Mission: Earth "Villainy Victorious" (35 page)

Faht Bey led the way down the tunnels and they came at length to the detention cell.

There sat Oh Dear, his pretty, made-up face streaked with tears. He recognized, from Voltar press photos of yesteryear, Jettero Heller. "Oh," he sobbed. "A Royal officer. I have one request before you kill me: take the magic mail card back so they don't kill my mother."

"You're not going to be killed," said Heller with a trace of disgust. "All I want from you is any other information you might have had for Gris."

"Where is Gris?"

"Apparently dead," said Heller.

"Not really?" said Oh Dear. "Oh, what utterly marvelous news. Oh, I just can't wait to tell Too-Too! We'll have a celebration party! I'll buy ribbons– – "

"The information," said Heller.

"That the General Staff despatch was very urgent," said Oh Dear, "and that I was to keep Gris up day and night to compile it and that I was to return with it."

Faht Bey said to Heller, "That means at least three months until they hit. Six weeks going back, six weeks for the Apparatus invasion fleet to arrive here. Add the time it takes them to assemble and board."

Heller said to Oh Dear, "Is that everything you had?"

"There was a message that Gris was assured he'd be the next Chief of the Apparatus only if there was no halt in drugs."

"A promotion?" said Heller. "But Hisst is the Chief of Apparatus."

"Well, you see, the plan is that Hisst will be moving up to Emperor. Any time now. And that's all I had, I swear it."

He was too shaking-scared not to be believed.

As Heller left he saw the Countess Krak at the end of the corridor. She was coming out of the cell that still held Utanc-Colonel Gaylov.

"Dear," said Heller, "your woman's intuition seems to have been right. The Apparatus has a plan on foot to use its own forces to smash this planet. Hisst is crazy insane."

"Then we've got to get off it right away," said the Countess. "We and you-know-who must not be here when they crack it up."

"And waste all the work I've been doing for a year?" said Heller. "This is a nice planet."

"Opinions differ," said the Countess Krak. "Psychology, psychiatry, perversions beyond belief and a population that doesn't even raise its voice when some nut like Rockecenter is ruining it. It's not worth saving, Jettero. We'd better get a move on."

"We've got time," said Faht Bey. "It will take more than three months for them to make the voyages and hit the place."

Heller shook his head. "How long ago did you stop the first freighter?"

"Oh, that's been about four weeks now," said Faht Bey.

"Then they will know for sure, within a couple weeks, that it didn't come back. But it was Bolz that triggered it. You haven't got three months. You may not even have five days."

"What are we going to do?" said Faht Bey. "When they find out we stopped the drugs, they'll slaughter us to a man and go right on with their invasion. We won't have anything left to stand on even if they miss us."

"Steady, steady," said Heller. "I admit this is quite a problem. We've got to make sure Prahd's patient is secure, we've got to move this base and we've got to safeguard this planet."

"What?" said the Countess Krak. "Try to stand off the whole Apparatus fighting force? Please, Jettero, please. Don't try to save this planet!"

"I'll come up with something," said Heller. "And make no mistake. Whatever else happens, I am going to make every effort to save this planet."

"Oh," said the Countess Krak in a voice of despair, looking at the set expression on Heller's face.

None of them knew that none of their estimates were correct. Just four days short of arriving, an Apparatus Death Battalion was approaching with orders to find any hostile influence at the base and destroy it. That happened to include, at that instant, every Voltarian on Earth excepting only the
Blixo,
its crew, Captain Bolz and Oh Dear. This was no major invasion, not yet, but it could be the preliminary of mass slaughter. Lombar would go crazy for revenge against the planet for getting in the way of his ambitions.

The wings of death hovered over Earth.

In the coolness of the patio at the villa, Jettero Heller paced up and down. His mood of grimness did not match the tinkle of the fountain.

For weeks the Countess Krak had been after him to give some serious thought to their plight but had made no penetration in his easygoing attitude. She was learning something about trying to live with a personality like his: with peril a constant companion, a combat engineer took joy in life when he could and tended to shrug off dangers he considered minor. But once he conceived that something should be done about a situation, his dedication to getting it handled was a little awe-inspiring.

She had thought he would simply shrug and leave the planet to its fate. His carefree attitude did not carry over into his suddenly confronted tasks.

She sat on the fountain's edge, hopeful that at any moment he would simply turn and say, "You're right. It is too much for us. We'll just put the Emperor in the tug and go someplace nobody ever heard of."

He turned all right. But he didn't say that. He said, "What do we know of Prince Mortiiy?"

She chilled. Calabar was writhing in the toils of raw, red war. What he inferred was even worse! But she said, managing a calm voice, "Nothing good, I'm afraid."

