The Potter of Firsk and Other Stories (33 page)

The screen at his back buzzed. He turned on audio and duovision together without first waiting for the caller’s identification, then took his bulk to the side. Allixter had no time to duck. Sam Schmitz stared at him eye to eye.

“
Allixter!
” barked Schmitz. “You’ve got five minutes to report. After that, don’t bother!” The screen went blank.

Allixter stared under thoughtful dark eyebrows at the bartender, who regarded him placidly. “Since you’re in a hurry,” said Buck, “I’ll make it twenty-five franks. It’s a cute little bobbet.”

Allixter rose to his feet, still staring at the bartender. He juggled the bubble from hand to hand. Buck reached out in alarm. “Easy—the thing might break.” He dived into the till. “Here’s your twenty-five franks.”

Allixter said, “Five hundred.”

“Can’t do it,” said the barkeep.

“Make it four hundred.”

Buck shook his head, watching Allixter from craftily narrowed eyes. Allixter turned, wordlessly walked from the bar. The bartender waited like a statue. Allixter’s long dark face returned through the door. “Three hundred.”

“Twenty-five franks.”

Allixter screwed his face into an expression of agony and departed.

In the street he paused. The depot, a big cube of a building, rose like a cliff in the wintry sunlight, dominating the rather disreputable purlieus of the Hub. At its base spread warehouses, glittering aluminum banks, each a quarter-mile long. Trucks and trailers nuzzled at side-bays like red-and-blue leeches.

The warehouse roofs served as cargo decks where flexible loaders crammed airship holds with produce from a hundred worlds. Allixter watched the activity a moment, conscious that, for all the activity, nine tenths of the traffic passed unseen along the tubes—to continental Earth stations, to stations among the planets, among the stars.

“Rats!” said Allixter. He walked without haste to the corner transit, considering the little bubble. Perhaps he should have sold—twenty-five franks was twenty-four franks profit. He rejected the idea. A man was able to carry only so much along the tubes and expected a decent profit from his enterprise.

The bubble actually was a kind of sea-creature washed up on the pink beaches of—Allixter couldn’t remember the name of the planet—9-3-2 was the code to the station. He tucked it away in his pouch, climbed into the shell at the transit, swerved, rose, popped out into light. Allixter stepped out upon the depot administration deck.

A few feet distant was the glass-enclosed cubicle where Sam Schmitz, the Service Foreman and Dispatcher, sat on a high stool. Allixter slid back a pane, said, “Hello, Sam,” in a kind voice. Schmitz had a round pudgy face, fierce and red. He had the undershot chin and general expression of a bulldog.

“Allixter,” said Schmitz, “you’ll be surprised. We’re tightening up around here. You guys on the repair crew have picked up the idea that you’re a bunch of aristocrats, responsible only to God. This is a mistake. You were due on standby three hours ago. For two hours the Chief’s been chewing my rear end for a mechanic. I find you in Buck’s bar. I want to be good to you guys but you’ve got to follow through.”

Allixter listened without concentration, nodding at the right places. Where next to peddle the bubble? Maybe wait till he got a week’s leave, take it down to Edmonton or Chicago. Or better yet, stash it away till he had accumulated a few other items and then make Paris or Mexico City, where the big money was. Schmitz paused for breath.

“Anything on the docket, Sam?” Allixter asked.

The response startled him. Sam’s chin quivered in rage. “Blast it! What do you think I’ve been talking about the last five minutes?”

Allixter desperately sent his mind back, recalling a phrase here, a sentence there. He rubbed his thin cheek and jaw, and said, “I didn’t quite catch all of it, Sam. Maybe if you’d go over it again…Just what’s the complaint?”

Sam flung up his arms in disgust. “Go see the Chief. He’ll give you the picture. I’m done.”

Allixter crossed the deck, turned down a hall, stopped at a tall green door with bronze letters which read: SERVICE AND MAINTENANCE DIRECTOR. ENTER.

He pushed the button. The door slotted and he entered the outer office. The secretary glanced up. Allixter said, “The Chief’s expecting me.”

