The driver’s assistant and the guards were still out and would stay that way for at least ten hours. I arranged them in a neat row in the front of the truck where they wouldn’t be in my way, and went to work.
The armored car almost filled the body of the trailer as I knew it would; therefore I had fastened the boxes to the walls. They were fine, strong shipping boxes with “Moraio’s” printed all over them. It had been a minor theft from their warehouse that should go unnoticed. I pulled the boxes down and folded them for packing, I was soon sweating and had to take my shirt off as I packed the money bundles into the boxes.
It took almost two hours to stuff and seal the boxes with tape. Every ten minutes or so I would check through the peephole in the door; only the normal activities were going on. The police undoubtedly had the entire town sealed and were tearing it apart building by building looking for the truck. I was fairly sure that the last place they would think of looking was the rear of the robbed store.
The warehouse that had provided the boxes had also provided a supply of shipping forms. I fixed one of these on each box, addressed to different pick-up addresses and marked paid, of course, and was ready to finish the operation.
It was almost dark by this time; however, I knew that the shipping department would be busy most of the night. The engine caught on the first revolution and I pulled out of the parking rank and backed slowly up to the platform. There was a relatively quiet area where the shipping dock met the receiving dock, I stopped the trailer as close to the dividing line as I could. I didn’t open the rear door until all the workmen were faced in a different direction. Even the stupidest of them would have been interested in why a truck was unloading the firm’s own boxes. As I piled them up on the platform I threw a tarp over them, it only took a few minutes. Only when the truck gates were closed and locked did I pull off the tarp and sit down on the boxes for a smoke.
It wasn’t a long wait. Before the cigarette was finished a robot from the shipping department passed close enough for me to call him.
“Over there. The M-19 that was loading these burned out a brake band, you better see that they’re taken care of.”
His eyes glowed with the light of duty. Some of these higher M types take their job very seriously. I had to step back quickly as the fork lifts and M-trucks appeared out of the doors behind me. There was a scurry of loading and sorting and my haul vanished down the platform. I lighted another cigarette and watched for a while as the boxes were coded and stamped and loaded on the outgoing trucks and local belts.
All that was left for me now was the disposing of the truck on some side street and changing personalities.
As I was getting into the truck I realized for the first time that something was wrong. I, of course, had been keeping an eye on the gate—but not watching it closely enough. Trucks had been going in and out. Now the realization hit me like a hammer blow over the solar plexus. They were the same trucks going both ways. A large, red cross-country job was just pulling out. I heard the echo of its exhaust roar down the street—then die away to an idling grumble. When it roared up again it didn’t go away, instead the truck came in through the second gate. There were police cars waiting outside that wall. Waiting for me.
CHAPTER THREE
For the first time in my career I felt the sharp fear of the hunted man. This was the first time I had ever had the police on my trail when I wasn’t expecting them. The money was lost, that much was certain, but I was no longer concerned with that. It was me they were after now.
Think first, then act. I was safe enough for the moment. They were, of course, moving in on me, going slowly as they had no idea of where I was in the giant loading yard. How had they found me? That was the important point. The local police are used to an almost crimeless world, they couldn’t have found my trail this quickly. In fact, I hadn’t left a trail. Whoever had set the trap here had done it with logic and reason.
Unbidden the words jumped into my mind.
The Special Corps.
Nothing was ever printed about it, only a thousand whispered words heard on a thousand worlds around the galaxy. The Special Corps, the branch of the League that took care of the troubles that individual planets couldn’t solve. The Corps was supposed to have finished off the remnants of Haskell’s Raiders after the peace, of putting the illegal T & Z Traders out of business, of finally catching Inskipp. And now they were after me.
They were out there waiting for me to make a break. They were thinking of all the ways out just as I was—and they were blocking them. I had to think fast and I had to think right.
Only two ways out. Through the gates or through the store. The gates were too well covered to make a break, in the store there would be other exits. It had to be that way. Even as I made the conclusion I knew that other minds had made it too, that men were moving in to cover those doors. That thought brought fear—and made me angry as well. The very idea that someone could outthink me was odious. They could try all right—but I would give them a run for their money. I still had a few tricks left.
First, a little misdirection. I started the truck, left it in low gear and aimed it at the gate. When it was going straight I locked the steering wheel with the friction clamp and dropped out the far side of the cab and strolled back to the warehouse. Once inside I moved faster. Behind me I heard some shots, a heavy crump, and a lot of shouting. That was more like it.
The night locks were connected on the doors that led to the store proper. An old-fashioned alarm that I could disconnect in a few moments. My pick-locks opened the door and I gave it a quick kick with my foot and turned away. There were no alarm bells, but I knew that somewhere in the building an indicator showed that the door was opened. As fast as I could run I went to the last door on the opposite side of the building. This time I made sure the alarm was disconnected before I went through the door. I locked it behind me.
