A member of the "deputation" raised and dropped a black sack over Hightee.
Four Death Battalion troopers grabbed her as though she were a bundle and rushed her into a personnel carrier.
Two hundred Death Battalion troops struck down the people who had stopped, stunned, in the street. They raced for their vehicles.
With a shattering roar of takeoffs, the street was empty except for pedestrians collapsed upon the walks.
Then people began to run out of the building and out of the shops. They looked around. They stared at the sky in horror. A woman began to scream.
Madison had the cameraman fade out on the crushed bouquet. It looked as though the battered flowers bled.
He was grinning. It had been carried live, as a special, over all Homeview.
It was on the streets in an hour:
HIGHTEE ARRESTED
BY HISST
Madison had it all scheduled. Later papers would carry that her whereabouts was unknown, later ones would headline the beginning of the riots, tomorrow it would be:
BILLIONS MOURN
Madison now had other things to do.
For three days, the Gris trial took second place. For all three of those days Madison had been beaming a message to Calabar. The message had been carried on all military wavelengths: these were known to be monitored by the rebels. The message, over and over, had said:
JETTERO HELLER. ON THURSDAY MORNING YOUR SISTER, HIGHTEE HELLER, WILL BE AT HERO PLAZA, GOVERNMENT CITY, VOLTAR. IF YOU DO NOT LAND THERE AND GIVE YOURSELF UP, AT NOON SHE WILL BE SHOT. LOMBAR HISST, DICTATOR OF THE CONFEDERACY.
On Wednesday night, Madison leaked it to the papers. On Thursday morning it was being carried throughout the Confederacy.
Orders were crackling on every Apparatus, Domestic Police and Army line to control and suppress riots.
Hero Plaza is a circular expanse. It is two hundred yards in diameter. There is nothing there but clear pavement since it is often used for affairs of state. In the exact center is a completely plain circular pillar fifty feet tall and about twenty feet in circumference, led to by three circular steps. The only decoration or inscription is on the front edge of the top step: it says Dedicated to the Heroes of Voltar. Madison had chosen it carefully.
Entering the plaza were eight boulevards, usually crammed with traffic. Today each boulevard, at the plaza's edge, was blocked by an Apparatus tank.
At nine o'clock, Hightee Heller, gowned in white, was taken to the pillar by a Death Battalion squad. She was without her gloves now and the shoulder of the dress was torn. Her golden hair was in disarray but it still looked like a halo.
Her eyes were calm as she looked at the Apparatus general who, in his red uniform, was directing the squad.
A camera crew was close to hand, one of the several on duty at the plaza now. Hightee saw the microphone pointing in her direction.
"Jettero!" she suddenly shouted, "If you are listening, don't come in here! They mean to kill you!"
The general had acted slightly late. He clamped his beefy hand over Hightee's mouth. At a gesture, three of his squad chased the camera crew away. But Madison, hidden by a tank at the plaza edge, saw that other crews were covering. It was all going live to the whole Confederacy.
The Death Battalion took a chain. It was twenty feet long and had big links. They clamped one end of it on Hightee's left wrist; they ran the length around the pillar; they fastened the other end to Hightee's right wrist. They made sure the links were solid. She was chained now with her back to the pillar.
The squad drew back.
The heavy guns of the eight tanks at the boulevard ends trained around on Hightee.
Madison grinned. What a tableau! Beauty chained to a pillar. A vast clear area of pavement. Eight deadly muzzles, ringing the plaza, poised for destruction.
And then things started to go slightly wrong. Possibly the crowds-which, despite roadblocks, had gotten into the boulevards-had been in the grip of unreality. This couldn't possibly be happening: it was too monstrous. But when the Apparatus general had dared to actually touch Hightee to silence her, a roar and mutter had begun to rise.
There must have been a hundred thousand people in those boulevards. There were only two or three thousand Apparatus troops forming barricades to block them.
The barricades buckled.
There was a roar of Apparatus stunguns.
Missiles flew from the crowd!
Apparatus troops charged them!
The Domestic Police were conspicuously absent. The Apparatus knew very little about crowd control.
For twenty minutes there was hand-to-hand fighting.
The crowd in three boulevards managed to break through the barricades. The tanks at the plaza end had to swivel their turrets about and fire.
Then the boulevards were full of stunned and bleeding bodies, civilians and Apparatus alike.
Two Apparatus relief regiments came in and boxed the mobs in the streets from the far end.
It was not until 10:20 that some kind of order was restored. But it was not very thorough, for people from the rest of the city were now surging up, and it took three more regiments to hold barricades as far away as a mile in each direction.
Madison had his eye on the big clock in a tower a thousand yards away. He supposed that Heller would wait until the last minute. At least he hoped so. He had no slightest notion that Heller would surrender. Besides, it would have wrecked his plans.
That clear space out there, a hundred yards in radius from the pillar where Hightee was chained, was ample for someone like Heller to land troops.
Madison did not think his own safety was at risk at all, for he didn't think that Heller would use artillery-it would endanger Hightee. Madison's greater worry was himself getting into the cameras: accordingly he was wearing a General Services gray uniform and he had altered his features with makeup and masked them with sand glasses. If any action started, he was going to step through the port of this tank.
The digitals of the distant clock were flashing second changes. He looked back at the tanks: their muzzles, freed now from crowd control, were pointed back at Hightee.
She was being pulled against the pillar too tightly by the chain. Her stretched-out arms must be half killing her. Her ripped gown had slid half off her shoulder. But she was looking at the sky.
Then Madison heard it.
A sort of booming sound.
IT WAS DIRECTLY OVERHEAD!
Madison looked up. For an instant, he could see nothing. Then he glimpsed a blur that was travelling high at some ferocious speed. What was it? Some strange kind of racer?
His view was suddenly blocked by a swinging gun. The tank was pointing at the sky.
A cry rose up from the held-back mobs.
It could only be Heller. But the high ship was going right on by!
Eight tanks opened up with a bucking, shattering roar. The odd space-racer had already passed. They were firing after it.
Their shots were going straight through it!
It must be some sort of an illusion being pushed ahead of a speeding ship!
It was almost gone. Then suddenly a gun must have detected the actual vessel behind it.
THERE WAS A HUGE EXPLOSION IN THE SKY!
A direct hit from a tank!
Fragments of a ship were black against the blue!
A shrieking moan came from the crowd. Before their very eyes, the vessel had been shot down!
Madison glanced across the hundred-yard gap at Hightee. She was weeping.
Somewhere distant, the remains of the ship crashed, apparently into a warehouse, for flames shot skyward.
Madison looked at the tanks. He felt that his plans for great PR were gone. He supposed that Heller had been killed. It would make such brief headlines!
But then he saw a tank officer pointing. The arm was stretched upward.
A thousand small objects were drifting down out of the blue. They were above this whole area and made a mile-diameter circle of their own.
They came lower and lower. A tank suddenly opened up to try to shoot at least some of them out of the sky.
Madison saw a distant one wink.
Then he had a sudden impression that all the world had turned blue. Painfully, unbearably blue!