Flick held up Madison’s identoplate.
“PR man?” said the warder. “What’s that?”
“Parole officer,” said Flick. “Apparatus parole officer.” And he made a little gesture toward the two “bluebottles” that had followed them in. The warder signaled with his hand that the escort could withdraw.
Flick reached into Madison’s coat and drew out two one-thousand-credit notes and slid them into the warder’s palm. It was a year’s pay.
“Ah, yes,” said the warder. “A parole officer. Anybody special?”
“Lead us to your computer consoles,” said Flick.
The warder took them down a stone passageway, ushered them into a room where several consoles sat, deserted at night. He waved his hand in invitation and left, shutting the door.
Flick took off his mustard-colored tunic, rolled up his sleeves and sat down before a keyboard and screen.
Madison said, “Flick, you’ve GOT to tell me what you are up to NOW!”
“Well,” said Flick, with a glance to make sure the door was shut, “if you plan a robbery you’ve got to have a gang.”
“You don’t need a gang, Flick.”
“Now listen,” said Flick, “I’ve dreamed and dreamed of having my own gang. I never had the means to break one out. Now, you’re not going to spoil it. You got to be more careful of dreams: they’re fragile.” He turned to a pad on the desk, a big smile beginning to split the horizontal oval of his face. “Oh, man! Am I ever going to have a great gang. Now I’m going to make a list of absolute essentials, so don’t you interrupt.”
He began to write and Madison, looking over his shoulder, read:
IDEAL GANG
1 Female for a footman in the car to fool with and feel up when I have long and tiresome waits.
3 More drivers for getaway and loot coaches and in case I get tired driving.
3 Chefs for cooking in relays 24 hours in case I get hungry at odd times.
1 Scaler to climb up walls and open windows and roof traps in places I think I might get dizzy or my shins barked.
1 Purse snatcher to get keys to houses and opening plates to avoid making noise by breaking locks.
1 Electronics security expert that knows all about security systems and can defeat them.
1 Salesman to fence loot for me so he gets caught and I don’t.
1 Good-looking girl to clean up my room because I hate making beds. Ha. Ha.
6 Whores to sleep with and cook for the rest of the gang so they leave mine alone.
He chewed the end of the pen for a bit, then he said, “Nope, that’s it. That’s just about right. A gang right out of my dreams for sure. Now I’m going to computer out ten candidates for each of these jobs, then I’ll get the warder to dig the applicants out of the old bunkers and parade them and I can select the absolute top-best criminals. Perfection!”
He turned to the console and shortly the screen began to show a racing blur of numbers, names, faces and records. Flick was preselecting categories and then entering them by number in on a side, portable computer board. Thousands of names and faces were pouring through.
Madison watched dully, wondering how he was going to stop this.
No master at operating one of these, Flick occasionally hit a wrong key. This got him in a tangle and wrong categories flashed up while he tried to get back.
“Wait!” said Madison, suddenly jarred out of his preoccupation. “What on Earth is that category you just passed? Go back to it.”
Flick did. “Circus girls? What would anybody want with circus girls? All they ever do is stand around and show off costumes. And there, look at the crimes: life for rolling drunks. That type of criminality is NOT dignified. We’re not rolling drunks: we’re in the house-robbing business.”
“Wait, don’t shift categories yet. Some of those carry the educated symbol. Does it say any of them were ever models?”
“What’s a ‘model’?”
“Pull the printout on those and get them paraded along with the rest.”
Flick muttered. He hit another wrong key.
“Hey!” said Madison. “There’s an ex-Homeview cameraman doing life for equipment theft!”
Flick was disgusted. “Look, if you’re going to put together another gang, go over to another console: you’re getting in my way.”
Madison approached another console and figured out how to operate it. He got to work.
PART SEVENTY-FOUR
Chapter 6
Madison, two hours later, was feeling more than slightly ill. He was standing in the ghastly blue light of the prison courtyard, one hand on the airbus, trying not to vomit. Naturally fastidious, he feared he’d be smelling that smell for weeks.
The warder, good as his word, had paraded ten candidates at a time in a noisome assembly bunker and Flick and Madison had had the job of interviewing each. Between them, they had examined 480 prisoners. They had selected forty-eight. They had been cursed luridly at the last by the 432 luckless ones who had NOT been chosen.
And here came the fruits of their interviews after being handled on the prison rolls. The small mob was being prodded forward by stingers in the hands of guards. Additional “bluebottles,” alert with guns, walked behind.
The night was dark and the courtyard cold with wind in off the sea. The prisoners’ rags were blown like tattered banners about their filthy limbs. They stank; their hair was matted; they were thin. The fourteen women and thirty-four men should have been cowed, but they were not.
