Mission: Earth Death Quest

by Ron L. Hubbard

  The Countess Krak was having better luck. Izzy had caught her with a broom in her hand and, a bit reverently, had taken it away from her and steered her into the "Etruscan Salon" where she was faced with a horde of domestics from which to choose her staff. Izzy explained the need of three gardeners, a butler, a chef, a second cook, two housemen, a chambermaid, two security men and, last but not least, a lady's maid for herself. He apologized that he could not presume to choose her staff.

  So she was involved with picking them out, only to find that they had already been screened, that there were just exactly twelve people who just exactly fitted the posts named. So she "chose" them and Izzy instantly handed the broom over to a houseman and they all promptly went to work under the eagle eye of the butler.

  I still watched to see if they would pick up a paper.

  The Countess was driven over to New Jersey to do some training of the son.

  Heller was trying to put his "study," or den, to rights and stow his things.

  The only other thing that happened was that his tailor arrived to measure him for his uniforms. It appeared that there would be a regimental ball in a couple of days and Heller, though an ROTC member, seemed to have neglected to get any uniforms.

  Bang-Bang was on the scene, giving the tailor some tips. It seemed that an officer of the ROTC-Wister was a second lieutenant, being a senior-and an officer of the U. S. Army wore the same uniforms except for a shoulder patch which was green with a red bar, a gold torch and had ARMY ROTC letters on it in white.

  "I haven't rubbed my brains raw and marched my legs to nubs to have you coming out looking like an Army bum," Bang-Bang explained, and proceeded to give the tailor the subtle tips that somehow converted the uniform, without changing its colors, slightly in the direction of a "self-respecting Marines officer."

  Well, I thought, they are busy today. Maybe they will look at the papers tomorrow.

  Tomorrow came. Sure enough, Madison had more headlines.

  WHIZ KID PARDONED

  GOVERNOR ANSWERS NATION'S PRAYERS

  It was announced tonight to cheering throngs that Wister, the Whiz Kid, has been pardoned unconditionally by the governor of New Jersey.

  The glad news was celebrated by torchlight parades. (See photos, center spread.)

  "It is not that I yielded solely to the pressures

  of the WASP Purity League," the governor said. "It is obvious that the young man has reformed and is, in his own way, a saint. Besides, Atlantic City was not given to Nevada but has been returned to the territorial jurisdiction of New Jersey by its new owner, the Crown Prince of Saudi femen, in a special treaty agreeing to let New Jersey tax collectors in, providing they also promise to use their bribes in gambling."

  Actually, I didn't much care for the story. A lot of the papers sort of went overboard on how the Whiz Kid was merely the victim of environmental underprivilege-ment and was at heart a sterling example of moral probity. Several mentioned the redeeming factor that not a single shadow of sexual immorality blotted his past.

  I watched the viewers anxiously to see if there was any reaction to this. I even sat up the whole evening, glued to the screens, hoping that in some unguarded moment somebody would mention that Heller had been pardoned.

  They were at the regimental ball. It was a very colorful affair, held beneath the draping flags of the New York Regiment Armory. A military band was trying to play hot pop.

  Heller was resplendent in his uniform. Nobody seemed to know him, which was not strange as this was the first contact he had ever had personally with the ROTC. They probably thought he was some ROTC second lieutenant from Boston, as one officer asked him how things were, up that way.

  The Countess Krak was resplendent in a white silvery evening gown that must have cost me ten thousand bucks, (bleep) her. The men she was dancing with seemed absolutely overwhelmed, gazing at her, the idiots. The women were more sensible: they had daggers in their eyes.

  Colonel Tanc, whom I eagerly hoped would instantly arrest her or do something else to bring her down, merely bowed, his face quite red, a model of proper de­corum.

  I was quite put out by the affair. Those uniformed popinjays and the empty-headed belles that swarmed around the regimental ballroom, including their senior officers, were just too plain stupid to realize they had a pair of extraterrestrials dancing in their midst. How were things going in Boston, indeed! How were things going on Voltar was more like it. Had Lombar asserted Grand Council control as yet? Did I have my orders to kill them?

  They didn't mention a single word about the pardon!

  The next morning Madison again had his front page. He was really batting high!

  WHIZ KID HONORED BY WASP PURITY LEAGUE

  HIGH APPOINTMENT

  GIVEN AT PARDON

  CELEBRATION BANQUET

  At a fund-raising dinner last night, the age-old tradition of the WASP Purity League was broken unanimously.

  An outlaw, Wister, the Whiz Kid, guest of honor, was appointed to high-official rank.

  In the appointment speech, the President of the WASP Purity League, Agatha Prim, said, "It is my privilege to appoint Gerry Wister VICE-President in Charge of Intolerance. We have examined this from every side and can find no slightest hint of real misconduct in his past. He is an unstained knight who has never stooped to gratify gross sexual appetites. His theft of Atlantic City can be looked upon as a gesture of protest against vice and gambling and evil."

  The dinner, attended by everyone that mattered in the Four Hundred, raised funds for the Campaign for Suppression of Puerto Ricans, whose sexual licentiousness has long been a target of the League.

  The Whiz Kid, in accepting the appointment, said, "I have never raised so much as a finger in lust in my whole life. I shall immediately use my influence to prohibit the Simmons Mattress Company from making double beds."

  I held my breath. While Heller and the Countess had been carousing at the regimental ball, did they at all suspect what was going on in the real world of the media?

  I clamped on to the viewers. The Countess and Hel­ler were having a leisurely breakfast in the spring sun on the garden terrace of the penthouse. The butler appeared to serve Heller more Bavarian Mocha Mint. There was a newspaper on the tray!

  The Countess sighed. "I have to go over to New Jersey apin today. I have to wash my hair every time I go over there to get the smell of pigs out."

  "How's it going?" said Heller, sipping his mocha.

  "Well, one thing worries me a bit. Most of the time Twoey is all right but there's some kind of viciousness hidden in his makeup that I can only suppose must be hereditary."

  "Such as?"

  "When people get in his way, he begins to mutter that human beings ought to be sent to the slaughter pens."

  "Hey, that's too like the Rockecenter family," said Heller. "It might be dangerous to leave him in charge of the planet."

  "Well, there's one saving grace, darling. He thinks the sun rises and sets on his brother, Jet. He'll do anything you say."

  "Wait," Heller said. "I know he seems to like me but I didn't think it went that far."

  "Oh, yes. You're very charming, you know. And also, strangely enough, ever since he met Izzy, Twoey is absolutely terrified of doing something that Izzy does not like."

  "Whoa," said Heller. "Much as I admire him, this is the first time I ever heard of anything being terrified of Izzy Epstein."

  Very primly, the Countess said, "Well, it's a fact!"

  Heller looked at her suspiciously. "Dear, are you sure you aren't tampering with Twoey's basic personality?"

  "Me, Jettero?" she said.

  Oh, she might fool Heller. She might blind the rest of the world with her innocent face and extreme beauty. But she didn't fool me. I saw through her plot at once!

  She was preparing a puppet emperor for Earth just so she could go home and get married! Women will stoop to anything to gain their foul and despicable ends. She was even putting up with pig aroma just
to eventually get her own way!

  The newspaper lay neglected when they left the table. I knew Madison. It was really just as well that they did not suspect the trap he must be baiting.

  The very next day, I could not buy all the papers. My money was running out. And it was a shame not to have every single front page, New York and across the world. For that sterling, priceless Madison, doing anything to retain his front page, as I knew he eventually would, sprung his trap.

  The story was absolutely gorgeous!

  Headlines! Big ones! Glaring!

  WHIZ KID NAMED IN PATERNITY SUIT

  FARMER'S DAUGHTER SUES FOR $2 BILLION!

  Attorneys Dingaling, Chase and Ambo today filed a two-billion-dollar suit against Wister, the Whiz Kid, on behalf of Maizie Spread of Corn-hole, Kansas, stating paternity out of wedlock had been malfeased.

