Mission: Earth "Fortune of Fear" (11 page)

They had landed me in the middle of a deep, deep snowdrift!

I was totally hemmed in!

Either it had been snowing before the
fцhn
started, or this was the residue of snowplows clearing runways. But the cold was not the problem. The fact that I was a prisoner gripped me with icy fingers.

How was I going to get out?

I wondered if the airport came equipped with St. Bernard dogs, the kind with the kegs under their chins. Then I remembered reading that the Coca-Cola civilization had wiped them out. The Coca-Cola Company would not hear of the dogs carrying anything but Coca-Cola and the dogs, with a final pathetic hiccup, had died out. So there was no hope there.

Even if I started to dig, I did not know which way. It was one time I could have used Heller's built-in compass brain, but that was no solution either. The last person I wanted to see at this time and place was Heller.

But one thing was certain. I was not going to sit here and perish in the snow, even if it was the Swiss custom. There is a limit to the courtesy one must display in emulating primitive ethnological fixations.

Cunning came to my rescue. I could locate the runway nearest to me by listening to the planes. Gods, they were loud enough as they landed and took off. They must be being landed and sent away by the controllers in the tower. No wonder nobody had time to notice a new arrival.

Despite rebounding echoes from the walls of the drift, I did make out what I hoped was the landing strips. That direction I did
not
want. Combing superjets out of one's clothing is almost as bad as freezing in the snow.

Nothing for it. I would have to risk a Code break and hope nobody reported it.

I chose my direction. I got out a blastick. I took off its safety. I levelled it. I closed my eyes and pressed the trigger.

It sounded like a cannon shot.

I opened my eyes. There was no snow in a path twenty feet wide and about thirty yards long. Only water!

I was quite certain guards and everybody else would come tearing out. It must have made a flash visible for miles even in the fog.

I waited.

Nothing happened.

More jets landed and took off.

I was very, very unwilling to leave this platform. I could not be sure that those pirates would not have second thoughts and come back and grab it.

The FIE shotgun would not make much impression on that super-blastproof hull!

But at length, when I saw no patrols and no line-jumper responding to the blast, I took the only action I could. I stepped off the platform into the water which still ran and walked along the new pathway to its end.

I could see nothing and hear nothing.

I didn't want to use another blastick. I might knock a building down if one was on the other side of the remaining snow barrier. I decided on caution. I fished in my pockets and got out the Domestic Police slash gun. My hands clumsy with their ski gloves, I managed to set it on lowest intensity.

I pointed it. I depressed the trigger. I steadied the tendency of my arm to recoil and began to slice away at the remaining wall of snow.

For a few moments it stood there in very neat blocks. Then it suddenly, under the latent influence of the slash-ray heat, disintegrated into slushy water.

VICTORY!

A building wall.

I had only burned it a little bit.

Looking backwards, I saw that my precious platform was still there, a murky darkness in the swirling fog.

I looked back at the building wall. I did an "eeny-meeny" and chose the left direction. Using the slash gun, I carved a passage down the wall.

A big door with a little door in it.

I put the slash gun away. I took a grip on my shotgun. I opened the smaller door.

It was a sort of office. Several counters. Some men in caps shuffling packages around.

One looked up incuriously. A beefy, phlegmatic sort of man, very red of face.

"Ja?"
he said.

"Sprechen Sie Deutsch?"
Isaid.

"Ja,"
he said.

Well, I didn't, so that was no help.
"Parla Italiano?"
I said hopefully.

"Nein,"
he said.

"(Bleep)!" I said. "How am I going to talk to you people?"

"Well," he said, thinking it over, "you could talk English like you just did."

Thank Gods! He spoke English!"Is this the customs freight shed?" I said hopefully.

"Bulk freight only," he said. "If you've come in here to clear those weapons, the passenger terminal customs..."

"He can't clear anything in," said a bigger, beefier man with a redder face, waddling over. "You haf to go to Immigrations, yet. And in your hands I don't see yet any papers. If customs you vant, den Immigrations iss..."

