Part Ten, Chapter Six - How Not To Blackmail Someone

The mysterious figure with a gun trained on Gris steps out of the shadows, revealed to be Raza Torr!

What? Surely you remember - okay, he's the Chief of Provocation Section, the murdering rapist who Gris blackmailed with photos of the foul deed. That guy. He's come alone, save for the camera he's used to record Gris' latest crime, as well as Gris' visit to the head plumber, "cellologist," and Colonel Recently Deceased at the officers' club.

Talking isn't shooting.  Keep him talking.  "Then you were the one who blew up my airbus in the Bilke Mountains!"

Yes, the attack that you completely ignored after it was over, Gris.  The attempt on your life that you showed no interest in, which you didn't investigate, which didn't convince you to extra careful in your recent adventures.  That attack.  The one that occurred in one chapter and had no effect on the plot whatsoever until right now.

Raza wants the originals and duplicates of Gris' blackmail photos, as if there were a reason Gris would be carrying them on his person at all times.  Once Gris points this out, Raza reluctantly agrees to a truce so that Gris can tidy up this crime scene, thus covering both their backsides.  Then they'll go back to the office and swap their respective incriminating photos.

So Gris goes through the trouble of retrieving the projectiles fired by his "blade gun," which involves a lot of blood and "electronic pliars" to pry out a shot that hit a doorjam.  Then Gris carefully packs the bugs he intends to use, and less carefully grabs the contents of the cash register and a bunch of other goods in order to better simulate a robbery.  Raza helps him carry stuff, as well as get Colonel Horrible Judge of Character's corpse into his car along with his driver.  Gris sets up a blaststick so that a good jolt would set it off, and puts the car on autopliot towards Slum City, where it will either collide with traffic or crash somewhere.  Then it's a simple matter of starting a fire in the store and heading home in the car Raza stole.

We got into the stolen car.

"I take it back," he said, putting the camera down. "You sure are thorough!"

"I sure am," I said, and I put ten inches of the Knife Section knife into his back.

Yeah, just like that.  Questions abound: when did Gris draw the knife he kept sheathed under the back of his neck, and why didn't Raza notice it or react?  How easily can you stab someone in the back when they're sitting in the car with you, especially if the blade's nearly a foot long?

Gris takes to the air and pushes Raza's corpse out somewhere over Provocation Section headquarters, heedless of any worries that doing so might start an investigation that ends with his head on a platter.  He heads back to his office and opens up his stash of blackmail goodies under a floorboard and briefly considers getting the photos published in a newspaper, but decides to be careful and just burns everything - his photos, Raza's photos, his bloodsoaked clothes, etc.  After that he writes a suicide note from Dr. Bittlestiffender and leaves his coat and ID next to a river, and then it's bedtime.  All in all, a full day.

The moral of the story - make duplicates of your blackmail photos, put them in a safe place, set it up so some get published if anything happens to you, and then you go to the person you're blackmailing and tell them you've taken these precautions.  Gris sure is lucky his would-be blackmailer confronted him at the scene of the crime while carrying all the evidence of said crime, and not the next time Gris dropped by his office, where there would be plenty of witnesses.

With that I guess we're done with the "Who's Watching Gris?" subplot... which only popped up at five distinct points in this story, and could be cut from it without affecting The Invaders Plan in any way.  It certainly didn't lead to any character development or advance the main plot or anything.  But I could say that about 70% of this stupid book.


Back to Chapter Five

Forward to Chapter Seven

Part Ten, Chapter Five - "Stiffen" Isn't a Command I Could Shout With a Straight Face

The Eyes and Ears of Voltar (no caps or italics this time) is owned by a man named Spurk, who greets a twice-disguised Gris and Stinkens from Supply when they come by after hours for a late-night, high-figure deal. Spurk is naturally the only one in the store, which Gris is quietly grateful for.

He offers his guests a tour of his inventory, particularly some cutting-edge overstocked goodies they're waiting for the Army to place an order for. I'm wondering why such sensitive espionage tools would be allowed to sit around in a downtown store, rather than made to order and hurried off to a secure Army facility, but maybe that's how things happen in the real world. Maybe there's a warehouse somewhere full of Predator drones that Uncle Sam hasn't purchased yet, just waiting for a wealthy Air Force clerk to snap up during his off hours.

