The combat engineer risks painful death by popping open one of the brain-frying devices and fiddling with its innards. Normally messing with the Countess' machines is an act of suicide, but the woman, "as beautiful as the Goddess on the altar of a church, but every bit as cold as that carved stone," continues to silently watch Heller from beside her desk. Heller continues his tour of the sadistic devices, and one of them in particular stands out:
It was a maze of electrodes that could be applied to different parts of a strapped-down body. There was a sort of projector screen. The hapless being strapped to it could be shocked with high voltage and shown pictures at the same time.
It's not quite the same as using an "electronic ribbon" to suck the souls of atomized aliens into "vacuum zones" before subjecting them to intense 3-D cinema in order to brainwash them, a chain of events that will culminate millennia later in Tom Cruise shelling out hundreds of thousands of dollars to rid himself of extraterrestrial ghosts until he feels better about himself. But it's close enough to make me suspicious.
The torture devices left behind, Heller reaches a part of the room where the exercise equipment is. He confirms my suspicions that his hands are inhumanly strong by spinning a hundred-pound weight on one fingertip, then playfully swings himself along some suspended gymnastic rings. This culminates in a twenty-foot flip that drops him right next to the Countess Krak.
He saw her. He stood up very erect. It was as if somebody had turned on a light inside of him.
"HelLO!" he said. "Hello, hello, HELLO! What is a beautiful creature like you doing in a place like this?"
It's almost refreshing to find something that Heller absolutely sucks at. Gris is horrified, not just at the corniness and raw Fail of Heller's pick-up line, but because Krak has killed people for lesser insults. But just as he's ready to write off Mission Earth as a failure, Krak surprises him by not killing Heller, instead collapsing into her chair and half-turning away from the idiot standing next to him.
She just sat there. Her eyes were fixed on a spot a yard in front of her feet. In a low, strained voice, not looking at him, just looking at that spot, she said, "You should not talk to me." There was a silence. She seemed to sink lower into her chair, tense, indrawn. "I am not worthy of you." It was just a monotonous mutter. "I am rotten. I am vile. I am not fit for you to talk to."
How telling is it that Hubbard likes for his books' heroes to be worshiped? Jonnie Goodboy Tyler was made a demigod by people he had never met, a person whose girlfriend's only defining characteristic was her unconditional, slavish devotion to his cool indifference. And here we have Jettero Heller, a beacon of such purity that murderous thugs become his humble servants while this woman is crushed because she'll never be "worthy" of interacting with him. I can't wait to see how the people on Earth will fight each other for the honor of kissing his keister.
I mean, lots of protagonists fall under the messianic archetype, but this is... it's just... dammit, Hubbard.
The now-ruined Countess Krak is sobbing uncontrollably because Heller's god-awful pick-up line was "the first friendly thing anyone has said to me in three years!" He's a little lost, but holds her hand and gives her his hanky in an attempt to calm her down. Gris, meanwhile, has had enough of this crap. He steps outside, has the guards move in to make sure nobody leaves, and hits the medical labs to get some more "skin patches" for his face. When he gets back to Krak's room he finds that she's still crying. Oh, and all her tears "were making her breast pretty wet." Thank you, Hubbard, for attempting to eroticize the sight of a woman crippled by self-loathing.
So Gris starts gathering equipment on his own. There's headgear that puts the wearer into a hypnotic trance while it plays language tapes, perfect for rapid learning, and fortunately Earth provides a lot of commercial language courses that the aliens have appropriated. There's even a nearly funny moment as Gris muses that the "FBI" who warns of the penalties of copying such products will have a pretty hard time arresting him. Since Heller will be primarily operating around New York City, Washington DC, and Virginia, and there are a confusing number of accents listed for NYC, Gris settles for a basic Virginia accent and an "Ivy League" intonation, since he concludes that New England must be close to where they're going.
Now, were you aware that Jettero Heller is totally awesome? I know you just saw him reduce a woman to crushing despair with his inherent goodness, but I'm not sure you properly appreciate just how incredible this man is. Krak finally pulls herself together, so Gris moves in with a language tape and the hypno-learning-helmet. Heller shrugs it off and deflects his handler's attempt to explain its use, sits down on Krak's desk to mess with the device, and listens to it say "My name is George" in "Elementary English (Ivy League)." But this will simply not do for Jettero Heller!
He gets Gris to call in one of Spiteos' many surveillance technicians while he starts fiddling with the teaching helmet. When the worker arrives, Heller orders, very specifically, a "small frequency step-down unit," and of course the technician hurries off to get the part. With it installed the device will play one of the language strips, which normally take an hour to get through, in a mere thirty seconds. The noise is a high-frequency screech, but Heller listens to it and then flawlessly recites the lines from the language lesson!
The Countess Krak breathed, "Instant articular assimilation and retention. At hyperspeed."
I looked at her. "Is that rare?"
"No," she said. She seemed to be in a daze. "Well . . . yes, at speeds like that, it is." She wasn't talking to me, really. "His hearing is trained to differentiate minute time intervals." Her voice sounded so strange. "I've never seen it done that fast." She seemed to become aware of me for a moment. With bright-eyed awe she said, "Isn't he beautiful?"
Gris grudgingly admits to himself that Heller is indeed smexy. On the bright side, since Heller can go through four language tapes in the space of this side conversation, they can just take the language gear to his room and learn it all in a night, right? But no, Krak is adamantly opposed to that idea. Regulations, you see. They'll just have to come back tomorrow for Heller's next lesson, preferably one done shirtless. Gris hurriedly drags Heller out of there, and this long, painful chapter comes to an end.
RIP Countess Krak, emotionless dominatrix. We barely knew ye. Here comes Countess Krak, Jettero Heller fangirl and love interest.
Back to Chapter Three
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