PART NINETY-TWO
ENVOI III

XVI

The hut was isolated. It stood upon a point which jutted like a finger from the cliffs above the sea. Two thousand feet, straight down, the Northern Ocean roared, battering its heavy green fury against the basalt barricade, using for battering rams great floating islands of white ice.

We had to go through a locked gate before we could enter upon the point. The guard used a plate to unfasten the bars. “It’s past noon,” he said. “The cleaning crew have probably just come and gone, so you will find them reasonably sanitary. It’s a good thing: usually you can smell that hut clear from here.”

We walked along a path between the two vertical cliffs. The wind from out of the northern pole moaned dismally. A flurry of snow beat at my mask. This was a gruesome place—think of being incarcerated here for nearly a century!

After a walk of a hundred yards, we arrived at the hut. It was rectangular, built of heavy insulating block like all these huts, a kind of a fortress standing lonely by itself in the teeth of icy winds. It had two doors on the shore side.

The guard approached the left-hand door. “I’ll let you see Number 69,000,000,201 first.” He consulted his list. “Yes, that’s somebody once named Crobe. Now you must be very careful, for both of these are quite mad. I’ve been here sometimes guarding the cleaning detail while they work and to ensure that nobody speaks to them.”

“Have they ever attacked anybody?” I said.

“Not that I recall.”

I became even more certain that this was what I said it was—political expediency. This guard had been coached by Neht, that was obvious. “You’re not going in with me,” I said. “My interview is technical but it may contain state secrets. So let me in there and stand well clear of the door.”

He looked a little uncomfortable. Then he hitched his greatcoat around him, dropped his stungun off his shoulder into his hand, put his plate against the door and gave it a shove. He glanced in and then, with another look at me and a shrug, walked off thirty feet.

I repressed a thrill of excitement. I was about to see the notorious Doctor Crobe!

I walked in.

My eyes adjusted to the sudden gloom.

The whole hut was really just one oblong room; dividing it in the center was a string of vertical bars.

I scanned the area I had entered. It was a very capacious room. It was even furnished. It had shelves of books.

Somebody was bent over a tub of some sort. He turned around.

IT WAS CROBE!

His nose was too long; so was his chin. His arms looked more like the legs of birds. He had no hair left at all. He was wearing a coat, but if the cleaning crew had given him a fresh one, it was already dirty.

“You’re just in time,” he said, as though my visit was a daily occurrence. “The fermentation is completed and I’ve just hooked up this tube. Let it drip a little longer into the canister and you can test it. I think it is the best I have ever made.”

“What is it?” I said.

“Home brew. I save half of my dinner every day and dump it in this tub. It ferments quite nicely.” I saw he had a lid over the tub and a tube came out of its center, going through several coils before it dripped a clear fluid out the end.

He removed the canister which had been receiving it, quickly putting another in its place. “Now,” he said, “sit down on that comfortable couch and try this.”

I was amazed. This was no madman. He was even smiling pleasantly. I sat down on the indicated couch and he handed me the canister, making a sign then that I should sip.

I was cautious. I removed my snow mask but I only pretended to drink.

“Oh, goodness, go ahead,” said Crobe. “You’re not depriving me! I have gallons and gallons of it.” And he indicated a rack of jugs on the far wall.

Well, it couldn’t kill me. I tossed it down.

PURE FIRE!

It scorched my throat like acid! I couldn’t talk!

He watched me carefully. Then he said, “Ah, no convulsions. Which means the fusel oil has distilled off. Can you still see?”

I coughed. “Of course, I can see. Good Gods! What is this?”

“The very finest Kentucky bourbon or possibly white mule. One of the many gifts to heavens from the planet Earth. I learned how to make it from a professor there in a higher institute of learning called Bellevue.”

A glow was springing out of my stomach. My alarm faded. Actually, I suddenly felt very good. I looked around. I said, “I see you also have a lot of books.”

He smiled at the shelf. “They’re a bit dog-eared now, but Noble Stuffy insisted they be brought for me from the townhouse long ago. He seemed to think I might need them.”

I stared at their titles. The letters didn’t make any sense.

“Psychology, psychiatry,” said Crobe, “and all the works of Sigmund Freud. All the basic texts of psychotherapy on Earth. But they won’t let me use it here. They are very unenlightened and retarded. I could clean out this whole asylum for them but every day they gag me before they let the cleaning crew in. However, I have lots of friends, such as yourself, dropping around all the time. Have another shot?”

He poured me one from a jug and then took one himself. He shuddered as it went down. He said, “Gods!” and after a second, “but that’s good.” Then he sighed. “I wish they’d let me have some retorts, for without them I can’t make LSD. So you’ll just have to be content. Drink up.”

I threw down the second drink. It sizzled like the first. But shortly, the room looked quite rosy.

“Well, we’ve wasted enough time,” said Crobe, glancing at his wrist where he had no watch. “I have other patients coming in, so you’ll just have to rush it a bit. Now lie down on the couch and start talking.”

I lay back. I said, “What about?”

“Does it matter?” he said. “We will simply begin by free association. You leave it to me. Just say anything that jumps into your head.”

Well, of course, the first thing that jumped into my head was the continual plotting of my family to manage my life for me. I said, “If my book is not a success, I am finished utterly. My uncles will crush me into some awful job or I’ll have to marry that ghastly Lady Corsa and spend my life, much like you, in a cultural desert, Modon, an exile.”

“Ah,” he said, “trouble with your mother!”

“How did you know?” I said.

“Obvious,” he said. “Sigmund Freud covered it like a blanket. An Oedipus complex! I can get to the bottom of your case at once. It is a classic example of psychopathology. You see, there is the anal passive, followed by the anal erotic. Then there is the oral passive, followed by the oral erotic. There is also the genital stage but no one ever really reaches that. These are ALL the mental stages there are. Everything is based on sex. Sex is the single and only motivation for all behavior. So there you are.”

I thought maybe it was the white mule. “I don’t quite understand.”

“That’s because you have yet to achieve insight into your condition,” said Crobe. “But it is VERY plain to me. Your mother did not let you play with her nipples when you were a baby. Correct?”

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“You see? And that inhibited your natural sexual outlets! ALL your trouble with your family comes from that. This will inhibit you from freedom of expression and movement. The cure is simple. Just face up to the fact—and you MUST face up to it—that you are arrested in the oral erotic stage. You will NEVER find any remission of symptoms unless you ride roughshod over your repression and find yourself a nice young man and practice, unremittingly, fellatio.”

I stared at him.

