“Reverend Jimmy,” Shirley said quietly.
The redness faded, and Jimmy’s breathing slowed. Again he smiled with otherworldly emotionlessness. “Thank you, Shirley. Anyway, I’ll suggest to the man that he ought to quit while he’s got a head.”
“Well, I don’t know,” O’Hair said, frowning. “It hasn’t worked so far, and I know he’s had a threat or two already. Either the fellow doesn’t frighten all that easily, or else there’s just too much money in it for him to give up. Or it could be that he actually believes everything he says.” His voice trailed away for a moment, and he sighed deeply. “Maybe we ought to just —” He had intended to say, “forget about it all and leave him alone.” But then he looked at the rapacious faces around him and looked at the floor and said nothing. These were scary people, and his own beloved helpmeet was one of the scariest.
“If he doesn’t,” Jimmy Earl said, “we go to Plan B.”
Bess O’Hair glared at him. “Oh, Jesus, you sound like a fifties B movie.”
“Whatever that is,” Shirley said, emphasizing to the assembled company that, unlike Bess, she was not old enough to remember fifties B movies.
Glares, hisses, snarls. Carol O’Hair looked terrified. Jimmy Earl looked smug. Finally, Reverend Jimmy interrupted the feline confrontation. “Shirley, tell the folks about Plan B.” To the O’Hairs, he said, “Plan B was Shirley’s invention. Ain’t she great?”
Shirley explained Plan B. Carol O’Hair paled, giving his normally pale skin a ghostly look. Bess O’Hair nodded with reluctant respect. Had Malcolm Erskine been a fly on the wall, he would have fainted.
* * * * *
Another wall on which Malcolm should have been a fly was that of Jimmy Flicker’s office at the new headquarters, in downtown Piketon, of his new corporation, MegaFlicker. In fact, though, to have heard anything, Malcolm would have had to be a fly with extraordinary hearing, since the office was immense and Jimmy’s absurdly large desk was in the very center of it and thus so far from the walls that a conversation held in normal tones at the desk would have been inaudible at any of the walls. But if he had been a fly on that wall, endowed with preternatural hearing, and had he recovered from the earlier fainting spell resulting from overhearing the conversation between the men of God and their female lieutenants, he would have fainted again.
Jimmy Flicker’s lieutenant was male, middleaged, exceedingly tall, stupendously broad across the shoulders, expressionless of face, and murderous of mind. His name was Mongo. He liked to tell his victims his name because he liked to see the bewilderment it engendered and because he was amused by the knowledge that they would never get the chance to pass his name along to anyone — the police, for example. His official title at MegaFlicker was “Director of Cosmic Outplacement.”
Coincidentally, Mongo had been an astronomy buff since boyhood and thought it would have been very nifty if Malcolm Erskine really had been in communication across time and space with an ancient star dweller who could pass on good info about the true nature of the universe. Although even in that case, he suspected, Malcolm’s purple prose would have made the telling of those cosmic truths unreadable.
“There’s another one just hit the stands,” Mongo said. His voice was appropriately deep, but it was soft and mild rather than properly menacing. Mongo had never felt any need to develop a menacing tone or way of speaking. That was because, other than telling outplacees his name, he never bothered with preliminary verbal threats or game playing. He preferred to get to the actual bloodshed right away.
“So what’s this one called?” Jimmy’s jacket hung on a stand beside his desk. He snapped his red suspenders irritably, a nervous habit he had been unable to break.
“Management Secrets from Ancient Empires. Very serious stuff, it looks like. Written by a real history professor, and it really does tell all about how various ancient societies were governed.”
Jimmy waved his hand in dismissal. “Bull crap. We can ignore that one. No one will go for that. It’s another non-starter.”
Fortunately, so far there had been no serious threat to the sales dominance of Malcolm’s book. The previous week had seen the publication of The Stars and Your Business — an Astrological Guide. Yet another, as Jimmy Flicker liked to say, non-starter. The competition, up to this point, had consisted of obvious repackaging jobs — books written before Malcolm’s great success, and now reissued with new covers and usually new titles to try to cash in on his hit idea. It had not worked yet, and both Malcolm’s book and his seminars continued to reign supreme.
Next, Jimmy supposed, would come the quickie jobs, books dashed off in a matter of days or weeks which came closer in tone and fundamental ideas to Malcolm’s. It seemed likely to Jimmy that none of those would hit the big time, either.
But even as he sat there listening to Mongo report on the latest contender for Malcolm’s title, Jimmy Flicker knew that someone, somewhere was writing the book that would become the new champion. Of this he was quite sure. Things don’t stand still in the business world. It was Malcolm’s book that had taught him that! Nor do good ideas remain unstolen for long.
And when that new champion ascended to the top of the heap, where would Jimmy Flicker’s investment in Malcolm Erskine and his seminars be? Nowhere, that’s where. Losing value quickly, that’s where.
The very thought of one of his investments decreasing in value was enough to make Jimmy go like, “Wow! I’m losing it!” More precisely, it made him queasy. If the investment were actually to decrease, Jimmy would be blown away. More precisely, he would throw up. Given the cost of the carpet in his office, that was unthinkable. Can’t happen, Jimmy Flicker thought. Mustn’t happen. No, wait, that’s not the way Lukas of Aldebaran would think! Lukas would say: “Starseed of my starseed, you cannot allow it to happen!”
Energetically, like a star-dwelling Merskeenian, Jimmy Flicker jumped to his feet. “Yes!” he cried. “No, I won’t!”
Mongo was used to this sort of behavior on his employer’s part. He awaited his orders calmly.
“Mongo, go and see Erskine and tell him I’m going like, he’s gotta produce a new bestseller and protect my investment in him. Quickly.”
“Or?”
“Or I’ll lose it completely. I’ll find someone else to do the job instead, and Erskine will be cosmically outplaced.”
“Aah.” Mongo smiled happily. He loved performing cosmic outplacement on ineffective employees of MegaFlicker. In fact, under whatever circumstances, he simply loved performing cosmic outplacement.
* * * * *
In South Carolina, at the bottom of a sea of humidity, atop a low ridge overlooking the more conventional sea, surrounded by acres of startlingly green lawns and shaded by immense oaks, a complex of linked, low, white buildings housed the international headquarters of the Children of God. Central to the complex were the television studios from which the Very Reverend Jimmy Earl broadcast his message of hope, love, and greed to an addicted world; the mail room where an army of clerks and machines processed the flood of contributions that came in daily from the addicts; the sumptuous living quarters where Jimmy Earl indulged in his cheerfully debauched lifestyle; and one of the biggest and most secure safes in private hands in the world.
Not so central physically, but very important indeed, were the offices of COG’s Security Division. One office in particular, although small and unpretentiously furnished and decorated, was the most important place in the Security Division and possibly the second most important place within COG headquarters. This was the office of the aforementioned Shirley, whose official title was Reverend’s Right Hand but whose job in reality was Chief of Security and Inventor and Perpetrator of Useful Evil Deeds.
At the moment, the wall of this office was yet another one to which Malcolm Fly should have been attached by his sticky feet. He would have needed those sticky feet to stay attached, for the scene in this office would also have caused him to faint.
Shirley was in her office
discussing Malcolm Erskine with a rather tall, very pretty, fairly young woman. Shirley began by asking her about certain aspects of the World’s Greatest Channeler’s personality.
“He’s not a bad guy, really,” Shirley’s operative said thoughtfully. “Easily manipulated, of course, and not all that bright. And desperate for love and comfort, which is what made him so easy a mark. And sex, obviously.”
Shirley nodded. “Nothing unusual so far.”
“Well, yeah, I guess there’s nothing really unusual about him, when you come right down to it. In any sense, I mean. Actually, I kinda think that underneath all the fakiness and smarm, there’s a nice guy hiding in there. Well, somewhere, anyway.”
