Mission: Earth "Villainy Victorious" (31 page)

Flick was past Cun in a flash. He slammed the door violently and stood before it, glaring at them as he barred their way.

"All right, all right, all right!" shouted Flick. "The minute I finish my dinner, I'll see both of you in the bedroom. Strip and get ready. I've re-reformed."

"And no more mention of Hightee Heller?" said Cun.

Flick looked beaten in more ways than one. "I promise," he said.

Madison beamed, benign as a god. He had carefully coached the women. He had restored everything internally. It was an odd employment of his craft, using it for peace, but by the simple expedient of advising the girls to PR the regiment, he had changed the mind and behavior of Flick. It just proved to Madison how much he himself was a master of his trade. Microcosm or macrocosm, it didn't matter; for bad or for good, it didn't matter. What mattered was that one could command, without fail, the destinies of men. The Supreme Being must feel this way from time to time as he directed the courses of the universe. The only reason Madison hadn't done it the other way around and gotten Flick killed was that he didn't need him for a headline.

Shortly after midnight, it was very difficult for Madison to descend from his cloudy heights to assimilate bad news.

The four reporters stood about his bed like lost wool animals, looking like they had been chewed upon by fangers who had taken great satisfaction in it.

Copy dangling limply from his hand, the lead reporter said, "They won't take it."

"What?
A good sensational story like that?"

"They never heard of 'handouts' before. We tried every editor we could get past the door to. They wanted sources and every one said they'd send out their own reporters, but why bother?"

"Didn't you try bribes?"

"That's what we were doing time for. We didn't think you'd like it if they put us right back in, what with the iron box and all."

Madison waved them out of there with advice to have a drink and go to bed.

He was certain he knew what the trouble was: they were simply inexperienced and deficient in salesmanship. He wrote an order to the director to practice them in sincere and earnest expressions and went back to bed.

It was obvious he would have to break the first ice himself.

Accordingly, brisk and early in the morning, he dressed himself in his most conservative and expensive suit, practiced expressions a little in the mirror, picked up fresh copies of the well-poisoning story and went to the hangar.

A very exhausted Flick told his smug footwoman to take the controls, for he could hardly see and in addition, now, had trouble in even getting his hand up to point the way. PR had really worked!

Madison had decided there was no reason to start at the bottom. As the top of his profession himself, he had better start at the top.

By a slight misrepresentation to underlings, startled by the blanket order from Lord Snor to Homeview, Madison gained audience to the publisher, no less, of the
Daily Speaker,
the most widely circulated newssheet on Voltar.

In the lofty office which overlooked Commercial City with disdain, Noble Arthrite Stuffy kept Madison standing. "I understand you have some message from my cousin, Lord Snor."

"Actually," said Madison, "I came because I have a sensational news story. Headline stuff. Here it is."

Noble Stuffy read it and tossed it back, "It's written in news format. Is it supposed to be a story?"

"Yes, indeed," said Madison. "Print it and you'll increase your circulation."

"We already circulate more than we can easily handle. Why would anyone want to increase their circulation?"

"To get better rates from the advertisers."

Noble Stuffy frowned. "Advertisers? We don't print advertising. I think you have us mixed up with notice-board cards. Where did you say you were from? Let me see your identoplate."

Madison handed it over, expecting to be able to answer questions about
PR man
and bowl this publisher over. Instead, Stuffy snarled, "The Apparatus? You're from the Apparatus? Well, let me tell you, whatever your name is here, this isn't the first time the Apparatus has tried to get something changed or a story pulled. I suppose you have a Death Battalion waiting at the door or some such other poppycock. You have just become unpopular."

Madison didn't like the tone. He was used to editors and publishers bruising their heads against the floor before the PR of the government. "I could get a Royal order that you'd have to publish anything I say!"

"Hah," said Stuffy. "You just get your Royal order and I will get you a revolution as quick as blink. Seventy thousand years ago a monarch tried to force papers to report the soirees of his commoner mistress and they even erased his name from history. Royal order! Oh, this will be rich when I mention it at luncheon at my club to other publishers."

"I could start another paper and give you such competition, I could wipe you out!" grated Madison.

"Hah, hah!" said Stuffy. "There hasn't been a new newssheet started in fifteen thousand years. Try it and the other papers will buy up all the available paper and leave you nothing to print on but gutter stones. Now you better leave before I ask somebody to throw you out."

Madison departed. He went to other papers. He got the same treatment. He also found something else that was discouraging: These papers were all chains that re-published, with local sections, on every planet of the Confederacy, and where it had looked like there were tens of thousands of newspapers on the 110 planets, in reality there were only about seventy-five.

Not letting himself look or feel downcast, for after all he was a veteran PR, he told himself he at least had a blanket order for Homeview.

It was getting on toward evening by that time but he phoned them from the airbus.

"Homeview?" he said to the bright face of the receptionist. "Please connect me to your news section."

"News section? We don't have a news section, sir."

"You give out news!" said the incredulous Madison.

"Oh, yes, sir. I'll connect you to the announcers' rest lounge."

The sleek face of an announcer came on: he was sipping hot jolt. Madison said, "Who is your ace news commentator?"

"Our
what?"
said the announcer.

"Don't you have a news staff?"

"What would we want with that?" said the announcer. "Whoever is on at those periods, we just read items from each page of some leading newspaper. We use a different paper every day and give them credit. Oh, I see what you must mean: you mean the camera coverage of lordly and notable people. Do you want me to connect you to our social director?"

"No!" snarled Madison and hung up.

He sat while Flick hovered above the lanes. Confound it, Madison told himself, I can't run a PR campaign on billboards! And come to think of it, the only signs I have seen just told what store it was.

"Take me home!" he snapped at Flick.

Once there, he soaked his feet, Itwas the first door-pounding he had done in a decade. It was making him cross.

