Mission: Earth "Disaster" (15 page)

Riding back to Afyon, I could hardly restrain myself. Oh, yes, he was going home.

He was going home to Lombar Hisst—and his death! 

The next day at the base, the cruelty of them toward me continued and even intensified. I could tell from the attitudes of those about me that they were taking a sadistic pleasure in abusing one whom they thought could not defend himself. I submitted to the abuse only so they would not suspect what I had planned for them.

In the morning the Countess Krak took it into her head—or had been asked by Heller—to collect all the evidence that would hang me.

She said, "When we turn you over to the court, we want to make sure the justiciary has all the evidence. While I was in that cell, I had ample time to read the Voltar Confederacy Combined Compendium Complete, including all the Codes. It was very thoughtful of you to put that in there. Voltar law is very straightforward and no nonsense. But you have been associated with Earth and my recent experience has shown that anyone knowledgeable in its so-called justice can find loopholes by the ton. Jettero, for some reason, wants you to have a fair trial. You will claim, of course, that there are a lot of loopholes. And the biggest of them is that 'you didn't have your records' and 'all the evidence is hearsay.' Faht Bey has several teams out collecting sworn affidavits on things you have done. So we're going to dig into the dustbins you call your files and assemble them, and if you have any defense at all, you sure better find it."

I was quite sure there wouldn't be any trial of me. The trial of them, by Lombar, would be quite swift. And as to their affidavits, I fully intended to come back here with a Death Battalion and wipe this nest of traitors out. But under her piercing eye, lest she suspect that they didn't really have me at all, I let myself be propelled by two guards into the secret room of the villa and under their watchful glare got to work.

Things were hidden under piles of other things; boxes of recorded strips were covered with dust, paint and sira. My logs were so badly scribbled even I had trouble making them out—reading my own handwriting was not a skill I had acquired any facility in. The dust grew thick in the air and after a while she got restless and began to wander around the villa.

The bug in Utanc's room was working very clearly and I heard her in there. She had found the two little boys crying under the bed. She didn't speak any Turkish and they spoke nothing else and she couldn't make much sense out of the blubbering she got for answers, so she went and got Karagoz and Melahat, both of whom spoke English, and tried to get to the bottom of what was wrong. The villa headman and the housekeeper were pretty embarrassed. The Countess Krak listened in growing horror and disgust. It seemed that Gaylov had made the two little boys into catamites, and each night and sometimes in the day had practiced many sexual perversions with them to satisfy his lust. They knew all along that Utanc was a man but hadn't told anybody. All this talk of homosexuality was making me very ill and the guards had to keep nudging me to keep me working at the records. So I was not prepared at all for the way it all wound up. The Countess Krak couldn't believe it, but it seemed that what the little boys were upset about was that they weren't getting it anymore, now that Utanc had disappeared. Krak, on an embarrassed via of Melahat and Karagoz, tried to argue them out of it. But what she got was even worse. The two small boys said that unless their mothers let them go find Utanc they were going to run away and find other men to sleep with, and if they were prevented from doing that they were going to kill themselves the very first chance they got!

By this time both Karagoz and Melahat were in tears, the little boys were in hysteria and the Countess Krak was in rage.

"This perverted planet!" cried the Countess Krak. "It's just as if they never heard of normal sex!"

The two little boys were dragged away and I could hear the Countess going through Utanc's things and giving orders to the staff to pack the whole room up into trunks for storage.

After a time she came in and glared at me. "While you're at it," she said, "you better dig up all the evidence of how you got mixed up with Gaylov. There are thirty-two statutes in the penal codes relating to homosexuality."

"There's homosexuality in the Confederacy!" I flashed.

"Not with children, you filthy brute."

"Wait a minute!" I flashed. "I didn't have anything to do with that! I hate homos!"

"You better be ready to prove it!" said the Countess and stalked off.