Gris makes a show of inspecting product ID numbers for Stinkens' benefit, as Spurk presents a "respondo-mitter" that works by induction (through bone, no less) so long as it's implanted within two inches of an optic nerve. It picks up the... signal, or electrons, or something, and transmits the data up to two hundred miles (ten thousand with the 831 Relayer) into a receiver that renders an image of what the subject is seeing. And nobody can tap into this signal because it's:

"Undetectable! Nonobstructable. No known means will register it. Actually, it is a very long wave acting as a carrier and a conduit for a side band."

Ah, magic.

Gris is disappointed the Super Bug won't transmit the subject's emotions or allow him to send "hypnopulsars" or electrical jolts back the other way, but he has Spurk bundle up both of the kits in stock, along with all the spare parts and power packs, and their equivalents for the audial nerves. Then he shoots the storeowner in the throat with his bladegun.

And things immediately go wrong. Colonel Stinkens, who hasn't done anything besides follow Gris around and occasionally ask questions, doesn't conclude that "Snahp" is executing the guilty party like Gris had hoped, but goes for his gun, shouting "What the Hells are you doing?" And since a blastgun's "magnetic shock waves" could endanger all the sensitive equipment, Gris shoots the Colonel too. And then the Colonel's driver comes running, sees his officer down and Gris splattered with blood, and reaches for his gun. But by some miracle the weapon doesn't fire, so he grabs a bayonet and charges Gris, who shoots him.

So there's blood everywhere, three corpses on the ground, but Gris has finally gotten the surveillance equipment that the Army can routinely order but the Apparatus can't even blackmail someone into delivering. But then:

"Stiffen, Gris!"

It came from the door to the next room! A blastgun pointing.

And so we end the chapter on a cliffhanger doubling as a sentence fragment.


Back to Chapter Four

Forward to Chapter Six

Part Ten, Chapter Four - Stinkens and Snahp

It takes four hours to get Colonel Stinkens sober, but Gris gets it done thanks to a supply of sobriety pills, hot jolt, and Gris' grasp of Psychology! The disappointing thing is that we don't see how he uses this pseudoscience to convince the alcohol to leave Stinky's system, as it's lost somewhere in the gulf between chapters. Missed a chance for some good satire there, Hubbard.

Hmm, or maybe that was smart of him. Gris Psychologying the colonel sober might look uncomfortably close to a Scientologist using Dianetics to cure someone of nearsightedness, and that could raise questions that Hubbard wouldn't want asked.

Anyway, Stinky asks who Gris is and what's going on, and the Apparatus agent explains that he's Timp Snahp from Army Intelligence, and he needs Stinky for a top-secret mission relating to espionage on Flisten. Someone's been stealing top secret super-sensitive bugging devices for sale on the black market, and Stinky is needed to go to one of the manufacturers here on Voltar and inspect their stock with an eye towards similar electronics, so Gris - excuse me, Snahp - can compare the serial numbers and stuff.

In other words, this whole convoluted set-up is so Gris knows which bugs to get his hands on. Good grief.

Well, the Supply officer is very excited by all of this and happy to do his patriotic duty. Gris goes off and uses Stinky's "identoplate" to make a call to THE EYES AND EARS OF VOLTAR COMPANY and set up an appointment for after dark, then helpfully "finds" the "dropped" ID when Stinky fumbles on the floor looking for it. They head out, and it turns out Stinky has his own driver, but Gris rolls with it. Gris, seasoned infiltrator that he is, has to be reminded that he should probably change out of his Army Intelligence uniform by the formerly drunken desk jockey, but of course "that was the very hint that [he] was waiting for." He gets back into civvie attire while en route, raising the question of whether or not he was carrying a change of clothes with him the whole time or if the colonel's aircar had a set that happened to fit.

And so they're off for their rendezvous with "smugglers" so Gris can grab the devices necessary to bug Heller. Because the Coordinated Infiltration Apparatus does not have such devices in stock, nor does it have an espionage specialist able to tell Gris which ones he needs, nor does it have a secure operating room to perform a surgical bugging or a surgeon to do the cutting, nor does it have any other personnel able to perform these errands rather than have Gris do every damn thing related to getting Mission Earth airborne.

These guys couldn't manage a fast-food chain, but they're trying to take over the empire. Hubbard villains, ladies and gentlemen.


