Mission: Earth "Doomed Planet" (27 page)

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 cover-up 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 levelled 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 U.S. 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 COVER-UP! 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!

Biographies 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 un-verifiable. 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 HlSST: 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 cover-up. 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 Biographies Publishing Company