Part Forty-Seven, Chapter Four - Two Dirty Armenians

Short chapter, transitive chapter.  Nothing's really happening, but characters are moving into position for the next plotline.  The kind of chapter that makes you wonder why you'd bother slicing up a book into such dinky, three-page episodes.

The next day's headline is about the Whiz Kid surrendering to police and being extradited from Kansas for trial in New York, and Gris presumably smiles evilly to himself as he watches Madison "set the stage."  Both of the... well, they're not the story's protagonists, and I hesitate to call them "good guys."  Let's call them Krak and Heller.  Their viewscreens are coming through loud and clear, meaning they're within the two hundred mile standard range, and sure enough Gris can see the New York skyline from the farm they're visiting.

With them is Pig Boy, who the narration goes from calling Delbert John II to Delbert Second to "the boy" within the space of a page.  Krak is calling him "Twoey."  That's a terrible name, but Mission Earth is a series full of terrible names.  Twoey it is.

Twoey is yellin' and hollerin' and runnin' 'round the rental trucks, talking to his pigs, introducing them to their new home, and is able to give a squealing call to get all the porkers out of the trailers and into the pens.  He loves his new home: "Jus' smell that breeze from the othah fahms.  What a beeootiful aroma of pigs!"  The property doesn't actually have a house, but Twoey offers to sleep in the pens with his livestock family.

"No," said Heller.  "That won't do."

"It's just fahn with me," said the boy.  "These yere two men that come with the place and me will make out great."

Heller looked at two very dirty men who stood nearby, evidently Armenians.  They were nodding brightly.

Evidently how, Hubbard?  Were they in the Armenian national costume (whatever that is)?  Wrapped in Armenian flags?  Flashing their Armenian passports?  Did they conform to some sort of physical stereotype of what an Armenian should look like that you the author ascribe to and assume the reader will understand?  Is it the dirt that makes them Armenian? 

Two careless words in an unimportant sentence in an uneventful chapter make me spend ten minutes flipping forwards and backwards through the rest of the wretched book, searching for something that will make them make sense.  It's like the author is reaching out from the pages, through the years, and beyond the grave to punch me in the forehead.

Let it not be said that Hubbard can't connect with his readers.

Not much else to the chapter.  Krak convinces Heller to leave one of the motor homes and its staff at the farm for Twoey both as a home, and as her base when she's over, ominous pause, quote training endquote the kid.  Heller praises the land yacht's crew and gives them bonuses, Gris is revolted that those Fleet officers have no idea how to properly fire someone.  Then the Countess announces that someone's offering to sell a Rolls Royce Silver Spirit with a complementary English chauffeur.  In an amazing coincidence, I was lying awake in bed last night, grinding my teeth, bitterly lamenting the fact that my hero, Jettero Heller, didn't have someone to drive him around in a boxy, bland, British saloon car.  I think I'll have sweet dreams this evening.

Fifty thousand dollars, credit card, Mudur Zengin, security deposit, "The trap I had laid absolutely HAD to work!"


Back to Chapter Three

Forward to Chapter Five

Part Forty-Seven, Chapter Three - That Deadly Weapon, Morality

Right, let's see what we can do to get this plot moving.  Leave her in neutral and put your backs into it, lads.

Gris realizes that he might be putting the cart before the horse here, and that gathering intelligence is a waste of time if you have no way of acting on it - or to use his words, "It is no good, I discovered, to do a plan to use a tank and then have no tank to gather."  He looks around, but nobody's left a tank in his hotel room, so he concludes that he'll have to use his brains.

What he actually uses is the power of contrivance.  Gris just so happens to notice, underneath the cockroaches, an old newspaper that just so happened to be left in his room, and which just so happened to have a headline about someone's morality being called into question.

It was an omen!

MORALITY!

I well knew Voltar customs were different.  The tremendous life expectancy there meant that one had to be pretty sure who he or she was marrying before taking the plunge: otherwise one could be stuck with an unsuitable partner for a century and a half.  So it was quite unusual for a man and a woman

And only a man and a woman, thank you very much.

to live together for anything up to two years before tying the final knot.

So... not all that different from Earth, then.

The only way you could get a "divorce" in the Confederacy was by finding the other partner guilty of bigamy or adultery and getting them executed, as the penalty for those was death.  So marriage was a totally fatal step.

Why?

But Earth customs, I knew

No, go back, why is Voltarian marriage absolute and final?  Why is the price for infidelity death?  And what do these things have to do with life expectancy?  What about the expected duration of a marriage makes it a capital crime to end it?  Why does the government feel the need to enforce these measures?  What is the reasoning behind them?  Religious?  Economic, so that voiding a marriage is viewed like trying to back out of a business merger?  Something even more nonsensical?

You're never gonna tell us, are you, Master Storyteller?

But Earth customs, I knew, were much different. One was expected to take the plunge without any data at all on the other person. They frowned heavily on loose living, no matter how much they practiced it.

It was a weapon.

I'm not sure the 60's and 70's happened on this version of Earth.  And I guess this is still satire and insightful commentary on modern society and all that junk, except it's coming from a perspective of vicious marital conservatism.  So what, we gonna say the Voltarians are right?  Death to adulterers?  Enforce "'til death do you part" with the electric chair?

Gris takes his new "weapon" to the office of our old friend, Madison the anti-publicist, who's complaining that he's lost the front page (oh noes!) ever since sending the Whiz Kid to Kansas.  Gris speaks for all of us and asks "What's this fixation on Kansas?" and Madison reminds us that he's trying to turn the Whiz Kid into Jesse James.  'cause when you hear about racecars and revolutionary fuel sources, you think of a train robber who died in 1882.

The bombshell is dropped - Gris reports that Heller is living with a woman, and they aren't married.  Madison thinks about it and admits that, amateur though he may be, Gris' idea has some potential.  So Gris runs back to his shabby hotel and gloats about being a spider and spinning his webs, before going back to staring at the viewscreens while Madison takes actions that he hopes will turn out to his benefit.  Like Books Three and Four all over again.

He catches Heller at a service station, joined by who the chapter will either refer to as "the gawky country boy" or just "the boy," not Richard, not Dick, not even Rockecenter the Second.  Geeseebee is of course gawking at the land yacht.

"Good golly!  Whereja get this big motor home?  That's the flashiest vehicle I ever see!"

Heller said, "I think my girl stole it."

It'd be nice to know how he said it.  With a wry smile?  A genuine grin?  A worried frown?  Sadly?  Approvingly?  Golly gee, it sure would be nice to have some way to identify with the character we're supposed to be rooting for, but we can't really empathize with him if we don't know what he's thinking or feeling.

Heller introduces Geeseebee to his "mob," and the kid is quite excited to meet "Bang-Bang Rimbombo, the most notorious car bomber in New York," because there are good murderers and bad murderers, and it turns out to come down to whether or not your outfit helps the people you don't kill get high.  He's also delighted to learn that all his pigs will be coming along too.  Then Krak walks into sight and gets out Gris' credit card to pay for all the diesel.

I turned the viewers off hastily.

But never mind, flies.  The web is spread and you are flying straight into it.

This web, with one strand in it, subcontracted to a second spider with an extremely hit-and-miss record when it comes to fly captures.  And I'm gonna watch you, and watch that other spider, and hope that you run into each other, like the master manipulator I am.

The attack might be slow but I was sure it would be deadly.  I knew Madison.  I had seen the gleam in his eye.  There would be a kill!

Yeah.  "Kill."  This guy's one success was convincing a mob boss to cut ties with Heller, which ended up merely setting him back a bit since he was able to become insanely wealthy with his magic telescope.  Again, Madison's ability to create an alternate reality for an imaginary Whiz Kid to play in only affects the plot when someone is stupid enough to believe it.

But as luck would have it, there happens to be someone close to Heller who latches onto ideas even though they aren't grounded in reality, then acts on them.  Someone who avoids attempts to clarify miscommunication.  Someone with a stubborn loyalty to worst-case scenarios and misunderstandings.  So the question is, how many chapters will it take for this person to read a newspaper?


Back to Chapter Two

Forward to Chapter Four

Part Forty-Seven, Chapter Two - Species Confusion

Gris' knowledge of the dark arts of psychology doesn't allow him to notice when he's unconsciously making excuses to sit around and watch TV.

The next part of the campaign was "3. PLAN BEFORE YOU ATTACK."

Accurate planning requires data.  Accordingly, I brushed the cockroaches off my viewers to see what the most horrible monster in the universe was up to now.

They were still in Virginia!

What about that last sentence justified an exclamation point?

Heller is actually sunbathing next to the parked land yacht and its support motor home, the crew's out sipping mixed drinks and playing cards, and then Krak drives up with Bang-Bang.  It's at this point that Gris realizes whoops, her viewscreen's blank because "I had her activator-receiver and 831 Relayer here and I was probably four hundred miles or more away!"

Just to reiterate how all this works - if the bugs are within 200 miles of the receiver, all's well.  If the bugs are more than 200 miles away, nothing gets through unless the 831 Relayer is turned on, extending their range to 10,000 miles.  But if the bugs are within 200 miles and the Relayer is turned on, the signal is overwhelming and shorts out the viewers or something.  These are the three states of the alien neural espionage implants, with no transition stages in-between.

I'd also like to remind everyone that this same civilization produced telescopes that can see through walls or peer a day into the future.  But they can't rig the relayers to, like, look through time and figure out when they need to boost or dampen their signal, or something similarly contrived.

Krak has evidently been training "young Rockecenter," who the book just hates calling Richard "Dick" Roe.  She's gotten him to use water to bathe instead of mud, and stop grunting and scratching his back by rubbing up against things, but he still refuses to eat at a table and will push unwanted food away with his nose...

I actually went back over the past couple of chapters and checked to see if I missed a comment about poor Dick mistakenly ending up in the barn to be raised by pigs.  I can't find it, but that's what seems to be implied here. 

Heller asks why Krak doesn't just use her hypno-helmet (like she ever needed his prompting to do so), but she explains that (for once) she's worried about overdoing it, and doesn't want the kid to "become a robot."  Now as best I can remember, Voltar doesn't use robots.  No spybots, no cargo-haulers in the hangars, no android soldiers, no drone aircraft.  The closest we've come to an artificial intelligence was the Apparatus computer, which was essentially a sassy search engine.  I don't count 54 Charlee Nine, the Robot-brain in the Translatophone, because I fully expect him to never appear in the actual story.

Guess someone briefed Krak on the amazing mechanical workers those primitive Earthlings have come up with.

She also sasses the Rockecenters by concluding she's not up against an environmental influence, but hereditary.  Yeah, those billionaires, always wallowing in the mud and scratching their asses on fence posts... wait, psychology is the devil and foreign to Voltar, but Krak knows about early environmental influences?  Has she been reading the forbidden texts?

All this to say, they've gotta do something about not-Richard's pigs, since he won't leave them behind.  After briefly considering making Izzy, who you'll recall is Jewish, handle the non-kosher situation, they decide that the best solution is to use Gris' credit card to buy the pigs, a farm near New York, and a fleet of trucks to transport the porkers.  So we end the chapter with Gris grinding his teeth and worrying about his Swiss bank certificate and whether Mudur Zengin would use up all his money and why?!  Why are we still talking about this?  That stupid subplot came and went last book, and all it did was get Gris to finally make an effort to do his damn job!  Why is all of this necessary?

There's one obvious answer - since Krak's using Gris' credit card, this is really a way to shower the protagonists with wealth, to allow them to buy luxury mobile homes and pig farms and so forth, because that's what makes for a good book, reading about imaginary people living in decadent comfort.  Only Heller is already stupid wealthy thanks to cheating the stock market with the aforementioned time-telescopes.  He could be paying for all this out of pocket.  But let's have the Countess do it instead, so Gris can throw a hissy fit over his security deposit.

The more likely explanation is that this money's misuse will be a future source of misery for Gris, because if this book isn't about showering Heller with praise and treasure, it's about showering Soltan Gris with misery and misfortune.

Or underaged sex.  Or curing lesbians with more sex.


Back to Chapter One

Forward to Chapter Three

Part Forty-Seven, Chapter One - After Dozens of Anonymous Partners, Gris Takes an Interest in VD

Surprisingly enough, the book isn't over yet.

Sure, we've had an "arc" of sorts.  Gris hired a hitman, tried to set up a murder, and failed miserably.  Problem is, he failed in only 185 pages, so rather than make this series a "undecimology" we'll just have to start a new plotline and stick it in the same book.  Onward, then, to more Madison, some legal drama, more underage sexual activity, and boats!  Glorious, majestic boats to lead us into Mission Earth Volume 7: Voyage of Vengeance!

Gris decides he can't deal with Pinchy and Candy right now, and so checks in with what little money he has at a wino hotel where "they didn't even bother to sort the living from the dead."  And only now, six books into this series, does Gris decide to use the "Apparatus fundamental musts:"

1. PREPARE A BASE BEFORE YOU ATTACK
2. HANDLE YOUR TROOPS BEFORE YOU ATTACK
3. PLAN BEFORE YOU ATTACK
4. GATHER WEAPONS BEFORE YOU ATTACK
5. PINPOINT OBJECTIVES BEFORE YOU ATTACK
6. TIME EVERYTHING

Preceded of course by rule 0: "ALWAYS CAPSLOCK, ALL THE TIME."

Gris reminds us that the Apparatus' job is to undermine civilization, making "the maximum amount of trouble for the maximum amount of people for the minimum number of reasons."  The same thing that governments do, of course!  Even primitive Earth can get that part right!

Unfortunately we can't say the same about Gris.  #5 is easy - kill Krak - but the best base he can come up with for #1 is his hotel room, he jots down the time to complete #6, and when he considers #2 realizes that his only troops are himself - "Bury and Torpedo and Madison had failed me."  Again, Raht slips his mind.  Also, why isn't Bury a valuable resource?  He's a potential source of guys to kill Krak, not an assassin who failed his mission.

Anyway, Gris decides to address the "troops," i.e. himself.

What was the matter with the troops?

Venereal disease.  What with goats and dogs and Torpedo,

And twenty-odd Turkish not-hookers and random pairs of strangers delivered to your bed so you can "cure" them of lesbianism.

this was obviously the case.  While there was no sign of it, in every text you read on military matters it is a problem.  Good.

So, after a good night's sleep, Gris wakes up bright and early, which given the numbers and distances involved last chapter means that he probably got a whopping three or four hours of shuteye.  Gris spends the last two pages of this four-page chapter at a V.D. clinic.  His account of his "contact" history gets the doctor's attention.

"How long have these contacts occurred?" he solicitously.

I counted it up rapidly, using my fingers.  The first time I had collided with the Countess Krak was in Spiteos about half a year before Heller came along.  She had murdered an agent who sought to grab at her sexually.  "Thirteen months," I said.

"How do you know you got it from her?" he asked.

"She forced me into it," I said.  "If it weren't for her I would never have had any association with dogs or goats or llamas from Peru."

Which leads to a ten-day montage of shots and medical treatments that leaves Gris nearly broke, but he can say with absolute confidence that he has no sign of STDs.  The doctor advises him to "terminate any association" with the woman who put him in that situation, so it's like ironic and funny and crap when Gris mentally agrees that oh yeah, he'll terminate that Krak all right.  Terminate her to death.  By killing her.

This will of course involve sitting on his pallid alien ass while watching the viewscreens and trying to get Madison's world of negative publicity to have an impact on Heller's life.  So back to Book 3's plot.  Or was it Book 4?  Mission Earth is one big blur of Gris sitting around, Gris running around desperately trying to get his subordinates to do something, or Gris giving up and wasting time in Turkey.


