The last sign was more faded than the others, and because Hoken was walking so briskly, he didn’t get that good a look. It was for Dr. Pepper, encouraging its use at ten, two, and four o’clock. On Oria, physicians didn’t advertise their services. Hoken could think of no reason to see a physician three times a day, so he presumed the comment was in a non-medical context.
Hoken found the advertising methods and slogans simplistic, but interesting, and they certainly did catch his attention. Humans had no idea what they would be subject to, thought Hoken, when advertisers were armed with another thousand years of technology, psychological research and more aggressive methods. Advertising had become so seductive, so able to influence and capture the minds of even the smartest, normally most skeptical people who could think for themselves, so subtle yet addictively successful, that many societies, including the Septadians, the ultimate capitalists, had put very significant limitations on how all goods and services could be advertised. The use of sex in advertising, either overtly or even by not-so-subtle innuendo, such as a scantily-clad woman with unusually large breasts advertising seemingly everything from autos to paper towels, floor wax, or canned tomatoes, was considered a sign of depravity and below any civilized society. All advertising was reduced to basic facts about the product and required government approval. It was the only way to protect honest, hard-working citizens from unfair manipulation.
Chapter Forty-Three
Bad Guys
Hoken turned left onto a street that looked more like a wide alley. No sidewalks. No curbs. No grass. It may have been a street thirty or forty years ago, but now was just a lot of broken, cracked pavement: some very old concrete with too much tar between each section, poorly patched with asphalt that needed patching, with chuck holes guaranteed large enough to break an axle. The sides of the pavement just blended in with loose chat. The exact kind of street where a kid could throw all the rocks he wanted to at a trash can, or a stray feral cat, or a starling on the telephone wire, and no one would care.
There were a few old homes with garages that opened up right onto the pavement. You couldn’t tell if you were looking at the back or the front of the house. Though there were scrubby trees next to a few of the homes, most of the homes were just there, plain as could be. There were one or two other buildings and a few vacant lots, some nicely trimmed, some pretty overgrown, one surrounded by a chain-link fence. There was an old Ford pickup truck about half way down on the right that very well could have been built by Henry himself. Hoken could see and hear a dog chained in one of the lots at the very far end of the block.
Hoken had gone about thirty meters down the street, rehearsing what he would say when he met #1. A young man suddenly came out from behind some trash cans on his right. He appeared to be walking across the street, but then stopped in front of Hoken and immediately turned toward him. He flicked his right hand to open the switchblade.
In an instant, seemingly from nowhere, there was a man on Hoken’s right, a man on his left, and two men behind him—including a huge man, easily weighing 160 or 170 kilos. Hoken was surrounded.
“Hey, man,” said the thug with an arrogant, and purposefully threatening swagger, as he waved the knife in the air, “this is a stick-up.”
Hoken said nothing. He stood motionless and quickly looked around. Unless one of the punks had a gun that wasn’t showing, thought Hoken, it was smack-down time.
Hoken was an amazingly conditioned man, trained in the toughest of hand-to-hand combat. On Oria, he could take five other good soldiers in a situation like this. On Earth, his strength was magnified by a third. But he had other, more important things to do. He needed to demolish these dumb punks and get on with his business. He was going to totally pound these jokers. He liked a good workout before breakfast.
The head punk, the man with the knife, came a few steps closer to Hoken. He stopped barely a meter away, just out of reach. He used the switchblade to point out the objects he was most interested in.
“Well, let’s see,” he said, acting like a big shot that had control of everything. “That backpack looks pretty cool—you know. I’ve never, you know, seen anything like that, man. That’s mine,” he said with authority. “That’s mine, and everything in it.”
Hoken thought, I’m going to wipe the smile off that idiot’s face real fast.
The punk paused for a second as he continued to look Hoken over. “Nice watch,” he said.
In a voice so deep that it seemed beyond the range of human hearing—that almost made Hoken’s insides, his kidneys and liver, vibrate—the huge man standing behind Hoken, said, “I want that watch.”
There were no objections from the other thugs.
The apparent boss-punk went on about everything that he thought would soon belong to him and his hoodlum friends.
Hoken knew he had to take out the man with the knife first.
“Hey, man. A wedding ring,” he said with a smile, pointing the knife toward Hoken’s left hand. “I like wedding rings, you know. They’re easy to pawn. Let’s see the ring, man.”
This was Hoken’s chance to act. He pointed his clenched left hand straight at the man’s face. “You mean this ring—Activate!”
A sonic boom rang out. The man with the knife was blown several meters into the air backwards, and was out cold before he hit the ground.
The sonic boom made the dog at the far end of the block start to bark. His howling caused several other farther away, unseen mutts, to start to yell and howl in a doggerel cacophony. For a brief moment; the sonic boom, the sudden yelling and barking of the dogs and the demolition of their friend stunned the other attackers.
A moment was all Hoken needed.
He leaned slightly to his right. His left leg went up, kicking the man on his left on the side of the chin. There was a pop almost as loud as the sonic boom as the man’s head jerked around. He went straight down. Hoken was sure he had broken his jaw.
The instant Hoken’s left foot touched the ground he turned to his right. The punk was ready for a fight, but before he could even throw a punch, Hoken grabbed his bare, tattooed left forearm with his right hand and squeezed. The Ponchielli stun device was activated and delivered its only stun. The man just closed his eyes and crumpled, like putting water on toilet paper.
In an instant, Hoken spun around to face the last two men behind him. The smaller man tried to grab Hoken around the throat. With an upward thrust of both arms, Hoken knocked the man’s hands from his neck and punched him hard with a left to the jaw, followed in an instant by a right to the solar plexis, which lifted the man—George Foreman vs. Joe Frazier style—completely off the ground. When the man came back to Earth he doubled over. Hoken grabbed his head with both hands. A right knee to the forehead knocked him backwards, banging his head on the asphalt. He lost bowel and bladder control. Another punk out cold.
Hoken was ready for the last would-be robber, the giant-like man.
But in typical bully fashion, now that the odds were even, the man mountain—actually just a big fat slob who thought he was tough, a Sergeant Wiggans type that had fallen on the wrong side of the law—had seen enough and started to run.
There could be no witnesses, no loose ends. Hoken couldn’t let anyone summon help, especially the authorities. It was unlikely that a punk hood would go to the police to report a botched robbery, but stranger things have happened. People have reported robberies to the police—of material they had stolen. How many times have you heard of a guy pulling a robbery, then getting picked up in a hot red sports car because he was going seventy in a twenty-five mph speed zone? Guys like this aren’t exactly rocket scientists. They couldn’t even get into the missile base with a pass.