"I can see right through that girls' dress," said Crobe. "She has nice (bleeps). Easy to alter them to squirt semen."
"Pay heed," I insisted. "[Heller] is drawing attention to himself because he is too tall. Cut him down to size."
"On the other hand," said Crobe, "it might be more interesting to change her tongue to a (bleep). That would cure her (bleep) envy."
"Do you hear what I'm telling you?" I snarled.
"Very distinctly," he said. "Your stomach rumbles indicate you want a woman. Wouldn't a little boy do? I could fix up his behind so it looked like a goat's."
"You must follow instructions!" I threatened.
"Oh, I intend to," said Doctor Crobe, itching himself inside his restraint jacket as best he could. "Psychiatry is a wonderful subject."
it just doesn't work. In Book One the doctor had spliced six children together into "a ring, twisted up into pornographic positions." None of the operations Crobe is proposing are any more horrifying than that, so Hubbard can't blame psychology for any of this.
This isn't the only problem with mixing the two, either. A couple of chapters ago, Citizen Justin commented that Voltarian medical science is already capable of moving heads around or grafting them on new bodies. Furthermore, Voltarian engineers have created things like mind-control helmets, devices that trigger certain emotions in targets, and a mood-sensing bug. Unless all of these advances are nothing more than the result of trail-and-error, Voltarian science in general and Doctor Crobe in particular should know something about neuroscience. Yet when Crobe gets his grubby little hands on a psychology textbook made by bunch of primitives who still think digital watches are pretty neat, he's sold and immediately has to dissect someone to find their lizard brain - even though there's no telling how many dissections or brain surgeries he's performed before then.
And that's the paradox of psychology in Mission Earth. It is a sham, it is false, it is garbage, and just about everyone knows this - but it's also hugely influential and corrupts people into following it, even when they should know it's false.
Or in Crobe's case, "corrupt" someone who was a pretty sick (bleep) to begin with.
After one last off-screen briefing, Gris sends Crobe and his two plainclothes escorts onto a plane out of Afyon, then returns to his customary position on his arse in front of a viewscreen. Crobe's main gimmick is that the emotional bug Gris inexplicably implanted in him flashes summaries of his mood at the bottom of the screen - Gris guesses that such a device was invented to "give a spy-master, ten thousand miles away, the opinion of the spy wearing it as to whether the spy thought the enemy invention was good or bad or to what degree." I guess such a spy-master doesn't want to wait a day or two to debrief his agent.
The difficulty comes from Crobe's other gimmick.
It was pretty hard for me to tell exactly where Crobe and the guards were as their flight progressed, because the viewer only registered the bugged eye that saw at different depths through things, according to what distance Doctor Crobe focused it.
So whaddya know, the X-ray eyeball Gris installed for absolutely no reason turns out to be an obstacle to his all-important job of watching someone do his dirty work for him.
And I really mean no reason. Gris has made no attempt to justify his decision to use the damn thing. No "hey, this could help me find where Heller's hidden his platen!" Or "such a useful implant to a surgeon like Crobe would help earn his trust and allegiance." It's just "I need a bug, turns out I have three different types, so I'll use them all."
Worn by a spy, it was supposed to be able to read through envelopes or enemy code-book covers and into gun breaches to identify the shell type.
Wait, I thought you super-advanced space aliens used blaststicks? Charged, energy weapons, not ballistic, shell-based weapons?
But Doctor Crobe wasn't using it for that.
By focus, he undressed every stewardess. The letters of emotion spelled:
DISSATISFACTION
While Gris is distracted by all the naked stewardesses parading across the viewscreen, Crobe only feels "EXHILARATION, EXCELLENT" when he spies a fellow passenger with an interesting brain. Aww, he really does appreciate people for their minds and not their looks. But all the naked ladies makes Gris realize that he forgot to have Sexy Time in the back of his limo last night, because he was too busy watching Crobe. He sends a thug to find Ters (implied evil laugh) for an explanation, only to be told that Ahmed never showed up last night. Gris can't get the taxi driver on the phone, either. How mysterious. But probably not important.
I must not miss any part of Crobe's arrival in New York. Too much depended on it!
I hitched the two-way-response radio close to me, ready to give the guards coaching if anything went wrong.
Wait wait wait - part of the problem with using Raht and Terb (Manco Devil rest his soul) as Gris' agents was that they had a one-way radio that could only send reports, not receive instructions, because the alternative would be too great a security risk or such horseflop. But suddenly Gris is using a proper communications device allowing two-way, real-time conversations. Now he has one? Now he's willing to use one?
The kicker is that Gris doesn't even mention breaking the bloody ban on two-way radios when he does this, much less justifying it with "but this was a real emergency!" or something. It's like the author forgot that idiotic contrivance from the earlier books that left Gris a helpless observer of his agents' ineptitude.
If Crobe failed, my own life could be hanging by a thread. Heller must NOT succeed!
And wasn't there some mysterious assassin leaving threatening notes on Gris' pillow, promising to kill him if he didn't handle Heller? A mysterious assassin who did nothing when Gris spent a month completely ignoring Heller in favor of adventures in the back of his new limo?
Also, Mission Earth drinking game - take a shot every time Gris says something along the lines of "Heller must NOT succeed!" Take another each time Gris declares Heller stopped dead in his tracks.
Back to Chapter Two
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