The Invaders Plan (17 page)

"No, don't go," said Lombar, looking at the ready folder before him. "First sign that invoice." What could I do? Numbly I signed and put my identoplate to the receipt for the first shipment from Blito-P3. I handed it over to him and he glanced at it, nodded and put it in the folder. It seemed to give him momentary satisfaction.

"Now," said Lombar, fingering a second paper, "there's this matter of a leak." I went chill. What had he gotten word of now? The survey? What other thing?

"I have a clipping here from the newssheets, (bleep) them. One of these days we will wipe them out. Somebody leaked Mission Earth to the press." He flipped a page and there was the story:
"Famed Combat Engineer"
the same one I had seen Heller reading. But I did not think it was much of a leak, really, for the orders were on the data circuit and, even if confidential, were available to many.

"I didn't leak it," I blurted.

"So I have ordered a full investigation of potential and existing leaks. Oh, I'll get down to this. You can't have Apparatus business being yelled from the building tops. Somebody, somewhere leaked this to the press!" He threw it aside. "So you don't know anything about it. Well, I didn't think you would." An investigation? Oh, I better get off this planet!

Investigators turn up facts and they also turn up delusions. Dangerous!

I felt like I had been hit repeatedly with stunguns. I was really standing there paralyzed.

"No, don't go," said Lombar. "There's this letter from the Grand Council." I read it upside down. Fortunately I have a few skills. One needs them in such a dangerous environment. It was from the Grand Council. It commended the Exterior Division for so wisely choosing an experienced combat engineer like Jettero Heller. It wondered why the Grand Council had had to be informed of this by the press. It said that the Grand Council would appreciate the courtesy of being kept posted on the progress of the mission. Particularly, the Grand Council wanted to be advised the instant said Jettero Heller departed from Voltar so the council could expedite if there were any unseemly delays.

"This means," said Lombar, "that so long as this mission is still on Voltar, the Grand Council will be in a position to stick their noses into our business. If there is delay in getting off, we'll have Crown inspectors all over the place looking into everything.

"Once you have this fellow out of here, we're all right. The Grand Council can be strung along for years. They can get agents into everything on Voltar but they sure can't get any onto Blito-P3.

"Your agent, of course, has to be language trained and prepared and it would make them suspicious if we just launched. But my advice to you is to let no dirt cool under your feet. Crown inspectors running all around could mean your neck, Soltan. Don't delay that launching! Understood? Good." I was practically in a spin. Crown inspectors! But it was my decision to get away fast anyway. I felt a stab of irritation. Lombar wasn't helping. He'd delayed the mission himself by keeping me waiting half the morning.

I was saved from Lombar's further "help" by the entrance of a creepy looking staff doctor carrying a tray. Lombar looked at him in sudden relief. "Oh, it's here." When I passed the old criminal clerk in the anteroom, he said, maliciously, "Feel better now that you've had your interview?" I must have looked like a wreck.

Copy of a letter inserted in the manuscript at the date of this writing:

I had been rushing so hard down the tubes and corridors to get to the training rooms that when I opened the door and jumped in, I thought for an instant I was in the wrong section.

The smell of soap and disinfectant was overpowering! The Apparatus steals its cleaning materials from the Army Division – they are so seldom used it is not worthwhile to buy them properly. And the Army doesn't think anything is clean unless it stinks to the heavens of germ killers. It never occurs to anyone to steal materials from Fleet whose spaceships have to be odorless.

There is no circulating air in Spiteos. And the usual stench of these rooms, soaked as it is into the very stone, was simply being battered down by this gas attack of army cleaning chemicals.

I peered through the fog. Fully forty people, must be Krak's whole training crew, were spotted around the vast hall and nearby rooms. They were stripped to breech clouts and – I couldn't believe my eyes – their personal filth had been washed off! They had buckets and brooms and sprays and mops and they were gouging away at the centuries of litter and dirt. Bins of it were shooting down the escalator, going to only the Gods knew where.

Technicians were finishing the replacement of burned out lights. Another team was bringing in some new chairs and desks. What a turmoil! And too unusual in Spiteos to be readily understood.

But I had my own urgencies. I had to get Heller trained and gone. And fast. I shifted this way and that, looking for the Countess Krak.

And there she was! Over by a far wall. In a half-moon before her stood a group of fortress officers. I stepped toward them, fearful that something was up that would delay Heller's training. It was the deputy commander of Spiteos, the one that handles internal administration, and several of his troop officers, all in their filthy, ragged uniforms. There was some sort of argument in progress.

The Countess Krak was standing there talking to them. She was leaning on a broom. She was garbed in her shapeless work coveralls. The coveralls were wet! They had been
washed!
Through the gape in front was another surprise. She was clean. She had
bathed!
There was an exercise cloth wrapped around her head. Her hair had been
shampooed!
What in all the prayers to Gods was going on?

"I am very sorry," she was saying to the deputy commander. "But you will just have to accept it. In the future, I will train no more people that you have maimed!" The deputy commander was a harassed-looking fat fellow. "But, Countess," he pleaded, "if we don't cut out their tongues before we send them to you, they will betray Spiteos when we ship them out."

