Mission: Earth "Fortune of Fear" (10 page)

The
Blixo
mate accommodatingly lashed down the visible nine cases with their eighteen fifty-pound bars of gold-painted lead.

I verified that all was now secure. And to again show how important I considered this project, I gave him the additional hundred dollars. He was pleased. He and his crew would also be dead drunk very shortly, for the first place he went was to the phone. This meant he wouldn't be talking to the Antimancos when they came.

I looked up through the electronic illusion of the mountaintop. The day was fading out. The sun is early gone in a Turkish January. We were above 38° north latitude.

I went up the tunnel and got into my house. I bolted down a fast supper. I put on my ankle holster and shoved the Undercover Colt into it. I filled my pockets with the other concealed weapons. I strapped on the Ruger gunbelt and checked the cylinder of the Blackhawk and thrust it in place. I put the thong over the hammer and tied the holster to my leg. I draped the two shotgun bandoliers left and right across my chest and fastened their lower edges to the cartridge belt of the handgun.

I picked up the phone and called Prahd. Yes, the Antimancos were ready to be sent-had been for hours. I phoned the taxi driver and had him pick them up.

Nervous now from the very prospect of having to be convincingly calm with the Antimancos, I threw my bearskin coat over my shoulders, picked up the FIE shotgun and went down into the hangar.

The Antimancos came down the barracks tunnel, restive and annoyed. I wished I had thought to tell Prahd to blow some calming gas on them. Or on me, for that matter.

I met them at the platform edge.

"Of all the condemned nonsense!" said Captain Stabb. "I'm a blasted pincushion. That (bleepard) stuck us full of holes!"

"Did he give you the epidemic certificates?" I said tensely.

"He gave us some (bleeped) piece of paper," snarled Stabb. He had it out.

I took it, scanned it and put it in my pocket. "It would not do," I said, "for you to be caught robbing a bank and be put in jail for not having the right health certificate."

It had the desired effect. Captain Stabb's beady eyes gleamed with greed.

They crowded close. I knew they would. This was going well.

"Tonight," I said in a very low voice, "we are going to make the preliminary run. I have a wonderful plan. In order to seize the gold reserves of Switzerland..."

"The gold reserves of Switzerland?" they breathed in awe and greed.

"Just that," I said. I spoke to Captain Stabb but let the others hear. "In order to steal something, it is necessary to know where it is."

They nodded.

"So at great risk to myself, I am going to do just that."

"How?" whispered Stabb.

"Look at that platform," I said.

They did. What they really saw was what they supposed was a steel platform with nine bullion cases lashed to the top.

"The gold in those boxes," I said, "isn't gold at all. It is just lead bars painted with gold paint. Check them and see for yourself."

They undid a lashing. With a careful dagger, they verified it. I took a small hammer and repaired the damage.

"But how does this rob Switzerland?" said Stabb.

"Very simple," I said. "You are going to land me and this at Kloten Airport in Zurich. They will take it to their vaults and I will follow them. I will pinpoint exactly where the vaults are and when we have planned the raid all out we'll go back and lift the whole thing away with the line-jumper!"

"Oh," said Stabb, his eyes glowing as I knew they would. "There's only one trouble with the plan. The line-jumper will only lift about two hundred tons."

"Better a little than none," I said.

"Two hundred tons of gold," said an Antimanco engineer. "Devils! That would buy half a country at the price of gold here!"

"It's a big risk for you," said Stabb.

"That's why I am carrying this gun," I said, patting "The Brute."

"And then we pick you up?" said Stabb.

"No," I said. "All you have to do is put this platform near their customs shed. I will climb out of the ship and down onto it. And then you cut for home. I'll fight my own way out."

"Devils," said a pilot in awe. "That's nerve."

"So, quick, get yourselves ready," I said. "We'll take off within the hour."

They scrambled!

