Part 3

"The proper address to Mr. Gerding is 'Your Royal Highness,' darling," Miss Vingt said, accompanying her point of protocol with a jab at the small of Orison's back. "Come along, darling."

"I'm not going anywhere until I've telephoned Dink," Orison said.

"Terribly sorry," said Colonel Auga Vingt. "Our telephone has just gone out of order." Two bravos wearing U.S. Army fatigues--surely the largest such uniforms ever sewn together--stepped into the room. They were enormous men, menacing, purple of ear. "Will you walk along like a good girl, or shall I have my pets carry you?" the odious Auga asked.

"I'll walk," Orison decided. "What's more, I'll sue."

"All in good time, darling," Auga Vingt said.

* * * * *

Orison's cell was large enough to be a ballroom, comprising as it did the entire basement of the armory. A cot had been unfolded in one corner, next to a parked half-track, and three olive-drab blankets were stacked upon it. "Home, darling," Colonel Vingt said.

"I hope you realize that kidnapping is a Federal offense," Orison said.

"So is seizing an armory," her warden explained. "Of course, the U.S. Army doesn't realize we've got it, yet. They drill here only on Mondays." She turned and spoke quickly to the two guards, using what was apparently the same language Wanji had employed over the telephone. The guards bowed, then each chose a vehicle for his guard-post. One seated himself behind the wheel of a weapons-carrier, the other posting himself, cross-legged, on the steel hatch of a Sherman tank.

Auga Vingt turned to leave. "Hey," Orison said. "You're not going to abandon me here with these two gorillas."

"But, darling, I am!" the obnoxious Auga replied. "If you're worried about your virtue, rest easy, lamb. I can assure you that my thugs are safe as kittens, providing only that you make no attempt to escape. They are required, you see, to confine their romantic aspirations to members of the Royal Refreshment Corps of appropriate rank. Since they speak no English, nor any other tongue you're likely to have heard of, they won't be much company. But they will be loyal in their attendance."

"Let me out of here!" a man's voice shouted, the sound echoing among the ranks of tanks, half-tracks, weapons-carriers, and jeeps.

"Who's that?" Orison demanded.

"Your fellow-prisoner," Auga explained. "Until quite recently, he was Commanding Officer of C Company. Your keepers have strict orders not to let you two speak to one another. But I must get on with my duties, charming as I find your company. Good day, darling."

"Drop dead," Orison suggested.

* * * * *

After the door had slammed behind Auga Vingt, and the key had chattered in its lock, she sat at the edge of her cot. The two guards watched her as casually as though she were just another item on the Motor Company's T.O.&E. This is what she got for playing it coy with Washington, Orison thought. If she'd clued J-12 in on the Microfabridae, she'd at least have been given some technical help. Then someone might have been there to blow the whistle when she disappeared from the Taft Bank Building. As things stood now, no one would know of her abduction until her pillow called tonight at eleven-fifteen and got no answer: A long time off, she thought. Perhaps she could get some help from the imprisoned commander of C Company, she thought. Orison stood and called out, "Hey, there! Can you hear...."

A large palm suddenly closed over her mouth. The guard who'd been seated atop the tank had sprung down and appeared beside her as suddenly as a circus trick. Experimentally, he removed his hand from her mouth. "... me?" Orison completed her query, and was shut off again.

"Five by five," the male voice answered. "Who are...." The other guard was gone now, and presumably stood beside the captain as his fellow stood beside Orison. There was silence for five minutes, Orison having trouble breathing, struggling until it became apparent that no action of hers would have the slightest effect on the mountainous bulk of her muffler. Then he removed his hand. Orison, out of breath, her lesson learned, stayed quiet. The guards resumed their seats aboard the rolling-stock.

There must be another way to signal her fellow-prisoner, Orison thought. Tapping? She clicked an S-O-S on the side of a jeep with her pen. Her guard appeared beside her as quickly as before, and took the pen to stick it in his pocket. She was, it appeared, effectively in solitary confinement.

Orison stood up to see if the guard minded. Apparently not. She walked about the huge basement. She'd never before seen so much military hardware outside an Armed Forces Day parade. Impressive, all this steel. A ramp led up to a door the size of a barn-side, also steel, bolted. If she could get inside a tank, and close the hatch, and somehow get the monster up that ramp to ram that door, she'd make an impressive call for help, Orison thought. She put one foot atop a tank-tread when a large arm reached around her and set her aside. Her guard, silent-footed, had been following all through her tour.

