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The old man sits back and takes his first pull of gin. “Oh, yes, I remember the Kurtz affair quite well…” He chuckles: “Yes, everyone always wants to hear about poor old Kurtz, the madman, the communist cult leader, the latter-day Pol Pot, all the wild stories of mass slavery and brainwashing…. But no one wants to hear that, really, once we got to the actual compound, it was pretty mundane.
“…Who is Pol Pot? Well, it really doesn’t matter for the purposes of the story. Besides, I have made it a habit, in my old age, to tell people the parts of stories that they don’t want to hear about. No more five-minute thrillers for me anymore. No, it has become my mission to show people that it’s what comes before the big story, it’s the getting there, that is really interesting.
“Take the first man in space as an example. The story of the Cosmonauts really is quite fascinating; how they endured incredible physical and mental hardship before they were cleared to go up;- why, you would think that the true purpose of the Russian space program was to drive their cosmonauts insane! And then, there was the day of the launch, when the first man in space went flying up on top of a converted war missile… frankly, the end result – that of actually being the first man in space – is quite mundane! There’s a reason why there was so much excitement the first time it happened, the first time it worked, and yet now people fall asleep while giant starships ferry them entire light years, from sun to sun in just 30 minutes or so. Perhaps that is part of the point of the modern culture: making the extraordinary seem terribly mundane….
“But I do seem to be rambling again… ah, yes, Kurtz. Well, the whole thing started when I was brought aboard the expedition as a replacement captain for the previous man; it seems that an unfortunate accident had claimed his life. Well, that was the story that everyone was getting, anyway; but the ship’s boatswain let slip exactly what had happened to the poor bastard when I got aboard: it seems that he had killed himself, and for no particular reason. Apparently he was plugged into the meganet, when he suddenly stood up, ran into his bathroom and jumped into his 'tub, which he had been filling for his evening bath. Of course, he still had the linkup node on his head, so the poor man was instantly killed. Shocked to death, you know. He left no note to explain himself – which was most rude of him, if I might say so myself – so the only clue anyone had was what his servant heard:- the man simply shouted an expletive, very loudly and unexpectedly (well, I hate to be crude, but if you must know what it was, it was “Bullshit!” Quite nonsensical, really) and then there was a loud sort of cracking bang as his battery hit the water. No one had any real idea what he had seen that had motivated him to do it; when they connected the memory pack to a viewer, all they saw was several pages of stocks, some celebrity news, a page or two of pornographic art – oh, no, nothing shocking at all; the usual stuff that any bored, lonely man will look at – the point is, there was nothing subversive or mind-damaging in the least bit.
“So anyway, the company decided it best that, in the interest of public relations and general morale, his family and everyone else who cared to know what had happened to him be politely informed that the man had accidentally ingested some native food that had poisoned him. It was, after all, a nice opportunity to advertise the obvious advantages of synthfoods, which can never go bad or cause food poisoning, and all of that stuff that we’ve heard since grade school.”
The old man plucks at his large, white moustache for a moment, smiling, takes another drop of gin and continues:
“Regardless of all that nonsense, everything had been straightened out by the time I got there. I arrived early, as was always my habit (I’m afraid that old age means that this is no longer really possible…) so I had plenty of time to inspect the ship we would be using. It was a long range expeditionary ship, and it was really a piece of art, even if there are thousands just like it. It came complete with two quad-turrets, 250 millimeter recoilless railguns; high-quality gold wiring for maximum electronic transmission efficiency; a perfectly aligned jump drive (that allowed us to move a lot faster than we would have otherwise – I can thank the ship’s mechanic for that); a top-of-the-line reactor that gave us the freedom to go much further than your standard ship of the same size without refueling; and to top it all off, there was a small, friendly Greek man who kept the whole thing cleaner than any robot could ever have. Yes, I know, he really was a bit of an indulgence; no one wants to bother with giving a man a cheap job like that these days when a robot can do it for a fraction of the price, but the man was quite amusing. I do wish I could have kept the ship – what was it called now…? Ah, yes; the Komus! But that was never an option, as it was owned by the company, and they weren’t willing to sell for any price. At any rate, we should have been ready to go within twelve hours of my arrival, still ahead of schedule.
“Unfortunately, there was another delay after I had arrived: it seemed that the dock workers had suddenly decided, after decades of loyal and hard work, that they were not being paid enough; something to do with inflation… it doesn’t really matter, workers will find any excuse to demand more money. It was most unfortunate timing for all of us, and the expedition leader, a man by the name of Harold Lenin (a most unfortunate name; the man was as purely good and capitalist as they come) quickly became flustered and demanded that the lot be rounded up and shipped to a prison planet. You see, the dock was owned by the same company that was running the expedition – the company? It was Leopold United, of course (that’s Leopold United Planetary Industries and Shipping, one of the largest trusts in the eastern reaches at the time.) But anyway, the expedition leader also happened to be the ranking company man on site, and so when he demanded they all be arrested, there wasn’t much anyone else could do. Lucky for the poor workers, we happened to have an independent “Chirper” on board (I’m terribly sorry, that’s CHRPR; Combined Human Resources and Public Relations: real geniuses, if you can find the right man for the job.) He was a man by the name of Macarteney; Alan Macartenty, I believe; and he offered to settle the whole affair in exchange for a 150,000 credit bonus (which was quite low, given the magnitude of the task) and twelve hours of complete control. Well, the situation was getting quite ugly at the moment, as the company police were nervous about the prospects of trying to arrest so many workers, so Lenin decided to give this man Macarteney a chance. A good thing he did, too: Macaretney quickly located a clause in the employee contracts that, when interpreted correctly, stated that any form of strike or refusal to work was ground for immediate dismissal. But Macarteney was too clever to simply fire 5,500 dock workers at once; no, he managed to pull quite a stunt:
“He first announced to the striking workers that, according to their contracts, their activity was grounds for immediate dismissal; then, after giving this a moment to sink in, Macarteney offered them a deal: in return for returning to work immediately, they would be given a stock sharing opportunity in a new colonization and industrialization expedition that was scheduled to be launched in three years. Of course, the actual money for this expedition, which Leopold United had been trying very hard to find, was to come out of their retirement packages, so they were not actually allowed to make good on this investment until they retired. And even when they did, the company was to take a 50% operations tax out of the return, if the return was at least double the initial investment; if the return was less than double, the company would keep the equivalent of the initial investment, with the workers paying any of the difference if the return was less than the initial investment. Rather tangled, I know;- still, it was a better deal than anything else they would be getting otherwise; but those few workers who could even read the new contract, much less understand what it meant, refused to make any concessions whatsoever. Of course, they were clearly the ringleaders, and so they were quietly moved offworld.
“After this incident, the manager, Lenin, quickly delivered a speech written for him by Macarteney over the meganet. He was quite effective at advertising the efficiency and generosity of Leopold United; I myself was well impressed with the personal presence of this little man, this paper-mache Mephistopheles, who was able to make himself look much more important than he honestly was; but then, that is how most men gain their own way.
“Despite this little excitement, we were still able to launch on time; and the rest of the story is pretty mundane, to be quite honest. Oh, sure, it was interesting at the time, but there was little that would really be worth relating. It was just a few chance encounters, such as when we happened upon a rather poorly developed planet, and one of the expedition members, a man by the name of Harris, took it upon himself to present the gift of the meganet to the locals. When they refused, of course, he was quite shocked; so, in order to make sure that the planet did not remain forever overlooked, he applied for an emergency takeover charter. I expect by now that everyone on the planet has been plugged in. But, as you can surely see, it was not a particularly exciting, danger-filled voyage; in-between such little moments of excitement, it was terribly dull. It seems like everyone always has the wrong idea about what happened.
“There was, though, one incident which I am sure you will find interesting: it happened while we were taking a detour through the southern edge of the Empire of Japan; you see, Lenin had some urgent business that had to be concluded there. We stopped in distant orbit over a largish asteroid, where Lenin could meet with his business associate. It was while they were talking, and rather vigorously at that (there was some disagreement over prices, you see) that I suddenly noticed ten war cruisers moving into bombard pattern over the asteroid. Of course, I was quite curious as to why the Japanese Imperial Navy would be bombarding an apparently lifeless asteroid, as were the other people to whom I pointed out this most curious incidence. Our Japanese liaison quickly solved the mystery, however: it seemed that the asteroid was not lifeless after all; there was a large Buddhist colony located on the asteroid, intentionally built there in order to maximize their solitude. They didn’t even have a link to the megaweb. Apparently, the Buddhists in the monastery had refused to participate in the Autumn Festival for the Emperor, with the excuse that they did not recognize him as sovereign. Of course, as proper Englishmen, we easily understood the need to remove such an invasive menace; and when the liaison extended an invitation to watch the burning, we eagerly agreed.
