The story below was copied from a
Facebook.com account. A link to this story in the comments to an older post awhile ago.
Tucker Max's face, meet Megan ******'s hand
Megan was discussing ball shaving with a nice man at a tailgate. Good start to this story;) NE ways, Tucker Max was also at the tailgate and started talking shit to Megan (he obviously thought she was a hot girl who would sleep w/ him if acted like an asshole, and he was showing off in front of his buddies). Megan hit him on the arm, and he said that meant Megan wanted to fuck him because if she hit him in the face, then he'd know she was mad. She then dissed his elastic waistband (yes, he was wearing elastic waistband shorts, what is he, 12?), and he said "its so stupid bitch whores like you can suck my dick without any confusion." So she slapped him in the face!!!
Tucker threw his drink at her, Candice threw her drink at Tucker with lightning fast reflexes, then he proceeded to grab Megan by her hair and hit her in the face with his pathetically small hands. With a bruised face, and a bruised ego, he took his shriveled penis back to his buddies.
In Tucker Max's own words, "My name is Tucker Max, and I am an asshole." Oh, and he hits girls.
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Thirty minutes to Litchfield.
Conn Maxwell, at the armor-glass front of the observation deck, watched the landscape rush out of the horizon and vanish beneath the ship, ten thousand feet down. He thought he knew how an hourglass must feel with the sand slowly draining out.
It had been six months to Litchfield when the Mizar lifted out of La Plata Spaceport and he watched Terra dwindle away. It had been two months to Litchfield when he boarded the City of Asgard at the port of the same name on Odin. It had been two hours to Litchfield when the Countess Dorothy rose from the airship dock at Storisende. He had had all that time, and now it was gone, and he was still unprepared for what he must face at home.
Thirty minutes to Litchfield.
The words echoed in his mind as though he had spoken them aloud, and then, realizing that he never addressed himself as sir, he turned. It was the first mate.[Pg 6]
He had a clipboard in his hand, and he was wearing a Terran Federation Space Navy uniform of forty years, or about a dozen regulation-changes, ago. Once Conn had taken that sort of thing for granted. Now it was obtruding upon him everywhere.
"Thirty minutes to Litchfield, sir," the first officer repeated, and gave him the clipboard to check the luggage list. Valises, two; trunks, two; microbook case, one. The last item fanned a small flicker of anger, not at any person, not even at himself, but at the whole infernal situation. He nodded.
"That's everything. Not many passengers left aboard, are there?"
"You're the only one, first class, sir. About forty farm laborers on the lower deck." He dismissed them as mere cargo. "Litchfield's the end of the run."
"I know. I was born there."
The mate looked again at his name on the list and grinned.
"Sure; you're Rodney Maxwell's son. Your father's been giving us a lot of freight lately. I guess I don't have to tell you about Litchfield."
"Maybe you do. I've been away for six years. Tell me, are they having labor trouble now?"
"Labor trouble?" The mate was surprised. "You mean with the farm-tramps? Ten of them for every job, if you call that trouble."
"Well, I noticed you have steel gratings over the gangway heads to the lower deck, and all your crewmen are armed. Not just pistols, either."
"Oh. That's on account of pirates."
"Pirates?" Conn echoed.
"Well, I guess you'd call them that. A gang'll come aboard, dressed like farm-tramps; they'll have tommy guns and sawed-off shotguns in their bindles. When the ship's airborne and out of reach of help, they'll break out their guns and take her. Usually kill all the crew and passengers. They don't like to leave live witnesses," the mate said. "You heard about the Harriet Barne, didn't you?"
She was Transcontinent & Overseas, the biggest contragravity ship on the planet.
"They didn't pirate her, did they?"
The mate nodded. "Six months ago; Blackie Perales' gang. There was just a tag end of a radio call, that ended in a shot. Time the Air Patrol got to her estimated position it was too late. Nobody's ever seen ship, officers, crew or passengers since."
"Well, great Ghu; isn't the Government doing anything about it?"
"Sure. They offered a big reward for the pirates, dead or alive. And there hasn't been a single case of piracy inside the city limits of Storisende," he added solemnly.
The Calder Range had grown to a sharp blue line on the horizon ahead, and he could see the late afternoon sun on granite peaks. Below, the fields were bare and brown, and the woods were autumn-tinted. They had been green with new foliage when he had last seen them, and the wine-melon fields had been in pink blossom. Must have gotten the crop in early, on this side of the mountains. Maybe they were still harvesting, over in the Gordon Valley. Or maybe this gang below was going to the wine-pressing. Now that he thought of it, he'd seen a lot of cask staves going aboard at Storisende.
Yet there seemed to be less land under cultivation now than six years ago. He could see squares of bracken and low brush that had been melon fields recently, among the new forests that had grown up in the past forty years. The few stands of original timber towered above the second growth like hills; those trees had been there when the planet had been colonized.
That had been two hundred years ago, at the beginning of the Seventh Century, Atomic Era. The name "Poictesme" told that—Surromanticist Movement, when they were rediscovering James Branch Cabell. Old Genji Gartner, the scholarly and half-piratical space-rover whose ship had been the first to enter the Trisystem, had been devoted to the romantic writers of the Pre-Atomic Era. He had named all the planets of the Alpha System from the books of Cabell, and those of Beta from Spenser's Faerie Queene, and those of Gamma from Rabelais. Of course, the camp village at his first landing site on this one had been called Storisende.
Thirty years later, Genji Gartner had died there, after seeing Storisende grow to a metropolis and Poictesme become a Member Republic in the Terran Federation. The other planets were uninhabitable except in airtight dome cities, but they were rich in minerals. Companies had been formed to exploit them. No food could be produced on any of them except by carniculture and hydroponic farming, and it had been cheaper to produce it naturally on Poictesme. So Poictesme had concentrated on agriculture and had prospered. At least, for about a century.
Other colonial planets were developing their own industries; the manufactured goods the Gartner Trisystem produced could no longer find a profitable market. The mines and factories on Jurgen and Koshchei, on Britomart and Calidore, on Panurge and the moons of Pantagruel closed, and the factory workers went away. On Poictesme, the offices emptied, the farms contracted, forests reclaimed fields, and the wild game came back.
Coming toward the ship out of the east, now, was a vast desert of crumbling concrete—landing fields and parade grounds, empty barracks and toppling sheds, airship docks, stripped gun emplacements and missile-launching sites. These were more recent, and dated from Poictesme's second hectic prosperity, when the Gartner Trisystem had been the advance base for the Third Fleet-Army Force, during the System States War.
It had lasted twelve years. Millions of troops were stationed on or routed through Poictesme. The mines and factories reopened for war production. The Federation spent trillions on trillions of sols, piled up mountains of supplies and equipment, left the face of the world cluttered with installations. Then, without warning, the System States Alliance collapsed, the rebellion ended, and the scourge of peace fell on Poictesme.
The Federation armies departed. They took the clothes they stood in, their personal weapons, and a few souvenirs. Everything else was abandoned. Even the most expensive equipment had been worth less than the cost of removal.
The people who had grown richest out of the War had followed, taking their riches with them. For the next forty years, those who remained had been living
on leavings. On Terra, Conn had told his friends that his father was a prospector, leaving them to interpret that as one who searched, say, for uranium. Rodney Maxwell found quite a bit of uranium, but he got it by taking apart the warheads of missiles.
Now he was looking down on the granite spines of the Calder Range; ahead the misty Gordon Valley sloped and widened to the north. Twenty minutes to Litchfield, now. He still didn't know what he was going to tell the people who would be waiting for him. No; he knew that; he just didn't know how. The ship swept on, ten miles a minute, tearing through thin puffs of cloud. Ten minutes. The Big Bend was glistening redly in the sunlit haze, but Litchfield was still hidden inside its curve. Six. Four. The Countess Dorothy was losing speed and altitude. Now he could see it, first a blur and then distinctly. The Airlines Building, so thick as to look squat for all its height. The yellow block of the distilleries under their plume of steam. High Garden Terrace; the Mall.
Moment by moment, the stigmata of decay became more evident. Terraces empty or littered with rubbish; gardens untended and choked with wild growth; blank-staring windows, walls splotched with lichens. At first, he was horrified at what had happened to Litchfield in six years. Then he realized that the change had been in himself. He was seeing it with new eyes, as it really was.
The ship came in five hundred feet above the Mall, and he could see cracked pavements sprouting grass, statues askew on their pedestals, waterless fountains. At first he thought one of them was playing, but what he had taken for spray was dust blowing from the empty basin. There was a thing about dusty fountains, some poem he'd read at the University.
The fountains are dusty in the Graveyard of Dreams;
The hinges are rusty, they swing with tiny screams.
Was Poictesme a Graveyard of Dreams? No; Junkyard of Empire. The Terran Federation had impoverished a hundred planets, devastated a score, actually depopulated at least three, to keep the System States Alliance from seceding. It hadn't been a victory. It had only been a lesser defeat.
There was a crowd, almost a mob, on the dock; nearly everybody in topside Litchfield. He spotted old Colonel Zareff, with his white hair and plum-brown skin, and Tom Brangwyn, the town marshal, red-faced and bulking above everybody else. Kurt Fawzi, the mayor, well to the front. Then he saw his father and mother, and his sister Flora, and waved to them. They waved back, and then everybody was waving. The gangway-port opened, and the Academy band struck up, enthusiastically if inexpertly, as he descended to the dock.
His father was wearing a black suit with a long coat, cut to the same pattern as the one he had worn six years ago. Blackout curtain cloth. It was fairly new, but the coat had begun to acquire a permanent wrinkle across the right hip, over the pistol butt. His mother's dress was new, and so was Flora's, made for the occasion. He couldn't be sure just which of the Federation Armed Forces had provided the material, but his father's shirt was Med Service sterilon.
Ashamed to be noticing things like that, he clasped his father's hand, kissed his mother, embraced his sister. There were a few, but very few, gray threads in his father's mustache; a few more squint-wrinkles around the eyes. His mother's hair was all gray, now, and she was heavier. She seemed shorter, but that would be because he'd grown a few inches in the last six years. For a moment, he was surprised that Flora actually looked younger. Then he realized that to seventeen, twenty-three is practically middle age, but to twenty-three, twenty-nine is almost contemporary. He noticed the glint on her left hand and caught it to look at the ring.
"Hey! Zarathustra sunstone! Nice," he said. "Where is he, Sis?"
He'd never met her fiancé; Wade Lucas hadn't come to Litchfield to practice medicine until the year after he'd gone to Terra.
"Oh, emergency," Flora said. "Obstetrical case; that won't wait on anything. In Tramptown, of course. But he'll be at the party.... Oops, I shouldn't have said that; that's supposed to be a surprise."
"Don't worry; I'll be surprised," he promised.
Then Kurt Fawzi was pushing forward, holding out his hand. Thinner, and grayer, but just as effusive as ever.
"Welcome home, Conn. Judge, shake hands with him and tell him how glad we all are to see him back.... Now, Franz, put away the recorder; save the interview for the Chronicle till later. Ah, Professor Kellton; one pupil Litchfield Academy can be proud of!"
He shook hands with them: Judge Ledue, Franz Veltrin, old Professor Dolf Kellton. They were all happy; how much, he wondered, because he was Conn Maxwell, Rodney Maxwell's son, home from Terra, and how much because of what they hoped he'd tell them. Kurt Fawzi, edging him aside, was the first to speak of it.
"Conn, what did you find out?" he whispered. "Do you know where it is?"
He stammered, then saw Tom Brangwyn and Colonel Klem Zareff approaching, the older man tottering on a silver-headed cane and the younger keeping pace with him. Neither of them had been born on Poictesme. Tom Brangwyn had always been reticent about where he came from, but Hathor was a good guess. There had been political trouble on Hathor twenty years ago; the losers had had to get off-planet in a hurry to dodge firing squads. Klem Zareff never was reticent about his past. He came from Ashmodai, one of the System States planets, and he had commanded a regiment, and finally a division that had been blasted down to less than regimental strength, in the Alliance Army. He always wore a little rosette of System States black and green on his coat.
"Hello, boy," he croaked, extending a hand. "Good to see you again."
"It sure is, Conn," the town marshal agreed, then lowered his voice. "Find out anything definite?"
"We didn't have much time, Conn," Kurt Fawzi said, "but we've arranged a little celebration for you. We'll start it with a dinner at Senta's."
"You couldn't have done anything I'd have liked better, Mr. Fawzi. I'd have to have a meal at Senta's before I'd really feel at home."
"Well, it'll be a couple of hours. Suppose we all go up to my office, in the meantime. Give the ladies a chance to fix up for the party, and have a little drink and a talk together."
"You want to do that, Conn?" his father asked. There was an odd undernote of anxiety, or reluctance, in his voice.
"Yes, of course. I'd like that."
His father turned to speak to his mother and Flora. Kurt Fawzi was speaking to his wife, interrupting himself to shout instructions to some laborers who were bringing up a contragravity skid. Conn turned to Colonel Zareff.
"Good melon crop this year?" he asked.
The old Rebel cursed. "Gehenna of a big crop; we're up to our necks in melons. This time next year we'll be washing our feet in brandy."
"Hold onto it and age it; you ought to see what they charge for a drink of Poictesme brandy on Terra."
"This isn't Terra, and we aren't selling it by the drink," Colonel Zareff said. "We're selling it at Storisende Spaceport, for what the freighter captains pay us. You've been away too long, Conn. You've forgotten what it's like to live in a poor-house."
The cargo was coming off, now. Cask staves, and more cask staves. Zareff swore bitterly at the sight, and then they started toward the wide doors of the shipping floor, inside the Airlines Building. Outgoing cargo was beginning to come out; casks of brandy, of course, and a lot of boxes and crates, painted light blue and bearing the yellow trefoil of the Third Fleet-Army Force and the eight-pointed red star of Ordnance. Cases of rifles; square boxes of ammunition; crated auto-cannon. Conn turned to his father.
"This our stuff?" he asked. "Where did you dig it?"
Rodney Maxwell laughed. "You know the old Tenth Army Headquarters, over back of Snagtooth, in the Calders? Everybody knows that was cleaned out years ago. Well, always take a second look at these things everybody knows. Ten to one they're not so. It always bothered me that nobody found any
underground attack-shelters. I took a second look, and sure enough, I found them, right underneath, mined out of the solid rock. Conn, you'd be surprised at what I found there."
"Where are you going to sell that stuff?" he asked, pointing at a passing skid. "There's enough combat equipment around now to outfit a private army for every man, woman and child in Poictesme."
"Storisende Spaceport. The freighter captains buy it, and sell it on some of the planets that were colonized right before the War and haven't gotten industrialized yet. I'm clearing about two hundred sols a ton on it."
The skid at which he had pointed was loaded with cases of M504 submachine guns. Even used, one was worth fifty sols. Allowing for packing weight, his father was selling those tommy guns for less than a good café on Terra got for one drink of Poictesme brandy.
II
He had been in Kurt Fawzi's office before, once or twice, with his father; he remembered it as a dim, quiet place of genteel conviviality and rambling conversation. None of the lights were bright, and the walls were almost invisible in the shadows. As they entered, Tom Brangwyn went to the long table and took off his belt and holster, laying it down. One by one, the others unbuckled their weapons and added them to the pile. Klem Zareff's cane went on the table with his pistol; there was a sword inside it.
That was something else he was seeing with new eyes. He hadn't started carrying a gun when he had left for Terra, and he was wondering, now, why any of them bothered to. Why, there wouldn't be a shooting a year in Litchfield, if you didn't count the Tramptowners, and they stayed south of the docks and off the top level.
Or perhaps that was just it. Litchfield was peaceful because everybody was prepared to keep it that way. It certainly wasn't because of anything the
Planetary Government did to maintain order.
Now Brangwyn was setting out glasses, filling a pitcher from a keg in the corner of the room. The last time Conn had been here, they'd given him a glass of wine, and he'd felt very grown-up because they didn't water it for him.
"Well, gentlemen," Kurt Fawzi was saying, "let's have a toast to our returned friend and new associate. Conn, we're all anxious to hear what you've found out, but even if you didn't learn anything, we're still happy to have you back with us. Gentlemen; to our friend and neighbor. Welcome home, Conn!"
"Well, it's wonderful to be back, Mr. Fawzi," he began.
"Here, none of this mister foolishness; you're one of us, now, Conn. And drink up, everybody. We have plenty of brandy, if we don't have anything else."
"You can say that again, Kurt." That was one of the distillery people; he'd remember the name in a moment. "When this new crop gets pressed and fermented...."
"I don't know where in Gehenna I'm going to vat mine till it ferments," Klem Zareff said.
"Or why," another planter added. "Lorenzo, what are you going to be paying for wine?"
Lorenzo Menardes; that was the name. The distiller said he was worrying about what he'd be able to get for brandy.
"Oh, please," Fawzi interrupted. "Not today; not when our boy's home and is going to tell us how we can solve all our problems."
"Yes, Conn." That was Morgan Gatworth, the lawyer. "You did find out where Merlin is, didn't you?"
That set them all off. He was still holding his drink; he downed it in one gulp, barely tasting it, and handed the glass to Tom Brangwyn for a refill, and caught a frown on his father's face. One did not gulp drinks in Kurt Fawzi's office.
Well, neither did one blast everybody's hopes with half a dozen words, and that was what he was trying to force himself to do. He wanted to blurt out the one quick sentence and get it over with, but the words wouldn't come out of his throat. He lowered the second drink by half; the brandy was beginning to
warm him and dissolve the cold lump in his stomach. Have to go easy, though. He wasn't used to this kind of drinking, and he wanted to stay sober enough to talk sense until he'd told them what he had to.
"I hope," he said, "that you don't expect me to show you the cross on the map, where the computer is buried."
All the eyes around him began to look troubled. Most of them had been expecting precisely that. His father was watching him anxiously.
"But it's still here on Poictesme, isn't it?" one of the melon planters asked. "They didn't take it away with them?"
