“Izzy bought you a ticket for South America,” said Bang-Bang.
“I have a feeling,” said Heller, “that there will come a day, not too distant, when I’ll be asking you to kick me for not using it. But it’s against my creed.”
I was intent at once. Another Code break? For I remembered clearly that day in the Personnel Office at Fleet, the creed of the combat engineers, “Whatever the odds, the Hells with it. Get the job done.”
But Heller said, “Come on. Let’s go in the shop and get the heat on before you freeze to death. I’ve got to think of something.”
And that was exactly what I was afraid of. Now I had two unknowns. What was Madison really going to do? And what was Heller going to do?
I only knew what I was going to do—stop the Hells out of him!
PART TWENTY-EIGHT
Chapter 9
On Wednesday it started snowing.
There was a battle of forecasters played up heavily on TV. Was it going to be snowing at race time or was it going to be bright sunlight?
The flood of publicity carried on. Snow or sun, it was never even mentioned that somebody might call the race off.
It didn’t matter what the weather was. I had solved all that. I had rented a little van with an independent heater in the back. It had lug tires, being designed for the suburban trade. So let it snow! I also bought a pair of the highest-powered binoculars I could find in a hock shop. I had to acquire them because my efforts with a hacksaw to cut off a tourist telescope from the observation platform of Fort Tryon got interrupted by some school kids who couldn’t read my Federal identification.
With the snow came new information about the race. The spot ads and talk shows began to talk about “bombers.”
I had no idea what a “bomber” was. The hotel TV had a teletext system cable and after rejecting several definitions I found one that fitted. A “bomber” was an ordinary car with no added armor except roll bars. It had all its glass removed. Its object was to ram other vehicles to make them unable to move. They backed, mainly, to protect their own radiator and engine. They were used in demolition derbies. A winner of one of these was defined as a vehicle that could still move under its own power.
Now the controversy made sense. Would only bombers be allowed or also standard stock cars? The racing commission solved it by including both. It said that as this was a demolition derby that would test laps and hours of endurance, both bombers and stock cars could participate. It was a wise decision. The public would have lynched them if they had arrived at any decision that tended to exclude the Whiz Kid’s car. It, strictly speaking, was not a bomber but a hopped-up stock car.
The bogus Whiz Kid, Heller’s “double,” was muchly seen on talk shows and in the news. He was being very pugnacious about the oil companies, bragging about his cheap fuel and generally making an ass of himself.
Then, that very Wednesday afternoon—following through all day Thursday—the other drivers began to be announced. They were the toughest, meanest bomber drivers that existed on any circuit! There would be eighteen starting cars and the list of names sounded like a horror movie. “Slammer,” “Mayhem,” “Killer,” “Morgue,” followed by some last name, seemed to be the order of the day.
Amongst this crowd of wanted murderers, the name “Hammer” Malone seemed to be the star. His car bore a gravestone silhouette for every driver he had killed.
On the national talk show, America Alive or Almost Anyway, the bogus Whiz Kid and Hammer Malone met head-on. They began yelling at each other and then they were at each other’s throats and then the cameras fell over and you couldn’t see the end of it. Special appearances of the bogus Whiz Kid in his red racing suit were featured the following morning to assure his millions of fans he was all right and that he would get Malone and the oil companies in that race!
Heller, through all this, just went on working. He seemed to be using his suite as an office for I couldn’t tell what he was up to. The interference was on continually as the UN was in session. He had stopped appearing in the lobby. I sort of got the impression he was lying low.
Snow and more snow. Friday another battle of forecasters. Would it be clear or snowing ten o’clock Saturday morning when the race was scheduled to start? Bets were being laid on that. But bets were being made on everything you could think of. It was difficult to get an idea of what would constitute a win, and as so many people had beaten each other up over trying to decide this, the racing commission announced, in a stop-program bulletin, that the winning car would have to be able to move under its own power and to do one thousand laps. No car could do a thousand laps without refueling four or five times. So if the Whiz Kid did that without refueling, then that was how he would win the race, but other cars could refuel as much as they wanted.
There was an outcry on this but the bogus Whiz Kid stuck out his jaw, opened his buckteeth and said that was fine with him. He knew the oil companies would bias the race. But he was still taking them on.
A presidential statement that Friday night informed the world that America could not lose as long as it had sterling youth of the stamp of the Whiz Kid.
On that note, knowing the roads would be jammed at dawn Saturday, I slid out in my van. I had my viewer. I had my binoculars, I had warm clothes and I had my rear heater.
The spot had already been picked. It was a knoll that overlooked the speedway three-quarters of a mile away, much higher, providing a clear view of the track. It was in the front yard of a house and a hundred dollars had secured the spot.
My snipers, with white cloaks, were posted much closer to the track on building tops, armed with silenced and telescopically equipped Weatherby rifles firing .30-06 “Accelerator” bullets, 4,080 feet per second.
In complete comfort, smug and confident, I lay down on the van’s bunk, the viewer buzzer set to alert me if Heller stirred.
What a beautiful victory this would be–for me.
About the Author
L. Ron Hubbard’s remarkable writing career spanned more than half-a-century of intense literary achievement and creative influence.
And though he was first and foremost a writer, his life experiences and travels in all corners of the globe were wide and diverse. His insatiable curiosity and personal belief that one should live life as a professional led to a lifetime of extraordinary accomplishment. He was also an explorer, ethnologist, mariner and pilot, filmmaker and photographer, philosopher and educator, composer and musician.
