“Don’t worry,” I said, “we’ll soon be on our way!”
Stabb’s men were scrambling to get Tug One ready to lift off.
I hobbled back toward the tunnel.
A black-uniformed assassin pilot pointed his red-gloved finger at the tug. “You’re going to take off in that?”
It was an unnecessary question. The Antimancos were swarming over it.
“Just remember this,” said the assassin pilot, pointing at the two flying cannons on the other side of the hangar, “if you try to leave this planet, we will blow you out of the universe. Those are our orders. They have not been changed. The locational bugs are in place on your ship and we will be right behind you.”
“Wait,” I said, staring at the deadly assassin ships, “you could get some nutty idea we’re trying to evade you when we aren’t. You take it easy with those things.”
“You are not our senior,” said the assassin pilot. “You just make sure you don’t do anything that might give us ‘nutty ideas.’ Your tug is completely unarmed. Just one shot from either one of our ships and you’re finished. We haven’t had a kill in months and we’re hungry.”
He went off to alert the other three pilots and get ready to fly.
Faht Bey was barring my way. “What are you up to now?”
“I’m just carrying out orders,” I said.
Faht Bey looked at the assassin ships. All four of the pilots were now in conference below them. “If they have reason to finish you off, what do I do with Forrest Closure? You can’t keep a representative from Grabbe-Manhattan here forever.”
“Don’t you dare let him go until I return!” I said in sudden alarm. “I’ve got this all solved now, so don’t mess it up.”
“YOU are telling ME not to mess things up?” he said. “Officer Gris, if I had the slightest excuse I’d convene an officers’ conference on you this instant.”
“You would be sorry,” I said. “I am of vast service to this base. Just a short while ago I removed the Crown inspector that was going to execute every one of you!”
Faht Bey walked off.
I went to my room. Gods, my feet were hurting. Maybe I was developing gangrene. Or possibly lockjaw. I felt my jaws experimentally. No, they hadn’t locked yet.
I got into the black ski suit.
Musef and Torgut were at the door. “Any orders?” said Musef.
Suddenly I realized I had good news for them. “Remember the DEA man that you had a fight with last fall?” I said. “He’s dead.”
They beamed like rising moons. They grabbed each other and began to do a circular dance, the combined seven hundred pounds of them shaking the floor. Their whoops were earsplitting.
Utanc came to the door to see what the noise was. Alarmed, she saw I was buckling on my guns.
She sped forward to me and threw her arms about my neck. “O Master, you are going into danger!”
“It’s nothing,” I said.
She kissed me tenderly. “O Master, I would die if anything happened to you. Come back safe!”
I was touched.
Eventually my room cleared of people. I had one further problem. Should I kill the Countess Krak now or when I came back?
I had a little time. I had two poison-gas grenades. All I had to do was walk outside and up the hill to the vent hole hidden behind a rock, drop in one or both of those grenades and that would be that.
There was only one thing really wrong with it. The thought of walking on these feet over the rough terrain was more than I could measure up to.
I went in and looked at her viewer. It had no image on it. She must have lost track of time in that place and was asleep.
And then I was seized with an uneasiness. Suppose, while I was gone, she would get out: I’d come back to the base and find her waiting there, ready to stomp me into the pavement.
I picked up a poison-gas grenade. I hobbled out into the yard. My feet were terribly bad. I did not think I could make it up the hill.
Ahmed was sitting in a car talking to Ters. I beckoned and Ahmed came over.
“Listen, Ahmed,” I said. “There’s a gray rock up on the hill there. Just behind it you will find a hole. A badger made it and his noise is interrupting my sleep. Here’s a gas grenade. You pull the pin and drop it in. Will you do that for me?”
“Of course,” he said. He took it and raced off.
I went out further into the yard where I could watch.
Ahmed went out on the highway and trotted up the hill. He went to the gray rock and pointed, looking down at me in the yard. I nodded.
I saw him pull the pin.
He reached over and dropped the poison-gas grenade in the hole and darted away.
There was an immediate explosion. White vapor rose into the air.
Ahmed was coming back down.
“Thank you,” I said fervently.
I went back into my secret room.
Her viewer was blank.
I waited for a thrill of exultation.
It didn’t come.
I said aloud, loudly, “COUNTESS KRAK, YOU’RE DEAD!”
I threw the viewer across the room. It broke. I was finished with it at last. I looked at the shards of glass that now spattered the floor. I went over and stamped on the speaker.
It hurt my foot.
Rage shook me. Even in death she was able to injure me!
I stamped harder.
It hurt more.
I jumped on it with both feet!
I found that I had begun to scream.
That wouldn’t do. I was the winner, wasn’t I?
I found that I was coughing and my throat burned. That wouldn’t do either. SHE was the one who had been gassed, not me!
Carefully, I steadied myself down. I must do something to get my mind off it.
I had other things to think about anyway. She was finished!
I began making further plans. We would pick up the diamonds and other things in Connecticut. Then we would flash down to Ochokeechokee, Florida, and bomb the spores plant. Then we would move to Detroit and wipe out Chryster. And after that we’d blow the Empire State Building sky-high.
Then I would contact Peeksnoop at National Security Agency and get connected to Bury or Rockecenter, tell them the fuel man and all his works were no longer a menace to them and be back in their good graces. And finally I could tell Black Jowl to tear the mortgage up.
I would then go home to glory and reign supreme as the Chief of the Apparatus.
Feeling steadier, I went down to the hangar magazine to collect weapons and explosives. I planned that my last days on Earth would end with a big BANG!
About the Author
L. Ron Hubbard’s remarkable writing career spanned more than half-a-century of intense literary achievement and creative influence.
