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Chapter 19

Apparently, the staff of the rocket port was used to having Elijah Lincoln and his bag ladies carry arms through the check points. A uniformed security guard didn't even blink while Nikki, Lincoln, and I walked through the detectors and set off alarm bells in our wake. The guard shifted his weight from one foot to the other and gave a salute, in the form of a yawn, as we passed.

Lincoln put his Mastivisa into a machine and paid for tickets for all three of us. "Thank you," the machine told us. "Enjoy your trip."

We sauntered up the plastic ramp into the passenger compartment of the rocket, crouching as we stepped from the loading ramp into the narrow confines of the first class section of the rocket.

With some trepidation, we'd decided to leave Jake behind in New Denver. Since the rocket was taking off in the middle of the day, there was no good way for the van to follow it and we hated to leave it behind unattended. Too, we figured it would most likely be hard enough to get Nikki and me into Sammy Dobrynin's hide-a-way, let alone a third member.

So our plan was for Jake to follow the first rocket for Miami after darkness fell and--if all went well--pick us up in Miami that night. The way Jake flew, I privately felt we'd be lucky if he landed somewhere within two hundred kilometers of Miami somewhere in the Atlantic forcing us to swim to get to the van. Making things doubly hard was the fact that none of us had ever actually been in Miami. Therefore, to simplify things, we would be forced to meet at the rocket port parking area in Miami.

I sat in my chair, reflecting that after flying in the van, rocket flight seemed crude. We were strapped into heavily padded seats inside a cabin that was the size of a large drain pipe and which imparted the same cheery interior that one would expect in a drain pipe. The first leg of the journey we spent scrunched back into the seats with our belly buttons leaning against our spines. Then we fell weightlessly for long enough to make breakfast stumble half way into our throats, and finally enjoyed some high-G slowing down that threatened to turn our tortured navels wrong-side out. At the end of our flight, we floated into the Miami port without power—the rocket becoming just a fancy glider on the way to the landing strip. This later point making it impossible to try for a new landing approach if the computer messes up on the first pass. Not reassuring.

As the ship shivered toward the landing strip, I closed my eyes and tried not to think about the fact that all that was in the cockpit was a bot or maybe just a hunk of metal and plastic screwed into the wall somewhere.

With a bounce that I felt for sure spelled the end, we skidded to a stop. A bot built like a stewardess with a smile painted permanently to its face helped me get to my shaky feet. The bot had what might have been mistaken for a dress into which she'd been poured--and forgotten to say when. She/it guided me to the disembarking ramp and gently shoved me out the cabin.

Since the gradual warm-up of the atmosphere over the first half of the twenty-first century had melted a lot of the polar caps, Miami was another of the many cities along the coast that was ringed by a protective dike. The rocket port was an octopus-like affair to the north of the walled city with landing strips extending out from its hub over the water. With Lincoln leading us, we journeyed to the tram which sped us over the ocean into the city.

As we crossed the waves below us, I inspected the approaching city which was a sunken little island in the middle of the ocean, a strange hodgepodge of ancient high-rise buildings made of concrete and glass, new crystalline needle buildings, and--as I discovered when we stepped off the tram car into the parking lot--wall to wall humanity. When you walked anywhere in Miami, you had to be careful not to step on those sleeping--or recovering--on the plastic or concrete walkways. Doorways were beds; real beds were occupied in shifts; whole families lived on stairways. In part this was because when the poor lost their homes under water, they hadn't left Miami, they'd just changed their addresses. Now, each person in the city had a square meter of space all his own at any given moment.

"Here it is," Lincoln said as a large pink limousine pulled to the curb, nearly running over a puker who was lying there. The car was embellished in chrome, a vehicle that would have seemed gaudy to a pimp.

I held the door so Lincoln could climb in. Although he was acting according to our programming, he still thought he was in control and neither Nikki nor I risked crossing him for fear we might undo his performance. We weren't sure just how far the drugs could be trusted to force him to do what we wanted.

"Take us to Dobrynin," Lincoln said over the intercom.

"The villa?"

"Is Dobrynin there?"

"He will be after the game."

"No. Take us to wherever he is right now," Lincoln said. "We have important information and can't afford to wait in his villa."

The driver pulled away and threw us all back into the plush pink snake-skin upholstery of the car. Lincoln opened up the small bar in front of us and poured himself a drink, "You two want anything? I always take advantage of Dobrynin's free goodies," he confided to me with a wink as he stuffed four cigars into the breast pocket of his suit; a small vial of some type of drug followed the cigars into the hiding place.

I was thirsty. "I'd like a Pepsicoke."