“We’re working the intimidation angle right now. Think that’ll do the trick?”
The operative thought that over for a few moments, then shook her head. “Malcolm’s no hero, that’s for sure. In fact, he’s a physical coward. But his greed is in control. In my opinion, he’s not going to give up the channeling scam for anything.”
“Hmm. We’ll see about that. Next step is to make an offer, something that’s lucrative enough for him but still gets him out of our hair. What about that?”
“It’d have to be one hell of an offer, wouldn’t it? I mean, look at those photocopies I gave you.” She was referring to photocopies of various financial records of Malcolm’s. “How can you match those numbers?”
“Could be a problem. If he refuses our offer, we’ll have to go to Plan B.”
The other woman’s eyes widened. “Oh, I hope not! The poor man!”
“Well, we’ll see what happens. All right, I’ve got your written report, so that should supply me with any other details I need. Good job.”
The other woman blushed. Praise from Shirley was rare and to be treasured.
“And if I need more info from you, I’ll call you,” Shirley added. “Enjoy that liaison job with our foreign associates. That’s a good step up the ladder. Why, one day, you’ll probably be back here trying to take my job away from me!”
The two women looked at each with unsmiling eyes while they both laughed heartily at Shirley’s very small joke.
* * * * *
CHAPTER TWELVE
Oh, my fellow cosmic ray, brother spawn of the same mother stars, companion traveler through the great void, blah, blah, blah, gibber, gibber, gibber...
— Lukas of Aldebaran, as quoted verbatim in Business Secrets from the Stars
The White House was in crisis.
No one on the outside knew anything about it. That was the way it was with the Jibber administration. When they took over the government, the Jibber team assured the nation that the adults were now in charge, that honor and dignity now reigned supreme, and that the business of the Executive Branch would henceforth be conducted in a calm, methodical, carefully planned manner. Crises and unanticipated events were a thing of the past. Since it was essential, as every member of the administration team agreed, to preserve the illusion that all of this was true, those crises that did arise were kept from the ken of the outside world. No matter what frenzy and despair might fill the private offices inside the White House, the façade of unflappability was always carefully maintained. Because of the complete absence of competence, maintaining the illusion of complete competence was imperative.
And so no one knew that Jibber, frustrated and bored by being confined to the White House, furious at never being allowed to take off his little cowboy boots even though they had started to pinch, completely unmollified by being told that he was a cute little monkey and really, really, really the President of the United States to boot, an office and role he didn’t understand anyway, had reverted to the ways of his primitive youth.
How he yearned for the vast savanna of southern Africa! The veld called to him with its siren song.
He didn’t know of the old Great White Hunter proverb, that Africa is like a lion, and once it gets its claws into you it will never let you go, it will always draw you back. He would have appreciated the sentiment.
Well, except for the part about the lion. As a tiny little simian, he had spent a lot of time in the highest branches of the trees, shivering, as lions roared below or, even more terrifying, as leopards climbed toward him, testing the branches, finally giving up only when they climbed high enough that the branches could no longer hold their weight.
Anyway, when the lions and leopards weren’t around, Africa was a wonderful place. Oh, and the cheetahs. And the baboons. And the snakes. And the hyenas. And the humans. Well, anyway, when all of those weren’t around, it was a great place to be a little arboreal simian of an undescribed species. As long as an adequate number of females of your own species were hanging around, and they usually had been, for they also seemed to think that Jibber was a cute little monkey.
But now, here on this cold continent, how sadly different his life was.
It hadn’t struck Jibber until now. He had been, he thought, happy for years, playing son to Daddy and Grammy. Being made a governor, even though he didn’t really understand what that meant, had been fun enough for a while. The same applied to being made President. That had been briefly amusing.
But Jibber had a very short attention span, and now he was bored. He missed Africa, he missed the trees, he missed those vigorous little females of his unknown species.
Especially today.
