Heller put the button plate down. “As to arrival time, we would have found it easy to keep. But one has to be able to read screens very well to land in an area one has never seen before.
“Captain Stabb is just a bit nervous. He’s a bit of a grouch like some old subofficers and he’s gotten too careful.” He shrugged. “He wants to see a place in daylight before he goes in for the first time, that’s all. So he’ll hang up about five hundred miles and study it in daylight for hours and when he’s sure there aren’t sudden traffic movements and that the base isn’t a trap, he’ll take it in, in the first darkness.
“Too bad. I planned a predawn arrival because I thought you’d want to be up and on the job early. You probably have things to do at the base.
“But it all has its advantages. I’ll be able to look this so-called base over, too. I’ll tell you what. Right now you look pretty shaky. Why don’t you go get some more sleep and when we’re hanging above that area in daylight, say about noon, come back here and have some lunch with me and you can show me the various points of interest.
Right now, if I were you, I’d get some more rest. You don’t look good, you know.”
I didn’t even tell him to please turn off that awful churning wake that still surrounded us at every hand.
I cursed feebly to myself.
I was walking out that (bleeped) door just like that (bleeped) time-sight had shown — shoulders slumped and all caved in!
Chapter 5
As noon approached, I felt infinitely improved. We had come down out of time drive smoothly. We were now on auxiliaries, barely running. I had had a marvelous long sleep and as seventy-six hours had now passed since I had taken that (bleeping) speed, it was out of my bloodstream.
I had watched some Homeview comedies in the crew’s salon and had even had a dice game with one of the engineers — he had lost half a credit to me.
But what made it really good was Stabb. He had seated himself in the captain’s chair and when the dice game was over, he put his huge mouth near my ear. He whispered, “I been watching you, Officer Gris, and if I read the signs right, we’re going to get a crack at that (bleeping) (bleepard) Royal officer, ain’t we?”
I felt good enough to be witty. I whispered back, “I heard you very extinctly.”
He laughed. It’s a bit awesome to see an Antimanco laugh: their mouths and teeth are so big in proportion to their triangular faces. It was an uproarious laugh. In fact, it was the first time any of them had laughed and it so startled the off-duty pilot that he burst in to see if something was wrong.
The captain whispered to him and he whispered to the off-duty engineer and they both went off to whisper to their mates and very shortly there was a lot of pleased laughing in the forward end of the ship.
Captain Stabb took me by the hand as I was leaving. “Officer Gris, you’re all right! My Gods, Officer Gris, you’re all right!”
So when I went back to have lunch with Heller, I was feeling great.
Heller was in the upper lounge. He had laid out a tray of sparklewater and sweetbuns and he waved me to a seat.
He had the starboard viewscreens on to see the exterior view. We were hanging in the sun, five hundred miles above our base, just a hundred miles inside the Van Allen belts. And there, way below, was Turkey!
The ship was really on its side. Spacers are crazy. They don’t really care whether they are right side up or down. It was a bit disconcerting to me to have a vertical tray and sit on a vertical seat. It always makes me feel like I’ll fall for sure. The gravity synthesizers of course take care of it all but nevertheless I was very careful with my canister. It is such moments that make me glad I am not a spacer!
Regardless, I felt good and I actually enjoyed the sparklewater. When I had finished my lunch, life looked pretty good. We had all but arrived, had not blown up and the gravity compensators had held.
I noticed Heller had out all the computer papers I had given him on Voltar and several books and charts. I also saw the “delete” notice which said Lombar had removed all cultural and such material from the Earth data banks.
“I’ve been identifying these seas by local names,” he said. “But you better verify them for me.”
The day below was bright and almost cloudless. It was just past the middle of August in local seasons so it was somewhat dry and the only slight haze in some places was dust.
I was glad to know that he didn’t know everything. “That sea at the bottom,” I said, “below western Turkey, the bright blue one, is the Mediterranean. Just above Turkey there is the Black Sea — although as you can see for yourself, it isn’t black. Over to your left, there, the one with all the little islands in it, is the Aegean Sea. And that little landlocked one in northwest Turkey, is the Sea of Marmara: that city you see at the top of it is Istanbul, once known as Byzantium and before that, Constantinople.”
“Hey, you really know this place.”
I was pleased. Yes, I really knew this place. And, factually speaking, while he might know engineering and space flight, he didn’t know a ten-thousandth of what I knew about my own trade: covert operations and espionage. He would learn that to his sorrow in due course.
But I said, “Just to the left of the center of Turkey, there is a large lake. See it? That’s Lake Tuz. Now look to the west of it and slightly south and you’ll see another lake. That’s Lake Aksehir. There’s some more lakes just southwest of it. See them?”
He did. But he said, “Point out Caucasus.”
Oh, my Gods, here we went on that stupid theme. “Over there, just east of the Black Sea, there’s an arm of land that comes down and joins Turkey. That’s Caucasus. Way over on the horizon is the Caspian Sea and that bounds Caucasus on the east. But you can’t go in there. That’s communist Russian country. Georgia and Armenia are right there on the Russian side of the border. But Caucasus is out of bounds. Forget it. I’m trying to show you something.”
“Very pretty planet,” said Heller irrelevantly. “You mean nobody can go into the Caucasus?”
I let him have it. “Listen, northeast of Turkey and clear to the Pacific Ocean on the other side of this planet, that’s all communist Russia! They don’t let anybody in, they don’t let anybody out. They are a bunch of mad nuts. They’re run exclusively by a secret police organization called the KGB!”
“Like the Apparatus?” he said.
“Yes, like the Apparatus! No! I mean you can’t go there. Now will you pay attention?”
“That’s awful,” he said. “A piece of the planet that big being run by secret police. And it’s such a pretty planet. Why does the rest of the planet let them get away with something crazy like that?”
“Russia stole the secrets of atomic fission and it’s a thermonuclear power and you have to be careful of them because they’re so crazy they could blow up the whole planet.”
He was busy writing on a pad and, unlike him, was saying the words as he wrote: “Russia crazy. Run by KGB secret police like Apparatus. Could blow up the world with stolen thermonuclear power. Got it.”
I finally had his attention. “Now get off this Caucasus fixation and pay attention.”
“So poor Prince Caucalsia even lost his second home! The Russians got it!”
I raised my voice. “Look west from Lake Tuz in a straight line across the top of Lake Aksehir and about a third of that distance further west. That is Afyon. That’s the landmark!”
Well, I had gotten him unfixed from that stupid Folk Legend 894M! He obediently reached for a control panel and the whole scene swooped up at us. I felt I was falling and grabbed hold of my seat.
“Oho!” said Heller, staring at the enlarged scene. “Hello, hello, hello! Looks just like Spiteos!”