news story; Elliot Mongery
had fifteen minutes, beginning at 1215--no, that wouldn't do.
Mongery's sponsor for that time was Atomflame Heaters, and Atomflame
was a subsidiary of Canada Northwest Fissionables, and Canada
Northwest was umbilicus-deep in that Kettle River lease graft that
Pelton had sworn to get investigated as soon as he took office.
Professional ethics wouldn't allow Mongery to say anything in Pelton's
behalf on Atomflame's time. Well, there was Guthrie Parham, he came on
at 1245, and his sponsor was all right. He'd call Parham and tell him
what he wanted done.

[Illustration:]

The buzzer warned him that he was approaching the lower Manhattan
beacon; he shifted to manual control, dropped down to the
three-thousand-foot level, and set his selector beam for the signal
from Pelton's Purchasers' Paradise. Down toward the tip of the island,
in the section that had been rebuilt after that Stalin Mark XV
guided missile had gotten through the counter-rocket defenses in 1987,
he could see the quadrate cross of his goal, with public landing
stages on each of the four arms, and the higher central block with its
landing stage for freight and store personnel. Above the four public
stages, helicopters swarmed like May flies--May flies which had
mutated and invented ritual or military drill or choreography--coming
in in four streams to the tips of the arms and rising vertically from
the middle. There was about ten times the normal amount of traffic for
this early in the morning. He wondered, briefly, then remembered, and
cursed. That infernal sale!

Grudgingly, he respected Russell Latterman's smartness, and in
consequence, the ability of Wilton Joyner and Harvey Graves in
selecting a good agent to plant in Pelton's store. Latterman gave a
plausible impersonation of the Illiterate businessman, loyal Prime
Minister of Pelton's commercial empire, Generalissimo in the perpetual
war against Macy & Gimbel's. From that viewpoint, the sale was
excellent business--Latterman had gotten the jump on all the other
department stores for the winter fashions and fall sports trade. He
had also turned the store into a madhouse at the exact time when
Chester Pelton needed to give all his attention to the election.

Pressing the button that put on his private recognition signal, he
rose above the incoming customers and began to drop toward the
private landing stage, circling to get a view of the other four
stages. Maybe the sale