The cymbal clash again. And Hightee cried, “Louder, louder! You’re singing about an enemy, not a friend! SING IT!” And she started the song again, words appearing across the sky:
We’ll end off our invasion . . .
The roar of the voices, increased in volume, from the nearby park swelled into the Grand Council hall. The sound from the monitors themselves began to reach toward hysteria.
The final bang of the song.
“Oh!” cried Hightee, “you can do better than that! I am here in a park in Palace City, Voltar. I want to hear your voices all the way from Flisten! SING, SING, SING IT!”
“Good Gods,” said Stuffy, “here come more riots! I can feel it! Can’t you stop her?”
“Stop my sister Hightee?” said Heller. “Never been able to. Can’t start now.”
We’ll end off our invasion
From the culture of contagion
And blow the offending planet from the sky!
You’ll find our guns quite warm . . .
And on it went through again.
And then again.
And then again!
Anyone in the whole Confederacy who was anywhere near a Homeview screen was singing that song!
It was swelling from the planets in a hymn of hate!
Hightee, an expert in judging audience reactions from the stage, was putting the whole Confederacy through it and through it and through it again to obtain the exact effect which she was watching for. She took them up to frothing with that savage music and then took them beyond it.
Then, signaling with an electronic clicker held in her other hand, the words ceased to appear in the sky. But everyone knew them by this time and the music and singing continued.
Against the stars, a small dot appeared. The choruses put their backs to the audience and began to march in place, but looked like they were marching forward.
The whole audience felt they were approaching that small dot for it was getting larger.
Bigger and bigger the dot enlarged, until it was a sphere. Then bigger and bigger the sphere became until it was a planet.
And there the planet was, right before them, swirling against the night.
Heller blinked. Krak must have given them an approach shot from his files. It WAS the planet Earth! The filmy liquidness of it, like a huge blue, white and red bubble, was hanging there spinning, but too slowly to be detected. The shot had been taken from the sun side: Europe and North America were both reddishly visible on either side of the cloud-strewn ocean. The yellowish moon was even there, peeping from behind the equator. Although the picture strip had been taken from thousands of miles up, the three-dimensional illusion now appeared to hang just beyond and above the stage.
Seeing it made him feel a bit bitter. It was such a nice planet: too bad they had made so little use of the heritage Prince Caucalsia had given them—that made so many things similar culturally between Voltar and Earth. Too bad they valued it so little. It was a shame they had been so corrupted by their own primitives they had permitted themselves to go so far astray. The clutter of isms and hates could all be solved if they just realized that only a handful of men were using them for personal exploitation: their political creeds were just nonsense and lies manufactured for the benefit of the few, while pretending that they answered the demands of the many. And the way that culture was fixated on material possessions as a single concentration excluded it from attainment of the real and valuable things in life. A can of soup was equated on their communication lines—measured by volume of minutes—far, far more important than a man’s soul.
Well, there it was, huge against the stars.
Hightee gave a signal. The music changed to the martial clamor of attack.
She cried, “Each one of you at your seat will find a pistol. GET THEM IN YOUR HANDS!”
There was an instant scramble in the tiers of seats. Yes, pistols were hanging there. They were of the type that makes only flash and noise.
Hightee drew one from her own belt. The choruses also drew. She pointed at the electronic illusion of the planet. The choruses also pointed. She yelled, “START SHOOTING!”
In a blaze of fire the choruses and audience began the barrage!
The music rose in volume. The shots began to hammer in cadence! The target was the Earth against the stars!
The music again rose in volume.
Unseen before but suddenly illuminated, a circular row of tanks appeared. They began to fire with their main turret guns, pounding at the planet with smoke and flame.
Then at a sweeping signal, an outer ring of cannon suddenly sprang into view, manned by actual gunners. They began to belch huge salvos at the target.
The music rose in fury.
Hightee gave another signal.
By optical illusion, a vast Voltar Fleet appeared all around the planet in the sky. They added a new thunder of guns to the deafening din.
Under the impact of this pounding, ABRUPTLY, WITH A DREADFUL BANG, THE PLANET BLEW TO BITS!
There was a sound like a dying scream.
There was a guttering rumble.
Something small and charred seemed to fall upon the stage.
It lay there sizzling: a small, dead, shriveled, smoking thing.
The music suddenly shifted to a dirge.
The dirge was slow and it was awful.
A blue spotlight hit the sizzling thing. All other lights were gone.
Then, bathed in blue and with a solemn pace, thirty priests came forward from the dark.
With motions of timeworn solemnity, assisted by black burial servants who tonged the object into an open grave, the priests went through, with dirge choir music, the whole long litany of burial.
