Mission: Earth "Death Quest" (3 page)

I wound up with several suits, topcoats, shoes,

assorted hats and haberdashery. I walked out very well dressed, carrying a tower of boxes. There was only one thing wrong: they had, by some mysterious calculation I could not fathom, estimated my bankroll to the penny. All I had left was a handful of bus tokens which they didn't seem to want. A marvel of mathematical subtraction.

I now had the whole ten thousand to go. But such was the lure of the vision of a dead and bleeding Countess Krak that I was not daunted in the least. Something would turn up.

With my new wardrobe safely deposited in the apartment, I caught a bus downtown. With many a lurch and roar, I landed in the Bowery.

I stood and looked at the black-glass and chrome high-rise with the sign Total Control, Inc. fanned out in a splendid arch: the office building of the Faustino mob. My plan was to hire a hit man on credit.

My suit was charcoal gray with a banker pinstripe. My shirt was impeccable mauve silk. My tie was a patriotic red, white and blue. My topcoat was the finest black. I reeked prosperity. Credit should be easy.

I walked past the murals depicting American history in drugs. I was not carrying a gun. And there was Angelina, her pretty brunette self. She remembered me. And why not? She had personally dumped me down the chute of the fake elevator.

"It's about time you showed up, Inkswitch," she said.

At last somebody had noticed I'd been gone!

"Accounts has been raising hell since you skipped out of your hotel."

"I did no skipping," I said stiffly. "Tell Faustino I have arrived."

"Buster, you ain't seeing the
capo
today." She had

been punching a computer. She read the screen. "You're several months overdue for an appointment with the
consigliere."

"I'm sure there has been some misunderstanding," I said.

"Well, you just go misunderstand it with him." She beckoned to a security guard and I found myself in an elevator. It was a real one this time. So I was making progress. We shot up to the fortieth floor. I was shoved into an executive office.

Razza Louseini was sitting at his desk. His reptilian eyes fastened upon me. The knife scar that ran up from mouth to left ear went livid.

"So you're Inkswitch," he said. "I was looking for a much more prepossessing man."

"I want to hire a hit man on credit," I said. I didn't want him to get into all that Italian circumlocution.

"I'll bet you do," said Razza. "And that's what I wanted to see you about. Credit. When are you going to pay?" He was waving a bill!"You hired two snipers last fall. You got them both killed. And you never even had the decency to show up and pay the compensation. This bill," and he waved it with an Italian gesture for emphasis, "has been the subject of more legal correspondence than any other item on my desk! Attorney after attorney, collection agency after collection agency. Letters, letters, letters! I am sick of them! A
consigliere
has better things to do than mess around with delinquent accounts."

I was beginning to become uneasy. It must be an astronomical bill!

He was, Italian-wise, carrying on. "You know the rules. Liquidate or get liquidated. So when are you going to get this God (bleeped) bill off my God (bleeped) plate?"

"What's wrong with it?"

He echoed that a few times. "Swindle and Crouch won't pay it because they have no matching voucher. The Federal government won't pay it because you never signed it. Octopus Oil won't pay it because the third assistant vice-president didn't initial the requisition. Letters, letters, letters! Torrents of letters! And where are you? You can't be found. Skipped out of your hotel..."

"Wait a minute," I said, "I wasn't in any hotel."

"Well, whatever your story is, Inkswitch, you've had every (bleeped) computer in the organization so screwed up, it's cost a fortune in fuses."

"How much is this bill?" I said.

"Two thousand dollars," said Razza Louseini. "It isn't the money. It's the organizational screw-up. We've got to get it paid just to straighten out the computers. They're so crazy on the subject by this time that they gibber. Just yesterday we were trying to do a cost accounting for hit men for the CIA and all we could get on the printouts was the cost of Cape Canaveral. Pay this God (bleeped) bill!"

I can be pretty cunning about these things. I said, "All right,
Consigliere,
I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll pay that bill, but you give me another hit man."

He thought about it. Sicilians are pretty quick to spot who has the leverage. "When?" he said.

"In just two or three days. I have to go into some things for it."

