Bill 4 - on the Planet of Tasteless Pleasure (17 page)

“Psst!” That voice again. “Bill! Bill, down here!” It was from the floor! “Your foot, Trooper. Lift up your foot?”

“Which one?” said Bill.

“The cloven one, you idiot! I've got to talk to you!”

Bill shrugged. It was something to do. “Excuse me, Irma,” he said, gently pushing her away. “My foot wants to talk to me. Could you keep me standing while I lift it up.”

“The strain,” Irma sobbed. “I can understand, it was too much for you. Something snapped. But, dearest Bill, you're all I've got now.”

“Look, can we talk about this later. Just let me lean on your shoulder.”

She nodded moistly through her tears, holding him so he wouldn't fall while he lifted his bare foot up. His joints crackled and he could barely lift it high enough to reach his chest, but he bent his head down to meet it halfway.

“What do you want?” he whispered to his foot.

“Gee — don't you recognize my voice, Bill?” said the foot.

“Bgr the Chinger!” Bill cried out.

“Not so loud! Delazny will notice!”

“What are you doing in my foot?” Bill visualized the interior of his foot with a set of controls, screens, a water-cooler — just like back on board the FANNY HILL.

“Gee, I'm not in your foot, dummy. I planted a two-way TV-radio transmitter in the crack in your cloven hoof, just in case. Good thing, too. Delazny's got me and all the other Chingers imprisoned back here at the base. Mission: Peace through the Over-Gland is, I must admit it, a total bust, Bill. We've got to stop this maniac, or both Chingers and human beings will be kaput!”

“Tell me about it! But what am I supposed to do? One wrong move and I'm zapped. Or eaten for breakfast by the computer.”

A loud voice interrupted Bill's intimate tête-à-tête with his foot. “What's up, Bill? What kind of hanky — panky you up to over there standing on one leg! Is the strain telling?”

“Yes, well — ahh, indeed,” said Bill, completely at a loss for words.

“Not good enough, Bill,” the Chinger hissed. “Gee, but you are dumb. Give him an excuse. Tell him you're praying!”

“Praying!” said Bill, shouted. “It's a kind of real old form of Zoroastrian prayer, Doctor. I'm making my peace with my God. That okay with you?”

“Oh! Sure. Sorry. Never want to come between a man and his stupid superstitions. Seen one god, you've seen them all,” Rick/ Delazny muttered as he went back to work on the controls.

Irma was watching all this with a clamped-shut mouth and wide eyes, straining with every erg of energy she was capable of erging to keep Bill from falling on his face.

“Now what?” asked Bill. “Tell me what to do!”

“I never thought you would ask! Fortunately, my mentally debilitated friend, I have also planted a micro-grenade right by the radio. You got that?”

“To blow me up or what!” Bill asked, instantly filled with suspicion.

“Gee — Bill, what kind of an old buddy do you think I am? We go back a long ways! I would be hurt, Bill, by that accusation. If I had human emotions. Which I don't. So let's get on with. No, it's not to nuke you, of course not. It's for you to use, in a jam like this! Foresight I believe it is called.”

“Things are bad, but not bad enough to commit suicide. You can't ask me to do it!”

“No, no, bowb-for-brains! I don't want you to kill yourself. Just dig the thing out first, huh? Slide the right half of the hoof off ... I made it like a false heel.”

“Okay. Right,” said Bill, obeying the instructions. Hopping about and crunching Irma at the same time, he grabbed the hoof and pulled hard. Half of the bottom slid off, easy as you please. A little round ball, with a button sticking out fell out into Bill's palm.

“Now what?” said Bill.

“First you press the Button. Then —”

Bill pressed the button.

“No! Not now you idiot!” screeched the voice. “You've only got eight seconds before it blows!”

“What'll I do?” Bill said, frantically. The little black ball was sizzling! It didn't sound promising, not at all.

Rick/Delazny wheeled around. “What's going on over there?” He demanded. “Am I hearing things — or do I recognize that voice! A Chinger voice. Bgr! What are you doing here?”

“Hurry up, Bill! We've got to destroy the bio-computer. Lob the micro-grenade.”

But Bill's attention was on the android's hand, reaching down to the destruct switch that would sizzle him. He groaned in fretful, anticipation. This was the end.

“Never! No!” Bill cried aloud, and hurled the mini-grenade directly at Rick/Delazny.

“Fool!” cried Doctor Delazny. “You can't stop me now. You can't —”

The mini-grenade landed directly in Rick/Delazny's wide-open mouth, rattled down its throat and landed with a clang in its metallic stomach.

“Oh no!” he sighed. “Stop me if I am wrong. But, is it possible, that I just swallowed a mini-grenade?”

“No,” said Bill. “Actually it was a micro-grenade!”

“Four seconds, Bill!” warned Eager Beager. “You had better do something, or you'll all be blown into a cloud of glowing atoms. That's a wicked mother of a grenade!”

The android was already groping at the control board when Bill hurled himself across the room. He caught the arm just as the fingers were about to pound upon the relevant switch. His mighty farmboy thews, Trooper training improved, strained against his enemy's weight. Bill's shirt burst open as his mighty muscles tensed — and it was working! Not only was the android Rick stopped from touching the controls, he was lifted inches off the ground.

“Two seconds, Bill!” cried his foot.

Panicked, Bill looked wildly about for a way out.

Only one existed.

“Open wide, bio-comp!” he said, picking up the squirming android with his two right arms, and sighting along his body. Gasping with the effort he ran forward and chucked Rick and the embedded micro-computer directly into the thing's mouth.

“Now run, Bill!” cried the radio-voice of Eager Beager.

“But there's no place to run to!” said Irma.

“One second!”

Bill grabbed Irma and headed for the furthest corner. They almost reached it.

Imagine the sound that a star might make if it were made of cream cheese and bologna when it novaed. This was somewhat the sound that the exploding bio-computer made.

The air filled with flying strips of flesh, gallons of splattering gore. A fine red mist hung in the air, like a ground cloud of beet juice, when Bill managed to struggle to his feet and looked around at the carnage.

“Not nice,” said Bgr.

“Yuck!” said Irma.

“That wasn't at all friendly, Bill!” said the head of Rick, rolling about on the floor.

Before Bill could respond a strong current of some implacable ethereal force seized him, pulling him and Irma from the corner of the chamber.

“Bill, what's happening?” Irma screamed questioningly.

Bill thrashed up and turned toward the center of the room, getting exactly one second's worth of a glimpse of their unfortunate destiny.

Like a swirling spiral galaxy, sparklers of thrashing energy had popped into being where the bio-computer had once been. These were spinning like a pinwheel, causing a malevolent maelstrom in the air.

Then Bill was pulled down again, and his consciousness got mixed up with the sparklers and blackness below.

OLD TROOPERS NEVER DIE; THEY JUST SMELL THAT WAY

Down through the years, in what some might call a checkered career, though he rarely played checkers, since being forcefully inducted into the Imperial Troopers, Bill had had many near-death experiences.

In any case, in all of the close calls, close encounters of the repulsive kind, in all the near-death experiences he'd ever had, this was definitely the most unedifying.

Bill dreamed, oh how he dreamed!, that he was frolicking frenetically in a gigantic beer mug with a dozen nubile women. One of the voluptuous women was Irma, who was sitting on top of a soggy potato chip, beckoning to him like a siren. Bill admired all the other gorgeous creatures who were frolicking about him, but rejected their sultry advances and breast-stroked instead toward Irma.

It was difficult indeed to ignore the others, but in his heart-of-hearts he knew that he was now a one-woman-Trooper, and so he swam the rest of the way, ignoring temptation. He clambered up the potato chip, which soggily bent and crumbled under his weight, closer ever closer to the smiling, beckoning Irma.

“Here, Bill,” she said in a sweet, huskily sensuous voice. “Come here and kiss me, lover!”

In his death-dream, Bill knew that this contained all that was beautiful and mysterious in Love. All that he'd yearned for all this time was in this proffered smooch; life and death, fire and ice, yin and yang; even the code for his Captain Cosmos Secret Decoder Ring. Here was life's Promise; here was Destiny's Call; here was what all these frustrated pent-up feelings gnawing at his innards were for!

“Oh, Irma!” he said passionately, reaching for her.

Her lips blossomed into a pink blossom of ecstasy.

Closing his eyes, he puckered up and fell toward her, surrendering his heart, his body, his soul, his hopes for Heaven and his Phigerinadon salamander-tail collection.

But instead of moist, delicious, tender lips —

Reality did a belly-flop, death retreated, and Bill landed hard and headfirst on his mush on the ground, getting a mouthful of grit and sand for his trouble.

