Universe 4 - [Anthology] Read online

  Josh said, “Gee, Dad, if you and your crew are going to keep yelling, we better not hold this planning session here tonight.”

  His father ignored him, telling the red-furred Selma, “How many people would give a dog-faced boy an equal share of a cool million bucks just for doing a little driving?”

  Selma shrugged, folded his arms.

  The other man in the room was a tall thin lizard named Harry Miles Minter. He had a bushy brown mustache and was smoking a soy cigar. “Let’s get on with outlining this caper, Amos.”

  After a few seconds Josh remembered his father’s name was Amos. “I brought the forms you asked for, Dad,” he said. “You sure these aren’t going to tie me in with the highjacking?”

  After taking the three sheets of paper from his son, the old man said, “We’re not going to use these. We’re going to use counterfeits. That way, it looks like a completely outside job, see?”

  Josh said, “Gee, Dad, I’m not sure—”

  “We’re going to need one thousand dollars in front to pay the forger. He’s not going to get cut in on the loot we get out of the penal system.”

  “I thought we made money on this,” said Josh.

  “Our expenses aren’t going to be over two thousand dollars, tops,” his father assured him.

  “The circus wagon may run fifteen hundred dollars.” Selma was frowning at a shadowy corner of the den.

  “Circus wagon?” Absently Josh took a kelp chip from one of the snack bowls on the floating coffee table. “Why a circus wagon?”

  “I like the looks of them,” said his father. “And nobody ever suspects a circus truck of evil intentions.”

  “I would,” said Josh. “If I saw a big circus wagon in the vicinity of the prison, I’d suspect it.”

  “We’re not going to have the truck anywhere near the prison, it’ll be a mile away.”

  The dog-faced boy asked, “Is all you have to eat this cracker crap?”

  “Yes, it’s very healthful. My wife has it teleported in from a health-food shop on Mars.”

  “Didn’t your wife ever hear that dog-faced boys like chunks of lean red meat?”

  “I didn’t tell her I was having you people over. She doesn’t know anything about this . . . this caper. She thinks you’re old school friends of my dad,” said Josh. “Dad, how are you going to snatch Stungun Slim with the truck a mile from the prison?”

  “I’m not going to snatch him,” replied the old man. “I’m not going anywhere near the prison. I’m going to be sitting comfortably in that circus wagon waiting for Stungun Slim to appear.”

  “Oh, so?” said Josh, nibbling again.

  Harry Miles Minter rubbed his scaly brown-green palms together. “I do the job.”

  “How?”

  “Watch.” The lean lizard man locked his fingers together, closed his eyes, strained.

  “I suppose you don’t have any bones, either,” said Selma.

  “No, we—” Josh found himself sitting across the room from where he bad been. “Gee.”

  Something in the shadowy corner whimpered and said, “My, my, my.”

  “Harry is a telek,” explained Josh’s father. “One of the great tele-kinetic thieves of our day.”

  “You’re going to teleport Stungun Slim out of his cell,” said Josh, still sitting where the lizard man had put him, “and all the way to the waiting truck?”

  “A cinch,” said Minter. “One time I teleported a race horse, complete with jockey, from here out to a secluded paddock on the edge of town.”

  “What the crap is that whimpering over there?” asked Selma, growling.

  “Oh, that’s my wife’s quint.”

  “Huh?”

  “A pet. He’s harmless.” Josh bit his lip. “I take it Harry has to be in the same room with Stungun Slim to do it.”

  “No, that’s no problem,” said his father. “Harry only has to see Stungun Slim before he does it, to get his coordinates worked out.”

  “To get the feel of the place and of the subject,” added Harry.

  “Then he can leave and go anywhere within a mile or two of the prison and still move Stungun Slim from there to us.”

  “I was in prison twice,” said Selma. “On Barnum and here on Tarragon. They have a rotten exercise program in your prison system here. For instance, you have to do push-ups and toe touches, but there’s no regular daily regiment of rolling over and playing dead, and you hardly ever get to chase a stick.”

  Josh crossed back to his original chair. “So what else do I have to do?”

  “Make sure Harry gets an interview with Stungun Slim,” said his father. “He’s going to pretend to be a toy manufacturer who wants to sketch Slim.”

  “That’s all?”

  “Right. Harry cases things, sizes up Stungun Slim and comes out. Then pam! Stungun Slim is now in our circus wagon, heading for our hideout in the farm belt beyond the city.”

  “You really think the penal system’ll pay a million to get Stungun Slim back?”

  His father’s wrinkled face grinned. “Wouldn’t you if you were them, Joshua? From what you tell me, two television networks, one cable system, a tri-op service, a satellite broadcast system and three cassette firms have paid for the rights to broadcast or record the public execution of Stungun Slim. How much does that amount to in fees paid to the territorial prison system?”

  “Six point two million,” answered Josh.

