Bill 3 - on the Planet of Bottled Brains (16 page)

As it approached the globular exterior, by some sensing device not generally known, it split open like a multi-petalled flower. Out of its middle came a tiny thing that looked like a short length of platinum wire but was actually a psychoactive broadcasting device. The wire squirmed into Bill's ear, not causing any pain, but a good deal of discomfort at the mere knowledge that the damned thing was there. Bill pulled one arm free and clawed at his ear until the guards overpowered him again. The middle judge said, “No need to carry on like that, young fellow. It's merely a reprimand, and when it has done its job it will vacate your ear. No damage will be done to you. But you will hear the reprimand.”

Bill didn't have to be told that. Already a voice in his head — detectable as a recorded voice because of its tinniness — was saying, “You were bad, you were very bad; why did you do such a thing; how could you ever have; you were bad, very bad, oh yes you were bad...”

It wasn't really so annoying, having a little voice saying you were bad. Most people don't need a platinum wire implanted through the ear to know what that feels like. What bothered Bill was that it was difficult to think about anything else while the voice was broadcasting in his ear.

Thus it was that, back in his cell, drinking heavily from a bottle of Swingli* brandy, that a sympathetic young guard, who thought that the reprimand practice was outlandish and barbaric, brought to him, Bill could hardly respond to the gnawing sound that came from the wall near his feet, and even later, when the hole suddenly opened, he found it difficult to put his full attention to it.

“Bill! Can you hear me?”

“You were a bad boy; you were a very bad boy —”

“Bill!”

“What?”

“Bad boy, very bad boy —”

“What's the matter with you, Bill? Have you been drugged?”

“— were a very bad boy; oh such a bad boy —”

“No, it's just this reprimand I got in my ear.”

Ham Duo inspected Bill's ear but could see nothing, naturally enough, since the platinum wire was now snuggling into Bill's medulla obligato.

Ham Duo cleared away some obstructing mortar and squeezed into the cell. Ham was looking tough as usual; even crawling out of the tunnel he moved with a certain panache. “Bill,” he said, “you ready to get out of here?”

“— bad boy, bad boy, bad boy —”

“Yes, I'm ready,” Bill shouted.

“OK. But what are you shouting for?”

“Didn't mean to,” Bill said. “This reprimand makes it difficult for me to hear you.”

“We'll take care of that later,” Duo said. “Right now, let's go before they grab us and lay on a Reprimand Preemptive.”

Bill agreed that that sounded bad. He followed Duo into the tunnel, squeezing through the upper part with difficulty, since Bill's upper part was more massive than Duo's upper part. He managed to get through, losing only trifling amounts of clothing and skin in the process, and fumbled along in pitch blackness. The ground underneath was rough, with many little pebbles. The sides of the tunnel widened. Soon they were walking along an old railway tunnel, its twin rails gleaming faintly in a ghostly phosphorescence given off by the walls. Bill was wondering how Ham had excavated all this in so brief a time. He was to learn later that after rescuing the Kookie from the Exotic Rug Factory on the edge of the city, where the Swinglis* had been keeping him until the master rugmaker could make up his mind about just how best to use his pelt, Duo had consulted the special planetary maps he had stolen from the Empire maproom. The disused railway line was shown, of course, since the main purpose of a secret map was to show unobvious but practicable routes. The rest was history, or would be as soon as they could get back to Ham's ship, which Chewgumma had managed to put to rights, and get out of this irrational and unpleasant place.

Once aboard the ship, Ham Duo went through the takeoff drill while Chewgumma watched the dials and adjusted the rheostats. There was no time to lose, since, coming from the city, they could see a large group of the Swinglis*, waving their arms excitedly. Trundling along with them was a gigantic bulldozer. It didn't take any genius to figure out that the Swinglis* had decided that breaking out of their prison was an insult to the whole planet, and that they were going to do something about it.

“I don't know what's the matter with those people,” Ham said. Chewgumma gestured urgently at the radiotelephone. The red light was glowing, showing that call-holding was holding a call.

Duo punched the receive key and snapped, “Whoever it is, make it snappy. We're right in the middle of an escape.”

“Is Bill there?” a well-modulated feminine voice said in the unmistakable intonations of Illyria, the plucky backwoods nurse who had helped Bill at considerable discomfort and even danger to herself.

“I got no time for personal calls,” Duo said.

“Bill's there, isn't he? I just want you to give him a message.”