Back to Chapter Three

Forward to Chapter Five

Part Ten, Chapter Three - Because Nothing Says "Satire" Like Implied Bestiality

Maybe I've misunderstood Hubbard and his ideas on race. I mean, he's not stereotyping skin tones into single roles - he has multiple interpretations of skin tones in this book. We've seen a hulking yellow brute or two in fight scenes, and servile yellow waiters in the Artists' Club. Now Gris is disguising himself Army Intelligence officer Timp Snahp by means of some yellow make-up, black hair dye, and skin strictures to make his eyes slanted, creating a "sinister" sort of Fu Manchu appearance.

So like I said, multiple racial interpretations, all of them negative.

Gris has Ske drop him off in Joy City, where the Army's best and most affluent officers relax in the Ground Forces Play Club, which gets italics, but is commonly known as the "Dirt Club," which doesn't. With a "blade gun" (it shoots pretzels, of course), two high-powered blast sticks, and his Knife Section dagger concealed on his person, Gris goes in to look for someone.

The club itself is fifteen stories tall, decorated with a pair of fire-spewing cannons flanking a woman clad only in a general's hat lounging on the arcs of flame. It's a complex of bars and private rooms, where nearly-naked girls parade on glass-floored catwalks hoping to bring a drinker upstairs with them once he "shoots" them with a spotlight. That's just in the third room:

The fifth room is like the girl's [sic] parade except it is animals doing the parading. They get potted and taken upstairs the same way. The Army, being so much in the field and away from home, can develop peculiar tastes.

Charming. So to recap, in this book we've seen assaults, blackmails, and murder via evisceration. We've seen the results of sadistic doctors' surgeries, had multiple off-screen instances of rape, and watched people be doomed to a life of slavery. And now bestiality has been brought into the story.

And yet all of the cursewords are (bleep)ed out. Absolutely, utterly baffling. What warped values do you have to possess to think "goddamned" is what you need to censor in a story like this? I almost wanna investigate this now, to explore how Hubbard viewed the power of words. The guy obviously liked making up his own terms for his stuff, so was it a way of taking control of the world? Why is he avoiding cursing in this work, did he not like words used towards such crude purposes? Why did he think all this rape and murder was fine but an s-bomb was not? Or is this part of the "satire," an exploration of American attitudes towards sex, violence and language?

Also, it's pretty weird that lonely soldiers on campaign would have to resort to pet lambs in a society rife with prostitution and slavery. What, no camp followers?  They don't go raiding for enemy women? Or women in general?

Moving along. Gris leaves behind the ordinary "gambling" halls and enters the "hypergambling" section. The main attraction here are rotating wheels that girls strap into so that patrons can lob cloth grenades at their naughty bits - if they get a hit, "a shower of tokens seems to fly out of her (bleep)." Gris speculates that there's someone working the handle of the nude chick roulette wheels to dodge the throws, but this is accompanied by a hilarious footnote at the behest of the Ground Forces Play Club (no italics) denying such slander. A footnote positioned at the very end of the chapter, requiring the reader to turn to page to find it, making it more of an inconvenience than anything.

Gris finds his man slumped over a table in the Bunker Room, a dingy bar dressed up like a fortification, where soldiers seeking to escape the horrors of war do so in an environment straight from the battlefield and the waitresses serve "blood cocktails" while wearing skimpy field nurse outfits. Colonel Rajabah Stinkins (yes, really) is described paradoxically as both "beefy" and "much given to lard," and the divorce papers and photos of five kids that Gris finds on him seems to suggest that he's drowning his sorrows. But once the guy wakes up he explains that he's "shelebrating" his new freedom from that "(bleeping) old hag and her five awful brats." You can laugh if you feel like it, I'm much too tired.

So Gris, posing as an old academy friend for the benefit of the waitresses, feeds Stinkins hot jolt and "sobriety pills" so that the next phase of his plan can proceed next chapter. 

From the "animal parade" and "blood cocktails," I guess it's safe to add the military to the Great Big List of Professions Hubbard Hates. So what's that make now: soldiers, psychologists, doctors, policemen, politicians, clerks, intelligence agents... I know I'm missing some stuff.


Back to Chapter Two

Forward to Chapter Four

Part Ten, Chapter Two - Nor Swedish, Farsi, Japanese, Sumerian, Latin...

Back at the hanger again, Gris sees that the refitting of Tug One has entered a new phase - Heller is replacing the vessel's "absorbo-coat," which "takes all incoming waves and simply drinks them up; absolutely no energy gets reflected, visible or invisible." Stealth stuff, in other words. TV Tropes has a pretty good article on the issue of stealth in space, the most obvious problem of which isn't evading incoming sensors, but masking your own spaceship's heat emissions. And since Hubbard's "absorbo-coat" is absorbing all this energy in addition to the energy generated by the boat's engines, life support, and freaking movie theater, Tug One is going to have some problems in that regard.

