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http://www.foxnews.com/us/2016/05/13/flight-logs-show-bill-clinton-flew-on-sex-offenders-jet-much-more-than-previously-known.html

Flight logs show Bill Clinton flew on sex offender's jet much more than previously known

Former President Bill Clinton was a much more frequent flyer on a registered sex offender’s infamous jet than previously reported, with flight logs showing the former president taking at least 26 trips aboard the “Lolita Express” -- even apparently ditching his Secret Service detail for at least five of the flights, according to records obtained by FoxNews.com.

Clinton’s presence aboard Jeffrey Epstein’s Boeing 727 on 11 occasions has been reported, but flight logs show the number is more than double that, and trips between 2001 and 2003 included extended junkets around the world with Epstein and fellow passengers identified on manifests by their initials or first names, including “Tatiana.” The tricked-out jet earned its Nabakov-inspired nickname because it was reportedly outfitted with a bed where passengers had group sex with young girls.

“Bill Clinton … associated with a man like Jeffrey Epstein, who everyone in New York, certainly within his inner circles, knew was a pedophile,” said Conchita Sarnoff, of the Washington, D.C. based non-profit Alliance to Rescue Victims of Trafficking, and author of a book on the Epstein case called "TrafficKing." “Why would a former president associate with a man like that?”

Epstein, who counts among his pals royal figures, heads of state, celebrities and fellow billionaires, spent 13 months in prison and home detention for solicitation and procurement of minors for prostitution. He allegedly had a team of traffickers who procured girls as young as 12 to service his friends on “Orgy Island,” an estate on Epstein's 72-acre island, called Little St. James, in the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Virginia Roberts, 32, who claims she was pimped out by Epstein at age 15, has previously claimed she saw Clinton at Epstein’s getaway in 2002, but logs do not show Clinton aboard any flights to St. Thomas, the nearest airport capable of accommodating Epstein's plane. They do show Clinton flying aboard Epstein’s plane to such destinations as Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, China, Brunei, London, New York, the Azores, Belgium, Norway, Russia and Africa.

Among those regularly traveling with Clinton were Epstein’s associates, New York socialite Ghislaine Maxwell and Epstein’s assistant, Sarah Kellen, both of whom were investigated by the FBI and Palm Beach Police for recruiting girls for Epstein and his friends.

Official flight logs filed with the Federal Aviation Administration show Clinton traveled on some of the trips with as many as 10 U.S. Secret Service agents. However, on a five-leg Asia trip between May 22 and May 25, 2002, not a single Secret Service agent is listed. The U.S. Secret Service has declined to answer multiple Freedom of Information Act requests filed by FoxNews.com seeking information on these trips. Clinton would have been required to file a form to dismiss the agent detail, a former Secret Service agent told FoxNews.com.

In response to a separate FOIA request from FoxNews.com, the U.S. Secret Service said it has no records showing agents were ever on the island with Clinton.

A Clinton spokesperson did not return emails requesting comment about the former president’s relationship and travels with Epstein. The Clinton Library said it had no relevant information and does not keep track of Clinton’s travel records.

Martin Weinberg, Epstein’s current attorney, did not respond to multiple inquiries. Epstein said in a court filing said that he and his associates “have been the subject of the most outlandish and offensive attacks, allegations, and plain inventions.”

However, hundreds of pages of court records, including reports from police and FBI agents, reviewed by FoxNews.com, show Epstein was under law enforcement scrutiny for more than a year.

Police in Palm Beach, Fla., launched a year-long investigation in 2005 into Epstein after parents of a 14-year-old girl said their daughter was sexually abused by him. Police interviewed dozens of witnesses, confiscated his trash, performed surveillance and searched his Palm Beach mansion, ultimately identifying 20 girls between the ages of 14 and 17 who they said were sexually abused by Epstein.

In 2006, at the request of Palm Beach Police, the FBI launched a federal probe into allegations that Epstein and his personal assistants had “used facilities of interstate commerce to induce girls between the ages of 14 and 17 to engage in illegal sexual activities.”

According to court documents, police investigators found a “clear indication that Epstein’s staff was frequently working to schedule multiple young girls between the ages of 12 and 16 years old literally every day, often two or three times per day.”

One victim, in sworn deposition testimony, said Epstein began sexually assaulting her when she was 13 years old and molested her on more than 50 occasions over the next three years. The girls testified they were lured to Epstein’s home after being promised hundreds of dollars to be his model or masseuse, but when they arrived, he ordered them to take off their clothes and massage his naked body while he masturbated and used sex toys on them.

The U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida prepared charging documents that accused Epstein of child sex abuse, witness tampering and money laundering, but Epstein took a plea deal before an indictment could be handed up.

On Sept. 24, 2007, in a deal shrouded in secrecy that left alleged victims shocked at its leniency, Epstein agreed to a 30-month sentence, including 18 months of jail time and 12 months of house arrest and the agreement to pay dozens of young girls under a federal statute providing for compensation to victims of child sexual abuse.

In exchange, the U.S. Attorney’s Office promised not to pursue any federal charges against Epstein or his co-conspirators.

Florida attorney Brad Edwards, who represented some of Epstein’s alleged victims, is suing the federal government over the secret non-prosecution agreement in hopes of having it overturned. Edwards claimed in court records that the government and Epstein concealed the deal from the victims “to prevent them from voicing any objection, and to avoid the firestorm of controversy that would have arisen if it had become known that the Government was immunizing a politically-connected billionaire and all of his co-conspirators from prosecution of hundreds of federal sex crimes against minor girls.”

The U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida did not respond to a request for comment about the deal.

Other politicians, celebrities and businessmen, including presidential candidate Donald Trump, have been accused of fraternizing with Epstein. Trump lawyer Alan Garten told FoxNews.com in a statement Trump and Epstein are not pals.

“There was no relationship between Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump,” he said. “They were not friends and they did not socialize together.”

It's my own fault, I suppose, but... OUCH! I'm hoping there is a solution in the collective wisdom of my fellow Soylentils.

My primary browser is Pale Moon (PM), a fork of Mozilla's Firefox (FF), which I run on Win 7 Pro x64.

Scenario: I tend to leave my browser open for days/weeks at a time. I regularly have 30+ tabs open with everything from SN's main site and editor-related pages, local weather forecast/history, Folding@Home stats, a few blogs I follow, etc. On occasion, depending on what I've been working on, I find myself with 70 tabs open. That is not a problem.

Once in a great while, I'll find myself switching back and forth between two tabs so often (like when submitting/reviewing a story), I find it easier to move one of the tabs to a separate window, so that I can see both on my screen at the same time. Or, on other occasions, I'll do a 'view page source' on a tab which is then opened in another browser window.