“If you have never seen a colony burned from orbit, it really is quite beautiful. The war cruisers, once aligned, belched out great volleys of space-to-surface torpedoes, creating shimmering streamers joining the cruisers and the asteroid’s surface; and wherever these tendrils connected, gigantic billowing flowers of liquid flame spread upon the surface, fed by huge oxygen feeders that were carried with the primary warheads. Of course, they dissipated quickly, but not before they melted whatever they touched almost instantly; and yet more flowers would bloom in their place. It wasn’t long into the show before Macarteney made a most amusing comment about the monks below being “fired”, which had all of us laughing most heartily (the liaison as well, which surprised me, the Japanese normally being so dour.) Unfortunately for Lenin, he missed the entire show as well as the joke, being engaged still in a heated disagreement with the man he was doing business with.
“There was not so much of this excitement through most of the trip, as I said earlier. Most of it was spent dealing with the little men who constantly went to and fro on the ship, constantly scheming, making plans and striking deals on the stock market, looking for the big break. Always they would carry their little communicator sets with them; I would swear that they all went to sleep with those communicators still in their ears;- it was on more than one occasion that I indeed found them, having fallen asleep in a meeting chair somewhere, communicator still in their ear! One poor bastard actually died rather unexpectedly, after working for some seventy hours straight; he just collapsed in a hallway, with someone on the other line asking if he was still there. We had no place to store him, so we had to dump the poor man into space; he had no relation we knew of, so no harm was done anyway.
“Then, of course, there was the matter of finally finding Kurtz, way out there, having thoroughly failed the company in his attempt to bring civilization to one of the distant worlds in the Sagittarius-Perseus gap. I don’t know why you’re so hung up on that little bit of the story, especially seeing as how it has been retold and sensationalized to such an incredible degree. Well, anyway, as everyone knows by now, he was quite mad: he had created shrines to himself, he had built a mental broadcaster so that he could shove his very thoughts into everyone on the planet, everyone thought he was a god and worked and lived for no other purpose other than his…. One thing, though, that is rarely mentioned, and I don’t know why, is how sick he was. He was absolutely wracked with fever; the man’s flesh was almost dissolving as we watched him. I do feel that it is worth mentioning, because everyone seems to think that it was uprooting him from his new empire that destroyed him, but the fact is that he would have died soon anyway, had we not come to get him; probably sooner, in fact. We most certainly did not inadvertently kill him – in fact, we did all we could to save him, but the man was quite beyond helping by the time we got to him.”
The old man’s gin is finished; he reaches for his bottle to pour another glass, then pauses, new memory passing before his eyes.
“There is one other thing, though, that I remember just now… I don’t know why, but I feel it worth mentioning, since the story you’ve gotten so far has been mainly odds and ends; I suppose, then, that this will fit in well. When Kurtz was finally about to die, he was lying in a medical chamber, and the rest of the expedition (with the exception of the crew on duty, of course) was watching through a large window. Kurtz had been lying there for days, apparently actively resisting our efforts to save him (you see, there really was nothing that could be done.) We all stood there for some time, watching him slowly fade away; everyone wanted to see when the man, the legend, would finally die. All at once, Kurtz sat bolt upright in his bed, yanked out all of the wires in his arms and legs, and in a single bound had reached the window. I tell you, we were frightened out of our wits – a moment ago, the man had been catatonic, on the edge of death, and now he looked ready to smash through the window and tear us all to shreds! We all leapt back from the window, and Lenin was already online with security; but Kurtz did nothing. He just pressed his face and hands against the window, like this:”
The old man puts up his hands, palms forward, and bulges out his eyes, mouth open a little; a grin plays around his eyes.
“…And then he said the most curious thing: he said something like, ‘Nay-bobs! Nay-bobs!’ And then he simply fell over dead. Of course, we were all befuddled as to what he had said; the director was sure he had said ‘Napalm,’ or perhaps ‘A-bombs,’ but the recording from the security camera confirmed it was ‘Nay-bobs.’ To this day, no one knows what on earth he meant; but perhaps it is appropriate: after all, the expedition began and ended with the death of a complete madman.”
The old man chuckles again, stroking his moustache: “The true mark of a madman, eh…?” He pours another glass of gin, recalling yet another tale of his spacefaring youth.
