Mission: Earth "Fortune of Fear" (29 page)

Ahead I saw a small and mean hotel. I slowed to a sauntering gait. I had a cunning plan for the first stage. Police, when they want to trap a criminal they expect to be in a hotel, surround it. They would think I was inside when I was outside, and I would be able to detect them.

I went in. The clerk, if you could call him that, was sound asleep. I woke him up and told him I wanted a room. Without opening his eyes, he reached up, got a key and handed it to me.

Stealthily, I went up some stairs. I found the room. I went in and hid my bag. There was a drain pipe. I slid down it.

Through an alley I made my way up the hill to some always-open stalls around the Great Bazaar. There were no throngs at such an hour. Many shops were closed. But I soon found what I wanted: an Arab and Oriental clothing shop. The place smelled suffocatingly of mothballs and camels. A single electric bulb shone down on racks of tangled merchandise. I pawed through them. I was looking for a
djellaba,
a hooded cloak. I wanted the kind that Arab chieftains wear. I found one. It was of soft, yellow wool. A bit ornate, since it had a border of embroidered gold thread, but it would have to do. I found a turban. I found some baggy pants. I found a gold-embroidered waistcoat and a shirt. I found a bandolier with lots of pouches.

The proprietor, suspecting thieves, woke up. He was very fat and yawning. He looked at me strangely. He began to add up the items I had selected. He yawned. "Eighteen thousand lira," he said.

"Nine thousand lira," I said.

Then he did something very suspicious. He shrugged and nodded! He did not try to bargain! I knew what that meant. He was hoping to lull my natural alarm.

I got out a bill. My Gods! Mudur Zengin had only given me thousand-dollar bills!

I had no choice. I had to give it to him.

"I'll have to wake up Muchmud the moneylender next door to get the change," he said. My suspicions were confirmed! He was trying to detain me!

I was very cool, however. "Go ahead," I said.

He was gone for over five minutes! I knew he had called the police. He said, "Here is your change. Ninety-one thousand lira." It was an awful wad. It contained small bills. He thought I would delay long enough to count it. I would fool him. I didn't. I shoved it in the bundle.

He looked at me strangely. Then it hit me what this was really all about. He was making sure he would have my full description. He knew what clothes I had bought. He would tell the women what they were when they came to question him.

I was up to it. I executed Item (C). I would cover my trail.

While he was lying down again on his couch, I pretended to have trouble tying up my bundle. I bent over and slid a time bomb underneath a clothing rack. I pushed the plunger.

I walked out.

I went down the hill. I did not run.

Ten minutes went by.

The shop and a lot of others around it flew into the sky in a pyre of orange flame. The concussion broke a window near me.

That part of the trail was covered. The women would never get my description out of him!

I felt reassured. But I remained very watchful. I approached the hotel. There were no police around it. My trap had not been sprung. Probably they were merely late. I had better be quick.

I scaled the drain pipe. It was only four feet long. I got back into the room.

Way off up the hill I could hear police and ambulance sirens going. A good diversion. Maybe that was why they had not come to the hotel. Clever of me.

I opened my suitcase. I took off my Western clothes. I got into the balloon pants and shirt and vest. I put the bandolier over my shoulder. I put my military boots back on. I tied the turban and got into the
djellaba.
Quite a change!

I transferred the remaining bombs and U. S. money to the pouches of the bandolier. I got my diplomatic passport and put that in a pouch. I stuffed the wads of Turkish money into my waistband: it was far too lumpy for the bandolier containers.

I repacked the suitcase with the clothes I had taken off. Then, with sudden decision, I took out a Beretta Model 81/84.380 caliber. It was a lightweight pocket size and it held thirteen rounds in its magazine. I put it in the inside pocket of the
djellaba.
I looked around. I had left nothing in the room. I strapped my grip back up.

Now I would cover my trail.

I took a time bomb, put it under the mattress and pushed the plunger.