Event: On rare occasions, I need to reboot my system, or reload PM (after an update). I pre-emptively close PM and see a warning dialog displayed which states something like: "You have 37 tabs open; do you really want to close Pale Moon?" This is good! Yep, I know that I have a whole bunch of tabs open, no big deal. I let it shut down. Do whatever I needed to do. I relaunch PM and all my tabs are sitting there waiting to be reloaded. Usually.

NOTE: I suspect this capability may be a result of the Tab Mix Plus (TMP) addon I have installed, but it has become critical to my workflow and I don't want to lose the settings/features I've enabled, so I do not mess around with disabling it.

Problem: The problem arises when I have multiple Pale Moon windows open. I'll have, say, my main PM window open with those 37+ tabs, and another PM window open with a tab or two. I close the main window, get the dialog, confirm, and only then do I discover that I have another PM window open, with its one or two tabs. I complete closing this last instance of PM. Here's the problem... when I restart PM, I now only see the one or tabs from the last window I closed -- the other 37+ tabs are lost. (The workaround is to go through my browser history and try to find and reload all the prior tabs, but that is a major, time-consuming, error-prone pain.)

WIBNI: (Wouldn't it be nice if) What I would like to see is the warning dialog not only caution me that I have 37+ TABS open, but also warn that there are 'N' other WINDOWS open, as well. At that point, I could merge windows into one, or close the tabs in the other, non-main window. Only after closing all the other PM windows, would I then close my main window. Then, when I reloaded PM, I'd find all my tabs in all the same places and ready to reload.

Request: Has anyone else here run into this problem? Is there a setting, whether in TMP or PM, that I am missing? Do you know of a setting or addon that warns me when I am closing one of multiple windows? Any other suggestions on how I can avoid losing my window/tabs context for later restore?

Thanks for the kind message. I have been looking to submit more through the recent dry spell, but the usual sources did run pretty thin. Perhaps we could put call-outs for Soylentils to submit good primers and how-to's they have found to fill those rough patches?

Well - I work in a plastic factory. Production makes thousands of identical parts, every night, some of them to be assembled with other parts before they leave the plant. Parts need to have flash trimmed off of them, sometimes, and various other tasks have to be performed before packing the parts into boxes for shipping. All light work - the worst part of the work is the heat. Plastic has to be melted before it can be injected into a mold, so it's hot. That really is the worst part of the job.

Well - this week, we've had THREE new hires walk out of the plant, mid-shift, literally CRYING! Crying, because they can't perform the tasks. Worse - it was one female, whom I can overlook, and TWO MALES, which is very damned hard to overlook. Women have always had license to cry, but GUYS?!?!?!

I might understand, if the job were difficult. It really isn't though. No one in production lifts weight over - ohhhh - maybe twenty pounds. There is no physically demanding task to be done. Well, aside from standing on your feet for eight hours. Just a little moderate coordination, just a little bit of strength, and just the tiniest bit of perseverance, you get through the shift, and then you can sit and rub your tired feet all you want.

And, three millennials walked out of the plant, CRYING, because they couldn't handle it.

FFS, what is this nation coming to? I'm beginning to believe that we DESERVE to be eclipsed by the rest of the world, where they still raise young men and women willing to work.

My first paying job, for which I needed a Social Security number? A place that was competing with McDonald's. I spent my sophomore year in high school working there, but when summer came, I wanted a REAL JOB. A few months of wimpy-assed work, serving burgers and wiping counters was enough for me, I wanted a MAN'S JOB! So, the summer between 10th and 11th grades, I got a job with a roofer.

How many of you knows what a bundle of shingles weighs? Typically, people want 270 weight shingles on their roofs. 270 pounds per 100 sq ft of coverage, each bundle covers 33 sq ft, so a bundle weighs 90 pounds. Here I am, an 85 pound runt, looking at those 90 pound bundles. Hmmmm - heft one onto my shoulder like the other guys are doing, and head on up the ladder. Holy SHIT people, my legs were flaccid rubber by the time I got up there! Did I walk off crying? FEK NO!! Ease on down the ladder, look at that next bundle, flop it up on my shoulder, and off I went again. THIS WAS MAN'S WORK! If they had tried to run me off, I'd have fought them! It took a couple weeks before I built up enough strength to carry ten square of shingles up on the roof without panting like a winded horse.

I haven't spent all of my life doing such strenuous work, but I've always done work that involved some physical labor, at least.

Plastics. This work is EASY! There's just nothing to it. My mama did this work when she was 70 years old. A little bitty tiny woman handled this at 70. Mama was tough as nails when she wanted to be, but she wasn't some hulking Amazon!

And, this week, I see THREE apparently healthy youngsters walk out of the plant, CRYING, because the work is "to hard"!!!

I just don't have the words to express my contempt for the people who are going to be running our country in the years to come. I simply can't imagine how they are ever going to make anything of themselves. Flabbergasted, I am.

I guess it's payback time. The US has exploited much of the world over the past 100 years or so. With candy asses like these set to take over this country, I expect that the US is going to be exploited right up the ass. China is already showing us that they are able to work their asses off. India as well. Korea, and much of the Pacific.

Maybe I'll join all the damned fool progressives who promise to renounce their citizenship if Trump is elected. I can't stand to watch weenie babies trying to do easy work, and failing. I don't have much in common with Koreans, or Indians, but I could stand to spend my last years watching honest men and women earn a living. Watching crybabies whine because simple tasks are "to hard" may just drive me to suicide. Or, drugs, which amounts to the same thing.

Ten years ago I wrote a humorous article titled “Useful Dead Technologies” about technologies that are no longer used that I sorely miss, like furnaces that still worked when the power went out, or things made of durable steel instead of today’s fragile and short-lived plastics.
        A couple of the things on the list have improved since then. Shoelaces, for instance. Ten years ago I wrote:
        “Shoelaces have been designed for hundreds of years to keep your shoes on your feet. No longer. Today's shoelaces are designed with one purpose in mind – to annoy you.
        “What are they making shoelaces out of now? Nylon! Good old frictionless nylon ‘because of its strength’. One wonders if today's engineers even need a college degree, as it seems that some things, like today's shoelaces, were designed by “special ed” students.
        “Because now, not only are they made of a friction-free material, they're round rather than flat, further eroding their ability to stay tied.”
        Since then, they’ve been making them of both cotton and nylon woven together, with all the friction of cotton and the strength of nylon.
        And they’re flat again.
        Another item was knobs on car radios. At the beginning of the century they had buttons for tuning and volume, so you couldn’t turn it up or down without taking your eyes off the road. It was dangerous. Thankfully, they’ve gone back to knobs, even though they’re digital rather than potentiometers.
        The radio in my car now really annoys me, because the morons who designed it stupidly put the volume knob right above the tuning knob rather than the time tested volume on the left side of the radio and tuning on the right. Often when I try to adjust the volume, I’ll grab the wrong knob.
        I also miss the way presets worked back in the analog age. They were simple to operate: to set a preset to a station, you tuned the radio to that station, pulled out on the button, and pushed it back in. These days you simply cannot tune a station to a preset while you’re driving, at least unless you’re a suicidal maniac. What’s worse, every radio has a different way of tuning a preset button, and many are impossible to figure out without an owner’s manual.
        The worst thing about that radio is I can’t change the time on the clock. The car came with a manual, but they put three different models of radio in those cars, and the manual lists all of them. But each of the three says to push a button that simply isn’t on the radio!
        And I just discovered by watching a commercial where they were trying to sell new cars – the morons took the knobs away again, and now it’s even worse than the buttons. Now they have touch screens. There’s no way possible to change the station or volume without taking your eyes off the road!
        I’m all for hiring the handicapped, but I wish they wouldn’t hire idiots to be engineers. Touch screens for automobile controls are brain-dead stupid.
        The following items haven’t all become extinct in the last decade, I simply didn’t think of them when I wrote it. Here are some more.