His reptilian eyes were pretty slitted. "All right," he said. "I'll put all this on hold."

I'walked out, practically treading on air. I wasn't ten thousand in the red, I was only two thousand.

Two thousand to go and one dead Countess Krak!

That very night, an omen of success came my way.

I was still, as both Miss Pinch and Candy emphatically told me, in the doghouse over this fleas business. Women get so picky about the smallest little things.

They worked all evening getting things arranged for their "open house," as they were suddenly calling it. And I overheard that it was to be held the very following night.

I had been keeping out of the way, trying to work out how to get two thousand dollars. I had not been paid for yesterday and I doubted I would be paid for today or tomorrow. They had been working themselves to exhaustion and I had been relegated to the back room at night. I was getting no chance to run up a bill and earn my money.

About eleven, all other sallies having failed, I came up with a cunning idea: I would get interested in the decor. The new furniture was all in the shape of clamshells and tall, thick posts with rounded tops. The walls were a green seascape below a yellow sky. The curtains and borders of the rooms looked like sea foam. As I often watched TV commercials, I thought it might be an ad for shaving cream.

So, as they hurried about, I asked, "What are you trying to put up? A shaving cream ad?"

Well, I must say,
that
got a response.

"Aphrodite!" snapped Miss Pinch acidly. "The goddess of love, you lunkhead. The sea, the undulant waves

repeating in sensuous curves, the phallic symbols stabbing nobly upward, the foam. Haven't you ever heard of Greek mythology? Where in hell were you educated?"

I was about to tell her heatedly that it had been the Royal Academy on Voltar, no matter how many courses I'd flunked, when Candy came to my rescue.

"No, no, Pinchy," Candy said. "You get so emotional where the story of Uranus is concerned. I'll tell him."

"Well, go ahead," said Miss Pinch, calming down, "I always love to hear it."

"Aphrodite," Candy told me, "is the ancient Greek goddess of sexual love and beauty. The Greek word
aphros
means 'foam'. You see, there was an earlier God named Uranus, which means 'heaven', and he had a son called Cronus. Now, apparently this son Cronus got pretty mad at his old man. He grabbed a knife and cut his father's (bleeps) off and threw them into the sea."

"Isn't that beautiful," said Miss Pinch with a dreamy look in her eye.

"Wait a minute," I said, not liking that look, "what does this have to do with love?"

Miss Pinch would have answered but Candy quickly continued, motioning to Miss Pinch to shut up. "Cronus threw his old man's (bleeps) in the sea and they foamed, of course. So that's what sea foam is. And Aphrodite was born out of the sea foam and everybody worships her."

"And you will notice," said Miss Pinch, "that everybody remembers and knows Aphrodite and nobody either knows or cares who the hell Uranus was."

They got back to work. But I withdrew into a corner to think this over. I knew the Greeks, aside from producing fleas, engaged in sacrifice. Now, I could not quite

remember if they were animal sacrifices or human sacrifices. Then the horrible thought struck me that here on Earth it wouldn't matter. They believed that men were animals so they probably sacrificed both without much compunction.

What the Hells
was
this "open house" they were going to hold? Some kind of a mystical sacrifice in which they cut off my testicles? It worried me, especially since there wasn't a Voltarian cellologist handy to grow me any new ones.

Accordingly, I didn't push to go to bed with them in the front room and when they at last collapsed from completing the apartment at 2:00 A. M., I did not even venture near the front room to go to bed. I felt much more secure on a new sofa in the back room.

It was then I got my omen. My mood had been sort of black and this occurrence cheered me enormously. The Greeks specialized in omens, so it was very fitting.

The viewers I used to monitor Krak, Heller and Crobe had small buzzers on them one could set. In cleaning them up I must have tripped the switch of one. I had just about closed my eyes when there was a whirr in the closet. It meant that one of the three had opened their eyes after being asleep.

I went in the closet to shut it off. And then I didn't.

It was Krak's. She was sitting on the side of the bed in the "thinking room" of the Empire State Building. She had on a nightgown. She was crying.