A scarlet devil suddenly appeared and scooped up what would appear to be a shriveled, blackened soul. He turned and dumped it into a flaming pit of a Hell.
The lights were gone. Hightee was gone. The stage was empty and there was only the moan of the cold desert wind.
PART EIGHTY-NINE
Chapter 4
Gods,” said Noble Arthrite Stuffy in more of a groan than a word. He daubed at his forehead, found it was still bandaged. He clenched his hand. “Oh, I really think that ruined it,” said Noble Arthrite Stuffy. “I have never seen a population rise to such a fever pitch!”
“Look at the backfeed monitors,” said Heller.
They all did.
The crowds in the streets were thinning.
THE PEOPLE WERE GOING HOME!
“I don’t understand,” said Stuffy.
“I think what you don’t understand,” said Bis, “is the business of a combat engineer. As a favor, Jet, tell us.”
“You really want to know?”
The general and admiral and Captain Roke nodded eagerly. They did not understand why the crowds were dispersing.
Heller sighed. Then he said, “I set it up with Hightee. And she certainly carried through. The credit is hers. All I did was take advantage of a cautionary theorem in Advanced Symbolic Logic: The apparency of an answer can be mistaken for the answer. A parallel is that the apparency of a result can be mistaken for the result. This once, it seems to have worked. The bulk of the people of the Confederacy will now think of Earth as dead. Those who don’t won’t be able to find anybody else all that interested.
“If you noticed, Hightee even let them sing too long. They got tired of it. They have also worked their spleen out quite thoroughly. I trust we have replaced mass hysteria with mass agreement, and mass agreement is the true substance of reality. Frankly, it’s only combat engineer elementary mathematics.”
“Wait,” said Stuffy. “Completely aside from the fact that we have not handled Earth at all and now must, what you did seems like molding mass opinion. This seems very close to ‘public relations.’ Are you sure this isn’t like Madison’s PR?”
Bis let out a snort. “Noble Stuffy,” he said, “Fleet combat engineers have been defeating and stampeding mobs of enemy people since before M
adison’s race learned to wear fur pants. Just yesterday, Jet defeated fifty thousand Apparatus troops in this very city, using a population-control weapon, all by himself. How’d you think we retook the place with no real casualties or destruction?”
Stuffy gawped. “I didn’t know that.”
“NOT for publication,” said Heller. He looked again at the backfeed monitors. The people were indeed going home. And even as he looked, a couple monitors went blank as Homeview camera crews in far cities began to pack up. “We’ve chilled the mobs. Now let’s get to work on the sixth proclamation and decide just how we are going to dispose of the real Earth. Unfortunately, it is NOT an electronic illusion and His Majesty has given us our orders.”
PART EIGHTY-NINE
Chapter 5
It was very quiet in the hall now. The backfeed monitors were going off, one by one. The main channel program now concerned weather for the coming day. At the table it threatened to be stormy.
The six sat there, a small group in this vast expanse. Heller was no longer sitting on the dais. He had taken a place at the table to be closer to them.
The Fleet admiral scrubbed his jowls. He was surveying his own console as he fed displays to it, displays which concerned the military potentials of the planet Blito-P3. “Looking at these factors, the satellites they have and so on, I think we’re left no option but to blow it up: they could develop space travel.”
“Technically, they might,” said Heller, “though they would have to overcome gross faults in their sciences. Socially, they won’t. Only two things motivate their thinking: one is commerce, the other is war. Their power elite could not see any commercial advantage in space travel, and the moment such research does not lead to internal superiority in war they curtail it.
“But actually, there is another factor which defeats them at every turn and that is an oddity in leadership. Even a casual study of their history shows that they only worship and obey leaders who kill: Caesar, Napoleon, Bismarck, Hitler, Eisenhower are just a few names. They revere scientists the same way: the biggest known names basically made it possible to build the biggest weapons. Einstein, for instance. It’s a pretty primitive attitude.
“They actually revile and degrade and kill decent men who try to help them. It’s as much as your life is worth to try to do anything for them that will benefit all.
“I doubt they could attain space travel before such ills as bad leadership, socialism, inflation and other things ate them up internally. They are actually totally incapable of doing something nationally just because it is the sensible thing to do or because it’s fun. It always has to have a twist, such as who can make a million from it or who will it do in. They’re pretty mixed up. As for achieving real space travel, I don’t think you have a thing to worry about.”
But he had not made his point. The admiral said, “Blast! No wonder the Emperor wants them disposed of!”
