"That's it, that's it!" the man babbled. "There are blacklight beams across the halls up there, set to trigger blasters and stunners. The boss calls down and the man on the boards sets up whatever he orders."
"Okay. What's his door like-wood or steel? Locked? And how about guards up there?"
"Wood. Not locked. No guards-no trouble ever gets to where he is, sir. He would've set 'em, of courses--" nodding his head at the dead man beside the PBX-"but you blasted 'im too quick."
"Okay. Lead the way. That's so in case of trouble you'll get it first from me, if necessary."
Nothing happened until they reached the Boss's door. The bartender knocked-no code, Jules noticed. A voice from inside the room called "Come in," and the pilot opened the door and led the way into the office. The man behind the desk was alone in the room. He gasped once, turned pale and reached for a row of buttons; but stopped the motion halfway as Jules' blaster came to bear.
"Go ahead, push 'em," Jules said, but the boss, except for twitching muscles, made no move whatever as Jules gave the bartender a tap on the jaw, taking a hypodermic kit out of his pocket, went up to the desk. The man's eyes widened in panic fear.
"Not that-please not nitrobarb!" he pleaded, desperately. "I'm allergic to the stuff-it'll kill me sure, my doctor says."
"What makes you think this is nitrobarb? It could be plain distilled water!"
"Don't mace me, mister! I think I probably know what you want ... and you don't need to give me anythingl I'll tell you everything I know without it, honestly I will!"
And he did, and once again the d'Alemberts listened to the secrets of a traitors' nest. And it was, as Jules bad expected it to be, a clear, straight lead to one man in one city of the planet Durward.
"Okay," Jules said, finally. "I won't kill you this time. Just tell your boss on Durward I'm coming; loaded to the gills with stuff he never even beard of."
Then the eight d'Alemberts went back to their ship; where Jules and Yvette spent all the rest of the day and almost all of the night in the control room, the most secure spot they could find, composing and encoding a long message to the Head.
When it was done, Jules rose, stretched and walked over to the galactic chart. His eyes brooding, he set it for maximum span and turned on the activating circuits. As the great wispy star-clouds of the galactic lens took form, each surveyed star positioned with minute accuracy, he keyed the index locators for Durward, the planet to which all their hard-earned information pointed so surely, and for old Earth. Quickly the taped data spools whined and spun and printed out course and the dizzying distance in parsecs between the two planets. He said slowly, "All the signs say Durward is where the action is ..."
"I know, Julie," said his sister, covering a yawn. "So, of course we go to Earth. Well, what are we waiting for?"
VIII
All explored space was divided into 36 wedge-shaped sectors; the line common to all sectors being the line through the center of Sol perpendicular to the plane of the Earth's orbit. Each sector was owned, subject only to the Throne, by a Grand Duke. Earth, by far the most important planet, did not belong to any sector, but was the private property of the Throne. Each Grand Duke had a palace, several residences and a Hall of State on Earth. Because of these facts the nobility of Earth were far more powerful than their titles indicated. The Principal Palace, in which all Grand Imperial Courts were held, was in Chicago; hence the Count of Chicago had more real power than most Earls and Marquises. More, in fact, than many Dukes. (Manley, Feudalism; Reel I, Intro See viii).
The Massagerie
In his private office the Head was talking with a greyhaired man who, while old, was in no sense decrepit. Grand Lady Helena sat, shapely legs crossed, working on a twelve-ounce glass of cherry-ice-cream float.
"But what does it mean, Zan?" the older man asked. "Route the Circus to Durward-with instructions not to do anything whatever except circus routine. Carlos and Carmen Velasquez will not report and nothing they do, however wild, will be of any importance. And now this beautyparlor business, right here on Earth! It doesn't make sense."
"Not a beauty parlor, Bill. A massagerie de luxe. Or rather, "The House of Strength of Body and of Heart.'"
"But don't you know what they're doing?"
"Very little; and I don't want to know more. I give them a job; they do it their own way. I would hazard a guess that they have some reason to believe that a specific person they are interested in is likely to take an interest in bodybuilding. This, you will note, implies that they have reached the point of being interested in specific persons ... but I don't know who. That is to the good.
