Fortune of Fear Read online

  “Better a little than none,” I said.

  “Two hundred tons of gold,” said an Antimanco engineer. “Devils! That would buy half a country at the price of gold here!”

  “It’s a big risk for you,” said Stabb.

  “That’s why I am carrying this gun,” I said, patting “The Brute.”

  “And then we pick you up?” said Stabb.

  “No,” I said. “All you have to do is put this platform near their customs shed. I will climb out of the ship and down onto it. And then you cut for home. I’ll fight my own way out.”

  “Devils,” said a pilot in awe. “That’s nerve.”

  “So, quick, get yourselves ready,” I said. “We’ll take off within the hour.”

  They scrambled!

  PART THIRTY-SEVEN

  Chapter 6

  The personnel area of the line-jumper consisted of forward seats for the two pilots and rear seats for a tank crew of six. It was a peaked compartment way up at the top of the bell and it was almost without ports—it had small slits that could be opened or closed so as to not leave any reflective surface for detection beams.

  The engine room was elementary and required only one engineer but two of the Antimanco crew got into it. It lay just below the personnel compartment and one went through it to climb down and out.

  The rest of the ship was just like a flared bell mouth. In fact, if you looked at the ship from the side, it had the appearance of an enormous church bell.

  Stabb got the two pilots into their seats and stood between them. They were going over the charts they had.

  I sat down on a ledge seat clear at the back of the compartment. I buckled myself in very loosely so nothing would impede my getting to my guns.

  I watched anxiously for any sign that the Antimancos had not been taken in. It was a bit nerve-wracking.

  Stabb came back to me. “This ‘border-jumper,’ as we call it, is useful in atmosphere only. We’re only going to go up about a hundred thousand feet. The trip is about a thousand miles one way and we don’t have to go very fast. We’ll arrive there at about 7:30 PM, their local time, allowing for time differences. They’ll probably still be groggy from dinner, a factor we always take into account in pirating. Now, does that fit in with your plans?”

  “Exactly,” I said.

  “Then we’re ready to go,” he said.

  They got their motors going and their screens live.

  They lifted it in the hangar and settled it down over the platform. They attached safety lines to the new structure. They turned on the traction beams and engines again and floated the whole ship and platform a few feet off the hangar floor.

  An engineer swarmed down with a radiative test meter and checked the ship and platform for reflectance of radar beams.

  He leaped up on the platform, swarmed back into his engine room and shouted up to the flight area. “All responses null!”

  Stabb tapped the pilot at the main controls on the shoulder and up we went through the electronic illusion, ZOOM!

  I opened a slot. I wanted to glance down at the receding Earth and maybe make sure we hadn’t left the platform behind.

  Stabb reached across and closed the slot. “No, no,” he said with a finger wag. “They got radar on their satellites now and could detect a blip, even as small as that one. Watch those screens instead.” He pointed forward.

  I couldn’t see very much of the flight deck. I was also pinned to the seat by our upward motion. This craft didn’t have anything like the vast array on the tug. It was pretty elementary. I guessed the army or whoever had designed them didn’t have much familiarity with spaceflight. I could only assume we were on our way. I was worried that we’d left the platform behind.

  An engineer was yelling up through the shaft. Stabb knelt over the opening. They talked. Stabb came back.

  “That (bleeped) platform,” he said.

  Alarm shot through me. “It’s all right?” I begged.

  “Yeah, it’s all right. But it is registering a higher weight value than it should.”

  I went cold. I had had it built of aluminum and then had them make it look like heavy steel. I thought that would make it seem the right weight even when filled with gold bars.

  At a hundred thousand feet, they sent the line-jumper streaking along on course to Zurich. I worried that at this speed it might be making a sonic boom that nobody below on the planet would be able to account for.

  Then I made a discovery that really stood my hair on end. In trying to rise enough to look past a pilot’s shoulder and see a viewscreen, I didn’t feel the customary thump of the control star against my bare chest.

  I had forgotten to put it on!

