Part Thirty-Three, Chapter Five - Sick Day

Well, Gris has now spent three nights getting battered and beaten by lesbians, and not in the good way.  But broken and exhausted as he is, he has a plan.

I had one ace up my raw sleeve.

I was not going to visit Miss Pinch that evening!

Brilliant.

The problem of course is that he can't leave New York until he's sure Heller has been "stopped," which is somehow dependent on what headline runs next morning.  And if Heller isn't "stopped" by those devastating headlines concerning the fictitious activities of an impostor, then that super-competent Apparatus assassin will kill Gris.  And then Gris panics after remembering that the assassin promised to kill Utanc first! 

Skimming over the past Part or so, it looks like the last time Utanc was so much as mentioned was about 70 pages ago. 

This all leaves Gris a nervous wreck, sure that the Miss Pinch is about to call down the wrath of the IRS upon him for failing to show up for the evening's beating, or that Mr. Bury will notice that Madison linked the wrong two firms in the newspaper.  So when Gris gets the day's paper, with a story about the Whiz Kid donating his settlement money to the farmers of Kansas, Gris is so perplexed by the meaningless gesture that he slips into a feverish delirium. 

I'm not exaggerating.

I knew now that, factually, it was a nothing amount that he was retaining a nothing of.  But this thing about the farmers of Kansas was quite beyond me.  What did they have to do with it?

Maybe I was sort of feverish already but this puzzle turned it into a kind of strange delirium.

So Gris spends that afternoon and evening waiting for "two deadly IRS men to slither through the crack at the bottom [of the door] or a snake to call me via the U.S. Army Signal Corps before I could check out."  He finally comes to the next morning to find the hotel doctor fussing over him and prescribing aspirin in case Gris starts screaming again.  Utanc is nearby, and explains that she called the doctor after Gris' deranged ranting made it hard for her to hear the radio.  "How thoughtful of her!  How tender!"

When the doctor leaves, Gris confesses that the feds may be after him, and that they'll have to flee that day.  Utanc assumes this is about the man Gris had killed, back in... um... well, I don't remember what she's talking about.  I remember three chapters of lesbians torturing Gris, but not Gris recovering a bloody wallet from anyone.  Wait, did he kill someone in Turkey?  Or take credit for Silva killing - oh, it was the director of the CIA!  Yeah.  That very meaningful plot point. 

Utanc, white-faced but all business, hurries off to book the four o'clock flight, and it says a lot about Gris' deteriorating condition that he doesn't pointedly excuse her suspicious actions as somehow befitting a simple desert girl.  Instead he calls room service and orders "two scrambled newspapers, overdone."  The chapter ends with a heart-stopping cliffhanger as Gris unfolds the day's paper to read the headlines.

Will the story Madison worked on and planned to release that day get released that day?  Will an article linking a fake Whiz Kid to the mafia that the real Whiz Kid's mafia is at war with somehow sabotage Heller's efforts to revolutionize Earth's energy industry through competitive racing?  Will Gris be able to safely leave for Turkey?  And will we be happy to leave New York, or rant at him for skipping out on the plot again?

The answers are yes, somehow I guess, barely, and "good lord I am not looking forward to Turkey."


Back to Chapter Four

Forward to Chapters Six and Seven

Part Thirty-Three, Chapter Four - Spicy Soltan Gris

Unabridged version here.

Once Hoodward is dropped off, Gris returns to his problems of being 1) broke and 2) the chew toy of a terrifying lesbian cashier.  He concludes that since he's too weak and battered to rob a bank, his only course of action is to "torture the [money safe] combination out of Miss Pinch and then to murder her in the most gruesome and grisly way imaginable."  Y'know, the woman who's always been one step ahead of him so far.  This time he'll get the drop on her, oh yes.

And then comes a paragraph that I'm pretty sure was stuck in by an editor, because it actually acknowledges the whole "confession" framing device the Mission Earth series uses.

Actually, I would like to omit that evening from this confession.  It is too horrible.  Murder should not be advertised to the young and this confession might someday fall--Gods forbid--into the hands of the immature.  Even a Judiciary is likely to pale at what happened.

But in all honesty, as promised, I will carry on, even though the next few hours fill me with remorse.  In all my crimes and escapade, this was the worst.

This paragraph is a lot of things.  First, I think it's the editor's way of saying "Get out while you still can!" and "hide your kids!"  Second, it's wildly out-of-character for Gris, who in the next paragraph will go on scheming without a glimmer of guilt.  And third, it's a load of crap because Gris is victimized this chapter, and doesn't get a chance to enact any evil schemes.  He does worse things in previous books, and if the dark murmurs are true there's even worse to follow.

So Gris has a plan, "an Apparatus technique called the 'Lure-Kill.'  It pretends affection as a mask for murder."  Yep, he's going to fool the virulently misandric lesbian by pretending to like her.

He hits a supermarket and gets a big box of McKormick's Red Pepper, then buys a nice bouquet of white chrysanthemums.  After leaving, Gris carefully works the pepper into every petal of the flower.  This is totally going to work.