"As a recent event proved, the less I know of detail, the better."
"That's true. No trace of your missing person?"
"None. There probably won't be any until the d'Alemberts crack the main case. While they're working on it they get anything they want, with no questions asked."
"As they should, especially since they want so little from us. I know that Circus taxes are rebated, but surely they spend more than that on Empire business?"
"My guess is, they don't. The Circus is so successful that its taxes are very high, but the Duke won't say how high. I asked him once if we didn't owe him some money and he told me if I wanted to count pennies I'd better go get myself a job in a dime store."
The old man laughed. "That sounds exactly like him. But DesPlaines is a rich planet, you know, and Etienne d'Alembert is a tremendously able man-as well as being one of my best friends. Well, I'll leave you to your work. I like to talk to you when I'm feeling low, Zan; you give me a lift." He raised his glass. "Tomorrow, fellow and friend. May we all live to see it." They drank the toast and Emperor Stanley Ten, erect and springy, left the room.
Helena grinned up at her father. "You didn't exactly lie, either; but if he knew as much as we do he wouldn't feel so uplifted." .
"He has troubles enough of his own without having to carry ours. Besides, we don't know who they're after. It could turn out to be someone outside those six, as well as not."
The girl nodded. "If we had even a good suspicion, he'd get a shot of nitrobarb. All we know is that they haven't got a shred of evidence of anything. But bow under the sun and moon and eleven circumpolar stars can this glorified gymnasium help solve anything?"
"I haven't the most tenuous idea, my dear-and just between us two, I'm just as curious as you are."
A ten-story gravity-controlled building in the Evanston district of Chicago had been remodelled from top to bottom. All the work had been done by the high -grav personnel who now occupied the building. Over its splendidly imposing entrance a triple-tube brilliant sign flared red:
DANGER-THREE GRAVITIES-DANGER
and on each side of the portal, in small, severely plain obsidian letters on a silver background, a plaque read:
duClos
For weeks before the opening it had been noised abroad that this House of Strength would cater only to the topmost flakes of the upper crust; and that was precisely what it did. It turned down applicants, even of the nobility, by the score. Its first clients, and for some time its only clients, were the extremely powerful Count of Chicago, his Countess and their two gangling teen-age daughters. Since this display of ultra-snobbishness appealed very strongly to the ultra-snobbishness of the high nobility of the Capital of Empire, "duClos" raised snobbery to a height of performance very seldom seen anywhere.
"How're you doing, sis?" Jules asked, one evening. "I'm getting a few bites, but nothing solid. But there's a feel about Sector Twenty that I don't like-I'm sure we're on the right track."
"So am I, and I'm getting an idea. I wasn't going to mention it until I could thicken it up a little, but here goes. You know that Duchess of Swingleton? That snooty stinker that's supposed to be the daughter of the Grand Duchess?"
Jules came to attention with a snap. "Supposed to be?"
"Well, is then. Maybe I shouldn't have put it quite that way-but you know how I've learned to sneer,
in my own inimitable ladylike way?"
"I wouldn't put that 'quite that way,' either. If it was me on the receiving end I'd sock you right in the middle of your puss."
"She'd really like to. I've been giving her the royal snoot all along and she's burning like a torch. But her mother, Grand Duchess Olga, takes it in stride. So why wouldn't Swingleton ... unless she's bursting at the seams with something she's bottling up?"
"My God, Eve! You think she's the Bastard's daughter?"
"I'm not that far along yet, it's just a possibility. Not daughter; sixty-seven he would be; she's only about twenty. Still in the silly age-which may account for her touchiness and everything. She's beautiful, athletic, rich, talented, noble and spoiled rotten. Her hobby is men. She works hard at it. So my thought is this: if she gets the idea from somewhere that duClos. himself is the one and only Mister Big in this business I'm positive that she'll insist on you coaching her yourself-personally. You take her on, but instead of bowing down and worshipping, you act like and say that you wouldn't be caught dead with her at a catfight, to say nothing of in bed. If I'm right she'll blow up like a bomb and say something she shouldn't."
