Mission: Earth "Death Quest" (20 page)

He staggered.

He hit the balcony rail.

With a clatter he went over and fell fifteen feet to the ground!

I wasted no time.

I grabbed up my things and jammed them in a suitcase.

I snatched up my viewers.

I scrabbled around. I couldn't find my gun! The (bleep) must have stolen it or I had dropped it earlier in the day.

No time now to search.

I streaked out of the room.

Running like mad, I got to the manure truck.

I threw my things into it. I jumped under the wheel. I jimmied the ignition. It started.

I tore out of there, horse biscuits flying behind me in the wind!

Had I had my gun, I might have shot him. But I certainly would not have touched anything he touched, so using his rifle was out. In retrospect, as I drove, I thought it might have been smarter to have gone over to him on the pavement and stamped his head in. But again, I hadn't wanted to touch him. Yes, I was doing right. Just get out of there and fast!

I thought I was safe. The motel proprietor would never suspect anyone would steal this manure truck. He probably wouldn't even notice it was gone until much later in the day, for he never seemed to be around. And if the police stopped me I could say it was a Federal commandeer of transport.

So I felt safe as I drove in to an all-night trucker's station to the north of Lynchburg and filled up with gas and oil.

I was just pulling out of the island when I chanced to look back.

Here came Torpedo! Wild-haired and wild-eyed, insane for revenge, he was driving an old Toyota subcom-pact!

I stepped on it!

With screaming wheels I went tearing up Route 29.

I was outdistancing him!

Charlottesville, Culpeper, Warrenton, Arlington. In the dawn I was rocketing around the Capital Beltway of Washington, D. C.

Anxiously stopping again for gas, I looked behind. I thought I had lost him. For the next hour, I drove more sensibly. I was on the John F. Kennedy Memorial Highway and just passing Elkton, Maryland, when-
BLAM! SCREEYOW!-zn
elephant slug hit the car top and went ricocheting away!

Oh, after that I drove!

The prospect of not only being dead but raped and not only being raped but infected totally gave me a very heavy foot upon the throttle.

The New Jersey Turnpike is usually fast but it was too slow for me that awful day.

I had almost come abreast of Staten Island when the horrible realization came to me that I had no place to go!

Torpedo knew my phone number at Miss Pinch's. And furthermore my welcome at that apartment would be very violent.

Driving in that stinking truck, my head spun in a quandary. Then Apparatus training took over. Go to the least expected place. Go to the place where one might get protection.

HIS MOTHER!

She would defend me, that was for sure! She hated her son.

The Goethals Bridge lay just ahead. I turned off the New Jersey Turnpike onto it. I went down the Staten Island Expressway like a fired cannonball. I got across the dizzy heights of the Verrazano Narrows Bridge and was shortly speeding up the Queens Expressway.

Rounding corners on two wheels, I rocketed toward safety. I slammed on the brakes before the house and

leaped out of the steaming car. I raced up the steps and pounded on the door.

The hulking monster of a woman recognized me. I crowded past her into the hall. In a voice I was carefully keeping from sounding hysterical, I told her that her son was after me with intent to kill.

She nodded, seeming to understand. She went up the stairs and was gone a bit. Then she leaned over the banister and beckoned. I went up.

Apparently the room at the top of the stairs had once been Torpedo's. He had painted bars on the window-pane. The bedstead was cold iron. A portrait, a photograph, hung on the wall. The man in it had a crooked, leering face. It was autographed:

His prison psychologist!

Mrs. Fiaccola pointed to the closet and indicated I should enter it.

A POUNDING OF FEET ON THE STAIRS!

TORPEDO!

"Where is the son of a (bleepch)?" he was screaming and I realized he had seen the car.

"Torpedo!" she said. "You want a kill. You're going to get one!"

His mother was beckoning him up to the room. Her right hand was obscured in the folds of her skirt.

He was snarling and agitated. But he was obeying.

Firmly, she pushed him into the room and made him sit down on the bed.

She made a shushing signal with her left hand and

then used it to gesture at the closet. "He's in there," she said. My hair stood on end!

His mother lifted her right hand. She was holding his leopard, the sawed-off shotgun!

She pushed it vertical at his chest as though to force him to take it.

He reached out to grab the breach.

With a quick movement, his mother lowered it so that the barrel was against his chin from below.

SHE PULLED BOTH TRIGGERS!

The noise was deafening!

The whole of Torpedo's jaw and head hit the ceiling!

His mother wiped off the triggers with the hem of her skirt. She curled his dying fingers around the guard.

She then opened a drawer and got out some gun cleaning materials and put them on the bed.

Then she stood back. "Ever since you been out of the Federal pen," she said to the dead body, "you talk psychology, psychology, psychology. So I read up. Now you got some psychology, you no-good, filthy, rotten philanderer of corpses! I hope the devil makes you read psychology the rest of infinity!"

She turned to me and beckoned me out of the closet. "You witnessed it. He was cleaning his gun and it went off, wasn't he?"

I nodded numbly.

"So that's the end of my no-good, carrion-{bleeping) (bleep) of a son. And a pleasure it is to see him lying there dead even without the twenty-five thousand insurance I now get."

Only then, at that very moment, was the brutal truth borne in upon me.

Torpedo had failed.

I personally would now have to handle the whole situation.

The fate of Earth, of Rockecenter, of Lombar and the entire Voltar Confederacy depended upon one haggard and worn frail reed, Apparatus Officer Soltan Gris.

And it was more vital than ever to remove the vicious Countess Krak.

As I went out into the night, I shook my fist at the sky. "By all the stars, by all the Gods and Demons of the firmament," I cried. "In spite of what you are doing to me, I must prevail! Do what thou wilt, I shall still terminate that awful woman!"

A deadly oath.

I meant it!

I did not have too much money. I could not go back to Miss Pinch's and endure those women.

I drove to midtown Manhattan and abandoned the manure truck on a side street. Lugging my bag and viewers, I made my way to a hotel I had noticed at times in the past. It was a wino hangout, shabby and dirty, the lobby littered with collapsed human wrecks. The very place to hide out, for here they didn't even bother to sort the living from the dead.

I got a room with a cracked window, cracked washbasin and cracked floor. Cockroaches swarmed, thriving on the remains of a soiled carpet.

I should have been exhausted, but I was not. I had too much to do.

Despite the lateness of the hour, I got out pad and pen and sat down at the rickety table. One must be orderly, one must do things by the textbook. I must be careful and precise, for only in that way was I ever going to bring about the demise of the Countess Krak.

I wrote down the Apparatus fundamental musts:

1. PREPARE A BASE BEFORE YOU ATTACK

2. HANDLE YOUR TROOPS BEFORE YOU ATTACK

3. PLAN BEFORE YOU ATTACK

188

L. RON HUBBARD

4. GATHER WEAPONS BEFORE YOU ATTACK

5. PINPOINT OBJECTIVES BEFORE YOU ATTACK

6. TIME EVERYTHING

I knew you had to do these things in exact order. Geniuses, long since, have worked these things out. If an organization such as the Apparatus has the prime duty of undermining a civilization, it must be thorough. One must make the maximum amount of trouble for the maximum number of people for the minimum number of reasons. That rule holds good for governments, for governmental organizations and for government officers and agents. Even on Earth, which is primitive about such things, the FBI and others adhere to these maxims totally. So I knew I was being wise.

So I took up number five first. That was the easy one. The primary objective was the Countess Krak. I knew that very well from long and bitter experience.

As to number one, I had my base in this hotel room.

As to number six, I looked at my watch and carefully noted the hour, minute and second and put them down.

Suddenly, I realized that I was not taking these in perfect order. I got a grip on myself. I should be working on number two, handling the troops.

