Mission: Earth "Villainy Victorious" (21 page)

The convicts let out a gasp. One retched. They stared at Madison.

He shooed them off to the air-coaches and sauntered after them, humming his little song.

Even Flick looked at him a bit white-eyed as he climbed in.

Madison was still humming as they all took off.

And he had something to hum about.

When he walked into the watchman's office, he had disregarded three levelled guns from three tough watchmen. He had pointed to the viewer-phone on the desk and said, "Connect me to your owner, please. The president of the company." He had held up his identoplate and they had.

When the startled president of Classy Togs was blinking into the viewer-phone from his bed, Madison had told him, "I am an Apparatus officer. I'm outfitting an Apparatus crew who must not be recognized. We are therefore getting clothes out of the warehouse without the help of clerks. Take an inventory in the morning, see what's gone and put the amount on the bill."

"Wait a minute," the president had said. "The Apparatus is poor pay!"

"Oh, this is on my personal account," Madison had said. And he had pushed his identoplate into the viewer-phone slot.

"UNLIMITED pay status," the owner had gasped. "Hot Saints! Go ahead! Take the whole blasted warehouse! WATCHMEN, STAY OUT OF SIGHT! DON'T YOU DARE LAY A FINGER ON THAT MAN!"

In retrospect Madison liked the touch of taking the bottle of red ink off the watchman's desk and sloshing it on his hands.

He ended his song with a laugh. He had certainly repaired his image with this crew.

And yes, he had. The sound of that laugh turned the blood of Flick to ice.

BARE-HANDED! And he liked it. Oh, Flick told himself, by Gods, they'd have to think twice before they crossed the chief. A REAL murderer for sure! A PROFESSIONAL! And he LOVED HIS WORK!

"We're heading for Joy City right now, sir," said Flick.

Madison heard the tremor, the fear and the respect in that voice.

It made everything complete.

He had total charge of this crew!

It didn't hurt at all to use the techniques of PR to improve one's own image.

Now he could REALLY PR Heller-Wister!

Dawn had not yet arrived, for all Flick's fears. A moon had set and it was very black night in the countryside below. But ahead it was a different matter: the whole sky was aglow. Very shortly, at this speed, they would be entering Joy City.

Madison wiped a hand across his face. "My nose is bothering me," he told Flick.

"Try a chank-pop, sir," was the prompt response. "Them convicts didn't touch them. They're in the bar compartment. Try a yellow one: that's 'summer blossom sighs.'"

Madison got one out: it seemed to be just a small round ball. He twisted and turned it, trying to make it do something. In the dimness of the airbus he didn't see the indented line that you press. He, in some annoyance, tried squeezing the whole ball between his palms with force, the way he was sometimes able to crack walnuts, a small fruit of Earth.

Instead of just opening, it exploded and hit him in the eye. The scent-fog, misdirected, struck his forehead and the roof of the airbus.

"Summer blossom sighs" might be just great-he could catch an errant whiff of it-but Madison grated to himself that he'd be blasted if he was going to lose one eye and the top of his head every time he tried to remedy the miasma of Apparatus stink!

When he could see again, the airbus seemed to be full of light. He looked down and saw that they were entering the vast and brilliant expanse which was Joy City.

They had not yet passed over the main clubs and lakes and amusement parks but, as they were coming from Commercial City, they were still over the market service areas of the pleasure metropolis. Sitting in the center of an interlace of rails and roads he saw what would be on Earth a shopping mall. There were other malls scattered about to left and right. This one below was vast but only seemed to be two stores:
Restaurant Supplies,
one said; the other one said
Beauty.
"What's that?" he yelled at Flick.

" 'Beauty'?" said Flick. "Oh, there ain't no dames down there if you feel horny, Chief. That's where revellers buy things to repair the ravages of all-night revelry."

"Go back, go back," said Madison, "and land. We need food and I think that shop might sell just what I need!"

Flick braked around into a dive, the air-coaches followed after and they all landed-thud, thud, thud, thud-adjacent to the two shops.

