“Right, Captain! Say, this is a sweet little buggy,” he added as the car shot forward. “How did you pick it up so fast?”
“I knocked out a few of our Oriental friends;” answered Isaacs briefly.
“Watch that signal!”
“Got it!” The car dewed around and dodged under the nose of oncoming cross traffic. A PanAsian policeman was left futilely waving at them.
A few seconds later Minkowski demanded, “How about that spot up ahead,
Captain?” and hooked his chin in the indicated direction. It was the square of the civic center.
“O. K. ” He bent over the silent figure on the floor of the car, busy with his staff.
The Asiatic began to struggle. Smyth fell on him and pinned the blanket more firmly about the head and shoulders of their victim. “Pick your spot. When you stop, we’ll be ready.”
The car lurched to a stomach-twisting halt. Smyth slammed open the rear door; he and Isaacs grabbed corners of the blanket and rolled the now-conscious official into the street. “Take it away, Pal”
The car jumped forward, leaving startled and scandalized Asiatics to deal with an utterly disgraceful situation as best they might. Twenty minutes later a brief but explicit account of their exploit was handed to Ardmore in his office at the Citadel. He glanced over it and passed it to Thomas. “Here’s a crew with imagination, Jeff.”
Thomas took the report and read it, then nodded agreement. “I hope they all do as well. Perhaps we should have given more detailed instructions.”
“I don’t think so. Detailed instructions are the death of initiative.
This way we have them all striving to think up some particularly annoying way to get under the skins of our slant-eyed lords. I expect some very amusing arid ingenious results.”
By nine a.m., headquarters time, each one of the seventy-odd PanAsian major officials had been returned alive, but permanently, unbearably disgraced, to his racial brethren. In all cases, so far as the data at hand went, there had been no cause given to the Asiatics to associate their latest trouble directly with the cult of Mota. It was simply catastrophe, psychological catastrophe of the worst sort, which had struck in the night without warning and without trace.
“You have not set the time for Phase 3 as yet, Major,” Thomas reminded Ardmore when all reports were in.
“I know it. I don’t expect it to be more than two hours from now at the outside. We’ve got to give them a little time to appreciate what has happened to them. The force of demoralization will be. many times as great when they have had time to compare notes around the country and realize that all of their top men have been publicly humiliated. That, combined with the fact that we crippled their continental headquarters almost to the limit, should produce as sweet a case of mass hysteria as one could wish: But we’ll have to give it time to spread. Is Downer on deck?”
“He’s standing by in the communications watch office.”
“Tell them to cut in a relay circuit from him to my office. I want to listen to what he picks up here.”
Thomas dialed with the interoffice communicator and spoke briefly. Very shortly Downer’s pseudoAsiatic countenance showed on the screen above Ardmore’s desk. Ardmore spoke to him. Downer slipped an earphone off one ear and gave him an inquiring look.
“I said, ‘Are you getting anything yet? ” repeated Ardmore.
“Some. They’re in quite an uproar. What I’ve been able to translate is being canned.” He flicked a thumb toward the microphone which hung in front of his face. A preoccupied, listening look came into his eyes, and he added, “San Francisco is trying to raise the palace — ”
“Don’t let me interrupt you,” said Ardmore, and closed his own transmitter.
” — the Emperor’s Hand there is reported dead. San Francisco wants some sort of authorization Wait a minute; the comm office wants me to try another wave length. There it comes — they’re using the Prince Royal’s signal, but it’s in the provincial governor’s frequency. I can’t get what they’re saying; it’s either coded or in a dialect I don’t know.