"Nothing, thanks," Nikki said.

I nearly spilled the drink when our limo rammed a small modif-horse and rider. I had noticed the plow-like attachment on the car's bumper; now I knew what it was for. Lincoln didn't blink. Apparently this was the practice followed by all polite drivers in Miami.

Most of those in front of us got out of our way. As we neared the pink and purple plastic stadium that had been erected in the center of the city, we hit more and more pedestrians with stomach-wrenching regularity. While most of them were pukers or druggies, it still made me ill. Nikki scrunched down into her seat and tried not to look.

The limo pulled around the side entrance of the eighteen story stadium, avoiding the long line of people waiting to purchase tickets. Lincoln gave me his evil grin, "There's your energy dollars at work. Biggest stadium in the world."

I could believe it. "Also the most hideous."

As we stepped from the car, a group of bag ladies formed up around us; I lost Nikki among the look-a-likes. Sweat popped out all over me and it wasn't because of the hot, humid climate. This is it, I thought, time for the show down.

We marched into a small elevator which only could accommodate Lincoln, me, and two bag ladies. Had Nikki made it in? There was no way of telling since all of those who'd met us carried shotguns just like Nikki had. I toyed with the idea of heading back down the elevator and just sending our message from some safe place--like Antarctica.

We reached the top and headed down a long, rose walkway. Pink had never been my favorite color; now it was loosing more ground, quickly falling into last place behind the color of vomit.

Our military parade advanced through the pink and violet archway and paraded through a large room where four bag ladies sat playing an electronic game built into the table between them. The surface whirred and flashed as they quickly hit colored squares in its top.

Lincoln ignored them and walked to the compu-door and whispered a few words into the small speaker at its side. Apparently he said the right thing; the door whipped open so quickly that it seemed to simply disappear.

Lincoln, the two bag ladies, and I stepped in and the door zipped shut behind us. I decided to be sure I wasn't standing too close to it next time it closed; it looked like it would be easy to discover bits of yourself standing on either side of it.

The interior of the chamber was giant, hideous, nearly continuous wall, floor, and ceiling salmon-colored mirror with tiny veins running through it. It was like standing inside a gargantuan stomach. The pinkish nightmare was broken only by three doorways and the back of the room which was all glass. Beyond the glass was a panoramic view of the sports field and the mammoth screen on the opposite side of the stadium which allowed those in the stands to see close ups of the field.

Upholstered swivel chairs were arranged in front of the glass with small tables between them. Each table was piled high with trays of fruit. All the chairs were empty except for the largest in which, looking down on the playing field far below us, was the mass of fat and flesh that comprised Sammy Dobrynin. I knew from the news-Ds he was overweight, but his pictures did him a disservice. His whalish figure was at least twice as great as he appeared to in his pictures. He was dressed in a rose-colored toga with a garland of leaves encircling his greasy hair. Just your typical, everyday Nero get-up.

He turned a blubbery face toward us, "Just in time for the game, Mr. Lincoln," his high feminine-sounding voice purred. The flesh under his chin bounced about long after he'd quit talking. He rotated his chair around to face us. "Nothing like a good game of football to get the blood boiling." He looked at me, "And how about you? Did you come to see the game?"

"I lost interest in it when they substituted clone giants for the robots," I said.

"Oh, come on!" he said, rolling his eyes with a hog-like grunt. "When the defenders use their bats... All that blood is so exciting." He held up a hand that looked like a chunk of meat with sausages attached to it, and an androgynous youngster came running forward from a corner of the room with a large platter of food. The child had his skin dyed--you guessed it--pink and was dressed only in a loin cloth; rose sequins were glued over each of his nipples and around his eyes.

Dobrynin's oily fingers grubbed through the food on the tray and extracted half a chicken from the pile. "Excuse me, but we boys have to keep up our youthful figures," he droned around a mouthful of food.

In an age of no-cal foods and anti-fat pills, Dobrynin could give obesity a bad name, I thought. He patted his servant on the behind as the servant cautiously moved to take up his station at the wall. After slurping down a chunk of greasy chicken and spitting a bone on the floor, Dobrynin spoke, his high voice now having a sing-song rhythm, "Mr. Lincolnnnnn-- You haven't introduuuuuuced us." He batted his eyes at me.

"Excuse me," Lincoln half bowed. "This is Phil Hunter, the man that invented the anti-gravity rods."

"Ohhhh. So you're the naughty boy that's been giving us so much trouble."

