Masters of Sleep - Chapter Seven - From Baron to Prisoner to Admiral

You'd think that Palmer being sent to bed early with the help of a lead pipe might have some impact on Tiger's transition from sleep to wake in the other world, but although he is the first person in the cell to wake up, he doesn't suddenly jerk awake or come to with an unexplained headache.  He's just a little stiff from volunteering his arm as Wanna's pillow all night.  He doesn't even remark that he's up earlier than usual, so maybe Tiger's the sort of person who normally wakes up at dawn.

Tiger stretches, "like a big cat" of course, which disturbs and wakes the others, who start to complain "until they found it was Tiger who had done the disturbing, at which they relapsed into sufferance."  Remember, the key characteristic of heroes is that they can get away with crap that normal people can't.  Tombo and Malek also wake up, and Tombo immediately decides it's time to look for that diamond.

Don't worry, the beautiful white girl doesn't get felt up by the brutish ifrit, Tombo decides that Wanna's skimpy outfit doesn't have any pockets to search.  But Tiger gets patted down, then the other humans, until with a cry of surprise followed by a punch and a yelp, Tombo pulls the Two World Diamond from Muddy McCoy's person.  Tombo taunts that the "foolish humans" have no idea of the stone's true power, tells Malek to grab his arm, and with a cry of "To Ramus City both!  Fly!" the two jinn rocket into the sky, a rainbow trailing in their wake.  Excuse me, vanish in a blast of sudden wind.

You know, like how Zongri managed to vanish from Palmer's study at the start of the previous book, without the aid of a powerful magical artifact.  Boy, this stone must be powerful if it lets these genies do what we've seen another genie accomplish on his own.

Once the humans are done being stunned that the supernatural genies actually used magic, Tiger scrabbles on the floor and holds up the "magic stone" Tombo used to escape, and tries to do the same.  He gets everyone to gather close and hold on to each other, lifts the diamond up high, commands "To Ramus City all five!  Fly!" and-

Wait, Ramus City?  Hang on, let me yank at the book jacket and see if I can read the map on the inside of the cover... o-kay.  The World of the Jinn apparently comprises of a paltry two landmasses.  The one on the north is Tarbutón - excuse me, Tarbuton, someone forgot the diacritic - which consists of the Withered Desert in the northeast, the city of Tarbuton in a bay along the south coast, but there is also the settlement of Ramus City a short distance to the northwest of that.  The weird thing is that it looks like the Palace of Ramus is in Tarbuton the city, while the Temple of Rani is in Ramus City.  But I thought Tiger was able to reach the temple by running the streets and alleys of Tarbuton?  If it's one sprawling settlement, why is the part of it that Ramus doesn't live in called Ramus City?

Oh, and there's also Balou to the south of Tarbuton, and if you consider Tarbuton to be a continent then Balou could only be called an island.  Balou's capital is Balou, situated on Balou Bay.  And aside from those two landmasses and three cities, Genie World is nothing but water, some small isles, and the squiggle of the Frying Pan Shoals to the east.

Anyway, Tiger can't get the Two World Diamond to work, even when he spends the next two hours trying out various commands.  When he finally gives up, he asks McCoy where he got the thing, and the pickpocket insists he didn't do nothin', he just woke up and the thing was on him.  How strange.  Much like how Wanna ended up with the thing after Alice took it from Palmer in the human world.  Gee, I wonder who McCoy's human world counterpart might be?

Also, for an artifact that purportedly "becomes the soul companion of its possessor but attaches itself to the material being" it sure changes hands a bunch.

Tiger tells McCoy to shut up and suddenly asks Wanna how things were doing back in Tarbutón "when the old lady kicked off?"

"You mean Ramus the Magnificent?" said Wanna, dutiful subject that she had been.

"I mean Ramus of the Triple Chin," said Tiger.

"She died."

"I know," said Tiger patiently.

This is what happens when you marry take someone as your consort based on how they look in a slave dancer's outfit.

Wanna explains that they tried to keep Ramus' death a secret, but then Zongri took over.  Oh yeah, didn't you know?  Our old friend Zongri escaped from the work camps last March and just swept in and replaced Ramus once the old bat kicked it, but he still plans to continue the campaign against Arif-Emir over "some silly jewel" ...Wanna, uh, well she does the best she can with what she has, okay?

So Stagger Ryan summarizes the situation for us, that between Arif wanting to kill them for stealing his diamond and Zongri wanting to kill Tiger over that dimly-remembered stuff that happened last book, they might actually be safest as prisoners on a pirate ship.  Wanna starts bawling because she wasn't able to figure all this out for herself - her "education was, after all, only that of a temple dancing girl" - and tells Tiger to just get rid of the diamond.

Tiger, following the Arabian adage of always listening carefully to the advice of women and then doing the exact opposite, chucked her under the chin.  "Honey, if I were Old Thunderguts up on deck--"

Whirrrrrrr!  Zzzzzzt!

I mean... this isn't a complete retread of "If I Were You."  We're on boats instead of in the circus.  There's no little people involved.  The only Tiger around is a human.

So Tiger is now in the flabby, lice-infested, intoxicated body of Thunderbolt the pirate emperor.  He's able to push through the alcohol and come up with a quick scheme, and tells a guard that he's bored and orders the prisoners brought up.  In due time the five humans are produced (those two genies have vanished, oddly enough), and for some reason one of them is ranting and raving about how he's Thunderbolt the pirate emperor.  Wanna is of course crying.

So Tiger-as-Thunderbolt confiscates the magic diamond from Thunderbolt-as-Tiger, then he makes an announcement - he knows his crew is starting to think him old and weak, so he'll challenge each of these prisoners to a knife fight, and the winner gets his crown.  He starts with Thunderbolt-as-Tiger, and takes care to mention how he's heard of Tiger the legendary sailor and former baron, and asks the ship's crew if they'll except him as leader if he wins.  Naturally, the crewmen all cheer at the thought of following a Hubbard Action Hero into battle.

"Wait!" said Thunderbolt as Tiger, for his rage had cooled to a point where he realized that he would be stabbing his own body and was, in short, in a considerable mess against unknown magic.

Tiger as Thunderbolt threw his opponent a knife.  The quarterdeck was cleared.  And then Tiger gripped the stone and whispered, "If I was you--"

Whirrrr!  Zzzzt!

Whirrr!  Zzzzt!

Tiger steadied himself as Tiger and plunged ten inches of good steel into the heart of Old Thunderguts.

This feels kind of murder-y, doesn't it?  Tiger using magic to make someone agree to duel him and then stabbing them in the heart while they're still disoriented from having their soul moved from body to body.  I mean, he could've taken Thunderguts over and abruptly announced his retirement and Tiger's surprise appointment as his successor.  But nope, he killed the guy instead.  Simpler that way, isn't it?

So a "shudder of pleasure" goes through the ship's crewmen, that very physical happiness that comes from being commanded by a Hubbard Action Hero, but the late Thunderguts' guards had been ready to follow a nameless guy in the red shirt, and they immediately lunge at Tiger.  What follows is... not really an action sequence.  We get a paragraph explaining that Tiger learned how to fight with a rapier after becoming a baron, then two paragraphs summarizing the fight.  Unsurprisingly, Tiger is too skilled for anyone else to lay a finger on, and cuts down five grunts without breaking a sweat.  When Red Shirt himself presses our hero, Tiger fights him on the after house, throws a rope at his enemy to entangle him, then "with two quick punctures, let out Red Shirt's sinful life."