Anyway, Gris' attention is soon grabbed by the arrival of the Blixo, a rather generic freighter that makes regular, secret runs to Earth for the Apparatus. Crews are unloading its mysterious "priceless cargo" for shipping to the storerooms of Spiteos, but there's something else: a shouting prisoner.

"Take your God (bleeped) hands off my God (bleeped) neck and get these God (bleeped) cuffs off my God (bleeped) wrists!" It was in English! Not Turkish or Arabic. But English!

Hubbard, honey... why is the specific human language being spoken more important than the fact that a human language is being spoken? Shouldn't the sentence read "It was in English! Not Voltarian, but English!" Are Turks or Arabs being towed into Spiteos a common occurrence not worthy of attention, but a guy speaking English, ooh that's a big deal? Were you expecting us not to care if the captive was babbling in Cantonese but for our hearts to go out to him if he sounded American? Is this pandering towards your readers or just some more of your casual racism?

Stupid. Upon being questioned by Gris, the human prisoner refuses to confirm or deny that he is Gunsalmo Silva (who? how does Gris know to ask this?), and demands to speak to his senator or the U.S. consul. Then the guards take him away for interrogation at Spiteos, and he exits The Invaders Plan, leaving readers to wonder if Silva will reappear, how many books it will take for him to do so if he does, and how the hell Hubbard expects us to remember who he is with so many other pointless characters floating in and out of the story.

This short but thoroughly baffling encounter concluded, Gris goes to speak to Captain Bolz, a big shaggy bear of a being who offers the agent a glass of the Earth whiskey he's about to break into. This friendliness is because Bolz wants twenty cases of Scotch smuggled into Joy City and needs Gris' help to do so. Gris refuses monetary compensation, but has Bolz agree to taking on some special passengers and cargo for his next run to Earth - Twolah the Mincing Agent, a certain doctor, some "cellological" supplies, and some "radioactive" boxes Gris is looking forward to liquidating on Earth. All hush-hush, off-the-record of course.

Gris explains how he'll be able to intercept this cargo on Earth, which leaves Bolz to question how Gris could get there before him. And that leads to another tiresome paragraph in which a spacer marvels at Tug One's dangerousness and explosiveness, in case the other fifty times it's happened in this wretched book have failed to impress upon the reader how daring and fearless Jettero Heller is in choosing such a vessel.

Next chapter we learn what the Voltarian Army does on its days off, and it isn't pretty.


Back to Chapter One

Forward to Chapter Three

Part Ten, Chapter One - Gold, Again

His Hunger Meter sated for now, Gris makes a few quick purchases. He uses some "hundredth-of-a-credit" tokens to buy a greeting card to write a note to "Know All Lombar" thanking him with a "going away present," and makes a copy of a million credit bill and writes a "÷2" on it to let his boss know what to expect. He also copies that "I totally didn't give Gris a kickback" note Zanco wrote him last chapter and writes "Please can you lift this restriction a little bit?" on it, because Gris is a greedy little bugger.

With this cunning cipher in place, Gris drops the message not in the normal mail, but in a secret Apparatus office in the back of a lingerie shop. Thereby making the deception all but pointless. The Coordinated Information Apparatus, ladies and gentlemen.

His next stop is the industrial sector called Power City, a 150,000-year-old warren of power stations and smog. This is where induction fields convert materials from one element to another, generating both ore and electricity to power the planet, presumably from all those electrons changing orbits and such. Which would mean that the Voltarians have perfected nuclear transmutation to such an extent that the energy released by the operation exceeds the energy necessary for the conversion. And I'd love to pick at this and criticize it from an educated standpoint, except my high school chemistry teacher was going through a divorce the year I had her, so I remember the names of the movies we sat through rather than actual nuclear science. Osmosis Jones, Joe Dirt, The Wedding Planner, Inspector Gadget...

I think I got to endure Joe Dirt three times that year, all in separate classes, all because one guy kept lugging it around and suggesting it to teachers, curse him. And that's not a film that appreciates with subsequent viewings, let me tell you.

