Commander Rex Starling

Earth's Greatest Hero, according to Earth's Greatest Hero. Jaw like an anvil, chin like a smaller anvil. Pilot of the rocket ship Comet Queen. Brave to the point of being a hazard. Has never once read an instruction manual.

Professor Thaddeus Quill

Inventor of the Quill Ether Drive, which allows a rocket to cross the void between planets in a matter of days, provided somebody remembers to fuel it. Brilliant. Absent-minded to a degree that borders on a medical condition. Has lost the ship twice.

Penelope "Penny" Quill

The Professor's niece, twenty-two, ship's mechanic, navigator, cook, and the only person aboard who knows where the fire extinguisher is. Rescues the others roughly once a chapter. Would like it noted.

Ticker

A brass robot with a cuckoo clock where his heart should be. Speaks in telegrams. STOP. Loyal, literal-minded, and cannot be trusted near a magnet.

Emperor Gorgax the Insufferable

Absolute ruler of Planet Zorbo. Green, three eyes, eight feet tall, wears a cape indoors. Wants to conquer Earth for reasons that keep changing. Laughs at his own jokes, which are not good.

Grand Vizier Smeel

Gorgax's chief advisor and chief flatterer. Rubs his hands together so constantly that they squeak. Is secretly plotting to overthrow Gorgax, but so far only in his diary.

Blorp

A Zorbian palace sentry with a heart of gold and a spear of tin. Wants very badly to see Earth, mostly because he has heard about ice cream.

Queen Vella of the Purple Moon

Ruler of Zorbo's rebellious moon. Sensible, regal, and unimpressed by Rex Starling, which he finds baffling. (Appears from Chapter 5.)

The Zorbians

Green. Three eyes. Perfectly nice, mostly, if you get them away from Gorgax. Violently allergic to Earth music, particularly whistling, which comes up more than you would think.

Having escaped the Onion Palace with the Professor and a very large soup ladle, our heroes blasted off from Zorbo with Gorgax's fleet of Doom Saucers on their tail, and hid in the only place available: the Purple Moon, where they crash-landed in Queen Vella's royal vegetable garden (Chapter 4). Vella, whose moon has been in rebellion against Gorgax for three hundred years, agreed to shelter them on the condition that Rex stop calling her "sweetheart" (Chapter 5). He has not entirely managed it.

The Professor, meanwhile, discovered that the Purple Moon is purple because it is made almost entirely of zorbonite, the one substance that can jam a Doom Saucer's engines, and set about building a Zorbonite Cannon out of garden tools (Chapters 6-7). Ticker fell in love with the Queen's mechanical toaster. It did not work out (Chapter 8). Gorgax laid siege to the moon; Smeel began writing his memoirs; Blorp, our friend from the palace, deserted and swam across the Sea of Mild Acid to join the rebels, which is why he now has no eyebrows (Chapters 9-11).

In Chapter 12 the cannon worked, once, and then exploded, and in Chapter 13 Gorgax proposed a truce, which was of course a trap, and in Chapter 14 the trap was sprung and Penny was carried off to Zorbo in Gorgax's flagship, the Unpleasantness. In Chapter 15 (September 15), Gorgax announced to all the spaceways that he intends to marry Penny Quill at the next conjunction of the three suns, thereby making Earth his in-law and legally his, according to Zorbian law, which he wrote that morning. Rex, the Professor, Ticker, Blorp and Queen Vella are aboard the patched-up Comet Queen, headed for Zorbo with no plan whatsoever. Penny, locked in the tallest tower of the Onion Palace, has already found a hairpin.

In the year 2150, the Earth had conquered hunger, disease, and the common cold, and had turned its attention to the larger problem of what to do on Saturday nights. It was on one such night that the message arrived.

It came in on the ether-wave receiver at the Bureau of Interplanetary Affairs in Washington, in letters of green fire that scorched themselves into the wall, which was going to be a problem for the janitor. It read:

PEOPLE OF EARTH. SEND YOUR GREATEST HERO TO PLANET ZORBO WITHIN SEVEN DAYS OR I WILL SHRINK YOUR MOON TO THE SIZE OF A GRAPEFRUIT. THIS IS NOT A JOKE. WELL, IT IS A LITTLE BIT OF A JOKE. BUT I WILL ALSO DO IT. — GORGAX, EMPEROR

The Bureau held a meeting. The meeting lasted six minutes, which was five minutes longer than it took everybody in the room to think of the same name.

Commander Rex Starling received the news in the gymnasium of the Spaceman's Club, where he was lifting a piano. He set it down carefully, because it was not his piano, and squared a jaw that had already been described in three newspapers as "granite" and in one as "a cliff with teeth."

"Zorbo," he said. "Never heard of it. Where is it?"

"That," said the man from the Bureau, "is the trouble. Nobody has. It is not on any chart. But there is one man on Earth who might be able to get you there, if anyone can. Professor Thaddeus Quill. He has built a new kind of drive. He lives in Hoboken."

"Then to Hoboken!" cried Rex Starling, and strode magnificently out of the wrong door, and had to come back.

Professor Quill's laboratory occupied a former pickle warehouse on the Hoboken waterfront, and still smelled faintly of its former career. Inside, under a ceiling festooned with wires, copper globes and what appeared to be a dozen bicycle wheels connected to no particular purpose, sat the Comet Queen: sixty feet of gleaming silver rocket ship, fins swept back like an eager dog's ears, her nose pointed up through a skylight at a sky she had never yet visited.

Professor Quill himself was a small, round man in a laboratory coat that had once been white and a pair of spectacles pushed up onto a forehead that went on for some distance. He greeted Rex warmly, shook his hand twice, and asked him who he was.

"Starling. Commander. Earth's greatest hero."

"Are you? Splendid. I have just invented something. Come and see." The Professor led him around the ship, explaining the Quill Ether Drive in terms which used the word "simply" fourteen times and which Rex did not follow at all, and which ended with, "...and so, simply, we can be on Zorbo in four days, wherever it is. The only difficulty is that it doesn't work."

"It works," said a voice from underneath the ship. "You just hadn't tightened the flux coupling, Uncle Thaddeus. Hand me the number-nine wrench."

A pair of boots slid out from beneath the Comet Queen, followed by a pair of coveralls, followed by a young woman with a smear of grease across one cheek and an expression of the sort of patience that is only earned by long practice. She held out a hand. Rex, who had been about to help her up, discovered that she was already up.

"Penny Quill. I keep the ship flying. You'll be the hero."

"I will," said Rex, who felt this was going well.

"Then you'd better strap in. If Gorgax means seven days, we've got six left and my uncle spent the first one looking for his glasses." She pointed at his forehead. He found them.

The Comet Queen lifted from Hoboken at midnight, on a pillar of blue fire that set off every car alarm in Hudson County. Rex Starling, at the controls, held the ship steady with a hand of iron while the Earth fell away beneath them like a dropped blue marble. Penny, at the navigator's station, called out the settings. The Professor, in the third seat, was taking notes on how it felt.

"Course for Zorbo," said Rex. "Bearing?"

There was a pause.

"Uncle," said Penny, very calmly. "The star charts."

"Ah," said the Professor. "Yes. They are on the kitchen table. In Hoboken. I was using them to hold down a sandwich."

Rex Starling's jaw did the thing it did. "Then we are lost in the trackless void with no chart and a madman's ultimatum!"

"No," said Penny, "we're not," and she closed her eyes. "There was a map of the outer planets on the back of a box of Astro-Flakes when I was nine. I ate that cereal every morning for two years. I could draw it in my sleep." Her fingers moved across the dials. "Zorbo wasn't on it. But there was a blank spot past the fourth ring of Saturn where the free toy was supposed to go, and if I were a planet nobody had ever charted, that's where I would be."

Four days later, they found it.

Zorbo hung against the stars like a lumpy green pea with a single purple moon, ringed in a halo of old comet ice. Below the Comet Queen lay swamps, and towers, and a great domed city shaped, as far as Rex could tell, exactly like an onion.

"Take us down," said Rex. Penny took them down. The Comet Queen settled into the swamp with a squelch that they would all remember, and the hatch swung open on the warm, green, faintly pickle-scented air of an alien world.

Rex Starling stepped out first, as heroes must, and sank to his knees in mud, as heroes sometimes also must. He looked up.