Jules whistled piercingly through his teeth. "Wowl" he said.
Three days later, Jules accompanied Yvette into the apartment of the Duchess of Swingleton, who proved to be a tall girl-two inches taller than Jules-beautiful of face and figure, with dark blue eyes and a mass of wheat-strawcolored hair piled high on a proudly-held. Jules, after being presented, walked slowly around her once, studying her from head to foot from every angle. He scowled and then said, "Maybe I can do something with this, but there doesn't seem to be much of anything there to work on. Peel, you, and I'll see."
"Peel?" The girl's head went even higher, her eyes blazed. "Are you talking to me?" she flared.
"I'm talking to a mass of fat and a little flabby meat that ought to be muscle but isn't, he replied caustically. "Do you expect a master sculptor to make something of a tub of clay without touching it? Wear a bikini or tights if you like-although how you can imagine that I, duClos, would get the thrills over such a slug's body as yours is completely beyond my comprehension."
"Get out!" Trembling with rage, she pointed at the door. "Leave this castle at once!"
He gave her his choicest top-deck sneer. "Madame, nothing could possibly please me more." He executed a snappy about-face and made for the door.
"Wait, you! Turn around!"
"Yes?" he asked, coldly.
"I am the Duchess of Swingleton!"
"And I, madame, am duClos. There are hundreds and hundreds of duchesses, but there is only one duClos."
She fought her anger down. "I'll put on a swimsuit," she said. "After all, I do want to find out whether you're any good or not."
But when she came back, dressed in practically nothing, duClos was even less impressed than before. "Lard," he said, when his talented fingers had reported their preliminary findings to his brain. "Flabby, unrendered lard; but I'll see what I can do with it. Well go to your gymnasium now."
"Why, aren't you going to take me to your place?"
He looked at her in amused and condescending surprise. "Are you that stupid? You'd fall flat and could hardly get up. It'll take a month of work here before you'll be able to work in the House of Strength. To your gymnasium, I say."
In the castle's gymnasium, he said, "First, we'll show you what we, accustomed to three Earth gravities, can do easily here on Earth," and he and Yvette went through a routine of such violence that the apparatus creaked and groaned and the very floor shook.
"Now what a fair Earth gymnast-such as perhaps I'll be able to make out of you-can do," and they showed her that.
"Now I'll find out what you can do-if anything. You can't do even fifty fast push-ups without going flat on your face," and of course she couldn't
He worked her fairly hard for half an hour, which was about all she could take, then said, "That's enough for today, poor thing." Then, turning to Yvette, "Give her a massage in steam, and go deep. After that, the usual."
"No, I want you to do it yourself," the girl said. "They say you're tops and I want nothing but the best."
"Okay," Jules said, in a perfectly matter-of-fact voice, and peeled down to his white nylon shorts. "That'd be better-I'll know more exactly how you come along."
The ladies-in-waiting were shocked-or pretended to be -as the three-quarters-naked man worked on their completely naked mistress; but Jules, alone, of all those present, was-apparently-not affected at all. He was a top-expert masseur working at his profession.
This went on for day after day. Since the Duchess was actually a strong, healthy athletic girl, splendidly built, and agile both physically and mentally, she learned fast and developed fast. But for the first time in her life she had struck a man and bounced. It was an intolerable situation -a situation that got no better at all as time went on.
He stayed coldly impersonal and more than somewhat contemptuous; he was and he remained a master craftsman wasting his talents on material entirely unworthy of his skill. He paid no attention whatever to any of the little plays she made.
One day, however, when she had become a pretty fair gymnast and was very proud of her accomplishments, all the ladies-in-waiting disappeared before the massage was to begin.
"We don't need them any more, I don't think." She posed, with her skimpy garment half off, and gave him an undereyebrows look that would have put any other man she knew into a flat spin. "Do we?"
