“Now, are my old quarters ready?”

This upset him further. I finally got it out of him. “That dancing girl you had there got to playing around with anybody and she gave the (bleep) to four guards and stole some of your clothes and ran off.”

Well, women always were unfaithful. And factually, there aren’t any real dancing girls left in Turkey. They’ve all emigrated elsewhere and what remains are just the bawds in the big city, not real belly dancers. “Get on that phone to our contact in the Istanbul Sirkeci quarter and have him ship one in on the morning plane.”

Faht Bey’s wife came in with some more tea and coffee. Now that important things were cared for, I sat down and drank some of the coffee. It was as thick as syrup to begin with and the heaps of sugar in it made it almost solid.

The base commander was through so I said, “Are Raht and Terb here?”

He bobbed his head. “Raht is. Terb is in New York.”

I produced Lombar’s now-sealed orders to Raht. “Give these to Raht. Have him on the morning plane to the U.S. Give him plenty of expense money as he’s going to Virginia to get something ready.”

“I don’t know if I can get him a seat,” said Faht Bey. “Turkish airlines…”

“You’ll get him a seat,” I said.

He bobbed his head. Yes, he would get him a seat.

“Now,” I said, “speaking of money, here is an order.” I threw it on the desk. It was a pretty good order. I had typed it myself on the tug’s administrative machine. It said:

I had even forged a signature and identoplate stamp nobody could read. It would never go back to Voltar. Voltar doesn’t even know these Blito-P3 funds exist. Clever.

It made him blink a bit. But he took it and put it in his files and then, because I was holding out my hand, went into the back room where he kept his safe.

“Ten thousand Turkish lira and ten thousand dollars United States will do for a start,” I called after him.

He brought them out and laid the wads in my hand and I stuffed them in the pocket of my trench coat.

“Now,” I said, “open that top drawer of your desk and take out the Colt .45 automatic you keep there and hand it over.”

“It’s my own gun!”

“Steal another off some Mafia hit man,” I said. “That’s where you got this one. You wouldn’t want me to violate Space Code Number a-36-544 M Section B, would you? Alien disclosure?”

He did as he was told. He even added two extra loaded clips. I checked the weapon out. I had seen the gun there a year ago when I was snooping in his desk looking for blackmail data. It was a U.S. Army 1911A1.

But a year ago I didn’t have the rank I had now. That he had taken it off the Mafia was pure guess. But sure enough, it had three notches filed into the butt plate.

I wanted to reassure him. No sense in making him too panicky. I cocked and spun the .45 expertly and pulled the trigger. There was no bullet under the firing pin, of course. And the barrel had wound up pointed at his stomach, not his head. The gun just went click. “Bull’s-eye!” I said in English, laughing.

He wasn’t laughing. “Timyjo Faht,” I said, using his Flisten police-blotter name, and speaking in a mixture of Voltarian and English, “you and I are going to get along just fine. So long, of course, as you do everything I tell you, break your (bleep) to see to my creature comforts and keep your nose clean. There’s nothing illegal you can do that I can’t do better. So what I want around here is respect.” He also speaks English. He also deals with the Mafia. So he got my point.

I gave the Colt .45 another twirl and put it in my trench coat pocket just like I’d seen an actor called Humphrey Bogart do in an old Earth film last year.

I went back to my waiting “taxi.” I got in. In American, I said, “Home, James, and step on it!”

For, in truth, I was home. This was my kind of country. Of all the places in the universe I’d been, this was the one place that really appreciated my type. Here, I was their kind of hero. And I loved it.

Chapter 7

I rode through the sultry night, the air like soft, black velvet on my face. To the right and left of me the sunflowers flashed along in the headlights. And beyond them, nicely obscured from the casual passing tourist, were the vast expanses of Papaver somniferum, the deadly opium poppies, the reason the Apparatus had settled here in the first place.

It is an interesting story as it sheds some insight on how the Apparatus works, and tonight, when we found ourselves held up by a procession of badly tail-lit carts, I went over it.

Long ago, an Apparatus cultural and technical survey crew, made up of a subofficer and three Apparatus peoplographers, had been interrupted by the outbreak of what they call, on Earth, World War I. They had missed their pickup ship, were unable to get to the rendezvous and thereafter had dodged across this border and that, taking advantage of the turmoils of war. They had gotten into Russia when it was writhing with revolution and had fallen south through the Caucasus and, from Armenia, had crossed the border into Turkey.

They had hidden out on the slopes of Buyuk Agri, a 16,946-foot peak known otherwise as Mount Ararat. They put their call-in signal there in the hopes that its steady radio beep and the prominence of the mountain would eventually bring an Apparatus search ship.

But the war came to an end and still no rescue ship, so, pretty chilled with altitude and privation, they slogged their way westward, vowing amongst them not to stop until they found warmer weather. It must have been a bitter trip as the high plateau of eastern Turkey is no garden spot. But they made it, assisted by the fact that Turkey, which had been in the war on the wrong side, was in the chaos of defeat and victor dismemberment. They came at length to Afyon. It was warmer. And before them they saw the remarkable tall black rock and fortress, Afyonkarahisar. They put their call-in signal up in the ruins and made shift to survive, hiding in the war-ripped countryside. They could actually speak Turkish by this time and the land abounded with deserters.

Nineteen hundred twenty, Earth date, came. A huge Greek expeditionary force was approaching Afyon to grab a big slice of Turkey. The Turkish general, Ismet Pasha, not only checked the Greek army but actually defeated the invaders twice and in the very shadow of Afyonkarahisar.

Caught up in all this, the Apparatus subofficer and the three peoplographers chose sides, took uniforms and weapons from the dead and actually fought in the second battle as Turkish soldiers.

The following month somebody in the Apparatus, probably looking for an excuse for a vacation, noticed they had a cultural and technical survey team missing. It was not a very important survey — it was the twenty-ninth Blito-P3 had had in the last several thousand years. The Timetable did not call for an invasion of that planet for another hundred and eighty years or more but this Apparatus officer got permission and a scoutship and was probably surprised to find the call-in beeping away on the top of Afyonkarahisar. So the Apparatus squad was finally rescued after nearly seven years.

This survey team subofficer, probably himself looking for a sinecure, came back with a wonderful idea.

Old Muhck, Lombar’s predecessor, had listened.

It seemed that during World War I, the rest of the world had begun to adopt a Russian idea called “passports”; it had failed utterly to save the Russian government from revolution and was silly, so, of course, the other governments were avidly taking it up. In the predictable future, and long before the invasion was scheduled, it would be pretty hard to infiltrate Blito-P3.