Mission: Earth "Fortune of Fear" (7 page)

Heller said, "Sounds interesting. I accept your word that it is good for us."

The Countess Krak said, "Not just good but marvelous beyond our wildest dreams! So let's get busy and wind up this mission to a rocket success and get home."

Oh, Gods. My sending her was having exactly the opposite effect to what was intended. Even Lombar had told her Heller was working too hard and she was paying no attention to that! Oh, Gods, with all my other troubles, they really had to be slowed to nothing. If I could delay them long enough, then word would come and with a few shots I could kill them both. I prayed. Please, please, Gods of evil, intervene for once on my side. How could I slow them? If I only had money. If I could only get rid of other crises, maybe I could do it. Not maybe. I had to, for it meant my life.

Heller was showing her the office now. "At least we have a working base," he was saying. "Until the next rent day. Here is the secretary's boudoir and some closets. Over here is a "thinking room" with a couch where I sleep. Over there is the bath. This is the bar and the only 'kitchen.' It's all the home I've got right now. It will have to do, I guess."

"Have to do!" said the Countess Krak, until recently a prisoner in stone cubicles in Spiteos. "It's a
palace!"
Her eyes lighted on the cat which was sitting on the desk eyeing them. She said, "Who is this?" Heller said, "Oh, that's the cat."

The cat dropped down off the desk and came over and sat down in front of her, looking at her interestedly.

She said, "Doesn't he have a name?"

Heller said, "He's kind of a shady character. He won't tell us."

The Countess took off her cape and threw it on a chair. She knelt down and looked at the cat. She said to it, "The thing to do is to take an alias that isn't in the Domestic Police computers. Would you like to do that?"

The cat began to purr loudly as it sat there, looking at her. The silly wench. She was talking to it in Voltarian and it was an Earth cat.

Heller said, "He's very particular about his associates. He usually just spits at or ignores anybody but me and Bang-Bang, our driver. He's taken to you, but, of course, who wouldn't?"

"What kind of a cat are you?" said the Countess Krak.

Heller said, "He's an African cat. You can tell because he's white with black and orange patches. They're supposed to be great fighters. They're awfully smart and they bring good luck-don't you, cat? Oh, also, they're called calicos."

So he
does
have a name," said the Countess. "Mister Calico. You like that name?"

The cat purred.

"All right," said the Countess Krak, kneeling there in front of the silly cat, "let's see how smart you are. How much is two and two?"

The cat was watching her finger. Krak had extended it at a point between the cat's eyes. Krak now took her finger and tapped it four times on the floor in front of the cat.

The cat lifted its paw and tapped the floor four times!

I watched this with considerable dismay. I did not want to believe her reputation that she could train anything to do anything. She was dangerous enough without that ability. But then, it was just coincidence.

"Very good," said the Countess Krak. "Mister Calico, how much is two and two?"

The cat solemnly tapped his paw four times on the floor!

Krak laughed with delight. She picked up the cat and petted it.

Heller said, "Hey, we've got an adding machine. Why don't you teach him something useful?"

The Countess said, "That I will!"

Heller said, "Well, he doesn't know how to unpack for you yet, so let's get you moved in."

She put the cat down with a stroke of its fur and went over to help Heller unload the cart. They started to handle some boxes and then they dropped them and came together and just stood there in each other's arms.

Heller said, "I can't believe you're here."

And then they both started crying again.

After a long time, she said, "We've got to get busy and go home and get married and have kids and live happily ever after, Jettero. I really just came down here to bring you
home.
We're getting older. We will be fully grown-up in another few years. We can't risk it on a dangerous planet like this."

"I agree," said Heller. "It's no planet for a delicate lady. We'll get busy at once."

What little remained of my faint hopes went glimmering. This time she wouldn't slow him down. She'd work like mad to speed him up.

Gods help all of us. But namely me. The Countess Krak was loosed upon Earth!

