Part Forty-Eight, Chapter One - Halt

Three days pass, three days of media coverage in which the Whiz Kid's babymama, Maizie Spread, goes into great detail concerning the circumstances and positions involved in her loss of virtue.  Three days of Heller wandering around all sad and Krak crying in her room instead of attempting to communicate with each other.  Gris is jubilant.

Mission Earth had been brought to a HALT!

Yaaay!  The already sputtering plot is now dead in the water!

Wait, did I say Gris was jubilant?  Because immediately after celebrating his victory with the line above, he says

But there was a danger that activity on their part might start it up again.

So the enemy is defeated and not going anywhere, but what if they start moving again?  How suspenseful!

To make sure Heller and Krak's halting is permanent, Gris turns once more to Madison, who explains that he's got the Whiz Kid saga planned out for years, and will culminate when Miss Spread "claims he got other members of his gang to rape all the livestock," but a less sanguine Gris points out that one of the papers let the story fall off the front page.  Madison replies that he'll use his connections to get that paper's staff fired, Gris points out that he can't just fire every editor in the country, and we get some absolutely riveting dialogue.

"Yes, I can!" he said.

"No, you can't," I said.

"Yes, I can!" he said.

In a way, this is a very empowering book, because it likes to remind me of all the productive things I could be doing right now instead of reading it.  My desk is looking a little cluttered, I should put up those pens and papers.  Could probably afford to dust it too.  If the weather stays nice, I could try and get the cobwebs out from between the window panes.  Maybe shelve some books, I'm letting them stack up in front of each other.

Anyway, Madison assures Gris that he's got everything under control, and sure enough the next day's headline reveals that the Whiz Kid, while robbing a train in Kansas like a modern Robin Hood, decided to force himself upon one Toots Switch, and to avoid violating the Mann Act while violating the girl, forced a parson passenger to marry them at gunpoint so the consequent consummation would be nice and legal.

Satire means you can make up stupid stories, stick them in an in-story newspaper, and laugh at the media for being stupid.

Gris prances around his (Pinch's) apartment in merriment, but checks on his foes and sees that they're showing no signs of having heard the latest development in the fictional Whiz Kid's imaginary exploits.  So he calls up the lawyers from a few chapters ago to get them to deliver another suit to Heller's apartments and force the heroes to notice the elaborate web of lies he's weaving around them.  The lawyers are hesitant because, even though the author forgot to tell us this two chapters ago, Heller was carrying and almost drew a gun the first time he got served by a shabby lawyer.  But Gris gives them instructions for the lawyer to buzz in as Lombar Hisst.

Krak is the one who's at home for the call, and as Gris planned tells the butler to admit "Hisst."  She's surprised when it turns out to be "the shabby man in the shabby coat with the shabby hat pulled over his eyes," and immediately realizes that something is amiss.  Somehow this man knew a name that would make her see him, a name that only a handful of people on the entire planet know.  And since she never trusted Gris to begin with, it seems likely that he's somehow involved with these shabby bearers of outrageous misfortune...

Wait, that's not what happens at all.

"You're not Hisst," she said.

"Madam, as a member of the household of Wister, I give you this.  He has been served."  He jammed the paper into her hands and fled.

Confused already by the false announcement, she opened the paper.

And there before her eyes was the Toots Wister nee Switch suit and all its gory details legally phrased.

And that's it.  Krak's train of thought about Hisst getting namedropped doesn't even leave the station.  She is immediately and fully distracted by a legal document alleging adultery, cries in the bathroom a bit, calls Mamie Boomp to sob about how "he was already married!" and gets invited to Atlantic City.  She makes another call to schedule transportation, absently mentions that "If I only had my own ship I could go home," and the guy on the other end immediately sets her up with a personal luxury yacht that just came on to the market, courtesy of Gris' credit card of course.  Gris moans about his security deposit for... it's been at least a dozen times by now, surely?

