D-99: a science-fiction novel by H. B. Fyfe (top books to read .txt) 📖

the desert to mummify. This thing will hover overhead to spot the location."

"Do they just ... leave us?"

"Yes, as far as anybody has ever been able to find out. I talked to the Capellan next door in the foreign quarter here, and he says they might not leave you in one of their own burial grounds. Otherwise, I would hate to take the chance of having this gadget seen in the daylight."

"All right, so we're out in the desert," said Taranto. "How does this ship you arranged for pick us up? We'll still be out for the count."

"I plan to tell them where to touch down. I can talk louder by radio, you know, than I can to you now. They will grab your 'bodies' and scramble for space. Against the sunset, they may not even be seen from the city. If they are, I never heard of them."

"Who are they?" asked Taranto.

"Some bunch hired for the job by the D.I.R.'s Department 99. Just as well not to ask where they come from or what their usual line is."

"I ain't got any questions at all, if they get us out of here," said Taranto.

He watched as the hatch closed itself and the tiny light blinked out. The rotors began to spin, and two minutes later they were alone.

"Come and get yours," said the spacer.

He reached out with his empty hand to guide Meyers to him, then very carefully delivered one of the capsules to the other.

"We're supposed to swallow that big lump?" whispered Meyers.

"Just don't lose it," admonished Taranto.

He relayed the instructions as precisely as he could.

"One thing more," he concluded. "You stay awake to make sure I stay awake until it's time to take the stuff."

"We could take watches," suggested Meyers.

"I could," said Taranto bluntly, "but I'm not sure about you. In the second place, I ain't going to have you sleep while I don't. We're going to play this as safe as possible."

Meyers grumbled something inaudibly. In the darkness, a sardonic smile twisted Taranto's lips.

"If you know how," he advised, "pray! We're goin' to our funeral in the morning."

FOUR

Westervelt sat at his little desk in the corner, doodling out possible ways and means of breaking out of a cell thirty fathoms or so under water. From time to time Beryl or Simonetta offered a suggestion. He knew that everyone in the office was probably engaged in the same puzzle. Smith believed in general brain-storming in getting a project started, since no one could tell where a good idea might not originate.

"If I ever get into space," Willie muttered, "it will never be to a planet as wet as Trident. What ever made this Harris think he was a pearl diver?"

"Is that what he was after?" asked Beryl.

"No, I just made that up."

He glanced over at Simonetta, who winked and continued with the letter she was transcribing. An earphone reproduced Smith's dictation from his tape. As she listened, she edited mentally and spoke into the microphone of her typing machine, which transcribed her words as type. Westervelt realized that it was more difficult than it seemed to do the job so smoothly. He had noticed Beryl rewriting letters two or three times, and Parrish was more likely than the boss to set down his thoughts in a logical order.

"I've heard so many wild ideas in this office," said Beryl, "that I simply don't know where to start. How do they decide on a good way?"

"They guess, just the way we've been doing. They're better guessers than we are, from experience."

"It's just a matter of judgment, I suppose," Beryl admitted.

"They make their share of mistakes," Simonetta put in.

"Yeah, I read an old report on a great one," said Westervelt. "Ever hear of the time they were shipping oxygen tanks to three spacers jailed out around Mizar?"

Simonetta stopped talking her letter, and the girls gave Willie their attention.

"It seems," he continued, "that an exploring ship landed on a planet of that star and found a kind of civilization they hadn't bargained for. The natives breathed air with a high chlorine content; so when they grabbed three of the crew for hostages, the ship had to keep supplying fresh tanks of oxygen."

"How long could they keep that up?" asked Beryl.

"Not indefinitely, anyway. They weren't recovering any carbon dioxide for processing, the way they would in the ship. The captain figured he'd better lift and orbit while he tried to negotiate. Meanwhile, he sent to the Department for help, and they came up with a poor guess."

"What?"

"They got the captain to disguise some spacesuit rockets as oxygen tanks and send them down by the auxiliary rocket they were using to make deliveries and keep contact. The idea was that the prisoners would fly themselves over the walls like angels, the rocket would snatch them up, and they'd all filter the green-white light of Mizar from their lenses forever."

"And why didn't it work?"

"Oh, it worked," said Westervelt. "It worked beautifully. The only trouble was that when they got these three guys aboard and were picking up stellar speed, they found that the Mizarians had pulled a little sleight of hand. They'd stuck three of their own into the Terran spacesuits—pretty cramped, but able to move—and sent them to spy out the ship. Well, the captain took one look and realized it was all over. He couldn't supply the Mizarians with enough chlorine to keep them alive until they could be sent back. He just kept going."

"But the men they left behind!" exclaimed Beryl. "What happened to them?"

Westervelt shrugged.

"They never exactly found out."

Beryl, horrified, turned to Simonetta, who stared reflectively at the wall.

"For all we know," said the dark girl, "they were dead already."

"It was about even," said Westervelt. "The Mizarians never heard exactly what happened to theirs either."

There was a period of silence while they considered that angle. Simonetta finally said, "Why don't you tell her about the time they gave that spacer the hormone treatment for a disguise?"

"Oh ... you tell it," said Westervelt, trapped. "You know it better than I do."

