The Invaders Plan (61 page)

There's a lot you don't know about beautiful widows, I muttered to myself. "Now, two more things."

"M . . . more?"

"On that ship there will be a young homosexual. You are not to associate with or speak to him. You must remain unknown to him. He is an enemy spy."

"A . . . and?"

"And if you are not delivered to that ship, if you do not arrive as I have said, its captain will bring a ferocious, blastgun-packing crew right here, seize you and . . ."I was about to say "rape the Widow Tayl" but she'd be overjoyed by that. "... burn down this whole estate and maim and shoot your dear Pratia on suspicion of being an enemy agent. Understood?" He was paralyzed. Well, he'd have to get used to the operating climate. Might as well start now. I had worked out how he could make me a personal fortune. Except for that, I didn't need him and could have shot him right where he shivered. But, as Lombar says, money talks.

I sat there smiling in a Lordly way. Let him see I could also be his friend. Police psychology is the applicable branch. Crush them and then pretend friendship. But he didn't seem to be responding. However, if I sat there long enough with lifted lips, gazing down my nose at him in a superior way, it would eventually work.

But the psychotherapy was ruined. A voice came from the house, over a loud speaker. "Yoo-hoo, you boys," the musical lilt of the Widow Tayl. "Don't keep sitting out there like the dear little angels you are.
Come
into the house and get some lunch." So we went in. It was a gorgeous dining room. All done in blue and gold with little gold nymphs having a rare time of it all over the ceiling. There were soft couches at various levels. The center of the room was utterly sagging under the weight of canisters, platters of cakes and dried rare meats and fruits.

She was dressed in the filmiest of films and she had her hair piled up and held with diamonds. She looked at the two of us. "Where's the other one?"

"He won't come to for another three or four hours," I said brutally.

She looked at the spread. She glanced at herself in a wall mirror. And she got a very, very sad look on her face. "Well, go ahead and eat," she said dispiritedly.

I ate. Prahd was just sitting there.

Finally he said, "Not burn down the whole estate!" What a fool. To talk like that in front of the Widow Tayl. It was my lot to deal with fools and amateurs.

But the Widow Tayl had not heard him. She was sitting on the sofa behind him. Her eyes were dreamy. With one of her hands she was curling the hair on the back of Prahd's neck. In the other she idly grasped a large, soft fruit.

Prahd suddenly looked at me and said, "Oh, you mustn't doubt me. I'll come. I'll come!" The Widow Tayl's eyes went glassy. Her breathing quickened. She yelled suddenly, "And he put his red cap in . . . in . . . in ..." The fruit in her hand was clenched into an explosion of soft white meat. "OHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH-HHHHH!" I was glaring. (Bleep) her. She was thinking of Heller. She had dressed and primped and laid out this huge lunch THINKING ABOUT HELLER!

I attacked a sweetbun like it had bit
me!

I'd show HIM!

Late in the afternoon. Heller came out of the gas. Prahd gave me the signal and I made Ske shift the airbus to the confined space just outside the hospital door – a thing he cursed over, as landing on some shrubs scratched his paint. But I was taking no chances on the Widow Tayl seeing Heller again. She might remember what he looked like: it would be out security.

I whisked Heller through the hospital door and into the airbus and we took off at once.

The recorder was still locked to his wrist. It was running and with ten hours of strip capacity, would keep right on running and recording for some time. So I was saying nothing. Just before he had come out of the hospital door, I had thrown a towel over his arm, so it was not getting any pictures: there would be no views of where he had been.

He was still groggy. He had a cup-like dressing over his right temple and several more at different places on his body. Prahd had told him they contained "heal-fast" fluid, that they wouldn't come loose if he showered. Prahd had given him a small vial of solvent and in twenty-four hours, Heller could apply it and the cups would come off: the spots would be a light pink for another day, but Prahd had given him another vial of false-skin coating which would eradicate even that. Heller had received the data and vials with a minimum of attention. He seemed to want to go back to sleep.

I was very anxious to see how this equipment worked. The whole success of the Earth operation depended upon it. I had the rest of the items of one whole set with me. My hopes were high but there was a bit of anxiety, too.