Before I could speak or throw up, the buzzer on the field blared and Dobrynin's attention turned toward the field. "Ohhhh. Here come the teams. Sit down, you two," he motioned us to the seats beside him. Lincoln sat down, I remained up so I could beat a hasty retreat if I needed to. The last thing I wanted was to be within Dobrynin's greasy reach.

Miami's ball games are just as sadistic as you hear. The giant screen across from us allowed the fans--who had packed the stadium--to see close-ups taken from cameras located all around the stadium, the game starting out with the usual animal sacrifices to the players and ending with the immolation of the head cheer leader. She might have been an android, and certainly seemed to have approached the long-blades of the killer bot without coercion, but the blood and writhing looked pretty real on the screen from which I turned in revulsion. Even though I averted my eyes, it was impossible not to listen to her amplified screams and the revolting roar of the fans. Finally, the preliminary sacrifices and fanfare were over and the ten-foot-tall players in their chrome armor came tromping onto the field. After the playing of the World Anthem, the game began. And I'd already seen more of the game than I cared to.

I "casually" strolled about the room and get some idea what we were up against before I made my move. Assuming that Nikki had made it in and was the one of the two bag ladies (was that a safe assumption), we only had one guard to contend with in the room. And the three servant boys stood about waiting for signals from Dobrynin; were they dangerous? Could be, even though they look harmless, I decided. There didn't seem to be any sort of monitoring equipment. And the room seemed to be thoroughly sound proofed; the four bag ladies' noisy game in the front room couldn't be heard in Dobrynin's room and the sounds of the sports going on outside seemed to be piped in through a speaker.

In addition to the entrance which had a bag lady on either side of it (one of which I prayed was Nikki), there were doors on either side of the room. One was open and I could see the wall-to-wall pink fur bed that filled the room. No way I would go in there. The other door was closed. I fooled with a piece of pear that I picked off a platter of food for a moment, then casually sneaked toward the door as I munched on the juicy morsel. Dobrynin did have good food, if you could keep the surroundings from turning your stomach.

As I neared the door, one of the boys quickly skipped over to block my way. "Sorry," his almost masculine voice said.

"Uh... I'm looking for a rest room," I whispered to him.

"That's the communications room in there," he whispered back and put a too-friendly hand on my shoulder. "Dobrynin has us use that urn in the corner. He thinks it's a good joke. I'm sure you'd really make a hit if you just went over there and--"

"That's OK. I can wait." Disgusting bunch of maggots, I thought. Time to get the ball rolling.

If Nikki had made it into the room with us. If she hadn't, I was hoping to quietly leave.

Time to test out the bag ladies. I whistled the opening bars of Beethoven's fifth.

One of the bag ladies scratched her head and adjusted her mask. Provided I hadn't just managed the world's worst coincidence, the scratching in response to our pre-agreed upon signal told me Nikki had managed to made it into the room with me.

Now it was time for signal two: I whistled a few bars of the 2112 Overture. The music triggered a response from Lincoln, "Time for a little chat Mr. Dobrynin," he said as he flipped off a switch in front of Dobrynin. The din of the game being piped into the room was suddenly cut off.

"What the hell are you doing?" Dobrynin said flipping the switch back on and the sounds of the fans again gushed in. "Am I going to have to spank you?"

Lincoln reached over and switched off the speaker off again. He paused a moment in the abrupt silence, then ripped the control pedestal off the floor and hurled it across the room where it shattered the mirrored wall. That takes care of that, I thought.

The bag lady next to Nikki raised her gun; Nikki raised hers a little faster. The barrel of Nikki's shotgun lined up with the unarmored area of the bag lady's neck. The report rattled the room's windows.

The bag lady turned slightly, stumbled, then fell, asleep before she hit the floor as the stun chemical coursed through her veins.

One of the boys pulled a knife--how he'd hidden it on his person is beyond me--and advanced toward Nikki.

"You don't want to do that," I suggested, Beretta leveled strategically at his groin.

I guess he did since he threw the knife at me. Fortunately, his athletic skills were about as skimpy as his attire. The blade went careening past me and shattered the mirror behind me.

"Dobrynin," I said, "you're going to have some major redecorating to do when we leave."

Nikki fired again, putting the knife thrower down for his nap and quickly aced the other two boys as well just to be safe. I reminded myself to ask her where she'd learned to shoot so well if and when we got out of our present predicament.

At this moment, taking his part as a leader of the world to heart, Sammy Dobrynin fell on the floor and threw a tantrum.

I don't exaggerate.

It was a real chew-the-rug, scream-and-holler, curse-and-threaten, hold-your-breath-and-turn-purple tantrum. If we could have sold tickets, we might have retired right there.

Lincoln and I started laughing and the show came to an abrupt halt.

