Mission Earth Volume 4: An Alien Affair

  I re-entered the sitting room. “The messenger had to count it,” I said in apology. “But here it is.”

  He took it, counted it and stuffed it into his pockets, quite a wad. As he left, I said, “Good luck on your retirement.” He gave me an evil smile and was gone.

  PART THIRTY

  Chapter 6

  At dawn there was a furious pounding on my bedroom door.

  Ah, Terb with my money!

  Groggily, I staggered over and opened it.

  It wasn’t Terb. It was Raht!

  He was standing there, shivering and shaking, covered with the snow falling outside, blue with cold—and something else.

  He came in, he shut the door behind him and leaned against it. He said, “He’s dead.”

  “Well, that’s good news,” I said. “Hand over the money.”

  He stared at me noncomprehending. He looked pretty shattered, sort of half doubled up and sort of liable to fall.

  “Don’t stall,” I said. “You know very well I sent Terb to tail Silva and get the money back.”

  He slumped all the way down and sat there with his back against the door, head bowed over. I could swear he was crying.

  “Come on, come on,” I said. “No stalling. It’s too early in the morning for any tricks. Just hand over the money and don’t try to hold any out!”

  “He’s dead,” said Raht. “Tortured to death.”

  “Well, good,” I said. “So Terb had a little fun. But that doesn’t mean you two (bleepards) can keep the money.”

  He said, between sobs, “It’s Terb that’s dead.”

  I had opened my mouth to speak. I closed it. GUNSALMO SILVA WAS STILL ALIVE!

  Quickly, I locked and barred the door. Hastily, I got another gun out of my bureau, a Smith and Wesson .44 Magnum revolver. I made sure the living room was empty, locked and barred. I scouted the terrace. No Silva. Yet.

  I came back and grabbed Raht by his shirt front. “You better (bleeped) well tell me how you two fouled this up!”

  He was so blue and so shaking with shock, it took him quite a while before he could do much talking.

  “I never would have found him,” he finally got out. “But we both wear bugs we can locate each other with. He didn’t come back last night. They said he had gone to your place. I traced him by the bug sewn in his pants. He was in a basement entrance of an old abandoned house.” He halted.

  “Was there anything on him?”

  “His feet were burned half off. His teeth were all broken with grinding them. We always worked together. If he was following Silva, the man must have pretended to go in the house and then circled and got him from behind.”

  “Did he have my hundred thousand on him?” I demanded. You can never get a straight story out of such riffraff.

  “Nothing. He had no weapons, no money—nothing.”

  “Did he talk?”

  Raht had begun to cry again, sort of dry, choking sobs. Then he said, “I think Terb must have been too cold to fight.”

  What a way to try to pry money out of somebody for an overcoat! Believe me, I kicked Raht out right then.

  He got to the elevator and was supporting himself against a piece of wall, head down, shivering and sobbing. I slammed my door. I had more important things to think about.

  Had Terb talked?

  Very likely.

  I better stay very close inside. I better keep this gun on me day and night.

  Leave it to those two to foul everything up!

  Suddenly, I remembered Silva had impersonated the wife of the director of the CIA, had kidnapped her and hung the murder on her. Utanc!

  I got brave enough to cross the sitting room. I pounded on her door. After a long time, she opened it.

  “Don’t go out. Keep your door locked. Don’t let anybody in!”

  “Why?” she said in alarm.

  “Silva. You remember Silva. The man you hired as a bodyguard once. He murdered the director of the CIA and now he may be gunning for me.”

  “He did?” said Utanc, eyes flying wide. Then, “Are you sure?”

  She needed convincing. It was still there on the sofa, slid behind a cushion: the ID of the director of the CIA. I scooped it up and thrust it at her, bloodstains and all.

  Her mouth was open in astonishment as she stared at it. Then she said, “You paid him to do it?”

  “And tried to get the money back. He may be around any corner. Don’t go out!”

  Psychologists will tell you that murder and blood do strange things to women. Death stimulates them sexually.