Orison returned to her cot.

Great deal, she thought. From desk to dungeon in an hour and a half. She'd battled with shadows, earmuffed shadows, and had got herself set in an amateur jail guarded by a pair of purple-eared apes. Nothing to do but wait.

Four feet crashed onto concrete, two figures bowed till the palms of their hands brushed the floor. "_T'ink_," the newcomer said. The two guards backed to their vehicles and resumed their seats.

"Orison, my dear!" It was Kraft Gerding, all unction and teeth, advancing upon her like the loser at tennis, hand outstretched. "I hope you haven't been unduly discommoded," he said.

* * * * *

"I haven't been commoded at all," Orison said. "No one showed me the way. Would you mind explaining this chivaree to me, Mr. Gerding?"

"I'd be delighted to explain, my dear," Kraft Gerding said, bowing. "May I sit?" he asked, waving a hand toward her cot.

"You may fall on your dreadful face, for all I care," Orison said.

"You must learn to speak like a queen," Kraft said, seating himself on the cot beside her. "Otherwise, of course, you are perfect."

"Of course," Orison said. "I can't say the same for you."

"I grow on one," Kraft said. "You wonder, no doubt, how the William Howard Taft National Bank and Trust Company became a battleground; why many of our employees have ears the color of day-old bruises; why Wanji was so exercised by the color of escudoes; and what the work is that the Microfabridae sing at. No?"

"Yes," Orison said.

"May I smoke?" Kraft Gerding asked, bringing a cheroot from an inner pocket of his fieldmarshal's uniform.

"Smoke, glow, burst into flame. It's all the same to me," Orison said.

Kraft Gerding lit his cheroot with the air of an acolyte igniting incense. Then, puffing, "Accident," he said, "has made you privy to a _coup d'etat_. Our Empire, you see, is based on porphyrogeniture. Thus my brother, Dink, is the Heir Apparent. I, his elder brother, conceived before our father became Emperor, am merely Margrave of the North, Prince Royal of the House of Dink, Colonel-General of the Forces of the Triple Crown, Grand Duke of the Zilf Archipelago and Holder of the Keys to the Royal City of Chilif."

"How unassuming can you get?" Orison asked.

"Your un-knowledge is deeper than I bethought me," Kraft Gerding said, smiling, scooting a little wester on the cot. Orison moved one hips-breadth further to the west.

"Very well," Kraft said. "As a primer, thus: my brother Dink ger-Dink, heir through accident of tradition to the Triple Crown of Empire; I, his elder, better brother; and our officers and exiles--these latter common criminals, marked for men's contempt with purple ears--constitute the XLIIth Subversion-and-Conquest Task Force of the Empire of Dink. This mighty Empire, for your information, lies some distance off in the southern skies of Earth."

"How far off?" Orison asked.

"As far," Kraft Gerding said, "as all your men since Adam have run in pursuit of beauty." He scooted further west.

Orison made still further westering. "You come from some foreign planet?" she asked.

"No longer foreign, my dear," Kraft said. "Our planet, our triple footstool, welcomes young Earth to share our ancient wisdom and relax under the shadow of our might."

"And I, young Earth, tell you, Kraft Gerding, to go sail a saucer," Orison said.

* * * * *

Kraft Gerding stood up. "Come with me, my dear. I'll show you the greenery that establishes me as Emperor Apparent of the planet Earth." He strode to a steel door, took a key from his pocket, and unlocked it. "Behold!" he said, flinging the door open.

Orison stepped into the basement room, a cube some fifty feet in each dimension. She found herself in a corridor between huge walls of bundled paper. Kraft Gerding, behind her, pried a packet from the wall and handed it to her. "This, my dear Orison, is the lever with which I'll over-turn the Earth," he said.

The bundle was banded with a strip of paper bearing the legend, "$5,000 in 50's." Each bit of paper in the bundle bore the portrait of President U. S. Grant. "This room," Kraft Gerding said, "contains some four hundred million dollars in U.S. currency. I intend with this money, and as much more as I need, to subvert and purchase a nation. The United States will then be the beach-head for the world."

