And then an irritation of worry tinged my amusement. All this data he was getting, right or wrong, could be dangerous to me. It might accidentally make him think.
There was one field he mustn't study. And that was the subject of espionage. I didn't think it was taught in American public schools, even though I knew it was a required subject in Russian kindergartens so the children could spy on their parents. I knew that America often copied what the Russians did. I crossed my fingers. I hoped it wasn't one of his required subjects. I tried to read some of the text titles that were spread around.
Heller went back to his studies. At 2:45 he packed up all his gear, hefted the two rucksacks and trotted off. He paused in a hall, watching a door.
Ah, now I was going to find out what they had been up to!
Students streamed out of the room. The professor came bustling out and went up the hall.
Heller walked into the empty classroom. He went straight to the lecture platform. He reached down into the wastebasket.
He pulled out a tape recorder!
He shut it off.
He put it in the rucksack.
Heller pulled out a small instant recording camera, stepped back and shot the diagrams on the blackboard.
He put the camera away.
He left the room.
He raced over to another building.
He stepped into an empty classroom. He went to the platform, took a different recorder out of the rucksack, verified that it was loaded with 120-minute tape, put it on "record," placed it in the bottom of the wastebasket and threw some paper over it and then walked out of the room just as a couple of students were entering.
Outside, he leaned up against a building. He took the first recorder he had recovered, checked to make sure it had worked properly and removed the cassette. He marked the tape with date and subject, fastened the blackboard picture to it with a rubber band and put the package in a compartmented cassette box marked Advanced Chemistry. He checked the recorder battery charge, reloaded it with blank 120 tape and put it back in the rucksack.
Oh, the crook! He and Bang-Bang were simply recording all the lectures! He didn't intend to go to a single class in that college!
Oh, I knew what he would do. He would speed-rig a playback machine as he had done with languages and zip a lecture through it in a minute or so at his leisure! Maybe even save them up and do the whole three months' course in under an hour!
What dishonesty! Didn't he know that the FBI arrested people for doing unauthorized recording? Or was that for copying and selling copyrighted material? I couldn't remember. But anyway, it was an awful shock to me! He had a chance of getting through college in spite of Miss Simmons!
I had a momentary glimmer of hope. There might be quizzes. There might be lab periods. But then I sank into a deeper gloom. Heller had probably figured those out, too!
(Bleep) him, he was defeating the efforts to defeat him! My hand itched for a blastick! I had better quadruple any effort I was making to put an end to him!
Chapter 2
Rucksacks and all, Heller went for a run. He went west on 120th Street, south on Broadway, east on 114th Street, north on Amsterdam, circumnavigating the whole university. He was obviously trying to kill time. I hoped he would look out of place and maybe even get arrested for something, but there were lots of other joggers or people late for something.
At 3:45, he began to drift back to the job of picking up and planting recorders. Then he went back to the
original "command post" and looked expectantly around for Bang-Bang. He muttered, "The Marines should have disengaged by now. Where are you, Bang-Bang?" No Bang-Bang.
Heller went for a run on a path in Morningside Park and then came back and picked up what seemed to be the last recorder of the day.
He returned to the "command post." No Bang-Bang. His watch winked at him in Voltarian numbers that it was 5:10.
Heller found a shady place, spread his ground sheet again, reinflated his backrest and sat down. He didn't study. He just kept watching for Bang-Bang. The shadows grew longer and longer. He looked at his watch oftener and oftener. Finally it was 5:40.
And here came something!
It was approaching down a path. It looked more like a mound of baggage with two legs than a person.
Towering and unsteady, the mountain came near Heller. It tipped over and crashed on the lawn. It avalanched for a few seconds longer and then there was Bang-Bang, standing amongst the debris. He was out of breath from the effort. He moved over and collapsed on the ground sheet.
"Well," said Bang-Bang, "the engagement was bloody and prolonged. I will give you my battle report, Marines versus Army." He composed himself. "You presented yourself on time to the standard Army confusion of ROTC induction. You signed the form as 'J. Terrance Wister.' You then presented yourself to the first obstacle of the obstacle course.
