Office of Scientific Personnel
Disbursements, Third Floor
Dr. Benton C. Quest,
This office has processed your travel reimbursement for fiscal year 1966 and notes the following:
Seventeen field sites visited. Fourteen no longer exist. The remaining three are under investigation by agencies whose names this office is not cleared to type.
Your receipts from the “Land of the Turu,” which appears on none of our maps and all of yours, include a line item for “structural demolition (unscheduled)” which is not a category. It is now a category. You are the reason it is a category.
We have approved the claim. We ALWAYS approve the claim. The Secretary has asked us to stop telling him what you cost and start telling him what you prevent, which is apparently everything, at the expense of everything else.
Please find enclosed your per diem adjustment and a revised W-2 reflecting hazard pay for your son, Jonny, your son’s friend, Hadji Singh, federally classified as wizard “mystic,” your son’s dog, Bandit, whose security clearance this office can neither confirm nor explain, and a man named Bannon whose job title changes with every form he submits.
The Director of Intelligence One requests that you try to prevent something without destroying something else.
Regards,
G. Pfeiffer
Office of Scientific Personnel
Disbursements, Third Floor
P.S. Mr. Bannon’s Form 27-B requesting naugahyde seat covers for your aircraft is denied. There is no budget for jet upholstery.
Jonny Quest seems an honest lad, reminiscent of a young Allan Quatermain, a Doc Savage Jr. with more explosives, better weaponry, and a Cold War super scientist for a father.
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