Thermostats that don’t need batteries
        In the twentieth century, thermostats were simple yet clever devices: a mercury switch on the end of two dissimilar metals. The metal would bend one way or the other depending on temperature. When the metal reached a certain shape, the mercury would roll down the inside of the switch and close the circuit.
        Shortly before the turn of the century they came out with programmable thermostats, and they were indeed superior despite the one disadvantage of needing a battery; perhaps it could be done, but I don’t see how you could have a programmable thermostat without one. But they could be set to turn themselves down at bedtime, then warm the house back up before you arose in the morning. More comfort, lower heating costs.
        Fast forward to a couple of years ago when the landlord had a new furnace installed in my house. With the new furnace came a new thermostat. The old thermostat was programmable, the new one isn’t.
        But it’s digital and still needs batteries.
        At first I thought they had to be digital because mercury has been shown to be toxic, but on second thought you could simply have a copper ball replacing the mercury. Such a switch would be easy to engineer.
        Folks, digital thermostats have been in use for a couple of decades now. Why aren’t new homes designed to have a low voltage DC supply to thermostats so batteries wouldn’t be needed?

Sticky Menus
        When GUIs first came out they were a great improvement over the old CLIs. Easy to use and hard to screw up. Click on a menu heading and the menu drops down. Nothing happened until you clicked somewhere. If you clicked on an empty space the menu closed. Click on a different menu and that menu opened.
        So some moron had the bright idea that if you had the file menu open and simply mouse over the edit menu, File closes and Edit opens.
        This incredibly stupid change drives me nuts, especially in Firefox and GIMP. I have nested bookmarks in Firefox, and after clicking a folder I have to slowly and carefully slide the cursor over, making sure the cursor never goes over a different folder, as the folder I want will close and the one I don’t opens.
        GIMP drives me nuts, too, especially trying to select the “rectangle select” from the “selection” menu, as the “filters” menu will open when I’m trying to navigate to “rectangle select”.
        Folks, losing sticky menus was an incredibly stupid, productivity killing thing. BRING THEM BACK!

Rectangular cabinets
        Stuff used to have cabinets made of wood. The better stuff had rounded corners, because they were safer.
        Every large CRT TV I ever owned was rectangular, before 2002 when I bought a forty two inch Sony Trinitron. It takes up a huge amount of floor space, and you can’t set anything on it because it’s stupidly shaped. My DVD and VCR and converter box should be able to sit on it, but nothing can.
        The rectangular shape is far from extinct, but more and more things seem to be eschewing it.

Useful user manuals
        Some would criticize me for this one, saying user manuals always sucked, and they would have a valid point. When I was young, user manuals were complete – and completely unreadable to many if not most people. I had trouble making heads or tails out of more than one, and I could read at a post-doctoral level at age 12 (although I didn’t understand the math).
        DOS 6.2 came in a box with two floppies and a thick user manual. Windows 95 came with a very thin manual. I don’t remember what XP’s was like, but the manual for this old Acer laptop was really thin.
        Then my phone. Honestly, come on, now, a smart phone is a complex, sophisticated piece of equipment but its user manual is three by five inches and a dozen pages?
        The worst was the “Seagate Personal Cloud”, which is really a network hard drive. Tiny pamphlet with pictures and few words. Look, folks, pictures are good for illustration but lousy for information. I spent twenty useless minutes studying the thing, then finally just plugged it in and turned it on. It didn’t even need a manual!
        I did find a detailed, very good manual for it online. Its printed manual should have added its URL.

Automobile hoods and trunks that didn’t need props
        Before the 1970s, to open a hood you opened the hood latch, and springs opened the hood and held it open. It was an ingenious design where it didn’t spring open, you lifted it a little first. Trunks worked the same way. It didn’t matter if it was a Volkswagen, a little Plymouth Valiant, or a big luxury Cadillac.
        Then the Arab oil embargo hit in 1974 and the price of gasoline doubled in a matter of months. People started replacing their American gas guzzlers with compact Japanese cars that had far better mileage.
        The more weight a vehicle carries, the worse its mileage is. Part of the raising of gas mileage was replacing the heavy steel with a lighter material when possible, and those springs and the rest of the steel assembly for them were jettisoned, replaced with that stupid hood prop.
        Soon American auto makers started following suit. I don’t know if big sedans and luxury cars ever went to hood props, but I know my ‘67 Mustang had no hood prop, nor did my ‘74 LeMans. My 76 Vega did, though, as did every other car I owned until I bought an ‘02 Concorde. Rather than springs or a hood prop, it had lightweight hydraulic struts for both the front and back.
        It was far better than a hood prop, but not as good as the spring mechanism. Those springs lasted forever, but the struts fail in a few years and you wind up propping up your hood and trunk with a stick. Either that or shell out for new ones.

Bumper Jacks
        All cars and trucks used to have bumpers, and there was a slot on each end of each bumper. The slots were for flat tires. If you had a flat, you got the jack out of the car, hooked it into the slot, and jacked it up with its handle like you were pumping water out of a hand operated well pump. This was easy on the back, as you were standing up. It took very little effort to jack up the vehicle.
        Now they all have scissors jacks, and I hate them. You have to get down on your hands and knees to slide it under the car, and jack it up by cranking it. It always takes skin off of your knuckles and takes twice the effort and three times the time.
        Yes, the new jacks take up far less space, but the trade-offs simply weren’t worth it.
        I miss the full sized spares, too. If you had a flat, you changed the tire, got the flat tire fixed, and simply put that one in the trunk instead of having to change the “doughnut” to put your real tire on.
        At least we have fix-a-flat now.