"As you were new to this ROTC, you had a physical examination. Now, you will be horrified to know that you have incipient cirrhosis of the liver from overindulgence in alcohol. I'm glad it wasn't my physical. I have
sixteen cases of Scotch left. So you were passed, providing you stop drinking.
"You then proceeded to the next obstacle. Uniforms and equipment. Those are them," he indicated with a disdainful hand toward a pile of clothes. "The quartermaster insisted everything would be a perfect fit. But I'll have to get them to an alterations tailor right away, get them taken in and let out to really fit me. I refuse to have you looking so sloppy! Even if it is the Army, there is just so much a Marine can take! So, you got over that obstacle.
"The next wasn't so easy. You know what those (bleepards) did? They tried to issue me a defective M-l rifle! Now, you know and I know that a Marine can be socked a whole month's pay if his piece is found defective. And (bleep) it, kid, its firing pin was sawed off! Yes! Sawed right off! They tried to argue with me and I bench stripped it right there down to the last screw! They said ROTC trainees weren't allowed to have a firing pin. They said somebody might put a live round in the chamber and when they did inspection arms it might go off. And, boy, I let them have it. The dangerous thing is to have an inoperational weapon! You get charged, you can't shoot! And I said, 'What if you want to shoot some colonel in the back? How about that?' And that stopped them. They couldn't put the weapon back together and I refused to as I said it ought to be sent to the gunnery sergeant and repaired, and finally a Regular Army captain said he'd put in a request to allow you to have a non-defective M-l. So they'll issue the rifle later but you got by that. All right so far, kid?"
"Perfectly reasonable," said Heller. "Bad enough to have a chemical weapon already without its being defective. Must be an awful army."
"Oh, it is, it is," said Bang-Bang. "Dogfaces. Anyway, then you came to the swamp and no ropes to get
over it so I had to make up your mind for you and I hope I did right.
"Some Regular Army lieutenant with glasses noticed it was your senior year and noticed in your prior military training at Saint Lee's that you'd never indicated preference for branch of service. Well, I hedged. But he said the classroom work in your senior year depended on it and you had to choose. And so he handed me a long list.
"Well, kid, I knew you didn't want to dig latrines, so the infantry is out. And I didn't want some dumb army jerk pulling a lanyard on a 155 when your head was in the barrel, so the artillery is out. And these days, all tanks is good for is to get burned up in, so that's out. I knew that you, like me, hated MPs, so that's out. When I finished the list, it left only one thing. I hope you will like it. G-2."
"What's that?"
"Intelligence. Spies! It seemed to sort of fit my job right now—a Marine infiltrating the Army. So I knew it would make you feel good, too."
I didn't feel good. I reeled!
Bang-Bang got to the books and pamphlets in the mountain. They were marked Restricted and Confidential and Secret.
"Look at this
one," said Bang-Bang. '"Codes, Ciphers and Cryptography.' 'How to Talk Secret.' Look at these things. 'How to Train Spies.' 'How to Sneak Somebody Back of the Enemy Lines to Poison the Water.' 'How to Seduce the Wife of the Enemy General and Get Her to Give You Tomorrow's Battle Plans.' Good, solid stuff! And look at the number of these manuals. Dozens! 'How to Tail a Russian Agent.' 'How to Select Sensitive Targets to Destroy Industrial Capacity.' Good, solid stuff, kid!"
"Let me see those." And he got hold of one about
blowing up trains. And then another about the art of infiltration. Heller started to laugh.
"Are you pleased, kid?"
"Fantastic," said Heller.
"Oh, I'm glad you're pleased, kid. I just thought I was being a little bit selfish. You see, it makes me feel less degraded."
Bang-Bang recovered his USMC fatigue cap and put it on. Then he got an Army fatigue cap and put it on over it, hiding the Marine one.
