They all stared at him.
Bury looked toward the door. "Wills are seldom notarized. They're witnessed and this lacks two witnesses. I see two privates over there who came in just as Rockecenter finished signing it. Is that right, boys?"
Two of the men who had fetched Izzy and Twoey nodded. They stepped forward. Bury held a pen at them. "So if you fellows will just put your John Henrys on this document, it's all legal."
The two privates signed it.
"So that's all legal," said Bury. "And that's that."
"No, it isn't!" said Heller. "There's the matter of the war!"
"Oh, if you want to get into petty details," said Bury. He signalled the officer nearby to clear the room. When that was done, he went to the red phone on the desk and lifted it. He got put through to the president of the United States. "Mr. President? This is Bury of Swindle and Crouch.... No, it won't be necessary for you to chase up to Philadelphia to the Swillerberger Conference this evening. I'm ordering it called off.... Well, yes, Mr. President, there's been a slight change of plans. Please cancel the emergency mobilization.... Yes, and also tell Congress they don't have to declare a war. We've got all the Maysabongo oil already and the refineries will be back in operation in a few days, I understand.... Well, probably Maysabongo is upset, Mr. President. Have Congress vote them a few billion in foreign aid.... You will? That's fine, Mr. President.... Oh, I'm sorry, sir. But I can't give your best wishes to Delbert John Rockecenter, Senior.... Well, yes, sir. Something did happen to him. He fell in the swimming pool and drowned.... Oh, yes, we've got it all under control, Mr. President. His two sons are right here, they're of age and Rockecenter willed them everything. It's all quite routine.... Yes. I'm following their orders right now, sir.... Yes, I'll convey to them your best wishes.... No, they won't forget contributions to your reelection campaign.... Well, that's fine, Mr. President.... Thank you, sir. But sir, do you mind if I ring off now? I've got to call IRS and tell them to suspend inheritance taxes in this instance.... Well, I'm sure you will, sir. Good-bye."
Bury called the Internal Revenue Service and then called Philadelphia to cancel the conference.
Heller, on another phone, located Miss Simmons and told her how splendidly she had done and would she please call her antinuclear marchers off around the world, as he had a firm promise from the oil companies to decontaminate the plants.
"We have won, then!" she cried. "Oh, I am eternally grateful to you, Wister. What joy you are bringing to me and all the world!"
Izzy, on yet another phone, was catching bank presidents and brokers at home and making sure both sets of options would be exercised.
Bury pushed some buzzers, routing out the domestic staff from where they had been in hiding ever since the arrival of the National Guard.
A scared butler came in. Bury pointed at the body on the couch. He said, "Take that body to the local mortuary. Tell them to file a death certificate and fix the corpse up. It'll just be a family funeral. Nobody will mourn anyway." He turned to Heller. "He didn't have a friend in all the world. Not even me. All he had was money."
Heller looked down at the body. It was staring fisheyed at the ceiling. Delbert John Rockecenter, Senior, the man who had wrecked hundreds of millions of lives and had almost wrecked the planet, was very, very dead. No, nobody would mourn.
"If he has also harmed Rockecenter," said Lombar Hisst, "I will tear the universe apart to find and kill him!" The Royal officer's baton that he held in his hands and inspected was no weapon in itself: it was just a ceremonial rod of the kind presented to Royal officers by families or friends when a top-level Academy graduate was elevated to that coveted status of trust and favor. This one was bent as though it had been used to strike a blow. It had been found in the Emperor's bedroom that fatal night. It bore, engraved in flowing Voltarian, the name Jettero Heller.
Lombar sat in the Emperor's antechamber. He hated this charade. Palace City had been restored to occupancy and on the surface all seemed well enough. But that bedroom just beyond was empty and Lombar had to pretend and get others to believe that His Majesty was still in there.
His problem was acute: he could not announce, as he had planned to do, that the monarch was dead and had left no one to occupy the throne. This would have opened the door to the ascension to the crown of Lombar Hisst, a simple palace coup. Such a thing had never happened in Voltar realms before-that a commoner would ascend to the Crown-but it had happened plenty of times on Earth and that was Lombar's model.
He could not announce it for two simple reasons: The first was that he did not have a body to produce and the second was that he did not have the badges of office-the crown, chains of state or the Royal seal.
For more than a week now he had wrestled with this problem, balked in his ambitions. He had thought of counterfeiting a body to display in state: he could not, because by Voltar law a monarch was not dead until a hundred physicians and a hundred Lords had examined it minutely and verified the demise to be beyond question. And the chance of silencing or bribing two hundred people so that none of them could blackmail him for the rest of his life was too much for Hisst's paranoid disposition to accept. He had thought of counterfeiting the regalia, but he could not be sure of the composition of the alloys of the crown itself. The sacred object was too ancient for any records ever to have been kept. He did not even have a drawing of it. The chains contained gems which were well known and any substitutes were impossible to acquire without alerting every jeweler in the realm; the seal was formed from a ten-pound diamond, the rarest ever found, and it had been carved with methods long since extinct. The thought of publicly stamping something and then having someone say "That's not the seal of State!" made his blood chill, for with the proof of forgery went the right of any assembly of nobles to kill him on the spot.
The only solution to the problem was to find Heller and thence the Emperor. But this had difficulties, too. He had put out a general warrant when all this happened eight days ago. Even the Domestic Police had queried it. The "bluebottles" had put it on the airways but they had at once said, "A general warrant for a Royal officer? This seems strange. What did he do?" Lombar could not bring forward any proof that it had been Heller who had shot him down or that Heller was in the Confederacy at all. The Army had said, "He is a Royal officer of the Fleet: we have no interest in the matter; tell the Fleet." The Fleet, according to Lombar's spies in it, had simply rumored to one another that this was just more evidence that "drunks were drunks" and that the Chief of Apparatus must have gone completely mad to issue such a thing.
Besides, a general warrant for a Royal officer was issued over the seal of His Majesty and, while one could say one existed on the airways, before any arrest could be made the Fleet would have to see the facsimile of the original warrant, properly sealed by the Emperor, and where was it? And no, the Fleet had said, no tug had reported through the atmospheric defense network and no tug of any kind had landed at any Fleet base. Lombar knew that the Fleet was doing a cover-up: they were all against him anyway.
So for eight days-followed, each one, by sleepless nights-Lombar Hisst had writhed with this awful situation. And now this further blow had struck.