these clothes all right?”

“They probably won’t fit.”

“Yes, Sultan Bey.”

Two small boys rushed in with my baggage and hastened out.

“Tell that cook to bring in some food. Now clear out!”

“Yes, Sultan Bey.”

A serving man and the cook hastened in with a big bowl of hot iskembe corbusi — it’s a heavy soup of tripe and eggs and they often keep it on the back of the stove just in case. There was also lakerda, slices of dried fish. There was a big pitcher of chilled sira, which is fermented grape juice and a platter of baklava, a sweet pastry containing ground walnuts and syrup.

“It’s all we have right now,” the cook quavered. “Nobody said you were arriving!”

“Get to town at dawn,” I reprimanded him, “and get some decent food! And stop putting all the purchase money in your pocket!”

He blanched at the accusation. So I said, “And send in Karagoz!” That really upset him for Karagoz handles the accounts. He and the serving man rushed out.

I sat down at the table and began to eat. It was delicious! What the Gods must dream of — the reward for being mortal.

Karagoz came. “You said I had until dawn to finish the accounts.”

“You’ve stolen and sold all the rugs,” I said.

“Yes, Sultan Bey.” He knew (bleeped) well I had sold them but he sure knew better than to say so.

I had a mouthful of wonderful baklava. I washed it down with the chilled sira. “Add a special requisition to buy rugs for the whole house. The most expensive kind. Even Persian.” Who knew when I might hit another snag on money and would have to sell them again. Recent experience on Voltar had made me prudent.

“Yes, Sultan Bey.”

“And turn in any commission you get to me,” I said.

“Yes, Sultan Bey.”

“And reduce the amount of money you’re spending on staff food. By half. They’re too fat!”

“Yes, Sultan Bey.”

“That is all,” I said, dismissing him with a wave of the sira glass.

He backed out the door.

I sat there grinning. I really knew how to handle people. Psychology is a wonderful thing. A true tool in my line of business.

I could get away with anything on this planet!

And that made me think of Heller.

I bolted the door to my room. I went into the right-hand closet. I pushed the back panel and it slid open. I stepped through into what was really my room.

It was bigger than the one I had just left. It was unknown to the staff. It didn’t show from the outside as it was dug back into the mountain. A secret door at the end of it led right down into the base. Another secret door led to a passage that ended in the archaeological barracks.

I opened a closet. The laugh was on the staff. Here were my real clothes, various costumes of different nationalities. They were all here.

A cupboard disclosed that my makeup kits were intact.

I opened a panel and revealed my guns. They were protected by a device which took moisture and oxygen out of their hiding place. I removed the chambered cartridge and clip from the Colt .45 and put it away. I got out a Beretta which is more my style, really, being easier to hide — and I even have a license for it.

That done, I opened a safe and reviewed my passports. Some were expired in the last year and I made a note to get them renewed. I looked over other identification documents: they were fine.

With a quick inspection, I verified that all my assorted luggage, like suitcases and attache cases, were there.

Great. I was in business.

I went back into the advertised bedroom and changed my clothes, noting I should be more careful and not go around in space insulator boots in public.

I put on a sport shirt with flaming poinsettias, a pair of black pants and some loafers. I looked in the mirror: no movie gangster ever looked more at home.

Now for Heller. I picked up the box and went back into my real room. I unloaded the gear and set it up on a table. Nothing wrong with it from the trip.

I set it all up and then, as an afterthought, brought in the pitcher of sira and a glass.

What was Heller up to?

I turned on the activator-receiver and viewscreen.

I didn’t think I’d need the 831 Relayer as he wasn’t in the ship and must be within ten miles.

And there he was!

Chapter 10

Heller was walking along a dark street.

I wondered what had taken him so long to get into Afyon and then realized that, after the rumor I’d spread, probably nobody at the hangar would give him a ride and he’d had to walk. It was only a few miles, they had probably said in a nasty tone of voice.

I adjusted the viewscreen controls. I found out that by flaring the screen a little bit, I could possibly pick things up as well as Heller could.

The picture was really great quality. Because I could look directly at the peripheral vision area, even though it was a trifle blurry, I could probably see what was going on around him even better than Heller: a matter of my concentrating on it while he was looking at something else. Great.

He wasn’t doing anything. He was just walking along the street. Up ahead of him were a few lights from shop windows. But Afyon is really dead at night and it was at least ten by now.

It gave me time to study the instruction book. I found to my delight that, by pushing a button, the screen split into two screens. You could go on watching the continuing action while you replayed, at any speed you wished, fast or slow or still-framed, on the second screen. And all without interrupting recording. Great. What a brilliant fellow that Spurk had been. Good thing he was dead.

