An Alien Affair

  With variations, the story was in all the Sunday papers. But there was much more. Dirt Illustrated had full-page ads announcing the coming expose. And double-page ads were carried by Octopus Gasoline, "The Drink of Industry and the People!"

  By the Gods, he had even made the Sunday papers! I was really pleased. Bury's faith in Madison had not been misplaced!

  I hastily went down to get the newest copy of Dirt Illustrated and there it was! A complete expose! According to the leading story, the Whiz Kid himself had tried to win the prize! He had submitted an unsigned entry that simply said "Octopus Gasoline"!

  I really chuckled. This Madison was a howling genius after all.

  I tuned in on Heller. He was at his Nature Appreciation 101 class with Mr. Wouldlice as his instructor. The snow was all over the place and the class looked cold. Wouldlice seemed a sort of chinless young man. With an ice saw, he was trying to cut a hole in the frozen Harlem Meer in Central Park and lecturing on the nesting habits of carp. He wasn't making much headway with the ice cutting. Heller, hands in pockets, finally finished the job for him with some strategically placed kicks with the heels of his baseball spikes. Heller handed the resulting slab to a girl and the students began to use it as a sort of belly sled. Mr. Wouldlice went on lecturing with Heller as his sole attending student. He didn't seem antagonistic to Heller; well, that would change with the next term when Miss Simmons got back on the job.

  Heller did act sort of depressed. He was stirring the soot-covered snow with his foot. It made me very cheerful.

  Monday, however, made me sort of wonder whose side this Madison was on.

  He got his front page again. But a new twist.

  OCTOPUS OFFICIALS

  DENY INSTIGATING

  WHIZ KID RIOTS

  The mayor today denied that he had been summoned before a full-scale meeting of the Octopus Oil Company. However, unimpeachable inside leaks reached this paper just before dawn that a secret meeting of the Seven Brothers had occurred over the weekend to discuss the Whiz Kid riots.

  All officials reached denied the meeting and the discussion.

  "In admitting that he used Octopus gasoline in the race," a spokesman said, "the Whiz Kid obviously sought to implicate the oil companies in his vicious and villainous plot to undermine the entire oil industry with a felonious breach of racing rules. I deny vigorously that the oil companies financed the rioters. Besides, the Whiz Kid, being only 17, could not legally drive in Nassau County. This is an effort to link the great American patriots of the oil industry to an illegal act and imply that by selling the Whiz Kid Octopus gasoline to use in his fraud, the oil companies are also party to the crime."

  But when Tuesday's papers came, Madison had lost his front page. He had slumped to page 3. The story was even short.

  WHIZ KID FORBIDDEN TO DRIVE

  Officials of the State of New York today revoked the unissued New York Driving License of the Whiz Kid due to the Octopus disclosure that he is only 17 and underage.

  NASCAR officials also revoked his membership, effectively ending any further racing by the Whiz Kid.

  Charges of fraud and public conspiracy ...

  Ah, well. I could relax. Madison had done it. I phoned his office. He wasn't there. I phoned his mother.

  "Mr. Smith? Oh, I am sorry. I can't call him to the phone. He has been under a terrible strain all morning and didn't feel well enough..."

  Madison took the phone away from her. "Mr. Smith?" He sounded very depressed. "I am so sorry, Mr. Smith. I lost the front page. I could feel it in my bones last night." And an aside, "Mother, please hold the ice bag tighter, it's slipping. Mr. Smith, please don't lose faith in me. These things take time. Somewhere I went wrong. I promise you I will live up to everything you ever thought of me. Really. I have to hang up now. My psychiatrist just came in."

  He really sounded depressed. But I wasn't!

  I checked up on Heller. He was in the High Library at Empire University. He was reading Hakluyt's The Principall Navigations, Voiages, and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589 A.D.).

  He was lingering on a section where a vessel had gone aground on the North American coast and natives were swarming all over it, hacking the crew to pieces in the intense cold. Then he just sat there looking into space.

  An assistant librarian, gathering up some books, said, "You look kind of lost. Can I help you?"

  Heller said, "No. I don't think anybody can. Somewhere I went wrong. And for the life of me, I can't spot where."

  "Just go see the student psychiatrist," said the assistant librarian cheerfully.

  "Just because I'm lost is no reason to make two mistakes," said Heller and went back to studying Hakluyt.

  But oh, was I cheerful. My life felt like a song.

  Bless Bury. Bless Madison. Heller was stopped cold!

