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.

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.

"Give me back my glove," said Heller. I handed it over. He was about to put it in his pocket when he felt that the cuff was damp.

We were at about twenty thousand feet and he was flying at about five hundred miles an hour. There was even some light traffic up this high now. But he took his hand off the wheelstick and began to fly with his knee! He rolled back the glove cuff, blew into it to turn it wrong side out, took out his redstar engineer's rag and wiped the glove dry. "You must have been nervous," he said consolingly. "I keep forgetting you might not be used to certain things." Heller turned the cuff back, blew the glove right side out and put it and the rag in his pocket. "Well, don't you worry, Soltan. We'll get something nice and safe to travel in." Not very reassuring when the pilot is flying with one toe, one knee and, while admittedly very relaxed, is paying no slightest attention to whizzing traffic at his flight level. The overdriven airbus felt like it was about to shatter!

We were to the north of the main Fleet base. Below us an isolated plateau rolled up. The airbus was shaking so hard my vision was jittered and I couldn't see what it was.

"Here we are," said Heller and made what would be ranked in any book as a crash landing.

The dust settled. We were sitting before a low administration building, white and decorated with antique blastguns. It was very quiet. Nobody seemed to be around. Behind the building was a huge and seemingly endless fence. On it was a gigantic sign, EMERGENCY FLEET RESERVE Heller bounced out and I followed him up the building steps. There was a hall, a lot of empty desks, some unposted bulletin boards and plenty of echoes.

Apparently knowing where he was going, Heller trotted to the end of the hall and, without knocking, burst into a tomblike room.

A grizzled old space officer was sitting in a gravity chair, working on some lists, nursing a canister of hot jolt with his left hand. The unlighted sign on the front of the desk said, Commander Crup He looked up, a thundercloud scowl on his face. And then he burst into pure radiance. "Jettero!" He leaped up. They came together like colliding spaceships, pounding each other on the back. They laughed. The commander backed off, "Let me look at you! I haven't seen you for a year!" Suddenly he caught sight of me. His scowl came back. "A 'drunk'!" How do they always know?

Heller whipped out the orders: the Grand Council authorization and his own. He handed them to the commander. That worthy looked hard at me. "He's all right," said Heller. "Commander Crup, meet Officer Gris." But Crup didn't offer to shake hands. He read the orders. He relaxed a bit.

"Well, what can we do for you, Jet?"

"Just on a shopping tour," said Heller. "Can I have permission to overfly the place?"