The Invaders Plan (32 page)

"Fine, fine," I said. "But how did she get so well trained so fast to do a Fleet marine manual of arms!
And
march drill!"

"Oh, didn't you see me down there training her one afternoon? Oh, I remember – we stayed back of a couple of the big shock machines and you weren't much around. She learns awful fast – must come from being such a good trainer herself. But it was mostly me: I'm a pretty good drillmaster. Don't you think I did a fine job? It sure had you fooled today!"
That
made me savage. "(Bleep) you, you'd still need money to bribe your way in and out through the tunnel. Troops can't go in there without authorization!"

"Oh, we have a reason. We're taking out some training equipment for evening use and returning it each morning because the training department says it needs it in the day."

"Even that would require money to buy a pass! You can't move in and out of Spiteos without a stamped pass!"

"Oh, don't you remember? You put your identoplate on a permanent pass for my platoon." He looked at me with a bit of mischief in his eye. "And in case that expires, you put your identoplate on a permanent equipment demand."

"I did no such thing!"

"Oh, yes, you did. This morning. Just before you woke up!" I was stunned. The guard that had awakened me! The dirty thief had picked my pocket of my identoplate and put it back in before he woke me up!

It made me furious. "Don't tell me Heller isn't paying you handsomely to do this, Snelz!" He looked at me wonderingly. "Well, I suppose he will one of these days. Gris, what is all this (bleep) about money-money-money? Do you think I'd take all this risk for just money? You've got a peculiar idea of life, Gris. One doesn't do everything just for money. Sometimes, like today, one does it just for fun. Try it." I turned on my heel and left him. I was desperate. I didn't need his advice. I was hungry and I was broke!

My driver was sleeping peacefully in the airbus. I looked at him. He had been eating and drinking the whole (bleeping) day!

Abruptly, I had an idea. Heller had been shovelling money at him to buy things. This driver had once been a commercial shuttle pilot: he had murdered a flight attendant and had fled to another planet where he joined a smuggling ring; he had stolen stolen goods from them once too often and had been convicted; the Apparatus had taken him from prison, given him false identity papers, thinking to use him as part of their Theft Section. He hadn't been good enough and they had given him to me as a driver. With his criminal background, he would have stolen Heller blind!

I opened the door and hit him. It was not dangerous to do. He is a small fellow. Without giving him time to collect his wits, in a savage voice, I said, "Give me my share of the money you tore off from Heller today!" He sat up. He had had too much tup. Without even thinking, he said, "Oh, certainly I will, Officer Gris." I was saved! "All right," I snapped. "Hand it over!"

"Well, Gods, I'm sorry, Officer Gris. There ain't any left." He was trying to wake up. I helped him with a rough shake.

"Gods, Officer Gris. Don't do that. I got a headache. . . . The money? . . . the money? Oh, the money!"

"Don't stall! Give it to me straight! Now!" He was fumbling in his tunic. He had some pieces of paper. "Oh, yeah. I remember now. I got all the receipts. Gods, Officer Gris, you got no idea how much things cost! Do you know he spent three hundred and two credits through me today? The Fleet gave him the cleaning supplies for nothing – he has a pal in supply there and all it took was a note." He was fumbling with the receipts. "The tup truck cost a hundred and seventy-five credits. Oh, yes! It was the dresses!

"Officer Gris, I ain't ever going to get married. You won't believe it, but them dresses cost one hundred credits! Oh, that was embarrassing. I'd spent twenty-five credits for some other things. . . ." I shook him again, "Come to the point and stop stalling!"

"I'm trying to tell you," he wailed. "Where was I? You got me all mixed up and I lost a paper to boot. Ah, there it is. It was such a fancy store and they looked on me like dirt. I had the dresses all picked out and I only had ninety-eight credits of his money left and I knew he was really counting on me. I myself had two credits of my own so I put that with the ninety-eight and I got out of there with the dresses. I got it now. He owes me two credits." He thought for a moment. "I'll give him his receipts tomorrow and he'll sure pay me back my two credits. But that ain't important." A note of admiration crept into his voice. "Ain't he a really great guy, Officer Gris!" Such insolence! I hit him and I hit him hard.