"Most of you gentlemen," he said, "contributed to sending me to school on Terra, to study cybernetics and computer theory. It wouldn't do us any good to find Merlin if none of us could operate it. Well, I've done that. I can use any known type of computer, and train assistants. After I graduated, I was offered a junior instructorship to computer physics at the University."
"You didn't mention that, son," his father said.
"The letter would have come on the same ship I did. Besides, I didn't think it was very important."
"I think it is." There was a catch in old Dolf Kellton's voice. "One of my boys from the Academy offered a place on the faculty of the University of Montevideo, on Terra!" He finished his drink and held out his glass for more, something he almost never did.
"Conn means," Kurt Fawzi explained, "that it had nothing to do with Merlin."
All right; now tell them the truth.
"I was also to find out anything I could about a secret giant computer used during the War by the Third Fleet-Army Force, code-named Merlin. I went over all the records available to the public; I used your letter, Professor, and the head of our Modern History department secured me access to non-public material, some of it still classified. For one thing, I have locations and maps and plans of every Federation installation built here between 842 and 854, the whole period of the War." He turned to his father. "There are incredible things still undiscovered; most of the important installations were built in duplicate,
sometimes triplicate, as a precaution against space attack. I know where all of them are."
"Space attack!" Klem Zareff was indignant. "There never was a time we could have attacked Poictesme. Even if we'd had the ships, we were fighting a purely defensive war. Aggression was no part of our policy—"
He interrupted: "Excuse me, Colonel. The point I was trying to make is that, with all I was able to learn, I could find nothing, not one single word, about any giant strategic planning computer called Merlin, or any Merlin Project."
There! He'd gotten that out. Now go on and tell them about the old man in the dome-house on Luna. The room was silent, except for the small insectile hum of the electric clock. Then somebody set a glass on the table, and it sounded like a hammer blow.
"Nothing, Conn?"
Kurt Fawzi was incredulous. Judge Ledue's hand shook as though palsied as he tried to relight his cigar. Dolf Kellton was looking at the drink in his hand as though he had no idea what it was. The others found their voices, one by one.
"Of course, it was the most closely guarded secret ..."
"But after forty years ..."
"Hah, don't tell me about security!" Colonel Zareff barked. "You should have seen the lengths our staff went to. I remember, once, on Mephistopheles ..."
"But there was a computer code-named Merlin," Judge Ledue was insisting, to convince himself more than anybody else. "Its memory-bank contained all human knowledge. It was capable of scanning all its data instantaneously, and combining, and forming associations, and reasoning with absolute accuracy, and extrapolating to produce new facts, and predicting future events, and ..."
And if you'd asked such a computer, "Is there a God?" it would have simply answered, "Present."
"We'd have won the War, except for Merlin," Zareff was declaring.
"Conn, from what you've learned of computers generally, how big would Merlin have to be?" old Professor Kellton asked.
"Well, the astrophysics computer at the University occupied a volume of a hundred thousand cubic feet. For all Merlin was supposed to do, I'd say something of the order of three million to five million.
"Well, it's a cinch they didn't haul that away with them," Lester Dawes, the banker, said.
"Oh, lots of places on Poictesme where they could have hid a thing like that," Tom Brangwyn said. "You know, a planet's a mighty big place."
"It doesn't have to be on Poictesme, even," Morgan Gatworth pointed out. "It could be anywhere in the Trisystem."
"You know where I'd have put it?" Lorenzo Menardes asked. "On one of the moons of Pantagruel."
"But that's in the Gamma System, three light years away," Kurt Fawzi objected. "There isn't a hypership on this planet, and it would take half a lifetime to get there on normal-space drive."
Conn was lifting his glass to his lips. He set it down again and rose to his feet.
"Then," he said, "we will build a hypership. On Koshchei there are shipyards and hyperdrive engines and everything we will need. We only need one normal-space interplanetary ship to get out there, and we're in business."
"Well, I don't know we need one," Judge Ledue said. "That was only an idea of Lorenzo's. I think Merlin's right here on Poictesme."
"We don't know it is," Conn replied. "And we don't know we won't need a ship. Merlin may be on Koshchei; that's where the components would be fabricated, and the Armed Forces weren't hauling anything any farther than they had to. Koshchei's only two and a half minutes away by radio; that's practically in the next room. Look; here's how they could have done it."
He went on talking, about remote controls and radio transmission and positronic brains and neutrino-circuits. They believed it all, even the little they understood. They would believe anything he told them about Merlin—except the truth.
"But this will take money," Lester Dawes said. "And after that infernal deluge of unsecured paper currency thirty years ago ..."
"I have no doubt," Judge Ledue began, "that the Planetary Government at Storisende would give assistance. I have some slight influence with President Vyckhoven ..."
"Huh-uh!" That was one of Klem Zareff's fellow planters. "We don't want Jake Vyckhoven or any of this First-Families-of-Storisende oligarchy in this at all. That's the gang that bankrupted the Government with doles and work relief, and everybody else with worthless printing-press money after the War, and they've been squatting in a circle deploring things ever since. Some of these days Blackie Perales and his pirates'll sack Storisende, for all they'd be able to do to stop him."
"We get a ship out to Koshchei, and the next thing you know we'll be the Planetary Government," Tom Brangwyn said.
Rodney Maxwell finished the brandy in his glass and set it on the table, then went to the pile of belts and holsters and began rummaging for his own. Kurt Fawzi looked up in surprise.
"Rod, you're not leaving are you?" he asked.
"Yes. It's only half an hour till time for dinner, and I think Conn and I ought to have a little fresh air. Besides, you know, we haven't seen each other for six years." He buckled on the heavy automatic and settled the belt over his hips. "You didn't have a gun, did you, Conn?" he asked. "Well, let's go."
III
It wasn't until they were down to the main level and outside in the little plaza to the east of the Airlines Building that his father broke the silence.
"That was quite a talk you gave them, Conn. They believed every word of it. I even caught myself starting to believe it once or twice."
Conn stopped short; his father halted beside him. "Why didn't you tell them the truth, son?" Rodney Maxwell asked.
The question, which he had been throwing at himself, angered him. "Why didn't I just grab a couple of pistols and shoot the lot of them?" he retorted. "It wouldn't have killed them any deader, and it wouldn't have hurt as much."
"There is no Merlin. Is that it?"
He realized, suddenly, that his father had known, or suspected that all along. He started to say something, then checked himself and began again:
"There never was one. I was going to tell them, but you saw them. I couldn't."
"You're sure of it?"
"The whole thing's a myth. I'm quoting the one man in the Galaxy who ought to know. The man who commanded the Third Force here during the War."
"Foxx Travis!" His father's voice was soft with wonder. "I saw him once, when I was eight years old. I thought he'd died long ago. Why, he must be over a hundred."
"A hundred and twelve. He's living on Luna; low gravity's all that keeps him alive."
"And you talked to him?"
"Yes."
There'd been a girl in his third-year biophysics class; he'd found out that she was a great-granddaughter of Force General Travis. It had taken him until his senior midterm vacation to wangle an invitation to the dome-house on Luna. After that, it had been easy. As soon as Foxx Travis had learned that one of his great-granddaughter's guests was from Poictesme, he had insisted on talking to him.
"What did he tell you?"
The old man had been incredibly thin and frail. Under normal gravitation, his life would have gone out like a blown match. Even at one-sixth G, it had cost him effort to rise and greet the guest. There had been a younger man, a mere stripling of seventy-odd; he had been worried, and excused himself at once. Travis had laughed after he had gone out.
"Mike Shanlee; my aide-de-camp on Poictesme. Now he thinks he's my keeper. He'll have a squad of doctors and a platoon of nurses in here as soon as you're gone, so take your time. Now, tell me how things are on Poictesme...."
"Just about that," he told his father. "I finally mentioned Merlin, as an old legend people still talked about. I was ashamed to admit anybody really believed in it. He laughed, and said, 'Great Ghu, is that thing still around? Well, I suppose so; it was all through the Third Force during the War. Lord only knows how these rumors start among troops. We never contradicted it; it was good for morale.'"
They had started walking again, and were out on the Mall; the sky was flaming red and orange from high cirrus clouds in the sunset light. They stopped by a dry fountain, perhaps the one from which he had seen the dust blowing. Rodney Maxwell sat down on the edge of the basin and got out two cigars, handing one to Conn, who produced his lighter.
"Conn, they wouldn't have believed you and Foxx Travis," he said. "Merlin's a religion with those people. Merlin's a robot god, something they can shove all their problems onto. As soon as they find Merlin, everybody will be rich and happy, the Government bonds will be redeemed at face value plus interest, the paper money'll be worth a hundred Federation centisols to the sol, and the leaves and wastepaper will be raked off the Mall, all by magic." He muttered an unprintability and laughed bitterly.
"I didn't know you were the village atheist, Father."
"In a religious community, the village atheist keeps his doubts to himself. I have to do business with these Merlinolators. It's all I can do to keep Flora from antagonizing them at school."
Flora was a teacher; now she was assistant principal of the grade schools. Professor Kellton was also school superintendent. He could see how that would be.
"Flora's not a True Believer, then?"
Rodney Maxwell shook his head. "That's largely Wade Lucas's influence, I'd say. You know about him."
Just from letters. Wade Lucas was from Baldur; he'd gone off-planet as soon as he'd gotten his M.D. Evidently the professional situation there was the same as on Terra; plenty of opportunities, and fifty competitors for each one. On Poictesme, there were few opportunities, but nobody competed for anything, not even to find Merlin.
"He'd never heard of Merlin till he came here, and when he did, he just couldn't believe in it. I don't blame him. I've heard about it all my life, and I can't."
"Why not?"
"To begin with, I suppose, because it's just another of these things everybody believes. Then, I've had to do some studying on the Third Force occupation of Poictesme to know where to go and dig, and I never found any official, or even reliably unofficial, mention of anything of the sort. Forty years is a long time to keep a secret, you know. And I can't see why they didn't come back for it after the pressure to get the troops home was off, or why they didn't build a dozen Merlins. This isn't the only planet that has problems they can't solve for themselves."
"What's Mother's attitude on Merlin?"
"She's against it. She thinks it isn't right to make machines that are smarter than people."
"I'll agree. It's scientifically impossible."
"That's what I've been trying to tell her. Conn, I noticed that after Kurt Fawzi started talking about how long it would take to get to the Gamma System, you jumped right into it and began talking up a ship. Did you think that if you got them started on that it would take their minds off Merlin?"
"That gang up in Fawzi's office? Nifflheim, no! They'll go on hunting Merlin till they die. But I was serious about the ship. An idea hit me. You gave it to me; you and Klem Zareff."
"Why, I didn't say a word ..."
"Down on the shipping floor, before we went up. You were talking about selling arms and ammunition at a profit of two hundred sols a ton, and Klem was talking as though a bumper crop was worse than a Green Death epidemic. If we had a hypership, look what we could do. How much do you think a settler
on Hoth or Malebolge or Irminsul would pay for a good rifle and a thousand rounds? How much would he pay for his life?—that's what it would come to. And do you know what a fifteen-cc liqueur glass of Poictesme brandy sells for on Terra? One sol; Federation money. I'll admit it costs like Nifflheim to run a hypership, but look at the difference between what these tramp freighter captains pay at Storisende and what they get."
"I've been looking at it for a long time. Maybe if we had a few ships of our own, these planters would be breaking new ground instead of cutting their plantings, and maybe we'd get some money on this planet that was worth something. You have a good idea there, son. But maybe there's an angle to it you haven't thought of."
Conn puffed slowly at the cigar. Why couldn't they grow tobacco like this on Terra? Soil chemicals, he supposed; that wasn't his subject.
"You can't put this scheme over on its own merits. This gang wouldn't lift a finger to build a hypership. They've completely lost hope in everything but Merlin."
"Well, can do. I'll even convince them that Merlin's a space-station, in orbit off Koshchei. I think I could do that."
"You know what it'll cost? If you go ahead with it, I'm in it with you, make no mistake about that. But you and I will be the only two people on Poictesme who can be trusted with the truth. We'll have to lie to everybody else, with every word we speak. We'll have to lie to Flora, and we'll have to lie to your mother. Your mother most of all. She believes in absolutes. Lying is absolutely wrong, no matter whom it helps; telling the truth is absolutely right, no matter how much damage it does or how many hearts it breaks. You think this is going to be worth a price like that?"
"Don't you?" he demanded, and then pointed along the crumbling and littered Mall. "Look at that. Pretend you never saw it before and are looking at it for the first time. And then tell me whether it'll be worth it or not."
His father took a cigar from his mouth. For a moment, he sat staring silently.
"Great Ghu!" Rodney Maxwell turned. "I wonder how that sneaked up on me; I honestly never realized.... Yes, Conn. This is a cause worth lying for." He looked at his watch. "We ought to be starting for Senta's, but let's take a few minutes and talk this over. How are you going to get it started?"
"Well, convince them that I can find Merlin and that they can't find it without me. I think I've done that already. Then convince them that we'll have to have a ship to get to Koshchei, and—"
"Won't do. That'll take money, and money's something none of this gang has."
"You heard me talk about the stuff I found out on Terra? Father, you have no idea what all there is. You remember the old Force Command Headquarters, the one the Planetary Government took over? I know where there's a duplicate of that, completely underground. It has everything the other one had, and a lot more, because it'll be cram-full of supplies to be used in case of a general blitz that would knock out everything on the planet. And a chain of hospitals. And a spaceport, over on Barathrum, that was built inside the crater of an extinct volcano. There won't be any hyperships there of course, but there'll be equipment and material. We might be able to build a ship there. And supply depots, all over the planet; none of them has ever been opened since the War. Don't worry about financing; we have that."
His father, he could see, appreciated what he had brought home from Terra. He was nodding, with quick head jerks, at each item.
"That'll do it, all right. Now, listen; what we want to do is get a company organized, a regular limited-liability company, with a charter. We'll contribute the information you brought back from Terra, and we'll get the rest of this gang to put all the money we can twist out of them into it, so we'll be sure they won't say, 'Aw, Nifflheim with it!' and walk out on us as soon as the going gets a little tough." Rodney Maxwell got to his feet, hitching his gun-belt. "I'll pass the word to Kurt to get a meeting set up for tomorrow afternoon."
"What'll we call this company? Merlin Rediscovery, Ltd?"
"No! We keep Merlin out of it. As far as the public is supposed to know, this is just a war-material prospecting company. I'll impress on them that Merlin
is to be kept a secret. That way, we'll have to engage in regular prospecting and salvage work as a front. I'll see to it that the front is also the main objective." He nodded down the Mall, toward the sunset, which was blazing even higher and redder. "Well, let's go. You don't want to be late for your own welcome-home party."
They walked slowly, still talking, until they came to the end of the Mall. The escalators to the level below weren't working. Now that he thought of it, they hadn't been when he had gone away, six years ago, but he could remember riding up and down on them as a small child. For a moment they stood in the sunset light, looking down on the lower terrace as they finished their cigars.
Senta's was mostly outdoors, the tables under the open sky. The people gathered below were looking at the sunset, too; Litchfielders loved to watch sunsets, maybe because a sunset was one of the few things economic conditions couldn't affect. There was Kurt Fawzi, the center of a group to whom he was declaiming earnestly; there was his mother, and Flora, and Flora's fiancé, who was the uncomfortable lone man in an excited feminine flock. And there was Senta herself, short and dumpy, in one of her preposterous red and purple dresses, bubbling happily one moment and screaming invective at some laggard waiter the next.
They threw away their cigars and started down the long, motionless escalator. Conn Maxwell, Hero of the Hour, marching to Destiny. He seemed to hear trumpets sounding before him.
And an occasional muted Bronx cheer.
IV
The alarm chimed softly beside his bed; he reached out and silenced it, and lay looking at the early sunlight in the windows, and found that he was wishing himself back in his dorm room at the University. No, back in this room, ten years ago, before any of this had started. For a while, he imagined himself
thirteen years old and knowing everything he knew now, and he began mapping a campaign to establish himself as Litchfield's Juvenile Delinquent Number One, to the end that Kurt Fawzi and Dolf Kellton and the rest of them would never dream of sending him to school on Terra to find out where Merlin was.
But he couldn't even go back to yesterday afternoon in Kurt Fawzi's office and tell them the truth. All he could do was go ahead. It had seemed so easy, when he and his father had been talking on the Mall; just get a ship built, and get out to Koshchei, and open some of the shipyards and engine works there, and build a hypership. Sure; easy—once he got started.
He climbed out of bed, knuckled the sleep-sand out of his eyes, threw his robe around him, and started across the room to the bath cubicle.
They had decided to have breakfast together his first morning home. The party had broken up late, and then there had been the excitement of opening the presents he had brought back from Terra. Nobody had had a chance to talk about Merlin, or about what he was going to do, now that he was home. That, and his career of mendacity, would start at breakfast. He wanted to let his father get to the table first, to run interference for him; he took his time with his toilet and dressed carefully and slowly. Finally, he zipped up the short waist-length jacket and went out.
His father and mother and Flora were at the table, and the serving-robot was floating around a few inches off the floor, steam trailing from its coffee urn and its tray lid up to offer food. He greeted everybody and sat down at his place, and the robot came around to him. His mother had selected all the things he'd been most fond of six years ago: shovel-snout bacon, hotcakes, starberry jam, things he hadn't tasted since he had gone away. He filled his plate and poured a cup of coffee.
"You don't want to bother coming out to the dig with me this morning, do you?" his father was saying. "I'll be back here for lunch, and we'll go to the meeting in the afternoon."[Pg 26]
"Meeting?" Flora asked. "What meeting?"
"Oh, we didn't have time to tell you," Rodney Maxwell said. "You know, Conn brought back a lot of information on locations of supply depots and things like that. An amazing list of things that haven't been discovered yet. It's going to be too much for us to handle alone; we're organizing a company to do it. We'll need a lot of labor, for one thing; jobs for some of these Tramptowners."
"That's going to be something awfully big," his mother said dubiously. "You never did anything like that before."