It's all so matter-of-fact, so disinterested compared to those old Hubbard Action Sequences that are still decades away from when this book was written.  Not a single exclamation point to be seen.  Guess even the author knew how much a foregone conclusion any battle against Tiger is, so why pretend there's any question over who will win it?

So Tiger strikes a heroic pose on the rear of the ship, with his headsilk glowing in the sun and his sword red with blood, and the crewmen cheer because now they're going to be commanded by a proper captain.  Our hero gives orders, installs his buddies as officers, and sticks Wanna in the "emperor"'s cabin because she's useless before bedtime.  By the end of the day the fleet of mangy pirates is starting to look more respectable, any recalcitrant captains have been giving a thumping by the new boss, and Tiger's fellow outlaws are worried that Tombo will come back once he learns he left the diamond behind, or that Arif will catch up with them.  Tiger's so unconcerned that the chapter ends with him saying "Pass the salt horse."

So while Palmer's situation back in Seattle has taken a turn for the worse, and will continue to decline, Tiger's star is rising even if there's... uh, other stars out there that are trying to kill him?  And want to take a planet from him?  At any rate, we're all set for yet another climactic naval battle.  But don't worry, Hubbard has more satire in store for us in the intervening chapters with Palmer, so at least some parts of this book will be entertaining.


Back to Chapter Six

Forward to Chapter Eight

Masters of Sleep - Chapter Six - The Perils of Hiring Swedes

It's debatable whether it's better to let your spouse sleep if you find him or her or other slumped over their desk, or to wake them up and encourage them to get in a proper bed so they don't feel gross the next morning.  Alice evidently believes in the former approach, so Palmer wakes up feeling "none-too-oiled" the next morning.  He rings a bell to summon "the Swede girl" to make him some coffee while he "applied the materials necessary to make his cheeks smooth, like in the ads."  Which is to say that Palmer shaved.

I dunno, there's just something weird about this book, and not just from reading it right after the previous volume.  The POV has stopped jumping around so much, but there's still odd phrases like that, attempts at wry humor or something that just don't suit Hubbard at all.  Like he's trying to imitate Douglas Adams thirty years before The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy came out, except Hubbard also wants to put in - well, we'll see soon enough.

Smooth-cheeked and caffeinated, Palmer sits down at his desk to study the diamond some more, and is so certain that it should be where he left it yesterday that it takes him a while to notice that it isn't right in front of him.  He searches his office, calls in the Swede girl to ask her about it, but she explains she "vas not seeing" a diamond and won't stand for any accusations of theft.  Except we don't see this interaction play out through dialogue, it's just summarized in a brief paragraph.  More evidence if you wanted to make the case that Hubbard was phoning this one in.

Palmer manages to mollify den svenska tjejen right before Alice comes in to tell him it's nine o'clock and he really needs to be at the office, before anyone on the board of directors tries to take over the company.  Again.  Hubbard inexplicably decides to give a belated description of Alice's character, and presents her as "a hard-eyed ex-businesswoman who had gotten her man and, having gotten him, was making very sure that he did all the business necessary not only for the money involved but also because she had a lifetime habit of keeping a man at his job."  Because it's just ludicrous to think that a woman might want a career of her own, especially after getting married.

Nothing we couldn't guess already, in other words, but Hubbard also insists that this is a recent change, that Alice had lost "something poetic" just as Palmer recently lost his courage.  We'll have to take his word for it, though - unlike Palmer, we never saw Alice's character change as a result of her becoming aware of her dual existence as Wanna.  So we can only speculate how that timid temple dancer rubbed off on Alice, and what "poetic" traits were gained, and lost, entirely off-camera between this book and the last.

Palmer meekly agrees to get moving, but remembers to ask his wife about a diamond, and she says yes she saw it, and it's much too expensive a present, "what with the government and its silly taxes and all.  You'll have barely enough cash to pay your income tax as it is, despite the fact that they are letting you keep one half of one percent of your own money this year and only telling you how to spend two-thirds of that."

Ladies and gentlemen and smizmars, I believe the Satire is well and truly beginning.  God help us all.

Palmer decides to let her keep believing that it's a present to be returned to the jewelry store rather than a magic rock that suddenly appeared in his pocket the other day, and asks where it is so he can go take it back.  But Alice can't quite remember, though she does think it might be in the pocket of one particular gown.  We get a paragraph of her summoning a maid and trying to find the specific outfit while Palmer hides his impatience, and in the end they realize the dress has been sent to the cleaners.  Then over the rest of the page we get a cursory description of how Palmer called the cleaners, learned the gown must still be on a truck, and so set out in his car, desperate to find the diamond even though he's not quite sure why, only that it might be connected to the strange nightmares he had last night.  He eventually tracks down the right vehicle, only to come up empty-handed when he searches its cargo of dirty laundry.

He goes home, defeated, only to be greeted at the door by Alice with the diamond in hand.  They found it under the bed.  Welp.

Jan sighed with relief and asked for it.

"Not until you give me a kiss," said Alice.  "There, that's a good boy."

Did Hubbard forget to write Palmer giving his wife the kiss?  'cause she went for asking for one to thanking him for one without any other indication that she'd actually gotten one.

But she didn't give up the diamond.  "If I were you," she said, "I--"

Whirr!  Zzzt!

No, no, we're going with the doodily-doodily-doodily sound effect, Hubbard, it's much more dignified.  But yeah, no sooner does Alice say these careless words than suddenly Palmer is looking at himself from the other side of the doorway.  And I have to say, this stupid diamond is awfully trigger-happy.  We went from Palmer saying "Good lord, I wish I was someone else" and thus activating it, to Wanna simply wishing that she was with her Tiger, to Alice speculating about if she was someone else.  Thing needs a child safety lock or something.

If this book were written thirty years later, there's no telling what kind of kinky stuff would have happened after Palmer and his wife swapped bodies, but in this case Hubbard is restrained enough to have Palmer immediately grab the diamond and say "Good lord, I wish I were Jan."  And with a Zzzt!  Whirr! doodily-doodily-doodily they're back in the right flesh sacks.

"Wha-what happened.  I-I-" gasped Alice.  "I-I'm sure I was you for a minute!  I felt as though-"

"Nonsense," said Jan hastily.  "Delusions, delusions.  Why don't you go see your Dianeticist.  Something restimulated, no doubt." 

You can just imagine the slow, incredulous smile that spread across my face when I got to this part.  Yes, Hubbard's program to cure all your physical and mental problems at very reasonable rates was launched in the May 1950 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, a few months before Masters of Sleep debuted in the October issue of Fantastic Adventures, so he decided to include it in this story as well.  Feels almost like cheating, writing a book in which your other product is wildly successful.  And kind of sad, too, like charging other people to read your wish-fulfillment fan fiction.

