The Invaders Plan (26 page)

"Pack him up," said Snelz to his men.

It was amazing how much stuff had been accumulated in this short stay. The food lockers had been filled. Covers had been gotten for the beds, bath towels . . .

Heller was unhooking the Homeviewer. A guard took it toward a carton. "Pack 'em up, move 'em out!" said Heller. The guards all laughed and kept busy. I couldn't understand why they were laughing until I realized Heller's words were the first words of a song, "Spaceward Ho!" For the first time since awakening, the joyous possibility hit me. Were we really on our way? I finished the last drops of hot jolt and then paused. Wait. Why was he packing up a Homeviewer? It was no good on Earth. Had he just tamely told the Countess bye-bye kid? I didn't think so. Why should the guards laugh at the first words of that old song of the spacers? Did they know something I didn't know? Was there something secretively amusing in Heller's attitude? Long service in the Apparatus teaches one to note the signs in scenes carefully. There was something wrong here.

But they now had the place all packed up. They put the cartons on dollies and shortly we were boarding a tunnel zipbus, baggage and all.

The only attention anyone was paying to me came at the various barricades where the alert guards demanded satisfaction for all the commotion. Heller, each time, just jerked a thumb at me and I presented my orders and identoplate. And well the sentries might be curious: somebody in a racing suit was not an ordinary sight at Spiteos or Camp Endurance. Heller had
no
security sense: if trained, he would have worn something old and shabby, more fitting to the scene. He wouldn't be standing out like an emergency beacon! And he made it even worse by handing the sentries puffsticks and shaking their hands and telling them good-bye. They were not very good sentries, either: they laughed and made jokes with him. In espionage you don't get yourself remembered! This guy wouldn't last two minutes on this mission – if he was really going, which I sourly doubted.

We finally got to my airbus in the Camp Endurance departure zone. My driver had evidently been alerted and he greeted our guards like old friends. He gave Heller a grinning crossed-arm salute. Dawn was hardly breaking. What was there to grin about? My suspicion that these people were up to something deepened.

Although the driver opened the back for Heller, the engineer stepped aside. The dollies rolled up and the guards pitched the cartons and baggage into the back seat. They almost filled it!

"In you go," said Heller and the driver scrambled in on top of the baggage!

Heller climbed into the driver's bucket and gestured for me to run around and get into the guard's seat up front.

He was going to drive!

No guards were getting in. There wouldn't have been room for them anyway. They showed no signs of going off to get another airbus. I didn't want to expose to Snelz that I didn't know what in blast was going on. In a sort of rattled way I thought I might come back and give him further orders when
I
knew. "I'll see you later," I yelled at Snelz.

"I know," he said.

I wondered if I was participating in a jailbreak for Heller. But I was well armed. Heller was gunning the drives – rohw, rohw, rohw. I scrambled into the guard's bucket beside him.

The rest of Snelz's people were all standing around grinning. They didn't say good-bye. The airbus vaulted straight up and the group below were pinpoints in the half-light of desert dawn. The red sunlight flashed blindingly in our faces as we ourselves, with altitude, made it rise.

You don't drive airbuses this way. At least sane people don't. Apparatus vehicles are not all that well maintained. But Heller was draped back in the seat, only one hand on the wheelstick, only one toe on the bars. "You comfortable back there?" he shot over his shoulder at my driver.

The pilot had settled himself in a nest in the boxes, only his feet were visible. Then a canister of hot jolt rose in a happy hand. Where had he gotten that? "First-rate, Officer Heller, sir." Heller certainly broke down discipline, I thought sourly.

Heller turned to me. Now it was my chance to gain some control over this crazy departure. I said, "The Apparatus freighter terminal is just to the southwest of Government City. You've got lots of time. There isn't one leaving until midafternoon." He looked like I had said a dirty word. "Freighter?" I opened my mouth to say of course, freighter; they leave once a week on a regular run for Earth. And then I clamped my mouth shut. It was too early in the morning. My wits were not about me. I mustn't tell Heller or anybody else who didn't need to know that Earth had a scheduled Apparatus freight service to it. If that got out, questions would hit the Apparatus like balls of fire! From all over the government and Grand Council.