It is the hardest job in the world to run and be quiet at the same time. My lungs were burning before I reached the employees’ entrance. A few times I saw flashing lights ahead and had to double down different aisles, it was mostly luck that I made it without being spotted. There were two men in uniform standing in front of the door I wanted to go out of. Keeping as close to the wall as I could, I made it to within twenty feet of them before I threw the gas grenade. For one second I was sure that they had gas masks on and I had reached the end of the road—then they slumped down. One of them was blocking the door, I rolled him aside and slid it open a few inches.
The searchlight couldn’t have been more than thirty feet from the door; when it flashed on the light was more pain than glare. I dropped the instant it came on and the slugs from the machine pistol ate a line of glaring holes across the door. My ears were numb from the roar of the exploding slugs and I could just make out the thud of running footsteps. My own .75 was in my hand and I put an entire clip of slugs through the door, aiming high so I wouldn’t hurt anyone. It would not stop them, but it should slow them down.
They returned the fire, must have been a whole squad out there. Pieces of plastic flew out of the back wall and slugs screamed down the corridor. It was good cover, I knew there was nobody coming up behind me. Keeping as flat as I could I crawled in the opposite direction, out of the line of fire. I turned two corners before I was far enough from the guns to risk standing up. My knees were shaky and great blobs of color kept fogging my vision. The searchlight had done a good job, I could barely see at all in the dim light.
I kept moving slowly, trying to get as far away from the gunfire as possible. The squad outside had fired as soon as I opened the door, that meant standing orders to shoot at anyone who tried to leave the building. A nice trap. The cops inside would keep looking until they found me. If I tried to leave I would be blasted. I was beginning to feel very much like a trapped rat.
Every light in the store came on and I stopped, frozen. I was near the wall of a large farm-goods showroom. Across the room from me were three soldiers. We
spotted each other at the same time, I dived for the door with bullets slapping all around me. The military was in it too, they sure must have wanted me bad. A bank of elevators was on the other side of the door—and stairs leading up. I hit the elevator in one bounce and punched the sub-basement button, and just got out ahead of the closing doors. The stairs were back towards the approaching soldiers, I felt like I was running right into their guns. I must have made the turn into the stairs a split second ahead of their arrival. Up the stairs and around the first landing before they were even with the bottom. Luck was still on my side. They hadn’t seen me and were sure I had gone down. I sagged against the wall, listening to the shouts and whistle blowing as they turned the hunt towards the basement.
There was one smart one in the bunch. While the others were all following the phony trail I heard him start slowly up the stairs. I didn’t have any gas grenades left, all I could do was climb up ahead of him, trying to do it without making a sound.
He came on slowly and steadily and I stayed ahead of him. We went up four flights that way, me in my stockinged feet with my shoes around my neck, his heavy boots behind me making a dull rasping on the metal stairs.
As I started up the fifth flight I stopped, my foot halfway up a step.
Someone else was coming down, someone wearing the same kind of military boots. I found the door to the hall, opened it behind me and slipped through. There was a long hall in front of me lined with offices of some kind. I began to run the length of it, trying to reach a turning before the door behind me could open and those exploding slugs tear me in half. The hall seemed endless and I suddenly realized I would never reach the end in time.
I was a rat looking for a hole—and there was none. The doors were locked, all of them, I tried each as I came to it, knowing I would never make it. That stairwell door was opening behind me and the gun was coming up, I didn’t dare turn and look but I could feel it. When the door opened under my hand I fell through before I realized what had happened. I locked it behind me and leaned against it in the darkness, panting like a spent animal. Then the light came on and I saw the man sitting behind the desk, smiling at me.
There is a limit to the amount of shock the human body can absorb. I’d had mine. I didn’t care if he shot me or offered me a cigarette—I had reached the end of my line. He did neither. He offered me a cigar instead.
“Have one of these, diGriz, I believe they’re your brand.”
The body is a slave of habit. Even with death a few inches away it will respond to established custom. My fingers moved of their own volition and took the cigar, my lips clenched it and my lungs sucked it into life. And all the time my eyes watched the man behind the desk waiting for death to reach out.
It must have shown. He waved towards a chair and carefully kept both hands in sight on top of the desk. I still had my gun, it was trained on him.
“Sit down, diGriz, and put that cannon away. If I wanted to kill you, I could have done it a lot easier than herding you into this room.” His eyebrows moved up in surprise when he saw the expression on my face. “Don’t tell me you thought it was an accident that you ended up here?”
I had, up until that moment, and the lack of intelligent reasoning on my part brought on a wave of shame that snapped me back to reality. I had been outwitted and outfought, the least I could do was surrender graciously. I threw the gun on the desk and dropped into the offered chair. He swept the pistol neatly into a drawer and relaxed a bit himself.
“Had me worried there for a minute, the way you stood there rolling your eyes and waving this piece of field artillery around.”
“Who are you?”
He smiled at the abruptness of my tone. “Well, it doesn’t matter who I am. What does matter is the organization that I represent.”
“The Corps?”
