Part Thirty-Six, Chapter Three - Suspicious Displays of Affection

Bwa ha ha ha!  Gris barely restrains his mirth when he brings the Countess Krak to the airport's waiting area, and watches as she "ruefully" compares her "dingy cloak and hood with the holes in it" to the other women's silk clothes and gold brocade (or more specifically, those parts visible under their veils and cloaks.  I didn't know Turkish women rocked the burqa).  He decides that "the comparison was not favorable" and exults how Heller will have to buy the Countess a better wardrobe.  Truly these are dark days for the forces of righteousness.

His mirth is short-lived, though.  Like one paragraph short.  After snickering at what he made her wear, Gris goes back to urging Krak along, since "just being around her was a pretty nerve-wracking experience."  So she has to remind him to give her Heller's address and Earth alias, and when the guy on the P.A. system directly tells him "You'll miss your flight, Sultan Bey!  Move it!" Gris gets thrown "into confusion."  He tries to find a pencil, gets one from a counter, can't find any paper, finds a scrap in his pocket, scribbles down the address... I can see what Xignals Magazine meant when they said this series had "the kind of adventure and excitement that made all of us fans to begin with."

When they finally reach the gate, it happens - Krak grabs Gris' shoulders and gives him a peck on the cheek, calling him a "good man" and thanking him for his help.  She hurries up onto the plane, while Gris stands in numb shock.

That burst of affection was so unlike her, I knew down to the roots of my soul that it boded no good.  Yes, the more I thought of it, the more certain I became.  Some horrible trick was involved!  I knew her too well!  And to my sorrow!

So here's the first bit of real tension in Fortune of Fear.  Gris is convinced that Krak's uncharacteristic affection must mean she's up to something.  On the one hand, this is a pretty reasonable observation, like Gris noticing that being tortured by sadistic lesbians isn't nearly as fun as the internet makes it out to be.  But on the other hand, the universe exists to prove Gris wrong and otherwise abuse him, so even a logical conclusion like this could very well turn out to be incorrect just to spite him.  So is Gris stating the obvious or once again misinterpreting things?  Guess we'll have to keep reading to find out.

Also, "roots of my soul?"  Isn't Gris a psychologist, and therefore an amoral atheist?  I mean, the guy thought his entire personality would change because his dangly parts got enlarged.


Back to Chapter Two

Forward to Chapter Four

Part Thirty-Six, Chapter Two - A Critique of Modern Currency

The act of wringing his hands gives Gris a glance at his watch and reminds him that he has two hours to get the Countess Krak on her plane, so it's time for some last-minute preparations.  Apparatus agents usually get five hundred bucks for travel expenses or emergencies, but Gris is broke, so he pockets everything but a fifty for the Countess to get a cab with.  Then it's off to find Raht so the agent can tail Krak and Heller with the relayer for the implanted bugs.

Gris admits that Raht is looking younger and healthier than ever after the treatment for broken bones and pneumonia and all the other injuries Gris kept putting him through.  And Gris, of course, rails at Raht for "lying around doing nothing."  And I guess I could get annoyed at Gris for failing to appreciate the value of a good minion, but since he's going to keep repeating this mistake, what's the point?  Gris pulls his knife on Raht to make him shave his beloved mustache, so Krak won't recognize him.  I'm not sure if this is "comedy" or a redundant effort to make Gris seem as petty and unlikeable as possible.

Krak comes back with two hypnohelmets, which are not nearly as bad as that disgusting false science of "psychology," and compliments a bowing and scraping Dr. Prahd for his work.  The helmets are disguised as World Health Organization specimens, because nobody at customs wants to rummage around in a sample of spinal meningitis.  Krak thinks Gris' alias for her, Heavenly Joy Krackle, is awfully "sweet" of him.  And then the issue of money comes up.

First there's Gris' commentary that "modern U.S. money, a dingy blackish green on gray-green paper, does not compare very well in appearance to the gold gleam of Voltar currency."  I guess this implies that Gris has made a study of the history of American currency and finds the original dingy blackish green on gray-green paper notes from 1862 noticeably different from today's dingy blackish green on green-gray paper notes, suggesting an incredible eye for detail and nostalgia for the good old days.  Also, this might be the closest we've come to a description of Voltarian currency, but I can't be certain.  It's been so long since we've been on Voltar, after all.

Krak is confused because the fifty dollar bill says "Grant" on it, which means "give away," so "This bill can't be very valuable if they just give them away."  Gris, in a stroke of inspiration, explains that most people on this strange planet use something called "credit cards," with which you can just buy whatever you want.  Krak finds this a bit odd, but accepts it.

So the super-advanced 110-world alien empire has no notion of "credit."  Which is a bit odd, because I'm almost certain the first book mentioned things like gambling debts and debtors' prisons, but I'm not going to check.  The important thing is that, for this plot point/gag to work, the Countess Krak has to have no idea that using credit cards carries any repercussions, to say nothing of a grasp of basic economics.

So the chapter ends with Krak deciding she'll have to get a credit card from somewhere, and patting Gris on the shoulder - remember this.  And then it's off to the airport.


Back to Chapter One

Forward to Chapter Three

Part Thirty-Six, Chapter One - The Warehouse of Forgotten Espionage Equipment

Let's start the book off with a moment of panic.  When we last left off, Gris had taken a seat outside Krak's room, her clothes in a pile next to him and his feet propped up on her "spaceboots" in a way that would jolt him upright if the boots were moved.  He wakes up around five in the morning to find things a bit off.

Something was wrong.  I could not place it.

The boots!  The boots my foot had been resting on!

They were GONE!

My eyes darted to where I had left the pile of clothes.  They were gone!

I started up.

My hand went to the knob of her door.  Silently, I opened it.

THE COUNTESS KRAK WAS GONE!

And so, not only were Gris' painstaking preparations from last chapter completely ineffectual, but it took us less than a page for him to go into an all-caps freakout.

This is gonna be a long book. (edit from the future: you have no idea how long)

He rushes into Prahd's room and once again finds the "good" doctor in bed with an underaged girl, who complains "You broke your promise!"  Then Gris runs all over the hospital looking for the Countess, and grills the receptionist and guards over her whereabouts, to no avail.  Then he finally remembers that he implanted a bug in her head, and he can just turn on... uh... the Krak Channel?  KTV?  Well, the important thing is that we get to the meat of the chapter: watching the Countess Krak look at things.

Gris finds her poking around the warehouse, rummaging through medical supplies and assembling a first aid kit.  But not for her, oh no, this is all for Heller.  She picks up some healing agents because "He could put his hand on something hot," (yes, conveniently for us the Countess talks to herself all the time), some space-age poultices "That would heal a blastgun scar," that sort of thing.

There's a, ah, clever shout-out to Hubbard's more infamous book, as Gris wonders where the Countess got the idea that "Earth was a battlefield!"  And then it's right back to gawking at alien doodads - again, for Heller.  "I'll bet his spinbrush is all worn out. . . . Maybe his nerve ends have gotten dull. . . . Maybe he has grown a mustache and wants it speeded up. . . ."  And then she gets into the Eyes and Ears of Voltar stuff.  See, when Gris raided that shop waaaay back in book one, he didn't just take the bugging equipment, he looted the whole vault.  And then shipped it to Earth.  And promptly forgot about it.

So we get almost a full page of alien espionage equipment: "A gadget that detected eye-pupillary shift when someone was lying," a very useful device nobody in the Apparatus uses.  "A perfume that makes a person say yes to anything," man, that'd be useful for taping false confessions, you wouldn't have to muck about with hypnohelmets or anything.  A "dart that causes people to grow warm and itch so they will disrobe and you can get divorce evidence," that's a device with a strangely specific function.  As is "a headlight fitting which installed in one's own headlights causes other drivers to act like they are drunk so they can then be arrested for drunken driving" - well if you're not going to breathalyze them but want to jail them anyway, why not lie about the swerving too?  Oh, and here's a "field coil that stimulates the desire to pick up money so the person can be arrested for stealing."  Yes, influence behavior by shooting Greed Radiation at people!

It's just bizarre.  Not just the gizmos, but the sudden deluge of creativity and imagination, an avalanche of fantastical spy toys that are only showing up five books into the series, amazing devices that have not been used by anyone in the story despite their obvious utility.  And these were all made by a civilian company, not the Apparatus' private labs!

And again, I must wonder why psychology is being treated as the worst thing imaginable when these Voltarians have invented "a case of emotional perfume bombs that cause people to react with emotions that make them say the required things: packs of eight assorted emotions.  Caution: point away from self when breaking tip."  Bloody alien hypocrites.  Or maybe they're dismissive of psychology because it doesn't work as well as their "field coil" devices.

Well, Krak helps herself to this bounty of gadgetry, and Gris is about to go stop her when he remembers that doing so would reveal that he isn't under hypnotic suggestion to let her run freely through the hospital.  He then takes stock of his weapons but glumly concludes that a stungun, couple of blasticks and knife just wouldn't be enough to handle one flat-footed female loaded down with loot.

There was only one thing I could do and I did it.  I sat there and suffered.

She had tricked me.

Wow, the Countess "tricked" Gris into sitting on his arse watching another character's actions on a television set.  She's certainly something special, isn't she?


Back to the Start of the Book

Forward to Chapter Two

Wow, That's a Lot of Gold

I get annoyed just looking at the cover of Fortune of Fear, or more specifically after reading the inside cover jacket of my hardback copy.

There's a very 80's-looking woman, presumably the Countess Krak, in a skintight red outfit that presents just the suggestion of nipples, while behind her stands a nervous-looking twit in poofy pants carrying a stack of gold bars, presumably Gris.  And then you realize that the two are standing on a veritable mountain of gold ingots, a pile of treasure that nearly eclipses the pair of shiny, triangular, nondescript spaceships also adorning the cover. 

The synopsis on the bookjacket hypes how the Countess has finally arrived on Earth, which will never be the same - and specifically that Atlantic City will never be the same.  It also claims that she's "the most beautiful, the most deadly and certainly the most feared woman in the 110-planet Voltarian Empire," which is a load of crap.  Krak's only killed what, three, four people?  And how can she be the most feared person in the Voltar Confederacy if only her immediate associates in the Apparatus know she exists? 

But not only is Krak going to "threaten the future" of our world, the book jacket goes on to say, there's also "the sudden arrival of $250 million in gold" from Voltar that could prove to be "the death blow for Earth."

Now, Gris already tried to smuggle in some gold bars he synthesized on Voltar, but those were only eighteen bars valued at "more than $349,999.99!" a piece, for a total worth of approximately 6.3 million dollars.  Those bars were stolen while he wasn't looking, of course, a turn of events Gris seems strangely disinterested in, given how it left him not just bankrupt but deeply in debt.  So not only is this $250 million being promised by the book jacket not his original treasure, but it presumably solves Gris' financial problems.

And my question is: why?  What was the point of Gris losing the money if he's going to get it all back in a sudden windfall?  Why did those events have to happen if he ends up in the same place he started?

One of Mission Earth's many failings is its lack of character development.  When Gris gets tortured by a scary lesbian brainwashed by "psychiatric birth control," he doesn't have any doubts about psychology, he continues to follow it religiously.  When Gris sees the devastating power of public relations, he doesn't learn from it and try to improve his image, he crows about it for a few paragraphs before moving on with his life.  He's the exact same character at the beginning of The Invaders Plan as he is at the end of An Alien Affair... well, I guess he has a bigger package after Prahd's surgery.  But that's about it.

Likewise, Heller is just as handsome and intelligent and strong and boring now as he was when he was first introduced.  He hasn't had to come to terms with associating with a criminal syndicate to further his mission.  His reaction to psychology was "haha that's dumb," he hasn't started questioning if the people of Earth can be saved from themselves, or if they deserve to be saved.  Or maybe he has grappled with these questions, but the audience will never know because the author never gives us a chance to get into the hero's head.  We just see Heller throwing cats at people or kicking thugs to death with metal cleats; his character, what little there is, is largely inferred.

The closest thing we've seen to character development was when the Countess Krak, introduced as a frigid, ruthless instructor, burst into tears at the sight of Heller, declared that she was unworthy of him, and became his devoted love interest.  And that took place over the course of a chapter or two back in The Invaders Plan.

So the two main characters are doing things, driving in races, blowing up federal employees, getting tortured as part of a lesbian couple's heavy BDSM session, and going into crippling credit card debt.  These activities are utterly meaningless if you judge them by how the characters changed as a result of the experience.  But maybe they've at least advanced the plot?

Well, Heller was making some progress towards saving the world by winning a car race, but that fell through and now he's out of the mob.  So he's back at about square one, maybe a little better off than when he started since he now has connections.  And Gris bought and lost a slave girl's affections, then lost all his money, but according to the book jacket that's about to be corrected.  So he's about as well-off as he was when he arrived on Earth.

In other words, we're starting Book 5 and we have jack squat to show for it.  Things have happened, but the plot has not progressed, and the characters are just as flat and static as they always were.  The best you could say is that we might have had entertaining hijinks in the interim but... well, I'd have to politely disagree about this book being in any way entertaining.

Wrapping things up.  The book jacket goes on to hint that "the future of high fashion, the power of a Squeeza credit card and an army of mounted highwaymen in the streets of New York City may well derail everyone's plans."  But I'm too jaded by lesbian torture sessions and an aircraft carrier's launch cable being used to trap an escaping publicist to get too excited about this.

Maps again, there's Atlantic City on the coast of New Jersey, and New York City but not Turkey.  The Voltarian Censor's Disclaimer is upset that the author would suggest that practitioners of "cellology" would use their skills to "make human freaks," so yeah, looks like Dr. Crobe is going to be up to his old tricks, that rascal.  54 Charlee Nine, the Robotbrain in the Translatophone, warns us about the Marquis de Sade, to which I respond "one book too late."

Though he does make me crack a smile when he complains about "Blindstein" and other Earth minds: "I don't know which one is worse: Blindstein, with his idea that nothing travels faster than the speed of light; or de Sade, who said that pain is pleasure; or Bugs [Bunny], who goes down a rabbit hole and then asks 'What's up, doc?'"  The only characters I like in these books are the two robots.

The book's Key explains what arbitrage is (selling goods internationally to profit from currency differences), but doesn't define Hot Jolt as more than "a popular Voltarian drink."  A native of Manco is called a Mancian.  Oh, did you remember the Turkish wrestler who tried and failed to beat up Heller three books ago?  His name was Musef.  I guess he'll be important in this book too.  So is Ske, Gris' driver back on Voltar.

Part Thirty-Six begins with Gris once again recapping the story to the Judiciary.  Despite everything that happened in the last book - most significantly Heller falling out of favor with Babe Corleone, and Gris having to flee New York only to discover his crippling debt - the "confession" focuses on the events of the last few chapters of An Alien Affair, when Krak and Crobe arrived.  Typically, Gris ends with a strangely-detailed segue into his state and mind and what he was doing when the last book ended - namely sitting down to guard the Countess Krak's recovery room.

I can just imagine Lord Turn reading it and thinking "I know, I just read that part you twit.  Cripes, why does your 'confession' read like an immediate, first-hand account of events rather than something penned with the benefit of hindsight?"


Back to Part Thirty-Five, Chapters Ten and Eleven

Forward to Part Thirty-Six, Chapter One

Part Thirty-Five, Chapters Ten and Eleven - Jettero Heller's Girlfriend is Physically Flawless

The Countess is directed to shower and change into scrubs for her cosmetic touch-up, and while she's busy with that Gris tells Dr. Prahd that he'll need to do a skin-search of Krak.  Prahd is upset that Gris will be tracking germs into his clean operating theater, but agrees.  A freshly-washed Krak complains about how bad the soap smelled, Prahd assures her that Gris will be leaving shortly, hur-hur-hur wait that doesn't make any sense, Gris never used the shower and she was smelling the stink before she got in the room with him.

Now, here's the confusing part.  The Countess is agreeing to this procedure partly because Gris has given her a "wrist-recorder" so she'll know if anyone's done anything inappropriate while she's unconscious.  However, Gris sees her fumbling with its controls and assumes she's not used to Earth devices - so even though we first saw a "wrist-recorder" on Voltar, these aliens aren't using their own equipment, they've picked up something on Earth, something that while unidentified functions in the same way.

But the weirdest part is that there's no attempt to sabotage or position the recorder in a way to keep it from picking up anything incriminating, like what Gris did with Heller.  It goes on Krak's wrist, but all Gris has to do to avoid detection is take off his shoes and tiptoe.  So it's audio only?  Krak is hoping the doctor will talk to himself and describe which procedures he's doing, without lying?  Or did the author omit an important detail?

Whatever.  Krak gets on the table, Prahd puts her out, Gris takes off his shoes and sneaks in, Prahd pulls off the surgical gown.  Gris declares that the naked Krak is "a beautiful woman!  No Greek sculptor had ever had a model like that!"  He's still too terrified of her to actually touch her, and Gris gets Prahd to flip Krak over (which of course doesn't affect the wrist-mounted recorder in any way) while Gris scans for hidden documents.  But there's nothing, not even in Krak's discarded clothing.  She has - pause for emphasis - managed to outsmart Soltan Gris.  "(BLEEP)!"

After vowing that "constant watchfulness" will be his new watchword, Gris puts thought to action and leaves the operating room to observe through the one-way mirror (another thing Krak was evidently fine about).  Which is pretty much all that the last chapter is, Gris watching Prahd work on Krak.  He takes some measurements, then waves Gris outside and declares that the Countess must be from Atalantan aristocracy.

"That accounts for it," he said.

"For what?" I said, irritated.

"The perfection.  She's the product of tens of thousands of years of selective breeding.  The aristocracy married nothing but the most beautiful and bright.  Do you realize that her thyroid..."

And truth be told, I'm just as annoyed as Gris is at this point.  Must be my innate American disdain for nobility.

Tinkering with nobles carries the death penalty, she's an unperson so it's okay, yadda yadda.  Prahd  implants the bugs and fixes the scars.  He heals old burns from "electric cuffs."  He examines every inch of her naked body and corrects every old scratch or blemish.  He cleans her teeth.  He gives her a pedicure and a manicure.  He gives her a tan, because the Atalantan nobility are "white but it is a white with a faint tan tinge.  He was restoring the exact shade!"  And when Prahd is done, he walks out with a "dreamy farawayness in his eyes" and murmurs that "Anybody who messed up such a gorgeous creature should have atomic bombs exploding in his head."  As opposed to feeling annoyed that he wasn't allowed to enlarge her ovaries and perform an artificial insemination.

And that's the last chapter of the book.  Jettero Heller's girlfriend can finally compete with his gilded spaceship in terms of physical perfection.  Afterward, Gris camps outside the sleeping Krak's room and congratulates himself:

I folded my arms across my chest and grinned.  Gris, I complemented myself, you got 'em.  Sending an implanted Krak to Heller and his whores would be like tossing an anvil to a drowning man.

Evidently he's forgotten that Heller is no longer rooming with the whores of the Gracious Palms.

Then when Hisst sent the OK, I could humanely end Heller's misery, get the forgeries even if I had to torture the information out of Krak (a delicious thought), sell her to the black market in Istanbul, settle matters with Utanc and rake in the money from my host of enterprises.

Evidently he's forgotten how Utanc hates him enough to defy Freudian psychology, and that he's so deeply in debt that selling his "host of enterprises" wouldn't make him solvent.

Sleep well, Countess Krak.

Tomorrow belongs to me.

I guess the author is trying to suggest that we're in the second act of Mission Earth, the part of the story where the heroes are at their worst and it looks like the villains could triumph in spite of narrative convention.

Except Heller's not at his lowest.  Yes, the all-powerful newspaper made him break up with the mob, but he still has his business, and more importantly friends and contacts.  He definitely has more than he started his mission with, and Gris just dropped his lover in his lap.  Meanwhile, Heller's misfortune is mainly Madison's work (somehow), while all Gris has done this book has been get tortured by psychotic lesbians, spend a week in the hospital, and lose all his money.

So it's really hard to spin this as some sort of victory for the bad guys, or feel any sort of tension that Heller is in serious trouble.

What will Krak do when

she finds Heller knee-deep 

in girls?

 Is this the end of

Heller's mission?

Read

MISSION EARTH

Volume 5

FORTUNE OF FEAR

Even the author has forgotten that Heller is no longer rooming at the Gracious Palms.  Heller's "knee-deep" in Iggy and a cat with no name and sometimes Bang-Bang.  If anything, she might wonder if he's changed teams.


Back to Part Thirty-Five, Chapter Nine

Forward to Fortune of Fear

Part Thirty-Five, Chapter Nine - So Why Is Psychology Worse Than a Society With Mind-Control Helmets?

Why would you put Mission Earth on Kindle?  Sure, it's better than chopping down trees to do another printing of it, but is there seriously enough of a demand to justify scanning this trash into digital form?  Or is someone, or some group, hoping to take advantage of this hip new technology to attract a new audience of potential customers?

Anyway, Krak and Gris get to the hospital and meet Dr. Prahd, who stands gobsmacked at the unearthly vision of loveliness that is the Countess Krak, forcing Gris to privately explain that she's a criminal who has killed at least four people.  He gives Prahd orders to bug Krak the same way he did Heller, which means I'll have to think of a Krak-related analogue for HellerVision, and explains the whole hypnohelmet plan.

