“WHEE!” they were shouting. “WHEE!”
Madison caught an arm of a naked woman as she raced by. But she was gone, shouting, “Whee!”
He spotted another one who had stopped to catch his breath and quickly went over. It was one of the cooks/logistic personnel.
“What’s going on here?” demanded Madison of the naked man.
He was catching his breath. He finally said, “I’m afraid it’s all my fault, Chief. Your Lieutenant Flick told us we were going to get new clothes tonight so I said, ‘Let’s throw all these rags away!’ I think they got a little enthusiastic.”
A voice was at Madison’s elbow. The director, naked as the day he was born, said, “Isn’t it great? If my cameraman just had a camera, I could really get it in the can. And show it as the ‘Rites to the Goddess of the Sea.’ Hells, I’ll direct it anyway. YOU THERE! GRAB THAT WOMAN AND PITCH HER OFF THOSE ROCKS!”
Madison raced back to the Model 99. It had every known kind of noisemaker: sirens, klaxons, scream-beams, moans and bomb blasts. He pushed them all. A dreadful assortment of sound racketed across the waves and sand. Naked convicts came streaming out of the water and rushing in from the dunes to see what was up.
Madison found a floodlight knob and pushed it. The immediate scene went a glaring yellow.
He was surrounded now by a mob of naked bodies. He rapidly made a count. The last one was just arriving: he now had forty-eight.
“Blast!” cried Flick, above the thunder of the surf, “How we going to do our job with no clothes?”
“You said the job was to get clothes,” somebody yelled.
“That’s right!” cried another.
A woman shouted, “You can beat us and we won’t put those rags back on!”
Madison saw mutiny in the air. He motioned Flick to be silent. “I think you did just great!” he shouted. “Just be sure you don’t leave those rags lying around. People will think somebody has escaped. So gather them up and we’ll be on our way.”
The throng disintegrated.
Shortly a pile of rags was gathered in one heap just above the water’s edge. Somebody got a laser-lighter from an air-coach and touched off a blaze.
That would have been all right but somebody else promptly found some driftwood and piled it on the flame and then somebody else found some more and they had a bonfire. They thought that was great and, grabbing hands, began to dance around it in two rings going opposite ways.
Then, mysteriously, sweetbuns and sparklewater from the lockers of the Model 99 began to get tossed from hand to hand. They had robbed the airbus!
Then they were all sitting, toasting sweetbuns on long sticks and guzzling sparklewater from jugs. And somebody began to sing a song!
And here’s a cheer
To the boys in blue
And here’s to the cons
They love to screw.
So let’s screw the blueboys
Screw, screw, screw.
And chaw on their carcasses
Chew, chew, chew!
Up their butts
And off with their nuts
And here’s to a life of crime!
Flick was seething. “Some gang! Lay into ’em, Chief. Kick some sense into their heads. They’ve got a job to do tonight!”
“You lay into them and kick some sense into their heads,” said Madison.
“You’re the boss. They’ve got to learn to respect you.”
“You’re the lieutenant. You’ve got to teach them respect for me.”
“I’m too disgusted,” said Flick. “I’m going over and sit in the airbus.”
The sweetbuns had vanished. The sparklewater jugs were empty. They had finished the hot jolt and were smoking the puffsticks.
Madison got up. He said, above the surf, “All right. It’s getting late. Let’s be on our way.”
“Just as soon as we wash this sand off!” somebody yelled.
There was a concerted rush into the sea and then they began a water fight.
A statuesque circus girl, body gleaming in the moonlight, rushed out of the water toward Madison. Three more came whooping on her heels. Madison thought they were just chasing the first girl until she was upon him. She grabbed him with a shout. The others jumped on him.
“Come on in!” they were shouting at him.
They had his clothes off so fast he hardly knew when they had been slipped off. Yikes, these girls were expert!
They bore him straight into the sea and pitched him into the teeth of a towering wave. Madison came up blubbering and blowing.
Something pulled him under. He hadn’t taken a breath. Then he was on the surface again and being carried into the air.
Buffeted by the waves, four girls bore him back to dry land. Madison was coughing and sneezing and trying to get his breath.
He was being held horizontally six feet off the ground.
His blurred sight took in faces rushing at him.
They were going to wipe him out!
He stared around anxiously.
In the lights from the bonfire and the car, eyes were glittering. Like wolves?
Suddenly they began to chant, “Hup! Hup! Hup! Hup!” Was this some sort of a convict or guard cry that marched them about?
They were going to the fire. Were they going to throw him in?