It's that time again. Time to pay tribute to those willing, nay eager, to say that which a lot of people do not want to hear. Be their motives sincere or simply to wind you up, they are the souls brave enough to be unpopular with the masses. Here are the top ten by sheer number of times modded Troll and (of the top 50 of the previous group) the top ten by percent of their comments that have been modded Troll. These are not an "all time" list, only the ones that haven't fallen off the end of our moderation log table. By count: NickTrolls%Troll Ethanol-fueled50117% Runaway19562617% jmorris18412% The Mighty Buzzard18111% aristarchus1558% Hairyfeet1459% frojack1262% zugedneb8624% khallow706% VLM672%

By percent: NickTrolls%Troll zugedneb8624% Ethanol-fueled50117% Khyber2015% jmorris18412% The Mighty Buzzard18111% jasassin3010% Hairyfeet1459% aristarchus1558% Arik418% TLA148%

Yeah, so someone suggested a pretty good name for the April 1st theme and I utterly lost track of it. Which is a shame because it's currently named "april1". Anyone have a link, remember what it was, or have a suggestion of their own? Best my brain is kicking out is GeoShitties and I don't particularly want to put "shit" in community-facing site stuff (code comments are another matter entirely).

When I'm in an actual S/N thread of comments I almost never see the "slow down cowboy". That wait is a good thing in that case, but I wish you would shut it off when one is replying to comments left in the "messages". They're yesterday's or older and usually not in the same thread.

I finished this story early January, and it's made the rounds of magazines it would fit in that I submit to, except Analog and the new site Compelling SF. Compelling has "Agoraphobia" and it will be six weeks before I can submit anything else, and Analog holds on to them for six months. So you guys get it. It will be in a future book titled "Voyage to Earth and Other Stories".

          I’m going to kill a planet. I don’t know how yet, but I swear I’m going to do it.

        I was making a routine prospecting run and got a radio message from my best friend. As luck and coincidence would have it, the radio relay was only a little over two light hours away—and Roger was either dying or already dead.

        The radio’s message started “Warning! Anyone who hears this, stay away from Darius. This is probably the deadliest planet in the galaxy. If you land here, you’ll die here. I’ll probably be dead by the time you receive this message.”

        Darius? He was prospecting in the Luhman system, the same system that I was, and I didn’t even know it. I doubt he knew I was in the system, too. I hadn’t heard from him in months, and here he was only between a light hour and three away. I wondered what he was looking for? I was after rare earths. This system was supposed to be a lot like the solar system and we’d mined quite a bit of it from our own asteroid belt. Most of the rare earths in the belt, in fact. But Darius? What of value could possibly be there?

        I couldn’t bring myself to leave him there despite his dire warnings, at least until I’d heard the entire thing and knew he was... Oh, God. Roger!

        I started the jump drive and in half an hour I’d be on my way to Darius to see if there was any way I could help him survive. I listened to the rest of the message as the engines warmed up.

        “I don’t remember the crash, but I suspect it was the cornodium that caused it. Do not land on this planet!”

        I wondered what in the galaxy cornodium was. I’d never heard of the stuff before.

        “I woke up on the floor with a terrible headache, not knowing where I was. Hung over, maybe? I sat up and looked around. No, I was in the pilot room of my craft and wouldn’t have been drinking. I got up with my head reeling, and stumbled to the controls.

        “It looked like I’d crashed on Darius, the third orbit out from Luhman. That’s the weirdest star system we’ve found so far, weird because it was so much like the sun, and its planets were so much like our own solar system’s planets. Darius even has a giant satellite like Earth does, and the Luhman system even has a ring of asteroids between the fourth and fifth planets, just like the solar system. Nature is really strange sometimes.

        “I was looking for cornodium. Only small amounts had been found anywhere, and my calculations said the substance would be here, and likely vast riches of it. I don’t know how many of us prospectors roam the galaxy these days, but we’ve looked for valuable ores either not readily available or not available at all in our own system on hundreds of thousands of planets, and cornodium had only been found on six of them. None had much of it. It had all been mined and taken to Earth, less than a ton of the substance.

        “I didn’t know much about cornodium despite doing as much research as I could about it. It was discovered only ten years ago and had revolutionized high end electronics, and the highest end at that because the stuff was so rare, and therefore very expensive. All I knew about cornodium was that they used it for power generation, but I had no idea how they got power from it. I didn’t know what the stuff is or why it’s so rare, but I didn’t care. All I knew was that it was rare and very expensive, and if I found a planet with it I’d be rich, so I learned as much about its origins as I could. I was sure Darius fit the bill. If I was right I’d be as rich as my buddy who had found all that gold and platinum. I know now. Lot of good it will do a dead man.”

        I choked up again; Roger was thinking of me as he died.

        “Well, I would have been rich. It was obvious I’d crash landed on Darius.

        “My head was bleeding, which explained the headache. I ignored it; I needed to assess my situation and get help if necessary.

        “I checked the controls, and yep, I was screwed. I tried to radio for help, but radio only goes at the speed of light and the closest radio relay craft was thirty light minutes away. I sent a distress signal, knowing it would be over an hour before I heard back.

        “Two hours later it dawned on me—the antenna was on the bottom of the craft to better communicate with bodies one was taking off from or landing on. No one had heard me.

#
        “Like I said, Darius is really weird. They’d only surveyed it by telescope so far, but It’s exactly like Earth and its moon, with two exceptions: the land masses are quite different, and there is no life whatever. The air is mostly nitrogen like Earth, with about the same amount of oxygen and carbon dioxide, and science couldn’t explain where the oxygen came from. On Earth, it comes from vegetation and photosynthesis, but Darius was completely lifeless.

        “That didn’t matter to me, though. I needed to find the cornodium I was certain was here and stake a claim.

        “The trouble was, I seemed to have wrecked my craft, and it was all I had. It was insured, of course, but with my antenna busted how could I collect on the insurance? And find the cornodium and stake a claim?

        “I decided to go outside and think about it, since I needed to see how much damage was done in the crash. After all, what danger could there be? This planet was lifeless, including microbial life. It being lifeless was, of course, the biggest mystery, even bigger than where all the oxygen had all come from. The planet was perfect for life to have formed, yet it hadn’t. It should have even had sentient life, even though so far our own species was the only sentience we had ever found, which still puzzled evolutionists. We’d discovered lots of life in the galaxy, but most of it was no higher form of life than bacteria, and none smarter than a cow is on Earth.

        “I got out to do an outside inspection, and wow, I was right; the cornodium was everywhere, just laying on the ground! One piece looked like a daisy; nature comes up with some strange coincidences, and I laughed at it. There was a weird sound in the air, and I couldn’t figure out what it was or where it was coming from.