And though he was first and foremost a writer, his life experiences and travels in all corners of the globe were wide and diverse. His insatiable curiosity and personal belief that one should live life as a professional led to a lifetime of extraordinary accomplishment. He was also an explorer, ethnologist, mariner and pilot, filmmaker and photographer, philosopher and educator, composer and musician.
Growing up in the still-rugged frontier country of Montana, he broke his first bronc and became the blood brother of a Blackfeet Indian medicine man by age six. In 1927, when he was 16, he traveled to a still remote Asia. The following year, to further satisfy his thirst for adventure and augment his growing knowledge of other cultures, he left school and returned to the Orient. On this trip, he worked as a supercargo and helmsman aboard a coastal trader which plied the seas between Japan and Java. He came to know old Shanghai, Beijing and the Western Hills at a time when few Westerners could enter China. He traveled more than a quarter of a million miles by sea and land while still a teenager and before the advent of commercial aviation as we know it.
He returned to the United States in the autumn of 1929 to complete his formal education. He entered George Wa
shington University in Washington, DC, where he studied engineering and took one of the earliest courses in atomic and molecular physics. In addition to his studies, he was the president of the Engineering Society and Flying Club, and wrote articles, stories and plays for the university newspaper. During the same period he also barnstormed across the American mid-West and was a national correspondent and photographer for the Sportsman Pilot magazine, the most distinguished aviation publication of its day.
Returning to his classroom of the world in 1932, he led two separate expeditions, the Caribbean Motion Picture Expedition; sailing on one of the last of America’s four-masted commercial ships, and the second, a mineralogical survey of Puerto Rico. His exploits earned him membership in the renowned Explorers Club and he subsequently carried their coveted flag on two more voyages of exploration and discovery. As a master mariner licensed to operate ships in any ocean, his lifelong love of the sea was reflected in the many ships he captained and the skill of the crews he trained. He also served with distinction as a U.S. naval officer during the Second World War.
All of this—and much more—found its way, into his writing and gave his stories a compelling sense of authenticity that has appealed to readers throughout the world. It started in 1934 with the publication of “The Green God” in Thrilling Adventure magazine, a story about an American naval intelligence officer caught up in the mystery and intrigues of pre-communist China. With his extensive knowledge of the world and its people and his ability to write in any style and genre, he rapidly achieved prominence as a writer of action adventure, western, mystery and suspense. Such was the respect of his fellow writers that he was only 25 when elected president of the New York Chapter of the American Fiction Guild.
In addition to his career as a leading writer of fiction, he worked as a successful screenwriter in Hollywood where he wrote the original story and script for Columbia’s 1937 hit serial, “The Secret of Treasure Island.” His work on numerous films for Columbia, Universal and other major studios involved writing, providing story lines and serving as a script consultant.
In 1938, he was approached by the venerable New York publishing house of Street and Smith, the publishers of Astounding Science Fiction. Wanting to capitalize on the proven reader appeal of the
L. Ron Hubbard byline to capture more readers for this emerging genre, they essentially offered to buy all the science fiction he wrote. When he protested that he did not write about machines and machinery but that he wrote about people, they told him that was exactly what was wanted. The rest is history.
The impact and influence that his novels and stories had on the fields of science fiction, fantasy and horror virtually amounted to the changing of a genre. It is the compelling human element that he originally brought to this new genre that remains today the basis of its growing international popularity.
L. Ron Hubbard consistently enabled readers to peer into the minds and emotions of characters in a way that sharply heightened the reading experience without slowing the pace of the story, a level of writing rarely achieved.
Among the most celebrated examples of this are three stories he published in a single, phenomenally creative year (1940)—Final Blackout and its grimly possible future world of unremitting war and ultimate courage which Robert Heinlein called “as perfect a piece of science fiction as has ever been written”; the ingenious fantasy-adventure, Typewriter in the Sky described by Clive Cussler as “written in the great style adventure should be written in”; and the prototype novel of clutching psychological suspense and horror in the midst of ordinary, everyday life, Fear, studied by writers from Stephen King to Ray Bradbury.
It was Mr. Hubbard’s trendsetting work in the speculative fiction field from 1938 to 1950, particularly, that not only helped to expand the scope and imaginative boundaries of science fiction and fantasy but indelibly established him as one of the founders of what continues to be regarded as the genre’s Golden Age.
Widely honored—recipient of Italy’s Tetradramma D’Oro Award and a special Gutenberg Award, among other significant literary honors—Battlefield Earth has sold more than 6,000,000 copies in 23 languages and is the biggest single-volume science fiction novel in the history of the genre at 1050 pages. It was ranked number three out of the 100 best English language novels of the twentieth century in the Random House Modern Library Reader’s Poll.
The Mission Earth dekalogy has been equally acclaimed, winning the Cosmos 2000 Award from French readers and the coveted Nova-Science Fiction Award from Italy’s National Committee for Science Fiction and Fantasy. The dekalogy has sold more than seven million copies in 6 languages, and each of its 10 volumes became New York Times and international bestsellers as they were released.
The first of L. Ron Hubbard’s original screenplays Ai! Pedrito! When Intelligence Goes Wrong, novelized by author Kevin J. Anderson, was released in 1998 and immediately appeared as a New York Times bestseller. This was followed in 1999 with the publication of A Very Strange Trip, an original L. Ron Hubbard story of time-traveling adventure, novelized by Dave Wolverton, that also became a New York Times bestseller directly following its release.
His literary output ultimately encompassed more than 250 published novels, novelettes, short stories and screenplays in every major genre.
For more information on L. Ron Hubbard and his many acclaimed works of fiction visit www.galaxypress.com.
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