He gave the churned ground an inspection. His spike tracks were everywhere.
Heller looked down at his baseball shoes. They were coated with blood and fragments of bone and flesh.
He did a tour of the dead men. He chose one of them and took the shoes off the corpse. He took off his baseball shoes and put them on the dead man’s feet. Then he pulled on those of the dead man.
It was a bad sign. He had already been reading G-2 manuals, obviously. As I feared, it was likely to make my work that much harder!
After a bit of search, he found Miss Simmons’ stick. He went over the scene again—and a gory scene it was, there under the darkening sky, wind now tugging at the hair and clothing of the dead.
He picked up Miss Simmons and looked around again to make sure there was nothing left, apparently. Then he looked up the hill to where the shotgun man still lay, partially in view.
“I wish you’d listened,” he said. “I’m not here to punish anybody.” He looked down at Miss Simmons’ face. She was out cold. Then he looked up at the scudding sky and in Voltarian said, “Is this planet inhabited by a Godsless people? Has some strange idea poisoned them to make them think they have no souls? That there is no hereafter?”
Well, that was Heller. Stupid and theatrical. It served his best interests to just dump Miss Simmons and shove one of those abandoned switchblades into her. You could tell he was not Apparatus trained, so maybe G-2 wasn’t going to do me as much harm as I had thought.
Yes. Stupid. He seemed to be casting about for compass directions. Then he began to move swiftly westward and south through thickets and trees, trotting along in a way that seemed to hold Miss Simmons level.
Eventually he emerged from what must have been a vast expanse of parkland. He was soon on some streets.
After quite a distance, a sign loomed ahead in the dusk:
Van Cortlandt Park Subway Station
He bought tokens and the person behind the glass didn’t even look at him. He put two tokens in the gate.
He was shortly on a train. It roared along. There were hardly any people aboard. A security guard walked by. Despite the bloody trouser cuffs, the torn clothes on the girl and the splinted ankle, the guard did not even pause as he passed.
Empire Subway Station was there on the white tiles. Heller got off.
Carrying Miss Simmons with no bounce, he moved smoothly along. He was on College Walk. He turned south on Amsterdam Avenue and halted at a door marked:
Empire Health Service
There were no lights on.
He went across Amsterdam Avenue and walked into what must have been the emergency ward of a hospital. He waited a bit and a nurse passing through the waiting room saw him and came over.
“Accident,” she said. “Sit right there.”
She went off. She came back pushing a wheeled stretcher and patted it.
Heller put Miss Simmons down on it.
The nurse threw a blanket over her and tugged a strap tight over her chest.
The nurse led Heller over to a counter. She got out some forms. “Name?”
“She’s Miss Simmons,” said Heller. “Empire faculty. You can get the details out of her purse, probably. I’m just a student.”
The nurse got Miss Simmons’ purse and dug out insurance cards and so on.
A young intern came down the hall and looked at Miss Simmons. “Shock,” he said. “She’s in shock.”
“Broken ankle,” said Heller. “Compound fracture.”
“You got a slashed arm,” said the young intern. He was lifting Heller’s sleeve. “Needs handling. Looks like a switchblade wound. Student?”
“Yes,” said Heller.
“We’ll fix it up for you.”
Miss Simmons came to and started to scream.
Another nurse came along with a tray and a hypodermic syringe. The intern got hold of Miss Simmons’ arm. The nurse put a rubber tube around the arm. Miss Simmons was threshing about and the nurse couldn’t control the arm long enough to get the needle in.
“That isn’t heroin is it?” said Heller. “I don’t think she’s on horse.”
“Morf,” said the intern. “The purest medical morf. Calm her down.”
Miss Simmons was lunging against the strap. She had her other arm loose. She was pointing at Heller. “Get him away from me!” She struggled to draw backwards. “Get away from me, you murderer!”
The intern and the nurse managed to hold her still. The nurse got the needle into a vein.
Miss Simmons was glaring at Heller and screaming. “You murderer! You sadist!”
The intern said, “Now, now, you’ll feel better in a moment.”
“Get him away from me!” screamed Miss Simmons. “He’s just like I thought!”
“There, there,” said the nurse.
“Grab him!” screamed Miss Simmons. “I saw him murder eight men in cold blood!”
“Nurse,” said the intern, “mark that she’s to be placed in an observation ward.”
She threshed further. “You’ve got to believe me! I saw him kick eight men to death!”
“Nurse,” said the intern, “change that to psychiatric observation ward.”
The morphine must have been biting. She lay back. Suddenly she raised her head and looked venomously at Heller. “I knew it! I knew it all the time! You’re a savage killer! When I get well and out of here, I’m going to devote my life to making certain that you FAIL!”
Oh, I was so relieved. I had been afraid all this time that she would be grateful to Heller for his preventing them from raping her, giving her the (bleep) and probably killing her for kicks. But she was true blue to the end.
The grimness was still on her face as she went under the full effects of the morphine and fell back.
I did some rapid calculation. She would not be able to continue as teacher of that course this semester but she certainly would be his teacher again in late winter and the spring. She had ample time to flunk him. Or—oh, joy—hang him sooner with a murder rap!
Bless her crazy, crooked and ungrateful heart!
How wonderful it was to feel I had a real friend!
And even if they put her under psychiatric care, that would change nothing. It never does.
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 Washington 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.
L. Ron Hubbard, Mission Earth Volume 2: Black Genesis
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