  She suddenly grabbed me and kissed me!

  Then she raced around and closed all the drapes so the room was dark as pitch.

  She threw me on the bed and was all over me!

  We didn’t go out that day.

  Her mouth was hot as fire!

  PART THIRTY

  Chapter 7

  After two days of such isolation—and very rewarding isolation it was—I was feeling pretty cocky.

  Because there had been nothing and no one strange in our vicinity, I had to conclude that it was possible that Terb had not talked.

  I decided it might be possible to venture out cautiously. Besides, forty-eight hours of uninterrupted bed with Utanc was actually making me weak. At breakfast, I found that lifting a spoonful of ice cream required considerable effort.

  Besides, she had left the table and gone into her room and locked the door and had now come back and was standing there fully dressed in a mink coat, mink snow boots, mink hat and was drawing on mink gloves.

  There was just a trace of irritation in her voice. “I was looking through my clothes just now,” she said, “and found I don’t have a thing to wear. It has finally stopped snowing and there’s a sale on at Tiffany’s.”

  “They sell jewelry,” I said.

  “I know. So ta-ta.”

  “Wait!” I said. “Be careful of the money!”

  With some asperity, she seized her mink purse, opened it and showed me. It was stuffed with money! What a manager! She turned to leave.

  “Wait,” I said. “One more thing!” I weakly stumbled to a bureau and got out an old Remington Double Derringer with pearl handles. It was small, weighing only eleven ounces. I made sure it was loaded with its .41-caliber rimfire shorts. “You better take this.”

  She recoiled. “Oh, dear me, no! I am absolutely terrified of guns! I might shoot myself by accident!”

  Oh, well, little wild desert thing that she was, naturally she was too shy to shoot anybody.

  Around one o’clock, after another sleep, I got energy enough gathered up to get dressed and go out myself. What prompted me was the state of my exchequer. There must be only about $38,000 left under the mattress.

  Looking around corners first and keeping the Smith and Wesson .44 Magnum in my hand in my overcoat pocket, I made my way through the snowy streets to Rockecenter Plaza. It was time to draw my pay as a family “spi.”

  Soon, I was standing at my destination:

  Window 13

  Petty Cash

  There was a new girl there. Well, I guess you could call her a girl. She had a man’s haircut and a man’s suit on and a thin, hard slit for a mouth.

  “Where,” I said, uncertainly, “is Miss . . . Miss . . . ?”

  “Miss Grabball finished her twenty-five years yesterday and retired to a villa in Monte Carlo. I am Miss Pinch. Who the hell are you?”

  “Inkswitch,” I said, tendering the Federal ID.

  She looked at her thick book of employees. “You aren’t listed here, buster.”

  “If you will just punch the computer,” I said helpfully.

  She did. It came up blank.

  “Beat it,” she said.

  “Wait,” I said. “You know what it means when it comes up blank.”

  “It means I call the cops. But I’m in a good mood today. Get out of here before I pull the trigger on this under-the-counter riot gun. I been dying to see how it works.”
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  Naturally, I left. I went to see the personnel director.

  “Miss Pinch? New personnel,” he said. “They always give trouble.” And he left for his afternoon coffee break.

  I went to Bury’s office.

  It was locked.

  I went home.

  Well, at least Silva hadn’t shot me.

  For a little while I toyed with the idea of robbing a bank. It seemed to be pretty easy to do and certainly something had to be done to recoup my dwindling fortune. That hundred thousand really hurt.

  Thinking Raht might know something about robbing banks, I phoned the New York office.

  “Raht?” said the receptionist. “He’s been in the Metropolitan Hospital for two days with pneumonia.” More vacation! My Gods, how could you work with such riffraff!

  But the day ended with some good laughs. They had a comedy show and who was on it but the bogus Whiz Kid, buckteeth and all!

  The show was called “The Benighted Show” and the interviewer was Donny Fartson, Junior. The show had run on prime time for decades and the son had taken over from the father.

