Mission: Earth "An Alien Affair" (7 page)

Mike Mutazione's crew was standing in a semicircle around the pit area.

The crowd was plowing down the track like a storm cloud gone crazy. The race was forgotten. All they wanted was blood.

Track security police tried to make a stand to check them. They were hurled aside!

The crowd came storming on. They were screaming, "Get the Whiz Kid!" "Cost me ten thousand!" "Kill him!" and other ferocious war cries.

Heller just sat there watching.

The foremost ring of the mob, mouths snarling, fists shaking, got within twenty feet of the Mutazione line.

"Now!" barked Mike.

Abruptly flame erupted from nozzles!

A dozen oxyacetylene hoses played a fan of fire over the heads of the mob!

There was an instant of incredulous gasps cut by the sizzle of flame.

Then a torrent of screams!

Howls of terror burst out!

The foremost ranks recoiled!

They knocked down people behind them like dominoes!

The crowd was racing away, leaving the fallen and trampled in the snow. And then these, too, found the energy to run.

The oxyacetylene torches popped out as their valves were shut off.

Hammer Malone's old wreck staggered past the grandstand and wrecked cars and knocked along, working to complete his thousand laps.

But the race was over for the crowd. They were going home.

I packed up and drove the van down off the hill, heading for the track and grandstand.

I had seen Heller get into the Peterbilt and knew there was no danger he would spot me.

The disgruntled and disgusted crowd was trailing away. I steered the van slowly through them. I was hoping I could find J. Walter Madison.

Behind Heller's back, Madison had fabricated the Whiz Kid and the controversy around this race. With Heller's spectacular defeat and the bloodthirsty crowd, I had to find what Madison planned next.

The security guards were no longer tending the gates. They did not care who went in or out now.

I went through a tunnel and emerged in the littered grandstand. There was a cluster of people around a box. I recognized one of the nearest ones. It was a reporter I had seen at Madison's office, 42 Mess Street.

I went up to him. Although he had a sheepskin coat up around his ears and although I was wearing a hooded parka, we recognized each other.

I said, "Did Madison start that great riot?"

He said, "No. I did, on the spur of the moment. J. Warbler is in a weird state. Twenty minutes before the race he went into shock and passed out. We had to take him to the hospital tent. He only returned to the grandstand in time to see the end of it."

I looked through the cluster of 42 Mess Street people and saw Madison sitting there on a folding chair. Cold as it was, he had an ice bag on his head! His face was gray and awful!

I went over to him. I said, incredulously, "Are you feeling that way because Heller lost?"

He shook his head. "Oh, no. Win or lose, that wouldn't have mattered. It would only have given us one day's front page and then we would have had the work of doing something else."

I didn't understand it at all. "Well, if winning or losing didn't matter, what are you feeling so bad about?"

He ineffectually adjusted the ice bag. Then he broke down. "Never trust a client! They always do you in!"

"Maybe you better tell me what you think is wrong," I said, puzzled.

He began to cry. In a choked voice, he said, "He wasn't supposed to race at all! Just before the race he was supposed to be kidnapped! We would have had two weeks at least of front page!"

He ground his fists into his knees. "It was all to be so perfect! After two weeks he would have turned up behind the Iron Curtain, a captive of the fuel-hungry Russians!"

He let out a frustrated wail. "It would have started World War III! He'd be IMMORTAL!"

After a period of writhing and pounding his knees, he said, "You just can't ever depend on clients! OH, MY GOD! WHAT DO I DO NOW TO RECOVER THE FRONT PAGE??????"

I crept away.

Sunday morning, the Bentley Bucks Deluxe Arms (to give it its full name) held me in tender and loving, if expensive, embrace. That was the only embrace I was getting these days.

But by ten my feeling of laziness began to give way to a vague disquiet. It occurred to me that it was altogether possible that Heller might recover from that debacle. In life, he was treacherously hyperactive. A type of disposition for which I have no sympathy.

I called down for a breakfast of strawberry shortcake—imported from the Argentine, the menu said—and, wrapped in a robe, was soon devouring it. My carbon-oxygen furnace needed restoking after the shocks and labors of the day before.