Back to Part Forty-Six, Chapter Seven

Forward to Part Forty-Seven, Chapter Two

Part Forty-Six, Chapter Seven - Torpedo's Wrath

I probably should have hyped this chapter last time instead of dwelling on the callous treatment of a recently-slain cast member.  I could've said something like, "next time, on Mission Spork, Torpedo will strike, and someone will die."  Missed opportunities for, like, tension and crap.

Since Heller's just going home, and Gris' innate Plot Sense indicates that he won't be saying anything important during the ride, the Apparatus agent switches to the Countess Krak's viewer.  "The young man" wakes up and thinks it's nice of her to stick around, and Krak rewards his trust by getting out a "new type of football helmet" that "teaches you."  And sure enough, she puts the mind-control helmet on the kid and flips the switch.  It's for the mission, you see.  Free will, even people's identities, all must be sacrificed for the good of Jettero Heller's mission to save the world from itself.  Such a lofty objective elevates you above the petty laws of the sinful earth, or the morality of the blinkered masses.

We don't see how Krak programs Junior the Second, though.  Gris is watching her thinking what a tempting target she makes, sitting with her back to the window, and can't wait for Torpedo to strike.  So there's that magical moment where he hears Torpedo's voice shout "GOT YOU!" and he wonders how Krak couldn't have heard that.

Snipers normally shout "GOT YOU!" just before they pull the trigger, right?  From their hidden vantage spots half a mile away?

Dramatic reveal!  Torpedo is in Gris' motel room!  He's real mad, and accusing Gris of setting him up and tipping off the cops at the hospital!  He had to ditch the car and walk back!  And not only is that worth a gut-shot, he's also super-mad Gris didn't tell him that the girl he was supposed to kill was the girlfriend of the guy who trounced him last year!  Obviously Gris meant for Heller to kill him, too!  I can't seem to end a sentence in anything but an exclamation point!

Yeah, this deadly killer saw cops waiting at a hospital, panicked, and ran home... but stuck around long enough to see Krak and Heller at the same time?

Oh, and he's also dumb enough to explain why he's mad, and how he's gonna kill and violate and give STDs to Gris' corpse, which of course gives Gris enough time to take advantage of the undescribed "preparations" he made several chapters ago.  Before Torpedo can shoot, Gris activates his "Apparatus radio relay ring," setting off the "vibration speaker" he planted on the balcony railing, so that it emits a scream.  Torpedo whirls, Gris yanks the rug out from under him and sends the hitman over the balcony.  He can't find his gun (and won't touch anything Torpedo's been holding), but quickly gathers up the rest of his stuff and scampers outside to his escape vehicle, the manure truck he took an interest in earlier.  He speeds off, belatedly concluding that it would have been safer to try and stomp Torpedo's head in while he was stunned on the pavement, but it's too late for that now.

We get a page of Gris driving across Virginia towards New York, stopping at gas stations and occasionally getting shot at by Torpedo, who has stolen his own pursuit vehicle.  Gris decides that since Torpedo has his address, he'll hide out at the least expected place - Torpedo's mother's house!  He shakes his would-be killer, makes it to New York, pounds on the door, Mrs. Fiaccola answers... when the hell time is it?  Heller and Biggs kept waking people up and it was after dinner before they even got started.  Seven, eight o' clock at night?  Gris starts out at Lynchburg, VA, and Google says that from there to New York is about a seven hour drive.  So it'd be somewhere between two in the morning and dawn.

Anyway, Mama Torpedo seems to understand his predicament and lets Gris enter, directing him to hide in Torpedo's room, which features a framed portrait of a leering, crooked man signed "To Torpedo, my best con, J. Q. Cortikul, Ph.D."  So... "Corti" as in "cortex," or cortex-kill, brain-kill?  Am I overthinking it?  Is this a reference grounded in the 1980's, the 1930's, or something only the author will understand?

