Miss Simmons sighed and looked back at he class. "Now, students, a vile, foul trick has been played on me. You have all had basic psychology from kindergarten up, so you know about HYPNOTISM!"
Is it normal for the people who want to mind-control the world to tell everyone else, from an early age, how they're trying to mind-control the world?
While the Countess Krak shudders and wonders if the game is up, Simmons describes how she got a letter warning her that she'd been hypnotized, making her realize that someone had been messing with her sex life. Then she talks about her childhood, and how her father would tell her bedtime stories about how men "were no good and only wanted vile gratification of their base desires." So when she got Gris' warning letter, Simmons immediately realized that her father was the one who had hypnotized her, went to the police about it, then confronted her parents.
This is why, when you're sending an anonymous tip that someone's been hypnotized by someone you want them to retaliate against, you tell them who you're talking about.
I'd also like to note that there's no real-time reaction from Gris regarding the magnitude of his failure, no "I clutched my head," no "cold sweat ran down my back," nothing. He narrates very loudly when Heller sees "THE COUNTESS KRAK!" a page later, but it's only at the end of Chapter 11 that he starts existing again and summarizes what went wrong. Hubbard went through a great deal of trouble to make in-story justifications for Gris to be a narrator, and here he is forgetting to make him narrate.
Miss Simmons tells how she confronted her parents, how her mother made her father confess that "he had told me again and again under trance that I was FRIGID! He told me that if I had a man or experienced an orgasm I would go BLIND!" Y'know, important things to tell a grade-schooler. Simmons calls him "a craven traitor to psychology! It is supposed to (bleep) everybody, not make them frigid!"
And while we could explore the twist of a psychologist going against his own teachings to protect his daughter, instead Miss Simmons calls attention to the fact that she's not wearing her glasses, so the author can with uncharacteristic subtlety reference Dianetics, an ad for which claimed "You are only three or four hours from taking your glasses off for keeps."
Simmons then thanks "Wister" for letting her get raped - "Those orgasms were GLORIOUS!" - tenderly takes his hand, gives him an A+ for the course, thanks him again for letting her get raped, and dismisses him from further classes with tears in her eyes. A confused Heller wanders off, spots "THE COUNTESS KRAK!" watching from nearby (she claims to be "Just visiting the classroom to see how the pupils were getting on"), and repeats what Miss Simmons told him. He's a little confused and wonders if his teacher has "scrambled her main drives" and decides to go back and check on her, flat-out rejecting Krak's attempt to get him to head home already. I actually rooted for Heller a bit when he did that.
They get back in time to watch Miss Simmons kick off the orgy.
"I am at last free to teach you what I subconsciously wanted to teach you in Nature Appreciation. Now, Nature Appreciation is really about the birds and the bees. So there will be a substantive change in course material.
"We will not use the texts of Krafft-Ebing, Havelock Ellis and Freud, for they are crummy fellows to run around with. Such sources are bad, because they do not have any love in them. Instead, the text we will now use for the class is a classic Persian book, The Seventy and Seven Variations in the Act of Love by Hammer Hammer, translated by the respectable Chinese scholar Hoo Chu Longdong, with beautiful illustrations and diagrams by Phullup Cummings. I was able to get these at the college bookstore last night."
She flipped open the sack on the stump and began to pass them around. The students took them with great interest. "Now, girls, open your books to Chapter One, 'The Essentials of Orgasm.' But the boys should open theirs to Chapter Thirteen, 'Variations of Gang Rape.'"
You're a freshman at the university, you've got to take this BS nature appreciation course because some hippie has a lot of clout when it comes to graduation requirements, and then the professor suddenly says it's now a sex ed practicum. What will you do? Panic and flee because you've already got a fiancee, thank you very much? Call the cops? Lodge a "WTF?" with the Dean? Or drop trou and go along with it?
Even better is the Countess' reaction.
The Countess Krak, able to see those pages with her sunglasses
And Gris won't make a leering comment about those pages, even though he's looking at them through the Countess' eyes, because the author has forgotten that he exists.
sunglasses, muttered, "Now I know for sure why he was so tired Sunday nights. That slut! Jettero," she said in a louder voice, "I think we better be going."
