The Invaders Plan (39 page)

"Oh, yes," cooed the clerk. "And it has window blinders and the cutest bar. You and me will just have to take a ride in it," wink, wink, "won't we?" I decided there were things I didn't know about Ske.

Shortly "Dear Chalber" arrived and there was a hurried and furtive interchange between him and the clerk and I saw the golden flash of money changing hands. Aha! So that was why the Apparatus had so many strange vehicle wrecks!

The clerk gave "Dear Chalber" a kiss and when a following vehicle had flown him off, the clerk turned to Ske and there was a furtive interchange there and I distinctly saw another, smaller golden flash.

The new airbus was quite elegant: purple light spinners and green landing wheels with a bright red band all around it. Hardly the thing for undercover work! The interior was so
clean
it was disgusting. I got in wearily.

"Have some more wrecks, dear," I heard the happy clerk tell Ske.

I was wrong about Ske. He was wiping the clerk's kiss off very vigorously as he eased in under the wheel-stick. We took off for my office.

"I think you owe me something," I said. I had to repeat it in a louder voice even though the new bus was much quieter.

"Oh, you mean the money," said my driver. "That was just one credit he owed me." He protested he would need it for food but he knew how firm I could be. He finally threw it over his head at me. And even though I was quite certain he had had to peel it off a roll of bills, the airbus was diving about in traffic so I decided to be satisfied. The back windows were down and I hadn't fastened my belt. The note had almost sailed out! A close one!

At my office, when I walked in, the two boys Too-Too and Oh Dear instantly, with just one glance at me, fell into each other's arms and began to cry. The rest of the clerks in the front office left and it wasn't even lunch hour. It was quite late in the day. Must be early quitting time, I thought.

Bawtch came stooping out of his office and saw me. "Oh, it's you!" he said. "Why do you have to keep coming in here and upsetting everything?" I tried to point out that I had been
missing
for three weeks. And he just kept raving on about me always being underfoot!

Defensively I went back into my office. I looked on the desk, half-expecting to see a warrant-for-my-arrest notice. Nothing. Same dust.

The contractors had finished their work. I went in and checked and sure enough, when you pressed the wall just so, it revolved and there was a ladder to a hatch in the roof. The silent-break glass was innocently in place. The river roiled along five hundred feet below.

When I came out, Bawtch, a very inconsistent type, had piled some forms on my desk. "As long as you're here, you can stamp these forms. You never stamped the first contractor and now there are
two
to stamp. I have a new payroll and the expenses allocation that Twolah and Odur will require. And another shipment came in from Blito-P3 that must be stamped as received in good order. Office expenses have also gone up." He was shoving me at my desk now. "I can't understand why it is if you're always bursting in here why you can't at least do your work!" I began to stamp. I got even with him. I didn't even read the stuff. Maintain a lofty attitude is always the best way! Puts the riffraff in their place!

I found out suddenly I was stamping blank forms! That would never do. They have to be written on first! I got brave. "Bawtch, you're getting soft in the head. You forgot to make these forms out before you brought them in! Old age, Bawtch. Dotage!" He snatched the pile away in considerable anger. He stalked out. I could see I had reached him. You have to be very firm with such riffraff. Lombar was right when he had said that there were very few Academy officers about: those of us there were had to really slave to make the Apparatus run as well as it did!

I got up and walked into the main office. It promptly cleared again of clerks. I was aware suddenly that some people were behind me and to my left. It was Too-Too and Oh Dear. My position had them trapped: they couldn't leave without running close to me. They were standing there in frozen horror.

Behind them was a third, it was a training operator from the Apparatus Training Command. And, what do you know, he was sitting at a brand-new master data console!

How out of place it looked, all bright, shining, new plates and keyboards and glittering screens amongst the dirt and decayed furniture of the outer office.

