Part Seven, Chapter Five - Vacation's Over, Get Back to Work

Being stranded in the mountains offers Gris and his driver a three-week vacation, spent hunting and consuming the local game and enjoying the majestic scenery as they move from camp to camp. Gris kills over five hundred songbirds to express his appreciation for nature, while Ske the Nameless Driver gets to lug around all the sweetbuns and sparklewater and dead game, not to mention a twenty-foot length (!) of their air bus' frame, the part with the identification number that he needs to requisition a replacement, torn from the wreckage with a great deal of effort.

So Ske has a bit of a bad attitude during their journeys, but Gris tries to put him straight with the power of Psychology!, explaining that Ske is obviously suffering from an "atavism deficiency," or that the reptilian part of his brain that likes to blindly follow orders is underdeveloped. It doesn't help and Ske keeps grumbling. Oh, those wacky psychologists and their big words and their silly delusions. It's not like they're any sort of threat, or could end up as the series' Big Bads or anything.

Of course, Ske's also dumb about campfires, and likes to use green bark that sends columns of white smoke into the sky every sunset. Three weeks after their ill-fated hunting trip Gris wakes up with a gun in his face, confronted by two forest wardens employed by a Lord Mok, who isn't happy with these poachers. But then Ske, who is close to being hanged by this point, blurts out that Gris is an officer of the Apparatus on a secret mission, and more guys come out of hiding, and everyone shows everyone their badges, and the wardens are nice enough to arrange for a transport to take them back to Government City the next day.

So. Gris and Ske go hunting while looking for wrecks. Someone tries to kill them and strands them in the wilderness. They get picked up three weeks later and sent back to work. There, the past two chapters summed up in three sentences.

Hubbard? What's the point? Why did this chapter happen? Why were you willing to skip three weeks of having your characters romping around in the mountains instead of skipping to the completion of Tug One's repairs? Why introduce a subplot about somebody trying to kill Gris instead of getting the main plot moving? Did you think we needed a comedic interlude of Gris throwing the phrase "atavism" around and watching Ske haul an oversized hunk of metal? Did you want to make a statement about recreational hunting? Why?

Tune in next chapter for a flamboyant clerk, a hideous new car, and more paperwork. Then we'll meet up with Heller again like the intervening chapters never even happened.


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Forward to Chapter Six