The personnel area of the line-jumper consisted of forward seats for the two pilots and rear seats for a tank crew of six. It was a peaked compartment way up at the top of the bell and it was almost without ports-it had small slits that could be opened or closed so as to not leave any reflective surface for detection beams.

The engine room was elementary and required only one engineer but two of the Antimanco crew got into it. It lay just below the personnel compartment and one went through it to climb down and out.

The rest of the ship was just like a flared bell mouth. In fact, if you looked at the ship from the side, it had the appearance of an enormous church bell.

Stabb got the two pilots into their seats and stood between them. They were going over the charts they had.

I sat down on a ledge seat clear at the back of the compartment. I buckled myself in very loosely so nothing would impede my getting to my guns.

I watched anxiously for any sign that the Antimancos had not been taken in. It was a bit nerve-wracking.

Stabb came back to me. "This 'border-jumper,' as we call it, is useful in atmosphere only. We're only going to go up about a hundred thousand feet. The trip is about a thousand miles one way and we don't have to go very fast. We'll arrive there at about 7:30 P. M., their local time, allowing for time differences. They'll probably still be groggy from dinner, a factor we always take into account in pirating. Now, does that fit in with your plans?"

"Exactly," I said.

"Then we're ready to go," he said.

They got their motors going and their screens live.

They lifted it in the hangar and settled it down over the platform. They attached safety lines to the new structure. They turned on the traction beams and engines again and floated the whole ship and platform a few feet off the hangar floor.

An engineer swarmed down with a radiative test meter and checked the ship and platform for reflectance of radar beams.

He leaped up on the platform, swarmed back into his engine room and shouted up to the flight area. "All responses null!"

Stabb tapped the pilot at the main controls on the shoulder and up we went through the electronic illusion,
ZOOM!

I opened a slot. I wanted to glance down at the receding Earth and maybe make sure we hadn't left the platform behind.

Stabb reached across and closed the slot. "No, no," he said with a finger wag. "They got radar on their satellites now and could detect a blip, even as small as that one. Watch those screens instead." He pointed forward.

I couldn't see very much of the flight deck. I was also pinned to the seat by our upward motion. This craft didn't have anything like the vast array on the tug. It was pretty elementary. I guessed the army or whoever had designed them didn't have much familiarity with space-flight. I could only assume we were on our way. I was worried that we'd left the platform behind.

An engineer was yelling up through the shaft. Stabb knelt over the opening. They talked. Stabb came back.

"That (bleeped) platform," he said.

Alarm shot through me. "It's all right?" I begged.

"Yeah, it's all right. But it is registering a higher weight value than it should."

I went cold. I had had it built of aluminum and then had them make it look like heavy steel. I thought that would make it seem the right weight even when filled with gold bars.

At a hundred thousand feet, they sent the line-jumper streaking along on course to Zurich. I worried that at this speed it might be making a sonic boom that nobody below on the planet would be able to account for.

Then I made a discovery that really stood my hair on end. In trying to rise enough to look past a pilot's shoulder and see a viewscreen, I didn't feel the customary thump of the control star against my bare chest.

I had forgotten to put it on!

I was sitting here without the basic control device for these bloodthirsty (bleepards)!

Only my few puny weapons were on hand to defend me.

As the shock of it passed, I realized what had happened. It had been occasioned by a slip of the Freudian unconscious, a deep-seated reaction against lockets in general caused by my recent traumatic experience. But realizing it didn't ease my sudden surge of roaring anxiety.

Stabb didn't help a bit. He said, "Oh, you're trying to get a glimpse of the screen and see where we are? We're right over the Sava River in Yugoslavia: if you got dumped into it you wouldn't last five seconds. Look at that torrent roar!"

Soundlessly, trying not to move my lips, I began praying to the god of voyagers.

The line-jumper boomed onward through the night, flying at a speed that kept the Earth below shadowed from the sun. I wished I could open the slit. I knew what I would get: a blast of setting sun at this altitude and nothing but ink on the ground below. But I wished I could anyway: it would make me feel less trapped.