“Pfuiii!” he said, opening his eyes. They were gummed with grit. He wiped them and spat out a gobful of sand. Coughing, he managed to pull himself up into a half-crouch, peering uncertainly about him, trying to get a finer focus on this particular glandscape tune-in.

Bill sat plumb in the middle of a large stretch of desert. It looked a lot like the stuff that Great-Great-Grandfather Bill had bought on Phigerinadon last century, when he took his family to that colony planet: valuable beachfront property, without the beach. (Fortunately, they relocated to more fertile territory, but at a cost of what little money they had, resulting in generation after generation of the same penury that Bill had inherited.) As far as Bill could see (which wasn't too far — there was still a lot of grit in his eyes) cactus and sagebrush stretched out to the distant horizon. Occasionally, a tumbleweed rolled along, pushed by a melancholy, sighing desert wind. Up ahead were jagged, majestic mountains, capped by snow. In the near distance, a sign by a snaking road tilted precariously.

Bill groaned and rubbed his head. Then he got up and did a quick inventory of all the important body parts. The presence of his head and legs was already established; a quick examination proved that his hands were still intact, and that, yes, he still had a cloven hoof for a foot. However, instead of the rags he had worn before, he was now dressed in denim jeans, chaps and a red checked flannel shirt, loosely surrounded by a leather vest. Around his waist was a belt, leather as well, and upon this belt was a holster, containing an antique firearm which, possibly, might be a six-shooter revolver.

Upon his head was a ten-gallon, Texas Ranger hat.

Bill recognized all his gear from the days of his first stumbling literacy. While his speaking vocabulary had been severely limited, his reading skills then, like most of his peer group, and possibly now, were next to zilch. Which is why all comic books had verbal outputs that talked to the reader when he turned the page. Which meant that the idiot reader didn't have to read CRUNCH, CRASH or BANG since they sounded out tinnily from the page. In those days TALES FROM THE OLD GALACTIC WEST had been one of his favorite three-dee eye-screamers.

Which was fine for the past — but what the bowb was he doing now, in this strange yet familiar place? He took off his hat and examined it.

And what was a six-limbed, seven-inch tall lizard doing inside his new ten-gallon hat?

“Hi there, Bill! Gee, it's sure good to see you're still alive, old hoss.” The Chinger waved his tiny hands in greeting, and then hopped down to the ground, where he made a pot-hole in the sand. (Bill wondered why he'd not been crushed to the ground with the incredibly dense animal on his head; then put the thought aside for the moment since there were a few more pertinent things to wonder about now than that.)

“Bgr the Chinger! What are you doing here? And by the way, just where is here, anyway?”

“Can't you tell, Bill! It's the Mythical Great American West of Old Earth! The stuff that dreams are made of.”

Bill shook his head. “Old Earth is just a legend ... er ... oh!” He snapped his fingers. “I get it! This is like, a part of the Over-gland!”

“Not only a part, it would seem Bill,” said Eager Beager, hopping around excitedly. “It would seem to be the actual base! The phor below the meta — or should it be the opposite way around? No matter ... I'll ask Delazny before I blow him all the way to the unhappy hunting grounds.”

Bill could see that Bgr was dressed in miniature Western garb as well, down to tiny spurs and two tiny Colt .45s, which he was spinning fancily with two hands, the thumbs of his other two hands hooked into his cartridge belt. “Hey, watch it with those guns, guy!” said Bill. “What happened, anyway? Last I remember, we were getting sucked into the hole that was left after the Fountain of Hormones blew!”

“Gee — you got a great memory, pardner. That explosion — well done, by the way, Bill — reached out and clobbered Delazny's machines on Colostomy IV — and sucked him and me and the whole crew of the complex into the Male-Female-Strom in the bargain! Apparently, once more our destinies are interwoven, Bill! I ended up here, with you!”

Bill blinked rapidly as his groggy brain cells labored for comprehension. Thinking can be a painful process. “Right,” he finally said smiling with understanding. Then frowning with unhappiness, “But I've lost Irma again!”

“Oh no, you haven't, podner! Look over there!”

Bill looked in the direction that the Chinger was pointing. Behind a particularly large cactus, he noticed the flutter of cloth, a protruding shoe.

“Well I'll be hornswaggled!” Bill shouted, whooping and yipping and tossing his hat into the air. “It's Irma.” A befuddled expression crept onto his features. “Now, why'd I say that? What's a hornswaggle?”