"Raise pigs," said Twoey.
"Now there," said Jettero to the Countess Krak, "no problems at all. They've got it all worked out."
"Oh, Jettero, be serious," she said. "I'm sure there's some kind of plan or program."
"Yes, ma'am!" said Jettero. "You've put your lovely finger right on it. There certainly is. At four o'clock this afternoon we're due over at Bayonne. And it's very important that you dress well and look very proper and prim, for if you are acceptable, we can then schedule the engagement party."
"Acceptable to WHOM?" she wailed.
"Well, I can't call her by her title yet because she won't be invested until Saturday. And that's the other thing I've got to take up with her, the coronation party. And we have to decide upon the date of the engagement party, but I should say it should be the following week."
"Jettero, I feel like I am going faintly insane."
"Blame the summer weather, not me," said Jettero.
Balmor came to the door just then and said to Izzy, "Mr. Bury is on the phone, sir. He merely wants to know if Mr. Twoey will be available tomorrow to address the Swillerberger Conference that will now be held at the White House in the afternoon. He says he's sorry to trouble you and he has written the speech. He is just verifying."
"There better be some item on the agenda about pig production," said Twoey.
"Tell Bury he'll be there," said Izzy, "and while he's on the phone tell him to hold up clearing out the Rockecenter offices until I can see to it personally."
The cat had been trying to get her attention and the Countess was very glad of the distraction.
The rest of the luncheon went off in a blur and then, dressed somehow and feeling she looked a fright, she was in the Silver Spirit with Jettero, escorted by two army tanks.
There were things she wanted to say to Jettero, urgent things, but he had the window down and the roar of the huge monsters made it hard to talk. "What are the tanks for?" she said in desperation.
"I haven't had time to separate from service," said Jettero.
"Do they always escort junior officers with tanks?" said the Countess Krak.
"Well, no," said Jettero. "They're probably afraid that I will forget to turn in my sidearms. One signs for them, you know."
"Jettero, for Heavens' sakes, be serious! I'm worried sick about this Voltar situation."
"If you go worrying about everything all the time, all you get done is worrying," said Jettero.
"Some worry is necessary," said the Countess.
"You'll never be a combat engineer," said Jettero.
"I'm not trying to be a combat engineer," she wailed. "I'm trying to become the wife of one."
"Ah, well," said Jettero, "it's a good thing you decided to put your mind on that. Here's your crucial test. We've arrived."
They had pulled up in front of a high-rise which rose grandly beside a park.
Two dark, lean Sicilian men carrying submachine guns were there, looking warily at the tanks. One peered into the Silver Spirit and then relaxed.
"Oh, it's you, kid!" he said. "You better go right up. This place has been in an uproar all day."
The other yelled into a lobby, "Hey! On your toes! It's the kid and his moll!"
They were walking through a mob of men in black suits, and swarthy faces that had appeared from nowhere, apparently specially to get a look at her. She felt she was wearing everything backwards and was missing a slipper, for those eyes were very alert and appraising.
Then a whisper reached her, "Jesus, kid, where did you find HER? Cristo, is she a movie star or something?"
It made her feel a bit better, but at the top of the elevator, a booming voice was heard coming down the hall, "I don't give a (bleep), you (bleepard)! Tell those sons of (bleepches) in Chicago to throw their God (bleeped) drugs in Lake Michigan and begin running rum or I'll put a hundred hit men on their tails. Now get the hell out of here. I think I heard my kid!"
A very old Italian, beautifully dressed, lugging a briefcase, fled out of the room, almost collided with Jettero, looked at him in a cautionary way and said, "Take it easy in there. She's on fire!"
An old Sicilian in a white coat hurried up and gave Jettero a reassuring pat and ushered them into a salon of such elegance the Countess thought for an instant she was back on Voltar.
A middle-aged woman, very blond, was sitting on a sofa in a pose of elegance and decorum. She wore a gold-sequined gown and was idly thumbing through a fashion magazine. Then she looked up and smiled politely and said, in a cultured and modulated voice, "Ah, Jerome. How nice of you to drop in." She extended a hand for him to kiss and he did so.
