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reporter. "There's more Controversy/Conflict around than there's been for the past ten thousand years. You CAN'T POSSIBLY escalate it!" "Oh, yes, we can," said Madison. "And to do our jobs as PR men, we MUST!" "How?" they gaped at him. Madison leaned forward. He beckoned. They put their heads near his. He whispered. When they drew back, they were staring at him with awe. "OH, MY GODS!" the horror story writer said. "He CAN escalate it!" Madison smiled. Now he would get things back on the rails and going in the right direction: at Heller.
     
 PART EIGHTY-THREE
     
 CHAPTER 1
     
    Palace City was the safest place to be. Not only was it thirteen minutes in the future but, like Spiteos, it was protected from mobs by the simple fact that they could not cross the vast Great Desert on foot or with ground cars. Palace City also had heavy exterior defense bunkers that could shoot anything out of the sky. Under the yellow mist of warped space, in the great round antechamber of the Emperor, Lombar Hisst sat with his back to the locked and bolted bedroom door and faced his general staff. A red-uniformed old criminal, whose battle-scarred face also bore traces of debauchery and no sleep, was speaking. "The Army finally took it into their heads to cooperate," he said. "A thousand transports have landed a million men on Calabar. This freed up the remainder of our forces there and they should be arriving at Apparatus Staging Area Seven by this evening. So, factually, sir, we don't have any more troops on Calabar, only a few observers. That puts me out of a job as Calabar staff overseer here. And I was wondering if I might not take a little run up into the Blike Mountains. I've an estate there…" "You'll stay on duty!" thundered Hisst, slapping his stinger down on his desk. "Set up a bureau for future population suppression. This would never have happened if we'd planned for it." He pointed the stinger at another general. "If Tur there had had his wits about him, if he'd done some advance planning, he wouldn't be in trouble now. Gas. Set up some ps extermination chambers for troublemakers: I'll get you the plans from one of the Blito-P3 surveys." "Sir," said the general indicated, "I don't think there's any time for construction of anything. Over two hundred Apparatus town headquarters have been wiped out to a man. If I could just have a few troops from the staging areas____________________
    "
    "Empty a few prisons and put the inmates in uniform," snapped Hisst. "Do I have to think of everything?" Tur was already doing that as fast as he could but he held his peace. "Now you, General Muk," said Hisst, "how are you coming along with the Earth-invasion staging?" "As a matter of fact," said Muk, squirming, "I've put the invasion of Blito-P3 on hold. It seemed to me that the two and a half million troops might be needed right here on Voltar." "Bah!" said Hisst, glaring at the other generals. "We have a million and a half Apparatus troops to handle Voltar and some of the others. This is no full-scale civil war. It's just mobs. Sooner or later they'll get tired of being shot down and that will be the end of it." "We are having trouble with suppliers," said Muk. "The troops that came in from Calabar are short of everything. We can't seem to get deliveries into the staging areas." He added hastily, "We are, of course, sending out armored convoys and simply raiding civilian warehouses and we can, of course, accomplish our outfitting. We have had some trouble with mobs burning plants and we have lost eighteen convoys in street fights as of this morning, but we can be invasion-ready in a couple of days, even so. It just seemed to me that with all this trouble, you might need the Blito-P3 force here." "No, no, no," said Lombar. "We're just fighting riffraff. You others simply need to take stronger measures, that's all. The invasion goes off as scheduled, regardless of local disturbance." He gave a short, barking laugh. "Unarmed rabble, riffraff."