It was obvious to Barry why Beatrice always seemed to dress so inappropriately. There was no one brave enough to tell her she did not look good.
Beatrice glanced at her watch.
“We can't wait forever,” she said. She went to the door and screamed out into the hallway.
“Get Rubin. We're tired of looking for Rubin.”
“He's writing the founder's day speech for the faithful,” came a man's voice. It was one of her bodyguards.
“Use last year's. Tell him to use last year's,” yelled back Mrs. Dolomo.
“He says he can't. It's a new speech about the persecution of the righteous.”
“Persecute his duff up here to the south meeting room,” screamed Mrs. Dolomo, and then she returned to the table where Barry Glidden was desperately figuring out ways to sever relations with this client. He knew what was coming.
“Barry, we're going to make the President pay for this. We are going to make America pay for this. That guilty verdict was kangaroo justice inflicted upon us from the very top. All my life, I have respected the top too much. Well, Barry, I'm not taking it anymore. The President goes. Off with the top.”
“Mrs. Dolomo, as an officer of the court, I am not allowed to hear this without reporting you. I am a lawyer, I have taken an oath. So I would suggest you keep whatever plans you have to yourself. Leave me out.”
“You're in, Barry,” said Mrs. Dolomo.
“I'm not good at these things. I'm just a lawyer.”
“You'll learn. Rubin!”
“He's coming, Mrs. Dolomo,” came the bodyguard's voice.
Someone was shuffling down the hall. It was Rubin. He came into the room with a cigarette dangling from his mouth at just the right angle to make his eyes water. He had not shaved for two days and he wore a bathrobe. From the bathrobe came a light tinkling, the sound of plastic rubbing together. It was Rubin's pills. He put them on the table, his hands shaking.
“Do you want to hear the message to the enlightened? It's truly beautiful,” said Rubin.
“No,” said Beatrice.
“Not really,” said Barry.
“It's about religious persecution. I think it's the best thing I have ever written.”
“We have business, Rubin,” said Beatrice.
“It's especially meaningful in the light of our convictions, and appeals. The franchises will like it.”
“No,” said Beatrice.
“Legally I shouldn't be here,” said Barry. “I wish you luck in what you're going to do.”
“Enlightened ones,” Rubin began to read as he put a hand on Barry Glidden's shoulder, seating him back down. “Times of trial are nothing new. Each of us has faced them in daily life. They are but small obstacles in the path of enlightenment, only pebbles under the feet if you are going somewhere, but boulders if you are not. Your faith has made you free. Never let your new strength fail before some minor tribulation. Know that all blocks are only temporary and that you are the children of the good forces of all being. You will prevail. Let power be in you.”
Rubin rubbed a tear from his left eye with his bathrobe sleeve.
“You done?” asked Beatrice.
Rubin nodded, swallowing hard. He was deeply moved.
“Very nice, Rubin, and I will be sending you both my bill. I have to go now,” said Barry.
“We haven't planned on how we are going to get the President yet,” said Beatrice. “Sit down, Rubin, the President is not taking us seriously. What shall we do about it?”
“I don't know how we can get an alligator into the White House. We're going to have to do something else. What did you think of the speech? Do you think it was better than the Larkin king saying good-bye to the Dromoid mercenaries who had come to love him?”
“It's wonderful, Rubin.”
“As an officer of the court I will be forced to report anything I hear of a criminal nature.”
“Don't worry, Barry. There won't be any problem with that. You help us now and I guarantee you will have no problem with telling everything you know to the authorities.”
“You said that the alligator witness would turn also.”
“A little mistake. The President's. Now, how do we get the bum?”
“You don't,” said Glidden. “He is always surrounded by bodyguards. They are called the Secret Service, and they are prepared for everything.”
“Not everything. There's been one President killed and one wounded in my lifetime alone,” said Beatrice.
“They have electronic sensors. They have men who will shield him with their bodies. They have everything they need to catch you. And then they're going to put you in jail for a very long, long, long time. Longer than the alligator thing, Beatrice Dolomo.”
Barry Glidden felt the rage rise in him. His hands tapped the table. She had gone too far, and he knew what he would do to stop her. As soon as he got out of here, this responsible officer of the court would report this plan to harm the President of the United States. And he would forgo any fee. He would, for the first time in his glorious career, live up to that precious oath he had taken years before when he graduated from UCLA Law School. Then, once the Dolomos were safely in the slammer, he would make his move for the rolling lands of the estate and bring his children back from Switzerland.
The estate might be held against uncollected taxes. It might even be a steal.
“The President can't be reached through any girlfriends. He's faithful to his wife. You can't poison him,” said Barry, “because he's got tasters. Those cobras you snuck into someone's bed won't work, and boiling oil could never get near him. You might try to plant a sniper on a roof with a rifle, but the Secret Service would spot him. I guarantee it.”
“Does the President read letters?” asked Beatrice.
“Of course he does,” said Barry.
“Then we'll send him a letter. Meanwhile, we want you to speak to the Vice-President. He, after all, is going to be in charge, after the current President is lost. Tell him to lay off Poweressence.”