It was too bad, though, that I had missed Heller’s transportation refusal. It would have been delightful to watch. I fed in a pack of strips and vowed never to turn this thing off. Then I could speed review for juicy bits and save myself lots of time.

The action of doing a recording loading almost made me miss something.

Way up the street, somebody had moved across a light path from a store window. Aha! There was somebody up the street, standing in a dark place. Somebody waiting for Heller?

If Heller had registered it, he gave no evidence of it. He just kept strolling forward. I thought to myself, the dumb boob. In Afyon, you don’t keep right on walking toward a possible ambush. Not if you want to go on living! Heller was too green at this business. He would not last long. The green die young, one of my Apparatus professors used to say — Tailing 104 and 105, Apparatus school.

Yes! The figure was waiting for Heller. Whoever it was had chosen a patch of street darker than the rest.

Heller drew nearer and nearer. And then almost walked right on by.

The stranger halted him. The fellow was shorter than Heller. I stilled the frame of the second screen to study the face. More of a hatchet than a face. Hard to tell in this light.

“You from the DEA?” the stranger whispered.

“The what?” said Heller, not whispering.

“Shhh! The Yew S Drug Enforcement. The narcs!”

“Who are you?”

“I’m Jimmy ‘The Gutter’ Tavilnasty. Come on, you narcs and us have always been friendly.” I thought, indeed they have. The DEA narcotics agents would be paupers if it weren’t for the bribes of the Mafia.

Heller said, “What makes you think I’m DEA?”

“Oh, hell. That didn’t take any figuring. I seen you wading around in the poppy fields and I suspected it. And then when I saw you climb that skyscraper of a rock over there, I knew it. Anybody else would have gone up the regular way, but you went up the front, hoping nobody would see you. And then when this,” and here he lifted a night-rifle sight, “showed you surveying the whole valley with a glass, I stopped guessing.”

“I was measuring distances,” said Heller.

The Mafia hood laughed. “Trying to estimate the crop in advance, are you? Pretty smart. The Turks lie like hell about their morf.”

“What did you want from me?” said Heller.

“Good. I like that. Get down to business. Listen, I been hanging around here for weeks and you’re the first promisin’ new face to show up. Now, being you’re from the DEA, there’s a C-note in it for you if you can help.”

“A C-note?” said Heller. “A credit?”

“No, no, no. You guys can’t have the credit. That’s mine! Look, I got a contract on Gunsalmo Silva.”

Heller must have made a movement. Jimmy “The Gutter” darted a hand into his jacket, about to pull a rod. But Heller had merely whipped out a notebook and pen. “Geez, pal,” said Jimmy “The Gutter,” “don’t DO that!”

“Now,” said Heller, pen poised. “What did you say his name was? Spell it.”

“G-U-N-S-A-L-M-O S-I-L-V-A, as in dead man. You see, he was a bodyguard to Don ‘Holy Joe’ Corleone and we got an idea that he put the finger on his own boss and maybe even pulled the trigger a few times himself. The Family is very upset.”

“Family upset,” muttered Heller, writing.

“Good, I figured you’d have an ‘in’ with the local fuzz.”

“And who do I send the information to, if you’re not around?”

The hood scratched his head, just a shadow of movement. The light was very bad. “Why, I guess you could put it through to Babe Corleone, that’s ‘Holy Joe’s’ ex. That’s Apartment P — Penthouse — 136 Crystal Parkway, Bayonne, New Jersey. Phone’s unlisted but it’s KLondike 5-8291.”

Heller had written it all down. He closed the notebook and was putting it and the pen away. “All right. Too bad his family is upset. If I see him, I’ll tell him.”

The effect was electric!

The hood started to go for his heater. Then he halted the motion. “Wait a minute,” he said. He took Heller by the arm and steered him into a pool of light and looked at him.

Absolute disgust contorted the pockmarked face of Jimmy “The Gutter” Tavilnasty. “Why, you’re just a kid! One of them God (bleeped) leftover flower nuts out here looking around for some free junk! You can’t be more than sixteen or seventeen! Go home to your mama and leave a man’s world alone!”

The hood gave Heller a shove. He spat at Heller’s feet. He turned his back and stalked away.

Heller just stood there.

I myself was surprised. Doctor Crobe was wrong. He had pointed out that Heller would look young. He had said that at twenty-six, Heller would look like an Earth-man of eighteen or nineteen. The health of his unblemished skin had lowered that. People would think he was just tall for his age the way some kids are!

