by Mick Farren
"Will you listen to that bullshit? Will you look at that crap? They liquidated the last viable government, they directly caused the deaths of one-seventh of the population and then they give a lousy hospital and everyone weeps tears of gratitude. Shit, Ecuador isn't even a country anymore. It doesn't even have a puppet government. It's quite literally a Tyrell satrapy."
"Nobody cares. The motherfucker will probably fall down in five years."
Vickers poured his Jack Daniels into his coffee. He knew there was no way to stop Joe once he got going.
"You get what you deserve. Ain't that the heart of freedom?"
"I can't argue with that. We got what we deserved. We built working models of competition and greed. It was deliberate. We took the worst side of our collective personality and designed global systems to accomodate it. Maybe that's why communism failed. It believed that human beings could learn to freely cooperate. The system knew our weaknesses and it turned 'round and seduced us with them. Now they've got us by the balls. Hell, we didn't even need seducing. We were like a bitch in heat."
Despite himself, Vickers smiled at Stalin's willingness to mix genders.
"We laid down and spread 'em. We handed it to them. We begged them to take us and all we had. First it was the environment, the air, water and the land. Then it was medical care and the space program, communications and law enforcement. In the end we gave them national defense and finally the real function of government. We sold ourselves out like a whore on a holiday."
Vickers sighed. "You got to admit, Joe, the corporations work. That's it. There's nothing more to say. You can huff and puff but you know I'm right. The system's dog eat dog, but it's a dog eat dog world."
"That's the only way the corporations can deal with the world. That's their sole principle. The human being will always react in the worst possible way. The human being is greedy, treacherous and venal and always will be. That's the only way they can operate."
"For all the corporate evil you talk about, we ain't had a nuclear war."
"We still may, if the Russians decide to go down in a blaze of glory."
"We've had fewer regular wars."
"Of course we have. When the only principle is that the world is rotten, you don't defend it to the last man. You defend it just as long as defense is viable."
Vickers shook his head. "I don't know what the hell I'm doing standing up for the corporations. Contec's never done anything but screw me."
Joe spread a half-inch layer of marmalade on a slice of wheat toast.
"I'm not really attacking the corporations. Any half-bright executive would agree with me. They might object to the way I framed the argument but that's only more of the damned niceties."
A huge blue Persian cat hopped onto Stalin's lap. He automatically petted it.
"The only time that anyone takes any notice of what's going on is when the niceties break down. That's what happened with that mess in front of the Plaza. The veneer wore thin and we had a look at particularly savage reality."
Vickers grunted. "If they let us run the business our way, things like that would never happen. The way the rules stand now, they let the fucking amateurs climb all over us."
"What's all this us and them talk? You're all part of the same thing. Uh-oh, what do we have here?"
Something had caught his eye on one of the security monitors. It was the one that covered the street door. Three people were approaching, two men and a woman. They were anything but neighborhood. They were dressed for the Upper East Side. The men wore wide-brimmed hats and expensive overcoats cut in the current voluminous A-line fashion. The woman was exactly the opposite. She was an inverted triangle. Tailored pinstripes with wide padded shoulders and a narrow slit skirt. Her hair was swept up into a service-style pillbox. The men's outfits were totally unsuitable for the heavy, swampy weather.
"What do we have here."
Some of the local juveniles were slinking along some yards behind, trailing the trio like jackals that are too confused to actually attack. Stalin reached for a remote. He brought up the magnification.
"You know these people? I almost never have visitors, particularly visitors who dress like that."
Vickers sighed. "Yes, I know them. They're for me."
"Who are they?"
"Two ballerinas and a corpse. The ballerinas have been sent to fetch me. The corpse is to make sure I come."
"What the hell are ballerinas?"
"Ballerinas? Internal Security. Corporation secret police. In this case they're the flunkies of the person I work for. They're the two guys in the hats and coats. They're even starting to look like the Gestapo."
"And the woman?"
"She's the corpse. Ilsa van Doren. Nasty Ilsa, our very own she-wolf. She once put a target away by substituting nitric acid for his Visine."
"She's come to kill you?"
Joe Stalin seemed a little anxious. Vickers shook his head.
"No, just to remind me not to play hookey."
By this time the trio had reached the street door and were inspecting its defenses. One of them was looking straight into the camera.
"What do I do with them?"
Vickers smiled. The smile was nasty.
"You can let them inside the first door."
Joe Stalin pushed a button on the remote. The trio looked surprised as the door clicked open. They gingerly eased into the hallway. The Internals drew their weapons. Both had Yashas. They started up the first flight of steps with the woman hanging some way back. Vickers snorted in djsgust.
"Will you look at those ballerinas? Under those coats they're weighted down with body armor. Damnfool incompetents."
"She's a high stepper, though."
"Oh sure, Ilsa's a real high stepper."
The three were moving up the building at a steady rate. Vickers glanced at Stalin.
"Can you hold them up any?"
"Not until they reach the main door on this floor."
"How about annoying them some?"
"Without bodily harm?"
"Something like that."
"I've got a string of pressure horns. I could douse them with noise."