  Alleging that the notorious outlaw continuously rolled her in the hay while hiding out on her father's farm, to which he came a year ago, the innocent girl said, sobbing, in a press conference

  attended by all media, "I could not resist his wiles. In my innocence I did not understand that he was not really trying to protect my milk-white complexion from the sun by lying on me. I didn't get knocked up for five months but now, much to my embarrassment, I'm all swole up with child."

  The Whiz Kid could not be reached for com­ment. His attorneys, Boggle, Gouge and Hound, said that they were not available for comment.

  Rumor is rife that the Whiz Kid has fled to Canada, a fact regarded by legal experts as tacit acknowledgment of guilt.

  Oh, what a story! And the other papers, particularly the sexier ones, went into wild orgies of description of what had happened. One even pictured the Whiz Kid as dancing in the moonlight with rabbits all around and shouting to them, "Come, come! Let me protect you from the sun! With fifty strokes!"

  SCANDAL!

  The trap was sprung!

  Chapter 7

  Eagerly I hung on to my viewers to witness the inevitable blowup. The Countess Krak was prone to jealousy. One glimpse of that paternity story would blow the lid off. She might simply leave him!

  I watched while they breakfasted. I watched while the butler laid the paper on the table. I watched while they got up and were helped into their coats. I saw them leave their penthouse condo without ever a backward glance toward that paper.

  Oh, well. Sometimes the radio was played in the Rolls Royce Silver Spirit. And this morning, news bulletins about the suit were coming on every fifteen minutes: Madison was doing a masterly job of coverage.

  But this morning, the Countess Krak told Bang-Bang, who was riding in the front seat while she and Hel­ler rode in back, to put "a good tape cassette on" and he, of course, left to his own choice, put on the Italian opera Rigoletto, where everybody kills everybody and even drowns them in a sack still singing. It wasn't the kind of blood I wanted.

  At the office, Heller sat down at his big white desk and put in a call to Florida. Right in front of him, folded, lay the morning papers.

  The Countess Krak sat down on the arm of an interview chair, watching him patiently. Right in her line of view were those fatal newspapers, folded up but available.

  Heller apparently had a lease line to Ochokeechokee and he went into a lot of chatter about some regulation they'd come up against down there about the allowable heights of stacks in swamps. It seemed that a "propulsion stack" had to be at least five hundred feet high to get "im­pulsion."

  "They've got to blow rings," he said. "Big green rings of spores. If they are not propelled high enough, they won't reach the stratospheric winds. One goes every minute and if the stacks are any shorter, the perfection of the ring will foul and the resultant tumble will

  impede successive firings. They have to be five hundred feet tall."

  The contractor at the other end was very unhappy with Florida regulations but said that was what they said.

  "They sell sunshine down there," said Heller. "With all the soot and gases in the atmosphere, it's getting pretty dim. Put some pressure on them. Make them see that it's good sense to clean up the world's air."

  "Good sense has nothing to do with it," said the con­tractor. "It's just what's written in the little books the Florida State Inspectors carry. But I'll tell you what I will do: I'll send a lawyer to Tallahassee to talk to the governor. Maybe we can get a waiver on the regulation."

  Heller had to be satisfied with that. He clicked off and looked up. He saw the Countess was still sitting there. He said, "Isn't your class ready?"

  "Yes, dear," she said. "All fifty of them, some of them the country's best electronic engineers. You didn't give me the notes you made last night."

  "Oh, I'm sorry," said Heller. He reached right across the newspapers to an attache case, opened it and brought out a sheaf of notes. He handed them to her.

  She glanced at them and then gave him a kiss and walked out the door.

  She went down the hall and halted at a sign which said:

  Power, Power, Power, Inc.

  She straightened her jacket, opened the door and walked in.

  The large office had been converted to a temporary classroom. It was filled with men of various ages, ranged

  in school chairs. They all rose respectfully. The Countess Krak walked to the platform and blackboard.