And then I grasped the situation. Bawtch had come up. I spoke very severely, "What is this master console doing here?" Bawtch, who is silly about some things like keeping security from other parts of the Apparatus, ordered the training operator out and, when he had gone, turned to me. "You stamped the order for it three weeks ago. You are entitled to it with your increase in rank, though why they promoted you, I don't dare imagine!" I knew that wasn't the reason. That was just his eighty-year-old failure to become an officer talking. "You got this in here so that these two boys could use it!" Bawtch blew up. "You brute! You didn't expect them to get their data from a dirty old Lord, did you?"

"I certainly did! The kind of data you can get on these machines does not include what Endow knows. They better make up time getting into Endow's bed or I'll include any sisters!" The two boys had already fallen into each other's arms. At this last, they went out in a dead faint.

Bawtch left, spinning chairs out of the way and slamming them to the floor. He banged his door shut. He seemed upset.

I stepped over the boys and sat down at the console. Well, well. A master console of my own! I threw it out of training mode and into activation. I took out Bawtch's chief clerk identoplate and was about to insert my own when I changed my mind and left his in. In his agitation he had forgotten it.

I punched in my own name and designation: actually this takes a moment or two as there are twenty-two thousand, six hundred and eighty-one Soltan Grises in the tens of millions of Voltarian officers of all branches and I didn't want the wrong one.

Warrants? I punched.

Not yet, said the machine. Pay status?

I punched in. The machine promptly pulsated red flashes.

Alert, alert, alert! Through clerical error, this officer was advanced one credit in excess of a year's advance pay. All further pay uncollectible until refund occurs. I had thought I would now have three weeks pay I could draw on. But not so! But what luck! I did have one credit and I could send it in. But as I was reaching for it, the machine went on talking.

Warning, warning, warning. If said officer loses any one of his four paychecks for any reason or suffers demotion or fine, communicate at once to the Finance Department Courts-martial Unit. I went cold. What if I did lose Mission Earth?

The mountains had their game wardens, Government City had its Finance Department. There was no place to hide!

It was not unknown to me, but the threat of becoming a gutter bum in some slum city, living on garbage, if that, so unnerved me that the five-second warning flash had begun before I realized I had not remedied being broke right now. I hastily tapped, Item en route and scribbled my name and designations on a scrap of paper and wadded it and the one-credit note into a capsule. I slammed it hastily into the slot and punched, Finance Adjustments and off it went with a whoosh. Shortly, the screen flashed, Adjustment received. I hastily punched, Pay status? and the machine said, I am sorry but it takes two months to adjust pay errors. And before I could even protest, the machine again said, Warning, warning, warning. If said officer loses any one of his four paychecks . . .

I slammed the keys and shut it off. (Bleep) them! I should have paid it with a counterfeit note! That would show them.

I was so angry and so upset that I forgot I had two fainted bodies behind me and I stumbled on them as I left.

Outside I took a deep breath to steady myself. The sour smell of the Apparatus sector and the stink of the River Wiel did not compare with the Blike Mountains.

"Officer Gris," said Ske, startling me in the shadows of the building. "Don't you think we better go down to the Apparatus hangars while we got some day left?" While I had some paychecks left, I thought. I climbed hastily into the airbus. I had to get this mission going even if it killed me, which it probably would.

We hovered in the sky above the Apparatus hangars, waiting for the landing circle to clear. Such was my urgency and determination that I became impatient. It was all very well to hang there in the soft afternoon sunlight, sitting on the gaudy seat of the new airbus, but that didn't keep me out of gutter hollow! Way, way over to the west I could see Ardaucus, the fancy name they give Slum City. It even looked smudgy and dirty at this distance. Lombar was right: it ought to be annihilated! But not with me in it!

"What is holding us?" I at length demanded.

Ske shrugged. "It's that Fleet freight skyhauler." Alarm shot through me. I had been careful about keeping Heller away from Fleet anything! And sure enough, down there on the landing circle below, a Fleet skyhauler was hovering, bobbing up and down, giving the final adjustments to something huge and brass colored – a sort of cylinder. It was getting it finally onto a trundle dolly.

Even as I looked, the Fleet pilot tripped his let-go and the cables began to reel up. Without waiting for this to be completed, the blue freight carrier zipped up into the sky.

