The acid-pit was much too good for such a blithering nogoodnik. The electric whips would be a favor. The nuclear needles, or even the radioactive centipedes would hardly be sufficient to alleviate Grauschmitz’s crime against The State. Some incredibly ingenious new torment… some ferociously clever and original punishment would be needed… hmm.
The Admiral was deep in the pleasant paths of creative imagination, when a sub-lieutenant came up to him, quaking with terror, squeaking quickly to get his message out before the Admiral’s notorious temper would explode upon being so interrupted.
“Y-your Ul-Ul-Ulp!-Ultimacy!” he clacked, “a message from the p-planetoid-ship!”
The Admiral bent an icy eye-stalk upon the quivering amoeba.
“You mean a message from that brainless blackguard, Grauschmitz, fool!” he corrected. “Thirty lashes for your stupid error, cretin!”
Almost collapsing into a deck puddle from terror, the sublieutenant clacked on.
“N-no, Ultimacy, I don’t mean the Supreme Commander—the message is from the Ajaxian vessel!”
“Hmm. Very well. Plug it into my board and wobble off. And make that forty lashes—the extra ten are for daring to correct a Superior Officer! Discipline! Must have discipline! Entire service going to rot,” he grumbled as the quavering blob plugged the cable into his board and wobbled off, eye-stalks drooping forlornly, headed to the Disciplinary Chamber.
As the screen cleared, the face of Ajax Calkins filled in—expressionless and wooden.
“Utterly Supreme Admiral Heimmerschlitzer, I am the Saturnian posing as Ajax Calkins, as you know,” his voice crackled coldly over the receiver.
“Ah! Secret Agent F-109-X, is that you? Good! What in the name of Ten Thousand Cosmic Hells has been going on—where is Grauschmitz and his squadron?”
“Dead, Admiral. Gone to glory in the service of the heroic Saturnian Interplanetary Empire,” said the face in the viewer. “Tricked by this fiendish devil of a Martian spider-being, the one Calkins left behind in command of the planetoid-ship.” The face of Ajax faded back to show a tense scene in the rear of the Ajaxian bridge: poor Wuj, tied up in plastic cable, held at gunpoint by a stiffly wooden Emily Hackenschmidt, who saluted mechanically as the Admiral’s eye-stalks filled the screen.
“Tricked, F-109-X? How?”
Ajax shrugged. “Somehow the spider-being discovered that my comrade-agent and myself were not truly the humans, Calkins and Hackenschmidt. He tricked us into a refrigerator-room, lowering the temperature to such a degree he hoped would freeze our amoeboid bodies solid. Then he deluded the Grauschmitzian patrol with a clever mirage-effect—one of the ancient Asteroidal machines recently discovered here—and led them to their glorious doom. However, the spider-being was not quite clever enough. He did not know our pseudo-bodies contained laser equipment. We cut our way out of the refrigerator before freezing, and took him prisoner, shutting off his malicious device. Unfortunately, we were not in time to save Commander Grauschmitz and his squadron from plunging to a hideous flaming doom.”
“Well, we can’t have everything,” the Admiral grunted placidly. “Then I presume all is prepared for our scientific experts to board the craft?”
“All is ready—I am maneuvering the planetoid to orbit just beyond the moon the Earthlings call Phoebe,” Ajax said woodenly. “My comrade awaits your coming, as do I, with great anticipation: it will be a truly historic moment!”
“Ah! Good! Heimmerschlitzer signing off—good work, F-109-X! I have no doubt that His Indescribably Superior Lordship, the Crown Prince Zarfbladder, Heir Obvious to the Imperial Saturnian Crown, will agree with me that you deserve the ultimate honor: elevation to the rank of Secret Agent G-109-X! Congratulations!”
“My thanks to your Admiralship!” Ajax said sweetly. “And it is the sincere wish of myself and my comrade-agent, here, that your Admiralship will shortly receive the reward you deserve, too!”
Glowing with pleasure, Admiral Heimmerschlitzer cut the beam, and switched to Full Circuit.
“Attention!” His gloating voice thundered through every hall, chamber, suite and conduit of the entirety of Grand Ineffable Prime Base. “Due to my own highly superior grasp of space tactics and heroic leadership abilities, I take pleasure in reporting that the recalcitrant planetoid-ship, Ajaxia, has at last fallen into our pseudopods and is even now held by two of our finest Secret Agents! Scientific and engineering personnel, and distinguished military observers and Royalty may now disembark for the planetoid, according to System Red! I will myself join the vanguard in my private gig! Another magnificent chapter has been added to the heroic and glorious annals of our Beloved Saturnian Empire! That is all!”
Within moments ships by the dozen, the score and even more, began blasting up out of the entry-ports sunk like huge torpedo tubes in the rocky surface of Saturn’s tenth moon. They blazed a fiery arc against the splendor of the mighty rings, and hurtled towards the orbit of Phoebe where the planetoid-ship awaited them.
Another glorious chapter of history was about to be written, true. But in whose history?
XXIII
No one could possibly hold to the opinion that Vice Admiral Milton A. Kreplach was anything else but a fair man, and in the Earth-Mars Space Administration he had a fine reputation as being an officer noted for scrupulous self-control. In fact, his self-discipline was such that he was affectionately known to his subalterns as “Old Cast-Iron Head.”
However, even the mildest observer of recent events would have to admit that if ever a man—even an officer of Vice Admiral Milton A. Kreplach’s standing—ever had cause to get a bit riled, maybe even to blow his top, it was Vice Admiral Milton A. Kreplach.
No one in EMSA had anything bad to say concerning the very honest way Kreplach had comported himself during the recent and distressing affair of the defection of Ajaxia to the Saturnian side. No one could feel anything but sheer admiration as to his self-restraint in not attempting to pursue the fleeting planetoid-ship across the interplanetary border and into Saturnian space. Of course, an observer must realize how very frustrating it was to chase the defecting planetoid that far and then have to turn back with empty hands so to speak. But everyone in the know was well aware that for Vice Admiral Kreplach to have crossed the border between EMSA and Saturnian space would have been to cause an interplanetary incident and perhaps even precipitate war. So Kreplach turned back, after watching Ajaxia happily sail off in the general direction of the Ringed Planet. And no one could much blame the Admiral if he had not cussed every foot of the way back to his base on Ceres in the Asteroid Zone. And cuss he did. Some of his younger lieutenants, surreptitiously overhearing his marvelous wealth of colorful profanity on the intercom system, went so far in their admiration for the Admiral’s remarkably inventive grasp of Creative Linguistics as to turn on portable tape recorders so that at least a portion of his philological expertise could be preserved for history.
Experts in invective were particularly admiring of his analysis of Ajax Calkins and his ancestry, both paternal and maternal, going back some seventeen generations. In this genealogical survey, it was noted that the Admiral did not once stoop to repeating himself. This feat awoke awe even in the breast of the most eloquent top sergeants in EMSA’s Space Corps!
Once back on Ceres, Admiral Kreplach locked himself in his quarters for twenty-four hours with no external solace beyond a half-case of a liquid refreshment affectionately known to the Space Corps as “Old Paint-Remover.”