With glee, I contemplated what would happen.  Miss Pinch would open the door, holding a gun as usual.  I would say, "You have reformed me from being a beastly male and I bring this to express my affection."  She would say, "Oh, how charming!"  And then she would take the bouquet, pull back the top flap to see what it was, behold flowers and sniff!  That would be all I would need.  I would have her gun as she convulsed in sneezes.  I would hit her over the head.  I would drag her to that bed and use every torture implement in the place until I had that combination.  Candy?  I would just gut-shoot her and laugh as she writhed.

Again, Gris wants something to happen, and despite what his past experiences would suggest, and despite lacking ways to ensure that this vision comes to pass, he fully expects things to occur the way he imagines them.  It's a unique blend of optimism and idiocy.

Gris takes a cab to Pinch's home.  He says his line and offers the flowers.  She immediately goes off-script and rants about him trying to steal Candy from her, stomps on the bouquet, and opens the lid of a trashcan to dispose of them... until she smells the pepper on the flowers.  She snarls at Gris' treachery and gets him to strip at gunpoint, then shackles him to the bed as usual.

When she finished the last cuff, she threw the gun aside.  "So you like red pepper, do you?  Well, always give the male the right to his chauvinistic domination."  She turned and called into the other room, her voice lilting, "Oh, Candy dear, we're going to have Mexican red-hot tamales tonight."

Now, Mission Earth is printed by Galaxy Press, which is owned by the Church of Spiritual Technology, which publishes Dianetics and other Scientologist materials.  So it's basically an in-house job.  Which means that Hubbard never had to pitch his book to a publisher or have conversations like:

Publisher: Okay, so the main lesbian does the whole Naked Apron thing, nice, and puts on a chef's hat.  Then she strips the other to a napkin that doesn't cover anything either, very nice.  So with the spies and all, this is kinda like a hotter and sexier James Bond flick.

Hubbard: That's what I was going for.

Publisher: And then... she picks up a cheese grater... Uh... James Bond flicks don't usually show the protagonist getting tortured with a cheese grater.

Hubbard: It's okay, Gris is the bad guy, remember.  Anyway, if you'd read Casino Royale you'd know all about James Bond getting hit in the groin with a knotted rope.

Publisher: 's that so?  Well, they'd probably cut that bit out of the movie.  So... then the lesbians go to do, heh heh, their stuff.  And then they come out... and... Tabasco sauce and barbecue forks?  Really?

Hubbard: It shows just how depraved they are.  What psychology has done to them, giving them such sick ideas.

Publisher: But... they're just characters in a book.  They're your ideas.

Hubbard: I'm afraid I don't follow. 

Publisher: Just how many pages of this are there?

Hubbard: Oh, just four. Well, for this chapter.

Publisher: I'm just having trouble getting a feel for this series' tone.  I mean, one book you have the hero, Heller, smearing pasta all over somebody's face to embarrass him in front of some celebrities.  Then in this book we have three chapters of Gris getting tortured.  But earlier in the same book Heller throws a cat at a guy.

Hubbard: It's a complex story.  There's romance, comedy, action, satire-

Publisher: Did we really need three chapters of torture, though?

Hubbard: It shows how committed they are to Psychiatric Birth Control. 

Publisher: Now I'm not saying I'm gay, but this might be a little, uh, inflammatory?  And I'm still a bit confused as to how this is supposed to make Gris gay.

Hubbard: Psychologists are pretty twisted people.

Publisher: ...Yeah.

In the end, Gris gets kicked out without being allowed to wash his wounds, while Candy threatens him with jail time if he doesn't return the next night.  At the hotel, the staff doctor treats Gris' wounds "in the most painful way possible," which is immediately followed by a sentence explaining "It didn't hurt so much, only because he had first given me a shot of morphine."  So it was as painful as possible, but it didn't hurt much.

Gris resolves to leave the hell out of New York, and takes comfort that in forty-eight hours Heller will be "finished" thanks to that story about his mob ties (to the wrong mafia).  Because, as we've seen, things usually go according to Gris' plans.


Back to Chapter Three

Forward to Chapter Five

Part Thirty-Three, Chapter Three - A Mob Boss Who Thinks "The Most Honest Man of the Year" is a Real Award

After a thoroughly painful taxi ride ("every pebble or white line a tire hit communicated to one or another of my bruises"), Gris makes it to Madison's office to try and share this great idea of his.  Unfortunately, Madison seems to think that Gris is talking about Mount St. Helens erupting.  I guess he got confused by Gris repeatedly referring to his enemy as "Hel--I mean Wister," but then shouldn't Madison be talking about a Helen Wister?

It takes two pages, but Gris eventually gets across that Madison is due to run out of front-page material soon, while Gris has an exclusive scoop.  Madison retorts that he already has the next headline ready: "WHIZ KID DONATES WHOLE SETTLEMENT TO CHARITY."  Gris is aghast until Madison slyly explains that the undisclosed out-of-court settlement between Octopus Oil and the Whiz Kid amounted to zero dollars.  Nobody loses, nobody gains, so... the point was... well, somehow this is "stopping" Heller.  I guess.