At the hangar, fortunately, most of the contractor crews had gone for the day and nobody wanted to see him. I passed him into the airlock of the tug: he seemed to be heading for the rooms in back.

With speed – which Ske objected to – I rushed through the evening sky and soon arrived at my rooming house. I grabbed the box containing the rest of the set and went zooming up the stairs. Meeley was on her hands and knees on a landing trying to scrub the floor and I almost knocked her flat. She swore at me with surprising violence but I ignored her.

Locking my door, I swept some empty canisters off a table and hastily began to set up the equipment. With hands quivering with eagerness, I got the activator-receiver going. I was only twenty miles from the Apparatus hangar and this thing was good, the late Spurk had said, for two hundred miles.

I turned on the separate receiver-viewscreen.

Nothing!

Not even a crackle!

I turned up the activator-receiver until it was practically shooting blue streams!

Nothing.

I turned up the receiver-viewscreen.

Nothing!

(Bleep) Spurk! He must have been lying! It served him right to get himself killed!

I sat back. I thought. Then it occurred to me that the whole rig might just be underpowered. So I picked up and added the 831 Relayer to the setup. It was supposed to boost the signal between the activator-receiver and the receiver-viewscreen so strongly that they could be ten thousand miles apart!

Nothing.

I boosted every manual gain knob I could find!

Wait. I heard something in the viewscreen speaker. A faint rhythmic sound.

I looked at the viewscreen. I thought I must have turned the power up too high. Maybe a component was burning in it. It was a blurred, wavery pink.

I counted the rhythmic sound. It was going at about eighteen times a minute. Hard to recognize. The quality was poor.

Suddenly I had it! The sound was breathing! The dim pink was faint light coming through the eyelids. Heller was asleep! If it was Heller.

Well, it had gotten something. But Gods, with every manual gain at maximum and even the 831 Relayer on the line, it was only doing twenty miles! I despaired of ever using this in Turkey when Heller was in the Americas.

I sat back, wondering what to do now. With this rig so poor, Heller could just waltz around the United States as free as a bird; I wouldn't know what he was doing! I wouldn't be able to use information gained on this channel to sabotage his intentions. Awful thought!

For some time I sat there glooming. I was almost ready to give it up when I heard footsteps coming from the speaker. Very faint, hard to recognize as footsteps. They were a bit louder now. They stopped.

A voice: "Honey, are you all right?" It was so fuzzy, I couldn't recognize it from voice quality. But it must be the Countess Krak. Yes, as I glanced at my watch, the guard would have changed.

The viewscreen image came on gradually. Faint, furry. It
was
the Countess Krak. She was in uniform, her helmet was off. Her face was very big. A poor picture.

She looked concerned. She was touching the heal-fast capsule. "Did you fall? Did you have an accident?"

"Oh, hello, darling. I must have fallen asleep again." Bad quality, barely able to tell it was Heller's voice. "No, no. Don't be alarmed. It's nothing. I just had a lot of identifying marks removed by a cellologist."

"You WHAT?"

"Yes. Soltan came and got me and I kept an appointment." There was horror on her face. "They put you under gas? You were
out?"

"
Oh, please. It's not all that much. It takes more than a little gas to hurt me!"

"Hah, Jettero Heller. A lot you know!" She was quite cross. "You do something crazy like that the minute I turn my back! I've told you, where Soltan Gris is concerned, I can handle him and you can't!" Then she suddenly changed. She cupped his face in her hands, looking at the wound cover. Her voice was full of sorrow and concern. "Oh, my poor darling. What have these beasts done to you?" It gave me a bad moment. Would she guess what really had been done?

Heller tried to laugh her out of it. "Look," he said, fumbling about. "The doctor gave me the tiny piece of arrowhead he took out." He told her the story and then he opened the little gold case.

"It's all bloody!" she said, recoiling. I grimaced. Blood meant nothing to her unless it was Heller's.

"Of course!" said Heller. "He said he took it out of my frontal bone." He picked it up and the fragment became absolutely HUGE on my screen. "Hmmm," he said. "That's funny. I thought it was an obsidian arrowhead and this is flint." (Bleep) Prahd for his fancyextras, I gritted.