"You... You dirty boys," he sputtered as he got up onto his chubby knees.

"Why don't you just shut up, you tub of lard, and listen to what Mr. Hunter has to say," Lincoln said.

Another tantrum. But this one didn't last as long.

"Are you ready to listen, fatso," Lincoln asked, demonstrating that he had missed his calling as a diplomat. I also figured he'd hate himself when he realized that we'd filled him full of chemicals in order to get him to bring us in and insult his boss. No doubt he'd be on the run after this. Sammy didn't look too forgiving.

"What do you want?" Dobrynin growled, easing his frame into his chair, his face glowing a furious red.

"Well," I said, " I need to talk to you. We need to have an understanding."

"Tell me what you want so I can get back to my game."

"Yeah, we don't want to let the state of the world interfere with our ball game," I said. "We want you to agree to quit hounding us and to release the anti-gravity technology to the public."

"You don't beat around the bush, Mr., uh...whatever your name is. Just what do you stand to gain from that?"

"My life. I want to be left alone."

"Just what would I gain?"

"Dobrynin, you get all the wealth created by cheap energy."

He laughed. "What makes you think I need more wealth?"

"You must. Otherwise you'd quit trying to get rid of me and my new invention. But I don't aim to compete with your monopoly. I figure that once you start turning out the rods, all of us will benefit. And you'll get even richer. Just leave me alone and my secret is yours."

Again Dobrynin laughed. And laughed. He all but fell out of his chair. Finally, he wiped the tears out of his eyes and spoke, "You fool. I already have the formula. You don't understand how things work. Did you ever wonder why we haven't circled the Earth with solar cells and beamed microwave energy down to Earth? Or how about fusion power? If we took advantage of what we know, of our technology, your anti-gravity wouldn't make a dent in things. Why are there steel shortages when we could mine the Moon? Did you know we've closed our operations down there?"

I said nothing.

"Want to know why?"

"I'll bite."

"Because the operations would be successful. Our goal isn't to help the unwashed masses. Our goal is to keep the peons poor. And it isn't easy to keep them poor so we can retain control of all the naughty girls and boys on this planet."

"He's crazy," I said to Lincoln.

"No," Lincoln said. "And he isn't alone in his thinking. The industrial cartel agrees with him. More or less. Listen to what he's saying. It makes sense."

"Yes," Dobrynin continued. "Think about history. When do you have revolts and uprisings?"

"Whenever the people don't have enough. When they're oppressed."

"Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong," Dobrynin whined, shaking his finger at me. " If you'd study history--really study history, not this tripe we have them telling the school brats--you'll discover that revolts and turmoil occur when people start to get a higher standard of living. Or when they see their neighbors getting it and they aren't. During real times of hardship--the dark ages, the depressions, hyper-inflation--people knuckle under. They look to their government to help them. They become beggars--not fighters."

"And that's what you want?"

"You bet. By slowly lowering the standard of living, by letting them the peasants expect a price rise on their utilities, we gradually gain control of everything. As long as they sit at home and watch the 3V or come to my games... People like me retain our power and we all live in peace. Since we started manipulating the government, there hasn't been anything other than border squabbles and on occasional terrorist act."

"But..." It was so crazy, I didn't know what to say. Because in addition to being crazy it had a terrifying ring of truth to it.

"You," Dobrynin continued, "would throw in a monkey wrench into things if you had your way with releasing the technology of anti-gravity. Right away everyone is going to want a flying vehicle; but not everyone can have one. The skies can't hold them all. And if even a few have them, my rocket system will go broke. Next everyone is going to expect cheap energy; what happens to the people who work in the power plants? Are they going to want to be on the public fares while their neighbors continue to work? No. We'll just have more friction. Those who've lost their jobs to your new technology won't be able to keep up with the others. We'll have protests and--finally--riots. And who finally loses? The government. And who runs the government?"

"The people," I said. And felt instantly foolish as both Lincoln and Dobrynin laughed.

Dobrynin sneered. "You must think you're in the good-old-days. No wonder you want to give power away. No, we can't let that happen. Now why don't you leave and let me watch my games?"

He turned back and watched the games. Lincoln sat still, having come to the end of his program. I stood and fumed for what seemed like ten minutes, wondering if I might still be able to do something else. I hadn't expected to be able to reason with Dobrynin; Yet I had hoped that perhaps we could get everyone off our backs so that we could go about our work. And I had hoped against hope that we'd be able to get my anti-gravity technology released to those on Earth who really needed it to raise their standard of living.

But I did have a plan.

It was time to use our drug kit to program Dobrynin.

