!!!!!TED THE STORY B

CHAPTER 15

Behind the Scenes:

the Service Corps at work

When Apollo 11 landed on the Moon, The Pearl was there, along with another craft, one from the Emergency Corps. We stayed out of sight until after Armstrong’s moonwalk, then we set up station within clear eyeview of the astronauts and monitored their commlink with NASA. It wasn’t long before they noticed us.

As soon as they cut off normal communications with Houston, the Commander sent them a short, terse message: “A giant step indeed for mankind, but you will travel no further out than this, until otherwise agreed. After this current Apollo program is finished, you will not initiate more visits to this orb.”

The following few pieces are taken from Internet sites, a proliferation of which can be found on this subject. (One of these would be ufocasebook.com/moon.html.) I can say that the short excerpts below accurately reflect what occurred during the lunar landing. This first quote was picked up by an Australian TV station monitoring the event on a ham radio frequency and was corroborated by hundreds of others using the same medium.

Neil Armstrong: “These babies are huge, sir! Enormous! Oh my God!! You wouldn’t believe it! I’m telling you there are other spacecraft out there, lined up on the far side of the crater edge! They’re on the moon watching us!”

In 1979 Maurice Chatelain, one of NASA’s top engineers and the main designer of the lunar module’s communications system, confirmed that Armstrong had indeed reported seeing two UFOs on the rim of a crater. “The encounter was common knowledge in NASA,” he revealed, “but nobody has talked about it until now.”

The following exchange with Neil Armstrong is purported to have taken place at a NASA symposium, and was recorded by the (anonymous by request) professor who asked the questions. It is by no means an isolated occurance, as many other astronauts have begun speaking “off the record” about what they’ve seen.

Professor: What really happened out there with Apollo 11?

Armstrong: It was incredible. Of course we had always known there was a possibility. The fact is, we were warned off by the aliens.

Professor: How do you mean “warned off”?

Armstrong: I can’t go into details, except to say that their ships were far superior to ours both in size and technology. Boy, were they big! And menacing. [For the record, we did nothing overtly menacing. He must have been referring to the size of our ships.—A.P.]

Professor: But NASA had other missions after Apollo 11?

Armstrong: Naturally. NASA was committed at that time and couldn’t risk panic on Earth. But it really was a quick there and back again.

And this from John Glenn, early astronaut and later Senator, spoken on NBC: “Back in those glory days, I was very uncomfortable when they asked us to say things we didn’t want to say and deny other things. Some people asked, you know, were you alone out there? We never gave the real answer, and yet we see things out there, strange things, but we know what we saw out there. And we couldn’t really say anything. The bosses were really afraid of this, they were afraid of the War of the Worlds type stuff, and about panic in the streets. So we had to keep quiet.”

So it’s now been almost forty years since man has been on the Moon, and notwithstanding some exploratory unmanned vehicles (whose parameters and purviews were dictated by us), the Moon and Mars have remained off limits for humans. The cover story is that all of NASA’s goals of exploration can be achieved without sending astronauts, and that it’s too expensive to have manned projects.

The prohibition against manned flight has now been rescinded, which I’ll get to in a moment, but please try to see things from our perspective. The planet, Urth, which was thereby traversing beyond its immediate precinct into outer space, if only its own moon, was clearly “not ready for prime time,” not yet ready to be a friendly neighbor to the rest of civilized planetry.

As for the reasons why, after encouraging such exploration, we were backing off such support, two irreducible reasons were the JFK murder and the wantonly wayward war in Vietnam. Both of these demonstrated that certain forces within the American government visavi the military-industrial complex had gained the upper hand.

As Neil Armstrong was making his gallant proclamation about “a giant step for mankind,” his fellow Americans were burning down villages and shooting people whose only crime was defending their land from foreign invaders. (Not that different from Iraq, which I’ll also get to in a moment.) The US war machine was a nightmare-come-true of napalm and high explosives, of relentless death from the sky, of rampant deforestation of a once-beautiful landscape. America’s monstrous involvement in Vietnam, a country that in no way posed a threat to its national security, killed five million Vietnamese (from a population of under forty million).

And the US could not even be considered the worst country in the world, just the one most drunk on its military power and most controlled by its militindustrial complex. Plenty of other countries were far worse in terms of human rights and economic fairness.

Ahh, Nixon and Watergate! On my personal list of individuals for whom forgiveness was not an option, Richard M. Nixon ranked very high. There’s no question that he was the one who tipped the table against us in our dealings with the US government after the Eisenhower meeting. And, as always seemed to be the case with him, he did it for selfish aggrandizement. The gutless SOB thought he could get rid of Ike and become president right then: a backstabbing coup d’état.

I had two secret meetings with Bob Woodward, plus three telephone calls. My initial contact with him was over the phone, my first words to him being, “My name is Bill Willoughby except that’s not really my name. What is real is that I’m going to help you crack this Watergate thing. Wide fucking open.” Then I informed him that the deputy director of the FBI, Mark Felt, would perhaps be a good source for the story he was covering.

We knew this thru our surveilling of Felt’s office, and his growing dissatisfaction with being passed over for the top position at the FBI for L. Patrick Gray, someone he considered a political hack. (Felt continually talked to himself in his office!) In other words, the #2 man at the FBI, an old hand going back to his Nazi-hunting days, had a giant-sized axe to grind and knew of much damning evidence that would hurt Nixon—maybe even bring him down.

The brave boys at the Post (granted, they were men, but barely) had some unconfirmed data linking Nixon to the break-in, and after Woodward contacted Mark Felt they were able to confirm those leads and solidify their tenuous information. This was mostly done thru the infamous meetings in a shrouded parking garage.

I myself met Bernstein once in a (different) parking garage, after phoned instructions as to which parking space to meet me at. I remember how the poor guy was wide-eyed as he approached the car. I sat there, in full spy/counter-spy mode, with Sammy in the passenger seat, both of us wearing sunglasses and fedoras pulled down low over our brows. I said, “Get out your pad, kid, I’ve got a story to tell.” I then proceeded to tell him the real reason for the break-in, ie, that Nixon was worried about what Howard Hughes had told his former associate Lawrence O’Brien, who was now the head of the Democratic National Committee.

To review what was touched upon in the Howard Hughes material at the end of Chapter 9 and in Chapter 11: Nixon was privy to all the information concerning the botched Exoterrian contact which occurred in the ’50s. In his paranoia, he had convinced himself that Hughes, who was very angry at Nixon for not stopping nuclear testing in Nevada, would try to sabotage his re-election by revealing information about Nixon’s role regarding that whole unforturn of events. (There were otherings, as well, including some shady dealings that Nixon’s brother had with H.H., but the alien stuff was the top item.)

I also gave him a copy of a voice recording, of twenty minutes duration, which included the missing eighteen minutes from Nixon’s self-recordings. It was mostly about the men called “The Plumbers,” and what they might reveal about some of their prior assignments, especially the failed attempts to kill Castro and the successful assassination of Kennedy. At one point also, Nixon let loose with, “And my God, Hunt knows all about the alien shit, just about everything about that goddamn mess.” He composed himself, with Haldeman’s help, and said, “But he won’t spill anything, and Liddy too. They’re soldiers to the fucking core.”

But then he went back off the deep end and paranoically raved that Hunt might have confided to Liddy some of the super-secret stuff, which Liddy might have shared with the other guys in the unit. “So what we might end up with is a situation where the president is being blackmailed. Either we fess up that we sent them in for the Watergate job, or they spill the beans to the Post and the Times about goddamn Jack Kennedy and, Heaven help us, the deal with the aliens.” At that point he talked about some secret slush fund (which included some left-over Hughes money from earlier dealings) from which they could pay off the guys in jail.

Bernstein made a whiny comment about how could he be sure that it was really Nixon on the tape, and Cooper piped up with, “Do we have to tell you how to do everything? Take a sample of it, nothing too wild, just a common phrase or two, and have it checked against a Nixon speech. Simple as that, Jimmy Olsen.”

The only other person to hear the voice recording was Ben Bradlee, the chief editor at the Washington Post. He kept it to himself, other than a private talkversation with Senator Barry Goldwater, for whom he detailed the incriminating comments. When Goldwater and the other Republicans from the Hill met with Nixon, Goldwater ushered the president aside for a few moments and told him about the tape, supplying some exact quotes. “If you don’t resign, this tape will be forced into evidence, and that would cause problems far bigger than you, Mr. President. At this point, it’s just your patriotic duty to step aside, sir.”

And that did it. Richard Milhous Nixon, Horse’s Ass Par Excellence, agreed to resign, and soon exited the public stage he had so shamelessly sought, and so shamefully squandered.

I suppose the time has come when I have to write about the Iraq war. To be honest, I’ve gone round and round in my mind as to whether or not to include the story behind the story (well, within the story is a better way of phrasing it) of what actually transpired, how certain well-meaning intentions led the US into that ill-forsaken messmire. Also on tap, once I get the preliminous facts out, will be an accounting regarding the Service Corp’s role in the downfall and death of the Butcher of Baghdad, Saddam Hussein.

You see, that was the whole sumstance of our intention—to rid the world of Hussein. As I was a major player in the operation, I need to come clean about this, at least for my own conscience, but also so that you folks can see how things went so terribly wrong. After all the billions of words churned out by the massmedia and blogosphere, all the countless television reports, all the books, the veils are now about to be finally lifted.

The more astute among you have never had three questions satisfactorily answered. First, why was George W. Bush so tunnel-visioned on invading Iraq, even before 9/11? Second, once the invasion and ouster of Saddam occurred, why was the occupation so badly fugged up? And third, in the face of horrifically obvious reality, why did Hussein act the way he did, from his pre-invasion Allah-laden speech and not putting up his best defense, to not fleeing the country while he had the chance?

By mid-1999 it had become obvious to us that Saddam’s Iraq still had the potential to become a centraforce in the region. The sanctions placed on Iraq were a porous joke, as money and armaments were freely being exchanged for oil. Led by the French and the Russians, and with some support from certain big-bore American businessmen, it was likely that the sanctions would be lifted within a few short years.

If not soon checked, Saddam might have eventually achieved some problematic alliances, leading to hegemony over Arabia, possibly addcluding Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Northern Africa, and even the Soviet Muslim Republics.

Dominance by any man of this large of a contingent, plusfacting its vitacritical petro-wells, Suez access, and Holy Lands, would be cause for trepidation. But by a man whose humanality existed well below civilized standards, whose use of and actual participation in torture-deaths was legendary—such an ascendancy can only be viewed as a Mordorian shadow descending on the Middle East and beyond.

Based on overhearsations, it was not very brain-straining to lay out what the Iraqi leader’s planalysis would have been after the sanctions were removed. Having achieved its first-stage primejective of turning a negative cash-flow into a wealthy surplus, Iraq would have then moved with a terrible suddenness to fulfill its other goals. With money to pay the foreigners, mainly the helpful French and Russians, but alsocluding the Germans and Chinese, Hussein’s Iraq would have attempted to augcrease its militplex dramatically—jetcraft, ranged missiles, war-gas, chemicals, and, eventualater, nukebombs.

After thus-how gaining supremacy over his rivals—Iran, Turkey, Syria, and Egypt—he would have (after some bullyclubbing) invited the latter two into a onified military confederacy. This would have been based on joint militments and shared spoils. The other members would problikely have been Libya, Jordan, and Yemen. In privesultation with certain Arab leaders, he referred to this pooling of militforces as “The Arabian Fist.”

With a concerted mutualation, this powerful Arab combine would then have set-sight on, if not the destruction, then at least the crippling curtailment of Israel. They would have used their clench-hold on the world’s petroleum supply to pressure the world’s leaders toward the establishment of a Palestinian state. Such a state would have become a stageground, in that geo-politisphere, for hate-revenging anti-Israeli forces.

In Saddam’s rantravings, this reportionment would have taken back the occupied territory from Israel, plus some additional territory, plus control of Jerusalem, as retribution for its “murderous Zionism” and “filthy, evil arrogance.” (This I have mostsuredly on voicetape, straight from the ass’s mouth.)

His plan had something less than an even chance of succeeding, but if left in power there was always the possibility of at least partial success on his part. This would be especially true if the region continued to be roiled by what it perceived as Israel’s heavy-handed treatment of the Palestinians.

The most sinister of the various plots and plans being hatched by the malicious mind of Saddam was the following schemario. In 2000, he was in contact with a military officer from Belarus, the former Soviet republic. He was part of a cabal that had secretly sequestered three small nuclear devices just before the Russian pullback. Hussein was willing to pay 300 million euros for them—money he had squirreled aside from the corrupt oil-for-food program.

His ultra-devious machination involved a group of fanatical Iranians, who would eagerly detonate two of the nukebombs on Israeli soil and send the third to an operative in Washington. Hussein wanted to blow up President Clinton, in retaliation for his bombings—the so-called “Wag the Dog” episode—when, in the midst of MonicaGate, Clinton ordered airstrikes on Iraq.

Saddam, according to what was being laid out, would give the paramilitary Iranians the “suitcase bombs” at no cost and provide them transportation to locations in Tel Aviv and Bethlehem. But then he would double-cross one of them, causing him to be killed and identified as an Iranian linked to the rest of the murderous scheme. The Tel Aviv targeteer would be allowed to complete his mission. The Washington one would fulfill his mission in any case, either by detonation of the dirty bomb in the proximity of the White House or merely by being caught in the attempt (and identified as an Iranian).

When the dead men were shown to be part of the same Iranian group, then Israel would undoubtedly nuke Iran, and the US would, at the least, send waves of further destruction by warplanes and missile attacks. This would lead to a heightened state of terrorism aimed at the US, from Iran and other Islamic extremists.

So, to gather the picture, Saddam would have his three mortal enemies (Israel, Iran and the US) all seriously damaged with one evil stroke. But then, in late October of 2000—just before the election—as the Israel part of the plot was in place and logistical details of the DC end were being finalized, Saddam had a brainstorm. If he waited a few months, he could trigger the Washington nuke at the inauguration, an event attended by all the power elite of the United States.

He could possibly kill not only Clinton, but also congressmen and senators and judges and rich political donors. And (the biggest and) he could possibly kill both Papa Bush and the Junior Bush. The thought of such an ultimately revengeful perpetration put Saddam in a state of exultation.

In a real Mission Impossible–type operation, Emergency Corps commandos (who are called in for the extreme heavy-lifting jobs) re-secured the three Belarusian bombs and dumposited them in a field within a Russian military base. They placed a simple sarcastic message on the container, translated to English as “Watch your stuff!” but in Russian idiom having the same meaning as “You forgot something, stupid!”

To summ: When propelled by preeminent power, pathillogical paranoia (as displayed in someone like Iraq’s Hussein) becomes a cause of great instability in a world seeking peaceful outcomes. Despite the clamor of some of the peaceniks, it was abso-essential that the psycho-problemated Saddam Hussein be curtailed before he could deliver on one of the many plots he was constantly cooking up.

We thought that the Iraq invasion would be followed by a quick draw-down; thought that between Colin Powell, George the Elder, Brent Scowcroft, James Baker, and certain senior aides, the war would not be in any way a prolonged one. We knew for a fact that the intelligence agencies assessment of Iraq cited, before the war, the danger of any attempt at a lengthy occupation. And Vice President Dick Cheney was, after all, a major opponent of the prolongation of the earlier Gulf War, arguing successfully that anything like an occupation would be a giant mistake.

But Cheney and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, along with their dark minions in the neocon world (who shall remain nameless, except for Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle), had their grand purposes set in a different direction: that of a long war and occupation of Iraq. Their reasons were 1) to establish a large military base in Arabia from which to neutralize Iran and Syria and protect Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and, especiallymost, Israel; 2) to control the production of oil in the region, at least in the sense of preventing any form of cut-off or price-gouging by (potentially) anti-Western regimes; and 3) to reap the spoils of war for their friends and benefactors in the (odiously hungry for a war, any war) milindustriaplex, starting with Halliburton and its subsidiaries.

But the stated intentions of the administration—the continuously promulgated promises and proclamations—were that the Iraq incursion would be an in-an-out operation. The official objectives were to secure the weapons of mass destruction and remove the tyrant who was brinkverging on unleashing them against us and/or our allies. During the run-up to war, while garnering the support of Congress, the media, and the vastjority of the populace, the administration line was that the incursion would last “perhaps six weeks, doubtfully as long as six months,” and that Iraqi oil revenue would pay for it.

