The Invaders Plan (10 page)

"Don't let him touch anything," said the big, tough officer. "We'll do any packing." They jostled me aside and opened an invisible door, displaying a vast closet of clothes and personal gear. One of the officers lifted a dress uniform off the rack and brought it out.

"No, no," I said. "He'll be under cover. No uniforms. Just personal necessities. He's travelling light." They shrugged and began to gather those up. But they had dropped the dress uniform close to me and I looked at it. It was red-piped, of course, and had the gold "Ten" for his grade woven into the stand-up collar. Now most civilians think that the wavy gold, silver and copper lines that ornament the chest of some dress uniforms are just that: ornaments. They wonder sometimes why some junior officer looks like a metal mine on parade and some seniors look so plain. The fact is, those thick, wavy lines of braid are citations; they are sewn in such a way that the top flap can be lifted and under it, in tiny letters, is the citation itself.

Jettero Heller's dress uniform breast had neither silver nor copper braid. It was an almost solid mass of gold!

I lifted some of the flaps: building a bridge under severe enemy fire; mining the orbit of Banfochon III; rebuilding the destroyed control center of Hemmerthon under enemy barrage; recovery of the derelict
Genmaid;
sabotage of the Rollofan transport system; mining the fortress of
Montrail . . .
On and on! I had to look at several more before I even found the battleship
Menuchenken.
Jettero Heller's few years of service had been active ones even for a combat engineer. Behind each one of those brief entries would lie a whole lurid scene of close shaves and violent battle.

I told myself how it must have happened: fellow gets a reputation and they keep drafting him when the odds look hopeless. And in times of perpetual war, there were lots of these. Then my estimate was soured by noting that what they call the "Volunteer Star" – a blaze of diamonds with a ruby center – was tucked with its ribbon inside the jacket. They award that for fifty perilous volunteers. They didn't keep drafting him – he kept volunteering!

I thought I had it then: a glory hound. That was his fracture. If I could play on that . . .

"He has a lot of other citations and awards," said the old gunner-manager. "Some of them are so valuable we keep them in the big vault. He never wears them." So he wasn't a glory hound. Oh, well, there were other faults he might have that I could exploit. I wandered off to look at the walls.

He had a lot of pictures of people. I don't know why portraitists always insist on cloud-sky backgrounds: when you see one of these three-dimensional color shots against a sky it makes it look like a little bust parked in the heavens; gives it a religious note as though everyone was being made into a Goddess or Godlet. I don't like them; they make the viewer feel like he's in the sky, too, and I don't care for that.

There was an older woman with a gentle smile, evidently his mother. There was a tough old hawk of a man in a shabby business tunic: it was inscribed "To my dear son." And then there was one of... I stopped dead. I was looking at the most beautiful female I have ever seen in my life. It was one of these trick portraits where the bust follows you with its eyes and when you lower your head it just looks sweet but when you raise it, the lips smile. Honest, this beauty took your breath away! Wow!

I had it now. This was the handle! I turned toward the gunner-manager.

"That's his sister," said this hope-shattering fiend. "She's a star on the Homeview circuit. You must have seen her." I hadn't. We are too busy in the Apparatus for self-indulgence like art. I wandered off to an assembled collection of press photos, all in their fake porthole frames. Jettero with classmates; Jettero being carried on the shoulders of some crew; Jettero finishing a bullet ball tournament; Jettero being introduced at a banquet; Jettero pulling a basketload of survivors into a ship. On and on. But before I could conclude I had a publicity freak on my hands, I noticed that the little
other
faces in the pictures were circled and their names written under the circles: they were a gallery of his
friends,
not Jettero. (Bleep), but you can't succeed with just a few tries.

But there
was
one of Jettero alone! It was full color, three-dimensional and gorgeous. He was sitting in the seat of a ship: it was one of these knife-edged racing craft they use in space – the kind that blow up if you just look at them.