Gris suggests a new headline: the Whiz Kid's in with the mafia!  Madison isn't too excited ("well, who isn't?") but soon has a stroke of inspiration.  He rustles up an old reporter "who knows mob figures and is expendable," one Bob Hoodward of the Washington Roast and crap on a stick.  It's even explained that this "Hoodward" guy is credited with taking down Richard Nixon "and some other mob figures" back in the day, so it's pretty obvious who he is.  So why bother with the fake name?  You didn't call the fallen president "Richard Dixon" or anything, Hubbard.  Is this satire?  Are you trying not to get sued? 

Hoodward gets on the phone with somebody and arranges for a suspiciously abrupt, brief ceremony in which they'll hand over a "Most Honest Man of the Year" award to an undisclosed recipient.  Madison gets some trusted photographers in face-obscuring makeup and bulletproof vests, while the fake Whiz Kid receives his own orders.  Soon Gris and Madison and other crewmen get in an unmarked van and arrive at the back of Tammany Hall, which incidentally was restored as a landmark to be used "for only the most sacred occasions" by none other than Rockecenter.

New York's political machine?  Oil cartels?  The drug trade?  The mafia?  The Klan?  Terrorist cells?  Psychology?  All one guy.  Is this how Scientology views the world?  A few, enlightened followers of the Right Way versus a monolithic alliance of evil?

Gris and Madison get to a convenient overlook, the cameramen take their hidden positions.  The fake Whiz Kid moves in and Gris notices how, besides not looking anything like Heller, he lacks the real deal's "aura," and instead has "the air of a cheap bum."  Madison finally reveals which mob figure he's involving in this scoop - Faustino "The Noose" Narcotici himself.  Gris is dismayed because, as we've seen, the Narcotici mob is absolutely terrified of Heller and will flee on sight.

But the "Whiz Kid" looks nothing like Heller, so why would... oh.  Yeah, last chapter the Narcotici guy who panicked at the sight of Heller was a lieutenant who had seen him before the whole "Whiz Kid" thing started.  But this is Narcotici himself, who only knows Heller by his reputation as established in the papers, so he'll recognize the Whiz Kid as presented with the goofy glasses and buckteeth.  Which means that at no point did the Narcotici outfit get suspicious that the "Wister" one guy recognized looks nothing like the "Whiz Kid" being trumpeted in the papers.

Stupid Hubbard Villains and plot holes, what else is new.  They put a racing helmet on the "Whiz Kid's" head to hide his face.

(edit from the future: no, wait, Heller put on a ski mask before crashing the funeral a few chapters ago, and everyone only panicked after he introduced himself even without seeing his face.  Which is pretty sad, really, but at least it covers up this little plot hole)

Narcotici shows up.  He is given some bills to give to the recipient of the fake award.  Fake Whiz Kid walks up to take the bills and fake award, flips his visor, and in the split-second between this and Narcotici fleeing in terror, the cameramen get a shot of a smiling mob boss giving cash to a smiling Whiz Kid.  Mission accomplished.

Poor Hoodward complains that he's going to get whacked for this stunt, so Madison offers him a new life in Israel as Martin Borman.  If that's a reference to anybody I can't figure it out.  The chapter ends with Madison and his team on their way to the airport.

Wonder how differently the book would have gone if Gris had explained which mob family Heller was in with.  I guess it's supposed to be ironic that the journalist is ignoring the truth even though it'd be much more useful to him, or something. 

Next chapter... oh goodie.  Miss Pinch is back.


Back to Chapter Two

Forward to Chapter Four

Part Thirty-Three, Chapter Two - A Funeral He Will Never Forget

Gris flips on the HellerVision and sees a lot of red.  It's Babe Corleone in a red gown, red veil, and red cape marked with black hand symbols, which is either a reference to a protection racket that was fading away even when Hubbard was young, or another product of the author's eclectic tastes in fashion and interior decorating.  Gris realizes that Heller is with Babe in the back of a parked limo, preparing to crash GUNSALMO SILVA!'s funeral. 

There's another guy there too, trying to talk her out of it since, y'know, it's a rival mob family's funeral and the place will be swarming with Narcotici's "lice."  Not that Babe's coming unprepared - there's a dozen thugs with riot shotguns waiting outside the car.  Since he can't make any headway, Unnamed Naysayer appeals to Heller as the voice of reason.

"Mrs. Corleone," said Heller, "why don't I just step over to that church and see what's really going on?  Then we'll know for sure whether it's safe or unsafe.  We don't want you in the middle of a gang fight."

"They'll shoot you!" said Babe in sudden alarm.  "Take ten or twelve men!"

"No," said Heller.  "I'll be all right.  I'll wear this ski mask."

Oh yeah, a mobster wouldn't get an itchy trigger finger when approached by someone in a ski mask.  And they'd certainly never kill someone unless they were absolutely certain who they were.  Also, "what's really going on?"  I think, based on the fact that it's a funeral, that these guys plan on sticking a corpse in the ground.  As opposed to throwing a rave or playing cards.

Heller takes his gun, that golden "Llama" .45 pistol, and on his way out has to say "You stay there."  You see, he brought that cat along with him, the one that helped killed Silva, who is yowling in protest at being left behind.  And then it follows Heller's orders and stays put.  I'm now skeptical that Hubbard ever owned a cat.