Many analyses were undertaken by the intelligence community to determine what should be done to ensure a quick end to the mission, and a return of US troops to American soil. Part of these reports covered items and actions that should be avoided, as they would lead to delays in the cessation of hostilities. The main things warned against were, in no particular order, the occupation force being too small to protect the ammunition depots from pilferage, the oil wells from vandalism, the infrastructure from vandalism and looting, and the borders from foreign fighters; failure to retain the army as a cohesive—and paid—institution; and the firing of all Baath party members from their (mostly benign) administrative posts throughout Iraq.

How is it, then, that every damn one of these must-nots came to be, and without the usual decision-making chain being followed? Well, the answer is that a handful of men wanted it that way. For the reasons stated above—a permanent military base in the region, commandeering of oil reserves, and the wet dreams of the military-industrial complex for profits, power, and prestige—they manipulated the entire game to rig the outcome. Along the way they added the additional propaganda-ploy that they were installing freedom in the region, but that chimera (which they never thought worthy before, as they supported the least democratic regimes in the world) was a tiny consideration beside the chance to rake in hundreds of billions from the US treasury for war contracts, including the building of the world’s largest embassy in Baghdad.

But try as I may, none of this lifts the stink of failure off of me, as it was my job to judge and assess what the ramifications would be for a US removal of Saddam’s regime. I made my judgment with assurance and duly presented it at a committee meeting aboard The Pearl in mid-2000—that the US-led mission would be in Iraq for less than a year, with minimal collateral damage. Thus assured, the Service Corps official policy became to engender the conditions necessary to engineer—sooner better than later—the removal of Saddam’s regime from power.

So, having decided that, we proceeded with the next stage, the convincing of Bush the Younger that he was being given a mission from God. A scant week after his people had certified their larceny of the election, we set up geo-synchronous orbit many miles above Bush’s Crawford ranch. From there we projected a sound beam into the room he was sitting alone in, which was actually my voice in its most ponderous impression of the Father Deity. The message was brief, the central part of it being something like, “My son, you are entrusted with a mighty responsibility. Know that I am with you always. Above all else you must protect my world, especially my beloved America. You must for this reason remove Satan’s minion from his perch in Iraq. This you must do soon.”

We kept our beam on the room, but only in receive mode, and heard GW babble semi-coherently that he was prepared “to do thy will, Father, whatever you thus command me, your servant, oh Lord.” He then proceeded to cry for several cringe-inducing minutes, at which point we lowered the volume and looked around at each other (Tro, Randa, Corrina, and Komo were the others), then we re-discussed if we really, really wanted to do the mission.

Our continued surveil of the ranch revealed that George had his top Secret Service officer do everything he could to secure the premises from outside transmissions and conduct a thuro internal debugging in search of any electronic emplacements. (Our technovancement was such as to render us undetectable.) When he was given the all-clear, he requested a 24/7 upstepping of the agency’s counter-surveillance activities. This he did without mentioning anything specific about the episode.

On the day following our first fake epiphany event, we noticed that GW would return regularly to the room where we had initially broadcast to him. He would sit a while, in the same chair, sometimes pretending to read (it was a kind of study/den), and whisper prayerful imprecations to the Almighty to speak to him again. In the afternoon we let loose with another bolt of revelation. In that one, we praised him for his courage and said he was “divinely appointed to lead America in this troubled time.” As a kind of clincher, we ended it with, “I am with you always, my son, and hear you always, just as I heard you that day out by the creek. Accept my word and fulfill your destiny.”

The referred-to event by the creek was something we had picked up while close-watching the president-elect when he was still a candidate. During a respite at the ranch, he had walked off by himself and, separating himself for a short while from his Secret Service detail, he had knelt down and prayed, with outstretched hands, to have the strength to become president.

We knew he was a dolt, but didn’t somehow believe he would be such a virtual cipher once installed in the White House. Many other presidents had been elected in a state of relative unpreparedness and had grown on the job.

But we developed an odd mixed emotion toward the younger Bush, an unlikely combination of contempt and affection, laced with pity. He truly was, in many ways, a captive of the office. We picked up several heated confrontations between him and Dick Cheney, where George was attempting to stand up to him, conversations that ended in sputtering acquiescence for the overmatched young president. (Conversations that ended this way were a sub-specialty of Cheney’s, a man we usually referred to as “Snort,” short for “Snort-Dog.”)

About once a month, I would give George his message from “above,” urging him to be the people’s president, commending his admittedly lame efforts to be a “compassionate conservative” and reminding him of the need to remove Saddam. After 9/11, my words took on a strong urgency, and I might have even said something to the effect that Iraqi Intelligence was behind the al-Qaida attacks. (As they say, the first casualty of war is the truth.) But that got the ball rolling full speed, and it wasn’t long before the US invaded Iraq and deposed Saddam Hussein.

So here’s the kick in the pants. Just as it was becoming clear that the militarists had taken over the conduct of the war, ie, that it was going to be a long and bloody occupation, we received a PRIO-1 communiqué from the Astanian Service Corps High Bibbly-Boo. It was meant for the Commander, but I was in Tro’s office at the moment it beeped in. Tro was going to be gone for at least ten minutes, and since I knew what it was concerning, (Subject line: “Cease Iraq Project”), I listened to it.

The High Horse Officianado was livid about the Iraq Readjustment Program and used several languages to excoriate us for our abrogation of the religious prerogatives directive. I shuffled the HQ message into a Read Later folder, and when Tro returned I emphastated to him that I wanted to get a beamcast down to the president at the earliest opportunity.

That night, while George was awake in his bedroom (his wife thankfully didn’t wake up), I sent the last of my messagings, urging him to draw down the war in Iraq and focus fully on bringing peace to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “There is a path of justice and righteousness. The Palestinians need their own fully secure homeland. Only then will the Israelis, my ancient Chosen People, be themselves safe and secure.”

During a meeting in the tempest-pot of the Middle East, the former Palestinian foreign minister, Nabil Shaath, said Mr. Bush had told him and Mahmoud Abbas (former prime minister and now Palestinian President): “I’m driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, ‘George, go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan.’ And I did, and then God would tell me, ‘George go and end the tyranny in Iraq,’ and I did. I feel God’s words coming to me: ‘Go get the Palestinians their state and get the Israelis their security, and get peace in the Middle East.’ And by God, I’m gonna do it.”

When asked by the chronicler of the Iraq war, Bob Woodward (the same reporter I had contacted thirty years before), if he asked his father about the invasion of Iraq, George made reference to a “higher Father” from whom he received guidance. This of course brought him no end of grief from certain quarters of the mediastablishment. (When you’ve been mocked in print by Maureen Dowd, those lacerations usually leave a mark.)

My deception came to light later that same night—even before the Commander came upon the tucked-away comq. Shortly after I made the final transmission to GWB, I received a call from Tro to come to his office. Even tho we were two-dozen meters from each other, he was sensing a disquietude from me, as if I were trying to hide something from him. At that point I came clean and received a stern reprimand and various punishments, but the Commander did me the favor of not reporting the infraction to HQ.

Let us proceed now to the Saddam side of the bookend, which occurred during the US buildup to the war and continued until the fall of Baghdad. I wrote the scriptalogue for the several "supernatural" events experienced by Hussein and a few of his cohortisans—voices and visions of the great Shi’ite saint, Imam Mahdi. To them it was a first-class miracle—to us it was the equivalent of turning on a TV. In fact, our teks had to downgrade a holovision projector to get the right misty quality.

Cooper had the dubious honor of putting on the swarth makeup, headdress and robe to portray the ninth-century saint. Sammy diligently learned several sentences of Arabic for’purpose this staged event, and delivered admirably.

Thrucourse the pre-war period, Hussein was led to believe that, in the darkest hour, he would be somehow avenged and glorified, that he would inflict upon the West such a humiliating reversal of fortune that he would be recognized as the new Saladin. This 12^th century leader victoriously led pan-Arabian forces against the crusaders and then ruled the entire area. Saddam was a Sunni born in Tikrit, as was Saladin, and had similar objectives, so we cemented things by telling Hussein that he was, indeed, Saladin returned to “fulfill the destiny of Arabia.”

This destiny would include his becoming a powerful eminence in a newly structured world, one in which an Islamic Afro-Arabia could stakeclaim its status as a Superpower. In these messagings, Saddam was told not to back down, under any circumstances, to America the Great Satan, and the “Little Satans,” the two George Bushes.

The saint’s holo-sim intoned (translated here): “Let the American dogs come to this holy ground. When they do, do not resist with all your force. Allow them to think they are successful in their despicable invasion. Then, when they are upon Baghdad, Allah will smite the crusaders with fire from the sky. And hail the size of goat-heads. Then I myself will return, and you will stand beside me." Such a proclamation made sense to the Shi’ite Muslim clerics Saddam had gathered, as Mahdi is known to be “The Hidden Imam,” he who would return after the period of conflagration and vanquish Islam’s enemies.

Thru all this Hussein can be seen and heard mumbling and groveling, thanking the Imam profusely and promising his full cooperation.

The projection continued: “A voice shall be heard from the clouds. The mighty Allah will be heard by all. He will denounce the evil Satan and all his lackeys and declare you to be the One True Leader, the one to whom the world must give praise and obedience.”

Many of my phrases were incorporated into the dictator’s public announcements. One speech was so redolent with my scriptings that the Minta HQ brasscrats teased me that I was his unpaid Minister of Propaganda!

By and thru all this, the former ruthless atheist actually took a measure of religion—seeing himself as the sword-bearer for a resurgent Islam. From the Iraqi Command’s deep-burrowed bunker we could hear the Butcher/Thief of Baghdad requesting the Koran be read.

But as the American tanks rolled thru the streets of the capital city and no help came from the sky, Saddam let loose with some of the most exquisite curses ever pronounced, denouncing everyone and everything, starting with Allah. At that point he was forced into hiding and was eventually, and ignominiously, captured, imprisoned, tried, and hung.

So then, the moral of the story can be said to be that, in order to destroy Saddam, it became necessary, at least for a while, to save him.

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CHAPTER 16

Breaking the Secrecy Barrier:

problems and proposals

There’s a lot more story to tell regarding the Rigmodians, and to make any semblesense of Urth-Exoterrian relations since the ’50s, some of it must be forced into the open.

There was a provision in the US-Rigmodian agreepact whereby the Riggies would be allowed to conduct a small number of abductions for the purposes of medical study, and that these people would be hypnojected so that they would not remember the incident. A full inventory of these abductions would be given to the Americans so that they could monitor the individuals, making sure that they weren’t harmed. I guess it appeared to be a sound plan from the Americans’ perspective, but they didn’t yet comprehend what treacherous beings they were dealing with.

To say that the Rigmodians shat upon the agreepact, freeze-dried it, ground it into coffee crystals, boiled it, and tossed it into America’s face while snickering would be a moderately stated assessment.

First of all, the Riggies abducted at least ten times the number of people they “contracted” for. From these abductees they took sperm, ovum, blood, and cells, the last leaving the telltale “scoop marks” on abductees. Their program in this regard is solely for selfish reasons, as they have created a hybrid race, and a “product line” of human DNA on the illicit market. They also would take cattle, bore out the organs they wanted, and flop them back onto the fields.

Thru undercloak operatives (including Cooper), we got word to the MAJESTIC committee (those charged with overseeing the arrangements with ETs), after which they began monitoring the interventions of the fully cloaked Rigmodian ships. We showed them how to recognize the infrared “signature” of their ships, and they confirmed that we were telling the truth and the Riggies were lying. Of course the Riggies counter-claimed that we were setting them up, and it was actually we who were conducting these “raids” on innocent people (and cattle).

It needs to be pointed out that the Service Corps has also done a small number of “abductions,” but these have been for the purposes safeguarding certain individuals, securing a cross-mixture of DNA for possible reconstitution of the human race (in case of the worscario occurring), and the training of highly adept individuals in preparation for either contingency of emergency procedures and/or the Openization scenario.

Another thing, only found out in the 1970s, was that the Riggies, knowing of this planet’s untapped gold and diamond resources, stole vast quantities of these precious commodities out from under us. Their ripsploitation was obfuscated by their supposed need for underwater and subterranean bases, which they insidiously established where the gold and diamonds were. They cared not one iota for the people of Urth, only what they could exploit and steal.

The agreement between the Americans and the rogue Rigmodians teetered over many other issues, including the holding back of a promised ray-beam weapon (which the Riggies were probably afraid would be used against them), and was officially deemed over sometime in the late ’70s after many contrary incidents had occurred, culmineventing in the deaths of dozens of US personnel in an underground base in New Mexico.

Soon after that, and on many subsequent occasions, we tried to make direct contact of some kind, to work up an accord, but the US strategic thinkers, in synchlock with the militindustrialists (who had procured the tech they wanted), did not want any more relations with aliens, especially ones who wanted to make them become pacifistic, world-friendly, and environmentally responsible.

Using so-called “Star-Wars” militology, they would occasionally shoot at our craft and any others they spotted in the skies, indiscriminate in their ire at all things non-Urthian. This unwarranted carnage has killed several dozen beings, equally divided between Astanian ships and those of the Riggie alliance. Among our casualties was a ship with twenty-three medical scientists aboard, invited by the Service Corps to study anti-pandemic strategies. And all this despite the fact that we were correct in warning them about the Rigmodians.

Part of it also is that the Riggies poisoned the well on us by telling the Americans that if Urth joined the Confederation, the Sector would dictate multiple conditions to us, thus taking away many freedoms, and that they would punish the planet for not obeying their strictures, making it sound as if the Sector acted like cruel overlords, which is definitely not the case. (Of course there are laws and guidelines, just as there is in any ordered society.)

They also told the Americans that, after Urth joined Astania, the US would be subsumed into the UN and lose its ongoing special status, that the Sector would only negotiate with the world body, of which America would just be one voice among many. This was not fully false, as a planetary government must, of necessity, be properly empowered, but the US would have retained, as I wrote in one of the proposals delivered to a sitting secretary of state, “a preeminence among equals.”

As for the Rigmodians’ previous history, and why they were booted from the confederacy, they had sequestered over a thousand nukebombs – in serious violation of their Openization accord -- and failed to make a good effort in several other areas they promised they would, including the freeing of a slave race (the tall grays) that all their industrialized nations used for sex and free labor. So they were suspended, for a duration of ten standard years, in which time they did not change their ways and were consequently thrown out of the Confederation.

For many years now, the Astanian Sector had a standing offer to the powers-to-be on this planet, delivered in person to individuals of high station. In this proposal, which I co-wrote, we would agree to renegotiate from square one. As well, we agreed to make the central committee half Urthians (of which a slight majority would be American) and half Sector representatives. This proposal, while more than generous in my opinion, was rejected up to 2003.

Commander Tetrov, a man of many more years than any of us, took the defeat better than his staff, and established a long-range planaction for Urth. He told us that he’s been up against similar circumditions on other orbs where the entrenched leaders were reluctant to give up their monopolies on power for the benefit of their people, and that it was a matter of doing (this was one sports metaphor he used exactaprecisely) “the end-around strategy.” This entailed the awaiting of a new generation of citizens and leaders, all the while getting as much informadata into the hands (and minds) of proactive seekers of cosmic truth as possible.

Not to be underestimated in this pursuit has been the assiduous work with personalities in the music and entertainment fields, a project I took a very active hand in, as was detailed in a previous chapter. By our estimation, almost two-thirds of under-35 Americans and Europeans are now readyceptive for alien contact.

For those of you intrepid types, the UFOnauts as I like to call you, who constantly wonder why there has been no disclosure of the alien interaction, some of this exposition should help in knowing why. This does not fully justify the locked-down secrecy on Urth’s part (which has even led to ruined careers for some, and death for others), but you can now see a little more clearly what complexities there have been, and why the planet’s leadership has shied from informing the populace of the history of this matter. As well, you may now have a better understanding of our complicity in this secrecy arrangement. But within a few short years, I can all but assure you, a green light will be given for full disclosure of this whole area of hidden history.

So, besides all the factors already mentioned, the fact that the US leadership took it upon itself to strike a deal with an offworld civilization, and had a choice of two different ones, and chose the wrong one, AND did this in exchange for allowing the civil and human rights of a quarter-million Americans to be heinously violated . . . well, you can see why they wouldn’t want that in the public information pool.

