Long before this life of mine

[austin_dern]

Buck Rogers Chapter 7, ``Primitive Urge'', opens with the discovery that Rogers, Deering, and Prince Tallen are not dead.

Instead of being crushed by their subway car smashing into the blast doors or whatever it was just derailed, suggesting some big failures in their blast-door demolition program. While futzing around getting out of the car Rogers and Deering knock Tallen's hypnotic-ray helmet off. He's shocked he denounced Rogers before the High Council and promises to make it right. They'll need his help.

Laska, one of Kane's men, konked a Saturnian guard and fit into his uniform to lead the recovery of Tallen, since anybody pretty much fits in anybody else's uniform in this kind of world. He sneaks back to the spaceship where Kane's men were tied up and frees them, ahead of Rogers and a Saturnia squad, and they take off, then ... circle around and come back because they've got to take off and land every episode. Also Laska guy there doesn't want to go back and admit Rogers beat them, so why not hang around and get beat again?

As the Saturnian High Council signs a treaty --- written on transparent plastic, by the way --- with Rogers, who stuns them by radioing Earth to report back instead of flying all the way home, Kane's men discover that they left one of their hypnotic-helmet-controlled human robots just hanging around and the Zuggs, Saturn's class of semi-human slaves, are hanging around muttering and watching the motionless ``robot''. Jumping to the conclusion that the Zuggs see him as a god for some reason, Kane's men --- and I have to credit them for initiative here --- figure they can take over the Zuggs and Saturn through their slave, and what do you know but it works?

I note that a messenger runs in, tells the Zuggs running the subway platform that the Zuggs are in revolt, and then rushes off. By the way, Saturn has obviously not learned the first lesson in how not to have slave rebellions.

Rogers, who delayed returning from Earth by a couple days to ``clean up'' some minor details, is caught in the High Council when the rebels pour in and demand control of Saturn, so, less than a day after the alliance is formed Saturn seems to have fallen to a squadron of a half-dozen of Kane's men. Before Laska can report to Earth, Rogers picks up the radio set, which is the size of a small podium, and tosses it at guards and that's our cliffhanger somehow.

Trivia: In the negotiations for peace to end the Crimean War the Russian diplomats asked to retain Bolgrad, as a center of the Bulgarian colony in Bessarabia, on the Danube. The only maps provided to the congress showed a different, less important, Bolgrad, not on the Danube, and the allies believed this to be the Bolgrad left to Russia. After Russia seized the Danubian Bolgrad the crisis built to a new congress devoted to the question of which Bolgrad was meant to be given Russia. Source: The Struggle For Mastery In Europe, 1848 - 1918, AJP Taylor. (And, while, shame on them for trying to trick, this has to rank up there with the Webster-Ashburton Treaty thing, assuming my source on that map mystery was reliable.)

Currently Reading: The Clockwork Universe: Isaac Newton, The Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern World, Edward Dolnick.

Comments

[moxie_man]

You threw in the W-A Treat to catch my attention, right? };)

What a mess that was for many a Maine family at the time along the St. John River. After the treaty, those families found half their relatives were now British subjects rather than American citizens. There are some folks to this day who don't forgive Webster for "giving away" Grand Manon and Campobello Islands to the British. (chuckle)

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Well, not just, although it is a little border dispute story for which I have a decent anecdote of dubious providence.

I'm not surprised there are folks still upset about the islands; of course, New Jersey went recently through a spectacularly pointless and undignified battle over Ellis and Liberty Islands, and those at least didn't involve any specific people around the disputes.

[moxie_man]

Actually, there's one island still in dispute, Machias Seal. It's just this rock sticking out of the water 10 miles off Cutler, ME and about 15 miles west of Grand Manan. Both sides claim it. Canada has gone so far as to maintain a manned lighthouse station on it, one of the last such stations in the northeast and eastern Canada.

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

I'd no idea there was still a disputed territory of that nature. (And there's also a good five water-based territory lines between the US and Canada, apparently.)

--Chi

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

There are a surprising number of borders, even within the United States, that are disputed. It's engaging, really: maps are alive! If I'd known that as a child I might never have been torn away from them; as it was, it was hard enough.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I didn't realize the dispute had reached the point of actually putting up a manned lighthouse. That's wonderfully quaint, somehow.