The Invaders Plan (46 page)

They were beginning a song called, "The Spacer's Lot." It is a dirge! Why do they always sing dirges before they start a voyage? Hangovers?

It didn't make me feel a bit better to be climbing to the sad, sad melancholy of that tune. I was struggling as it was! The lament echoed down as though sung in a tomb!

I missed a rung and almost fell two hundred feet.

I tried to hurry my ascent. The awful dirge was depressing me.

I almost fell again. The echoing walls made the song more deep and awful. Maybe if I got there quick, they would shut up. I was feeling bad enough already.

I stuck my head precariously in the compartment door. It was the end of the song and they all sat there weeping, about twenty of them.

"Is there a doctor aboard?" I asked in general.

A big, tough ape, probably wanted on half the planets for numerous crimes, turned his tearful eyes to me and then pointed silently across the passageway. The hand air organ was starting up again.

I made out a sign, very smudged:
Health Officer. Do Not Open.

With a one-handed effort, I undid the seal cogs and stumbled into the room. A blast of decayed meat and tup fumes hit me. Somebody was snoring on the gimbal bed. With some difficulty, I woke him up.

Bleary-eyed, this doctor was representative of the profession, not the way they like to be seen in song and story but the way they really are: a stinking wreck.

"My arm," I said. "It suddenly has become paralyzed!"

"Well, buy a new one," he said and tried to turn over and resume snoring.

With some struggle I got him to sit up. "I have money," I said.

That reached him. He got professional.

"I want you to tell me what's wrong with it," I said.

I got off my gunbelt and somehow managed to get out of my tunic, all without the slightest aid from him. He started to examine the wrong arm and I had to direct his attention.

With a lot of yawns and some time out to get another drink of tup, he asked some questions and prodded. The questions were mainly a hopeful, "Does that hurt?" when he poked.

He had some sort of machine and he made me stand in front of it. I hoped he was looking but I heard him drinking more tup.

"No slugs, no bone breaks, no burns," I heard him mutter. Then, with a shrug, he indicated I could get back into my jacket.

He was looking at me rather peculiarly. "Well," he said, "I know what's wrong with it now." I was just finishing buckling my gunbelt. His fingers were sort of twitching. I got out the ten-credit note. I intended to ask if he could change it for this action he was doing never cost more than two credits.

He took the note and put it in his pocket.

He gave a tremendous yawn and then he said, "The diagnosis is, you can't use your arm." With that, he showed every sign of getting back onto his gimbal bed. I blocked him. "You'll have to do better than that!" The doctor looked at me, very bored. "You want a technical term? All right: you had temporary hysterical paralysis of the upper articulation muscles." And he started to climb back onto his bed.

I shouted, "That doesn't handle anything!"

"There's nothing to handle," he said. "You apparently did not notice that you used your arm perfectly normally when you put your coat and belt back on." I stared. I looked down. I swung the arm. I flexed my fingers. There was nothing wrong with it! I could use it perfectly normally!

Once more he started to get back on the bed. "Wait, wait! What could cause that?"

"The machine showed you had no slugs in your head or foreign matter pressing the nerves of the spine. So there is no cause." I made my voice sound deadly. "You better tell me how such a condition could come about!" He saw plainly that he was not going to be able to get back on that gimbal bed unless he either moved me out of the way or said something I would accept.

The doctor shrugged. "Hysteria? Battle shock? You're an officer, so no electric shock can be used on you. A lot of things can cause it."

"Such as?" and I continued to block his way back to bed.

He looked vague. "Neurotic predisposition which then precipitated into a temporary manifestation? Hypnotism?"

"You've got to do more than this!" I said.

"For only ten credits? I'm no Slum City head plumber."

"That's five times the usual fee!" I said.

"You were five times as worried," he said. And he pushed me aside and lay down and shortly was snoring once more. A true professional.

Back at the airbus, I walked around it several times, thinking. It was almost dusk. Every now and then I would flex my arm and fingers. They were working perfectly.

I was trying to sort out what the meat-chopper had said.

Learned as I was in Earth psychology, I knew very well that he was wrong about "neurotic predisposition." I am not neurotic. That left hypnotism. But aside from language training, I had not been hypnotized.

Certain it was that I was at severe risk. What if this happened again? Just when I was about to shoot somebody down, my arm didn't work! The thought made my hair prickle.

I did not dare go near an Apparatus practitioner. Any drilling into my unconscious might reveal too much. The practitioner would report that I was blabbing state secrets and that would be the end of me!

What else had that (bleeped) meat-slicer said? Ah, that he was no "Slum City head plumber." That was the clue. I had seen their signs. I made up a plan quickly, calling on my skilled talents in this sort of thing.

I went around to the door to get in.

My driver said, "How am I going to explain to Officer Heller when I can't return that costume deposit?" I hit him. I used my left hand as I couldn't trust my right. But I hit him.

I got in. "Take me to the Provocation Section at once!" I ordered.

We flew through the dusk over Government City, darted down to water level at the River Wiel and shortly zoomed into the tunnel of the shabby warehouses.

I got out. I trotted straight up the steps.

Raza Torr had been in the act of going home. He froze. He seemed to have turned bone white but it was hard to tell in the dim light.

I decided I had better put him at his ease. "Met any nice girls lately?" I said conversationally.

My former escort was behind me. They must have had burglars or troubles lately as he was holding a gun in his hand.

Raza Torr, in a sort of strangled voice said, "I'll take care of this." I led the way. I knew the place inside out now. I went to the civilian costume area. Raza Torr followed. The escort had vanished.