But this does lead to a possible answer to the question of why this story was written in the first place, so long after Slaves of Sleep, and when Hubbard seems oddly unenthusiastic about it - this nonsense about Palmer and the Two-World Diamond could be nothing more than a way of advertising Hubbard's entry in the self-help business, a story driven by the power of corporate synergy.

Let's get back to this joyless effort to shill pseudoscience.  Palmer doesn't go on to work like Alice wants, or does he drive off to take the diamond back to the jewelers.  Instead he locks himself in his study and gets out all the ancient tomes he has on Arabianology to try to find information about this thing.  By four o'clock he uncovers a reference to it in Ibn Mahmud's Magical Stones and Jewels of the Eastern Kingdoms, a book so rare and valuable that even Wikipedia hasn't heard of it.  The text's "Arabian script," which sounds a lot harder to read than plain old Arabic, describes the Two World Diamond as something that landed in a meteorite near Thebes, then was inscribed with a magical seal in Sulayman's workshops.  It also calls the sigil within it a tetrahedron even though we've wondered about this in the comments section of Chapter Three.  Oh, and the rock is two hundred and ninety-six carats, in case you wanted to try to attach a material value to this magical shiny thing.

Anyway, the Diamond is meant to command the air elementals, much like how the original Seal of Solomon is said to have bound genies to Solomon's will, but it can also move souls around, and has the quality of bind itself to whoever possesses it and travel between the world of genies and the world of men.  Neat.  Though designed to be used by a human, the jinn like the thing because they can use it to hop out of an old and dying body and take over a new one, kicking the body's previous owner's soul straight to hell.  Dick move, genies, but at least now we know why Ramus wanted her turn with the thing.

So there, the powers of this book's incredible magical artifact all laid out for us.  Makes you wonder why everyone hyped Solomon's magic ring when this puppy is so obviously superior to it.  On that note, once again said Seal of Sulayman is not so much as mentioned despite it being directly related to this artifact, and we're running out of chapters in which to learn what the hell happened to it.

Palmer reads the whole passage twice, feels foreboding from all this talk of jinn and magic, but keeps going through his books in hope of finding more information.  And then - dammit Hubbard, I just said the POV hopping had calmed down, and here you go again.

So while Palmer is pondering over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore, the Swede girl comes by with dinner since Alice is doing girly stuff this evening - and no, Hubbard didn't forget that Palmer locked himself inside his study, he mentions that Palmer had to let her in.  He'll let last book's magical artifact slip from memory, not minor details like this.  Anyway, she spies the huge diamond, then returns to the kitchens, where her fiancée is hanging about, a "sly-eyed lumberjack" who was actually just fired from his job at a lumber camp "up on the Skykomish or Snohomish or Snoqualimie or some equally Seattlesque name," so I guess he's just sly-eyed now.  Also, there's some more of that new Hubbard humor.

Anyway, he's not just a sly-eyed ex-lumberjack, this guy is also a lice-infested ex-lumberjack, so he wriggles.  A lot.  Several times a sentence, if Hubbard can help it.  And after his girlfriend describes this fist-sized stone, this ex-lumberjack suddenly remembers that he should leave for his meeting at the Friends of Russia Communist International Objectors Social Hall Lumberjacks Local No. 261, and also propaganda work to do as Chairman of the Committee for Making Dissatisfied Minorities Dissatisfied... okay, I'm scared.  This is starting to feel a lot like Mission Earth.  I've already read this stupid story but I'm still afraid that some lesbian is going to be raped straight in the next chapter.

So the lice-infested ex-lumberjack Communist wriggles his way down the driveway, then doubles back and wriggles his way to the shrubs outside Palmer's window.  Our protagonist has just been dismayed to learn that a work with additional information about the Two-World Diamond was lost when Julius Caesar burned down the Great Library of Alexandria, and doesn't hear someone use a wire to undo the latch of his window...

Okay, you'd think after Professor Frobish broke in, Palmer would have invested in better home security.  As it is, the ex-lumberjack breaks in and confronts Palmer with "the chief Communist political argument, the lead pipe."  Two whacks later and Palmer is out cold, while that dirty Communist is gleefully daydreaming about how many servants he'll be able to afford after he sells the diamond in his pocket.  Man, it's bad enough getting KO'd by a blunt instrument, but getting KO'd by a blunt instrument being wielded by a hypocrite is even worse.

And that's our chapter.  Sure was... something, wasn't it?  Learned a lot plot-wise, and learned a lot about what the author might have been doing when he wrote this turkey.


Back to Chapter Five

Forward to Chapter Seven

Masters of Sleep - Chapter Five - Dude, Where's My Diamond?

It's nighttime in Seattle and Palmer is asleep, so it's morning off the coast of Balou and Tiger is sitting in the boat, going through his pockets, unsuccessfully searching for the priceless diamond that so many people want to get their mitts on.  Walleye is the first to notice and comprehend what's happening, then Stagger Ryan sees the look on their faces and quietly asks Tiger "The diamond or the money or both?"  When Tiger admits that he's lost the rock, Ryan draws his cutlass, and Muddy McCoy finally stops sharpening his knife and realizes what's going on.  McCoy jumps up, his blade dancing in his hands as he insists "I didn't do nothing!" as the others advance on him, ready to shake the stolen rock out of him.

So I guess it's one of those situations, where the band of criminals turns on each other over suspicions of theft or squealing or whatever.  Might be more effective if we knew or cared who any of these non-Tiger people are beyond what we heard Tombo tell Malek two chapters ago, but whatever.  Everyone's ready to believe McCoy stole the diamond because nobody likes him and he's so nasty he'd give the sharks indigestion, which begs the question of why Tiger decided to escape with him in the first place.  McCoy gets up on the ship's railing and threatens to jump, but Tiger is easily able to overpower him and throw the thief onto the deck, an interaction so routine and unexciting that Hubbard doesn't try to spice it up with an exclamation point.

Tiger and Ryan search McCoy for the diamond but can't find it, so Ryan suggests they cut him open in case he's swallowed it.  But then someone says "I'll save you the trouble, lads," an interruption so dramatic it causes a break in the paragraphs.  Turns out Tombo and Malek have found the ship's supply of pistols, which they're pointing at the humans, and Tombo demands the Two-World Diamond.

Yes, the two ifrits were watching this squabble, waiting for their moment to step forward, but the narration helpfully explains that for all their power - snrk, sure, Hubbard - ifrits aren't actually all that bright.  So no, they never picked up that the humans might be squabbling because the diamond disappeared.  Tiger explains to the "dear admiral" that they don't know where the diamond is, then...

Well, that 'squabbling thieves' stuff was getting boring, wasn't it?  So here comes three pirate ships.  The Age of Sail equivalent of Chandler's Law, I guess.

Tiger leaps into action, giving orders and altering course, completely ignoring the pistol-toting jinn whose puny brains are still having trouble processing this sudden change in fortune.  Despite Tiger's efforts, the pirate ships are still faster than the cargo lugger, so after the second warning shot hits the water in front of their bow, Tiger gives the order to pull over, nautically-speaking.  A pirate demands through a trumpet that they come aboard, Tiger replies that they'll have to send a boat to fetch them since their ship doesn't have one of its own... and the funny thing is, the narration points out right before they do this that the pirates are flying a red flag to indicate that they aren't giving any quarter.  So I'm a little confused why they aren't just plugging Tiger and company where they stand.

