Mission: Earth "Black Genesis" by Ron L. Hubbard Read Free Book Online Page A

miles. Spacers are really crazy.
    "Flowers?" said Heller.
    "The yellow ones in the fields near the road are sunflowers. They are huge. They produce a vast number of seeds in the center which people love to eat. It's a food crop."
    "Wow," he said. "There's enough square miles of them! But what are those smaller ones in the other fields? The ones with various colored petals, dark centers and gray-green leaves?"
    He was looking at Papaver somniferum, the opium poppies, the stuff of deadly sleep and dreams, the source of heroin—the real reason the Apparatus had this base. He was too close for comfort. Afyon is the opium growing center of Turkey, perhaps the world.
    "They sell them in the flower markets," I lied. He was such a child at a game he didn't know. "Now, what I wanted to point out was the actual base. Pull that view wider. Good. Now draw a line from that lake there. Got it? Through Afyonkarahisar. Now, right on that line is a mountain. Got it?"
    He had. I continued, "The top of that mountain is an electronic simulation. It doesn't exist. But the wave scanners they use on this planet—and any they will develop—react on it normally. You just land straight through it and you are into our hangars."
    "Pretty good," he said.
    "It's quite old, really," I said. "Rock disintegrator crews came in here several decades ago from Voltar and built it and the subterranean base. It's quite extensive. Last year we enlarged it."
    He seemed impressed, so I said, "Yes, I had a hand in its extension. I added a lot of burrows and twists and
    turns. You can emerge in several places quite unexpectedly. But I had a real master to work from." "Oh?" he said.
    I checked myself. I had almost said Bugs Bunny. He wouldn't understand. I hurried on. "Center in on that mountain and nearby you will see a satellite tracking station. Got it? Good. Now, at the end of that canyon, you see that square block building? Good. That's the International Agricultural Training Center for Peasants. All right, now do you see that new earth there in the north of the canyon? That is an archaeological dig in an old Phrygian tomb and those houses around it are where the scientists live."
    "Well?" he said.
    I wanted to startle him. He wasn't the only bright one in the universe. "The satellite engineers, the whole school staff, all the scientists at the dig—they're all us!" "Well, I never! Really?"
    I knew I had him. "Turkey is so crazy to get modernized, has been for over half a century, that a lot of our work is even state and internationally funded by Earth!" "But how do you get papers? Identoplates and so on?" "Listen, these are very primitive people. They breed heavily. They have disease and babies die. Typical riffraff. So for over half a century, when a baby is born, we've made sure the birth is registered. But when it dies, we've made sure the death isn't registered. The officials are corrupt. That gives us tons of birth certificates, more than we could ever hope to use.
    "Also, the country is waist-deep in poverty and workers go abroad by the hundreds of thousands and they register overseas and this even gives us foreign passports. "Once in a while—they have a thing called the draft for the Army—one of our birth certificates gets drafted. So an Apparatus guardsman answers the call and does
    his tour in the Turkish army. The Turkish army runs the country so we even have officers in Istanbul. Naturally, we choose people who look somewhat like Turks but this country has dozens of races in it so who notices?"
    "Brilliant," said Heller. And, in fact, he was impressed. "Then we kind of own this little piece of the planet."
    "Pretty much," I said.
    "I wish you controlled some of the Caucasus," he said. "I'd really like to look it over."
    He was hopeless. I smiled indulgently. "Well, tonight we'll be groundside and you can catch a ride into Afyon and look over our little empire anyway." I wanted to really test those bugs that Prahd had implanted in him.
    "Good," he