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Framed

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Chapter 19

Apparently, the staff of the rocket port was used to having Elijah Lincoln and his bag ladies carry arms through the check points. A uniformed security guard didn't even blink while Nikki, Lincoln, and I walked through the detectors and set off alarm bells in our wake. The guard shifted his weight from one foot to the other and gave a salute, in the form of a yawn, as we passed.

Lincoln put his Mastivisa into a machine and paid for tickets for all three of us. "Thank you," the machine told us. "Enjoy your trip."

We sauntered up the plastic ramp into the passenger compartment of the rocket, crouching as we stepped from the loading ramp into the narrow confines of the first class section of the rocket.

With some trepidation, we'd decided to leave Jake behind in New Denver. Since the rocket was taking off in the middle of the day, there was no good way for the van to follow it and we hated to leave it behind unattended. Too, we figured it would most likely be hard enough to get Nikki and me into Sammy Dobrynin's hide-a-way, let alone a third member.

So our plan was for Jake to follow the first rocket for Miami after darkness fell and--if all went well--pick us up in Miami that night. The way Jake flew, I privately felt we'd be lucky if he landed somewhere within two hundred kilometers of Miami somewhere in the Atlantic forcing us to swim to get to the van. Making things doubly hard was the fact that none of us had ever actually been in Miami. Therefore, to simplify things, we would be forced to meet at the rocket port parking area in Miami.

I sat in my chair, reflecting that after flying in the van, rocket flight seemed crude. We were strapped into heavily padded seats inside a cabin that was the size of a large drain pipe and which imparted the same cheery interior that one would expect in a drain pipe. The first leg of the journey we spent scrunched back into the seats with our belly buttons leaning against our spines. Then we fell weightlessly for long enough to make breakfast stumble half way into our throats, and finally enjoyed some high-G slowing down that threatened to turn our tortured navels wrong-side out. At the end of our flight, we floated into the Miami port without power—the rocket becoming just a fancy glider on the way to the landing strip. This later point making it impossible to try for a new landing approach if the computer messes up on the first pass. Not reassuring.

As the ship shivered toward the landing strip, I closed my eyes and tried not to think about the fact that all that was in the cockpit was a bot or maybe just a hunk of metal and plastic screwed into the wall somewhere.

With a bounce that I felt for sure spelled the end, we skidded to a stop. A bot built like a stewardess with a smile painted permanently to its face helped me get to my shaky feet. The bot had what might have been mistaken for a dress into which she'd been poured--and forgotten to say when. She/it guided me to the disembarking ramp and gently shoved me out the cabin.

Since the gradual warm-up of the atmosphere over the first half of the twenty-first century had melted a lot of the polar caps, Miami was another of the many cities along the coast that was ringed by a protective dike. The rocket port was an octopus-like affair to the north of the walled city with landing strips extending out from its hub over the water. With Lincoln leading us, we journeyed to the tram which sped us over the ocean into the city.

As we crossed the waves below us, I inspected the approaching city which was a sunken little island in the middle of the ocean, a strange hodgepodge of ancient high-rise buildings made of concrete and glass, new crystalline needle buildings, and--as I discovered when we stepped off the tram car into the parking lot--wall to wall humanity. When you walked anywhere in Miami, you had to be careful not to step on those sleeping--or recovering--on the plastic or concrete walkways. Doorways were beds; real beds were occupied in shifts; whole families lived on stairways. In part this was because when the poor lost their homes under water, they hadn't left Miami, they'd just changed their addresses. Now, each person in the city had a square meter of space all his own at any given moment.

"Here it is," Lincoln said as a large pink limousine pulled to the curb, nearly running over a puker who was lying there. The car was embellished in chrome, a vehicle that would have seemed gaudy to a pimp.

I held the door so Lincoln could climb in. Although he was acting according to our programming, he still thought he was in control and neither Nikki nor I risked crossing him for fear we might undo his performance. We weren't sure just how far the drugs could be trusted to force him to do what we wanted.

"Take us to Dobrynin," Lincoln said over the intercom.

"The villa?"

"Is Dobrynin there?"

"He will be after the game."

"No. Take us to wherever he is right now," Lincoln said. "We have important information and can't afford to wait in his villa."

The driver pulled away and threw us all back into the plush pink snake-skin upholstery of the car. Lincoln opened up the small bar in front of us and poured himself a drink, "You two want anything? I always take advantage of Dobrynin's free goodies," he confided to me with a wink as he stuffed four cigars into the breast pocket of his suit; a small vial of some type of drug followed the cigars into the hiding place.

I was thirsty. "I'd like a Pepsicoke."