Almost indolently, I opened the ten pounds of Sunday paper. I don't really know what I expected to see. But I had not at all anticipated what I did see.

Nothing!

There was absolutely no word about that race in the whole paper!

Not ONE word!

I hastened over to the TV. I ran through the channels. Ah, a program called "The Week in Sports" was just beginning. Several items. Then a few brief clips of the race without any editorial comment, hardly any mention of the Whiz Kid! Just the crashes!

Oh, this was bad. Madison was right. He was off the front page. And not even in a day or two but at once!

I then remembered the local-radio-station dial position I had been listening to on Saturday—a Long Island station, WHOA. I tuned in on it. I was in luck! They were just beginning their news.

It was, apparently, a sleepy, snowed-in, suburban Sunday on Long Island. There were only two items of interest to me, both local.

A burned-out van with ten bodies in it had been found by some Boy Scouts in a picnic area of Jones Beach. Police said that they were burned beyond recognition; that a leaking muffler had overcome them; that they probably had been en route to pick up a load of seaborne narcotics; that Tommy Jones had been awarded his merit badge for snowshoeing.

The other item was another discovery: Miss Sarah Jane Gooch, the charming wife of Gooby Gooch, had been on her way to Cranston's Supermarket this morning and had stumbled over a body in the snowdrifts which now "dot our streets" and had called the police who had then found another body about two hundred yards away, the location traced by Police Chief Flab because of dogs quarrelling over it, which event had been phoned in by Mrs. Emma Gross, the charming wife of Bill Gross. The police concluded that one of the men had shot the other one with a rifle and had then committed suicide with a stiletto that was still sticking in his back. Crime in the community was thus reduced by two, which was heartwarming on a cold day.

The race might as well have never happened so far as the Spreeport area was concerned!

And it looked especially quiet when it came to news about the Whiz Kid. I was worried. What was going to happen now? Was Heller going to get off scot-free and ride to glory?

I thought I had better check up on said Heller.

I had kept my receiver-viewscreen loaded with strips to record Heller's actions and by replaying them I found out what he had been up to this morning.

He had come into his office! On Sunday? That was a bad sign. Awfully industrious!

The first thing he did was dig Izzy out of that closet-office he uses as a bedroom.

"I gave you a device some time ago," said Heller. "I want to look at it."

Heller went into his own office, turned on a heater and stood for a while gazing out across the snow-covered expanses of lower Manhattan. He seemed to concentrate on soot patches already darkening the snow. He was evidently letting his office warm up, for presently he took off a ski mask, a white fur hood and parka and sat down.

Izzy came in with the item. It was the unmodified carbon converter Heller had brought from Voltar and a duplicate of the one he had put in the now-defunct Cadillac.

Heller broke out some tools and, with very rapid motions, soon had the device spread all over a cloth on his desk. A small feeling of alarm began to rise in me.

One by one, holding each close to his eye, he began to go over the parts. Suddenly he stopped. He was holding a thin metal bit about an inch long.

"A notch!" he said.

Magnified by his own eyesight, I could see it too on my screen. Just a little V notch, the one our saboteur had cut to embarrass Heller.

"Look!" he said to Izzy, holding it out.

But Izzy couldn't see it no matter how he twisted his horn-rimmed glasses around. Heller got a huge magnifier and showed him.

"That caused the wrong electrical value to pour into the next component!" said Heller. "It built up to red-hot overheat! These were just cheap school kits. I should have known better."

Izzy gazed at him blankly. "School kits?"

"No, no," said Heller, probably realizing he was on the edge of a Code break. "They will work fine. All I need to do is redesign it slightly to guarantee its electrical values in this area and it will run forever. Get me the plans back."

Izzy got them and Heller made the changes. He seemed quite cheered up. The stupid idiot didn't suspect it was the farsightedness of Lombar Hisst that had cost him that race!

"Izzy," he said, "what do you do when you have lost a race?"

"You don't engage in one in the first place," said Izzy.

