There were thirty-six levels to the museum, each thirty feet in height, and an impressive hundred-foot entrance. Joe seemed to know his way around. He walked straight across the lobby and up a wide staircase.
On the first floor up Juble stopped him and pointed out. “Hey, what about here?”
Above the doorway to a long hall was the inscription: “ELECTRONICS - 1.”
“Huh,” said Joe derisively. “First electronics? Baby stuff. We’ve come for the real thing, boy.” He also went past the door marked “ELECTRONICS - 2” but stopped at “ELECTRONICS - 3.”
They paused just inside the entrance. There was a party going on. As Juble looked closer, the mélange of a hundred naked people resolved into various small incidents. The one which caught Juble’s eye was that of a man attempting to rape a struggling young girl. Automatically he looked around for the corpse of her protector, but to his surprise there was none: the party, probably in its early stages, was completely free of death. Just at that moment a black-haired, middle-aged man skulking against the wall jammed a policeman’s cap on his head and blew a whistle. Immediately there was the jangling sound of shattered glass: a tall window fell in fragments to the floor and through it poured a dozen heavily armed, angry-looking cops. On the other side of the window, Juble glimpsed a hovering squad-car.
“Better stay out of the way,” Joe whispered, hiding in the shadows. “Don’t want to get involved.”
Within seconds the would-be rapist was hauled to his feet and dragged bodily to the middle of the hall, and the party-makers herded belligerently aside. “The Supreme Court will go in session right here!” the biggest of the policemen shouted. He removed his cap and put on a judge’s hat. “Everybody shut their goddam row!” The heavy bazookas dangling carelessly gave everyone present a silent respect for the law. Then the policeman-judge took a sheet of paper about six inches square from the lining of his headgear and handed it to the prisoner.
On the paper were written all the laws of the nation, and not in small print, either.
“Mack,” said the judge, having climbed on to an improvised rostrum, “you don’t need me to tell you you’re in trouble. The law protects females from direct assault. Do you plead guilty of direct assault upon a female?”
The criminal looked sullenly at his feet.
“O.K., Mack,” the judge told him harshly, “we don’t need you to tell us just how guilty you are. I’m surprised you guys are so dim. Why didn’t you knock off her man and make it a legal assault?”
“‘r man wasn’ around,” the criminal muttered.
“No man may sexually assault a female except by first subduing a man protector!” the judge yelled at him. “I don’t care whether she’s got a man or not! The law protects the weak. And let me tell you, it doesn’t help that you knocked off one of our boys the other day. Why do you think we’re so hot on your trail?” He nodded to one of his colleagues. “Usual sentence.”
Guns were already levelled. The moment the judge finished speaking a volley of heat-packets centred on the sulking prisoner. Grimly the policemen made their way across the hall and clambered through the window to where their squad-car was floating.
“The law in action,” Joe whispered sagaciously. “You see it every day.”
“Maybe that’s too often,” said Juble with uncharacteristic terseness.
Joe nodded thoughtfully.
Although he had spoken openly in their favour, privately Joe was not over-fond of the police. He was a staunch upholder of the principles of Free America—freedom of action, liberty from restraint, a minimum of obligations. A he-man’s paradise. Secretly the police hated all this. Desperately they tried to preserve some relic of formal order in the world, and Joe suspected that if it were possible (which it was not) they would bring back the Bad Old days in all their rigidity. Joe had personally met that strange figure, Renville, Chief of Police, a haunted, burdened man whose mind harboured hopeless and forbidden dreams.
Still, they made life interesting while they lasted. Joe recognised that society would end altogether when their efforts finally failed—as, he was forced to observe, they must. Be that as it may, Joe despised any constraint on the indiscriminate impulses of a man.
It took about twenty seconds for the party to resume its swing after the execution. Joe had already surveyed the museum equipment on this level.
“Place has been wiped clean!” he exaggerated indignantly. “C’mon, next floor.”
The hall immediately above was labelled “ELECTRONICS - 4” and was, as far as they could tell, completely deserted. Joe cackled happily: the place was full of riches, all apparently in working order, and nearly all complete. There was, after all, little demand for such advanced apparatus as was exhibited in the 4th Electronics Hall.
Joe spent the next hour wandering through the hall and selecting what he wanted. Juble noticed that he seemed to have no thought for his future needs: if a piece of equipment did not on inspection come up to his requirements he would fling it carelessly but hard to the floor, or against a wall if there was one near.
“Say,” his hireling objected, “what’s the good of smashing this stuff?”
“Listen, boy, I know what I’m about and I know what I want. There are science museums all over the city, boy! How many people can even name fourth-grade stuff these days?” He dumped a bulky mass of transistors and helix-crystals into Juble’s arms. “Stow this in the car with the rest of the stuff and be careful.”
The old man actually helped to carry the last load, haranguing Juble all the while for dropping and breaking a lucky find. But he became silent once the car was in the air again, and concentrated on the device he was designing. The city was peaceful and still as they flew home; there were rarely more than a handful of people about in the early afternoon. A few stray cars glittered lazily against bright concrete.
Then, as far as Juble and Joe were concerned, the peace was broken. A large open car swerved swiftly round the corner of a nearby building and wantonly opened fire as it zoomed round to face them.
The wide-angled splash of heat-packets singed Juble’s hair, made the car rock and cooked the air a couple of yards over his left shoulder. Instantly he gave the controls a yank—then reached for his own heat-rifle on the seat behind him. The pistol under his armpit was no good for this kind of thing.
A second badly-directed volley followed the first. To fire back, Juble had had to abandon the controls. The vehicle veered to the left, rapidly passing to one side and just underneath of the other car, about thirty yards away. Upset by the crazy motion, Juble got in one shot which took away part of the hull.
The other car dropped to get even with him. Juble saw that there were other heads in it, besides the driver’s—puzzlingly small heads with curly golden hair. He let off another couple of wild shots, then his car smashed sideways into the wall of the skyscraper.
He and Joe were hurled bodily against the concrete and nearly tumbled to their deaths on the sidewalk below. Somehow they managed to stay in the half-wrecked but still floating vehicle while heat-packets scarred and blackened the wall surface around them.
Badly shaken, Juble gripped his rifle and let off shot after desperate shot. To his relief he heard screams—high-pitched screams—and the attacking car rolled over to fall smoking to the ground five hundred feet beneath.
For some seconds they sat getting their breath back. “There were a couple of kids in that car,” Joe gasped. “Cute little girls with golden hair. Crazy to come out like that!” He shook his head. “He must have been trying to get them blooded.”
Juble experimented with the controls. “Well, he has,” he said briefly.