I went downstairs. The clerk did not fool me. He was pretending to be asleep. I would look very ordinary: I laid the key and a hundred-lira note on the desk. I sauntered out.

There were no police around. My distraction in the Great Bazaar had worked. Flames were really shooting up over there.

Not attracting attention to myself, I walked at normal pace through alleys in the direction of a thoroughfare.

I found a cab. I woke the driver up and got in. I would red-herring my trail. I said loudly, "Take me to the Istanbul Sheraton."

He drove off.

The hotel went up!

I had covered that part of my trail.

Geysers of orange flame bulged into the sky.

The cab slued slightly with concussion.

"What was that?" the hacker said.

Aha. Trying to get information to tell the women later! I would handle that.

We drove along. He started into a shortcut up a narrow and deserted street. "Stop here a moment," I said.

He braked.

I hit him over the head with the Beretta butt. He fell sideways.

I got out. I pushed him onto the floor in front. I got in and started up the cab. I knew where I was going. It was not the Istanbul Sheraton, Gods forbid! I had to get out of Turkey.

I knew where I was. I headed for a ferry pier on the Golden Horn.

I passed mosque after mosque. Istanbul is absolutely crowded with mosques. All ready to fall over and stone

one to death at the command of the Prophet. Nerve-wracking. But I held on to my nerve.

The ferry pier was deserted at this time of night. I knew it would be. I got out. I removed my bag. I put the taxi in low gear. I walked beside it, steering. I stepped away.

Roar-SPLASH!

The waves raced outward in the dark.

Bubbles came up from the sinking cab.

I had covered one more part of my trail.

I ran back and got my grip. I knew exactly where I was bound now.

Speeding along the shore paths which ran perpendicular to the jutting piers, I came to a jammed fleet of fish boats.

I halted. There was enough ambient light from the city and enough paths of it across the water for me to make out exactly what I wanted.

At the end of the nest lay a vessel about ninety feet long. It had the exaggerated height of bow and stern compared to the waist that characterized the smaller ships which plied the Sea of Marmara. She had the high masts which permitted her to let out nets, and even sail on occasion. By the dock light I could see that she had a yellow and black triple stripe which ran the length of her gunwale, making an exaggerated curve. That she had been pushed out to the edge of this cluster told me that she was waiting there to go to sea at dawn.

I stepped down onto the nearest deck. I clambered from gunwale to gunwale, the boats rocking and groaning in the otherwise quiet night. I got to the edge of my choice. I saw the name. It was
Sand.
That checked me for a moment.
Sand,
in Turkish, means "stomachache." I don't like the sea any more than I like space.

But stern duty called.

I went aboard.

There was a little house toward the stern, sitting in the smell of fish. I pushed open a door.

A huge Turk was snoring on his back. He was the biggest Turk I had ever seen. So he must be the captain.

I fanned him awake. I did it very cleverly. A fistful of spread lira can make quite a breeze.

He woke up in midsnore. His eyes riveted on the lira.

"Sail now," I said, "and take me to the Greek mainland, and it is yours."

That brought him up, sitting, with only one scratch at his chest hair.

"How much?" he said.

"Forty thousand lira," I said.

"Eighty thousand lira," he said.

"Seventy thousand," I said, "if you shove off right this minute."

He got off his bunk and reached for his coat and cap. "I go to wake the crew now," he said, but he kept on standing there.

I took the hint. I counted out thirty thousand lira. "You get the other forty just before you put me on the beach."

He took it with a grunt and went to wake the crew.

Shortly the ship began to bob with activity. They were shortening up their lines, ready to cast off.

I looked at those other craft that I had walked across. One of them might have had a watchman who had seen me.

I could take no chances.

"Just a moment," I told the captain. "I think I left something on the dock."

I stepped swiftly across the intervening decks. I gained the pier. There was a small house there.