So our hero sets forth to "investigate" a rival mob family's funeral to see if it's "safe."  Gris is of  course gleeful at this situation, since Heller's liable to be shot.  He does remember that he doesn't have Heller's platen yet so it'd be a huge inconvenience if Heller were killed, so Gris instead assumes that the rival mobsters will only wound him with a bullet.  Gotta admire the man's optimism.  While continuing to loathe him for all his other qualities, of course.

Heller steps inside the spacious, gothic but "small" Our Lady of Gracious Peace cathedral.  Sure enough, there's an open casket.  Sure enough, there's a whole mob of mobsters standing around with shotguns out and ready.  And to make matters worse, Razza Louseini is there!  You don't know this, but he's Narcotici's consigliere, and you don't remember this, but he's the man who "fingered" Heller in the Howard Johnson waaaay back in Book Two.  Gris is elated: "He would probably recognize Heller!  Marvelous!  A good, disabling wound in Heller was exactly what I needed!"

It's like the Countess Krak "plan" of his.  Gris wants something to happen, and assumes that someone who he has no control over or contact with will do exactly what he's expecting.  At least Terl knew how important it was to get Leverage over someone and make them oh God I'm referencing Battlefield Earth as a positive example.

Louseini (oh I get it, "louse"-ini!) is trying to convince his boys to stay put and bury Silva properly, but they're complaining that they've already lost so many men this year, and they've got better things to do.  A priest asks for pallbearers, but one of the thugs points out that even though Silva died doing family business and killed a hated rival for them, he's still "a traditore, a traitor."  Because once again, you the reader are an idiot unable to make an educated guess as to the meaning of a foreign word, and you lack the attention span to remember the last time the author defined this word for you.

I don't think consigliere has ever been defined. 

The priest is taken aback by the whole "traitor" thing: "All are equal in the eyes of God, but a traditore . . ."  Even Jesus has limits, y'know.  But at this point one of the Narcotici goons spots Heller and advances in a no-doubt menacing fashion, demanding to know who this masked newcomer is and whether he's a spy.  The priest calls for peace in this house of God and tries to be diplomatic, inadvertently emasculating an entire group of antagonists.

"My son, you are masked," said the priest.  "What is your name?"

Well, I suppose a Royal officer doesn't lie to a priest.  He said, "Here on this planet, they call me Jerome Wister."

"But I'm not an alien!"

The noise was such that I couldn't tell what happened for a moment.  It was a dreadful smashing sound.

Heller looked.

Men were going out those leaded windows in a rocket stream!

Screams of panic!

Shattering crashes of riot gun butts hammering out panes to clear the way!

Yes, this is happening.  The place was "absolutely crammed" with heavily-armed mob soldiers, and this is happening.

Men were pouring out onto the shrubbery outside!

Limousines were roaring to life!

The room was empty.

The limousines were gone.

A tinkle of broken glass fell with one last sound upon the floor.

YOU OUTNUMBER HIM "ABSOLUTELY CRAMMED"-TO-ONE, YOU COWARDS!  HE DOESN'T EVEN HAVE HIS CAT WITH HIM!

But there you have it.  The Narcotici mob, the closest thing we have to an organized opposition to Heller now that Mr. Bury has given up on physical confrontations in exchange for undirected and meaningless bad publicity, is so terrified of our book's hero that they flee at the sight of him.  So much for tension or conflict or excitement.

And yet it's still going to take six books to wrap this wretched story up.

So Heller steps out, tells Babe that it's safe, and the Corelone mob moves in to give Silva "a funeral he is not likely to forget," with the still-nameless cat hitching a ride on Heller's shoulder.  They go up to Silva lying in state, and Gris notes that the morticians did a good job rebuilding his face after the whole "broke every bone in his body" thing.  Let the festivities begin.

Babe towered over it.  She lifted her red veil.

"Traditore!" she said.

SHE SPAT ON SILVA!

The priest drew back in horror.

Suddenly the cat let out a snarl!

It rocketed off Heller's shoulder!

It went straight at Silva's face, snarling and clawing!

RAKE!  RAKE!  RAKE!

Heller hurriedly reached over and pried the cat off.  As he held it, it kept snarling and hissing the way only a cat can do!  It was hard for Heller to hold it.  No cathedral organ for Silva.  Those sounds of hate reverberated through the vaults.

Yeah, take that, you... guy who killed another guy we never met, off-screen, before the book even started.  Yeah.  We hate you... so much.  Grr.

Is Silva representing one of Hubbard's enemies or something?  It just seems like he's expecting us to really enjoy this for whatever reason.

While the "powerless" priest continues to cower, all the Corleone mob soldiers come up one by one to stab Silva's corpse in the chest, spit on him, and shout "Traditore!"  Which is no longer being translated.  Thanks for showing some faith in our cognitive processes, Hubbard.

When that's done, Babe gets a branding iron, heats the end with a blowtorch, and marks Silva's corpse with a T on each cheek, branding him as a - you guessed it - traitor.  But she's not through.

Babe was not through.

She took the other iron and began to heat it.

Father Paciere wailed.

It was a cross!

It glowed cheery red.

She again approached the casket.

