–Translator

"I'll be there," said Heller.

He went on groping through notices. Finally he found a fresh one.

Nature Appreciation 101

This class has been transferred for this semester to

Instructor Wouldlice. The schedule remains the same.

That was what he was looking for. He went to a phone kiosk and looked in the yellow pages so quick, I didn't get it. Then he went trotting off to the Empire Subway Station.

He was playing hooky!

He caught a train and went roaring downtown and presently was clickety-clacking into an elevator of a big building. It dawned on me that he was wearing another pair of baseball spikes! The elevator mirror showed he was in tennis flannels with his red baseball cap on the back of his head. I had learned what that cap meant: he thought he must be working.

He stopped before a door marked Geological Survey and United States Government. Then he went in.

A clerk was behind a counter. "I'm looking for gold mines," said Heller.

"Who isn't?" said the clerk.

"I'm studying gold mines along the New England coast," said Heller.

"Oh, hell, you must be a fan of old Cap Duggan," said the clerk. "Cap!" The clerk pointed, "Go on in there and wake him up. He'll chew your ear for hours."

Heller went in. An old man was sorting charts.

Heller told him what he wanted. "Yeah," he said, "I wrote a book on colonial mines and minerals once. Nobody ever read it though. The publisher sent me a bill. Sit down."

Cap Duggan, being a government employee, was not pushed for time and he proceeded to tell Heller the story of his life. He was a surveyor, too old to push a transit anymore, and put out to grass pending retirement. Heller heard all about the Seven Cities of Cibola and lost mines and Indian fights, and they went out and Heller bought him a lunch and then heard all about Alaska and the Klondike and the days of '49. Aside from the fact that it was all about gold—which never fails to interest—I could not see how Custer's Last Stand really was caused by gold in the Black Hills. But Heller just sat there lapping it all up.

Three solid hours and a lunch and they got down to absolutely nothing!

Finally old Cap Duggan ran out of steam and decided to discuss the subject to hand. "These are what you are looking for, young fellow," he said as he managed to wrestle open a huge drawer. "They're photostats of charts that are in National Archives down in Washington."

They were bad copies of charts that must have been so old and stained in the first place that not even the originals could have been made out.

Cap Duggan spread some out. "They're colonial surveys. See here? This top one was done by George Washington himself. The scale is all perverted on most of them as the original charter companies was trying to convince the king they had less than they wanted, but you can make them out."

Heller was going over them with a microscopic eye. He found one marked Connecticut. "Hey," he said suddenly, "here's a creek named 'Goldmine'! Empties into the Atlantic. Right there—only twenty or thirty miles northeast from where we are right now!"

"So 'tis," said Cap Duggan. "Probably some local name."

"Can I see the current charts of that area?"

Cap Duggan got them. "Well, well," he said. "It's on the current chart, too. Look, there's even some mineral indicators. Oh, yeah. I know that place. Lost mine. Never found. I remember about forty years ago somebody that was adjusting boundaries around there. Probably never was a mine, just somebody's idea to attract colonists or something. Now look, way up to the northeast of there, almost in the middle of the state, there's a real mine—near Portland, Connecticut. The Strickland Quarry. Lot of rock hounds go there. There's also quarries at Roxbury, Branchville, East Hampton and Old Mystic right down on the coast. They dig gemstones, garnets and such like. Lot of stuff like that in Connecticut. Just drive up to Westchester and get on the New England Thruway—that's really U.S. 95—and have at it. Connecticut's awful pretty this time of year. I wished I wasn't stuck in this God (bleeped) office! Well, I'll be retired soon and they'll let me out of the cage."

Heller bought a stack of maps down to the tiniest sections. He also bought twenty copies of Cap Duggan's book—autographed! And really left the old man beaming.

When he left, he made one more stop. At a flower shop. He ordered that, every day, Miss Simmons was to get a bunch of beautiful flowers in the hospital.

He got back on the subway and very soon was sitting in High Library again. Bang-Bang came in from a tape-recorder pickup and planting, Heller's sneaky way to avoid attending classes.

"What's new?" said Heller.

"Nothing," said Bang-Bang. "Going to college is great." And he got back to reading his comic books.

But the day left me in a spin. Heller was now up to something else. I could feel it. I was really frustrated. I did not know where he was going to break out next. He was milling around. And I knew he was up to no good.

And then I really got upset. About midnight I went into my bedroom. There was a card lying on my pillow!

Nobody could have gotten into that room!

But there was the card!

The message was addressed to me in a scrawled hand:

SOLTAN GRIS: I WAS TOLD TO REMIND YOU FROM TIME TO TIME THAT SOMEBODY UNKNOWN TO YOU IS AROUND WITH ORDERS TO FINISH YOU OFF IF YOU MESS UP. HISST LEFT THE CHOICE UP TO THAT PERSON. A KNIFE? A GUN? AN AUTO ACCIDENT? MAYBE SOME POISON IN THE FOOD? YOU HAVEN'T GOT A CHOICE. EXCEPT NOT TO MESS UP. SO, GRIS, DON'T MESS UP.

And then a dagger drawn! The only signature!

Who was it? One of the Turkish help? Somebody in Afyon? Somebody on the base? Time after time I was certain I had it.

I didn't get any sleep.

It was Tuesday at 4:00 P.M. Eastern Standard Time.

Heller had had his usual day—going to college the hard way. He was sitting on the steps of High Library, dressed for a change in a beige lounge suit. He had been reading a secret manual from his Army ROTC class on how you blackmailed agents into blackmailing the general's wife to get the battle plans. The class bell rang somewhere. He put the manual aside, looked up and there was Izzy Epstein.

I was rather amazed to see Izzy appear. After Heller gave him ten thousand dollars to set up some corporation, I had been more or less certain that he would simply take Heller's money and vanish. But here he was. I knew at once that some deeper plot must be boiling in his cunning brain, some way to take Heller for even more money.

Epstein looked very apprehensive. He stood fumbling with the tattered briefcase, two steps below the level Heller was sitting on.

"Hello, Izzy," said Heller. "Have a seat."

"No, no. I should stand when in the presence of my superior."

"You're responsible for me, so what's this superior stuff?" said Heller.

"I am afraid you'll be cross with me. I deserve it."

"Sit down and tell me why," said Heller.

"I didn't get it all done. I knew the job would be too heavy for me."

"Well, I'm sure you got something done," said Heller.

"This and that," said Izzy. "But..." and then he sighed with relief, looking down the steps and to the opposite side. Bang-Bang was trotting up.

"Last charge recovered," said Bang-Bang. "We got no five o'clock class today."

"What's this?" said Izzy.

Heller told him about the recorders Bang-Bang had planted in the courserooms.

Izzy was shocked. "Oh," he said. "That must be very tiring. And dangerous, too! There will be quizzes and lab periods. It is really just a problem in business administration. For a small expenditure, I may be able to unburden your day a bit."

"Go ahead," said Heller.

"I'll do a time-motion efficiency study and let you know," said Izzy. "But here, I am wasting your valuable time right now." He opened his case, got out some papers and handed them to Bang-Bang. "If you will just sign these, it makes you a social-security, withholding-tax employee of the New York Amazing Investment Company. I understand you have to have something to show a parole officer tomorrow morning."