"I never had the kind of a partner I have now. It's Maxwell & Son, from now on."
"Who's going to be in this company?" Flora wanted to know.
"Oh, everybody around town; Kurt and the Judge and Klem, and Lester Dawes. All that crowd."
"The Fawzis' Office Gang," Flora said disparagingly. "I suppose they'll want Conn to take them right to where Merlin is, the first thing."
"Well, not the first thing," Conn said. "Merlin was one thing I couldn't find out anything about on Terra."
"I'll bet you couldn't!"
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"The people at Armed Forces Records would let me look at everything else, and make microcopies and all, but not one word about computers. Forty years, and they still have the security lid welded shut on that."
Flora looked at him in shocked surprise. "You don't mean to tell me you believe in that thing?"
"Sure. How do you think they fought a war around a perimeter of close to a thousand light-years? They couldn't do all that out of their heads. They'd have to have computers, and the one they'd use to correlate everything and work out grand-strategy plans would have to be a dilly. Why, I'd give anything just to look at the operating panels for that thing."
"But that's just a silly story; there never was anything like Merlin. No wonder you couldn't find out about it. You were looking for something that doesn't exist, just like all these old cranks that sit around drinking brandy and mooning about what Merlin's going to do for them, and never doing anything for
themselves."
"Oh, they're going to do something, now, Flora," his father told her. "When we get this company organized—"
"You'll dig up a lot of stuff you won't be able to sell, like that stuff you've been bringing in from Tenth Army, and then you'll go looping off chasing Merlin, like the rest of them. Well, maybe that'll be a little better than just sitting in Kurt Fawzi's office talking about it, but not much."
It kept on like that. Conn and his father tried several times to change the subject; each time Flora ignored the effort and returned to her diatribe. Finally, she put her plate and cup on the robot's tray and got to her feet.
"I have to go," she said. "Maybe I can do something to keep some of these children from growing up to be Merlin-worshipers like their parents."
She flung out of the room angrily. Mrs. Maxwell looked after her in distress.
"And I thought it was going to be so nice, having breakfast together again," she lamented.
Somehow the breakfast wasn't quite as good as he'd thought it was at first. He wondered how many more breakfasts like that he was going to have to sit through. He and his father finished quickly and got up, while his mother started the robot to clearing the table.
"Conn," she said, after his father had gone out, "you shouldn't have gotten Flora started like that."
"I didn't get Flora started; she's equipped with a self-starter. If she doesn't believe in Merlin, that's her business. A lot of these people do, and I'm going to help them hunt for it. That's why they all chipped in to send me to school on Terra; remember?"
"Yes, I know." Her voice was heavy with distress. "Conn, do you really believe there is a ... that thing?" she asked.
"Why, of course." He was mildly surprised at how sincerely and straightforwardly he said it. "I don't know where it is, but it's somewhere on Poictesme, or in the Alpha System."
"Well, do you think it would be a good thing to find it?"
That surprised him. Everybody knew it would be, and his mother didn't share his father's attitude about things everybody knew. She hadn't any business questioning a fundamental postulate like that.
"It frightens me," she continued. "I don't even like to think about it. A soulless intelligence; it seems evil to me."
"Well, of course it's soulless. It's a machine, isn't it? An aircar's soulless, but you're not afraid to ride in one."
"But this is different. A machine that can think. Conn, people weren't mean to make machines like that, wiser than they are."
"Now wait a minute, Mother. You're talking to a computerman now." Professional authority was something his mother oughtn't to question. "A computer like Merlin isn't intelligent, or wise, or anything of the sort. It doesn't think; the people who make computers and use them do the thinking. A computer's a tool, like a screwdriver; it has to have a man to use it."
"Well, but...."
"And please, don't talk about what people are meant to do. People aren't meant to do things; they mean to do things, and nine times out of ten, they end by doing them. It may take a hundred thousand years from a Stone Age savage in a cave to the captain of a hyperspace ship, but sooner or later they get there."
His mother was silent. The soulless machine that had been clearing the table floated out of the room, the dishwasher in its rectangular belly gurgling. Maybe what he had told her was logical, but women aren't impressed by logic. She knew better—for the good old feminine reason, Because.
"Wade Lucas wanted me to drop in on him for a checkup," he mentioned. "That's rubbish; I had one for my landing pratique on the ship. He just wants to size up his future brother-in-law."
"Well, you ought to go see him."
"How did Flora come to meet him, anyhow?"
"Well, you know, he came from Baldur. He was in Storisende, looking for an opening to start a practice, and he heard about some medical equipment your father had found somewhere and came out to see if he could buy it. Your father and Judge Ledue and Mr. Fawzi talked him into opening his office here. Then he and Flora got acquainted...." She asked, anxiously: "What did you think of him, Conn?"
"Seems like a regular guy. I think I'll like him." A husband like Wade Lucas might be a good thing for Flora. "I'll drop in on him, sometime this morning."
His mother went toward the rear of the house—more soulless machines, like the housecleaning-robot, and the laundry-robot, to look after. He went into his father's office and found the cigar humidor, just where it had been when he'd stolen cigars out of it six years ago and thought his father never suspected what he was doing.
Now, why didn't they export this tobacco? It was better than anything they grew on Terra; well, at least it was different, just as Poictesme brandy was different from Terran bourbon or Baldur honey-rum. That was the sort of thing that could be sold in interstellar trade anytime and anywhere; the luxury goods that were unique. Staple foodstuffs, utility textiles, metal products, could be produced anywhere, and sooner or later they were. That was the reason for the original, pre-War depression: the customers were all producing for themselves. He'd talk that over with his father. He wished he'd had time to take some economics at the University.
He found the file his father kept up-to-date on salvage sites found and registered with the Claims Office in Storisende. Some of the locations he had brought back data for had been discovered, but, to his relief, not the underground duplicate Force Command Headquarters, and not the spaceport on the island continent of Barathrum, to the east. That was all right.
He went to the house-defense arms closet and found a 10-mm Navy pistol, and a belt and spare clips. Making sure that the pistol and magazines were loaded, he buckled it on. He debated getting a vehicle out of the hangar on the landing stage, decided against it, and started downtown on foot.
One of the first people he met was Len Yeniguchi, the tailor. He would be at the meeting that afternoon. He managed, while talking, to comment on the cut of Conn's suit, and finger the material.
"Ah, nice," he complimented. "Made on Terra? We don't see cloth like that here very often."
He meant it wasn't Armed Forces salvage.
"Father ought to be around to see you with a bolt of material, to have a suit made," he said. "For Ghu's sake, either talk him into having a short jacket like this, or get him to buy himself a shoulder holster. He's ruined every coat he ever owned, carrying a gun on his hip."
A little farther on, he came to a combat car grounded in the middle of the street. It was green, with black trimmings, and lettered in black, GORDON VALLEY HOME GUARD. Tom Brangwyn was standing beside it, talking to a young man in a green uniform.
"Hello, Conn." The town marshal looked at his hip and grinned. "See you got all your clothes on this morning. You were just plain indecent, yesterday.... You know Fred Karski, don't you?"
Yes, now that Tom mentioned it, he did. He and Fred had gone to school together at the Litchfield Academy. But the six years since they'd seen each other last had made a lot of difference in both of them. He was beginning to think that the only strangers in Litchfield were his own contemporaries. They shook hands, and Conn looked at the combat car and Fred Karski's uniform.
"What's going on?" he asked. "The System States Alliance to business again?"
Karski laughed. "Oh, that's the Colonel's idea. Green and black were his colors in the War, and he's in command of the regiment."
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"Regiment? You need a whole regiment?" Conn asked.
"Well, it's two companies, each about the size of a regular army platoon, but we have to call it a regiment so he can keep his old Rebel Army rank."
"We could use a regiment, Conn," Tom Brangwyn said seriously. "You have no idea how bad things have gotten. Over on the east coast, the outlaws are
looting whole towns. About four months ago, they sacked Waterville; burned the whole town and killed close to a hundred people. That was Blackie Perales' gang."
"Who is this Blackie Perales? I heard the name mentioned in connection with the Harriet Barne."
"Blackie Perales is anybody the Planetary Government can't catch, which means practically any outlaw," Fred Karski said.
"No, Fred; there is a Blackie Perales," Tom Brangwyn said. "He used to be a planter, down in the south. The banks foreclosed on him when he couldn't pay his notes, and he turned outlaw. That's the way it's going, all around. Every time a planter loses his plantation or a farmer loses his farm, or a mechanic loses his job, he turns outlaw. Take Tramptown, here. We used to plant nothing but melons. Then, when the sale for wine and brandy dropped, the melon-planters began cutting their melon crops and raising produce, instead of buying it from up north, and turning land into pasture for cattle. The people we used to buy foodstuffs from couldn't sell all they raised, and that threw a lot of farmhands out of work. So they got the idea there was work here, and they came flocking in, and when they couldn't get jobs, they just stayed in Tramptown, stealing anything they could. We don't even try to police Tramptown any more; we just see to it they don't come up here."
"Well, where do these outlaws and pirates who are looting whole towns come from?"
"Down in the Badlands, mostly. None of them have been bothering us, since we organized the Home Guard. They tried to, a couple of times, at first. There may have been a few survivors; they spread it around that Gordon Valley wasn't any outlaws' health resort."
"Why don't you join us, Conn?" Fred Karski asked. "All our old gang belong."
"I'd like to, but I'm afraid I'm going to be kind of busy."
Brangwyn nodded. "Yes. You will be, at that," he agreed.
"So I hear," Fred Karski said. "Do you really know where it is, Conn?"
"Well, no." He went into the routine about Merlin being still classified triple-top secret. "But we'll find it. It may take time, but we will."
They talked for a while. He asked more questions about the Home Guard. His father, it seemed, had donated all the equipment. They had a hundred and seventy men on the active list, but they had a reserve of over eight hundred, and combat vehicles and weapons on all the plantations and in all the towns along the river. The reserve had only been turned out twice; both times, outlaw attacks had been stopped dead—literally. The Home Guard, it appeared, was not given to making arrests or taking prisoners. Finally, he parted from them, strolling on along the row of stores and business places, many vacant, under the south edge of the Mall, until he saw a fluorolite sign, WADE LUCAS, M. D. He entered.
Lucas wasn't busy. They went into his consultation office, and Conn took off his gun-belt and hung it up; Lucas offered cigarettes, and they lighted and sat down.
"I see you've started carrying one," he said, nodding to the pistol Conn had laid aside.
"Civic obligation. I'm going to be too busy for Home Guard duty, but if I can protect myself, it'll save somebody else the job of protecting me."
"Maybe if there weren't so many guns around, there wouldn't be so much trouble."
He felt his good opinion of Wade Lucas start to slip. The Liberals on Terra had been full of that kind of talk, which was why only four out of ten of last year's graduating class at Armed Forces Academy had been able to get active commissions. The last war had been a disaster, so don't prepare for another one; when it comes, let it be a worse disaster.
"Guns don't make trouble; people make trouble. If the troublemakers are armed, you have to be armed too. When did you last see an Air Patrol boat around here, or even a Constabulary trooper? All we have here is the Home Guard and Tom Brangwyn and three deputies, and his pay and theirs is always six months in arrears."
Lucas nodded. "A bankrupt government, an unemployment rate that rises every year, currency that buys less every month. And do-it-yourself justice." The doctor blew a smoke ring and watched it float toward the ventilator-intake. "You said you're going to be busy. This company your father's talking about organizing?"
"That's right. You're going to be at the meeting at the Academy this afternoon, aren't you?"
"Yes. Just what are you going to do, after you get it organized?"
"Well, I brought back information on a great deal of undiscovered equipment and stores that the Third Force left behind...." He talked on for some time, keeping to safe generalities. "It's too big for my father and me to handle alone, even if we didn't feel morally obligated to take in the people who contributed toward sending me to school on Terra. You ought to be interested in it. I know of six fully supplied hospitals, intended to take care of the casualties in case of a System States space-attack. You can imagine, better than I can, what would be in them."
"Yes. Medical supplies of all sorts are getting hard to find. But look here; you're not going to let these people waste time looking for this alleged computer, this thing they call Merlin, are you?"
"We're looking for any valuable war material. I don't know the location of Merlin, but—"
"I'll bet you don't!" Lucas said vehemently. That was the same thing Flora had said.
"—but Merlin is undoubtedly the most valuable item of abandoned TF equipment on this planet. In the long run, I'd say, more valuable than everything else together. We certainly aren't going to ignore it."
"Good heavens, Conn! You aren't like these people here; you were educated at the University of Montevideo."
"So I was. I studied computer theory and practice. I have some doubts about Merlin being able to do some of the things these laymen like Kellton and Fawzi and Judge Ledue think it could. Those sorts of misconceptions and exaggerations have to be allowed for. But I have no doubt whatever that the
master computer with which they did their strategic planning is probably the greatest mechanism of its sort ever built, and I have no doubt whatever that it still exists somewhere in the Alpha System."
He almost convinced himself of it. He did not, however, convince Wade Lucas, who was now regarding him with narrow-eyed suspicion.
"You mean you categorically state that that computer actually exists?"
"That, I think, was the general idea. Yes. I certainly do believe that Merlin exists."
Maybe he was telling the truth. Merlin existed in the beliefs and hopes of people like Dolf Kellton and Klem Zareff and Judge Ledue and Kurt Fawzi. Merlin was a god to them. Well, take Ghu, the Thoran Grandfather-God. Ghu was as preposterous, theologically, as Merlin was technologically; Ghu, except to Thorans, was a Federation-wide joke. But he'd known a couple of Thorans at the University, funny little fellows, with faces like terriers, their bodies covered with matted black hair. They believed in Ghu the way he believed in the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Ghu was with them every moment of their lives. Take away their belief in Ghu, and they would have been lost and wretched.
As lost and wretched as Kurt Fawzi or Judge Ledue, if they lost their belief in Merlin. He started to say something like that, and then thought better of it.
Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.
V
The meeting was at the Academy; when Conn and his father arrived, they found the central hall under the topside landing stage crowded. Kurt Fawzi and Professor Kellton had constituted themselves a reception committee. Franz Veltrin was in evidence with his audiovisual recorder, and Colonel Zareff was leaning on his silver-headed sword cane. Tom Brangwyn, in an unaccustomed best-suit. Wade Lucas, among a group of merchants, arguing heatedly.
Lorenzo Menardes, the distiller, and Lester Dawes, the banker, and Morgan Gatworth, the lawyer, talking to Judge Ledue. About four times as many as had been in Fawzi's office the afternoon before.
Finally, everybody was shepherded into a faculty conference room; there was a long table, and a shorter one T-wise at one end. Fawzi and Kellton conducted them to this. Both of them were trying to preside, Kellton because it was his Academy, and Fawzi ex officio as mayor and professional leading citizen, and because he had come to regard Merlin as his own private project. After everybody else was seated, the two rival chairmen-presumptive remained on their feet. Fawzi was saying, "Let's come to order; we must conduct this meeting regularly," and Kellton was saying, "Gentlemen, please; let me have your attention."
If either of them took the chair, the other would resent it. Conn got to his feet again.
"Somebody will have to preside," he said, loudly enough to cut through the babble at the long table. "Would you take the chair, Judge Ledue?"
That stopped it. Neither of them wanted to contest the honor with the president-judge of the Gordon Valley court.
"Excellent suggestion, Conn. Judge, will you preside?" Professor Kellton, who had seen himself losing out to Fawzi, asked. Fawzi threw one quick look around, estimated the situation, and got with it. "Of course, Judge. You're the logical chairman. Here, will you sit here?"
Judge Ledue took the chair, looked around for something to use as a gavel, and rapped sharply with a paperweight.
"Young Mr. Conn Maxwell, who has just returned from Terra, needs no introduction to any of you," he began. Then, having established that, he took the next ten minutes to introduce Conn. When people began fidgeting, he wound up with: "Now, only about a dozen of us were at the informal meeting in Mr. Fawzi's office, yesterday. Conn, would you please repeat what you told us? Elaborate as you see fit."
Conn rose. He talked briefly about his studies on Terra to qualify himself as an expert. Then he began describing the wealth of abandoned and still undiscovered Federation war material and the many installations of which he had learned, careful to avoid giving clues to exact locations. The spaceport;
the underground duplicate Force Command Headquarters; the vast underground arsenals and shops and supply depots. Everybody was awed, even his father; he hadn't had time to tell him more than a fraction of it.
Finally, somebody from the long table interrupted:
"Well, Conn; how about Merlin? That's what we're interested in."
Wade Lucas snorted indignantly.
"He's telling you about real things, things worth millions of sols, and you want him to talk about that idiotic fantasy!"
There was an angry outcry. Nobody actually shouted "To the stake with the blasphemer!" but that was the general idea. Judge Ledue was rapping loudly for order.
"I don't know the exact location of Merlin." Conn strove to make himself heard. "The whole subject's classified top secret. But I am certain that Merlin exists, if not on Poictesme then somewhere in the Alpha System, and I am equally certain that we can find it."
Cheers. He waited for the hubbub to subside. Lucas was trying to yell above it.
"You admit you couldn't learn anything about this so-called Merlin, but you're still certain it exists?"
"Why are you certain it doesn't?"
"Why, the whole thing's absurdly fantastic!"
"Maybe it is, to a layman like you. I studied computers, and it isn't to me."
"Well, take all these elaborate preparations against space attack you were telling us about. I think Colonel Zareff, here, who served in the Alliance Army, will bear me out that such an attack was plainly impossible."
Zareff started to agree, then realized that he was aiding and comforting the enemy. "Intelligence lag," he said. "What do you expect, with General Headquarters thirty parsecs from the fighting?"
"Yes. A computer can only process the data that's been taped into it," Conn said. That was a point he wanted to ram home, as forcibly and as often as possible. "I suppose Merlin classified an Alliance attack on Poictesme as a low-order probability, but war is the province of chance; Clausewitz said that a
thousand years ago. Foxx Travis wasn't the sort of commander to let himself get caught, even by a very low-order probability."