Then, fortified by supper and easy in bare feet and a robe, he went into the reporters' workroom and began to go through the stacks of newssheets that had been purchased. He had an idea that what he was up against was that curse of the PR profession, journalistic truth. Long, long ago, on Earth, they used to talk about it to graduates in journalism. But these days, they even awarded Pulitzer Prizes for the most false story of the year. The Voltarians, with all this nonsense about sources and accuracy, were definitely on the wrong road: even the corniest weekly in Podunk could give them lessons.

He was reading lead stories now.

NEW MONUMENT

DEDICATED

And another:

LADY PROMPTON

ORPHANAGE

SPEECH IN FULL

Those were
headlines?
How ghastly!

Pages two to seven were usually social news.

WIFE OF LORD ELD GIVES

PINK SPARKLEWATER

PARTY

And

DAME ALT GIVES

GARDEN SOCIAL

AT ALT ESTATE

And

EDITOR'S WIFE

ANNOUNCES

WEEKLY AT HOME

Madison exploded. HOW DULL! These people had never grasped the idea that news is
entertainment!

There was a little hope: several papers, on inside pages, bottom, carried news on the revolt in Calabar, and on the back page of one paper, five lines said that a couple of lovers had been found suicided in a river. Lacking anything else, those stories had the blood to make them headlines!

WHAT A BACKWARD CIVILIZATION!

He had better reform them fast!

Although his determination was strong, he knew he needed more than that. He needed some point of entrance to penetrate this media wall.

He went to bed and stared at the ceiling. No ideas. Eventually, he slept.

Factually, dear reader, not just Heller's fate but that of both Voltar and Earth were hovering in the balance in that dark chamber.

At dawn, the searching fingers of the sun pried gently at his eyelids.

He lay in the semi-world, half-awake, half-asleep. A thought was drifting through his semiconsciousness.

One of the proper purposes of newspapers, ran the thought, was to cause trouble and worry people. Thus, it followed, a primary intention of all Earth media is to make people go mad.

He stirred. Something was tugging at his mind for recognition. He suddenly realized that he had never seen any psychiatrist on Voltar or any sign of one. Not even a psychologist.

Aha! The Confederacy, through its deficient media, was not only not causing insanity, it was not even curing it! Suddenly an idea hit him.

He struggled out of bed. He got on a robe. He went into Flick's room.

Flick, black eyes now yellowing, was lying spent between the naked bodies of Cun and Twa, both of whom were snoring peacefully through gently smiling lips.

"Flick," said Madison, "what do they do with the insane on Voltar?"

"They sic two women on them and kill them," said Flick, trying to free his arms and sit up.

"No, seriously," said Madison. "It's important that I know."

Flick crawled weakly down to the foot of the bed and sat, too spent to progress further. He said, "The insane? Let's see. Well, when they say somebody is insane, it's not very hard to figure out they're right. They get staring eyes and rush about or flop. They don't know anybody and, when they talk, they say crazy things. So they send them to a big prison far up north and that's that."

"What happens if they get well?"

"Get well? That's a funny term. You mean if they go sane again? Well, if that happens, they watch them for a while and then they let them out."

"You mean they don't shock them or operate on their brains?"

"For pity's sakes, why? How come somebody should punish them? They don't work on them or touch them at all. I had a cousin once was sent to the Insane Detention Camp on Calabar: he went crazy as a gyro with half a wheel gone. They kept him for half a year, didn't do a thing but feed him, and then they let him back out. He was all sane again. I'm sure glad they didn't damage him: my aunt would have raised a thousand Devils if they had."

"Have you ever heard of a mental doctor?"

"Nope. Don't think I ever saw a doctor that went crazy."

"I mean a
psychiatrist?"
said Madison.

"Look, Chief, I been sitting here awfully patient and every muscle aches, but couldn't we lay off foreign words at least until I have had some breakfast and wake up?"

All this talk had stirred the girls. Twa said, "You don't need any breakfast yet," and reached for him.

Madison left. He felt blocked again.

He went back to his room and paced.

The idea he had had was not really his. It was a historic milestone of the PR trade. It had come to him when he realized the primary purpose of Earth media was to make people go mad. And this had jarred into view one of the PR triumphs of the century.

The American Psychiatric Affiliates, many decades ago, had had a terrible problem with the media. At that time, nobody in his right mind would print anything serious about psychiatrists; the breed was regarded as just a bunch of vicious fakes and quacks, destructive at the very least with their electric shocks and murders.

But PR had saved the day. In league with the World Federation of Mental Stealth-an organization composed of ex-Nazis who had murdered the millions of Jews as well as all the "insane" in Germany, and who were running from the Allied forces-the American Psychiatric Affiliates had pulled the most cunning coup of the age.

They had done such a marvelous job on the media that now, today, a psychiatrist could commit murder several times a day, including Sunday, and could do anything, even exhibit himself in front of children, and the media and every page and frame of it would praise him to the skies and say how scientific and necessary it all was.

Yes, their PR procedure had indeed worked and continued to work. Resoundingly, psychiatry and psychology were now considered totally above all law and even the highest in the land licked their scruffy, bloodstained boots.

Madison, with his command of PR history, knew exactly what they had done, how they had gone about it and continued to go about it down to the finest, minute detail.

But there was one small flaw in his plan: he didn't have a psychiatrist.

Madison, grim determination in his eye, got dressed and had some breakfast and then got on the viewer-phone. He was trying to locate Lombar: he was not at Palace City, he was not at his office in town. He seemed to have vanished.

From what he knew now of Apparatus offices, he hazarded that Lombar must have a chief clerk. By using his blanket order from Hisst that gave him. a free hand in all matters of PR, he finally got through several shunts and wound up looking at an old man of very bitter visage.