"Could have been metamorphic," puzzled Heller. "But obsidian and flint seldom mix."

"Oh, Jet. You should have been more cautious. You should have made them do it here. Where I could be present. They may have said something to you while you were out. Think hard! Do you remember what they said? Any general anesthetic can act as a hypnotic." You and hypnotism, I snarled to myself in a wave of hate as I recalled the horrible thing she had done to me.

Heller said, "Oh, yes. I forgot. It's still here on my wrist. Soltan let me put this on. Only I know the numbers to open it." He busily began to undo his combination. I made a mental note that he favored an idiot's combination – 3, 2, 1. Ho, ho. You could learn things with this bug rig!

"It's still running," he said. "Here, I'll put it on a player." And he got a player and shortly had the strip running.

Heller was watching the Countess. And that was good because the whole thing made or broke on just this part of the project. Had I tricked her or hadn't I? My voice, very fuzzy, came out of the speaker, "I feel a little queasy. Have you got something?" Then Prahd, "Could you hold this?" And then my, "Oh, no. The sight of blood makes me quite ill lately for some reason." The Countess Krak was sitting up very straight, listening intently.

Then my voice through the speaker on the ship, "Oh, my Gods, I'm going to be sick at my stomach!" Followed by the heaving sounds.

The Countess started nodding for all the world like a teacher who is approving a pupil for being exceptionally obedient. Then she relaxed. I knew I had won! She thought that the hypnotic suggestion to get sick if Heller was hurt was still securely in place.

When the picture went white, Heller said, "My wrist must have slipped off the table." The Countess shrugged.

"I'll speed play it through," said Heller. But, of course, there were only clicks and snips and bubbles of beakers. He spot-checked the return to the tug.

The Countess said, "I'll get you something to eat." Had I won? You can't ever tell about females, but she apparently didn't suspect anything underhanded had been done. I realized she had been worried about physical damage; nothing would point to anything else.

But my problems with this rig were crucial. I could not hang on Heller's coattails and still oversee all our Earth operations.

There were some minor flaws. Peripheral vision-things in the view field but not being looked at directly – were there, if blurred. I could cope with that. But the overall visio and audio quality left so much to be desired that I was gloomy.

I thought of turning the strip on in my receiver-viewscreen and just leaving it. It had an automatic strip-feeder in it. It would record for days, maybe even weeks, untended. You just put a pile of strips in it. But then, the Countess came back in and I thought that maybe I could pick up some crucial data. After all, I knew nothing of their domestic relationship. It was really a new scene to me for they would not act naturally with me close by. What
did
this pair do when they were alone together? So I kept watching.

She had changed from her guard's uniform and was wearing a blue exercise suit. She was holding a couple of steaming canisters with tubes in them – you can't use anything else in space and it was, after all, a spaceship. "Yell up there and tell it to convert the gym to a steam bath, will you? I want to steam some of that anesthetic poison out of you." Heller accommodatingly yelled, "Steam bath!" And they drank their soup.

Well, I was going to find out if water and heat hurt anything. And shortly Heller stripped and walked into the steam. I sure got a lot of steam! But the extra heat and water did not change things. Spurk hadn't flunked there. He had only flunked on range and quality, in my opinion, so far.

When Heller had showered in a bathroom, he yelled, "Gym!" The Countess yelled from somewhere, "You put on an exercise suit! It'll take more than steam to get the poison out." There was still a tinge that he had been naughty.

He was shortly running on an escalatorlike rig and then he was doing some backflips and generally working up a new sweat. Finally he went and showered again and put on a blue lounging suit.

She was crossing the gym toward him when he stepped down to go back to the lounge. He suddenly grabbed her and kissed her. My set viewscreen flickered. Oh ho, it did register emotion in an odd way.

He pushed her back. "Am I forgiven?"

"Oh, Jet, I'd have to forgive you anything!" They kissed again. And then Jet held her away from him and in a cheerful voice said, "You haven't said what
you
have been up to today! Maybe it was even worse than me!" She laughed. "I've been drilling for the review." Review? Review? I thought. What review? This was news.