"Well how do you explain the absence, after forty years, of any mention, in any history of the War, of Merlin? How do you get around that?"
"I don't have to. How do you get around it?"
"Huh?" Lucas was startled.
"Yes. Stories about Merlin were all over Poictesme, all through the Third Force, even to the enemy. Say the stories were unfounded; say Merlin never existed. Yet the belief in Merlin was an important historical fact, and no history of the War gives it so much as a footnote." He paused for effect, then continued: "That can mean only one thing. Systematic suppression, backed by the whole force of the Terran Federation. A gigantic conspiracy of silence!"
Brother! If they swallow that, I have it made; they'll swallow anything!
They did, all but Lucas. He banged his fist on the table.
"Now I've heard everything!" he shouted in disgust.
"Not quite everything, Doctor," Morgan Gatworth said. "You will hear, one of these days, that we have found Merlin."
"Yes, that'll be the day!" Lucas sprang to his feet, his chair toppling behind him. He shoved it aside with his foot. "I'm not going to argue with you. Conn Maxwell gave you a thousand-year-old quotation; I'll give you another, from Thomas Paine: 'To argue with those who have renounced the use and authority of reason is as futile as to administer medicine to the dead.' I'll add this. Conn Maxwell knows better than this balderdash he's been spouting to you. I don't know what his racket is, and I'm not staying to find out. You will, though—to your regret."
He turned and strode from the room. There was a moment's silence, after the door slammed behind him. Too bad, Conn thought. He would have made a good friend. Now he was going to make a very nasty enemy.
"Well, let's get to business," his father said. "We don't have to argue about the existence of Merlin; we know that. Let's discuss the question of finding it."
"I still think it's somewhere off-planet," Lorenzo Menardes said. "The moons of Pantagruel...."
Evidently he'd read something, or seen an old film, about the moons of Pantagruel.
"No, that's too far; they'd keep it where they could use it."
"The old GHQ," Lester Dawes suggested. "Suppose it's down under that, like the place Rodney found under Tenth Army."
"I hope not," Gathworth said. "The Planetary Government took that over."
"Well, wherever it is, finding it is going to be expensive," Rodney Maxwell said. "Now, to finance the search, I propose we use this information my son brought back from Terra. Doctor Lucas was right about one thing; that's worth millions of sols. Well, I propose, also, that we set up a company and get it chartered; a prospecting company, to operate under the Abandoned Property Act of 867. My son and I will contribute this information as our share in the capitalization of the company. The work of opening these Federation installations can go on concurrently with the search for Merlin, and the profits can finance it."
Silence for a moment, then a bedlam of cheering.
"Well, let's get organized," Gatworth said. "What will we call this company?"
A number of voices shouted suggestions. Rodney Maxwell managed to get recognition and partial silence.
"It is of the first importance," he said, "that we keep our real objective—Merlin—as close a secret as possible. The Planetary Government would like to get hold of it—and I leave you to ask yourselves how far Jake Vyckhoven and his cronies are to be trusted with anything like that—and I have no doubt the Federation might try to take it away from us."
"Couldn't do it, Rodney," Judge Ledue objected. "Everything the Federation abandoned in the Trisystem is public domain now. We have a Federation Supreme Court ruling—"
"What's legality to the Federation?" Klem Zareff demanded. "They fought a criminally illegal war of aggression against my people."
Down the table, somebody started singing "Rally Round the Banner, the Banner Black and Green."
"Well, I think it's a good idea to keep quiet about it, myself," Kurt Fawzi said.
"All right," Rodney Maxwell said. "Then we don't want this company to sound like anything but another salvage company. I suggest we call it Litchfield Exploration & Salvage."
"Good name, Rodney," Dawes approved. "That a motion? I second it."
Unanimously carried. They had a name, now, anyhow. Everybody began suggesting other topics for consideration—capitalization, application for charter, election of officers, stock issues. Conn paid less and less attention. Industrial finance and organization wasn't his subject, either. His father was plunging happily into it as though he had been promoting companies all his life. Conn sat and doodled with his six-color pen, mostly spherical hyperspace ships.
"We can't get all this cleared up now," Lester Dawes was protesting. "Your Honor, I mean, Mr. Chairman; I suggest that committees be appointed...."
More hassling; everybody wanted to be on all the committees. Finally, they appointed enough committees to include everybody.
"Well, that seems to be cleared up," Judge Ledue said, "I suggest a meeting day after tomorrow evening; the committees should have everything set up, and we should be able to organize ourselves and elect permanent officers. Is there anything else to discuss, or do I hear a motion to adjourn?"
Somebody thought they ought to have some idea of what the first operation would be.
"You heard me mention a spaceport," Conn said. "I can tell you, now, that it's over on Barathrum, inside the crater of an extinct volcano. I think we ought to have a look at that, first of all."
"I know you seemed to think yesterday that Merlin is off-planet," Fawzi said, "I'm inclined to disagree, Conn. I think it's right here on Poictesme."
"We ought to nail that spaceport down first," Conn argued.
"Conn, you mentioned an underground duplicate of Travis's general headquarters," Zareff said. "They thought we'd possibly send a fleet here to blitz Poictesme, or they wouldn't have built that. And this underground headquarters would be the safest place on the planet; they'd make sure of that. Staff brass don't like to get caught out in the rain, not when it's raining hellburners and planetbusters. Merlin would be too big to take there along with them, so they'd put it there in the first place."
That made sense. If he'd been Foxx Travis, and if there had been a Merlin, that was exactly where he'd have put it himself. But there was no Merlin, and he wanted a ship. He argued mulishly for a little, then saw that it was hopeless and gave in.
"I want to find Merlin as much as any of you," he said. "More. Merlin was the only thing I was trained for. We'll look there first."
Somebody asked where, approximately, this underground Force Command headquarters was.
"Why, it's in the Badlands, over between the Blaubergs and the east coast."
"Great Ghu! We'll need an army to go in there?" Tom Brangwyn said. "That's where all these outlaws have been coming from, Blackie Perales and all."
"Then we'll get an army together," Klem Zareff said happily. "Might make a little of that reward money that's been offered."
"We'll need more than that. Well need excavation equipment, and labor. Lots of labor," Conn said. "It's a couple of hundred feet below the surface; from the plans, I'd say they just dug a big pit, built the headquarters in it, and filled it in. There are two entrances, a vertical shaft and a horizontal tunnel."
"When they pulled out, they probably filled the shaft and vitrified the rock at the outer ends," his father added. "That was what they did at Tenth Army."
Another idea hit him. "Mr. Mayor, do you think you could set up some kind of a public-works program here in Litchfield? We can't start this till after the wine-pressing's over, and we'll need a lot of labor, as I pointed out. Now, it's important that we keep all our projects a secret until we can get our claims filed. If we start this municipal fix-up-and-clean-up program, we can give work to a lot of these drifters who haven't been able to get jobs on the plantations, get them organized into gangs, and keep them together till we're ready for the Force Command job."
Lorenzo Menardes supported the idea. "And while they were boondoggling around in Litchfield, we could pick out the best workers, get rid of the incompetents, and train a few supervisors. That's going to be one of our worst headaches; getting capable supervisors."
"You telling me?" Rodney Maxwell asked. "That was what I was wondering about: where we'd get gang-bosses. And another thing; this municipal housecleaning would mask our real preparations."
"Well, we need something like that," Fawzi said. "We've needed it for a long time. I guess it took Conn, coming home from Terra, to see how badly we've let the town get run down. Franz, suppose you and Tom Brangwyn and Lorenzo form a committee on that. Look around, see what needs fixing up worst, and set up a project. Who's city engineer now?"
"Abe O'Leary; he died six years ago," Dawes said. "You never appointed his successor."
"Well, I guess I never got around to that," the mayor of Litchfield admitted.
When the meeting finally adjourned, they went up and got in the car; his father lifted it straight up to thirty thousand feet and started circling. An aircar was one place where they could talk safely.
"Conn, I was kind of worried, down there. You were being a little too positive. You know, you're only twenty-three. As long as you agree with those people, you're a brilliant young man; you start getting ideas of your own, and you're just a half-baked kid. You let the older and wiser heads run things.
You can't begin to hope to foul things up the way they can. Look at all the experience they've had."
"But we've got to have a ship. Everything depends on that."
"I know it does. We'll get a ship. Let Kurt Fawzi and Klem Zareff and the rest of them have this duplicate Force Command thing first, though. Keep them happy. As soon as we have that opened, you can take a gang and run over to Barathrum and grab your spaceport. Wait till they find out that Merlin isn't at Force Command Duplicate. Then you can convince them it's really on Koshchei."
VI
The car Rodney Maxwell got out of the hangar the next morning wasn't the one he and Conn had gone to the meeting in; it was the one he had flown in from Tenth Army HQ at noon of the previous day. An Army reconnaissance job, slim and needlelike, completely enclosed, looking more like a missile than a vehicle, and armored in dazzling, iridescent collapsium. There was something to living on Poictesme, at that; only a millionaire on Terra could have owned a car like that.
"Nice," Conn said. "Where did you dig it?"
"Where we're going, Tenth Army."
"I'll bet she'll do Mach Three."
"Better than that. I've never had her above 2.5, but the airspeed gauge is marked up to four. And she has everything: all kinds of detection instruments, cameras, audiovisual pickups, armament. And the armor; you can take her through any kind of radiation."
The armor was only a couple of micromicrons thick, but it would stop anything. It was collapsed matter, the electron shells of the atoms collapsed upon the nuclei, the atoms in actual contact. That plating made eighth-inch sheet steel as heavy as twelve-inch armor plate, and in texture and shielding properties, lead was like sponge by comparison.
They climbed in, and Rodney Maxwell snapped on the screens that served as windows. Conn leaned back and looked at the underside view in a screen on the roof of the car, as his father started the lift-engine.
"Still think it's worth the price, son?" his father asked.
The price had begun to rise; even so, he was afraid that what they had paid so far was only the down payment. Dinner last evening. Flora, who had evidently been talking to Wade Lucas, shouting accusations at them; his mother fleeing from the table in tears. As the car rose, he reached out and turned on and adjusted the telescreen for the under-view.
"Keep your eye on that, Father," he said. "That's what we're paying to get rid of."
A distillery, bigger than the Menardes plant, long closed and now half roofless and crumbling. Rows of warehouses, empty after the War until taken over by homeless vagrants. Jerry-built shanties with rattletrap aircars grounded around them. Tramptown, a festering sore on the south side of Litchfield.
"If we put this over," he continued, "all those tramps will have steady work and good homes. We can have a park there, with fountains that'll work. Maybe even Flora and Mother will think we've done something worth doing."
"It'll be kind of hard to take in the meantime, though, but if you can take it, I can." Rodney Maxwell turned off the underside teleview screen and put on the forward one. "See that little pink spot over there? Sunrise on the east side of Snagtooth; Tenth Army's just behind us. Now, let's see if this airspeed gauge is telling the truth or just bragging."
Sudden acceleration pushed them back in their seats. The calibrations on the gauge rose swiftly; the pink-lighted peak grew swiftly in the teleview screen. The gauge hadn't been bragging, it had been understating; the car had more speed than the instrument could register. Two and a half minutes from Litchfield, they were decelerating and swinging slowly around Snagtooth, looking down on a tilted plateau that ended on the western side in a sheer drop of almost a thousand feet.
There were ruinous buildings on it: barracks and storehouses and offices, an airship dock and an air-traffic control tower from which all the glass had long ago vanished, a great steel telecast tower that had fallen, crushing a couple of buildings. Young trees had already grown among the wreckage.
"Look over there, on the slope below it; there's one entrance to the shelters." There was a clearing among the evergreens, half a mile from the buildings, and raw earth, and a couple of big scows grounded near. "They bulldozed rock and earth over the end of the tunnel. Then, there's another one down on that bench, a couple of hundred feet below the edge of the plateau. They blasted rock down over that. The main entrance is a vertical shaft under that pre-stressed concrete dome. That was chapel, auditorium, or something. They just covered it with sheet metal and poured a foot of concrete on top."
They floated down above the broken roofs and crumbling walls, and grounded in the area between the main administration building and the offices, back of the ship docks. Once, he supposed, it had been a lawn. Then it had been a jungle. Now it was a scuffed, littered, bare-trodden work-yard. Men were straggling out of the administration building, lighting pipes and cigarettes; they all wore new but work-soiled infantry battle dress. All of them waved and shouted greetings; one, about Conn's own age, approached. As he got out, Conn saw the resemblance to Lester Dawes, the banker, before he recognized Anse Dawes, who had been one of his closest friends six years ago. They shook hands and pounded each other on the back.
"Hey, you're looking great, Conn!" They all told him that; he'd begin to believe it pretty soon. "Sorry I couldn't make the party, but somebody had to sit on the lid here, and Jerry Rivas and I cut cards for it and Jerry won."
"You didn't tell me Anse was with you," he reproached his father. Rodney Maxwell said he'd been saving that for a surprise.
When Conn asked Anse what was the matter with the bank, he said: "For the birds; I'd as soon count sheets of toilet paper as this stuff we're using for money. Sooner. Toilet paper can be used for something, and this paper money's too stiff. Maybe some of this stuff we're digging here isn't worth much, but at least it's real."
That was something else the Maxwell Plan would have to take care of. Gresham's Law was running hog-wild on Poictesme. A Planetary Government sol was worth about ten centisols, Federation, and aside from deposit boxes, woolen socks under the mattress, and tin cans buried in the corner of the cellar, Federation currency was nonexistent.
"Had breakfast yet?" Rodney Maxwell asked.
"Oh, hours ago. I was out and shot another spikenose; it's hanging up back of the kitchen, waiting for the cook to skin it and cut it up." He grinned at Conn. "You don't get this kind of hunting in a bank, either."
"Jerry still inside? I want to see him. Suppose you take Conn around and show him the sights. And don't worry about him bumping you out of a job. Worry about the six or eight extra jobs you'll have to do besides your own, from now on."
Conn and Anse crossed the yard and entered one of the office buildings, through a big breach in the wall. Anse said: "I did that myself; 90-mm tank gun. When we want a wall out of the way, we get it out of the way." Inside were a lot of lifters and skids and power shovels and things; laborers were assembling for work assignments. Most of them had been with his father six years ago and he knew them. They hadn't done any growing up in the meantime. They climbed into an airjeep and floated out over the edge of the plateau, letting down past the sheer cliff to where the lower lateral shaft had been opened. A great deal of rock had been shoveled and bulldozed away to expose it; it was twenty feet high and forty wide. Anse simply steered the jeep inside and up the tunnel.
There were occasional lights on at the ceiling. Anse said they were all powered from their own nuclear-electric conversion units. "We don't have the central power on here; there's a big mass-energy converter, but we're tearing it down to ship out."
That was something they could get a good price for. Maybe even one-tenth of what it was worth. At least they wouldn't have to sell it by the ton.
The tunnel ended in an enormous room a couple of hundred feet square and fifty high. There was a wide aisle up the middle; on either side, contragravity equipment was massed. Tanks with long 90-mm guns. Combat cars. Small airboats. Rank on rank of air-cavalry single-mounts, egg-shaped things just big enough for a man to sit in, with quadruple machine guns in front and flame-jets behind. Ambulances armored against radiation; decontamination units; mobile workshops; mobile kitchens. Troop carriers, jeeps, staff cars; power shovels, manipulators, lifters. All waiting, for forty years, to swarm out as soon as the bombs that never came stopped falling.
They floated the jeep along hallways beyond, and got down to look into rooms. Work was already going on in the power plant; a gang under a slim young man whom Anse introduced as Mohammed Matsui were using repair-robots to get canisters of live plutonium out of a reactor. Workshops. Laundries. Storerooms. Kitchens, some stripped and a few still intact. A hospital. Guardhouse and lockup.
More storerooms on the level above, reached by returning to the vehicle hangar and lifting to an upper entrance. By this time, gangs were at work there, too, moving contragravity skids in empty and out loaded.
"The CO here must have had squirrel blood," Anse said. "I think when the evacuation orders came through he just gathered up everything there was topside and crammed it down here, any old way. Honest to Ghu, this place was packed solid when we found it. Nobody'd believe it."
"Wait till you see the next one."
"You mean there's another place like this?"
"You can say so. You can say a twenty-megaton thermonuclear is like a hand grenade, too."
Anse Dawes simply didn't believe that.
When they got back to the Administration Building on top, they found Rodney Maxwell, Jerry Rivas, the general foremen, and half a dozen gang foremen, in consultation.
"We're getting a hundred and fifty more men and ten farm scows from Litchfield," his father said. "Dave McCade's coming out from our yard, and Tom Brangwyn's sending one of his deputies to help boss them. Well have to keep an eye on this crowd; they're all Tramptown hoodlums, but that's the best we can get. We're going to have to get this place cleaned out in a hurry. We only have about two weeks till the wine-pressing's over, and then we want to start the next operation. Conn, did you see all that engineering equipment, down on the bottom level?"
"Yes. I think we ought to leave a lot of that here—the shovels and bulldozers and manipulators and so on. We can move it direct to Force Command. How are we fixed for blasting explosives?"
"Name it and we have it. Cataclysmite, FJ-7, anything you want."
"We'll need a lot of it."
"We're going to have to get a ship. I mean a contragravity ship, a freighter; first, to move this stuff out of here, and then to move the stuff out of Force Command. And we want it mounted with heavy armament, too. We not only want a freighter, we want a fighting ship."
"You think so?"
"I'm sure of it," Rodney Maxwell said. "Where we're going is full of outlaws; there must be hundreds of them holing up over there. That's where all the trouble on the east coast comes from. Now, outlaws are sure-thing players. They want to be alive to spend their loot, and they won't tackle anything that's too tough for them. A lot of guards and combat equipment may look like a loss on the books, but the books won't show how much of a loss you might take if you didn't have them. I want this operation armed till it'll be too much for all the outlaws on the planet to tackle."
That made sense. It also made sense out of the billions of sols the Federation had spent preparing for an invasion that never came. If it had come and found them unprepared, the loss might have been the war itself.