Gris gets stuffed in the closet, but then he hears the sound of someone racing up the stairs, and Torpedo bursts into the room.  Mama Torpedo assures her son that he's gonna get a kill, points at the closet, and offers him his "leopard," or sawn-off shotgun.  But when her son reaches for it, she spins it around so that the barrel... the sawn-off barrel... is against his chin, and then "SHE PULLED BOTH TRIGGERS!"

Torpedo's head splatters across the ceiling, Mama Torpedo wipes off the shotgun's grip while the corpse topples over, then she sticks the weapon in her son's lifeless hands and gets out some gun-cleaning junk to leave at the scene of the "unfortunate accident."

Then she stood back.  "Ever since you been out of the Federal pen," she said to the dead body, "you talk psychology, psychology, psychology.  So I read up.  Now you get some psychology, you no-good, filthy, rotten philanderer of corpses!  I hope the devil makes you read psychology for the rest of infinity!"

She turned to me and beckoned me out of the closet.  "You witnessed it.  He was cleaning his gun and it went off, wasn't he?"

I nodded numbly.

"So that's the end of my no-good, carrion-(bleeping) (bleep) of a son.  And a pleasure it is to see him lying there dead even without the twenty-five thousand insurance I now get."

So there you have it - the reason we went through the hunt for "hit man insurance," so that a woman could off her offspring and profit from it.  Satire?  Irony?  Hot espionage action?  I'm assuming this isn't meant to be romance or comedy, but with these books, who know?

Gris walks out of the House of Severed Family Ties, and it finally hits him that Torpedo failed, and now it's up to him to save Lombar Hisst, Rockecenter, and the whole Voltar Confederacy by removing the Countess Krak

As I went out into the night, 

Technically morning.  Unless you drove four hundred miles in less than five hours.

I shook my fist at the sky.  "By all the stars, by all the Gods and Demons of the firmament,"

Who shall remain nameless.

I cried.  "In spite of what you are doing to me, I must prevail!  Do what thou wilt, I shall still terminate that awful woman!"

Not Heller, the guy who was actually assigned the mission.  See, Krak is the key.  If she's killed, he'll surely be slowed down and stuff.  But not enough to actually scrub the mission so the invasion happens and also screws up the Apparatus plans.

A deadly oath.

I meant it!

I'm adrift in space and time.  Are we in the middle of book five, when Gris makes a deadly oath to complete his mission?  The end of book five, when he first decides to kill Krak?  The start of this book, when he begins planning how to kill the Countess?  Did the past 185 pages even happen?  Krak and Heller certainly did stuff, but what did Gris accomplish?

Besides developing hypochondria over STDs, I mean.


Back to Part Forty-Six, Chapter Six

Forward to Part Forty-Seven, Chapter One

Part Forty-Six, Chapter Six - The Unidentical Rockecenter Twins

I guess all this nonsense gives us an answer to the question of why it was so important that Heller look like a teenager - so he can, in a hugely convenient coincidence, pass for the brother of the true Rockecenter child.  Which leads to the follow-up question of why the true Rockecenter son couldn't have been in his late twenties, but had to be a gangly eighteen-year-old.

With the eighteen-year-old passed out from the realization of his true heritage, Krak gets Heller to sit down next to the lad, take off his shoe, and put their feet together while Biggs takes pictures.  Kinky.  Stonewall documents the matching tattoos of the "unidentical twins," then asks everyone to move on, he has something else to show them.  Krak volunteers to stay behind, and though Heller doesn't like it, Krak explains that the "poor boy" - not Dick, or Richard, we'll never use his name - will need lots of... "coaching," and "training," to prepare him for entering the world of millionaires.  She gets Sweeney to agree to help keep things quiet and press-free, while she'll stay by his side and be right there when he wakes up.  Just her and him.  No witnesses.

So Heller and Bang-Bang and Biggs head off... whoopsie, looks like they do leave Krak unattended for a couple hours.  I'll just have to go back and edit the part in chapter four where I said that wouldn't happen - don't tell anyone, okay?  Gris is absolutely elated, and counts on Torpedo taking care of the boy too.  "A setup if there ever was one!  Even quiet enough for the corpse rape!"  The corpse rape is important, remember.