Stabb had moved ahead, whispering to the pilots above the roar of engines and rushing air. Were they plotting against my life?

He came back through the empty seats to where I sat. By the interior green glowlight, his beady eyes looked like those of a wolf.

"We're just about to cross the Rhaetian Alps. Piz Bernina is right below: thirteen thousand feet. You should see those crevasses! Dump a man in there and you'd never find him until the end of the world. And right after we pass the lights of St. Moritz we'll be over the real deep ones!"

I held my lips rigid. I was praying harder, but now I was addressing the god of pirates. Wasn't there something he could do? Any favor would be appreciated.

He answered, but not in the right way. A pilot yelled back above the din. "It's time to dump him now!"

I must have fainted. Stabb was pushing at my shoulder. He was doing something with my safety belts. Trying to get at my guns and disarm me?

He had a hard grip on me, his fingers entwined in the straps.

Then I saw his feet were off the floor. Was he going to kick me into submission first?

"Hey, Captain!" a pilot yelled back. "This must be Kloten Airport. There's more (bleeped) airplanes down there than I ever seen before in one place!"

Stabb's feet settled back. He had simply been lifted up and forward by deceleration and was holding himself with my straps.

He was on his own feet again. He looked ahead, peering at the screen.

I was able to speak. "Be careful," I said. "Kloten is the busiest airport in Switzerland, if this is Switzerland. Don't land me in a runway and get me knocked down by a superjet."

"Turn up the magnification," yelled Stabb into the comparative silence of the hovering line-jumper. I tried to rise so I could see the screen. Were we really over Zurich's main airport or some crevasse? Stabb pushed me back. "Shift the scanner around," he yelled. "Let's see if we can read some of those signs!"

Glaciers seldom had signs. I was reassured.

Stabb said, "Devils, I can't read a single word of that gobbledegook."

"Put me off a runway and close to their customs shed," I begged.

"It's a bad scanner," said Stabb. "We'll have to improve it. I can't make out if they are letters or snow splashes, even if I could read their alphabet. Awful definition for only a hundred thousand feet."

I tried to get up again. Stabb pushed me back. "We'll handle it," he said. He yelled to the pilot, "Some of those buildings are hangars, so eliminate them. One is the main terminal, so eliminate that. Choose a shed that looks like it could be defended and put us down." He turned to me. "We can't hover here all night trying to read languages, even if we could read them."

"Hold on!" yelled the pilot.

Stabb gripped my shoulder safety straps again.

SWOOSH!

His feet came off the floor and my stomach stayed at a hundred thousand feet.

We went down twenty miles like a rocket in reverse.

CRUNCH!

Stabb used my body for a cushion to land on.

I didn't know how he kept his breath. I didn't. "Fast now. Out you go!"

I grabbed the FIE shotgun. Stabb unsnapped the seat and shoulder belts. I was propelled down the ladder.

The engineers were already out. They were standing on the platform, casting off the safety lines.

My feet connected with the boxes of the fake bars. I tried to get my balance.

The engineers swarmed up the ladder. I stared up. Stabb's pointed head was silhouetted against the green glow of the engine room as he peered down through the hatch at me.

"Don't leave a single man alive!" he yelled.

The hatch clanged shut.

The line-jumper leaped into the air.

It was swallowed instantly in glowing white mist.

I had arrived.

I was amazed to still be in the world of living things!

I had arrived. But where?

The only real clue I had that it was Zurich was the fog. They have a trick wind. It is called the
f
ц
hn.
It comes into these cold confines from the south and, being a warm wind, creates fog which lasts for weeks on end. The airport lights were making it glow so that one felt he was packed in cotton batting.

That's why I didn't see the snowbank at first. I moved to the edge of the platform and there it was: a wall of snow! It went up much higher than my head!

Not too concerned at first, I walked all around the platform.