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 Wrectokgy. 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-ht 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 good-bye 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!"
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 th
ousand 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.
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 investiptive 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 MANGO!
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 High-tee 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 rectang box but the rest of the base was blue and totally transparent. Taped to the bottom of that base and partial. 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, •ransparent and sticky. I had to use my fingernail.
AHA! I HAD THE PAPER!
The edge of the platform, when I released it, hit the able with a thump. The ring bepn 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:±c edge and yanked it.
IT PLAYED LOUDER!
The ring went faster! The paper sleeves flew off the figurines. They were care dancers! They were turning in a circle now and dancing to r 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.
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 naive 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), U.S. Army Reserve Address: 5606 Central Park West Charge to; Grabbe-Manhattan Bank c/o Israel Epstein III President 1 Antique Glass Animated Dancer Music Box 18th Century, Venetian $21,000.00 Note: No Credit Card Necessary And the date is ONLY THREE WEEKS AGO!
ANOTHER MONSTROUS COVER-UP!
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 May-sabongo 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 U.S. 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 COVER-UP! xxii And what is this last, biggest cover-up? 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 VOL-TAR 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 cover-up 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 cover-up. 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 cover-up 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.
Mission: Earth Doomed Planet Page 23