The injustice of it was like vinegar in my veins. I began to dig harder, assembling my records. Then I paused. How the Hells did you prove you were not a homo? It was almost impossible to prove you were not anything. The only evidence you could collect was that you were things. You could never show a court an absence of anything. You couldn't walk up to the judge and say "Here is a list of the cars I have not stolen." The judge would just say, "All you had to do was omit from the list the cars you have stolen: guilty as charged!" Justice was totally one-sided. There was no such thing as negative evidence.

And just that moment my eye lighted upon the packet of photographs of me and Teenie. There I was, into her from behind: lying evidence of sodomy! And children? Here was the lying evidence of rape of a minor!

One of the sentries tittered.

I made a hasty motion to tear them up.

The other one stopped me. "I wouldn't do that, if I were you, Gris. We have to attest you didn't destroy any evidence."

I began to sweat. I hadn't turned those little boys into catamites. These photographs were absolute lies. The toils of the law felt like whips as they wrapped around me in my imagination. I could be hanged for things I had NOT done!

I steadied myself. I made a plan right there and then to surreptitiously destroy such things as these photographs the very first chance I got and to pick up things which would only incriminate others, just in case. It gave direction to my work which promptly paid off. I found myself holding the copy of the contract Ahmed, the taxi driver, had made concerning the buying of Utanc. It cheered me up. Ahmed was the criminal in this case, not me. And right under that was a pile of strips from the Heller and Krak bugs that I was sure would show them plotting relentlessly to depart from the careful instructions they had been given by me, their mission handler, and doing all sorts of other things. I, after all, was also under orders here. I DID have evidence that would demonstrate a colossal conspiracy to ruin me. I got down to my task of collection. But after three more hours of it, I began to feel very put upon. Why bother to collect all this? It just showed their general cruelty to me. After all, there would be no trial of ME. My task was to deliver Heller and Krak into the hands of Lombar. One glance at those forgeries of the Royal signature would be followed by one command: "Execute them!" And given Lombar's hatred of Heller personally and his hatred of the aristocratic class of Krak and everything it stood for, that command would be very swift.

I would have to pretend I was going along with this charade that I would be brought to trial. But I didn't have to like it.

That afternoon the cruelty became extreme.

They put me on public display!

The Countess had seen that all the records I could gather fitted in a bag with a shoulder strap and she had hung it around my neck, and because she had to go to other parts of the base for affidavits– and, I knew, to talk about me behind my back—she had dumped me in the hangar, lashed to a chair, close beside the hull of the tug where Heller was working.

Clerks and workmen and repair crew all seemed to be finding errands that took them across the hangar floor, and although the two guards on either side of me told them time and time again to keep moving, they would stop and stare. They would whisper to each other behind their hands and once I overheard an old clerk say, "You can tell a lot from faces: look at that scowl." I would have answered that that horizontal mark was NOT a scowl but came from falling on a skateboard, but the guard, before I could get out two words, told me to shut up.

It was pretty dreadful. Out of those two hundred crew, there were many I had never seen before. I wondered if there had been a special excursion from the New York office. It was hard to get Heller's attention. He was helping fit the last sleeves in the tug repairs. He had time to tell the cat it was a great cat when it came swaggering over to show him a rat it had caught, but he didn't have any time to help fend off the glares his suffering prisoner was getting. I finally convinced a guard that he should tell Heller it was urgent that I talk to him. Heller came over and I said, "What am I? Some kind of a circus freak? I feel like a monstrosity Crobe turned out! Why are you keeping me out here in the open?"

"Well, it's not from any joy in your company," he said. "I gave you my word to deliver you to Voltar for trial. There are several hundred Turks and about two hundred crew that have expressed varying degrees of desire to kill you. Your guards asked permission to keep you in sight of the Countess or myself."

"What?" I said.

A guard said, "They respect the officer and his lady too much to start a fight in their presence. And we also don't want to succumb to the temptation of killing you ourselves. Now stop bothering Officer Heller. We could have told you that."