"Good, bad, what does it matter?" said Heller. "I need information."

He was asking her because she had lately been entertaining him with bits of Royal history she had read in the books Gris had left in her cell during her captivity. Suddenly she grasped an opportunity to discourage him from some mad course that could end in their destruction. He wouldn't believe her unless he saw it himself in print. "Wait right there," she said. "I'll get the books."

She returned in minutes with the latest supplement of the
Compendium
she could find. It was only a year old. She fluttered pages. There it was and she showed him, reading aloud:

"So you see, Jettero," said the Countess when she finished reading, "if you are thinking of taking His Majesty to Calabar and joining the rebel forces you'd seal his fate. Mortiiy would simply kill him."

"Mortiiy is not a madman," said Heller.

"He'll do until one comes along," said the Countess. "He is no longer in line for the succession. The whole fighting force of the Apparatus, as we heard when we were on Voltar, is engaged in a full-scale attack to wipe him out."

Heller did not answer her. Instead he went to see Captain Bolz, who was sitting in his ship under heavy guard.

Bolz looked up the instant Heller appeared. "No sense talking to me," he said. "I'm not going to join the (bleeped) Fleet and neither will my crew. We're sensible people. We belong in the Apparatus and we are going to stay there!"

"I am sure," said Heller, "that, with your smuggling, you find it far too profitable. But I'm not asking you to join. All I'm asking you to do is take back a cargo to Voltar."

"WHAT?" said Bolz. "So all this talk about no more drugs was just wind."

"It will take several days to get your cargo here from New York, so if you will promise to sit quietly and give no trouble, you can go home with it and you won't be in any trouble at all."

"That's fair," said Bolz.

Heller went immediately to Faht Bey's office. He put in a long-distance call to the president of I. G. Barben and you could almost see the sweat spurting back out of the phone when the man realized who he was talking to.

"Now hear me carefully," said Heller. "I want a ton of tablets made. They will be composed of 50 percent antihistamine and 50 percent methadone. They will be shaped and packaged and marked as amphetamines and you will get them to the airport in Afyon, Turkey, by jet within four days."

"A ton?"

"Correct," said Heller. "See to it."

The antihistamine, he knew from his studies, would give a semblance of reaction like amphetamines; the methadone would counteract heroin. If Lombar ran out of drugs, let the Lords withdraw more easily with that. He doubted anyone would detect the difference. It bought time.

He wrote a despatch to Bolz telling him to be on the lookout for it, load it up when it came and go home. And he wrote the despatch with an ink that would fade to nothing in a couple of days.

He found Faht Bey. "How many freighters do you have that will operate?"

"We got the old ones running. Two more have been stopped here. Five freighters."

"Good. That's enough. Disassemble the base and load it and all personnel. Break your neck and be ready to go as soon as possible."

"It will take days," said Faht Bey.

"I hope not," said Heller. "If we do this right and we are quick, we can save this planet."

There seemed, suddenly, to be a thousand details to what had looked like a simple undertaking. Family connections who had been unaware of extraterrestrial husbands and domestic connections who had never known who their employers really were had to be cared for somehow, at least decently set up in life. Faht Bey remarked that the Apparatus would simply have killed them and then hastily said he was just commenting, when he saw Heller's look.

The New York office had to be shut down and its personnel hauled back.

Heller found out from Prahd that there was now a lot of trained Earth staff, including doctors, and that made up Heller's mind. He phoned Mudur Zengin at the Piastre National Bank.

"Make up papers," Heller said, "transferring amounts which have been scheduled for 'company maintenance, Afyon' over to 'hospital and disease-eradication use.' Make them up so they stay in effect pending any cancellation from me."

"That's an awful lot of money for health," said Zengin.

"We're earmarking a good chunk of it for drug rehabilitation," said Heller.

"That's a big job," said Zengin.

"Right. Maybe we can undo some of the damage that's been done. Would it be asking too much to fly the papers down here?"

"Not at all," said Zengin. "I'll come myself."

Krak got hold of Heller. "That Russian spy colonel is still sitting there in his cell. You were holding him in case they needed more when they tried Gris. Remember?"

"Well, he hasn't got a country anymore," said Heller. "He can't be very dangerous. Put a hypnohelmet on him and suppress his memory of the base and let him go."

"It's not that simple," said the Countess. "There's the two little boys he corrupted. They're caving in, nobody can do a thing with them. I had an idea. France has been exporting an awful lot of drugs."

"What's that got to do with Colonel Gaylov?" said Heller. "He was also exporting heroin. From here. To keep the international KGB network running."