What Else?

About the Book

Everything is getting along nicely on Earth, as planned. The people of the world are doing very well at redeeming themselves in the eyes of Council. But life on Earth is still in jeopardy. The average level of development of the people on Earth, rated on a scale of one to one hundred by the Council, is still well below 50.

Even if all the good people on the world had to knuckle down and stop their violent, greedy and dominating nonsense there were still the inhabitants of the Killer Cities who would drag the average down. The Groupers and the Neutrals were the survivors and their descendents who were given the freedom of the Cities after the war of the world.

Tom Boraign and his wife, Alette, had been high-ranking officers in the war. Tom had done his fair share of cultivating and training people to become killing machines. "Damn it, Alex," he explained to his grandson, "we had a war to fight and they were weapons! But they can't all still be psychopathic killers and their descendents can't all be like that. Look at me, I've also come that way and I didn't turn out too badly."

The residents of the Killer Cities were not all that different from normal people. It was just that they preferred blood sport, like gladiator tournaments, to boxing and wrestling. They enjoyed stalking and preying on each other and on the softies in the good cities whereas the good people would rather make their killings in the business world and in politics. Team sports such as hockey and football were not popular. In the Killer Cities the people would only team up to hurt others when they played war games with live ammunition, either with rival groups or in raids on softy cities.

When Alex's parents and grandparents get blown up in a bomb blast Tom's ghost teams up with his grandson to hunt down killers. "I know you can't fight them all by yourself," Tom's ghost said. "But our single contribution in wiping out some of the bad ones and sparing some that are not so bad should make up for my single contribution, turning some of them into what they and their offspring have become."

Heinrich recognizes the potential of the two hunters and stops them from doing their sloppy, inconclusive work ("Sloppy because all you're doing is to rip their crazed souls from their physical bodies. Inconclusive because those crazy souls only find themselves other bodies to perpetuate their madness in.") He takes the two under his Marshall wing and teaches them how to recognize and translocate the ones beyond redemption to an exile world.

The Boraigns get organized and build a team to rid Earth of the millions who handicap the world's redemption. By exporting the problem Heinrich and the other Marshals speed up Earth's rating but what happens to the exile world and the individual ratings of Jammarcyn, Heinrich and Eloise in the process? And what about the known fact that everybody in the top ten percent of the ratings gets absorbed in the amorphous pool that is Council?

About the Author

I’m a retired accountant. Retired means I can write and keep myself otherwise occupied than by pestering my wife. Accountant means I have to be kept out of the mischief of telling others how to spend their money.

Numbers are cold and figures are uncompromising. Business correspondence is either dictating or placating and minutes of meetings leave no room for one’s own flights of fantasy. I earned a living in the harsh world of facts and stories got bottled up inside me while I dreamed to escape.

My characters talk a lot and think a lot to express their feelings. Their attitude to events and an underlying motive is more important than the mere occurrence of events. I like to see what I consider to be good to prevail. I want to express myself in my writing to identify with my kindred spirits – be they accountants or plumbers or housewives or whoever.