"Mrs. Corleone," he said with his most courtly Fleet manners, "may I present my fiancee."
The woman languidly unfolded and stood. She was six foot six, over eight inches taller than Krak.
"Ah," she said, extending her hand, "You are the Countess, I presume."
Krak's head spun. What was coming off here? How did this woman know she was really the Countess Krak? No one else on Earth knew that!
The giantess was looking her up and down as though she was some kind of a horse. And then apparently, she couldn't keep the pose up any longer and she suddenly put her arms around Krak and hugged her and then held her off and looked at her and then hugged her again and said, "God (bleep) it, Jerome, this is the most beautiful lady I've seen in all my life!" She held her off again. "God (bleep) it, you're more gorgeous than a Roxy girl. You'd stop the show!" And she hugged her again and said, "God (bleep) it, yes, Jerome! For Christ's sake, marry her quick before she gets away!"
After a while, the giantess put her in a chair like Krak was some kind of porcelain and, gazing at her with admiration, offered her a silver box with Russian cigarettes-which of course Krak didn't smoke-and called for cookies and milk for Jerome.
And then she and Jettero began to discuss the details of the engagement party and decided on Madison Square Garden and that it would be a week after the coronation. They had a lot of trouble with the guest list because Mrs. Corleone had not yet decided what to do with the mayor's wife: on the one hand she wanted her there and on the other she didn't, so that part of it was left up in the air.
They were finally being shown out and Mrs. Corleone turned to Jettero at the door. She said, "No wonder you would never touch those girls at the Gracious Palms!"
Kissed on both cheeks and getting into the Silver Spirit again, the Countess Krak's head was in a new whirl. What girls?
To the clank of tanks and the beat of a police helicopter that was riding escort overhead, Jettero got her laughing a bit about his unarmed-combat class at the UN's "favorite hotel." He was quite witty and charming about it and she forgave him. But she didn't get a chance to talk to him at all about Voltar at dinner. Although they ate in a most exclusive restaurant on East 52nd Street,
The Four Reasons, and although Jettero had said they would have an intimate dinner, he also insisted that the tank officers and crews, two police captains who seemed to have joined the parade and the condo chauffeur also have dinner in the same place; and even if they were at different tables and studiously let Jettero and his lady sit close to each other in candlelight, people kept dropping by who had nice things to say. And from the restaurant manager to the head of Saudi-Yemen Oil, all had to be introduced.
Then they went to a world title prizefight and a whole row had to be cleared out for the tank crews, police officials, bank presidents and a pop star who now seemed to have joined the parade.
The Countess never did figure out who won the fight or why, as she couldn't understand why neither fighter used any proper blows when they were wide open for them and never once even tapped each other with their feet.
The after-fight late supper was about as intimate as rush hour, as they had now acquired the heads of two TV networks and their guests and it drove Sardine's half mad trying to serve them all. She hadn't realized that Jettero knew so many people and even though he assured her that he didn
't, the restaurant manager himself took over a microphone from the M. C. and convulsed the whole assemblage with a story, which they found hilarious, of Police Inspector Grafferty accidentally getting his face full of spaghetti at the hands of "a certain celebrity" who "shall not be named" as he looked at Jettero.
It was not until they had been in bed for two hours that the Countess Krak found him quiet enough to listen.
"Jettero, I hate to have to bring this up. But please be serious. I'm quite worried about the danger we are in.
You just grazed over it on the viewer-phone. I do not agree with your estimate at all."
He propped his head up on a pillow and she knew she had his attention.
"You don't know Lombar Hisst," she said. "I do. For almost three years I had to work at his orders. He's completely mad. He's entirely capable of blowing this whole planet up simply to get revenge on it if it thwarted him."
Jettero yawned. "I don't think you know what a big job it is to blow up a planet. I even doubt it could be done. It's even a very great engineering feat just to pull off a planet's atmosphere."
"But it could be attacked," she said. "The populations could be mowed down."
"Listen," he said, "you stop fretting your pretty head. In the first place, the planet does have some defenses and they would be an embarrassment to any invader. Even if they were wiped out, which they would be, they still would take a lot of killing. You'd have to land at least a million men to mop the place up. And that would require, in terms of ships, everything the Apparatus has got. In order to conquer Earth, Lombar Hisst would have to pull his ships and troops out of every hangar and barracks in the Confederacy. And they have a lot of other things to do, like suppressing the revolt of Mortiiy on Calabar. Lombar would be spread too thin. And he won't have any other forces available. He can't tell anyone we have the Emperor here and the Fleet and the Army would simply yawn at him if he tried to insist they chase all over the place looking for me. They wouldn't help him invade Earth. They'd think he'd gone crazy."
The Countess rose on her elbow and pushed her hair out of her eyes. "Darling, I know your reputation with the Fleet and even the Army has been excellent and that is as it should be. But I get a horrible feeling about all this. You have forgotten what happened here on Earth: that PR made an awful mess. All that horrible publicity. All those women and all those lies. Remember Madison?"
"Aw, they don't do that sort of thing on Voltar," said Jettero. "That goofy PR technology isn't even known there. And as for Madison, he went in the river."
"Well, call it woman's intuition if you will," she said, "but I've got a bad feeling about all this. Please, won't you worry just a little bit?"
"Lady mine," he said, "a lifetime is composed of a finite number of minutes. What is happening now is important. I have seen men who well knew they'd be dead in half an hour enjoy a glass of tup most thoroughly. Others spent the same half hour worrying. They were just as dead but they had missed a glass of tup."
"You're impossible!"
Jettero looked at his watch. He said, "You have just wasted one minute of your life. Don't waste the next one. Give me a kiss."
"Oh, Jettero, I wish you knew Lombar like I do!"
"I assure you, lady mine, that you are just now in much better company. Come here."
And though he smothered her with kisses and though he soon had her mind on other things, he did not, that night or in the weeks to come, succeed in smothering her worries.
Somehow she KNEW it was far more dangerous than he said. But he wouldn't even listen!
Chapter 5
Haggard with the smell of his own brand of danger, three days later Madison was returning to the Royal antechamber, escorting Lombar Hisst.
Keyed up until it felt his whole insides were going to rip asunder, Madison would know now, in just minutes, if he was to stride on to victory or be left expiring in some unpleasant Voltar gutter, a loser cast away. Just a hair's width of miscalculation could expose all and even bring him death.
For three days he had worked and worked hard, with the knowledge that a failure at any given point in a complicated chain could leave him lost and condemned forever upon this distant strand and it would wreck forever his last chance to finish Heller.
The major problem had been to prove to Hisst that he, Madison, was such a magical PR that he could get the Lords to bow to Hisst-a thing which Lombar, a commoner, considered utterly impossible-and to get the action shown through the Confederacy on Homeview.
The sequence of minor problems had been hair-raising, each one in itself.
The first incipient nervous breakdown occurred when the son of Snor had been unable to wake his father up long enough to get him to stamp and certify a blanket order giving Madison the run of Homeview. Finally the boy had been persuaded by Teenie to go back and, when no nurses or doctors were about, and out of the sight of the security scanners, get Lord Snor's seal of the Interior Division out of a desk and stamp the order himself.
The next threatened crackup happened when the manager of Homeview at the Joy City Studios had been unable to believe that Lord Snor would issue such an order and had tried to call Palace City to verify it. Unable to connect with Snor, he had gotten back at Madison-he evidently did not like the Apparatus-by giving him a lousy crew. No director, a scrub team of drivers and crewmen and, worst of all, a cameraman whose wife had just left him and who was not yet recovered from a five-day drunk. "A stinking order from the stinking Apparatus to do a stinking event only deserves a stinking crew," he had said, little reckoning that he was putting Madison's life on the line-and he probably would have cheered if he had found out. "We'll put it in the Family Hour, so hold it on time, for we won't reprogram all of Homeview just to insert a stinking clip." Madison had left him wondering what the blazes a PR man was and had had to be content with what he got. Hair-raising!