"Counterfeits," Orison said.

"But perfect counterfeits," Kraft said. "The paper was manufactured by the master-craftsmen of Chilif. The inks were compounded by the chemists of that same capital city of Empire. The plates were cut by twenty million engravers, the Microfabridae of the Storm-Planet, supervised by Elder Compassion, an ancient of the slothful race that inhabits the planet nearest our mother sun. This is but one of my treasuries. I have many such. There is the Threadneedle Room, filled with pounds-sterling, in ones, fives, fifties and hundreds. There are other rooms, boxes, trunks and trucks filled with all the currencies of Earth. I am ready now to purchase this planet from its owners. No violence, you see. Just subterfuge."

"It's violence enough, to ruin a planet," Orison said.

"It beats war," Kraft Gerding said, drawing on his cheroot.

"And that disgusting Miss Vingt?" Orison asked. "What does she do in your forces of subversion?"

"Colonel the Margrave Auga Vingt is commander of the Royal Refreshment Corps," Kraft said. "You understand that it wouldn't do to allow our men, the purple-eared scum of three planets, to live off the land in the delicate matter of women. Colonel Vingt's Corps both maintains morale and prevents incidents of fraternization that Earthmen might deplore with their fists and guns." Kraft chuckled. "You'll be amused to hear that Auga Vingt has an ambition to become my Empress, once I have overthrown my brother's tyranny and taken over Earth."

"I must sit down," Orison said.

"By all means, my dear," Kraft said. He tipped over a stack of bundled twenty-dollar bills as a hassock for her comfort.

* * * * *

"Could I have a cigarette?" Orison asked.

"Do." Kraft Gerding removed a pack from his pocket and lighted it for her, passing it from his lips to hers. Orison, hiding her feelings of distaste for this intimacy, drew on the cigarette. "Perhaps I might have a drink as well?" she asked. "All this is making me rather dizzy."

"It is dizzy-making," Kraft conceded. "In an instant, my pet." He strode from the treasure-room, shouting in his native language to the guards.

Orison tugged a twenty-dollar bill from one of the bundles on which she'd been sitting and held it to the tip of her cigarette, drawing to make it hot. The paper glowed, but the tiny patch of fire died out almost at once. She fumbled in her purse. There it was--her bottle of nail-polish remover. She splashed the aromatic fluid over the bundled money and again touched her cigarette to it. The paper flared. Flames ran in upstream rivers through the stacks above.

Orison ran to the nearest jeep and turned the key. The gears were unfamiliar to her, but she mastered them sufficiently to get moving forward toward the steel doors. Up the ramp she rolled, her feet braced down hard on the accelerator, wedged into her seat. The jeep struck the steel doors and bounced back the ramp to the sound of a giant Chinese gong, its engine stalled. Groggy, Orison dismounted and ran to the door. She pounded on the steel with both fists, shouting for help.

An arm encircled Orison, and she heard behind her the door of the money-room slam shut. "The blaze will smolder itself out in a moment, my dear," Kraft Gerding said. He spoke to the guard who held her, and she was released. "I doubt that you've destroyed more than a million dollars' worth of your local paper with your prank," he said. "Five minutes' press-run. I've brought you a spot of brandy. I daresay you can use it. Arson is thirsty work."

He held out his hand. One of the purple-eared guards produced a silver tray with a decanter and two balloon-glasses, poured them a quarter full and presented the glasses to his chief, bowing deeply. Kraft took one glass, giving the other to Orison. "A toast?" he asked. "To the success of my rebellion. To our inevitable marriage. And to the health of our progeny, who are, my dear, to inherit the Earth. A shotgun toast," he said.

Orison dashed her brandy toward his face. Kraft turned, catching the shower against his left ear, where it trickled down to stain the braid of his epaulette. He glared and raised his hand in a most unchivalrous gesture, then stopped himself. One of the guards produced a silken cloth to blot him dry.

"The word 'shotgun' was perhaps ill-chosen," Kraft said. "The spirit you show, dear Orison, is a quality most appropriate to the future Empress of Earth."

"Keep away from me," Orison said.