"That's the
Chun-chu,"
said the gunner-manager. "She broke the Academy interplanetary speed record and it's never been bettered since. Jet loved that ship. It's down in the Fleet museum and Jet's always telling them it will still fly. But you'd have to get an order from the Lord of the Fleet just to move its position on the museum floor. They won't let Jet go near it so he keeps this picture of it." They had a bag packed. It had taken them time because they'd argued amongst themselves about "Jet would want this" and "not want that." I was glad to get out of there. For all my prying and hopes, I had really learned nothing useful, nothing that I could use, that is. To handle someone, from an Apparatus viewpoint, you have to have his flaws. And all people have flaws. I told myself I'd keep looking.

We went on downstairs (they call them "ladders" in the club, which is silly because they're twenty feet wide) and I was about to walk out of the lobby when I found my way blocked.

The biggest, ugliest young officer I have ever seen before or since, stood squarely in the middle of the doorway. And he had the toughest, nastiest expression on his face I never want to see again.

" 'Drunk,' " he said. "I just want you to know that if any of this is crooked, if Jet is
not
all right, if anything happens to him, we have your identocopies and we have your photo. And remember what I say," and he spoke in an even, grating voice that leaves the nerves scraped, "we will take you personally ten thousand miles up into cold, empty space; we will remove your clothes; we will push you out the airlock into vacuum. And in seconds you will be a
pale, pink mist!"
The last three words were punctuated with hard, firm taps on my chest.

"Right!" It was a roar! It was behind me! And I turned to find that about two hundred young officers were there in a sullen mob.

I am not all that brave. It scared me.

I got by the brute and ran down the steps with the bag. The airbus was there and I dived in.

With shock I saw my driver, Ske, was soaking wet. They must have thrown him in the nearby fountain.

He took off nearly vertical and fast. His hands were clenched and shaking on the controls. He could see me in his rear screen.

"It looks like they really put you through the grinder," he said. And it's true, I must have looked like quite a mess with cuts clotted up and bruises beginning to swell.

He drove for a bit, guiding us into the diversionary course so we could head, undetected, for Spiteos. Then Ske said, "Officer Gris, how could they possibly have known we was from the Apparatus?" I didn't answer. Because we're shabby, I thought. Because we're dishonest. Because we're just crooked thugs and never should be permitted to go near decent people. Because we stink. It had been a very trying day.

"Officer Gris," said the driver when he had the airbus scooting above the floor of the Great Desert, "if you had just told me they would know we was from the Apparatus, I could have brung a blasthoser and wiped the (bleepards) out." Oh, fine, I thought. That was all this mission would need: two or three hundred dead Royal officers and an Apparatus Secondary Executive standing there amongst the charred remains. Maybe I belonged in another Division!

But you don't transfer out of the Apparatus – you leave it feet first, stone-dead.

I had no slightest choice except to carry out this mission to its violent, brutal end! And succeed.

Lombar, seated in a king's chair looted from some Royal tomb, looked agitated.

We were in his tower office at Spiteos, watching the weekly "freak parade." The whole wall of glass at the office end had refraction index switches: it could be a mirror, it could be a black wall and it could be so set that we could see out but nobody could see in. It was set the last way now. Beyond it, completing the width of the rampart, was a vast, stone-walled room.

Doctor Crobe was showing off the week's production of himself and his assistants and horrible enough it was. They made freaks and the Apparatus got a good price for the products.

Just now was a being that had feet for hands and walked on all fours with a skipping gait. It was comical, really. Especially the way it stamped after each skip. Until recently it had been a normal man. But Doctor Crobe had changed that.

Factually, the doctor was a very skilled cellologist. He had been a member of a government department-Section for Special Adaptions – that specialized in retailoring people for unique duties or habitations: harmless enough, making them see better on dark planets, walk better on heavy gravity planets, breathe under water on planets dominated by sea. But Doctor Crobe had a twist in his own skull and he perverted the technology of cellular alteration to making freaks – real abominations. The government got some protests and a senior, who might very well have been a party to it, blamed it all on Crobe. The doctor vanished from his Domestic Police cell, thanks to Lombar, and was put to work, with a staff, at making freaks for the Apparatus.