Heller had the airbus at about twenty thousand feet. He was holding it there. Dangerous. The things slide off-balance if you're not an expert. They crash. It made me nervous.

"Well?" he prompted. "You said 'freighter.'" And then he must have seen that I didn't have any more to say so he did the saying. "Soltan, are you telling me the mission ship is a
freighter?
But that's silly, Soltan. A freighter would take six weeks or more to crawl along to Blito-P3. And we don't have anything to carry. Besides . . ." I plunged, "We don't have a mission ship."

"Ah," said Heller. He was thinking. He perched the cap a little further back on his head. He had the airbus hanging there like a ball balanced precariously on a finger. Didn't he know these things crashed? The desert, getting lighter now, stretched out from Camp Endurance. Government traffic control detectors would be asking shortly what the Hells we thought we were doing. We shouldn't be attracting attention this way. He shot over his shoulder, "You all right back there?" A curl of puffstick smoke rose out of the nest. "First-rate, Officer Heller, sir."

"You do have some craft in the Apparatus hangar, though," said Heller. And he must have taken it that I had nodded. "Good. We'll go there and look at them." With a blasting roar it was never made to endure, the airbus catapulted across the sky. Heller, flying with one hand and one toe, picked up the traffic control communicator. "Airbus
469-98BRY
heading for Apparatus hangars from Camp Endurance." He had read the numbers on the communicator disc. He thrust it at me. I fumbled for my identoplate and pressed it on the disc; and I had a horrible feeling that that was going to be my sole function the rest of today: presenting my identoplate! Fronting for whatever mad scheme Heller might have in mind. At least we were away from the Countess Krak!

The desert fled below us. Spiteos got smaller behind us. Way over on the horizon the place where Palace City should be seen and wasn't, loomed as only a snowcapped mountain. Commercial City spread as a smudge, still in night, way off in the opposite direction. Government City rolled up toward us as we passed the desert-fringing mountain range.

"You ought to get this thing fixed," said Heller. "I can't get it above five hundred miles an hour. You ought to get this thing fixed," he yelled back.

"Yah, I keep telling Officer Gris," came from the languid spiral of smoke.

They were both idiots. An airbus's safe top speed is only four hundred. It was shaking like it had palsy – and maybe it did, it was old enough. I closed my eyes. It was a trifle cruel to die just when I might possibly be getting Heller off this planet, me out of danger and him into it. The bottom fell out!

I stared down to see where my grave would be. But it was just the landing target of the Apparatus hangar field. Heller slammed us down dead center on the
X.

Before us loomed the huge hangars of the Apparatus Space Section. It is a pygmy compared to Fleet hangars but it is big enough. It rises about five hundred feet, a huge, rickety structure covering a square mile. Gantries and tractor platforms lay about in various states of decay and disarray.

Black-uniformed sentries with blastguns at port came racing up. This Apparatus area is extremely secret and well guarded.

"Officer Gris and party," shouted Heller. With a finger he indicated I should push my identoplate at the board a sergeant held aloft. "You stay here," he yelled back at my driver. "We may not be long. Come on," he said to me.

We piled out. The guards, disinterested now, slouched off. Odder things than a race driver came and went in this place. All in all, despite savage orders for top alertness, the Apparatus space hangar and area is glum, apathetic and shabby.

Heller was trotting briskly toward the hangar. I followed him not so briskly. I felt all this was out of my control someway. I was just an animated identoplate.

We got inside. Spaceships just arrived, spaceships waiting to go, spaceships being repaired, spaceships that wouldn't ever go anywhere again, stood far and wide, shadowy monsters full of secrets, half-operational machinery and old bloodstains. I groaned at the idea of having to walk endlessly amongst these assorted craft. It made my feet already begin to hurt.

But Heller was looking around alertly. And this was odd because you couldn't see much past the first three ships. He spotted something. I didn't understand his interest. It was a gigantic crane hoist used to lift heavy machinery.

The operator was in his cab way up in the air, sitting in bored idleness.

