Mission: Earth "An Alien Affair" (12 page)

She threw down the glass of red wine with violence! It shattered and splattered like blood!

Her voice made the room shake!

"THIS IS THE LAST TIME I WILL WARN YOU! KNOCK OFF THIS GOD (BLEEPED) BAD PUBLICITY!"

She turned back to her screens.

Bang-Bang must have detected a sign Heller didn't see. "You better come along," he whispered in Heller's ear. "If you stay any longer, she's liable to get upset."

They withdrew and got back into the cab. Bang-Bang ran into a couple more no-parking stanchions and they got out of there.

Heller was sitting in back, chin on his chest. Finally, he said through the partition, "I can't do anything about the publicity. But I can try something else. Bang-Bang, what does Babe really like?"

"Babe? Why hell, just like all dames, she goes for jewelry."

"You sure?" said Heller.

"Absolutely. Couple diamonds and they purr."

"Good," said Heller. "Take me to Tiffany's."

Across town they went and very shortly Heller was standing in front of a counter being addressed by a courteous clerk. Heller looked at all kinds of things, trays and trays of jewelry on black velvet. He didn't like any of them. Suddenly he snapped his fingers with the force of inspiration. "Do you make jewelry to customer design? I want something more sentimental."

"Of course," said the clerk. "Follow me." And he left Heller with an artistic type in a design department. The artistic type thought he would need some help drawing. But Heller grabbed art paper and colored pens and went to work.

What in Hells? He was drawing the Sovereign Shield of his Voltarian home, the Province of Atalanta, Manco! Two crossed blastguns, firing green against a white sky, circled in red flame. Incidentally, I had seen him draw it before under the words Prince Caucalsia on the tug he flew to Earth. More sentimentality? Crossed blastguns? What was he up to?

In response to his questions, the designer said, "Yes, we can make it into a tiara. The shield will be on the front of the head, of course, gripped in place by the semi-coronet. We can make the field in diamonds, the guns in onyx, the blasts, as you call them, in emeralds and the flame circle in rubies. And set it all in white gold, of course, so it will not clash."

"How much?" said Heller.

They called in some others and after calculation, they could do it for $65,000.

Heller dug into his pockets. He only had $12,000 on him. "This is all I've got just now," he said.

"It will be ample as a deposit," they told him. "You can pay the balance when it is done."

"When will that be?"

"The Christmas season is coming on. We are quite busy already. Will a few weeks be all right?"

He gave them the $12,000. But I could see he was a bit defeated. I hadn't realized that Heller himself was going broke. He told them to do the best they could and left.

I was jubilant. Izzy would soak up his cash. He'd never be able to pick that tiara up.

I hugged myself. The real jewel was Madison!

The publicity was having its effect. Not only was it assassinating Heller's character but was also stripping him of support from his friends. It was worth thinking about. As a direct knife and gun devotee, I was really getting my eyes pried open with what could be done with the media! And how marvelously painful! One could wreck lives just like that!

Little did I know that I had really seen nothing yet!

I wished I could hold on longer to these manic states, they are so pleasant. But that very night, the depressive began to raise its ugly head.

I was running the TV channels looking for some good animated cartoons and I just happened to pass the program "59 1/2 Minutes Too Late." And there was the Whiz Kid!

He had a little college beanie on his head and was holding a little pennant on a stick. He had stacks of books and you could hardly see the interviewer back of them.

The bogus Whiz Kid was telling the story of his life: how he had been lying in a crib, choking on his bottle, and had gotten this marvelous idea for a new fuel. But years of underprivileged decadence as a member of the white minority had deprived him of reaching toward his goal. And then one day, in a supermarket, while he was riding in a shopping cart, a book had fallen off the book rack and hit him in the head and it had changed his life.