  An elderly man had been addressing them. But now he surrendered the platform, saying to the group, "I will now turn the class over to Miss Krackle."

  The men all applauded politely.

  The Countess put down the sheaf of notes on a table. "Gentlemen," she said, "you have been employed as engineers for Power, Power, Power, Incorporated. I am privileged to be able to address some of the top electronic and power engineers of the planet. Some of you have been selected for your abilities in foreign languages as well.

  "Far be it from me to tell you, who are experts in the field, how to do your jobs. I am solely here to relay to you certain technology, that with which you will work."

  She looked at her notes. "The beaming of power from central collection stations to distribution units and then to consumption absorbers by microwave accumulators and reflectors may be, in some respects, new to you."

  She turned to the board, chalk in hand. "If we regard power as a stream of water which yet can be beamed and focused, we can see that a central collection station in a country may receive the power from a source and then deflect and focus it to subreceivers which, in turn, can focus it upon consumption units." She began to draw a pattern upon the blackboard, giving flow lines.

  It came to me with a shock that she, using Heller's notes, was laying out a standard planetary power-collec-tion-and-distribution system using microwaves.

  That the Countess Krak would be lecturing so learnedly was not much of a surprise for she was simply relaying material.

  What got to me was that here was a whole new insidious plot I had not even been aware of. I did not ask myself what they were going to use as a power source, although that was a mystery. All I knew was that if she was genning experts in on microwave-relay technology of power, Rockecenter's empire might well be in the soup! Some of his billions depended upon burning fossil fuel-oil and coal-locally and inefficiently to furnish power expensively and profitably to industries and homes. So what if, as the environmentalists said, Rocke-center practices were wrecking the atmosphere? The environmentalists were missing the whole point! The action was PROFITABLE and that was everything!

  The Countess Krak was furthering an insidious plot to destroy Octopus! And that plot was very far advanced, even to the point of hiring and training engineers to build and install equipment!

  That wasn't chalk she was holding as she copied Heller's drawings on the blackboard. That was a dagger aimed straight at the heart of Rockecenter and, through him, at Lombar Hisst! If Rockecenter's grip on the planet relaxed, we might no longer be able to export drug ammunition to Voltar!

  (Bleep) her!

  This had to be stopped!

/>   I looked back at Heller's viewer. He was just sitting at his desk drawing up more notes, translating Voltar technology into Earth terms.

  There lay the newspapers with the fatal story, completely neglected!

  After half an hour, the Countess Krak came back into his office. I was willing her, straining my neck muscles, to get her to pick up that newspaper.

  Heller looked up. "Did it go well?"

  "Of course, dear," she said. "Your notes covered all their questions. I've turned the class over to Professor Gen. I think it will take them a month or two of class-work to review all their own texts and reconcile the systems. They have to shed some preconceptions, but they'll make it."

  "Well, I'm sure you can take care of that," said Hel­ler. "It's just a matter of their shedding a few prejudices about energy."

  The Countess reached across the desk to the newspaper! She picked it up! I really held my breath.

  She went over to the bar and got a can. She put it in an opener.

  She spread the newspaper on the bar. She dumped the contents of the can on it.

  The cat jumped up and said "Meow" and began to eat.

  The Countess Krak picked up her purse. "I'm going over to New Jersey now."

  She gave him a kiss on the cheek and walked out!

  The only one reading that newspaper was the cat!

  I ground my teeth!

  Then I knew what it was. It was a policy they must have. A conspiracy! You could only be happy on the planet if you never read newspapers or listened to the news. And while this was perfectly true, it gave them no license to gang up on me.

  That beautiful story was failing!

  She was going right on helping Heller to undermine everything worthwhile: MONEY!

  Between the two of them they were going to salvage life on this planet! Oh, the villainy of it!

  I knew I would have to act!

  Chapter 8

  After considerable pacing, I went back and read the story again.

  INSPIRATION!

  No sooner conceived than acted upon. I must attack!

  I brushed the better part of the cockroaches off my coat and with determined stride made my way to the subway.