Mission: Earth "Doomed Planet" (26 page)

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!

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.

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!