"That one," began Simonetta, "happened on a world where there's a colony from Terra that isn't much talked about. It's a sort of Amazon culture, and they don't allow men. They were set to execute this fellow who smuggled himself in for a lark, when the Department started shipping him drugs that changed his appearance."

Westervelt admired Beryl's wide-eyed intentness.

"Finally," Simonetta continued, "his appearance changed so much that he could dress up and pass for a woman anywhere. He just walked out when the next scheduled spaceship landed, and was halfway back to Terra before they finished searching the woods for him. It made trouble, though."

"What happened?" breathed Beryl.

"They never quite succeeded in changing him back. His wife wound up divorcing him for infidelity when he gave birth to twins."

Beryl straightened up abruptly.

"Oh...! You—come on, now!"

Westervelt reminded himself that the blush must have resulted less from the joke than from having been taken in. They were still laughing when a buzzer sounded at Beryl's desk phone. She flipped the switch, listened for a moment, then rose with a toss of her blonde head at Westervelt.

"Mr. Parrish wants me to help him research in the dead files," she said. "I bet he won't try that kind of gag on me!"

"No," muttered Westervelt as she strode out, "he has some all his own."

He looked up to find Simonetta watching him with a grin. She shook her head ruefully as Westervelt grew a flush to match Beryl's.

"Willie, Willie!" she said sadly. "You aren't letting that bottle blonde bother you? I didn't think you were that kind of boy!"

Westervelt grinned back, at some cost.

"Is there another kind?" he asked. "After, all, Si, she's only been around a few weeks. It's the novelty. I'll get used to her."

"Sure you will," said Simonetta.

She returned to her letters, and Westervelt hunched over his desk to brood. He wondered what Parrish and Beryl were up to in the file room. He could think of no innocent reason to wander in on business of his own. Perhaps, he reflected, he did not really want to; he might overhear something he would regret.

He passed some time without directing a single thought to the problems of the Department. Then the door beyond Simonetta opened and Smith strolled out. He carried a pad as if he, too, had been doodling.

"Well, Willie," he said cheerfully, "what are we going to do about this Harris fellow?"

"All I can think of, Mr. Smith, is to offer to trade them a few people we could do without," said Westervelt.

Smith grinned. He seemed to be willing to make up a little list.

"Some who never would be missed, eh? And let's head the page with people who take messages from thinking fish!"

He pottered about for a few moments before winding up seated on a corner of the unoccupied secretarial desk.

"I was actually thinking of skin divers," he confided. "Then I realized that if it takes a twenty foot monster to wander the undersea wilds of Trident without being intimidated, maybe those waters wouldn't be too safe for Terran swimmers."

"Unless they could get one of the monsters for a guide," suggested Westervelt.

The three of them pondered that possibility.

"I can see it now," said Simonetta. "My name Swishy. Me good guide. You want find pearl? Not allowed here; we no steal from other fish!"

They laughed, and Smith demanded to know how one thought in pidgin talk. They discussed the probability of fraud in the reports that Smith had received, and concluded reluctantly that, whether or not some trick might be involved, there was bound to be some truth in the story.

"I suppose we'll have to use this fishy network to locate him," sighed Smith at last. "It would take too long to ship out parts of a small sub to be assembled on Trident. The whole thing makes me wonder if I'll ever eat another seafood dinner!"

"Maybe somebody else will think of something," said Westervelt, partly to conceal the fact that he himself had come up with nothing.

"Tell you what," said Smith, nodding. "Suppose you go along and see how Bob Lydman is making out, while I sign these letters. You might check at the com room sometime, too, in case anything else on the case comes in."

Westervelt agreed, made sure he had something in his pocket to write upon should the need arise, and left.

A few minutes later, he reached the end of the corridor, having cocked an ear at the door of the old file office as he passed and heard Beryl giggling at some remark by Parrish. He unclenched his teeth and knocked on Lydman's door.

He waited a minute and tried again, but there was still no answer.

He hesitated, wondering what would happen should he walk in and find that Lydman was physically present but not in a mood to recognize any one else's existence. Slowly, he walked back to the washroom on the opposite side of the hall.

Washing his hands with deliberation, Westervelt decided that it might be best to get Lydman on the phone. He could not, in fact, understand why inside phone calls were not more popular in the office. He supposed that the face-to-face habit had grown up among the staff, probably reflecting Smith's preference for getting everyone personally involved in everything. There might even be a deeper cause—they were so often in contact with distant places by the tenuous beaming of interstellar signals that there must be a certain reassurance and sense of security in having within physical reach the person to whom one was speaking.

"I'll have to watch for that if I stay here long enough," Westervelt told himself. "You don't have to be a prizefighter to get punchy, I guess."

He examined himself critically in the mirror over the sink, thinking that he could do with a neater appearance. A coin in the slot of a dispenser on the wall bought him a disposable paper comb with which he smoothed down his dark hair.

I need a haircut almost as bad as Castor P. he thought. I wonder if that really stands for Pollux? What a thing for parents to do! On the other hand, from people that came up with one like him, you'd expect almost anything!

No one came in while he was in the washroom, much as he would have welcomed an excuse for conversation. He dawdled his way through the door into the corridor, not liking the thought of inflicting his presence upon Beryl and Parrish. That meant he would have to walk back as far as the spare conference room to find a phone.

"Of course, there's the lab," he muttered.

That was only a few steps away, and he could hardly do much damage between the door and the