"I have a problem with you, Mort?"
"I hope nothing that can't be worked out, sir." Mossman formed his two index fingers into the approximation of a steeple. He didn't tell Vickers to call him Herbie. His pudgy fingers were encrusted with gold. He was about the fattest man that Vickers had ever seen, an emotional baby with a mind like a vise who had long ago abandoned all ideas except power and gluttony. He suspected that Mossman was actually too fat to walk. His rolls of flesh, that could scarcely be contained by a dark-blue bell tent of a funsuit, sagged and flowed and sweated into a monster of a chair, a creation of chrome and black leather that contained him like a vat. The whole thing was mounted on a rugged set of servotracks, the kind that they use on guard robots.
"I have to decide whether to accept you on face value or whether you are something much deeper and dangerous. I have to entertain the possibility that Victoria Morgenstem is using you under the deepest of deep cover."
"Victoria Morgenstem was holding me under house arrest and might well have had me executed if I'd stayed around."
"You are still alive, though, aren't you?"
"I hope you won't hold that against me."
Vickers could feel sweat under his right armpit. Mossman wasted no time in conversational detours.
"I don't hold anything against you, Mort. This is pure business. It may even be that Morgenstem is using you without you knowing it. I have to satisfy myself as to what you are and how you will affect me. Bit by bit, the process reduces it to a single question for me: should I let you run or do I need to neutralize you?"
"I'm a little confused. Why should I be of any concern to you at all? I'm an out of work corpse. I'm in enough trouble already."
Mossman's voice came out like slow gravel.
"But you are a corpse, Mort. You're a corpse and you're in this town. This is my town, Mort, and any kind of corpse causes me concern. I wonder who you might be here to kill, Mort." He made a dismissive gesture that might have been a shrug in a man who wasn't too heavy to raise his shoulders. "You might have come here to kill me."
There was silence in the room. George Revlon was standing a little behind Vickers on his right. Mossman's personal attendant, a world-class muscle builder called Chuck, stood further back on his left. Both seemed to be waiting for an answer. All Vickers could do was look pointedly around the penthouse. The top of the Global tower was a cluster of transparent domes of four-inch blown plexiglass. They all belonged to Herbie Mossman. They were his private domain from which he could personally watch the sweep of his desert empire. One dome was his vast office, a second housed an equally vast dining room, another his pool and the one that was a constant opaque black hid his legendary bedroom. In the office, as the sun rose higher, light sensitive pigments progressively filtered it through a screen of deep gold. It was like being dipped in maple syrup. Vickers' chair had been set at sufficient distance from Mossman's huge desk and huge chair to make it feel like an inquisition.
"I think you know that I haven't come here to kill you, sir."
On the way up to the penthouse, he'd been scanned and body-searched no less than four times. The room itself showed all the symptoms of being equipped with a Gee Ten Thousand, which was about as far as it currently went in automated defense systems. By the way the decor was arranged, he suspected that, in any emergency, an armored steel shield would drop around Mossman while the rest of the room could be pumped full of high velocity metal fragments. Mossman caught his look and smiled a smile that was completely lacking in humor.
"Perhaps not a frontal assault, but who knows what might be contemplated in the dark schemes of Victoria Morgen-stern."
It was Vickers' turn to shrug. "She cut me loose. There's nothing else that I can tell you."
A white-coated butler appeared at the other end of the room and came silently across the acre or so of deep pile carpet. He held a silver tray in his right hand. On the tray was an extremely generous slice of banana cream pie, a large glass of chocolate milk and a large Coke. Mossman postively beamed.
"Flanders."
"Sir."
Mossman patted the left arm of his chair. "Just set it down here, Flanders."
The chair arm was quite large enough to accomodate the tray. The righthand arm had a small computer terminal built into it.
"Will that be all?"
"All for now."
"Thank you, sir."
There was silence in the room while Mossman ate. All conversation was put on hold as he shovelled pie into himself with a silver fork. His eyes were half-closed and he was clearly in ecstacy. Vickers couldn't remember seeing anyone so absorbed in their food. When he'd finished he wiped his mouth with a linen napkin. His eyes flicked to Vickers and it was back to business.
"Suppose I offered you a job, Mort. What would you do?"
"I'd jump at it."
"Without knowing what it might be?"
"I'd assume you'd want me as a corpse, but I'd take anything that'd get me out of the storm."
"From my point of view, having you on the payroll at least puts you where I can keep an eye on you."
"Then you are offering me a job?"
"Provisionally. You have a good reputation. If you're not pulling something, you'd be a valuable asset."
"I'll take it."
"I rather thought you would."
Mossman glanced down at the computer terminal. "Note to Pattel in Legal. Vickers is to put on a standard corpse indenture with the rider added to cover the special project."
Vickers raised an eyebrow. "Special project?"
"You didn't ask what the job was."
"That's right, I didn't. But now I have."
"I'm putting together an elite team for a very special project. You'll be a part of that team, Mort. That's all you need to know at the moment, except that you'll initially be based at a place in the desert just out of town. You and the others will be isolated there. You can look on it as refresher training."
Vickers tried to picture Mossman dragging his lard around a strip of blistering desert doing "refresher training." He hadn't forgotten that the man mixed chocolate milk and Coca-Cola. Something flashed on Mossman's terminal. He tapped the keyboard.
"This is very interesting." He regarded Vickers with an amused expression. "I wonder how you'd react if I told you that a Contec hit team has installed itself in your room at the Pyramid."
Vickers didn't even try to disguise his concern.
"You're not serious."
"Indeed I am. According to our tap into the Pyramid's computer, they've made a prisoner of your girl friend and are, at this moment, watching the tapes that you and she made last night."
Vickers stood up. "I have to get over there."
Revlon quickly interjected. "The woman didn't mean anything to you, did she? If you take on a hit squad actually inside the Pyramid while you're registered in the employ of Global Leisure, it could cause major intercorporation problems. I seriously advise you to accept Mr. Mossman's offer and simply leave town."
Vickers shook his head. He was tired of running; the point had come where he had to settle the situation.
"I owe Lavern that much. I'm going back over there." He glanced at Mossman. "We haven't inked anything yet. If there's trouble, you can always disown me. Everybody else does. I'd appreciate it, though, if someone could supply me with a gun."
"Quite the little knight errant, aren't you, Mort? I wouldn't have expected it."
To be truthful, Vickers himself wouldn't have expected it, either.
"I'm getting tired of being bounced around."
In the back of his mind there was also an image of a trio of ballerinas sitting around laughing at the video tapes of his antics in bed. His pride gritted its teeth and wanted to hurt someone.