And know what?  I'm gonna skip the half-page description of Krak's luxurious new yacht.  Because it doesn't matter.  It's not important.  Nobody's sighing happily now that the Countess Krak has a boat with gold fittings in the captain's cabin and two swimming pools.  Nobody's life has been improved by reading about Krak's fully-crewed two-hundred-foot floating palace.  It's not advancing the story, it's not telling us anything about these fictional people, it's just treasure being dropped in the laps of the author's pet characters without action or effort.

To use a nerdy metaphor, this is a Dungeon Master running an all-NPC Monty Haul campaign.  In front of a paying audience.

Krak's designated maid helps her pack, i.e. Krak sits on her mopey ass while the maid does all the work, and then she's driven to the docks and boards her nautical castle.  Gris realizes that she might be heading out of range of our favorite plot device, the bugging equipment implanted in her skull, but Gris has a plan to deal with that problem:

Well, never mind.  Maybe the yacht will blow up and sink.  I had to look on the brighter side of things.

Yes, optimism!  Optimism without action or thought.  Just hope that your potential problems will spontaneously combust.  That's how granddad licked the Nazis, that's how dad thumped the Commies, and that's how we'll clobber the Terrorists.  

The chapter ends with Candy and Pinch sitting down for a meeting with Gris about their childrens' future.  Gris protests that Rockecenter's policy is for employees to get abortions or pink slips, their choice, but these two rebel former lesbians have turned on Psychiatric Birth Control and are determined to experience "the joys of motherhood."  To get around Rockecenter's policy, Gris'll have to marry them.

So Rockecenter ruthlessly orders his employees to terminate any pregnancies and tries to break their minds and twist them into horrible homosexuals, unless they get a loop of precious metal and a legal document, at which point he apparently shrugs and finds something else to do.

The main villain's idea of action is to tell other people to do stuff mixed with hoping that things will work out for him, the heroes are incapable of having an honest face-to-face conversation to clear up a pretty dumb misunderstanding, and the Big Bad's plan to depopulate the planet can be thwarted by a Las Vegas quickie marriage.

Mission Earth.  Forty-eight Parts long now, and still going on stupid.


Back to Part Forty-Seven, Chapter Ten

Forward to Part Forty-Eight, Chapters Two and Three

Part Forty-Seven, Chapter Ten - The Hero is Exiled From Canada

So the newspapers are howling about the Whiz Kid's expulsion from the Purity League, the radio is inviting people to join a lynch mob, preachers are working the Whiz Kid's moral failings into their sermons, the U.S. government is looking into the Whiz Kid's back taxes, and the United Kingdom has banned the Whiz Kid from not just the isles but Canada.

And none of it matters because nobody besides Gris is paying any attention to the media.  So, another riddle.  Is the author, while satirizing the media by presenting it as nothing but slanderous fiction, undermining his own message by showing how ineffective it is?  Or is the media's impotence part of the satire?  If so, is it wise to spend book after book talking about something that isn't real and doesn't matter?

Except exactly twice in the series it has mattered, when Babe Corleone and Krak decided to accept the media's rendition of reality over their own senses and experiences.  So does the author need to explain why the media is meaningless 99% of the time but catastrophically powerful the other 1%?  

Anyway, Krak is still in her room, crying, and Heller has evidently given up trying to talk things out with her, and is instead examining his legal dilemma with Izzy.  Cue three-and-a-half pages of Izzy explaining how anyone can sue you at any time for no reason for millions of dollars in legal battles the lawyers will draw out for years to fill their own pockets.  Heller chimes in with zingers like "civil suit?  It sounds awful uncivil to me," or "sounds illegal to me," or "any honest lawyer/government would end this," or "nobody could live in a society like that!"  It is all very droll social commentary that makes the reader reflect on the absurdities of the world he or she lives in, and perhaps compels him or her to act to reform the nation's legal system so that it will never accuse an alien infiltrator of fathering an illegitimate baby while on a mission to prepare the world for conquest by an imperialist extraplanetary civilization.

Izzy reminds Heller that he did try to give him that plane ticket to the Amazon one or two books ago, but promises to do what he can to deal with the situation.

"This could wreck my whole mission," said Heller despondently.

"That's all the legal system is designed to do," said Izzy.