“I see I am being too technical for a layman. I am giving you pure Freud. Your insanity can be cured only by a life of dedication to making love only to young boys and men—orally, of course. Now, I am sorry,” and he glanced at his watchless wrist, “but your appointment is over for the day. However, you are now cured so you need not come back. My calendar is overfull.”

XVII

I rose up from the couch. “Well, I certainly thank you for your therapy,” I said. “And I can understand how busy you must be, but do you mind if I ask you for your professional opinion?”

“About what?” said Crobe.

I got out some puffsticks—I had taken to smoking them since I had seen that all the reporters did at the Ink Club. I offered one to Crobe and was about to light it for him when he ate it. I didn’t know they were comestible. I lit my own.

“Doctor Crobe,” I said, “you may very well have been illegally incarcerated here.”

“I’ve said so all the time,” he replied. “These barbarians do not appreciate professional technology.”

“Do you know the man who put you here?”

“I certainly do. I saw him issue the order. I would have run away at once the way I am supposed to, but they restrained me.”

“So you know that it was Jettero Heller.”

He flinched a little, looked around. We were still alone. He nodded.

“What is your professional opinion of that man?”

Crobe sat back. He rubbed his overlong nose. He stroked his overlong chin. Finally, he said, “You can appreciate that I have made a considerable study of Jettero Heller. Our doctor-patient relationship goes back many years. He disregarded my earliest advices to him and so, you understand, I cannot be held responsible for his mental state. Had I been permitted to give him true professional help—his physiomental composition was entirely wrong for Mission Earth—none of this ever would have happened.”

He sighed and then he tapped the top of his radio. “I have, of course, followed his subsequent career, but anything I have heard of him only confirms my first spontaneous analysis.” He shook his head sadly. Then he got busy fortifying himself with a long gurgle of white mule, after which he sat and stared out into space.

“What was that analysis?” I prompted.

Crobe recalled himself. “Of what?” he said.

“Jettero Heller,” I prompted, eagerly.

“Oh, him. Well, I can tell you but you must remind me to explain if I go in too deep for a layman to follow. It is a very difficult case, not well covered in some points by the textbooks.

“To begin with, he likes height. This is very grave, for it is a deviation from normal alto-phobia. I know, therefore, that he suffers from alto-libido.”

I stared.

“Yes, very grave,” said Crobe. “But that is far from all. He likes to go very fast. This is a condition of velocitus-libido.

“The next symptom is no less strange. Everyone knows that people are just riffraff, yet—and I witnessed this myself in the early days when he was my patient—he is pleasant to people. This shows that he has urbanus-populi-libido. Very bad.

“He also erects a façade of pretending to be fair to others—an utter sham, but it takes many people in, since it is, in fact, a fixation. An utterly craven insistence on justice for others. This detects that he has justitious-libido.

“Now his record—although it is very confidential, he is no longer my patient and I can disclose it to you—shows that he is very athletic. He runs and jumps and exercises and engages in sports. This reveals deep-seated lascivus-libido—roughly translated from professional language, a love of sports. Damning.

“Libido means a desire, craving or love of something. But in Heller’s case, it is a deviation since it is NOT confined to sex. As the word libido is used constantly by Freud to describe the gravest mental conditions, you can begin to see where this is leading us with Heller.

“Now, were it to stop there, possibly we could classify the man only as extremely neurotic. But unfortunately, it doesn’t. A résumé of his career discloses that he persists until he gets a job done. This puts us in very dangerous waters. According to the best texts, it means,” and he paused and frowned, “that he is achiever-oriented!

“Nor is this all: unlike the normal person, he does not get confused or dispersed easily. According to the most exacting psychology authorities, this is equally bad. He is GOAL-ORIENTED!”

Crobe sat back and sadly looked at the floor. “Actually, I hate to tell you the last and worst thing, it is so very awful.”

“Oh, you must,” I said.

“Well, it is pretty technical,” said Crobe. “While it is just standard Earth psychology, it may exceed your grasp. Now let me define the word schizo for you: it means split or divided like two of something. Do you follow that?”

I said that I did.

“Very well,” continued Crobe, “then you must realize that schizophrenia is a very dreadful psychosis. A schizophrenic is an insane person, as any psychologist or psychiatrist on Earth will tell you.

“And so, to return to the case we are examining, you are aware that he once called himself Jettero Heller.”

“That’s right,” I said.

“But NOW,” said Crobe, with a meaningful look, “he calls himself the Duke of Manco! TWO NAMES! TWO IDENTITIES! SCHIZOPHRENIA!”

He sat back and shook his head. “So we are forced, then, to conclude that the man in question is totally, utterly and completely insane!

“HE should be the one in here. Not I!”

He sat for some time, lost in thought. Then he said, “But I should not be spending my valuable time discussing this with a layman. It is a matter only understood, in its awful enormity, by fully trained Earth professionals. You must excuse me now. I have to get busy making more white mule.”

He started to get out of his chair.

XVIII

I stopped him from rising. “Wait!” I said. “My business is not done.” I pointed at the bars which divided the room.

It was very dark in the other half and I had not been able to see clearly.

There was a swivel glowplate at the top of the couch. I tipped it up so it would shine through the bars into the gloom.

A shadowy shape was sitting there, a sort of small mountain on the floor. The chin lifted and the light struck into yellow eyes.

LOMBAR HISST!

His hair was totally gray. His skin was so deeply wrinkled it seemed to have chasms. The face looked blank.

“Oh, him,” said Crobe. “I gave him ninety-some years of psychoanalysis, but for the last five or so, he refuses to talk. Actually, it is a psychiatric case and requires the expertise of a neurosurgeon. You see, the frontal lobe has become too involved with the parietal lobe of the brain, causing the inevitable biofeedback predicted by the magnificent Earth scientist Snorbert Weener in his work, Stybernetics, based on his constant association with pigs at the Massachusetts Institute of Wrectology. Believe me, it would cause Weener to absolutely squeal with rage and wiggle his tail if he knew his vital work was not being applied. Ah well, the mighty are often forgotten.

“Now, it so happens that I am certified by no less august a body than the American Meddle Association—the group that is dedicated to making all the money for medical doctors possible, no matter how—to perform this simple operation. It is textbook, done constantly on Earth. In fact, it is mandatory! But these unenlightened barbarians here are denying me my tools.

“Factually, I only need one tool. It is the standard one employed by all psychiatrists everywhere for this elementary and vital operation. It is called an ice pick and it isn’t even expensive to buy: one can be purchased in any hardware store.

