wavedhis arms, ordering Boswellister to the sidewalk, but Boswellisterrefused to move. He had his mission on Earth.
Boswellister shouted over the piled-up noise, waving his hand to thesky, calling to them to follow his lead to the glory of Ippling.
The officer grabbed his coat collar and hustled him to the sidewalk."You're under arrest!"
"You can't arrest _me_!" Boswellister squirmed and jerked away. Heshouted, "Follow me!" and ran north, a good part of the crowd after him.He shrieked an order into the pickup while he ran over the bridgetowards Moorpark.
A woman spotted the Ipplinger starship that followed overhead. "Freesamples!" she screamed, and those who had lagged behind fell into a runwith the crowd following Boswellister.
The northwest corner of Laurel Canyon and Moorpark had been cleared ofhouses for the erection of a new billion-dollar shopping center, and theground was smooth and bare. Here, in the center of the five-acreconstruction site, the Ipplinger starship settled to Earth.
The Ipplinger Supreme Starship Commander was panic-stricken. He had torescue Boswellister from that sample-seeking mob. If Boswellister shouldbe trampled and injured! Each screamed demand, picked up byBoswellister's lapel microphone, sent the Supreme Commander's bloodpressure up another notch, and the moment the ramp was unshipped he hitthe ground.
Officers and crewmen quickly lined up to pipe Boswellister aboard. Butthe crowd pushed in close, forcing Boswellister to the rear as theyscreamed for their free samples. Two bulky crewmen stood embattled bythe entrance port, strong-arming the kids who tried to storm through theport and inside.
"Space Angel's inside!" That was their battle cry as they tried towriggle under the legs of the crewmen.
"Ya sellin' Oatbombs?" one screamed in the commander's ear, then reachedup to snatch off a shoulder patch.
Boswellister stood in the rear of the crowd and wrung his hands whilethe crowd clamored for their samples.
"Give us the pitch, then pass out the stuff!"
"Lookit that ship! Ain't it a dilly! Whatcha sellin', Wheatsnaps?"
"Bring on the dames!"
* * * * *
They pressed in close to the starship, running their hands over theslick metal surface.
"Boy, what a prop! Bet it cost a million bucks. What ya sellin',mister?"
"Sanity!" Boswellister shouted from the rear.
His men tried to hold their ranks, but the crowd broke the lines,jerking the medals off their chests for souvenirs.
Boswellister was almost babbling by the time the commander and his menbattled their way to him.
"You saw it all! You know!" Boswellister protested. "That Blond Terrorand his harem darlings, and those violence-avid ruffians in theaudience! Dodie, the stripper, with her lip-licking ogglers! ThatCalsobisidine pitchman, oozing allure and implied invitation! Myequation! My precious equation, buried under a mass of pills, lotions,toys, food, clothes and everything sold with a bump and grind!"
They fought to the ship with him, while the crowd opposed each step,yelling for entertainment, for TV cameras, for samples of anything.
"How could I have missed it?" Boswellister moaned. "I should have soldthem with sex, right from the beginning."
"What do you do, handsome? Sing?" A bundle-clutching housewife breathedinto his face, stepping on the commander's foot as she shoved in closeto Boswellister.
"Take me home!" Boswellister beseeched the commander.
The officers and crew, tattered, demedaled, bruised and completelydefeated in morale, formed a flying wedge and drove for the safety ofthe ship.
The ramp retracted. The port closed, then opened briefly to eject anosey boy, closing finally on the demands and the mocking laughter andthe clangor of arriving police cars.
"Raise ship!" the commander ordered. He sopped at the blood from hisgashed arm and said to his first officer, "Somebody in that mob used aknife to go after those service stripes."
The first shuddered. "Ugly brutes."
Boswellister leaned against the corridor bulkhead and sighed as theIpplinger starship rose from the ground. How could he explain to hispoppa? All his brothers had won their worlds. He _would_ do it. Hesquared his shoulders. After all, he was a Boswellister. BoswellisterXIV, no less. A son of Gaphroldshan IX himself, the Prince of IpplingWorld LXIV, a Royal Prince of the Central Ippling.