The scows and the newly hired workers began arriving a little after noon. The scows had been borrowed from plantations where the crop had been gotten
in; there were melon leaves and bits of vine in the bottoms. The workers were a bleary-eyed and unsavory lot; Conn had a suspicion, which Brangwyn's deputy confirmed, that they had been collected by mass vagrancy arrests in Tramptown. As soon as they started arriving, Jerry Rivas hurried down to the old provost-marshal's headquarters and came back with a lot of rubber billy-clubs, which he issued to his gang-bosses, regular and temporary. A few times they had to be used. By evening, however, the insubordinate and troublesome had been quieted. They would all steal anything they could put in their pockets, but that was to be expected. By evening, too, the contents of the underground treasure trove was moving out in a steady stream, and scows were shuttling to and from Litchfield.
Rodney Maxwell was going back to town after lunch the next day. Conn wanted to know if he should go along.
"No, you stay here; help keep things moving. Remember what I told you about the older and wiser heads? Let me handle them. I've been around them, heaven pity me, longer than you have. Just give me an audiovisual of your proxy and I'll vote your stock."
"How much stock do I have, by the way?"
"The same as I have—ten thousand five hundred shares of common, at twenty centisols a share. But watch where it goes after we open Force Command."
His father was back, two days later, to report:
"We're organized. Kurt Fawzi's president, of course, and does he love it. That'll keep him out of mischief. Dolf Kellton's secretary; he has an office force at the Academy and can conscript students to help. He's organizing a research team from his seniors and post-grad students to work in the Planetary Library at Storisende. There are a lot of old Third Force records there; he may find something useful. Of course, Lester Dawes is treasurer."
"What are you?"
"Vice-president in charge of operations. That's what I spent all yesterday log-rolling, baby-kissing and cigar-passing to get."
"And what am I, if it's a fair question?"
"You have a very distinguished position; you are a non-office-holding stockholder. The only other one is Judge Ledue; as a member of the judiciary, he did not feel it proper to accept official position in a private corporation. Tom Brangwyn's Chief of Company Police; Klem Fawzi is Commander of the Company Guards. And we have a law firm in Storisende lined up to handle our charter application. Sterber, Flynn & Chen-Wong. Sterber's married to Jake Vyckhoven's sister, Flynn's son is married to the daughter of the Secretary of the Treasury, and Chen-Wong is a nephew of the Chief Justice. All of them are directly descended from members of Genji Gartner's original crew."
"You don't anticipate any trouble about getting the charter?"
"Not exactly. And Lester Dawes is in Storisende now, trying to find us a contragravity ship. There are about a dozen in the hands of receivers for bankrupt shipping companies; he might find one that's still airworthy. Oh; you remember how I insisted on absolute secrecy about our Merlin objective? That's working out better than my fondest expectations. It's leaking like a machine-gunned water tank, and everybody it leaks to is positive that we know exactly where Merlin is or we wouldn't be trying to keep it a secret."
Three days later, Conn hitched a ride on a freight-scow to Litchfield. From the air, he could see a haze of bonfire smoke over High Garden Terrace, and a gang of men at work. There were more men at work on the Mall and along the streets on either side. He went up from the yard below the house, where the scow was being unloaded, and found his mother in the living room watching a screen play with one eye and keeping the other on a soulless machine like a miniature contragravity tank, which was going over the carpet with a vacuum cleaner and taking swipes at the furniture with a rotary dustmop. She was glad to see him, and then became troubled.
"Conn, when Flora comes home, you won't argue with her, will you?"
"Only in self-defense." That was the wrong thing to say. He changed it to, "No; I won't argue with her at all," and then quoted Wade Lucas quoting Thomas Paine. Then he had to assure his mother a couple of times that there really was a Merlin, and then assure her that it wouldn't get loose and hurt anybody if he did find it.
In the middle of his assurances about the harmlessness of Merlin, the housecleaning-robot began knocking things off the top of a table.
"Oscar! You stop that!" his mother yelled.
Oscar, deaf as the adder, kept on. Conn yelled at his mother to use her control; she remembered that she had one, a thing like an old-fashioned pocket watch, around her neck on a chain, and got the robot stopped.
No wonder she was afraid of Merlin.
He took advantage of the interruption to get to his room and change clothes, then went up to the hangar and got out an air-cavalry mount. About fifty men were working on High Garden Terrace, pruning and trimming and leveling the lawns. There was a big vitrifier on the Mall—even at five hundred feet he could feel the heat from it—chuffing and clanking and pouring lavalike molten rock for a new pavement. And all the nymphs and satyrs and dryads and fauns and centaurs had had their pedestals rebuilt and were sand-blasted clean.
He landed on the top of the Airlines Building and rode a lift down to the office where Kurt Fawzi neglected the affairs of his shipline agency, his brokerage business, and the city of Litchfield. The afternoon habitués had begun to gather—Raymond Fitch, the used-vehicles dealer, Lorenzo Menardes, Judge Ledue, Tom Brangwyn, Klem Zareff. Fawzi was on the screen, talking to somebody with sandy hair and a suit that didn't seem to be made of any sort of Federation Armed Forces material, about warehouse facilities. The addresses they were mentioning were in Storisende.
"No, Leo, I don't know when," Fawzi was saying, "but don't you worry. You just have space for it, and we'll fill it up. And don't ask me what sort of stuff.
You know what a salvage operation's like; you just haul out the stuff as you come to it."
Tom Brangwyn, lounging in one of the deep chairs, looked up.
"Hello, Conn. We're having a time. Another two hundred tramps came in on the Countess this morning, and Ghu only knows how many in their own vehicles, and they all seem to think if there's work for some there ought to be work for all, and some of them are getting nasty."
"We can use some more out at the dig. The ones you sent out Thursday are doing all right, once they found out we weren't taking any foolishness."
Fawzi turned away from the screen. "Well, Conn, we're in," he said. "The charter was granted this morning; now we're Litchfield Exploration & Salvage, Ltd. And Lester Dawes has found us a contragravity ship."
"How much will it cost us?"
Fawzi began to laugh. "Conn, this'll slay you! She isn't costing us a centisol. You know those old ships on Mothball Row, back of the old West End ship docks at Storisende?"
Conn nodded. He'd seen them before he had gone away, and from the City of Asgard coming in—a lot of old Army Transport craft, covered with muslin and sprayed with protectoplast. The Planetary Government had taken them over after the War and forgotten them.
"Well, Lester's getting one of them for us under the old 878 Commercial Enterprise Encouragement Act. She's an Army combat freighter, regimental ammunition ship. Of course, she still has armament; we'll have to pay to get that off."
"Why?"
Fawzi looked at him in surprise. "It would only be in the way and add weight. We want her for a cargo ship, don't we?"
"That's what she was built for. What kind of armament?"
Fawzi didn't know. Klem Zareff did.
"Four 115-mm rifles, two fore and two aft. A pair of lift-and-drive missile launchers amidships. And a secondary gun battery of 70-mm's and 50-mm auto-cannon. I know the class; we captured a few of them. Good ships."
Fawzi was horrified. "Why, that's more firepower than the whole Air Patrol. Look, the Government won't like our having anything like that."
"They're giving her to us, aren't they?" Menardes asked.
"Gehenna with what the Government likes!" the old Rebel swore. "If they'd put a few of those ships into commission, they could wipe out these outlaws and a private company wouldn't need an armed ship."
"May I use your screen, Kurt?" Conn asked.
When Fawzi nodded, he punched out the combination of the operating office at Tenth Army, and finally got his father on. He told him about the ship.
"There's talk about tearing the armament out," he added.
"Is that so, now? Well, I'll call Lester Dawes before he can get started on it. I think I'll go in to Storisende tomorrow and see the ship for myself. See what I can do about ammunition for those guns, too."
"But, Rod," Fawzi protested, joining the conversation, "we don't want to start a war."
"No. We want to stay out of one. You don't do that by disarming. We're taking that ship down into the Badlands. Remember?" Rodney Maxwell said. "Ever hear the name Blackie Perales?"
Fawzi had. He stopped arguing about armament. Instead, he began worrying about how much the civic clean-up campaign was costing Litchfield.
"You think we really need that, Rod?"
"Of course we do. You'd be surprised how much labor we're going to need, and how hard up we're going to be for capable supervisors. This thing's a training program, Kurt, and we'll need every man we train on it."
"But it's costing like Nifflheim, Rod. We're going to bankrupt the city."
"Worse than it is now, you mean? Oh, don't worry, Kurt. As soon as we find Merlin, everything'll be all right."
Franz Veltrin came in, shortly after Rodney Maxwell was off the screen. He dropped his audiovisual camera and sound recorder on the table, laid his
pistol-belt on top of them and took a drink of brandy, downing it with the audible satisfaction of a thirsty horse at a trough. Then he looked around accusingly.
"Somebody's been talking!" he declared. "I've had all the news services on the planet on my screen today; they all want the story about what's happening here. They've heard we know where Merlin is; that Conn Maxwell found out on Terra."
"They just put two and two together and threw seven," Conn said. "A Herald-Guardian ship-news reporter interviewed me when I got in, and found out I'd been studying cybernetics and computer theory on Terra. What did you tell them?"
"Complete denial. We don't know a thing about Merlin. Naturally, they didn't believe me. A bunch of them are coming out here tomorrow. What are we going to tell them? We'll all have to have the same story."
"I," said Judge Ledue, "am not going to be interviewed, I am leaving town till they're gone."
"Why don't you steer them onto Wade Lucas?" Conn asked. "If you want anything denied, he'll do it for you."
Everybody thought that was a wonderful idea, except Klem Zareff, and he waited until Conn was ready to go and rode up to the landing stage with him.
"Conn, I know this Lucas is going to marry your sister," he began, "but how much do you know about him?"
"Not much. He seems like a nice chap. I don't hold what he said at the meeting against him. I suppose if I'd come from off-planet, I wouldn't believe in Merlin either."
"Hah! But doesn't he believe in Merlin?"
"He makes noises like it."
"You know what I think?" Klem Zareff lowered his voice to a whisper. "I think he's a Federation spy! I think the Federation's lost Merlin. That's why they haven't come back to get it long ago."
"Pretty big thing to mislay."
"It could happen. There'd only be a few scientists and some high staff officers who'd know where it was. Well, say they all went back to Terra on the same ship, and the ship was lost at space. Sabotage, one of our commerce raiders that hadn't heard the War was over, maybe just an ordinary accident. But the ship's lost, and the location of Merlin's lost with her."
"That could happen," Conn agreed seriously.
"All right. So ever since, they've had people here, listening, watching, spying. This Lucas; he showed up here about a year after you went to Terra. And who does he get engaged to? Your sister. And what does he do here? Goes around arguing that there is no Merlin, getting people to argue with him, getting them mad, so they'll blurt out anything they know. I'm an old field officer; I know all the prisoner-interrogation tricks in the book, and that's always been one of the best."
"Then why did he act the way he did at the meeting? All he did there was cut himself off from learning anything more from any of us. In his place, would you have done that? No; you'd have tried to take the lead in hunting for Merlin yourself. Now wouldn't you?"
Zareff was silent, first puzzled, and then hurt. Now he would have to tear the whole idea down and build it over.
Flora was quite friendly when she came home from school. She'd found out, somewhere, that Conn had been the originator of the municipal face-lifting project. He was tempted, briefly, to tell her a little, if not all, of the truth about the Maxwell Plan, then decided against it. The way to keep a secret was to confide it to nobody; every time you did, you doubled, maybe even squared, the chances of exposure.
He told his father, when Rodney Maxwell came in from the dig, about his talk with Klem Zareff.
"How long's he been like that, anyhow?" he asked.
"As long as I've known him. When it comes to melons and wine and bossing tramp labor and taking care of his money and coming in out of the rain, Klem Zareff's as sane as I am. But on the subject of the Terran Federation, he's crazy as a bedbug. What is a bedbug, anyhow?"
"They have them on Terra, in places like Tramptown. They have places like Tramptown on Terra, too."
"Uhuh. I suppose, in Klem's boots, I'd be just as crazy as he is," Rodney Maxwell said. "One minute, he had a wife and two children in Kindelburg, on Ashmodai, and the next minute Kindelburg was a puddle of radioactive slag."
"That was in '51, wasn't it? I read about it," Conn said. "It was a famous victory."
That was from a poem, too.
Rodney Maxwell flew to Storisende early the next morning. Conn rode back to Tenth Army on an empty scow and pitched into the job of getting the stores and equipment out of the underground shelters. More farm-tramps arrived, and had to be pounded into obedience and taught the work. At the same time, Litchfield was getting a steady influx of job-seekers, and a secondary swarm of thugs, grifters and gangsters who followed them. Klem Zareff, having gotten all his melons pressed, came out to Tenth Army, where he selected fifty of the best men from the work-gangs and began drilling them as soldiers to guard the next operation. The manual of arms, drill and salute he taught them was, of course, System States Alliance.
A week later, the ship arrived from Storisende; a hundred and sixty feet, three thousand tons, small enough to be berthed inside a hyperspace transport, and fast enough to get a load of ammunition to troops at the front, unload, and get out again before the enemy could zero in on her, and armed to fight off any Army Air Force combat craft. The delay had been in recruiting officers and crew. The captain and chief engineer were out-of-work shipline officers, the gunner was a former Federation artillery officer, and the crew looked more like pirates than most pirates did.
tuckermaxlies.blogspot.com, where the moderators are such big trolls they trolled the 10kthpoast
NICE GOING DUMBASS
I would prefer reading an unmoderated blog while being slowly devoured by army ants than peruse a site that has Jon Tando as a moderator. That's just me though.... I choose the path of less pain.
TROOLLLLLLLLL WAAARRRRRRZZZZZZ
so
tucker tehdumdum
c/d?
CCCC
C
C
CCCC
in case anyone isn't aware, ryan holiday was banned from wikipedia for editing tucker's article like a faggot. he was also editing american apparel's article, and according to gawker, holiday works PR for american apparel. fastcompany says holiday does "online strategy" for american appparel. i think the reason holiday resigned from wikipedia in a huff (his username was TheRegicider) was so he didnt make american apparel look bad. if anyone wants to pwn him, check out his wikipedia activities. i hope gawker will pounce on him soon.
american apparel must be pro rape if their spokesperson (ryan holiday) is a moderator/friend/employee on an anti-woman website, tucker max.com, which is pro rape. does american apparel even know their spokesperson condones rape? i dont think this is good for their reputation. someone shouild probably email them.
hey ryan. are you enjoying your trolling here? does american apparel know what you are up to on the internet with tucker the rapist? i wonder if it would be considered ironic if they got bad publicity due to their publicist?
"And then there's a third type. The ones who ask about the art. The ones who understand that the hookups and the parties and the fame are a consequence of making something truly great."
?? His stories are all of before he achieved internet fame. So Master Ben Kanobi how can they be a consequence of making truly great art?
"A few times on the tour I've seen someone with that hunger. The type that wants to change the world with something they've created."
Are you sure they weren't looking for a Kegger?
"They want to follow Tucker not because they are looking for the party but because they understand that something is being built here."
I've never heard of artists who want to change the world refer to themselves as following an amazing D-bag.
"And if it works, it'll be unlike anything built before it. They understand that it's not about the spoils, it's about the act of creation."
So when he was talking about F-you money, we'll easily beat the hangover, and saying "we could gross 20 to 200 million" it was all about the art. Yeah! Art! Totally Bra!
"I like that hunger. I relate to that hunger. It's that hunger that brought me on this tour, that I think brought all of the crew on this tour."
I'll bet you do hunger for Tucker cum...
"There isn't one of us that wants to do this as a career. We're not professional gophers. I think that all of us see this as a step to something bigger, as a door that opens opportunities that we don't even know are out there."
Opportunities to later film, "I failed an no one noticed." The Tucker Max story.
"Charlie Hoehn said something really smart on his site."
The only smart thing that ever came out of Charlies mouth was vomit from gagging on Tuckers dick.
"That he was getting paid to receive a film school-level education in less than six weeks."
Yeah...F USC film school, those idiots don't have a clue. 6 weeks of T-max is equal to a doctorate in film!
"And I think that's why it's going so well."
Apparently someone doesn't read the only places of not this has appeared. Gawker, The Onion, and Fox News, all of which were bad stories for Tucker. And Gawker and The Onion both said he was a douchebag.
"It's not about doing a job. It's about doing a job better and faster than the other guy who could be here."
So you sucked off Nils and rimmed him in 2 minutes as opposed to the guy who did so in 2 1/2 minutes.
"It's about knowing that this is a chance to prove ourselves so that later we may reap the rewards."
But I thought it was about the art?
"Because as cool as it may be to be here, and for all the love that gets heaped on us for being on tour"
I've seen the pictures. There's nothing cool about an empty bars and Bill Dawes and Nils blowing each other in the corner.
"none of us wants this to be the high water mark in our careers. None of us sees this as the goal."
I would have suspected like most of us, you'd already accomplished more than being a gopher and to not mark that as a potential highwater point.
"It's just another step on the way to where ever we happen to be headed."
The 1.99 DVD Bin at my gas station?
"I don't think any of us want to exist in Tucker's orbit forever. We're arrogant enough to want to be the center of gravity in our own universes."
Well, you all are certainly over weight enough to have your own orbits, I will give you that.
Even TM's trolls are shit.
Is it annoying anyone else how TM is posting his Q&A conversations like they are the epitome of wit. It's embarassing...
^^^
totally agree with you man
tucker max really does rape girls btw
TUCKER MAX IS A RAPIST
wtf is this "http://su.pr/1byQfW" link he has for "read it on the blog" in his sexray post? did someone h4x0r tuktuk's account? when I try that link it redirects to a stumbleupon page that displays nothing. doesn't even try to trojan my machine or anything. tuktuk even fails at that
btw. you know how when you go to the dentist and they x-ray your teef they put this leadlined thingimajiggerbob over your privates to protect 'em from the evil mutational zapping? so, he x-rayed himself having sex. can we hope his balls only produce horribly disfunctional mutants now?
horribly disfunctional mutants
waitamin
n/m, that's 'normal' tuktuk all over
Well, I guess we're going to hit our 10,000-comment goal.