The only troops was me. I fully realized that now. Bury and Torpedo and even Madison had failed me. I was entirely on my own.

What was the matter with the troops?

Venereal disease. What with goats and dogs and Torpedo, this was obviously the case. While there was no sign of it, in every text you read on military matters it is a problem. Good.

Determined to do things right this time, I let first things be first. Even when they were second on the list.

To handle the troops required rest. I carefully noted the time as required in number six and went to bed.

Bright and early I got up, brushed the cockroaches off my clothes and dressed.

Marching with bitter determination, I made my way to a phone kiosk in the lobby and looked up VD clinics. There was one close by. I made an appointment and was promptly there.

I was the first in and I got quick service. I laboriously filled out a card. A young doctor, without looking at it, sat down in the interview room where I had been placed. He said, "All this is in confidence. You can talk freely. What symptoms have you noticed?"

"None," I said. "It is simply inevitable."

"What have your contacts... you know... been?"

And here I could give him real information. "I have been in contact with a horrible blond woman, a fiend in human form, that treats life as if it were chaff. It is all her fault. She is five feet nine and a half inches tall. She hypnotizes everybody!"

"How long have these contacts continued?" he said solicitously.

I counted it up rapidly, using my fingers. The first time I had collided with the Countess Krak was in Spi-teos about half a year before Heller came along. She had murdered an agent who sought to grab at her sexually. "Thirteen months," I said.

"How do you know you got it from her?" he asked.

"She forced me into it," I said. "If it weren't for her I would never have had any association with dogs or goats or llamas from Peru."

He was shocked, as well he might be. He held up his hand. "Oh, I think we had better not even waste time on examinations. This sounds pretty desperate. Nurse! Bring the big tray quick!"

And thus began a treatment course which lasted the better part of ten days.

I endured it because it just showed all I had suffered at her hands.

First there were the antibiotic shots, seven kinds. Every one of them was agony. I hate needles!

Then I stoically endured a harrowing experience in which my body temperature was raised to 106 degrees while under medication.

Next, when I was able to get around again, I got neoarsphenamine-606. The doctor told me that it killed one in every ten thousand and I half expected to be the one. It would show people what she had put me through.

Finally, a bright day came. I had hardly any money left. I had lost many pounds. The doctor was reviewing the last series of tests.

"Null," he said. "You now do not have the faintest sign of anything. So the whole course has been very successful. You have been very lucky, really, since there are strains about today which do not respond to any cure at all. Now let me give you one solid piece of advice: Do not ever have any physical contact with that woman ever again. And terminate any association with her as soon as possible!"

I promised him earnestly to adhere to his advice. I would get on with my termination of the Countess Krak now, as soon as I was able to complete my program.

Gods, what that woman had put me through!

The next part of the campaign was "3. PLAN BEFORE YOU ATTACK."

Accurate planning requires data. Accordingly, I brushed the cockroaches off my viewers to see what the most horrible monster in the universe was up to now.

They were still in Virginia!

Heller and the two retired Greyhound bus drivers were sitting in the spring sunlight. Heller was in shorts, getting a suntan in a deck chair. The two drivers, with their collars open and caps on the backs of their heads, were drinking what looked like mint juleps and playing cards under an awning nearby. Loafing at my expense!

The land yacht and other motor home were parked in an L in a grassy field with their awnings out. The blue-misted mountains were plain in Heller's sight.

The roar of an approaching motor caused Heller to look up a forest road. It was the jeep, leaping all over the place with Bang-Bang at the wheel. The Countess Krak was in the front seat.

Suddenly I realized her viewer was blank. (Bleep)! That was because I had her activator-receiver and 831 Relayer here and I was probably four hundred miles or more away!

The jeep skidded to a halt. Heller rose and went over. He helped the Countess Krak out. She seemed tired. He led her over to a reclining deck chair. A stewardess came running up with a tray and cold drink.