“When Jet was down there,” said Captain Roke, “I got interested in the place and looked it up more thoroughly—though I will admit that Hisst was sitting on the key surveys. I worked out the routes to other systems that are targeted and I couldn’t find one that had to go through Blito: it’s a yellow dwarf but it is off the direct traffic tracks. I was appalled by its social structure, really, and although I laughed at Jet at first when he said Prince Caucalsia might have taken some of the Voltar civilization to it, I think Jet must be right. It’s a clutter of primitive and modern, but the think they use in utilizing the modern is primitive. They’ll blow up culturally before they ever get to a stage of real space travel. So if it were disposed of, it really would have no key effect on anything else we were doing.”
“Well, then,” said the general, “I don’t see why the Fleet can’t just transport several Army biological warfare units to the upper atmosphere and we lay in a barrage of germs and defoliants and just bullet-ball the place: no landing.”
“There are always survivors,” said Heller. “And it would leave it on the Invasion Timetable.”
“Jet is right,” said the admiral. “I’d hate to put Marines in there 115 years from now if bacterial warfare were used. Bugs mutate. No telling what diseases we’d be bringing back to Voltar: we’d have real contamination. But what I don’t like about any of this is the disturbance to our operating schedules: we’re committed to another invasion—Colipin—next month. And if you start deranging schedules, you wind up falling behind. We, frankly, would have to use several home-based fleets for any attack on Blito-P3, and they’re needed for normal defense, especially with the recent unsettled conditions. I imagine quite a few Apparatus units escaped and will be into piracy without having heard of the amnesty. You can’t double patrols with less ships.”
“We’re short, too,” said the general. “Having to assist the Domestic Police will absorb available Army reserves.”
“Well, let’s see where we stand,” said Heller. “The Emperor does not want to hear of Blito-P3 again and we’ve got to dispose of it to get it off the Invasion Timetable. If we land on it to attack, we risk further contamination of Voltar.”
“My Gods, this is a dilemma,” said the admiral.
“It certainly is,” said the general.
Heller’s heart was beating very fast but he kept his face quite calm. Would he get away with it? He picked up the sixth proclamation.
“Well, gentlemen,” he said with a sad shake of his head, “the only way I can see out of this is simply to proclaim that Blito-P3, Earth, doesn’t exist.”
There was a stunned shock.
They thought it over.
Heller waited with bated breath.
The general looked at him. The admiral looked at him. Captain Roke looked at him. Bis looked at him. Noble Arthrite Stuffy looked at him. Their eyes were round.
Hastily Heller wrote the possible text:
ROYAL PROCLAMATION
VOLTAR CONFEDERATION
SECRET
In that the planet Blito-P3, Earth, has been found to possess elements of criminality inimical to the best interests and culture of Voltar,
In that the landing of troops upon it would risk further contamination of the Confederacy,
In that it is our Royal command that we never hear of the planet, Blito-P3, Earth, again,
The planet is officially declared to be a nonplanet.
It is therefore proclaimed that said planet DOES NOT EXIST AND IT WILL NOT EXIST FROM THIS DAY FORWARD FOR VOLTAR, FOREVER!
They read it. It was the only way out. They began to nod.
A surge of elation went through Heller.
He had won! He had won for Izzy and Bang-Bang and Babe and five billion people.
He lowered his head so they would not see his grin and hastily transferred it all to the proclamation in neat script.
They signed above the Royal signature.
Now came his coup de grâce. THIS was the reason he had raked in Noble Stuffy and appointed a Censor.
Solemnly he looked at the ex-publisher. “Now we come to your vital part in this. Noble Arthrite Stuffy, His Majesty never wants to hear of Earth again. You therefore must eradicate every mention of these recent riots and upsets in every newssheet morgue.”
Noble Stuffy gawped.
“This proclamation is YOURS to put in force! You must eradicate every reference to Blito-P3 in every book and text, on every map—a clean sweep.”
“Everywhere?” said round-eyed Stuffy.
“Everywhere,” said Heller. “And it is your sworn duty to prevent all future mention of that planet anywhere. AND THAT INCLUDES EVEN THIS PROCLAMATION!”
“Oh, dear!” said Noble Stuffy.
“And when,” Heller continued in a hard voice, “anybody asks you what happened to Blito-P3, you are going to flinch and look sad and say it was so unspeakable it had to be censored and forbid them to even breathe its name again. Understood?”
Noble Arthrite Stuffy nodded numbly. From the look in Heller’s eye he also understood Heller would probably p
ersonally break his neck if he did not comply.
So he did!
And to this day, that Royal proclamation lies in a lead case in the office of the Royal Historian and Censor.
AND THAT IS THE COVERUP!
A WHOLE PLANET!
Don’t doubt me. I have seen it! The Royal Historian and Censor, my great-uncle Lord Invay, was out to lunch! Now, how’s that, dear reader? Does it make me the investigative reporter of all time or doesn’t it? The answer is yes, yes, yes! I knew you would agree!