The organization, well-connected with the criminal underworld, sold them to circuses, theaters and nightclubs for fantastic prices. They were billed as denizens of newly conquered planets, which, of course, was nonsense, but the publics of the 110 worlds of the Voltarian Confederacy ate it up.

Some, of course, actually were prisoners of war, which made it quasi-legal as such prisoners have no rights and are often slaughtered off. But there never were such beings anywhere except out of the vials and tubes and vats of Doctor Crobe. As some wit in the Apparatus had said, "The evil Gods invented Doctor Crobe to give the Devils some competition." There must have been some truth in it. These freak parades always made me ill. Here was a woman with her breasts where her buttocks should have been; there was a being whose legs had been interchanged with his arms; then came a female with two heads; following was a thing covered wholly with hair but in half a dozen colors; and then came a monster with eyes in the place of his privates.

While Apparatus guards drove them along with whips, old Doctor Crobe, himself, stood beyond them, looking on, beaming at his handiwork. He was a funny-looking creature himself: too long a nose, too long in the arms and legs, like some weird bird. In my opinion, every cellologist I have met is not only misshapen himself but crazy.

Lombar seemed to be quite agitated. He was fiddling with his stinger, probably to hide the shaking of his hands. He didn't seem to be paying much attention to the freak parade and so I ventured to give him some good news, thinking it would divert him.

"It's all handled now," I said, "but they had the whole Domestic Police out looking for Jettero Heller. I got a line on it and iced it and now they couldn't care less." He didn't answer but then he never does. But after a little he tapped a silver box beside him and pincers sprang out holding something. He took it.

"I knew you felt bad about losing your post," he said idly. "So I arranged this." He threw it sideways at me.

It was the gold chain and emerald insignia of a Grade Eleven Officer! It bumped me up
three
grades! It made me the equivalent of an Army commander of five thousand troops!

"It's now in the data banks and legal. You'll be drawing the pay as of yesterday." I started to thank him but he wasn't listening. "That ought to bring some money," he said.

The guards had rolled a cart into the parade. Six children had been cellularly joined together so they made a ring, twisted up into pornographic positions.

The Apparatus got tons of appropriations in secret government channels but its income must be five times that in its criminal sidelines. And true, they would get a lot of money for the six children freak, probably bill it from Blito-P3 or Helvinin-P6, maybe get a hundred thousand credits.

It reminded me I had other news. "We really ought to train this Jettero Heller up in espionage," I said. Lom-bar sort of twitched at the name but he didn't look at me nor stop me. The "trained act" parade was about to begin but there was a lull while Crobe's staff cleared off and the next lot came on. I took advantage of the time.

"They put a lot of correspondence in his bag," I said. "A letter from his mother, notes from friends, fan mail. He spent the whole evening answering them – it was quite a stack.

"Of course, when he gave them to me to mail for him, I read his answers very carefully. And, Chief, he has no faintest idea of security. He simply spilled his brains all over the paper. Really
stupid!

"I had to get two forgers and we spent until 2:00 a.m. rewriting his letters.

"He'll
never
make a spy,
never!
He'll put the whole mission at risk!" Lombar didn't say anything. The one we called Countess Krak was on now behind the glass. She was standing there in thigh-high black boots, a shabby coat and little else, twitching a long electric whip. In a dull and listless way she was bringing on the first performer of her trained act parade. She was actually a very beautiful female, statuesque, young, but she never smiled. She was an enigma even for the Apparatus. Approach her sexually and you could get
killed!
But she could train anything to do anything and
fast.
She was a genius at training. She was rumored to use electric shock and pictures but how she got her results nobody really knew.

Countess Krak had been a perfectly unsuspected government teacher, specializing in adult classes and advanced subjects. But she had a twist. There are some who say it was actually being done by the government and she just got the blame, and maybe that is true, but I think personally she just needed more money.