  The phony Whiz Kid sat there and bragged and bragged about what a great student he was and how smart he was and how he was top of his class. And in a stroke of genius he had invented this fuel in the university laboratories and now he had come out of hiding to tell all and the Octopus Oil Company was against him. And then he did a little dance, waving a college flag.

  And then the interviewer asked him, “If you’re the top of your college class, maybe you can answer this one. Why was New York called the ‘Big Apple’?”

  The Whiz Kid double grinned, his buckteeth especially prominent, and said, “Because it’s full of worms!”

  The audience laughed and laughed and the Whiz Kid took a couple bows.

  At that moment I had a twinge of worry. They hadn’t thrown any rotten eggs at him! They had laughed at him, yes. But at the end, the audience even seemed sympathetic! I didn’t want this sort of thing getting out of hand. I didn’t want them thinking he was a brilliant student. I called 42 Mess Street. The phone was busy, busy, busy.

  Well, I hoped Madison would handle it.

  I went to bed to recoup my energies.

  PART THIRTY

  Chapter 8

  And I had been right not to worry!

  The very next morning, Madison had his front page!

  WHIZ KID

  FALSIFIES COLLEGE

  ___________________

  FAKE STUDENT

  Last night, when the Whiz Kid appeared on the nationwide prime time Benighted Show, he alleged that he was a top student of the leading engineering university of the country.

  He also alleged that Octopus Oil was behind his recent troubles.

  Investigative reporters at once swarmed to the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Wrectology.

  The Whiz Kid is not and never has been enrolled there!

  No student in the engineering school had ever heard of him, no professor had him on any roll book.

  The President of MIW, in a public statement, said, “This is a deliberate fabrication. I will not have the name of this noble and honored institution dragged through the public scrap heap! It is an obvious effort to trade upon the lofty and divine right of universities. If we had more appropriations from the CIA we would be better equipped to handle monstrous cabals of this sort!”

  There was more. And it was in every paper and on radio and TV. I was filled with awe.

  It was a type of assassination I had not been familiar with. And it was all the more deadly because the assassin seemed so general and it was all within the allowed law! And it could be done to anybody!

  I tried to call Madison to congratulate him but all his phones were busy.

  Ah well, Madison was doing fine so I wondered if there was any reaction from Heller. His plans were being so undermined, he must be utterly wild. I resorted to the viewer.

  He was certainly taking his time getting to the office. It was a bitterly cold, windless day and every oil- and coal-burning furnace in the city was adding so much smoke and smog that one’s eyes watered. Instead of just observing that, Heller was going along measuring it with an atmosphere densometer, a Voltar instrument being used right out there in the street! It would have been a Code Break except that New Yorkers never notice anything, (bleep) them.

  At length he reached his floor in the Empire State Building and en route to his own palatial layout noticed that the door to Multinational was ajar. That was where Izzy slept in his mop closet.

  Heller went in.

  He stopped suddenly.

  Right there on the giant screen of Izzy’s business computer, a spelled-out sign!

  In green electronic-type letters, it said:

  GOODBYE CRUEL WORLD!

  Heller dropped whatever he was carrying. He rushed to the elevator area that served his floor and, like lightning, pushed every one of the call buttons urgently, both up and down.

  One after the other they stopped.

  He urgently asked each operator, “Have you seen Mr. Epstein? The little fellow with the big nose and big glasses?”

  He hit it with the third one.

  “He went up about five minutes ago,” said the young man. “Then he found you couldn’t get to the Observation Platform in this car and he had me take him all the way down.”

  “Forget these passengers,” said Heller. “It’s life and death. Take me all the way down instantly!”

  The operator did that. “He seemed awful confused, Mr. Jet,” he said as they rocketed downwards with the other passengers protesting.

  Heller was out and over to the express elevator on 34th Street at speed. He was up to the eightieth floor in less than a minute. He switched to the elevator to the eighty-sixth floor. The sign said:

  Visibility Poor Today

  There wasn’t any traffic to the eighty-sixth floor.

