"Crobe . . . ," I began to say that he wouldn't be there that long and then I definitely realized he would! But so what?
"To compound this problem," continued Crobe, "the growth period of a humanoid on Manco is thirty-two years. And they dolive their factor of six. Now, unless something else gets to him first, this special agent of yours will live to be about one hundred and ninety-two." I couldn't see what all this had to do with it.
"That special agent in there is about twenty-eight years of age. He is right this moment six feet two inches tall. Growth in the last years is small but by the time he is thirty-two, he will be six feet five inches!" I was feeling sick and apprehensive. I knew something was coming.
"The average height," said Crobe, consulting his table, "for a race on Earth that has his skin color – white? more like bronze – is only five feet eight and a half inches." He threw down his papers and looked at me. "He is too tall! He is going to stand out like a lighthouse!" I started to pooh-pooh it. Crobe said, "Wait. He will also look too young to them." He peered at his tables. "Yes. He will look to them like a boy of about nineteen, even eighteen." Crobe held up some age photos he had. "See?" Then he smiled. "But all is not lost. We can save it." He leaned over toward me, very close. He got that crazy look on his face he gets on the subject of freaks. He said, "We can subsection his legs and arms. We can take out some pieces of bone from each. We can also shrink his skull . . . Officer Gris! What is the matter?" I was doubled up. I was holding my stomach with both hands. I have never before felt such pain in my life! I started to vomit. I vomited all over my legs, all over the floor. I threw up everything I had eaten for a week. And then went into agonizing, dry retches.
It must have made a horrible commotion. Noisy! The next thing I knew, Heller was standing there, holding my head.
One of Crobe's assistants got a tube and tried to get some fluid down my throat. I threw it up violently! Another fanned a vapor bottle in front of my face but it just made it worse.
Heller was barking some orders to someone. The two platoon guards came in. Heller took a redstar engineer's rag from his pocket and wiped off the worst of it from my face. Then he got a stretcher from an assistant and put me on it very gently. The two guards got on either end and we left that place.
Chapter 4
In my room, Heller got my clothes off me and put me in the bath and when he had the mess washed away he got me into my bed. He was amazingly solicitous. He turned a drying lamp to put heat onto my stomach area, hoping that would help.
I lay there in dull misery. I had never felt so ill in my whole life, even worse than talking to Lombar.
Heller picked up some of my clothes from where they had fallen. "These are ruined," he said.
I went rigid with alarm: he was emptying the pockets! I couldn't think of any way to stop him. When one is not going regularly to a place of work, he tends to make himself into a sort of walking office; there were notebooks, old envelopes, messages, you name it. If he were to comb through them, the double cross of Mission Earth might be exposed!
But he was just putting them aside in a pile. He was not even looking at them. Sick as I was, I felt a slight edge of contempt for his total ignorance of the espionage game. He was a child!
He put the numerous weapons in a second pile and then he took the whole uniform, cap, boots and everything, verified it was empty and dumped it in the waste disposer. Well, it had been pretty dirty and stinky even before the "accident" today.
One of the guards had remained inside the room, ready to help him. Heller fished my identoplate from the pile of papers and handed it to the guard.
"No!" I pleaded weakly.
"Go down to the camp," Heller told him, "and get a complete new General Services uniform from their supply." The guard gave him a crossed-arm Fleet salute – they never saluted me – and vanished with my identoplate.
"Heller," I wailed. "With that plate he'll just buy half the prostitutes in Camp Kill! You've bankrupted me."
"Oh, I don't think so. Soltan, you'll just have to learn to trust people." Trust riffraff and criminals like these? "Oh, I am too ill for a conduct lesson! Don't moralize at me." He adjusted the heat on my stomach and put a cool wet cloth on my head. "Feeling better?" I wasn't. Heller cleaned up the mess the clothes had transferred to the floor. These Fleet spacers are amazingly neat. He undressed and took a shower himself. He washed out his redstar engineer's rag and then his exercise suit. He neated the whole place up and then put on a one-piece casual evening suit. He combed his hair and then, looking like something that just stepped out of a tailor's window, he turned on the Homeview and sat down.
My heart almost stopped. He was leaning forward and reaching toward the two piles from the suit. I thought he was going to go through my papers!
But he didn't. He reached toward the weapons pile and picked, up a blastick. "Quite an arsenal you've got here." He opened the blastick load chamber and checked the power cartridge. "You have to be careful of these things. They ship them with a dummy load – looks just like the real thing. Well, this one is okay." I expected him to, any moment, start pawing through the papers. But he picked up the stungun and verified its load. He reached again and once more I held my breath. But he picked up the ten-inch Knife Section blade. He looked at it curiously. They certainly aren't common. If you know them, there is a certain way you can flick at the tip and make them sing. He flicked the tip and made it sing. "Good alloy," he said.
His hand moved up and before I could even see what he was going to do, it left his hand with such velocity it hissed. I flinched. Was it coming at me?
There was a melon on a shelf and the knife hit it dead center and went through it with a thunk! He went over and removed it with a sort of double flip of his wrist and stood there offering me a neat slice of melon. "Want some?" he said. The thought of it made me go green inside again. "Sorry," said Heller, "but sometimes a melon can cool one down." He replaced the piece of cut melon and returned to the chair but he still didn't reach for any papers. He cleaned up the knife and its scabbard.
The guardsman came back with a package of uniforms. He returned the identoplate. Heller handed him a credit note and the guard said, "Will that be all, sir?" They never said "sir" to me. But then, I thought nastily, you can buy a lot of things with a credit note.
But that wasn't the end of it. The fellow leaned over and whispered something in Heller's ear and Heller smiled and whispered back. They both grinned. What were they planning? A breakout?
The guard stepped back and was about to salute when Heller pointed at the floor. "You dropped the money."
"So I did," said the guard and picked it up and put it in his pocket. Then he gave Heller a salute and left. So the guard wasn't only interested in money, I told myself. They wereup to something.
Heller got a textbook about Earth and began to read. He still ignored my papers. What a fool! He wouldn't last ten days on Earth.
Somehow this made me feel worse and I began to worry about myself. I had never before had any stomach trouble. I didn't seem to have a fever.
What could it be?
If I were to go down to Doctor Crobe, he would tell me that he would put in a new stomach. I thought about Crobe. I would never, never, never permit myself to go unconscious around that loony: you could wake up with a cow's head!
That suggestion he had made about Heller's legs . . . !
I was sick all over again! There was nothing left to throw up. I just hung off the side of the bed, retching.