When your boyfriend tells you how much he hates his professor, he's actually having sex with her. When the professor tells you how much she hates one of her students, she's actually having sex with him. When your boyfriend returns home, exhausted from a class he hates, it's because he's having sex with the teacher.
So an increasingly befuddled Heller watches clothing fly through the air as Miss Simmons commands that "For classwork during the remainder of the term, each boy of the class must first handle me and then each female classmate." He moves closer to investigate -
"Now Roger, we'll call that a pass. Thompson and Oswald, you come over here at once. The rest of you get busy. BUSY! BUSY!"
A boot landed in the brook with a tremendous splash!
Three girls' jackets went flying up in the air!
The very trees were shaking!
The Countess Krak had a leafy willow in her hand. Miss Simmons' strained voice came through the speaker. "Remember, it's no good without love. So I love you and you love me. OH, OSWALD!" The Countess snapped the willow with a furious jerk.
- and Heller retreats, thoroughly lost and happy to no longer be taking the course. But he has some uncharacteristic misgivings about his mind-raping, deceitful, paranoid girlfriend:
He was gazing at her very suspiciously. "Did you have something to do with that?"
Her look was very bland and guileless. The very soul of innocence. She said, "Me? Jettero!"
I guess... we should laugh? That's the appropriate response when an insanely jealous woman uses mind control to make her not-rival think she'd been raped and turn a college course into a swingers' club, right?
Gris starts existing again and voices his disgust that Miss Simmons' father, "a renowned psychologist, would go against his whole profession and try to suppress promiscuous sex, the very backbone of Earth psychiatric treatment." And this just raises a whole heap of questions. Is that why all the students are willing to shuck their pants, regardless of their personal beliefs, existing relationships, or fear of sexually-transmitted disease - they've already been sexualized by their other psychology classes? When Krak removed Miss Simmons' hypnosis, did that remove one layer of indoctrination, allowing her traditional psychological education to lead her to turn her class into an orgy, or did that merely let her realize her nymphomanic potential and sexualize her class, psychology or no psychology? And if "psychiatric birth control" is a real thing, why isn't Miss Simmons trying to turn her students gay, and why are books on more traditional sex available from the school bookstore instead of copies of Brokeback Mountain?
It's like this book was written by a ranting conspiracy theorist rather than someone trying to build a rational and consistent narrative setting.
Gris reasons that his attempt to warn Simmons backfired because Krak had hypnotized her to disregard and find a reasonable explanation for everything that happened in her living room the next day, which covered Gris' letter. Krak foiled him by complete accident. And then "In a brilliant flash, as clear as lightning itself, I understood something utterly: In order to thoroughly wreck Heller, I would first and foremost have to get rid of the Countess Krak!"
Sure, there's no "INSPIRATION!" this time, but Gris is on a roll:
And then another lightning bolt. Whereas I could not slaughter Heller until I got the word from Lombar that the former's communication line to the Grand Council no longer mattered, there was NO restraint of ANY kind WHATEVER in removing the Countess Krak. She could be dropped off buildings or ground to mush under the heavy wheels of trains and I would suffer not the blink of an eye about it from Lombar.
After some herculean mental efforts, Gris has succeeded in recognizing the obvious. And he's completely given up on the whole "find Heller's platen" subplot. Now he's going to "Concentrate on that deadly female" and do whatever he can to take out Krak.
I could do it! I would do it!
And my eyes slitted with firm resolve.
GET RID OF THE COUNTESS KRAK!
And after five books of Gris' repeated lack of success, we're supposed to view this as a dramatic moment rather than the set-up to another book of failure. Speaking of which:
What crazy plan
will Gris use now?
Does this finish the
Countess Krak?
Read
MISSION EARTH
Volume 6
DEATH QUEST
Even the book is acknowledging that for all Gris' drama, he's basically the coyote trying to off the roadrunner at this point. What wacky hijinks will ensue as Gris tries to get that wascally woman?
Good grief, we're only halfway through this idiotic series.
Back to Part Forty-Two, Chapter Nine
"It's like this book was written by a ranting conspiracy theorist rather than someone trying to build a rational and consistent narrative setting." Another wonderful book cover blurb.
ReplyDelete