He had the book right there to prove it and the TV cameras shifted to his reverent hands as he opened it. It was by Carl Fagin, a reprint of a reprint, entitled Homecraft Series: You Too Can Make an Atom Bomb in Your Own Little Basement Workshop, or, A Visit to Graves of the

Mighty Men of History. And there was a picture of Albert Blindstein. And the shaggy hair that had inspired him.

And then he showed a newspaper clipping of the remains of his basement workshop which had blown up and flattened nearby houses.

The canned applause resounded.

And here was a picture of his winning the soapbox derby by getting the daughter of a neighbor to ride inside and pedal on a secretly connected sprocket.

The canned applause resounded.

I thought, wait a minute, what is this doing on prime-time national? It was not nearly as good as the usual sex orgies on the rival channels. And then I remembered that all the Rockecenter people had to do was call the director of the TV network and tell him what to run.

But then the bomb burst!

The Whiz Kid pulled out a high-school yearbook and there he was in the fifth row of the choir! Buck-teeth and all!

Worse!

A picture in the same yearbook: The Student Most Likely to Get Shot. Buckteeth and all!

Much worse!

Another yearbook. Picture of the freshman class. A circle drawn around a head with buckteeth in the third row.

Very much worse!

Another yearbook. A picture of the sophomore class and, although much marred by the printing screen, the buckteeth and horn-rimmed glasses were unmistakable!

The hands turned the book over.

Yearbook, Massachusetts Institute of Wreckology of just last June!

And there was his name on the cover: Gerry Wister!

It left me in a complete spin! So much so that I didn't even hear the rest of the program!

Something was going wrong!

An hour later, my search for cartoons utterly abandoned, I remembered that Bury had chosen Heller's identity and given it to him in the Brewster Hotel. Bury had ordered Madison to use this bucktoothed double and no other and that Madison had even had to make Heller up.

There was another Wister! A Gerry Wister, probably a cousin or some such to a Jerome Terrance Wister who may or may not ever have existed.

This clever Wall Street lawyer, Bury, had covered every trick! If snipers didn't work, there were bombs. If bombs didn't work, there were doubles!

But I still didn't get the full horror of it until, with shaking fingers, I opened the paper beside my breakfast plate. Hotels sure know how to ruin your appetite!

Front page!

WHIZ KID SUES M.I.W. FOR 500 MILLION!

FIRST SUIT IN UNIVERSITY HISTORY

Alleging that he actually was a student at M.I.W., the attorneys of the Whiz Kid—Boggle, Gouge and Hound—today filed suit against the university for 500 million dollars for defamation of fame with compounded mortal felony.

A stunned nation last night on the prime-time program "59 1/2 Minutes Too Late" beheld the evidence itself.

Never before have the sacred precincts of M.I.W. been breached by the slightest breath of scandal.

A spokesman at Boggle, Gouge and Hound said, "We'll win in a walk. The honor of American youth must be upheld against the denigrating connivings of the pillars of learning. This is a landmark case. We will murder the bums."

The president of M.I.W., who was not called, could not be reached for comment.

In frantic search for opinion, this paper called Supreme Court Chief Justice Hamburger. He stated, "In an unofficial opinion, off the record, justice must always get its just desserts. If called on to review the case, we will consider anything in writing."

(See page 34 for on-the-scene, exclusive riot photos of M.I.W.)

I would have rushed down to get the other papers but I didn't have to. The news vendor, accustomed to my habits by now, had them piled three feet high on a cart. Just as I feared! National coverage!

This Madison was making me nervous. You understand, my faith was not really shattered, it was just wobbled a bit. I realized that it was the size of the suit and that it was the first time anyone had ever dared sue the mighty M.I.W. that was making the news, and I hoped the Whiz Kid would sort of get eclipsed in this.

I would let Madison have his head. Probably some deep-seated strategy lay behind this.

However, the following morning Madison had his front page again!

M.I.W. FIGHTS BACK! WHIZ KID BLASTED!

In an exclusive interview with the president of M.I.W., this paper was entrusted with an exclusive message for the Whiz Kid.

