Read Ebook: Tubemonkey by Bixby Jerome Vestal Herman B Illustrator

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Ebook has 119 lines and 7451 words, and 3 pages

That tore through Rhiannon's fog and he reacted. He straightened his seventy nine inches into the position of attention. "I'd like nothing better, sir," he said.

Karrin made a great show of inspecting their immediate surroundings for eavesdroppers.

He said: "This is a very important, a top secret mission. We--the Council--believe that you are the only man who can fly it. We selected you from among thousands, Rhiannon!"

Rhiannon stood ever more stiffly, his face incandescent.

"Very few people do," Karrin replied dryly. "Now, soldier, a special boat is being tuned up at my private field. Do you know where that is?"

"Outside in back, sir. I've worked on your boats."

Karrin nodded. "Then go there immediately and wait. Talk to no one. I have to confer with President Naro before--"

Karrin saluted theatrically and Rhiannon responded with eyes afire. The big man executed a neat about-face and marched one two through the door. And looking after the broad back, Karrin speculated where to place the death shot when the time came.

The nebula hung to starboard, seeming almost at arm's length from the ports; a silver pinwheel; a thirty thousand light year toy. Rhiannon jockeyed the boat closer and closer to the Rebel craft, his big hands skipping over the board with consummate, unthinking skill. He shot out the hand-line and it snaked to the airlock of the other boat.

Janus, holding the briefcase flat against his belly, stepped into the lower portion of the single spacesuit and ducked under and up into the top portion that hung from its rack. The muffled clicks as he turned the sealing handles were the only sound in the cabin. Then his voice came metallic from the speaker. "We'll contact you, Karrin, if we need you again--although I think this trip should be the last one." He inflated the suit and stamped several times, testing the suit's perfection by the ringing in his ears.

Karrin's reply was purposefully vague, with an eye to Rhiannon. "There should be use for the Security Chief of Federation Spacelines even after the war is over, Janus. A--ah--'Rebel' underground will likely start up--and as you've already seen, a man with a briefcase will hardly doubt the purity of my kitchens or suspect one of my cabin-boys of unwanted partisanship. I have some very cooperative men working for me."

Putting a boot on the hatch-ladder, Janus showed a sardonic grin through his faceplate. "Every man's purse is a traitor--"

Karrin sliced off the words with a quick gesture and shot a look at Rhiannon. The tubemonkey was staring through the front port at the stars, his face a caricature of bliss.

Karrin walked over to the front port and watched for Janus to become visible on the near length of the line. Watched, too, Rhiannon's reflection in the glass. The big man was gaping at the nebula and twitching the thick muscles of his neck in ecstasy. Karrin felt an urge to snicker.

"Good to get back, eh?" he asked.

Rhiannon pointed. "There's your friend, sir."

Janus was bobbing, hand over hand, toward the unmarked Rebel boat. His faceplate gleamed once as it caught the fire of the nebula.

Then, before Karrin's paling face, the silver cigar that was the other boat suddenly threw off into space a thin leafing of curved misshapen plates. It grew whiskers that were ray-guns and the Nova sign of the Patrol blinked into being on its nose. The transformation took just three seconds, and on the tick of the fourth there was a honk from Karrin's telaudio to announce that the revealed law-boat desired contact.

Hissing between his clamped teeth Karrin leaned over Rhiannon's wide shoulder and speared a finger at the control board. The Patrolmen had made the mistake of judging his boat at its space-yacht face value, but it was far more than that.

The "yacht's" concealed atomicannons blasted the other craft into radioactive dust. The frantically gesticulating figure of Janus was swallowed by the glare, and when space darkened again there was only the fused cable end, chewed off short near Karrin's porthole.

"Ge-ez!" cried Rhiannon. "Why'd you do that?"

"Didn't you see?" Karrin snapped. "It was a Rebel boat! Janus must have been a spy!"

"But there was a Patrol Nova on--"

"Rhiannon--you've done a magnificent job!" Karrin clapped a hand on the giant's arm and tightened it emotionally. He slipped the safety on his pocketed atom pistol with the other hand. "That wasn't a Nova--that was the Rebel Tetra!"

Rhiannon looked up at him, his forehead plowed over with thought; then gradually a wide grin spread his lips. "We done it, didn't we?"

"We sure did."