Anyway, a bunch of pirates come to take over the lugger, and when asked if he stole the boat, Tiger grins in response, earning him some points in their eyes.  Then he and the other captives are ferried over to the buccaneers' flagship, the Terror.  Or, as the narration explains, maybe it "might better have been named the Horror for so she would have appeared to any seamanlike eye."  Why, the ship's rigging is so askew that its masts are raking in different directions, the ship's halyards are chafed, even its blocks are rusted!  And note that of these nautical terms, only "halyards" is in the book's glossary, because go to hell, landlubber.

This filthy, mismanaged boat is run by His Majesty Thunderbolt, a fat drunk in a silk robe with a gold crown on his head, who sits on a throne while his red-shirted lieutenant gives the orders to keep the ship moving.  Once Tiger and friends associates are brought before him and his retinue of bodyguards, he takes one look at the prisoners and sentences them to death.  So I guess the red flag means that prisoners will be executed eventually, once the captain has gotten a good look at them.

Tiger immediately replies that it'd be a waste of a ransom amounting to three hundred thousand... well, he doesn't specify a currency beyond gold coins, so let's just assume it's gil.  Anyway, he keeps repeating that three hundred thou figure, pirate king Thunderbolt keeps repeating his execution order, and all the pirates around them mutter their suspicions and suggestions.  The story Tiger spins is that good old Admiral Tombo is a very wealthy jinn who owes Tiger a life debt, and when a pirate suggests they just kill the humans and ransom the genie, Tiger goes from putting a hand on Tombo's shoulder to holding a knife to his throat.  Needless to say, Tombo is getting really confused by this point.

In the end, Thunderbolt tells his crew to put the captives all in the same brig as Tiger demanded, then as they're being led away complains that "You never do what I tell you.  Never.  But I get the next captives and I get to do it like I want!"  Despite this, as he follows Tiger belowdecks, Tombo tries to insist that this is "Old Thunderguts," the fearsome leader of a crew of escaped slaves who now terrorizes the sea lanes.  Point the first, let me say you just can't do that, introduce the characters to a drunken 'king' who can't properly command his subjects, then insist he's some sort of scourge of the seas.  You can do the opposite for comedic purposes, of course, but it doesn't work the other way around.  Point the second, don't ask me to fear someone whose name evokes the sound of flatulence.

Fast forward to two o' clock in the afternoon, when Tiger and associates realize that someone in their dark, cramped cell is sobbing.  After sparking a light with some flint and steel, Tiger finds a girl huddled in the corner, and the sight of her sends him reeling - "Her delicate and lovely face, seen through her veil, discovered her to be Wanna, one-time temple dancer, the fragile beauty who had become by his conquest, Tiger's consort!"  Which is to say that he stole a slave and never properly married her.

Now, Tiger's puddle-shallow female 'love' interest should be in far-off Tarbutón, safe in "what remained of the baronial possessions which he had mostly squandered," and when Tiger tells her to "Stand and deliver" and "stow the weeps," she admits she has no idea how she ended up in the belly of a boat.  She starts crying again when he lets slip that she's stuck on the vessel of the dreaded "pirate emperor" Thunderguts, but eventually gives a half-page-long paragraph trying to explain what happened.

"When I woke up this morning (sniffle) I didn't mean any harm (dabs with Tiger's headsilk) and I put on my bathing gown and started to go to the baths (two sniffles) when I felt in my pocket and there was something there (more dabs with the headsilk) and I took it out and oh!  I almost went blind!  (Swift recovery with no sniffles whatever.)  It was a diamond as big as my hand!  What a stone!  I almost fainted

You get the picture.  Like Palmer, she freaked out after thinking of all the things that could happen to her if someone found out she had such a valuable treasure on her hands... you know, it's really strange that Hubbard is taking the time in this book to consider some of the burdens of wealth, when he spent most of his life trying to stuff as much of other people's money in his pockets as possible.  Anyway, Wanna got scared and hid the diamond under her bed, wished that she was with her Tiger, and doodily-doodily-doodily, here she is.  If she'd just said 'I wish Tiger was with me' this book would be pretty different, and I suspect a few chapters shorter.

Tombo, eyes on the prize, asks for the diamond now, but the squirrelly thing has of course vanished once again.  Tiger gets Tombo to back off while demanding to know what's so important about this shiny stone, but all the ifrit says is that he'll wait until the thing reappears, then it's his.  And that's where we end the chapter: waiting for this whimsical artifact to make up its mind about what dimension it's in and where it wants to be. 

So... last time Tiger had the Two-World Diamond until he fell asleep, then it wound up in Palmer's pocket.  When Palmer set it down and fell asleep, it stayed put until Alice found it and moved it around, but it should have gone back to Tiger, right?  And if Alice had it until she fell asleep, and then Wanna had it until she accidentally used it to transport herself to Tiger but she's still awake, is it just sitting in the floor of her room?  I don't think so, because next chapter-

You know what, it's magic, there's no use trying to explain it.


Back to Chapter Four

Forward to Chapter Six

Masters of Sleep - Chapter Four - Be Careful What You Say When Holding a Magic Diamond

We open this chapter with Palmer on his way to work, driving the streets of Seattle.  Now, two chapters ago we saw him wake up and head to work, only for the intervening chapter to cover a full day with Tiger escaping from Balou.  So either this is a different workday than the one Palmer was about to start in Chapter Two, or the author has completely forgotten how the 'two worlds one soul' mechanic functions.

Palmer's on his way to meet some other Bering Steamship bigwigs at a ship's christening ceremony, and is dreading the human interaction this will require.  And as he drives, he's dogged by the suspicion that this extreme shyness is something new, and that other people are surprised that he's suddenly become so timid.  But nothing comes of it because he's forgotten about his other life as Tiger the Hubbard Action Hero, so on he goes.  Way to stick it to him with that curse, Zongri.

The ceremony, as the next page summarizes for us, doesn't go entirely smoothly.  Palmer parks in the wrong spot, joins the crowd hanging around the entrance, and takes half an hour to realize that everyone's waiting for him to arrive but no one's noticed him yet.  The lady supposed to break the champagne bottle against the ship's hull gets paint on her dress, and the ribbons on it get tangled in her bracelets, and she forgets to actually give the ship its name.  Her kid nearly plummets a hundred feet from the announcement platform to the dock not once, but twice.  The newly-named Zachariah P. Palmer almost hits a ferry boat on its way out.  But the narrator ultimately concludes that "It was, all in all, a highly satisfactory, extraordinarily average christening," which is either an attempt at dry humor or an indication that Bering Steamship is going to go bankrupt in a few years due to gross incompetence.

Once the farce is over, everyone but Palmer goes to have fun, leaving our protagonist hanging out at the docks, fumbling for a cigarette.  But when he retrieves his lighter and tries flicking the thing on, it doesn't work, and in fact rather feels like a hard, heavy diamond.  Needless to say, Palmer's cigarette remains unlit.  When he finally looks at what he's holding and sees a brilliantly-shining precious stone obviously worth thousands, even millions of dollars, he's so startled that he shoves the thing back in his pocket in case someone sees him with it and causes a commotion.  He tries to reason that this must be a paste fake or something, but it's just too shiny, and hard enough to cleanly cut a piece glass in two.  So Palmer is stuck with an immensely-valuable diamond, making him a target for thieves or thugs or whoever the rock's original owners were.

You'd think a millionaire shipping magnate would be used to this sort of thing, but remember that Palmer has been zapped with a character development neutralizer, so his spine is as stiff as wet cardboard.  So his response is not to smirk to himself and plan on giving Alice a hell of a surprise later, or a puzzled frown as he tries to figure out where this rock came from, but to moan "Good lord!  I wish I was somebody else!"

No sooner can you say doodily-doodily-doodily than Palmer is suddenly up on a tower two hundred feet above the dockyard, running cabling between his broad hands, dressed in leathers and drab wool instead of a business suit.  This is a bad place for an acrophobic to be, but eventually he's able to look down to where the distant Zachariah P. Palmer is pulling out of the harbor, and spots someone who looks rather like Jan Palmer standing on a lower platform, staring puzzled at a diamond he pulls out of a pocket.

This story was published ten years after If I Were You, by the way.  Just felt the urge to mention that for some reason.

Now Palmer of course has studied the totally legitimate field of Arabianology, and thus "had some inklings about magic and demonology," so he knows that if he wants to reverse whatever happened to him, he needs that diamond back.  So he manages to climb down to where the dock worker-in-Palmer's-body is still examining that diamond.  A foreman looms out of nowhere to tell him to get back to work, and while Palmer tries to say "I beg your pardon, sir," what comes out is "Dry up, Donovan!  You want a spanner around your neck?"  When the foreman scampers off and Palmer confronts not-Palmer, the interaction quickly becomes "The glass, dummy.  Fork it over before I beat your skull in!"

And this is all a little problematic, I think.  This Two-World Diamond is supposed to be pretty powerful, right?  Like the next tier above the old, forgotten Seal of Sulayman.  Except when Zongri - who did not have the Seal - cursed Palmer with "Eternal" Wakefulness, his personality overrode Tiger's for the first day or two spent in the other man's body.  Whereas here, after Palmer has accidentally done a body swap thanks to the Two-World Diamond, he can't seem to get his mouth under control.  So the thing that the genies know must absolutely not fall into human hands can't do as good a soul transfer as a genie relying on his innate magic.  In a word: weak.

In the end, worker-in-Palmer bolts, forcing Palmer-in-worker to chase down and grab the guy, then yank the diamond out of his clutches.  While Palmer-in-worker tries to remember what he did to switch bodies with a stranger, that foreman reappears to yell at him for accosting the very rich and therefore important Mr. Palmer.  Palmer-in-worker says "Good lord, I wish I was somebody else!" and then whoosh, he finds himself with a mouthful of chewing tobacco watching Jan Palmer standing close to a dock worker - he swapped bodies with the foreman by mistake.

Let's just fast forward through the next two pages, skip the parts where Palmer feels more powerful and confident in the foreman's body than in his own.  First he confronts the very confused dock worker, takes the diamond, and says "Good lord, I wish I was Murphy."  Once the foreman is himself again, Palmer grabs the rock again and say "Good lord, I wish I was Palmer."  So everyone gets back in their own bodies, the other two guys are freaking out, and Palmer leaves after his assurances that "there has been some mistake" fail to calm the others down.  He flees to his car, feeling shaken, like "he had somehow been stretched like a sweater tried on by too big a man."  A sensation he didn't get after ending up in the body of the brawny Tiger.  Step up your game, Two-World Diamond.

In the safety of his parked vehicle, Palmer takes a closer study of the diamond, and finally recognizes the three-dimensional Seal of Sulayman in its depths.  He remembers that at least, and the death of Frobish and his own stint in jail and the fate of Green the corrupt businessman, but the stuff in between all that is still a bit of a haze.  All he knows is that he was "somebody else somewhere else," and recently all his self-confidence and vitality had been drained away.

Still nothing about what happened to the physical Seal of Sulayman that Tiger was having fun with last book.

So Palmer goes home to try to figure out this puzzle.  All he knows for sure is that this diamond is otherworldly and capable of switching the souls of two bodies, and it's very important to keep his hands on it.  He goes to his room, puts the thing on his desk, suddenly becomes very sleepy, and leans back in his chair for a nap.  Sigh.

Then Alice comes in to "go over the household accounts with her and demand an increase in her expense allowance for, romantic as she might have been as a secretary, she was, after all, a woman."  Ah, that classic 1950's 'humor.'  Alice gasps at the diamond, assumes it's next week's birthday present, and can't resist taking it to show off to her visiting girlfriend, then they move on to talking about another woman's dress, and then Alice goes off to the theater, so by the end of the night the priceless diamond and magical artifact is sitting forgotten in the pocket of Alice's frock.

And now we know what Palmer will be doing when the narrative's focus returns to him in two chapters.  Tune in next time as we check on our friend Tiger, who must have suddenly awoken a few hours before dawn if Palmer suddenly fell asleep before his bedtime.

It bothers me that the Two-World Diamond works by invoking the Good Lord directly.  My conception of God isn't as an active force who likes to intervene directly in worldly affairs, but if I'm wrong and He is, I'd like to think that He shows more discretion than helping a nerd get into trouble.  Unless Palmer and the dock worker and the foreman's souls and bodies getting swapped around for half an hour is all part of His divine plan, which is more worrying than reassuring.


Back to Chapter Three

Forward to Chapter Five

Masters of Sleep - Chapter Three - It's 50% More Powerful than the Last Doodad

And now we're back with Tiger in the World of Sleep.  Huh.  Last chapter it looked like Palmer had gotten up and was getting ready to go to work.  But since Tiger and Palmer are two bodies that share one soul, one sleeping while the other is awake, Palmer must have gone back to bed, right?  That's how it works, that's one of the core rules of this setting.  Maybe he did his tie too tight and passed out, and Tiger will suddenly fall asleep at the end of this chapter when the paramedics revive Palmer.

But back to Genie World, where a triumph is being led through the streets of Balou, whose human population is cheering wildly because marids with whips are on watch for insufficient displays of enthusiasm.  Other marids lead the procession as trumpeters, followed by human-pulled chariots carrying Arif-Emir's ifrit officers, how's that for a tongue twister, and then there's the... okay, so is he an emir, or is he using that as a name?  If that's his title, why does it come after Arif's name?  If that's not a title, what is his title?

Anyway, Arif is resplendent in his golden sedan chair, borne on the backs of human slaves, the Two-World Diamond shining in his turban, while he waves a wand to make "magic signs, pieces of golds, crosses and stars and other things, shedding his glorious light upon the multitude."  And I'm not sure whether he's using actual magic or just being grandiose.  Probably not, since this is a mostly low-magic setting.  Behind him comes the prisoners from the breaking of the blockade: Mr. Malek the sailing master, quite depressed about being in chains, Admiral Tombo, who is taking things in stride and bowing and grinning at the cheering crowds, and then...