"I'm riding shotgun on a gold shipment!" I said. "It's right outside."

"Gold," said the first man.

"GOLD!" said the bigger man.

"Well, bring it in," said the first man.

"I can't," I said. "There's twelve and a half tons of it!"

"Wait, wait!" cried the bigger man. "Stand right there! Don't breathe. Don't move. Ve vill handle every-t'ing!"

Eight hours later, I was riding shotgun again on a much more valuable package.

In financial and related matters, Switzerland spells service with a capital
bow.

It seems that everybody has a relative or friend who has exactly what you want.

They phone ahead.

And they're probably called gnomes because they work at any time, whether it is day or night.

A wonderful place. Their weather might be cold and their buildings gray, but Switzerland had all looked very rosy to me.

The customs chief had a relative who ran the armored trucks business. This relative had a brother who ran the Zorich Banking Corporation Gold Department. And this brother had a cousin who was the bank's assayer. And none of them minded leaving the opera or mistresses or wives and kiddies, no matter the time of night, to highball me through.

Wonderful. Nice people. Best on the planet.

Each time I went to the next place, I was known already and expected.

A whirlwind night. And it contained some wonderful high points. Gold, at the evening fix, had been $855.19 an ounce. The verified and assayed quantity, once the lead decoys were discarded, had come to 301,221 ounces. This added up to $257,601,186.99.

But that was not all of the good news.

My problem was that money could be robbed off me and my signature could be forged and all these hard-won gains could have been wiped out at any time in the future by a single misstep on my part. That had all been solved.

The interest, at a nominal 10 percent, on such an amount was $25,760,118.70 every year. That itself was more than I could even extravagantly spend. And so the bank had made a deal.

I had sold them the gold, for 515 one-half-million-dollar certificates and $18,527 pocket cash. Each separate certificate would earn 10 percent per annum until it was cashed.

All I had to do in the future was hand over one of these certificates to a Zorich Banking Corporation correspondent bank in any country and I would be given half a million U. S. dollars, plus the interest up to that date on the certificate. They were actually each a bank IOU for half a million dollars. They have a fancy name: they are called "bank demand debentures." It means simply a bank's IOU.

They were better than the gold. They were more valuable, because of interest, than the gold. And even more important to me, I could hide them much more easily.

It was a good deal for the bank as well. They now owned my gold and could make money with it at far more than 10 percent. They actually didn't have to pay for it right then. And it got around the fact that U. S. dollars, in banks, usually ride as figures in ledgers, not bills in a cash box. Had I demanded that many actual bank notes, I would have almost scraped Zurich clean and I would have needed a truck instead of this small attache case which was now fastened firmly to my wrist.

There had been two more stops after the bank.

The first had been at the Zurich agency for an Amsterdam precious-and-semiprecious-stone firm. It was run by the cousin of the head of the Zorich Banking Corporation Gold Department.

"I want," I had said, "a big sackful of junk stones."

He had not minded at all being dragged out of bed at three in the morning for a sale of just junk stones. He even called the janitor and asked him where he kept the trash bins.

For a thousand U. S. dollars I got the prettiest bag of discarded baubles you ever saw. It was the first time I learned that emeralds can be so worthless they are sold by the pound, that diamonds can be so synthetic they can't even be used in costume jewelry and that paste rubies can be so bad you can't even put them in stage regalia. But they glittered.

They were vital to my plans.

He poured them into a fancy sack with a rival company's name on it, I paid him and he went happily back to bed and I went to my last stop, the airport.

The charter jet people didn't the least mind getting a pilot and co-pilot up out of bed and the hangar crew didn't the least mind getting a hopped-up Grumman Gulfstream on the line for immediate launch.

And here I was, streaking for Istanbul with the vital certificates chained to my wrist and the bag of junk stones under my feet, looking down at the Alps, where I had not been dumped, so rosy in the glow of dawn.

A telephone was at my elbow in the jet. I picked it up. I got the taxi driver in Afyon right away. My Gods, but things were going smooth. Not even a foul-up in Turkish phone connections.

"Meet me at the airport in Istanbul," I said.

"What flight?" he said.

"My flight," I said. "You think I'd stoop to travel by commercial jet? My own flight, Ahmed. I own the whole (bleeped) world!"

It was an eager and walking-on-air-type Gris who stepped out of the jet at Yesilkoy Airport, Istanbul.

Immigration stamped me into Turkey without noticing Sultan Bey had not left.

Customs took one look at the wrist cuff and chain, ignored the guns, and sped me on through into the country. They knew me, anyway.

And there amidst the colorful airport throng was Deplor from the planet Modon, alias Ahmed, the taxi driver.

"Jeez!" he said in gangster English, "you look like you et fifty canaries, boss."

"At one gulp," I said. "Lead on, lead on, for we have lots to do. There are going to be some changes made!"

A lot of people didn't know it yet, but this was just the start of fatal days for them. I had plans!

We battered our way out of the crowded airport and then battered our way along the seventeen miles which led to the city. The minarets which made a masonry forest all along the Golden Horn had never looked so good. Roaring along, we soon sped through the breach made in the city wall to accommodate the car traffic and began our tortuous course through narrow, noisy streets. Ignoring the protests of how close we came to pointed-toed slippers, giving vendors' carts the necessary bumps and sounding our horn continuously to clear the way, at length we drew up before our first destination: the
Piastre Bankasi.

I trod like a conqueror across the tile floor. I pushed the lowly clerk aside who would have inquired my business. I stalked into the office of Mudur Zengin, czar of the biggest bank chain in Turkey.

Fat and immaculate and manicured, dressed in a pinstripe Western suit of charcoal gray, he looked up from his mother-of-pearl inlaid desk to see who it was tracking up his priceless Persian carpet.

He wasn't used to having people with crossed bandoliers and a shotgun coming in for business conferences. Maybe it was that he was short-sighted-his glasses had fallen off-and seeing the bearskin coat thrown over the shoulders, mistook me for a bear.

"Allah!" he said.

I advanced. I unsnapped the case and opened it. I riffled 515 engraved certificates under his nose.

"O Allah, I was going to say. Sit down!"

He found his pince-nez glasses, polished them and

put them on. He evidently didn't need glasses to see money. He only needed them to see people. He peered at me. "Aha," he said. "You must be Sultan Bey. You do business, I believe, with our Afyon branch. The Zorich Banking Corporation said you were coming but we did not expect you so soon. Now, what can we do for you?"

"A safe-deposit box," I said, "that nobody can get into but me. Nobody."

Buzzers buzzed and guards paraded. We were shortly in the safe-deposit department.

"Two combinations," said Mudur Zengin. "The latest thing. One is yours and one is ours. Only you can appear. No one else can sign the card. Your photograph appears on it and the guards will look at you for sight recognition."

I was shortly in a private cubicle with the box. I laid the precious certificates in it. I laid the gold-sale original receipt on top. I then took out five certificates, each a half a million dollars. It hurt to do so but I did it. There were still 510 of them left in the box.

I rejoined Mudur Zengin. He was polishing his hands. I ended that by pushing a certificate into them. "I want this in cash," I said.

He stared at it. "Cash?"

He suddenly pushed me into his office. He sat me down in the most comfortable chair. He would not hear a word until a clerk brought in
kahve
on a silver tray. It was like Switzerland all over again except that there it had been chocolate.

Having ascertained if my
kahve
was sweet enough, if it was just the right temperature, if I was warm enough and if the cushions were soft, he got down to business. "You had better tell me your banking problems, Sultan Bey. I was a friend of your father's, the great revolutionary hero." That was the traditional lie because I doubt if he had ever met the original Voltar surveyor. "I consider your problems as though they were my own. So speak."