Add, even further, if the files were opened up, amnesty or no amnesty, then the question of what happened to quite a few good men and women—upticluding former CIA head William Colby—would unearth the whole stinking rot of the crazy mess that’s been going on for over sixty years. It all started with the big-shot general who shot the other general that day in 1954. xxxxxxx xxxxxxxxx was a very famous man, equally feared and respected by all in the military, and to reveal the circumstances of that crime would have been a multi-faced public rerlations disaster for the military.

There are by now so many layers of wrongstablishment surrounding this bubblepot, so many cloaked criminals in their cloisters of corporate and institutional hiding places, that only one solution holds any hope: that of a full and unconditional amnesty.

The frighteningly airtight impasse that we find ourselves in can only be alleviated by a several-stage disclosure program, with a promise of no reprisals toward the culpable. This is made somewhat easier by the fact that most of those involved in the earlier coverups, of Roswell, the Eisenhower meetings, etc., have passed away. Those who are still alive are extremely elderly.

As Colonel Philip Corso (the high-ranking officer/scientist entrusted with technology from crashed Exoterrian vehicles) explained before he died a few years ago: The military was just doing what they thought best against a superior force which had not proven itself friendly. Very few will clamor for their hides, possibly not even those who committed murder protecting the secrets. They were mostly following orders and were imbued with the overriding conviction that disclosure would bring about horribly negative results, including economic and religious negpurcussions in the US and elsewhere.

As well, the corporations that have benefited from offworlder tech must be allowed to continue unabated, with at worst some kind of retroactive tax. And the companies that control the world’s 15-trillion-dollar fossil-fuel business must be guaranteed that any changes will come gradgradually, ensuring these corporos that there will be no precipitous loss for them. One way to do this might be to “tax” the enterprises that have derived offworlder tech and transfer that monetary flow to the old-style energy companies in the out years. Some of this is already extant: Thru interlocking corporate boards, mutual investments, and diversified holdings some of these major companies already have covered their big behinds. A sizable portion of the future energy industry will be funneled thru the current fossil-fuel conglomerates.

In summary, it must be noted that the US intellicommunity has spun such an intricaweb of disinformation regarding interworldation that ifnwhen the day comes when the truth is finally exposed, the inhabizens of our planet will be astounded at the levels of interplexity they introduced and maintained over the course of over a half-century. But the truth will eventually surface. What was it they used to say on that TV program? Oh, yes, “The truth is out there.”

In 2003, as the US invasion of Iraq was turning into a full-scale occupation, with the Bush administration’s propaganda mills in full orgestration, our Service Corps operatives found out about an al-Qaida plot to simultimely blow up an alarming number of American landmarks. These included the Statue of Liberty, the Mall of America, Old MacDonald’s Petting Zoo in Woodville, Alabama, the St. Louis Arch, and several sites in Indiana.

This led to some transmissions between myself and xxxxxx xxxxx, a man whom I had some earlier contact with. He had ready access to everyone within the Bush hierarchy, yet had no official government position at the time. This made him ideally suited to our purposes, ie, the implementation of a détente with the United States—especially the part about not shooting at us—and the establishment of some kind of permanent channel of communication.

I provided Mr. xxxxx with very exact information about the nefarious plot, and the terrorist cell that was planning its execution. The feds bungled the capture of the plotters, but did recover the explosives, maps, and blueprints from their house in Evansville.

Something of a thaw with the US government was created by this, and I passed several communications to the American hierarchy thru xxxxx, who passed back to me and the Service Corps their responses. Soon we had negotiated a “Principles of Understanding” agreepact, in which we would pre-inform them of our flights over US-controlled airspace, and they would restrain themselves from playing their live-ammo video games against our ships.

Some further comm occurred around Thanksgiving, mostly centered on the question of weapons in space. Our objectives were achieved and ultimately led, around Christmas of 2003, to the lifting of the Astanian Sector proscription against manned space travel by Urthians. Because of the complete shutdown of manned exploration, the time lag to revisit the moon and embark on the Mars trip would obviously be quite a few years. We made it clear that this was a provisional OK, subject to continued cooperation on a plethora of matters. (What we didn’t do was tie it to the Iraq situoblem, as Mr. xxxxx recommended strongly against such an ultimatum.)

President Bush eagerly latched onto this as a new space initiative that he could proclaim, gathering to himself some benefit as a bold, forward-looking leader. He immediately set a few of his best speechwriters to work on an address outlining the US’s return to manned space missions. Less than two weeks after we had issued the green light, Bush made a hyperventilated speech to NASA, catching everyone off guard with his projection of an aggressive new space program. “Today I announce a new plan to explore space and extend a human presence across our solar system.”

Getting back to xxxxxx xxxxx for a moment: I had contacted him on several occasions while he was xxx xxxxxxxx under Bush One, to pass on sensitive information to him regarding the Exoterrian presence, which included the occasional “heads-up” on one of our crafts passing near military or nuclear installations. We never met face-to-face, but he expressed his appreciation for my messages. As a result of his Eagle Scout integrity and experience on the front burner of US foreign policy, he had earned substantial trust within the US uppchelon. Therefore he was considered a key target for us. He knew me as “Bill Willoughby,” knew that I was a contactee, and was spurred to learn as much as he could (which was a lot, given his ultra-high clearance) about the Exoterrian contact history.

Let me also insert that, while he’s a true American patriot, Mr. xxxxx has an advanced sense of the world as one cohesive unit. He is truly a paragon of acquired wisdom—that rare combination of smartelligence, honor, and gritty courage that one so infrequently finds at the highest reaches of government.

Quite most of the facts about the “UFO Coverup” are on record in one form or another (mostly on the Internet), but for the most part uncognated by the general populace. You see, the PTB don’t need to exercise much actual censorship anymore—altho there are still such instances. Writers and researchers who oppose and attack their actions need not be imprisoned or killed. No, these types are merely marginalized, their voices in the wilderness relegated to, well, the wilderness of the Internet and fly-by-night publishers. From these venues, chock full of the truly crazy, they can never gain a wide audience, never be sanctioned as truth-bearers, eg, never get on The Today Show.

Side-side with that is the glaring actuality of the omnipresence of entertainment modalities, one layered upon the other, in the lives of Americans. With what time they have aside from their job, family and relationships, there’s their computer browsing, emailing, texting, twittering, torrenting, video gaming, music listening, DVD watching, and the everpresent television viewing, whether real-time or recorded. On top of everything distracting people from paying attention to real reality, there’s the fake reality of shows like Survivor, American Idol, Super-Mean Nanny, The Bachelor, Mommy Swap, Dancing with the Stars, and Return to MILF Island. (An exception to this is Deal or No Deal?, which is just great television.)

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CHAPTER 17

Blackness from a Burst of Light,

as I tell you a cautionary tale

Gather round now, young’uns, and let an old man tell you a very scary story. If it doesn’t give you nightmares, you’re a tougher hombre than I, because the following still causes me to wake up in a cold sweat.

Around 1993, as required by the Astanian uppchelon for all Service Corps personnel, I did a stint with the Emergency Corps. This agency operates on all Sector worlds to prevent undue loss of life or planetary viability -- everything from being the peacekeeping force after a worldwide or interplanetary war to deflecting asteroids that endanger the inhabizens of a populated planet.

As I may not have mentioned, orbs that are judged by the Central Government’s scientists to be capable of producing higher life are manipulated in certain ways to produce desirable results. A good example is Urth’s ozone layer, long a mystery as to its exact perfection in keeping the sun’s more dangerous rays blocked from adversifying life here. At some point long ago, ships came and sprayed the necessary molecules to create that “fortuitous” layer.

Anyway, from time to time, because of some ecoclysm, the Emergency Corps has to race somewhere to save a planet or a population. They’re kind of like the paramedics of the starzone. Another way of defining them is that they’re halfway between the Service Corps and the Astanian Armed Forces. The Emergency Corps has an armed contingent, but when it’s utilized it’s usually as a defensive shield of some sort, similar to what our UN has and does.

I haven’t mentioned the Armed Forces until now because they’re rarely ever used, serving more as a deterrent force to any advanced planet that has the deluded intention of preying on its neighbors. Like I might have mentioned, there are no Klingon or Romulan Empires around here, and the Astanian Armed Forces keep it that way. Well, there is the Rigmodian-led contingent you’ve already read about but, aside from their nefarious doings here and a small handful of other places, they don’t pose a real threat to the Sector government, ie, they’re more pests than anything.

Also, once in a great while and not for several millennia, there occurs a rogue Sector or Quadrant that tries to bully or attack its neighboring starzones. The Armed Forces are a preventative measure for that as well.

After my first stint in the Emergency Corps, and having fulfilled my obligation in that regard, I re-upped for a second tour. I found the work interesting and exciting, never the same from one juncture to the next. Just as my second four-year stint was coming to a close, I was toying with the idea of doing one more, when the following occurred and wiped my mind of the thought.

There was a planet called Karda, several hundred light years from here, which was transitioning out of its militaristic stage (something Urth is due for within a few decades). Elections were held shortly after a terrible war in one of the two combatant nations. This war was at least as bad as our World War II, but concentrated in an even smaller land mass. The “peace” party, comprised mostly of women candidates, won the election across the board, which was no surprise because the people were quite sick and horrified at what had just transpired, and it was believed by most that the war could have been avoided thru patient negotiations. Also, as a result of the high mortality rate in the just-completed war, and one a few decades before, women held over 60% of the eligible vote.

Soon after, the other country held their elections. With basically the same conditions and attitudes prevailing, further buoyed by what had transpired in their rival’s nation, the anti-militaristic party won in a heavy landslide.

Both countries then proceeded (a bit too rigorously, most everyone later agreed) to dismantle their respective armed forces, close military bases, and destroy weaponry. These moves were met by stiff resistance from the generals and officers, as well as the uppchelon in the military-industrial complex—grown very fat and arrogant under the previous set-up.

One point the militarists tried to make was that their countries were not guaranteed permanent safety just because they were no longer fighting each other. There was another country on the short horizon (think China) that had a large population and was developing fast, in both industry and military strength, and a second nation (think India or Japan) that could turn aggressive if it had the opportunity down the line.

But the new leadership in both these war-weary countries did not desist from their plans. Military personnel and their supporters, when they began fomenting violent demonstrations, were arrested and jailed, which led to even more protests and riots. The situation quickly spiraled out of control, with major sabotage and acts of terrorism bringing the two nations to a virtual standstill.

In a much-to-regret “get-tough” stance, public executions were carried out for hundreds of prisoners, some with barely more than a perfunctory hearing. After several days of this, there occurred a general revolt among the remaining uniformed soldiers in both countries, and they marched on their respective capitals, demanding the resignation of the new governments.

At this point, most of the police and internal security—made up primarily of ex-military men—joined the revolt. The new leaders, after badministering a crisis into a Crisis, went on television and (with way too much screaming) not only refused to step down but insisted that the coup leaders order the insurgent forces to remove themselves back to their bases, and then turn themselves in for treason. The response to that was the shelling of both capital cities, which lasted for a day and a night, coupled with demands that the new governments resign. The leaderships adamantly refused, making several shrill broadcasts filled with angry denunciations.

Meanwhile, on a space transport only a few hours away and proceeding at top speed was the vehicle I was on, accompanying the Emergency Corps for what had originally been a call to establish a peacekeeping force on the ground while mandatory arbitration could be conducted. In fact, the plan was for us to hold the fort until Commander Tetrov could get there and set things back in proper order.

But now that it had turned to civil war (the ugliest form of armed conflict), we received word from HQ to proceed to a medium-height synched orbit, from where he could monitor the local broadcast stations and be nearby in case a ceasefire had to be enforced.

At the following dawn, the insurrectionist armies marched on the cities. They were met in both cases by a civilian barricade, composed mostly of women and children. From the broadcast we were watching from our ship, they looked to be three- or four-thousand deep. Signs read “We are your mothers and wives and sisters and daughters.” The military men, obviously crazed beyond any sense of humanity, hesitated briefly, ordered them to stand aside, were met with renewed chants, then proceeded to mow them down like so much harvest wheat. The crew witnessing this with me gasped and yelled and gasped some more.

Just at that juncture our communications systems began to get terribly befuzzed with static and we were having difficulty sending a message back to The Pearl updating our status. Then we saw what was creating the signal interference! Entering from the opposite side of the world, a fleet of over a thousand vessels from the Sector Peacekeeping Forces was descending like a cloud of locusts onto Karda. Arjun shouted at the viewscreen, “Mordacksa Hima!”—which roughly translates as “motherless baboons”—and gave the order to rise to a higher orbit.

I should probably interrupt myself for a moment to tell you more about the Sector Peacekeeping Forces. Rarely used but extremely feared, this army is over ten billion strong, and drawn from every member planet. They have countless advanced weapons, including an estimated 20 million fusion bombs, the weakest of which is about five times more devastating than Urth’s biggest H-bomb. Plus, many, many atomic and hydrogen bombs, the ones confiscated from planets entering confederacy.

And, the stuff of nightmares (or blockbuster movies), tens of millions of killer mechchines -- think Terminator meets Transformers -- mostly recovered from the war they fought on Drason. Drason was a rogue non-member world, highly militaristic, which attacked and occupied their resources-rich neighbor, a League member. That was the last time they had been called out, more than a hundred years ago.

Since then, with the emblazoned memory of the smoldering ruins of the totally vanquished Drason acting as a cautionary tale, the mere mention of “The Forces” has been enuff to forestall trouble at many turns. Even Tro, when things would get intractable, would play this card. I had been a part of this charade on two occasions, while on arbitration missions with him. Tro would set up a pre-arranged scene in which he called me over and whispered something in my ear. I would then look a bit shocked and repeat back to him, a little too loudly, “Have The Forces put at the ready, sir?” He would angrily shush me and look at the others as if to see if they had overheard, which of course they had, but pretended not to have. In both instances, accords were reached posthaste after that.

But getting back to the story, the Sector HQ, obviously believing the situation on Karda to be an irremediably broken crisisflict, decided to exhibiate a show of force, a tried-true method of bringing incipient war to an abrupt halt. But the event I’m about to describe should be prefaced with a reminder that The Forces had not been in a battle for a century and were perhaps lackadaisically trained. Their mere presence was always such a deterrent that few of their number believed they would ever be engaged in a real battle.

Our ship had just pulled into a higher orbit when the unthinkable occurred! While taking fire from patrol craft commandeered by the desperately boldistic rebels (undoubtedly a shock in itself to the Sector Forces), and beaming their salvoes in defense of their fleet, a Sector fighter ship accidentally hit a comrade ship—not any ship but a Tactic-One bomb carrier. Carrying a dozen fusion weapons, it was one of three sent in with the armada (needlessly, foolishly, as they would never be used in such a skirmish). The blast that hit it was a Z-Ray, a highly electrical charge that acts as a disrupter to anything that runs current. It was being aimed at the insurgents’ stronghold but instead hit the command deck of the T-1, knocking out its power and creating short-circuits on all decks.

The tragedy ensued during the hasty recircuiting, when a long-defunct self-destruct mechanism was erroneously re-activated. The ship was originally used for advanced scouting missions and had the self-destruct mechanism in case it was about to fall into the hands of an enemy or low-tech planet.

(I can’t resist interjecting this: Just such an event happened here in 1908, over Tunguska, Siberia. Laughably explained by Urth scientists as an asteroid that “exploded” six kilometers up, generating tremendous damage on the ground, it was in actuality a malfunctioning scout ship for the soon-to-arrive Service Corps. The crew ejected and set it into a self-destruct mode.)

So the ship, in blowing itself up, triggered one or more of the fusion bombs, which triggered the rest, which trigstarted the detonation of the other fusion bombs on the other bomb-laden vessels. The result was catastrophic to the nth degree. It was like a small sun going nova. Every Sector ship and all crewmembers (numbering 1.4 million) were fried to death. Since the populated zone of the Karda was concentrated in one land mass near the equator, the whole world became one big Ground Zero. Of the 1.87 billion persons on the planet, there were only about 200 survivors, mostly miners, and they were all rendered sterile by the radiation, which meant that an entire race had been rendered extinct.