Oh, but what's this?  Some of the captive human sailors have hoisted that rapscallion Tiger upon their shoulders, and now he's pompously imitating Emir Arif by waving a stick around, making the crowds scream with laughter!  The paragraph break that follows this revelation is presumably there to give us time for this scandal to sink in.  Tombo tries to go back and stop Tiger from screwing up any hopes of getting a light sentence, or maybe even a job as an emissary to Ramus' former holdings, but he's chained to the back of Arif's chair, and Tiger responds to his frantic gestures with more waves of his stick.  It's only when they reach Arif's palace and a guard helpfully points out the ruckus that Arif becomes aware of this mockery, and he promptly turns "three shades bluer than indigo."  So if indigo is a mix of blue and purple, he just turned blue?  His skin tone lightened when he got angry?

Whatever, Arif gets out of his chair to personally punish the prisoner, or rather tries to.  In a scene we've seen at least twice in Slaves of Sleep, an important genie gets all tangled in something and falls over, and Tiger rushes over to "help" them up in a way that gets them even more humiliated as they trip and fall down over and over.  This escalates to a whole crowd of soldiers and servants trying to assist their liege, and when the commotion is over - try to hide your shock - not only has Tiger and three other prisoners vanished, but a guard's keys have been stolen and his pockets picked.

Arif is furious, and thirsts for "the very special blood of Tiger" ...Hubbard, come on.  Admiral Tombo goes into full toady mode and offers to identify "our worst human" the instant he's captured, and Arif demands that the guards "Produce him!"  So yes, we're on the downward trajectory that will eventually end with Mission Earth's wonderful dialogue.

But Tombo, even though he was eager to stay on Arif's good side earlier, yanks his and Mr. Malek's chains free of Arif's throne and scampers off to allegedly search for Tiger.  Twenty minutes later the two fugitive ifrits have hidden themselves aboard a little cargo ship, unseen since all the harbor works are apparently still lining the parade route.  So two hours after that, a very nervous messenger gets to tell Emir Arif that - well, before he says anything meaningful, he asks for his master's kerchief as an assurance that he won't be decapitated for giving bad news.  And that makes sense, who'd want to get blood on a good hanky?  Especially someone else's blood.  That's not hygienic.

First is the revelation that not only are the four missing humans still at large, but the two ifrits captured from the Graceful Jinnia have vanished as well.  The second, much more important bit of news, is that the Two-World Diamond has been stolen.  The irreplaceable and unmistakable treasure that nearly glows with a light of its own.  The diamond set in the turban that Arif is currently wearing.  That diamond.

Arif reached to his turban but reached in vain.  The fabulous gem was not there.  He grew gray.  He shook.  He staggered back and looked at the apprehensive faces of his officers.

"You know what this means," he said in a hoarse voice.  "If it comes into the hands of a human slave and he knows its use--"

The next paragraph mentions that all the genies know what's at stake here, and the whole war between Ramus and Arif was due to the former not trusting the latter with something that absolutely must not fall into human hands.  Paragraph break for no reason.  Arif flies into action, ordering his men to ransack the town for the Diamond, and to bring him that insufferable Tiger.  "He'll be taught, when we get him, he'll be taught!"  But Tiger is already-

Okay, Hubbard, you just interrupted a scene with a paragraph break but you didn't use one when you changed location.

Amazing what a difference ten years can make.  Anyway, Tiger's stolen a small trading vessel with the help of his fellow fugitives - Muddy McCoy, Walleye, and Stagger Ryan - and they're already far enough away from Balou that they can only just see the flash of signal guns ordering its port to be closed.  But in a highly convenient coincidence, they've stolen the vessel upon which Mr. Malek and Tombo are hiding, and the two jinn are peering at the humans from the cover of a bunch of sacks.

I think Hubbard is going for one of those classic comic duos with these two genies - Tombo is the big, bombastic one while Malek is dour and a bit dumb.  When they see that Tiger has the Two-World Diamond, Tombo has to clamp down on Malek's mouth to keep him from crying out in shock, then restrains the other ifrit before he stupidly goes charging out.  When Malek whispers that they should just jump the humans, Tombo has to point out that Walleye is a triple murderer and quite handy with a cutlass, Stagger Ryan is strong enough to climb a 160-foot rope hand-over-hand, Muddy McCoy is a former pickpocket and gutter-fighter, and they're all armed and the jinn aren't.  And then there's the matter of the diamond.

Malek blinked expectantly.

"The man who has the diamond is Tiger," said Tombo.

Mr. Malek heaved a very dismal sigh, wriggled backwards and gave up.  "It's impossible," he agreed.

At least they know who the main character is.  But yeah, it's a shame that these hulking, magical beings have no hope of overcoming a quartet of humans armed with sharpened bits of metal.  Especially when that ifrit on the cover of the book is shooting fire from his fingertips and everything.

But Tombo points out that the mortals have to sleep sometime, so the two genies wait while Tiger and the murderers and scumbags who he hangs out with eat their supper and speculate over how much the diamond he stole is worth.  The others think they could pawn it off and buy half a kingdom, but Tiger is strangely distracted, and admits that it feels like he can't quite remember something before shrugging the sensation off.  Then he takes a good, close look at his new treasure.

It was a limpid stone and its many facets were almost blinding when the light struck fair upon it.  But he had seen something else.  Down deep in its depths, etched there by some necromancy he could not understand,

Since necromancy involves trafficking with the spirits of the deceased, classically for the purposes of divination and more recently for the purposes of raising the dead, it's safe to say Tiger is out of his depth here.  This is just further evidence that Palmer's influence over him is gone, since as a college graduate he'd know all about necromancy.

he saw the three-dimensional Seal of Sulayman, three triangles made with only six lines.  

A tetrahedron, then?

He blinked and looked again and then sat back.  Tiger was not unacquainted with the two interlaced triangles which was Sulayman's original seal and which had itself vast powers.  He had seen the original seal knock every bolt and fastening aside which it met.  But here, here was a greater mystery.

It's almost as great a mystery as what happened to that original seal?!  The book finally mentioned the damn thing, but it has nothing else to say about it, much less an excuse for why Tiger hasn't been using it for the past twenty pages to get out of all his problems.

I mean, Tiger still remembers how to use the thing, he experimentally invokes the Seal of Sulayman and commands "that every nail in this box fly out!"  But nothing happens beside the other guys wondering what the hell he's doing.  So they go back to shooting the breeze, and when Tiger mentions that Ramus is dead - no other reaction to her death, no snide laugh that his puppet finally stopped being useful, no regret that one of his few genie allies is gone - they start talking about her throne being up for grabs and how Tiger would make a great emperor.  Or rather Stagger Ryan thinks Tiger would be a "swell" emperor, Muddy McCoy says he'd just get them all into trouble.  I'm with Muddy on this one - the last thing the world needs is an absolute monarch with Tiger's sense of humor.

Eventually it's time for bed, and after two changes of watch, Tombo creeps out of hiding to quietly search the slumbering Tiger.  But he can't find the Two-World Diamond, and returns to Malek empty-handed.

"I knew we'd fail," said Malek.

