He got the electronics man busy on the upper floors.
He even managed to get in, to keep him happy, another clip on Homeview of Lombar. With his own crew this time, using the occasion of a national holiday, Confederation Day of Delight, he had Lombar dedicating a new cemetery for the dead of the Calabar Revolt. It fitted the day, Madison explained to the dumbfounded manager of Homeview, because of the close-ups of delighted smiles of Lombar viewing the as yet unused grave markers in a truck. Lombar, however, thought it was great when Madison explained to him that he was building Lombar an image of "Don't trifle with Hisst, the most ruthless and relentless man in the Confederacy."
At the end of ten days, Madison, everything else going well, wanting to see Teenie, had to fly from Joy City to Relax Island. Flick had left Cun pointedly behind. They had a pass stamped by Teenie.
This time, being more experienced, they took no chances of flying over the top of the mountain and, coming in low, almost collided with the side of a five-thousand-foot cliff, coal black, that gave Madison quite a shock. But, rising up over it, they were rewarded by the stupendous scenery of the valleys and hills.
They landed in front of a much-changed palace. Evidently Too-Too's new kiss had worked like magic on Lord Endow. The whole vast front was stripped of moss and glowing in new gilt, the paths were trimmed and neat, the shrubbery pruned, not a single errant twig obstructed the terrace, and even the paving stones, firmly gripped in new cement, had ceased to teeter. Staff, and possibly some construction companies, had worked miracles.
Two stiffly standing guards, shimmering in silver uniforms, stood on either side of the door. A properly robed seneschal came out and bowed Madison in.
"Her Majesty is in the third music salon," he said. "Follow me, please."
Expecting to see Teenie being played to with soft airs suggested by the climate and beauty of the place, Madison was a little startled to find her stripped to the waist, wearing a pair of blue pants with red side-stripes and nothing else. She held a stinger in her hand.
"Madison," she said without preamble, "you just got no idea how dumb these (bleepards) are!"
Madison had no idea who she was talking about. They were the only ones in the room. There were mirrors on all the walls which cross-multiplied their images, and although there seemed to be several hundred Madisons and Teenies, that did not make them any less the only occupants of this large and ornate salon.
"Watch this," said Teenie. She barked out, "Hike!"
A woman, dressed in noble clothes, entered by a far door. With leisurely and cultured steps, idly gazing about her, she wandered toward a pedestal which must be a performer's platform. Madison recognized one of Teenie's Palace City maids.
"Let him go!" cried Teenie.
Instantly, from another door, a man in officer's uniform raced into the room. He spotted the woman. He made a beeline for her.
He tore the robe off her. He knocked her down. He hauled her over to the performer's platform. Keeping one foot on her so she couldn't escape, he half tore off his own clothes. He leaped on her and was just about to spread her legs when Teenie moved forward with a yell.
"No, no, NO!" cried Teenie and stabbed him in the butt with her stinger.
That didn't stop him. Not for a second. Teenie grabbed hold of the hair of his head and sought to pull him upward.
Two sergeants had rushed in and they backed up Teenie. They got the man out of and off the maid and held him there.
"Madison, that's the third God (bleeped) time he got it wrong! In a row!"
"Teenie, maybe he doesn't understand what he's supposed to do."
"Oh, he understands all right," she snarled, jabbing him in the belly with the stinger. "He is supposed to walk up to her and bow, then kneel and kiss her hand and request her company for a stroll in the park, AFTER which he is supposed to make an improper proposal. But they know (bleeped) well that after the proposal they just get sent back to barracks, so they use these lessons as a chance to get by me and tear off a piece before I can stop them."
"Well, Teenie," said Madison, looking at the wilted officer, "I wouldn't dare to advise you, but has it occurred to you that if you let him actually take a girl to a bedroom and do it, IF he did all the rest right, they might revert to protocol? It's called 'reward' in animal psychology. I know, I studied it in college."
"You got it all wrong," said Teenie. "That's the trouble with them. They're acting like a bunch of beasts! Five hundred God (bleeped) noblemen, my (bleep). They're just five hundred God (bleeped) animals!"
"I think even their fathers and grandfathers were led to the queen with an electric collar on them," said Madison. "I think maybe their protocol requires them to act that way."
Teenie became thoughtful. She sent for Governor Spurt. He came racing, all dressed up, now that the chests had been unlocked. He came to a halt with a clank of office badges and bowed low.
Teenie dragged him over to the side and had a low-voiced conversation with him.
She came back shortly. "By God, Madison, you're right. It wasn't animal psychology that was missing– who'd miss it-it was the standing Royal orders! Queen Hora wanted to be hit and stripped and raped!"
Governor Spurt soon returned accompanied by a clerk in black and three footmen carrying a table and other things. They set them down.
Teenie, with their help, drew up a document which altered former Royal orders. The clerk, with a flourish, handed her the Royal Seal of Flisten-a two-pound carved emerald-and she stamped and signed it.
"It won't do any good to do any more training until the heralds yell it all over the island to make it legal." She got up, a maid dropped a cloak over her shoulders and Madison followed her out onto the terrace.
