Mission: Earth "Disaster" (25 page)

"I couldn't stand to see you pouting," said Shafter. "So last night I followed the cables from that console. I came out here!"

He was pointing down a tunnel. I followed him. He opened a huge metal side door.

It was a vast room full of tables, benches and cabinets. Pieces of hide and working tools lay all about.

"They use it for a sort of factory to make clothes in. They had no way to get the cabinets open and didn't need them anyway."

"What is this place?" I said, playing my light down the vast expanse of grimy, age-crusted cabinets.

"The computer feeder room," he said. He threw open a cabinet whose hinges he had disintegrated. "This is the place where they prepared the memory bank of that console."

I reached in and pulled out sheaves of paper.

DOCUMENTS!

These were the originals!

RECORDING STRIPS!

These were the first-generation recordings!

"Will this do?" said Shafter.

"Oh, thank Heavens and all the Gods, yes!" I cried, my hands shaking.

"Well, that's a good thing," said Shafter, "because you just bought the place."

Rape, murder and sudden death: I was looking at so many crimes at once, it was a shocking mess!

To me, raised in the belief that government is honest and does no wrong, protects its citizens and labors for the good of all, it was a terrible shock!

No wonder they hid—what were these headed, the Coordinated Information Apparatus?—from the public view!

Kidnap this one, assassinate that one, blackmail someone else. And silly crimes as well: "Poison his pet fish!" And crimes that were stupid: "Break the windows of his house so he'll think the public don't like him." But dominant were awful crimes: "Rob a bank, plant the evidence on him, make it look like suicide." "Kidnap his children and when he comes to get them back, murder them in front of his eyes." A catalogue of villainy such as I had never seen stared at me from this data bank: slaughter, arson and revenge– destruction, hungry and rampant!

How could this possibly be? Was THIS the government?

All through the night and near to dawn I sorted through this fearful hoard, staggered in reality but too fixated to let the papers drop.

"You better come away from there." A voice was at my side. "The camp and village will be up soon and they'll be wondering where you are."

"I'm halfway between the sixth and seventh Hells," I said. "I've just come on a small religious group the government harassed. The order here says to plant a whole false file into their church with their names forged to it. Then there's going to be a raid and they'll all be arrested and shot. Incredible!"

"Come away," said Shafter. "Your eyes are pretty wild."

He led me off and I went to bed to fall, dumbfounded, into fitful sleep.

Hound routed me out, scolding me for getting my clothes and hair so thickly scummed with dirt. I didn't tell him the shape my soul was in. I felt it was past washing.

Midmorning, dear Corsa came bounding over. How much she looked like a farm animal, I unkindly thought. "Oh, Monte!" she said, sitting down at the camp table, crossing her beefy legs and emptying my canister of hot jolt, "I know you thought it would be awfully sweet of you to buy this place for me. Here are the deeds the village headman endorsed: aren't they quaint? Squatter's deeds, laying claim to abandoned land. They also make you responsible for any existing tenants. Valid enough, but really, Monte, it will cost a fortune to clear away those old black rocks and there's hardly enough ground here to run my pets on. I know you mean well, Monte, but really, I sometimes wonder about your finer sensibilities. It is very plain that you need someone strong to take you in hand." She patted me on the shoulder and left a bruise. "But never mind, we'll get along just fine once we're on Modon and I have the help of my family in shaping you up."

She threw the deeds down into the sweetbun syrup and galloped off.

"A fine girl," said Hound.

He would think so, I thought privately. He weighs about three hundred pounds. I would have to weigh more than that and be a champion wrestler to boot to handle Corsa—and now, to this threat, she had added her family. Were they all like her brother? Charging around breaking bats and shooting songbirds?

But I had a secret weapon. Despite the shock it gave me, I was certain I had my hands on a cover-up to end all cover-ups. The matter was very dicey, of course. When I saw what a government could cover up, the task of uncovering it seemed monumental. But somehow I would get my name blazing across the sky yet! The Gris confession was an understatement of the way things ran!