Madison jumped out and yelled, "All cooks front and center."

"Yes sir! Yes sir!" came the cries, and five cooks streaked to him from the air-coaches.

Madison led them into the sparse mob of predawn restaurant shoppers who were picking up their supplies for the coming day. The place was vast; on every hand stood small mountains of comestibles.

Madison waved his hand across the acres. "Get anything you want," he told the cooks.

The five looked at him, round-eyed, stunned.

"ANYTHING?" gawped the oldest one. "Why, this is the choicest market on Voltar! WHAT A CHIEF!"

They rushed off like a battle charge.

Madison sped the other way, for even in their new working clothes those convicts smelled like the Apparatus.

He rushed into the Beauty Supply vendors. He sped though the aisle toward a place where stood three idle clerks. "SOAP!" yelled Madison. "And LOTS of it!"

A clerk turned and picked up a small bottle and handed it to him.

"No, no," said Madison. "LOTS of it!"

"Well, just one drop of this will give you a whole bath," said the clerk.

"No, no," said Madison, "I'm trying to get rid of Apparatus stink."

"That," said another clerk, "would be VERY beneficial. In fact, I wish we could sell you a solvent that would get rid of the whole Apparatus."

He had their interest now. "I've got fourteen women and thirty-four men. They haven't shaved, they haven't bathed, they haven't cut or coiffed their hair for years. They STINK!" He looked around. The stacks of goods bore no placards or advertising signs. "I need stuff to cut beards and hair, shave them and polish their teeth, make them look like high-class people and also to cut toenails and make them tan-and no chank-pops!"

"High-class people?" said another clerk. "From Apparatus thugs? Sir, we heartily agree. You DO have a problem. Come on, boys, let's help him out. Start getting what he needs."

"In QUANTITY!" said Madison.

They laughed and began to rush around with carts, grabbing big boxes and cases and grosses of this and dozens of that.

Madison had never heard of most of these things. Nothing seemed to have any labels, just numbers. It began to be borne in upon him that, while he had seen a little bit of advertising in the Confederacy, real marketing was an unknown commodity.

These people had so much technology, such a stable economy, such cheap fuel, that they weren't fixated on having to market some new invention every day, and lives were not lived around logistics as they were on Earth. PR was a creature which had grown out of advertising, and these people, despite their high culture, had never developed it. That meant that they would really have no inkling of PR. It made him feel powerful. He could, he realized suddenly, get away with anything, no matter how old and stale, and never even be suspected.

Madison was trying to think of some of the oldest and hoariest PR tricks that had long since become pure corn on Earth. He realized they would all work, even selling the Brooklyn Bridge, and he began to laugh in delight.

A clerk had paused with a piled-up cart. "I'm glad you're so pleased, sir. I wanted to ask you if you'd also want some paint masks and party things."

"Oh, there'll be a party," said Madison. "In fact, it will be a ball!"

"Right, sir, we'll add it to the order," and the clerk rushed on.

At last they took it all through the lighted night and the clerks crammed it in the airbus until there was hardly any place for Madison to sit.

The five cooks and roustabouts were handling the comestibles. The air-coaches, already crammed to overflowing with clothes, had to have their new loads strapped in crates on top.

Madison stamped mounds of cards handed in to him by clustered clerks, and then, with a flutter of vegetable leaves and papers streaming out behind, the convoy took off.

The glittering lights and parks of Joy City spread out in a symphony of shapes and sparkles. Signs and decorations, even at this hour, shone like jewels and suns, illuminating more than a hundred square miles dedicated to companionship and gaiety. Here clustered as well, in enormously tall buildings, large domes and shining fields, the amusement industry of the Confederacy, dominated by a silver hemisphere which, with its surrounding skyscrapers and parks, comprised Homeview. Madison, flying near it in a sky-traffic lane, was impressed: NBC, CBS and ABC together would have fit in just one of those buildings. He slavered when he thought of what he could do with those facilities that reached 110 planets. Like a concert pianist who beholds a marvelous instrument, he ached to get his fingers on it. Oh, what tunes then he would play! And he even had the order from Lord Snor in his pocket that would let him do it!