Between them, if I didn't stop it, this pair would salvage the planet, bankrupt Rockecenter and ruin Lombar forevermore.

Only the thin, frail reed of me could prevent it. And I was a penniless, shattered wreck, afraid even to go home.

Weary nigh unto death, shocked and drained to the dregs of human depression, I stood in the interview room of the hospital, dully pondering where I could go.

I needed a hole to crawl into. One that I could pull in after me. Even that was a short-term solution. I knew that Fate would get to me in the end.

But I could not stay here. The very environment was traumatic.

A hole. Some of the spacecrew quarters in the subterranean Afyon mountain base were more like a hole than a room. Utanc would be unable to find me there. At least I would have refuge from the ferocity she would exhibit when she found her favorite locket gone.

Having no money, now that my wallet was missing, I very much doubted if I could stretch my credit further with the taxi driver.

The hospital was a tomb of silence. It must be getting on to three o'clock in the morning. This is the hour of lowest human vitality: most people die at such a time of day. I wondered if it might not be the best thing to do after all.

I packed up the viewer in a haphazard way. I somehow got into my bearskin coat and found it strangely clumsy. I crept outside into the night and stumbled down the long, dark road.

It was cold, bitter cold. The wind, with a mournful dirge, played the funeral song of my passage.

It was quite impossible to stand up against those two. I had no money. I would soon be swept away by the credit companies. Lombar's unknown assailant would not be long in finding out the true state of affairs and his dagger would not lag.

Chilled and numb, I came at last to the workman's barracks. I passed into the secret tunnel. I finally came to the tunnel end just outside the office of the guard captain. I was surprised to see him at his desk.

I had, of course, activated the panel lights just by entering the tunnel.

"There you are!" said the guard captain, somewhat in the tones of a German police dog surprised by a suspicious stranger. "Where the Hells have you been? Come in here!"

I was standing in the pool of green light that they use to target intruders just before they shoot them down. An uncomfortable place. Too much in public view. I found the energy to shuffle forward into his office and get my back defensively against a wall.

"The order," he said. "Where the Devils is the order? I can't detain that crazy doctor that came in on the
Blixo
without a detention order. You've been missing two nights and a day! I was going to turn him loose at dawn if I didn't get authority to hold him." He was banging his fist down on an unstamped sheet.

Oh, Gods. Miserable as I was, the thought of Doctor Crobe getting loose upon Afyon made me reel. That would be all it would take to escalate my condition to terminal heart failure.

I grabbed spastically at my pockets for my identoplate. I couldn't get into my pockets.

The guard captain snorted. "You've got your fur coat on backwards, Gris."

I looked down. It was true. In my dull condition, I had donned it back to front. No wonder the walk had been cold.

I somehow got the coat off. It fell to the floor. I fumbled around and found my identoplate. I stamped the order two or three times just to make sure it was making an impression. I was pretty shaky.

The chill of the hangar was biting into me. I put the identoplate back in my pocket somehow. I reached over and tried to pick up the coat.

After a couple of ineffectual plucks, I got hold of a corner of the coat and lifted it. I couldn't make out what part of it I had hold of. I rotated the whole thing and found I now had it upside down.

The guard captain said, "My Gods, Officer Gris, are you drunk or something?"

I looked at him. He was pointing at the floor.

THE LOCKET!

THE WALLET!

In my dazed condition I stared at them stupidly on the floor. I was still holding the bearskin coat upside down. I looked at the coat.

It had an inside breast pocket I never knew had existed! The locket and wallet had fallen out of it!

Dazedly I tried to account for it. And then I remembered that when I had paid the excess baggage check, I had put my wallet back into what I thought had been my
tunic
breast pocket. But by the evidence before me, I must have stuffed it into the bearskin coat instead. The stuffing process must have caught the locket chain and snapped it and the locket had been stuffed into the pocket along with the wallet!

I was stunned. I hadn't known of this pocket. And furthermore, I thought only kangaroos had pockets, not bears!