And it works!  Not a single successful alien invasion!  Long live the lawyers!

"Enrich the lawyers and bums and ruin everybody else.  But cheer up.  An atomic war might intervene and settle everything."

"With a legal system as insane as that, they deserve it," said Heller and left.

That alarmed me a little bit.  And then I realized that he hadn't packed any atomic bombs that I knew of in his suitcase.

The book's hero just advocated global nuclear Armageddon because he's annoyed with the legal system. (editor's note from the future: and Heller doesn't need a nuke to bring about an apocalypse)

Gris is in deep thought following this talk about lawsuits - what if Candy and Pinch decided to sue him for getting them pregnant?  But then Gris cheers up because he's "guilty as Hells," and "Only the innocent were ever found guilty."  So between that and Krak crying in her room, he's in a pretty good mood.  Which is of course to set up the next disaster the author will visit upon Soltan Gris.

Little did I know the next horror coming my way.

I was about to get the anvil's view of the hammer.

I thought in most cases the anvil doesn't get to see the hammer, but rather the object the hammer is striking upon the anvil.

Wait, anvils don't have eyes.  Stop confusing me with your alien metaphors, Gris!


Back to Part Forty-Seven, Chapter Nine

Forward to Part Forty-Eight, Chapter One

Part Forty-Seven, Chapter Nine - Shabby Lawninja

So at five o'clock sharp, Gris' eyes are viewed to his viewscreen like a kid watching Saturday morning cartoons.  Krak and Heller are driven back to their apartment, and:

They ascended in the elevator.

Heller unlocked the door at the top and stepped into the small hall.  The Countess Krak was right behind him

A shabby man in a shabby overcoat with a shabby hat pulled over his eyes stepped out from behind a potted plant.

"Jerome Terrance Wister?" he said.

Heller stopped.

The man shoved a court summons into his hand.  "You are duly served in the matter of Spread vs. Wister," he said and then bolted down the fire escape.

"What is it, dear?" said the Countess Krak.

"I don't know," said Heller, "but he almost got himself shot."

And yet nowhere did we see Heller produce, aim, or threaten the guy with a handgun.  But later we'll be told that he had one all along.

Also strange that none of the dozen members of the apartment's staff heard this shabby guy break in or bumped into him while tidying up the place for their master.  I could also point out the weirdness of a shabby lawyer deciding to break into someone's home to serve them a legal document, though this is undoubtedly satire of how criminal those shabby lawyers are, always skulking about and lurking in shadows to stick someone with a subpoena.

But now for the heartbreaking dissolution of one of the greatest romances ever to be expressed in a satirical science-fiction dekalogy:

He started to toss the paper aside.

The Countess Krak took it from him.

She read a short distance into it.

She went white.

Then suddenly she marched into the salon, across it, to her room and slammed the door!

I had connected!

Yep.  That's it.  That's how it happens.  That's all it takes.

Heller stood there, rooted.

Then he went to her door.  It was locked.

"Dear," he said through the closed portal, "could you tell me what this is all about?"

She was lying on the bed face down with the legal paper crumpled in her hand.  She was crying!

"Dear," he called.  "Is there something wrong?"

Hmm, that depends.  Does your girlfriend often storm out of the room to lock herself in her chambers, crying?  If so, then you might be fine.  Otherwise yes, something's wrong.  Dumbass.

So for half an hour Heller keeps at it, trying to get a response out of Krak, but she refuses to say anything.  Until she does decide to say something.

At length she replied through the closed door "Go away!  You lied to me.  You had a woman after all!"  And then she wailed, "You got her pregnant!"

After that she would say no more.

Oh, I really writhed in glee.  What a hit!  This would finish everything!

And that's that.  Gris declares the operation a success and gets up to do something else.  Heller evidently doesn't even try to explain that being accused of a crime does not necessarily mean that you are guilty of it.  And Krak decides that the little piece of paper delivered by a shabby burglar confirms all of her fears and jealousies, so she doesn't even need to confront her boyfriend over them, just skip straight to the crying breakup.