Then a page had had to sneak into a meeting of the Grand Council. It had only been attended by five members and these were all bleary with speedballs. The page had slipped the prewritten resolution under the palsied hand of the Crown who was stamping something else and then he had to get it logged by a clerk who was too deaf to hear things that were being passed. Madison had crouched outside shivering until the page sauntered out, tapping his jacket to signify he now had a legal order to the Master of Palace City to change building names.
It had taken every credit Teenie could scrape up to bribe the Master to order the name wanted and to make the ceremonial arrangements for the right minute of the day. If this final result, about to be received, did not work, then Teenie would be after his blood again.
And then there had been the struggle of pages and sons to get most of the Lords to feel indulgent enough toward children to agree to attend the affair, followed by the heroic feat of actually getting them into their robes and out there.
Throughout the event, Madison had been too tied up with guiding Lombar to keep an eye on the Home-view crew. It had been HARROWING to have to walk along with dignified mien and resist all cravings to watch that (bleeped) cameraman and see if he even had the thing on, much less pointed at the exact required angle. If Madison had looked, the camera would have gotten him subjective-looking into its lens-like some gawker. So as of right here and now, walking across the antechamber, bringing the chief back to his desk, Madison did NOT know what he had in the can.
Lombar lumbered to his desk in front of the bolted door of the Emperor's bedchamber and sank down in his chair. There was no telling what his reaction was thus far: he was completely silent.
Madison went over to the Homeview screen and with a bit of fiddling got it turned on. He didn't know how to calculate the transmission time as the signal had left Palace City through a thirteen-minute future drag, had been transmitted to the planetary network center at Joy City and then had to come back and go through time relays to get back into Palace City time. So he didn't know how to set the digitals to be sure he was ahead of the program on the screen's recording
strip, which would give him a replay. His palms were dripping and his hands shook.
Oh, God, he was about to do a thing which no PR with any brains would ever dream of doing: showing a client a program which the PR himself had not previewed. With a drunk cameraman, heavens knew what was on that strip and if that camera had even wobbled, Madison knew he would be dead.
He abandoned time calculation. He just yanked the strip ahead at random and hoped he was before the start point he wanted.
He got the afternoon "Family Hour." There was a picture of a woman rocking a child and crooning while the commentator went on and on about the joys of motherhood.
Madison stole a glance at Hisst but Hisst was just sitting there, eyes upon the screen. Madison couldn't figure the reaction.
The commentator said that you should never feed a child anything but mother's milk so that "what gets indrawn with sweet nourishment carries with it, on this channel of deliciousness, a soft and vibrant flow of love and family."
Madison wished desperately he knew how to fast-forward the strip. He glanced at Hisst to see how he was taking it: the yellow eyes, aside from their ever-present flicker of insanity, were unreadable.
The picture showed a lot of shots of strange animals rutting in dirt and the announcer condemned all beast milk as imparting only lust and greed, and wound up in style.
Now there came a series of views of ancient buildings. SCHOOLS! Oh, thank heavens, this was finally the start of the program they had just enacted.
A rather nasal commentator voice was running along with a history of schools and began to show those which had been named after members of the Royal family and even Emperors.
Madison cast a covert glance at Hisst. He was just sitting there in his gaudy scarlet Apparatus general's full-dress uniform, more like a brutish Devil than a man. One couldn't tell what he was thinking.
Then suddenly the part that Madison had been waiting for came on. "... but times change and the parade of power across the stage of history can ever glitter to new heights. Yesterday it was determined by Lord Snor, Lord of the Interior, acting through the Master of Palace City, to celebrate our dedication to fineness and decency in tomorrow's noblemen and courtiers and celebrate as well the glory and dedication of our magnificent and relentless protector of the realm, Lombar Hisst, Spokesman of the Emperor..." Madison thought the text was absolutely great, for, after all, he had written it himself; but he didn't quite like the trumpet fanfare: it sounded more like razzmatazz. He glanced anxiously at Hisst to see how he was taking it but Madison could get no reaction at all!
Mission: Earth Villainy Victorious Page 11