As for our ship, our chief pilot was monitoring the voice transmissions and, realizing the implications of what was unfolding, wisely turned tail and left orbit, giving us a half-minute of full outward propulsion before the explosion. As it turned out, our craft was badly scorched, but aside from several optical injuries no one was hurt.

A lesson to be learned from this is that when brinkmanship, one-upmanship, an inexperienced leadership, and weapons of mass destruction come together in unholy union, there results a tragedy of innocents. In this case, that destruction encompassed an entire race and culture, almost two billion souls, and over a million Force members, themselves drawn from over 500 worlds. A further lesson: Extremism in trump-response to extremism—in this case, the peaceniks vs. the militarists—often leads to disasterclusion.

Shortly after we left the scene of this cataclysmic event, the speed-cruiser carrying Commander Tro arrived in the area. We parked alongside each other and our Commander filled in Tro, who had joined Arjun in his office. When they were concluded, Commander Tetrov came to see me on the main deck where I was doing my report.

Receiving my salute with his customary wave-off, he said, “Bierce, how is it with you?” Still shaken by what I had just witnessed, I was unable to say much that was coherent. Owing to his proclivities, the Commander could tell my mind had just been pounded hard and was still somewhat jumbled.

“Come with me a few minutes back to the cruiser. I’m sure it’ll be okay with Arjun. Wait, I’ll ask him.” He walked a short distance back to Commander Arjun’s office, knocked, stuck his head in briefly, and returned to me with his finger pointed to the connector tube between the stationary ships.

Once back on the cruiser, he led me to his private area and sat me down. “Ambrose, as I’ve made clear already, I truly hope that you can rejoin us when your stint with the Emergency Corps is ended next year. Your services are surefactedly missed. Many developations are afoot on Urth. The crop circles are now at stage three, we’re gaining two percent a year in people who want contact, and many other things I could report to you.”

Finally finding a level keel, I told him that I would not only not be re-upping with the Emergency Corps, but that I would be exercising my escape clause. and would be back in sixty days, ready for duty.

“Excellent, excellent, Ambrose. This sad day then has one silvery lining.”

CHAPTER 18

Letters to the Surface,

in which semi-direct contact is made

In the early ’90s, a form of contact—thru a series of letters—was made between Commander Tetrov and a UFO organization, an outfit that published an excellent monthly journal (The Missing Link). Six of his seven letters were reprinted, five of them in their entirety. Unfortunately, after we sent the seventh, the magazine folded, due mostly to the fact that the publisher got married and wanted a respite. It was in that final missive that he announced a postslowment, until the “end of the decade,” of the attempt to speedify Openization.

Tro would read me these letters before he sent them, and I would give him advice on having certain statements in or not, and the phrasing of certain things. As for his syntax, he was a bit stubborn, and after awhile I let the minor matters go and concentrated on helping him with substantive content.

“Ambrose, I’ve prepared another communique for the Urth group. Please spend some time with me and help me smootherate it.”

“Yes, sir. Can I assume you looked over my report on the group’s last meeting?”

“Well done on getting thru that doorhole. But did you have to volunteer for so many of the social thingativities? We may need you on the ship more than that schedgenda may allow.” (This is illustrative of much of my undercloak ground work, infiltrating groups and finding ways to meet chosen individuals, the general purposes of which were to procure data and seed specific information.)

I replied: “I thought it facilitive to speedify my closegetherness with the group. Also, I’ve made further progress with my sleep reductions. I find that two raw meals a day between breakfast and dinner, and three twenty-minute breathometric sessions, has brought me down to under four hours per night.”

“Excellent, Bierce. Let’s get a letter out.”

I’ll skip the details of the backforth edit/revision process, especially as it would become contentious at times. Here is an excerptation from two separate letters, presented in their final form.

Permission has come back from the superiors to proceed with certain dispensements for the purpose of establistarting relations between our entity groups. What has been so far approved is but a meager allowance of my request list for such and consists mainly of a general layplan, as well as a continued dispelimination of faulty knowlisms, of which even the most ardent/brilliant of you are rife with. As to the issue of proof-making, it has been further decided to let what I write stand alone (for now) as a kind of proof-unto-itself—to allow us to take note of who among you are wise enuff to discermine it; to watchsee which of you has the mentacuity to recognize truth when it (rare’casion) shows its face on this planet, so fraught as it is with lacknowledge, misinformation, and programs of deception. Sofore, it has been decided to inform the subject-focused, let form a cadre of attuned cognizenti . . . and go from there when the table is prepared.

Thus and so, we will basistablish, thru these letterings, the open communication phase between our Peoples. It was my intention to move forward at a quickened pace, but some factors now counterweigh that approagram. For one, it may be better to allow a little more time to pass while your geopolitical world order stabilizes. For another, it appears imminent that I myself will be called away on a different (emergency) assignment. My tenure here is suddenly subject to another world’s degree of discord.

As important as this planet is, it is classified as an “Age-Ready” assignment, where things can be slow-railed if nessquired, in contrast to a situoblem on a member world (and its colony moon) that may need mandarbitration to avoid mutual bloodletting. My firstmost responsiduty would be to the resolution of such a confliction, but I would return immed’ely I could to oversee activities here. Others can fill my job in the interim, which won’t be long, but no one is available who can better handlehelm the other complicrisis, which is of a type that I have brought to settlecision many times.

The Commander did indeed soon depart on the emergency arbitration—to Estidea. A few of us joined him on a super-transport, capable of up to 36 on the I.F. scale. The crisis was soon settled, which was fortuitous for them and a learning experience for me.

In the closed-quarters conference room on Estidea, where the main planet and its sizable moon colony were on the verge of all-out war, Tetrov was in his true element—pacing about with the contending leaders, cajoling, screaming, sometimes even shedding tears of dismay, declaring more than once that the negotiations were a hopeless charade and the planet/moon were to be quarantined, and ordering his staff to prepare for quickmediate departure. He would mix offers of increased benefits with threats of trade boycotts and anecdotes from his previous experiences -- whatever it took to finally bring the two sides to an agreepact. He accomplished his mission in less than two days of nonstop practitioning.

On the way back, I stopped by his quarters and he invited me to share with him a bottle of rixi (a light Estidean liqueur). I remember him laughing and telling me, “It usually takes about that much. They don’t call me in unless all else has failed.” We returned to the Openization process here on Urth.

A later letter had this informadata for the “cognizenti.”

My main purpose in this letter is to pull the cloak partly away, enuff for you to surify more in the next few minutes than your race has truthstablished in the past forty-five years, regarding our presence.

(As I dictate this letter, I peer thru my pri-chamber portview down at the beautious orb you so luckily call your homeworld. Just now, the sun is catching full on the Ural Mountains, and the clouds describe a giant pinwheel over the glittering Caspian . . . reminiscene of our own gorgeous galaxy when viewed, as I have had the thrillsight to do, from far above.)

The problems attendant upon contact initiation on any planet are considerangerous. Count that double-true on this your sphere, so multi-fraught with evering emerguations—from rampant nucliferation to the many close-brinking enviroclysms. But let it be hoped that the worscarios of your poli-military hightensives have been relegated to the history pages, and that your major nations will commence cooperation toward the rectification (redirect your resources) of the more-serious-than-you-think ecodamage.

We will do what we can, and it will be plentious, but there is such a thing as “point of no return” (irrevocable damage) when it comes to nature chains and lifecycles. This is the main reason why it is being urged by some among us, selfcluding, to establistart relations in the sooncome rather than the latertime, and why grantmission is being sought to waive the usual readyness criteria. There are some ecovironmental dangerations that we must work to eradicate, beginning in the short future.

Despite the complaints by some among the Sector Service Corps and other interworlders that this planet is a troublenest and a bubblepot, I can honest-facedly say (and not only I, but manymost of those assigned here) that I have grown in love with this place—with its valiant peoples, and many natural treasures. We’ve come to admire the courage, tenacity, humor, and generosity that most of you exhibiate on a daily basis. And of course to mention the music, in all its stripes and strains, long renowned among the worlds of this starsec. Most of the stationees, meclusive, have been gladhappy to takevantage of this indigenous sourcelode.

You can stand assured that, while I hold this helm, it will weigh improbable that any final curtains will befall you. I think that the darkest days are now problikely behind us, not only the nuclear scenarios, but most of the earthquake threatuations, and a very close call with an asteroid a few years ago. (There’s still one more on the way, but not to be worryhensive; we have one-third of the mammoship fleet approaching it at present.)

You should be confident of my having pilot-guided many worlds thru the rocky narrows of the Transition Age, including some that were nearly as problacious as this blue place. I am in fact the seniormost of my job-calling (in this region) both in terms of age and assignments resolved. The translaquivalent of my role-function is “magnifying psychsensor/situation adjudicator,” from which is gotten Magnificator. A way of terming my job is that of an Empath/Arbitrator. I specialize in Planet-Member In’duction and Crisis Resolution—your world providing ampletunity in both categories. (While it is rare that I particattend any meetings with non-aware humans, my presence has been referred to as “a tall robed man” or a “mysterious shrouded figure standing off to the side.”)

And so it is that I find myself on orbas such as yours, which are Coming of Age, are achieving the maturity to basicstand the responsiduties of interplanetary relations as a member of a peaceful federation. But you will learn that all is not strictly idyllic among the member worldizations; there are frictions and disputes, some of which have even tainted our efforts here. But a majorpoint is that these are nevever settled by warmaments.

I will now attempt to dispossess you of several notions that you have concerning us. For the record, I must mention that a strong minority among my consulteam is in nonagreement as to my decision to so “de-myth” us now, but I sincerely befeel that it has come time to clean the air of some of the overconceptions concerning our powers, as well as to put-rest the sheer misinfo that has grown up around our activities here. (For me to speak to you of our splitcisioning is in itself a de-mything, as most’you picturemagine our modalities as like computer printout—coldly analytical indices, inexorable formulae.)

But, despite the fact that we were born under a different sky, we are people too. We were not spawned by a separate creation. To paraphrase one of your students of perceptuality: We exist as equal neighbors in the community of the One Creation, founded by Spirit and unified by spiritual awareness. But that is not nearly my department. Those verities are the revelation prerogative, as on all worlds, of the ministering angelic corps and their superiors.

Compared to them, we’re the nuts and bolts of the apparatus; we’re the engineers and biologists and cultural historians, the peacekeeping force and the rescue squad. We manage, coordinate, legislate, regulate, and enforce. We take care of the political, economic, educational, and social inter’lationships in this local Sector (621 worlds; 1000 eventualbe). [Note: The planet/colony that Tro arbitrated went back to being one unit, thus the 620 number I reported previously.—A.P.] We solve disputes, supervise trade, provide logistical support for the spirit workers, maintain academies, ferry exchange students, clear asteroids, and introduce the readyceptive to the larger family of planets to which they belong.

But we are not in any actualsense omnipotent or omniscient. Certaintrue, we have technoportation and mediciques that by your standards are farvanced, but for you to be unduly awetimidated by these-such is not to realize how close you are to the same methods. (With our helpguidance, even closer.) So I would like to repeat my stresspoint that most of the offworlder races are composed of persons not that dissimilar from you—eating and sleeping, raising families, pursuing careers. We spill our juice, we cry (especially y-truly, being an empath), we forget things, we get divorced, we argue among ourselves. On the last (having just come from a meeting where once again very little was settled by more than a 6–4 vote) I will tell you this. Perhaps an analogy. Imagine putting ten of your Nobel laureates, all from different fields and representing several countries and age generations, on a committee to recommend poli-social action in a Third World nation. Do you see where I’m driving? The more hightelligent a person is, the more difvarious ways he/she can think of to have something done. And the more egoful they become as to the weight of their own opinionalysis.

Despite all the controversy sayrounding this blue place, there are none in the starsec who would disagree: If you survive with your biosphere primely intact, this planet is suredestined to become one of the greatest and wealthiest among our union. With your fortuitous location near the Translanes, your abundance of rare resources (water, wood, platinum, diamonds, plus manycetra), your music proceeds, your splendid natural wonders—all this combined with the general strengthbility of your psycharacters, all but insure this as a dawncoming world of majorportance.

The one truthguide for you to remember closely is this: Altho we will be of service to you during these tenuous years, defending you from the vicissitudes of geologic calamity and advising you on matters such as international organization, you must look not so much to us as to yourselves for your successful entry into the future.

So if (when) this People emerges from its long-wrought chrysalis-cocoon into the brighting day of world democracy, mutual plentitude, and nature in balance, it will be your triumph—the shining crown of human cooperation—the many disparatisms within your onified race finally workgethering to unlock the potential of this mighty orb.

Until I reach you again,

Peace and Protection,

Tro

(For a more detailed record of the other letters, and additional words of Tro, you may go to Section Four. For an even fuller presentation, please log on to words-of-tro.blogspot.com.)

CHAPTER 19

An Interstellar Romance and Tragidrama,

as my heart is renewed/my career crushed

I came to be on Raxa that warmest of their months because I was accompanying Commander Tetrov on an urgent mission to dissuade them from quitting Sector membership. They had become members barely thirty years before, after what I heard was a fairly hard bargaining session by Tro himself. Before the Commander’s involvement, they had become somewhat infamous for their reclusive intransigence. The natural course of events was for an orb to achieve a status-state of peaceful civilization and rudimentary space travel, then to be placed on a path toward Openization and Astanian statehood. But Raxa resisted, unrelentingly and obstinately, for tens of years.

The reason for their reluctance started with what has been described as a slight xenophobia, but what is more akin to a stubborn Kansan aloofness, an attitude of “leave us alone and we’ll do the same for you” -- not necessarily a meanattude, but an on-my-own-two-feet, prideful independence.

Another factor, and this proved out as the stated reason why we were summoned there, was that they were not advantageously equipped for the interplanetary trade market. They were well-off in a subsistence sort of way, but didn’t have a high yield of products or services that other planets wanted. Their primary export up that point had been their dazzlelovely jewelry, but even that was a high-competition market.

The other side of the equation was the reverse, ie, they were very import-intensive. Most of these were luxury and hi-tech items, which the simple-styled Raxans coveted to a high degree, making up, it would seem, for a long history of frugality and parsimony.

In addition, there was the fact that certain large manufacturing concerns were hurt badly by the Astanian Traders, in that their once brisk-selling products—be they autos, entertainment consoles, or whatever—were now considered somewhat stodgy. Another native technization that was severely debilitated was the coal business. They had wind, solar, tidal, and some oil, but clean-burning coal was their chief electropower source, until they found out how cheaply they could purchase fusion reactors and zero-point home antennae.

The other factor cited was that they were experiencing a “brain drain,” with thousands of their engineers, artists, and scientists heading off for jobs on other worlds. This is not uncommon after Openization, as the call of space is a strong call, but especially so in the case of Raxa, which offered not that much in the way of excitement and achievement vistas.

These corporations put heavy influence on the planet leadership, a kind of monarchy with a popularly elected legislative body, to reverse course and drop out of Sector memberhood. They were well within their rights, as there is a clause in every planet’s Openization Agreement allowing for withdrawal; if it’s within 100 standard years, there’s no penalty whatever.

So I was there with a small contingent from the ship, led by the Commander, who was double-determined not to lose Raxa from our confederation, as he had labored hard to sign it up in the first damn place. I should add that this was my initial assignment with the rank of Ambassador First Class, having been recently promoted from Ambassador. The new designation meant that I could meet alone with all but the top planetary official in any negotiating situation, that being reserved for Commanders. But I was gratified to be given the extra responsiduty and looked forward to contributing in any way I could.

Like the others on the trip, I was quickly taught the rudiments of the Raxan tongue (a lot like Hungarian), getting subjected to an intensive langlearning technique that would be given half in sleep and half while in a small class. Tro didn’t have to attend, as he already knew the language from previous dealings. In addition, we were all given crystalexes containing summaries of Raxan culturedata to study before we landed.

As it turned out, there wasn’t much for me to do on Raxa, as it was basically a two-on-two match-duel between Commander Tetrov and Komo on one side, and King Johma and their High Magistrate Tarek on the other. This was the same foursome that had sat in the same room in the same hilltop castle a generation before, hammertonging out the original agreepact, in a time when the king was newly crowned and his wife, Queen Ebetha, was pregnant with their first child, Ekatia.

