PART SEVENTY-ONE

TO: BIOGRAPHICS PUBLISHING COMPANY

COMMERCIAL CITY

PLANET VOLTAR

GENTLEMEN!

I am thoroughly delighted with the agreements that we have reached. I can assure you that our names will be mutually and eternally emblazoned in history.

I could not believe that my government would ever lie to me. I had no idea that anyone would seek a “coverup.” That was why I was so shocked to discover that they have deleted, changed and destroyed records so that no one would learn the existence of this single planet called Earth.

Why would they want to deny the existence of a minor planet that is a mere 22 ½ light-years away?

Ah, that’s the story that I am so arduously and so faithfully writing!

So that you may better appreciate my achievement, I am sending what I have completed thus far and will continue to write. I mailed the first part to you earlier. Let me try to bring you up to date. This is no small task because the imagination is staggered by the sheer magnitude of the events. However, I shall seek to achieve this.

As I have discovered, Earth is controlled by the man who owns the planet’s fuel—Delbert John Rockecenter. His power is such that he can determine the political future of a country simply by making a telephone call to one of his minions.

Voltarian Fleet officer Jettero Heller’s mission was to depollute the planet and to create an inexpensive, safe source of energy so that Earth could survive long enough to be invaded.

When Heller arrived on Earth, he had the identity of Delbert John Rockecenter, Jr., which was given to him by the head of the Coordinated Information Apparatus, Lombar Hisst. This was done because Hisst wanted the Fleet officer’s mission to fail, and he thought this would bring the force of the Rockecenters down on Heller. The reason Hisst wanted the mission to fail was that he was using Earth to produce mind-altering drugs that were being smuggled back to Voltar as part of a conspiracy to overthrow the Empire.

What no one knew was that there was a real inheritor to the Rockecenter fortune—Delbert John Rockecenter II.

The first person who tried to stop Heller was Rockecenter’s attorney Bury, who gave Heller the identity of Jerome Terrance Wister. It didn’t stop him, however. Heller became a consul for the African nation of Maysabongo and began to form corporations that created and patented new energy sources—a revolutionary microwave power source, a new carburetor that didn’t use gasoline and cars that worked without Rockecenter-controlled fuel. When petroleum stocks dropped out the bottom, Heller used his Maysabongo resources to buy them all up and to take control of Earth’s oil industries.

But Rockecenter was no fool, and he had forces that Heller could not muster—the American presidency, for example, and the armed forces of the United States.

One Sunday afternoon Rockecenter was preparing to go to Philadelphia for a Swillerberger Conference that he controlled. The president of the United States was to be called before the conference that night and ordered to go before the Senate the next day to request that war be declared on Maysabongo.

Bang-Bang drove Heller and his financial advisor Izzy Epstein to the great Rockecenter estate, and Heller and Izzy walked in while Rockecenter was chastising Bury for the current predicament.

Heller made Rockecenter an offer: Call off the war, grant “Twoey” (Rockecenter’s actual son) a ten-billion-dollar trust, draw up a new will leaving Twoey the entire estate, and Heller would give Rockecenter the patents and a portion of the oil empire that Heller now controlled.

With the smile of a snake, Rockecenter agreed and the documents were signed—then the snake struck!

When the brief scuffle was over, Rockecenter’s attorney Bury lay unconscious on the floor and a weaponless Heller was surrounded by Army troops.

Rockecenter scooped up the papers that now gave him complete control and put them into a huge steel suitcase. He turned to a major general whose squad had its weapons turned on Heller and Izzy.

“General,” said Rockecenter, “hold this riffraff until I return. Then, as we will be at war, we’ll have work for a firing squad.”

What? Has Heller lost everything?

Fear not! I, Monte Pennwell, Voltar’s first, only and greatest investigative reporter, have the story!