Part Two, Chapter Five - A Fleet of Office Buildings

I overlooked something in the previous chapter - when Gris tells Heller about Mission Earth he makes sure to play it up as a humanitarian mission rather than a prelude to invasion. That's because as a mere Fleet officer, Heller wouldn't know about the Invasion Timetables. So the commands passed down from long-dead ancestors ordering Voltar to conquer planets aren't public knowledge, it's basically a conspiracy, which makes it even less sensible.

The whole premise is stupid enough as it is, but at least if the whole society believed in the ineffability of the Invasion Timetables, peer pressure could keep the government following them no matter how little sense it made. Now I'm left wondering why, if only a comparatively small number of people are in on it, they continue to follow the plan... and if this is more of Hubbard's "satire." Did he think George Washington left a secret guide to world conquest that the U.S. government has followed ever since? Just what the hell is going on?

I guess Hubbard's won this round. Now I want to keep reading this lousy series in hope that there are answers to these questions that won't make me slam my head into my desk. It's a fool's hope, but I cling to it.

As for this chapter, Gris is off to get transfer orders so Heller will go along with Mission Earth. Now last book I made a big deal about how the Psychlos' civilization was built around mining, to the extent that their mass transit was patterned after minecarts. So guess what the Fleet's office buildings look like?

I am sure you have noticed that the first impression a visitor gets of the Fleet Administration Complex in Government City is that he has just encountered an actual fleet in outer space. When somebody said "buildings" the architects must have thought "ships." It is most annoying: there they are, spotted around ten square miles of otherwise barren land, like ten thousand huge, silver ships. They're even in formation! They say the officers and clerks even wear spaceboots! And not a shrub or tree to be seen anywhere!

Few things - one: how the hell do you mistake a collection of structures in the middle of a wasteland for a fleet in the black depths of space? Two: ten thousand buildings in a ten square mile patch of land? Three: purposefully designing the buildings to reflect the occupation of their inhabitants is both silly and flies in the face of everything I've noticed about government-funded offices. Four: wouldn't it be easier, if you had to have buildings that looked like spaceships, to bring in a bunch of actual decommissioned ships and convert them to offices? Five: why doesn't the Fleet have an orbital administrative complex, with only a small local office to act as a go-between between it and ground-pounders?

Gris doesn't like the base for other reasons, such as how it takes two hours to get anywhere because of all the security checkpoints. He eventually finds a personnel officer "in a cubicle that looked for all the world like a storeroom on a battleship." The officer is able to deduce that Gris is part of the "drunks" despite his lack of an Apparatus uniform, and Gris wonders at this until he glances down. "I saw no grease spots, no food stains, no old blood. But I also saw no style, no flair. No pride! Shabby!"

I'm still wondering where this "shabby = evil" concept came from. Though I hate to invoke Godwin, the Nazis were pretty snappy dressers, right? And in Star Wars the evil Empire were the ones with the sharp officer uniforms, immaculate white armor, and antiseptic interiors. But here Hubbard is once again using a lack of style to indicate a group's moral depravity.

Anyway, Gris says he's after transfer orders for Jettero Heller, which gets the clerk to reminisce for a moment about the athletic skills of the book's star, and then an attempt at bureaucratic stalling is averted by Gris' orders from the Grand Council. The clerk isn't happy when the clearance turns out to be legit, and complains that it's not right for a Fleet combat engineer to resign and enter the service of the Exterior Division - and since Gris doesn't have Heller's resignation from his previous service, he can't authorize the transfer.

Gris channels Terl and considers finding or making up something to blackmail the clerk with, but instead asks what he would do to resolve the situation. The Fleet clerk hits buttons and prints out a very brief set of orders putting Heller on "independent duty on his own cognizance terminating on his own cognizance." Gris is awed both by how open-ended the orders are, and also at the fact that he just achieved something through entirely legal means.

It felt odd to have done a straight, legal piece of work, no twists. The honest world is a strange place for a member of the Apparatus. It leaves one feeling confused. Unfamiliar territory!

Satire? Possibly. Subtle? Certainly not. The chapter ends with the clerk wishing Heller luck in his new mission (while mentioning that his Academy track record still stands), and Gris realizing that he could effectively erase Heller from official records with these new orders. Then he's off to pick up Heller's stuff from his old quarters.


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