Now I come to the princess Ekatia. While the primary negotiators were in the inner sanctum, Ekatia served as hostess to the four others of us who were on the away team. We had our databoards and drop-down computers and were hooked into the Raxan equiv of our Internet, and we would periodically be asked to provide some downloaded info. When these were printed out, Ekatia and I would walk together down the ornately decorated hallway and enter the meeting room. There would be a short exchange of pleasantries, mostly from Tarek to Ekatia, as they were (despite their age difference) engaged to be married. We would hand over the readaterial, and then we would walk back together.

In those brief interludes, we found out the first thing we shared, and that was a similar sense of humor. Without a doubt the wittiest woman I had ever met, she would have me in stitches with her comments and mimicry, including, in quite pointed fashion, fun-poking at her betrothed. when I would make a jest or an anecjoke, she would titter or even shriek with laughter. Those men among you who have had a woman react that way can attest as to how appealing that is, inofitself.

On the third day of the proceedings, it was decided that I should go out into the capital city and poll and interview the citizens on their attitudes and opinions regarding Sector membership. Ekatia was sent to accompany me. After three or four hours of this, Ekatia suggested we go to a café in the public square for some food and refreshment. That we did, and spent an overly long break getting to know each other, ignoring the many curious onlookers and laughing uproariously every minuteor two. Our hands would find themselves grasped together as we succumbed to the basic funjoyment of each other’s company.

Oh, you say you’re lacking for a full picscription of this lady? Well, here it is: She’s quite tall, almost to my height, and bearing a resemblike to the actress Emily Blunt. She has a big smile, and possesses blue/violet eyes that can light up -- or melt down -- anything in their path. She looks quite Urthian, except for her elongated ears and forehead ridge, but her hair, burnished bronze with interweaved highlights of untamed red, would usually cover those up.

When it came time to leave the café, Ekatia declared that she had to freshen up, and so we went to her private quarters, a building near the castle that was constructed entirely of chrome and colorfully tinted glass (like that found in Tiffany lamps). Once inside, she directed me to a cabinet of light liqueurs while she went into her private chamber. Still technically on duty, I poured myself only a half-glass of something amber and waited for her.

She came out a few minutes later, but dressed in something altogether different, a kind of tightly clinging soft pink frock that highly flattered her highly flatterable features. Before I could say much beyond a clumsy compliment, she had sat down and said, “We don’t need to go back out there. I know what they’re all going to say before they say it. In fact, I will hereby be the Raxan citizenry. Interview me.”

Before I even framed a question, she was on her feet, mimicking a young housewife, saying, “I love the Trader stores and the catalog buying. Why, it’s mostly what I think about, other than my two precious little boys.” Then, in a deep, somewhat slurred voice, while bulking up her shoulders and snarling her lips, she continued with, “The way I see it, we can do with the Sector stuff, or without it. Lots of my friends are out of work at the present time due to them new turbines down at the power grid. No jobs for old coal haulers.”

She proceeded to do a half-dozen of these pitch-perfect imitations, and I had no doubt that she was being accurate, that she was the kind of princess who was in touch with her people and knew their wants and joys and needs. I found myself falling a little (more) in love with her as she put on this performance, possibly with a some assistance from my third glass of sherry. This strong affection must have shown in my eyes, as she stopped suddenly, looked at me with her head cocked one way, then the other, studying me with a happy bemusement, and said, “Oh, stand up, will you, Ambrose.” I got up a little shakily, and suddenly we were in each other’s arms, and kissing like there was no tomorrow, and you can about guess the rest.

Up to that point, I had tried not to think about her in a sexual way. Our first day on-planet, I had met her fiancé, Tarek, a coldly smug man with a permanent half-sneer on his puffy face. I had the thought several times that it was a bad match, but, other than a few passing fantasizations, hadn’t considered there to be anything I could do about that or our obvious mutual attraction. Even if she weren’t attached, our Service Corps regulaws prohibits us from any intimate personal relations with any principals of the planet we’re conducting negotiations with—never mind, for crimminy sakes, the king’s engaged daughter.

But the stone was hurled. I was in such a state of blissvana afterward that I made some very bold proposals to Kat, about her breaking off her engagement and joining the Service Corps, and how I would get her assigned to The Pearl, and we could be together, and have adventures up and down the Sector and beyond. She wasn’t particularly averse to any of this, but said that she would be letting her parents down, and her people, who deeply loved and appreciated her. Then there was the matter of Tarek, whom she described as a total egosaurus, practically spitting out the words, “I very much don’t love him!” Apparently it was some kind of an arranged deal, and she claimed that Tarek was not in love with her either, only the obsession of someday becoming the king.

At that point, a kind of reality set in for me, and I grew a bit despondent, settling down low after my previous blithe figmentizing. “Oh, that’s right, you’re set to be the queen of this place some day, and here I am offering you a job as a spacefaring ship-rat. Can you forgive me my foolishness?”

“I’ll do more than that,” she giggled, and rolled over on top of me to renew our trysting.

“It’s all your fault, anyway,” I said, trying to lighten my mood, “for being so beautiful and wonderful and seductive.”

“Oh, I seduced you, did I? I seem to recall it being quite the mutual thing, with you, if anything, mostly seducing me!” With that it was off again with her frock, and I didn’t have any breath left for words.

So anyway, the deed was done, and I was in it up to my neck. After a while-and-a-half we noticed it getting late and returned to the castle. I worked over the notes we had compiled, fudged some numbers, and added the new data to the computer banks. The next day, we did nearly the same thing, and the day after that as well. The only difference was that we met at a nearby hotel, in a room that was always kept ready for her private entertainment purposes.

After five days the negotiations were concluded. It wasn’t an easy pull, but Commander Tro had gotten Raxa to agree to stay in the League, but with several major and many minor changes to the original accord. I was happy for this fact but took little notice of the details, as I was beswooned with my burgeoning feelings for Ekatia, and beside myself a little that our time together was about to end.

The team said its goodbyes to the Raxans in the castle’s chandeliered stateroom, and we were told to be on the ship in one hour’s time. By prearrangement, I met Kat at the hotel, and we spent a somber yet delirious three-quarters of an hour together, then said a few tearful adieux between last kisses. I promised to visit as soon as possible.

As I was leaving, Tarek showed up, unannounced. Ekatia’s door had just closed and I was walking down the hallway when I saw him strutting toward me. I wiped my eyes a bit, and he approached me with a “What are you doing still here, and in my fiancée’s room? Hey, I thought I noticed you two getting awful friendly!” I said I had to be back on the ship and tried to brush past him, but he grabbed my elbow in a vicelike grip. A big man, taller and wider than I, he had the strength of an angry ape. He spun me around and yelled, “You’re not going anywhere until I get an explanation!”

Hearing the ruckus, Ekatia opened the door and, seeing the confrontation, leapt the distance between us, shouting, “Leave him be!” and slapped Tarek on the side of his face so hard that he nearly went down. He then made a menacing start in her direction, but I flat nailed him with one of the best sucker punches I’ve ever thrown. He hit the wall and slumped down in an awkward pile. Kat went to kick him in the head but I pulled her back, as she yelled, “I don’t love you, you bastard. I love Ambrose!”

Not knowing what else to do, I grabbed Ekatia’s hand and ran with her to the elevators, where we took one of the available cars to the ground floor. I walked ahead and she followed me, as we made a beeline for my landcar. A few miles later, I headed straight into the ship through the garage section entrance, neither of us saying a word. After parking the car, we went immediately to my pri-quarters, arriving there just as the green lights and tri-tone signaled imminent takeoff.

The ship took off straight upward, then veered off to the east in preparation for atmospheric exit. Just then it swerved back and began to descend. “The jig is up,” I thought, and correctly. Standing in the doorway was the Commander, looking very tall, as he always did when he was angrified. He took two steps into the room, looked at Ekatia, then back at me, staring in disbelief at what could only represent the worst of scenarios, one that would no doubt undo all his efforting on Raxa and create a black mark on his career.

“Ambrose . . . What . . . Have . . . You . . . Done?”

I said nothing, for what could I say? He no doubt had received a frantic call from the king, or perhaps the High Magistrate, that I had attacked him and kidnapped the future queen.

Tro strode up close to me, putting his bony hand upon my shoulder. He then slid his fingers behind my head, low on the skull, and looked into my eyes. He inhaled slowly, deeply, and I found myself doing the same. With a cold feeling in my extremities, I realized that he was mining my mind and emotions. The next several seconds were almost like watching a movie trailer of highlights—my meeting and wooing Ekatia, then us laughing in the gilded hallway, our going to the public squares, Kat’s mimicking of the people, the surreptitious lovemaking, the fight with Tarek, and the fleeing onto the ship. Thru this the Commander remained silent, except for barely audible little hums, rising and lowering in pitch as he surveyed my mindscape and elicited my memories of this disastrous affair.

Finally it was over, less than a minute having elapsed, and Tro stepped back from me. The ship was descending now to the point where buildings and trees could be seen. The Commander gazed at me for another moment, giving me a withering look that I hadn’t seen from him since that first fateful day almost a century ago, only with an added layer of hurt resentment. Justifiably so, because while what I had done was a betrayal of my Service Corps oath, it was even more painfully a betrayal of the person I most respected in the universe.

Commander Tetrov looked then at Ekatia, as she unsuccessfully attempted to make her lanky frame blend into the corner. He smiled a sad sort of smile at her and put out his hand. She walked to him, glanced back at me with a forlorn look that seared my soul, took his hand, and went out the door.

My first thought, which almost became a pathetic blurt, was how much I loved Ekatia. But in a moment, with the cold walls, ceiling and floor seemingly crushing me, I realized that my long-fostered career was suddenly a shamble.

The penalties that came down as a result of this incident could have been worse, quite admittedly a lot worse. This the Commander reminded me several times while he was dispensing my punishment. First, from Ambassador First Class, I was knocked down three ranks, back to just Envoy. That meant I couldn’t go ashore on any worlds for negotiations, arbitration cases or undercloak operations, and could not talk to any offworld officials, even if they were on the ship, unless they asked me a direct question, and even then only with a supervising officer present.

The other thing, the bigger thing, was that I was not allowed to leave the ship whatsoever for one year. Not even to Urth, while we were parked here. I protested this, but Tro said that he had to enforce something that had the sting of severity to it, because he was at first ordered to have me imprisoned in the ship’s brig for a year, then confined to quarters for a year, then confined to ship for a year. Plus, he was supposed to bust me all the way down to Shipman, which is the lowest grade, and what I started out as in 1914. He flatly refused to do all this, stating that mine was a lapse of judgment caused by an affair of the heart, not anything strictly criminal. And, he added, I was a valuable adjunct who had never abrogated his oath before, and that those two factors counterweighed somewhat the severity of the misdeed.

So, with only a minor quibble, I accepted my new circumstances.

CHAPTER 20

The Crunch Time Cometh,

or say it ain’t so, Tro

I suppose by now I’ve put off telling this part of the story long enuff. So here’s what happened at the end of my sojourn with The Pearl, and how I came to be returned to Urth as a walking landlubber. I was already downhearted by the demotion and confined-to-ship order after the Ekatia imbrog, but this next part amounted to the last straw.

I should point out that Urth had its allies and supporters for giving us O’z status (led by y-truly) right up to the time of the occupation of Iraq in 2003. (See further on the backscape of this signal occurrence the Appendix chapter, “The Interstices of History.”) We all realized that the new paradigm of US foreign policy/radical Islamism represented a catastrophic downturning that would have the effect of taking the wind out of the sails of Urth’s Openization proponents. The mostjority of the Sector leaders and observers, all along, had been giving derogatory commentsessments regarding Urth. They had predicted just such possibilities as the War on Terror and a rampant overseas war by the militaristic US, among several other “fragile tectonic plates on an overly precarious geopolitical landscape.”

Tro actively campaigned for early Openization as late as 1998, then, starting with the Clinton scandal, which he likened to desperate rats frenzy-feeding on feces, he took a less strident position, noting that the progressives were in danger of losing their power. He lamented that, if that happened, “the weasels would be in charge,” and set the clock back on, among other things, international amity and the environmental situoblem. After the election of G. W. Bush, which he called “a substantial step backward—one that will repurcuss to the negative for many years,” Tro stopped arguing with the naysayers altogether.

That election (which Bush did not fairly win) supplanted the moderate step forward that the environmentalist/internationalist Al Gore would have represented. This reversal was combined with what we knew would be a regional disasterclusion resultant from the occupation of Iraq, the failure to reach a settlement in the ticking time-bomb of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, the concomitant growth of international Islamic terrorism, and the downward spiral of the ecovironmental indicators (while non-polluting alternatives were being suppressed). In the face of these negfactors, the weakening of the UN by the Bush administration’s antagonism and non-support, and the continued obstinate coverup of the extraterrestrial presence, the decision for an indefinite Openization delay was made.

Tro’s response to the decision, on which he concurred, was, “Urthians have a right to act as they do, but we have the right to not invite them into our tent.”

The meeting occurred in a lower bowel of the ship, and in a hallway adjoining the room I confronted the Commander. He had just emerged from the meeting, which included the Sector Ad/Ob (Advisor/Observer). That would have been a serious enuff line-up, but known to myself and a few others was the presence of the Quadrant liaison from the capital HQ at Nestra Grand.

The previous two times he had paid visits had precipitated big changes. The first time was in late 1943, after the Philadelphia Experiment (when the STC—Space-Time Continuum—had been violated) and at a point when the development of the A-Bomb was a certainty. That executive session resulted in a doubling of our staff and a quadrupling of our surveil-flights.

Shortly after the development of the much more deadly H-Bomb, seven-eight years later, he was back, and that visit led to the implementation of a full-scale preservation program (male sperm, female eggs)—which also included, ark-style, the collection of every valuable species on Urth (or its DNA) for safekeeping, from microbial on up, including the plants. As well, he ordered the Eagle Ace project, which culminated in the Eisenhower meetings.

As they came out of the room, except the rep from the Quadrant HQ, who must have used the secret exit, their faces were dour. Those who spotted me, even Komo and Randa, quickly averted their eyes.

Commander Tetrov was the last one to exit the room. Seeing me, he at first increased his pace toward the elevator, then realizing the futility of that, walked directly up to me.

“Your world is on shaky ground, Mr. Bierce.” (He only called me Mr. Bierce when it was “tough-news-soldier” time.)

“Give it to me straight up, no ice, Commander.”

He said that delay of O’z was a foregone conclusion, and that I was a moon-eyed optimist to think otherwise. As for the new implementations, nothing final had been formalized, but the Sector and Quadrant HQs were concerned about the backsliding status of a world on the verge of what was already considered a forced Openization—this despite their excessively high deployment of funds, ships, and personnel. Several options had been discussed, but nothing was officially decided beyond indefinite postponement of the O’z protocols.

“But if you were a betting man, sir—”

“I wouldn’t bet.”

“If you had already put the money down?” I insisted.

No doubt realizing that he had a lot of reconfiguration and hardalysis to do, and not wanting me playing terrier on his ankle bone, he desisted enuff to say, “If I had to bet, I’d say Plan J7. Sorry, Ambrose.”

Plan J7 is pullback mode. It would mean severely deep cuts in all departments, a mostly hands-off attitude toward Urth. In all problikelihood, that would mean that we would be allowed to ring our own death knell by bringing on global warming, which would result (sooner than current computer models predict) in the plunging of the polar ice caps into the ocean. As discussed in a previous chapter, the tsunami from such an ecoclysm would all but murder the planet, and the surviving people and institutions would be left at least halfway to a Mad Max worscario. The Service Corps would undoubtedly evacuate as many people and valuable artifacts as they could, but Urth would be relegated to ruins.

Not only that, but Service Corps pullback could doom the slim possibility of curtailing international nuclearization, beginning with Iran and North Korea, but including (in everyone’s worscario) the procurement of nukebombs by terrorist organizations from those two, or the old Soviet Union.

My heart was in my feet, but I stood my tallest and gave my crispest circle-fingered salute. “I’ll be requesting a discharge, sir.”

He replied, “I won’t allow it. We’ll need you more than ever.”

Emotions were welling up in me fast, so I spoke quickly. “It’s within my prerogative, Commander. (My commission had long since been amended to that of any other crewman—that of a volunteer). Then, thru tears—the first that Tro had ever seen from me—I wrenched out something about “the green, green hills of home,” and being “with my people this last little while.” (But of course I assumed that I would be among those picked up ifnwhen crunch time came.)

