Destination: Saturn

XXIV

The crimson deepened through the spectrum to a lovely shade of lavender. Kreplach’s voice broke a little on the high notes, but his remarkable self-control held firm.

“Oh, yes, we’ll have some ships there, waiting for you—yes, sir, quite a few ships. Waiting for you.”

Ajax smiled. “Good-oh! Make sure you have a goodly Flock of empty personnel-carriers will you, Kreplach old man?”

The Admiral blinked; his smile wavered.

“Empty personnel-carriers?”

“That’s right: empty.”

“What for, you mealy-mouthed, pig-snouted, lard-hearted, milk-livered…”

“Temper! Temper!” Ajax reproved with a wagging finger. “Apoplexy one of these days, Kreplach. Self-control’s the thing, you know.”

“… swine-gutted, pea-brained, pox-ridden, donkey-faced, jug-eared, jelly-spined…”

“But, to answer your question, for the prisoners, of course,” Ajax added with superb nonchalance.

“… quarter-witted, fat-headed, cross-eyed, milk-hearted, snake-… hmm? What prisoners?”

Ajax absently examined the polish on his fingernails. “The prisoners I am bringing back from Saturn, of course,” he said casually.

The delicate lavender hue which embued Vice Admiral Milton A. Kreplach’s jowls deepened into a rich, turgid purple. Ajax viewed it admiringly.

“I say! Wish I could capture that shade in my prize odontoglossums, Kreplach. What’s your secret, man? I’d take home every prize ribbon in the Shanghai Flower Show if I could…”

“What prisoners from Saturn?” Kreplach roared, rattling every loose object in the entire room.

“Little gift for our gallant boys in EMSA,” Ajax said modestly. “After all, you couldn’t expect the likes of Ajax Calkins to make a daring raid behind enemy lines—all the way to the enemy’s home planet—without bringing back a few prisoners, could you?”

The rich purple suffusing Kreplach’s jowly visage became mottled with patches of leaden gray, all except for the pinched white about his lips and nostrils. His eyes goggled and glared as if about to burst free of their sockets and bounce about the room like two blood-shot Ping-pong balls. He clenched his teeth so hard the blood drained from his gums.

Breathing heavily, Kreplach stared at Ajax’s amused expression.

“Daring raid… enemy lines… prisoners?” he asked, pitifully. Ajax nodded.

“Of course, Kreplach. Why do you think I made that speech about my so-called, ha ha, ‘defection’—of course you’ll understand I had to play it straight. Couldn’t let anyone else into my plan, even you, Kreplach. Enemy has eyes and ears everywhere, you know. So… I am bringing you back a few prisoners from Saturn’s Prime Base, the naval headquarters.”

The mottled hue gave way to dead gray. Milton A. Kreplach reached out and held onto both ends of the control panel. I won’t say his grip was tight, but observers did notice that the enamel flaked off and cracked quite badly.

“Who… did you take… prisoner?”

Ajax mused.

“Well, let’s see. There’s Utterly Supreme Admiral Heimmerschlitzer, that’s one. He’s supreme commander of all interplanetary military and naval forces, you understand. And the head of the Tactical Command planning the invasion fleet—can’t remember his name, Baron something-or-other. And his staff officers, about fifty-nine of them. And most of Heimmerschlitzer’s staff commanders, thirty-odd, of course. There’s also the head of the Secret Service, and two of his top Secret Agents. And a passel of high-ranking Code experts. Not to mention some scientists. About three thousand of them: space scientists, electronics men, linguists and mathematicians, physicists, all kinds of chemists and energy-weapon men, engineers, and I don’t know what-all.”

Kreplach was quite pale by now, and breathing heavily.

*… Really?” he said faintly.

Ajax nodded.

“I may as well be immodest, and admit I carried off about two-thirds of the top-ranking scientific geniuses of the whole Saturnian Interplanetary Empire,” he grinned. “They all wanted first crack at the planetoid’s scientific treasures… so we let ‘em all on board and captured the lot of ‘em!”

“… D-do you mind telling me… how?” the Admiral said in a faint whisper. Ajax smiled affably.

“Why, of course not, Kreplach old sport! It was just a minor variation on a trick my Prime Minister played to capture a couple of spies who infiltrated the Kingdom of Ajaxia! You see, below minus-250 degrees, Saturnians hibernate. It’s an automatic environment-response, and despite all their civilized conditioning, it can’t be stopped. Any more than we humans can avoid going to sleep every dozen-or-so hours, you understand?”