His attention was distracted by Flick's slowing down. They were approaching the townhouse which had belonged to General Loop.

The building stood like a steel slab, floodlit with a greenish light. The top four floors had no windows but all the rest of the seventy-six levels below did. A strange-looking building of harsh architecture: itself an enormous rectangle, everything else about it was rectangular. Madison had thought he must have had an exaggerated idea of its size, but now, looking at it as they eased down to it, he saw indeed that it was two New York City blocks wide and three long. Huge!

As they dropped lower, he glanced about. He was surprised to see that it was very far from the tallest, biggest building in this sector: Although separated from it by broad parks, many other structures were far higher and, in their much more elegant architecture, covered, most of them, far more ground. This steel rectangular shape was definitely an oddity in the landscape of joyous Joy City: a sort of a grim, hard-nosed slab. What would General Loop want with all that space? And why would his heirs be so anxious to get rid of it they would accept almost any price?

Flick dropped the airbus down opposite to the windowed seventy-sixth floor, holding it about a hundred feet out from the side of the building. He was talking the air-coaches into line beside him to their left. Flick had a box in his hand.

"Find a red dot," Flick was saying, "and hold while pointed at it. You there, Number Two, get into line: you dump that air-coach and I'll have your head!"

Madison looked over Flick's shoulder through the forward shield toward the building, across the empty space. He looked down. Yikes! but the ground seemed awfully far away. He glanced at a digital dial on Flick's panel: it read that they were 912 feet above the park below! He looked up. The top of the building rose another 200 feet!

An errant gust of wind rocked them. A wisp of cloud passed like a ghostly hand between the airbus and the building side. Yikes! He suddenly realized that he was almost as high as the Empire State Building! He glanced around: several structures in this area were much higher. It reassured him in a dazed way. Well, their townhouse was NOT as high as the Empire State Building; it just covered about six times the ground! More stable, then. He felt better. Then a wisp of cloud passed by their lights that looked even more like a ghostly hand, even curled fingers to clutch at him. He felt worse.

"What's the holdup?" he said to Flick.

"Them dumb drivers can't find their red dots on the building side. This blank space all along here is hangars. I got our blue dot right ahead. See it?"

Madison saw the glowing blue dot. But there was no door!

"I can't go in until those bird droppings we got driving the other coaches find their truck dots. The dumb primates would sit out here all night. And if I let them go into a passenger slot with that load they're carrying on top, they'd crash."

The babble of voices from Flick's speakers was getting more frantic.

"Oh, blast," said Flick. "This red button here must be their dot activator. I forgot to push it." He did so.

Coaches one, two and three promptly answered up. They had their red dots.

"Well, blast it," then said Flick. "Drive on in!"

"At that steel wall?" came the combined babble. The consensus was they'd crash.

"You tell 'em," said Flick and pushed a microphone at Madison.

Wondering if he was sending forty-eight people plunging to their death, Madison said, "This is the chief. Drive!"

Resigned mutters.

Three air-coaches moved ahead at the red dots and steel wall.

Gasps of surprise.

Invisible tractor beams had grabbed them, each of the three. The steel opened. The building swallowed them!

Flick drove straight ahead. Beams grabbed the Model 99. Just as he was sure they would hit solid steel, there wasn't anything in front of them.

There was a gentle thud as they sat down. Lights came out with a flare. They were in the seventy-sixth floor hangars.

Flick was out. He was yelling at the electronics man. "You get these coaches set up with their own beams! I'm no blasted nursemaid, sitting around all night. You fix this airbus, too, so it can go in and out!"

Madison looked around. The place was just a hangar with doors opening to passageways. Twenty or thirty vehicles could line up in here.

"Everybody out!" Flick was yelling. "Find some galleys and get that food stored. Find a hallway near bathing rooms and unload this airbus into it. Then find some living quarters for yourselves and store those clothes."