Heller woke up. He sat up and pulled her over to him and put her head on his chest, stroking her hair. "There, there," he said. "What's the matter?"

"It was an AWFUL nightmare. It was so
real"

"I'm sorry. Want to tell me about it?"

"I was in some sort of a room. I was lying on my

back. I was sort of paralyzed. I couldn't move. And then this awful-looking monster was kneeling over me." She began to cry very hard, clutching at him. After a bit she could talk again. "Then I heard a voice from somewhere and it said that you were dead." And she began crying again in earnest.

Gently, Heller said, "Well, I just looked and there aren't any monsters watching. And I'm not dead. I'm right here."

She threw her arms around his neck convulsively. She said, "Oh, Jettero, this planet makes me afraid. If anything happened to you, I think I would just die. I couldn't stand it. If I can't live with you, I don't want to live and that's all there is to it."

"There, there," he said. "You know that I love you. We'll succeed."

"Jettero," she said, crying again, "please, let's hurry up and finish and go home. I have an awful feeling something dreadful is going to happen to me and then to you."

He was trying to soothe her and get her to go back to sleep in his arms. But I had seen enough.

Dreams are portents, that I knew.

It was an omen.

She had foreseen that they both would die.

I went back to the sofa, grinning into the dark. It was a beautiful omen. All else that troubled me was pushed away.

There was not the slightest doubt left in my mind.

THE COUNTESS KRAK WAS GOING TO DIE!

The only thing which kept me from completing the project was money. And little did I know that it was sliding toward my pockets in an unpredicted avalanche.

The following evening, after the omen, the open house was held. All day I had been buffeted about by caterers and such: because it was a working day, Candy and Miss Pinch had made me responsible, with many threats, for letting tradespeople in and out. I performed the job a bit absentmindedly, as I was mainly concentrating upon how to get the two thousand dollars, pay the Faus-tino bill and arrange for a hit man.

Accordingly, I was pretty surprised to be blasted by Miss Pinch when she came home from work and found I had not finished cleaning up and had not dressed.

"People will start arriving any minute!" she stormed, tearing out of her work clothes and getting into a cocktail dress. "Get into a tuxedo or something and then help me pick up these wrappings from the floor."

Anticipating spring arid summer, no doubt, the old Jew garments man had provided me with a white tuxedo jacket and black pants. But I didn't know how to tie one of those bow ties and Miss Pinch almost strangled me getting it on me. Then Candy noticed I was wearing military boots and they got them off me and jammed on patent-leather pumps just as the doorbell rang with the first guests.

I was surprised, now that I looked at the place, how

big the rooms really were. Once the torture equipment was taken out and the hall was better integrated into the rooms, the front room looked quite like a salon. The back room, which had been promised me in which to work, was almost as large. It had a huge expanse of glass now, which looked out upon a garden. Everything tonight, including the newly planted garden, was ablaze with light. Ribbons scalloped down from the ceilings. Temporary tables groaned under foamy-looking cakes and bottles which were ready to gush. Some classic piece called "The Rites of Spring" filled the place with music. Quite impressive. It ought to have been from the number of blank petty cash vouchers I'd been signing.

I thought I might be seeing people like the Security Chief or some fellow males from Octopus Oil. But the doorbell rang and rang and couple after couple came in, deluding me at first into believing I would see a fellow man by the slouch hats and men's topcoats. But nay, alas, they were all lesbian couples. Some of the "males" even wore tuxedos. They tried to greet me heartily with bass voices. They swatted me on the shoulder and called me "old man." But I certainly was not fooled. The bass voices broke into treble unexpectedly and the swats might well have been intended to push me away from their "wives."

I never saw a party move quite so fast. The bottles gushed and gurgled. The cake was washed down. The music started through only the third time.

Suddenly Miss Pinch broke away from a cluster and said to me in an undertone, "Inkswitch, I have a frightful headache. All this will be over in minutes. You are not required to tell them good-bye. Here is five bucks. Run down to the all-night drugstore and get me a bottle of aspirin. They'll all be gone by the time you get back,