They were marching around the fire. Some sort of savage ritual. “Hup! Hup! Hup! Hup!” Like Indians or wild animals!
Then suddenly they all stopped. A male voice—the director’s?—began a chant, calling one line and being answered by all the rest.
“Who’s the gang?”
“WE’RE THE GANG!”
“Who’s the mob?”
“WE’RE THE MOB!”
“Who’s the chief?”
“HE’S THE CHIEF!”
And threw Madison in the water!
He came up spluttering.
They paid no further attention to him. They were now trooping off to the air-coaches.
Madison, not knowing how to take all that, but quite certain it was not the kind of respect and image he needed, trudged alone across the sand to where his clothes had been stripped off.
He dried himself with his undershirt and got his clothes back on.
He was glancing around to see if anything had dropped out of his pockets. Nothing lying there. He patted his pockets. He had his identoplate. Then he missed a bulge which should be at his breast. He patted again.
HIS WALLET AND FORTY-EIGHT THOUSAND CREDITS WERE GONE!
He felt himself go white.
He looked at the air-coaches over there in the moonlight. They were all loaded and waiting to go.
He flinched at tackling that mob again.
That settled it. He would have to work on his own image first. He went over to the Model 99.
“Some gang,” muttered Flick. “Bunch of lousy beach (bleepards) out for a holiday.”
Madison sank back in the seat. He didn’t agree at all. That mob was a bunch of criminals. But he wasn’t going to tell Flick they had stolen his wallet—no use to harm his image even more.
PART SEVENTY-FOUR
Chapter 8
When they flew in over the outskirts of Commercial City, it was dark as pitch below. A hill blocked off the moonlight and left the part of the plain they wanted in the deepest shadow.
That was fine by Madison. He couldn’t possibly imagine greater folly than using a Model 99, so recognizable, on a robbery job. Not unskilled in the methods of crime—since these often go hand in hand with truly expert PR—he knew you were supposed to steal some cars and, after the heist, abandon them without fingerprints.
A vast factory complex, spreading over possibly six square miles, squatted in the darkness below, all of it, apparently, devoted to just one company, Classy Togs. In daytime it might well be occupied by hundreds of thousands of workers, and a network of monorails led in from the town and curled and swooped all over the plain and mountainside and then went over to another site,
a collection of high-rises, a miniature city in itself.
The Model 99’s screens, turned to night frequency, showed it all up plainly, color-corrected to look like day. It was quite startling to then look out and see only blacks and shadow.
Flick was sorting out the buildings. He found the various chimneyed structures where they made cloth and fabric molds and discarded them. He was able to label the many-windowed, low, long buildings, each standing in its park, as design and assembly structures.
“I thought you’d cased this joint,” said Madison.
“I did. I saw it on Homeview,” said Flick. “It produces, all by itself, .07 percent of all the clothing for the nobility, their staffs and estates.”
“That’s not very much,” said Madison.
“But it’s quality we’re after and that is the TOP .07 percent. Or maybe it was 7 percent: I always have trouble with my ciphers because they’re nothing, you see, and you don’t have to bother with them. But I’ll convince you: the cloth they make in them factories down there have been used in stage clothes for Hightee Heller. So there’s no better recommendation than that!”
Hightee Heller? thought Madison. Ah, yes. He’d heard something: that was Jettero’s sister. “That’s the Homeview star,” he said.
“Star?” sniffed Flick. “You mean goddess! Don’t you go running down the girl of my dreams. Hey, there it is! The warehouse! No windows. See it in that snarl of monorails? Here we go!”
They shot down to a truck roadway that ran under the monorails and stopped. They were in a park, close by the warehouse, within a hundred feet of its doors. Three air-coaches came down, crump, crump, crump, on the road behind them.
It gave Madison the creeps. Here he was in a glaringly recognizable car, accompanied by three vehicles full of naked cons. He looked around hastily for guards.
The night was very black here, the moon blocked out. Ah, there it was: a watchman’s office, marked by a blue light. The office itself was inset into the side of the circular warehouse and close by the main entrance.
His attention was distracted by someone at their windows. It was the scaler, the purse snatcher and the electronics security man, stark naked.
The security man said to Flick, “All the controls will be in that watchman’s office. This place will go up like a celebration if we even touch the latch of that front door at this hour. We were talking it over in the coach.” But he was pointing at the watchman’s windows.
Madison’s hair stood up. In silhouette, a watchman could be seen peering out.
“You see?” said the electronics convict. “Our gang ain’t complete. We ain’t got no slugger to take the watchman out.”