"You may know that," said Tombo, "but I don't.  All I know is that the diamond has never before been in human hands.  It becomes part of the soul, you know."

Malek blinked.

"It's gone now for Tiger sleeps," said Malek.  "It will be here when he wakes.  We'll have to plan for that.  Go to sleep."

So wait, if Tombo knew that the Seal of Sulayman 1.5 bonds with the soul, and that human souls flit between bodies whenever they fall asleep, why did he bother to - you know, whatever.  If Hubbard isn't going to answer the big questions, there's no hope for getting answers for the little ones.


Back to Chapters One and Two 

Forward to Chapter Four

Masters of Sleep - Chapters One and Two - Like the Last Book Never Happened

We now join our adventure, already in progress.  Our hero is over a hundred feet above the deck of a ship, sitting in what I would call the crow's nest and what Hubbard calls the "fighting top" of the Graceful Jinnia, one of twenty men-o-war sailing under the colors of Queen Ramus the Magnificent.  Tiger's keeping an eye on the fifteen enemy vessels in Balou Bay, which have raised their anchors and are moving into attack position.  He yells down at Captain Tombo, who looks like a "fat scarlet doll, mostly hat," from Tiger's height, but the ifrit is stuck in a loud argument with the other captains of the fleet and doesn't reply even when Tiger yells into a trumpet "Hey, fatso!  Your pal Arif is going to dine on you for dinner!"

Gotta say, I'm less surprised that Tiger lost his barony now.

The narration explains that Tiger is only playing lookout because he mouthed off to the gunnery officer yesterday, and he's supposed to stick to this new posting, "But following orders was no long habit with Tiger," so he uses his cap as a handle and slides down a rope to the main deck, descending so quickly that he has to kick out a spark.  This is no doubt meant to impress us, but it still fails to catch the attention of the squabbling ifrits.  Capt. Tombo is insisting that he's going to follow his orders, maintain position, and wait for the marines to come and capture that Two-Worlds Diamond, but the other captains want to give up this blockade because their crews are mutinying and they're out of supplies and other nonsense like that, the whiners.  Plus, they've gotten the news that Ramus is dead, so...

So Hubbard just killed off a fairly important character from the last story, completely off-screen, on literally the fifth page of this one.  Nothing to do but turn to the camera, give an exaggerated goofy shrug, say "That's our Hubbard!" and play canned applause.

Anyway, when the other captains hear that on top of everything else they're dealing with, here comes Arif-Emir's fleet, they are officially Done.  Saying that there's no point in fighting a hopeless battle for a dead queen, the jinn return to their ships and bug out, leaving a furious Captain Tombo to fight on, one ship against fifteen.  Tiger watches the captains flee "passionlessly," then taps Tombo's shoulder and suggests he prepare for battle.

So Tombo starts snapping orders, and Tiger gets down to the port battery to get the gun crew pumped up.  It's not an ideal situation by any means, but Tiger has gotten through worse.  Remember Zongri's fleet, when Tiger only escaped from the brig when the vessel he was on was being grappled on both sides, and all the other friendly ships were either sunk or fleeing?  Compared to that this is no big deal - all he has to do is hold up the Seal of Sulayman, command all the bolts holding Arif-Emir's ships together to come undone, and whammo, easy as

Two hours later [the Graceful Jinnia] was a bloodied and shuddering ruin, her every spar gone, her sheets trailing in the sea, her sodden hulk lifting less and less to the running sea.  More and more her castle lifted, less and less of her bow was shown and then she plunged with a bubbling sigh into the littered water.  The tangled flag of Ramus, twisted about a staff, was black against the frothing maelstrom for an instant and then the ship was gone.

Admiral Tombo, the sailing master, Tiger and twenty men, the remainder of her crew, were prisoners aboard the Tong-Malou, flagship of Arif.

pie, wait, what?  Oh that's right, Tiger doesn't have the Seal of Sulayman anymore.  Apparently.  Well, obviously not, because otherwise he'd have used it, right?  But since the narration doesn't so much as mention it, not even with a little section in which Tiger wishes he still had the thing, we can only speculate what happened to it between this story and the one previous.  Did the ring mysteriously vanish, leaving Tiger so that someone else somewhere could make use of it?  Did the darn thing run out of juice and became a worthless bracelet?  Did Ramus talk him into burying it beneath the palace so that no one could abuse its power?  Did Tiger pawn it off for drinking money?  If the author knows, he's not telling.

So that's Chapter One, in which Tiger and a genie captain stupidly lead a one-ship assault against an enemy fleet that ends predictably, though I'm surprised the author didn't feel like showing us the battle itself.  Maybe he's saving all that for later, when we like last time have another big naval engagement during this story's climax.

Chapter Two is only three pages long, compared to Chapter One's four pages.  Presumably Tiger has passed out or gotten knocked out after being tossed in a cell, because over in Seattle, Jan Palmer wakes up with a headache.  He's momentarily confused, because he feels like his hands should be bloodstained and the rest of him half-dead, yet here he is in bed with his wife Alice.

As Palmer is vaguely aware of memories escaping him, we get another paragraph-long recap of Slaves of Sleep - copper jar, evil genie, "Curse of Eternal Wakefulness," Tiger the sailor, and again no mention at all of the Seal of Sulayman.  But those recollections fade, and Palmer feels "like a man whose vitality was ebbing from him.  He felt as though some necessary portion of him were slipping away and he could not tell how or why."  So maybe that's the real Curse of "Eternal" Wakefulness, you're not permanently one soul being bounced between two bodies, you just experience enough to know that you're less than what you should be, but can never really understand or articulate this feeling of loss.

Not that Tiger was all mopey because him brains were going with no Palmer's influence.  Again, I think that Palmer got the better end of the shared-soul dealie.

For many years now he had not slept but, transferring from the Land of Awake where he was Jan Palmer into the land of Sleep where he was Tiger, he had lived a dual and highly fascinating life.  In the Land of Awake he ruled Bering Steamship Corporation with a vigor which had never manifested itself before the opening of that jar and the subsequent adventures had made him Tiger.  Asleep, he was awake again in the land of the Jinn where, as Tiger, he carried out an amusing role.  It had been a highly satisfactory continuance of a beginning which had seemed harshly adventurous.  The Jinn ruled humanity when humanity slept, for the soul wandered far in sleep.  But Jan was suddenly unaware that his soul had ever wandered anywhere.  One last datum tried to penetrate his wits: The soul of Alice, his wife, was Wanna in the land of the Jinn and Wanna was waiting for Tiger somewhere in the world of sleep.  And then that fact too was gone.

One of these sentences doesn't belong, and in fact interrupts the flow of the whole paragraph.  But there you have it, Palmer was enjoying his happy ending from the last story, and... it just suddenly went away one day.  So when his headache recedes and he gets ready for his day, he shudders at the thought of all those vice presidents and desks and documents he'll have to deal with, just like he did at the start of Slaves of Sleep.  Alice wakes up and mentions a funny dream that she can't quite remember, asks if her husband is well, and when he insists he is, tells Palmer to get downtown for a board meeting.  Palmer would rather go out on a boat instead, just like he did at the start of Slaves of Sleep, but Alice is having none of it.