Having slept a bit in the afternoon and, although jaded from a dinner full of "The Earthmen are coming," I was able to go to bed early, sneak out the back of the shelter and go with Shafter back to the tunnels.

I saw tonight that what had preserved this area was that it had been below ground level and whatever earthquake had overturned the place had left this whole level, and probably areas below, intact.

"There's an old cellological laboratory in there," said Shafter, pointing to a door. "And right up here, there is what might have been a gymnasium or something. The tribesmen couldn't get the doors open but I took care of that."

I looked into the place. The Countess Krak's training rooms! I waded through clouds of dust that almost made a white fog in front of my lamp. Cabinets of training materials! I was looking for something—there it was! Blito-P3 materials! I opened a drawer. Aged newssheets in some strange language! Was that English? I didn't dare touch them: after nearly a hundred years they were so yellow and decayed that, even in this dry desert air, they looked like they would go to powder.

Back in the hall, Shafter said, "It's lucky the tribesmen couldn't open this next one."

I turned my light into it. An arsenal! Blastrifles, blasticks, grenades. They were in preservation boxes, all usable if you had power packs. But what was this? Hand firebombs, assassin scopes, poison, booby traps for houses, on and on. Oh, they were very nasty people.

"Lock that place up!" I told Shafter with a shudder as I came out.

I went back to the computer feeder room, stifled my reaction to half-rotten hides and got back to work on the files. I just want you to know, reader, what I went through to finish this job!

This night I was hopefully searching for more data about Blito-P3. After only a couple of hours, I came up with something shattering.

SURVEYS!

There were more than fifteen thousand years' worth of surveys

on Blito-P3! I was amazed that Voltar had been interested in it that long. Every few years, or sometimes every few centuries, a whole survey crew had wandered through the place. They had references here and there to the Voltar Invasion Timetable. Civilizations had risen and fallen and track had been kept of them. I couldn't read the originals, of course, but the computer summary in Voltarian—the sheet they used to transmit the data into the banks—was pinned to each one.

The most massive collection of these was grouped under just one heading: Earth Government Intelligence Organizations.

The pack covered a span of about three thousand years.

Strange-sounding names jumped out at you: Julius Caesar, Karl

Schulmeister, Napoleon, Webber, a host of them. They seemed to

get thicker as they approached later dates. They were separated

into groups, and near the top, the thickest one began with Cheka,

then, moving forward, OGPU, NKVD, MGB, and wound up with

Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Besopasnosti or KGB. Another pack said

OSS and CIA and yet another one said FBI. I guessed that Voltar

was keeping tabs on what the potential enemy was doing. And they

must be very interested, because every one of these documents was

initialed by the existing Chief of Apparatus at the time of its receipt.

The latest ones bore initials which I knew by now stood for Lombar Hisst.

if Very, very curious: a supersecret organization Voltar didn't even admit existed, studying supersecret organizations that maybe their governments didn't admit existed either. I glanced over my shoulder. I knew exactly how Bob Hoodward must have felt when he was about to blow the cover off something. I put all those packs back and got into the Voltar files. I was getting a little giddy at the sheer quantity of this stuff. How was I ever going to straighten it out and extract a coherent story?

But if I could ever get through this and sort it out, I really had them! No wonder they would engage in a huge cover-up! Their

hands were running scarlet with innocent blood! How could a population stand for this? What an explosion my expose would make!

I was standing in front of a cabinet that was labelled Don't File. Ah, this should be interesting.

I reached in and the very first thing I picked up almost made my eyes pop out. It said:

ARREST HIGHTEE HELLER AND HOLD HER. THEN BARGAIN WITH HER BROTHER AND GET HIM TO COME IN. THEN KILL THEM BOTH.

LOMBAR HISST

My hands shook. I was on the trail! That was Jettero Heller's sister!