Ringed around the ship, on every hummock, stood two hundred green figures, eight feet tall, each with three unblinking eyes and each holding a rod of black metal that hummed. And from somewhere above, from everywhere, a voice like a landslide with a sense of humor said:

"WELCOME TO ZORBO, EARTH HERO. YOU ARE LATE. I HAD TO SHRINK A SMALLER MOON TO PASS THE TIME."

WHO IS THE VOICE? WHAT ARE THE HUMMING RODS? WILL REX GET OUT OF THE MUD? DON'T MISS CHAPTER TWO: IN THE CLUTCHES OF GORGAX!

The humming rods, it turned out, were ray guns, and the ray guns worked perfectly well, and Rex Starling found this out by charging two hundred of them at once, which is the kind of thing that makes a man Earth's greatest hero and also the kind of thing that gets him tied up.

He came to in a cage. It was a very nice cage, as cages go: gold bars, a velvet cushion, a small dish of something that might have been water. It hung by a chain from the ceiling of a throne room the size of a railway station, and in the two cages beside it hung Professor Quill, who was measuring the bars with a pocket rule and murmuring "fascinating," and Penny, who had already tested every bar and was now sitting with her arms crossed, waiting.

Below them, on a throne carved from a single enormous purple gemstone and shaped rather like a bathtub, sprawled Emperor Gorgax the Insufferable.

He was everything the Zorbian sentries had been, but more so. Greener. Taller. His three eyes were arranged in a triangle, the top one being noticeably the most sarcastic. He wore a cape of scarlet that trailed six feet behind him and which, they would learn, he wore at all times, including in the bath. Beside the throne stood a thin Zorbian in grey, rubbing his hands together with a sound like a wet balloon.

"He wakes!" said Gorgax. "Smeel, he wakes. Note the time. Earth Hero, I am Gorgax, Emperor of Zorbo, Terror of the Purple Moon, Landlord of the Seven Swamps. You have been summoned so that I may explain my plan to you, since a plan that is not explained to a hero is merely a chore."

"You'll never get away with it," said Rex Starling, who had not yet heard what it was.

"I already have, mostly. Behold." Gorgax gestured, and a curtain rolled back to reveal a great glass globe in which floated a little grey ball about the size of a grapefruit. Penny gasped. It was, unmistakably, a moon. Not Earth's. But somebody's.

"My Shrinking Ray," said Gorgax, with modesty so false it practically rang. "It is aimed at your Earth's moon now. But I do not want your moon, Hero. What is a moon? A rock. I want the one thing Earth has that Zorbo lacks. I want" — and here the top eye narrowed — "your rubber bands."

There was a silence.

"Rubber bands," said Penny.

"Rubber bands! Do you know what it is to run an empire of seven swamps without a single thing that stretches and then goes back? Our scrolls will not stay rolled. Our vegetables will not stay bundled. My cape is held up with string." His voice cracked. "I have seen pictures. I want them all. Your world will surrender its rubber to me, Hero, or the moon goes in the globe. Tell them so."

"Never!" said Rex.

"Excuse me," said the Professor from his cage. "How large is your shrinking ray's focal aperture? Because if it is under nine meters I really don't see how you got the moon in the—"

"SILENCE. Smeel! To the dungeon with the old one and the female. The Hero I shall keep here, where I can explain things to him."

And this, as Penny would later say, was Gorgax's first mistake, because Rex Starling, alone in a cage with a great deal of time, began to whistle.

He whistled because he was nervous, though he would have denied it, and the tune was "Yankee Doodle," because it was the only one he knew. By the second bar, Grand Vizier Smeel had gone the color of pea soup and both of his hands had stopped squeaking. By the fourth, the six guards at the door had dropped their ray guns and were clutching at their heads. By the chorus, Emperor Gorgax the Insufferable was on the floor behind the bathtub throne with his cape over all three of his eyes, howling.

Rex stopped whistling. Everybody stopped howling.

Rex started again. Everybody started again.

It was the finest moment of his career to date, and he had no idea what he was doing, which is how most of his finest moments have gone.

The dungeon of the Onion Palace was, appropriately, several layers down. Penny and the Professor had been marched into a cell with a door of iron bars, a small barred window, and a sentry: a young Zorbian named Blorp who leaned on his spear and, after twenty minutes of silence, asked shyly whether it was true what they said about Earth's ice cream.