"Nothing, thanks," Nikki said.

I nearly spilled the drink when our limo rammed a small modif-horse and rider. I had noticed the plow-like attachment on the car's bumper; now I knew what it was for. Lincoln didn't blink. Apparently this was the practice followed by all polite drivers in Miami.

Most of those in front of us got out of our way. As we neared the pink and purple plastic stadium that had been erected in the center of the city, we hit more and more pedestrians with stomach-wrenching regularity. While most of them were pukers or druggies, it still made me ill. Nikki scrunched down into her seat and tried not to look.

The limo pulled around the side entrance of the eighteen story stadium, avoiding the long line of people waiting to purchase tickets. Lincoln gave me his evil grin, "There's your energy dollars at work. Biggest stadium in the world."

I could believe it. "Also the most hideous."

As we stepped from the car, a group of bag ladies formed up around us; I lost Nikki among the look-a-likes. Sweat popped out all over me and it wasn't because of the hot, humid climate. This is it, I thought, time for the show down.

We marched into a small elevator which only could accommodate Lincoln, me, and two bag ladies. Had Nikki made it in? There was no way of telling since all of those who'd met us carried shotguns just like Nikki had. I toyed with the idea of heading back down the elevator and just sending our message from some safe place--like Antarctica.

We reached the top and headed down a long, rose walkway. Pink had never been my favorite color; now it was loosing more ground, quickly falling into last place behind the color of vomit.

Our military parade advanced through the pink and violet archway and paraded through a large room where four bag ladies sat playing an electronic game built into the table between them. The surface whirred and flashed as they quickly hit colored squares in its top.

Lincoln ignored them and walked to the compu-door and whispered a few words into the small speaker at its side. Apparently he said the right thing; the door whipped open so quickly that it seemed to simply disappear.

Lincoln, the two bag ladies, and I stepped in and the door zipped shut behind us. I decided to be sure I wasn't standing too close to it next time it closed; it looked like it would be easy to discover bits of yourself standing on either side of it.

The interior of the chamber was giant, hideous, nearly continuous wall, floor, and ceiling salmon-colored mirror with tiny veins running through it. It was like standing inside a gargantuan stomach. The pinkish nightmare was broken only by three doorways and the back of the room which was all glass. Beyond the glass was a panoramic view of the sports field and the mammoth screen on the opposite side of the stadium which allowed those in the stands to see close ups of the field.

Upholstered swivel chairs were arranged in front of the glass with small tables between them. Each table was piled high with trays of fruit. All the chairs were empty except for the largest in which, looking down on the playing field far below us, was the mass of fat and flesh that comprised Sammy Dobrynin. I knew from the news-Ds he was overweight, but his pictures did him a disservice. His whalish figure was at least twice as great as he appeared to in his pictures. He was dressed in a rose-colored toga with a garland of leaves encircling his greasy hair. Just your typical, everyday Nero get-up.

He turned a blubbery face toward us, "Just in time for the game, Mr. Lincoln," his high feminine-sounding voice purred. The flesh under his chin bounced about long after he'd quit talking. He rotated his chair around to face us. "Nothing like a good game of football to get the blood boiling." He looked at me, "And how about you? Did you come to see the game?"

"I lost interest in it when they substituted clone giants for the robots," I said.

"Oh, come on!" he said, rolling his eyes with a hog-like grunt. "When the defenders use their bats... All that blood is so exciting." He held up a hand that looked like a chunk of meat with sausages attached to it, and an androgynous youngster came running forward from a corner of the room with a large platter of food. The child had his skin dyed--you guessed it--pink and was dressed only in a loin cloth; rose sequins were glued over each of his nipples and around his eyes.

Dobrynin's oily fingers grubbed through the food on the tray and extracted half a chicken from the pile. "Excuse me, but we boys have to keep up our youthful figures," he droned around a mouthful of food.

In an age of no-cal foods and anti-fat pills, Dobrynin could give obesity a bad name, I thought. He patted his servant on the behind as the servant cautiously moved to take up his station at the wall. After slurping down a chunk of greasy chicken and spitting a bone on the floor, Dobrynin spoke, his high voice now having a sing-song rhythm, "Mr. Lincolnnnnn-- You haven't introduuuuuuced us." He batted his eyes at me.

"Excuse me," Lincoln half bowed. "This is Phil Hunter, the man that invented the anti-gravity rods."

"Ohhhh. So you're the naughty boy that's been giving us so much trouble."