Vickers grinned.
"That would be ideal."
"Say when,"
The three were cautiously climbing the final flight of stairs. At the halfway point, Vickers nodded. Stalin thumbed another button. They could hear the scream of the horns through the steel door. On the monitors, the two corporation cops clapped their hands over their ears and dropped to their knees. The woman, however, stood calmly waiting, four or five stairs behind them.
"The bitch is smart. She came with ear filters." Vickers gestured to Stalin. "Ease up on them a bit."
The two Internals were fumbling in their pockets and stuffing plugs into their ears. Vickers shook his head.
"Cut it off." He stood up. "I'll meet them at the door. You better stay out of the way."
"I don't want any of my stuff damaged."
"I don't want me damaged. Just stand back. Nothing's going to happen."
Vickers faced the door. He had left his Yasha on the table in among the remains of the breakfast. He signaled to Stalin to turn off the locks. He reached forward and snapped back the manual bolts, then hastily retreated a couple of paces. The two ballerinas came in taking Tiger Mountain. They were all over Vickers like a pair of cheap suits. One stuffed his Yasha hard under his chin. They seemed bitter about the blast of pressure noise. Vickers stood perfectly still with a resigned expression on his face. When Ilsa came through the door, he addressed himself exclusively to her.
"Will you call off these idiots before they kill me by accident?"
Ilsa van Doren's lipstick was a contemptuous scarlet, flawlessly applied.
"Accidental death seems to be today's special around you."
* * *
Once in the back of the official car, Ilsa revealed a need to maintain brittle, non-stop conversation.
"Do you ever push yourself, Mo
rt?"
Vickers was suddenly very tired. He wasn't actually under arrest, but there was the release of tension. He was no longer responsible for what was going on around him. He hardly had the energy to understand what she was saying. He found himself staring at her legs. Her stockings were patterned with tiny stars.
"You know what I mean?"
Despite the perfect makeup and tailoring, she still chewed gum when she talked.
"Don't you play games? Try and beat your own record, so to speak? You know what I mean, do a hit the hard way to prove something to yourself?"
"I usually find that the easy way's hard enough for me."
"There are times when I just want to do something different, just to see how it would be. Don't get me wrong, I don't want to cause the target any unnecessary pain. I just like to vary the routine so I stay sharp."
Vickers couldn't stand any more of this killer to killer conversation. He locked his fingers like he was handcuffed, bowed his shoulders and pushed his hands down between his knees.
"Honey, you're sicker than I am."
* * *
"You'd better sit down, Mort."
Victoria Morgenstern's office had one large window that overlooked East 58th Street and the enormous air conditioner on top of the multiple parking lot opposite. Steam rose from it constantly, adding its own contribution to the soup that passed for air in the city. In the far distance, he could see passenger aircraft coming and going to and from La Guardia. Vickers stood with his hands in his pockets, looking out at the view. Behind him, Victoria tapped impatiently on the glass top of her desk with long purple fingernails.
"Sit down, damn you."
Vickers turned. His expression was one of cold, exhausted non-cooperation.
"I want to know what I'm doing here. You didn't need to send those three assholes for me. I'd have come in my own good time."
"I needed you."
"To throw to the wolves?"
"Don't be ridiculous."
"I'm not. I'm thinking ahead. Everybody's getting so twisted about what happened at the Plaza, I figure someone's going to be sacrificed."
"It'll blow over."
"Yeah? It'll blow over quicker if there's a scapegoat. Am I the scapegoat, Victoria?"
"Sit down, Vickers."
"Well, am I?"
"Of course you're not. You're much too valuable to be thrown to the wolves. It has, however, cost the department an arm and a leg in both finance and favors to keep the wolves confused about you. If any thing's to be salvaged from this total loss, we are going to have to put you straight back to work."
"I'm not going back to work. I'm not ready. I need to rest up."
Control occupied a single floor in a perfectly normal midtown tower. From the outside, it could have been any low profile business, personnel movement, data shuffling, something non-dramatic. The sign on the door read "Designated Projections—A Contec Enterprise." Nobody would look twice at it. There was another office in the subbasement. This could only be reached by a private elevator from the underground parking lot. It was the S&I Department. Screening and Interrogation. It was where the real spite came out. Vickers had gone down there once and refused to ever go again.
"Sit, Vickers."
Vickers finally sat. The pattern of their relationship was such that he always wound up obeying her in the end. Victoria Morgenstern was certainly the most forceful woman he had ever met. She was also an extrememly beautiful woman just starting on the journey into middle age. Perhaps her nose and her chin were a little too pointed, but these only served to reinforce the first impression that here was someone with whom it would be foolish to mess. The tailoring of her lilac suit was almost military in its severity. Her only possible concession to femininity was the way she wore her jet-black hair unfashionably loose and long.
"I'm not going back to work. I'm not emotionally capable. I'm not accepting another assignment minutes after the last one."
Vickers' voice was icy. Victoria pretended not to have even heard him.
