I leaped aboard an AA train and soon was speeding north. My rendezvous with destiny would set of a chain reaction even Heller would be powerless to stop.
The roar, roar, roar of the pounding wheels carried me relentlessly forward, oblivious of the churning crowd. At last I was in action. My mission of vengeance would be fulfilled. Blood, red blood, would pay the awful price of putting me through the agonies which had spent my energies and lacerated my soul.
Just as a reminder, Gris is talking about making sure a college professor flunks Heller.
Gris arrives at Empire University and finds a wild-eyed Miss Simmons in the Puppet Building of the Teacher's College (?). She also doesn't have her glasses on, allowing Gris to introduce himself as a reporter from the Morning Press there to talk about the protests over the "women's thermonuclear rights" bill... wait a second, something is terribly wrong here. That newspaper name isn't lamely "satirical!" Shouldn't it be the Morning Pus or Moaning Press or Mourning Press or something? You're slipping, Hubbard!
While Simmons fumbles for her glasses (which Gris swipes and puts in his pocket), Gris insinuates that there are "black forces" at work. Miss Simmons asks if she's met him before, perhaps in a psychiatric ward, and Gris changes his story so he's now a PLO agent masquerading as a reporter. Simmons assumes she was in the same Psychology class as him.
"You did indeed," I said. "I sat right behind you and cheered you on all the way."
"Then your name is Throgapple," she said. "I always remember my classmates."
"Correct," I said.
This isn't the old "call them a made-up name and if they answer to it you know they're fake" trick. Miss Simmons just supplied Gris with the identity he's trying to masquerade as. It kind of undermines the deviousness of your secret agent when the person he's fooling is cooperating with his deception.
Anyway. Simmons rants about psychological "preindoctrination" to keep teachers cold and collected, then about how much she supports the Antinuclear bill, until Gris steers the conversation towards Nature Appreciation. Simmons starts hyperventilating when she remembers the terrible event of last year, and when Gris namedrops "Wister" she screams outright, stacks a bunch of chairs atop each other, and perches fearfully on her ramshackle tower. Gris claims that Wister is using all his wiles to make sure the anti-nuke bill is defeated, and Simmons spasms and falls to the floor.
Seeing how Gris just "pushed" Simmons to the floor, a mob of students rushes in and starts beating on him, and one even nabs his wallet and screams about the "dirty, stinking, rotten FED!" So they throw him down a staircase, but are nice enough to toss his wallet after him. Gris flees to take an express train home, sucking his injured hand but gloating over his mighty victory.
I had done it! Actually, it had worked perfectly.
If that bill passed now, she would jeer at Heller that it had gone through despite his most villainous plots. And if it didn't pass I could certainly guarantee that his life from there on out would be a hell not even he could live through.
So long as nobody tells Miss Simmons that the man he was speaking to was not who he said he was, but "A FED!", causing her to doubt his entire story. Or that, having been unjustly flunked by a hostile teacher, Heller doesn't raise the issue with the university. This also assumes that Heller's allies, such as - just to pick a person at random - the Countess Krak, decide not to handle matters more directly.
But yes, if none of that happens, then Gris has certainly "struck a blow that Heller would not soon forget and certainly could not possibly recover from." I mean, he has the advanced alien eco-friendly technology and made boatloads of money from the stock market, but he's gonna flunk Nature Appreciation! You can't save the planet without passing Nature Appreciation. How would you know what to save?
Back to Part Forty-One, Chapter Ten
Since you've been posting the positive review blurbs, here's a critical review of the series via Wikipedia that really resonated with me:
ReplyDelete"In L. Ron Hubbard and Scientology, a survey of Hubbard's literary career, Marco Frenschkowski of the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz described the Mission Earth series:
The satire is not humorous, but biting and harsh, which makes the novels not easy to read. Also Hubbard somehow had lost contact with developing narrative techniques: he writes exactly as he had done 40 years earlier. When read as entertainment Mission Earth is disappointing: it does not entertain. Many of the scenes (especially some sexual encounters) are incredibly grotesque, not in a pornographic sense, but they are violently aggressive about modern American ideals. The Mission Earth novels on the whole are a subversive, harsh, poignant attack on American society in the 1980s. As such they have so far received almost no attention, which perhaps they do deserve a bit more. They also have some quite interesting characters, especially when read with a deconstructionist approach. These 11 later novels by Hubbard are not Scientology propaganda literature, but have some topics in common, especially the very strong opposition against 20th century psychology and psychiatry, which is seen as a major source of evil. All open allusions to Scientology are strictly avoided. They are not as successful in their use of suspense and humour as Hubbard's early tales, but have to say perhaps more about the complex personality of their author."
Satire, really? I love satire, but I would hardly count these books as satire.
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