Before I could speak or throw up, the buzzer on the field blared and Dobrynin's attention turned toward the field. "Ohhhh. Here come the teams. Sit down, you two," he motioned us to the seats beside him. Lincoln sat down, I remained up so I could beat a hasty retreat if I needed to. The last thing I wanted was to be within Dobrynin's greasy reach.

Miami's ball games are just as sadistic as you hear. The giant screen across from us allowed the fans--who had packed the stadium--to see close-ups taken from cameras located all around the stadium, the game starting out with the usual animal sacrifices to the players and ending with the immolation of the head cheer leader. She might have been an android, and certainly seemed to have approached the long-blades of the killer bot without coercion, but the blood and writhing looked pretty real on the screen from which I turned in revulsion. Even though I averted my eyes, it was impossible not to listen to her amplified screams and the revolting roar of the fans. Finally, the preliminary sacrifices and fanfare were over and the ten-foot-tall players in their chrome armor came tromping onto the field. After the playing of the World Anthem, the game began. And I'd already seen more of the game than I cared to.

I "casually" strolled about the room and get some idea what we were up against before I made my move. Assuming that Nikki had made it in and was the one of the two bag ladies (was that a safe assumption), we only had one guard to contend with in the room. And the three servant boys stood about waiting for signals from Dobrynin; were they dangerous? Could be, even though they look harmless, I decided. There didn't seem to be any sort of monitoring equipment. And the room seemed to be thoroughly sound proofed; the four bag ladies' noisy game in the front room couldn't be heard in Dobrynin's room and the sounds of the sports going on outside seemed to be piped in through a speaker.

In addition to the entrance which had a bag lady on either side of it (one of which I prayed was Nikki), there were doors on either side of the room. One was open and I could see the wall-to-wall pink fur bed that filled the room. No way I would go in there. The other door was closed. I fooled with a piece of pear that I picked off a platter of food for a moment, then casually sneaked toward the door as I munched on the juicy morsel. Dobrynin did have good food, if you could keep the surroundings from turning your stomach.

As I neared the door, one of the boys quickly skipped over to block my way. "Sorry," his almost masculine voice said.

"Uh... I'm looking for a rest room," I whispered to him.

"That's the communications room in there," he whispered back and put a too-friendly hand on my shoulder. "Dobrynin has us use that urn in the corner. He thinks it's a good joke. I'm sure you'd really make a hit if you just went over there and--"

"That's OK. I can wait." Disgusting bunch of maggots, I thought. Time to get the ball rolling.

If Nikki had made it into the room with us. If she hadn't, I was hoping to quietly leave.

Time to test out the bag ladies. I whistled the opening bars of Beethoven's fifth.

One of the bag ladies scratched her head and adjusted her mask. Provided I hadn't just managed the world's worst coincidence, the scratching in response to our pre-agreed upon signal told me Nikki had managed to made it into the room with me.

Now it was time for signal two: I whistled a few bars of the 2112 Overture. The music triggered a response from Lincoln, "Time for a little chat Mr. Dobrynin," he said as he flipped off a switch in front of Dobrynin. The din of the game being piped into the room was suddenly cut off.

"What the hell are you doing?" Dobrynin said flipping the switch back on and the sounds of the fans again gushed in. "Am I going to have to spank you?"

Lincoln reached over and switched off the speaker off again. He paused a moment in the abrupt silence, then ripped the control pedestal off the floor and hurled it across the room where it shattered the mirrored wall. That takes care of that, I thought.

The bag lady next to Nikki raised her gun; Nikki raised hers a little faster. The barrel of Nikki's shotgun lined up with the unarmored area of the bag lady's neck. The report rattled the room's windows.

The bag lady turned slightly, stumbled, then fell, asleep before she hit the floor as the stun chemical coursed through her veins.

One of the boys pulled a knife--how he'd hidden it on his person is beyond me--and advanced toward Nikki.

"You don't want to do that," I suggested, Beretta leveled strategically at his groin.

I guess he did since he threw the knife at me. Fortunately, his athletic skills were about as skimpy as his attire. The blade went careening past me and shattered the mirror behind me.

"Dobrynin," I said, "you're going to have some major redecorating to do when we leave."

Nikki fired again, putting the knife thrower down for his nap and quickly aced the other two boys as well just to be safe. I reminded myself to ask her where she'd learned to shoot so well if and when we got out of our present predicament.

At this moment, taking his part as a leader of the world to heart, Sammy Dobrynin fell on the floor and threw a tantrum.

I don't exaggerate.

It was a real chew-the-rug, scream-and-holler, curse-and-threaten, hold-your-breath-and-turn-purple tantrum. If we could have sold tickets, we might have retired right there.

Lincoln and I started laughing and the show came to an abrupt halt.