Anyway. Ske swears up a storm from all the smoke dirtying his garish ride, not to mention the energy fields scrambling his equipment. But he's able to get Gris to the Reliable Ready-Pack Take Away Metals Company, where the agent inquires about a personal purchase of gold. Gris wants nine hundred pounds of it in some secure crates for spending money - after all, Voltarian credits aren't good where he's going. A little backroom dealing, a bit of lead fed into the magical science machine, and voila, futuristic alchemy.

I took one of the fifty-pound ingots off the pile. Gold is deceptive. It looks small but it's heavy. It almost broke my arm. I poked at it with a fingernail and then put my teeth into a corner of it. Nice and soft. Pure gold. Gleaming, lovely! Gold is so pretty!

If only the Psychlos had figured this stuff out. It would have crashed the pan-galactic economy, of course, but it would've made Battlefield Earth a lot shorter.

So soon Gris is on his way back to the hangar with enough treasure to overload his garish aircar. He cunningly secures the gold by putting labels warning of radioactive materials on the crates, which will fool anyone without a Geiger counter, and fantasizes about what he can do with such wealth on Earth. He's memorized the exchange rates for gold on various Earth markets, and estimates that he'll have over six million American dollars for his private use.

Power, power, who saith it doth not have a sweet taste? I was spending it in English already. And in my imagination, Heller, a ragged, shabby and starving, panhandling bum, approached on the street and begged me for a quarter and I pulled the sleeve of my tailored jacket out of his bony, clutching fingers and slammed the door of my limousine in his tear-streaked face.

This chapter raises an interesting point - did Gris get any sort of allowance for Mission Earth, any sort of operating funding? Nobody mentioned what his war chest for infiltrating human society was. Were they expecting him to improvise? I guess this is part of the mission being intended to fail.


Back to Part Nine, Chapter Ten

Forward to Part Ten, Chapter Two

Part Nine, Chapter Ten - $5,000 Sweetbuns

The next morning Gris visits the hangar to find a whirlwind of activity, with contractors scurrying every which way and Heller guiding a fin into position on Tug One's back, which is completely unnecessary for space flight, wouldn't be enough to make the monstrous tug aerodynamic in atmospheric flight, but might make it look cool. A Fleet Intelligence officer is also there to deliver some now-obsolete "variable time sights" for the ship's baffling propulsion system, which Heller coos over. Gris is just happy to see some progress being made, and concludes that the Countess has convinced Heller to get his fanny into space ASAP.

Next he goes to the corporate headquarters of Zanco Cellological Equipment and Supplies to discuss a millions-credit order with CEO Koltar Zanco himself, who is described as both huge and sleek, like a manatee in a skintight jumpsuit. Gris namedrops Professor Slahb as a family friend and discusses a high-paying, top secret project. He gets Zanco to fill the materials list Dr. Starving wrote up last chapter, and, because Zanco's a worldly man experienced with government graft, requests that the bill be doubled so half of it can go to Lombar Hisst. This requires Gris to go through the entire Zanco product catalogue and order multiples of each item, as well as some "special" purchases not normally listed, but the bill is properly padded.

Even though Hisst expressly forbid Gris from earning a space penny from any kickbacks relating to Mission Earth, Gris has the executive give him a cool ten thousand credits, and covers his tracks by having Zanco write and sign a little note refusing Gris' demand to give him money - "Oh no, boss, I didn't get no kickbacks, this guy even wrote a note about how he didn't give me any! 'Where'd I get the ten grand, then?' Er..."

Zanco is quite pleased with the day's transactions, though Gris threatens to complain about faulty goods if Zanco tells Hisst about the ten thousand credits. And Gris is ecstatic as well - "I suddenly wasn't poor! I could even buy some hot jolt and a bun!" Good grief, what kind of inflation is Voltar going through?

Oh dammit, that reminds me, I was supposed to be keeping track of Gris' diet. But to my recollection there's been nothing to keep track of - no mention was made of Gris either scavenging for food (beyond stealing Bawtch's tup) or suffering from hunger pangs. Odd. I guess that meal at the restaurant was really filling.

Anyway, Gris has Ske take him to a place with sweetbuns, but his driver is worried - he thinks someone's watching the airbus and shadowing Gris. Gris, of course, waves it off as nonsense, because he's a careful Apparatus agent always covering his tracks and watching his back.

Heavens help you now, Heller, I said to myself as I ravenously chomped down on a sweetbun. A clever Gris might not be enough. But a clever Gris and a rich Gris are an unbeatable combination! You're sunk!

...Does Gris have a clone?


Back to Part Nine, Chapter Nine

Forward to Part Ten, Chapter One