"I want a speedwheel suit," I said. "The street kind. Something plain." Raza Torr seemed to have recovered. Probably, I thought, he had had a hard day. He was a naturally nervous fellow. But he doesn't always have good sense. He walked over to the rack and got down a speedwheel suit: they are shiny, made of slick body-armor material. This one had flaring scarlet flame patterns painted all over it, it could be seen from a mile off and hurt the eyes even then.

"No, no," I said. I went to the rack and found a plain black one in my size. It had some accident blood caked on the collar but one can't be choosey and I was in a hurry.

"Now a helmet," I said and went over to that rack.

Again he got in my way and tried to give me a rider helmet with a flame plume and no visor. I pushed it aside and got a no-plume black visor one.

"Now a tri-knife," I said. I led the way over to the weapons section and finally found one. They are a great knife. Criminals use them when they want to do a particularly gory murder. They are thin as a needle when their ten-inch blade goes in. When it hits bottom, the blade springs into a narrow fan, becoming three razor-edged blades. When you pull it out, a lot of guts come with it. They even have a ring in the hilt so you can yank back. Some knife fighters say they are too hard to draw out of a stabbed body, but that is just quibbling.

"Gods," said Raza Torr. "Who you going to kill?"

"I doubt I'll return these," I said.

"I doubt you will either," he said. I ignored the unjustified slur on my honesty. I was too intent on my project.

Back at my airbus, I directed my driver on a circuitous course to the outskirts of Slum City. Night had come. Real evening traffic had not yet started up. People in other cities were at their suppers. Not too many people in Slum City would have suppers to be at.

Although they are poor in Slum City, they are not inactive. The dilapidated and decayed structures do contain spots of liveliness. These pinpoints of brilliance seemed to deepen, rather than brighten, the intense gloom. Fifty square miles of deprivation are strung around a fetid lake. Nobody had any record of when Slum City had been built and even when constructed it was probably old at once.

There was a tale that Lombar used to set fires down here to while away his youth. I doubted the story. Lombar was more efficiently destructive than that and he certainly hated any slum. Someday, he had once mentioned to me, all this would be swept down, the population annihilated. It looked like it was overdue for the treatment.

I saw what I wanted. It was one of the bright spots. Youths hang out in dens in Slum City. They sometimes have orchestras, pretty bad ones. Tup is about a twentieth of a credit per canister, pretty bad tup.

Around this place there would be speedwheels.

I directed my driver to sit down well away from the lights of a bluebottle station. It was in what once might have been a park. I made him turn out the lights so that not even he could see what I was doing.

I scrambled around, got off my uniform and got into the speedwheel suit. I put on the black-visored helmet. I left all identification and normal Apparatus weapons with my uniform. I took with me only the tri-knife and a small wad of counterfeit bills. I told my driver to wait right where he was, showing no lights, until I returned.

With very silent feet I raced in the direction of the orchestra. I stopped well clear of the flaring lights. A lot of youths were dancing.

A quick survey discovered a speedwheel of the more powerful type. It was deep in the shadows. I jimmied the lock. It was so easy, the guy deserved to lose it!

I pushed it well away and then, when safe from any detection, I went zipping down what they sarcastically call a boulevard in Slum City, the speedwheel crushing through the garbage. The fetid stink of the lake was almost solid in the night wind.

The district to which I was proceeding with speed was known for its fornication machines, electric thrillers and head plumbers. In ten minutes the dimly lit signs began to flick by. I slowed down.

Painted in bad lettering anywhere there was a bare space on a building were directions to
Irrigate Your Rotting Bowels
to visit
Titillation Palace
and to announce that
Electric Penis Stimulation Is Done Here.
Finally, even dingier than the rest, I found a building which, amongst other signs, bore a badly scrawled floor label,
Mental Doctor; Brain Examination; Physiological Nerve Specialist; Hypnotist; Bowels Purged. See Doctor Cutswitz Before It Is Too Late.
There was my man.

I hesitated only because it was a little bit close to a bluebottle watch post. In fact, the police stand was only about thirty feet from the door of Doctor Cutswitz. It was handy for them because the police probably referred people they picked up to Doctor Cutswitz. But it was a bit public for me.

I had come in very slow. So I spun back and went into an alley. Beside me, a lot of building blocks were quite broken and edged as the wall ascended to the desired floor. There was also a window up there and it was lighted.

With catlike agility, I went up the wall and through the window. I was in a hall.

There were people about. Further down the hall a woman came out of a door and went into another door. Of course, she did not see me. I am good at that.

I slid along the passageway and found the door of Doctor Cutswitz. There was a light inside.

Boldly, I entered.

The guy was lying on a mechanical fornicator. He was too interested to notice that somebody had come in. I reclosed the door – noisily. He bounced up off the machine, fastened his pants and said, "I was just trying out a new model to see if it should be recommended to my customers." He was lying. The machine was all scuffed up and worn out. He was wearing side-blinders and it reminded me of Bawtch. He looked like he had soaked himself a year or two in oil and, from the smell of him, it must have been rancid.

I looked around his office. It was very dirty. There were five tiers of shelves along two walls. They had transparent jars on them, hundreds of transparent jars. Each jar contained something in a discolored fluid. I flinched. They were human brains.

He waved his arm toward them. "My very best customers," he said pleasantly. His voice sounded like it had been greased. "I am sure that we can satisfy your needs." I told him my name was Ip – that being about the commonest name on Voltar. I told him that I had a friend who had a problem and that I wanted some advice for my friend.

He sat me down in a reclining chair. He sat down on a stool beside me.

I told him my friend didn't have any metal bits in him or broken bones and that my friend didn't suffer from battleshock or neurosis. But my friend had had a dreadful thing happen to him: he had tried to draw his gun to shoot in self-defense, only to find his arm and hand refused to obey him. And then less than an hour later it vanished. That my friend was in a dangerous line of work and couldn't afford not to be able to draw his gun and shoot people.