Rockecenter drew the pack of assignments and contracts to him. Smiling slightly, he rapidly began to sign on every signature place. He finished straight on through to the will and scrawled his name on it with a flourish.

"Now, Jew," he said, pointing to Izzy, "it's your turn."

Izzy grabbed the pack, bent over, adjusted his spectacles and began to sign.

"Now you," said Rockecenter to Twoey when Izzy was done. "There's a document here relating to the trust that requires your signature."

Twoey shuffled forward and scrawled his name.

Rockecenter looked at Heller, then at Bury. "Doesn't he need to sign a quitclaim?"

Bury nodded and went to his attach case and got out a blank form. He brought it over to the desk.

"Now," said Rockecenter, "Bury, as a notary, will need your I.D. to verify your signatures, so lay your wallets out right here." He tapped the middle of the desk.

All three put their wallets there.

Bury looked at them and the signatures. He got busy with notarial stamps and worked down through the pile. Rockecenter whispered something to him.

The Wall Street lawyer got to the last sheet. It was Heller's quitclaim. "You've signed this Jerome Terrance Wister." He finished notarizing it. "But I am going to have to have one signed Delbert John Rockecenter, Junior, from you also. I'll get another blank."

He walked around Heller and went to the wall where his attache case lay. He reached in and handed Heller the second quitclaim.

Heller bent over to fill it in and sign it.

He had his eye on the top of a solid silver inkwell.

In distortion, he saw Bury draw! : Behind his back, the gun came out like a striking snakel

Heller whirled. His hand shot up!

He caught Bury's wrist, forcing it toward the ceiling! THE GUN WENT OFF!

Heller bent the arm into a smashing blow!

He made the clenched gun strike Bury's head!

The scalp parted to the bone!

"HOLD IT!" came a shout.

Heller whirled.

The library doors had slammed open.

THERE CROUCHED AN INFANTRYMAN WITH A BAZOOKA!

TWO MORE SOLDIERS HAD THEIR RIFLES ON HELLER!

Bury fell to the floor behind the couch, blood pouring from his head.

He had taken the gun with him!

Heller stood there, unarmed. The soldiers were too far away to rush.

Rockecenter stood, with a sharp, crazy laugh. He scooped up all the papers. He scooped up their wallets. He reached down and grabbed a huge steel briefcase. It had a circular dial combination. He opened it. The only thing that made it different from a safe was that it had a handle.

"You think I'd keep my word on a crazy deal like that? All I wanted from you was the patents! Now we can nullify and hide this work and keep the world on profitable oil." He peered over at Bury on the floor. The man appeared to be dead. "I'll take the rest of this along to keep it out of plotting hands." He stuffed the papers and wallets and all Izzy's papers into the case, got them out of the way of the beveled, fitted edges, closed it and spun the combination.

A major general came rushing in, followed by a squad.

"General," said Rockecenter, "hold this riffraff until I return. Then, as we will be at war, we'll have work for a firing squad!"

Has Rockecenter foiled the entire plan?

What will Hisst do to retaliate?

Find out in MISSION EARTH

Volume 9 Villainy Victorious

About the Author L. Ron Hubbard

Born in 1911, the son of a U.S. naval officer, the legendary L. Ron Hubbard grew up in the great American West and was acquainted early with a rugged outdoor life before he took to the sea. The cowboys, Indians and mountains of Montana were balanced with an open sea, temples and the throngs of the Orient as Hubbard journeyed through the Far East as a teenager. By the time he was nineteen, he had travelled over a quarter of a million sea miles and thousands on land, recording his experiences in a series of diaries, mixed with story ideas.

When Hubbard returned to the U.S., his insatiable curiosity and demand for excitement sent him into the sky as a barnstormer where he quickly earned a reputation for his skill and daring. Then he turned his attention to the sea again. This time it was four-masted schooners and voyages into the Caribbean, where he found the adventure and experience that was to serve him later at the typewriter.

Drawing from his travels, he produced an amazing plethora of stories, from adventure and westerns to mystery and detective.

By 1938, Hubbard was already established and recognized as one of the top-selling authors, when a major new magazine, Street and Smith's Astounding Science Fiction, called for new blood. Hubbard was urged to try his hand at science fiction. The redheaded author protested that he did not write about "machines and machinery" but that he wrote about people. "That's just what we want," he was told. The result was a barrage of stories from Hubbard that expanded the scope and changed the face of the genre, gaining Hubbard a repute, along with Robert Heinlein, as one of the "founding fathers" of the great Golden Age of Science Fiction.

Then as now he excited intense critical comparison with the best of H. G. Wells and Edgar Allan Poe. His prodigious creative output of more than a hundred novels and novelettes and more than two hundred short stories, with over twenty-two million copies of fiction in a dozen languages sold throughout the world, is a true publishing phenomenon.

But perhaps most important is that as time went on, Hubbard's work and style developed to masterful proportions. The 1982 blockbuster Battlefield Earth, celebrating Hubbard's 50th year as a pro writer, remained for 32 weeks on the nation's bestseller lists and received the highest critical acclaim.

"A superlative storyteller with total mastery of plot and pacing."—Publishers Weekly

"A huge (800+ pages) slugfest. Mr. Hubbard celebrates fifty years as a pro writer with tight plotting, furious action, and have-at-'em entertainment."—Kirkus Review

But the final magnum opus was yet to come. L. Ron Hubbard, after completing Battlefield Earth, sat down and did what few writers have dared contemplate—let alone achieve. He wrote the ten-volume space adventure satire Mission Earth.

Filled with a dazzling array of other-world weaponry and systems, Mission Earth is a spectacular cavalcade of battles, of stunning plot reversals, with heroes and heroines, villains and villainesses, caught up in a superbly imaginative, intricately plotted invasion of Earth—as seen entirely and uniquely through the eyes of the aliens that already walk among us. With the distinctive pace, artistry and humor that is the inimitable hallmark of L. Ron Hubbard, Mission Earth weaves a hilarious, fast-paced adventure tale of ingenious alien intrigue, told with biting social commentary in the great classic tradition of Swift, Wells and Orwell.

So unprecedented is this work, that a new term—dekalogy (meaning ten books)—had to be coined just to describe its breadth and scope.

With the manuscript completed and in the hands of the publisher and all of his other work done, L. Ron Hubbard departed his body on January 24, 1986. He left behind a timeless legacy of unparalleled story-telling richness for you the reader to enjoy, as other readers have, time and again, over the past half century.

We the publishers are proud to present L. Ron Hubbard's dazzling tour de force: the Mission Earth dekalogy.