One thing sure. There were a lot of people I would order killed at once!
But there was one flaw in all this planning. And he was sitting down there ahead, waiting with a report to send. If that report gave me the platen...
I must have dozed off. Captain Stabb was shaking me by the shoulder. "I don't think the landing is safe." I left my cabin and went with him to the flight deck. He pointed at the screens. He had everything turned on. Even the steel plates that cut off the eyeball-view ports were closed. Pirates take no chances.
We were about two hundred miles straight up. It was about seven in the evening of a very black autumn night. New York lay about thirty miles to the south of our position, a vast spread of lights. One could see the planes taking off and landing at La Guardia and, further off, John F. Kennedy International Airport. The planes looked like tiny fireflies. The skyscrapers of Manhattan were clearly outlined. There was the Empire State Building! Izzy probably busy! There was the UN, and nearby, one of those high-rises must be the Gracious Palms, probably busy.
To the northeast, scattered like small sheets of light on a black velvet cloth, lay Bridgeport, Danbury, New Haven and, further away, Hartford. It was a crystal clear night.
Directly below us it was black as pitch, a hole of lightlessness.
A call-in receiver was beeping in the panel. Its grid showed the signal was coming from directly below.
I looked at Stabb. I had seen nothing alarming. But he was the accomplished smuggler and pirate.
"Watch," he said. He turned a dial to shift a screen to a different part of the spectrum. He pushed a button and let it enlarge the picture.
There was a police car sitting beside the road. The road was just east of our destination.
"Trap," said Stabb.
I laughed. "That's where they hang out," I said. "They're sheriff's men. Deputy sheriffs. That's a speed trap, not a trap for us."
"You sure?"
"If that Royal officer is down below us, he has probably conned them into seeing nothing. But they won't see anything anyway as we're not going to blueflash. Their names are George and Ralph."
"Devils!" said Stabb. "How'd you know that?"
"It's safe to land. They won't see anything."
"On your orders," said Stabb, giving the usual Fleet half-protest.
Down we went!
The New Haven Submarine Base radar indicated on our hull. They would get no blip back.
A hundred feet up, our pilot laid the tug horizontal. He scanned the ground with a screen. "Not even a sharp rock," he said.
We settled into place.
The second engineer was out through the airlock like a shot. He scanned the area for living things.
A hot spot.
It was Heller!
He came walking up. He stood in the glow from the airlock. He wasn't even disguised. He had on workman's coveralls, dark blue. He wasn't wearing his baseball cap and he wasn't even wearing those deadly spikes!
I saw he had no gun in his hand. He thought he was amongst friends, the fool. So I met him at the port.
He nodded to me and to Stabb. He went down the passageway and knelt. He unlocked the floorplates to the hold.
"If you will give me some crew," he said, "we'll move these inside. There's two dollies over in the edge of the woods."
Stabb looked to me and I nodded. Very soon, with a lot of help from Heller, despite working in the dark, fifteen cases lay on a thick canvas he had put down to protect the dance floor.
A kerosene oil lamp spread a yellow glow across the ancient dance decorations and the Voltar cases. Heller was checking case markings.
"Where's Box Number 5?" he said. Before I could answer, he went trotting back to the ship. He got down in the hold again.
He came out. He opened up other doors to the rear and checked there. He locked everything up once more. "There's a box missing," he said to Stabb. Stabb shrugged. "I never been in that hold," he said. Heller checked the forward cabins and storage spaces. Then he left the ship. He reentered the roadhouse. He once more verified the numbers and the count.
He beckoned to me to follow him. I went into instant alarm. I was carrying a blastick, a Colt Cobra in an ankle holster and a Knife Section knife behind my neck and he was apparently unarmed. But I did not feel comfortable. I turned. Captain Stabb was at the road-house door. He winked at me. I followed Heller.
He had a kitchen fire going. The night was somewhat chilly. He had cleaned up the place. There was a kitchen table and a couple of chairs. Heller sat down at the far end.
I sat down but I didn't take my hand off the 800-kilovolt blastick in my pocket.
Heller had taken some papers out of his pocket, a notebook and a pen. He began to look at the papers– they appeared to be old invoices. I didn't see any sign of the letter.
I looked around. The kitchen was quite clean now. He had a fire going in the old iron cookstove: a wood fire, from the way it popped occasionally and from some wisps of pungent smoke.
The place was lit with a hanging kerosene lamp. Probably the electricity was not turned on. The light glowed and flickered on some old glass jars on a shelf.
A calendar was on the walclass="underline" big picture of an elk and the words Hartford Life Insurance. The year was 1932!
Ordinarily I might have been very interested in this place. But I had to get that letter! If I was lucky, in a few minutes Heller would be dead and we would be sailing away.
He was going over some invoices and writing things on the piece of paper. For some reason, seeing him so calm made me very nervous.
I imagined he was reconstructing the list of things in the box.
He wasn't talking so I sort of felt I had to be talking. Maybe I could steer him around and hurry him up and get that letter. Maybe he was being silent because he suspected I had done something with the box. "I never saw those boxes," I said. "I didn't even know they were in the hold. If you remember, I was not aboard the tug at that time."
He was consulting the invoice sheets again. I said, "I do recall, though, a Fleet lorry driving away one day. It had a box on it. I asked the sentry at that time why they were removing a box. He said he didn't know."
He didn't say anything. He was making some sort of a calculation. I wished he'd just give me that letter.
"I mailed the other letter on the first freighter out. It went just two or three days after you gave it to me," I said.
He was trying to locate some item on an invoice. I wished he would speak.
"I know how important it is," I said, "that I mail your letters to Captain Tars Roke. I know he tells the Emperor and the Grand Council. If they didn't hear from you, I know they'd send an invasion fleet right away. They'd have to, to preserve the planet. I can see it is in very bad shape. So don't think for a moment I'd let you down. I know both of us could be killed if this invasion hit. So it's in my interest, too. I'll sure make certain the letters get mailed."
He was busy with his figures. No sign of the letter. Maybe he was upset about the telephone.
"I am sorry I had to cut you off on the phone. You see, the National Security Agency monitors all longdistance calls. It was my fault really. I didn't give you a phone number you could call."
I wrote the cover phone number in Afyon on a piece of paper of my own, torn from a notebook, and put it down on the table near him.
He just kept on working.
"I should have given you a mail address, too," I said. I wrote the mail address he could use in Turkey on another piece of my own paper and laid it on the phone number. "Future reports can just be mailed to this. I'll take the one you've got now."
He was riffling through his papers. Sort of absently, he encountered a sheet and laid it on the table halfway between us. He went on working.
I picked it up. It was a request form. It said: