So like I said, Gris spends the next two days after his recovery consuming Heller's gift of sustenance without even a fleeting thought of gratitude, and doing paperwork. It's only after Bawtch mentions how Gris' landlady got paid by Ske that Gris thinks to check his pockets for the banknote his driver was showing off the other night. Faced with the terrifying prospect of moving back into his old digs, Gris stops to think for a while, interrupted only by the contractors coming in to renovate his bathroom, which I sincerely hopes becomes a valid plot point later because otherwise why the hell is it in the book?
Gris decides to analyze his hallucinatory chat with Manco Devil from the other night and get some closure out of it. He quickly concludes that Manco Devil was a father figure, the various spaceships were phallic symbols, so obviously he lusts after his mother and is jealous of his father. But despite this swift and decisive self-diagnosis Gris is still feeling edgy, and he decides it's due to the patrol craft he dreamt about. So he suddenly freaks out about the crew of Heller's ship that the Apparatus took care of way, way back in Part One... you remember that, don't you?
Anyway, Gris looks at some old Apparatus documents but can find no report of the patrol craft in question being discovered "crashed" in the desert. So he panics some more - what if the Death Battalions sold the prisoners and ship to smugglers, and the Fleet somehow catches word of the Apparatus' crimes, and then the entirety of Voltar's Fleet personnel comes to beat up Gris?
But then Gris remembers some other details of his dream - demands for money, allusions to something he doesn't know, and counterfeit money. And then it all comes together: "Deep in the primordial reptile brain which every sentient person has, I had worked it all out already! Because of a normal fear of erotic self-gratification, I had just not let myself know about it." So he creates the "elaborate charade" of taking a hunting trip ("I like to kill small songbirds"), grabs his gun, and leaves the office, ending the chapter and this section.
So all of that hallucinating, all of those ever-so-entertaining fever dreams and whatnot, was so Gris could remember to double-check on something that happened in Part One, Chapter Three, because maybe there's a security risk. So we'll get to spend the next Part dealing with something that should have been taken care of two hundred pages ago. And then in the Part after that we'll get back to the "Tug One sitting in a hangar" plot like nothing's happened.
I just wanna go to Earth, Hubbard. You promised an alien invasion, why aren't we on Earth yet? Can't we just skip to the spaceship being ready to go? Why did we need to see Gris do paperwork and pass out repeatedly? What exactly is this a satire of? Are we supposed to be laughing at psychology or worried about its threat to our civilization? Just, why?
This is a book that provokes an existential crisis.
Back to Chapter Six
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