She lifted her red-veiled face to the vault of heaven.  She cried, "MUEM SUPROC TSE COH!"

She plunged it down on his forehead.  The cross was upside down!

Oh, Gods, I suddenly understood.  The words Hoc est corpus meum are the words of Holy Communion.  They mean "This is my body," in Latin.  When they are said backwards, over an inverted cross, the grace of one of their Gods is taken from the individual, not given to him.  He would receive the reverse of forgiveness.  BLACK MASS!

That's... it's just... the weird thing is that this almost certainly isn't one of Hubbard's childhood interests popping up in Mission Earth.  The modern conception of a Black Mass as a sort of dark ritual only popped up in the 50's or 60's as a side-effect of heavy metal music.  Earlier Black Masses in the medieval era were either parodies of Catholic rituals or sensationalized rumors accompanying witch hunts.  Or so says my 5-minute research on Wikipedia.

So this nonsense is probably Hubbard staying trendy.  He's with that Satanism stuff, kids!  Buy his books!

After she's done invoking the powers of Satan to curse her enemies, the priest declares that it'll take thirty Pater Nosters and thirty-one Ave Marias for Babe to make up for desecrating a church.

"It's worth it," said Babe.  "The dirty, filthy traitor!  Now you cannot bury him in consecrated ground!"

"No, we cannot," wept the priest, "though it is doubtful if even God would accept a traitor."

Let's see... "In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, in accordance with the riches of God's grace," that's Ephesians 1:7... "For he has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins," that's Colossians 1:13-14...

Babe suggests the church dispose of Silva's corpse by throwing it in a pig trough, but the priest protests that they'll get in trouble for poisoning the pigs, so Babe tells him to donate the body to I. G. Barben Pharmaceuticals to make poison.  The priest thinks that's workable.  If only, though, if only there were something he could do to consecrate Silva's body, to undo the Black Mass.  If only he, a cleric of the lord, had the power to bless people and conduct religious rituals.

You are a rubbish priest, Father Paciere.  

Well, Babe and everyone leaves the funeral, quite satisfied.  I leave the chapter somewhat worried that I've had to research some occult rituals, but take heart that I might have balanced it out by going through bible verses.  And Gris, well, Gris has an idea. 

Hey, why didn't any of the Corleone gunmen engage the Narcotici guys when they were swarming out of the cathedral?  Your sworn enemy crashes through the windows and runs at you and you don't take a few shots?  No worries about shedding blood on holy ground, priest says you'll just have to say the magic words a few dozen times to make up for it.  


Back to Chapter One

Forward to Chapter Three

Part Thirty-Three, Chapter One - Mandatory Brainstorming

A new day begins, as does a new Part of the story.  There's a reassuring familiarity about this chapter, with Gris checking the day's paper and panicking at the job Madison is doing.  No sadist lesbians to be found or anything.

Soltan Gris on newspapers:

You would not think that a wad of wood pulp, crushed flat, messily smeared with some carbon, could constitute a deadly weapon.  But a newspaper is all of that and more.   Any direction it is pointed, it can kill.  Especially when motivated by an idiot.  One who does not seem to know who he is pointing at.

The headline is about the Whiz Kid's out-of-court settlement with Octopus Oil and the fallout of such a landmark case.  The New York Stock Exchange is reopening, which is surprising since I never noticed it closing.  A stock broker is quoted as giving his condolences for all those ripped off after he and his firm bought a bunch of Octopus Stock after causing a sell-off.  And now I realize why this chapter seems reassuringly familiar - we got the same headline in Chapter Seven of the last Part.  You know, between Torture Sessions #1 and #2. 

Gris realizes that despite his meeting with Madison, the story mentions Swindle and Crouch in the same sentence as Boggle, Gouge and Hound.  Mr. Bury's gonna be maaaaad.  So Gris is in a pickle.  He's decided that New York City is "just too small for me and Pinch," but he can't flee to Turkey because there's that Apparatus assassin waiting to kill him if he continues to botch the mission, and Heller is "still winning."

How?

Heller's got his driving privileges suspended or something thanks to the fake Whiz Kid's antics, while he's unlikely to gain anything from the fake's recent victory because he wasn't the one actually in the courthouse.  Well, I say his driving privileges are gone, but we haven't seen anyone confiscate his keys or anything, probably because he looks nothing like the Whiz Kid getting spat on in the papers.  In fact, all this newspaper drama isn't having any discernible affect on him beyond making Babe Corleone cranky.  It's not so much that Heller has been stopped as it is that he's just not doing much.  Aside from keeping Izzy from killing himself again and taking out a laughably killable super-assassin and recovering tons of money and stuff.

It's like the newspaper drama is totally divorced from reality and the rest of the story.  Like the whole Psychiatric Birth Control garbage.  We're told it's there, but that's about it.

Well, the best Gris can come up with to get himself out of this mess is to hit Madison with a baseball bat, so he sits down and waits for inspiration.  "An idea greater than any idea I had ever had was absolutely mandatory!"

So of course he turns on the HellerVision.