"You... You dirty boys," he sputtered as he got up onto his chubby knees.

"Why don't you just shut up, you tub of lard, and listen to what Mr. Hunter has to say," Lincoln said.

Another tantrum. But this one didn't last as long.

"Are you ready to listen, fatso," Lincoln asked, demonstrating that he had missed his calling as a diplomat. I also figured he'd hate himself when he realized that we'd filled him full of chemicals in order to get him to bring us in and insult his boss. No doubt he'd be on the run after this. Sammy didn't look too forgiving.

"What do you want?" Dobrynin growled, easing his frame into his chair, his face glowing a furious red.

"Well," I said, " I need to talk to you. We need to have an understanding."

"Tell me what you want so I can get back to my game."

"Yeah, we don't want to let the state of the world interfere with our ball game," I said. "We want you to agree to quit hounding us and to release the anti-gravity technology to the public."

"You don't beat around the bush, Mr., uh...whatever your name is. Just what do you stand to gain from that?"

"My life. I want to be left alone."

"Just what would I gain?"

"Dobrynin, you get all the wealth created by cheap energy."

He laughed. "What makes you think I need more wealth?"

"You must. Otherwise you'd quit trying to get rid of me and my new invention. But I don't aim to compete with your monopoly. I figure that once you start turning out the rods, all of us will benefit. And you'll get even richer. Just leave me alone and my secret is yours."

Again Dobrynin laughed. And laughed. He all but fell out of his chair. Finally, he wiped the tears out of his eyes and spoke, "You fool. I already have the formula. You don't understand how things work. Did you ever wonder why we haven't circled the Earth with solar cells and beamed microwave energy down to Earth? Or how about fusion power? If we took advantage of what we know, of our technology, your anti-gravity wouldn't make a dent in things. Why are there steel shortages when we could mine the Moon? Did you know we've closed our operations down there?"

I said nothing.

"Want to know why?"

"I'll bite."

"Because the operations would be successful. Our goal isn't to help the unwashed masses. Our goal is to keep the peons poor. And it isn't easy to keep them poor so we can retain control of all the naughty girls and boys on this planet."

"He's crazy," I said to Lincoln.

"No," Lincoln said. "And he isn't alone in his thinking. The industrial cartel agrees with him. More or less. Listen to what he's saying. It makes sense."

"Yes," Dobrynin continued. "Think about history. When do you have revolts and uprisings?"

"Whenever the people don't have enough. When they're oppressed."

"Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong," Dobrynin whined, shaking his finger at me. " If you'd study history--really study history, not this tripe we have them telling the school brats--you'll discover that revolts and turmoil occur when people start to get a higher standard of living. Or when they see their neighbors getting it and they aren't. During real times of hardship--the dark ages, the depressions, hyper-inflation--people knuckle under. They look to their government to help them. They become beggars--not fighters."

"And that's what you want?"

"You bet. By slowly lowering the standard of living, by letting them the peasants expect a price rise on their utilities, we gradually gain control of everything. As long as they sit at home and watch the 3V or come to my games... People like me retain our power and we all live in peace. Since we started manipulating the government, there hasn't been anything other than border squabbles and on occasional terrorist act."

"But..." It was so crazy, I didn't know what to say. Because in addition to being crazy it had a terrifying ring of truth to it.

"You," Dobrynin continued, "would throw in a monkey wrench into things if you had your way with releasing the technology of anti-gravity. Right away everyone is going to want a flying vehicle; but not everyone can have one. The skies can't hold them all. And if even a few have them, my rocket system will go broke. Next everyone is going to expect cheap energy; what happens to the people who work in the power plants? Are they going to want to be on the public fares while their neighbors continue to work? No. We'll just have more friction. Those who've lost their jobs to your new technology won't be able to keep up with the others. We'll have protests and--finally--riots. And who finally loses? The government. And who runs the government?"

"The people," I said. And felt instantly foolish as both Lincoln and Dobrynin laughed.

Dobrynin sneered. "You must think you're in the good-old-days. No wonder you want to give power away. No, we can't let that happen. Now why don't you leave and let me watch my games?"

He turned back and watched the games. Lincoln sat still, having come to the end of his program. I stood and fumed for what seemed like ten minutes, wondering if I might still be able to do something else. I hadn't expected to be able to reason with Dobrynin; Yet I had hoped that perhaps we could get everyone off our backs so that we could go about our work. And I had hoped against hope that we'd be able to get my anti-gravity technology released to those on Earth who really needed it to raise their standard of living.

But I did have a plan.

It was time to use our drug kit to program Dobrynin.

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