Wait a minute. Hightee Heller was still alive! I'd seen her being interviewed on Homeview not a month ago. She was in her later middle age now, graying but not too badly preserved. They had been having a festival to commemorate her songs. She had even sung a bar or two.

I wondered if she realized there had been a government plot against her life. A celebrity like that? Monstrous!

Maybe there were more details elsewhere. I looked at this vast, vast array of files—millions, billions of bits. The feeling came over me that it might take me years and years. Long before that they would have me shipped off to Modon or bolted to a dusty desk. Desperation took the place of hope. Abruptly, as I looked back at what I held in my hand, the solution to the whole thing hit me.

Hightee Heller would know all about her brother. She would have letters, clippings, things beyond the government reach. They obviously had never dared kidnap her.

My mind was made up. I would use this scrap of paper for an entry. I would go see Hightee Heller. I would get her help.

Oh, we would blow the cover off everything!

I had Shatter lock the place up. We went back. At the crack of dawn I told them the camping trip was ended. I told the headman to take care of the place, finish Corsa's project, and shelled out the rest of my allowance so he could.

We sped back to the city.

At two o'clock that very day, using my family connections with the manager of Homeview, I walked into the drawing room of Hightee Heller's rooftop estate at Pausch Hills.

A bit gray-haired, retaining some of her beauty and very pleasant, Hightee Heller graciously told me to sit down.

"I've come to tell you there has been a plot against your life," I said.

She looked at the paper and then at me. "What are you doing?" she said.

"I'm writing the story of Jettero Heller's life."

"A writer," she said. "Well, well, you've come to the right person, Monte Pennwell. You may have to do some travelling, for his papers are all kept in the place where he was born: Tapour, Atalanta Province, Planet Manco. I can give you a letter to the museum librarian there."

"What about this threat against your life?" I said.

She went to the window and looked across at Government City. Then she said, "Are you a good fighter, Monte Pennwell?"

"I'm not sure," I said. "I never tried."

That seemed to surprise her. Then she looked at the paper. "From this, I would say that you have somehow gotten into the files of the Coordinated Information Apparatus. Have you got more than this?"

"I've got tons and tons and tons," I said. "I even own the place they're sitting in: the old fortress of Spiteos. I just bought it."

"Good Heavens!" said Hightee. She grew very thoughtful. She looked back at Government City. Then she looked at me. "You seem a nice young man. I know your family quite well. I won't give you a letter. I'll come with you. I haven't been home for a long, long time."

And that was how, with the Apparatus files, I got all the data that permitted me to finish the confession of Soltan Gris.

I hope you appreciate it. It was an awful lot of work!

It DOES contain the cover-up of all time!

And right now, with no more ado, I will get on with it and grab that Soltan Gris by the neck in midflight and tell you what really happened after that fatal day he rushed into the Royal Prison hoping to be executed quickly!

The REAL story is a stunner!

Jettero Heller, Royal officer of the Fleet, Grade X, and member of the Corps of Combat Engineers, tried to counter the eagerness of his lady, the Countess Krak.

He did not like the idea of approaching Spiteos, heavily defended as it was, in an unarmed and unarmored tug.

Just returning from what he supposed to be the completion of Mission Earth after an absence from Voltar of ten months, he did not like the look of things.

He was still travelling on his own orders, those of a combat engineer, and these gave him very wide latitude. He didn't have to report in to the Apparatus and he had no slightest intention of doing so.

Ten months before, after he had been kidnapped by Lombar Hisst and thrown into the dungeon at Spiteos, he had found himself being pushed into a mission under the Exterior Division. His mission handler was supposed to be an Apparatus officer named Soltan Gris. What Gris didn't know was that Jet had never once supposed himself to be directed by the Apparatus.

Before they left, while outfitting the mission vessel Prince Caucalsia, a space tug, Jet had had a chance to talk to Bis of Fleet Intelligence.