With this cunning cipher in place, Gris drops the message not in the normal mail, but in a secret Apparatus office in the back of a lingerie shop. Thereby making the deception all but pointless. The Coordinated Information Apparatus, ladies and gentlemen.
His next stop is the industrial sector called Power City, a 150,000-year-old warren of power stations and smog. This is where induction fields convert materials from one element to another, generating both ore and electricity to power the planet, presumably from all those electrons changing orbits and such. Which would mean that the Voltarians have perfected nuclear transmutation to such an extent that the energy released by the operation exceeds the energy necessary for the conversion. And I'd love to pick at this and criticize it from an educated standpoint, except my high school chemistry teacher was going through a divorce the year I had her, so I remember the names of the movies we sat through rather than actual nuclear science. Osmosis Jones, Joe Dirt, The Wedding Planner, Inspector Gadget...
I think I got to endure Joe Dirt three times that year, all in separate classes, all because one guy kept lugging it around and suggesting it to teachers, curse him. And that's not a film that appreciates with subsequent viewings, let me tell you.
Anyway. Ske swears up a storm from all the smoke dirtying his garish ride, not to mention the energy fields scrambling his equipment. But he's able to get Gris to the Reliable Ready-Pack Take Away Metals Company, where the agent inquires about a personal purchase of gold. Gris wants nine hundred pounds of it in some secure crates for spending money - after all, Voltarian credits aren't good where he's going. A little backroom dealing, a bit of lead fed into the magical science machine, and voila, futuristic alchemy.
I took one of the fifty-pound ingots off the pile. Gold is deceptive. It looks small but it's heavy. It almost broke my arm. I poked at it with a fingernail and then put my teeth into a corner of it. Nice and soft. Pure gold. Gleaming, lovely! Gold is so pretty!
If only the Psychlos had figured this stuff out. It would have crashed the pan-galactic economy, of course, but it would've made Battlefield Earth a lot shorter.
So soon Gris is on his way back to the hangar with enough treasure to overload his garish aircar. He cunningly secures the gold by putting labels warning of radioactive materials on the crates, which will fool anyone without a Geiger counter, and fantasizes about what he can do with such wealth on Earth. He's memorized the exchange rates for gold on various Earth markets, and estimates that he'll have over six million American dollars for his private use.
Power, power, who saith it doth not have a sweet taste? I was spending it in English already. And in my imagination, Heller, a ragged, shabby and starving, panhandling bum, approached on the street and begged me for a quarter and I pulled the sleeve of my tailored jacket out of his bony, clutching fingers and slammed the door of my limousine in his tear-streaked face.
This chapter raises an interesting point - did Gris get any sort of allowance for Mission Earth, any sort of operating funding? Nobody mentioned what his war chest for infiltrating human society was. Were they expecting him to improvise? I guess this is part of the mission being intended to fail.
Back to Part Nine, Chapter Ten
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