Back to Part Thirty-Two, Chapter Seven

Forward to Part Thirty-Three, Chapter Two

Part Thirty-Two, Chapter Seven - This Time with Antique Firearms

Gris wakes up in his hotel room feeling like a sadistic lesbian had spent the previous evening hitting him with various truncheons.  Before going to bed he evidently visited the hotel's resident doctor who patched up his hands, while Utanc apparently paid the repair crew that fixed the damages done by the Signal Corps. what feels like years ago.  He showers, which is painful, then dries his bandages by the fireplace.  "I was encouraged.  They only caught fire twice."

Now, here's a little writing trick to try at home - last book, when Gris packed before returning to America, neither he nor the narrative actually described what he packed.  The reason for this is simple: if I told you, for example, that I had a backpack containing three pounds of jellybeans and a marmoset, there's no way you would accept me pulling a combustion engine out of it.  After all, I didn't include it on my list.  But if I never define the contents of my backpack, then I can pull anything I want out of it and not strain your suspension of disbelief.  I call this hypothetical backpack that can hold potentially anything an Ambiguous Storage Space.

So Gris reaches into his Ambiguous Storage Space and pulls out a pair of blackpowder dueling pistols, working replicas based on an 1810 design, complete with gunpowder and lead balls.  Gris assures us that they're ".50 caliber and that half-inch slug could almost cut a body in half," then spends some time cocking and snapping the archaic firearms to produce pleasing showers of sparks.  He loads them up with "enough charge to kill an elephant," presumably referring to a pygmy elephant with hemophilia and lung cancer.

We could wonder, at this point, what possessed Gris to bring along this pair of antique firearms, or why he would pack them in preference to, say, any weapon made in the last century.  But we can't argue with their existence.  After all, Hubbard never defined the contents of Gris' luggage, so he can pull stuff like this out of his Ambiguous Storage Space whenever he needs to.

Bathed and armed, Gris decides to check the morning paper, only to be infuriated by the headlines - "WHIZ KID COURT TRIUMPH."  Yes, Madison followed his orders to end the lawsuit by having it end in the Whiz Kid's favor with an out-of-court settlement of an undisclosed sum.  Satire comes from the article mentioning "Herman T. Guesswinkle, noted astrologer" trying to guess at the exact number.  No doubt you are shivering at how eerily prescient this criticism was, given the great astrology and necromancy scandals that rocked CNN and MSNBC during late 2007.

So Gris gives up and goes back to bed until four in the afternoon, when he's awakened by a phone call asking if this is "Inkswitch"'s address.  He stupidly answers in the affirmative, only to learn that it's the IRS confirming his location - an unsubtle warning from Miss Pinch.  Wellp, nothing for it, she's gotta die, her and Candy.  Gris gets dressed, pulls some explosives out of his Ambiguous Storage Space, locks, loads, and heads out.

Gris takes a cab to a block away from Pinch's apartment, approaches carefully in the wintery darkness, draws one pistol, and uses its muzzle to ring the doorbell.  He realizes his first error when he doesn't use Miss Pinch's three-buzz code.  Candy opens the door, and before Gris can do anything else something knocks him out from behind with what he thinks was a blackjack.  Now, he has no real way of knowing this, but he posits that Miss Pinch was standing in the shadows of the entrance waiting for him.  So it might have been a good idea to check those shadows before going for the front door.

Apparatus training + Gunsalmo Silva = unstoppable super-assassin (as long as no cats are involved).  Apparatus training + Soltan Gris = how have you not died yet?

And then it's more of the same from last chapter.  Gris awakes naked and chained to the bed.  Miss Pinch draws his pistols "expertly," cocks the guns, then fires them at Gris' head and belly - releasing only a spray of sparks.  She taunts that "You forgot to prime them, Inkswitch!  Not a single grain of powder in the priming pan!"  But Miss Pinch of course knows all about blackpowder weapons from 1810, because... which is how...

So Pinchy goes to town with the old guns, showering Gris' beaten and bruised body with sparks and branding him with flash burns.  Candy demures on participating, since she's staying true to the teachings of Psychiatric Birth Control and refuses to touch men.  I would like to point out that heterosexual men and women rarely have such antipathy towards their own genders as to avoid physical contact with the same sex.  Eventually Candy gets so excited from Gris' screaming that she and Pinchy have to leave the room to engage in that mysterious activity of theirs.

Half an hour later they return.  Miss Pinch still has her shoes on as she spends some time berating and cursing at Gris, and when she's done Gris tries to turn the tables by using Psychology! to suggest some childhood trauma causing some role reversals, only to fail when he can't come up with anything that would explain her sadistic behavior.

So is that why Gris is Most Definitely Not Gay?  He was spared by his own half-assed understanding of psychology?  Is true psychology like the Necronomicon only instead of sprouting tentacles or going insane after studying it, you catch the gay?

Pinchy turns Gris' tactics around and accuses Gris of throwing girls off cliffs as a child and turning his sister into a prostitute.  Gris counters that he doesn't have a sister, but Pinchy assures him that he will after she hits him with this truncheon enough.

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why torture is an ineffective method of collecting intelligence, but a very useful way to obtain a false confession.  Lock a man in a freezer long enough, play Metallica at rock concert decibels for days on end, whip him with an extension cord, and he'll happily explain how he not only masterminded 9/11, but is actually Osama Bin Laden in disguise.