  I was sitting here without the basic control device for these bloodthirsty (bleepards)!

  Only my few puny weapons were on hand to defend me.

  As the shock of it passed, I realized what had happened. It had been occasioned by a slip of the Freudian unconscious, a deep-seated reaction against lockets in general caused by my recent traumatic experience. But realizing it didn’t ease my sudden surge of roaring anxiety.

  Stabb didn’t help a bit. He said, “Oh, you’re trying to get a glimpse of the screen and see where we are? We’re right over the Sava River in Yugoslavia: if you got dumped into it you wouldn’t last five seconds. Look at that torrent roar!”

  Soundlessly, trying not to move my lips, I began praying to the god of voyagers.

  The line-jumper boomed onward through the night, flying at a speed that kept the Earth below shadowed from the sun. I wished I could open the slit. I knew what I would get: a blast of setting sun at this altitude and nothing but ink on the ground below. But I wished I could anyway: it would make me feel less trapped.

  Stabb had moved ahead, whispering to the pilots above the roar of engines and rushing air. Were they plotting against my life?

  He came back through the empty seats to where I sat. By the interior green glowlight, his beady eyes looked like those of a wolf.

  “We’re just about to cross the Rhaetian Alps. Piz Bernina is right below: thirteen thousand feet. You should see those crevasses! Dump a man in there and you’d never find him until the end of the world. And right after we pass the lights of St. Moritz we’ll be over the real deep ones!”

  I held my lips rigid. I was praying harder, but now I was addressing the god of pirates. Wasn’t there something he could do? Any favor would be appreciated.

  He answered, but not in the right way. A pilot yelled back above the din. “It’s time to dump him now!”

  I must have fainted. Stabb was pushing at my shoulder. He was doing something with my safety belts. Trying to get at my guns and disarm me?

  He had a hard grip on me, his fingers entwined in the straps.

  Then I saw his feet were off the floor. Was he going to kick me into submission first?

  “Hey, Captain!” a pilot yelled back. “This must be Kloten Airport. There’s more (bleeped) airplanes down there than I ever seen before in one place!”

  Stabb’s feet settled back. He had simply been lifted up and forward by deceleration and was holding himself with my straps.

  He was on his own feet again. He looked ahead, peering at the screen.

  I was able to speak. “Be careful,” I said. “Kloten is the busiest airport in Switzerland, if this is Switzerland. Don’t land me in a runway and get me knocked down by a superjet.”

  “Turn up the magnification,” yelled Stabb into the comparative silence of the hovering line-jumper. I tried to rise so I could see the screen. Were we really over Zurich’s main airport or some crevasse? Stabb pushed me back. “Shift the scanner around,” he yelled. “Let’s see if we can read some of those signs!”

  Glaciers seldom had signs. I was reassured.

  Stabb said, “Devils, I can’t read a single word of that gobbledegook.”

  “Put me off a runway and close to their customs shed,” I begged.

  “It’s a bad scanner,” said Stabb
. “We’ll have to improve it. I can’t make out if they are letters or snow splashes, even if I could read their alphabet. Awful definition for only a hundred thousand feet.”

  I tried to get up again. Stabb pushed me back. “We’ll handle it,” he said. He yelled to the pilot, “Some of those buildings are hangars, so eliminate them. One is the main terminal, so eliminate that. Choose a shed that looks like it could be defended and put us down.” He turned to me. “We can’t hover here all night trying to read languages, even if we could read them.”

  “Hold on!” yelled the pilot.

  Stabb gripped my shoulder safety straps again.

  SWOOSH!

  His feet came off the floor and my stomach stayed at a hundred thousand feet.

  We went down twenty miles like a rocket in reverse.

  CRUNCH!

  Stabb used my body for a cushion to land on.

  I didn’t know how he kept his breath. I didn’t. “Fast now. Out you go!”

  I grabbed the FIE shotgun. Stabb unsnapped the seat and shoulder belts. I was propelled down the ladder.

  The engineers were already out. They were standing on the platform, casting off the safety lines.

  My feet connected with the boxes of the fake bars. I tried to get my balance.

  The engineers swarmed up the ladder. I stared up. Stabb’s pointed head was silhouetted against the green glow of the engine room as he peered down through the hatch at me.

  “Don’t leave a single man alive!” he yelled.

  The hatch clanged shut.

  The line-jumper leaped into the air.

  It was swallowed instantly in glowing white mist.

  I had arrived.

  I was amazed to still be in the world of living things!

  PART THIRTY-SEVEN

  Chapter 7

  I had arrived. But where?

  The only real clue I had that it was Zurich was the fog. They have a trick wind. It is called the föhn. It comes into these cold confines from the south and, being a warm wind, creates fog which lasts for weeks on end. The airport lights were making it glow so that one felt he was packed in cotton batting.

  That’s why I didn’t see the snowbank at first. I moved to the edge of the platform and there it was: a wall of snow! It went up much higher than my head!

  Not too concerned at first, I walked all around the platform.

  They had landed me in the middle of a deep, deep snowdrift!

  I was totally hemmed in!

  Either it had been snowing before the föhn started, or this was the residue of snowplows clearing runways. But the cold was not the problem. The fact that I was a prisoner gripped me with icy fingers.

  How was I going to get out?

  I wondered if the airport came equipped with St. Bernard dogs, the kind with the kegs under their chins. Then I remembered reading that the Coca-Cola civilization had wiped them out. The Coca-Cola Company would not hear of the dogs carrying anything but Coca-Cola and the dogs, with a final pathetic hiccup, had died out. So there was no hope there.

  Even if I started to dig, I did not know which way. It was one time I could have used Heller’s built-in compass brain, but that was no solution either. The last person I wanted to see at this time and place was Heller.

  But one thing was certain. I was not going to sit here and perish in the snow, even if it was the Swiss custom. There is a limit to the courtesy one must display in emulating primitive ethnological fixations.

  Cunning came to my rescue. I could locate the runway nearest to me by listening to the planes. Gods, they were loud enough as they landed and took off. They must be being landed and sent away by the controllers in the tower. No wonder nobody had time to notice a new arrival.

  Despite rebounding echoes from the walls of the drift, I did make out what I hoped was the landing strips. That direction I did not want. Combing superjets out of one’s clothing is almost as bad as freezing in the snow.

  Nothing for it. I would have to risk a Code break and hope nobody reported it.

  I chose my direction. I got out a blastick. I took off its safety. I leveled it. I closed my eyes and pressed the trigger.

  BLOWIE! SWOOSH!

  It sounded like a cannon shot.

  I opened my eyes. There was no snow in a path twenty feet wide and about thirty yards long. Only water!

  I was quite certain guards and everybody else would come tearing out. It must have made a flash visible for miles even in the fog.

  I waited.

  Nothing happened.

  More jets landed and took off.

  I was very, very unwilling to leave this platform. I could not be sure that those pirates would not have second thoughts and come back and grab it.

  The FIE shotgun would not make much impression on that super-blastproof hull!

  But at length, when I saw no patrols and no line-jumper responding to the blast, I took the only action I could. I stepped off the platform into the water which still ran and walked along the new pathway to its end.

  I could see nothing and hear nothing.

  I didn’t want to use another blastick. I might knock a building down if one was on the other side of the remaining snow barrier. I decided on caution. I fished in my pockets and got out the Domestic Police slash gun. My hands clumsy with their ski gloves, I managed to set it on lowest intensity.

  I pointed it. I depressed the trigger. I steadied the tendency of my arm to recoil and began to slice away at the remaining wall of snow.

  For a few moments it stood there in very neat blocks. Then it suddenly, under the latent influence of the slash-ray heat, disintegrated into slushy water.

  VICTORY!

  A building wall.

  I had only burned it a little bit.

  Looking backwards, I saw that my precious platform was still there, a murky darkness in the swirling fog.

