by CD Moulton
of friends. Z and the grandchildren of Tom and Tranz get to be demons on Tlorg once again. The destruction of the entire universe is at risk, which is beyond the belief of anyone – other than Thing.
If Thing says a thing is, it is.
This one came about because I've always wanted to put a Pluton into the crew. Kurk somehow seems to fit. He is a very honest loyal and open character. He's the kind you want with you when there's danger, but who you want to never cross. His outlook is simplistic. He doesn't take on a lot of phony guilt. If he's in a situation where there’s something unpleasant to be done he'll say, "That's the way it goes!" do it and move on.
I observed the way people react to some friends who are in a motorcycle club. I have to admit they seem to have an air of danger around them, of extreme violence just below the surface. One, in particular, is the lowest crud I've ever met. He's big, about 6'4', and works out with weights. He's also arrogant and obnoxious and a total bully to those who don't stand up to him.
Women find that exciting and are apt to proposition him.
One woman in the group is a bit better than average good-looking, but has a air of danger around her and I find that exciting at times. I suppose that's a psychological point because of either the way I was raised or societal. For all I know it's genetic from a time when the world and life were a lot more dangerous or uncertain.
Be that as it may, Kurk has a dangerous and violent air about him and women of most compatible races come on to him and he responds. To males, Kurk is at first almost terrifying, but they soon learn to like and trust him. He's direct enough that they KNOW he's not working a bit of trickery or subterfuge. If Kurk has anything to say he says it. As Maita says, *A diplomat, he ain't.*
Kurk is a contrast character who fills out the crew in an area where it had lost some basic things.
The story ain't bad, either.
I ‘ve often wondered what thoughts REALLY different lifeforms would have so the next one was another slant on psychology: What would an intelligent plant think like? What influence would immobility have on the processes? Would it understand pain? Cooperation?
The problem was to make it able to communicate. That was solved with a psy ability it could use to control those around it and it could use the ability to "program" its spores, thus giving itself a strange kind of immortality. If the thing got off of Grandish it could wreak havoc on the empire, but was it moral to kill it simply because it didn't think the same way the rest of the empire thought?
I liked the slightly more "action" stories at times and Z liked being a powerful furry being and there was the old psychological thing about different types of intelligence competing for supremacy on a world. It was explored with Mactow as two different types in a solar system who did not compete, so next was a story about two different kinds of cultures in a single solar system, one reptile, one mammal. They had been at a kind of standing war for some time so the crew, being the crew, had to try to straighten the mess out. Z got to be a furry being again. He used the talents he learned in book 24 and overcame more of his inhibitions.
I then decided it was time to feature Kurk a bit to see how he worked out with the others and if my ideas for him would fit as well as I thought they would.
I had always put the various members of the crew together in different combinations to see (I really don't know before starting a book. I give the personalities a situation and try to extrapolate what would happen with those types) if they could work together. This one was Kurk and Kit. They find a distress signal that is 250,000 years old and is just now being activated! They find a stagnated society that Kurk's stubbornness decrees he WILL change, but nothing they do seems to have any effect whatever!
This is a VERY old society, yet it is only beginning an industrial age? It had that satellite to broadcast a distress signal, but had apparently stumbled on the way to activate it. The people were held in thrall by a select few who programmed them from birth to react to a fixed set of commands. This was stagnation beyond belief!
I won't go further with this because I'm only trying to show how these things occur to me and even the crew were surprised when they found what was going on there.
I decided, seeing I had just written a murder mystery in the CD Grimes series and one in the Nick Storie series since my last Maita book and the Nick Storie one had used a method of murder that depended on the stupid cops not discovering it wasn't a natural death. I wondered if more modern technology would make murders of that type as much as impossible to hide.
In Murder, Khlien Style Tab tries to determine what happened to a Feach medical researcher and is led into some weird kind of vast con scheme having to do with psiltripium. It seems to be a twist on the old "salted mine" idea, but an Acnian had been murdered and that was something that would not, could not, be dismissed.
Here, there is the psychology of an extended family society. There were several races in each family and they were fiercely loyal to the family unit.
I had a lot of ideas then that wouldn't quite make a full book. Some ideas and plots simply will not lend themselves to a short or long piece so it was time for another collection type thing.
Like Old Times is a collection of shorts involving Maita, Thing and Z, mostly – the original crew. It is a collection of Maita's "Little adventures" where the crew went out to discover new things.
There was an article in the paper about a real estate developer who had formed a partnership with another two people, a father and son. The developer was murdered and the father and son "inherited" the multi-million dollar properties of the company – and the will was shown to be forged.
If you know the way big developers run this part of Florida it won't surprise you in the least that the case was never solved.
That resulted in a tale about a newly discovered world that has a lost civilization who were amazing artists on a par with the Parf and Woost (and Zulians, of course). The trouble is, the finders did not report it or file on it and are into some kind of crazy real estate scam.
Here the psychology made some of the people totally oblivious to the fantastic beauty all around them. They were real estate developers with land to prepare and sell. They couldn't see past that. The problem was there were a few behind it who were stealing the art to make a huge profit from it on the black market.
The interplay between Z, Kurk, Maita and Thing needed exploring so I wrote a sort of farce where they went to a cyclic world in a barbarian age. Here is where Heleemius and the M-82nds finally fit as more than periphery characters.
Us Barbarians is a fun book. Z, Kurk, Thing and (due to unrelenting pressure on me from two friends) the golems go to a world where there is a very strange kind of societal inertia that could doom what could be a very good people. It is a basic psychological study and Heleemius (one of the M-82nds) joins them to try to bring about a positive change in the society. Z gets to be a huge Boris type of barbarian warrior and is big enough to wrestle and play with Kurk. The enormous change that could save these people was a very simple thing: a script.
Any story with the golems in it my writer friends find hilarious. They are one cynic with a bad attitude (Favorite expression: –AHHH! SHUT UP!–) and a super goody-goody personality forced to share a floater (Most common expression: +Now, No!+). They are run by a computer who is developing independent intelligence. It becomes a question of whether the nasty No or the sugary Yes will drive you crazy first. I find I have more sympathy for No. The basic gimmick is that No doesn't use the same insulting name twice in one year.
I was thinking about the Foundation Trilogy by Ike Asimov and wondered what would happen to a world where a throwback could actually seize control.
In All the King's Minions Tab and Kit find another race with a powerful psychological control of some sort that is about to be destroyed by a throwback or two. They find an ideal society so work to save it. This one won't be won on a psychological point. They are going to have to find the ones doing the deeds and get rid of them.
The berserker came back and that was a better book than the first one where it was originally found so.... In book thirty four Tab and Kit are called by the Freenz to a world where they find another clone of the old Grandish intelligent fungus and some plots that seem to somehow be disconnected.
I enjoyed the interplay between Thing and Kurk, something I never really expected when Kurk was brought in and there was a potential for a good comedy piece there.
Book thirty five, Odd Couple Out, is a comedy. Thing and Kurk go to Hades on a vacation and find a civilization not unlike Terra's that is being manipulated by some big companies. Thing, being Thing, decides to clean up the mess. Kurk, being Kurk, would rather forget it and spend his time with the women. This one has a lot of "Keystone Kops" type of comedy, but the Plutons, like some of us on Terra, react when things get hopeless and straighten things up. They won't act much until it's determined beyond doubt that the situation is irreversible and hopeless to the Nth degree.
I like the swords and sorcery times and Maita needed a little respite from problems. Z liked the type of world and the stage of civilization and this was to be a sort of vacation for him and Maita. Maita would take apart a lot of its servos and devices and do a complete personal overhaul while Z could live in