        “It looked like I’d smashed up the bottom of my craft pretty good. I’d have to find a way to make the radio work, and I decided to eat lunch and take a short walk first, since I was going to need all my brain and it didn’t seem to be working right, so I decided to give it a break. I ate lunch and went back outside.

        “Darius reminded me of Mars, except there was air and water. And mud. And the sky’s blue when Luhman is shining. It wasn’t the same color as Mars, either, more brown than orange, with all of the patches of the bright blue cornodium. Lots of large areas didn’t show dirt, just piles of small to tiny pieces of cornodium. And that strange sound, and it was heavy like Earth and the horizon was different than Mars, but it still reminded me of Mars, anyway. I don’t know why.

        “It wasn’t all that muddy, kind of like dry dirt that had a small shower maybe the day before and there were enough rocks to keep my boots from getting too nasty. Most of the rock and gravel was cornodium.

        I figured the planet wouldn’t be lifeless for long; this system had only been discovered six months ago. I came out as soon as I’d heard of it, because I had a hunch based on what I’d read about cornodium: it had only been found on lifeless planets with gravities between Mars’ gravity and one point five Earth gravities within a star’s “Goldilocks zone”, and Darius fit perfectly. I wondered why nobody else had figured that out, the numbers were all there.

        “I walked up a shallow incline, and when I reached the top I saw in the distance what looked like it might have been a large machine, halfway buried. I started walking toward it to investigate, but it started sprinkling and the sky looked menacing, so I went back to my ship. I needed to work on that radio, anyway. I’d have to find some wire that didn’t feed the radio or kitchen or air refreshment to use as an antenna.

        “Shortly after I was inside my craft it started storming badly, with thunder’s noise and the wind’s howl echoing through the boat constantly. I searched the ship for wire I could scavenge from the wreckage without stopping the kitchen or radio. I found enough to reach just outside, and now needed something to use as an antenna.

        “I thought of what had looked like half-buried machinery, and hoped there was wire in it, since all I would need for an antenna was a little more wire. I figured to go exploring it as soon as the storm abated.

        “It stormed all afternoon and half the night. The next morning when I woke up, Luhman was shining brightly in a cloudless sky. I ate breakfast, despite not being very hungry, and packed a lunch, because it had looked like the machine might be quite a way off. It seemed I’d gotten a concussion in the crash, because my head still hurt, and I was still weak and disoriented. My stomach was a bit queasy, too, especially after breakfast.

        “It was a two hour walk to the machine, and I had to rest halfway there. Where was my normal stamina? I should have been able to sprint to it. ‘Probably has to do with the concussion,’ I thought. I still wasn’t thinking clearly.

        “The thing was bigger and farther away than it looked. Space ship, perhaps? I looked for a door or a window or a hatch. I didn’t find one, but I did find an opening where the thing’s metal had torn; it had to be some sort of craft, although it was nothing like any craft I’d ever seen or imagined.

        “I didn’t find any wire, but I did find a steel rod I could use for an antenna, and two statues of some weird animal I’d never heard of, made of cornodium. There were strange sounds coming from the statues, which were clothed in rags. Art? Or... A chill went up my spine. Were these intelligent aliens that had somehow become cornodium? I thought of when I’d seen what looked like a flower made of cornodium earlier, and had thought it was one of those coincidental freaks of nature.

        “By then I wasn’t feeling well at all. In fact I felt downright sick, and decided to go back to my boat. I went outside, and noticed that my skin had taken on a slightly bluish tint.

        “By the time I got back I was weak and shaky, and cold. Really cold, as if I’d been in the snow in summer clothes, even though the day was very warm, almost hot. It only took a minute to hang the rod from the wire and start the radio.

        “I had made quite a few incredibly profound discoveries, discoveries that were incredibly important to humanity. I’d found evidence of alien intelligent life in the crashed alien craft, and another alien was taking me over—the planet itself. Rather than being lifeless, the planet itself is alive. It grows, reproduces, and eats. The cornodium is its brain! I now know why the strange sounds were coming from the alien statues; the planet was trying to taunt me in an alien language. It’s talking inside my head right now, in English. I... I have to... I have to set this on repeat... before Darius...

        “Warning! Anyone who hears this, stay away from Darius. This is probably the deadliest planet in the galaxy. If you land here, you’ll die here. I’ll probably be...”

        I shut it off and saved my best friend’s last words, tears welling up in my eyes. Even if I could have gotten to him in time, I couldn’t have rescued him. I doubt it’s possible to land safely on Darius, as I suspect it caused Roger’s craft to crash land.

#

        The jump drive made it seem like I got to Darius immediately, but it would have actually been five to twenty minutes later when I really got there, and hours since he had sent the message. I went into orbit around Darius and called the survey bureau and staked a claim to it. Nobody’s going to make batteries out of my friend! And I’m going to contact the authorities when I get to Earth and see if I can get the use of cornodium outlawed before all life there becomes cornodium. And I’m going to learn everything I can about the stuff. Including how to kill it.

        God, but the government is exasperating! I not only didn’t make any progress getting cornodium outlawed, I was issued a gag order! The substance promised to do wonders for the economy, because it seemed to produce free energy, despite the laws of thermodynamics.

        But of course it wasn’t doing that. It was getting energy from somewhere, and I was convinced that the somewhere was from the energy in life forms that were, little by little, becoming cornodium themselves. My friend Roger who had died and become cornodium died in a about a day, but it had been a planet that was almost completely covered in cornodium. People, animals, and plants on Earth were only exposed to tiny amounts of it. They would die of old age before becoming cornodium, because there was so little of it.

        But eventually Earth would become cornodium, I was sure. Ultimately enough live matter would become cornodium that it would awaken and eat everything that lived on Earth.

        I’m a very wealthy person, having discovered a planet that was mostly made of gold and another made of mostly platinum, two metals that are incredibly useful in electronics, and my mining licenses don’t come cheap. I decided to buy as much cornodium as I could, hopefully all of it, and send it to Darius. I hoped I could afford it.

        I’d bought half a ton at ridiculous prices when the government stepped in again. I’d dropped all the cornodium on Darius, and they took Darius from me. Imminent domain. There were a year of legal battles but I lost. Sure, I made a fortune on it, and I was now the richest individual on Earth, but damn it, I wanted Earth to live and these idiots were going to kill it!

        Crap. What to do next? I decided to chance ignoring the gag order and talk to a scientist, and contacted a local university. I was to have a meeting with a Dr. Felber, a materials scientist who was studying cornodium and trying to find a way to make artificial cornodium and a way to recharge cornodium batteries. I was a little uncertain about what the outcome might be, what with the gag order and all.