Beatrice nodded at the reasonableness of her own suggestion.
Barry gave only a polite smile. He wondered if he should drive directly to the Federal Bureau of Investigation or run. As Rubin escorted him to the door, Beatrice issued a particularly strange good-bye:
“Give him just enough for now,” said Beatrice.
“What is she talking about?” said Barry.
“Nothing,” said Rubin. He invited him to the lounge bar downstairs.
“No thanks, I was interrupted down there by your wife.”
“Beatrice does not like to see anyone but her making love.”
“It wasn't love.”
“Whatever,” said Rubin. He needed two Motrin and a Demerol to make it down the stairs. He asked Glidden if he would deliver a letter for him.
“Sure,” said Barry.
Apparently Rubin was going to write the letter while Barry waited. In order to rush Rubin, Barry followed him through the door he'd exited. It led to a cellar, a cellar where many rubber suits hung against the walls. A cellar with several doors so that Barry couldn't quite be sure which he'd used to get in. So he picked one door at random and burst through. He found himself staring at Rubin. Rubin was sweaty-faced, wide-eyed, and on the other side of a piece of glass, and his hands were stuffed into rubber-coated arms protruding into Barry's room.
“Get out of there. Go back,” yelled Rubin. The voice was muffled by the glass. One rubber hand held a cotton swab and the other a pink letter.
“What are you doing with that letter?”
“Go back.”
“You're doing something funny with the letter,” said Barry.
“I'm not doing anything with the letter. Get out of here. Go back.”
“That's the letter you want me to deliver?”
“Get back. For your own good. Get back. I control forces you know nothing about, forces beyond your understanding.”
“That's the letter you wanted me to deli
ver. What are you doing to it?” Barry went over to the small table the rubber arms worked over. There was a jar of something on the table. The swab was wet with something. Barry leaned over the little jar. He sniffed. It smelled strangely like a root cellar he once had made love in. He had gone to a client's house to help her with a divorce. Her husband had accused her of adultery. He was very suspicious, she had said. Life was hell, she had said. Perhaps they had better talk about it in the root cellar, she had said. It was the first time Barry Glidden had ever accepted an alternate form of legal fee.
So Barry Glidden basked in the fond memories of this odor.
“Get back,” said Rubin.
“What's wrong here? What are you doing, Rubin?”
“It's too intricate for you to understand.”
“What if I were to take this jar and bring it to the police, Rubin? What would happen then?”
“You'd only hurt yourself,” said Rubin. “Don't touch it, please.”
“I'm not so sure,” said Glidden.
“It's dangerous. What do you think I am doing on the other side of the glass shield with my hands in rubber gloves?”
“You tell me,” said Glidden. He did not move. He liked the aroma of the liquid in the jar.
Beside the steel jar was a steel cap. If he could protect his own hands with his own jacket, Barry reasoned, he could cap the jar, put it in his briefcase, and drive it to some chemist to get it analyzed. It could be good evidence in the government case against the Dolomos, good enough to cut six months off the projected time when all this land would be sold.
Glidden removed his suit jacket, taking out the wallet and the keys and stuffing them in his pants. Then, very carefully, he used it like a giant potholder to move the steel jar top over the container of the pleasant-smelling liquid. One of the rubber gloves tried to push him away. It held the letter. Barry ignored it. Then the letter touched the back of his hand.
He looked down at his suit jacket. For some reason it was bunched up in his hand. Inside it was a jar top. He was holding a jar top with his suit jacket. He put the lid on the table and began to brush out his suit. As he did so, he knocked over the jar. A sense of panic seized him as the dark stain spread over his shirt and jacket and pants. Someone was going to tell his mommy.
Barry Glidden began to cry and he only stopped crying when the nice man brought him into a room with toys and other children, nice little boys and little girls. But they were not really that nice. They kept all the toys to themselves and would not share with Barry. Nobody would share with Barry. He cried even harder. Then a nice lady gave him the yellow boat, and he stopped crying. Barry Glidden, after twenty tough competitive years before the California bar, was happy at last.
Rubin Dolomo left Glidden in the first playroom and began his assault on the President of the United States. He was not sure whether he should cast legions in a wild charge such as in Invaders from Dromoid, or send in a single lone deliverer. Like in Defenders of Larkin.
Beatrice had a simpler plan.
“Do both and do it now. If we wait around for you to get things right, we'll die of old age,” she said. She now blamed him for failing to turn the witness.
The problem had been that they couldn't get through. A man of such negativity as to be totally unreasonable had been responsible for keeping the love note from the President.
In his own way, Rubin Dolomo had more than a little shrewdness, and Beatrice, despite her haranguing, appreciated that. She knew that though he often failed once, he rarely failed twice, if one kept after him. So when he said he had a new and better plan to reach the President of the United States, she did not question him.
“I am only asking for one thing. Get the SOB. Get the President of the United States. Is that too much to ask?”
“No, dear,” said Rubin. For this assault he was going to have to use Powies who didn't know him, or who couldn't trace him. This was not altogether impossible, because his photograph in the back of all Poweressence books was one taken of him in his twenties and then touched up by a comic-book artist, so that a powerful, benign, eternally young presence radiated from the picture. It wouldn't even pass muster now for his passport.
