Friday, November 9, 2012

Part Forty, Chapter Seven - Flight of the Spastic Gris

Gris is in a state of panic, wildly glancing about wondering where to go and what to bring with him, while Faht Bey chimes in with suggestions - the Blixo will be landing soon, with "those homo couriers" and their "postcards" which are really "magic mail cards" that delay a death sentence.  Oh, and with Gris gone there'll be nobody to stamp paperwork.  The end result is that Gris flings all the "magic mail cards" and his identoplate for Faht Bey to use.  Now Faht Bey has no use for Gris - he can sign papers in his name, he can even manage the couriers who would ordinarily bring news from Voltar and do Gris' bidding back home.

How convenient for him that Gris needs to immediately flee the country.  And is such a state of mind to willingly hand all this over to Faht Bey.  Could this all be an anti-Gris conspiracy?  And more importantly, why should anyone give a rat's ass if it is?  Nobody likes Gris or is rooting for him, and he wasn't accomplishing anything in Turkey.  He never accomplishes anything in Turkey.  The story would be five books shorter if Hubbard just cut out all the Afyon garbage.

At best this is the overly-convoluted, unnecessarily-dark method the author came up with for getting Gris back to the States.  At worst it's a set-up for yet another overly-convoluted, unnecessarily subplot to distract us when the main story stalls later.

Gris packs, still panicking.

I opened the grip.

grip (noun, archaic) - a small traveling-bag

Into it I packed guns and ammunition so I could defend myself.

As opposed to guns and ammunition for a midday snack.

I packed the phoney Inkswitch federal I.D. so I could change my identity.  I grabbed some instant gas pellets that would render any assailant unconscious and packed them.

As opposed to grabbing some instant gas pellets that would render any assailant unconscious and shoving them up his nose.

I snatched up the two-way-response radio and packed it.  I strapped the grip up.  Then I realized that I had forgotten to put in any clothes and unstrapped it.  I put in a business suit, some shirts and ties and a combat camouflage dress.

He specifies "dress."  Not "uniform" or "fatigues," but "dress."  Combat camo dresses - when you want to go to a ball, but don't want to be seen.

Oh, uh... wasn't expecting anyone to actually make something like that.  Well.  Carry on.

I strapped it up.  I realized I had not put in any money.  I unstrapped it.

This goes on for nearly a full page, for three long paragraphs.

The most relevant thing Gris packs, at least for the immediate future, is a "pile of plunger time-fuse bombs" from his gun case.  Why was he storing explosives next to his guns in his room?  Why is the space-age, alien intelligence service using plunger time-fuses on their bombs?  The author knows but ain't telling.

Deciding that he needs money, Gris happens upon the taxi driver polishing the new Mercedes in the driveway, feels "a surge of purest hate," and decides "to kill two jailbirds with one bomb.  They would learn in one last agonizing flash the penalty for grabbing women before I could get at them."  So Gris cheerfully asks Ahmed and Ters (evil laugh) to take him to the bank to get some more money - not the local bank, but the one in Istanbul.  All the while, Gris is nonchalantly glancing out the back window for signs of pursuit, and noticing how some of the camels along the road are giving him suspicious looks.

They reach their destination around ten at night, which means Gris will have to get a policeman to wrangle his banking buddy for him.  The Apparatus officer depresses the plunger on one of his delightfully archaic bombs, slips it under the cushion of the limo's rear seat, and sends Ahmed and Ters (evil laugh) home since he has a "convention of drug pushers at the Istanbul Hilton" to attend.  So off they go, with one last evil laugh from Ters, presumably to meet their sudden death well off-screen.

Think they'll really die?  We don't even hear a distant explosion, in this chapter or the next.  And in most cases, whenever a villain like Gris assumes his foe perished in an explosion he set up but did not actually witness, he ends up disappointed.  Hubbard, though, seems to have a talent for anticlimactic and off-screen character deaths, such as Mary's from Book Two.  Unless her miraculous survival is being saved for a later plot twist. (editor's note from the future: no, she's gone) The important thing is, like the question of the potential anti-Gris conspiracy, there's no reason to care.  If they're gone for good, good.  If they weasel out of death somehow, oh boy, another meaningless subplot for Gris to waste half a book on later.

Anyway, Gris walks up to a night watchmen only to be told that Mudur Zengin is already in the bank waiting for him, which Gris puts down to the credit card companies keeping a constant watch on their customers.  Sure enough, Zengin has been asked to detain Gris (though he doesn't specify by whom), so Gris drops to his knees and begs for dollars.  Zengin, because he and Gris are such good... uh... owing to their long... out of respect for... well, Zengin whips out a quick something for Gris to sign and counts out a hundred thou US from his personal safe to drop on the floor.  Because he's just a nice guy, or Gris is really that good at grovelling.

I bent to grab them.  I stuffed them in my pocket.  Then I saw the contempt in his eyes.  It struck me that he was certainly behaving in an unfriendly way.  Rushed as I was, I still said, "What have I done?"

Completely pissed away the fortune hyped on the book jacket that you randomly received at the beginning of this volume, making the intervening 177 pages utterly pointless.

Also, rape.  And murder.

"What you have done," he said, "is between you and Allah.  It is not given to a mere mortal to comprehend the actions of such as you."

He walked over and gave me a shove toward the door.  "Good night and, I hope, good bye."

Bye-bye, banker with no real personality or character development who only appeared in this book because Gris got handed the aforementioned pissed-away pile of gold and who then inexplicably decided to aid him in his flight instead of turning him over to the authorities.


Back to Chapter Six 

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