  Chapter 5

  According to psychologists a manic state seldom lasts very long. And so it was with mine.

  Not two minutes after I left the viewer, there was a knock on the door. Thinking it was a bellhop with some deliveries for Utanc, I unsuspectingly opened it.

  Raht and Terb!

  I hastily swept them into the living room, looked up and down the hall, reentered and locked it behind me.

  Raht's mustache was growing back—they must have shaved it to repair his fractured jaws. He had some facial scars from the wires. He was very hollow-eyed.

  Terb had lost most of his fat and, apparently, the use of a couple of fingers.

  "It's about time!" I thundered at them. "Lollygagging about on company time! You ought to be ashamed of yourselves. I've a good notion to dock your whole year's pay!" That's the way you have to handle such riffraff.

  I sat down and poured myself a cup of coffee from the silver pot and looked at them contemptuously through its steam. They were standing in the middle of the room, their thin clothes shabby, shivering from the outside cold, kind of blue. Apparently they had lost their overcoats.

  "The New York office is open and running," said Raht. "They got all the criminals scheduled for their identity changes as you requested."

  "That's no reason for you to come around and bother me," I said.

  "Oh, we wouldn't have," said Terb. "But Faht Bey said on the wire that it was pretty urgent so we had to come."

  I sighed the sigh of the harassed executive. "And what," I said, "is urgent enough to disturb the vital work I'm doing? Without any help from menials, I might add."

  Raht said, "Apparently, he wouldn't wait."

  "And whom is he?" I said, correcting his grammar. You have to keep such riffraff on their toes.

  "Gunsalmo Silva," said Terb.

  I felt my hair lift. I had told Silva to go kill the Director of the CIA. Silva shouldn't be alive. He should be safely dead while executing an execution that couldn't possibly be executed!

  "Evidently," said Raht, "he arrived several days ago in Afyon. Faht Bey tried to find out what he wanted and get it handled but Silva said his business was with you and a couple days ago he simply left. The airline booking he made was for New York!"

  Well, New York is a big town. Silva couldn't possibly, Gods forbid, know my address. One mustn't appear nervous before underlings. "So what else is new?" I said.

  Terb promptly handed me a stack of orders to stamp!

  Wearily, I got out my identoplate and stamped away. But, for once, I was alert. There were two orders there: one for their hospital expenses and another which called for overcoats and new clothes. I tossed them aside. Then, on second thought, to make a better impression, I recovered them and tore them in small pieces.

  "You be on call," I said as I swept them into the hall. "No more of this loafing!"

  I slammed the door on them.

  For some time I sort of paced around the bedroom and sitting room. Then I decided to go for a walk. I got my warmest clothes and, all wrapped up, I went to the hall door and opened it.

  GUNSALMO SILVA!

  In moments of intense shock
, the thing uppermost in one's mind tends to surface.

  "How did you find me?" I gasped.

  He pushed on by. He removed a camel's-hair overcoat from his squat and muscular frame and threw it on the sofa. He put his hat, a Russian astrakhan, on the coat. He sat down, found the coffee was still warm in its thermos pot and poured himself a cup.

  "Come in and close the door," he said. "It's drafty."

  I did. I went in the bedroom and took off my own coat. I checked to make sure I had my Colt Bulldog but, actually, I don't think I could have drawn it, because my hand was shaking.

  I reentered the living room and sat down to hide what my knees were doing.

  "The answer to your first God (bleeped) question," he said, "is easy. I seem to have these miraculous powers. That Utanc is sending avalanches of postcards to her two little servant kids back in Afyon and they're showing them to half of Turkey." He pulled one out. It was pretty dogeared. It was of the Bentley Bucks Deluxe Arms with an X on the penthouse and said "X marks my room." And also "Confidential."

  "I had to twist the little (bleepard's) arm a bit, but there it is. Now as to your next question," he said, overlooking the fact I hadn't asked it, "where's my hunnert big ones?"

  I found my wits. "How do I know you did the job?" I said. "After all, the rub-out of the Director of the CIA would make big news."

  "Jesus H. Christ," he said, "don't you ever read the papers?" He looked around. A stack of them for the last two weeks stood in a corner: my Heller file that I hadn't clipped yet. He went to them. Sure enough, there was the story:

  CIA DIRECTOR

  REPLACEMENT

  HITS SNAG IN SENATE

  He fished around in the stack some more. "And how about this?" He jammed it under my nose.