        She turned out to be a delightful woman, but of course the court order had me worried. “Dr. Felber,” I said, “I’ve been under a gag order about cornodium, and I’m not supposed to talk to anyone at all about it or they’ll put me in prison. Can you keep this to yourself?”

        She became a bit pensive. “Not if it’s something subversive.”

        “It isn’t. I have a recording of a dead friend that I’m not allowed to play anywhere, and if they knew it existed it wouldn’t exist. They had erased it from the radio relay’s data banks, but didn’t know I’d kept a copy.”

        She raised an eyebrow. “Play it,” she said. I did.

        When it was finished, she said “I’ve been exposed.”

        “Yes,” I replied, “and so have I. But there is so little of it you’ll be dead of old age long before it affects the tissues; Roger was on a planet where most of the whole crust was covered in cornodium. But we need to save the Earth!”

        “Yes,” she agreed, “But how?”

        “I don’t know, you’re the scientist. How can we kill it?”

        “Kill what?” she asked.

        “Kill Darius,” I said vengefully.

        “Kill a planet?”

        “Yes,” I replied, “before it kills us! It will, you know, if it lives.”

        She looked doubtful. “I’m going to have to study that sample some more, our present theories may all be wrong. That recording explains a few things that had puzzled us and may be a paradigm changer. I’ll get back to you. Don’t worry, this is between us.”

        A year and a half later rumors started leaking about government mining expeditions that had gone to Darius, all of whom had “mysteriously” disappeared. It was no mystery to me; those people were now all cornodium, no longer human, or even alive as we know life. They had been eaten by the evil monster that was Darius.

        Friends and relatives of the missing people were served the same gag order that I had been served, and a few were jailed after publicly complaining. So far, it was only rumor as far as the public was concerned... for now. Later on, a lot of politicians lost their jobs. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

        Six months after the rumors started, Dr. Felber emailed me. “See what I found” is all the email said. So I did, and visited her at the university.

        “It’s easy to kill,” she said when I visited her. “Middle C.”

        “Middle C?” I asked, perplexed.

        “Two hundred sixty one point six Hertz,” she replied. “That tone kills it. Earth is full of music, including that note, which we think is why they ever run down at all, so we have nothing to worry about.”

        My jaw dropped. “So if Roger had been playing music there he wouldn’t have died?”

        “Maybe, maybe not. It might have taken a very loud continuously operating tone generator, and even that might not have been enough.

        “There are only tiny amounts in any one place on Earth, where there’s lots of music, and cornodium batteries last ten years or more, and most of Darius is covered in the stuff.

        “In any case, even if he had lived, the cornodium would have been useless. Like the Land Bridge theory was replaced by continental drift, and the solid state universe was discarded in favor of the big bang theory, all of our theories about what made it vibrate were completely wrong.

        “We had believed that the vibration was caused by some process internal to the substance and trying to find where its power was stored; we had thought it must have been a chemical reaction that we hadn’t found. It made perfectly logical sense, since it seemed that the energy drained like a normal old fashioned chemical battery, except far more slowly and they couldn’t be recharged. People have been seriously injured trying to recharge them.”

        Wow. Dead cornodium wasn’t useless. I wondered why nobody thought of military and construction applications, since such a small amount was so explosive; the cornodium in a thousand watt battery was only about a cubic centimeter in size, although most of the battery is the piezoelectrics and the battery takes up a lot more room than a cubic centimeter, more like four cubic decimeters, and that thousand watts lasts for ten years or more. Yes, I’d learned a lot about cornodium since Darius had murdered Roger.

        Of course I didn’t say anything; kept to myself this could bankroll whatever it took to kill Darius. I needed to get that planet back.

        And kill the evil thing and let the military and construction crews blow the stuff up. Roger didn’t deserve to die like that! I’d had my legal team negotiating with the government for months by then, ever since the rumors about the missing miners had started floating around.

#

        Six months after that the government, failing to find a way to mine Darius, ceded the planet’s rights back to me, at twenty percent of what they’d paid me for it. Of course there were a lot of lawyers involved, but I can afford the best, and you can trust that I hired the best. When you need a lawyer, the most expensive one you can afford is usually your wisest investment.

        The next day I was in orbit around Darius with a drone, a tone generator tuned to middle C, and a hamster. I would have used a plant, but didn’t know how long it took for plant tissue to become cornodium, but it takes about a day with a mammal on Darius. I sent the drone down, wondering if it would crash.

        It didn’t, so the cornodium had affected Roger before he even landed. If he’d landed on autopilot the fool might have lived. But probably not.

        This was a truly evil thing, and I planned to destroy it, full of hate for my friend’s tormentor and executioner. Hate for the monster that had eaten him. Hate for the evil that wanted to consume all life.

        Forty eight hours later the drone returned, with a cornodium statue of a hamster. Damn, the doctor was wrong. Oh, well, my cornodium hamster would pay for the trip and a whole lot more. That was a valuable statue, at least after it was made into batteries.

        It was a six month jump from Luhman to Sol, and I don’t understand the math behind that at all. The jump seemed instantaneous to me, but it was six months later when I arrived. The part I don’t understand is it should have been years instead of months, and a whole lot more than only six. I simply don’t understand jump drives. Yeah, they covered them in pilot school, but I just didn’t get it. It has something to do with artificial worms drilling holes or something, and has a lot of really complicated math that has to do with space, time, and gravity. Like I said, it’s over my head. I’m lucky I passed the test, it was multiple choice and I guessed at a lot of it.

        In any case, when I got back to Earth I of course visited Dr. Felber, who told me “We have additional data since you left. The sonic frequency must be out of phase to discharge the cornodium; if it’s in phase it strengthens it. It’s still dangerous to Earth!”

        “Have you said anything to anyone else?” I asked. “Please don’t let anyone know cornodium batteries are rechargeable! My God...”

        “Well, finding a way to recharge them was one of my original goals, but don’t worry. This thing needs to be gone before we are. I’m working with an engineer on a device that will take the cornodium’s frequency and send it back out of phase. I’ll email you when it’s done.”

#

        It only took a month and I was on my way back to Darius with my drone and another hamster. Again the generator was sounding middle C, but the computers had measured and sent a perfectly out of phase middle C. I waited the two days to see if it would come back a hamster or a cornodium statue of a hamster.

        I got my hamster back, alive and bewildered. But maybe hamsters are always bewildered, I don’t know. Anyway, it worked. I could mine explosives to make up for my losses now, then figure out how to kill this horrible thing once and for all. By “this horrible thing” I mean the monster, Darius, of course. That bitch has to die! I returned to Earth to talk to Dr. Felber again, and maybe talk to my government contacts whom I had sought out during and after the gag order and imminent domain court proceedings, about sales of explosives to them. It would depend on what Dr. Felber said.