Teenie sat down on a balustrade and stared out across the valley. A footman handed up a silver tray which held a piece of bubble gum, bowed and withdrew.
She chewed for a while and, when she could blow a bubble, did so. "This queening business is pretty tricky, Madison. You can get away with anything so long as you do it with the proper legal actions. But I'm learning."
"This certainly is a lovely place," said Madison. "Birds singing and the air is like perfume. They're really making progress fixing it up."
"Oh, the contractors are getting the panels and machinery working. I've got two air-coach trucks making daily runs now. I'm having trouble with the villages: they keep organizing dancing festivals of welcome. But the main holdup is in Commercial City: they never heard of some of these torture instruments and they're having to be handmade. How's it going with publicity?"
"You mean PR. I think I'll be in business in another two or three weeks."
Teenie sighed. "I guess I'll just have to resign myself to it. How long do you think it will be until I get my hands on Gris?"
"Two or three months," said Madison.
She looked at him crossly. "You sure are slow! Well, you didn't come down here sightseeing. What do you want now?"
"I just wanted your permission to send in a camera crew and get some blank passes. I want a little travelogue."
She shrugged. Then she said, "While you're at it, tell your cameraman to be sure and take some pictures of that dungeon. I want something to remind you with in case you get ideas of not coming through. Call it animal psychology." And she popped her bubble gum emphatically in his face.
Chapter 8
One week later, Madison called his staff together.
"I think we're all organized," he said. "I just want to tell you that if anybody flubs, he will be subjected to one or both of two penalties. He or she will be forced to take a dose of LSD and if the offense is very bad, the offender will be forced to have a psychiatric treatment. Is that understood?"
They squirmed. It must be pretty bad if the chief, a known murderer, looked that grim about it. They shivered, they went pale under their newly acquired tans. They said they understood.
"All right," said Madison. "It's all systems go!"
The five
circus girls rushed off, got dressed as noble ladies.
Five air limousines took off, headed for five different social functions.
Five false identoplates that said, incontestable that they were noble ladies from distant Confederacy planets got them entrance to estates and ballrooms.
The PR war was on.
They had their orders. They had been drilled and drilled. They were to circulate amongst the guests and at any opportunity, talk about the marvelous new doctor from a planet of very advanced culture named Earth that had developed a marvelous thing called psychiatry. And would you believe it? The root of all mental disturbance was sex? Amazing! But he was curing people in droves. It was the latest thing, quite the rage.
For days and days, on and on, for dozens and then hundreds of soirees and balls and at homes, the whispering campaign pounded on.
The two officer-impersonators, dressed now in solemn scientific garb, attended on the heels of the circus girls, thoughtfully and conservatively confirmed the rumor and also brought Madison his feedback.
Madison, with a dungeon waiting, watched the campaign nervously.
Very few people, even on Earth, realized that psychiatry and psychology were just the creations of PR and had no other substance.
Freud's theory that everything was sex had remained scoffed at and neglected until he had married into a New York advertising firm and then the advertising men began to push it, and until this day sex was the dominant basis of all Earth advertising. The PR on psychoanalysis was so good that it overrode the fact that a third of the patients committed suicide in the first three months of treatment. And there were no cures of record.
Madison was following the general PR pattern psychiatry had pursued so successfully. He even had LSD available, a milestone of psychiatric success which had permitted it to capture no less than the head of the largest news magazine in America, make him an addict and convert him to the psychiatric cause. Loose, of Slime magazine, had thus become a primary crusader for psychiatry and LSD and a relentless hatchet man for any other technology that arose that psychiatry thought might constitute a threat.
Madison did a little praying when, at the end of ten days, it was announced that the famous psychiatrist would give a lecture to a very select few.
An auditorium on the eightieth floor had been made ready. Limousine after limousine arrived on the roof. Seat after seat was taken. Madison began to breathe more easily as he watched through a peephole.
Doctor Crobe, an electric collar hidden beneath his professional tunic neckband in case he departed from his coached speech, came to the platform and began to speak of the work of Sigmund Freud in the field of sex. It was a good speech. It should be: it was taken straight out of Freud, for Madison had found, much to his delight, that the old Soltan Gris office contained complete translated transcripts.
Crobe droned on. He had a small speaker in his ear that could prompt him if he forgot any part of the speech. He filled the air with ids and egos and censors. And then he got down to the nitty-gritty of it: if wives were dissatisfied sexually with their husbands, inhibitions could build up. The censor was only a thin veil at best, and with the least prompting, the terrible insanities which lurked below could burst out and bring terror. Everyone was inhibited. It all depended on whether one was sexually satisfied.
Applause greeted the lecture. It was not surprising. Most of the people attending were the wives of publishers and editors.
Then Doctor Crobe, as he was supposed to do, said that as a special favor, he would grant interviews that very afternoon to a favored few.
He got five.
They were taken to a room equipped as a hospital. The two actors, now garbed as medical technicians, took their pulse and weighed them and did other banal things. But they also looked into their mouths with a tongue depressor. And unbeknownst to the women, that tongue depressor had on it a small dose of LSD.
Madison held his breath. Lady Arthrite Stuffy was one. She was the wife of the publisher of the largest news-sheet in the land, the Daily Speaker, the one where he had first been rebuffed so cruelly.
