The Invaders Plan

The lights went off. They were disco

Some of the tension was going out of me. I was just drifting off when a dreadful clamor brought me straight up. Pounding! Hammering! It sounded like they were ripping the ship apart!

I hastily threw a towel around my waist and rushed into the passageway. The sounds redoubled. Then I realized they were coming from the forward auxiliary engine room. That was not right. We were still in the hangar! We ought to be getting crane-lifted to a trundle dolly.

In the control deck, there was Heller. He was perched on the edge of the local pilot chair, red cap on the back of his head. He was talking over the comm system to the engine room. From what he said, it was obvious that it was just a hangar engineer in there, somebody borrowed.

"I'll lift her off very easy, so I don't want much drive," he was saying.

I stared through the opened view windows. The space-particle armor plates were lowered. Heller leaned out and looked around and then yelled a "Stand clear" to some people in the hangar.

My Gods! He was about to fly this thing in the hangar! He might ram another ship or zoom through the roof. "Hey," I yelled. "Don't try to fly in here!" Heller was sitting back. He gave a small laugh. "That's what tugs are for – to move around constricted spaces. Hold on, Soltan. She's jumpy." Somebody with target wands was out in front of the ship. Heller reached for throttles.

I held on!

It wasn't even a straight run! He had to go around a crane and two spaceships and then turn again to get out the door!

There was a crash under us. I thought our bottom had fallen off. But it was just the big blocks and chocks tipping over.

He just perched there on the edge of the chair and flew her out of the hangar on warp drives!

The target man was putting him over well away from the local landing circle but still quite close to the door.

"Hold on, Soltan," said Heller. He wasn't doing any holding on himself, he was just working throttles and switches. I should have believed him!

With a swoop and a drop back, he stood the tug on its tail!

I went sailing down the passage and brought up hard against the door.

The tug didn't. It touched without a quiver and was now vertically sitting just outside the hangar in the open air.

Heller swarmed down the now vertical rungs and offered me a hand and led me into the crew salon. The furniture had gimbaled over ninety degrees to adjust to the tug's being upright now. He pulled out a hot jolt canister from the locker, passed it through the heat coil, pulled the tube up and handed it to me. He smiled. "You ought to leave the bubblebrew alone the night before a voyage, Soltan." It wasn't a criticism, it was just the kind of chatter these Fleet guys engage in. Probably a joke. But it made me feel cross. I didn't want the hot jolt. All I wanted was to go to my room and get at least a few minutes sleep. It was barely daylight outside.

I was just in the act of pushing the hot jolt away when a face jutted into the door.

It was Bawtch!

There he was, with his side-blinders flapping, his popeyes critical, his bony arms piled a yard high with paper!

"I couldn't resist the extreme pleasure of seeing you off, Officer Gris," he said. "And I brought you a going away present. Some orders to stamp."

"All those?" I groaned.

"No, only about a third. But you sure been busy ordering things! Buy, buy, buy! No wonder taxes are so high. The rest of this is just your neglected work: you have several weeks of reports you haven't read and I thought it might relax you on your voyage to do some honestapplication to your job." I tried to wish him away. It didn't work. So I carried the hot jolt back to my room and fished my identoplate out of a waterproof bag, sat down at the gimbal table and started stamping. We would soon be gone. The worst was over – I thought. I would snooze from here on out.

"The rest of this," said old Bawtch, "I'll just put in between these voyage clamps where you can see this undone work every time you start to lie down. Hi, what's this?" The room hadn't neatly returned to horizontal. I had not stowed the gear for flight. He wasn't looking at the weapons that had fallen out of the antiexplosion safe. He was picking the dress uniform off the floor.

"A colonel of the Death Battalions! So that's how you see yourself, Officer Gris. How nice. How appropriate. You'll look well in it, too. The color matches your soul exactly." I ignored him. I noticed from a bill, Ske had bought that uniform at my expense! I went on stamping until my arm was tired. Finally he picked up the validated and OK-to-pay orders.

"Well, I'm leaving now. I heard a rumor that these ships blow up, so have a nice voyage." And, with the sort of evil chuckle that only Bawtch can manage, he was gone.

I finished off the hot jolt. Now if I could just stretch out and go to sleep, some hours later I would awaken, refreshed to find us hurtling through space and Voltar far behind us. What a lovely thought.

Alas, that wasn't the way it happened. I was about to experience the most nerve-shredding departure in space history!

Chapter 8

Just as I was about to lie down, I became conscious of a sort of thundering roar outside. The door to my room and airlock were open, but this wave of sound seemed to make the whole ship shake. It was exactly like a motorized army would sound if one were approaching. And then my ears were shattered by a heavy pounding close to hand.

It was too much for my nerves. I leapt up and ran to the airlock. I almost got my face knocked in as a stage section banged into the ship!

A commercial crew was working like fury erecting an eighty-foot-high, portable reviewing platform and wide steps which would reach from the ground up to the airlock!

I stared beyond this. My Gods! The hangar security fence gates to the outside world were wide open! Commercial lorries were pouring through the gap six abreast!

Already dozens of lorries were in the hangar.

Crews were unloading portable stages and bars: they were obviously converting this end of the hangar into the most gigantic entertainment tup hall anybody had ever seen! One bar was over two hundred feet long! One stage alone was thirty feet high and wide enough to take half the dancing girls on Voltar! And there were still more going up and still more lorries coming!

In total panic I rushed to the control deck. Heller was there dropping the meteor armor plates into position to cover the front ports.

I screamed at him, "You can't have a go-away party! That was just a joke! THIS IS A SECRET MISSION!" He stopped working and looked at me with surprise. "But you've been okaying party orders. You authorized tons of them the other day. Just an hour ago I saw you stamping more!"

"Lombar will kill me!" I shouted.

"I'm sorry," he said, and he seemed to mean it. "But you see, this ship doesn't have a name. When she was transferred out of the Fleet she lost her designation. She hasn't been christened. It's about the unluckiest thing you can do to cruise around in an unchristened ship. Anybody in the Fleet can tell you that. They might blow up." (Bleep) his Fleet customs. But the idea of this tug blowing up was never far from my mind.

He thought it over. "It's now going on eight! The christening will probably start around ten. We will be able to launch around noon." I kept shaking my head.

"I'll tell you what we'll do," Heller said. "We'll hold it down all we can. We'll try to keep it just as sort of a family affair. All right?" I knew I couldn't call back my orders or stop those lorries now. And there must be hundreds of contractor men, who had worked on the ship, invited with their families. And all the hangar crews. It would be worse to try to stop it than to let it go forward. So I nodded.