“All the psychiatrist has to do—he must be qualified of course, but that’s easy, one just hangs a piece of paper on the wall—is insert the ice pick up under the left eyelid, shove it all the way up and sweep it from left to right. Then one slides it up under the right eyelid and does the same. It severs the nerves of the prefrontal lobe quite effectively. And so simple. Why, one day, at Bellevue, I asked for a demonstration and the leading neurosurgeon there simply rushed out into the waiting room, said ‘Watch!’ and in a trice he had operated on over fifty people: they were impoverished black people, charity cases. Only a small percentage, no more than seventy, died on the spot. The remaining fifteen never gave anyone any trouble after that. Economical, too, they only lived a couple of years. Saves the state money! Earth psychiatry is nothing if not practical. They trained me well!”

He got himself another shot of white mule and as he sipped it, deeply sighed, “Ah, well, there he sits, deprived utterly of real professional help.”

“Well, didn’t the psychoanalysis make him sane?” I said.

“Oh, that it did,” said Crobe. “He just won’t talk. He doesn’t even say anything when they come in each day and lift him up to clean away the excrement and urine. Sane as can be. Just obstinate.”

I looked through the spaced vertical bars, but Hisst was just sitting there on the floor, yellow eyes glinting in the glowlight. He did look obstinate.

I found I was drinking another shot of white mule. I felt a sudden surge of confidence. I was willing to wager anything that Lombar Hisst would talk. I was sure he was simply waiting for an investigative reporter to come in so that he could tell the real truth about his role in Mission Earth.

I put down the canister, missing the table. I put out my hand to say goodbye but unfortunately knocked a jug of white mule over. It lay there gurgling but Crobe was examining my palm, muttering that it was significant there was no hair on it.

“Thank you for your time, Doctor Crobe,” I said. “I must be going now.”

“Pay the receptionist,” said Crobe, “but if you (bleep) her, that will be extra. However, I do not advise it. It is not that most of these receptionists at Bellevue have syphilis, since they associate with psychologists, it is that you would be departing from my professional Earth psychiatric advice. You realize that Heller came to grief solely by not following my prescription and refusing to have his limbs shortened. So don’t descend down his disastrous trail. You are clearly oral erotic, a textbook case of Freud, and your only chance of mental recovery lies in finding, as any Earth psychiatrist would verify, some good-looking boy and doing it constantly. Good day. Next patient, please!”

XIX

The guard seemed a little surprised to see me. He came forward and locked Crobe’s door. “Well, you got out of that alive,” he said.

I gestured at the other door. “Open it!” I said.

“You mean you’re going into the same room with Inmate 69,000,000,202? It says here on the record that he used to be prone to violence. See, right here on the back of the card it says, ‘Warning: he almost killed a cleaning steward once.’”

I looked at the date. It was almost seventy years ago. “Since that time,” I said grandly, “he has had decades of standard psychoanalysis.”

“What’s that weird smell?” said the guard. “Oh, it’s your breath. You didn’t drink anything he gave you, did you? Maybe I should rush you over to the hospital and have your stomach pumped!”

“Don’t infer a Crown inspector doesn’t know his business,” I said haughtily. “Open the other door!”

He shrugged, applied his opening plate and I walked in. I looked back and glared at the guard, for he was standing there with stungun ready. He shook his head, but leaving the door ajar, he walked off about thirty paces.

I looked back into the room. It was quite dark. The fumes of the spilled jug were seeping through the slotted bars making the whole place reek. Crobe was just lolling over there, drinking from a canister, more white mule.

Lombar Hisst was sitting very still. I had not realized what a very big man he was: even with his haunches on the floor, I saw the yellow eyes were level with my shoulder as I walked up to him. I stood in the path of his gaze.

Suddenly he looked straight at me.

In a perfectly normal voice, he said, “Could I have one of those puffsticks?”

Accommodatingly, glad of the time it gave me to phrase my first questions, I reached into my pocket and got out a box. I extended it.

He took one, still sitting there in quite a mannerly way. He put it in his mouth.

“Could I have a light?” he said.

I reached in my pocket again and found a firestick.

I squeezed its shaft.

It flamed.

I extended it close to the end of Hisst’s puffstick.

SUDDENLY HE SEIZED MY WRIST!

The power was bone-crunching!

With his other hand he grabbed the shaft of the falling firestick.

With a roar quite like a lepertige he surged to his feet!

He threw me with a twist, as though I were a doll, straight against the far wall!

I had not hit before he grabbed a cover from the bed.

He touched the flaming shaft to it and it burst into flame!

He swished the blanket as though it were a whip and rushed up to the bars!

He screamed as he flogged fire through the bars, “I’m sending you to HELL, you hear? I’m sending you straight down to HELL NINE, DIRECT!”

He was hitting the bars with the flaming blanket!

Gouts of fire were flying off and spraying into Crobe’s room.

“You and your psychoanalysis!” shrieked Hisst. “I’ve waited decades just for this!”

Crobe had sprung up, clutching a jug of white mule to his bony breast. He added his screeches to the din. “Keep those blasted angels on your own side of the bars!”

A gout of fire was racing now across Crobe’s floor, eating puddles of spilled white mule, spouting tongues of blue.

“No, no!” screamed Crobe. “You’re getting angels all over me!”

Lombar still lashed the bars with fire.

I found my legs and sprinted for the door.

The guard was racing up. As I exited, I hit him.

The stungun flew into a snowbank.

In a tangle of arms and legs, the guard and I went pinwheeling down the path away from the hut.

Lombar raced out.

He was wrapping the flaming blanket around him.

Spurts of blue fire were following him out of the door.

Suddenly there was an awful roar!

The jugs of white mule had blown up!

The whole roof of the hut blew wide in a geyser of red and blue.

And there went Crobe sailing skyward!

Just as the roar of the explosion died, I heard Crobe’s voice. In tones of exultation the doctor cried, “Look, I’m flying! I’m flying! I WAS AN ANGEL AFTER ALL!”

Abruptly, high in the air, carrying his white mule bomb, Crobe exploded with a tremendous BANG!

Lombar Hisst, wrapped in the burning blanket, was racing toward the far point of the cliff.

He reached the edge. He was still running. He tried to spring up in the air.

He was bellowing, “I’M GOD! I’M THE REAL GOD! MOVE OVER, YOU (BLEEPARD), SO I CAN RULE THE UNIVERSE!”

He went plunging, a blazing fireball, two thousand feet down toward the water, a spectacular arc.

He struck a piece of floating ice in a final gout of bursting flame!

He slid off to be crushed in the thundering surf against the cliff, a charred and roasted nothing, ground to pieces in the cold, green sea.

Crobe and Lombar Hisst were very, very dead.

XX

I promised Neht I’d hush the matter up.