“Exactly. The Special Corps. You didn’t think I was the local police, did you? They have orders to shoot you on sight. It was only after I told them how to find you that they let the Corps come along on the job. I have some of my men in the building, they’re the ones who herded you up here. The rest are all locals with itchy trigger fingers.”
It wasn’t very flattering but it was true. I had been pushed around like a class M robot, with every move charted in advance. The old boy behind the desk—for the first time I realized he was about sixty-five—really had my number. The game was over.
“All right, Mr. Detective, you have me so there is no sense in gloating. What’s next on the program? Psychological reorientation, lobotomy—or just plain firing squad?”
“None of those, I’m afraid. I am here to offer you a job on the Corps.”
The whole thing was so ludicrous that I almost fell out of the chair laughing. Me. James diGriz, the interplanet thief, working as a policeman. It was just too funny. He sat patiently, waiting until I was through.
“I will admit it has its ludicrous side—but only at first glance. If you stop to think, you will have to admit that who is better qualified to catch a thief than another thief?”
There was more than a little truth in that, but I wasn’t buying my freedom by turning stool pigeon.
“An interesting offer, but I’m not getting out of this by playing the rat. There is even a code among thieves, you know.”
That made him angry. He was bigger than he looked sitting down and the fist he shook in my face was as large as a shoe.
“What kind of stupidity do you call that? It sounds like a line out of a TV thriller. You’ve never met another crook in your whole life and you know it! And if you did you would cheerfully turn him in if you could make a profit on the deal. The entire essence of your life is individualism—that and the excitement of doing what others can’t do. Well that’s over now, and you better start admitting it to yourself. You can no longer be the interplanet playboy you used to be—but you can do a job that will require every bit of your special talents and abilities. Have you ever killed a man?”
His change of pace caught me off guard, I stumbled out an answer.
“No … not that I know of.”
“Well you haven’t, if that will make you sleep any better at night. You’re not a homicidal, I checked that on your record before I came out after you. That is why I know you will join the Corps and get a great deal of pleasure out of going after the other kind of criminal who is sick, not just socially protesting. The man who can kill and enjoy it.”
He was too convincing, he had all the answers. I had only one more argument and I threw it in with the air of a last ditch defense.
“What about the Corps, if they ever find out you are hiring half-reformed criminals to do your dirty work we will both be shot at dawn.”
This time it was his turn to laugh. I could see nothing funny so I ignored him until he was finished.
“In the first place my boy, I am the Corps—at least the man at the top—and what do you think my name is? Harold Peters Inskipp, that’s what it is!”
“Not the Inskipp that—”
“The same. Inskipp the Uncatchable. The man who looted the Pharsydion II in mid-flight and pulled all those other deals I’m sure you read about in your misspent youth. I was recruited just the way you were.”
He had me on the ropes and knew it. He moved in for the kill.
“And who do you think the rest of our agents are? I don’t mean the bright-eyed grads of our technical schools, like the ones on my squad downstairs. I mean the full agents. The men who plan the operations, do the preliminary fieldwork and see that everything comes off smoothly. They’re crooks. All crooks. The better they were on their own, the better a job they do for the Corps. It’s a great, big, brawling universe and you would be surprised at some of the problems that come up. The only men we can recruit to do the job are the ones who have already succeeded at it.
“Are you on?”
It had happened too fast and I hadn’t had time to think. I would probably go on arguing for an hour. But way down in the back of my mind the decision
had been made. I was going to do it, I couldn’t say no.
I was losing something, and I hoped I wouldn’t miss it. No matter what freedom I had working with an organization, I would still be working with other people. The old carefree, sole responsibility days were over. I was joining the ranks of society again.
There was the beginning of a warm feeling at the thought. It would at least be the end of loneliness. Friendship would make up for what I had lost.
CHAPTER FOUR
I have never been more wrong.
The people I met were dull to the point of extinction. They treated me like just another cog going around with the rest of the wheels. I was coggy all right, and kept wondering how I had ever gotten into this mess. Not really wondering, since the memory was still quite vivid. I was carried along with the rest of the gears, their teeth sunk into mine.
We ended up on a planetoid, that much was obvious. But I hadn’t the dimmest idea of what planets we were near or even what solar system we were in. Everything was highly secret and hush-hush, as this place was obviously the super-secret headquarters and main base of the Corps School too.
This part I liked. It was the only thing that kept me from cracking out. Dull as the cubes were who taught the courses, the material was something I could really sink my teeth into and shake. I began to see how crude my operations had been. With the gadgetry and techniques I soaked up I could be ten times the crook I had been before. Pushing the thought firmly away helped for a while, but it had a way of sneaking back and whispering nastily in my ear during periods of depression and gloom.
Things went from dull to dead. Half my time was spent working at the files, learning about the numberless successes and few failures of the Corps. I contemplated cracking out, yet at the same time couldn’t help but wonder if this wasn’t part of a testing period—to see if I had enough sticktoitiveness to last. I swallowed my temper, muffled my yawns, and took a careful look around. If I couldn’t crack out—I could crack in. There had to be something I could do to terminate this term of penal servitude.
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