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!
THE AUTHOR!
Biographics 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 unverifiable.
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 HISST: 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 coverup. 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
Biographics Publishing Company
THE TRUE AND FINAL END OF MISSION EARTH
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 start
ed 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