Growing up in the still-rugged frontier country of Montana, he broke his first bronc and became the blood brother of a Blackfeet Indian medicine man by age six. In 1927, when he was 16, he traveled to a still remote Asia. The following year, to further satisfy his thirst for adventure and augment his growing knowledge of other cultures, he left school and returned to the Orient. On this trip, he worked as a supercargo and helmsman aboard a coastal trader which plied the seas between Japan and Java. He came to know old Shanghai, Beijing and the Western Hills at a time when few Westerners could enter China. He traveled more than a quarter of a million miles by sea and land while still a teenager and before the advent of commercial aviation as we know it.
He returned to the United States in the autumn of 1929 to complete his formal education. He entered George Washington University in Washington, DC, where he studied engineering and took one of the earliest courses in atomic and molecular physics. In addition to his studies, he was the president of the Engineering Society and Flying Club, and wrote articles, stories and plays for the university newspaper. During the same period he also barnstormed across the American mid-West and was a national correspondent and photographer for the Sportsman Pilot magazine, the most distinguished aviation publication of its day.
Returning to his classroom of the world in 1932, he led two separate expeditions, the Caribbean Motion Picture Expedition; sailing on one of the last of America’s four-masted commercial ships, and the second, a mineralogical survey of Puerto Ric
o. His exploits earned him membership in the renowned Explorers Club and he subsequently carried their coveted flag on two more voyages of exploration and discovery. As a master mariner licensed to operate ships in any ocean, his lifelong love of the sea was reflected in the many ships he captained and the skill of the crews he trained. He also served with distinction as a U.S. naval officer during the Second World War.
All of this—and much more—found its way, into his writing and gave his stories a compelling sense of authenticity that has appealed to readers throughout the world. It started in 1934 with the publication of “The Green God” in Thrilling Adventure magazine, a story about an American naval intelligence officer caught up in the mystery and intrigues of pre-communist China. With his extensive knowledge of the world and its people and his ability to write in any style and genre, he rapidly achieved prominence as a writer of action adventure, western, mystery and suspense. Such was the respect of his fellow writers that he was only 25 when elected president of the New York Chapter of the American Fiction Guild.
In addition to his career as a leading writer of fiction, he worked as a successful screenwriter in Hollywood where he wrote the original story and script for Columbia’s 1937 hit serial, “The Secret of Treasure Island.” His work on numerous films for Columbia, Universal and other major studios involved writing, providing story lines and serving as a script consultant.
In 1938, he was approached by the venerable New York publishing house of Street and Smith, the publishers of Astounding Science Fiction. Wanting to capitalize on the proven reader appeal of the
L. Ron Hubbard byline to capture more readers for this emerging genre, they essentially offered to buy all the science fiction he wrote. When he protested that he did not write about machines and machinery but that he wrote about people, they told him that was exactly what was wanted. The rest is history.
The impact and influence that his novels and stories had on the fields of science fiction, fantasy and horror virtually amounted to the changing of a genre. It is the compelling human element that he originally brought to this new genre that remains today the basis of its growing international popularity.
L. Ron Hubbard consistently enabled readers to peer into the minds and emotions of characters in a way that sharply heightened the reading experience without slowing the pace of the story, a level of writing rarely achieved.
Among the most celebrated examples of this are three stories he published in a single, phenomenally creative year (1940)—Final Blackout and its grimly possible future world of unremitting war and ultimate courage which Robert Heinlein called “as perfect a piece of science fiction as has ever been written”; the ingenious fantasy-adventure, Typewriter in the Sky described by Clive Cussler as “written in the great style adventure should be written in”; and the prototype novel of clutching psychological suspense and horror in the midst of ordinary, everyday life, Fear, studied by writers from Stephen King to Ray Bradbury.
It was Mr. Hubbard’s trendsetting work in the speculative fiction field from 1938 to 1950, particularly, that not only helped to expand the scope and imaginative boundaries of science fiction and fantasy but indelibly established him as one of the founders of what continues to be regarded as the genre’s Golden Age.
Widely honored—recipient of Italy’s Tetradramma D’Oro Award and a special Gutenberg Award, among other significant literary honors—Battlefield Earth has sold more than 6,000,000 copies in 23 languages and is the biggest single-volume science fiction novel in the history of the genre at 1050 pages. It was ranked number three out of the 100 best English language novels of the twentieth century in the Random House Modern Library Reader’s Poll.
The Mission Earth dekalogy has been equally acclaimed, winning the Cosmos 2000 Award from French readers and the coveted Nova-Science Fiction Award from Italy’s National Committee for Science Fiction and Fantasy. The dekalogy has sold more than seven million copies in 6 languages, and each of its 10 volumes became New York Times and international bestsellers as they were released.
The first of L. Ron Hubbard’s original screenplays Ai! Pedrito! When Intelligence Goes Wrong, novelized by author Kevin J. Anderson, was released in 1998 and immediately appeared as a New York Times bestseller. This was followed in 1999 with the publication of A Very Strange Trip, an original L. Ron Hubbard story of time-traveling adventure, novelized by Dave Wolverton, that also became a New York Times bestseller directly following its release.
His literary output ultimately encompassed more than 250 published novels, novelettes, short stories and screenplays in every major genre.
For more information on L. Ron Hubbard and his many acclaimed works of fiction visit www.galaxypress.com.
Mission Earth Volume 3: The Enemy Within Page 36