So Heller and Bang-Bang and Biggs head off to wake another person up, this time at an "old-fashioned, two story, brick farmhouse."  Wonder how Gris knows it's old-fashioned?  Did he study American agriculture?  Biggs knocks on the door until it produces a "Miz Hodges" and asks the woman if she's cleaned her attic lately, which I guess is a rural Virginia equivalent of a prank call.  After hinting that she might be in for a tax deduction if he can prove her efficient use of space, the lady lets them all in to poke around her attic while she tries to get a good night's sleep.  Behind a bundle of Jefferson Davis election posters and Confederate currency - yeah, really, and keep in mind that by my Nazi Math this book is set around the turn of the millennium - Biggs digs out a dusty box of photos and letters.

First there's a picture of Mary Styles, who in another amazing coincidence looks a lot like Heller even though he was born on a different planet.  Now would be an excellent moment to explore the complex emotions of an infiltrator being introduced to his would-be mother by a misty-eyed old man convinced of their relation, buuuut Hubbard decided Gris would be narrating, so we don't get any of that. 

There's a newspaper clipping about "LOCAL GIRL JOINS ROXY CHORUS IN NEW YORK" and photos of a young Rockecenter and Mary doing coupley things like drinking from the same bottle of Coke with some straws.  Biggs says "the boy at the farm" - not Dick, or Richard, even though that's his name - takes after his father, which "w'd be the case with unidenticals, ah guess."  There's notes from "Delie" to "Mary Yum-Yum" coordinating their trysts, and then a letter from Miss Agnes.

'cuse me, Dr. Agnes Moray, Ph.D., M.D.  Her letter is to Mary's parents, informing them that after her marriage to an absurdly wealthy and powerful young man, their daughter has come down with "delirium altaphasis" from being unable to adjust to her sudden change in fortune.  So she's being kept in a secure facility until she delivers her baby and is able to get "professional psychiatric care" (ominous music).  And don't tell anyone about her marriage or pregnancy, if she found out anyone else knew she might go insane.  Here's some money to cover her care, stay quiet.  At least until I can arrange for your deaths in a car accident.

The last thing in the convenient box of keepsakes and documentation is a wedding certificate from Elkton, Maryland, "the place of instant marriages."  I am once again amazed that Gris knows this stuff.  Biggs says that the certificate proves that Heller isn't a bastard, which is such a relief - I don't think I could root for a flawless alien super-commando who stole the identity of a multimillionaire's illegitimate child, could you?

Biggs resolves to write up a birth certificate for "the other boy" - not Dick, or Richard, they'll call him Delbert John Rockecenter the Second.  Brother of Delbert John Rockecenter Junior.  Argh.

Once they get done with duplicating and forging the necessary legal documents to explain how one child become "unidentical" twins, Biggs asks Heller about chipping in to help rebuild the courthouse.  Heller agrees only if Biggs pledges "to build an absoloot ohriginal that George Washington slept in," and Biggs laughs that the smartest thing he ever did was get "th' late" Tremor Graves drunk one night.

This is the Dr. Graves who was murdered literally a few hours ago, remember.  Right in front of Biggs.


Back to Chapter Five

Forward to Chapter Seven 

Part Forty-Six, Chapter Five - Pigs as a Standard of Beauty

Stonewall Biggs he has something else to show Heller and Krak that evening.  Wonder what time it is?  They showed up after dinner, then they drove around, talked to a guy at a hospital, got shot at.  After that last bit I'd probably call it a night.

Anyway, they all load up in the land yacht, and Gris resigns himself to a blast of static from that carbon-based radiation in the thing's power plant, but conveniently a somewhat fuzzy picture is able to get through, which Gris conjectures is due to the transmitters being on the opposite end of the vehicle from whatever's causing the interference.  Even more conveniently, Heller and Krak took care of all that mushy crap off-screen, so we don't get to endure any romance or anything.  Instead Krak gets Heller to hop up on the operating table in the land yacht's surgery room...