I did not tell him I would not put it in this book. I am an investigative reporter. I have learned fast at my trade. Lying to get access is a key technique of that profession—with cheating here and there and a dash of misrepresentation. For what are lies to the riffraff when I can bring the truth to you, dear reader? You should be grateful to me for becoming so adept at my chosen profession. Bob Hoodward, I assure you, could not have practiced better.

And so I sailed off southward with Shafter at the controls. I was going to make one last visit to Hightee Heller: I had to check something very vital to these revelations.

With a stopover at a northern hostel so I could recover from a mysterious headache and spots before my eyes, and where I could also dress the next morning in something more suitable than singed snow clothes, we came at last to the landing target of Hightee Heller’s home in Pausch Hills.

I did not wait for any attendant to appear. I knew the place now and so just walked in.

I saw a butler shortly, a very big man, sitting in a hall polishing silver. I said, “Inform Hightee that Monte Pennwell is here to talk with her.”

He went off and so I wandered. I was looking for, perhaps, a correspondence room where she would have her letters: just a few moments alone with her personal files might be very rewarding.

The door to the art salon was open. I saw another door to a room beyond it: that might be the correspondence room. An investigative reporter must not even heed the meaning of privacy. I glanced over my shoulder. No one was watching me. I began to cross the art salon.

Here was where Hightee Heller kept many of her gifts. People sent them to her from all over, even today. It was a sort of museum but I wasn’t interested in that.

I was just passing a table in the middle of the vast room when my eye chanced to catch the writing on a card. I stopped right there!

Somebody had taken the interplanetary shipping wrappers off. The card said:

HAPPY HIGHTEE HELLER DAY

With Love

Jettero

IT WAS THE SAME BOX I HAD SEEN HIM CARRYING ON MANCO!

Apparently it had been delayed in shipment from that planet.

I hastily glanced around. Any clue was worth investigating. No one was in sight. I stepped to the table.

Evidently a footman had prepared it so that all Hightee had to do was remove the ribbon and top cover, making it easy for her to receive and examine whatever it was.

The box itself was quite large: it was covered in a crinkly gold paper the like of which I had never seen before. The ribbon was two inches wide and ended in a huge rosette. Very foreign looking.

It took me only an instant to remove the ribbon and the cover.

I took some packing paper out and then didn’t know what I was looking at. There was a horizontal round ring suspended five inches above a wider base. From the ring, each separately wrapped in paper, hung a dozen figurines, apparently made of glass.

In the center of the base was set a green rectangular box but the rest of the base was blue and totally transparent. Taped to the bottom of that base and partially seen through it was a slip of paper, printed, with writing on it, like an invoice from a store.

THE LETTERING!

Had I seen it before?

Oh, any clue was welcome.

I MUST HAVE THAT PIECE OF PAPER!

To get it, I had to remove the strange device from the box.

I started to lift it. I had underestimated its weight from the ease with which Heller had carried it.

I struggled to get it removed. It kept catching on the wrappings. Finally, I wrestled it over to the center of the table top, knocking the wrappings and box to the floor as I did so. But at least I had it sitting there.

I ignored the strangeness of the gadget. My task now was to lift its edge up and get at that taped paper.

There were some levers around the edge. In lifting it, I must have touched one. The thing went CLICK!

I clawed at the tape under it—what strange stuff, transparent and sticky. I had to use my fingernail.

AHA! I HAD THE PAPER!

The edge of the platform, when I released it, hit the table with a thump.

The ring began to turn!

THE THING BEGAN TO PLAY A TUNE!

I went into a panic that the noise might be overheard.

I stared at it. Then I grabbed one of the levers on the edge and yanked it.

IT PLAYED LOUDER!

The ring went faster!

The paper sleeves flew off the figurines. They were glass dancers!

They were turning in a circle now and dancing to the music.

YE GODS, BUT THAT WAS LOUD!

Frenziedly, I yanked up and down on the levers!

ANYTHING TO STOP IT!

IT WENT FASTER!

The dancers were now whirling madly.

Their glass toes, which had sounded like small bells, were now more like high-pitched gongs!

I gave one more yank at the levers.

It was too much.

The figurines suddenly flew away, sundered from the ring.

They sailed through the air.

They shattered with small tinkles on the floor!

The whole device let out a vibrating WHAM!

A yellow spring flew out of it and hit me in the face!

A voice!

The butler!

“WHAT IN BLAZES ARE YOU UP TO?”

He grabbed me by the collar!

He lugged me to the door.

He pitched me, seat first, onto the landing target!

I lit on my butt with a skid and a puff of dust.

The butler’s voice again. He was standing in the door, dusting off his hands.

“Monte Pennwell, do not land here anymore!” he said.

Actually, I had been misled: I had believed they did not have any security here. But who needed it, with that butler around!

I did not know if this was Hightee’s message. Never mind, relentless investigative reporter that I was, I had what I had come for!

I could even ignore Shafter’s amazed look.

XXI

We flew at once to the Royal Institute of Ethnology. I raced to the Department of Unconquered Planets.

I was in luck: a junior assistant professor there was familiar with my family name. I promised him advancement I knew very well I could never effect, if he would translate the paper. He was naïve enough to accept.

They have machines and dictionaries there and all sorts of contrivances for decipherment of alphabets and meanings, anything short of an outright military code.

It took him only two days and I sit now in my tower study with the translation before me. It says:

TIFFANY’S
FIFTH AVENUE
New York, New York
Customer: General Jerome Terrance Wister (Retired),
US Army Reserve
Address: 5606 Central Park West
Charge to: Grabbe-Manhattan Bank
co Israel Epstein III
President
One Antique Glass Animated Dancer Music Box
Eighteenth Century, Venetian
21,000.00
Note: No Credit Card Necessary

And the date is ONLY THREE WEEKS AGO!

ANOTHER MONSTROUS COVERUP!

With a viewer-phone call I just made ten minutes ago to the Reliable Spacetug Building Company, I learned that ten years after his return from Earth and one week after he had received Izzy Epstein’s letter, Heller commissioned the construction of an exact duplicate of Tug One, even down to the phantom duellist in its gym. He paid for it himself—and how easy that was, since, as Duke of Manco, he received one percent of its huge annual revenues, the usual remuneration for a duke but quite enough to buy ten such tugs a month. According to the old chief engineer at Reliable, now retired and garrulous with age (and who had been very proud of the job they did on it—“all gold, silver and jewels, ran like a watch”), they built it in three months (a record), loaded it with digging disintegrator tools (note that), test-flew it and then Heller “took it on a shakedown cruise that lasted three weeks.” The tug has long been the pride of the company, for it is nearly indestructible and is in service right up to today. “He uses it to jink around the Confederacy planets: a powerful man in his position has to be in a lot of places fast, and even though many think it eccentric to use those monster Will-be Was main drives just to get home for a weekend from Voltar to Manco, it makes good sense.”