An idiotic scheme devised by an idiotic villain that's successful because of idiotic heroes.  Mission Earth, ladies and gentlemen.

Like I said, Gris is jubilant that he saved Rockecenter's polluting ways, and the "sudden surge of optimism" convinces him to go back to Miss Pinch's apartment for more money, since he's pretty broke at this point.  He hikes back to the Gigolo Gris Subplot and is met by a curiously expressionless Candy and Pinch, who proceed to hose him down with bug spray, "The Deadly Kind."  He's returned from the wino hotel covered in cockroaches, you see.

So half a page passes of Gris getting coated in pesticides while his clothes get dumped in an incinerator.  He showers and prepares for bed, Candy and Pinch approach in their nightgowns, and Gris admits he doesn't feel up to any hanky-panky, but they weren't gonna ask anyway.  They don't want to miscarry, see.  They're pregnant.

Cold terror gripped me by the throat!

The whole room spun around me!  I was totally disoriented!  I wanted to tell them no, no, you're all mixed up.  It was Heller who got girls pregnant.

"I've never been in Kansas!" I wailed.

What, you didn't think you could use that super-penis with impunity, did you?  Especially since the doctor who enhanced it also had a fetish for increasing his patients' odds of conception. 

But they were both gone.  And all that night, I lay in the dark, spinning.

Now and then I would say to the walls, "I am Officer Gris.  I am not a combat engineer.  My name is not Heller.  I am Officer Gris.  Miss Pinch is not Maizie Spread.  This is New York.  My name is not Heller. . . ."

It was a very terrible and eerie experience.

And a plot point, but we'll get to that later.

But there you have it.  A great gulf has been driven between Heller and Krak, all thanks to their jaw-dropping inability to bridge it through basic communication.  Gris has meanwhile gone back to his life as some sort of lesbian-busting superhero, but is now faced with some of the consequences of his history of unprotected sex.  So bad things are happening to the heroes and villain alike, and the main plot has once again slowed to a crawl.

And we'll keep reading, I guess.  'cause we, uh, care deeply what happens to these characters.  And can't wait to see where this roller-coaster of a story takes us next.  Yep.


Back to Chapter Eight

Forward to Chapter Ten

Part Forty-Seven, Chapter Eight - Foxy-Eyed Lawyers Doing the Happy Dance

Gris paces for a bit, trying to figure out how he can destroy his enemies if they won't read the flippin' newspaper, but then gets hit with more "INSPIRATION!"  I regret not keeping a tally of how many times a completely random idea has landed in Gris' head to jolt the plot forward.

He rushes out of his cockroachy hotel room and fifteen minutes later arrives at a disreputable and, of course, shabby building.  The first floor is a "porno store," the second a massage parlor, the third the local chapter of the National Association of Mental Stealth (still a bloody stupid name), but the plot-relevant fourth floor holds the offices of Dingaling, Chase and Ambo.

Like... they hear the dingaling of a siren, and then chase the ambo-lance?  Humor?

Anyway, Gris is "about to unleash the most terrible weapon ever devised: the American legal system!"  Yes, it took 219 pages, but we're finally getting around to the intense courtroom drama promised in the translator's note.  After meeting Mr. Dingaling, "a baldheaded man with foxy, shifting eyes," Gris is introduced to Chase and Ambo, "two other baldheaded men with foxy, shifting eyes."  Gris declares himself to be Madison's boss and challenges them to call the man to confirm this, though he orders them not to reveal that he's in their office.

No, he doesn't explain why he's hiding from Madison, or why he thinks Madison won't be able to deduce that the guys calling to confirm Gris' identity might have met him at some point.

The lawyers aren't too excited when Gris says there's real potential in this Wister case, since they know the Whiz Kid is Madison's fabrication.  But then Gris drops his bombshell - Madison's Whiz Kid is in fact a double.  "The REAL Wister lives in a ten-million dollar penthouse on Central Park West, has a domestic staff of twelve and is driven to his posh office in the Empire State Building in a Rolls Royce Silver Spirit."  Or, as the lawyers put it, there's a "defenseless millionaire" out there just beggin' to be subpoenaed.