Of course, they had just made it all up to frighten me. My treatment of these people had been just what such riffraff deserved. But it showed me the futility of expecting humane treatment. Prahd came around and checked my wounds right in public, and people thought they had not been serious enough and were very disappointed when he pronounced me well. But they cheered when he told Heller I could travel any time. About four o'clock, an electronics man who had been working inside the tug came out carrying a viewer-phone. "Sir," he said to Heller, "this thing keeps ringing. It's on an Earth band and it's got Me Only chalked on its glass." Heller took it and the man gave him a crossed-arm salute. This (bleeped) crew was certainly putting on airs!

Heller found a toolbox, saw that nothing but black hull was behind him and sat down. He pushed the answer button.

"Oh, thank heavens, Mr. Jet," said Izzy. "I finally reached you."

"Something wrong?" said Heller.

"No, I just wanted to tell you that everything's all right. That's what makes me nervous. The wonderful news that Miss Joy was all right after all couldn't help but whet the appetites of Fate. How is she? Is she still all right?"

"She's just splendid, Izzy, as always. I'll ask her to call you this evening and you can see for yourself." "Oh, that will be wonderful. But I don't deserve it."

"So, how are things?"

"Well, bad news first. When Russia blew off the map, of course that killed all threats of international holocaust, so the price of gold went down. I was going to sell that weighty lot you gave me but it's only worth about six million now. Do you think I should hold on to it?"

"That's up to you," said Heller. "Is Russia that bad?"

"Oy, Mr. Jet. Russia ain't. And every one of its satellites has thrown off the yoke. It just shows you that there's a God in the heavens after all."

Hastily Heller said, "How are the options?"

"All right. I'll get around to the good news, now. Oil shares are going down like the Black Friday of 1929. We could already net five billion on the sell options. Brokers are ringing the phone to pieces trying to deal but we're holding on. Miss Simmons is doing the greatest job you ever heard of. They tried to shut her off the media and her people took to the streets in every country with loud bailers. People won't touch radioactive gasoline or oil and Maysabongo is exercising its buy-reserves options, so that's shut off. Our oil-shares buy options are just sitting there waiting to take over every oil company."

"What is the last date for all these options?" said Heller.

"The shares are all July options. The last real operative date is the Monday before the first Saturday following the third Friday in July. That's because brokers close them out a week earlier than the actual date on the options so they can clear their books."

"That's confusing," said Heller.

"Well, I know," said Izzy. "But if you don't keep such things confusing, then how could people in the know win?"

Heller looked at his watch. "That Monday, then, is only about thirteen days away. So everything is going fine, then."

"Right on schedule, Mr. Jet."

"Well, you've got it all under control, then. I won't be seeing you for a while, Izzy."

"Oh, no! Did I do something to displease you?"

"Of course not," said Heller. "It's just that I have some other duties I must attend to."

"What if something goes wrong?"

"We've discussed all this. You have Rockecenter, Junior, for a front name. And you are perfectly capable of handling any corporate angle anybody ever heard of. You have never fooled me for a minute, Izzy Epstein."

"Oh, dear!" said Izzy in dismay.

"Oh, by the way," said Heller, "you can close the condo."

"Oh, NO! I have done something wrong! You are mad at me!"

"No, I am not!"

"I refuse to close the condo!"

"At least lay off the staff," said Heller.

"You'll need them when you get back!" wailed Izzy. "They had the whole place full of flowers to celebrate Miss Joy's safe return! DON'T LEAVE US, MR. JET!"

Heller looked upset. He tried to speak a couple of times and couldn't. Then he managed, "I'll call you later, Izzy."

Heller turned it off and put the viewer down. He wandered away, looking very unhappy.

Faht Bey was just coming out of the tunnel into the hangar and approached him. "You don't look very cheerful, sir."

"It's kind of hard to leave," said Heller. "But I can't wait around another thirteen days when there's no reason."