Then I hugged myself. Oh, this was better than I had planned! You have to realize that, on Earth, they don’t take kids seriously. It’s almost a crime for a man to be seventeen!

Heller, after a bit, walked on. It was too bad Spurk had never put a feeling indicator in the lineup. Heller must feel about one inch tall!

There was a bar ahead. There are very few in Afyon — really the place is no city. And the bars are not much. The men hang out there during the day, taking up chairs and nursing coffee and reading newspapers. The dumb proprietors don’t object.

Heller walked in. And I suddenly realized he didn’t have any money to order anything with. I hoped he’d forget he only had credits on him and couldn’t produce them. If he did, I could seize him for a violation of Space Code Number a-36-544 M Section B and even imprison him for making the presence of an extraterrestrial known. I made a mental note to be on the watch for such. That pen and notebook had been a near breach but wouldn’t stand up in a charge. Money would.

The proprietor was the usual greasy, mustached Turk. He was taking his time. The place was practically empty as it was very late for Afyon and the proprietor had nothing else to do. He finally came over to Heller at the counter.

In English, Heller said, “Could you give me a glass of water?”

The Turk said, “Ingilizce,” and shook his head to indicate he didn’t speak it. The Hells he didn’t. Half the people around here did. He started to walk off and then I saw a light come into his eyes, followed closely by a cunning look.

Now, it is a funny thing about Earth races. From one race to the next, they rarely can tell how old anyone is. And Heller might look seventeen to an American, but a Turk would not notice that. They think all foreigners look alike!

At last I began to see the fruits of the rumor I had had Faht Bey plant. The proprietor changed his mind. He reached under the counter and got a somewhat dirty glass and he filled it with water from a jug. But he didn’t put it in front of Heller. He carried it over to one of the many empty tables and pulled back a chair and pointed.

Heller, the fool, went over and sat down. Now, while the water in Turkey is usually pretty drinkable, that dirty glass gave me hopes. Maybe Heller would come down with cholera!

The proprietor went straight over to a telephone at the far end of the room. And then I found out something very interesting: the audio-respondo-mitter, not being tuned to his ear channels, could evidently hear what was going on in the room better than Heller! All I had to do was advance the audio gain. While it brought up the room noises uncomfortably high, you could pick out what you wanted to hear. What a nice rig for spies! Which is to say, the handler of spies. An ambulant bug! I was beginning to really love this rig.

The proprietor just said three words in Turkish: “He is here.” And he hung up the phone.

But Heller was not drinking the water. From his pocket he had pulled half a dozen poppies! He put them in the glass!

Oh, how sweet, I sneered. He had bought the lie that this type was for the flower markets and he had picked himself a bouquet! Well, they do go in for a lot of flowers on Voltar. And come to remember, some of the estates on Manco — was it Atalanta? — specialized in breeding new varieties. Lombar had even once considered bringing seeds back and growing the poppies at home but he had been given pause by the fact that a new variety of blossom always produced enthusiasm amongst the flower fans and one could see these from air surveillance too easily. I also dimly recall there was some problem with a seed virus that attacked poppies. But anyway, Heller was indulging nostalgia. Probably homesick for pretty flowers.

He was certainly intrigued by them. He stroked their leaves as they sat there in the glass. He smelled them.

I lost interest in what he was doing and was suddenly very interested in how he looked. By peripheral vision, a big mirror was showing his image.

They had given him clothes too small! Even though they might not have had his size, I was certain this was intentional. The sleeves of the shirt and jacket were three inches too short. The shoulders pinched way in. They had given him no tie and he had just buttoned the shirt.

Now, Kemal Ataturk had made it against the law to wear Turkish national costumes and had forced the whole country into Western dress. He had even put people in prison for wearing the red Turkish fez. And as a result, the Turks, with no tailors for it, have since looked about as sloppy as anyone ever.

But Heller was worse!

He had gotten cement dust on him climbing that rock. He had evidently torn his jacket. He had mud on his shoes from the poppy fields.

He looked like a complete bum!

Where, I gloated, was the spiffy Royal officer now? Where were the shimmering lounge suits? Where was the natty working cover suit and the little red racing cap? Where was that fashion plate in Fleet full dress that would make the girls faint?

Oh, I gloated! Were our roles reversed now! On Voltar I was the underdog, the uncouth, the tramp. Not on Earth! I glanced down at my lovely gangster outfit. And then I looked back at Heller, a slovenly, dirty tramp!

This was my planet, not his!

And there he was, my prisoner. He had no funds to buy any clothes, to go anywhere.