"On one level, all this could be looked on as something of a gift. There's a situation that's been building for some time. It could be that you've inadvertently provided us with a solution. Or, to be more precise, you have provided the basis of a cover that will enable you to solve the problem for us."
"You're not listening to me, are you."
"No."
"If I go out on a job right now, I'll screw up. I'll probably be killed."
"If you look at it another way, you're lucky to be alive." She touched the intercom on her desk. "Rebecca, dear, please bring in the disk in the red sleeve."
Vickers assumed that Rebecca was the one that he'd spoken to on the phone. It was a quirk of the Morgenstern style. She always had a dopey sex object in the front office. This one was blonde and had big tits. She indulged the current vogue for toreador pants and those halo haircuts. Vickers first reaction had been bimbo and he saw no cause to revise it. Victoria didn't do anything with the disk. She placed her clasped hands on top of it and regarded Vickers with a look as cold as his own.
"Have you finished sulking?"
"I'm not going out on an immediate assignment and that's that."
Victoria appeared not to have heard him.
"Do you remember the bunker craze?"
"Of course I remember the bunker craze. How could anyone forget it? Billions were pissed away."
Billions had indeed been pissed away. Some dozen or so years earlier, it had finally dawned on the military-industrial complex that there were, in fact, finite limits to a continuous arms build-up. They had already moved into the realm of the absurd with stuff like the Hidey-Seekey "minisile" system and the J20. Their next-best answer was to move into space. At this point, the corporations themselves had dug in and resisted. The Big Four had just come into their full power. They were moving aggressively into space. There was serious money to be made beyond the atmosphere and they didn't want the military in the way. They didn't need random nuclear fireworks, EMPs or stray hunter-killers interrupting their highly profitable work. The military had no option but to accept the area bounded by the moon's orbit as a practical DMZ. They really had no counter-argument. The Russians, the eternal bogeymen, were now so close to bankrupt that they hardly could maintain even a token space program. The Chinese had been so infiltrated by corporate economics that only the most rabid could consider them a threat.
One problem remained, however. Limiting the toys available to the military was one thing. Drastically cutting the profits of the toymakers was quite another. This could turn one division of a corporation against another. This could not be countenanced. All of the Big Four and most of the smaller outfits enjoyed fat arms contracts. Something had to replace them. The solution was to burrow. The sad symbolism of this was not missed.
Before you can burrow, you have to convince someone to pick up the tab. As with all the other truly huge and truly worthless projects, it was the hapless population that would be billed for the insanity. The first move had to be to soften them up. For this, a brand new fear had to be created. Red Armageddon was the phrase. Even the Pope was pulled in on that one. The fantasy was the Last Twilight of communism. The scenario went thus: As the Soviet system fell to pieces, as the famines raged and the vast, hungry and totally disorganized Red Army couldn't put down the dozens of local uprisings, a gang of ruthless, bloody-handed Commissars would decide that everything would go out in a blaze of glory. They would let off the entire nuclear arsenal. In this refined nightmare, the old fashioned idea of deterrence, of MAD, no longer signified. The only solution was protection. As the Pope put it, "Our most sacred duty is to ensure the survival of both our culture and our species."
To perform this sacred duty a consortium was formed between the largest corporations and the national governments of the West. The corporations would build ten very large underground bunkers that could withstand nuclear attack and maybe even a square-on asteroid hit. They would house the art, science
and philosophy and enough representatives of the human race to repopulate the planet when the dust settled. The Pope was promised a place in the one under the Atlas Mountains provided he could wing it in from the Vatican in time. All that the governments had to provide was the money of their citizens. It was one of their last acts before they slipped into powerless limbo and the corporations assumed all of their functions.
It took five years to complete the ten bunkers. Their creation produced the final, spluttering surge of old style full employment. When they were finished, the Big Four simply took them over. They were manned, they were stocked and, from that point on, they were publicized as little as possible. They waited quietly for any available apocalypse.
"There were billions pissed away."
Morgenstern slipped the disk into her desk unit. Two pictures appeared on the worktop screen. She rolled them around so they were facing Vickers.
"You know these men?"
Vickers stared from beneath raised eyebrows.
"You want me to kill these two? Have you gone crazy?"
"I asked you if you knew them."
"Of course I know them. The old one's Doctor Kurt Lutesinger, the main architect of the bunker plan. The other one is Anthony Lloyd-Ransom."
"Lloyd-Ransom now commands our bunker under the desert in Nevada."
"I didn't know that."
"Few people do. There isn't much about the bunkers that's for public consumption."
"I'm hardly the public."
"You are where the bunkers are concerned."
"Why are you showing me these pictures?"
"It appears that they may be on the way to creating a problem."
Vickers shook his head. "No." Victoria's eyes narrowed.
"What do you mean, 'no.' Is this more of the I'm-too-sensitive-for-another-assignment garbage?"
"I'm not ready for another assignment but this is something different. If you're sending me after these two, you're up to something that's in no way kosher. Lutesinger is the biggest of the big and now you tell me that Lloyd-Ransom has got himself pretty damned elevated. They're not only biggies, they're Contec biggies. Anything that involves people like that isn't normal corpse work."