The blood started trickling down the side of his mouth. He gathered up the receipts quietly. Without a word, he got into the driver's seat. That's how you have to treat this riffraff. It's all they understand. Lombar was right. They should be exterminated for the good of the Confederation.

I got in back. "Take me to my town hotel," I ordered. At least I had a place to sleep.

We flew through the early evening traffic toward the north end of Government City. The area has long been a sort of slum. That's why the Apparatus has its offices there. The offices themselves are on a cliff where the River Wiel takes a bend. But well inward from the cliff and down the hill, there is a sort of stew where Apparatus clerks gloom away their off-time and just a little further up is where some Apparatus officers live. The area stinks, not just from the dirty river but also from the dilapidated buildings themselves.

My "hotel" was not strictly speaking a hotel. It had been some notable's residence long ago and clapboard shacks had been added on and these were lorded over by a female who called herself Meeley. I had a small room there.

The airbus stopped at the side entrance, setting down in what had once been a small yard but was now a garbage dump. The driver usually sleeps there in the airbus so I left him and went up the crooked stairs to my room.

It was locked. Not just locked but barred.

I stamped over to a stairwell and yelled down for Meeley. I was gratified to hear a rush of feet. She was practically beating the stairs apart she was coming up so fast. For a moment I was gratified to get such quick response.

The light was dim and I did not anticipate anything. I could not see the expression on her ancient and cut-up face – she has several knife scars.

"Where's my money?" she demanded.

"Why, Meeley! You know I always pay you!"

"Always means never!" she shrieked. She has never liked me. "You been gone for days and days without no word. I thought we'd had the good luck you'd been killed like you deserve! You Apparatus scum is all alike. (Bleep) you!" She hit me!

"Open my room door!" I said, prudently stepping back.

She found a keyplate and dropped the bar. She flung the door open. She flashed on the lights!

Without another word, working like fury, she began grabbing up my things. She blasted past me and rushed to the balcony above the side yard. She pitched the whole armload down toward the airbus.

"Driver!" I yelled.

Meeley came rushing out of the room again with another armload. She hurled it into the night!

She returned and came out with an old pair of boots and my one bedcover and pitched those after the rest!

"Now get out!" she screamed. "I'm going to tell every lodging keeper in this whole area that you haven't paid a particle of rent for a year! GET OUT!" I thought I ought to look in the room to see if she had gotten everything. But I changed my mind. There are times to fight and times to run. She had always had a dislike for me for some reason.

My driver and I picked my things out of the garbage in the side yard, cleaned them off as best we could and bundled them into the airbus.

"Where to?" said the driver.

I couldn't think of anyplace.

"How about your office?" said the driver.

"Old Bawtch doesn't like that," I said.

"It's the only place you got," said the driver. "If you want my opinion, a desk is better than a gutter anytime. There really ain't room for two to sleep comfortable in this airbus. I'll take you to your office." There were cabins on that tug. But the very thought of it brought heavy pains into my stomach.

(Bleep) this mission. And (bleep) Heller! I ought to kill him!

And then I really got sick. A little later, the driver even had to help me to get up and stretch out on the hard desk.

It had been an
awful
day!

I woke up as I hit the floor in a shattering crash. It was daylight. Somebody had pulled me off the desk.

"You know you're not supposed to sleep in here," said old Bawtch, peevishly.

"Whose office is it, if it isn't mine?" I muttered from the floor under his big feet.

"Now get away from the side of the desk," he said. "I've got to stand there to put these papers down." And it was true. He was standing there with about a yard-high stack of documents and forms. I understood the situation then. He had needed the top of the desk to put this massive stack of papers on it.

I scrambled sideways out of the road and got to my feet. "That's an awful lot of papers," I said.

