Mission: Earth "Black Genesis" (7 page)

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:

KNOW ALL:

The Inspector General Overlord must be advanced any and all funds he asks for any time he asks for them without any such (bleeped) fool things as signatures and receipts. It is up to the Inspector General Overlord how he spends them. And that's that!

Finance Office

COORDINATED INFORMATION

APPARATUS, VOLTAR

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.

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.