Tro paused ever so briefly, then gave me his ceremonial bow, the same one he used to end his arbitration-case signings. This meant “It Is Now So” and conferred legality on whatever was just decided or requested.

Without further talk, I turned for the stairs and headed to my pri-quarters, to pack my things and make preparations to return to Urth.

CHAPTER 21

Just the Facts Sir,

regarding the secrets of our forbidden history

They made me sign an Oath of Non-Disclosure before they’d let me off. Tetrov had a list sent to my quarters of what was verboten, and it was 200-some mentions. I asked for a meeting, and we hashed over some agreements on what I could reveal of the various secrets that I’m privy to. I could make your eyeballs pop out with answers to long-sought questions, from the true Adam and Eve story to the role of the Illuminati. I could even fill you in on why there really was a “Curse of the Bambino” against the Red Sox, but I am forced to limit my revelations for the present.

The Commander’s dictum was not to say much, not to complicate the revelatory process, already in a multifractured condition. As for the forbidden history stuff, he especially didn’t want me to say much, as it is the most tender of areas, affecting our very self-esteem, not to mention religious beliefs. He said that he was satisfied with the speed of things being circulated by Zecharia Sitchin, Lloyd Pye, Graham Hancock, etc., and the promulcasting being done on the Coast to Coast AM, Jeff Rense, and other radio programs. He said I could “add maybe an inkling here and there.”

I replied, “You mean an occasional drib, a well-timed drab.”

“Somewhere between dribs and drabs. Closer to dribs.”

“But surely you’ll allow me some supplemental smidgeons, to further inform the populace.”

“Some smidges perhaps. But no smidgeons. If you have need of your pension. And your limbs.” (True to his personality to the end, Tetrov was sametimely deadly serious and playful.)

“It’s damn well about time my people heard the full disclosure of the olden days. Hell, Sitchin has let half of it out already. Let me tell the full story about the ancient Anunnaki who ruled Urth as deities.”

“Let sleeping gods lie! You seem to forget that, whatever their original motives, and they’ve paid the punishment, they brought your race into being; oversexed, neurotic, and prone to disease as it is, but they pulled it off. Left a lot of loose ends and squirrelly culture, but gave your people endowment, including bigger brain engines than most of you can handle.”

“I’ll balance it out. I won’t make them out to be the bad guys, totally.”

“Don’t reveal much more than what’s already out there, Bierce. If you do, I’ll have you on a griddle. Didn’t you read the fine print on the Active Personnel Secrecy Agreement you signed? That covers all infodata that you secured during your time of duty, on or off the ship. That includes our three visits to Niburu. You oathed that you would not dissemishare one iota of, I’m quoting now, ‘information gained in the course of duty, without specific Level One’—that’s me, Bierce—‘written authorization.’”

“Under penalty of what, now that I’m leaving active duty?”

“Loss of honorable discharge, loss of veteran discounts, loss of free travel with passing ships, and—think twice, sir—loss of your balloon pension payment, which you’re less than five years away from. For you, that could be the equiv of a quarter-million American dollars; I just looked it up. You wouldn’t want to blow that up. And if nothing else works, you still have your transponder chip with a send-receive function. I’ll set that on a frequency that’ll make your ears bleed.”

I did pause long and hard then. I really hadn’t read all the fine print. I had been figuring that when I got back I’d be the one to spill the beans to brew the wake-up coffee.

“Damn it, Commander, let’s work something out. Where’s that list?”

In the next few days we went down that long list of subjects and wrangled them one at a time, with me taking notes on each new allowance. (This was more grueling than negotiating with that old bastard-brained London publisher, John Camden Hotten.)

“What about the face on Mars, and the buildings around it? They’re in Hoagland’s videos, for gosh sakes.”

“Such harsh language won’t save your buttbone now, Bierce. You’re perturbing me mightily now with all this cantanky arguation.”

“Yes, sir. Sorry, sir. Now what the tarnation! Can I at least write about the Great Flood?”

“No. All this will come out after the . . . you know. People will be more receptive to us, and their true history at that time. You would just embitter people now with all that old scandalhash.”

One further incentive I have to toe the line regarding the Commander’s dissemination strictures is that he’s told me that I’m “still in the Medfiles, in case that thing of yours starts breaking down,” by which he meant my body. He then asked me, slyly I think (this exchange took place right after a conversation we had regarding the limitations on my writing), how long I thought I’d be “keeping the vehicle”—the same question he had asked me a few times previously, shortly before my switches were enacted. I said something to the effect that it was humming along rather smoothly and probably still had a lot of miles in it.

In the end, Tro did relent enuff to give me some little leeway, barely more than what’s already been put on the airwaves or published. But he made me swear to wait until three years hence. At that time he gave me specific items that I could put into the public domain, things that are unlikely to be revealed research or revelation anytime soon . But it’s not a pretty story. In fact it’s not only quite ugly, but when I finally got hold of it many years ago now, I agreed that it was justifiably covered up all this time. This from a person who despises cover-ups and has spent a lifetime, or at least his first seventy-some years, railing against those who imprecated humanity to “just have faith.”

But I’ll leave off this subject now, before I get too wound up in it, but in a few years hence, when the dust has settled, and the time has fully ripened, I shall have some say.

CHAPTER 22

On With the Show:

adjusting to life anew

I negotiated to receive my pension balloon payment four-plus years early, settling for the tidy sum of $116,688 American. That’ll be enuff, as I have some other funds, including the resultant interest accruals and investments from that $4000 in gold I got from McBurr way back (literally) several lifetimes ago. I had hid it that night and planned on taking it to the drop box when I knew I was alone. It was a couple years before I got back there and dug it up. So I banked it, nobody the wiser, not even Tro at first, but he managed to get that out from me, just like so many other things I mentally tried to shelter from his mind. He actually didn’t much care; it just meant I had some extra spending money while on Urth assignments and wouldn’t always be dipping into the bursar’s funds. Along the way, I made some good investments (including, regrettably, only 120 shares of early Microsoft stock).

So I’ve set myself up nicely, thank you very much. I bought a decent-sized place on the water in Venice Beach, Florida, USA. Got a pretty boat—an eighteen-footer with sails and two big outboard motors; it has a sleeper cabin down below. Purchased a used Lincoln Town Car, always liked those, and I got it cheap off an older gent whose driver’s licence the state wouldn’t renew. Only has 47,800 miles on it and drives like a champion. (Which is what I named it, after my faithful Mexican horse.)

Let’s see, what else. Oh, I went to Best Buy and picked up a big flat-screen TV. Had to have one of those. And I hired a woman to come in and cook and do errands and cleaning and such. Never liked doing any of that myself if I could help it.

Speaking of women, I’ve noticed (and, as I cruise slowly down the boulevards here and walk the beach, been noticed by) all manner of fine specimens of femaleness. Not that I don’t miss Ekatia, because I do terribly, and I backplay my time with her constantly, but I may have to let that one dissolve into scar tissue and continue on my way. I just don’t see any feasible way to do otherwise.

On that score (the Ekatia botchmess), I’m frankly self-surprised at my ongoing emotional outpourings regarding her. It’s been beyond all my previous experiences of female relationship response. It may just be this Mediterranean flesh engine I’m now ensconced in, but it may also be duefact that she’s the loveliest, smartest, and funniest woman I’ve ever been close to, let alone involved with.

One of my neighbors, let’s call him Johnson, is an odd duck, in that he’s seemingly intelligent, but possessed of quite a few faulty notions, mostly of the conservative Republican variety. I attribute this to the generation he’s part of, those now in their late-sixties, who went to high school and college during the Eisenhower years: the pre-Baby Boomers.

They were geared for the game as taught to them, back in that relatively straight-simple time 10-15 years after World War II -- flush with the exciting new world of home appliances, TVs, stereos, portable radios, etc. Then there was a sudden paradigm shift, the fabled 1960s, blowing to kabloohy much of their stable linear expectancies about the world and how to get along within it. Bear in mind that they were the first recipients of the “hidden persuader’ of TV advertising and “educational” films. Their programming featured a strong belief in consumerism, honest politicians, land developers as “progress,” life as a series of Kodak moments, “Better living through chemistry,” “We bring good things to life,” and the whole of inculcation of technoproductism.

They had little way of knowing what effects were being created by this rush to progress, what levels of air, water, soil, house, and office pollution were being generated by GE, Westinghouse, Kodak, Dupont, General Motors, and the others. Not to mention the power plants that had to be constantly built and expanded to handle the needs of an electrical-hog nation.

Most of them became conservatives, and resentful ones at that, never quite comfortable with the new-expanded roles of women, minorities, sexuality, and the explosion of mass media.

You see, they thought they were hipsters, modern America personified for all time hence, with their colorful cars and beatnik phrases and daring music—Little Richard and Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis. While they were still humming Tutti-Frutti and Hound Dog, and Great Balls of Fire, it suddenly became Sergeant Pepper time. During the ’60s and ’70s the changes engendered by that era made them squares, and they never quite got over it. So their communication content became disparaging, critical—remindful to any who’d listen to them that old values and modalities were better.

I was very pleasantly surprised by the price of a new computer, and had to ask the clerk to repeat himself when he said they would throw in a color printer free of charge. Happy as a lark was I until three or four days later when I ran out of ink (in the starter cartridge) for the printer. I returned to the store and had the same clerk tell me that an ounce of it was 32-something with tax. I started to say that I remembered when gold was twenty-seven the ounce, but held back. Remembering me, and obviously figuring me for an old coot, he just short of patronizingly said, “I guess there’s no such thing as a free printer after all, sir.”

It’s been a while by now, but there was an incident a few years back that has stuck in my craw, so I might as well get it off my chest. It was when they hung Saddam. Not the hanging itself, or the fact that he was heckled by the gathered crowd, but the fact that there were some who thought it uncivilized that he had to hear any invective in his final moments, that he wasn’t just quietly terminated in a private execution.

It really galls me the way the mass media picked up on this and made it such a big issue that leaders everywhere had to naysay his final treatment. In my day (by which I mean the late nineteenth century) the biggest social event for most towns was the occasional public hanging. Believe me, they stretched these events out for hours, and it wasn’t uncommon to see people bring their picnic baskets. The hangee was forced to hear, besides an enumeration of the charges, many earfuls of hateful denunciation. It was considered part of the sentence that he go to his death listening to shouted curses. It was also a common practice to throw rotten fruits and vegetables at the doomed man

In the case of Saddam Hussein, the “Butcher of Baghdad,” he was let off entirely too gently. If there was ever an instance where the expression “Hanging’s too good for him” (a phrase I think I might have coined, but by now I frankly forget) then this was it. The Astanian Emergency Corps had as their top priority here the prevention of nuclear weapons getting into the hands of terrorists and rogue nations like North Korea, Iran, and Iraq. As I reported in an earlier chapter, Hussein came whisker-close to nuking Washington and Tel Aviv. So, good riddance to him!

I gave a neighbor, a kid about twenty years old, $60 to take me to a rave the othernight. He’s into a “gothic” look and lifestyle, never suspecting that the old guy he was being semi-embarrassed by was at one time referred to as Mr. Gothic (for my spooky short stories).

I’ll summarize my reaction to the evening’s proceedings: WHAT THE HELL WHAT THE HELL WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT ABOUT?!?! But I must admit that I didn’t actually have a horrible time and just may go back a few more Fridays to investigate this phenomenon further. The females were a bit bizarre but very open-minded and pleasure-ready, which are two of the three best things one can say about a woman.

There has been a stir created lately about the sudden “disappearance” of huge numbers (over 50%; in some places, 80%) of honeybee colonies, a phenomenon reported in over twenty-five states. It made me recall something told to me on the ship by a visiting environmental scientist around twenty years ago.

He said that the early sign of our planet’s environmental deterioration will be the reduced numbers and markedly higher centage of deformities in frogs. A middle stage sign will be birds straying off course in huge numbers on their winter pilgrimages. Other middle stagers will be an increase in the red tide phenomenon and whales beaching themselves. (These have by now occurred.) But the one to look out for, the signal that the tipping point has been reached, will be the disappearance of dozens of thousands of bee colonies.

Such a dropoff is alarming inofitself, but what relatively few people realize is that bees pollinate over one-third of the food crops in the world, from apples to soy. Their disappearance will be a precursor to food shortages and famine, but, even more significantly, the unmistakable sign of biospheric breakdown due to pollution and a change in the UV light reaching the planet’s surface.

I’ve watched several westerns on cable TV this past week. Westerns! Don’t make me laugh! I was in some of those places during that era and, other than parts of HBO’s Deadwood, I never saw a western that came close to depicting accurately what life was like out there. For one thing, they don’t give proper discredit to the saloon trash they had back then—scummy, degenerate critters and renegades who’d ride the range or pull off robberies for a month’s worth of drinking and whoring money. Not only the vilest collection of villains, varmints, and vermin you ever could imagine, but most of them stank to high heaven. (I confess that I can forgive a man a moderated degree of evil if he is properly outfitted and fastidiously manicured.)

This Venice Beach is quite a lovely community. Not too hip and not too square. They have very dignified tree-lined streets leading to a commercial section with an enticing variety of shopportunies. One of these trees is worthy of special comment—the banyan tree, one of the most remarkable botanical specimens on Urth. They start out as sprouts on a host tree, then eventually develop on their own into massively canopied fruit-bearing shade trees. Most fascinating is that their branches root themselves as additional trunks. They are native to India, and Thomas Edison planted the first one in Fort Myers; that one’s girth has grown to be 400 feet wide.

There’s also a very fine beach here, but again with a singular oddity: Fossilized shark’s teeth, millions of years old, have washed up on the beaches here. This has earned Venice the title of Shark-Tooth Capital of the World. Why is a mystery, but these relics continue to wash up in abundance.

I try to take a daily walk, the constant good weather here making it easy to maintain this habit across the seasons. (We used to call this a “constitutional;” nowadays they call it aerobic exercise.) On my route, I kept noticing this attractive woman who was also taking her walk at the same time. We would nod at each other, then graduated to “hello” as we passed or intersected. Then one day, I twisted my ankle on a curb (daydreaming, no doubt) and had to sit on a bench rubbing it. So the lady, whose name is Yvonne—a “snowbird” from the Chicago area—stopped and asked me if she could help. I requested that she go across the boulevard and procure me some ice, which she did. But after a while, I still couldn’t walk on it, so she went back and brought her car around for me.

The injury turned out to not be that serious and I was back to walking after several days. But Yvonne and I started going on our walks together and developed a nice platonic friendship. I wanted something more, but she’s been seeing someone down here, and has a steady fella up North as well. (These independent, liberated women!) Anyway, it turns out that she’s a retired English and reading teacher. She was the first to read this book in manuscript form and gave me some positive feedback and suggestions—so that was a fortunate turn of the ankle.

So here I am, happily ensconced in twenty-first-century Florida, USA. Who would have thunk it possible? I’m even catching up to the modern trolley, having bought myself an iPhone, and before that a snazzy cell phone/camera and a BlackJack. I get 350 channels off my dish, and have subscriptions to Newsweek, UFO Magazine, and Foreign Affairs. With my Mac laptop (wireless courtesy of Comcast, and enuff power to guide a rocket to the Moon) I Google, Yahoo!, Bing and Twitter, partake in “Second Life,” and “Farmville,” and occasionally surf the YouTube. I go for walks wearing my chock-full iPod and subscribe to Satellite Radio. (It’s quite amazing what a person can say on the latter venue, and flabberstunning that a company would pay 100 million dollars a year to someone to say these things.)

I’m a registered member of the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, and Amnesty International. Netflix just signed me up for a DVD program and I have recently begun “burning” my favorite movies onto disks. My Xbox gets a workout every night—but I cap it at one hour daily. I’m a regular at Starbucks, order Domino’s once a week, and have a Capital One credit card in my wallet. I watch PBS news, Charlie Rose, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Paula Zahn, Jay Leno, the crew on SNL, and NBC’s Thursday night sitcoms (that Baldwin is a hoot!). I have a TiVo but had to turn off the additional-recording function on it, whereby TiVo “suggested” I might like certain shows and records them for me, as it was extrapolating over forty additional hours of programming a week based on my 15 or so hours of actual choices.