Little does he know!

Probably feeling sorry for “poor Izzy” and his friends, it is vivid now that Heller went and dug him out a new Earth base, probably in one of the hills near the roadhouse in Connecticut, less than an hour’s easy drive from the Empire State Building or the condo. He’s probably got the descendants of Connecticut deputy sheriffs Ralph and George still thinking they are part of the Maysabongo Marines and drawing the corrupted payoff of their fathers as they watch the old bootlegging roadhouse for him.

By now he has probably attended the funerals of all his one-time friends, has given their progeny a leg-up into high positions and is very likely known as “Uncle Jet,” the fellow they have to keep cooking the Social Security and Army records for so nobody will notice he is 127 years old, a totally giveaway age for that planet’s short-lived people. They probably keep backing him up ten years at a clip so he never gets above sixty-five. But he must look to them like he is fifty. Maybe he puts white powder in his sideburns to further the deceit.

Oh, you can excuse it by imagining a conversation between him and Lord Bis, the head of the Combined Service Intelligence Committee. He and Bis would be agreeing it was a very good thing for Heller-Wister to maintain his exalted five-star-general US Army status, even though it is just reserve and never active. By being in the background there, they would agree, any space military adventure on the part of Earth would be known to Voltar long before it happened. But as Earth firmly believes that nothing can go faster than light, a supply line for any Earth attack on Voltar more than twenty-two light-years long would make any attack extremely unlikely. So you would have to regard such a conversation as an utter sham and see it just for what it is:

AN EXCUSE FOR THIS MONSTROUS, FINAL COVERUP!

XXII

And what is this last, biggest coverup?

Well, dear reader, I will tell you.

We already know he is hiding the existence of a whole planet.

But now the matter becomes MUCH more serious!

Jettero Heller, Duke of Manco, is DEPRIVING VOLTAR OF SOME OF THE MOST MAGNIFICENT DEVELOPMENTS EVER HIT UPON IN THIS WHOLE UNIVERSE!

Now, let me take these things up one by one and I will soon convince you.

PR: The skills of PR, even to the tiny degree I have been able to utilize them, have literally saved my life. They are jerking me from total, hounded and depressed anonymity to a position where my name will blaze across the sky. People will no longer be able to push me around and make nothing of my writing. Utilizing only a tiny fragment of PR, I have rooted out the TRUTH. And after this it will be “Yes, Noble Pennwell” and “No, Noble Pennwell” and “I’m shivering in my boots lest you frown at me, Mr. Pennwell!” One assuredly cannot discount the vast value of this technology, now known only to Earth and available nowhere else!

INTELLIGENCE SERVICES: Unless you can spy upon your own population, you cannot keep them in line. The riffraff will get out of hand and impudent—even revolt—unless spies and armed spy forces are planted on them at every street corner. How else can a government get even with those they do not like? How else but by provoking them into crime and then arresting them? Unless you can make continual trouble for citizens individually and keep them at each others’ throats, then they may unite and in a screaming wave overwhelm the government! On Earth they have developed those skills to a very fine point and practice them in every country. Only there can our power elite learn how to do it!

BEVERAGES: When you think of what we call strong drink, it becomes a laughing matter. Tup and varieties of sparklewater are absolutely nothing. They merely make one relaxed and cheerful. NOT ONE OF OUR DRINKS IS REALLY EFFECTIVE! It takes white mule to really throw one into the land of I-Don’t-Care. None of our drinks cause one to cast away his inhibitions—they don’t even make anyone see double. What a powerful surge is available from Earth beverages. I know. I have felt it. Yet how to make them is ONLY available in full from Earth!

MUSIC: You have to experience the scorching beat of Punk Rock to really appreciate what Earth could do for the whole artistic universe. I swear, there is nothing like it ever heard before, anywhere else. The wild abandon of it doesn’t even have to be in tune! And the sentiments are not hidden at all! Only Earth could develop such music. Only Earth can teach us how to properly play it and thus sweep aside our too-smooth and complicated melodies and chords. Punk Rock gets right down to it! It beats your eardrums in!

DRUGS: This is just cabal and propaganda. I have experienced marijuana, the most powerful of these drugs, and I frankly did not care a snap what happened! I simply let them do anything they liked to me and enjoyed it. DRUGS YOU NEVER HEARD OF ARE AVAILABLE FROM EARTH! IT IS THE SOLE SOURCE OF THE THRILLS YOU CAN EXPERIENCE!

PSYCHOLOGY and PSYCHIATRY: These are obviously the most advanced population-control techniques ever heard of anywhere. Imagine a government having a corps of doctors it can use to kill anyone it doesn’t like and no questions asked! That’s POWER! Imagine the boon of a state monopoly in bending the minds of children, making them into anything it wishes, even animals just grazing in the fields!

Now, it must have been quite obvious to you, dear reader, for I rely on your intelligence, that the only reason Lombar Hisst remained insane was because the skilled and qualified Doctor Crobe was FORBIDDEN the use of his normal tools. Had he been able to properly treat Lombar Hisst as he proposed, all would have been well! And only Earth has that technology.

SEX: Oh, sex and sex and sex. Before Earth shed its divine light on this subject, who knew anything at all about sex? We are all so unenlightened, we are so dreadfully inhibited on the subject that it is a matter of weeping. Teenie was a master of it, a divine goddess, sent to us from Earth to lead us out of darkness. Today we could have innumerable varieties of sex if we only knew the whole story from Earth. We could have oral sex and anal sex rampant in every salon. We could have mass orgies. And we could have incest as a common way of life. They know how to do these things on Earth. Pratia is not imparting her divine wisdom: she is hoarding it because she is just a voyeur now. She is not even letting this enlightenment escape outside her own family, and I doubt very much, since she has a wandering wit, that she is teaching accurately. The place to get the REAL information is EARTH! It is a paradise of wallowing, rampant sex perversion! Wonderful!

CATAMITES: All this stupid fuss that was made about catamites is a coverup in itself.

I will have you know that when Doctor Crobe psychoanalyzed me, I was IMPRESSED! It was a stunning revelation to know why my life had been so tortured and so grim.

Never had I suspected before that I was merely oral erotic. Failure to know that has almost wrecked my life!

Just as soon as I get this book into print, I am going to hunt up Har and importune him or blackmail him or anything and force him to let me do it to him every day.

And, oh, I am certain there will be many changes in my life.

So I will owe my very sanity to Earth, the only place where such wisdom comes from!