Penny told him it was all true and then some. Blorp sighed the sigh of the deprived.

Then, from far above, came a thin, faint whistling, and Blorp winced and dropped his spear and put both hands over his ears, and Penny took a hairpin from her hair, because it is a well-established rule of the spaceways that a heroine's hair contains exactly one hairpin and that it will open any lock in the galaxy. She had the door open in eleven seconds. Blorp, she noticed, watched her do it and did not say a word.

"Come on, Uncle. Up the stairs. Rex is doing something and we've got to be there when he stops."

Up they went, past guards writhing in hallways, past a kitchen where a cook had fainted into a vat of something, past a hundred doors, and out onto the rooftop of the Onion Palace where the three suns of Zorbo were setting in a blaze of green. From here Penny could see the swamp and, in it, the silver nose of the Comet Queen. She could also see, with a sinking heart, that she was alone.

She ran back down four flights and found her uncle sitting on the dungeon steps with his notebook open, sketching the arch of a doorway.

"Look at the masonry, Penelope. No mortar at all. Simply—"

Behind him, the whistling stopped. Somewhere far above, a voice like a landslide that had recovered its sense of humor said something, and a hundred ray guns hummed back to life.

HAS REX RUN OUT OF BREATH? WILL THE PROFESSOR EVER FINISH THAT SKETCH? WHAT IS IN THE VAT? ALL THIS AND A LADLE IN CHAPTER THREE: THE SINISTER SOUP OF GORGAX!

Rex had not run out of breath. Rex Starling had a chest like a steamer trunk and could have whistled "Yankee Doodle" until the three suns went cold. What he had run out of was Gorgax's patience, and it was Smeel who solved the problem by crawling to a wall and pulling a lever, whereupon the floor beneath the golden cage opened and the cage, Rex and all, dropped forty feet down a chute and out into the swamp beside the Comet Queen with a splash that would have been comic from any distance.

He was still there, cage and all, when Penny found him. She had gotten out through the kitchens, dragging the Professor by the collar, while the guards were still shaking the whistle out of their ears. Two of them were out. One was not.

"They've got Uncle Thaddeus," she said, working at the cage lock with the hairpin. "He went back for his notebook. They caught him at the door. And Rex, I heard what Gorgax said to Smeel on the stairs. He's going to put him in the soup."

"The fiend! Cannibalism!"

"No. Worse. Listen."

The Sinister Soup of Gorgax, as the palace cooks called it (though never within his hearing), was a broth of swamp roots and seven secret herbs which had one extraordinary property: anyone lowered into it up to the neck would answer any question truthfully for exactly one hour. It was how Gorgax found out what Smeel wrote in his diary, which is why Smeel now wrote it in code, which Gorgax had also found out about. And Gorgax intended to lower Professor Quill into it and ask him one question only: how the Quill Ether Drive worked. Because with the Drive, the Doom Saucers of Zorbo could reach Earth in four days instead of forty years, and Gorgax would not need to bargain for rubber bands. He could simply come and get them.

"Then we go back in," said Rex, climbing out of the cage. Mud ran out of his boots. "Tonight."

"We'd be spotted in a second. Unless—" Penny looked at the ship. Specifically at the tin of hull paint in the lockers, which was, as it happened, green.

The three figures who presented themselves at the kitchen door of the Onion Palace an hour after nightfall were green, more or less, and eight feet tall, more or less (Rex on his own account, Penny on a pair of stilts made from the ship's galley shelves), and three-eyed, more or less. Penny had made the third eyes out of the doorknobs from the Professor's cabin. The third figure was Ticker, the ship's brass robot, whom Penny had switched on for the occasion and painted with the last of the tin; he clanked, but so did Zorbian armor, and he had promised to keep his cuckoo quiet.

"NEW KITCHEN STAFF STOP," Ticker told the cook at the door. "SENT BY SMEEL STOP DO NOT ASK QUESTIONS STOP."

The cook, who had been fainted into a vat that very afternoon and was in no state to argue, let them in.