Gris fills them in with the necessary details, suggests that they schedule the fateful delivery for five o' clock that afternoon, and lets himself out while the lawyers "made a ring and were dancing round and round in their office, shouting in hysterical joy."  End chapter, which is barely over two pages long.

So... well, this is definitely an improvement over the whole "create an elaborate fantasy world and hope people are dumb enough to believe it over the real world" plan.  But I can't help that think that we're getting away from the Death Quest promised on the cover.  Now we're moving into a legal drama, or more specifically Heller's attempts to run away from his legal problems.  There will be boats, even before we formally begin our Voyage of Vengeance.  And of course, Gris will have sex with lesbians.

I think the author may even be able to work a minor into sexual situations as well.  As tastefully done satire, of course.


Back to Chapter Seven 

Forward to Chapter Nine

Part Forty-Seven, Chapter Seven - Spore Rings, Microwaves, and Feline Literacy

So after that headline about the paternity suit, Gris can't wait to see Krak's reaction - after all, she's quite "prone to jealousy.  One glimpse of that paternity story would blow the lid off.  She might simply leave him!"  But not kill him, remember, because it's not safe for Heller to be killed yet.  He still needs to write those coded reports to...

So it's been what, a year?  And if I remember correctly he's written a whopping one report.  So is he due for another one soon?  Might that give Gris a chance to see where Heller's hidden that platen of his?  Or have we dropped that subplot entirely?

Anyway, Gris is disappointed to spy Krak and Heller listening to Rigoletto, an opera "where everyone kills everybody and even drowns them in a sack still singing," instead of the news on the Rolls-Royce's radio.  They drive from their ultra-luxurious non-shabby fully-butler'd apartment to their not-quite-as-luxurious but still tastefully-decorated offices in the Empire State Building, and completely ignore the stacked and folded morning papers waiting for them there.

Heller makes a business call to Florida, trying to reconcile his spore factory's needs with local ordinances about the permissible height of smokestacks in swamp properties.  He needs his "propulsion stacks" to be five hundred feet high, because of "impulsion."

"They've got to blow rings," he said.  "Big green rings of spores.  If they are not propelled high enough, they won't reach the stratospheric winds.  One goes every minute and if the stacks are any shorter, the perfection of the ring will foul and the resultant tumble will impede successive firings.  They have to be five hundred feet tall."

Since we're talking about magical green spores being fired out of towers by alien science, there's not much you can say here - maybe he can't reduce the firing rate for some reason, and maybe the magic spores being fired in a ring formation as opposed to a rhombus shape is absolutely critical.  And hey, near the equator the stratosphere starts about ten miles up, so Heller needs every foot of "propulsion stack" he can get.

Krak meanwhile is giving a lecture to fifty of the country's best electrical engineers, gathered together under Power, Power, Power Inc.  She tells them all about beaming electricity through microwaves, which might be new to them (it shouldn't be), and then tries to explain to these certified electricians that "if we regard power as a stream of water which yet can be beamed and focused, we can see that a central collection station in a country may receive power from a source and then deflect and focus it to subreceivers which, in turn, can focus it upon consumption units."  Standard Voltarian power distribution stuff, even Krak can talk about it.

And Gris freaks out, because this threatens Rockecenter's energy monopoly built on wonderful, polluting coal and petroleum.  "So what if, as the environmentalists said, Rockecenter practices were wrecking the atmosphere?  The environmentalists were missing the whole point!  The action was PROFITABLE and that was everything!"

But here's the thing - Krak is talking about microwave energy transmission.  As in, you shoot electric energy to another point without using wires.  But correct me if I'm wrong, that electricity still has to come from somewhere, right?  And Heller hasn't talked about shooting a solar collection satellite up into orbit to beam down some energy to microwave around.  So unless Rockecenter's invested heavily in power lines, this shouldn't threaten him much. (editor's note from the future: as it happens, Heller does have plans for a satellite, but we'll have to wait for Book 8 to experience that stupidity)

Which isn't to say that Heller doesn't have an alternative fuel source that does threaten Rockecenter's energy monopoly.  He brought out that magic carburetor as early as Book Two.  But this microwave energy isn't nearly as big a deal as that.

