About twelve hours later I was not as bad off for I had gotten about eight hours sleep, and although feeling depressed, I had decided I might possibly live.
After running out of epithets to curse I. G. Barben and its pharmaceutical products, Gris reflects that reading the clinical descriptions of speed's effects isn't quite the same as going through a day of the shakes yourself. There's a paragraph where he goes over some exotic terms from Earth's drug culture, such as speed, speed freak, and popped (pills), but he decides to stay off the junk forever. He gets up to throw the bottle of pills in the disintegrator, changes his mind so that he can give the pills to his enemies, and changes his mind again when he decides "it was impossible to hate anyone that much."
So, you hear that, puny human drug users? Even Soltan Gris thinks Drugs Are Bad. The man who pulled someone's guts out through their ribcage wouldn't wish a hit of speed on his worst enemy. What the hell is wrong with you?
Suffering from cabin fever, Gris decides to... do some paperwork. Guess he wants to be really sober. Amongst the usual reports of opium production, assassinations, and bribe fees, Gris discovers that senior clerk Bawtch has made a mistake! Exciting, I know. See, Bawtch failed to mark some papers as "urgent," so Gris never stamped them (this is still Bawtch's mistake, mind you), which means that some human abductees are going to be "hypno-blocked" and trained by the Apparatus for use on Earth rather than simply discontinued.
Among them is Gunsalmo Silva, the guy we bumped into in the hangar chapters and chapters ago. According to his file, Silva is a Sicilian immigrant to America who became a Mafia "hit man" who "wasted" people before going "on the lam" in Turkey, where he was picked up by the Apparatus and interrogated. And no, I don't know why we're suddenly using quotation marks for Earth phrases instead of italics. Consistency is for authors who haven't founded their own religions.
And then, while Gris is fantasizing about chewing out Bawtch for his errors, we get a blink-and-you'll-miss-it plot point.
Then a sudden thought struck me. The Prahd package! The one that contained his overcoat and duplicate identoplate and the forged suicide note. I had been so hurried that night, I'd forgotten to give it to a courier to hold and mail a week after we left. That package was still sitting there on the floor beside my office desk.
Oh, well, we can't remember everything, can we? A mere detail. Unimportant.
So, how many chapters is it going to take before this becomes relevant again? And will there be any reminders along the way? And why was now the best time for Hubbard to bring it up?
Gris finishes his paperwork and gets cranky because now he doesn't have anything to do. Then a screen on the wall turns on to display a message from "Stabb, The Actual Captain." Due to the course calculations of a certain Royal officer who I dearly hope isn't real royalty, The Actual Captain is slowing down to extend their voyage by half a day so they arrive in Turkey after dark.
This means that Gris gets to spend another thirty-six hours in this "(bleeping) metal box." But since there's no hero to take away his metal boxes, Gris resolves to go give that Heller moron a stern talking to.
He gets zapped by static three times in the process of leaving his room. You can laugh if you want to.
Back to Chapter Two
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