So now that I have explained it, you can see the vast dimensions of this last coverup.

JETTERO HELLER is denying the whole Voltar Confederacy, the rest of the universe, if you please, of these colossal benefits!

But WHY he is doing it is the best of all.

Now you will recall what the learned Doctor Crobe said about two identities? Good!

Look at Heller!

He has TWO identities on Voltar alone.

On Earth he is known as Wister and maybe others!

So, hold your hat, we come to the most awful coverup of all:

JETTERO HELLER has MORE than TWO identities. That makes him a schizo-schizophrenic!

He is not only just the real villain of this piece.

HE IS INSANE!

THE WHOLE OF THE VOLTAR CONFEDERACY HAS BEEN GUIDED FOR NEARLY A CENTURY BY A MAN WHO IS COMPLETELY AND UTTERLY CRAZY!

Oh, let’s forget for the moment the imagined successes of the Confederacy during that period, since they are hardly to his credit. That Voltar, since he took over as Crown, has never lost a war is simply a tribute to the Army and Fleet, and wars have been few, remember that! And let’s not harp upon the fact that Voltar has never in her history been so prosperous internally: when everybody is employed and working cheerfully, you can’t help but have prosperity. His popularity doesn’t count, for it is based on the fact that he is never in the news and there are no investigative reporters around to tell people the TRUTH!

The multiple identities would prove it by itself that Jettero Heller is insane. But there is a REAL BIG PIECE OF EVIDENCE YOU MUST NOT OVERLOOK!

By submerging Earth, JETTERO HELLER HAS COST VOLTAR THE STAGGERING BENEFITS THAT WE COULD GET FROM EARTH!

I have listed them above. It should be plain to you, dear reader, that only a madman would underprivilege Voltar that way! A vicious, dirty trick to play on all of us!

SO!

That spot is blank on the invasion tables.

The planet Earth belongs there.

Those tables are SACRED!

The time for the invasion is still a few years in the future!

There is AMPLE time to mend this hideous, psychotic coverup engineered by a madman!

So I give you the vital battle cry:

RESTORE EARTH TO THE INVASION TABLES AND INVADE!

I will drive it home in the very best way I know. Read this and it will lift your heart, Voltarian, with a THRILL!

ODE TO EARTH
O Earth, O Earth, you luscious globe,
You beckoning, wine-fat treasure-trove,
You whet our hunger as you spin
And lure us with your wealth to win.
You saved my life with your PR.
I triumph now without a scar!
Your spy techniques are quite sublime
And can be used to undermine.
And who could think but to extol
Your psych and psych for mind control.
Who would refuse to cut their fug
If offered some divine Earth drug?
Who can deny that men will drool
For just one shot of good white mule?
And no musician would heed sneers
If he had Punk Rock to drown their ears.
And who, pray tell, would show aversion
To lovely butt and mouth perversion?
And Earth, you number in your riches
Sex that converts girls to (bleepches).
Did I say sex? Oh, you excel!
Sex is the thing you do so well!
Never has such concentration
Been leveled at self-gratification!
Nowhere else in the universe
Did anyone dream that sex came first!
We thank the Gods that you are weak
And believe so well when your leaders speak.
We praise to the Lords your internal squabbles.
We’ll just step in and grab your baubles!
It is so nice you can’t unite,
For you won’t offer any fight.
We are so thankful for your schisms
Brought on by all your social ISMS.
For all your wealth, you stand around
And eat suppression, finely ground.
Your leaders lead you to the slaughter.
You’re as easy to rape as a poor man’s daughter!
So we’ll throw you on your back
And insert us in your crack
And rape and gut until you squirm
And fill you full with our bullet sperm!
And when your dead carpet the streets,
We’ll roll right in with Rocking Beats
And loot you of your luscious hoard
Of the wisdom and lust that I’ve adored.
We’ll suck you dry!
Our thirst you’ll quench
With the dripping blood of every wench!
And when you are then but a husk,
To me, you’ll smell like lovely musk.
And to Voltar as slaves we’ll bring
Every virgin for a fling
And have here in our native land
All the things that made you grand!
Until this happens, I will rave
And beg and plead until you, slave,
Are captured there and put in chains
To let us pick your luscious brains.
And then at length establish here
Your culture as a proud veneer
Upon our peoples far and wide
So that their semen runs like tide
Up into your legs spread wide!
For with your culture, we will nurse
A whole enticing universe,
And from your womb, tomorrow springs
As you lie weeping with slashed-off wings.
So cower there, O Earth, we come!
And we will beat the funeral drum
For bodies slaughtered on your plain
That died in agony and pain.
Don’t plead, O Earth, for mercy now!
Your time has come and this I vow:
Each thing you know we will suck up
And toast your death with blood in cup!
Surrender? No, it is too late.
Just weep while soldiers fornicate
Upon your grave up there so high,
So soon to be our Voltar sky.
But, cheer up, Earth! When soul has flown
It will in Voltar find its home.
Your wisdom wise like graveyard flowers
Will come to us and will be ours!
So, Earth, just bare to us your breast
And let us suckle you in death!
VOLTAR! SEEK NOT MORE OF MY PERSUASION!
LAUNCH ON TIME THE EARTH INVASION!

THE (TRIUMPHANT) END!

(To be published immediately after The Triumphant End)

LETTER FROM MONTE PENNWELL
TO HIS PUBLISHERS

 

TO: BIOGRAPHICS PUBLISHING COMPANY
COMMERCIAL CITY
PLANET VOLTAR

 

GENTLEMEN (though I am certain there is not one in the shop!):

I have just received back for author’s approval the edited copy of my book.

I AM OUTRAGED!

I am so angry, I have never been so angry!

I hardly know how to start screaming at you!

You have changed the name of every single Lord in the book! I demand you use the real ones I used!

You ink-spattering dabblers and meddlers!

You have changed the US Army name that Jettero Heller used on Earth. It wasn’t Wister! I gave the REAL name!

And if this were not effrontery enough, YOU HAVE CHANGED MY NAME AS AUTHOR! “Monte Pennwell,” indeed! THAT IS NOT MY NAME! My family name is one of the most honorable and respected names in the whole Confederacy and I INSIST THAT YOU USE IT!

It is a wonder to me you didn’t change the names of New York and Turkey!

THIS IS VILLAINOUS!

I WILL HAVE YOUR HEADS!

YOU SIGNED A CONTRACT!

I know my rights!

If you DARE to dicker around with me, I will take you RIGHT TO COURT and sue you for a BILLION CREDITS!

This book deals with corruption in government. I don’t care if it attacks the leaders of the state! YOU IDIOTS! That’s why I’m writing it!