The morning had started with deceptive calm. Jibber was in the Oval Office, curled up on the white leather couch at one end of the room, dreaming of Africa, while Daddy and Mr. Umbral and various aides and Cabinet secretaries gathered around the giant desk that was supposed to be Jibber’s and stared at the mounds of crackling parchment that made up the original Constitution of the United States. They had requisitioned the document from the National Archives so that they could try to make some sense out of it. They had been doing this for the past two days, and none of them was yet able to make head or tails of its archaic language and obsolete concepts.
Bip and Bop, now grown into juvenile delinquents, stood nearby smoking and glaring in resentment at the adults who refused to let them out of their sight. They were also discussing in low tones whether Jibber was hairy all over and speculating about how interesting certain activities might be.
In the middle of all of this, Tess entered the room.
Jibber awoke immediately. It was the smell of machine oil that roused him.
Jibber’s repeated refusals to mate with Tess after that first disastrous attempt had played havoc with her programming and internal mechanisms. She advanced toward him with a fanatical robotic glint in her eyes. Her face almost had an expression. Planting herself in front of the couch, she stared down at the shivering little simian, who shrank away into a corner as if hoping the leather would swallow him and hide him. Oblivious to the gang around the desk, Tess pulled up her skirt, pulled down her panties, spun around, and bent over, shoving her star-signaled banger in Jibber’s face.
Jibber screamed and made it from the couch to the drapes in one leap and from there to the chandelier in another. As usual when alarmed, he emptied his bowels and bladder.
“Gross!” Bip said.
Bop said, “He’s not a cute little monkey now!”
They giggled.
Daddy sighed and gestured to a Secret Service man. “Clean this up.” He pointed at the soiled Constitution.
“Um, sir, the ink,” the Secret Service man said. “I think we’d better get some kind of expert in here.”
“You got a handkerchief?”
The man nodded.
“Use it. Just wipe it off. Doesn’t matter if the ink smears. No one’s read it in years.”
Bip said, “When you gonna house train the little bastard, Grandaddy?”
Mr. Umbral said to her, in his cold, dangerous voice, “At least with him it comes out of the proper end. He doesn’t spend his time getting drunk and throwing up all over Washington.”
The twins subsided and began to move quietly toward an exit
.
Daddy looked up at the chandelier thoughtfully. “Does okay if he’s not startled. That’s the problem.” He looked at Tess. “Yep, there it is. Done her job. Liability.”
Daddy looked at Mr. Umbral. A communication seemed to pass between them. High frequency. Encrypted. Burst messaging. Very cool top-secret CIA, NSA stuff.
“In the meantime,” said Mr. Umbral, “a nice lice-picking would probably do wonders to calm him down.” He snapped his fingers. “Lackey! Bring in the lice-pickers.”
A lackey saluted and rushed from the room. He returned moments later, followed by four humble men.
The four humble men knew what their duty was and needed no instructions.
Jibber recognized them immediately. Gibbering with delight, he leaped from the chandelier to the drapes to the floor, and in another leap into the midst of the party of lice-pickers. When he landed on the floor, he hit the middle of one of the puddles of his own feces and urine, which splashed in all directions, but he was so delighted by the prospect of a session of lice-picking that he ignored that. He would have ignored it in any case. He always did.
The lice-pickers grimaced at the smell as he landed among them, but they quickly schooled their faces to neutrality and surrounded the crouching simian and began to comb through his fur, picking out lice and dirt and anything else they found. With determination if not happiness, they bent to their task. It was a position made easier by their lack of vertebrae.
Jibber sat rocking slowly back and forth, gibbering quietly, happy as a cute little monkey resting safely high in a tree in the warm southern African sun. As the Senate and House Democratic leaders and whips scrupulously did their job, Jibber let himself imagine that he really was back on the endless veld, safe with his mindless, irresponsible, hedonistic little friends, far, far away from all of this painful complexity. Oh, if only he could be back there, in that paradise of simplicity, that uncomplicated world! No more cowboy boots, no more playacting, no more Tess, no more Bip and Bop. No more pretending to be a man.
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