It's ok TM bitches.
We're editing the wikipedia entry for Tucker over and over come September 24th. If you try to change it, we'll nominate it for deletion.
yeah good luck editing the wiki, apparently you don't realize that nobody outside of this hateblog gives a fuckk and that page is closely monitored.
scoresman, got a tattoo.
'Anything the Hangover can do, we can beat. Easily' Eh tugger?!
ttttugger mmmax FFFFAIL!
p.s. 10k+ posts, woot
otto is a douche, a liar, and a suspected rapist (allegedly).
true story of a tiny handed douche-fail,
I am not a "hater" (yo!), but I did go to Duke Law with Tucker Max, and I think a representative tale of how the "charming" portion of his internet-fueled "persona" is a fraud was his behavior during law school softball games.
Tucker was captain of his team in the Duke Law softball league, and his propensity to cut corners to win combined with hilariously over the top poor sportsmanship made playing against him (not so much of) a pleasure. I'll spare too many details, but one example is that his team had these special bats made of graphite or ceramic or something which they wouldn’t let opponents use. If that wasn’t douchey enough, he would recruit the best players from other teams for big games, despite the fact that this was a blatant flouting of the spirit/rules of the league, which was, after all...a law school slow pitch softball league filled with ivy league caliber nerds.
My team faced his team in a playoff game during 2L year as underdogs of probably at least 20 runs. Predictably, the two ringers in the law school (who were technically on other teams) made an appearance for Team Tucker, an event which may have boosted the spread to 30. Yes, our team was the modern equivalent of the Bad News Bears – strictly recreational – and we featured a few guys who had probably never picked up a baseball bat before the season.
Of course, we won...thanks Tucker!
How did Tucker single handedly bring down a vastly superior team (his own)? Consistent with his narcissistic need to be the center of his universe, Tucker inserted himself at a prominent position in the field (shortstop) and batted himself third in the lineup. Unfortunately, for such a self-proclaimed alpha male, he is a really terrible athlete - bad enough to completely neutralize the small handful of superior athletes on his team. He must have mishandled about seven routine grounders in this game, and as you might guess, he also likes to throw the ball as hard as he can to first base, even though getting it in the vicinity of first base didn’t seem to be much of a priority. In case you are wondering, he also popped up into an out nearly every time at the plate.
Still, it took a lot of karmic justice to win this game; a few well placed bloop singles counterbalanced a few 400 foot flyouts by their two ringers...but those seven errors by the egomaniacal shortstop didn’t hurt.
However, the result of the game isn’t what’s interesting. The best part came when Tucker and “JoJo” refused to shake our hands after the victory. Way to buck social norms, Tuck! What a rebel...
Not only would he not shake hands, but the truly priceless moment I will never forget featured Tucker loudly consoling himself by repeatedly whining in his lispy, effeminate voice about the unfairness of our bingle-centric approach - this remains one of the few absurdly humorous moments in my dreary "elite" law school experience and was certainly funnier than any of the trash he pawns off as "literature" on males with no life experience and even less ability to think critically.
Few things are funnier than spoiled rich kids with unchecked egos who don’t get their way.
Anyway, I can’t say his team was much fun to play against, since they took the game so seriously and were constantly bickering at one another when shit went bad. Then again, I generally recommend avoiding athletic competition against lawyers (unless you like whimpering and excessive preoccupation with rules). I really don’t have any particular axe to grind against Tucker Max, although I remember him (as I am sure most people do) to be quite charmless and almost universally disrespected when not hiding behind an internet persona.
If you like this comment, feel free to re-post it as an anonymous but truthful articl
I worked for producer Elie Samaha and had this project come across my desk sometime last March. This was before they cast the movie and right after Bob Gosse was attached to direct. We (meaning me and my boss) could not believe the project was getting made. In the words of Elie Samaha, it was "the worst script to ever make it this far." Now, this is coming from the producer of Battlefield Earth as well as Ballistic Ecks vs. Sever.
On top of it all, Tucker was obviously full of shit. He stated that he had gotten a number of "A-List" actors who were vying for the role of "Tucker". The funny thing was that at least two of the A-listers he mentioned were also friends of Elie, and when contacted, none of them had even heard of the project, let alone Tucker Max. The other one said he had gotten the script through Bob Gosse, but couldn't make it past the 1st act and declined.
Also, Tucker had mentioned that he had gotten an EIGHT FIGURE OFFER for the script. When this was told to Elie, he laughed and ended the 2nd meeting right then and there. While Elie is not the best producer in the world in terms of quality, he can still smell a con game and this stunk worse than an old dead person who passed away in a closed window apartment for the entire summer.
That's what the word on the streets in LA was about Tucker, he was a modestly successful author who nobody wanted to do business with because he was completely and totally full of shit. It's a shame that Darko bought into the con, but hey, it's their 6 million.
And for the record, FOX Searchlight (where I work now) passed on the project without even viewing it. It never fell under our umbrella of what we do.
In other words, nothing Tucker has said on his message board about this project is remotely true. It's one giant con game.
All these trolling spammers who cut-and-paste huge blocks of text over and over need to stop doing so. It's not clever and moreover it isn't even an effective strategy since we can click on the name of the poster and minimize their post.
That said, Tucker's vanity-tour is going slightly better for him than I expected (and WAY better than I'd hoped) ... he's still a douche with an "empire" built on lies, though
Its going better than you thought?
Not being able to fill tiny ~ 2-300 capacity theaters, and generating zero, or next to zero media buzz is a pretty good definition of a tucker max fail imo.
tuggers hijinx are goin' straight to dvd.
butht-thectht!
Tucker couldn't fill up a single 150 seat theater in Washington DC.
Tuckerssss! Tuckerses!!! We hates it, precious, we hates it forever!
"Tucker couldn't fill up a single 150 seat theater in Washington DC."
Kinda sad when you think about it considering what a decadent party town DC is. If anyplace could muster up a decent number of drooling fanboys DC w... well, no, on second thought, DC is precisely the sort of place where they'd know the difference between the real drunken sex lifestyle, and Tucker's attempt at imitating it.
Fuck dude, he didn't even fill up for Blacksburg, and he considered that a major success.
you dumb fucks realize every stop is sold out right?
Jesus Christ you are more delusional than you claim Tucker ever was.
Blacksburg had at least 15-20% empty seats. I was there. The only way it was "sold out" is if Tucker took a lot of seats off the market in order for it to look sold out. It most certainly had a lot of empty seats.
By the way, the movie sucked ass.
nah man nah man tucker's fans are just so into him they buy tickets even if they know they can't go or don't even live in the same state just so they can be there in spirit man cause he's just that great man he's totally cool and made an awesome movie and this way they can say they had a ticket for the premiere and can talk about it for the rest of their lives man ain't that cool man that this is a memory they'll treasure man totally treasure that's how it is man that's what it means to recognize tucker's artistic genius
>tucker's artistic genius
BLEEAAARRRRGGGHHCH
gack, spit
somewhere, a kitten just got tossed in a blender, you jerk
Gawker posted their review of the movie:
TUCKER MAX FAIL
http://gawker.com/5346223/tucker-maxs-movie-poop
"you dumb fucks realize every stop is sold out right?
Jesus Christ you are more delusional than you claim Tucker ever was."
Tucker has held back a lot of the tickets that weren't sold so he could say it was sold out. He gives those tickets away, as has been shown time and time again on this tour.
Jennifer Loe is lying about her age
i hope they serve beer in hell: it's like battlefield earth, but less funny, doesn't have john travolta, and tucker max rapes women.
i hope they serve beer in hell: it's like battlefield earth, but less funny, doesn't have john travolta, and tucker max rapes women.
i hope they serve beer in hell: it's like battlefield earth, but less funny, doesn't have john travolta, and tucker max rapes women.
i hope they serve beer in hell: it's like battlefield earth, but less funny, doesn't have john travolta, and tucker max rapes women.
i hope they serve beer in hell: it's like battlefield earth, but less funny, doesn't have john travolta, and tucker max rapes women.
i hope they serve beer in hell: it's like battlefield earth, but less funny, doesn't have john travolta, and tucker max rapes women.
In his pet project, L. Ron Hubbard's ``Battlefield Earth,'' he has transformed himself into a green-eyed monster.
He's kinda cute.
Even with gravity boots that make him about 8 feet tall, an unruly mass of dreadlocks, cruddy teeth, eyebrows that point to outer space, a rubber suit that doesn't cover up his chunkiness so much as exaggerate it and breathing tubes that make him appear snot-nosed, which is a fair description of the villain he plays.
Travolta is a middle-management tyrant from a race of aliens called Psychlos, who have taken over Earth in the year 3000 to strip it of its minerals. Earth is their Siberia. They hate it, consider an assignment there worse than hell and can't wait to get away and blow it up behind them. If you kick the ``l'' out of Psychlos -- as cave-dwelling earthlings try to do -- they become Psychos, which is a good thumbnail description of the plot.
Did I say thumbnails? Travolta's are gross and pointy, like spades, emerging from wispy hair on his knuckles. And he thinks humans are ugly.
There is a kind of nuttiness at work in this great big comic book of a movie. It is a spacey demolition derby. ``Battlefield Earth'' needs to be approached by audiences in the same spirit Travolta approached the material. He's obviously getting a kick out of it.
Will it become a campy, sci-fi classic along the lines of ``Planet of the Apes''? Too soon to tell. Is it worth seeing once? Sure.
Travolta, who is the producer as well as star, had wanted to make movie of Hubbard's book for at least 15 years. There was only one catch: His career was in the tank. Ever since ``Pulp Fiction'' jump-started his professional life in 1994 and he followed up with a string of hits, including ``Get Shorty,'' ``Face/Off'' and ``The General's Daughter,'' he has the leverage to bring this movie off.
``Leverage'' is a key word among the Psychlos, too. A conniving, untrustworthy bunch, they are constantly playing dirty tricks on one another and, like lawyers, pulling fast ones with the language as they maneuver for power.
The security chief, Terl (Travolta), has a sidekick, played by Forest Whitaker (``Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai''), whose spacecraft is a few brain waves short of lift-off. Terl is constantly taking advantage of him. Their interaction becomes a weird Abbott and Costello routine.
Travolta's wife, Kelly Preston, appears all too briefly as his baldish Psychlo girlfriend, with a tongue that rolls out like a venetian blind.
It is the year 3000, and our planet is being manhandled by evil Psychlos alien beings. Security chief Terl is the meanest sonnova-bitch of them all, ruling with his arrogance, power and blackmailing skills. It isn't until a peasant man who goes by the name of Jonnie Goodboy Tyler takes a stand that the few surviving humans decide to rally in the hopes of defeating their gigantic oppressors.
Fun cheese. Despite starting off like a bad Star Trek episode, this film eventually graduates to a higher level with great special effects, some really slick bad-ass aliens, an intriguing premise and a good flow of loud, campy fun. Don't bother seeing this movie if you're expecting a film similar in nature to 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. This one definitely asks that you bring along a bag of farfetchedness, with many of your likely questions relating to the plausibility of a handful of human beings fighting an entire alien race. But if you consider the pure arrogance of the Psychlos, and the way in which they underestimate and even misdiagnose many of the humans, it becomes a much easier pill of reasoning to swallow. I personally had very few issues with the story, which I found to be interesting and fast-paced enough to keep me entertained.
I had an initial problem with the alien beings, their accents and their exaggerated laughs, but all that seemed to disappear about 20 minutes into the film, as I got more and more used to their world. I also loved the fact that the aliens were some real bad muthas! I mean, these guys were nasty boogers! I dug on them completely, and was even rooting for them to stomp our dumb human asses...! Overall, the movie played like a 2-hour sci-fi comic book with many a loud bang, an overly obtrusive score, great scene transitions and some of the better special effects of the year. You truly felt like this was the end of the world as we knew it, and I certainly didn't notice any part of my fair city of Montreal in any of the proceedings (the film was shot on location here). This film is not to be taken too seriously, with many melodramatic human moments sappy as hell (one scene seemed like a carbon copy of Mel Gibson's infamous BRAVEHEART sequence "...fight for our freedom!). And I also could have done without the umpteen slo-mo shots of Barry Pepper running down Matrix-like hallways, but in the end, the film was fast, furious and just a good ol' time at the theatres.
Now whether or not you end up liking the film, I think we can all agree that this is certainly an admirable turn for Travolta. Both he and Whitaker chew right into their dirty, grungy roles and truly become these unconscionable alien beings. So if you're looking for a cool, mindless, special-effect laden film starring a couple of bad muthas, this puppy is made prime for you. This movie is loud, sorta campy, over-the-top and certainly not super-tight in narrative. But overall, the energy of the film is slated to "fun" and the last 20 minutes are especially wild. So don't take it all so seriously and enjoy the ride!
from teh WIKIPEDIMATIC:
"The project was eventually taken on by an independent production company, Franchise Pictures, which specialized in rescuing stars' stalled pet projects. Travolta signed on as a co-producer and contributed millions of dollars of his own money to the production, which was largely funded by a German film distribution company. Franchise Pictures was later sued by its investors and was bankrupted after it emerged that it had fraudulently overstated the film's budget by $31 million."
Ok, Tucker hasn't failed THAT badly yet.
>Travolta described the book in interviews as "like Pulp Fiction for the year 3000" and "like Star Wars, only better"
No, John.
Just ...
No.
Hey cool, Franchise Pictures was founded by Elie Samaha, who Anonymous@5:35 claims to work for.
And that's the crowd that looks DOWN on Tucker.
Battlefield Earth sounds like a really good fun movie. I need to watch it now.
"Ok, Tucker hasn't failed THAT badly yet."
I think the film could have cost more to make than he lets on, and he could be sued by the investors. I think that's a possibility too.
In all honesty, Tucker's film hasn't even made 25K yet on a tour that caters to his own fanbase.
"I'll pop the champagne when the box office numbers start coming in on the opening Friday, and we are projecting at a 25 million dollar opening weekend." - Tucker Max, March 25, 2008 (http://messageboard.tuckermax.com/showthread.php?t=20811&page=3)
Over on imdb, somebody claimed that wasn't a prediction, but rather tucker (awkwardly) saying that he'll pop the champagne bottles *if* they predict a $25 million opening weekend.
You could potentially (mis)read it that way, but think it over for a couple minutes.
Tucker is a writer. In his own words, an elite writer (or maybe elite blogger). Surely, he understands basic shit like compound sentences and conjunctions. He can't rewrite the rules of English any more than he can rewrite the rules of Hollywood.
Take note of the comma. The only valid reading of that sentence is:
I'll pop the champagne when the box office numbers start coming in on the opening Friday. We are projecting at a 25 million dollar opening weekend.
I think that's nonsense, because he's always said he defined it as successful *if* he made way more than just getting paid, which he needed to get paid 15 to 20 million to make money he said.
He's also thrown out..."it could make anywhere from 20 million to 200 million"
So, he's always thought it was going to be blockbuster big, He also thought he would have a studio when he was saying a lot of those things.
Agree with 4:50. Beyond the grammar, it just makes no sense to read it the other way. He's going to pop champagne IF he's predicting $25M? No.
Nah, you guys are reaching here. It reads pretty clearly as assertive speculation. "I'll buy myself that yacht when I get that job paying 50% more than I make right now" That's not an assertion it WILL happen, it's saying that assuming the second thing happens, then I'll do the first. Same as in the quote: assuming the 25 mil opening, that's when he starts popping champagne, not before, and not without that precondition.
There's plenty of other Tucker quotes to go to for him making unrealistic projections. You don't need to twist this one.
"Foreign pre-sales is going to be one of the main ways we finance the film.
So yes, it will be shown all over the world."
Yeah, from the same thread. He's not delusional at all.
Even though his quote is in reference to celebrating after major accomplishment, you can detect in his undertone what he always does...which is assume he can only be successful.
The operative part of the sentence is as follows:
"We are projecting at a 25 million dollar opening weekend."
The popping the champagne cork was to be based on the opening numbers. However, he clarifies this by saying "WE ARE projecting at a 25 million blah blah".
So basically he's saying he forsees the film making 25 million dollars.
Hence: douchebag
Tucker, in your retouched retellings of the supposed witticisms happening during the Q&A...where is the funny?
In your desperate attempts to stir up controversy during this tour and make your at-least-partially-made-up exploits appear to be interesting, where is the positive buzz?
Tucker, we may all be in the gutter (as Oscar Wilde wrote), but some of us are permanently face down in a fetal position, shitting on our own dicks.
~FDG
Tucker is spending his time in the gutter baking a quiche of comic failure.
He has to post all his so called witty and spontaneous remarks - they origiannly only reached an audiance fo 200 or so.
TDG: you're reading it as "I'll (A when B), and C". Seems to me a more natural reading is "I'll A when (B, and C)". Neither reading is impossible based on the phrasing. That just means he doesn't write clearly.
"Tucker. E. Max. SOOPER GENIUS. I like the way that rolls out."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STeVTzWelns
Tuck R. Max
http://cornellsun.com/section/opinion/content/2009/08/31/how-succeed-sex-without-really-trying
"A few years ago, some frat house paid Tucker Max, a man who blogs about having copious amounts of sex by being a douchebag (all true of course), to lecture on how to be a better douchebag. The number one question asked was, “How can I be like you?” 20-odd-years of being alive and that’s what you have to show for it?
I lived right next to one of the douchiest frat houses on campus last year. Come spring time, the dudes were out in full swing on the patio, jumping around a rack of Keystone in only their boxers at 10 in the morning. No girls were involved in this ritual. But the douchebag remains an idolized figure.