  He stepped out into the area of the snack bar and souvenir stand. Only the clerks.

  He rushed out onto the Observation Platform. He ran along the high fence which encloses it and prevents suicides. He was looking down. It made me dizzy.

  Then he saw a hand. It was gripping the bottom leg of a firmly embedded chair over by the door, well away from the edge.

  Heller looked over the top of the seat. There was Izzy. He was hugging the platform pavement, gripping the bottom leg. He was at least twenty feet from the edge!

  “Izzy!” said Heller. “Get up!”

  “No. Height makes me so dizzy I can’t walk! I can’t let go. I came up here to throw myself off but now I can’t let go of this chair!”

  “What’s happened?” said Heller.

  “All this bad publicity on you triggered it,” wailed Izzy. “That student story this morning was the last straw! My back is broke. I can’t be responsible for you anymore!”

  “Oh, come now,” said Heller, “that’s been going on for some time. There must be something else.”

  Izzy began to weep. “I don’t even deserve your scolding me. And you should. I have been so flustered and nervous with all this press that I have been making business mistakes.”

  Heller knelt down by him and put a hand on him as though holding him from slipping.

  It made Izzy wail all the harder. “You shouldn’t be nice to me! I’ve ruined us.” He choked and gasped for a bit. Then he said, all in a rush, “We were about to owe a fortune in income tax. There was an old, old company that was so deep in debt nobody would touch it: even the government and unions had abandoned it, years ago. The Chryster Motor Corporation. I couldn’t resist it. It would have furnished us with debt for years and years!”

  Heller put a second hand on him as though he might slide horizontally twenty feet. “Well, that doesn’t sound so incompetent, Izzy.”

  “It wasn’t,” said Izzy. And then he wailed, “But right away I did the most stupid thing! I fired the board of directors and I put my mother in charge of it and it started making money! Fo
r the first time since 1968!”

  “But that’s good news,” said Heller.

  “Oh, no it isn’t!” cried Izzy. “Right away, IRS made a retroactive ruling and invented taxes for it, overdue and compounded with fines and penalties clear back to 1967! They’ve impounded all our bank accounts even in corporations that aren’t interlocked! We’re ruined!”

  “How ruined?” said Heller.

  “We need over a million and a half to free our bank accounts. We can’t pay our staff or rent. We don’t even have money to start exchange arbitrage again. Throw me over the fence. You’ll be better off without me. I’ll close my eyes.”

  Heller pried his fingers loose from the leg of the seat with some difficulty. Izzy had his eyes tightly closed. Heller picked him up.

  “Oh, thank you, thank you,” said Izzy. He obviously thought Heller was going to throw him over the high fence.

  But Heller carried him into the area with the souvenir stand and snack bar and pushed an elevator button. Izzy tentatively opened his eyes and saw he was no longer on the platform and began to sob anew.

  Heller carried him down in the elevators and then up again to their floor. He went on through to his office, opened it and put Izzy in a chair.

  Heller went to a safe and got out the black garbage bag. He began to empty wallets and pile wads of notes in Izzy’s lap.

  The heap grew. Mostly thousand-dollar bills. Izzy was holding them up to the light, checking them.

  Suddenly Izzy began to count them with the expert motions of a bank teller.

  “One hundred and one thousand, two hundred and five!” said Izzy.

  “Tax free,” said Heller. “Now, will that let you start arbitrage exchange again?”

  “Oh, yes! How did you do this?”

  “And you can begin to pay the rent and payroll?”

  “Oh yes. The pound is out the bottom in Singapore and high in New York. But . . .”

  “There’s a string,” said Heller. “Promise me not to go near that Observation Platform again.”

  “Oh, I won’t. The wind hurts my sinuses!”

  “And one more thing,” said Heller. “I have now saved your life twice so you are doubly responsible for me.”

  “Oh no!” said Izzy with a wail. “Not with all that bad publicity!”