“Oh, yes, we have,” said Flick. “The chief. He’s a first-rate murderer.”
Madison groaned. He knew he had set up the wrong image.
“Well, don’t hold us up, Chief,” said Flick. “Go on over and erase that watchman. Sir.”
Madison knew his control of this gang was on the line. But murder?
“When you get in there, Chief,” said the electronics man, “you’ll find a big board. So as soon as you take the watchman out, remove the activating plate from his belt and push it over a green dot you’ll find on the board and all the alarms will nullify.”
Madison braced himself. He got out of the airbus. Two of the roustabouts had come up and showed every sign that they were going to go accompany him.
In a firm voice, Madison said, “Don’t come with me. I don’t want any witnesses to learn how I really work.”
“He’ll be armed,” Flick said.
“You birds stay here,” said Madison. And they watched him walk down the road, visible only against the watchman’s window light.
They saw Madison enter the office and the watchman vanish from the window. A small sound came to them, something falling. Then there was a delay and they grew more and more nervous. “Maybe he’s having trouble with the opening plate. Those boards are pretty complex. I better go help.”
“You stay here like he said,” snarled Flick. “You caused enough trouble for one night.”
They became more and more edgy.
Then suddenly someone was running toward them and they tensed.
It was Madison.
He beckoned.
Nervously they followed him.
Madison reached for the entrance door and opened it. At his gesture, forty-eight naked cons slid like whispers into the building.
Flick glanced toward the watchman’s office.
“Don’t go in there,” said Madison. “It would turn your stomach.”
Madison firmly closed the door behind them, fumbled along the wall and pushed a panel.
The interior of the warehouse flooded with light.
There were tiers and tiers of shelves of boxes, racks and racks of clothes, men’s and women’s.
The convicts let out suppressed squeals of delight and began to rush along the racks and tiers. They began to tear down boxes of fancy shoes and grab hats and capes.
At a low word from Madison, Flick called them to come back.
Holding items already grabbed they unwillingly returned.
Madison walked up to a rack of shimmering white dresses, probably expensive beyond belief. He ripped one off the hangings. He was using it to wipe his hands!
THEY WERE BRIGHT RED!
Madison tossed the gown, now gory, on the floor.
The convicts stared at him.
Madison went over to a hook and took down a book that was hanging there and looked at it. “Yes, I thought so,” he said. “This is the stock book for these rows. It has all the sizes. Now what I want you to do is each one outfit himself for any role he might have to play. Try everything on carefully.”
“Oh, no,” Flick gasped. “That will take time. On a job like this you grab and run!”
“And wind up with a sloppy-looking gang?” said Madison. “Take your time. We’ve got hours to dawn.”
“There are sometimes roving watchmen, too!” said Flick.
Madison let out a snort. “They’re not roving anymore.”
The convicts hastened back to the shelves. They began to grab stock books. They began to look at sizes. And soon they were very busy indeed.
The circus girls paraded around, getting opinions on which costumes were the most provocative until Madison told them they had to look like ladies of quality and, on this new thought, had to select all over again.
Flick kept trying different tunics on his footwoman to see which ones best showed off her breasts until Madison forced him to find his own and then match hers to that. He had to correct that again when Flick found some lepertige tights that left everything on her front bare. “But,” argued Flick, “I found some for myself and they match the upholstery!” In the end, Madison did manage to get them into shimmering violet uniforms but he had to let them take the tights as well: it was the footwoman, this time, who was protesting. She LOVED them!
The two actors who had been impersonating officers had to be argued down into more junior ranks when they found whole racks for generals and admirals.
The horror-story writer couldn’t find anything gruesome enough and Madison had to force him into a wardrobe for scholars and lettered men.
The director went crazy trying to decide whether he could direct best, dressed as an archbishop or a lord, and Madison had to talk very fast to get him to choose clothes of a working executive.
What was most trying about it, to Madison, was that he really didn’t know the styles or what they represented. He was finally saved by the studio production secretary finding vast books of fashion plates which showed what was now in style.
After that, it was plain sailing. He firmly got them to outfit themselves as, each one, people of quality, working people, domestics, executives and actors.
At last he could turn to his own wardrobe. And he had very little trouble with that. He found the racks for top-flight executives like presidents of companies and, in a conser
vative way, got himself into the height of fashion.
Throughout, he had thought that the warehouse stank a bit and then, smelling some cloth to make sure it didn’t make him sneeze—for he had some minor allergies—he realized that the bath in the sea had not been total for these convicts: they still stank of the prison; the odor clung to their matted hair and beards and seemed to ooze out of their skin.