I swerved in tight past the donkey. It was either my bump on his nose or it may have been the singing.
He dropped the lead rope, brayed and took off!
Ten camels exploded. They went bucking off the road into the sunflower field, spraying packs in all directions, trying to follow the donkey.
Oh, did I laugh!
I drew up at the International Agricultural Training Center for Peasants, knocked over a No Parking sign that shouldn’t have been there and bounced into the base commander’s office.
The contrast between his face and my mood was extreme.
He moaned; he held his head in his hands a moment. Then he looked up. “Officer Gris, can’t we possibly have a little less commotion around here?”
“What’s a No Parking sign?” I said, loftily.
“No. Not that. Last night there was that fight and today our agents in town tell us there are complaints from cart drivers, complaints from the police on your double-parking and just a moment ago I had a call that you and some gangster were shooting up a hotel. Please, Officer Gris. We’re not supposed to be so visible here. Before you came, it was all—”
“Nonsense!” I cut him off sharply. “You were not in tune with this planet! You were becoming hicks and hayseeds! You weren’t keeping up to it — you weren’t with it. You leave such things to me. I am the expert on Blito-P3 sociological behaviorism! You should watch their movies. You should even go to see some of the movies they make in Turkey! They do nothing but shoot people and blow things up! But I have no time now to educate you in the psychological cultural cravings of this place. I’m here on business.”
I threw the pack of contracts down on his desk and he picked them up wearily with a what-now shake of his overpadded head.
“Hospital?” he said. “A half a million dollars?”
“Exactly,” I said. “You leave the statecraft to me, Faht Bey.”
“This hasn’t been passed by our local Officer’s Council. Our financial agent will faint!”
I knew that financial agent. He was a refugee from Beirut, Lebanon, one of their top bankers before a war wrecked the banking industry there and ran him out. A very wily Lebanese. “Tell him to get his hands out of the money box before I cut them off,” I said. “And that reminds me. I’m low on lira. Give me thirty thousand this time.”
He quivered his way into the back room and returned with thirty thousand Turkish lira. He made a notation in a book and then he stood right there and counted off ten thousand lira and put it in his pocket!
“Hold it!” I yelled at him. “Where did you get a license to steal our government’s money?” It made me pretty cross, I can tell you.
He handed over the twenty thousand. “I had to give it to the girl. Out of my own cash.”
“The girl? What for? Why?”
“Officer Gris, I don’t know why you had her sent back to Istanbul. Our agent there said she was clean. And I saw her. She was actually a very pretty girl. She closed out her room and she flew all the way down here. Oh, she was mad! But I handled it. I went up into town: she was standing right on the street making an awful row. I gave her ten thousand lira for you — it’s only ninety dollars American — and I put her on a bus so she could get back to Istanbul.”
“I didn’t order her sent back!” I screamed at him.
“Your friend the taxi driver said you did.”
Believe me, I was mad! I stalked out of there and got the Renault started, ran over another No Parking sign just to show they couldn’t trifle with me and drove toward home lickety-split, expecting that taxi driver would be there.
The Renault didn’t make it. It ran out of gas. I left it in the road and walked to the villa which was only about an eighth of a mile, planning all the way what I was going to tell that taxi driver.
He wasn’t there.
I gave Karagoz what-for about the car and sent him and the gardener to push it home and refused to let them push it with another car, I was so mad.
No girl.
Nothing to do.
I barricaded my door. I sulked for quite a while. And then, needing something more to get mad about, I went into the real room back of the closet and turned on the viewer.
Heller couldn’t go anywhere: he didn’t have any money. Heller was really no worry to me now. In a couple of days, I’d hear from Raht; we’d use the tug to take Heller to the U.S., and shortly after, he’d be arrested as an imposter and jailed. It didn’t make any difference now, what he was doing. But maybe it was something I could find fault with.
And there he was, using the corridor outside the storerooms as a running track. He apparently had two bags of running weights over his right and left shoulder as I could see the weight sacks bouncing as he trotted. Him and his exercise! Adding weights to keep his muscles in trim despite the reduced gravity of this planet. Athletes!
That wasn’t anything I could really snarl about, so I thought I’d better check earlier. I backed to the point I’d left him and raced it ahead.
Oho! He had been very busy! After his silly survey, he had been inside the ship no time at all.
I couldn’t quite make out what he first did.
There were strange things on his legs. He stopped at the ladder bottom when he exited from the ship and adjusted something on his ankles. He had some bags and a coil of rope slung around him and I couldn’t quite see the ankles because the gear swung in the way.
He went straight to the construction shop. A technician was in there, fiddling at a bench. He spotted who it was that had invaded his cave and quickly looked away, saying nothing.
“I want to borrow your hand rock-corer,” said Heller in a friendly voice.
The technician shook his head.
“I’m awfully sorry,” said Heller, “I’ll have to insist. This appears to be earthquake country and you have an awfully big excavation here. There seems to be flaking in the rock. I am concerned for the safety of my ship. It will probably be here on and off and it must not be risked by a cave-in. So please lend me a corer.”
The technician almost angrily took a small tool from a drawer and thrust it at Heller. Heller thanked him courteously and went off.
These combat engineers! Heller took a hitch on his bags and began to climb the vertical interior rock face of the hangar wall!
I knew what he had on his ankles now. They are just called “spikes” but actually they are little drills that buzz briefly as they drill a small hold in rock or other material. In the Apparatus we used them for second-story work. But engineers climb mountain faces with them. There is a drill in the toe of the boot, one on the heel, one on the outside and one on the inside of each ankle. They terrify me: you can drill a hole in your inside anklebone with them!
Heller just spiked his way up the wall. Ouch! He was wearing them on his wrists, too! Had he worn these last night to go up Afyonkarahisar? No, I was sure he hadn’t. They would have been visible in the fight and a breach of the Space Code.
Ah, he was wearing them now because he was working. He had to stop and do other things. He was about fifteen feet from the hangar floor now. The corer started up. It set my teeth on edge.
With the tool, he drilled a plug out of the rock face. It was about an inch in diameter and three inches long: just a little shaft of stone.
He held it real close to his eye, inspecting it. The section exposed the rock grain. He examined it very critically. It sure looked all right to me!
He took a little hammer and with a tap, he knocked off the last half-inch of the plug, caught the fragment and put it in a bag. Then he took a can out of his shoulder sack. The label said Rock Glue, and very badly lettered it was.
He put a gooey piece of rock glue on the plug and put it back in the hole. He tapped it neatly with a hammer and in a moment you couldn’t tell that an inspection core had been taken out.