“I have a more important task for myself than any entrepreneurial activity in the short run, which transcends even the corporation’s achievement in value. That’s getting this thing finalized in book form. That is more important than any other single thing, because that is what will put it into the species time scale; not these lectures.”

V-201: Session 34, Part B
Vol. VI, p. 34

Again, I urge you to get a copy of Orbit!  What follows is but a brief history of the crimes that led to Sic Itur Ad Astra not being published over twenty years ago.

On Saturday, 1991, January 19, Mrs. Galambos telephoned William Martin to inform him that her husband wanted to make him his “literary executor” and that he would be calling him about this. Probably due to his declining health, the professor never did call regarding this. On 1992, May 9 Mrs. Galambos again called. Would he, she asked, serve as “alternate successor trustee on two trusts, one literary and the other financial?” The first successor trust for the financial trust would be Wayne Joyner, her lawyer, and Bill his successor. The first successor for the literary trust, she had decided, would be Mr. James Gafford, and Bill his successor. She explained that she had picked Gafford over Bill because of his “formal background in physics which neither I nor you have.” Bill thanked her for the honor and agreed to serve. Soon after Bill received a copy of the Galamboses’ trust dated 1992, April 16. Schedule B confirmed what Mrs. Galambos had discussed with Bill.

On the tenth of June, 1992 Mrs. Galambos phoned Bill to tell him that her husband had been diagnosed as a victim of Alzheimer’s disease. She wanted him to know before she mailed out the 500 letters to the FEI market. In this letter she announced that she was “editing BOOK I from the transcripts of the Professor’s V-50 and V-201 tapes, and I expect to bring out the first volume of this multi-volume opus either by the end of 1993 or early in 1994.”
In the summer of 1995 Mrs. Galambos announced that she had been diagnosed as having cancer. Rapidly declining in health, on 1995, October 23 she amended her trust and named Charles Hayes and Wayne Joyner as CO-TRUSTEES to succeed her. This huge mistake (probably suggested by Hayes, Joyner, or both) violated the professor’s teachings of corporate entrepreneurship, breached the original trust document she and her husband had signed, and above all failed to provide a successor trustee if the co-trustees chose not to serve or were incapacitated or deceased. 
On 1996 February 14 Mrs. Galambos passed away. Her successor at the institute, Mr. Gafford, sent out a letter stating that the editing on Volume One of the BOOK had commenced. He further announced that, “the co-editors who worked with Mrs. Galambos in preparing her husband’s manuscript and I have agreed to announce that we will publish Volume One on 1996, October 4, and we will commence delivery of Volume One on 1996, October 19.”
Seven months later Gafford sent out another letter stating that his previous estimates had been “optimistic” but assuring everyone that “the next time you hear from me under the TUSPCO banner, it will be to advise you of the availability of Volume One for delivery.” 

On 1997, April 10 Professor Galambos passed away. On June 22 Mr. Gafford went to visit Bill Martin. He brought him a working copy of “Volume One” and asked Bill if he would look it over. After he left Bill “sat down in my favorite reading chair, and excitedly opened the manuscript. I was greeted with a shock. There were major deletions of the original lectures; the professor’s words were often paraphrased; the text had been rearranged in places; and everywhere there were typographical mistakes, misspellings, and punctuation errors. My heart sank. I closed the volume and the next day told my associate Erik Falvey that I could not bear to look at Mrs. Galambos’s manuscript any further. It wasn’t the theory. The veracity of the text, the nerve and pulse of the professor’s lectures, the atmosphere, the syntax, the color, the down-to-earth appeal of his language, all were missing! There was only one thing to do: wait until Gafford brought back the corrected version and hope that it would be right. If it wasn’t, a great tragedy would befall the professor and his theory. In that very moment it came to me that the fate of mankind would soon come into my hands; that after all my years of study and preparation the hour of my destiny had at last come—I would be the one to finalize Galambos’ theories into book form.”
On 1997, October 4 Gafford resigned from his positions as editor-in-chief for TUSPCO, director of FEI, and in all capacities with respect to The Universal Corporation. Over the next several years he would stand stedfast behind Bill in his struggles against the trustees.

Those struggles were evident from the day the trustees decided to hire Bill as “editor-in-chief” of the book project. They had no intention of telling Bill, and were unaware that Bill knew his proper title according to the trust was “literary executor.” It was clear from day one that Bill was dealing with the worst kind of flatlanders. The “contract” Bill was forced to sign to gain access to the professor’s work was right out of flatland law from its insulting and impossible demands to its performance schedules and fines for lack of meeting deadlines, to its insistence on flatland arbitration procedures to settle disputes, ad nauseam. Again, I urge you to read Orbit!  for a detailed account of the Professor’s trustees at their flatland worst! Clearly they had no comprehension whatsoever of the theory.

For the next several months Bill and his assistants worked tirelessly on the BOOK all the while having to put up with the flatland trustees and their flatland attorney’s breathing down their backs. The explicit documentation and supporting documents for everything written above and much of what you will read below are all to be found in Orbit! Again, I urge you to get a copy.

On 1998, March 24 at 7 p.m. Charles Hayes and his wife Linda arrived at Bill’s office for a meeting. Also present were Erik Falvey, Ben Cooper, Julie Martin and Bill and Julie’s young daughter Heidi. Bill presented Hayes with the manuscript for BOOK I which according to the “contract” was due that day (manuscript only, no electronic file). Hayes opened the book to the foreword which Bill had written. “I see you haven’t signed the Foreword,” Hayes said. “No. There’s something we need to settle, Charles. The question is, how should I sign it?” At a meeting held on 1998, May 1 with about a hundred graduates, most of whom had purchased BOOK I under the pre-purchase subscription agreement, Bill would recall the rest of the conversation with Hayes:

I think the readership deserves to know whether this book has imprimatur on it. Is it authorized? And what makes it authorized? You know what makes it authorized, ladies and gentlemen? Galambos’ trust. Here are three questions that have to be answered. You should all ask these questions. This you deserve the right to know. Here it is: By whose authority? Under whose auspices? And by whom was the theory of freedom provided to you? Galambos named me as the literary executor. That’s by whom. Galambos is the one who has the authority. And the auspices are his natural trusts. If I didn’t sign this as W.W. Martin, or William W. Martin, or Martin, Literary Executor of the Natural Estate of Andrew J. Galambos and Suzanne J. Galambos, we don’t have an authorized version.

“I cannot agree with that,” Hayes replied. Next Hayes demanded to know where the credits to Mrs. Galambos were. “There aren’t any.” Hayes: “They gotta be in there.” Bill: “Charles, are you asking me to lie? Are you asking me to give her credit for something she did not do and which I did not use?” Hayes: “Ahh—it’s just a little fraud.” At this point Hayes’s wife Linda let out a slight gasp and said, “Why Charles, that’s against the theory.”

Yes, Ladies and gentlemen, that would have been a fraud (of course the Professor would never call anything a “little” fraud) and it sure as hell would have been against the theory. But, the flatland trustees who could care less about the theory were adamant. This reminds me of the quote Galambos told Bill during one of their last phone conversations: “Never is one so firm as in his decision to be weak.”

On 1998, April 20 William Martin made a last ditch appeal to the Professor’s dwindling market when he sent out the following invitation reproduced here from Orbit! to several hundred Book I pre-subscribers: