Search Worlds Without End

Ron Goulart is science fiction's supreme funnyman writer... and among his best creations is the remarkable agency Odd Jobs, Inc. This astounding organization takes assignments that have baffled the best establishments of the rather cockeyed world of the Year 2002.

If it was whacky, impossible, or simply incredible, it was their oyster.

It was whacky that a stage magician could spring a murder trap for them without any reason. It was impossible that the great talents of dead actors could appear again. It was incredible that the work of the fictional Doctor Frankenstein could be bettered two hundred years later.

So this was a case for Odd Jobs, Inc. Someone was piecing together the best parts of the late greats of stage and pix to make a super-Frankenstein monster that would dominate the entertainment world - and maybe everything else.

Meet Goulart's Ghoul-artist, Dr. Patchwork!

His name was Adolph Hibbler and he had escaped the doom of Hitler's Reich by inventing the cryogenic deep freeze long before the rest of the world. As a human icicle he had been just a circus sideshow for many decades until he finally thawed our--in the 21st Century.

The trouble began with a series of mysterious events and the government had to call in Odd Jobs, Inc. But when Jake and Hildy Pace started uncovering the clues the found on odder job than any previous capers.

There were the lost cassetes fo the world's greatest sex fiend to locate. There were model planes that fired real bullets. There was the army of baby-doll killers.
And there were the revolutionary gas station attendants and the Arabian shiek who had ignited them.

Only Odd Jobs, Inc. could have connected all these cockeyed clues and come up with Hibbler. When they did ti sure looked as if they--and the world-- were on a spinoff orbit into infinite disaster!

With a whoosh and a bang various important individuals around the world were being annihilated. Here today, then simply nothing tomorrow. Even the Siamese twins, who were the joining presidents of the United States, were scared. It could happen to them. And their secret services hadn't a clue.

So they called in Odd Jobs, Inc. That wizard agency, consisting of Jake and Hildy Pace, had cracked many an uncrackable case. There had to be a motive. Tehre has to be a conspiracy. There has to be... what?

For Jake, the case started when he wok up, mind-wiped, on Murderers' Row, awaiting the death sentence...

One of Ron Goulart's funniest mysteries, this tale fo the cockeyed twenty-first century is one that only the humor-master of science fiction could write.

A dead woman hires Jake to investigate her murder

Jake Pace is halfway through mixing a batch of cookies when his lawyer arrives with a corpse. The body in the coffin is an android, built in the shape of recently deceased electronics heiress Sylvie Kirkyard and implanted with a chip that holds Sylvie's memories. Although she was only twenty-seven, Sylvie had for a long time feared for her life, and took the precaution of insuring her consciousness with Kirktronics' patented Brainz, Inc. method. Upon her death, the chip was implanted in this electronic body, and the body was brought to Jake.

Luckily, as the planet's smartest private detective, Jake is used to corpses--robotic and otherwise. When the dead girl awakes and asks him to find her killers, Jake doesn't blink an eye. But fulfilling her last request will be perilous, and by the time it's over Jake may wish he had a spare body of his own.