Well... I don't know much about mobile homes.  Maybe this sort of thing isn't that uncommon for luxury land yachts.  Maybe you'd prefer a closet-sized infirmary and on-the-road, do-it-yourself surgery to stopping at an actual hospital.  You got places to go, y'know?

So while Heller reads over the late Dr. Graves' (modified) confession, Krak uses some more alien cellological equipment to put a dollar sign on his right foot.  Heller's a little uncertain about the whole thing.

"Dear," he said.  "Bury is not an honorable man.  He doesn't keep his word.  I don't think he would have given me the Wister name and birth certificate.  I think you must have gotten Graves to alter this some way."

"Me, Jettero?" she said.

D'aww, she's cute when she's feigning innocence concerning twisting peoples' minds to suit her purposes.

Before Heller can have a stern talk with his girlfriend involving the sanctity of free thought, Bang-Bang announces that they've arrived.  Biggs has led them to an "institutional sort of building," the County Agricultural Farm, aka the county poor farm.  According to Wikipedia such institutional sort of buildings disappeared by the 1950's, but this story takes place in a world of Prohibition-era gangsters, Nazis, and DDT in your home, so this isn't any more anachronistic than anything else we've seen.

A sleepy someone named Sweeney lets them in, Biggs asks to see a "Young Dick," and is directed towards the pig sheds - Dick loves his pigs, y'see.  In a small room covered with pictures of pigs cut out from magazines and stuck to the walls, they find a young blond man who, though shoeless, nevertheless bears an uncanny resemblance to Delbert John Rockecenter.  The boy thinks they're here to take him back to an agricultural college.

Hey, wanna hear Hubbard's Virginia accent again?

"Ah won' go!" he said.  "Ever' tahm ah leave heah, Sweeney, if only fo' one term, ah come back an' fin' mah pigs ahl in neglec' an' pinin' away.  You tell them fo'ks to jus' go away."

"They got guns, Dick," said Sweeney.

"Guns!" cried the boy, leaping bolt upright.  "Git away f'm heah with guns!  You ma'ht shoot a pig!"

The Countess Krak moved smoothly in.  "I'd better handle this," she said.  "Nobody is going to shoot your pigs."

"Whoosh!" said the boy, staring at her round-eyed.  "Who be you?  A angel or somethin'?  Hey, who be this, Sweeney?  Wow, she's pretty enough to be a pig!"

Not only am I sick of Virginia, I am sick of this kid less than a page after meeting him.

Krak says she's a friend and gets Young Dick to sit down and show her his foot, but even under his sock his foot is too filthy to make out anything.  Bang-Bang fetches soap and water, and after a totally unnecessary paragraph of delay we find "A DOLLAR SIGN!" on the youth's foot.  The kid is shocked.

"Well, golly be," he said.  "I ain't never noticed that afore.  

Before you criticize, ask yourself - when was the last time you looked at the sole of your foot?  Is it not conceivably possible for someone to live all eighteen years of their life without seeing the underside of their feet?

It do look lahk a dollah ma'k.  Is it some disease?  Hoof-rot mebbe?  What's it mean?  Tell me quick!"

"It means," said the Countess Krak, "that you are not a nameless

He has a name, it's Young Dick. 

orphan foundling.  It means that you are the son of the richest man in the world, Delbert John Rockecenter, found at long last."

He looked at her round-eyed.  He saw that she meant it.  And then it hit him.  He fainted dead away!

Saves her the trouble of using a hypno-helmet, I guess.  Now, I was fully expecting Krak to just fry the kid's brain and burn the tattoo off his foot with a magic Voltarian pen, but she's got something else in mind.  They're gonna keep the kid around.  Young Dick, and his pigs, are going to continue to reappear in the story.

Yeah.  More "pretty as a pig," more incomprehensible accent.  I'm looking forward to the book when we leave Earth behind and return to Voltar to find that it's been destroyed by imported psychology. (editor's note from the future: we've still got a ways to go before Book 9, but just be patient)


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