The trundle dolly was moving into the hangar now and my driver plummeted the airbus down to the target area.

I was actually quite alarmed to see Fleet touching even the fringes of the mission. The thought of the Fleet patrol crew, probably long dead now in Spiteos, and the words of Soams were almost enough to make me withdraw from the area.

But the computer threat was fresh in my mind. I jumped out and ran up alongside the trundle dolly. It was inside the hangar now. The crane hook was coming down to engage the rings on the cylinder.

And there was Heller, riding the crane hook over. I drew back a bit.

Tug One
had had some upper hullplates removed. Right in the middle of her back.

Heller was giving hand motions to the crane master way above. He dropped off onto the top of the brass-colored cylinder and then guided the hook to engage a huge ring. Heller locked the hook blades in place with a gloved hand and, with him signalling, was hauled high in the air, riding the cylinder as it rose.

I caught a sign on the cylinder. It said: HIGHLY DANGEROUS HIGHLY EXPLOSIVE DO NOT OPEN My Gods, I mourned to myself. She isn't enough of a bomb already?

The trundle dolly operator was clambering down. His job finished, he was lighting a puffstick.

"Have any other Fleet units been around here lately?" I asked him.

"What's the matter? Haven't you seen them?" He hadn't noticed I'd been missing for three weeks.

"Well, have they?" I insisted.

"Naw, this is the first in a couple days. There ain't been anything else, yesterday or today."

"What's been coming?" I persisted.

"That's a funny (bleeped) thing," he said, looking up at the swaying cylinder. "They can't change a time-converter in flight. Taking an extra one means they must be going to some well-equipped repair base. I was a drive operator once, you know. Before space started giving me the creeps." Heller had guided the huge brass cylinder down through the place that had been opened in the top of the hull.

"He wouldn't let anybody else guide it in," said the trundle dolly operator. "Or maybe they refused to. Those (bleeping) Will-be Was engines! They're dangerous even in a battleship. That's what they were designed for, you know, not for no (bleeped) tug. But I wonder what he's doing with a spare time-converter." Heller was directing the final lowering. He looked like a speck from where I was standing. The huge cylinder was spinning back and forth with him standing on it.

"I'll give you some advice," said the trundle dolly operator. "Don't never open one of them time-converters up. Believe what it says on the labels. You could lose your hand! I could even give you some better advice. Don't never go no place in that (bleeped) tug!" He was uncomfortable to be around. I walked deeper into the hangar. The day half-platoon was lounging about. They didn't even glance at me. I approached the subofficer.

"Have a bunch of things been coming in from Fleet?" I asked him.

He glanced around. "Most of the contractor crews seem to have gone home." That certainly answered no question. "What do the things look like?" I insisted.

"How does any long box look?" he said irritably.

"Where are they putting them?" I demanded.

"In the lower hold, of course. Say," and he focused on me very sharply, "can't you see, or something?" It was obvious he had not noticed I had been missing.

The hook was now rising out of the open gap in the hull, the cylinder seemingly having been gotten into its storage space.

Heller was riding the hook. It came down like a bomb. He jumped off and it hit the pavement with a crash.

"Oh, say, Soltan," he said, for all the world like he was rebeginning a conversation interrupted a half hour earlier, "like I was telling you, all the cultural notes and observations are missing from all those earlier Blito-P3 surveys. See if you can get hold of them, will you?" And he yelled back up to the high cab, "Very well done and thank you, crane master!" and with a friendly hand wave to him, he trotted over to the tug and went in through the airlock.

The day's work was over. People were drifting off. The sun was gone.

And then here it came, "Hup, yo, hup, yo, hup, yo!" The cadence counting of the Fleet marines, totally foreign to Apparatus areas. The slamming bootbeats of the marching squad. In they came and gave the day subofficer a salute. Then, "Pohstings! Guardsman Ip, yuoah post is in the ship!" And the Countess Krak, in perfect evolution, boot-slammed in through the airlock.