Gris goes home and flips on the viewscreen to find "good fortune staring at me with its evil grin," i.e. a map of Florida. Heller is planning an expedition to the Sunshine State, having arranged for Izzy to purchase miles and miles of property in the Everglades, nothing but swamp and gators. Then Hubbard hits us with a page-long barrage of stupefying anecdotes.
Izzy was hauling out some deeds. "It's a former retirement estate but the alligators ate the old folks they sold it to. Then the CIA bought it as part of a training program for a secret army to invade Jamaica but they got defeated by some small boys with slingshots on the beach,
Wait, what? Why? How?
so they sold it, according to the records search, to the Saint Petersburg Grimes, who used it for a place to hide out their reporters when people wanted to shoot them. But the people were so successful that the place was not much used. Then the
Can we go back to explaining the Jamaica thing? I still haven't come to grips with that.
Grimes went bankrupt and I bought it mud-cheap with fifteen leftover reporters thrown in, including a woman reporter named Betty Horseheinie."
Is this a reference? To who? A journalist who's wronged you, Hubbard?
"A woman?" said the Countess Krak.
"Yes," said Izzy. "And she was a problem, too. The alligators tried to eat her but got so sick the conservationists raised hell. We sent her to an insane asylum
Wait, isn't that very much a Bad Guy Thing, turning someone over to the tender ministrations of those twisted psychologists? Or is this excusable because Hubbard really hated whoever this character is "satirizing?"
near Miami but she drove the patients so crazy that we got a permit from the government and disposed of her as contaminated waste. She's
What?
miles deep in the continental trench now, but they do say all the fish are dying there.
What?
However, she's not around."
"Good," said the Countess Krak.
So there you have it - in less than three paragraphs the author has done the literary equivalent of that thing from that anime where the guy hits the other guy with like a million punches over three seconds, and then the other guy explodes. Except he's using words, and the target is the reader's brain.
And the madness doesn't stop. Izzy explains that he wanted to call Heller's latest company Beautiful Clear Blue Skies For Everyone, Inc., except Florida's government "want[s] only criminals in the state, and anybody trying to do good drives them up the palm trees in horror." In fact, they even confused Izzy and Heller's enterprise with a religion - what a silly mistake, mistaking an obvious corporate entity for some sort of faith-based organization. But Izzy was able to convince them to let it slide, because it turns out that "blue sky" is slang for worthless stock. Urban Dictionary can't verify this, but maybe it was a thing in the late 1970's.
Then Izzy starts ranting about Indians, because the Seminoles have a reservation nearby, and Izzy knows that such nasty-looking folks must eat dogs and frontiersmen. He also checked, and the Seminoles only signed a peace treaty a scant few decades ago. So he advises Heller to take some beads with him, in case the natives try to dispute the land purchase.
Those poor Native Americans. Genocide, broken treaties, residual racism, and now they're appearing in an L. Ron Hubbard novel. Haven't they suffered enough?
After listing all the... quirks of their new property, Izzy asks why Heller wanted it, conveniently letting us hear an explanation of what he's doing. This is where Heller is going to produce his miracle "spores" to release into the atmosphere, eat up the pollution, and blot out the sun with their cancerous growth... er, eat the pollution and fart out oxygen, shifting the composition of the atmosphere to prehistoric levels of oxygenation, heralding a new era of gigantic organisms in a world where lightning ignites cataclysmic fires... er, eat the pollution, fart out oxygen, and the end.
Florida is an ideal place for this due to trade winds, and Heller can use all the swamp's mud to break down into electricity... wait, what? Dirt + water = power? Guess this is another use of Heller's magical carburetor. It's been so long since the stupid thing appeared in the story, I've forgotten how it works.
The spore plant will make money by selling some of its magically-produced electricity to the local power grid, while Izzy's other projects in the area, namely an upscale retirement resort, will bring in the main profit. Heller's ready to go and asks if the Countess has her bikinis packed, but to his surprise, Krak announces she's staying behind. She's got things to do, you see.
Her smile was enigmatic. "I want to pick an item up that I haven't found. It's going to take a lot of search [sic]."
Heller orders Bang-Bang to look after he while he's gone, while Gris... well, at the start of the chapter he said this was all a sign of good fortune, but he's going to wait until next chapter to explain why. Oh, and have more uncomfortable sex with deluded "lesbians."
Back to Chapter Two
The Jamaica thing, I would guess, is Hubbard trying to be snarky about the Bay of Pigs, since true Americans should never have allowed themselves to lose to dark-skinned people, and this is caricatured as losing to little boys with slingshots. The "St. Petersburg Grimes" is the scarcely concealed SP Times, which has investigated Scientology for decades (still does, under the new name Tampa Bay Times) and won a Pulitzer in 1980 for its investigation of the sneaky way Hubbard's "church" bought up downtown Clearwater, Florida. The reporter who got the Pulitzer was Bette Swenson Orsini.
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