While Prahd goes to fetch the disabled helmets, Gris rummages through Krak's luggage, but can't find anything but the "language machine" and some toiletries.  Likewise, he can't find those forged proclamations he gave her on the clothes Krak was wearing.  Then he remembers that when he first gave them to her, she carried them directly on her person, "And that's exactly where they should be now."

Gris, when your instructors said you had "smart brains," were they coughing a lot, shaking their heads sadly, or rolling their eyes?

So Gris plans on strip-searching Krak once she's out, and Prahd comes in with the hypnohelmets, which Krak coos over.  Prahd gets to put his on first and fakes his brainwashing agreement to "not monkey with [Krak's] limbs or glands," and to use a knife on anyone who tries to touch her inappropriately while she's out.  The punishment for failing to do this is to feel like atom bombs are exploding in the doctor's head.  I'm disappointed that the Voltarians can think of any heavier ordinance than what humans came up with in the age of vacuum tubes.  Fusion bombs, quantum bombs, antimatter bombs, anything.

Then it's Gris' turn for some fake hypo-indoctrinating, where Krak attempts to expand the "feel urpy at the thought of harming Heller" programming to cover her as well.  When it's over, Gris again reflects on his "smart brains" and how cunning he was to spend those chapters implanting himself with something that disabled those hypnohelmets only to learn that he accidentally disabled all hypnohelmts in a several-mile radius.

Hmm.  I wonder why Krak trusts a hypnohelmet produced from an Apparatus facility, regardless of how "secure" its packaging looks.  Why didn't she bring her own helmet from home?  Why isn't she suspicious enough to pop open the devices and examine them herself?


Back to Chapter Eight

Forward to Chapters Ten and Eleven

Part Thirty-Five, Chapter Eight - A Noticeable Presence

After Gris has dealt with the other passengers, the Countess Krak makes her entrance.

Lulled by months of not seeing her, I had completely forgotten the impact of the presence of the Countess Krak.  You knew she was there.

She was wearing a spacer's greatcoat with the collar turned up.  She was wearing spaceboots.  Her blond-gold hair was in braids around her head like a crown.

Yeah, that's the extent of Krak's "presence."  Like many great figures in history, when you see her you say to yourself "Yep, she's there all right.  She certainly isn't absent."  And then you methodically tally what she's wearing.

She immediately asks if Heller is alright, and Gris remembers to feign a tummyache at the thought of his enemy being in any danger, because remember Krak thinks Gris is still hypnotized to barf up his last meal if he even considers harming Heller, a subplot that ate up a lot of time in Book 1 that could have been spent actually getting to Earth.

Gris asks about Krak's luggage, or more specifically some certain Royal documents, because remember, in order to secure Krak's cooperation in getting Heller off his ass and into space, Gris forged documents promising to pardon her for her past offenses, a capital crime that he's had to waste time in more recent books trying to cover up.  Krak assures him that they're safe but won't elaborate.

It occurs to me that I ought to have been taking notes to keep up with all these lingering subplots.

Gris hurries to get Krak reunited with Heller, which involves taking a fake passport photo, which Krak doesn't like because she looks like a mess and couldn't bring all those nice clothes Heller bought her.  Then she has to get dressed in the local custom with whatever Gris can find:

I found a dingy-looking woman's hooded cloak.  It was a sort of spotty brown.  I found a veil.  I couldn't find any shoes or stockings.  She was wearing spaceboots.  So let her wear spaceboots.

Sometimes I think Hubbard is just as bored writing this as I am reading it.

Krak gets dressed, Gris gets her into the cab, and then he starts to describe how crazy these Earthlings are about identifying marks, such as that little nick under Krak's right eyebrow or a faint scar on the back of her hand.  When this doesn't work, Gris suggests that Heller might not want to look at such "blemishes" for the rest of their life, and that convinces Krak to see a cellologist.

To sell the deal, Gris agrees that he and the doctor will submit to hypnohelmets (which of course Gris has already disabled), and reuses the old "and you can wear a wrist recorder while you're unconscious" trick he used on Heller back in the first book.  Yes, "Strategy Plan A" is succeeding.  Gris just restrains himself from hugging himself with glee.  I've never hugged myself with glee.  Maybe I've never been happy enough. 


Back to Chapter Seven

Forward to Chapter Nine