Hey, that'd be neat, if terrestrial animals could pick up the alien-ness of the otherwise human Voltarians based on scent. Heller would have to come up with an excuse for why he shies away from New York's strays or the Corleone guard dogs. Gris would have a better excuse for hating animals besides his innate evilness.
The old man offers Gris a drink as they sit down around the fire, and explains how his dear Turkish wife died years ago, and the nearest town is that way, and why no, there isn't anyone else around, thanks for asking. The man gets up to make a phone call, which Gris knows is going to the authorities.
I had everything I needed to know. And he was not going to detain me, drunk, while he brought the police. As he stepped out the door, I shot him with the stungun. It was on full power, narrow beam. It blew his head half off.
Yet the same weapon won't rip the pillowcase it's fired out of. And it can partially decapitate people, but they called it a stungun.
The dogs objected.
I shot them.
Guess the author's still tuckered out from last chapter, he missed a great opportunity to spend half a page giving a sentence-by-sentence description of the dogs running at Gris, Gris realizing his gun's on the wrong setting, flipping a lever, missing his shots, and then hitting the dogs at the last second.
I dragged all three bodies down to the beach. I pushed the remains of the rowboat down into the water. I put the bodies in it. I buried the fragment that had the ship's name on it.
People, if anyone ever came this way, would think they had been blown up by the exploding ship. And then cast ashore by the tidal wave.
So there's a patch of disturbed sand on the beach where Gris buried something, the tracks of Gris making at least two trips to drag the three bodies down to the shoreline since there's no way he could handle the old man and both dogs at once, and the yucky trail of whatever's dripping out of the old man's head. But Gris is sure that any investigators will decide upon the story he's dreamt up. And then he goes back into the hut and declares that "There wasn't much blood and what specks there were I obliterated." What about the brains? You blew the top of a man's head off!
Blargh. Forensics. Let's not even get started on the questions raised by the chemical composition of Gris' alien-made bombs.
Gris changes into some of the dead man's clothes, wraps a rag around his chin and puts a wad of cotton (where did he get a wad of cotton?) in his mouth to simulate a toothache to excuse why he isn't speaking Greek, and sets off for the nearby town of Moudhros. He reaches it at dawn, flinches at the prospect of taking a ferry to the mainland, but has no alternative because "Unlike some they say once existed on this planet, I could not walk on water." So is Gris being dismissive of one primitive religion while convinced another is trying to kill him, or jealous that he isn't the Jesus and able to walk all the way to Athens?
Gris freaks out again when he actually boards the ferry, because not only are women on deck with him, but he realizes that he has no Greek money and can't pay in Turkish lira because that would "open up the trail!" The solution, of course, is to flash around an American thousand dollar bill. There's a, uh, "tense" moment when the man running the ferry runs off and Gris gets to stew over what's happening, but when the man returns, pointing at a box, Gris is able to somehow discern that he intends to give Gris change once they get to port in Athens. More boating.
I got into a corner seat where I could keep the whole room under surveillance. One part of me dreaded the moment the ship would sail, the other part of me couldn't wait to get it away from the dock. Was I turning into a schizophrenic, torn asunder by a split personality?
Couple things to note: first, schizophrenia does not necessarily entail dissociative identity disorder. Second, Gris should know this because he was able to diagnose his boss as having schizophrenic tendencies all the way back in book one. Third, Gris is and has been displaying some symptoms of schizophrenia, namely persecutory delusions, sloppiness of dress and poor hygiene, paranoia, loss of motivation, poor judgment, and so on.
It is of course an open question as to how much of this is a result of Gris being an idiotic Hubbard Villain. But there's something sadly ironic about Hubbard's main bad guy turning out to be someone who could benefit from therapy and medication, or in other words the very field of medicine Hubbard spends so much time demonizing.
Well, back to the stupid.
I began to itch. The itching got worse. I began to itch in several places at once. Nervous hives. According to psychology, when one is under an enormous strain, he tends to itch. If psychology said so, it must be totally true.
Real truths, like those regarding ancient alien emperors dumping corpses in volcanoes, take years of expensive training to prepare for.
It doesn't take long for Gris to get to the bottom of things - he's got fleas from his stolen clothes. Or else from hauling around two canine corpses. "Oh, Gods, the old man was getting his ghostly revenge!" And then he starts throwing up from seasickness.
And each time I threw up again, I repeated by sacred vow.
Heller was going to pay for this. He was going to pay for it all!
It was the only reason now that I cared to bear all this and live.
VENGEANCE!
HELLER WOULD PAY!
I repeated it in every lull between the times that I threw up.
At least I knew who was responsible for my woe. And I was on the way to do something about it!
It was all that got me through that dreadful voyage.
Wait, Gris shot the dogs with his "stungun" and describes dragging their "bodies" to the beach. He didn't take any effort to finish them off, so presumably they were killed by the "stungun." So has anybody Gris shot with that thing survived? And what kind of mess did the weapon make out of the dogs that Gris miraculously didn't have to clean up?
The author's putting so little thought into this that I'm wondering why he even bothered telling us about it. We could've skipped Limnos and had the Sanci take him all the way to Athens. We could've skipped the Sanci and had Gris get on a plane in Istanbul. We could've skipped Turkey altogether and had Gris never leave New York last book!
Back to Chapter Two
No comments:
Post a Comment