"Oh," he grumbled to himself. Then he brightened. "But as soon as you get it, we kill him."

"Right."

"Right!" he said.

"Our strategy is to keep him lulled, give him no warning. Make him think we are cooperating."

"That's wise," said Stabb. "Then he can be gotten in the back."

"Right," I said. "Now, he wants those boxes down in the hold. It might be I don't get what I want this trip and we may have to deliver them. But if we do, I want to sabotage the shipment."

"I thought it was sabotaged," said Stabb.

Ah, Lombar had briefed him. "Well," I said, "not really enough. He is very tricky and dishonest."

"All Royal officers are," said Stabb. "Excepting present company, of course, meaning you."

"Well, actually," I said, "I never made it. They sent me to the Apparatus instead."

"You're not a Royal officer?"

"No," I said, telling the truth. "Just a Secondary Executive of the Apparatus."

He reached across and pumped my hand. "You're a good man, Officer Gris." Warmth flowed through the crew salon.

"The problem is," I said, "how to get Box Number 5 out of that hold."

"The hold and floorplates are locked tight!"

"I was hoping you knew of a way. We're going to remove it completely."

He thought. He called for one of the two engine sub-officers. They left. They came back.

Captain Stabb said, "There's a small engine-room escape hatch. It's mandatory in construction. You can get one man through it. It exits into the lower hold. It bypasses all his deckplate seals. In flight, the deckplates, in theory, would not be locked. One would drop from the engine room down into the hold and out through the deckplates in case of an overheat that fused the main engine-room doors. The Fleet does silly things like that."

A few minutes later I was in the hold. I played a light around. The boxes were all there, neatly lashed. Box Number 5 was just as I remembered it—on top.

I let them do the work. And it was a lot of work. We had to unpack the box piece by piece. It contained a lot of heavy pans, mostly. We passed these up into the engine room and out—or rather they did. Then we sawed the box up and passed the pieces out.

It was at this point I went to work. I got rid of every scrap of debris and packing that had drifted around. I retied every knot that secured the boxes. I even made Captain Stabb inspect. There was no trace of Box Number 5 left in that hold.

We got all the debris out of the ship and disintegrated it. I buried the heavy pans in the bottom of an old detention cell.

"What are you going to tell him?" said Stabb. "In case, that is, we don't get to kill him."

"That it was never loaded. Simplicity is best."

"You're a wonder," said Stabb. "What were those things?"

"I don't know. But I'm sure he does. And it will put an awful crimp in any plans he has."

"You really are a wonder," said Stabb.

I hung around for a bit. The Antimancos seemed to be taking a lot of pleasure in fixing things up so Heller's suspicions would be lulled. They were removing the tiniest bits of dust, eradicating every smudge, inside and out. The actions were quite foreign to their natural bent—they mostly laid around and shot dice or drank.

But now there was a sort of glee around them. They were creating the atmosphere which they were certain would disabuse a Royal officer of suspecting he was about to be stabbed in the back.

They couldn't get into the rear of the ship, of course, but Heller would not expect that. But anything he could see would be shining.

"We want," said Stabb, "a new uniform issue, all of us. We'll look like a perfect crew. And we'll want a new personal weapons issue, of course."

I stamped it gladly.

All was going along well there so I went back to my secret room. I wanted to be very sure that Heller wasn't laying any booby traps for us at his end.

But Heller was simply having breakfast in his suite and having a second chocolate sundae while he read a G-2 manual entitled The Handling of the Trained Spy. The interference was off, for a change, as it often was in the morning. The diplomats didn't seem to want to relive their youth under the carbon arc at that time of the day.

He was on a chapter named "The Case Officer's Dilemma." He was eating his sundae so I got a chance to read some of it without still-framing it on the second viewer. It seemed that spies often had personal intentions of their own. These included their reasons for being spies in the first place. They wanted personal revenge or wealth for their own purposes. And the case officer, which is their term for a handler, had to accommodate these personal ambitions and take advantage of them where possible.

Well, that was all kindergarten stuff. Naturally a spy had personal ambitions. It didn't mention that the case officer might have them also. Take my case: wealth and power covered it.

Then he was onto a subsection. It was entitled "Love, The Case Officer's Worst Enemy." It seemed that love was a very dangerous thing. When you sent a spy to some country, away from a lady love, he would sometimes just give the job a brushoff or turn in any old thing in order to get home.

It also covered the danger of a spy falling in love with an enemy agent and turning into a double agent. But that was of no interest to me.

I got to pondering this dangerous thing called love. In my own case, there was no menace in that direction. Utanc would simply never talk to me again, that was certain. And my heart was heavy about it.

But Heller, now, that was a different matter. He had been in love with the Countess Krak. In fact, he had even delayed his departure because of it. But he wasn't following the pattern laid down in the textbook. He was not skimping his job, (bleep) him. He was plowing right along on it.

The trouble with Heller was that he was inconsistent with the textbooks. Obviously, as I looked at it, he was planning to do his job fully and then go home, whereas, by the text, he should be skimping his job and rushing home. There was just no accounting for the man at all!

I idly speculated on all the ramifications of this. If he would just slow down and poke along and skimp his job, I would have nothing to worry about.

But in any event, I at last had some kind of a solution in progress.

If all went well, he would very shortly be dead. I would forge reports on and on and the whole thing could be strung out for years.

In spite of the leaden feeling I had about Utanc, some small hope was stirring in me.

In the first pitch-black dark of October second, we ascended through the optical illusion and rose far above the planet.

Ringing in my ears was the last warning from the assassin-pilot leader, "We're tracking your bug with a temporary satellite that went up three hours ago. At the first hint that you're leaving the vicinity of Blito-P3, up we come and down you go, on fire. We can catch you before this tug can get up to speed. And you are not armed. We will be watching you. Be smart. Don't try anything."

So I took no joy in the flight. I wouldn't anyway. Space travel, even a local jump, makes me nervous.

Captain Stabb let the dark band on the surface drift along directly below us. It would be seven hours and I simply should have lain down on a gimbal bed and had a sleep. But I was too jumpy.

Unlike Heller, I am not a religious person. I knew too much about psychology to really believe in anything but crude matter. But in my childhood I had been exposed to it by the more decent people around me, and now and then I would suffer a lapse and feel some need to pray. I did tonight.

The strategy was all worked out. Captain Stabb assured me there would be no hitches. But an awful lot depended upon this. If Heller were actually to get loose and start accomplishing things, he could utterly smash Lombar's connections, wreck the best-laid plans for Voltar and completely block, without knowing he was doing it, Lombar's rise to the rule of all Voltar. There were tremendous stakes here. Even for me. I hardly dared speculate on what I myself would do when I became the head of all the Apparatus. For it would be an Apparatus greatly strengthened beyond even what it was now.