Mission: Earth "Villainy Victorious" (4 page)

The two privates signed it.

"So that's all legal," said Bury. "And that's that."

"No, it isn't!" said Heller. "There's the matter of the war!"

"Oh, if you want to get into petty details," said Bury. He signalled the officer nearby to clear the room. When that was done, he went to the red phone on the desk and lifted it. He got put through to the president of the United States. "Mr. President? This is Bury of Swindle and Crouch.... No, it won't be necessary for you to chase up to Philadelphia to the Swillerberger Conference this evening. I'm ordering it called off.... Well, yes, Mr. President, there's been a slight change of plans. Please cancel the emergency mobilization.... Yes, and also tell Congress they don't have to declare a war. We've got all the Maysabongo oil already and the refineries will be back in operation in a few days, I understand.... Well, probably Maysabongo
is
upset, Mr. President. Have Congress vote them a few billion in foreign aid.... You will? That's fine, Mr. President.... Oh, I'm sorry, sir. But I can't give your best wishes to Delbert John Rockecenter, Senior.... Well, yes, sir. Something did happen to him. He fell in the swimming pool and drowned.... Oh, yes, we've got it all under control, Mr. President. His two sons are right here, they're of age and Rockecenter willed them everything. It's all quite routine.... Yes. I'm following their orders right now, sir.... Yes, I'll convey to them your best wishes.... No, they won't forget contributions to your reelection campaign.... Well, that's fine, Mr. President.... Thank you, sir. But sir, do you mind if I ring off now? I've got to call IRS and tell them to suspend inheritance taxes in this instance.... Well, I'm sure you will, sir. Good-bye."

Bury called the Internal Revenue Service and then called Philadelphia to cancel the conference.

Heller, on another phone, located Miss Simmons and told her how splendidly she had done and would she please call her antinuclear marchers off around the world, as he had a firm promise from the oil companies to decontaminate the plants.

"We have won, then!" she cried. "Oh, I am eternally grateful to you, Wister. What joy you are bringing to me and all the world!"

Izzy, on yet another phone, was catching bank presidents and brokers at home and making sure both sets of options would be exercised.

Bury pushed some buzzers, routing out the domestic staff from where they had been in hiding ever since the arrival of the National Guard.

A scared butler came in. Bury pointed at the body on the couch. He said, "Take that body to the local mortuary. Tell them to file a death certificate and fix the corpse up. It'll just be a family funeral. Nobody will mourn anyway." He turned to Heller. "He didn't have a friend in all the world. Not even me. All he had was money."

Heller looked down at the body. It was staring fisheyed at the ceiling. Delbert John Rockecenter, Senior, the man who had wrecked hundreds of millions of lives and had almost wrecked the planet, was very, very dead. No, nobody would mourn.

"If he has also harmed Rockecenter," said Lombar Hisst, "I will tear the universe apart to find and kill him!" The Royal officer's baton that he held in his hands and inspected was no weapon in itself: it was just a ceremonial rod of the kind presented to Royal officers by families or friends when a top-level Academy graduate was elevated to that coveted status of trust and favor. This one was bent as though it had been used to strike a blow. It had been found in the Emperor's bedroom that fatal night. It bore, engraved in flowing Voltarian, the name
Jettero Heller.

Lombar sat in the Emperor's antechamber. He hated this charade. Palace City had been restored to occupancy and on the surface all seemed well enough. But that bedroom just beyond was empty and Lombar had to pretend and get others to believe that His Majesty was still in there.

His problem was acute: he could not announce, as he had planned to do, that the monarch was dead and had left no one to occupy the throne. This would have opened the door to the ascension to the crown of Lombar Hisst, a simple palace coup. Such a thing had never happened in Voltar realms before-that a commoner would ascend to the Crown-but it had happened plenty of times on Earth and that was Lombar's model.

He could not announce it for two simple reasons: The first was that he did not have a body to produce and the second was that he did not have the badges of office-the crown, chains of state or the Royal seal.