Then comes a first for the series - a section break.  As far as I can tell, up until now the only breaks in the narrative have been between chapters (which is not to say that every chapter break occurred during a lull in the story).  Places were you'd expect a section break, such as Gris being knocked out in this chapter, do nothing but start a new paragraph with Gris waking up immediately afterward.  But now we get one to spare us from reading about Gris being hit with a truncheon, as opposed to last chapter, which did not.

The room's filled with marijuana smoke (drugs are bad) and Miss Pinch and Candy have gone through their record collection (this is the year 2000-something, by the way).  Gris gets dressed, and Miss Pinch has some more parting words for him.

"You obviously have not had company training, Inkswitch.  It is all too plain to see that you prefer sex-smashing a woman down into a bed.  You are perverted, Inkswitch.  Don't you know that makes babies and babies are forbidden?  Think Psychiatric Birth Control, Inkswitch.  Rockecenter would fire you out of hand if he thought you favored old-fashioned sex!  So we are doing you a favor, Inkswitch.  We will gradually win you away from your male beastliness.  Consider it our blessing, Inkswitch."

"Oh, I do," I faltered.

"Very good, you contemptible (bleepard).  We will see you here tomorrow night.  Without pistols.  Primed or unprimed.  And without fail."

So their plan is to what, knock the heterosexuality right out of him?  Hit him until he's so afraid of women that he turns gay?  What if he's kinky enough to be into masochism, but still straight?  What if homosexuals don't have a monopoly on the hard stuff?  Or what if a fear of Miss Pinch and Candy Licorice doesn't translate into a fear of the entire female gender?

Also, Rockecenter?  Last we saw he was promoting his infanticide programs, not Psychiatric Birth Control.  He wasn't spying on his ladies to make sure they were all lesbians, he was checking to see if they were pregnant. 

Blargh.  This is so stupid, even for Mission Earth.

Gris takes Pinchy's hundred bucks for cab rides from and to her house and leaves.  I hope you're not tired of Gris getting tortured by crazy lesbians, because there's another chapter of it in twenty pages.


Back to Part Thirty-Two, Chapter Six

Forward to Part Thirty-Three, Chapter One

Part Thirty-Two, Chapter Six - This Chapter is Part of the Reason Why People Try to Ban This Book

Unabridged version here. 

This chapter is twelve pages long.  It feels much longer.

The room's other door opens, admitting a thirty-something women with frizzy blonde hair who "wasn't very pretty but she certainly was making the most of what she had."  She coos and claps her hands excitedly upon seeing Gris (who is, need I remind you, still naked and chained to the bed), thanks Miss Pinch profusely for this gift, and starts making out with the other woman.

"A lesbian and her 'wife!'" Gris dubs them.  So wait, Miss Pinch is the lesbian, but Candy isn't?  And why would a homosexual couple necessarily adopt traditional heterosexual gender roles, with one being "butch" and the other girlie?  I'll just put this comment down to the 80's or something.

The newcomer Candy takes a closer look at him, before declaring that Gris "isn't very big, is he?"  And God help us all, but this is actually a plot point.  This will co... pop up... this will be addressed again later.  "This" being Gris' genitals.

And then, well.  It turns out these particular lesbians only get excited when a male suffers.  So Gris gets those mousetraps on his fingers yanked off in the most painful way possible, then gets beaten with a truncheon, then just gets beaten with fists.  And every now and then Candy and Pinch have to run off into the next room to do things that Gris just can't figure out; there's a lot of groaning and they emerge some time later half naked and covered in lipstick, so what could possibly be going on?  And all of this is set to Wagner's operas or funeral dirges.

But aside from that, there's a lot of exposition in this chapter, delivered while Candy catches her breath between rounds of torture and mysterious off-screen activity involving two women.

Indulgently, Miss Pinch said "All Rockecenter's companies have classes in Psychiatric Birth Control.  It's vital, you understand, to reduce the world's population.  They breed like rats.  And they're all riffraff.  They outstrip the world's food supply which has to be reduced so food prices will stay up and Rockecenter's friends can make a profit.  And, of course, that is the name of the game."

I guess "they" here is "everyone on the planet," not a specific ethnic minority or anything.  And the best way to keep food prices high isn't to pad them with "transportation costs" incorporating the high price of fuel (which Rockecenter can set), or to just set the prices high and expect people to pay them because you and all the other suppliers are in cahoots, or to simply sabotage your own efforts to produce food to keep supply low, or even to encourage overpopulation so there's more demand for a limited supply of food.  No, the best way to keep food prices high is to reduce demand by reducing the population.

She took a thirsty guzzle of her beer and, without bothering to wipe off the mustache, continued learnedly.  "Birth control requires more than pills and besides, I.G. Barben has no monopoly on them and there are competitors.  So the answer to controlling world population is homosexuality.  Now if everyone were a homosexual--the men gays and the women lesbians--then there's no more population problem at all.  The great work begun by the Rockecenters decades ago is just now coming into its own.  Birth control training is now being introduced even into kindergartens.  The competitors of Barben will go broke, as who will need the pills?  There will be no mass meetings against abortion and even abortion is going out of use.  The trend is overwhelmingly towards universal homosexuality."