"I don't, that's sure," he said, with the sneer that had become so maddening that she wanted to bash it back into his skull with a sledgehammer. "And if you're trying to seduce me you're wasting your time. You're a hunk of clay I'm trying to model into something halfway worth while, and nothing else. I'd not rather have you than any other mass of poor-grade clay-or a dime's worth of catmeat."
That blew it-sky high. "You low-born oaf!" she screamed. "You clod! You base-born peasant, I'll have you flayed alive and staked out on ..." She stopped screaming suddenly and her eyes widened the veriest little.
"Stop running off at the mouth!" he rasped, timing it so perfectly that she knew he had interrupted her tirade. "My birth, high or low, has no bearing. I am duClos. I am trying to mold you into what our Creator intended you to be; His instrument to produce men, not the milksops and flabs now infesting this sinful planet Earth."
"Oh? Don't tell me you're a Puritan!" she exclaimed, very glad indeed to change the subject. "I should have known it, though, by al! that hair."
"An ex-Puritan," be corrected her. "I do not believe that everything pleasant is sinful, but neglect of the human body most certainly is. So get in there. And snap it up - before you cool off too much."
Work went on, exactly as though nothing had happened. She graduated into the House of Strength and, everything considered, she did very well there.
And she convinced herself quite easily that she had not revealed any tittle of the secret that had been held for sixty-seven years.
IX
As an example of the traditional loyalty of the Navy: When Empress Stanley 5, her husband and four of their five children were assassinated in 2229, their youngest child, Prince Edward, escaped death only because he, then an ensign in the Navy, was being guarded as no other person had ever been guarded before. Fleet Admiral Simms declared martial law and, in the bloodiest purge in all history, executed not only all those found guilty, including Prince Charles and Princess Charlene, but also their entire families. He then made himself regent and ruled with an iron hand for six years. Then, to the vast surprise of all, he relinquished his regency on the day that Prince Edward came of age and he himself crowned Prince Edward Emperor Stanley Six (Farnham; The Empire, Vol. 1, p. 784).
The Fortress of Englewood
Jules and Yvette deigned to accept six Grand Dukes and their wives as personal clients-among whom were Grand Duke Nicholas and Grand Duchess Olga of Sector Twenty -but that was all they would take. In that positi
on of intimacy they dug up a few hints, but neither of them could lay hold of anything solid.
At every opportunity they planted Earth operators in the kitchens, in the garages and everywhere else they could. These detectives found bits and pieces of information, but they could not find any leads to Banion or to any of his blood: nor to the all-important Patent of Royalty.
"We've got to take this to the Head, Eve," Jules said finally. "I hate to yell for help on our first really big job, but he's just too damned big for us. And it's more than a possibility that it'd be the Head's head that would roll, not Duke Twenty's. We simply can't take the chance."
Yvette nodded. "You're right, I'm afraid. He's really big ... but he hasn't got a drop of Stanley blood in him..."
"Which is why he's playing it this way," Jules declared. "The power behind the Throne. I'll set up a meet."
He set it up and they laid the whole ugly mess squarely on the line, and while they talked the Head aged ten years. When they were done he sat silent and motionless, in intense concentration, for a good fifteen minutes. They could almost feel the master strategist's keen brain at work. Finally he lifted his head sharply and he said:
"I was hoping it would be one of the others, but you're right. We can't move against him without the genuine Patent actually in our hands."
Jules scowled. "That's what I was afraid you'd say. And that Patent must be in the solidest safe-deposit vault on Earth."
"It isn't," the Head said, flatly. "The Emperor can open any bank vault he pleases, with no reason at all. So it's in a vault as good as any on Earth, but in the deepest subcellar of Castle Englewood. I'd stake my head on that. Theoretically, the Emperor could open that vault, too, at whim. But trying it would touch everything off and Nicholas might win. So I'm going to stake all our heads. No matter how daintily we try to pussyfoot it, there's always the chance of our touching off the explosion. However, there'd be no point in his killing the Crown Princess as long as the Emperor and the Empress are alive, so what do you think of this?" and they discussed details for two hours.
The Best of E E 'Doc' Smith Page 28