Part Thirty-Nine, Chpater Five - The Countess Krak Just Isn't Interested In Global Warming

With Crobe securely sealed away, Gris deigns to check on his nemeses, who certainly couldn't have made any progress in the four days he's been otherwise occupied.  He finds Heller writing out chemical equations, and I shouldn't have to tell you that Gris isn't remotely worried about or interested in what kind of equations they are - "No threat there: he could do equations until the sky fell in and it wouldn't disturb the planet in the least."

Meanwhile, the Countess Krak has trained Mister Calico to respond to Voltarian commands and do flips and fetch the newspaper.  So that's what we've been doing wrong during all our failed attempts to train felines - we haven't been using the right language!  The front page story of the National Expirer asks "IS MISS AMERICA SAFE FROM WHIZ KID RAPE?"

Just a warning: rape is going to be a recurring theme for this book.

Krak reads the story, sees the picture of the half-naked pageant winner in question, worries that indeed "She is beautiful.  Oh dear, and we're not even married yet!"  And then she has the cat to press two buttons on a speaker phone to place a call to Miss Boomp (?!), so Krak can tell her friend that Jettero is much too busy to visit the casino, especially after she hears that Boomp is using the rigged tables to let the prettiest and most popular girls win to draw in more crowds.  Yeah, terribly sorry, but she'll be keeping Heller as far away from attractive women as possible.

So... Gris was right?  Kinda?  Krak is that jealous, willing to go behind her lover's back and arrange things so that he isn't in a situation where his eyes might wander?  But she's too meek to actually confront him with her worries?

It also goes without saying that Gris doesn't perk up at this and starting thinking of ways to use Krak's jealousy against her, perhaps by sending a leggy blonde Heller's way.

Phone call completed, Krak walks into the same room as Heller and asks, roughly a week after arriving on Earth, "exactly what are your plans for getting us home?"  And Heller, roughly a week after being reunited with his girlfriend, finally realizes "I guess I haven't been very exact in telling you about my planning."  Heller summarizes the world's need for a non-polluting fuel source, which will incidentally solve their inflation problem, I guess.  Then he talks in italicized parentheses.

"So (a) they are getting dirty and making fresh air scarce by using dirty fuel; (b) they are short on real fuel and can't build cheap sewage plants; and (c) they are unable to control their economy because they have such expensive fuel.

Yes, sewage plants are key to saving the environment.  Sewage plants could mean the difference between life as an alien protectorate and humanity's extermination.  And to my knowledge, this is the first time in all of Mission Earth that sewage plants have been so much as mentioned.

Krak says this is all "very good," but presses Heller about "what are your plans for getting us home?"  So Heller goes through his five-part plan: get diploma, make a carburetor and fuel, use "spores" to clean up the atmosphere - and this is why he needs Crobe, ahah!  Heller also has "some other things to prevent continent immersion by floods," and the last step, of course, involves making billions of dollars to finance the rest of the plan.

I'm kinda looking forward to hearing how Heller plans to combat rising sea levels.  Some sort of coastal force field?  A reverse heat generator to re-freeze the ice caps?  A serum to make seawater more compact, so the water levels go back down?  Anything is possible with Hubbard Science. (the answer is actually quite close to a gag in Futurama, just delivered in the most catastrophically idiotic way possible)

Krak concedes that this is all "very interesting," but against asks if Heller could "tell me what you are doing, right now, to get us home?"  Not "complete Mission Earth and go home," Krak wants to leave.

So Heller explains - or continues to explain - that he's studying all the pollutants in Earth's atmosphere, and describes the Greenhouse Effect and global warming for his girlfriend.  "The main danger, however, is that these particles do not permit adequately large water drops to form and so there is an increasingly scarcity of rain."

As far as I can tell from a quick check on Wikipedia, Hubbard has gotten this completely backwards.

Again, Krak is less than interested in Heller's rambling, but presses him on "what could you DO, RIGHT NOW, to speed up your program?  Some VITAL point you could PUSH on?"  She wants progress, dammit, not to-do lists!  She offers to buy what Heller needs with her magic credit card, forcing Heller to explain that magic is only good for so many decimal places, while he needs billions of dollars to get the Chryster Motor Corporation out of debt and back into carburetor production.

Krak concludes that Heller needs to both stay out of Atlantic City and start working on getting those billions now, before graduation, "in a manner that does NOT include ANY Miss Americas!  Not a single one!"

This might work a little better if it had been Heller eying the pictures of former Miss Americas in the casino lobby a few chapters ago, and not the Countess.  I guess her unjustified jealousy bordering on paranoia is supposed to be charming?  Or should we assume that it's just a womanly trait men have to put up with?

Also, does Krak even know how much money a billion dollars is?  Or how one goes about earning that much money?

Gris at least is pleased with the situation.

I really had to laugh.  She was pushing on him, yes.  But after the fiasco he had just made I had no fears at all that he would suddenly come up with pots of money.  All the money he had gotten so far was hit money put up to waste him that he, by luck, had gotten into his own hands.  High finance is an entirely different variety of slaughter.  The hit men there wear top hats and are very suave and clever and they do their shooting cunningly across desks.  It was wholly out of his field.  He didn't have, in my opinion, the ghost of a chance.

Billions indeed!

I think Hubbard's writing works better if you read it in a thick Swedish accent.  Though I guess reading it like a second grader giving a book report works too.  Go on, try it!

And with that, without wasting another moment to see if Heller and Krak are about to come up with a plan to make billions, Gris drops a blanket over the viewscreens and loads them with recording strips.  He has decided that Krak and Heller have no way of making billions of dollars, and so assumes that they're going to loaf around for however long it takes Gris to get the go-ahead to kill them.  Yes, Heller has once again been defeated for good.  Now it's time for Gris to get some fresh air and start enjoying life again.

God help us all. 


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