“Heller,” I said aloud in gloating glee, “I’ve got you just where I want you. And in my fondest dreams, I never thought you could look that bad! A dirty, penniless bum in a stinking slum cafe! Welcome to Planet Earth, Heller, you and your fancy ways. Everyone does MY bidding here, not yours! Our roles have reversed utterly! And it’s about time!”

Chapter 11

What a stupid, untrained “special agent”!

Didn’t he realize the danger he was putting himself in? Yet, there he was, in the center of the planet’s opium trade, sitting in a cheap bar, a stranger in the place, a foreigner, his back to the door, and a bouquet of opium poppies in front of him! Just asking for it! And no way to get out of trouble if anything did happen. No connections. No friends. No money. And he didn’t even speak Turkish! What a child. I could almost feel sorry for him.

Heller sat there for a bit, looking at the flowers. From time to time he rearranged them.

Then he took one of them, a gaudy, orange blossom and idly began to pull off its petals. I wondered if he was nervous. I certainly would have been in such a spot as that!

An opium poppy has a big black ball in the center. Really, that’s the bulk of the flower. He had it stripped. He smelled it. Silly performance: fragrance comes from petals, not the stamen.

Heller put it aside. He took another flower from the glass. He got out a piece of paper. He laid the whole flower on half the sheet and straightened out its petals. Then he folded the paper over, covering it.

Then he took his fist and banged the package!

I really laughed. That isn’t the way you press flowers. You put them in between two sheets of paper and you gently let them flatten and you put it away to dry. You don’t bang it with your fist. He didn’t even know how to press flowers: he should have asked his mother!

He opened the paper and of course the whole thing was a complete mess. The huge center ball had simply squashed! That isn’t the way to handle an opium poppy. You gently scrape the ball and you get the sap and then you boil it and you have morphine!

He must have realized that wasn’t how it was done for he just emptied the squashed mess on the table, folded the paper and put it in his pocket.

He looked up. People had been drifting in: Turks of the area, dressed in their sloppy jackets, tieless white shirts, unpressed pants. Maybe twenty of them had come in, a strange crowd for this time of night. I realized that the word had spread. They just sat down at tables, not ordering anything, not talking, not looking at Heller. They seemed to be waiting.

Then the front door crashed open and into the room swaggered the two top wrestlers of the area!

Now, the Turks love wrestling. It is a national sport. They wrestle in any style. They are big and they are tough and they are good! So that was who Faht Bey had called! The wrestling champs!

The bigger one, a formidable hulk named Musef, swaggered to the middle of the room. The other one, named Torgut, sauntered over to the wall behind Heller’s back. Torgut was carrying a short piece of pipe.

About fifteen more townsmen came in behind the wrestlers, avid expectancy on their faces.

The proprietor yelped in Turkish, “Not in here! Outside, outside!”

“Be quiet, old woman,” said Musef insultingly.

The proprietor, faced with that growl and about three hundred pounds of famed muscle, got very quiet.

Musef walked over to Heller. “You speak Turkish? No?” He shifted to badly accented English, “You speak English? Yes?”

Heller just sat there looking at him.

“My name,” and Musef hit himself on the chest, “is Musef. You know me?”

With a slight incredulity, Heller said, “A yellow-man!” And indeed, now that I thought about it, Musef and Torgut did bear some dim resemblance to the yellow-men of the Confederacy. Not surprising, since the Turks come from Mongolia.

But it was the wrong thing to say. Musef snarled, “You say I yellow?”

There was a ripple through the audience as those who didn’t speak English got those who did to tell them what was being said. And then it had to be clarified for some that “yellow” meant “coward” in English. And believe me, eyebrows really shot up and eyes went round with anticipation. You could almost hear them pant.

Musef pretended to be outraged that Heller was not saying anything further. So he spat, “You want to fight?”

Heller glanced around. Torgut was hefting the iron pipe over by the wall. It was indeed a hostile crowd. Heller looked at Musef. He said, “I never fight…” There was an explosion of laughter in the room. Instantly Musef picked up the glass and threw the water and flowers in Heller’s face.

“I was about to say,” said Heller, “I never fight without a wager!”

There was more laughter. But Musef thought he saw a way to make money. After all, how could he lose with Torgut and an iron pipe back of Heller. “A wager!” guffawed Musef. Then, “All right. We wager! Five hundred lira! You,” he yelled at the crowd, “make sure that it gets paid!”

The crowd screamed with laughter. “We will!” they shouted in English and Turkish. It gave them a perfectly legal excuse to pick the “DEA man’s” pocket when he lost. There is nobody quite as cunning as a Turk unless it is a crowd of Turks!