Heller called to him. Now, in the Fleet, officers accustomed to serving in the gigantic barnlike spaceships develop a type of voice. It is high-pitched and cuts across the rumble of drives with startling loudness. He was using that voice. "Hello the hoist! Stand by to lift!" Ordinarily an Apparatus man in this hangar wouldn't take orders from his own foreman. And I was somewhat startled to see the operator, almost a speck in his high cab, give a wave back.

Heller took a pair of gloves from his pocket and handed me one of them, putting his own on.

The hoist hook was resting on the floor. I went into shock as I understood. Heller put his foot on it and took hold of a handle on the upper plate. It was a huge hook. There was plenty of room to put more than one foot on it. He expected
me
to step onto that hook!

I had seen high riggers do it on gantries. But never in my days had it ever occurred to me to ride a hook!

Heller was gesturing at me, his attention elsewhere. It was nothing to him to ride a hook. Life around a combat engineer, I groaned to myself. I put on the glove, put my foot near his, seized a hand bar and closed my eyes tight.

"Take her to the top!" shouted Heller in that peculiar ear-splitting voice.

Up we went! I left my stomach on the hangar floor. With nothing under us or around us but one steel hook, with nothing above us but screaming cables, we were zipped to the top of the hangar. We stopped suddenly, the spring of the cables making us bounce.

I cautiously opened one eye and closed it again. Heller had one foot over empty space. I grabbed the hand ring with my other hand.

"Look over there," said Heller. And then he must have seen that I wasn't looking. "Hey, open your eyes. It's only five hundred feet down." They say never look down. I couldn't help it. I was horrified at the amount of empty space and the hardness of that concrete far below.

"We've got to find a mission ship," said Heller. "Look them over." I cursed the security which forbade me to tell him we should just be going by regular freighter.

"How big a ship will the hangars take on Blito-P3?" said Heller, nonchalantly swinging in the air.

I blurted the answer, "Five freighters, a couple combat ships."

"Then it will take a big ship," said Heller. He was looking down upon the whole expanse of the Apparatus space vessels now groundside. From this vantage point, a few were still hidden beyond others.

"Take her to the right!" shouted Heller to the cab that was just behind us now.

The hook swooped horrifyingly to the right. Heller could now see between several of the ships that had formerly blocked his view.

"Freighters. Transports. Some old model war vessels." He turned to me. "Where'd the Apparatus get these ships? Some temple rummage sale?"

"We're not the Fleet," I managed to get out.

"That,"
said Heller, "you definitely are not! I've got to think this over." Can't you think it over down on the ground? I silently pleaded. The hook was still swinging. He seemed to be determined to hang way up here in thin air and think. I got desperate. "We're supposed to take a freighter."

"Oh, no, no, no," said Heller. "Six weeks or more on the way. And no mission operating ship there. I've got to change your mind." You've changed it, I silently said. Anything, but get me back on the ground. He was still hanging there, thinking. "This stuff is all a pile of scrap," he said. "It just won't do. And a freighter won't do either. You certainly agree that we should have a proper mission ship." My hand was so sweaty it was slipping inside the engineer glove. My other one had already slipped! I screamed, "Yes. Yes! We need a proper ship! I agreeeeeee!" Heller turned and waved a hand at the crane operator just behind us. Then he signalled, palm down.

We plummeted! The cables screamed! We dropped five hundred feet so fast my foot came off the hook!

The steel heel banged into the hangar floor. Heller had stepped off just before it hit and stood there very composed. I reeled away and sat down on the concrete. I couldn't make my legs function.

Heller didn't seem to notice. He was sort of surveying the hangar floor around us, looking at a big empty space. "Aha!" he said.

His voice went racketing up to the crane cab. "Thank you and very well done, crane master!" The operator waved back.

"Come on," said Heller, trotting away.

Where the Hells was he going now? I gathered myself up and gazed after him. What was he up to? I desperately tried to think of some way to get this back under control. My neck was out a mile and a half. My prisoner was running around like a celebrity, without a single guard to back me up. He might take it into his head to go anywhere! But I had no ideas. I couldn't get even an inkling of what was really in his mind. If Lombar got wind of any of this . . .