Then Bang-Bang got down on all fours and crept to the other side of the tree and peered out with exaggerated care. He was clowning!
"Spies," said Bang-Bang. "A Marine spying on the Army! Get it, kid?"
Heller was laughing. He was laughing very hard. But I knew he wasn't laughing at the same thing Bang-Bang was.
Suddenly I knew how Izzy Epstein must have felt when the catastrophe he had dreaded struck. This Earth espionage technology was probably pretty crude. But it was espionage technology. It would make my job so much harder!
I hastily wrote another dispatch to the New York office repeating my earlier order to find Raht and Terb and promising torture along with extinction if they didn't comply! Heller had to be stopped!
Chapter 3
About the only thing different about Friday was that they had a different command post and iced soft drinks in a bucket!
What a way to go to college! Lying around on the lawn, watching the girls go by. Well, it was Bang-Bang who did most of the girl watching. Heller was getting caught up on grammar school and high school and college. But Bang-Bang did enough girl watching for both of them. Still, what an idyllic scene. How pastoral! Disgusting!
Saturday, however, was different. Bang-Bang had disappeared somewhere, some muttering about drilling. But Heller reported to some hall and began to take "counselling examinations" to determine which subjects and what part of them he should be tutored on.
I had slept late and when I did the scan through, I simply ignored his rapid pen movements on the exams he was doing. He is always showing off. I sped straight through to an interview he was having with some assistant dean.
"Agnes," the assistant dean was calling over his shoulder. "Are you sure that marking machine is in repair?"
A voice floated back. "Yes, Mr. Bosh. It has been flunking its quota all morning."
Mr. Bosh, an intense-eyed young man, fiddled with the big stack of completed exam papers he had and then looked at Heller. "There must be some mistake here. Your grade transcript said these were all D average and these exams are A average." A very severe glint came in his eye. "There is something unexplained here, Wister."
"Sometimes students have been known to date the wrong somebody's daughter," said Heller.
Mr. Bosh sat up straight and then beamed. "Of course, of course. I should have thought of that. Happens all the time!"
Chuckling to himself, he bundled the exam papers up and marked them To be microfilmed for student's file.
"Well, Wister, all I can say is, you're off the hook. There are no weak spots here to be tutored, so we will simply mark that completed in your admission requirements. All right?"
"Thank you very much," said Heller.
Mr. Bosh leaned forward and said in a low voice, "Tell me, just off the record, you didn't knock her up, did you?"
Heller leaned over and whispered, "Well, I'm here for my senior year, aren't I?"
Mr. Bosh went into howls of laughter. "I knew it, I knew it! Oh, priceless!" And with great camaraderie, he shook Heller's hand and that was that.
There was something in Bosh's attitude that irritated me. Possibly the way he was beaming at Heller. There was nothing that remarkable about Heller's passing: he had had several days and several long evenings in the lobby to review those subjects and, to him, it must have been a sort of ethnological study of how some primitive might view these things. There was nothing remarkable at all about a postgraduate combat engineer of the Voltarian Fleet passing a few lousy kiddie subjects like perverted quantum mechanics. It made me quite cross, really. Spoiled my faith in these Earth people—not that I'd ever had any. Just riffraff.
I walked around the yard for a while. Two of the children were picking grapes and I accused them of eating more than they picked and after I'd gotten them crying real good, kicked them and felt better.
I called the taxi driver and wanted to know when the Hells he was going to complete delivery of Utanc and he told me it was all on schedule. That made me feel a lot better. Watching that (bleeper) Heller being whistled into his room every night by gorgeous women had been getting to me more than I had admitted. And that I never
actually saw him doing anything with them made it even worse! One's imagination runs riot sometimes!
Only the possible early arrival of Utanc gave me morale enough to go back and watch what was happening around Heller. But all he was doing was trotting around a track in a running suit, not even making good time. He stopped and watched a football squad being mustered up, apparently lost interest and resumed his running. How can anybody just run for a couple of hours? What do they think about?