  “If Stungun Slim isn’t there to be hanged, disemboweled, quartered and beheaded, will they get the six point two million?”

  “No. The fees would all be returned if the execution doesn’t come off.”

  “Then they’ll pay out a million if it’s the only way they can make six,” his father said. “It’s good business.”

  * * * *

  Harry Miles Minter, the lizard telek, had a straw-colored mustache today. He handed the forged forms over to Josh, saying, “Here are all the necessary papers I need to pay a little visit to Stungun Slim, Mr. Birely.”

  Down in the execution yard they were tacking multicolor bunting to the scaffold for tomorrow’s execution. “You’re getting in just under the wire, Mr. . . .” He squinted at the forged permission papers. “Mr. Wallman. The execution is only a day away.”

  “I’ll just need a few snaps of Stungun Slim for our box people to work from.” Minter patted the robot camera perched on his shoulder. The camera twittered and took a picture of Josh.

  “You folks manufacture . . . ?”

  Minter poked a scaly finger at the fake papers. “Stunguns,” he said. “Candy-filled stunguns.” From a side pocket of his one-piece business suit he took a green jellybean. “You might like a sample of our candy.”

  “Thanks. Now I’ll-”

  Josh’s phone beeped. When he answered it, his lovely willowy wife appeared on the screen and told him, “He took the quint”

  “Who?”

  “Inspector Custer.” Glendora rubbed at her left eye. “Snatched him right out of my arms, saying there was a seven-hundred-fifty-dollar import fee I neglected to pay. Do you happen to have seven hundred fifty dollars so I can hop over to the credit detective warehouse and get him back?”

  “Tell her to wait a couple of days,” suggested Minter.

  Josh shook his head at him. “Not right now, Glendora.”

  “Quints don’t do well in captivity, especially warehouse captivity.”

  “I’ll think of something and call you back. Goodbye.” He pushed a button in the bank of them hanging above his desk.

  In answer to the button an android in a gray suit came into the office. “Yessir, Mr. Birely?”

  “This is Mr. Wallman. He’s been cleared for an interview with Stungun Slim. Will you escort him across to the prison, please?”

  “Stungun Slim’s going to turn out to be the biggest draw we’ve had all season,” remarked the android. “Bigger even than Anmar the Thrill Killer.”

  As he went out Minter said, “I’m sure we’ll a
ll benefit from his popularity.”

  Josh stayed at his desk with his hands gripping the edges. “Okay, this isn’t quite ethical,” he said to himself. “It’s really, though, not as bad as the public executions themselves. And I’m only going to try it once, then I’ll have the money. Gee, with a quarter of a million I won’t have to do this kind of disgusting work any more. We can pay all the bills off. After a decent interval, when suspicion has died down, I can quit here and . . . and do whatever I want.”

  Josh sat for over forty-seven minutes, alternately watching the prison yard below and the ceiling of his office.

  Forty-eight minutes after Minter left, an enormous hooting commenced in the prison. It was the escape warning.

  He let go of his desk and said, “Gee, a quarter of a million dollars.”

  * * * *

  He was smiling toward Glendora and walked into the TV wall. “How’d you get the wall back?”

  “I only rented this one on our Master Charge. I thought you’d want to keep up with the details of the daring daylight escape of Stungun Slim.”

  Smiling more broadly, Josh said, “There’s something I haven’t told you, Glendora. Now, I know there’s an ethical... a moral question involved, but I think when—”

  “Do you know who helped him escape?”

  Josh stopped smiling “Who helped who escape?”

  “Who helped Stungun Slim escape, obviously.”

  “Was that on the news?”

  “An hour ago,” said Glendora. “Here, I’ll flick on the six o’clock news for you. It really surprised me because he always gave me the impression of being so fantastically solvent.”

  “My father solvent?”

  His wife frowned at him. “I’m talking about Inspector Custer.”

  On the wall screen a sleek cat man newscaster was saying, “...authorities are still baffled to some extent. However, high-placed officials conjecture that possibly a telekinetic thief was employed by Custer in this daring daylight break. As you know, Custer, long believed to be a trusted credit detective, is now known to be the master mind behind the escape plan.”

  “Inspector Custer?” Josh dropped into a see-through chair filled with fresh-cut wildflowers.

  “Custer cannot be questioned since he still lies in a stunned state in the territorial hospital. Authorities, who found the once-respected inspector in a circus wagon two miles from the prison, conjecture that after Custer brought off the daring daylight escape, he and the vicious Stungun Slim had a falling out. A routine check of the stungun found beside Inspector Custer’s stunned body revealed the gun had been recently used by none other than Stungun Slim, thus enabling police to link . . .”

  The phone in Josh’s den began beeping. Rising out of the wild-flower chair, he shuffled to answer it.

  It was his father on the pixphone screen. His lower lip was swollen. “I got punched in the mouth by your inspector friend.”

