Krak steps into the apartment living room, now filled with paralyzed, nude forms on the floor and one security dude slumped next to an off-the-hook phone. And Krak, who evidently heard it ringing from the next room, picks it up.
"Who is this?" she said.
I went into total shock!
I was in direct communication with the Countess Krak!
She was talking to me!
Oh, Gods, my blood pressure went out of my head and splattered all over the ceiling.
I was on the verge of discovery by the deadly Countess Krak!
Measurements can't splatter all over the ceiling, Hubbard. Also, it sure makes for an interesting read when the bad guy is mortally afraid of one of the good guys. Let me point out that two books ago Gris was able to interact with Krak about as well as he could anyone else, even lie to her face, though his hands tended to shake and he flinched at physical contact. Now he's literally frozen in terror because not only is Krak on the same phone line as he is, but she says she can hear him breathing.
A brilliant idea hit me! I should put down the phone and hang up.
I couldn't unlock my arm muscles.
With the violent concentration that comes sometimes in threats to life, I made my muscles work.
I got the instrument down on the cradle and, with superhuman effort, unlocked my fingers.
And Gris proceeds to have a total freak out at the thought that Krak might somehow figure out it's him on the line, and then know where he was calling from - because after all, she's dressed like a policewoman, so she could trace the call. And then Gris starts hallucinating.
My hands began to shake. The corpse of the yellow-man she had killed back on Voltar was where the viewer should have been. He was staring at me with sightless eyes. He said . . . No, it was Torpedo. He was saying . . .
"Wait a minute, Gris," I said. "This is no time to go crazy."
"Who is this?" I said.
"This is Officer Gris of the Voltar Coordinated Information Apparatus, on duty as Section Chief of Section 451, Blito-P3. How are things going?"
"Terrible," I said. "How is Lombar Hisst these days?"
"Oh, he's fine," I said. "Has hunting been good in the Blike Mountains?"
"Only passable. Now that I have become Heller . . ."
"SHUT UP!" I screamed.
My hunch is that someone will have heard all this and try to blackmail or expose Gris later, leading to a hundred pages or so of him running around trying to get out of the situation. It might be Adora "Pinchy" Bey, who yells at Gris to turn down the "TV." Or maybe he didn't quite set the phone down all the way and Krak heard his rant, and this is how the author decided to have the good guys figure out that Gris was working against them. I haven't read far enough ahead to know for sure. (editor's note from the future: nah, Pinchy is about to leave the story, and she's got better blackmail material on him than his rantings in another language)
Anyway, the yelling snaps Gris out of his self-incriminating nervous breakdown so he can get back to sitting around, watching the good guys thwart him through morally-dubious methods. Krak puts on a pair of "Zanco SURGICAL gloves!" so she can safely handle all the naked people, clucking that "these primitives certainly can get tangled up in the subject of sex." Mamie Spread of the Whiz Kid Wives turns out to not even be pregnant, and was wearing a pillow with straps under her clothes. So Krak gets out a hypnohelmet to find out who put the "crooked slut!" up to it. Gris laments not being within two miles of the scene so that the relay breaker switch in his skull would disable the hypno-helmet, which is nice because I'd completely forgotten that had happened. When was that, Book Four? (editor's note from the future: Book Three)
Anyway, Krak hypnotizes the five naked men in the room so they'll forget the important bits and wake up on cue. Then after wiping Dolores' face of a mysterious "something" ("Too stupid to even get it in the right place," says Krak), the Countess uses the mind-control helm to interrogate the Mexican gal, who admits that she's a local prostitute hired by Dingaling, Chase and Ambo to play a part in a legal drama. Krak orders her to go to the lawyers the next day and tell them how she wants to confess in court and dismiss the suits, on pain of exposing them to the Bar Association. I guess at some point Krak learned about this legal stuff. Maybe when she was spending all those days crying in her room, or sailing around in her sea-going apartment.
Krak does the same to Toots Switch and Mamie Spread, adding a command for the latter to show off her pregnancy pillow in the courthouse When she sees the security guy starting to wake up, she hypnotizes him too, ordering the man to "do something about this orgy" when he wakes up, while forgetting any details of the policewoman who came by. Then she takes the wad of "something" into an ashtray, drops the surgical gloves on top of it, and torches everything with a match. Krak snaps her fingers thrice to wake her victims so she can leave.
The party-goers immediately get back to what they were doing before Krak so rudely interrupted them.
The Countess flinched with disgust as the cries of the three girls soared eagerly into the passionate snarls of the five young men. Bodies began to thud. The record started up.
The security man stood, looked at the gathering pile of bodies on the rug.
"Move over!" he ordered the Hispanic youth. "I got to do something about this!" And he began to unbuckle his pants.
"I'll never understand these primitives," said the Countess Krak. "You tell them the simplest things and they still manage to get them wrong!"
It's cute until you stop to think about how the mind control helmets really work, if there's this much wriggle-room when it comes to commands, or why Krak thought her definition of "do something" would be the same as the guard's. Oh that's what went wrong, she told him to do "something" about the orgy. See, that's what happens when you're careless with your euphemisms.
So Krak leaves the apartment, the security guards outside are still clueless and didn't notice the sudden cessation of voices or the flash of light or anything, and The Vehicle that Krak rode in is still parked in the shadows so Gris can't get its description. Krak slips inside, and Gris guesses that she dresses in the dark. Then the lights go on to reveal the policewoman whose outfit Krak borrowed, not even tied up, staring up at the ceiling with a big smile on her face. She sits up and dresses, ignoring Krak completely, before hopping out when The Vehicle stops in front of her station.
Hey, remember two chapters ago when Gris complained about the missed rape opportunity?
The woman was humming a little song to herself as she got out and walked toward her office.
Krak closed the door. The vehicle began to roll.
The Countess looked down. The Eyes and Ears of Voltar envelope was lying on the floor. The item that was Unit B was in it.
"Bang-Bang," the Countess called. "Didn't you take the black patch?"
"Well, no, I didn't," was Bang-Bang's reply from up front. "I don't entirely trust gadgets from the toy store."
"And that woman from the Vice Squad followed you?"
"Yes."
"But what could you have said to her?"
Bang-Bang's reply was muffled. "Nothing much."
"Bang-Bang, have you been up to something?"
"Me, Miss Joy?"
How droll, Bang-Bang done seduced a cop... except Krak still gassed her when she followed Bang-Bang into the car, leaving the other woman unconscious, stripped to her underwear, and tied up in the back of The Vehicle. So how could this scenario play out to not be disturbing? Did Bang-Bang lure her after him somehow before cutting a "deal" in exchange for untying her? Or is he enough of a charmer to win over the police officer once she woke up and realized she was trapped with him sans clothing? Or was she willing from the start, making Krak's use of knock-out gas and rope completely necessary? Why didn't Bang-Bang stay Krak's hand, then? Did he just so happen to bump into the sort of woman who could be seduced in a matter of minutes, and who had a bondage kink, and who was willing to get knocked out before satisfying that kink? Surely Bang-Bang didn't simply take advantage of the ten-minute knock-out duration, only for the woman to wake up and decide she was okay with the situation?
But beyond that, Krak never hypnotized the police officer. Even if she somehow didn't get a look at Krak or Bang-Bang's faces, she can at least confirm that it wasn't a cop who passed through the outer layer of security into the apartment that night, regardless of whether the people inside remember it. You really think someone so willing to addle people's brains would pick up on that oversight.
Blegh. Tune in next time for a genuine plot twist.
Back to Chapter Four
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