Yes, rather than work to expand I.G. Barben's business and attain a monopoly on birth control pills, or rather than simply being happy with its market share, the most sensible thing to do is to retire birth control products altogether and turn everyone gay, an undertaking that will certainly require a monumental investment of time and money and constant maintenance to keep the program going, an investment that could very well outstrip any profits to be made from higher food prices resulting from reducing the number of customers trying to buy your produce which, as I said before, doesn't make any sense. 

"The Psychiatric Birth Control classes are wonderful.  They were developed by Dr. Frybrain, the head of the International Psychiatric Association, on a special Rockecenter grant.  And the Rockecenters, as you know, have always controlled psychiatry and psychology.  What used to be called 'normal' sex is the real sex crime.  And what used to be called 'sex crimes' are now normal.  So if every student becomes dedicated, as psychiatrists are, to making all the perverts and sadists and homosexuals they can, then the long-term Rockecenter goal of shrinking world population will become a fact.  

And once again we run into Hubbard's greatest... one of Hubbard's great flaws as a writer: the incoherence of his setting and the lack of verisimilitude.

An energy monopoly's plan to turn the world gay, starting at kindergarten, is kind of a big deal.  It would have a huge impact on society - even assuming that somehow all resistance to the program gets cowed, you'd have the shockwaves of such a sudden drastic change in the planet's sexual orientation.  It would be visible, there would be new gay couples everywhere, straight couples feeling somewhat out of place, a whole shift in marketing as gender values were thrown through the blender, a media campaign to introduce and reinforce the new "gay is good" message... the world would be changing before our eyes.

Except it hasn't.  This is the first we've heard of Psychiatric Birth Control, and we've been on this planet for three books!  Nobody else has so much as mentioned this plan, much less a sudden surge in the gay community.  Heller hasn't been ordered to attend Gay Seminar 1010 for his freshman year.  Bang-Bang isn't hounded by the Rockecenter Gay Police for liking boobies.  Nobody's tried to shut down the Gracious Palms for practicing sexual deviancy, i.e. heterosexual relations.  Mr. Bury, Rockecenter's right-hand man, is still married to a woman.  Gris hasn't had to attend Psychiatric Birth Control classes as part of his employee orientation.  The closest thing to it was Mary's mention of psychiatrists turning women into prostitutes at the beginning of book two, a claim that also has not been reflected in the story since then.

In short, there is no indication that the Great Gay Conspiracy being described in this chapter is anything more than Miss Pinch and Candy's shared delusion.  It does not exist outside this chapter.  Its presence cannot be felt in the greater story.

Also, let me point out a fatal flaw in this crackpot plan - just because people are gay doesn't mean they don't want to have children.  Lesbians find sperm donors.  Gay couples adopt or get surrogate mothers.  I guess Rockecenter is going to have to outlaw pregnancy period, a hugely controversial move which would probably be aided by the same birth control practices he's abandoning in favor of Psychiatric Birth Control good god this is a mobius strip of stupidity.

But there you have it.  Homosexuality isn't the result of being born a certain way, or a lifestyle choice, it's something psychiatry does to you.  Rockecenter is not only crazy, but stupid enough to want to wipe out all his potential customers with a badly-thought-out master plan, leaving him with no way to make more money, nothing to spend it on, and nothing to rule. 

Once the hurting (Gris' hurting and the reader's, that is) stops, Miss Pinch also explains a few things about Gris' money - she didn't pay off the security chief, who is an honest drug pusher.  Rather, Miss Pinch used a hidden camera and fingerprint scanner to record Gris' identity whenever he made a withdrawal, regardless of what he signed the forms with, a system her predecessor taught her and one that Rockecenter doesn't know about.  She now has records of all Gris' semi-official embezzlement to report to the IRS if he speaks out, putting him completely in her power.

Pinchy showers Gris' naked, beaten body with the money she took, before stuffing it all in a safe.  She gives him a hundred dollar bill to cover his taxi fare - both home tonight and back to her dungeon tomorrow night - and suggests that she might part with more of the haul later.  Oh, and there's a hidden camera recording everything so he can't murder her.  Guess she and Candy don't mind putting on a show.

So Miss Pinch shows Gris out, but not without some parting words.

She opened the front door and wrought-iron gate.  She stood there, naked and thin-lipped in the icy blast.  "The first time you came to my window, Inkswitch, I told you to beat it.  I didn't think you'd last.  But due to Psychiatric Birth Control, all the males around here lately have turned into gays

Reader to author: PROVE IT!

to help cut down world population.  And I refuse to risk the danger of separating two dear gays.  So you're better than nothing, Inkswitch.  Although not much.  So I will see you right here tomorrow night.  It's better than three years in a Federal pen.  The homos there would murder you.  Don't be late."

Gris staggers home, and finally, finally the chapter ends.  A chapter containing Hubbard's forays into erotica, half-baked evil schemes, insistence that things are happening that aren't supported by the rest of the story, psycho lesbians, torture, revelations that mental therapy is trying to turn us all gay, bad economics, and blackmail.

And there's more to come.


Back to Chapter Five

Forward to Chapter Seven