They came to a stop in the sudden glare of a spotlight on the wall. They had not been outside, some of them, for years. They looked around brazenly. A couple of them barked laughs at the guards, jeering laughs. Flick and Madison had not chosen convicts who looked cowed.
The warder, walking over the black pavement to Madison, heard the laughs and turned around and glared at the group. Then he turned back to Madison and pushed papers at him on a board so they could be stamped.
“I hope you know what you’re doing,” the warder said. “The people you selected were not the ones I would have picked for parole. You passed over many a bird down there that have maybe reformed. Some of these you picked are probably killers we never got the goods on. Those women are a bad lot—capable of anything. I think they fooled you with their looks. But you guys in the Apparatus always have been crazy. We pick ’em up and you turn ’em loose. The government pays us to prevent crime and pays you to commit it. Funny world.”
Madison handed the now-stamped papers back.
“You got forty-eight killers there,” the warder said. “Don’t turn your back on them. Good luck.”
He walked a few paces toward the prison doors and then changed his mind and faced the tattered, filthy group grinning at him in the wind and spotlight glare. In a loud, harsh voice he said, “Listen, you bird droppings. If any one of you show up here again, I’ll put you in the iron box and down in the darkest hole and we won’t even bother to bury you when you die. You’ll stay free only as long as this Apparatus officer here is still alive. Your papers say you are to be returned here any time he says so. If you run away from him, a warrant goes out for you and back here you come. You belong in hells, not in free air.” He pointed emphatically at Madison. “Obey that man, you (bleepards), or you’re dead!”
Madison watched the warder tramp away. The fellow had earned his money: he had turned total control of these convicts to Madison with that speech even though he might suspect that Madison would order them to commit crimes.
Earlier, from the prison, Flick had called Chalber and out of the night here came three air-coaches and an airbus to ferry back the Zippety-Zip drivers. They flashed down out of the night and into the glare of the wall spotlight. They were shiny new vehicles, sparkling and sleek.
A driver popped out of the Zippety-Zip ferry airbus, spotted Madison and came over with papers to be stamped. While he waited, the driver stared at the prisoner group.
Flick had begun to sort them out and mo
ve them to stand beside different vehicles. The convict drivers were getting genned in by the ferry people.
“Ouch,” the man beside Madison said. “What a hellish lot! You’re actually putting them in clean, new air-coaches!” He looked closer. “What a bunch of killers!” Then he shrugged and took the papers back. “Well, they’re your vehicles now. Carry whom you please. Wow!”
Madison went over to the groups as the ferry airbus took off hastily.
Looking into the faces, he began to check his list. It was composed of:
1 Director, ex-Homeview, who had been making porno movies on the side.
2 Cameramen who had been caught selling government supplies.
3 Set men whose sets, because they had sold the fasteners, had fallen down and killed actors.
1 Horror-story writer who had frightened an audience of children into convulsions resulting in deaths.
5 Reporters who had been caught accepting bribes to omit names, and other similar crimes.
1 Studio production secretary who had been accepting bribes to ruin the careers of actors.
2 Actors who had been doing long stretches for impersonating officers of various kinds to shake people down.
5 Circus girls, educated and statuesque, who, variously, had been doing time on long sentences yet to be served for rolling drunks, extorting money, setting up people for hits.
6 Roustabouts who had been doing lots of time for mayhem and assault, amongst other things.
2 Drivers skilled in heavy vehicles who had been doing twenty and thirty years respectively for pillaging their trucks.
2 Cooks, experienced in crew logistics, who had been doing time for selling stolen food.
Madison finished his body check and despite the stench, a pulse of exultation began to course through him.
One thing they had in common. It was chief amongst the several quick tests he had used. If they tried hard, they could lay aside the killer stamp and appear totally honest and sincere. If they concentrated, they could even talk in persuasive voices. Oh, they would require some work and practice, that he understood. But he always expected that. A master at it like himself could drill it in.
A glow of eagerness built up to a fiery excitement within him. What luck!
HE HAD HIS CREW!
The exact people he needed to get on with his job!
He felt he could rise to heights now never before achieved!
Oh, how lucky Heller was, to have him for his PR!
He must not let anything stop him now!
PART SEVENTY-FOUR
Chapter 7
There was a holdup on departure.
The convicts were all loaded. The felon drivers were at the controls of the air-coaches. No Flick.
Madison looked around the black and gritty courtyard, noting there was a turret gun still trained on them from the wall. He wanted to get out of there before something untoward happened. He didn’t want to shout and raise a commotion.