There has been a MONSTROUS COVERUP! This book is intended to EXPLODE it into view!

The people of Voltar are being VICTIMIZED! They are being denied possession of a planet RICH IN WISDOM!

They are being misled and manipulated by an archvillain WHO IS INSANE!

I must get the word to them so they can RISE AS ONE MAN and SCREAM THEIR FURY at this DECEPTION!

Earth is right there aching to be TORN TO PIECES!

We could FEAST upon it!

You LACKEYS!

You MINIONS of a VILE and CORRUPT MADMAN!

HOW DARE YOU LABEL THIS AS A WORK OF FICTION!

How dare you insert an introduction that REFUTES EVERYTHING!

How dare you infer that I am simply an IMAGINATIVE WRITER?

Oh, let me tell you, you’re in REAL TROUBLE!

I have PROOFS!

I have hundreds of pounds of COURT RECORDS! I have a WHOLE FORTRESS FULL OF DOCUMENTS! I have all my notes and copies of the logs and records on Manco. I have my recordings of all interviews! I even have the Gris strips of every move Heller ever made!

I am armed like an Army with FACTS!

They won’t dare touch me!

I am shouting out the spirit of a great crusade! Invade Earth at ALL COSTS! We cannot afford NOT TO!

For an instant, I will throttle my rage and demean myself by trying to appeal to your reason even though it is quite obvious you have none!

You must not let yourselves be browbeaten by the VILE Duke of Manco into foregoing the HUGE benefits of invading Earth.

Look what that planet has done for me already! It has made me into a MAN! As soon as this book is published, I will haunt the house of Har and do my Earth thing with him until I get completely well! I have been assured by a great Earth authority and psychiatrist that it will handle all my family problems. AND I MUST HANDLE THEM! THEY ARE UNBEARABLE!

They are plaguing me about jobs and even proposing the UNTHINKABLE: that I marry that AWFUL Lady Corsa in that AWFUL rustic Modon. I am going completely MAD!

This book must be a roaring success! DO NOT MEDDLE WITH IT! My very soul, nay, even my SANITY depends upon it utterly!

You are going to ABIDE by your contract.

You are going to PUBLISH THIS BOOK!

OR YOU WILL BE COMPLETELY RUINED!

IF YOU DON’T PUBLISH IT, I WILL SUE!

And VOLTAR HAS GOT TO INVADE EARTH OR I’LL TEAR THIS GOVERNMENT APART WITH WHAT I KNOW!

That’s what you are up against!

BEWARE!

I suppose you are going to threaten me by saying you will publish this letter. YOU ARE TOO SNIVELLING A PACK OF COWARDS TO STAND UP. I DARE YOU TO PUBLISH IT!

DOWN WITH TYRANNY!

DOWN WITH DENYING US THE GOODIES OF EARTH!

And DOWN WITH YOU AND YOUR DEVIL MASTER, HELLER!

I’ve got to stop writing because this paper will CHAR from the intensity of my RAGE!

I am sending the manuscript back to you. I am NOT going to work for DAYS and DAYS reverting these names to the real ones. I am already worn out sweating for FREEDOM FROM DENYING US EARTH!

(Bleep) you!
THE AUTHOR!

Biographics Publishing Company
Commercial City
Planet Voltar

My dear Monte Pennwell:

We have, as of this date, received back the manuscript of the book.

We regret to inform you that due to pressure of work in our editing department, the changes we made will have to remain changed, just the way we changed them.

It was puzzling to us why you wished to defame your own immediate ancestors and relations, some of whom were on the Grand Council at that time, so we have also omitted the list of those Lords from the text without changing them.

You will be pleased to know that our company is very prosperous and influential now and that some changes have been made in our management. Several members of your family took a sudden interest in publishing and pooled their petty cash and bought the company. The editors you were dealing with originally, and to whom you are objecting so strongly, are no longer with us. So we can look forward to highly amiable relations, I am sure.

We do regret the necessity to give you the pen name Monte Pennwell as author, but if you will read the small print of the contract you signed, it not only reserves to the publisher the right to make any editorial changes, it also states he can change the names of the characters and that he alone determines what cognomen is used for the author. You should have read the contract more carefully.

However, we will publish, at the end of the book, your letter, so the reader will know that changes were made. This should reassure you.

Also, you should be pleased to know that the book WILL be published, but more of that later.

Now, you have raised the question concerning whether this book should be published as fact or fiction. And we are very pleased to be able to handle this point.

There is, however, a difficulty. You speak of proofs. Before embarking upon a fact book, one normally retains a verifier and so we did, a MOST reliable firm. We made every effort to support your allegations. And we wish to condense his report for you:

DRUGS ON TAYL FARM: Recent accidental brush fire swept over area and no crops exist. Marijuana farming there unverifiable.

MAN IN TAYL ESTATE ATTIC: King’s Own Physician gave verifier immediate access there to inspect. The place was being repainted. No evidence of any prisoner there.

WITNESSES: Pratia Tayl, grandchildren and great-grandchildren recently left, with staff, for some property Tayl seems to have owned on the Southern Continent. The place is deep in the jungle and inaccessible to process or subpoena servers or court officers. The King’s Own Physician stated it was just a usual annual vacation. But these and other witnesses that might come up in litigation do not seem to be available. Both the Duchess of Manco and Hightee Heller slammed off their viewer-phones quite angrily when the verifier mentioned your name and I do not think they would be willing to furnish any proofs.

GRIS RECORDS: The verifier called at the Royal prison and found they have a witnessed statement there to the effect that every scrap of material related to the confession of Soltan Gris and any trial have been properly destroyed. The person witnessing it was a man named “Hound,” but we have no reason to think this is your valet as the name is common amongst yellow-men. The only confession copy existing is the one you dictated. No proof.

SOLTAN GRIS: He is not alive, as you state. There is a body hanging to rot at the Royal prison. It had recently been freshly retarred: they do this to slow decay. However, from the tar, the verifier was able to get fingerprints and the body is indeed that of Soltan Gris. The warder said these bodies last for a long time so there is no telling exactly when he was executed and the justiciary seems to have misplaced the record of that.

CROBE AND HISST: Superintendent Neht at the Confederacy Asylum was extremely helpful to the verifier. He said there were no political prisoners there. There is no trace of a Hisst or a Crobe in their prison records. The verifier was shown a place on a point such as you describe, but he said the charred place there was just where they burned trash.