* * * * *

"Our ceremony of betrothal is simple," Kraft said. He put his sword-arm about her waist. "You need only hear me say the words, 'I, Rex-Imperator, take thee to wife,' and then bow, in the presence of witnesses of my choosing. You'll be as noble as any princess conceived in the Purple Chamber of the Palace of Chilif."

"I'd rather die than marry you," Orison said.

"You've established the parameters of the possible rather neatly, my dear," Kraft Gerding said. "You will become my wife, and Empress-Apparent of Earth, or you will shortly be the loveliest corpse on this fair planet. My will is heaven's law, you understand. My word carries the sanction of two suns, and my anger breeds massive destruction. I ask of you your one slight person. In return, I offer to share with you my greatness. You will rule with me in the palace I have chosen--I forget its name, but it is presently used as the tomb of the lady who invented the brassiere--the Taj Mahal, that's it. Perhaps we could rename it. Answer quickly, now; great deeds are deeds of impulse: marry me!"

"You're mad," Orison said.

"When a man has the power I have, he cannot be called a madman, for his mind shapes the world to his dreams. There is then, you see, no disorientation," Kraft said. "You've had a good ten seconds now to decide. Shall I call my wedding-guests or my executioner?"

"Dink will never let you marry me," Orison said.

"His suit has come so far as that?" Kraft said. "No matter. I'll destroy him."

"Please leave me, Your Excellency," Orison said. "I need time to think."

"I am clay in your lovely hands," Kraft said, bowing. "I grant your wish."

"If I might ask another boon, Your Excellency," Orison said, "I'd like to talk with Dink."

"And so you shall," Kraft promised her. "Tomorrow, perhaps. With my brother in chains and you in the regalia of an Empress." He bowed again, and left her. The door-lock clicked after him. The two huge guards closed in on either side of Orison and led her back to her cot. When she had seated herself, they withdrew to their perches on the Army vehicles.

VII

I might as well have joined the Marine Corps instead of the Treasury Department, Orison thought, resting her fists on her knees. She had no weapons now, nothing to help her break out from this steel-shuttered cellar. What's more, the only clear evidence she had of the crime these extraterrestrials were plotting was a single counterfeit twenty-dollar bill wadded up in her hand. It looked entirely genuine, she thought. It was perhaps too perfect for her purpose. It was quite possible that this bill could be established as a counterfeit only by the unlikely discovery of a genuine note with the same serial-number. The paper-makers and chemists of Chilif, the engraving millions of Microfabridae, had done their work too well.

Suddenly, across Orison's field of regard there danced dozens of brilliant, five-pointed stars--over the weapons-carriers and the tanks, the jeeps and the two lolling guards, the concrete floor and the steel doors. Orison rubbed the heels of her hands into her eyes, but the stars were still there. "Don't worry," someone said. "I painted the stars on the backs of your eyes only to get your attention." The stars disappeared, and Orison heard again the music of the Microfabridae, a singing almost unhearable.

"Who's that?" Orison demanded, her voice uncertain.

"Don't speak. You'll frighten the guards," the mysterious voice said. "We have had long association, Orison. It was I who, so close in empathy with you, prevented your eating lobster, for example. Earth's lobster is a distant relative of mine. I could not see you ingest one without feeling deep qualms. And it is to me you have been reading, filling my mind with knowledge and amusement while I was engaged in the dull work of projecting the images of currency to the Microfabridae at work at their printing-plates. I am known as Elder Compassion, and I am your friend."

"And Dink's friend?"

"His especially," the voice said. "Our business right now is to help you escape. We must know exactly where you are, Orison."

"I'm in the basement of the National Guard Armory," Orison said softly. "Where are you?"

"I'm on the ninth floor of the Bank building," Elder Compassion said. "Yes, that means telepathy, of a weak and uncertain sort. I am not one of the true telepaths, those gold and mighty minds I can hear trumpeting in the night. I can but whisper, and eavesdrop a bit in minds that let me. And is the fact that I speak within your ear and listen to the currents that make words within your mind so much more mysterious than your pillow that whispers?"

* * * * *

"Tell me what to do," Orison said.