Out of sight, but with everything on monitors, Madison watched the five being escorted to their interview rooms.
Lady Arthrite Stuffy, much younger than her husband, was led into the first room that Madison and Flick had earlier entered and turned on the black window.
The sacrificial altar had been covered with a velvet cloth. The room looked quite ordinary. The young woman, at the direction of the courteous medical technician and assisted now by one of the criminal whores garbed as a nurse, lay down on the block.
The other women were led into different rooms of the same nature.
Doctor Crobe entered the room of Lady Arthrite Stuffy. His collar was on remote control. He knew better than to depart from the arranged speech,
"Now just compose yourself," said Doctor Crobe. "Just lie there and go over all the rows you may have had with your husband. By doing so, we will penetrate the veil of the subconscious. If we can get back past the censor, we will then know what you are inhibiting. And we can clear away any latent neurosis or insanity. I will be back shortly."
The nurse remained, smiling a reassuring smile.
He went to each of the four remaining rooms and did the same.
Madison looked at his watch. The LSD would really bite in about an hour.
Doctor Crobe kept circulating, telling each one to think deeper about any husband troubles.
The hour was up.
Lady Arthrite Stuffy said to the nurse, "All this thinking is making me a little nauseated. My heart seems to speed up when I dwell upon the terrible arguments we have had."
It was the signal. Madison watched his monitor closely to be sure the subjective stage had been reached. He pointed at the electronics man beside him and gave a signal. The button was pressed.
In every LSD trip, two things were important: the first was the "set" or state of mind of the person; the second was the "setting," where the person was at the time of the trip.
The lecture and the directions to think of quarrels with the husband were the "set" and now came the "setting."
Devils appeared in every chair!
The window lit up and Demons threw a maiden into the roaring fire. Another body seemed to be lying where Lady Arthrite was and a Devil plunged downward with a knife.
LADY ARTHRITE SCREAMED!
In the next room, the woman there, on proper timing, was suddenly leaped upon by howling beasts which rushed in from a window that disclosed a jungle. Savage toothers attacked the third woman as she sank to the bottom of an engulfing sea. Timed precisely with the LSD, the fourth woman was being murdered by bats with daggers in their claws while a cavern howled. In the fifth room, the spaceship cabin was beset by space pirates from some ghastly planet who tore a superimposed body limb from limb.
The screams of the other women were no less loud than Lady Arthrite Stuffy's.
All five writhed and bucked, each one carefully attended by a "nurse" who was making sure she stayed there.
Gradually the illusions were faded down and the women were let go into their trips. Started like that, they must have been bizarre indeed, but they lay back, not protesting, spinning with time and space all tangled and with no sense at all to contradict the unrealities of it.
Some hours later, when the drug was wearing off, Crobe came back.
"I see," he said, "that we penetrated the censor. We now have in view the inhibitions. The case, I have to tell you, is very grave. There is no cure except to have sex with a handsome young man." It was the standard psychiatric remedy.
"Oh," shuddered Lady Arthrite, "it would ruin my reputation."
Crobe had even been taught to smile, with a little help from the collar. "Not as much as going suddenly insane due to domestic opposition. That would be fatal. But there is no risk at all. We have a private sanitarium where you could go and you would only have to say you had decided to take a rest."
"Hardly that," said Crobe. He opened up a folder and handed her some photographs of Relax Island. They were just stills but they were of some of the views. They had been dipped in perfume and in each one a different handsome officer was talking with a lady.
The jangled senses of Lady Stuffy were soothed and
caressed by the views. She was also still in the end grip of LSD where the victim is in a highly suggestible state.
"How lovely," she panted. "And it will cure these awful subconscious inhibitions?"
"Absolutely," said the well-drilled Crobe. "The matter is extremely urgent. It is plain you need the best possible professional help. We will keep it absolutely secret that you are potentially insane. Here is your ticket on the air-coach in the morning. Be on it."
When Crobe had done the same to all five, Madison did a rapid calculation. At five a day, it would take fifteen days to hook all the wives of the publishers of the seventy-five biggest news chains. Actually, he was organized to handle ten a day. He decided he would put the pressure on and speed it up.
He grinned.
He could almost smell, now, the Heller-Wister headlines!
PART SEVENTY-EIGHT
Chapter 1
It was the last week in August in New York. The weather had been warm, even hot, but a cool, sunset breeze was blowing across the landscaped terrace of the condo, rustling the leaves of shrubs.
The Countess Krak was sitting in a garden chair, petting Mister Calico and watching Jettero Heller at the umbrella'd table as he brought his combat-engineer log up to date.
"Jettero," said the Countess Krak, "do you know the date?"
"I was just going to ask you," he said, looking up, pen held thoughtfully against his nose. "Was it Tuesday or Wednesday when they finally let me out of the army?"
"I'm not talking about that, dear," said the Countess Krak. "It lacks just three days to the date you said it would take war vessels to arrive here on Earth if they started the same night you brought the Emperor out of Palace City."
"It was Wednesday," said Jettero and busily made an entry.
Mission: Earth Villainy Victorious Page 25