He had gotten the load down and was stacking it by categories. "You might drop by once in a while to validate forms. I can do all the rest of your work. But
not
push your identoplate. You do remember how to push it onto a piece of paper, don't you?" I detected a sneer.

Bawtch, for some reason, has never liked me. He stands – I had better say stoops – about six feet tall. He has two wild tufts of gray wool that stand out on either side above his ears; his nose is so sharp you could cut paper with it; he wears black blinders to keep light from side-striking his protruding black eyes. He doesn't talk, really: he bites. I think about eighty years ago he had ambitions to be an officer. The highest he ever made was chief clerk of Section 451. I worked it all out once. He is just jealous.

He was standing there threateningly to ensure I sat down and started stamping. "You might at least bring me some of the clerk's hot jolt," I said.

"The office funds are totally depleted. We heard a rumor you had been transferred elsewhere and we had a party. Then we heard you had been left on post and we had a wake. There is no jolt, hot or otherwise." I sat down, got out my identoplate and started to stamp. I was hungry and wondered if paper were edible. If it were, there was sure a feast here. The Apparatus rides, walks and sleeps on forms, forms, forms, nearly all of them lies.

Manifests for supplies that were personally stolen, certifications of payrolls that were never paid, sums scheduled for informers that went into the pockets of agents instead, personnel lists which falsely attested twice the number, "customer expenses" from the base chief in Turkey that were really fees of local prostitutes for himself: tons of made-out forms, the usual fare of the Apparatus.

I reduced the pile about half in half an hour. I was just about to bang my identoplate down on the next one when my attention was drawn to it simply by all the numerous currency symbols on it. I was broke. Here were all these people getting fat but not me. I stared at it:
Renovations, C764.9
it said at the bottom of the figure column.

"This is local," I said. "Renovations? For this place?" Bawtch muttered to himself something about my having the memory of an insect. Aloud, he said, "That's the repairs on the roof last year.
This
roof. The rain was coming down on our papers. The work was done. You even complained about the noise. The bill has been presented several times. You always find something else to do before you get that far down in the pile. The contractor has been on the phone twice a day for his money. Stamp it."

"What's this
'Unused Allocation'
down here at the bottom?" I said.
"C231."

"
I was nice enough to think, when I made the official request for funds, that you might like to get your office redone. You never said what you wanted done so it's unused." I looked around. There was a little paint peeling off the walls and a water stain over only half the ceiling. "I never could see anything wrong with it." A cunning thought had hit me, as yet only a proton moving out of the nucleus of an idea. Contractors kicked back when it was demanded. "Get me the original authorization," I ordered sternly. "Oh, I'll keep stamping the rest," I added hurriedly and only then did he move off.

I had finished the rest of. the pile by the time he came back. He was wiping hot jolt off his mouth. But I had other things in mind. He had the additional, unused two-hundred-and-thirty-one credit slip. I took it. "I'll handle this now." He carted away the tall stack of forms and I sat there looking at the two sheets. Now, first, let's see if I could get a kickback from the contractor who had done the work. He was pretty anxious to get paid, it being so overdue.

I got him on the communicator box. "You want this roof job paid fast?" I said and gave him the number.

"Who is this?"

"Officer Gris." He hung up. Well, that was a dead end. Bawtch had obviously been saying things behind my back.

I sat and thought. Redecorating this place was a waste of time. Who cared about pretty walls? Something more in keeping with my profession.

I had to go to the toilet. Now, one of the privileges of being head of the section was a private toilet opening off the office. While I was in there, I looked around. It was pretty messed up with paper scraps and all. When I finished, I chanced to look out the window. And it was then that the proton moved all the way out and went bang!

The toilet window of my office is right above a five-hundred-foot straight drop down the cliff into the River Wiel. Standing on tiptoe I could even see the river edge.

I went right back and put a call through to a building contractor we had never used. And to prove we had never used him, he was over there inside of fifteen minutes.