And before anyone knew what was happening, Musef reached out and grabbed Heller’s collar and yanked him to the center of the floor! It was not hard to do. Heller, here on Earth, weighed only 193 pounds and Musef weighed 300!

Somehow Musef’s hands must have slipped. Heller and Musef were standing there in the middle of the floor, facing each other. The crowd, on its feet and roaring for blood, made a circle.

Musef reached with both arms. Heller weaved sideways. I knew what Musef was trying to do. The standard Turkish action of engaging is for each opponent to seize the other, with both hands, on either side of the neck. What happens after that is anybody’s war.

Musef made a second try. He got his hands on Heller’s shoulders!

Heller got his hands on Musef’s shoulders!

The first seconds of such a contest is a jostle for position.

And then I didn’t understand it. Heller had his two hands on the shoulders of the Turk but Heller’s fingers were hidden by the Turk’s head. I couldn’t see that Heller was doing anything. But neither was the Turk!

Heller’s hands just seemed to be rooted there.

The Turk was trying to throw his arms out to get Heller’s hands loose. You could see the muscles jump with the Turk’s effort. The Turk’s face was contorting in savage hatred. But there was enormous strain there!

The two seemed to rotate a few degrees. Now there was a wall mirror in Heller’s view. And in that mirror, Torgut was plainly visible. Torgut, iron pipe in hand, was parting the crowd, approaching Heller’s back.

I realized then why Heller’s hands weren’t coming loose. Turks usually smear themselves with olive oil before they wrestle but tonight there was nothing there to make Heller’s hands slip on the Turk’s shoulders and neck.

You could almost hear the muscles grind with the effort of the two wrestlers.

Ah, I had it. Musef could see Torgut and Musef was simply holding Heller in position until the partner could bring that iron pipe down on Heller’s blond head!

The crowd was going wild, cheering Musef on.

Torgut was very near now.

Suddenly, using his grip on Musef to support the forward part of his body, Heller went back and horizontal!

His feet hit Torgut in the chest!

The thud of that double blow was loud above the yelling room.

Torgut flew backwards as though propelled from a cannon. He took three members of the crowd with him!

They landed with a crash against the wall!

The impact shattered the mirror on the opposite wall!

Musef tried to take advantage of the weight shift. He drew back a forearm to hit Heller in the face.

I couldn’t see what happened. But Heller’s hands clenched suddenly inward.

Musef screamed like a crushed dog!

Heller hadn’t done anything to cause that. He had just closed his hands in tighter.

The huge Turk buckled like a falling building and landed like rubble on the floor!

The crowd was silent.

They were incredulous.

They became hostile!

Heller stood there in the middle of the floor. Torgut was a half-dead mess against the far wall, blood trickling down his shoulders. Three town Turks were getting themselves untangled from chairs near him. Musef was collapsed and moaning at Heller’s feet.

With his two hands, Heller straightened up his own collar. “And now,” he said, in a conversational voice, “who pays me the five hundred lira?”

Now, money is a very important subject to the impoverished Turk. If Heller had had any sense, he would have simply walked out. But he doesn’t have any training in this sort of thing. I would have been running already.

The townsmen jabbered together. Then one said in English, “It wasn’t a fair bet. You, a foreigner, took advantage of these two poor boys!”

“Yes,” said an old Turk. “You exploited them!”

“No, no, no,” said the proprietor, getting brave. “You owe me for all this damage. You started the fight!”

Heller looked them over. “You mean you are not going to see that an honest wager is paid?”

The crowd sensed its numbers. It started to edge forward hostilely toward Heller. One tough-looking fellow was nearest Heller.

“Are you going to see that the bargain is kept?” said Heller to the nearest man.

The crowd was closer. Somebody had Torgut’s iron pipe.

“Ah, well,” said Heller. And before anyone could block him he grabbed Musef off the floor and with a wide sweeping movement threw him at the proprietor!

Musef landed against the counter. Glasses and bottles and kegs soared into the air. The counter fell over on the proprietor!

Every man in that room had ducked!

As the noise died down, Heller said, “Honor seems to be something you have never heard of.” He shook his head sadly. “And I did want to try some of your beer.”

Heller walked out.

The crowd had recovered a bit. They surged to the door after him and there they began to throw bottles and yell derisively and do catcalls.

Heller just kept on walking.

I saw that he was limping.

I really hugged myself. He had been utterly routed!

His crude scheme to get some money had failed.

Ah, indeed, the roles had reversed. He was the dog and I the hero here.

I went to bed singing — while Heller limped the miles back to base, broke, outcast and alone.