"No, no. No robbery, Maddie. How crude! I'm worth whatever the traffic will bear and I could show you if you'd ever let me. You could even– – "
"No, no!" Madison had said, aghast, horrified at doing something like that with a girl.
"You sure?"
"Of course I'm sure. You're trying to make me be unfaithful to my mother! I won't have that, Teenie. And don't do anything awful to Captain Bolz. We're at his complete mercy!"
Her laughter had been extravagant. "Bolzy? Look at all this dough, Maddie. See? These things are numbers. My problem is that I set my price too low and Bolzy, after he's had it done to him, can't (bleep) for another whole day, not even with what I learned from the Hong Kong whore."
She had looked dreamy, her too-big eyes fixed on the ceiling pipes, caressing her too-big lips with the end of a pen. Then she had laughed abruptly.
"I have it! I'll just begin to slip hash oil into his hot jolt. Man, I'll have him (bleeping) three times a day!"
Madison had retreated to his cabin, the vision of being on a spaceship out of control turning into nightmares in his dreams.
He had suffered through the rest of the trip, clinging precariously to his sanity.
He had landed in a place of such strange architecture he could not accept it.
He had been talked at by men in odd uniforms.
In a room that seemed to be made of stainless steel, they had plopped a helmet on his head and then for six successive days he had thought that he must have some awful disease that had put him in a coma.
Just this morning he had awakened fully. He had found his baggage was there in the room with him. He had seen what might be a shower but couldn't figure out how to turn it on. He had then stood in front of what might be a nozzle and peered at it and it suddenly sprayed him! Very disconcerting!
Now there was a knock and he was soaking wet.
He went to the door intending to open it, but it opened.
A man was standing there in a black uniform. "You better get a move on," the man said. "The chief has just sent for you."
"The chief?"
"Lombar Hisst! Don't stand there gaping. If that's your baggage, get some clothes out and get dressed. And you better look pretty respectable. But don't delay. The message said it was very urgent. So put some throttle to it."
"Where am I?" said Madison.
"You're standing right there, idiot."
"No, no. I mean where is this place?"
"Well, the chief is at Palace City where he always is these days, and I've got your airbus standing by. So hurry."
"No, I mean where is this place I am in?"
"You're in the Training Center of the Extra-Voltarian Personnel Induction Unit, Coordinated Information Apparatus."
"Yes, but what sun or star or something?"
"Oh, sizzling comets, I knew I should have brought an induction escort with me. You mean you don't know where you are?"
"You get the idea," said Madison.
"This is the planet Voltar, capital of the Voltar Confederacy. You're thirteen miles south of Government City in an Apparatus compound. I am Captain Slash of the 43rd Death Battalion, Apparatus."
"What's going on?"
"Buckets, how would I know? Here." And he fished out something and gave it to Madison. "But don't spend any time on it. I tell you the chief is waiting! Hells, man, get DRESSED!"
Madison went back toward his baggage, head in a whirl.
Then it hit him suddenly. HE HAD BEEN SPEAKING VOLTARIAN!
He couldn't understand how that had come about.
He started to lay aside whatever it was the man had handed him. His eye caught at it.
A NEWSPAPER!
He read something about the storming of a mountain on Calabar where the Apparatus had lost a thousand troops to heavy fire from the rebel forces of Prince Mortiiy.
NEWSPAPERS! THEY HAD NEWSPAPERS HERE!
He suddenly felt more at home.
Then he was startled to realize he was reading it all with ease!
Had he forgotten English? He said, "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." No, he could still speak English.
He looked at the paper again. It had headlines and news stories, just like a paper should. It was all kind of bland, with no appeal to a PR, but it was a real newspaper, titled The Daily Speaker.
Oh, this was great. It wasn't such a foreign world after all.
He opened up the sheet to an inner page. There were some pictures, three-dimensional, in color. He turned another sheet.
A small picture. Was it familiar?
YES!
JEROME TERRANCE WISTER!
No, this must be just coincidence rampant. What would a picture of him be doing in a Voltar paper? Madison knew that even he wasn't good enough to reach out into circulation like that!
He read the caption and story. It said:
HELLER WHEREABOUTS
UNKNOWN
Commenting yesterday on the general arrest warrant broadcast on Homeview, a Fleet spokesman said, "The Fleet has no knowledge of any general warrant for Jettero Heller. The famed combat engineer was last reported on mission and the Fleet has no knowledge of his whereabouts. It is probable that the rumored general warrant is just some clerical blunder on the part of the Apparatus which, it might be pointed out, never loses a chance to defame the Fleet. As a combat engineer, Royal Officer Heller is empowered to act on his own cognizance and report back when he believes his assignment finished. The Fleet has no slightest worry about Jettero Heller."
Madison stared at the picture.
There could be no mistake!
The photo was too lifelike!
Almost no men-and nobody he had seen amongst Voltarians-were as handsome as that! Nobody else he knew had ever worn such a devil-may-care expression.
IT WAS WISTER!
Captain Slash had gotten tired of waiting. "Blast it, Madison, GET DRESSED! The chief goes absolutely crazy when he doesn't get what he wants in a rush. And he wants you! NOW!"
Rushing now to get dressed, Madison was in a daze. Maybe he hadn't failed on Wister. A general warrant? Of course, that wasn't good enough. It was even being denied. And then a thrill went through him. Maybe God was giving him another chance! He must hurry over to see this powerful and frantic chief.
J. Walter Madison, dressed in a neat gray flannel suit and blue bow tie, walked out of the training barracks on the heels of Captain Slash of the 43rd Death Battalion.
They walked across a littered yard, old papers and dust blowing around. It was a sort of stockade but it had long rows of training rooms: Madison, not knowing he had been hypno-language-trained in the past week, was amazed to find he could read all the signs, even Check Out Here.
Captain Slash made him sign a book and then a receipt. A clerk handed him his wallet: his money was gone. When he tried to ask what had happened to it, they gave him an identoplate that said J. Walter Madison. PR Man. Coordinated Information Apparatus. When you pushed the back of it his picture flashed on it. When you pushed it a second time, his fingerprints showed up. They must have gotten these when he was in a coma. He pushed the back a third time and a legend flashed, Pay Status-No Pay-P. Oh dear, thought Madison, he was certainly off to a bad start! How on earth could he remedy that? He wasn't on Earth! Disaster! How would he eat?
Things promptly began to go from bad to worse. Captain Slash walked him over to a squat thing that was sitting in a flat circle. It had front and side windows but he couldn't see any wheels. However, it could only be a car, for it had a front seat and a back seat.
Slash opened the back door even though it didn't seem to have any handle. "This is your driver, Flick."
The driver, Flick, had a face like a squashed oval. He hadn't gotten out. He didn't look pleased. He was in a mustard-colored uniform and he might be a chauffeur but he looked more like a bandit, and a very scruffy bandit at that.