“That’s no secret.” Then she said into the mesh, “Scotty Allixter’s here.” She listened to her ear-plug, nodded at Allixter, keyed back the lock on the inner door. He slid it aside, stepped into the office. The air, as always, had a harsh medicinal odor which irritated Allixter’s nose.

The Chief was a small man, built to an angular design. His skin was wrinkled and yellow, parched like an old lemon. His eyes were small black balls, snapping with some kind of inner electricity. A few wisps of kinky hair rose from his head, some white, some black, without apparent design. The skin of his neck was corrugated like an alligator’s and the right side was marred all the way to his knobby chin by a heavy welt of scar tissue. Allixter had never seen the Chief laugh, had never heard him speak other than in a dry monotonous twang.

The Chief said without preliminaries, “Schmitz probably gave you the picture on this job.”

Allixter took a seat. “To be frank, Chief, I didn’t quite get it.”

The Chief spoke as if he were explaining table manners to an idiot—softly, with careful enunciations. “You’ve been through to Rhetus Station?”

“Code six minus four minus nine. Sure thing. They’ve got a new Mammoth installation.”

“Well, six minus four minus nine is coming in out of phase.”

Allixter’s thick straight eyebrows rose in an arch. “So soon? Why, we just—”

The Chief said drily, “Here’s the story. The tube came in, just barely scraping over the bitter edge of the tuner. I computed thirty-one-hundredths-of-a-percent slack in the phase.”

Allixter scratched his chin. “Sounds as if there’s a leak in the selector unit.”

“Possibly,” agreed the Chief.

“Or maybe they’ve got a new dispatcher and he’s playing with the adjustments.”

The Chief said, “To make sure we hit the unit dead-center I’m sending you out on six minus four minus nine, slacked down the same percentage that it came in.”

Allixter winced. “That sounds dangerous. If the code doesn’t sock home in the contacts I’ll come out something pretty poor on Rhetus.”

The Chief pushed himself back in his chair. “Job for a service man. You’re on standby. So it’s yours.”

Allixter frowningly looked through the window, across the misty reaches of the Great Slave Lake. “There’s something fishy here. That’s a new Mammoth and they work close.”

“True.”

Allixter shot a narrow glance at the Chief. “Sure it was Rhetus?”

“I never said it was in the first place. I said the code was six minus four minus nine.”

“Got a picture of that code?”

The Chief wordlessly tossed him an oscillograph pattern.

Allixter said, “Amplitude six, frequencies four and nine.” He frowned. “Almost six, almost four and nine. Not quite. Close enough to sock into the contacts.”

“Correct. Well, get your gear, climb through the tube, service that installation.”

Allixter anxiously pulled at his wedge-shaped Gaelic chin. “Maybe…” He paused.

“Maybe what?”

“Do you know what I think?”

“No.”

“Looks like it might be an amateur station or a hijacking outfit. The Rhetus tube runs valuable cargo. Now if some outfit could divert the tube to their own station…”

“If you think so, you can take a gun with you.”

Allixter rubbed his hands together nervously. “Sounds like a police job to me, Chief.”

The Chief raked him with his snapping black eyes. “It sounds to me as if the code is thirty-one-hundredths-of-a-percent slack. Maybe some silly bloke is punching wrong buttons on that Mammoth. I want you to go straighten it out. What do you think you’re drawing a thousand franks a month for?”

Allixter muttered something about the infinite value of human life. The Chief said, “If you don’t like it I know better mechanics than you who will.”

“I like it,” said Allixter.

“Wear Type X.”

Allixter’s thick black eyebrows became question marks. “Rhetus has a good atmosphere. Type X is anti-halogen—”

“Wear Type X. We’re not taking unnecessary chances. Suppose it is a hijack installation? Take along the Linguaid too. And a gun.”

“I see we’re of the same mind,” said Allixter.

“Don’t forget spare power and check your breather unit. Evans reported a leaky tube on the extra unit. I had it condemned but maybe they’re all that way.”

II

The mechanics’ locker room was deserted. In glum silence Allixter pulled on the Type X—first a thick neck-to-toe coverall webbed with heating elements, then a thin sheath of inert film to seal him from a possibly dangerous atmosphere, then high boots of woven metal and silicone impervious to heat, cold, dampness and mechanical damage. A belt strapped around his waist and over his shoulder supported his tool kit, a breather and humidity-control unit, two fresh power packs, a sheath knife, a JAR, and a heat-torch.