Then he saw a glow was coming from the Model 99. He raced over to it.
Flick was bent over one of the panel screens: three-dimensional colored maps were stopping, shifting, blurring on it. They were all of mountains.
“You’re keeping us waiting,” said Madison impatiently. “Let’s get out of here. What on earth are you doing NOW?”
“I’m looking for a place to take this gang,” said Flick. “There’s a lot of mountains but it’s not like on Calabar. On Voltar, I can’t find any caves.”
“And what do you want caves for?”
“To train! You got to train a gang. You can’t just let them blunder into a job. It all has to go off like clockwork—clip, clip, clip! Now, there’s some old ruins on the other side of the Blike Mountains—some town that got knocked out in a revolt ten thousand years ago, it says. And it would do, except only this airbus can cross the Blike Mountains. Those air-coaches can’t fly at fifty thousand feet. I got PROBLEMS!”
“Well, Flick, I don’t see why we don’t go to the townhouse in Joy City.”
“Oh, no! That would be cheating!”
“Well,” said Madison, “you can do what you please, but I’m going to take MY gang there.”
“YOUR gang—MY gang! What’s this? Are we splitting up? Hells, that could cause a gang war!”
“Oh, we should do anything to avoid that,” said Madison. “Look, I’ve got a compromise. The seventy-sixth floor is said to be just ordinary. It’s the rest of the upper floors that all the loot is in. I promise faithfully not to let anybody go up to the upper four floors.”
Flick frowned. He thought it over. Then he said, “All right. Nobody goes into the upper four floors until we’re ready to rob them. So that’s settled. We go to the seventy-sixth floor of the townhouse.”
Madison started to withdraw to signal the air-coaches. “Wait a minute,” said Flick. “It will look awful suspicious going into the townhouse in that swank neighborhood with a bunch of prisoners in rags. The cops would be all over us like a blanket. We’ll go rob a clothing warehouse first.”
“NO!” said Madison.
“Yes!” said Flick. “I compromised on the seventy-sixth floor of the townhouse. Now you can compromise on something. I know of the swankiest men and women’s clothing outlet you ever heard of. HUGE. Even noblemen’s stores get their stock from that place. Besides, I need to put my footwoman in a uniform: she’s got awful big breasts and is going to need a big selection to choose a uniform from, or we won’t get a fit. So, as long as I’ve got to get her one, we’ll just outfit the whole gang in one go.”
Madison looked at him aghast.
“Classy Togs Warehouse is the name. It’s in the outskirts of Commercial City, whole area deserted at this time of night. I cased the joint. It’s only got one watchman and he’s old.”
Seeing the determination, Madison felt helpless. “I’m afraid that I’ll wait outside.”
“Oh, good. You be the whistle man!” And Flick leaped out and raced to the air-coaches, ordering the drivers to follow him, whispering to each they were off to do their first job and get some clothes.
Shortly they soared into the air out of the courtyard and strung out, streaking down the coast. A moon had risen and was bathing the night with a soft green glow. The Domestic Confederacy Prison’s bulk disappeared behind. Then even the mountains were gone.
Flick was chortling happily. “Man, we’re off on our first job!”
Madison looked down. They were speeding along moon-bathed beach, the surf long ribbons as it purled against the sand.
Madison looked back.
NO COACHES!
“HALT!” he screamed at Flick. “You were going too fast!”
“WHAT?” said Flick. “No air-coaches? I only been doing three hundred. Those coaches can do four hundred easy! They’ve escaped!”
He flipped the Model 99 around in the air and sent its scanners flashing all around the sky.
NO BLIPS!
No sign of air-coaches on the screen.
“Well, (bleep) them!” raged Flick. “That’s gratitude! The lousy (bleepards) have taken off to do their own job!”
“Let’s go back the way we came,” said Madison. “Maybe they crashed. Can you do a ground search with something?”
Flick punched around and got a metal-detector beam working and registering.
They sped back up the moonlit sand. The tips of the mountains to the north rose once more as they headed back.
Then, A BLIP. TWO BLIPS. THREE BLIPS!
Three air-coaches down there on the sand!
Fearing the worst, they speeded near and did a fast pass.
THE COACHES WERE EMPTY!
“Oh, Gods,” said Flick. “They’ve escaped inland! We’ll never find them in that scrub. Where the hells is the body-heat detection button?”
“You don’t need one,” said Madison. He was pointing.
The group wasn’t inland. It was down in the surf. Were they fighting?
The Model 99 swooped nearer and
landed with a thunk in the sand. Madison leaped out.
Convicts were running everywhere!