Karrin's face was flattened at the cheeks. How the Patrol had known of this meeting he would never know, short of torturing each of his "cooperative men." Janus was gone. The briefcase was gone. The real Rebel boat was probably bright drifting dust somewhere between here and Llarn's moon. Karrin shivered.

"One way to find out."

Rhiannon looked up vaguely. "What, sir?"

"Get us back to Llarn, Rhiannon. I've got to report this to the President."

The swirling salt of the nebula moved out of the port and vanished as the big man tailed the boat around and side-stepped it into hyper-space. Karrin stood with wet hands clasped at his back. My papers. My money. I'll get them and make a run for Rebel H.Q. Surely the tip had not implicated him or he would never have gotten off Llarn in the first place. The Patrol would have seen to that: they knew that so many things could go wrong out in space.

The Government Spaceport was emptied and darkened by the evening. Steve Podalski and his brethren had gone to their homes, Tweety had gone sailing up into the stratosphere to sleep, and the only living creature was Sergeant Atoms who lay twitching his paws in a dream-chase.

From the floor of Bed 52 Rhiannon watched Karrin labor up the motionless 'scalator, saw the lights flicker on, saw his employer move about shoving things into a carrycase.

Rhiannon's affliction may be said to have been "stroboscopic" in character. That is, his brain functioned with an irregular alternation of clarity and fuddle. At this moment the lights were on in that great skull and his brain cells were skittering about, playing with a Thought.

He shifted uneasily in his wrappings of tubemonkey suit and reflections. He looked up again at Karrin's office. The man had moved back from the window; only his head was visible, seeming to roll like Tweety back and forth on the broad sill as he crossed from safe to desk, desk to safe. That distant face was sculptured in pure anxiety. Karrin was obviously, was definitely, not reporting to President Naro. He wasn't doing anything of the kind.

Rhiannon put these observations one under the other, added them, and got the right answer. He'd been taken. Just as his fellow workers could play incredible jokes on him--when Stevie wasn't around--and have them pan out because of his braincut, so had Spy Karrin pulled a whopper.

Having worked this out, the busy cells slowed down, the lights began to dim behind the giant's dulling eyes. He stood there in the darkness, having one grim determination, and not knowing quite why he had it.

Karrin came out of his office and grunted down the 'scalator, unused to the knee action of climbing and descending. His shadowy figure came across the floor, gradually giving its details. His face was red, his eyes were feathered with red; he hugged the carrycase like a mourning Apache mother.

"Ready?" he asked.

Rhiannon blocked the door; his voice came puzzledly: "I ain't going."

The carrycase thudded to the floor; it didn't bounce, but if it had, the appearance of Karrin's atom pistol would have shaded the second thud. Rhiannon planted his legs like standards.

"I ain't going to fly you anyplace," he said, "an' I ain't gonna let you go either. I--don't know why--I--can't--won't--"

At that moment a door rolled open at the far end of 52, and the tall, wary shapes of Patrolmen blinked through the rectangle of light into the dark pool of the Bed. They made directly for the still lighted office.

Silently, silently! Karrin had to reach to do it. He reached high, standing on tiptoe, and brought the butt of his gun down on Rhiannon's head. The giant made a sound like a baffled ape and took a forward step. His outflinging leg struck the floor without sensation and buckled. The gun went up and came down twice again.

Rhiannon felt a cloth-ripping pain in his head. Static crackled and slammed into his brain. It swelled louder and more penetrating; then muffled down to lengthening drumrolls.

The nebula beckoned him from his straight path back to Polaris. He circled it carefully, although there wasn't any sign of danger. It wasn't a very interesting nebula. He wheeled Karrin's boat once again toward Polaris and his three-headed friends. Sergeant Atoms sat alertly at his side.

Then suddenly, terrifying, the boat pulled away from under their feet and left them cold and lonely in airlessness. The sweet stars began to blink out in clusters; the celestial static dimmed down into the silence of infinite sleep.

From somewhere in this dying universe came a cold and wet nose. It sniffed anxiously at his face and red-matted hair.

A whine. Another louder whine; and a scratch of claws on concrete.

Rhiannon opened his eyes.

There were walls and the concrete floor and the hovering, shadowed cradles. There was the crouching figure of Karrin, seen from below and distorted, framed briefly in the door. There was a mud-colored shadow that sniffed and whined and gave its tail little hesitant twitches.

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