CONCLUSION: Carry out the exact orders of Lombar Hisst cleverly, painstakingly and with enormous care! And with no questions whatever!

If I do say so myself, it was a brilliant resume of the situation. It covered not only the essentials but every salient point of any importance. A masterpiece!

So down we slid, undetected by the crude surveillance equipment of the primitive planet’s military forces. They have what we call “bow and arrow”-type radar. Easily nullified.

We went through the electronic illusion of the mountaintop right on target. And I will say this, pirate or not, Captain Stabb was a good spaceship handler. We came down on the trundle dolly with only a severe jolt.

The ship vibrated as the trundle dolly moved us over to the side, into a bay within the mountain, clearing the landing target for other arrivals and take-offs.

I patted Captain Stabb on the back. We were fast friends now. “A good groundfall,” I said. “Couldn’t have done it better myself.”

He beamed at me.

“Now, what I want you to do,” I said, “is warn, as a friend, any Apparatus people you meet, that this bird we’re carrying is actually a Crown agent armed with secret orders to execute anybody he finds anything out about. Just tip them off they’d take their life in their hands if they talked to him.”

Oh, Captain Stabb went for that! The moment the airlock was opened, all three hundred pounds of him were down the landing ladder like an earthquake to spread the word while he pretended to be concerned only with clearing us in. A real jewel.

A door swung open down the passageway and Heller climbed up the rungs. “Any objection if I wander around?”

“None, none,” I said cheerfully. “You can even absorb some local color. Here’s a slip so they’ll hand you appropriate clothes at the Garb Section, right down that passageway over there. And why not take a spin around town? It’s early yet. Here’s a transport authorization slip: you can hook on to one of the trucks. Lots of people speak English in Turkey, so that’s okay. You haven’t any papers yet, but nobody will bother you. Just say you’re a new technician at the satellite tracking station. Feel free, have fun, live it up!” I added in commercial English with a gay laugh.

I watched him as he went smoothly down the ladder and disappeared into the Garb Section tunnel. He was just a stupid baby at this game, but after all, I had been a professional for a long time.

My baggage was all ready. I barked for a hangar handler and in minutes I had a motor dolly loaded up and was on my way.

There is one flaw in the Blito-P3 hangar. Earthquakes are common and severe in Turkey and this big of a space disintegrated out of solid rock needs an awful lot of pressure-beam supports. They turn off the cone ones when ships arrive and depart and then they turn them on again. I had not been down here for nearly a year and I had forgotten about them. I was right in the path of one when they were turned back on and it almost knocked me flat. Perhaps this made me a little more exacting and severe than I would have been, for truthfully, I was awfully glad to be out of that (bleeped) tug!

I stopped by the Officers’ Section and grabbed me a trench coat.

Using the exit through the “archaeological workman’s barracks,” I ordered up a “taxi,” piled in my baggage and had the Apparatus driver take me directly to the base commander’s office. It is in a mud hut near the International Agricultural Training Center for Peasants. It seems to be accepted that he is its superintendent. That excuses all the traffic in and out of his place, for peasants come there to be trained — in how to raise a lot more opium for a lot less price.

The Turks are actually Mongols. The word Turk is really a corruption of their original name, “the T’u-Kin,” which is Chinese. They invaded Asia Minor in about the tenth century, Earth time. But they don’t look Chinese and they invaded and commingled in an area that already had hundreds of other racial types, so it is very simple to find, in the Voltar Confederacy of a hundred and ten planets, vast numbers of people who can pass for Turks.

The base commander was one of these. His real name was Faht, so he calls himself Faht Bey — the Turks put “Bey” after their names for some reason. He had grown pretty plump on his easy post. He had a fat wife and an oversized old Chevy car and western-style over-stuffed furniture that would take his weight and he was pretty comfortable. He was wanted for a mass murder on Flisten and any thought of being relieved as base commander scared him into waves of shaking fat.

Obviously, the sudden news of my arrival, of which he had had no warning word, had perspired ten pounds off him in the last hour since the ship had called in for permission to land.

He was at the door when I came in. He was mopping his face with a huge silk handkerchief and bowing and trying to open the door wider and quivering all at the same time.

Ah, the joys of being an officer from headquarters! It scares the daylights out of people!

His wife got through the door with a tray bearing both tea and coffee and almost spilled them. Faht Bey was trying to wipe off a seat for me with his handkerchief — which only greased the chair up.

“Officer Gris,” he quavered in a high-pitched voice. “I mean Sultan Bey,” he quickly added, using my Turkish name. “I am delighted to see you. I trust you are well, that you have been well, that you will be well and that everything is all right!” (By the last he really meant, “Am I still base commander or are you carrying orders to have me disposed of?”)

I put his mind at ease at once. I threw down my orders. “I have been appointed Inspector General Overlord of all operations related to Blito-P3 — I mean Earth! At the slightest hint that you are not doing your job, cooperating and obeying me implicitly, I will have you disposed of.”

He sat down so hard in his overstuffed office chair, it almost collapsed. He looked at the orders. He was ordinarily quite swarthy. Now he was gray. He opened his mouth to speak but no words came out.

“We can dispense with formalities,” I said. “Get on your phone. Make three calls into Afyon right away. Your usual contacts, the cafe bartenders. Tell them that you have just received a secret tip that a young man, about six feet two in height, blond hair and passing himself off as a satellite technician, is actually an agent of the United States Drug Enforcement Agency, the DEA, and that he is here prying around and not to talk to him.”

Faht Bey was on that phone like a shot.

The local natives are very friendly with us. They overlook everything. They cooperate one hundred percent. They, and even the commander of the local army barracks, think we are really the Mafia. It puts us in all the way.

Faht Bey finished and looked up like an obedient dog,

“Now,” I said, “call two local toughs, give them the description and tell them to find him and beat him up.”

Faht Bey tried to protest. “But the DEA is always friendly with us! We have every agent they got in Turkey on our payroll! And, Sultan Bey, we don’t want no dead bodies in any alleys in Afyon! The police might hear of it and they’d have to go to work and they wouldn’t like that!”

I could see why they needed an Inspector General Overlord!

But Faht Bey was just quavering right on. “If you want somebody killed, why don’t you just do the usual and take him up to the archaeological dig…”

I had to shout at him. “I didn’t say kill him! I just said to beat him up. He’s got to learn it’s an unfriendly place!”

That was different. “Oh, he ain’t really a DEA man!”

“No, you idiot. He’s a Crown agent! If he learns anything, it could be your head!”

Oh, that really was different! Worse. But he made the call.

When he finished, he nervously drank both the tea and the coffee his wife had set out for me. It was nice to know how thoroughly I could upset him. I gloated. It was so different from Voltar!