I decided it might be possible to venture out cautiously. Besides, forty-eight hours of uninterrupted bed with Utanc was actually making me weak. At breakfast, I found that lifting a spoonful of ice cream required considerable effort.

Besides, she had left the table and gone into her room and locked the door and had now come back and was standing there fully dressed in a mink coat, mink snowboots, mink hat, and was drawing on mink gloves.

There was just a trace of irritation in her voice. "I was looking through my clothes just now," she said, "and found I don't have a thing to wear. It has finally stopped snowing and there's a sale on at Tiffany's."

"They sell jewelry," I said.

"I know. So ta-ta."

"Wait!" I said. "Be careful of the money!"

With some asperity, she seized her mink purse, opened it and showed me. It was stuffed with money! What a manager! She turned to leave.

"Wait," I said. "One more thing!" I weakly stumbled to a bureau and got out an old Remington Double Derringer with pearl handles. It was small, weighing only eleven ounces. I made sure it was loaded with its .41 caliber rimfire shorts. "You better take this."

She recoiled. "Oh, dear me, no! I am absolutely terrified of guns! I might shoot myself by accident!"

Oh, well, little wild desert thing that she was, naturally she was too shy to shoot anybody.

Around one o'clock, after another sleep, I got energy enough gathered up to get dressed and go out myself. What prompted me was the state of my exchequer. There must be only about $38,000 left under the mattress.

Looking around corners first and keeping the Smith and Wesson .44 Magnum in my hand in my overcoat pocket, I made my way through the snowy streets to Rockecenter Plaza. It was time to draw my pay as a family "spi."

Soon, I was standing at my destination:

Window 13 Petty Cash

There was a new girl there. Well, I guess you could call her a girl. She had a man's haircut and a man's suit on and a thin, hard slit for a mouth.

"Where," I said, uncertainly, "is Miss... Miss... ?"

"Miss Grabball finished her twenty-five years yesterday and retired to a villa in Monte Carlo. I am Miss Pinch. Who the hell are you?"

"Inkswitch," I said, tendering the Federal I.D.

She looked at her thick book of employees. "You aren't listed here, buster."

"If you will just punch the computer," I said helpfully.

She did. It came up blank.

"Beat it," she said.

"Wait," I said. "You know what it means when it comes up blank."

"It means I call the cops. But I'm in a good mood today. Get out of here before I pull the trigger on this under-the-counter riot gun. I been dying to see how it works."

Naturally, I left. I went to see the personnel director.

"Miss Pinch? New personnel," he said. "They always give trouble." And he left for his afternoon coffee break.

I went to Bury's office.

It was locked.

I went home.

Well, at least Silva hadn't shot me.

For a little while I toyed with the idea of robbing a bank. It seemed to be pretty easy to do and certainly something had to be done to recoup my dwindling fortune. That hundred thousand really hurt.

Thinking Raht might know something about robbing banks, I phoned the New York office.

"Raht?" said the receptionist. "He's been in the Metropolitan Hospital for two days with pneumonia." More vacation! My Gods, how could you work with such riffraff!

But the day ended with some good laughs. They had a comedy show and who was on it but the bogus Whiz Kid, buckteeth and all!

The show was called "The Benighted Show" and the interviewer was Donny Fartson, Junior. The show had run on prime time for decades and the son had taken over from the father.

The phony Whiz Kid sat there and bragged and bragged about what a great student he was and how smart he was and how he was top of his class. And in a stroke of genius he had invented this fuel in the university laboratories and now he had come out of hiding to tell all and the Octopus Oil Company was against him. And then he did a little dance, waving a college flag.

And then the interviewer asked him, "If you're the top of your college class, maybe you can answer this one. Why was New York called the 'Big Apple'?"

The Whiz Kid double grinned, his buckteeth especially prominent, and said, "Because it's full of worms!"

The audience laughed and laughed and the Whiz Kid took a couple bows.

At that moment I had a twinge of worry. They hadn't thrown any rotten eggs at him! They had laughed at him, yes. But at the end, the audience even seemed sympathetic! I didn't want this sort of thing getting out of hand. I didn't want them thinking he was a brilliant student. I called 42 Mess Street. The phone was busy, busy, busy.

Well, I hoped Madison would handle it.

I went to bed to recoup my energies.

And I had been right not to worry!

The very next morning, Madison had his front page!

WHIZ KID FALSIFIES COLLEGE

FAKE STUDENT

Last night, when the Whiz Kid appeared on the nationwide prime-time Benighted Show, he alleged that he was a top student of the leading engineering university of the country.

He also alleged that Octopus Oil was behind his recent troubles.

Investigative reporters at once swarmed to the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Wrectology.

The Whiz Kid is not and never has been enrolled there!

No student in the engineering school had ever heard of him, no professor had him on any roll book.

The President of M.I.W., in a public statement, said, "This is a deliberate fabrication. I will not have the name of this noble and honored institution dragged through the public scrap heap! It is an obvious effort to trade upon the lofty and divine right of universities. If we had more appropriations from the CIA we would be better equipped to handle monstrous cabals of this sort!"

There was more. And it was in every paper and on radio and TV. I was filled with awe.

It was a type of assassination I had not been familiar with. And it was all the more deadly because the assassin seemed so general and it was all within the allowed law! And it could be done to anybody!

I tried to call Madison to congratulate him but all his phones were busy.

Ah well, Madison was doing fine so I wondered if there was any reaction from Heller. His plans were being so undermined, he must be utterly wild. I resorted to the viewer.

He was certainly taking his time getting to the office. It was a bitterly cold, windless day and every oil-and coal-burning furnace in the city was adding so much smoke and smog that one's eyes watered. Instead of just observing that, Heller was going along measuring it with an atmosphere densimeter, a Voltar instrument being used right out there in the street! It would have been a Code break except that New Yorkers never notice anything, (bleep) them.

At length he reached his floor in the Empire State Building and en route to his own palatial layout noticed that the door to Multinational was ajar. That was where Izzy slept in his mop closet.

Heller went in. He stopped suddenly.

Right there on the giant screen of Izzy's business computer, a spelled-out sign!

In green electronic-type letters, it said:

GOOD-BYE CRUEL WORLD!

Heller dropped whatever he was carrying. He rushed to the elevator area that served his floor and, like lightning, pushed every one of the call buttons urgently, both up and down.

One after the other they stopped.

He urgently asked each operator, "Have you seen Mr. Epstein? The little fellow with the big nose and big glasses?"

He hit it with the third one.

"He went up about five minutes ago," said the young man. "Then he found you couldn't get to the Observation Platform in this car and he had me take him all the way down."