“Yes… k-keep talking… I understand!”

“Well, then! My Prime Minister, the Wuj, worked his trick by luring the spies into a storage room used for meat refrigeration and turning up the juice so that the spies hibernated. A very ingenious device and even a monarch such as myself is not above complimenting his underlings on the use of mechanical ingenuity. Once we fooled the Saturnians into thinking the planetoid-ship was in friendly hands, we guided them down to the main-air-lock which fronts, let me explain, on a very long large corridor. We let them all in—there were some thousands of them—and shut the door behind them. The door in front of them was already shut, but they had to go the length of the corridor before they could find that out, you see?”

“Yes. I see. And?”

Ajax grinned triumphantly. “And we refrigerated them! We had rigged up some refrigerator coils in adjacent rooms all along that corridor. Wasn’t much trouble—simply stripped the planetoid-ship of all its refrigerator equipment, and rigged it up anew. Seems like the planetoid-ship was built to house hundreds of thousands of ancient Asteroidals, you see, probably for some long-term voyage to the nearer stars for colonization purposes, or some such. Anyway, with all those people aboard—they never got on board, of course, the planet blew up before they loaded on—anyway, to feed all those people all the way to jolly old Alpha C or whereever the Asteroidals were going, they needed plenty of grub, and that meant plenty of refrigerators. So we locked the blighters in this long corridor and refrigerated the lot of them until they hibernated smooth as pie!”

“… Very clever, Calkins…”

“Tut, tut, nothing to it. All the Wuj’s original idea, of course,” Ajax said modestly.

“And… this was why you, uh, ‘pretended’ to defect? To make a raid on the Saturnians?”

“Well, perhaps we didn’t exactly have everything worked out beforehand, Kreplach old thing, but it all worked out pretty well, I must say.”

“Calkins… Calkins… don’t you think the Saturnians are going to… uh, shall I say, resent this kind of a raid? Just a little? I mean, you know, we aren’t officially at war with the Saturnian Empire, you know? Don’t you think this sort of thing might—just possibly—start off such a war?” Kreplach’s voice was dangerously soft. Color had returned to his face—most of it, anyway—and he smiled sweetly at Ajax Calkins, who returned the smile with a boyish grin of his own.

“Not a chance of it, old sport!”

“No?” A strangled note on the rising inflection.

“Positively not. Not a chance. For one thing, we’ve got about half of the general staff—nearly cleaned out the whole Admiralty, we did. You’ll be able to get enough information out of these brass-hats to make a war impossible. Also, from their code-experts you can get all their latest codes. From their engineers and scientists, you can get the dope on every last weapon and latest model warship they’ve got in the whole dang Saturnian navy! With this kind of information, how could you not beat the pants off ‘em, even if they were stupid enough to start a war?”

Kreplach stopped dead. He pondered heavily.

“You know, Calkins… you’ve got a point there.” There was a fresh note of hope in his voice.

“You bet I have,” Ajax said firmly. “And then there’s my ace-in-the-hole. I didn’t plan on it, but it just happened…”

Kreplach frowned.

“Ace-in-the-hole?”

“Um! An ancient pre-Space expression denoting a superior advantage for our side. One of the prisoners I forgot to list for you.”

“Who did you capture? The Emperor of Saturn?” Admiral Kreplach’s lips twitched; it was almost a smile.

Ajax’s face, however, displayed a genuine smile.

“Not quite. But I got his eldest son.”

Dead silence.

“To be brief, Kreplach, one of my prisoners included His Indescribably Superior Lordship, the Crown Prince Zarf-bladder, Heir Obvious to the Saturnian Imperial Throne.”

A dull, thumping sound, followed by even deader silence.

“I say, Kreplach, are you still there?” Ajax queried. For the viewscreen had just gone blank as the Admiral slid off it. In a second, a flushed officer’s face replaced the leaden jowly visage of Kreplach.

“Sorry, Your Majesty. Admiral Kreplach has, uh, just had a slight, uh, accident. He’s being carried off to the infirmary right now…”

“Accident? Serious, I hope?—Ahem! I mean, nothing serious, I hope” said Ajax.

“Oh, no, Sire. Quite minor, I’m sure.”

“That’s good… I wouldn’t like to think anything I said or did… what seems to be his trouble anyway, Lieutenant?”

The officer assumed an expression of polite seriousness. Was he repressing a grin? Ajax wondered.

“Uh, apoplexy, I think. Your Majesty.”