"You'll get to that board meeting!" said Alice.  "Sailing indeed!  With all that fog.  Not a breath of air and every ferry boat apt to run you down!"

Miserably he laid aside the sneakers he had picked up and grasped his business shoes.

"Yes, Alice," he said meekly.

Their relationship hasn't regressed to how it was last story, but I'd rather have Palmer as shy and awkward and Alice as professional and straightforward than this "henpecked husband" routine.

So that's the first bit of Masters of Sleep.  It just, I dunno, feels like it's lacking something.  Slaves of Sleep had its faults but was earnest, this just feels forced, like Hubbard wasn't really interested in writing it.  Which begs the question of why he wrote it, but I have my theory, and it involves something we'll see in one of Palmer's chapters.


Back to the Intro

Forward to Chapter Three 

Masters of Sleep - Intro - If It Was Important I'm Pretty Sure I'd Remember It

The problem with happy endings is that they get in the way of sequels.  After the hero finds a magic ring, solves his personal problems, defeats the bad guy, gets the girl, and attains a position of wealth and prestige, it can be difficult to find something to do with him afterward.  Because where do you go from there?  Ramp things up a notch, introduce an even bigger threat, which will require an even more powerful magic ring to defeat, which will earn the hero even more treasure and glory?  Or just slam that Reset Button, take away everything the hero accomplished, and make him do it all over again?

Some eleven years after writing Slaves of Sleep, Hubbard examined these two options and decided, 'Why not both?'  And so we have Masters of Sleep, the sequel it's hard to imagine anyone demanded.  But I have a theory why Hubbard wrote it, one tied into something else that Hubbard published in another magazine at around the same time.

The story's Foreword is just a page-and-a-half long, and is mostly a recap of Slaves of Sleep.  You probably remember the story: Jan Palmer ran afoul of the ifrit Zongri, the Curse of Eternal Wakefulness led to adventures in the world of the jinn and mishaps in the world of humans, until Palmer mastered "the problem of his duality" and solved "the Curse of Eternal Wakefulness," so...

Wait, what?  When'd he do that?  I remember Palmer using the Seal of Sulaysolomon to sink a lot of ships, and then he inflicted the curse on the Genie World counterparts of some douchebags he knew in Seattle, but he never de-cursed himself or anything.  He didn't have to, the Curse of "Eternal" Wakefulness turned out to only last a few weeks before the Genie World personality regains total control of the Genie World body.

So is Hubbard retconning the first story here, or is he so unwilling to proofread or reread his own work that he just plain forgot how Slaves of Sleep went when he decided to write a sequel a decade later?

Anyway, the Foreword tells us that things went great for Palmer in both worlds, because he "became, as himself, truly the head of Bering Steam, for in Seattle he was now partly Tiger and in the world of the Jinn, as Tiger, because he was partly the brainy Jan."  Which is an unwieldy sentence and a half.  But then, the author smashed that Reset Button.

So matters stood for some time.  But Tiger's nature was unruly and, in the world of the Jinn, little by little began to outweigh the good sense of Jan.  Escapade after escapade brought Tiger and Wanna, his dancing girl, down the ladder in the favor of the Jinn.  Humans in the world of sleep were, after all, slaves.  At length, after nearly oversetting the government itself, Tiger, as punishment, was returned to the fleet as a common sailor.

"Oversetting," yeah, gotta love that archaic and obsolete vocabulary.  But that's how the mighty Baron Tiger wound up back in square one.  Presumably Palmer just couldn't control Tiger's thirst for pranks, and everyone got fed up with his dickery and kicked him out of the palace.  And at the same time,

As Jan in this world, he became more and more immersed in scholarly concerns and became less and less Tiger.  Wanna, too, began to separate her natures as time went on and became less the dancing girl of the Jinn and more the authoritarian housewife in Seattle.

I think Wanna is mentioned by name as much in this little section as she was in the entirety of the previous story.  But how about that for some character assassination?  Mrs. Palmer née Hall was transformed by the horrors of matrimony from a supportive woman who was willing to stand up to her crooked boss and throw her career away to try to save Palmer, into a domineering yet vapid spouse ready to fill the void left by Aunt Ethel.  And Palmer's character development from his time spent adventuring in Tiger's body in the land of the genies?  You can just forget about all that, he's back to being meek and wanting to run away from his corporate responsibilities.

Also gotta love how Alice-Wanna in Genie World was just Tiger-Palmer's "dancing girl."  Maybe humans don't have the right to get married in that place.  I mean what's next, human-genie marriage?

But it's weird, I can't help but think that this Foreword is forgetting something.  Something that allowed Zongri to be pickled in the first place, something that became vital to Tiger's adventures in the Genie World.  Something that makes Tiger's fall from grace a bit far-fetched, since it should have allowed him to intimidate or destroy any jinn who dared to stand against him.  Something that is in fact prominently featured on the book's cover.

Yet not only does Masters of Sleep's Foreword fail to mention the fabulous Seal of Solomon, I can't remember the story itself mentioning it, and have flipped through the first few chapters for any word of what happened the thing, to no avail.  Maybe something will come up when I go through it again, and more carefully, for this blog?  Because how crazy would that be, the sequel to a story utterly forgetting the mystical doohickey that everyone in the first tale was so desperate to recover?

Though if the Seal has been forgotten, we shouldn't be worried, because Hubbard has a new magical MacGuffin for us to focus on.  The Foreword explains that Tiger has worked his way up to becoming a gunner's mate on a man-o'-war, and is liable to see some action shortly.  Because

Ramus, ruler of Tarbutón, the principal nation of the Jinn, had become old.  She dispatched an expedition to the land of Arif-Emir who owned a strange gem called the Two-World Diamond.  Arif-Emir refused to part with his stone, though Jinn custom seemed to indicate that it should be lent.  A war was declared and Admiral Tombo with a fleet of twenty sail was sent to beat Arif-Emir into submission.  Aboard Tombo's flagship was Tiger.  And while Jan slept in Seattle-

I'd have preferred ending the Foreword with an ellipses instead of a dash, it's less of a hard break to the action.

So there you have it - Slaves of Sleep happened, Palmer learned about another world and dodged a trip to the asylum, but afterword everything went back to just about the way it was before Zongri popped out of that jar.  As for the Seal of Solomon... well, this Two-World Diamond seems pretty powerful, we should focus on that now.

In other words, after his brush with near-competence in the previous story, Hubbard is back to normal for this one  Oh, it won't be as bad as Mission Earth - you have to really make an effort to top that masterpiece of awfulness - but we'll see many of the ingredients for that recipe for disaster in this tale.  A stunted understanding of international affairs, casual misogyny, and of course brain-scrambling psychologists who hand out lobotomies like candy on Halloween.  It's almost like coming home.

Now wait, that genie royal astronomer was hella old, right?  Several millennia old, in fact.  So how did Ramus go from 'ugly and scary but otherwise just like any other ifrit' to 'the reaper is sharpening his scythe' old in the space of how many years it was between Slaves of Sleep and now?  Did it all just suddenly come crashing down on her at once?  If that's true, how did the astronomer survive so long?


Back to Slaves of Sleep's conclusion

Forward to Chapters One and Two