The soup was in the great hall, in a copper cauldron the size of a bandstand, and it was already steaming. Above it, suspended from a winch by a rope around his middle, hung Professor Quill, spectacles on his forehead, making notes about the steam. Below sat Gorgax on a portable throne, Smeel at his elbow, and a ring of guards with their ray guns humming and, Penny saw with a chill, wads of swamp moss stuffed in all their ears. Gorgax learned fast. That was the trouble with him.

"LOWER HIM," said Gorgax.

The winch turned. The Professor descended. Rex Starling, who had been inching toward the winch with a ladle in each hand and no plan whatever, tensed to spring.

And Ticker's cuckoo went off.

He had promised, and he had meant it, but he was a clock, and it was midnight, and a promise cannot stand against a mainspring. The little brass bird shot out of his chest and shouted twelve times, and every head in the great hall, all forty-two of them, turned to look at the green robot with the doorknob on its forehead.

"Well," said Rex, "that's done it," and threw the ladle.

The next four minutes have been described by Penny as the most disorganized rescue in the history of the spaceways. Rex fought six guards with the second ladle. Penny, on her stilts, walked straight over the guards' heads to the winch and reversed it. Ticker, unable to stop cuckooing, waded into the guards, and it turned out that moss in the ears does nothing against a brass bird shouting from two inches away. Smeel hid under the throne. Gorgax stood, and bellowed, and drew the cape about him, and his boot came down on the ladle Rex had thrown, and the Emperor of Zorbo, Terror of the Purple Moon, went into his own soup up to the neck.

There was a long, steaming silence.

"Emperor," said Penny, from the winch, holding her uncle by the collar, "how do we get out of here?"

And Gorgax, who could no more help it than Ticker could, told her. Every door. Every guard. The back stairs, the drawbridge, the password (which was "rubber bands"), and, because she asked, the location of every one of his Doom Saucers and the fact that they could be launched in nine minutes from a standing start. Then he told her his real opinion of Smeel, which Smeel heard from under the throne, and which is a good deal of what happens in Chapter 9.

They ran. Down the back stairs, past Blorp (who looked the other way with all three eyes), across the drawbridge, through the swamp, into the Comet Queen. Penny had the drive lit before the hatch was shut. The Professor was tucking a ladle into his notebook as a specimen.

"Nine minutes," said Penny, as the swamp fell away. "It's been eight."

Behind them, all across the dark side of Zorbo, the domes of a hundred hangars slid open, and a hundred Doom Saucers rose on pillars of green fire, and turned as one toward the fleeing silver speck. Ahead lay only the stars and a single purple moon.

"Head for it," said Rex. "Nobody ever got captured on a moon."

Penny did not answer that. She just aimed.

A HUNDRED SAUCERS! ONE MOON! NO PLAN! CHAPTER FOUR: CRASH-LANDING ON THE PURPLE MOON! — coming back to this page just as soon as I get it re-typed.

I get a letter or two a month from the twenty or thirty of you who read this thing, and I print the good ones. Write me and I might print yours.

From Doug in Sheboygan, Wisconsin:
"I have a question about the Zorbian ray guns. In chapter 2 they work fine and Rex gets zapped and tied up, but in every chapter after that the guards have about a hundred of them and they never hit anything. Is this a plot point or are you just being lazy?"

Greg says: Doug, this is a serial in the tradition of the 1930s, and in that tradition a ray gun has three settings: Stun the Hero in Chapter Two, Miss Everybody Forever, and Prop. This is not laziness. This is scholarship. However, I have taken your note to heart, and in Chapter 16 a ray gun is going to hit something, and it is going to be the cake.

From a reader in Tulsa who signs herself "Not Penny":
"I have been reading since Chapter 4. I would like to point out that in fifteen chapters Rex Starling has personally accomplished the following: whistled. Penny has fixed the ship, found the planet, picked four locks, built stilts, reversed a winch, and interrogated an emperor. Why is HE Earth's greatest hero?"

Greg says: Because he says so, loudly, and the newspapers of 2150 print it. You will notice that Queen Vella has asked the same question, in almost the same words, in Chapter 5. I like Rex. Rex is the guy who charges two hundred ray guns. Somebody has to, and it is important that it not be the competent one. But the question of who is actually the hero of Planet Zorbo is, I promise, going somewhere, and Chapter 16 is where it starts to go there.