  CIA DIRECTOR

  SUCCUMBS TO OPERATION

  "They can't come right out and say he was hit," said Silva. "It would set the God (bleeped) Russians a bad example. But how about this?"

  He threw the whole wallet and identity cards of the Director of the CIA on the sofa. It was bloodstained!

  "Incredible!" I said, stalling for time.

  "Yeah, I thought so myself. You see, I sort of got these incredible powers. I don't know where the hell they come from."

  I knew. Taken to Voltar, he had been hypnotrained by the Apparatus! I had a killer-killer in front of me, very deadly indeed!

  I fought to think of more stalls. "It's hard to realize you could waste a man as guarded as that," I said.

  "Yeah, it took time. First, I had to get them to hire me as a hit man. They knew my score—'Holy Joe' and all—so they took me on. And I had to waste two Russians for them and then a dictator in Central America. That's what slowed me down."

  He poured himself another cup of coffee. "Still, it wasn't too slow. You see, these ideas on how to do things just pop up and away I go. Mysterious. Like angel voices. Really beautiful."

  Silva added two lumps of sugar to his coffee. "But wasting the CIA Director was easy. Hardly took any angel voices at all. After the three hits they trusted me so much I was even riding in his car. I learnt his habits, so to speak. So I disguised myself as his wife and shot him in a Georgetown brothel. They're looking for her now. Good, clean job so they won't find her. I sold her body to the God (bleeped) university hospital. It was a bit more money, too. And speaking of money, where's my hunnert big ones?"

  I choked. "Listen," I managed, "lira won't do you any good in the U.S. I'll phone and find out what the exchange is and pay you in dollars."

  "Lira!" he snarled. "What the hell would I do with ten million lira! It's a hunnert thousand U.S. greenback bucks, buster. So cough up."

  "That's what I was saying," I said hastily. "I'll make a call and get it sent over right away."

  "That's better," he said.

  I went into my bedroom. I had about a hundred and thirty thousand under my mattress but I had conceived a good plan. I phoned the New York office.

  "Raht," I said.

  They put Terb on the phone. He said, "I'm sorry. Raht has gone out to find us some rooms. I'm alone."

  "Then come alone!" I snapped. "I want you over here at once. Come to my bedroom door and no place else!" I slammed down the phone.

  I went back. Silva was sitting relaxed. "Well, you won't believe this," he said, "but I'm going to God (bleep) retire shortly."

  "Good," I said. "I don't have any more work for you."

  "Oh, I wouldn't take it if you had it. I'm a real artist now. I got these mysterious God (bleep) powers, see? And there's a bird that nobody will take a contract for. It's been offered and offered and no takers. One million God (bleeped) bucks. And no takers. What do you think of that?"

  "Marvelous," I said. "He must be pretty dangerous."

  "Oh, he is, he is." And then he snapped his fingers. "But me, I'm an artist. I'm taking it. He's wasted thirteen hit men, they say. But thirteen is his unlucky number. He's going to be fourteen! One million God (bleeped) bucks."

  He glowed for a bit. Then he waved his hand about and said, "I'm going to live in swanky joints like this one and have a swanky dame like you got and live it up! And speaking of living it up, where's the delivery boy with the money?"

  He waited and I sweated. It was actually a temptation to simply blow him full of holes with the Colt Bulldog, but such a slug spills a lot of blood and it would ruin the sofa. Besides, he might outdraw me.

  At last, a knock on the bedroom door. I closed the door to the sitting room and opened it. Terb was standing there, blue with cold.

  "Listen," I said in a tense whisper. "There's a man, Silva, going to be leaving here in a few minutes. He'll be carrying a hundred thousand dollars. You tail him, kill him and get the money back. And bring it right here back to me without one single penny missing."

  "I didn't come armed. We lost our guns. Can't I wait and get Raht on this with me? We work together...."

  "Not armed!" Oh, I was furious with him. But a hundred thousand is a hundred thousand. I pushed the Bulldog into his hands. I thought for a moment. I took the Knife Section knife out from behind my neck and gave it to him. I thought for a moment and went back into the room and got two Voltar heavy-concussion grenades—they are common enough, a fifteen-second delay time after you throw them and no fragments to leave evidence.

  "Now, no excuses," I said. "Watch my door from down the hall and when he comes out, tail him and, in a safe place, blow him away. Got it?"

  He said he did.

  I went back into my bedroom and dug the hundred thousand out from under my mattress. It certainly hurt me to part with it, even for a little while.

  I reentered 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.

  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!