YOUR OWN NOTES: You allege to have made copies of logs, etc., on Manco and stated that you had voice recordings of interviews. Your driver, Shafter, the one who is on probation for drunk driving, was interviewed. He remembers having a packet as part of the original manuscript but he said that when he was bringing it to us there was a sudden squall and it fell out of the air-truck into the Western Ocean. He could not swear to what was in it.

RELAX ISLAND: Sons of some local publishers were interrogated concerning this: they became very angry with the verifier and would not substantiate that the island ever existed.

SPITEOS AND THE APPARATUS: The Lady Corsa was quite helpful. The old pile of black rocks out in the Great Desert is indeed still there. You apparently gave it to her and she showed the verifier all around: they have been handling soil erosion. She even defended you, saying it was not really your fault you got strange ideas and that all you needed was more fresh air, exercise and a firm hand. She laughed quite amusedly at the idea of the place being full of documents. She explained the recent heavy truck tracks as having been made by a shipment of fertilizer, which, I think you will agree, was very quick-witted of her in that you could easily have been arrested for failing to report such a discovery of government documents.

In short, there is no coverup. There couldn’t have been, you see, because there is no evidence of anything remaining to have been covered up.

So, of course, your book only qualifies as a work of fiction and I am sure that you will be happy now on that point.

Frankly, I am certain the former management of this company expected an entirely different kind of manuscript from you. We won’t nuance with words and say that you deliberately misrepresented the book beforehand so that you could get a binding contract, but when they were dismissed they certainly seemed to be of that opinion. Vociferously so.

You see, as some experts on publishing advised them, very little is publicly known about the Duke of Manco, aside from the fact that everything goes smoothly when he is around. The public only knows that when Mortiiy the Brilliant retired to Calabar sixty years ago and his son, Prince Wully, ascended the throne, Wully was promptly dubbed “Wully the Wise” because he never did a thing without consulting the Duke of Manco first.

This great man won’t even give out data to encyclopedias and they have to rely on what they know of his youth as Jettero Heller.

So such a work as the “Life and Times of the Duke of Manco” (which, I may remind you, is what you told everyone you were writing) would have sold like sparklewater in the desert. It quite probably would have brought you the fame and fortune for which you seem to thirst.

This absolute rot about being an investigative reporter is clogging your wits, if we might loosen our own pen for a moment. It is not that you have not achieved something: the death of three men is not nothing. It is a very good thing for you that two were insane and the third a notorious traitor: Otherwise you would, as a reward for your “PR study,” be doing time in prison for willfully and knowingly hounding them to their deaths, contrary to the Anti-Harassment and Inviolability of Personal Privacy statutes introduced in the last century. We could forget driving an eccentric old lady and her offspring into exile and you may, of course, be fatuous enough to believe that the betrayal of the Duchess of Manco and the almost deified Hightee Heller is something you can live down, but we believe this sudden assimilation of “PR technology” and your inexplicable use of such debased maliciousness could lead to self-harm and you should be warned to abandon it for your own good.

Do not, whatever you may be thinking or supposing, blame the Duke of Manco for anything you might think is going on. Surprisingly, he feels sorry for you.

We showed him this manuscript and he read it in his rapid fashion and then simply sighed and said, “The poor fellow. It got to him.”

It was a very cryptic statement and we asked him his advice concerning the publishing plan. But he merely chuckled and said, “Go ahead. It might wake them up.” An amazing man!

Now let us take up this matter of the contract: It is true that one existed, duly signed, and it is valid. But talking of a billion-credit suit is nonsense. In the first place, the sum is preposterous and never has been heard of in court annals. In the second place, there has not been, on the part of the publisher, any violation of it.

And here is the good news you have been waiting for. The company is going to publish the book, and every clause of this contract—which you should have read—will be honored. So you can cheer up at this point.

Now, the contract undertakes to publish this book by you but it does NOT say where or when.

We consulted various legal experts but they could come up with no solution. It was left to Lord Bis, a distant cousin of yours, by the way, and who heard of it while chatting with the Royal Historian, another member of your family.

Lord Bis looked the project over—read the manuscript in fact—and came up with a most admirable solution, as I know you will agree. From his position as Chairman of the Intelligence Committee, he noted that the invasion of Earth, a blank slot on the invasion tables, would have been due to come up just a few years hence.

This brilliant man told us that all we had to do was hold the publication until that unutilized invasion date had fully and irrevocably passed and could not possibly be returned to: it would then be too distant in the past.

When that occurred, Lord Bis advised, we could send the book with one of the usual survey parties to the planet Earth and, through the auspices of publishing connections there, publish the book solely and only on the planet Earth. And there was no need, in meeting the terms of the contract, to publish it on Voltar at all!

He commented that the population there would regard it just as a work of fiction and that it would not cause them to strengthen their defenses as, he says, the planet is “quite muddly,” as he put it.

The brilliance of the solution becomes quite manifest when you realize, as he pointed out, that there is no Code break involved: The planet Earth does not exist, so it is outside the Space Code regulations!

So your book is going to be published after all. I know you will think that is wonderful. And there is no slightest tinge of contract breakage. Your publishers are taking care of you straight down the line.

We are sorry that we have no slightest idea of how you can be paid royalties. And this is too bad. For we understand that your mother went absolutely livid when she read what Crobe said about her and that you intended to become a fairy or a catamite and she cut off your allowance, dismissed your valet and driver for being so lax and sold all your vehicles.

So it is a very good thing that you have such tender and endearing friends as old Doctor Prahd Bittlestiffender. It was he who informed us, when we asked, that His Majesty had issued a Royal order about you. It is not often that a young, aspiring bridegroom is the subject of a wedding order.

I do wish to congratulate you on your forthcoming marriage to the Lady Corsa. You are very lucky that it will be by Royal command since it saves the tedium of waiting.

I understand that the Lady Corsa’s brother and two of his hunting companions have come over from Modon in their family space yacht with some lepertige nets to make sure you get safely to the wedding and safely back to Modon, which I thought was very courteous of them and a true brother-in-lawly gesture. As a matter of fact, as you receive this letter, you are probably already in their custody.

Your bride is a fine, strong woman, very patriotic and willing to do anything for her country and to suffer certain deficiencies for the sake of raising the social status and connections of her family by allying it to ours. A true powerhouse of a woman! So I am certain she will treat you very well, such as giving you money to buy shoes for walking in the mountains, an exercise of which she is extremely fond. It will give you lots of time to think.

And, who knows, in fifty years, you might even get back to Voltar from Modon for a visit, although I would advise, even then, a disguise.

So we are all agreed, then? Fine. I will see you at your wedding tomorrow.

Your Great Uncle
Cuht
New Managing Director
Biographics Publishing Company

THE TRUE AND FINAL END OF MISSION EARTH