Next week, the Goth kid has kindly consented (OK, I’m giving him $100) to come over for a few hours and show me all the “hot” online sites that the young types visit, as I don’t want to be missing out on the more exciting venues. Which is not to say that I don’t fully utilize the resources of the World Wide Web, from Wikipedia to university library compendiums, for serious research in preparation for my future writing projects.

CHAPTER 23

Out of the Shadows,

as I prepare to tell a true story

I have been chewing on an odd notion for a while, which is to finally write my Ambrose Bierce autobiography. It was a book that many people, including Mr. Hearst, urged me to write. In point of fact, this constant naggling from many sources was a factor in my disenchantment those last few years. You see, I had plenty of story to tell, enuff for a fat volume, and I did sketch out an outline and several chapters. But the truth is that I wouldn’t have been able to tell the full story without a) hurting some people I didn’t want to hurt (especially a living daughter); b) reliving in some detail my agony concerning my sons and; c) leaving out some of the best stuff, like my affair with Annie Oakley. But none of these factors weigh anything anymore. I would call it The Posthumous Autobiography of Ambrose Bierce, by Ambro Pyrce, and let people make of it what they wanted. But I’d set the record straight on a plentitude of issues and events.

For another thing, I knew several of William R. Hearst’s blackest secrets, things of such dark nefario that revealing them back then would have been a full-banner headline (the kind he most loved) in every paper in this country and probably London as well. But one angle of problem I had with those scandalicious stories is that I was Hearst’s co-conspirator on a few of the episodes in question. For another thing, if I had blown the whistle on him he could have turned the tables back on me, as he knew of (and kept locked evidence of) several of my indiscretions, including my dalliance with Ms. Oakley. So it was a true Mexican standoff, and both of us knew it.

My private autobiographical notes had been consigned to the fire before I left for parts south in 1913, altho I know that some previous exercises in this regard remain extant, having been given over to libraries and such with my other papers by my surviving family. These I must need visit in order to do some scholarly research upon myself.

But, in the mid- to late 1920s, my old original Ambrose “vehicle,” having long served me—at times quite well—was running low on steam and high on the need for repairs in the body shop. At that point I set down some of my primary reminiscings (some of them remimissings) of my eighty-plus years.

At the time I had no surety that I could be reconfigured within a new carrier, having been informed that the operation didn’t work successfully if the “original” was too enfeebled. Also, the blood types had something to do with it; not all types could be matched to all other types, which limited the number of prospective carriages. So, that and the possibility that I might suffer from mental semi-incapacitation upon waking from the transfer, provoked me to put down in words the outline of my first set of years.

Those notes I have before me, sitting in a yellowish stack upon my desk. I have not perused them for well-nigh seventy years, but there they sit, looking at me as I look at them. I remember how hard it was to write of my sons, both early to the grave, and my wife Mollie’s infidelity, and her early death after our divorce. But I also recall some things that will be of particular interest to today’s literary readership. To wit, there are renditions of my most interesting conversations with Samuel Mark Twain Clemens, including the one alluded to earlier, in which he made many cosmic references. (I’ll spill a few beans right here and tell you that it was I who provided the poison to him so that he could “go out with the comet” in 1910, as he had broadcast that he would.)

Also, I wrote some details of the downndirty dealings I had with that deplorable scur, Oscar Wilde. On a happier note, there are notes on my friendship and discussions with the talented Bret Harte, and various other dealings with writers, famous, semi-famous and deservedly unfamous.

Also-also, and I’m sure I suppose rightly about this, my relationship with Phoebe Ann Mosey, née Annie Oakley, the famous sharpshooter, will be of some prurient curiosity. She and I were relatively happy in our marriages when we had the affair, a ten-year tryst, but couldn’t seem to help ourselves from stoking the fire that existed between us. It is worth noting that she was the only person whom I contacted, as myself, after my capture/enlistment on the ship. In fact, that was the last sex that my old Ambrose bonebag experienced, along about the time of my seventy-fifth birthday. I surprised her as she was leaving her hotel in Oregon, still conducting her extraordinary roadshow, but that day without her husband/manager Frank. We went immediately to a different hotel and . . . well, I’ll save those details for the book.

When I awoke in the medical room on The Pearl, newly hardwired and fleshstrapped to a sensate body-engine, courtesy of the deceased Judge Joe Crater, retro-activated thoughts of my prickly-thorned past vacated my mind. These were replaced by the exhilaration of a future that now lay before me—indeed, the prospect of semi-immortality, as this transferring of the brain into a new receptacle could be repeated, I was told, dozens of times. At some point, tho, the nerve endings finally become too frayed and scarred to endure the operation. It helped if the brain was being transferred to a viable clone of oneself, but I had not taken any action in that direction and still feel trepidacious as to the ethics of such a course, as the clone-person of necessity must die.

As I lay there in the ship’s infirmary, my thoughts were filled with the possibilities my renewed lease on corporeality now afforded me: planets to visit, excursions and undercloak activities on Urth to conduct which I couldn’t handle as an eighty-eight-year-old man, intellectual projects I would have time for, and the re-ability to resume intimate female relations.

This self-telling holds the promise of being the first truly true exercise in total truthtelling ever written—to the veritable peak of truthitude itself. All persons who have lived a life as an active participant in the world have need to shield someone from what revelations they may bring to light—even if it’s themselves—as they confess to private failures, or misplaced motives, or even the actual circumstances behind some of their accidental successes.

Anyone who has call to write an autobiography is, by definition, a person of accomplishment, ie, a person of considerable ego. At the least, such a thoroughly honest laying bare of one’s deeds and misdeeds, as I contemplate, will stand in literary history somewhere between rare and unique. Besides, there is no chance whatsoever of any legal prosecution.

So, nothing is holding me back now from doing this belated autobio, except maybe Patty Hearst, that old bankrobbing revolutionary, coming after me for sullying grandpapa’s “good name.” (I’ll take my chances.)

Anyway, I’d keep it fairly simple, with a chapter listing along these lines:

1. Ohio and Indiana: Fast Train to Maturity

2. The Civil War: Terror and Triumph

3. The Early Newspapers: Slow Train to Money

4. Wives and Progeny: Suffer the Children

5. London Town: The World a Vista

6. The Bottom of the Shaft: Mining in South Dakota

7. Riding the Hearst Express: The Damnable Glory Years

8. A Straight-Shooting Woman: Me and Annie Oakley

9. NY and DC: A Twisty Tale of Two Cities

10. Hubris and Ennui: A Bad Combination at the Last

11. Zapata and Villa: Rebels with a Cause

CHAPTER 24

Springtime in the Universe

(my baby, she wrote me a letter)

I hereby declare that all is right with the galaxy!! A few weeks ago I received, by normal mail, a letter from Ekatia! This she had arranged thru a Raxan who knew Randa and was coming to Urth for some trade business. He then personally visited me and took my return letter with him back to my lovely.

There was so much to say, and said it I did, using my knowledge of Raxan, but also the interplanetary symbols I had learned in the Service Corps. I communicated my eddress, and it wasn’t long before we had set up an interlinkage, with messages routed thru our friends on several worlds, ships, and space stations. Randa would fulfill the last leg of this Tour de Astania, emailing me from the ship. (Yes, they have a broadband hookup.)

We thus commed back and forth and agreed on a plan. She’ll come here for a month or so, and I’ll show her around, then we’ll go back to her home world, where she says things have calmed down. (They found out that her fiancé was guilty of treasury embezzling and accepting bribes from the planet’s industrialists, so her breaking off the engagement turned out to be fortuitous.) We’ll spend a like amount of time on Raxa, and then decide if there’s one place or the other we’d rather be. If we can’t decide between the two, we may go to Albercron, about halfway between our planets, to judge that possibility.

But I’m seriously banking on good old Urth winning the day. Her world is OKish, but relatively bland compared to our orb. There are literally a hundred breathtaking vistas here, while Raxa has maybe ten in that category, three of which are waterfalls, all smaller than Niagara. Even the cultures don’t compare, as Raxa is fairly homogenized and rather conservative. Among Ekatia’s loves are the arts, especially paintings and music, and we have that here in abundance. She also enjoys letting her hair down and dancing the night away, something they frowned on in her homeworld, and in particular when it came to princesses. In between the great tourist attractions, I’ll take her to museums and concerts and some of the great nightspots around the globe. The ace in the hole is that she sincerely wants to get away from her parents, whom she of course loves very much, but who continue to treat her like a child, altho she’s close to thirty years old.

As for the honeymoon, there’s no better place than Lixia, just four days away from Urth on the Translane Speed Shuttle. We can leave here, do a rudimentary tour of this solar system, especially doting on the rings of Saturn, then park her diskcraft at the A19 space station, where the TSS makes a stop. The Speed Shuttle itself is a treat; think QE2, then think QE11 or 12, only with stars out your porthole instead of ocean.

It won’t be long now before I am reunited with Ekatia, and I admit to being breathless at the prospect. Thoughts and feelings of her consume my attention, and I can hardly even persist in my daily writing.

CHAPTER 25

An Abrupt Change of Plans,

as I hero to the rescue

I knew something important was up as soon as I saw the Caller ID. Instead of numbers, it was a series of dashes, which meant that Komo was telephoning me from The Pearl with his pirated frequency. Because of the danger, as he put it, of “the Bushies listening,” he told me he’d only call in case of a dire emergency.

He told me forthwith of the fact that there had been a coup on Raxa, led by the former High Magistrate (and former fiancé of Ekatia) Jerem Tarek. He had been imprisoned a few months earlier for the high crime of public malfeasance, ie, being on the active payroll of the planet’s industrialists, who as a group had come to be in opposition to Raxa’s membership in the Astanian League. With some of the police captains on their side, they busted Tarek out, took over the palace and media centers, and declared Tarek king. The initial report said that Kat’s parents, the king and queen, had been placed in custody, and that Ekatia was somewhere in hiding.

So what this amounted to was not only a leadership struggle but a rebellion against the Sector, as the coup government had shut down contact with Astania’s offices, evicted the Sector Representative, and declared secession. The Emergency Corps had been dispatched to the planet, and the Sector Armed Forces were put on Proximity Two status, which meant that they were being dispatched to the edge of Raxa’s solar system. Komo told me this after he informed me that Commander Tetrov had been requested by HQ to fastmediately get to a position in orbit there, to await further instructions.

“He left about thirty minutes ago, in a speedcruiser they sent for him.” (Note: These are capable of 375 times the speed of light.)

“Did he take Cooper with him?”

“No, just Randa and a few of the Envoys.”

“Put Sammy on, please.”

After a moment, Coop came on the line. “I think I know what you want to do, and let me just say—”

I cut him off. “Listen, Sammy, I have information as to where the princess is, and if she can be gotten to in time, she can help forestall the rebellion. Her whereabouts is information that the Commander does not have, so it is crucial that, at the least, I get there to give him that info.”

Sammy was quick to retort: “And at the most, what? Stage a one-man rescue mission of your honey and forever be the hero?”

“OK, yes, that had crossed my fevered mind.”

“How many ways is this going to get me in trouble, Mr. Bierce?”

“Enough to make it worth your while, Sammy. Besides, I’m thinking it’s getting to be a long time since you added any good stories to your repertoire. This might be good material for an awesome can’t-top-this-tale.”

“OK, but you’re paying for the gas.”

“Done.”

I went immediately to the Venice airport and waited on the landing strip furthest from the small terminal. Five minutes later, in a small Cessna, Elvis landed, slowed down enuff for me to jump on, and we took off again. A man from the terminal came running out waving his arms, but we just buzzed him and went into a steep vertical ascent. A few minutes later, we were being pulled up in by blue-light suction of The Pearl. (This utilization of small planes was an idea initiated by Amelia in the early ’60s as a way to do drop-offs and pickups more surreptitiously.)

We quickly went to the ship’s hangar and assessed the remaining flycraft. “Let’s take Red Delta,” Sammy said with calmsurance. “I know a trick to get hellacious speed out of her.”

“Double done, old buddy. Let’s rock and roll.”

Thirty seconds later we were accelerating at top speed thru the clouds on our way to planetary departure. Twenty minutes later we were passing the moon and setting course for Raxa. Cooper shortly had Red Delta up to its book-max speed of I.F. 87, ie, 87 times the speed of light. (For those wondering, the smaller saucercraft are much faster than the crew-carrying main ships, because they are equipped to do “space jumps” every minute or so, employing gravitronics and element 115.)

“So what’s the trick, and will you teach it to me?”

“Coming right up, sir. Here, I’ll show you.” After I had sat down in the chair alongside him, he continued. “I came across this by accident, but basically what I do is shut down the main power thrusters, close the out-take valves, then re-start the thrusters, putting it immediately into high-torque/pre-jump mode, then when the output gauge hits 60, push the throttle up to I.F. 80.”

“You put the pedal to the metal.”

“Exactly. I floor the sumbitch a second time, while it’s already doing max speed. I time it so it’s just before the jump phase, and poof, the speed is increased by a factor of five. What it’s actually doing is making one jump after another, without the one-minute pauses in between. If I had to put a number on it, we’ll be doing I.F. 400. The funny thing is that the speed gauge still reads 83 or 84.”

“Does anyone else know about this? Have the engineers seen the trick?”

“Well, not exactly. I told one of them, and he just kinda freaked on me and made me promise to not tell anyone that he knew, and he urged me to never try it again.”

“Oh, that’s reassuring. One more question, Sammy. What’s the furthest you’ve ever gone using this technique?”

“Just to Quilla once when I had her by myself. That’s only about one-third as far as Raxa, but there were no signs of instability. I’m sure it’s safe.”

“Damn the torpedoes. Full speed ahead,” I intoned.

“Why’d you say that?” he asked.

“Because I always wanted to have my last words be something gallant. Let’s put this puppy in gear, cowboy.”

With that Cooper did his magic trick and I once again had the thrillsight of seeing the stars passing by—like on Star Trek. (I had had a few speedcruiser experiences with Tro.) At that speed, if we didn’t blow up, it was only around twelve hours to Raxa. We passed the time with him filling me in on some Pearl scuttlebutt, then me telling him my plans regarding Ekatia, then us arm-wrestling. (He took me seven out of ten, but he employs a clearly illegal move which I’ll later get a ruling on, so that’s not over yet.)

About halfway there we get a call on the ship’s commdeck, and it was the Astanian Space Patrol. They order us to come to a complete stop and present credentials, as we are in extreme excess of the speed limit, and our vehicle is not registered in this starzone, and if it were, it is clearly not a speedcruiser and cannot possibly go as fast as we were going.

Sammy right away notices that their transmission is getting weaker with each passing second. “They can’t keep up with us. And the reason they can’t keep up with us is that we are now officially the fastest beast of burden in the whole darned Sector. Whaddya think of that, man?”

“But what if they ID’d us? There might be a ticket to pay.” I said this with feigned panic, and we both chortled and went back to arm-wrestling.

Several hours later, after a little nap-time, we made planet-fall on Raxa and I gave Sammy the coordinates for the place I thought Kat might be hiding out. It was a place she had told me she would go to get away from Tarek, a cottage her parents used for their honeymoon—the place where she was conceived.

Walking into the cottage, I knew immediately that she had indeed been there and had been forcibly removed. The door was left open and various pieces of furniture were broken or tipped over, including her handheld computer. I picked up the computer and saw that she was composing a message to me when she was accosted.

Leaving the cottage, I directed Coop to the building where the ex-High Magistrate was probably holed up, his former office on the River Ule. Doing a low fly-by while I peered down with oculars, I saw him thru the large glass windows standing with a contingent of armed men. They saw us as well, and Cooper had to evade a ground-to-air missile sent in our direction.

“Swing it down the same way, only a little lower. I’m taking the podcraft right in thru the glass.”

They couldn’t even get a shot off at us because we were coming in so low. I launched out the bay with an eight-foot diskcraft and aimed it for the big pane of glass. I slowed down to around 40 MPH as I burst thru, sametimely setting the podcraft’s sonic disruptors on high. I knocked around ten men over (like bowling pins!) and the sonics knocked the rest out within five seconds, including the rebellion leader.

I jumped out of the pod and straddled Tarek’s mammoth body. I injected him with a double-dose of jazra, and in a moment his eyes opened to the sight of me aiming a disrupter at his forehead. In Raxan, I said, “Take me now to where you have her, or I will introduce you to pain of the first magnitude.” I then pressed a button on my portable sonicizer, directing the beam at his chest. He grunted loudly, contorting and writhing in agony.

