Old Muhck was fairly competent. He knew very well that the Apparatus would be called upon to furnish pre-invasion commotion someday. This consists of people in various countries to run around hysterically in the streets screaming, “The invaders are coming! Run for your lives!”; power plant operators who blow up the works; army officers who order their troops to flee; and newspaper publishers who come out with headlines, Capitulate to the Invader Demands Before It Is Too Late! That sort of thing. Standard tradecraft.

But there was a clincher on the idea: finance!

Now, every intelligence organization has the primary problem, when working inside enemy lines, of finding money to do so. Voltarian credits are no good and can’t even be exchanged. Intelligence is costly and robbing banks calls attention to oneself. Imported gold and diamonds in such quantities can be traced. Getting hold of enemy money to spend is rough!

The subofficer had a piece of news. A country on Blito-P3, the United States of America, had passed a piece of legislation called “The Harrison Act” in 1914 and was pushing it into heavy effect by this date of 1920, Earth time. It regulated the traffic of narcotics, namely opium. So, of course, the price of opium was going to go sky-high. And that’s what they raised around Afyon. It was the world center for it!

As “Turkish veterans” on the winning side, they had an “in.” And what an “in”! They were war heroes and revolutionary pals with the incoming regime of Mustafa Kemal Pasha Ataturk!

So old Muhck, operating on the principle that governs all Voltar, really (“There’s lots of time if you take it in time”), authorized the project. The cost was small. He probably had some people he didn’t want around but to whom he owed favors. And the Blito-P3 base was born.

Up to Lombar’s tenure, nobody had thought much about the base. It just ran on as a local, almost unsupervised operation. Then Lombar, assisted by Muhck’s old age and, some say, some judiciously introduced poison, took over the Apparatus. This was in the early 1970s, Earth time.

Lombar, casting about for ways and means to accomplish his own ambitions, had his attention drawn to this obscure base by a report that the United States of America, a country he was now aware existed on Blito-P3, had decided that most of the opium which was slipping past Rockecenter’s control was coming from Turkey. And they undertook to pay huge sums to Turkey to stop growing opium.

Instead of reacting with alarm, Lombar knew exactly what would happen. The payments would fall into the hands of the Turkish politicians and they would not pass them on to the farmers and hardship would occur in the Afyon district.

And Lombar suddenly saw his chance on Voltar. For Voltar had never had any involvement with narcotics: their doctors used gas anesthetics and cellologists could handle most pains. He had reviewed drug history in the politics of Blito-P3 and found that a country named England had once totally undermined a population and overthrown the government of China using opium. From there, he planned his own advancement on Voltar.

He helped subsidize the starving farmers by buying their unwanted surplus. He increased the importance of Section 451 in the Apparatus and apparently after a couple of management failures, had found an Academy officer to take it over — namely me.

The U.S. subsidy was soon cancelled. But if the Apparatus had been “in” before, it was the hero of the day now. It was king here in Afyon and Lombar soon would be King on Voltar if he could figure out how to do it. Apparatus Earth base personnel were still the descendants of Turkish war heroes and, like every other Turkish business, they had plaster heads of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the father of modern Turkey, all over the place. Long live the revolution! Long live opium! Long live the Apparatus! And long live His Majesty Lombar, if he could turn the trick on Voltar.

My contemplation ended. Carts or no carts, we had arrived back at the mountain. And there sat my villa!

It had once belonged to some Turkish pasha, a noble of the long-departed regime and probably, before him, to some Byzantine lord and before him some Roman lord and before him some Greek lord and before him who knows: Turkey is the most ruin-strewn place on Blito-P3. Crossroads between Asia and Europe, most of the civilized Earth races you hear about had, at one time or another, colonized Turkey or run an empire from it! It is an archaeologist’s fondest dream: a land absolutely chock-a-block with ruins!

The Apparatus subofficer who founded the place had also rebuilt this villa and lived here a long time. Its maintenance was a standard piece of allocation budgets. Lombar Hisst had once even had the daffy idea of coming down here, a thing which he would never do — it’s fatal for an Apparatus chief to turn his back on Voltar — and so had increased the allocation.

It was built straight in against the mountain. It had big gateposts and walls that hid six acres of grounds and its low, Roman style house.

It was all dark. I hadn’t phoned ahead. I wanted to surprise them.

The “taxi driver” put my luggage down by the dark gate. He was a veteran Apparatus personnel, a child rapist, if I remembered.

The dim light, reflected from the dash of the old Citroen, showed me that he had his hand out.

Ordinarily, I would have been offended. But tonight, in the velvet dark, gleeful with the joy of arriving back, I reached into my pocket. The Turkish lira inflates at about a hundred percent per year. When last I handled any it was about 90 Turkish lira (£T) to the U.S. dollar. But the dollar inflates too, so I guessed it must be about one hundred and fifty to one by now. Besides, it’s what we call “monkey-money”: you’re lucky if anyone will take it outside of Turkey. And my new order gave me an unlimited supply.

I pulled out two bills, thinking they were one’s and handed them over.

He took them to his dashlight to inspect them. I flinched! I had given him two one-thousand Turkish lira notes! Maybe thirteen dollars American!

“Geez,” said the driver in American slang — he talks English and Turkish just like everybody else around here — “Geez, Officer Gris, who do yer want bumped off?”

We both went into screams of laughter. The Mafia is around so much that American gangster slang is a great joke. It made me feel right at home.

In fact, I pulled out two more one-thousand lira sheets of monkey-money. I hitched up my trench coat collar. In American, I said out of the corner of my mouth, “Listen, pal, there’s a broad, a dame, a skirt, see. She’ll be getting off the morning plane from the big town. You keep your peepers peeled at the airport, put the snatch on her, take her to the local sawbones and get her checked for the itch in the privates department and if she gets by the doc, take her for a ride out here. If she don’t, just take her for a ride!”

“Boss,” he said, cocking his thumb like he had a .45, “you got yerself a deal!”

We screamed with laughter again. Then I gave him the two additional bills and he drove off happy as a clam.

Oh, it was good to be home. This was my kind of living.

I turned to the house to yell for somebody to come out and get my baggage.