Krak returns to Grafferty and his three fellow officers, all frozen in ridiculous poses after grabbing those magical black squares thanks to Krak's "magician's forcer gesture." The Countess collects the rounds from their weapons using skills learned off-screen from Bang-Bang Rimbombo, then puts the now-empty firearms in the men's holsters. After that she packs up her mind-rape kit and puts her coat back on, but before she leaves she takes "A BOMB!" out of her bag and prepares to set it right under Kutzbrain.
Gris cranks up the melodrama to give a lament for the soon-to-be departed.
Poor Kutzbrain. If only somebody had thought to warn him that she had slaughtered three men for simply making an innocent pass at her! I knew she would never forgive that. She had simply put it off because she had other things to do. Now the world of psychiatry was about to feel the full degradation of one of its leading lights. I wondered if in his final moments he would trace his downfall to the cheery words inviting her to lie down on the couch for a jolly romp? How, in his profession, could he possibly suspect he had been dealing with worse than death itself? Alas, poor Kutzbrain's professional habits--nay, his professional duty to rape women and wives--had not included a subcourse in dealing with a Manco Devil incarnate, like the vicious Countess Krak.
Krak hits the plunger (of course) of the explosive, while Gris warns that "The bomb was set to go on time!" The author naturally forgets to tell us what time limit Gris is talking about.
The Countess causally steps out of the apartment, leaving the door open behind her, then waits in an alley across the street, "watching the apartment window intently as though expecting something to happen." And this is what happens when you decide the book's narrator is a character inside of it watching things unfold through another character's eyes and ears - Gris can't just say Krak "watched the apartment window expectantly" because he can't see her face, so we get that awkward line even though it's clear from context that she's waiting for something.
What happens is a flash and smoke pouring out of the apartment windows, but not a true explosion. Immediately afterward Krak triggers the dynamo to the paralysis paper (I guess Krak was looking down at her hands, allowing Gris to see what she's doing), causing "INSTANT SCREAMS!" Grafferty and his officers bolt from the apartment, "howling" the whole time, and after fumbling with their keys they manage to get into their cars and speed away.
Kutzbrain, meanwhile, leaps through a glass window, extracts himself from a hedge, and starts running around in a circle while babbling about someone being after him. And it's at this point that Gris realizes just what the hell is going on - those clever folks at the Eyes and Ears of Voltar make "emotion bombs," and Krak just used a "fear" variant.
This book would work so m... well, this book would be less irritating if the author just admitted that the characters were using magic. Krak would be a powerful sorceress who knows Paralyze, Fear, and Geas spells. Gris is of course a crap wizard who managed to get himself a scrying mirror or something, but is so inept that he has trouble keeping it on-target. Heller's a magic knight trying to save the world through his spellcraft, but with enough subtlety that the natives don't realize they aren't the ones doing it.
Calling this science fiction just gives Hubbard an opportunity to show off his ignorance.
Anyway, Krak isn't happy with just Fearing Kutzbrain - as he spins around in horror, Krak shoots him with another dart, "a dart that causes people to get warm and itch so violently that they shed their clothes."
I'd like to say that Dungeons & Dragons doesn't have any spells so bizarrely specialized, but I'm sure if I flipped through a rulebook I could find something just as weird.
So Kutzbrain, now nude, runs down the street, straight through a mob of staring children, who start running after him, yelling about the streaker. Take that, you nasty sexual deviant. Now you're buck naked... surrounded by children... feeling very hot... I think this might have been a bad idea.
The Countess Krak tidied up her shopping bag. She fluffed her hair.
Sedately she strolled off in the direction of the subway. She was thinking, no doubt--the sadistic female monster--that this was a day's work well done. She even bought a Milky Way at the subway stand and munched on it quite happily as she rode triumphantly home.
But this time Gris is able to see Krak's expression as she eats a candy bar. How about that.
Meanwhile Gris has to phone Raht and get him to call Miss Pinch to let Gris out of the closet. He's irritated at getting trapped, and his lingering flea infestation, but most of all he's mad at "the smug manner in which the Countess Krak had been eating that Milky Way!" But then he has more "INSPIRATION!" and decides to send Miss Simmons a warning that she'd been hypnotized, thus undoing Krak's conditioning. Sounds like a reasonable plan. Let's see how Gris screws it up.
Now, the troub... a troubling thing about this section is Krak's treatment of the policemen. Obviously she has reason to retaliate against Kutzbrain - he propositioned her, and we've established that she's willing to murder over that sort of thing. But Grafferty and his cops weren't actually a threat. The worst case scenario would be that Krak would have to go to the station and answer some questions, which shouldn't be dangerous if she stuck to her cover identity. Even if she wasn't willing to put up with that, she could have been patient and methodical and used her hypno-helmet to cover her escape, maybe even making the cops arrest Kutzbrain directly.
But instead she decided to use a Fear Bomb on them and send them screaming from the apartment. And what then? Are they supposed to forget that it happened? Don't they remember her face, and the inexplicable terror they felt after encountering her? What if they go back and find a comatose woman in the apartment? What if they gather the debris from the Fear Bomb and start wondering what sort of device detonated in that room?
Instead Krak chose to humiliate them. So either she has some strange grudge against New York's law enforcement, perhaps picked up from Heller's mobster friend, or the author got so caught up with stabbing strawmen in his "satirical" epic that he forgot to give his sock puppets reasons to do so.
Back to Chapter Six
"Calling this science fiction just gives Hubbard an opportunity to show off his ignorance." That should go on the book jacket.
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