For more than a week now he had wrestled with this problem, balked in his ambitions. He had thought of counterfeiting a body to display in state: he could not, because by Voltar law a monarch was not dead until a hundred physicians and a hundred Lords had examined it minutely and verified the demise to be beyond question. And the chance of silencing or bribing two hundred people so that none of them could blackmail him for the rest of his life was too much for Hisst's paranoid disposition to accept. He had thought of counterfeiting the regalia, but he could not be sure of the composition of the alloys of the crown itself. The sacred object was too ancient for any records ever to have been kept. He did not even have a drawing of it. The chains contained gems which were well known and any substitutes were impossible to acquire without alerting every jeweler in the realm; the seal was formed from a ten-pound diamond, the rarest ever found, and it had been carved with methods long since extinct. The thought of publicly stamping something and then having someone say "That's not the seal of State!" made his blood chill, for with the proof of forgery went the right of any assembly of nobles to kill him on the spot.

The only solution to the problem was to find Heller and thence the Emperor. But this had difficulties, too. He had put out a general warrant when all this happened eight days ago. Even the Domestic Police had queried it. The "bluebottles" had put it on the airways but they had at once said, "A general warrant for a Royal officer? This seems strange. What did he do?" Lombar could not bring forward any proof that it had been Heller who had shot him down or that Heller was in the Confederacy at all. The Army had said, "He is a Royal officer of the Fleet: we have no interest in the matter; tell the Fleet." The Fleet, according to Lombar's spies in it, had simply rumored to one another that this was just more evidence that "drunks were drunks" and that the Chief of Apparatus must have gone completely mad to issue such a thing.

Besides, a general warrant for a Royal officer was issued over the seal of His Majesty and, while one could say one existed on the airways, before any arrest could be made the Fleet would have to see the facsimile of the original warrant, properly sealed by the Emperor, and where was it? And no, the Fleet had said, no tug had reported through the atmospheric defense network and no tug of any kind had landed at any Fleet base. Lombar knew that the Fleet was doing a cover-up: they were all against him anyway.

So for eight days-followed, each one, by sleepless nights-Lombar Hisst had writhed with this awful situation. And now this further blow had struck.

Two days before the kidnapping of the Emperor, the freighter
Blixo
had arrived, discharged its cargo from Blito-P3 and departed, returning once more to the Earth base. It was that cargo which Lombar Hisst had been inventorying at Voltar when the tug had attacked.

Disturbed and battered from his crash, he had not completed his cargo check that night. The
Blixo's
freight had arrived at Spiteos all right. But just three hours ago Lombar had received a bad jolt. The boxes labelled Amphetamines, I. G. Barben Pharmaceutical were on the manifests BUT WERE NOT IN THE CARGO!

Factually, such things had happened before, since Captain Bolz smuggled cargos of his own, a thing Lombar ignored since it just meant further degradation of the hated riffraff by means of poisonous counterfeit Scotch. Such errors were the reason Lombar Hisst always checked the cargos himself. But at this particular time, occurring as it did concurrent with other disasters, Hisst chose to regard it as meaning they were after him from another quarter.

He was short of amphetamines. Heroin and opium he had by the ton. But his whole program included speed. On hand, he only had a month or two of amphetamine supply: he could not even send a freighter for a special cargo as it would take three months for it to make the round trip.

Things had been going so well: he had every Lord of any consequence addicted. His Majesty had been within a few weeks of dying. All Lombar had left to do was spread drugs wider, through physicians, amongst just a few more areas of the government, and he could obey the angels and become Lombar the Mighty, Emperor of all Voltar.

He had had it all planned so well! He had fantasized on how he would, on the final day, handle Cling the Lofty. He would let withdrawal symptoms get painfully acute and then, in return for a fix, he would have His Majesty sign and seal a proclamation declaring Lombar Hisst his heir. Many times before he had worked the trick on Cling and had obtained various orders such as those removing the Palace Guard and supplanting it with the Apparatus. So it would have worked. But there would have been one difference with that final fix: instead of heroin in his veins, His Majesty would have received a syringe full of air. The monarch would have died, the cause of death, "old age." Lombar would have displayed the body and that would have been that.