He created for this sacred mission the Servants of Zor, and then from franchises around the country he bought the names of seven Powies who had reached Level Seven. By Level Seven everyone had paid in at least eight thousand dollars. Anyone who had paid that much for Poweressence courses could be counted on for almost anything.
But Rubin Dolomo did not ask for just anything. From his hiding place in a darkened room lit only with candies, from behind a screen emblazoned with the sign of the eternal warmth of this galaxy, the sun, he addressed his band of housewives, executives, aspiring actresses, and a real-estate salesman from Poughkeepsie.
“You are a select group. You are the ones who have been given much— therefore, you must give much in return. You will save this country from religious persecution, from religious intolerance. You will guide the leadership of this land into the ways of righteousness. And future generations will call you blessed.”
Thus spake Rubin from behind the magnificent partition that was his shield in case his plan did not work, which seemed unlikely anyhow.
The real-estate salesman from Poughkeepsie felt a chill go up his spine. The housewife gasped— suddenly she was important in the world, important beyond her wildest expectations. The aspiring actress had a vision— a religious experience in which her name was up in lights, just like Kathy Bowen's. Kathy Bowen was a Powie. If she had gotten where she was by doing this stuff, so would she. And then she would do anything she pleased, from Shakespearean drama to Johnny Carson.
So when the man the actress could not see began talking about enlightening the President of the United States, about touching him with goodness, she had few questions. Fewer still when the speaker assured her that if there was any trouble, any fear, anyone questioning her, all she had to do was break a small glass vial and she would be invulnerable to the evil forces of the world.
But there was a warning:
“You must only break this glass vial when you are in trouble. Otherwise trouble will come to you,” said Rubin from behind the screen.
“Isn't this wonderful?” said the housewife. “It's just like Defenders of Alarkin.”
“Is that a book or what?”
“It's a book.”
“Sounds like junk,” said the actress.
“Whoever said that will be the first to save America,” said Rubin Dolomo.
* * *
For the Secret Service, entrusted with protecting the President of the United States, the nightmare began somewhat harmlessly in the main mailroom of the White House. It was nothing great, but anything out of the ordinary had to be investigated. Several clerks now had failed to show up for work.
“As you know,” said the supervisor, “we have five routings for mail. All of it is opened here after being checked for cookies, bombs, anything like that. Personal gifts go to the Courtesy Center, where thank-you notes are composed. If the gifts are worth more than a certain amount, our Courtesy Hostesses send them to the Smithsonian for display. Letters criticizing the President or the First Lady are routed to the Beige Room, where benign responses are written. Threats are sent to you for investigation. Letters that have to be answered by the President's staff of secretaries are sent to another department, and personal letters, ones that seem as though they actually come from people who know him, are handled by another. It was in this last category that we had the problem.”
“You mean the clerks who open the President's personal correspondence?”
“Oh, no. Machines open his letters. It was the clerks who handled them. They'd be working a regular shift and then they would just stare out into space. Just stare, gape, gawk, like they were in a void.”
“So you had no way to differentiate them from any other worker,” said the Secret Service man. “Just a joke.”
“We earn our mon
ey here,” said the supervisor, looking wounded.
“Sorry. Go on.”
“Well, they would entertain themselves for a while— play with stamps, trade lunches, that sort of thing, but then they would wander off. And when we phoned them at home, a few of them were gone.”
“What do you mean, gone?”
“They never returned home that day. Or any day thereafter.”
“Give me the names of those who didn't wander off,” said the Secret Service man.
There were two of them. Both of them seemed unaccountably listless. And they were incapable of answering any questions about their jobs or why they left— in fact, they hardly remembered ever working there at all.
Then came the real problems. The President would be making a Midwestern road trip to speak to farmers. As usual, the Secret Service had to sanitize the route, making sure that no bombs were set in roads. All hiding places and potential sniper sites had Secret Service men stationed at them, and all the roads that could be used as avenues of escape along the motorcade route were barricaded.
Halls where the President would speak had to be examined with metal detectors. The local hospitals had to stock his blood type, more than enough for any major operation.
Airplane traffic had to be rerouted because no airplane could overfly the presidential caravan. And then, as though he was going out for a pleasant ride to meet the people of Wisconsin, the President rode through the suburbs of Racine, waving to everyone as though he didn't have a care in the world. And he didn't: The Secret Service did.
It was the usual crowd at the fairground. Ninety-nine percent of the people were there to cheer their President this sunny autumn day. Then there were the hostile sign holders, those who lived for the opportunity to tell the Commander-in-Chief to get out of South America, the Middle East, the Far East, Africa, Europe, and Racine. The television cameras zoomed in on the one percent as the President began to speak.
What looked, to the untrained eye, like randomly placed Secret Service men was in actuality three zones of protection strategically placed in the crowd. The second formed a barrier between the crowd and the President. The third zone was what was called the “body” grid. This group was never more than an arm's length from their charge. These were the men who would crowd around the President at any sign of trouble.
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