So half an hour later Krak is done, and she and Heller chat about those backward engineers "shedding a few prejudices about energy," and they do get out a newspaper, but only to use as a plate for cat food.

The only one reading that newspaper was the cat!

Then I knew what it was.  It was a policy they must have.  A conspiracy!  You could only be happy on the planet if you never read newspapers or listened to the news.

But not watch the news on the TV, evidently.  Huh.  And no mention of TVs in Heller's apartment or office.  That seems a... rather significant oversight.

And while this was perfectly true, it gave them no license to gang up on me.

That beautiful story was failing!

Operation: Hope They Read a Newspaper And Believe It is in peril!

She was going right on helping Heller to undermine everything worthwhile: MONEY!

Between the two of them they were going to salvage life on this planet!  Oh, the villainy of it!

I knew I would have to act!

And not the "give Madison a newspaper idea and hope for the best" kind of act, no.  Gris is going to go talk to an entirely different set of people and then hope for the best.


Back to Chapter Six

Forward to Chapter Eight

Part Forty-Seven, Chapter Six - Read All About It?

Suddenly, four in-story days pass in the space of a single chapter.  Guess Hubbard found his muse again?  Or he got really caught up in his own work, in the excitement of this section about... hoping people read the newspaper?

The first day's headline describes how the Purity League has been petitioning New York's governor to pardon the Whiz Kid.  Meanwhile in reality, Heller is trying to convince his British chauffeur to let him modify the new car so it can run on a chunk of asphalt, but is met with a paraphrased, very British paragraph about how he'd have to petition the Archbishop of Canterbury for permission to customize his property, and "the Rolls would do better to just go on being a Rolls."

Another paragraph is spent listing how many maids and gardeners and butlers Krak hires for their new apartment.  I'm starting to wonder if there wasn't a rival, nine-volume series about an alien secret agent on Earth that Hubbard was trying to one-up.  "Oh yeah?  Well my alien commando has three gardeners, a butler, a chef, a cook, two housemen, two security guys, and a personal maid for his girlfriend.  Your story sucks!"

Nobody but Gris pays attention to the newspaper.

The second day's headline is about the Whiz Kid getting pardoned by the governor on account of his newfound virtue.  Meanwhile Krak and Heller go to the ROTC regimental ball and are well-dressed and dance and stuff.  All the other men there are awestruck by the Countess' beauty, and all the women are jealous of her.  And never the other way around. 

But nobody reads the paper.  Or notices that the two people in the middle of the dance floor who look just like humans are in fact aliens.  Gris starts to wonder whether Lombar's taken over the Council yet and can give him the go-ahead to just kill Heller, reminding us of yet another subplot that's sitting on the tarmac, waiting for the go-ahead.

The third day's headline has the Whiz Kid being honored by the WASP Purity League for being so damn pure and stuff.  The fictional character within the fictional story promises to use his influence to stop mattress makers from producing double beds.  The dinner raised money for the "Campaign for Suppression of Puerto Ricans, whose sexual licentiousness has long been a target of the League."  Is it satire when a racist author includes a fictional racist organization in his story?

Heller eats ice cream while Krak talks about her attempts to train Twoey, specifically how he sometimes mutters about how people should be "sent to the slaughter pens" when he doesn't get his way.  They put it down to heredity - some people are just evil, y'know?  And shouldn't be allowed to breed?  Heller does note that Twoey seems strangely devoted both to him and Izzy, and wonders if Krak has been tampering with his brains.  She gives the usual "Me, Jettero?" response because shattering peoples' psyches and rebuilding them as your slaves is cute and funny.

Nobody reads the paper.  I'm starting to think that Gris' plan might have a flaw or two...

The next day's headline is the biggest yet: "WHIZ KID NAMED IN PATERNITY SUIT!"  A two billion dollah lawsuit from a farmer's daughter!  The poor girl believed that dastardly Whiz Kid's story about shielding her complexion from the sun with his body, and then five months later she found herself "all swole up with child."

