So Ske and Gris take off for Spiteos, in the off-chance that the patrol craft crew is still alive and might know something that would allow Gris to control Heller. But not before Ske comments that Gris' second-hand uniform smells like "sewer gas and cadavers." On the upside, dogs will probably love him.
Along the way, Gris keeps an eye out for any sign of a crashed ship in the desert, but sees only that "the whitish expanses were white" and "the sand-dancers danced but not over any trace of a wreck." He decides to look into the issue later and focuses on the task at hand. After landing at Camp Endurance/Kill/Notasecretapparatusheadquartershonest he stuffs his Super Spy Suitcase with fake bills and poisoned food and goes in to get the other thing he needs: a whore.
They often take hill girls from other planets and cut out their larynx: they can't speak Voltarian anyway. Only a prostitute that is mute can be passed through the tunnel. Others at Camp Kill might suspect what was in Spiteos but none must be able to talk about it. It was common enough to entice a prisoner with a woman if it was thought he would not talk under torture. A lot of riffraff would do anything in exchange for a female.
Question time:
1. "Hill girl." Why is this significant? Are there a dozen splatbooks' worth of girlish subraces - high girls, dark girls, wood girls, sand girls? Is this meant to indicate that said girl is from out in the boonies, a country bumpkin abducted and forced into a life of sexual slavery? Or is it something worse, an implication that this "hill girl" is something subhuman (she doesn't even speak Voltarian, after all), which excuses her mistreatment?
2. Why cut out her larynx? If she doesn't speak Voltarian, isn't it redundant? And who is she going to blab to anyway, if the Apparatus has near-total control over who comes in and out of Camp Whatever? And suppose anyone did come snooping, wouldn't they be a bit suspicious to see a bunch of mutes with scars over their throats?
3. Remind me again why Spiteos is a super ultra secret? If the Apparatus is super-powerful and has blackmailed the rest of the government into compliance, they shouldn't have to hide their headquarters. Anyway, why wouldn't an intelligence agency have a headquarters? Why wouldn't they have a prison? On the other hand, if they're so shabby and ill-motivated and incompetent, why hasn't anyone put the pieces together and noticed an awful lot of traffic going towards a miserable little military post in the middle of the desert?
Whatever. The obese hag in charge of the camp has a bad attitude, so Gris decides to indirectly kill her by paying her with a fake fifty. He gets a subdued girl probably kidnapped "from the back country of Flisten," along with a bag of what I will euphemistically label accessories. Gris shows his incredible cunning by having her carry the bag of bad money, so that if it is somehow traced it will lead back to this mute, "primitive" prisoner who held it for a couple of minutes that one day.
They reach a checkpoint, Gris lets the guards do a thorough search of the girl so they don't check out the bag of counterfeit money, and afterward Gris is impressed because the girl is blushing after her groping session, even though most Camp Kill hookers quickly become "cold meat."
Now, I've read books with some dark stuff in it - off the top of my head, one of the Dune prequels had a rescue mission into a Harkonnen rape camp. So I have to wonder why this book in particular enrages me so. Am I just that biased against Hubbard? Or maybe it's the narrator's blasé reaction to it, like all this stuff with the sex slave is another inconvenience, while the Harkonnen experience was played for horror. Or maybe I'm offended that the author considers this a serious satire - no, a humorous satire - of the real-life CIA and how things work in America. Or maybe I'm wondering how much this reflects the author's views on women, and if the narrator isn't particularly horrified by it because Hubbard wasn't. Goodness knows Battlefield Earth wasn't exactly a feminist work, but you'd think he'd show more of a reaction here.
Anyway. They make it through the checkpoint without further incident, but over the bus ride to Spiteos proper Gris realizes he's been had - the girl is scared of the bus and becomes increasingly recalcitrant, so once they disembark Gris is forced to keep nudging her forward. He surmises that the hag at the camp has given him a troublesome hooker, which retroactively justifies him dooming her to death with that fake money.
Then it's trouble finding the spaceship crew in question, as Gris struggles with an unhelpful "half-naked, yellow-man clerk" who can't find any relevant records, and then wanders around until he finds a guardroom. The captain eventually produces records of the captive patrol craft crew, and gives Gris directions to what turns out to be a designated military section of Spiteos' dungeons. It's a dump. "Some large type of vermin leaped out of a sagging cell door. It scared me."
So alternative theory: maybe Gris has no reaction to the surgically-silenced sex slave because he is incapable of properly conveying emotion.
Back to Chapter One
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