Tucker Max has gone on to win a movie deal, making him rich. For this, I salute him. He is a good writer. But the people who actually buy into this crap are no different from eight-year-olds that want to go to Hogwarts. In reality, I imagine Tucker Max is married and spends nights teaching math to his kids so they don’t grow up tools."
http://www.alligator.org/articles/2009/08/27/the_avenue/features/090827_tuckermax.txt#blogcomments
"Although Max is known as a horrible person who's mastered the art of misogyny, he's not as much of a douchebag as everyone thinks. Tucker Max actually has a heart; he just hasn't grown up. Yet.
"No question I want a wife and kids. How [crappy] would it be to go through your whole life single with no one to love who loves you? I absolutely want that, I just don't think today, right now, I'm quite ready," he said."
http://www.collegiatetimes.com/stories/14088
"It was a trap.
Before premiering the movie adaptation of his book, "I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell," Tucker Max asked audience members at the Lyric to share their embarrassing stories this past Thursday.
For those who grabbed the mic hoping to impress Max with their own stories of debauchery and raunchiness, all they received in return was a shower of verbal acid rain. Max deflected their comedic attempts and launched a barrage of crushing insults. No one escaped his relentless pride-bashing, not even his own crew members.
Max asked one if he had gotten a haircut.
"You look like Calvin," he said. "Like, where's Hobbes?"
Also present in the crowd were Howdy Doody, Shrek, Grover, Doogie Howser, Gwen Stefani, Billy Mays and John McCain.
Some managed to take the abuse in stride while others returned to their corners visibly shaken. The defeated might claim sucker punches, but how could you not enter the venue without your dukes up? If anything, Max simply affirmed what is suggested in every word of his writing: He is an asshole, albeit a self-aware one."
"That analogy fails, though, when it comes to longevity. While "Dumb and Dumber" is something of a cult classic, I can't imagine "I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell" will ever reach such heights. In a few years we'll struggle to recall Tucker Max's name evoking Lloyd Christmas stammering, "Swim? Swammi? Slippy?...""
http://www.thefrisky.com/post/246-film-version-of-tucker-maxs-i-hope-they-serve-beer-in-hell-does-not-thr/
SSSOOOOOOPERRRR
GEEEEEENIUSSSSS
Tucker Max is a talentless relic of an earlier internet era. He has proven to be a student of urban legend and has had limited but fading success with a formula of introducing drinking and fornication urban legends to a naive audience who can be persuaded that these actually happened to Tucker.
Of course, this naive audience grows up fast, and by age 22, most people understand that it is all bullshit...
and the market for simplistic, unsophisticated, unoriginal, flat out dumb scott peterson, don't tase me bro jokes is so...2000 and late.
http://allbostonblog.com/how-do-we-douche-thee-let-us-count-the-ways-tucker-max-protest/
People actually need to stop protesting lest they give this trash unecessary media attention.
Deconstructing a Tucker fan:
In this episode: Hot Wheelz gets replaced by another person with a physical handicap. This fans handicap is that he’s got a bad case of virginity.
Also, he’s gay.
“From: Devon Edwards edwards. devon @gmail.com_To: Tucker Max tuckermax @gmail.com_Date: Tue, Sep 1, 2009 at 1:08 AM_Subject: I’m the virgin”
Okay, lets start out here for a moment. Put yourself in the place of Devon, you’re an overweight guy with some definite lack of social skills.
Obviously what you’ve been doing hasn’t been working in terms of nailing tail. You’re 20 years old and in a college of 50000 people and you still can’t get laid.
What do you do? Do you try and rethink your methods and perhaps come up with another game plan? No, you email another adult male and tell him you are still a virgin.
Devon is basically the prototype for the Tucker Max fan. A dude who goes to another dude to let him know you haven’t been laid yet.
Sound gay?
That’s because it is.
“Tucker-
I just wanted to thank you for tonight. Even though I didn’t get laid, I had one of the better experiences of my life.”
GAY!!!
“I got to chill with you and Nils for an hour, to be in your tour bus, and fuck,”
Holy Duct Taped Hamsters In Your Anus, that’s sounds GAY!!!
No, I mean seriously, if a dude said this out loud in a bar, you’d definitely think they were chugging cock in the back of a bus.
So that’s the secret of Tucker’s sexual prowess. He does fuck a lot, only it’s dudes.
It puts the statement “did you shit on my dick” in complete context.
“to have one of the best pick up artists on the planet as my wingman. “
or as his “top”.
“I know you did your best, and honestly, that’s way more than I would’ve ever experienced.”
He got as far as 95% of TMMB posters.
“When I prefaced my story with “So I’m a virgin…””
What Devon really meant was “his asshole” was still “a virgin”.
“I expected to get ripped on, fucked “
GAY!!!
“with, and maybe get a mention in the tour blog.”
Oh Devon, far be it from Tucker to exploit cripples and virgins on his website.
“I never would’ve thought you’d make it your personal goal to try and get my cherry popped.”
Yep, Tucker totally fucked his ass.
“It probably sounds fucked up, but standing outside of a bar for an hour tonight was one of the best hours of my life,”
Devon, you need to get out more, and perhaps read some new books. Maybe learn how to "speak to women" instead of reading Tucker (who only speaks to them like they are objects.
“just to know that there was some random stranger who cared that much about my lack of pussy”
What Devon lacks a pussy he gains in having a ripe asshole for Tucker to abuse in spades.
Holy shit, this is gayer than Kanye West staring at an aquarium.
“to ask every girl in a bar if they’d fuck somebody they didn’t know. “
Especially since Devon is obviously a homosexual.
“Hell, if you’d succeeded, that would’ve been pretty fucked up.”
I know, you’re not even famous for writing a book of 1/2 truths.
“It was as much a case as me being a dog chasing its own tail.”
Does “chasing your tail” mean “I like to suck my own dick”? Any gay guys here who can translate? I’m not that good with gay speak.
“I probably wouldn’t have known what to do with a girl even if you’d thrown one my way.”
Most gay guys wouldn’t.
“I don’t know whether anything will come of this whole night, of you putting me up there on your blog.”
Something will come of it, especially once I get through with this deconstruction, you’ll be famous the most famous guy Tucker ever fucked.
“It really doesn’t matter. It’s as much the entirety of the journey, for me, as it is the ultimate reward.”
You mean Tucker cumming on your face wasn’t “the ultimate reward”.
Some guys are just hard to please.
“You, Nils, and everyone in your crew are absolute class acts, “
Devon, do you mean that they cleaned up after you shat on their dicks?
Princes, all of them.
“no matter what anyone says–not like you’d give a shit anyway.”
Trust me dude, Tucker cares more about what people write about him than you personally. You’re just a prop, the one that he uses to say “I’m an asshole, but an asshole with a heart of gold.”
“What you all did tonight is among the nicest things anyone’s ever done for me out of pure selflessness,”
You mean he gave you a reach around after turned your face into a glazed donut?
“and it really means a lot to me that you went out of your way like that.”
Even if he wore gloves while jerking you off.
“Fuck Pennsylvania and its bullshit laws, that’s all I can say.”
Yeah, fuck PA. Sodomy shouldn’t be illegal anyhow, especially between two men.
“I wish there was some way I could repay you, but the best I can do is to see your movie again when it comes out,”
Yeah, so he can add to that 50K opening weekend.
“and to get all my friends to see it.”
Devon, be honest, you’re a dweeby guy. You have no friends.
“You deserve all the good that has come from the book, and the movie,”
and all the shit that he put on your dick.
“which truly exceeded my expectations.”
Devon has really low standards, afterall, he’s a Tucker Max conquest… er fan.
“You made a hell of a film.”
HOLY SHIT!!! TUCKER MAX FILMED HIMSELF HAVING SEX WITH DEVON?!?!?
Bet that doesn’t make the Flickr account or YouTube.
“But more importantly, you’re really a great guy, and after tonight, I’m proud to call you my friend.”
I’m sure Tucker is proud to call you a lot of things, and “friend” surely isn’t one of them.
“Thanks again,
Devon”
Devon, if your hero is a dude who is known to objectify wormen, and he took you under his wing while in his own element and STILL COULDN’T GET YOU LAID, what does this say about you? Seriously dude, you need some new role models.
“Ladies, below is a picture of Devon (posted with his permission). He is not the hottest guy ever,”
Well, he does get kind of hot when he has Tucker’s dick inside of him.
“but he’s a nice kid, and very smart.”
Smart enough to be used as a prop at least.
“That’s his real email address up there, if you want to get to know him and then maybe have sex, feel free to contact him. Maybe you can succeed where I failed.”
Thanks Tucker, and I emailed him my deconstruction that I’ve just written along with the subject heading “You’re a fucking tool”.
I suggest anybody who reads this do the same.
-TDG
Nice to see you TDG.
Tucker once again exploiting the bottom of the social pecking order for his personal gain (or, rather, using this guy as the football for his latest desperate hail mary in a series of desperate hail marys that Tucker naively hopes will result in personal gain).
Tucker's career is over. Nils is already looking for paralegal positions to help pay the credit card bills that accumulated during
“I got to chill with you and Nils for an hour, to be in your tour bus, and fuck,”
Holy Duct Taped Hamsters In Your Anus, that’s sounds GAY!!!
No, I mean seriously, if a dude said this out loud in a bar, you’d definitely think they were chugging cock in the back of a bus.
So that’s the secret of Tucker’s sexual prowess. He does fuck a lot, only it’s dudes.
=============================
AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
TDG
NICE JOB MATE!!!
TDG,
You totally nailed the Hot Wheelz corrolation. I remember when that kid started coming onto TMMB and Tucker "took him under his wing".
What became of HotWheelz besides ultimate disappointment? Was he thrown into the prop room with all the other idiots Tucker "takes under his wing"? Maybe he got lucky and got thrown on top of the two sisters from Canada who murdered their mother.
Tucker is to being a "nice guy" what Devon is to being a "lover".
"Holy shit, this is gayer than Kanye West staring at an aquarium."
This might just be the funniest thing I've read this past year.
Nice SP reference TDG.
Fuck it,
I just emailed Devon as well. Can't wait to get back a response.
Anybody else?
Tucker's movie is failing even harder than most predicted. I know Max is in a league of his own as far as delusional self-assuredness goes, but even he has to realize that, at this point, even breaking even is highly unlikely. I mean, seriously, who is going to see this fucking POS movie?
I think it goes without saying that Tucker will be reduced to selling $20 signed DVDs on his website by Christmas.
" I mean, seriously, who is going to see this fucking POS movie?"
Duh, Devon Michael and his horde of girlfriends.
Hey now, be fair- HotWheelz was given a job with the Rudius blog cartel.
Devon was just happy because he thought he was experiencing friendship!
Deconstruction Guy, I love you, man (totally not in a gay way, though- I'm not Devon). you're half the reason I come to this damn site. Keep it up, dude.
Some of these responses are hilarious, too. Yeah, I emailed Devon and told him what a winner I think he is.
Also, re: the Boston link someone put up a few moments ago: shouldn't Tucker sue them now? I mean, he said he'd sue anyone who accused him of rape, and they sure did. Where are you, Tucker? Why don't you flex your muscles of litigation, tough guy?!
So I was checking up on HotWheelz and it turns out that that Griffin fellow's *last* name is Griffin. First name? Chris.
Yes, his name is Chris Griffin.
Another glowing review of the movie. Wonder when/if it will get posted on his site:
http://www.indyweek.com/gyrobase/Content?oid=oid%3A400777
Love these quotes:
"As a wordsmith, he falls somewhere between a bad romance novelist and a "some assembly required" instruction manual writer"
"But while the current crop of gross-out sex movies tend to at least tip a hat toward plot and believability, Beer in Hell is simply an excuse to show nudity, poop and Tucker Max making fun of "fat chicks." The characters and scenes are poorly drawn and preposterous—one of Max's buddies wins his way into a stripper's bed with sweet nothings like, "If you touch me, I will gut you and grind you into pig slop." Lovely."
And, though a quote of a quote, this one really hits the nail on the head:
"As Teddy Roosevelt once said, "I could carve a better man out of a banana.""
I suppose in a way Tucker did make a movie that "set the bar" in terms of future comedies. Now anyone can go out and make a comedy comfortably knowing that it won't be the shittiest movie ever made. Kudos Tucker!
Jennifer Loe is totally lying about her age. She's not 23, she's 32. I gotta admit she's looking well preserved, but enough facepaint can support any lie
Jesus Christ, Tucker is seriously losing his hair. Look at that picture on Indyweek and see how far his hairline is drifting away.
More solid publicity...this time from the Boston Globe. By the time this tour is done, the entire world will know Tucker for one thing: being an idiot frat-boy douchebag. That's quite a legacy. Darko and Gosse must be wondering why the fuck they ever hooked up with this guy in the first place:
http://www.boston.com/ae/celebrity/more_names/blog/2009/09/tucker_max_the_smug_scribe.html
If any serious reporter gave a shit about him, they'd do a modicum of research and call him on the 1 million books sold thing.
Wow, Tucker is going to be bald before the tour is over. Did Corman forget to pack the Propecia?
Tucker Max walks into a bar, he goes to the bartender and asks him for a "Tucker Max".
The bartender asks "What's a Tucker Max".
Tucker Max replies: "You give me a shot, I suck at it for a few years, then it disappears."
I think the real salient news item today is that Tucker intimated that his film would need to gross a per screen average of 10,000+ in order to expand beyond 120 theaters. Needless to say the likelihood of this happening is incredibly low.
TDG this was some of your funniest work yet. Keep it up mate.
TDG was not very funny this time around. Too much homophobia. I thought that's why we hated Tucker Max?
We are being hypocrites if we actually found that last TDG post funny.
LOL and I just saw Tucker says they've already drawn up documents to sue the guy from Boston who said he rapes girls.
Holy hell have a look at the picture of the womens ass on the Philly recap blog entry. How the hell hard did he hit her to leave WELTS like that? Not marks but actual welts.
So Tucker invites movie attendees to the front of the room to tell stories and then makes fun of them. Does he fancy himself some kind of insult-comic? Don Rickles he ain't.
"TDG was not very funny this time around. Too much homophobia. I thought that's why we hated Tucker Max?"
I disagree, I wasn't posting to be homophobic, I just found Devon's email to Tucker to be oozing in gayness. I didn't say anything disparaging about being gay, I completely apologize if that's the direction you thought I was taking.
Still, you have to admit, Devon might not be scoring with women because he doesn't realize he's into dudes.
Also, I personally don't dislike Tucker for homophobia, that's merely part of the equation on why he's such a douchebag. I think that's why most of us are here.
"So Tucker invites movie attendees to the front of the room to tell stories and then makes fun of them. Does he fancy himself some kind of insult-comic? Don Rickles he ain't."
Yet Tucker LOVES his fans.
What the hell is this but a low rent "Rat Pack" type show that they're failing at.
From the spoiler thread -
"Corman (I think) was handing out tickets and I told him I wasn't able to get one, so he gave me one anyway. "We comped a shit ton of seats, might as well put them to some use."
Sold out? Yeah right.
But homophobia IS funny.
It's funny because it's true.
"I think the real salient news item today is that Tucker intimated that his film would need to gross a per screen average of 10,000+ in order to expand beyond 120 theaters. Needless to say the likelihood of this happening is incredibly low."
The liklihood of that happening is 0. No fall movies gross that much per theater.
September/October are historically the weakest box office months. And even blockbusters only gross 8k per theater at release.
Tucker isn't going to be able to sue the "allbostonblog"
They said, "In response to Tucker Max’s tendency to be a rapist in addition to comparably innocuous crime of being an asshole (Max often brags of having intercourse with women without their consent), Boston chapter of NOMAS has organized a protest of Max’s new movie tonight at Loews Harvard Square."
There's nothing defamatory about that. They said his tendency to be...it implies doubt, he'll never be able to get them.
I could say, Tucker Max reminds me of a rapist. He can't sue me.
"The discussion about consent needs to be had, but this is not the place to do it," he said. Another asked what his parents think about his career choice.
"They think I'm a rapist," he said, to scattered laughter. He paused. "If you put that in the fucking paper, I'll beat your ass."
Tucker has just given away any chance at suing anyone. Anyone can now repaste that quote free from any type of libel action because Max said it.
TUCKER MAX IS A RAPIST
TUCKER MAX IS A RAPIST
TUCKER MAX IS A RAPIST
"A recent analysis of 20 studies over the last 30 years indicates that between 31% and 57% of women have rape fantasies, and these fantasies are frequent or preferred in 9% to 17% of women."
and
"In one survey of romance novels (which tend to be written by and for women), the lead female character was raped in 54%."
Source: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/brainstorm/200805/why-do-women-have-erotic-rape-fantasies
No wonder Tucker has success with women!
ALL GUYS TAKE NOTE: TO MAKE WOMEN SWOON IN YOUR PRESENCE, BE A RAPIST
Women are twisted fuckups.
Tucker Max is such a huge asshole that gay guys don't have to spit on their dicks first.
Suzanne researched this.
http://www.indyweek.com/gyrobase/Content?oid=oid%3A400777
Lulz. The picture of the protester is a really fat ugly girl.
Cuz only fat ugly girls could possibly be hatin' on da Tuckster!
AMIRITE OR AMIRITE?
Remember, Tucker loves women. But that fat one doesn't count. Kill 'er.
Now, now, that's not fair. Tucker has never advocated brutal and cold-blooded murder of another human being, ever.
But fat chicks ain't people! Toss 'er in the piranha tank, them cute little bastards are hungry!
In Boston, in a theater that could fit around 700, Tucker Max's film was filled at about 80% of capacity.
Well that's more than I expected.
Someone please explain this video to me
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86wKWjvUD50
the protester is a fat, ugly girl? $10 says she fucked tucker and hates herself for it.
Someone please explain this video to me
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86wKWjvUD50
--------------------------------
This is the game that Tucker calls "Super Mario Kart" that he plays all day with his dudes.
Just a thought ...
Last night I saw "500 Days of Summer", an excellent movie about a guy who falls for a woman that doesn't love him the way he wants her to.
Beautifully shot, very-well written and incredibly insightful about human nature and the nature of relationships.
