"You ought to get this thing fixed," said Heller. "I can't get it above five hundred miles an hour. You ought to get this thing fixed," he yelled back.
"Yah, I keep telling Officer Gris," came from the languid spiral of smoke.
They were both idiots. An airbus's safe top speed is only four hundred. It was shaking like it had palsy – and maybe it did, it was old enough. I closed my eyes. It was a trifle cruel to die just when I might possibly be getting Heller off this planet, me out of danger and him into it. The bottom fell out!
I stared down to see where my grave would be. But it was just the landing target of the Apparatus hangar field. Heller slammed us down dead center on the X.
Before us loomed the huge hangars of the Apparatus Space Section. It is a pygmy compared to Fleet hangars but it is big enough. It rises about five hundred feet, a huge, rickety structure covering a square mile. Gantries and tractor platforms lay about in various states of decay and disarray.
Black-uniformed sentries with blastguns at port came racing up. This Apparatus area is extremely secret and well guarded.
"Officer Gris and party," shouted Heller. With a finger he indicated I should push my identoplate at the board a sergeant held aloft. "You stay here," he yelled back at my driver. "We may not be long. Come on," he said to me.
We piled out. The guards, disinterested now, slouched off. Odder things than a race driver came and went in this place. All in all, despite savage orders for top alertness, the Apparatus space hangar and area is glum, apathetic and shabby.
Heller was trotting briskly toward the hangar. I followed him not so briskly. I felt all this was out of my control someway. I was just an animated identoplate.
We got inside. Spaceships just arrived, spaceships waiting to go, spaceships being repaired, spaceships that wouldn't ever go anywhere again, stood far and wide, shadowy monsters full of secrets, half-operational machinery and old bloodstains. I groaned at the idea of having to walk endlessly amongst these assorted craft. It made my feet already begin to hurt.
But Heller was looking around alertly. And this was odd because you couldn't see much past the first three ships. He spotted something. I didn't understand his interest. It was a gigantic crane hoist used to lift heavy machinery.
The operator was in his cab way up in the air, sitting in bored idleness.
Heller called to him. Now, in the Fleet, officers accustomed to serving in the gigantic barnlike spaceships develop a type of voice. It is high-pitched and cuts across the rumble of drives with startling loudness. He was using that voice. "Hello the hoist! Stand by to lift!" Ordinarily an Apparatus man in this hangar wouldn't take orders from his own foreman. And I was somewhat startled to see the operator, almost a speck in his high cab, give a wave back.
Heller took a pair of gloves from his pocket and handed me one of them, putting his own on.
The hoist hook was resting on the floor. I went into shock as I understood. Heller put his foot on it and took hold of a handle on the upper plate. It was a huge hook. There was plenty of room to put more than one foot on it. He expected meto step onto that hook!
I had seen high riggers do it on gantries. But never in my days had it ever occurred to me to ride a hook!
Heller was gesturing at me, his attention elsewhere. It was nothing to him to ride a hook. Life around a combat engineer, I groaned to myself. I put on the glove, put my foot near his, seized a hand bar and closed my eyes tight.
"Take her to the top!" shouted Heller in that peculiar ear-splitting voice.
Up we went! I left my stomach on the hangar floor. With nothing under us or around us but one steel hook, with nothing above us but screaming cables, we were zipped to the top of the hangar. We stopped suddenly, the spring of the cables making us bounce.
I cautiously opened one eye and closed it again. Heller had one foot over empty space. I grabbed the hand ring with my other hand.
"Look over there," said Heller. And then he must have seen that I wasn't looking. "Hey, open your eyes. It's only five hundred feet down." They say never look down. I couldn't help it. I was horrified at the amount of empty space and the hardness of that concrete far below.
"We've got to find a mission ship," said Heller. "Look them over." I cursed the security which forbade me to tell him we should just be going by regular freighter.
"How big a ship will the hangars take on Blito-P3?" said Heller, nonchalantly swinging in the air.
I blurted the answer, "Five freighters, a couple combat ships."
"Then it will take a big ship," said Heller. He was looking down upon the whole expanse of the Apparatus space vessels now groundside. From this vantage point, a few were still hidden beyond others.
"Take her to the right!" shouted Heller to the cab that was just behind us now.
The hook swooped horrifyingly to the right. Heller could now see between several of the ships that had formerly blocked his view.
"Freighters. Transports. Some old model war vessels." He turned to me. "Where'd the Apparatus get these ships? Some temple rummage sale?"
"We're not the Fleet," I managed to get out.
"That,"said Heller, "you definitely are not! I've got to think this over." Can't you think it over down on the ground? I silently pleaded. The hook was still swinging. He seemed to be determined to hang way up here in thin air and think. I got desperate. "We're supposed to take a freighter."
"Oh, no, no, no," said Heller. "Six weeks or more on the way. And no mission operating ship there. I've got to change your mind." You've changed it, I silently said. Anything, but get me back on the ground. He was still hanging there, thinking. "This stuff is all a pile of scrap," he said. "It just won't do. And a freighter won't do either. You certainly agree that we should have a proper mission ship." My hand was so sweaty it was slipping inside the engineer glove. My other one had already slipped! I screamed, "Yes. Yes! We need a proper ship! I agreeeeeee!" Heller turned and waved a hand at the crane operator just behind us. Then he signalled, palm down.
We plummeted! The cables screamed! We dropped five hundred feet so fast my foot came off the hook!
The steel heel banged into the hangar floor. Heller had stepped off just before it hit and stood there very composed. I reeled away and sat down on the concrete. I couldn't make my legs function.
Heller didn't seem to notice. He was sort of surveying the hangar floor around us, looking at a big empty space. "Aha!" he said.
His voice went racketing up to the crane cab. "Thank you and very well done, crane master!" The operator waved back.
"Come on," said Heller, trotting away.
Where the Hells was he going now? I gathered myself up and gazed after him. What was he up to? I desperately tried to think of some way to get this back under control. My neck was out a mile and a half. My prisoner was running around like a celebrity, without a single guard to back me up. He might take it into his head to go anywhere! But I had no ideas. I couldn't get even an inkling of what was really in his mind. If Lombar got wind of any of this . . .
Helplessly and hopelessly, I followed Heller back to the airbus.
Chapter 3
We took off again. It was still very early and the intercity air traffic had not even gotten thick yet. The sun was still so low that the shadows on the ground were like long black fingers. I had no slightest idea where we were headed.
"This thing well fuelled?" Heller called back to my driver.
"For any place but the Royal Officers' Club," said the driver. I shook my head at him. Heller mustn't know about that. He sure did break down discipline around him: my driver had opened up a canister of sparklewater and was sipping it, admiring the view.