In the corridor he met Sam Schmitz. “Carr’s at the buttons. He’s checking you out on the adjusted code…”

A door labelled DANGER, KEEP OUT slid aside for them and they entered the central depot, a long hall filled with sound, activity, dust and, most notably, a thousand odd odors, whiffs of spicy reeks, balms and fetors from the thousand off-planet commodities coming in on the near belt.

The luminous ceiling gave off a cold white glare which searched out every shadow. There was no glamour or concealment in this light—every item on the belts minutely described itself to the eyes of the checkers. The walls were painted in ceiling-to-floor blocks of various colors, the better to designate the bays, where various shipments, temporarily stacked, awaited re-routing.

A narrow glass-fenced platform cut the depot in two. Back and forth from platform to the belts jumped the clerks in blue and white smocks, checking the merchandise in-coming on the near side, out-going on the far—crates, sacks, boxes, bales, bags, racks and cases.

Machinery, metal parts in ingots and machined shapes, consignments of Earth fruit and vegetables going out to the colonies, the homesteads, the mines. Other consignments of off-world exotics incoming to entice and stimulate the sophisticates of Paris, London, Benares, Sahara City. Tanks of water, oaken casks of whiskey, green bottles of wine.

Prefabricated houses, flyers, automobiles, speed-boats for the lakes of the Tanagra Highlands. Beautiful woods, richly mottled and marked from the hardwood swamps of a jungle planet. Ores, rocks, minerals, crystals, glasses, sands—all riding the belts, either approaching or leaving the twin curtains of dark brown-gold, shot with flickering streaks of light, at the far end of the hall.

At the curtain end of the out-belt a big blond man sat in an elevated box, viciously chewing gum. Allixter and Schmitz ducked across the in-belt, stepped over the clerks’ platform, rode the out-belt to the operator’s box.

Carr hauled back a lever and the belt eased to a stop. “All ready to go?”

“Yep, all set,” said Schmitz cheerfully. He hopped up into the box while Allixter stood glumly eyeing the curtain. “Howza wife, Carr?” asked Schmitz. “Heard she took a dose of dermatitis from something you carried home on your clothes.”

“She’s okay,” said Carr. “It was that kapok stuff from Deneb Kaitos. Now let’s see—I’ve got to set up this phony code. Hey, Scotty,” he called down to Allixter, “made your will yet? This is like stepping out of an airplane holding your nose and hoping you’ll hit water.”

Allixter made a nonchalant gesture. “Everyday stuff, Carr, my boy. Set those dials—I want to be back sometime tonight.”

Carr shook his head in rueful admiration. “They pay you a thousand franks for it—brother, it’s yours. I’ve seen some of the stuff that’s come out of the tubes when the settings were a little out of phase. Plywood panels come through looking like cheese-cloth handkerchiefs—a turbine agitator makes about a gallon of funny-looking rust.”

Allixter’s mouth tightened over his teeth and he cracked his knuckles.

“There she is,” said Carr. A bulb on the panel flared red, flickered, wavered through smoky orange, glared white. “She’s through.”

Schmitz leaned down over the box. “Okay, Allixter, all yours.”

Allixter pulled the hood over his head, sealed it, inflated the suit. Carr chuckled into Schmitz’ ear, “Scotty’s gloomy for sure over this one.”

Schmitz grinned. “He’s afraid he’s walking into some hijacker’s warehouse.”

Carr turned him a blankly curious side-look. “Is he?”

Schmitz spat. “Hell no. He’s going to Rhetus, to set adjustments on the coder. That’s how I figure it.” He spat again. “Of course, I might be wrong.”

Allixter lifted up his hood, yelled to Schmitz, “You better get me down the Linguaid.”

Schmitz asked with a grin, “Can’t you talk English? That’s all you’ll hear on Rhetus.”

“The Chief says take the Linguaid. So roll her out.”

A buzzer sounded on Carr’s panel. Carr grunted. “Get him his analyzer. I can’t tie up the belt all day. Old Hannegan’s hollerin’ to get his grapes off to Centauri.”