Three days prior, my girlfriend got free tickets to "Inglourious Bastards". Quentin Tarantino spent years writing and re-writing IB, and it shows.
The movie is brilliant, and if the guy who plays the Jew Hunter doesn't win an Academy Award for his role, it will likely be one of the biggest cinematic travesties of our time.
Tucker Max wrote a movie about fat chicks and poop. And he calls it "art."
How ironic.
Everything Tucker Max has ever done with his life can be summed up in six words:
"Notice me! Notice me!! NOTICE ME!!!"
^^^true dat, brah. actually, its maybe more like
notice me! acknowledge me! validate me! cant you see how important i am?!?!
500 days: no, it sucked. The guy was a total loser right from the start.
"500 days: no, it sucked. The guy was a total loser right from the start."
Yeah...on IMDb it's rated top 250 all time. #111.
I'm just gonna go out on a limb and say you are simply in the minority and probably wrong.
I just saw this link. It's maybe a month old, but it's such a juicy collection of funny trailer reviews that it made me laugh. Enjoy!
http://blog.spout.com/2009/08/04/i-hope-they-serve-beer-in-hell-trailer-is-awful-today-in-film-bloggery-080409/
"I'm just gonna go out on a limb and say you are simply in the minority and probably wrong."
I'm just gonna go out on a limb and say you like letting other people tell you what's good rather than make up your own mind.
The number of other people holding an opinion has absolutely no bearing on a matter of values, and if you were capable of anything resembling rational thought, you'd be aware of that.
"I'm just gonna go out on a limb and say you like letting other people tell you what's good rather than make up your own mind.
The number of other people holding an opinion has absolutely no bearing on a matter of values, and if you were capable of anything resembling rational thought, you'd be aware of that."
Assume much. Did I say anything about my opinion regarding the film?
No. Did I say whether it would have a bearing on my opinion? Nope.
What I said is you are likely in the minority when given a statistical summation of opinion.
Given a combination of data points, the likelihood that is "Sucks" as you say is low.
"The number of other people holding an opinion has absolutely no bearing on a matter of values"
This statement is ironic because it means I should hold your opinion of no value as well. Though you so very much want your opinion to be right.
Go ahead and spin the wheels some more. I could use the entertainment.
I liked 500 Days of Summer, even though I thought it would have been cooler if the dude actually was the guy that Cobra Commander was before he joined the military.
Fellas, fellas, fellas.... 500-Days-guy, Anti-500-Days-guy, can't we all just agree that Tucker Max is a raging fucktard, and a douchebag?
Jesus 500 Days of Summer was an awful movie, can't you just get it through your stupid fucking head? Since when has IMDB been right about anything?
Those early rankings are inflated anyways, movies always start out in the top 250 and slowly drop out.
YG here again, with some more thoughts.
Did you ever notice that Tucker can't make a fictional point to his audience without fabricating an e-mail to back him up?
Is he that unsure of himself that he thinks that the lie alone is not enough? He feels the need to lie some more in order to convince himself that his lies are convincing.
Oh, Tucker, I might be a bona fide alcoholic and have a problem with cocaine, but at least I, for the most part, like the person that I am.
If I were to have a massive coronary infarction right now, I could die and truly think that my brief life was well-spent. Could you say the same?
The next time that you're having meaningless sex with a girl you just met, ask yourself: Would she be fucking me if I were a nobody?
When is the last time you felt truly happy and completely contented with your life? Never? That'd be my guess.
Enjoy your bus tour, Tucker. Because this is the culmination of your post law school life. All of your tireless self-promotion has resulted in this bonanza.
Congrats, bro. Nobody doucheier could have pulled it off.
"This statement is ironic because it means I should hold your opinion of no value as well."
Unsupported opinion, absolutely. However it was supported with the characterization of whatsit as being a loser from the start. That's one (1) solid point! Which is more than enough for anonymous internet argumenting.
500 Days of Summer is the new Baylor Law.
"Fellas, fellas, fellas.... can't we all just agree that Tucker Max is a raging fucktard, and a douchebag?"
Nevar forget.
"my parents think i'm a rapist"
tugger tibor otto max, '09
What's wrong with Baylor Law?
There's nothing wrong with it, but back when nobody knew about this blog except a few of us, two weirdos spent pages debating its merits. Drove many of us away. I came back when the movie blog started getting more and more ridiculous.
I would dispute most strenuously your claim that there's nothing wrong with Baylor Law, except that the troll would be too obvious.
^ Actually we didn't debate the merits of Baylor Law. We debated the merits of the Baylor Business School and Baylor as a whole, for pages and pages...
KTAT
Some of you have been here for years.
SOYHBHFY
Dudes, I just got this email, and trust me, it's great:
"Hey Anonymous, I know you don't know me, but I was reading the discussion and I just wanted to say I totally agree with you. 500 days of summer really is a stupid movie. Hahaha! What kind of luser likes a movie like that? I didn't know anything about you or your opinions in movies before but you're totally right. Anyway, good to talk to a fellow Baylor grad. Rock on and peace out!"
i think mcoymountain may be the lol baylor guy
in other news, tucker is still a lying douche
Baylor is a piece of shit
Oh yeah? Well SO'S YOUR FACE!
FUCK BAYLOR LAW
"i think mcoymountain may be the lol baylor guy"
I think Mccoymountain is definitely Viacom guy.
"in other news, tucker is still a lying douche"
Yes. Yes he is.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/rudiusmedia/3883660606/in/set-72157622222511962/
i hope this midget 'female' like the taste of rohypnol
I just got an email from a random fan who totally gets it:
"Dude, the post you're about to write about a random fan who totally gets it is great. It really takes the wind out of Tucker Max's 'some random fan totally gets it' emails."
How do these people keep finding me?
STOP MAKING FUN OF TUCKER'S FAKE EMAILS
LEAVE TUCKER ALONE
http://www.flickr.com/photos/rudiusmedia/3883660606/in/set-72157622222511962/
Man, Keri Lynn Pratt is really hoing it up in these photos. She is begging to get noticed in Hollywood.
Studio Execs on notice, she will do whatever it takes.
She needs to start lying about her age, like third-rate models (HI JENNIFER) do. The womensexploitation "industry" turns its nose up at 30+ females, they're not-so-fresh anymore
Who the fuck is this Jennifer person, and why do you have a vendetta against her?
mccoymountain is definitely Viacom guy, I can't believe he's still kicking and screaming after all this time.
"She needs to start lying about her age, like third-rate models (HI JENNIFER) do. The womensexploitation "industry" turns its nose up at 30+ females, they're not-so-fresh anymore"
I don't see how the CW gets away with some of these shows these days.
Dawson's Creek a lot of younger people related to because the actors were their age when the show started.
Keri Lynn was playing a 16 year old on Jack and Bobby and she was 26???
How about freakin Chad Michael Murry, that guy is like 35 playing 18.
Anyway, I stick with my previous judgment of her.
"No offense Tucker, but I'm not taking my feminist cue from Keri Lynn Pratt. She played a girl known as being a cum dumpster on Jack and Bobby. You remember her 18 epi arc right?"
"She would let me rub my nut into her eyes if I was doing casting for underworld 4 and she was up for vampire girl #2."
Yes, Tucker, she's the height of the modern feminist movement. Girls who let guys shoot wads into their hair on the first date.
McMountain is almost certainly the Viacom guy. He clearly needs help.
The Baylor debate was actually several guys who did a reverse troll on the "Think about Tucker" guy. The Think about Tucker guy was a Baylor MBA who claimed to be some fabulously successful energy trader (coincidentally, that's Kungfu Mike's background).
Tucker the professional scribe writes this in his blog: "Put it on your calender, write it down in pen, that is our opening date."
How many errors can you find?
Go Tucker. You are so smart! It's too bad your parents think you are a rapist. I'd kill myself if my parents thought that. But at least you have your writing talent!
I just got tickets to Tucker's "sold out" show in Chicago. For a sold out show it was fucking easy to get two tickets.
Be seeing you soon douchebag.
I'll bring you bail money if you punch him out in front of everyone TDG.
I'll Paypal you money if you videotape wacky hijinx that make Tucker look stupid.
Well, no, actually I won't. But I'll say I will.
http://twitpic.com/gc0ys
A fucking billboard? Wow, revolutionary marketing there!
You just don't get it. Nobody's ever done a billboard like that before.
TDG, PLEASE do SOMETHING noteworthy at the Chicago showing. Like, bring a friend and have them cut the brake lines on the bus during the showing or something... just something like that.
I do believe cutting brake lines is the sort of thing that can get you double-digit years in prison, so, maybe not that.
Well, how about instead of cutting brake lines, we cut the blood lines in Tucker's throat? That's a class C at worst.
^^^ C'mon, how can you be mad about that? Fat girls and Tucker Mac aren't real people.
Tucker's a fat chick?
IT ALL MAKES SENSE NOW.
haha, this board is getting entertaining again.
500 days is an excellent film.
mccoymountain is either a troll or just as big of a douche as tucker max.
douchetribution, viacom!
Hey,
I'm in a position in my life, where if I do something like sucked punch Tucker I could very well lose my job (I'm a speech/hearing pathologist in a poor Chicago school district). That being said, I have some fucking CRAZY friends, one of whom has a sister who has been raped, also is black, also is a big Magic Johnson fan who I am bringing with me. God help Bill Dawes if that mic comes our way and Tucker insults him in any way shape or form (like most black people, he just doesn't get the charms of Tucker Max).
If this does occur, I'll be the guy pointing to the camera and saying "did you see Tucker get his dick ripped off?"
Mccoymountain is Andrew Ator, so is the douchebag talking about his script vs. Tucker's script.
I could believe that mccoymountain is Andrew Ator. Both are unbelievably bad writers.
TDG, I'm going to the Chicago show too. If this ends up going Snakes on a Plane, I'm down with you and your friend.
Andrew Ator isn't nearly as annoying as pretty much any moderator on TMMB with the exception of that body builder guy from NY (Mike something or rather) and maybe....
That's all I've got.
If the U.S. Military understands that de-humanizing people designated as "enemies" by labeling them "Japs", "gooks" "skinnies", "towel-heads", etc. makes it easier to break down a soldier's natural aversion to killing, then why is it so hard to understand that popularizing the degradation of women through the use of derogatory terms, belittling stereotypes, and, in Tucker Max's case sexual conquest as a means of humiliation serves to erode fragile moral barriers of restraint against the commission of sexual crimes against women?
If a person who does not engage directly in the commission of acts of violence by a crowd, but who stands on the sideline and taunts the victims may, depending on the circumstances, be charged as an accessory, then why is it so hard to recognize that trivializing rape by making light of it is tantamount to encouragement?
TDG, I wish I could go and back you up. Rep the haters, son.
Somebody should ask Tucker why Ann Marie Sliva killed herself.
Ann Marie was a girl who went to school at U of C with me and Tucker. She was bright, engaging and extremely funny. She was a very popular girl at U of C, not because she was a slut, but because she was cool. I liked Ann Marie very much.
One night she got really drunk and passed out at a party. Tucker bragged to a bunch of other U of C students how he fucked her at the party. Nobody was really that impressed as Tucker was a total douchebag, a social pariah.
Ann Marie became very withdrawn after the party and stopped hanging out with everybody in general. She didn't come back to school after that Christmas break, and because she had pretty much withdrawn from our social circle a few months prior, nobody really gave it any thought.
Sometime that March, her roommate Marjorie told us that she slit her wrists and died at home. I was a pallbearer at her funeral.
Marjorie said that everything changed with Ann Marie after the night she and Tucker had sex. I find it odd because Ann Marie did a complete 180 after having sex with Tucker.
Cut to 2009, I'm working in North Carolina and see in the paper that Tucker Max has not only written a best seller, but also has a movie out that people are ironically protesting because they believe he promotes rape. I notice that he has a Q&A session afterwards, and even though I am happily married with two children I want to make it to one of his shows to ask him "what happened between you and Ann Marie?" just to see his reaction.
If any of you are going to any of his shows, please ask him the question I posed above.
Thank you for your time.
^^^^^^^^^^^^
So much for all of Tucker's fun loving stories.
I feel really angry right now.
I wish I could go to a show, but Tucker pulled the Houston date. He is coming to UT (University of Texas) where supposedly this whole story is from (The Austin Road Trip)
I hear that most of the guys at UT thought Tucker was a tool and reported that after visiting more than 80-90% of what he said was completely made up.
They checked the blog and said, "Dude, we were there. You can't just lie. You were mainly a douche."
I think we have managed to get some things that are actually hurtful to Tucker.
1) He really hates his fans. Why? Because they are mainly stupid. While I hate Tuck, I will admit there is intelligence rolling around up there, though he has embellished his resume, not just anyone gets into UoC no matter who their daddy is.
So it is extremely insulting to him that intelligent people (like he views himself) don't find him funny at all. But worthless lay about frat shits find him histarical.
2) That he can now see he didn't make the film even his fans wanted. Many fans have complained the book simply did not translate in the movie.
The reason is, we know movies are acting. Acting is a lie. Thus when they see Tuckers story up on the screen, they are conditioned to disbelieve. The whole thing that made his stories somewhat funny, was the idea they were completely true.
3) That his narcissism has led him to a point where he has set his own bar for success. Do you think Kevin Smith was crushed by Clerks doing literally no BO? Nope. It was all development and he had realistic goals. Tucker has set his bar so high that success is beyond his reach.
"I notice that he has a Q&A session afterwards, and even though I am happily married with two children I want to make it to one of his shows to ask him "what happened between you and Ann Marie?" just to see his reaction.
If any of you are going to any of his shows, please ask him the question I posed above."
This.
Also, TDG, you had the most brilliant idea ever for fucking with Tucker IRL in one of your deconstructions, in case you've forgotten. To paraphrase, "I swear to God, I'm going to hire a trannie to come to a screening and have Tucker sign his/her dick. Then I'll take a picture of his horrified reaction. If he actually does it, I'll have a picture of Tucker signing a trannie's dick."
Nothing could be more full of win than this. Except beating him within an inch of his life in front of a whole cadre of his idiot fanboys.
Please, TDG, bring a camera and embarrass this fucking lying douchebag in front of everybody.
today is a great day for wikipedia, doucebags. look at what just got added to the article. tucker is a rapist! the encyclopedia even says so !
In 2009, during the pre-release promotional period for his movie, several publications accused Max of rape and of promoting rape culture by allegedly glamorizing the practice of engaging in sex acts with women who are intoxicated. In addition, protests were staged at screenings of the movie by demonstrators who argued that intoxication precludes a woman from consenting to sex, and thus Max's stories and movie include descriptions of acts that "meet the legal definition of rape."[38] As a result of the publication of an article that accuses him of being a rapist, Max has announced he will sue Bostonist [1] for libel.[39]
Tucker Max suing somebody for defamation of character is laughable, considering that he's setting himself up for a huge fall.
How huge? Well, in a number of states, claiming to videotape somebody during a sex act without their consent is CONSIDERED A SEX CRIME. It's a jailable offense in the state of Florida (where this occurred).
Tucker taking the stand in his own defense would be the death blow to his on-line persona. TDG said it best when he stated that an army of lawyers would be able to easily pick apart his "true" stories a lot better than some random person on the internet. Even a win would be a loss for him, because he'd most certainly be exposed as a liar and a fraud.
The other thing is, Tucker himself was protected by the 1st Amendment in his case with Miss Vermont.
She had a claim of Libel against him for what he put on the website.
Tucker won, by use of the 1st amendment.
Now, he expects to get to violate other persons 1st Amendment rights. I'm thinking no. The law doesn't work one way for you but not for other people.
He has no shot.
Tucker didn't win solely on 1st Amendment. He won because his story was true.
Sure it was a dick move to post the story, but Tucker had several materials of corroborating evidence. (Pictures, the shooting target love note, etc)
She was more angry about the fact that the story was ruining her image than the fact that it was a lie (which it wasn't).
Say what you want about his other stories, but the Miss Vermont one has been proven true.
^^ Yeah, there's no need for hyperbole. The Vermont story probably is true, and really, there's nothing unbelievable about it anyway. It's not like Tucker crashed her car into a phantom donut shop, or went to the bathroom in her living room, or had her go the bathroom on his penis, or any of the other classy and virtuous things he says he's done.
"If any of you are going to any of his shows, please ask him the question I posed above.""
Tucker's answer: "Who?"
There was a very similar article that came out about a year ago, where a woman described how, in college, she was hanging out with this guy she thought was cool, then realized that he wasn't going to let her leave the room until she had sex with his black roommate, and was accusing her of racism because she didn't want to. She went along with it, felt terrible, had various psych problems, got over them, lived her life. Then saw the guy's name in the news again. She made a point of confronting him and asking him why he had done such a thing. His answer: "I'm sorry, I have no idea who you are" and that was all she could get out of him. She tried going to the papers but aside from the one article they pretty much weren't interested - not even to the point of doing basic background fact checks to see if the story held together.
Who was this conveniently forgetful guy? William Ayers, the man our dearly beloved superpresident considers a mentor. (And the woman claimed to be an otherwise liberal Jew)
So, yeah. This will get exactly nowhere. It certainly won't be the equivalent of tying him down and torturing him into a confession, which may be what you prefer. It may even get you jeered by the audience as being just another silly protester. I'm not saying you shouldn't do it, but be prepared for that sort of result.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Wait, so based on your story reference, Tucker made her have sex with JoJo?
The Anne-Marie story sounds fishy, but I wouldn't put it past Tucker Max.
"So, yeah. This will get exactly nowhere. It certainly won't be the equivalent of tying him down and torturing him into a confession, which may be what you prefer. It may even get you jeered by the audience as being just another silly protester. I'm not saying you shouldn't do it, but be prepared for that sort of result."
Bullshit. It would get high fives and shit from Tucker's audience, because Tucker most likely would stand up raise his hand and ask the crowd:
"Raise your hand if you've ever had sex that caused a person to commit suicide!!"
And the crowd would cheer.
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