"Look at the entrance of your basement," Elder Compassion said. Orison stared at the steel doors at the top of the ramp. "Yes, Dink. You're in the right place." The inner voice ceased for a moment; and into Orison's mind flashed a picture of those doors seen from outside. An automobile was parked a dozen feet from the door. Dink's car! Wanji was at the wheel and Dink, grandly uniformed, was beside him. A pink, animate thread dipped down from the trunk of the Rolls and began working its way toward the steel doors. Microfabridae, Orison guessed. Then the picture in her mind flicked off, and she was alone again.

She watched the doors at the top of the ramp.

For ten minutes or so, there was nothing new to be seen. Then--a pinpoint of light, a tiny movement. "Look away," Elder Compassion said within her. "We don't want to make your guards suspicious."

From the corner of her eye Orison could see the thin pink line approaching the Sherman tank upon which one guard was sitting, at ease but alert. The line of Microfabridae split into two columns, and one set out toward the second guard, seated in his weapons-carrier, facing the little room where C Company's commanding officer was imprisoned.

Orison knotted her fists to keep from screaming, reminding herself that these creeping things weren't spiders. She heard, faint at first, but growing at the edge of her consciousness, the song of the Microfabridae. The twin columns were thicker now. It seemed impossible that the guards hadn't yet seen them. A living thread oozed up the side of the tank and busied itself a moment at the guard's ankles.

"What's going on?" the captain, Orison's fellow-prisoner, shouted from his hidden cell.

"Mmmmf," the guard assigned to the captain replied. Then he was entirely silent.

Orison stood. Her own guard was strapped to the steel of his tank by a hundred strands of Lilliputian thread. A thin net of the stuff, fine as angel-hair, covered his mouth. The second guard, in the weapons-carrier, was bound in the same manner. He stared at Orison and moved his jaw, but could say nothing. "They'll not be injured," Elder Compassion told her. "It is impossible for me to allow a living being to be hurt. Now, go look at the man who just called out."

Orison went to the cell where the Captain was, avoiding as she walked the pools of Microfabridae scattered about the floor. The man stood in a barred room, evidently designed as the toolroom of the motor-pool, his hands around the bars. "Good afternoon," he said. "What's going on here?"

"We're getting out," Orison told him.

* * * * *

"Ask him if he can drive a tank," Elder Compassion whispered to Orison. "Those steel doors are too well built to be quickly opened by our little locksmiths."

"Can you drive a tank, Captain?" Orison asked.

"Miss, I piloted one of those M4E8 Sherman's across Europe sixteen years ago. I've still got the strength to pull a landrel. But you'll have to get me out there to do it; because there isn't room in this cell."

"I'll get you out," Orison promised.

"You want the Microfabridae to chew through the lock?" the voice-in-her-head asked gently.

"That's what I had in mind," Orison said.

"I know," Elder Compassion said. "Please look at the lock, so that I may direct our little friends to it."

Orison gazed at the lock. A line of Microfabridae snaked up the steel door-frame and entered the keyhole. From inside the door came a chittering sound, like a clock gone berserk. Then the crustacea reformed and marched down the door to the floor. Orison pressed the door-catch. The eviscerated lock gave way.

The captain stepped out to stare at the Microfabridae. "Miss," he said, "you and I could make a fortune with a team of those trained termites. There isn't a bank in the country that could stand up against us."

"It's been thought of," Orison said. "Help me get this man down from the tank, please, and we'll be on our way." Between them they lifted the cocooned guard, wrapped like a larva in Microfabridaean silk, to the cot, the little workers snipping with their chelae the threads that had bound him to the steel.

"Can you unlock the steel doors?" Orison asked.

"I don't have the key," the Captain said.

"Then we'll have to go through them," Orison said. "Can we do it?"

"We've got thirty-five tons to roll up that ramp," the captain said. "If we can't bust out with a punch like that, shame on us. Seems kind of rough on the taxpayers to bulldoze through that expensive door."

"If we don't make it out of here, those taxpayers may find themselves paying their thirty per cent to someone less friendly than Uncle Sam," Orison said. She clambered up the side of the tank and tugged at the hatch.

"Let me," said the captain. He opened the hatch and dropped inside. "You sit here to my right. We're going out the hard way, and buttoned up." He closed the hatch, then reached over his left shoulder to tug the master battery switch, squeezed together the twin butterfly switches on the panel and grabbed hold of the steering-landrels. "Hold on, Miss. We're headed for sunlight."

* * * * *