"No, no, really, I want to know."

"You leave for South America," said Izzy. "There's this place up the Amazon where there are only soldier ants. Peaceful! No people! Even the reporters have been eaten up. I'm holding your ticket. I can get you a Pan American reservation in seconds!" He was starting to lilt with enthusiasm.

"No, no," said Heller. "I'll just fix up this thing, get another car and challenge them again!"

"Oh, no!" wept Izzy.

And "Oh, no!" wept I! I could not possibly tolerate that much strain again, ever! This was a REAL emergency.

I reached for the phone, found I was holding the viewscreen. I put it down and tried to make a call on my Colt Bulldog. I ran about, slamming doors, trying to get dressed.

Utanc, my darling Turkish love, stuck a sleepy head through the bedroom door. "Whatever is going on, Sultan?"

I had not seen her in days. But I had no time now. "The world is liable to fall "in!"

"Oh?" she said, closed the door, locked it and apparently went back to bed.

I didn't, let me tell you! I knew duty when I saw it calling! It was screaming at me!

I found the phone where I had knocked it off under the bed.

I managed to find Madison's number. I forced the hotel operator to dial it: I couldn't hit the right buttons.

A very concerned, older female voice answered. His mother!

"I must talk to J. Walter at once!" I yelled at her.

"Oh, dear," she said, "I'm afraid that is impossible. He is lying in bed. Three doctors have been here and they ordered absolute rest. I can't even go near him myself."

And, indeed, I could hear tiny suppressed screeches in the background.

I hung up.

Bury. I must phone Bury!

It was a tangle! His number was unlisted. The Octopus Oil Building Exchange would not give me his home phone.

Ah, I had it! That night he had gone home in the police car! I knew where he lived!

Sunday or no Sunday, Mr. Bury was going to have a caller!

I still had the van, the rental office being closed on Sunday.

I piled into some warm clothes, got the car brought around front and was soon tooling uptown.

The streets were deserted tunnels piled high on both sides with snow, the tops of cars showing vaguely in the mounds. The snowplows had been industrious! Some of those motorists would not see their vehicles until spring!

I was soon standing before his mailbox. It said Mrs. Destuyvescent Depleister Bury.

I rang. I got him at once.

Within a minute I was in an upper hall and he was letting me through a door.

"It's an emergency," I said desperately.

His reply was strange. "Oh, good," he whispered.

Then, with a conspiratorial finger he beckoned me into the sitting room. He was carrying a sheet of Sunday paper and he didn't have any shoes on.

A torrent of words was coming from an inner room-things like "When I married you, I expected..." and "Time and again my whole family told me..." and "That is what I get for marrying beneath..." Quite a blur.

Bury whispered, "Tell me again, real loud!"

"THIS IS AN EMERGENCY!" I yelled at him and meant it.

"OH, HEAVENS!" he shouted back. "AN EMERGENCY ON SUNDAY!"

He grabbed his shoes and put them on. He grabbed some overshoes out of a hall closet. He got into an overcoat. He put on his snap-brim, little New Yorker hat. He grabbed an attache case, rushed into a side room and filled it with white mice. He closed it.

Then he rushed into the room his wife's voice was coming from and said something to the effect that the office demanded his presence.

He rushed out. A storm of small pillows and perfume sprays and nail files poured after him. He got us into the hall.

"Thank God," he said. "I've never been so pleased to see anybody in my life, Inkswitch. I will remember this as a kindly act! So rare, kindly acts!"

He was pushing me along as he spoke. We got outside and we climbed into the warm van.

I handed him a half pint of applejack I had taken to the race in case of emergency. "You're going to need this." And I told him first how Madison had planned to kidnap Wister, send him to Russia, blame the Communists and start World War III.

Bury nodded. He didn't even touch the applejack. "Well," he said, "I told you, Inkswitch. A little bit of Madison always goes too far. Many think his mother should be arraigned for attempted humanocide. But frankly, Inkswitch, he's really no more skilled than any other public relations man or reporter. He's just a little faster, that's all."