I took out a time bomb. I set it for long fuse, half an hour. I laid it under the edge of the hut door and pushed the plunger. I stepped back across the boats and to the ship.

They cast off.

The engine barked and sputtered and complained. The screw churned a wake. We sailed down the Golden Horn. We rounded Seraglio Point. The Ataturk Monument loomed in silhouette against a strangely illuminated sky.

Masked by the point and monument, the bomb flash painted an already blazing sky.

I looked back. I had covered my trail.

The sky above Istanbul was orange with continuing flames.

I was on my way!

There is nothing quite like Apparatus training to help you when you are in peril.

But I was not safe yet!

Down through the Sea of Marmara, down through the Dardanelles, twenty-one hours of retching, twenty-one hours of Hells.

I sat in the fish-stink cabin of a mate and puked my guts out into an evil-smelling bucket. The
Sand
was well named! But no stomachache could compare with what I was experiencing. A bad head sea was being pushed along by a wind which originated in the Aegean and got worse-tempered every mile.

More was against me than the wind. At first I had kept watch across the waters as the lights of Istanbul receded into a distant blur: it seemed inevitable that the Turkish navy would come roaring out to seize me, and I had made up my mind to sell my life at the highest possible cost. But then the pitching began to get me. In danger of going overboard as I vomited at the rail, I was pushed by the captain into the mate's cabin and given a bucket: the captain said he did not want to lose the balance of the payment.

At first I was so sick that I was afraid I was going to die. Then I became so much sicker that I was afraid I wouldn't.

Gradually, between retches, I began to ponder, as a man will, how I had gotten into this. Was there not some other way of life which would avoid wildly running spacecraft and madly pitching fish boats? Was it not possible that some sedentary vocation existed which steered wide of these things? I was simply not constitutionally adjusted to this lifestyle.

Hour by tortured hour I began to sort it out to certainty. A dented, rusty bucket in which fish scales were sloshing around with vomit makes a remarkably good crystal ball. One can see quite clearly that much future of this kind was definitely hazardous to one's future health.

So I began to wonder what had placed me in such a state. The threads of Fate, somewhere in the past, must have begun to weave this horrible lot.

As the gray day wore on and the gray wind whipped gray whitecaps out of the gray, polluted sea, the grayness of my mood condensed upon and added to a pure black certainty.

HELLER! If he had not undertaken the original survey of this planet, I would not be here. I would not be in this terrible plight-pursued by demon women, blown upon by malign and sneering winds, rocked and jolted about until my stomach no longer added anything to the bucket but noise.

HELLER! If it were not for his sense of duty as a combat engineer, the Widow Tayl would never have come back into my life. Nurse Bildirjin would not be now posing the menace of shotgun charges and marriage.

HELLER! If he had never appeared upon the scene, that fatal call from Lombar, so long ago, would not have interrupted my hunting trip and right now, instead of watching anxiously for blood to spew into the bucket, I would be pleasantly shooting songbirds to my heart's delight in the Blike Mountains of Voltar.

HELLER! He had turned them all against me: Meeley, Ske, Bawteh, Faht Bey. He had plotted, plotted, plotted to get me into trouble. Prahd, Krak, Ahmed, Ters and all this Hellish crew of screaming demons would not be haunting me and sneering at me and standing with the Prophet in the clouds egging the women on to stone me to death.

HELLER! Oh, how very clearly I understood at last that it was all his fault!

HELLER! I vowed a holy vow upon the bail of the fish bucket that if it took the rest of my life, short though it might be, I would wreak vengeance upon him for all the suffering he was inflicting upon me with such sadistic glee.

When it became totally clear to me what had gone wrong with my life, I knew exactly what I must do.

I must go to New York. Regardless of any personal danger, regardless of any travail, I must end Heller once and for all. For the good of the Confederacy, for the good of Earth, for the good of all life everywhere, I must handle this menace to all the universe: HELLER!

Having come to that firm and dedicated conclusion, I felt easier.