Disaster

I was still laughing when a doctor came to handle my wrists and bandage my hands.

  Despite the lateness of the hour, the writing materials came.

  Oh, I would tell all. I had my records and my logs. I would tell everything I knew about Mission Earth.

  Who knew where Heller was?

  And the longer I wrote, the longer I would stay alive.

  And so this is my narrative. I give it to you, Lord Turn. I do not know another blessed thing.

  Be lenient.

  But please don’t turn me out.

  Just execute me quickly!

  SOLTAN GRIS

  Attested that the foregoing was confessed by said prisoner:

  Gummins

  Tower Guard, Royal Prison

  Scritch

  Life Prisoner, adjacent cell

  PART SIXTY-SEVEN

  Chapter 1

  Needless to say, Soltan Gris did NOT get his quick execution. Had this occurred, I would never have gotten the chance to finish this story for you, for myself or for Voltar. (Long Live His Majesty, Wully the Wise!)

  Instead of just bursting in upon you unannounced without so much as a trumpet blast, thus shocking your sense of proper decorum and protocol, perhaps I had better introduce myself.

  I am Monte Pennwell, lately graduated from the Royal Academy of Arts. I am of average height, average coloration and, according to my mother and innumerable relatives, near and distant, have a below-average chance of amounting to anything in life unless I give up the silly notion of becoming a writer of renown. How do you do?

  My involvement—and, I trust, yours—in this matter of MISSION EARTH began in a quite bizarre way.

  Every month, it is my duty to have lunch with my great-uncle, Lord Dohm, at the Royal Courts and Prison on the hill above Government City. These luncheons are part of a family-wide conspiracy (in which innumerable relatives take part) to get me talked to in the hope that I can be persuaded in some unsubtle way to get busy and amount to something in life, be a credit to my lineage and all that. Lord Dohm favors that I should now take up law. So every month I have to hear from him how I should run my life: he has no use for “scribblers,” particularly ones who have never published anything. He means well, of course. They all do.

  So I was sitting in his clerical office, waiting for him to finish a briefing on why he should lop off somebody’s head. His staff were bustling about, emptying some cabinets which, it seemed, were overstuffed. They were throwing an inordinate quantity of mildew about and a shaft of late morning sunlight, swording through the towering windows, was alive with dust motes.

  Suddenly I conceived a poem: I would call it “An Ode to the Dancing Air.” It was already wafting through my head and I didn’t have anything to write it on.

  “Bumble,” I said to the chief clerk—and fatal words they were—“let me have some paper, quick!”

  “Young Monte,” old Bumble said, “paper is expensive stuff and it’s a shame to waste it.” He looked down at a cart he was loading. “Here, have some scrap. The backs are blank.” And he took a fistful from the moldering box and shoved it at me.

  When I had finished sneezing, I looked at what I held. On every single page it was stamped Confidential: Justiciary Only. “Wait, Bumble,” I said, “I don’t want to get you into trouble. This is apparently a secret document.”

  Bumble looked at it. He shrugged. “All Royal cases are marked Confidential. A prisoner is entitled to certain privacy, at least until he is executed, and then the records are destroyed. What’s the date on that document? Ah, nearly a hundred years ago. Well, you could hardly call that current business, could you? So don’t trouble your busy little brain about it, Monte. This whole lot is going to the disintegrator: we need the space.”

  My eye had lighted on the last line of the last page. It said, “Be lenient. But please don’t turn me out. Just execute me quickly! SOLTAN GRIS.”

  “Wait,” I said. “They certainly didn’t do what he requested or this document wouldn’t still be here.”

  Bumble looked a little harassed. He peered at the big box he had taken it out of. The moldy label said Incomplete Jurisprudence, GRIS. “Well, I don’t see how they could have. The rest of this is trial transcripts. But possibly they never finished trying him or those papers wouldn’t be here either. Maybe a misfile. We find those now and then. But funny that it’s still marked incomplete.”

  “How interesting!” I said. “You mean they started a trial and never finished it? Tell me more.”

  “Confound it, young Monte, we’ve got to get these drawers empty before lunch. Take the blasted box and let me get back to work.”

  It really had poundage. The confession itself was heavy and the rest of the papers backbreaking. However, I wrestled the moldy, dusty mess off the cart and staggered away, heading for my air-speedster in the courtyard.

  Just then my great-uncle came out. “What have you got there, Monte? A hundred-pound ode? Looks like it’s been rejected pretty often. Ha, ha!”

  I parked the burden in a cloakroom and accompanied him to his dining hall where he regaled me with the news that he had been talking to the Chief Justiciary and they thought they could get me an appointment here as a junior clerk and wouldn’t that be nice? And who knew but what, in another fifty years, I could become somebody respectable like him.

  Repressing a shudder, I was then appalled to hear him say, “I was telling your mother, just last week, that if you kept insisting on this scribbler thing, and continued to refuse all the help the family is giving you, our only recourse—for your own good, mind—would be to marry you off.”

  “Did she have anybody in mind?” I quailed.

  “Why, yes,” he said, chopping off a piece of bread with a miniature headsman’s axe. “The Corsa girl. She may be ugly, but don’t forget, she will inherit half of the planet Modon one day.”

  “Modon?” I said, trying to keep my voice steady.

  “Good, clean fresh air,” he said. “Lots of interesting peasant revolts and different crops. The provinces are a fine, outdoor life for a vigorous young man. But I know you don’t like that sort of thing, so I would strenuously advise you to accept this junior clerk appointment. It will at least keep you in town. I’ve always been fond of you, you know, and I don’t want you to throw your life away.”

  The campaign was on!

  I sat there, the dutiful nephew, diffidently stirring my food, well aware of my frail defenses and the perils of an overmanaged destiny. My cause seemed hopeless.

  PART SIXTY-SEVEN

  Chapter 2

  Driving back to the family town estates beyond Pausch Hills that afternoon, I was in a depressed mood. My plight was cruel and the lovely spring landscape below my air-speedster had no charms.

  Time was running out. I had graduated from the Royal Academy of Arts over two years ago, and to date I had not had one tiniest line of anything published. I couldn’t point proudly to even a pamphlet and say, “Look, I am a writer: please let me sternly forge my way against the tides of life on my own! I will blazon my name in fire across the skies of Voltar and be a credit beyond credits to everybody’s credit one day, a veritable jewel in the family’s crown, if you will just let me go my own way!” But alas, I knew that the patience of my numberless uncles, great-uncles, aunts, great-aunts, cousins and second cousins was becoming strained. My days were numbered and sooner or later they would pounce with ferocity and plunge me into some ignominious post of vast respectability. And there I would be, just a cog in the relentless grinding machine of pale gray society.

  Mourning my lot, I landed my air-speedster on the target in the statue park, turned it over to my mechanic and had two footmen take the dilapidated records box to my study in the west tower. They keep me relegated to the suite there, distant from other things, because I play recordings late at night and pace.

  But I didn’t make it. My mother, a very commanding female, was coming down the grand staircase and spotted me seeking to duck behind a potted plant.


  “Oh, there you are, Monte,” she said. “I trust you had a helpful lunch. But whatever have you done to your clothes?”

  I glanced down. That box had gotten me pretty moldy.

  “Never mind,” she said. “Just be sure that you look well for dinner. I’ve invited the Corsa girl and her brother.” She went blithely on her way but she left me trembling. I could almost hear the mutter of the guns on the horizon as the enemy closed in for the kill.

  In my study, my valet was rowing at the footmen for getting dust all over everything with that box. He is a yellow-man named Hound that served with my father on some campaign and he is very determined to bring up the son so he won’t disgrace the family. His attention was distracted to me. “Look at your jacket!” he said. “You haven’t been going around in public looking like that, have you? Here—good heavens—get into a shower and I’ll lay out some other clothes. Footmen, get that box out of here!”

  “No, no!” I said. “It’s valuable!”

  “Valuable? It stinks just like the Royal prison!”

  “That’s just it!” I said desperately, blocking the footmen from carrying it out the door. “Nearly a hundred years ago, somebody was pleading with them to execute him and they refused to! It’s a miscarriage of justice. They didn’t even complete his trial. It stinks!”

  “Then you’re going to take that junior clerk position after all,” said Hound, with some relief.

  “No!” I cried. “I’m going to write an ode about it.”

  My valet raised his eyes to the ceiling and spread his ample hands. It was a typical gesture.

  We compromised by having a couple of maids wipe the worst of the dust off and leave the container in the middle of the floor, but with a cloth under it to protect the carpet.

  After I had my shower and changed my clothes I got rid of the intruders. Thinking to take my mind off my own troubles by studying those of others, I picked the thick confession off the top of the other papers, sat down in an easy chair and prepared to read. There might also be an ode in this. Some lines had already occurred to me:

  O stern prison walls,

  At last my heart hath . . . break? . . . broken?

  Bring down, bring down the headsman’s axe

  To end . . . token? . . . broken? . . . hopeless fate? . . .

  Well, I’d get it smoother later. I better find out what I was writing about first.

  I began to read the confession.

  I read all afternoon. I found myself quite absorbed. The prose was military, terse, unembellished. But also it was archaic. They don’t write that way these days: they just use sounds and pretty words without bothering to put any thought behind them. The intent is to build up towers of metered cloud which then avalanche down into a great thunder of nothingness. It was interesting to read something which spoke of events and scenes in a realistic way. Novel idea. Some of the early classics are like that. They tell a story that has a beginning and an end and everything: remarkable. I shall try to imitate it.

  Dinner came and Hound had to dig me out and get me dressed and for four hours I had to sit at the long table and in the music salon being chatty with the Corsa girl and her brother. She weighed twice as much as me and was as muscular as a man. She talked of crops from a too-thin mouth and he talked of hunting lepertiges with cannons, and while I pretended interest, I was inwardly shuddering at the horror of being exiled to Modon and its fresh air with this pair. My mother’s coy remarks and hints felt like somebody had a battering ram against my spine, pushing me off a cliff.

  I was only too happy to get back to my study and continue to read the confession.

  The man’s villainy had been absolutely appalling. His shamelessness had no slightest twinge of conscience. He was totally convinced that he was reacting quite naturally. I had never realized that the criminal mind operated that way. I read and read.

  I was actually unable to put it down. When I finally finished the confession, it was four o’clock in the morning.

  I sat there in the midst of the yellowed vocoscriber pages.

  Well, (bleep) him!

  Here were TWO empires left totally up in the air, Voltar and Earth! Here was a whole base about to be executed to a man. Here was Jettero Heller with a warrant out for him. Here was the Countess Krak possibly dead and falling into a mile-deep chasm. And it didn’t even say what happened to the cat!

  WHAT THE HELLS HAD HAPPENED THEN?

  Oh, I was pretty peeved with this criminal, Soltan Gris. Here he was, begging to be executed. Well, he ought to be executed for leaving a reader in the middle of the sky like that!

  Well, there was nothing for it. I knew that before I could get to sleep I would have to get some idea at least what had happened to Voltar and Earth at that time.

  I routed out Hound and, with complaints, he woke up a seneschal and they got into the tower storerooms and, with many a raise of eyes to the ceiling, got out my old school books.

  Confidently, I opened the unread pages of a dusty history text. It had dates on the margins to keep the student oriented and I found the comparable era.

  I read: “This period was noted for its peace and calm. The orderly succession from the reign of Cling the Lofty to that of Mortiiy the Brilliant was notable mainly for its unnotableness.”

  Hold it. Gris had mentioned that Prince Mortiiy was revolting on Calabar. Apparatus troops had undertaken the final assault to wipe out the rebel.

  I hurriedly opened up a civics text on the Voltar government. I looked in the table of divisions and departments.

  THERE WAS NO SUCH ORGANIZATION AS THE APPARATUS!

  I sat back. I have mobs of relatives connected to every imaginable part of the Voltar government. I had never heard any of them ever mention the Apparatus. And then I suddenly understood: THEY WERE KEEPING THE APPARATUS SECRET!

  Oh, but what a coverup that was! A whole organization!

  But I was far from finished yet.

  I got Hound back up out of bed and made him go wake up the chamberlain and unlock the library in the south tower and bring me up all the old encyclopedias, and when the footmen had lugged these in, with many an accusing look, I began to tear through them.

  I found Jettero Heller, a famous combat engineer and noted space racer and bullet ball champion. There was no mention of his ever having been to Earth.

  I sent the staff scurrying for additional volumes.

  Once more I tore into pages. This time I was looking for the planet Earth or Blito-P3.

  NO SIGN OF IT!

  Well, I can tell you, reader, I was a very puzzled person.

  I couldn’t make heads or tails of it.

  At the insistence of the seneschal and the chamberlain and Hound and accompanied by many eyes of the staff rolled at the ceiling, I went to bed.

  I was quite cross with Gris.

  PART SIXTY-SEVEN

  Chapter 3

  The following morning, when I awoke, despite the accusative racket Hound was making with spinbrushes and closet doors, I lay awake, on my back, looking at the ceiling.

  WHAT had happened to those people?

  What had happened to Izzy Epstein and Rockecenter?

  Hound fell over some of the books still stacked in my bedroom and I turned to ask him if he didn’t realize that writers needed quiet to concentrate, when my eye lit on one of the books that had fallen. It was 145th Deluxe Edition: In the Mists of Time, Legends of the Original Planets of the Voltarian Confederacy, Compiled by the Lore Section, Interior Division.

  Wait a minute. The Gris confession had mentioned that. I padded into my study and brought it back and, despite Hound’s eyeballs going to the ceiling, plopped it down on the bed in total disregard of the fountain of dust. Aha! Here was the number in the Gris confession: Folk Legend 894. It mentioned Blito-P3.

  I turned to the Deluxe Edition, feeling lucky that it was recent and not abridged. At least I could check that point.

  I flipped the pages. I found Folk Legend 893. I read th
e number of the next one. It was Folk Legend 895.

  Hold it. Back up.

  FOLK LEGEND 894 WAS DELETED!

  I seized the Gris manuscript. Could my eyes be playing me tricks? No, there it was: Folk Legend 894. It even quoted it, telling all about Prince Caucalsia and how he had escaped to Blito-P3!

  Hound tried to distract me by making me sit down while he shaved me, but I clung to the confession with a grip of steel. I continued to thumb through it while I was dressed and all the time I was eating breakfast, looking at it, wondering about it. His descriptions of the planet Earth seemed so real, I could not possibly imagine how he could have made them up.