He got them up and got them dressed. I got them out to the taxi and, in the cold dawn, packed them in.
"Deliver them to Doktor Muhammed only," I ordered him. "And then come back and see me."
Away they went.
I rushed back to the crew's berthing. I found the room and bed of the base construction superintendent.
Cost was no object now. I woke him by waving three one-hundred-dollar bills under his snoring nose. He swatted at them. He clutched them. He looked at them and sat up quite alert.
"There are two more of those," I said, "if you will do exactly what I want you to do."
"If it's murder, ask the guards. If it's another redesign of the base you've done, let me go back to sleep."
Oh, there were going to be some changes made!"Neither," I snapped. "It's a simple construction job."
He got interested. We turned up the glowplates and in a rapid, if somewhat imperfect scrawl, I showed him what I wanted.
"Huh," he said. "That's easy. There'll be two more of these?"
"Only if you finish by midafternoon," I said.
"That's easy, too. I'll rouse out the workers."
Hah! How easy that had been!
I raced out. I flashed into the Blixo. I pounded on the cabin door of the mate who had been left in charge.
I told his tousled head what I wanted.
"Why wake me now?" he said.
"Because I wanted to give you this," I said. I pushed a hundred-dollar bill into his hand. "And if you do a smart job when you get the signal this afternoon, there's another one."
His hand closed over it like a sun grabbing a spaceship at magna-speed.
It was all in train, now. It must not fail!
I went down and opened the storeroom door and crooned for three hours over that precious gold! I would not have it long. I would have to make this joy of communion last. It saddened me that after today I would never see it again.
But if all went well today, I would have the MONEY!
TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY-FIVE MILLION DOLLARS!
Money is POWER!
Given that much, I could ruin whomever I chose. At will! Including Heller and Krak!
The urgency of undone things at last wrenched me away. I must not leave the slightest detail to chance. I knew I was engaged in one of the most desperate ventures of my whole life. I was going to get five murderous pirates to move 12 1/2tons of pure gold. Rogues who would kill for ounces of it, let alone tons!
I scrambled down out of the Blixo.
The flash of electronic fire was filling the whole hangar with fitful light. The construction crew was working like mad. I surveyed it with interest. They were making good progress.
I ticked off on my quivering fingers the vital items that were left.
Guns. Clothes. Passport. Anything else?
Yes. The locket. I had to get the locket back.
I checked to make sure. Yes, I still had it in my pocket. I couldn't quite figure out how to give it back, unsuspected. If I died in this desperate venture, I still wanted a few tears on my grave.
I went up the tunnel. I entered my secret room.
Guns. I opened my gun case. I looked them over. I liked the looks of one. It was an FIE double-barrelled 12-gauge called "The Brute." It looked it. I had had the barrel sawed off to twenty-two inches. It had no hammer to catch on anything. I had had it fitted with a sling. One glance down those twin tunnels would scare a man to death. I was going to ride shotgun on a gold shipment, and I had better do it in style. So "The Brute" was the baby. No Wells Fargo guard had ever had a more impressive weapon. Nor bandits like I had, for that matter.
I got out two shoulder bandoliers and filled the loops with assorted types of shotgun shells.
I then laid out six blasticks. To them I added a Ruger Blackhawk single-action revolver with.30-caliber carbine chambers. I had.30-caliber armor-piercing bullets for it and, using what were actually rifle cartridges, it could outrange and outhit any other handgun I had. And this revolver wouldn't jam in the extreme cold I was about to court. I got out a tan, hand-tooled holster and cartridge belt and filled the loops with the.30-caliber carbine shells.
Thoughtfully, I added half a dozen maximum-damage Fleet Marine grenades. Then I loaded an ankle gun-an Undercover Colt.38 Special-using explosive bullets and laid out its ankle holster.
A very flat Voltar police slash blastgun-that could cut a man in half at a thousand yards if you waved it right-would serve as a pocket weapon, and I added it to the pile.
So far so good.
Now for clothes. I went through the secret door into my bedroom. I started going through the boxes of new clothes. An electrically heated ski suit! Hey! It was a beautiful black silk. It also had fur-lined, electrically heated boots. I was so glad to have it. A space pressure suit gives me absolute fits! You can't draw fast enough in them and they always smell. So I filled up the battery chambers and made a test. Great. I put the outfit on. It looked deadly! And it would look more deadly still with two shotgun bandoliers crossing the front of it and a handgun holster's leather and sinister brass around the waist. Formidable!
Passports next. Risky as it was to use my own valid Earth identity of Sultan Bey, I was going to do just that. Pretty bold and adventurous when you consider the state of police on this planet, and all the more so in the light that every credit-card company checked not just every movement but every slightest twitch of a cardholder, a fact I had just learned to my dismay. Battle the police? Yes. Even casually contact a credit card's computer? No! Emphatically, NO!
But there had to be no question as to who owned this gold. I was doing all this in such a way that nobody would be able to touch the resultant mountain of money-not even come near it.
My passport was in order; its health card was up-to-date right down to the smallpox vaccination and bubonic plague shot.
I still had not yet worked out how to return the locket: it left a loose end dangling.
I remembered, then, I had not eaten. I buzzed for breakfast: as it was midmorning by now they couldn't complain I was disturbing their sleep. But Karagoz and the waiter were very, very slow. When the food arrived in the dining room, the kahve was cool, the eggs nicely chilled and the melon warm. They explained it was a raw and windy day.
I vowed, oh, there're going to be some changes around here shortly! You just wait!
My meal was disturbed by noise. Above the howl of the winter wind, the small voices of boys made the day hideous. I looked out the window. There they were, laughing and shouting, the two of them making enough noise to disturb the Devils themselves.
The idiots were trying to fly a kite! It was some kind of a Japanese kite, a fancy-looking bat, obviously a present Utanc had bought for them in the most expensive available toy store and, of course, with a credit card. The thought of it enraged me.
Then inspiration struck again! A brilliant idea flashed down from the blue, just like that!
I buckled on the Ruger Blackhawk-you don't go around little boys unarmed. I made sure I had the locket in my pocket.
I stalked outside.
The idiots were trying to keep the kite from diving into the trees and, by luck, of course, were succeeding.
They had their backs to me and were too engrossed. I was able to creep up on them, by stealth, undetected.
Suddenly I stretched out a hand hardened with karate practice. I struck! Right, left!
As my stance and balance were absolutely textbook, I could not fail to hit.
WHAP! One little boy flying to the right.
WHAP! One little boy flying to the left.
RIP! One kite straight down into the tree.
With calculated cunning, I had not knocked either boy out. I wanted the resultant screams.
They screamed exactly according to plan.
One was pitched on his head on a gravel walk. The other was tangled up with a leafless shrub.