  I looked back at the building wall. I did an “eeny-meeny” and chose the left direction. Using the slash gun, I carved a passage down the wall.

  A big door with a little door in it.

  I put the slash gun away. I took a grip on my shotgun. I opened the smaller door.

  It was a sort of office. Several counters. Some men in caps shuffling packages around.

  One looked up incuriously. A beefy, phlegmatic sort of man, very red of face.

  “Ja?” he said.

  “Sprechen Sie Deutsch?” I said.

  “Ja,” he said.

  Well, I didn’t, so that was no help. “Parla Italiano?” I said hopefully.

  “Nein,” he said.

  “(Bleep)!” I said. “How am I going to talk to you people?”

  “Well,” he said, thinking it over, “you could talk English like you just did.”

  Thank Gods! He spoke English! “Is this the customs freight shed?” I said hopefully.

  “Bulk freight only,” he said. “If you’ve come in here to clear those weapons, the passenger terminal customs . . .”

  “He can’t clear anything in,” said a bigger, beefier man with a redder face, waddling over. “You haf to go to Immigrations, yet. And in your hands I don’t see yet any papers. If customs you vant, den Immigrations iss . . .”

  “I’m riding shotgun on a gold shipment!” I said. “It’s right outside.”

  “Gold,” said the first man.

  “GOLD!” said the bigger man.

  “Well, bring it in,” said the first man.

  “I can’t,” I said. “There’s twelve and a half tons of it!”

  “Wait, wait!” cried the bigger man. “Stand right there! Don’t breathe. Don’t move. Ve vill handle everyt’ing!”

  PART THIRTY-SEVEN

  Chapter 8

  Eight hours later, I was riding shotgun again on a much more valuable package.

  In financial and related matters, Switzerland spells service with a capital bow.

  It seems that everybody has a relative or friend who has exactly what you want.

  They phone ahead.

>   And they’re probably called gnomes because they work at any time, whether it is day or night.

  A wonderful place. Their weather might be cold and their buildings gray, but Switzerland had all looked very rosy to me.

  The customs chief had a relative who ran the armored trucks business. This relative had a brother who ran the Zorich Banking Corporation Gold Department. And this brother had a cousin who was the bank’s assayer. And none of them minded leaving the opera or mistresses or wives and kiddies, no matter the time of night, to highball me through.

  Wonderful. Nice people. Best on the planet.

  Each time I went to the next place, I was known already and expected.

  A whirlwind night. And it contained some wonderful high points. Gold, at the evening fix, had been $855.19 an ounce. The verified and assayed quantity, once the lead decoys were discarded, had come to 301,221 ounces. This added up to $257,601,186.99.

  But that was not all of the good news.

  My problem was that money could be robbed off me and my signature could be forged and all these hard-won gains could have been wiped out at any time in the future by a single misstep on my part. That had all been solved.

  The interest, at a nominal 10 percent, on such an amount was $25,760,118.70 every year. That itself was more than I could even extravagantly spend. And so the bank had made a deal.

  I had sold them the gold, for 515 one-half-million-dollar certificates and $18,527 pocket cash. Each separate certificate would earn ten percent per annum until it was cashed.

  All I had to do in the future was hand over one of these certificates to a Zorich Banking Corporation correspondent bank in any country and I would be given half a million US dollars, plus the interest up to that date on the certificate. They were actually each a bank IOU for half a million dollars. They have a fancy name: they are called “bank demand debentures.” It means simply a bank’s IOU.

  They were better than the gold. They were more valuable, because of interest, than the gold. And even more important to me, I could hide them much more easily.

  It was a good deal for the bank as well. They now owned my gold and could make money with it at far more than ten percent. They actually didn’t have to pay for it right then. And it got around the fact that US dollars, in banks, usually ride as figures in ledgers, not bills in a cash box. Had I demanded that many actual banknotes, I would have almost scraped Zurich clean and I would have needed a truck instead of this small attaché case which was now fastened firmly to my wrist.