Heller makes it to the Howard Johnson and against his instructions signs in and rents a room, not bothering to falsify his license plate number. He does pick an alias for himself, though - John Dillinger the bank robber. I'd complain about Hubbard's obsession with mobsters, but in fairness, where else would Heller get an alias at this point?
After dropping off his luggage, Heller hits the restaurant for what Gris is convinced will be his last meal. Once again there is a matronly waitress who refuses to serve him sweets until he finishes his veggies... or is it the same waitress following him around? At any rate, Heller has to observe the other diners to figure out how to use his utensils, which raises the question of how Voltarians eat their food, even though Heller has had little trouble adapting to Earth clothing and weapons and whatnot. How many centuries more advanced are these aliens' forks? What about an Earth knife would puzzle them?
All the while Gris is freaking out, complaining that Heller doesn't check behind him, isn't watching the shadows, didn't test the chicken for arsenic, and is obviously being led into a kill spot by the waitress since she insisted that he was in the wrong seat and put him under a bright light with his back to the wall. There's a "tense" moment when Gris spots movement out of the corner of Heller's eye, followed by a flash, but the waitress assures him that it's just a cashier's desk light blowing out. And then, because Heller was a good boy and ate all his salad, he gets to have a sundae.
After that hair-raising dinner, he goes to his room to experiment with drugs.
At some point during his tour of the FBI drug lab, Heller somehow got two "small handful"s of "DRUGS!" and shoved them into his pockets. And the trained investigators, guys who know drugs by sight and smell, did not notice. I'm not sure what form of drugs Heller took, if they were leaves or powder or clumps or whatever, all we're told is that he dumps each pocketful of DRUGS! into an ashtray.
Then he pops open his suitcase and brings out two vials with a "tiny amount" of powder. Gris calls the amount microscopic, and while this would normally be grounds for a rant along the lines of "if you can see them without a microscope they obviously aren't microscopic Hubbard you idiot," remember that Heller has super-special vision that lets him read the granularity of stone with his naked eye.
And... well, it's unclear. We have two samples of DRUGS! in two ashtrays, and two vials of other drugs. The former came from the FBI labs, the latter from who-knows-where. Heller pours each vial over a separate ashtray, then holds the result up to his Super Eye, so that "The granules were suddenly HUGE!" From this Gris is able to identify one sample as Turkish opium, the other as Turkish heroin.
...Which he couldn't recognize until Heller gave them the Super Eye?
I think what's going on here is that Heller is comparing what he somehow swiped from the FBI to what he must have somehow swiped, offscreen and unobserved by Gris, from the Apparatus base in Turkey. But this is never stated.
And then Heller sets the drugs on fire. Because... science? Well, the fumes make the HellerVision go all blurry (in contrast to, say, learning of a companion's death, or sampling from the FBI's exhaustive inventory of illegal substances), forcing Heller to go outside on his room's deck for some fresh air. Then he rinses out the ashtrays, vials and his sleeves, flushing the drugs down the toilet. And then... he reads his books on fishing and baseball. It doesn't take long since he has Super Reading Comprehension, of course.
We get some comedy, I guess, when Heller has trouble with the television, which stubbornly refuses to project in 3D. He settles down to watch THE FBI IS WATCHING YOU!, a film about how the FBI wiped out America's communists, Mafia, and Congress. So I guess when Maulin was describing how the FBI ran the show, he wasn't actually divulging a secret or anything. Hubbard's "satire" of America is openly a police state powered by drugs and attempting to use an ineffective science called psychology to stay in power.
After the movie comes the local news.
Whites had been mugged. Blacks had been mugged. Whites had been raped. Blacks had been raped. Whites had been murdered. Blacks had been murdered.
There is a law in America that TV must cover everything impartially without showing bias and they had racially balanced the program pretty well.
Oh good, Hubbard's commenting on race relations in America. Alternatively, oh god, Hubbard's commenting on race relations in America.
Heller goes to bed, and Gris continues to fret about the hit that he's convinced is imminent. Mary Schmeck is mentioned twice in this chapter - Gris notes that the local news doesn't have a death report for her, since she's just another self-destructive junkie. He also hopes that his own death is as overlooked and unmourned.
But I'm sure Heller is really torn up inside, just hiding it under all that fried chicken and ice cream.
Back to Chapter Five
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