"I have told you before," said the Countess, "but I will repeat it. The people picked up and sent here to be trained don't know where they are when they arrive. They don't find out while they are here. And in any event I can give each one a posthypnotic suggestion that he will become unable to answer the question, if he were ever to be asked where he had been. It is simply senseless and brutal to cut out their tongues. It makes them much harder to train." The deputy commander sort of moaned.

"So that is how it is now," continued the Countess Krak. "I have tried to get this into effect before but it is final now. If you send me any damaged people, I will not train them. And that will be the end of your trained acts program." The troops shifted restlessly. They were very nervous, having their eyes on that broom handle she was leaning on. With a savage one-two, she was capable of skewering any one of them with it before they could even flinch.

The deputy commander knew he would be the first to be spitted. He had been very ill at ease talking to her and now, with a sort of relief, capitulated. He lifted his hand in a self-protective gesture. "All right. As you say, so it shall be." She gave a bright little laugh. My eyes bugged. The Countess Krak laughing?

The deputy commander got himself and his troops out of there. They went, whispering to one another, glancing back over their shoulders at her, just plain scared!

The Countess Krak swept up a pile of debris and dumped it in a box. She pushed the box along toward the escalator. She was humming! No words. Just the tune of some little ballad.

Her crew and workmen seemed to be finishing up for they were working at double, triple speed. Their eyes kept flicking toward her as they sped about polishing the place up. They were terrified at this change in her.

I myself was too frightened to go near her. I supposed her wits had flipped. There was no telling what she would do next! As they say in the high country beyond Kabar, "Lepertiges do not change their fangs." Frankly, I was too scared to approach her, urgent as my business was. Lombar was clear up in the high tower; the Countess Krak was right here!

Her crew was practically finished. I drew off to one side after a while. The movement must have attracted her attention.

She came waltzing over to me. "Oh, Soltan," she said, "I am so glad to see you!" And she gave me a bright smile.

The Countess Krak
smiling
unnerved me. There was a big padded chair, a fairly new one, close by the wall. It had a new glowplate over it. A low table was in front of it and a matching chair was on the other side. A newly created cozy nook. I stumbled back against the big chair and sat down in it abruptly.

She had turned and was facing the whole room. She clapped her hands together to attract attention. The more than forty men hastily turned to face her.

"I think," said the Countess Krak, "that this is enough for today. You have done very well. You are all sweaty now, so you should go wash your clothes and take baths. And then, because you have been up since the middle of the night," she paused and smiled brightly, "you can have the rest of the day off!" You could have created the same effect by levelling a blastcannon at them. It had never happened before in the modern history of Spiteos. They looked at each other. They looked to the door to see if execution squads were waiting. They looked at her. They had worked for years for the Countess Krak. They didn't understand this. She lightly laughed. "Well, run along!" In terror they plunged en masse to the exit ramp and vanished.

She turned around and came walking toward me. Halfway across her smile vanished and her eyes blazed!

I knew it. I knew this change was not there to stay. She was still the Countess Krak! I braced myself for a blow.

She seized my arm and yanked me out of that chair like a cargo hook had grabbed me. She hurled me to one side.

Then she did a very idiotic thing. She took off her headcloth and carefully wiped the seat of the chair where I had been sitting. Just as if I had gotten it dirty!

She looked at me severely. "That is
not
your chair! This," and she swept her hand toward the small ensemble of two chairs and the table, "has been set up for Jettero!" Then she softened, made some minute arrangements in the position of the table and adjusted some books and a language machine. And then she patted the chair.

She was all mellow again when she walked over to the area where I was picking myself up. But there was a bit of calculation in her eyes, too.

"I've just remembered, Soltan, that you'll be going back to Blito-P3, too. You're Jettero's handler, aren't you?" Well, she could figure that out from the language courses I'd laid out and that I was making Heller's appointments. I mumbled something about this being the case.

"And you're in full charge of preparing him and running some mission he is on?" I nodded.

She smiled. She has very beautiful white teeth. I was very conscious of those teeth. She gently took my arm-ignoring my flinch – and guided me over to a bench and sat me down on it.

"You need a language brushup," she said.

I tried to get up nerve to tell her my English and Italian and Turkish and half a dozen other languages were in perfect shape. But my mouth didn't seem to want to talk. Too dry.

She walked sedately over to the racks and got down a hypnohelmet and came over to me with it. I offered no slightest resistance. After all, I'd spent weeks in these things. She patted my head comfortingly and then slid the helmet over it. From her coverall pocket she took a recorded strip.

"It's just a little accent check," she said, smiling gently.

She slid the strip into the slot and turned the helmet on.

There was the familiar buzz. I was out like a turned off glowplate.

I came to. I was a trifle surprised to see that a half hour had gone by. She was piling some books onto the table and neating up the chair some more. She saw I was out of it. She picked up a book and came over.

When the helmet was unstrapped and off, she patted me on the head again. "Now," she said, "read this and we'll see how your accent is. First, Virginian." I thought this was pretty silly. There was nothing wrong with my accent in commercial English. She sensed resistance. "Now, Jettero will be talking Virginian. It's a city or something, isn't it? On some planet named 'Earth.' And you must be able to understand him. Read." And she pointed her finger at the page.