Oh, what a story!  And the other papers, particularly the sexier ones,

The Sun?

went into wild orgies of description of what had happened.  One even pictured the Whiz Kid as dancing in the moonlight with rabbits all around and shouting to them, "Come, come!  Let me protect you from the sun!  With fifty strokes!"

SCANDAL!

The trap was sprung!

Assuming Krak and Heller do what they haven't for the past three days, i.e. read the paper.


Back to Chapter Five 

Forward to Chapter Seven

Part Forty-Seven, Chapter Five - Jettero Heller Has a Sweeter Crib Than You, Always

Bah, no such luck.  About a good night's sleep, I mean.  Sure, the fact that Heller finally has a British luxury car and a chauffeur to drive it put my mind at ease, but then I started thinking, where's he gonna go in that car?  His office slash apartment?  Now his ride is nicer than his crib.  Oh, if only these fictional characters had better living accommodations, then I could feel better about my own life.

Gris apparently spends the rest of the night watching his foes settle "the boy" in at the farm, then reports that the next morning's paper shouted about how the Whiz Kid had joined the "WASP Purity League" and given up his criminal ways.  The reader will probably be able to identify this as a set-up so the later revelation that the Whiz Kid is living in sin will be all the more shocking.  All Gris can say is that "I was not quite sure which direction this was going to go.  But I knew Madison by now.  He was on the trail of something hot."

So he goes back to watching the viewscreens in hopes that Krak or Heller will pick up the newspaper and be like what the eff, I wasn't in Kansas, and then they'd dismiss everything else they heard in the media since it was obviously fake.  Excuse me, pick up the newspaper and be stopped in their tracks!  Or... what's the objective again?

We went from hiring a hitman to kill the Countess Krak, to swearing a "deadly oath" to "terminate that awful woman," to spreading bad publicity about the Whiz Kid.  For one glorious sentence it looked like Gris was considering taking matters into his own hands, but immediately afterward he went back to trying to get others to do everything for him while he sat and watched.  And it's unclear what exactly this has to do with killing Krak in the first place.  It seems more like he's gone back to his "make Krak insane with jealousy so she murders Heller" plan.

Krak and Heller get driven home in their wonderful new car and wonderful British chauffeur, and then the cat goes bonkers when they step back into the apartment, running around in circles and yowling until it calms down long enough for them to pet him.  I think the author might have confused cats with dogs here. 

Izzy comes in and has a similar excited reaction, only he's waving documents around instead of running around in circles.  He explains that our friend Mamie Boomp sold Atlantic City to the Crown Prince of "Saudi Yemen," who has long coveted the Miss Americas and now will be able to "have his pick of them, year after year."  ...Yay?  The line about American beauty pageant contestants ending up as part of a presumed harem is immediately followed by Izzy saying "Oh, what a businesswoman Mamie Boomp turned out to be!"  I guess if the characters aren't bothered, we shouldn't be either.

Boomp has stayed on as president and the staff contracts have been honored blah blah blah the important thing, and what Izzy takes Krak and Heller to tour, is that some of the properties Boomp got in exchange include "eight posh apartment houses in Manhattan" overlooking Central Park.  And Izzy always said "Miss Joy" was too beautiful to live in an office.

Could it be?  Dare I hope?

Before them spread a pillared interior.  The columns were light tan and around them coiled designs in glittering stones, edged and banded in gold.  The floor was colored marble squares.  The furniture was scrolled and curving.  A very posh place.  Like a palace!

"Fifteen rooms!" said Izzy.  "Surrounded by so much roof garden it takes three gardeners to keep it up.  And the whole next floor below for servants and storage.  Do you like it?"

"Beautiful!" said the Countess Krak.

"It's your home," said Izzy.

And there you have it, one of the great lessons of Mission Earth.  No matter how life treats you, no matter how down you're feeling, no matter how worthless you consider your existence, there is one thing you must always remember: Jettero Heller will always have a luxurious home to live in, on Earth, in space, or back home on Voltar.


Back to Chapter Four

Forward to Chapter Six