I went outside again, and after a long delay in locating him, talked on the phone to the hospital contractor who said the earth-moving was almost finished, the water, electrical and sewage ready to place and he'd be into pouring foundations tomorrow. So I couldn't find anything to rag him about beyond being at the building site working when I was trying to call him.
It was late evening, Turkish time, by now. There was a sort of fascination about watching Heller. I desperately longed for a time when I would see him curl up in a ball, preferably in agony, and die and yet, so long as I did not have the platen, he carried my life in his careless, brutal hands. So I hung on to the viewscreen and raced the strips forward to the present.
Heller was going down in the elevator. He was dressed in a casual dark suit but there was nothing casual about the way he was acting.
He rushed out of the elevator and burst into Vantagio's office. "It's here! It's here! The car I want is here!"
Vantagio was in a tuxedo, apparently all ready for a Saturday night rush not yet started. "Well, it's about time! Babe mentions it every day and ever since you spaghettied Grafferty she's been insisting it be the best. Where is it? Out front or down in the garage?"
"Garage," said Heller. "Come on!"
Vantagio needed no urging. He went rapidly out of his office, followed by Heller, and into the elevator they went and down to the garage.
"It better be a beauty," said Vantagio. "I got to get this action completed so I can have some peace. Been over a week since Babe told me to buy you a lovely car!"
At the garage elevator exit, there stood Mortie Massacurovitch. Heller introduced him to Vantagio. "I been workin' double shift," said Mortie. "I couldn't get here until this evening. But there she is!"
Standing in the middle of the vast pillared structure, surrounded by sleek limousines of the latest model, stood the old, shabby, paint-worn-off, cracked-window Really Red Cab of decades ago.
It looked like a piece of junk that had been shovelled in.
"Where's the car?" said Vantagio.
"That's the car," said Heller.
"Oh, come off it, kid. A joke's a joke but this is serious business. Babe will just about tear my head off if I don't get you one."
"Hey," said Heller, "this is a great car!"
"This was built when they really built cabs!" said Mortie.
"Kid, this isn't any joke? You mean you are re
ally proposing I buy this piece of scrambled trash for you?"
"Hey," said Mortie, "the company ain't charging hardly anything!"
"I'm sure they wouldn't dare!" said Vantagio. "You ought to give the buyer twenty-five smackers to get it towed to a junkyard!"
"Oh, come on," said Mortie. "I'll admit she don't look like no limousine. But I had quite a time trying to get the company to agree to sell it. It's sort of a keepsake.
Like old times. Tradition! Of course, you can't keep it red or run it as a Really Red Cab in competition and you can't have its taxi license—that's expensive and stays with the company. But it's a perfectly legal car and the title would be regular."
Vantagio had looked inside. He backed off holding his nose. "Oh, my God."
"It's just the leather," said Mortie. "They didn't have vinyl in them days so it's real leather. Of course, it's kind of rotted and saturated a bit. But it's real leather."
"Please," said Heller.
Vantagio said, "Babe would kill me. She would have me whipped for two or three hours and then kill me with her bare hands."
"I got orders that you can have it cheap," said Mortie. "One thousand dollars and that's rock bottom."
"Quit torturing me!" said Vantagio. "I got a tough night ahead. This is Saturday night and the UN is hotting up—in just two weeks it is reconvening! Kid, have you got any idea——"
"Five hundred," said Mortie. "And that's absolutely rock bottom."
Vantagio tried to walk away. Heller got him by the arm. "Look, real quarter-inch steel fenders and body. Look, Vantagio, real bulletproof windows! See those stars in them? They stopped real bullets just a while ago."
"Two hundred and fifty," said Mortie. "And that's rock rock bottom."
"Kid," said Vantagio, "please, for God's sake, let me go upstairs and call the MGB agency, let them send over a red sports car."
"This cab," said Heller, "is a real beauty!"
Mission Earth 02 - Black Genesis Page 37