        Dr. Felber was pleased that the experiment was a success. “Add more amplifiers,” she said, “then blow up the dead parts.”

        Blow up the dead parts? Not me, I was going to mine it and sell it to the government like a patriot and let them blow it up. But I took her advice on the amplification.

        But first I needed to do one more experiment before talking to my government contacts, to see how much of Darius died from the out of phase middle C. I had one constructed that would run for two days then attempt to “recharge” it with electricity. According to Dr. Felber’s theories, it should explode several square kilometers of the planet’s surface.

        It didn’t. So she had some calculating to do, I guessed. I sent a drone down to collect a hamster-sized chunk of dead cornodium for her to examine.

        I jumped, and six months later even though it seemed like a second later I was in orbit around Earth, and talking to Dr. Felber again the next day. “It should have worked,” she said. “Puzzling. We’ll examine the sample you brought back and call when we have an answer.”

        “Okay,” I said.

        I waited in the Bahamas on a beach. No point stressing about it, we’d kill that terrible thing eventually.

#

        I sat on that beach for months. Finally Dr. Felber contacted me. “It has to be processed before it’s explosive,” she said.

        “Processed?” I had no idea how these batteries worked, even though I’d tried to learn. It did make me think of something Roger said in his warning—it had stormed when he was there. If raw cornodium had been explosive it would have blown him up.

        “Ground into a fine powder. Do that and the individual grains all sing in harmony, and you can turn that into a lot of electricity with a piezoelectric device, a really small one. Here, I’ll show you the math...”

        “Don’t bother,” I interrupted, “I wouldn’t understand it anyway.”

        “Well, okay,” she said, “but we can still kill Darius if you can afford it.”

        “I can afford it,” I said. “How?”

        “It emits sound. Kill a patch with your biggest amplifier and send a robot with a sound meter tuned to middle C to see how much is dead, and you can kill Darius a little at a time.”

        “Yes!” I exclaimed. “Let that bastard suffer!” God, but I hated Darius because of poor Roger, who had been killed with extreme malice. It had to have been horrible for him.

        I teared up a little. It seemed I wasn’t going to sell anything to the government, since dead, unprocessed cornodium was worthless. But that wasn’t what made me tear up, I was thinking of poor Roger. I missed my old buddy terribly. We were partners way back when these boats needed two people to fly them, and still got together all these long years later. We had some great times, and I was looking forward to more good times. But it was too late now.

        The next day I made the jump to Darius with a huge bank of midrange speakers, a phased C tone generator, and fifty thousand watts of amplification, with all of it mobile. I sent a robot with a sound meter down with them.

        The next day the robot reported a dead zone a hundred meters wide, so I sent all the equipment moving in an ever widening spiral. When this land mass was clean I’d move it all to another land mass and get to work there. I figured it would take months to kill the entire planet, but I was determined.

        A week later the spiral, now a hundred kilometer radius, wasn’t widening. Apparently, dead cornodium could regenerate in the presence of live cornodium. I left the equipment there running in circles, not wanting my meager progress to be erased, and went back to Earth for more sound equipment. Before I left I had a drone land with a robot to collect a few hundred kilos of live cornodium to bankroll the venture with.

        Killing Darius would be worth the incredible riches I was going to destroy by killing it. Poor Roger!

        I got to Earth immediately six months later. I sold the cornodium, mostly to Chinese buyers, and bought a huge number of mobile amplifiers, speakers, and the computerized gizmos that sent cornodium’s middle C signature back out of phase. I also bought the nicest casket I could find for Roger, and hired an engineer. An expensive one who had several different engineering degrees.

        I worried about taking all that cornodium to Earth, but the newspapers said that there was a backlash against cornodium and the rich people who used it, and middle C phase generators were becoming popular among normal folks who couldn’t afford cornodium devices and were afraid of them. Justifiably afraid, I thought, despite Dr. Felber’s initial reassurances. That relieved me quite a bit.

        I thought it was funny, I was very wealthy and rather than using cornodium devices, I was the first to call for their prohibition. But I did have more cornodium than anyone, a whole planet full, even though I was extirpating all of it. Well, what I didn’t sell to mostly China, at least.

        A year later, Darius seemed completely dead. There wasn’t a milligram of cornodium on any of the land masses at all, even dead cornodium; I’d mined it all and sent it to the heart of the perpetual fusion explosion known as Luhman.

        It looked like Darius had destroyed an intelligent species from what few artifacts had surfaced. The planet had been lifeless for a long, long time and very little was left to tell us about these aliens, but this monster had very obviously destroyed a great spacefaring civilization.

        Of course, before mining the dead cornodium and sending it to the star we recovered the cornodium bodies of the people who had tried to mine cornodium for the government, Darian artifacts (We found a cornodium Darian, but we don’t know if it was the intelligent species), and the intelligent aliens Roger found that Darius had eaten, and shipped them to Earth. The bodies, both alien and human, were now dead cornodium and therefore harmless as long as they were kept away from live cornodium. The few ruins of stone buildings stayed, as did Roger’s ship and the alien ship. Maybe some day they would be tourist attractions.

        I thought I had beaten the evil monster, but I hadn’t.

        I had several tons of Earthian dirt shipped to Darius for its microbes, and enough grass seed to wipe out the supplier’s inventory. I was determined to bring Earthian life to Darius, starting with grass and then with cows, and other species of flora and fauna later. I had a home by the sea side built there, and a shrine and burial site for Roger. I really missed Roger and the good times we’d had together.

        I ran the C generator for a year just in case, with nary a peep from it, and finally shut it off. I shouldn’t have.

        I went back to Earth for a visit, and to buy supplies. The few folks I had hired took care of my grass and cows when I was gone. Those cows were incredibly useful, widening the zone where plants would grow.

        Back on Earth, the Chinese had really taken to cornodium batteries. They actually believed that the batteries promoted health! Very wealthy Chinese folks powered their entire households with cornodium batteries. The government there had outlawed phased C generators, saying they were a plot to ruin the Chinese economy.

        However, in the Americas, particularly South America, most communities had outlawed cornodium. It was illegal in all of Peru and Venezuela, as well as most communities in the rest of the countries in those continents. It was also illegal in much of New Zealand, Australia, and in parts of many African and Asian nations. Europe was in the grip of a massive economic recession, so there were very few cornodium devices there. Most of the world got power from rooftop solar panels and back yard windmills. China was the only country still using fossil fuels, and was the only country to outlaw the phased C devices.

        They had also developed something called “twist jump radio”. I don’t understand how it works, but it has something to do with “twisted pairs of photons”. At any rate, it made communication instantaneous no matter how far away the other radio was... well, usually. Sometimes there were lags, and the theoretical physicists were still trying to figure out why.

        This was a real breakthrough in communications, since normal radio was useless between stellar systems, and messages had to be sent physically on a ship with jump drive.