I picked up the wallet. All the remaining $880 I had taken of their travel money was there.

I picked up the locket. The chain wasn't even broken: I had just neglected to push the safety catch closed when I had put it on and the clasp had simply slid out.

The Countess Krak had not taken them!

The kiss on the cheek had been in honest appreciation when she thought, mistakenly, that I had made her a present of a credit card.

She didn't even know you had to PAY for credit card purchases later, for that had been withheld in the effort to get her to wreck Heller with crazy spending.

I suddenly recalled that earlier she had even asked who was the boss of the hospital and, finding it was I, then supposed that everything in the area was Apparatus gear and thus open to mission requisition. She hadn't even stolen
that.

And then came the lowest blow of all. She wasn't a crook! Maybe Heller was correct that her police record was false and she had been framed by the Assistant Lord of Education for Manco! Maybe his deathbed confession was wholly valid and she was blameless!

Gradually, I began to seethe. My ire against her began to rise like a red and suffocating tide!

She was taking advantage of her innocence!

She was even denying me the relief of believing she was a criminal!

I knew right then that there was no limit whatever to the skulduggery of the Countess Krak!

Dimly, I became aware that the guard captain was still talking. He was going on and on about something. Eventually he got my attention.

"What?" I said.

"Captain Bolz!" said the guard captain. "I'm trying to tell you that Captain Bolz of the
Blixo
is awfully upset with you. No one could find you anyplace. He has been wanting to get up to Istanbul but he said he couldn't leave until he saw you. He's been tearing the place to pieces looking for you for a day and a half. He's mad as screaming Devils about it. I'm trying to tell you that you've got to go see him right away, regardless of the time."

Oh, Gods. Fate was not out of ammunition. Here was more trouble.

"Where the Hells have you been?" roared Captain Bolz.

He reared up off the gimbal bed in his cabin, a mass of chest hair and wrath.

I stood timidly in the oval doorway, twisting my karakul cap round and round in my hands. The master of the battered
Blixo
was not his usual self. No affable invitation to have a seat, no slightly fawning demeanor.

"It's been an awful trip!" he snarled. "A (bleeping) fairy running around flirting with my crew, a crazy, gibbering idiot of a doctor trying to convince the mates the ship would run better if he gave them flippers instead of hands, and the most beautiful woman I ever seen in my whole life locked up in her cabin and not even giving me an ankle glimpse. And then I arrive here and just before I slide in through the mountaintop the whole control panel tries to tell me I'm about to have a collision with a spaceship!"

I cringed. I knew why that was. The hypnohelmet breaker switch in my head!

"Then I get safely into the hangar," he ranted on, "after braving Gods know what perils and where are you? No Scotch. No 'Hello, Bolz,' and that ain't all! Three months ago when I was up in Istanbul, I meet this rich widow. And she says that she'll just die if I don't come back and, (bleep) it, Gris, here I am hanging around this stinking hangar for a day and a half and nobody can even find you!"

"Why did you have to see me?" I ventured timidly. And, indeed, it was true. He didn't have to clear in through me.

"First things first," he said. "Sit down in that chair! We can get this over with in time for me to be on that morning plane if we get moving."

I sat down in a gingerly way, my hand not far from my stungun butt. These spacers are peculiar people. They can get out of hand. Not only that, you have to be crazy to become a spacer in the first place. Just because some rich widow was waiting for him, he had no call to be so upset. Or did he?

He plopped a thick mass of paper down in front of me. Blank Voltar Apparatus gate passes. An unusual number.

"Stamp those and we can talk further," he threatened.

"Aren't these an awful lot?" I said. After all, one should have some care in authorizing official documents.

"It's none of your business, except the rich widow also owns a counterfeit Scotch distillery and Scotch is getting to be all the rage on Voltar-knocks them kicking! And I'm not offering you a piece of it-either the widow or the Scotch business-and I need so many cargo-gate passes because you might not be around very long."