Believing wormhole travel to another planet is a trick, a man decides to travel there by spaceship, and then, when circumstances change, he discovers the true nature of the alien planet.

What was that? The first chapter, with a computer that gets repaired because it told the truth, piqued my interest. The rest of the story has nothing at all to do with that computer, the third part is completely disconnected from the earlier parts, and the last couple of chapters seem like they belong in the middle of the book. In all, this book was completely messed up, in the way it was put together and the story it tried to tell. The character who gets hit by the LSD dart seems like an excuse for the author to write while stoned. The middle part, which seems to have been added at a later date, is completely incomprehensible. When things calm down a bit, the author hit on something with the paraworlds, which resemble alternate dimensions, and can be accessed through a change in mind state. Unfortunately, the idea wasn’t expanded sufficiently (outside the hallucinations), and wouldn’t have been enough to save this book. I know that PDK writes strange stuff, but this was beyond that. I can’t recommend this at all.

This story was messed up, in every way possible. While the first chapter in the book seemed to promise a computer that lied all the time, possibly sending out mind-controlling messages similar to 1984, the result of those lies left me completely baffled. What was the truth that caused Rachmael ben Applebaum to think he was a rat, with rat thoughts and rat dreams? I have no idea.

Seemingly disconnected, Rachmael goes into space to confront the head of Lies, Incorporated (Listening Instructional Educational Services), Matson Glazer-Holliday and his mistress Freya Holm. He owes big debts, but wants to keep his prize spaceship free of the debtors, and he wants Lies to provide a pilot to keep it moving around the solar system for him, until he gets a final piece.

The beginning of this book was written not long after World War II, and I imagine the author saw so many of the Nazis going free, and worried that the cycle would start all over again. The world is described as being owned by the Germans, who reunited their country and silently took over the UN, which rules the world. Rachmael and Matson think the wormhole travel that put Applebaum industries out of business is a scam, and that the travel is either one way (the best scenario) where people are being used as slaves, or it’s really an atomizer, taking over from the gas machines that were shut down after the war, and people go into them willingly, reducing overpopulation.

There’s a scene where the Liles pilot Dosker picks up Rachmael but they get captured by Thodoric Ferry, owner of THL, owner of the wormhole technology and whom he believes controls Whale’s Mouth, the alien planet. Thanks to Dosker, they escape, but Rachmael can’t get the part to his cryo-sleep chamber, and ends up on his ship alone, ready to take an eighteen year journey to Whale’s Mouth.

A chapter later, Rachmael is on Terra and going through the wormhole machine. What happened? He’s chasing after Freya, pretending to be Matson, and gets hit by an LSD dart. The next part of the book, almost half of it, is completely incomprehensible. A fish-like creature, paraworlds (essentially multiverse), a support group for those who can’t see the paraworlds, hallucinations, and an encounter with a being that turns out to be Matson’s half-alien child, before it’s killed. Huh?

The next part, where THL is at war with the UN (which seems to be good now, not necessarily German-controlled, but it’s not clear, because that reverts back at the end), is just as messed up. One character seems to be in a time-dilation tank while others talk to him from normal space –he then gets distracted and thinks about something in the past, and never seems to come back.

Meanwhile, Freya finds Rachmael but they go their separate ways. They each get to look into a book written in the near future, which tells of what will happen to them shortly. And it does… Rachmael doesn’t get much out of it, but Freya discovers that Ferry, the owner of THL, is actually an alien, and that he infiltrated Terra fifteen years earlier. She tries to go back to Terra but is caught (in a reasonably scripted fight scene), and is abandoned in the shuttlecraft, where she leaps to safety on Ferry’s ship. She confronts him, and it’s not clear if she get to kill him, or if it was an avatar.

Then Rachmael learns her fate and decides to open the UN weapon. I assume it either destroyed Whale’s Mouth or turned back time sending information back, because we end up in the missing section of the novel, where Freya is convinced to send herself and Matson across the wormhole, Dosker is captured by the UN and brought to see the secretary general, and we see Rachmael’s return after the failed mission across interstellar space, in which he’s told to go to Whale’s Mouth by wormhole.

I realize that this was written in parts for a pulp SF magazine, but even those parts are not coherent even among themselves. The entire book was a disaster. There were a couple of things that piqued my interest, like the paraworlds, the wormhole, and the aircars, but they were scattered, and didn’t make sense in context of the story.

Not worth the effort of reading.