He walked resolutely to the control room, riding the crest of hisrefurbished dignity.
"Put me down on that planet we spotted last year," he ordered. "What wasthat star map number?"
"G.S.R. 285139-F. R. A. 592-105-R.U. 13," his alert assistantastronomical officer answered, reading the number from a preparedmemorandum.
Boswellister hesitated. Should he reprimand the officer for anticipatinghis failure or compliment him for his efficiency? Boswellister backedwater and went to his room to learn the language he'd need, while theofficers pulled their own demoralized spirits together so they could goto work on the crew when the news broke that they weren't going home.
* * * * *
They made a quick passage to their destination, and Boswellister--wellrested, well fed, hypnotically tutored, supplied with communicators, asynthesizer for his food and a portable equation writer strapped to hisback, and his irrepressible, dauntless belief in himself in triumphantoperation--stepped from the ramp onto this newest world of his Princelydestiny.
"Circle in orbit," he ordered. "I'll call you when I need you."
Boswellister walked confidently down the road to town. He congratulatedhimself on having learned, also on his wise humility in admitting thefact of his having learned. He smiled now at the naivete with which hehad approached his first try at establishing a realm for his IpplingerPrincedom rights.
He had been so full of illusions that he had landed openly, had steppedright up and announced that he had come to establish his household andrear his own Princes, who would, in their maturity, leave to win theirown worlds. In addition to their being small-minded on that first worldabout his needing five wives for his household, they had nearly managedto commit him to a lunatic asylum, for he had overlooked, in hisequation, the fact that his first planet, with its two suns andperpetual daylight, had never known about the stars. There had been noway to break through their wall of stupidity, and he had left, theplanet's sanity-police close on his heels. Had he used money it wouldhave been a cinch, he had realized as soon as he was safely in the ship.
That hard-earned lesson he had applied to his second planet, but theresuperstition meant more than money, though money had seemed on thesurface to be the answer to everything. On that second planet he hadmade the error of buying his way into the half-political, half-religioustemple setup, and had tried to bring the local superstitions into linewith Ipplinger Reality Philosophy. They had lost an officer and threemen when they rescued him from the temple's torture chamber; and nonetoo soon, for he had been taking quite a stretching when his rescue hadarrived.
Applied on Earth, the superstition equation had not paid off. He hadfailed to notice that they didn't really believe in their religions andsuperstitions, though they showed every indication of being extremelydevout and credulous. He should have sold Earth, and sold it with sex.
Well, he had learned, all right, and here, on this new world, in thisfresh start, he would show how well he had learned. In the idiom ofVentura Boulevard, he'd hit 'em with the whole deck, deuces wild. He'dgive 'em sex and money and superstition and to hell with fact and logic.
These primitive worlds had to be brought slowly into a respect forlogic; for Ipplinger logic, the only valid system of logic in the wholeuniverse.
In the hovering ship, the commander turned to the astrogator and said,with the bitterness of yesterday's conflict with the mutinous crewevident in his voice, "Well, our little vaporized circuit is off again."He motioned to the image of Boswellister in the forward viewscreen.
It was a sight that tended to increase the tremor in the astrogator'shands. He re
plied, "I only hope we can pull the crew through anotherpickup. Home and family! Do they think I want mine any less?"
Boswellister marched confidently down the road. He _would_ succeed, fordidn't he have the well oiled machinery of the whole Ipplinger starshipcrew of cultural contact specialists to back him up?
* * * * *
While he walked, he practiced the strident-voiced delivery ofextravagant lies he had learned so well and had so magnificentlyimitated from the Ventura Boulevard pitch artists. He practiced theleering insinuendo of the barker outside the gambling hall; he gave itthe Calsobisidine con come-on; he sold it solid, dripping with sex,twitching with lure.
He knew that here, finally, he would succeed.
Boswellister XIV, Noble Prince of Ippling, smiled his