  Josh ran back to close the door panel. At the phone again he asked, “Gee, Dad, how did Inspector Custer get to be the mastermind of your plot?”

  “Don’t blame me,” said the old man. “Apparently he was even more in debt than you and your pea-brained wife. The credit dick computer tipped him his accounts were about to be audited, and he decided he had to raise some dough quick.”

  “You should have told me you were cutting him in.”

  “I didn’t cut him in,” said Josh’s father. “Your pea-brained wife’s pet quint cut him in.”

  “You don’t have to keep picking on Glendora just because you feel frustrated, Dad. What do you mean the quint did it?”

  “The pea-brained animal heard what we were planning when it was skulking around your den the other evening,” explained his wrinkled little father. “When Custer repo’d the thing today, it blurted out the whole caper and Custer decided to try to take it away from us.”

  “But the quint can only say ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye’ and a few simple phrases.”

  “For Glendora maybe, but for that cyborg inspector the damn thing was loquacious.”

  “How did Stungun Slim come to stun Custer?”

  “Ask Custer,” said his father. “The tin-eared bastard tossed me and Minter and Selma out of the truck the minute Stungun Slim materialized. He went barreling off toward the sticks.”

  “Gee, Dad, maybe it’s just as well,” said Josh. “I mean, it’s bad enough doing what I’m doing for a living without adding grand theft and-”

  His father asked, “Who’s getting executed next month, Joshua?”

  “One-Eyed Wally,” replied Josh, “the Lovers’ Lane sneak thief.”

  “No, he’s not popular enough. How about the execution after that?”

  After thinking a few seconds, Josh said, “That would be Madeleine MacLowney, the Motel Murderer.”

  “Ah.” His little father rubbed his hands raspingly together. “She’s sure to be even more popular than Stungun Slim.”

  Josh turned away from the phone screen. “Even so, I’d really like to forget the-”

  “Sure, if we highjack her we’ll stand to make even more than we would have with Slim.”

  Josh looked again at his father. He asked, “How much more?”

  <>

  * * * *

  DESERT PLACES

  by Pamela Sargent

  The end of the world comes in many ways. And of course a lot of it depends on just whose world it is that’s ending.

  * * * *

  “I DON’T know what you expect to see today, I don’t know how you can pick up anything,” Tiel Obrine muttered. She watched the fog in the streets, smoky wisps winding and unwinding slowly between the narrow avenues, slowly hiding the cobblestone roads.

  “Shut up,” said Eggar Knute. He stared at a large, ancient television screen while squatting on his heels. The screen revealed another narrow cobblestoned road not unlike the one Tiel Obrine was observing outside the window. All Eggar could see was fog, and the dim outlines of the tall thin wooden buildings on either side of the street. The buildings appeared to be tilting slightly toward each other across the narrow road.

  “Try camera three,” said Man Mountain L’ono. Man Mountain was carving a piece of wood, his huge hands holding the wood carefully, moving the knife painstakingly. He was carving Tiel Obrine. He glanced over at Tiel, saw her staring out the window, hands on slightly large hips, right foot tapping the floor, black hair stiff around her head.

  “Tiel!” Eggar shouted. She swung around, glaring at him with her small pale-blue eyes, her white face looking almost phosphorescent in the dim light. “Get me a beer,” Eggar said.

  “I’m not-”

  “Shut up, you stupid bitch, and get me a beer,” Eggar said. Tiel clenched her fists, and then stomped toward the kitchen.

  “Try camera three,” said Man Mountain, still carving. Eggar pushed a button, saw only another narrow street with fog. Eggar stared at the screen.

  “Here,” mumbled Tiel, thrusting an opened beer can in front of Eggar’s face.

  He reached out, took the can, held Tiel’s arm with his other hand. “Sit down,” he said.

  “Let go.”

  “I’m sorry, honey, sit down.” Tiel sat, looking away from Eggar, chin quivering. He put his arm around her. “Don’t cry.”

  “I’m not.”

  “I shouldn’t have called you a stupid bitch.”

  “I am.”

  “No you’re not.” Eggar kissed her on the forehead, then turned back to the screen. He watched as the buildings farthest from the camera shook, then slowly crumbled to the ground. He pushed a button, and the screen went blank. “Damn it,” he said to Tiel, “we’re going to have to move soon.”

  “Oh, Eggar, not again.” Tiel got up and walked over to the window, then turned to face him. “We can’t move all this stuff again.”

  “We won’t take everything,” said Eggar. “Just my equipment, a few cameras, and some of your things.”

  “There’s a good p
lace a few blocks down,” Man Mountain said. “Nik and me was looking at it before. Near the park. It’s got a freezer full of food that’s still working, and about a hundred cans of food in the kitchen. Nice place.”

  “I’m sick of it,” said Tiel. “I want to settle down.”

  “We will,” said Eggar.