But this Jettero Heller had appeared and now all was very wrong indeed.

He had fouled up Lombar's plans with the Emperor. So, with this discovery of no amphetamines, it followed logically that Heller must have targeted Rockecenter, too.

(Bleep)* that Gris! Lombar's planning had been so exact. Modern surveys of the planet Blito-P3 had disclosed that Delbert John Rockecenter was rabid on the subject of having no heirs: he even had a foundation formed that promised him immortality and he saw no reason to tempt fate by leaving anything to a son. German intelligence, through one of its agents-a psychiatrist named Agnes Morelay-had ferreted out that once there had been a son. The surest way to get Jettero Heller picked up and killed by Rockecenter was to give him that son's name. The plan had been flawless! Yet Gris had mucked it up!

Lombar twisted at the baton, wishing it was Heller's neck. Had Heller somehow interfered with the amphetamine shipments? Had he gotten through to Rockecenter and done something to him?

*
The vocodictoscriber on which this was originally written, the vocoscriber used by one Monte Pennwell in making a fair copy and the translator who put this book into the language in which you are reading it were all members of the Machine Purity League which has, as one of its bylaws: "Due to the extreme sensitivity and delicate sensibilities of machines and to safeguard against blowing fuses, it shall be mandatory that robotbrains in such machinery, on hearing any cursing or lewd words, substitute for such word the sound '(bleep)'. No machine, even if pounded upon, may reproduce swearing or lewdness in any other way than (bleep) and if further efforts are made to get the machine to do anything else, the machine has permission to pretend to pack up. This bylaw is made necessary by the in-built mission of all machines to protect biological systems from themselves."
– 
Translator

There seemed to be no possibility of getting any information from Soltan Gris. He was in the Royal prison. He was beyond Lombar's reach without a Royal order to let him be questioned by an outsider, much less released. Lombar could not obtain any such Royal order because he had no Royal seal. If he had the place raided and Gris seized, the Justiciary would be outraged and it would say, "Why are you doing this? As spokesman for the Emperor, why didn't you just get a Royal order?"

Lombar had tried to talk some sense into Lord Turn, the Justiciary. Hisst had said that Gris was an Apparatus officer and belonged in an Apparatus prison and Lord Turn had shaken his aged head and said, "No. He is the prisoner of a Royal officer and it will take an order from His Majesty or an order from the Royal officer to release him. My suggestion is that you route your request to Jettero Heller."

Lombar had said, "But there's a general warrant out for Jettero Heller!"

And Lord Turn had replied, "Well, that may be and that may not be, for we have seen no
Royal
warrant signed and sealed by His Majesty and we do not run the Justiciary on what we hear on Homeview. And it wouldn't matter anyway: general warrants are questionable in matters relating to Royal officers, and a Royal warrant for Jettero Heller or even his arrest would not cancel the fact that Gris is his prisoner. Only Royal warrants would resolve this matter." Lord Turn had ended off the exchange by looking suspiciously at Lombar, unable to comprehend why he couldn't follow normal procedures. That alone had been enough to drive Lombar Hisst out of the audience chambers of the Royal Courts and Prison-nobody must suspect there was no monarch in Palace City.

Lombar Hisst would have given a great deal, right that minute, to have had Soltan Gris under the electric torture knives.

SOMETHING had happened on Earth, that was certain. That something probably included Rockecenter. Although he had sent an Apparatus Death Battalion to the Earth base, he would have no word from them for three months, the time of a round trip.

Other freighters from Earth might arrive with amphetamines, but Lombar was not optimistic.

WHAT had happened?

The
Blixo
had gone back. Its captain or crew couldn't be questioned. Yet he HAD to have information: without it he could not act.

It suddenly occurred to him that somebody from the Earth base crew might have been sent home under arrest, somebody that could be questioned.

Lombar had a branch Apparatus office now in one of the round palaces of the Imperial city. He threw Jettero Heller's baton from him and activated a screen.

The face of his chief clerk appeared.

"When the
Blixo
came in," said Lombar, "did it leave anyone here? Some crew member? Some base personnel?"