        Of course, I bought five of them.

        After visiting friends and family I returned to Darius with all sorts of seeds, several honeybee hives, some pigs, chickens, a few other animals, my new twisted radios, and other supplies. Darius would become a pest-free paradise.

        A few months later I made the mistake of wading in the ocean for an hour or two, maybe even longer. It made me weak and dizzy and nauseous and I had a terrible headache, so I headed back to the house. I noticed that my skin seemed to have a slight blue tint, as if I were really cold, and I felt like I was freezing.

        On a hunch I turned the C generator on, and it came on very loud; there was cornodium somewhere, and lots of it.

        The cornodium it was reacting to was in me! I was suffering from cornodium poisoning, the same thing that had killed Roger.

        The ocean... I’d forgotten about aquatic life, and apparently the seas, rivers, and lakes were full of that damned cornodium. I got a blanket and sat weakly on a recliner, hoping the C generator would help.

        It did. An hour later my chills became a fever, and I threw up my breakfast. The vomit was blue, and later my urine and feces were blue as well. I was perspiring profusely, and my sweat came out with a blueish tint. I couldn’t eat at all for a week, and it was a sick, painful, miserable month before I was anywhere near normal.

        When I was mostly over the poisoning I returned to Earth again to hire another engineer to help me figure out how to kill the rest of Darius and to talk to Dr. Felber about sending an out of phase signal underwater. It turned out that she knew little about underwater sound, but put me in touch with a sonic engineer who could, and he got me acquainted with another engineer who specialized in robotic submarines. Both agreed to visit Darius and work on the underwater sonic equipment.

        The news on Earth was all about a panic in China, and it was about cornodium. It seems that a large part of the very wealthy Zhejiang Provence had succumbed to cornodium poisoning, and thousands of people and uncounted plants and animals there were now cornodium. The Chinese government quickly outlawed cornodium and cordoned the area with phased C generators. They then confiscated every cornodium device in China and sent them to the sun, and suspended trade with any country where cornodium was legal.

        The engineers and about fifty other folks went to Darius with me and a great big load of supplies, as I had more and more people working for me on Darius now. It wouldn’t be long before Darius was self-sufficient, at least as far as food was concerned. We’d need to import some robotic harvesters soon.

        Everyone wore a C generator on their belts to protect against cornodium poisoning, and we put up large phased C generators every hundred meters along all the planet’s seashores.

        Of course, one of the workers, new to Darius, got drunk and fell into the ocean. His two drunken buddies hauled him out laughing, and took him home. They weren’t laughing for long, though, as all three developed mild cases of cornodium poisoning. Even a “mild” case is pure sick and painful misery, but at least now we knew that a C generator was a cure.

        A message came over the twist radio from a doctor on Earth saying that one of the men had gotten a routine physical before coming to Darius, and his test results showed that he had developed a small tumor in one of his lungs and had to return to Earth for treatment immediately. It was the man who had drunkenly fallen into the water. The message had been terribly lagged, and should have reached Darius months before we did.

        The engineers, both family men, went back to their families on Earth. I accompanied the three of them, deciding to get a physical myself; I hadn’t seen a doctor in years and actually worried a little about the cornodium’s effect on my health after I found out about the guy’s tumor. After all, who knows? The stuff might cause cancer or something later.

        The doctor said she was amazed at my health. I was almost fifty, and she said I looked thirty five and my vitals were normal for a healthy twenty five year old!

        She’d been the doctor I’d seen years earlier, and asked when I’d had my mole removed and who had done the surgery. “I didn’t,” I said. “I hadn’t noticed it was missing.”

        “Puzzling,” she said. “They don’t usually go away by themselves. Your vitals are puzzling, as well. I’ve never seen anyone your age so healthy.”

        After I left, the fellow with lung cancer whose name I can’t remember called, saying he was going back to Darius with me.

        “But you need cancer treatment,” I exclaimed.

        “Nope, the doc said he couldn’t understand it, but there wasn’t any cancer. Said none of my vitals were anything like they were when I saw him seven months ago either, said I was healthy as a twenty year old. My warts went away, too!”

        I called Dr. Felber and told her what had happened, that it looked like controlled cornodium poisoning could cure some diseases. “Well, I don’t know,” she said, “a sample size of two isn’t very meaningful. I’ll talk to some of my colleagues.”

        When I got back to Darius I stopped decontamination of one medium sized lake. After all, if this was a cure for cancer...

        Five months later Dr. Felber showed up with over a hundred other scientists, from different fields; biochemists, chemists, biologists, materials scientists like her, and a lot more.

        One of the scientists was dying of liver cancer, contracted because of exposure to some chemical when he was young. He ran straight into the lake as soon as he left the ship!

        None of my crewpeople went into the water to drag him out, since they’d seen how nasty even a mild case of cornodium poisoning was. However, after quite a while two dumbass PhDs waded in and got him out. They all got sick, of course. The scientist with the cancer almost died, I think. He was in the water a long time before his fellow scientists even missed him, and the cancer had weakened him considerably.

        He did recover, though, and there was no cancer afterward. Three out of three!

        A year later Dr. Felber published her team’s first report. Cornodium attacked the simplest life, like viruses, first. Next was microbial life, then aberrant cells in the higher life form, then that life form’s healthy cells. It affected plants far more slowly than animals.

        We’d not just cured cancer, but almost all diseases. It wouldn’t cure diabetes, or arthritis, or baldness, or disease caused by genetics, or mental illnesses, but there were other treatments and cures for those ailments. It would cure the common cold or flu, but the cure was far worse than the disease in those cases. Believe me, you have to be really sick or dying before you’ll want to get cornodium poising, even a mild case.

        So we’re building a health facility around that lake, and decontamination of the rest of the aquatic bodies continues, as does the research. Right now the biologists are testing its effects on heart disease in rodents, since the worry is that the cornodium may make it worse rather than better, we’ll see.

        Roger and I were hailed as heroes, saviors of the Earth. He hadn’t died in vain after all.

        I do worry, though. What if there’s another cornodium planet somewhere?

The first copy of Random Scribblings came about a week ago, and I was happy that there only needed to be some very minor changes to some of the graphics, and the cover needed to be completely redone. They shipped the corrected copy Monday, so I'll probably get it next Monday.
        I'm releasing it on June nineteenth, and having a book release party at George Ranks from noon to two. I'll have copies of books for sale, including the new one that won't be in bookstores until late July at the earliest.
        I'm also raffling off a hardcover copy of Yesterday's Tomorrows. No purchase is necessary but food and drink will be available. I may raffle off a copy of the new book as well.
        So if you're in Springfield Sunday the nineteenth, drop by and say "hi". You may get a free book out of it!