“Just to give you a frame of reference, that was a level four.” I dragged him to his feet by his long hair and again ordered him to take me to where he had Ekatia.

He complied, muttering something foul-sounding under his breath. We walked around the prone bodies of the two-dozen or so guards, not one of them moving a muscle as we passed. We went thru the large brass door into a corridor. Down that corridor were many doors, one indistinguishable from the next. Finally we came to an alcove, and a door with an ornately gilded knob.

Tarek paused, staring grimly at the floor, probably in total embarrassment at his unforturn of events. Aiming my disruptor at my captive, I tried the door, finding it locked.

“Ekatia,” I called out.

“Oh my God! Ambrose?” she wailed thru the door.

“Open it!” I shouted out to Tarek, jabbing him in the ribs.

When he opened the door, Kat came running out and gave me an impassioned hug. In that split second, Tarek slapped the disruptor out of my hand, sending it into the nearby fountain, and began to run down the continuation of the long corridor. I sprang after him, with Kat at my side, despite my yelling for her to stay put. With her long, lithe legs she soon caught up to her lumbering ex-fiancé and jumped on his back, her fingernails raking across his face. Tarek elbowed her roughly, causing her to fall off him and onto me, leaving us both in a heap as Tarek went out the exit door.

By the time we got up and continued the pursuit, he was in the parking lot and popping the latch on his sporty hovermobile. We scrambled toward him but had to watch as he pulled away from us. At that moment a car pulling into the lot blocked Tarek’s exit. It was apparently one of his lieutenants, and he jumped out of his hover to discuss something with his leader. I raced up behind him and conked him with the butt of my stungun, then used it to take a swing at the side-glass on Tarek’s vehicle. All this accomplished was to give my entire arm a jolt of vibrating pain, and the evil bastard maneuvered around the car in front of him on his way out of the parking lot.

Ekatia and I piled into the hovercar and sped after him onto the semi-rural two-lane road, by now almost ten seconds behind. A few moments later, Tarek was forced to slow down for an intersection that had cars backed up waiting for the light change (except there, red is go). But he then raised the level of his hovermobile to pass above the waiting vehicles and go thru the green light, right between a few passing trucks. We did the same, and now we were only a few scant seconds behind him. I accelerated to go alongside him and ram him several times from the side. He did likewise back to our hover, and we jousted for half a minute in this manner.

Suddenly a double-decker bus loomed ahead and Tarek veered his vehicle off the side of the road, skidding into a farmer’s shed and overturning. Tarek got out and started running and, a short moment later, we pulled our car up next to the running man, braked it, and jumped out.

Tarek quickly reached a boatslip on a river’s shore, a rapidly moving river with white water showing on its surface. He had a small boat in the water in one swift motion, and started its engine. Ekatia beat me to the boatslip and started pushpulling an even smaller boat toward the river. I grabbed ahold of it and started to climb into the back of the boat near the controls, but she said she was very experienced with such boats and so I let her proceed to take the throttle. She did a zigzaggy motion to cut thru the roiling water, and we quickmediately came up alongside the apostate leader.

I grabbed an oar and thudsmacked him in the head, but he maintained his balance. But then, bleeding profusely from his face, he swung his own oar at me, missing me by a scant few inches. This caused him to topple out of his boat, at which point he grabbed the lip of ours and yanked it severely, sending Kat and me into the churning water. Our boats instantly careened away from us and I heard from Ekatia the words that chilled me more than the cold water: “We’re going to go over a waterfall. A big one! We’ll be killed.”

I said, “I’ll call Sammy,” which I then did by pressing the X-button on my wristcomm. Despite the apparent truth of Ekatia’s assessment, with the waterfall’s precipice about fifty meters away, Tarek and I couldn’t help ourselves from throwing punches at each other in between flailing and flapping.

After a few seconds of near-choking by both of us, and me losing my wristcomm, we both gave up on the battle and concentrated on fighting the current. As the river inexorably pushed us downstream, Tarek was cackling that it was a fine night for a swim and maybe a long dive. He was intent to have all three of us die, rather than be taken back into custody.

Efforting hard but losing the battle to the forceful current, a thought entered my mind. What if Sammy had landed or been forced down by ground fire? We had less than a minute until we were sent over the edge to certain death.

Kat and I both declared our love for each other, and Tarek shouted, “Just shut up and die, you two.”

Not that it could possibly help, but I started screaming out for Cooper: “Sammy!! Sammy!! Sammy!!”

Just then, out of the descending dusk, the saucer appeared. Hovering low over the river back where I had first signaled, it began to skim toward us, its blue vacuum light already activated. We were all yelling at the top of our voices while we continued to thrash, Tarek apparently having had a change of mind now that a rescue seemed possible.

I’ll never forget the feeling that came then; the speeded-up suction of the precipice as the waterfall shot us the last several yards to and over the brink. We were in free fall, heading straight down, encapsulated in the roaring sound of the falls, waving wildly into the spraying mist as we descended.

Then the blue light was all around us, and we began to slow, then stop, suspended in the blinding brightness that cocooned the three of us. We began to ascend toward the ship’s aperture. Kat, directly behind and above Tarek, finally fulfilled her desire to kick him in the head. This pushed him in my direction and we grappled while Ekatia continued to kick him in the back. We were still wrestling in weightlessness when we were pulled into the ship’s receiver bay, the portal spinning shut below us.

Sammy stood there, his arms folded, as Kat and I pummeled the man who would be king, and he pummeled back. Tarek backhanded Ekatia, knocking her down, and set upon me with his full fury, which I matched, noticing the blood on my lady love’s pretty face.

Tarek and I traded blows, then traded blows again, weaker ones but stinging nonetheless. I thought for a flash-moment of those old Popeye cartoons where he and Bluto fight themselves to exhaustion (and me without my spinach). Just then, he landed a punch to my stomach that doubled me over, followed by a heavy fist on the back of my neck. I was suddenly down.

Tarek made a move toward the door to the control-pit, but was blocked by Sammy. A second later, Sammy had delivered a beautifully executed spin kick to Tarek’s face, followed in quick succession by one to his chest and another one to his face. Tarek was staggering backward with each blow, the third one leaving him upright but obviously stunned and wobbly.

At that point I was struggling to my feet, and Cooper pulled me the rest of the way up. He shoved me toward the barely standing Tarek, saying, “Finish the job, hero.”

Stumbling forward, I threw the best right cross my aching body could muster and connected flush on his jaw, causing the big brute to finally tumble to the floor. There he laid, out cold, massive bruises beginning to color his face. Sammy put bindercuffs on his wrists and ankles, then shook my hand. “You’ve still got it, Mr. Bierce.” Chuckling, he added, “Even when it is in slow motion.”

Ekatia, still prone herself, motioned to me with outstretched arms and I moved toward her, pain in every quadrant of my body but a smile on my face. I knelt beside her and we hugged, long and quietly, until Sammy said, “I see the Commander’s ship pulling up.” We looked at each other for a frozen moment, then both of us burst out laughing, long gales of idiot laughter, finally releasing the tension of the day’s events.

Tro beamed aboard wearing his angry Commander face and looked at the four of us. Sammy and I were holding onto the wall to keep from falling over with our by-then convulsive spasms of laughter, and Ekatia had joined us from the floor with a high-pitched tittering, interrupted by hiccups, which made us laugh all the harder. Tetrov, having just arrived to Raxa, was unaware of anything except the fact that one of his flycraft was unauthorizedly (and inexplicably) many lighties from its mooring. He walked over to Tarek, who was just coming back to consch, his angry eyes darting about. Looking down at the bound man and recognizing, despite his puffy features, who he was, Tro surprised everyone by suddenly reaching one of his long arms down and slapping the apostate leader flush on the cheek.

Then, standing up straight, he moved to where Sammy and I stood, our laughter now exhausted. After returning our circle-fingered salute, he began to nod quickly, his eyes very wide (a good sign). He placed a bony hand on both our shoulders, looking to Cooper, then me, as he pulled in what he could of what had transpired. Knowing this, we both willingly relived our memories, allowing him full access to the sequence—the decision to come to Raxa, the trip, the confrontation with the rebel forces, the several-staged fight with Tarek, the blue-light rescue, the denouement on the ship.

Tro pulled his hands back, continuing to nod, and walked the few feet over to Kat. He helped her to her feet and they hugged silently for a few seconds. The Commander then assured her that the rebellion would soon be quelled and her parents returned to their rightful throne.

Just then, Tro’s wristcomm unit beeped and he took a call from Randa. “The Emergency Corps has arrived, sir. Shall I patch thru Commander Arjun?”

“No, I will be coming back to the ship with a prisoner, the rebellion leader, and the planet’s princess. Do an override on their broadcast channels. Arjun and the princess will have statements to make.”

With Ekatia in tow, the Commander turned to leave our ship for his, then turned back and faced Sammy. “When we get back, remind me to ask you about the upspeeding of this ship.” Then to me, “I see you’ve managed to get the last laugh—and I’m pleased that you have, Ambrose. Very well done, son. Very well done.” I glanced up and saw the tears welling in his eyes.

CHAPTER 26

The Rebellion Quelled,

as my bachelor days come to an end

Ekatia made a beautiful speech over Raxan television; Tarek (in a deal to avoid deathecution) called on the rebels to desist; and the culpable industrialists and their minions were rounded up and held for trial. As things returned to relative normalcy on Raxa, Kat and I finally found time to enjoy each other’s renewed company.

We toured all the best vacation spots on her world and enjoyed the full hospitality of her loving people toward her and, as the story of my part in the events became known, toward me as well.

After several blissful days of this, I decided to ask Ekatia to marry me. After dinner in the hotel adjoining the Gastillia Waterfall Park, I asked her to accompany me for a walk out to the edge of the falls. I think Kat knew I was going to pop the question, because I had been sweating and stuttering all that night. So I had barely gotten the words out of my mouth, when she hugged me and tearfully assented to making me the luckiest man in Astania.

The Service Corps was planning on leaving around that time, but I spoke to the Commander, and he pushed back their departure date long enuff to have everyone be there for the matrimonial event. He contacted HQ and insisted that more time was needed to ensure a proper stabilization on Raxa.

So, about ten days later, in the same room where we first met—the basilicalike domed room at the official palace—Ekatia and I were married. I wanted the Commander to officiate, but his mandate only covered ships in space, so he had to watch from the front row. Sammy was my Best Man, and he looked resplendent, his long white hair pulled back in a ponytail.

The whole thing, being a royal affair, was broadcast to the world and picked up by news feeds around the Sector as the culminating event in the “kidnapped princess” and Raxan rebellion stories that they had previously headlined. Komo and Randa and the entire crew were also there, and everyone had a great time at the reception.

In a separate ceremony, attended only by members of The Pearl crew and a camera team from the newsfeed service, I was reinstated as an Ambassador First Class and given a Medal of High Service (my third one, but who’s counting?). The Commander made a fine little speech, complimenting me in quite glowing terms, and then I made a few remarks. It became somewhat of a retirement party, as I was never given one of those, but they made me promise to keep an open mind about the occasional special assignment.

My bride and I honeymooned on Lixia, after a wonderful trip on the TSS, and have now returned to Venice Beach to live (we’re considering New Zealand for our summer residence). While on Lixia, I remember one night out on the balcony of our private lodging, the three orange moons there all glowing brightly. We spoke of the destinies of our problacious planets.

Ekatia opined that in fifteen to twenty years her world would be securely ensconced in Sector life, having made the necessary economic adjustments. Many of the most vociferous opponents among the industrialists had been jailed, which put a heavy damper on any more talk of secession. Also, the Commander had assured her that he would talk to HQ about some additional adjustments in the agreepact, in the areas of tariffs and fees.

“As for Urth,” I said, “I can’t be so optimistic, at least in the short run. There are multi-layered problems. There’s Muslim vs. Christian, East vs. West, North vs. South. The North vs. South is primarily that of developed vs. undeveloped nations. Underlying all this, within each nation, there’s rich vs. poor, the rich recently having figured out how to exploit and steal their way to vastly greater riches by buying off the politicians and the media.

“So it may be another twenty years until Urth is ready to enter even the preliminary stage of League membership. The miracle would be anything under ten years. The problematic part is that the degradation of the environment—if the paid-off politicians continue to run interference for the polluters—will likely be so far-reaching as to downgrade a future Urth from the majestic blue pearl it now is, which will cut into our value as a resort planet.”

“Ugh, that sounds depressing. I wish I could think of something to take your mind off of all that.”

“I don’t know. It would have to be a lot of something. A whole lot.” Kat rubbed my back in slow circles and scooted in closer to me, until we were hugging, then kissing. She whispered something in my ear.

“Well, OK,” I said, “that might be worth a try.” And I followed her back to the bedroom.

Ekatia and I are soon to embark on our Urth tour. Utilizing her private diskcraft (which she flies herself, and whose controls she said she would teach me), we’ll go first from Venice Beach to Sanibel Island. There we’ll cavort and canoodle on the powdery sand, watch a great sunset, then drink margaritas and dance under the stars. Our next stop will be Orlando’s Disney World, where we’ll spend a full day, then, after the fireworks (which they don’t even have on Raxa, if you can believe it), we’ll go to a nice disco that adjoins the hotel premises.

From there I will show her Heartland USA (not forgetting that I was once a Midwestern lad), starting with St. Louis, Missouri, where she’ll meet some clear-eyed, salt-of-the-earth souls, look up at the arch, and chow down on some baby-back ribs at an old acquaintance of mine’s eating establishment—Stan Musial’s Stan and Biggie’s Restaurant.

Then it’s Westward Ho to the Grand Canyon and a few other such geologic wonders. While in Arizona I’ll take her to Sedona, to one of the New Agey–type centers, where we can have some fun and try to stay out of trouble. Of course when we leave, we’ll do a low, double loop over the town, as it’s famous for UFO sightings and needs a sightings boost now and then to maintain their economy and reputation.

I suppose after that we’ll check out Las Vegas for a few raucous days and nights, catch Cher’s act, and do some gambling. Then some California beaching, followed by a trip to San Francisco.

Continuing westward, I’m thinking three days and nights in Hawaii, where I have a few favorite locales, and some bonjovial friends. My planaction after that would be a stop in Bali to have her witness a Fire Dance, then Tokyo and Hong Kong, just for the sheer audacity of the neon lights, and the charge-ahead pace of the teeming masses there.

Then, to show her some old-school architecture, I’m thinking India and its timeless testament to love: the Taj Mahal. We’ll of course have to visit Egypt and see the pyramids, some really old-school architecture, during which time I can tell her the astounding and fascinating hidden story of their original builders.

Then will come Europe, a lover’s tour. Five nights in Paris, from where we’ll partake of their tastilicious cuisine and take side trips to cathedrals, vineyards, and museums around France, plus stops at the palatial estate at Versailles and Monet’s home and garden in Giverney. Then, on to the Eternal City, Rome, where she’ll be impressed by many things, from the ancient ruins to the size of St. Peter’s. After Rome will come the original Venice, more exquisite restaurants, bistros, cafés, and a romantic gondola ride. Then I’ll no doubt take her to a favorite place of mine, the island of Malta, where the beaches, dining, people, and international casino are all top-notch.

After a few days in Malta we can zoom over to London Town, the most exciting place I ever visited as A.B., to avail ourselves of its history and art. (When it comes to eating, we’ll find a French restaurant.)

When we’re through with London, it’ll be back across the big blue pond to New York, where she’ll of course have to see the Statue of Liberty and accompany me to the top of the Empire State Building. We’ll stay in New York for the shopping and dining, but make some side trips to upstate New York (I’m timing this for foliage season), the Pennsylvania Dutch region, and Washington DC for some monument seeing. I suppose I should also take her to Niagara Falls, but I hope that she won’t think I’m trying to one-up the lovely, smaller falls they have on her homeworld (which are, admittedly, a prettier sight at night, thanks to the lavender-hued moonlight they have there).

Then, back to Florida. If, after that whirlwind co-experience at close quarters, she still loves me and I still love her, that’ll be a good sign of things to come. But before we return to Venice Beach, we will have one last night on the road, in Sanibel Island, whence we started our wonderama tour. There we’ll toast the many happy years we will undoubtedly spend together, and dance, and laugh away the night under the friendly stars above.