I halted. There was enough ambient light from the city and enough paths of it across the water for me to make out exactly what I wanted.
At the end of the nest lay a vessel about ninety feet long. It had the exaggerated height of bow and stern compared to the waist that characterized the smaller ships which plied the Sea of Marmara. She had the high masts which permitted her to let out nets, and even sail on occasion. By the dock light I could see that she had a yellow and black triple stripe which ran the length of her gunwale, making an exaggerated curve. That she had been pushed out to the edge of this cluster told me that she was waiting there to go to sea at dawn.
I stepped down onto the nearest deck. I clambered from gunwale to gunwale, the boats rocking and groaning in the otherwise quiet night. I got to the edge of my choice. I saw the name. It was Sand. That checked me for a moment. Sand, in Turkish, means "stomachache." I don't like the sea any more than I like space.
But stern duty called.
I went aboard.
There was a little house toward the stern, sitting in the smell of fish. I pushed open a door.
A huge Turk was snoring on his back. He was the biggest Turk I had ever seen. So he must be the captain.
I fanned him awake. I did it very cleverly. A fistful of spread lira can make quite a breeze.
He woke up in midsnore. His eyes riveted on the lira.
"Sail now," I said, "and take me to the Greek mainland, and it is yours."
That brought him up, sitting, with only one scratch at his chest hair.
"How much?" he said.
"Forty thousand lira," I said.
"Eighty thousand lira," he said.
"Seventy thousand," I said, "if you shove off right this minute."
He got off his bunk and reached for his coat and cap. "I go to wake the crew now," he said, but he kept on standing there.
I took the hint. I counted out thirty thousand lira. "You get the other forty just before you put me on the beach."
He took it with a grunt and went to wake the crew.
Shortly the ship began to bob with activity. They were shortening up their lines, ready to cast off.
I looked at those other craft that I had walked across. One of them might have had a watchman who had seen me.
I could take no chances.
"Just a moment," I told the captain. "I think I left something on the dock."
I stepped swiftly across the intervening decks. I gained the pier. There was a small house there.
I took out a time bomb. I set it for long fuse, half an hour. I laid it under the edge of the hut door and pushed the plunger. I stepped back across the boats and to the ship.
They cast off.
The engine barked and sputtered and complained. The screw churned a wake. We sailed down the Golden Horn. We rounded Seraglio Point. The Ataturk Monument loomed in silhouette against a strangely illuminated sky.
KEROOMP! THUD!
Masked by the point and monument, the bomb flash painted an already blazing sky.
I looked back. I had covered my trail.
The sky above Istanbul was orange with continuing flames.
I was on my way!
There is nothing quite like Apparatus training to help you when you are in peril.
But I was not safe yet!
Down through the Sea of Marmara, down through the Dardanelles, twenty-one hours of retching, twenty-one hours of Hells.
I sat in the fish-stink cabin of a mate and puked my guts out into an evil-smelling bucket. The Sand was well named! But no stomachache could compare with what I was experiencing. A bad head sea was being pushed along by a wind which originated in the Aegean and got worse-tempered every mile.
More was against me than the wind. At first I had kept watch across the waters as the lights of Istanbul receded into a distant blur: it seemed inevitable that the Turkish navy would come roaring out to seize me, and I had made up my mind to sell my life at the highest possible cost. But then the pitching began to get me. In danger of going overboard as I vomited at the rail, I was pushed by the captain into the mate's cabin and given a bucket: the captain said he did not want to lose the balance of the payment.
At first I was so sick that I was afraid I was going to die. Then I became so much sicker that I was afraid I wouldn't.
Gradually, between retches, I began to ponder, as a man will, how I had gotten into this. Was there not some other way of life which would avoid wildly running spacecraft and madly pitching fish boats? Was it not possible that some sedentary vocation existed which steered wide of these things? I was simply not constitutionally adjusted to this lifestyle.
Hour by tortured hour I began to sort it out to certainty. A dented, rusty bucket in which fish scales were sloshing around with vomit makes a remarkably good crystal ball. One can see quite clearly that much future of this kind was definitely hazardous to one's future health.
So I began to wonder what had placed me in such a state. The threads of Fate, somewhere in the past, must have begun to weave this horrible lot.
As the gray day wore on and the gray wind whipped gray whitecaps out of the gray, polluted sea, the grayness of my mood condensed upon and added to a pure black certainty.
HELLER! If he had not undertaken the original survey of this planet, I would not be here. I would not be in this terrible plight-pursued by demon women, blown upon by malign and sneering winds, rocked and jolted about until my stomach no longer added anything to the bucket but noise.
HELLER! If it were not for his sense of duty as a combat engineer, the Widow Tayl would never have come back into my life. Nurse Bildirjin would not be now posing the menace of shotgun charges and marriage.
HELLER! If he had never appeared upon the scene, that fatal call from Lombar, so long ago, would not have interrupted my hunting trip and right now, instead of watching anxiously for blood to spew into the bucket, I would be pleasantly shooting songbirds to my heart's delight in the Blike Mountains of Voltar.
HELLER! He had turned them all against me: Meeley, Ske, Bawteh, Faht Bey. He had plotted, plotted, plotted to get me into trouble. Prahd, Krak, Ahmed, Ters and all this Hellish crew of screaming demons would not be haunting me and sneering at me and standing with the Prophet in the clouds egging the women on to stone me to death.
HELLER! Oh, how very clearly I understood at last that it was all his fault!
HELLER! I vowed a holy vow upon the bail of the fish bucket that if it took the rest of my life, short though it might be, I would wreak vengeance upon him for all the suffering he was inflicting upon me with such sadistic glee.
When it became totally clear to me what had gone wrong with my life, I knew exactly what I must do.
I must go to New York. Regardless of any personal danger, regardless of any travail, I must end Heller once and for all. For the good of the Confederacy, for the good of Earth, for the good of all life everywhere, I must handle this menace to all the universe: HELLER!
Having come to that firm and dedicated conclusion, I felt easier.
It was a sign of Fate that at that moment the captain came in and told me we had arrived.
It totally confirmed my conclusion. The ship had ceased to pitch and I was no longer ill. It shows one what a completely right answer can do!
We lay in the lee of the land. The black mass of a hill loomed in the luminescent dark of midnight. By a thin, cold sliver of a moon, a thin line of whitish beach showed about a mile away.
"Greece," the huge captain said, pointing. "When you pay, we put you ashore."
I knew what I had to do. Cover my trail.
I went into the cabin. I boosted my grip up on the bunk. Covering what I was doing by turning my back to the door, I got out a very flat stungun. I strapped my grip back up.