"If," said the president, "Gerry Wister does not drop this suit at once, he will be expelled! Furthermore, we will cancel his Octopus Oil Company Scholarship and fire him from his job as waiter in the college restaurant."

These strong words were uttered with great force. The university means to fight!

The university attorneys—Fuddle, Muddle and Puddle—today filed countermotions in the state court, alleging that the accusations of the said Gerry Wister were false, malicious and unfounded on fact.

(See Photo Section page 19 for full coverage of M.I.W. riots.)

There were TV shots of the riots in most of the news hours. There was also a full-page ad in the papers telling the listening audience to watch "59 1/2 Minutes Too Late" if they wanted to get the news before it happened. They were really crowing over their scoop.

The other papers carried not only the M.I.W.-fights-back story, they also carried editorials on the victimization of American youth in their universities and concluded, by and large, that they ought to be clobbered.

Yes, Madison was coming through. Heller had been dealt another heavy blow, for the press was definitely favoring the universities. They even showed the bodies of some students beaten to death by riot police. A favorable sign.

I might have found even more favorable evidences in my analysis except that that very night, my attention was rudely snapped in another direction.

I might have missed it entirely if I had not been extraordinarily alert. I knew it was important for me to pick up every possible clue I could about Heller. He had an inkling, I am sure, after Connecticut, that I was out to get him and even though I was not moving around much in New York, I didn't want to run the slightest risk of turning a corner and running into him. In fact, every time I rode anywhere near the Empire State Building or the UN area, I scrunched way down in the cab just in case he happened to be on the street.

Thus, I had been making it a habit to rapid-scan the recorded strips of the viewer lately. Ordinarily, I would not have bothered with the night strips due to that strange electronic interference around his suite, but after Gunsalmo Silva had calmly walked up and knocked on my door, I knew I couldn't be too careful.

It paid off!

I was amazed! Apparently Heller's rescue of Izzy had turned his attention to the Observatory of the Empire State Building. I have never seen a man so interested in soot. Who really cared what happened to the atmosphere of this planet? After Lombar had taken over Voltar, he would make very sure there was no population left on Earth: Lombar had enough riffraff at home without a full, additional planet of it to cause him trouble. Probably at the most he'd put in a little colony in Turkey to keep the opium coming. So who cared about the atmosphere of Earth? Let them choke on their own soot or get wiped out with exterminator sprays—who cared?

Yet Heller had begun a routine. Each night he would leave the Gracious Palms dressed in heavy cleaner's clothes, carrying a bucket and broom, and have Bang-Bang drive him down to the Empire State Building Observatory entrance.

The last car went up at 11:30 P.M. He would take it, and with a transfer arrive at the 86th floor.

At that hour the snack bar and souvenir counter would be closed and the place deserted. And who, I suppose, ever stops a cleaner in a New York building?

The snack bar and souvenir counter are housed, with the elevators and staircase, in a structure which stands in the middle of the large platform.

He would go up on the top of this central structure and plant three new wind cones and take the ones left the night before and put them in his bucket.

Although the platform extended out widely all around the central structure and although even the platform edge itself was amply guarded by a ten– or twelve-foot wrought-iron fence, the sight of him teetering around up there, fixing those cones to catch the wind, made me quite giddy.

The area had considerable light, coming up as it did from the city down below and all about and from the aircraft-warning and other lights on the higher tower. But to watch him fiddling with wind cones on those buttresses was a lot more than I could stand.

He was catching soot specimens or spores or something. He was probably analyzing them minutely and making all sorts of valuable conclusions, no doubt, but in my opinion it was just plain silly. Crazy as he was on the subject of height, it was probably recreation.

So tonight, I almost didn't look at the viewer when the time came. But some keen sense that is bred into you in the Apparatus told me that before I went to sleep, I better make sure he was up there again and not knocking on my door.

Yes, he was up there.

He put the old cones in his bucket and put some new ones in place and climbed down to the platform. And then it happened!