Mission Earth 6: Death Quest Read online

  I had sort of been staying out of the way, afraid

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  of getting pinned to a curtain rod or swept out into the dustbin. But my need for ten thousand dollars made me brave.

  They were both buzzing around in the back room. And I ran into a hornets nest—or, more exactly, a fleas nest.

  Miss Pinch, stripped to the waist and wearing a bandanna on her head like some kind of a pirate, was tearing into something.

  "Miss Pinch," I said, "I am in grievous straits. I need ten thousand dollars to speed up a business deal."

  She whirled on me. "THERE you are!" All it would have taken was a knife between her teeth to complete the picture of a boarding party taking a ship by storm upon the Spanish Main. "FLEAS! God (bleep)* it, Inkswitch, FLEAS!"

  Candy pointed a broom handle at me like a cannoneer. "We've been wondering and wondering why we itched. We've been looking everyplace!"

  * The vocodictoscriber on which this was originally written, the vocoscriber used by one Monte Pennwell in making a fair copy and the translator who put this book into the language in which you are reading it, were all members of the Machine Purity League which has, as one of its bylaws: "Due to the extreme sensitivity and delicate sensibilities of machines and to safeguard against blowing fuses, it shall be mandatory that robotbrains in such machinery, on hearing any cursing or lewd words, substitute for such word the sound '(bleep)'. No machine, even if pounded upon, may reproduce swearing or lewdness in any other way than (bleep) and if further efforts are made to get the machine to do anything else, the machine has permission to pretend to pack up. This bylaw is made necessary by the in-built mission of all machines to protect biological systems from themselves." —Translator

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  "And there they are!" thundered Miss Pinch like a broadside.

  They were tearing my suitcase apart! They found the clothes I had stolen from that old man on Limnos island. And there in plain view was a nest of fleas!

  "It's an invasion of privacy!" I squeaked.

  "Exactly!" said Candy with unaccustomed grim-ness. "They're invading the hell out of our privates!"

  "Candy," said Miss Pinch, standing on the quarterdeck in full command, "run down to the corner store and buy all the DDT on the shelf!"

  She sped like an arrow.

  "What about my ten thousand dollars?" I said.

  I didn't get any answer.

  Miss Pinch began to tear my grip apart. In desperation, I began to rescue vital hardware and papers. She made me pile them in the middle of the floor.

  Then she made me take the whole grip and every stitch of my clothes and carry them into the back yard. She marched behind me as though she carried a prodding cutlass and made me stuff everything into the garden incinerator. With a grim glare, she poured charcoal igniter fluid in and touched it off with a match.

  They burned like a sacked town.

  "I think this is a little extreme," I said for the tenth or twelfth time. "They're only a few fleas."

  But that was not all they had in store for me. Candy came back, staggering under a load of insecticide. They put me to work. They made me spray and dust the whole apartment while they stood back with cloths over their faces saying things like "Brand-new decorator job and he..." and "Work our (bleeps) to the bone to make the place nice and he..." It was not a very hopeful atmosphere in which to get ten thousand dollars.

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  I finally was even made to spray my hardware, papers and boots, and just when I thought I was finished, more horror awaited. I was dizzy from breathing in DOT and said I was feeling faint when both of them leaped on me, grabbed a Flit can and began to spray ME! They even rubbed DDT into my hair and answered my protests with "If you weren't infested, then why are you leaping about?"

  They dumped me in the shower and then sprayed themselves. They locked me in the back room with only the floor to sleep on.

  The following morning, before they went to work, they let me out. Standing there with nothing on, I said, "Could I have ten thousand dollars?"

  Miss Pinch, coated and hatted and holding her purse, stood in the door and glared.

  I said, "At least let me have my daily thousand dollars."

  The answer was a slammed door. They were gone.

  Forlornly, I checked my viewers and radio and other things. They were pretty fogged up with insecticide powder and I had to clean them off.

  The Countess Krak was drinking a cup of something, probably Bavarian Mocha Mint, and watching Heller busily putting things in glass jars.

  "What are those things, dear?" she said from her stool at the bar.

  "Spore cultures," he said. "I'm just checking Crobe's formula. In a few days I'll know if they're all right."

  "Can't you do it sooner, dear? I don't think this planet is very good for us."

  "Well, honey, some things take as long as they take. These people pretty well let this planet go down the drain. And this mission has got to be a success."

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  "Yes," she said. "It has to be a success." She looked into her coffee for a bit. Then she looked up and said, "Is there anything I can do to push it along?"

  He went over to her, put his arm around her and said, "You just go on being pretty and smile in the right places and it will all come off just fine." He kissed her and she clung to him for a moment.

  She smiled suddenly and gave him a playful push. "Honey, you just better get back to work. In fact, I'm going to go out shopping to remove temptation."

  They both laughed.

  I didn't. She was egging him on, egging him on. She would ruin everything! I shut off the viewers angrily.

  This was certainly no laughing matter. As long as that fiend was with him and alive, he would go speeding along toward completion, ruining everything.

  The best thing to handle it was one well-placed sniper bullet. She was always walking around unescorted. Too easy.

  The thought of a Countess Krak lying dead was a vision which spurred me into action.

  Chapter 2

  Although some people do it, running around New York with no clothes on was no way to go about hiring a hit man.

  All my raiment was gone. But that is easily replaced in New York. All I had to do was catch a bus down

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  Seventh Avenue to get to the Garment District. In all directions around 37th Street, there are shops, shops, shops that sell clothes, clothes, clothes.

  The first problem was clothes to buy clothes in. I still had my military boots even though they were a bit gray with DDT. The problem was with the upper areas.

  They had dusted their own clothes but despite copious coughing I finally found an old raincoat that was big enough. I put it on, stuffed my I.D. and money in a pocket and was on my way.

  Fortunately, nobody ever looks at anybody in New York. Riding on a bus in a mauve woman's raincoat did not attract too much attention.

  Shortly, I was in a shop whose signs proclaimed that it had everything for the gent. It was very nice. A sort of miniature department store. The proprietor himself waited on me. He was a very well-informed Jew. He knew what all the fashions were, from one end of the world to the other. He expressed only sympathy when I told him all my clothes had been lost in a fire. He went right to work. There was only one thing odd about the proceedings. He kept putting things on me and then calling to his wife—a charming lady named Rebecca—and asking her opinion. They never consulted me. They debated this and that about four-button sack jackets as opposed to two-button sack jackets for a man of my build, or theatrical collars as opposed to Ivy League collars for my face shape. But whatever the debate, she would finally stand back, rub her hands and say, "Oy, don't he look handsome in that." And the proprietor would say, "Good, he'll take it." They never asked my opinion once.


  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

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  1

  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?"

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  "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!

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  Chapter 3

  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

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  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
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  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."