What on Earth are the Voltarians up to now?
Fast cars and fast women.
Voltarian Royal Officer Jettero Heller is putting the pedal to the metal—and the action is about to shift into high gear.
Behind the wheel of his souped-up Caddy, fueled by a new sustainable energy source, Heller’s in a race against time—not to mention against suicide car bombers and accelerator bullets. But his greatest challenge is a fight to the death atop the Empire State Building.
Meanwhile, Heller’s sworn enemy Soltan Gris has his own battles to fight … and he’s learning that, sometimes, love hurts. Especially in the hands of a couple of sadistic sweethearts named Miss Pinch and Candy Licorice—girls who really get under his skin.
People of Earth take note: there is nothing more seductive, more tantalizing, or more terrifying than An Alien Affair.
“The granddaddy of all series.” —Los Angeles Times
“He breaks all the rules.… The old master has created a new genre and a veritable blockbuster … and moves the art of science fiction into a new realm of entertainment as well as education.” —The Herald
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
L. Ron Hubbard not only broke all the rules but blazed a new literary path when, in August 1981, after less than eight months of writing, he completed the monumental 1.2 million-word bestselling saga Mission Earth. Working with exceptional speed, discipline, and skill, he produced a remarkable interweaving of deftly plotted action, adventure, intrigue, and espionage, all seasoned with scathing social satire.
PART TWENTY-NINE
To My Lord Turn, Justiciary of the Royal Courts and Prison, Government City, Planet Voltar, Voltar Confederacy
Your Lordship, Sir!
I, Soltan Gris, Grade Eleven, General Services Officer, former Secondary Executive of the Coordinated Information Apparatus, Voltar Confederacy (All Hail His Majesty Cling the Lofty and His Noble Dominions), hereby humbly submit the fourth volume of my confession regarding MISSION EARTH.
This volume has been the most difficult to relate and I must warn you beforehand that it will take a strong constitution to read. The crimes that I have openly and willingly confessed up to this point pale by comparison. The screams and blood are as vivid as if they were now.
That I would be put into the pinched position I am about to describe in this volume is now, looking back, beyond all comprehension.
I am not to blame for what I did. I was driven to it by Jettero Heller. The man is dangerous and the sooner he is found, arrested and killed, the better. I speak not only from experience but from my study of Freud and Bugs Bunny which makes me as expert as any Earth psychiatrist.
Heller’s violence is a sexual outlet. He is a classical example of a suppressed Oedipal-id in conflict with a sublimated father-ego fixation.
Look at this brilliant psychiatric analysis:
1. Heller lived at the Gracious Palms whorehouse across from the United Nations. And what does the UN have out in front? Flagpoles. And everyone knows what flagpoles mean. Freud is never wrong.
2. Babe Corleone’s Mafia family ran the Gracious Palms. At six-foot-six, she is hardly a “babe.” She is a widow and yet “Babe” became Heller’s surrogate Earth mother. That’s the source of his Oedipal fixation.
3. Heller’s infantile behavior was confirmed when J. Walter Madison, that master of PR (public relations—another brilliant Earth idea), was hired to immortalize him. He called Heller the Whiz Kid. The choice of name is indisputable proof.
4. Heller was using a platen code to write reports back to Voltar. A platen is a sheet with holes. You lay it over the document and the code words can be seen and the actual message read through the holes. This is further proof of his sexual aggression. (It’s also his underhanded way of antagonizing me. He knows I can’t forge his reports without the platen and that I can’t kill him until I find it. It’s typical of his aggressive nature.)
5. Heller’s right-hand man was Bang-Bang, an ex-Marine, member of the Corleone family and an expert not only with explosives but guns. Guns are merely phallic symbols to the sublimated super-ego, but Bang-Bang’s name is proof enough of Heller’s sexual problems.
6. Heller had set up corporate offices that were run by that anti-IRS anarchist, Izzy Epstein. The offices were in the Empire State Building and everyone knows what the shape of that building means. Further psychiatric fact.
7. Heller bought and then converted a large Cadillac to a Voltarian fuel system. He clearly chose that car because of the two “l’s” in “Cadillac.” Like the UN flagpoles, they are clearly phallic symbols. (And take note that Heller’s name also has two “l’s,” perhaps my most brilliant Freudian analysis and final proof that his criminal nature has a sexual origin.)
Conclusion: Heller is the source of my problems and should be killed with slow torture.
This is an example of how Earth psychiatry and psychology works. It never fails me. I used it to keep riffraff in line like those two bumbling Apparatus agents Raht and Terb.
I also used it on that crazy hit man Gunsalmo Silva when I found that he had been hired to guard Utanc, my one true love. As a wild desert flower from the Kara Kum Desert, she would need protection—but not Silva. So I cleverly convinced him to go kill the director of the CIA, a suicide mission if there ever was one. Then I brought Utanc with me to the United States. That is how you use psychology for your benefit.
The trip to the US was quite beneficial. Besides obtaining my phony federal credentials, I met “the Man” himself, Delbert J. Rockecenter. He and his attorney Bury were most grateful that I had alerted them to Heller’s plan to produce a cheap, nonpolluting fuel. (After all, as Rockecenter goes, so goes the plan of Lombar Hisst to move up from head of the Apparatus to Emperor.)
Due to my invaluable contribution, I was sworn in and had my chest invisibly tattooed by Miss Peace as a Rockecenter Family “Spi,” her clever way to code the word so no one else could understand it. Wonderful girl.
Bury introduced me to PR. To stop Heller, he hired Madison, otherwise known as J. Warbler Madman.
Heller had brought a small Voltarian element converter that was capable of producing fuel from virtually any source. He wanted to demonstrate it in his Cadillac in a thousand-lap endurance race at the Spreeport Speedway. Well, J. Warbler got to work.
Madison created a “double” for Heller and called him the Whiz Kid and while Heller prepared for the race, J. Warbler was getting one front-page story after another, with the bogus Whiz Kid challenging racing drivers around the world. He put the Whiz Kid on TV talk shows attacking the oil companies. He got spot ads, skywriting, radio news. The buildup for the race was the biggest thing to hit the media in ages.
Heller couldn’t figure out why all the newspapers, radios and TV stations were claiming to have interviewed him. He was working on the Caddy. Besides, with the jutting jaw, buckteeth and glasses, this “Whiz Kid” didn’t even look like Heller!
Little did he know the rules of PR! Madison didn’t need his consent. And truth had nothing to do with it. The standard that Madison worked on was “Do whatever would make the front page.” So he simply created and cranked out one story after another while Heller shrugged and went about his work in a garage beyond Spreeport.
Heller didn’t stand a chance. First, Madison got the race converted to a Demolition Derby and Combined Endurance Run with a dozen and a half killers, all screaming for Heller’s blood. Second, Lombar had earlier sabotaged the Voltarian element converter that Heller was using as a carburetor. It had only a few hours left, too few for him to finish the race.
But to really make sure Heller was stopped, I followed the advice my Apparatus professors used to give: if you want a job done right, give it to someone else.
I hired a couple of snipers, armed them with silenced, telescopically equipped rifles and dressed them in white to blend in with the snow that had been falling steadily for three days. I rented a van with a nice heater, got myself a good spot on a knoll overlooking the Spreeport Speedway on Long Island, set the buzzer on Heller’s viewer to wake me when he rose and settled down for the night.
If the bomber cars didn’t stop Heller, a .30-06 Accelerator bullet, traveling at 4,080 feet per second, would.
As I bedded down for the night, I was smiling.
Heller was doomed!