“Hey,” Bill cried, “give me that. It's Illyria!”

“I got no time for this,” Duo grated.

“— bad boy, bad boy —”

“Illyria!” Bill cried, lunging for the radiotelephone as Ham Duo was in the act of hanging it up.

“Bill my precious! Is it really you?”

The Swinglis* by now had reached the spaceship and formed a ring around it. They shook their fists at the ship and made other threatening gestures. The bulldozer had been out to work nearby. It was beginning to dig a vast pit. You didn't need a computer to figure out that the Swinglis* meant to tip Duo's spaceship into the pit, and probably cover it up with the remaining dirt. And although this was no real threat to the ship constructed as it was out of 5.1 asteroid crystalline steel, and with force fields as well, it was well known that Ham Duo hated to get his ship all mucked up. Since there are no abrasives in space, except for very large ones like meteors, and these are worthless for cleansing purposes, it meant he would have to fly around with a filthy spaceship and endure the taunts of his fellow space pirates. Now, for the first time, Ham could see what embarrassment meant to a Swingli*. His fingers danced on the computer keyboard, trying to get the systems fired up before the Swinglis* could carry out their threat.

He noticed that another mob of Swinglis* was dragging a hose out from the city. Were they going to wash his ship down?

Duo doubted it. They had some nasty scheme in their pointy little heads.

“Sweetheart, where are you?” Illyria asked.

“— bad boy, bad boy —”

“On the planet Rathbone,” Bill roared.

“You don't have to scream at me.”

“Sorry. It's because this reprimand is talking so loud I can't hear anything.”

“Did you say reprimand? What is a reprimand doing in your ear?”

“It's a little difficult for me to explain just now,” Bill said. “Illyria, where are you? How can I find you? Are you all right”

“I'm fine, Bill,” Illyria said. “It's a good thing that secret agent, CIA, thought of the Jansenite Maneuver. There was no psychic breathing space for the two of us in that tiny Chinger control room.”

Ham Duo scowled ferociously as the power dials flipped up and down erratically. “Can't you get me steady power on this thing?” he shouted. The Kookie howled back something about pinpoint erosion factors and a lack of platinum rebreathers. “Try to fake it,” Ham told him. “I can't get any life like this.”

Bill said to Illyria, “What planet was that?”

“Royo. Meet me there, Bill. I have some wonderful surprises for you.”

“Booze?” Bill asked hopefully.

“And sex.”

“Wow!” said Bill. “The big two of the pleasure principle! How do you know that, Illyria?”

“I know, don't ask questions, trust me.”

“But explain it to me.”

“—o time,” Illyria said. “Can't you hear how our transmission is fading? I have no time to go into the plans of the Alien Historian, or to tell you how I came to learn them. Just get away from there, Bill!”

“How am I supposed to do that? Build my own spaceship?”

“You must use the Disruptor,” she said.

“How can I be expected to learn how to use a gadget like that in the probably damned little time available to me? Illyria, can't the computer help?”

“Believe me,” she said, “the computer has its own problems.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Your friend Splock. You should see what a mess he's made.”

“What's going on? Tell me what's happening?”

“All right,” Illyria said, “you want conversation, you get conversation. When Captain Dirk brought the starship Gumption back to normal space, there was, as you'd expect, a showdown between him and the Counter-Dirk. Only it didn't go as you'd expect.”

“How am I supposed to suspect it would go?”

“Bill, try to join me, and hurry, hurry —” Illyria's voice had been growing increasingly faint. Now it shrank to a whisper, and then it faded entirely. Bill hung up. What Illyria had said was disturbing. It was true that he owed her his life, still she was getting more than a little pushy. She seemed to be taking a lot for granted for a woman who hadn't even shown herself yet in anything like human form. She said she loved him; but did she? The training sergeants back at base camp had warned about the danger of loving or being loved by an alien. “You can never tell if they mean it or not,” old Sergeant Adler had told him. “They're wily, these aliens. And how do you know what they mean by love? At least six alien races consume their mate after copulation. So you may start out looking for love and end up as your girlfriend's breakfast. There ain't no future in that.”

Chewgumma, meanwhile, shouted to Duo that he had found the main problem in the ship's energy system.

“That's really great, you furry moron,” Duo thundered. “But if you can't do something about it pretty quick, it's all academic.” For the Swinglis* had brought up the hose and begun spraying in a carefully-marked rectangle around the spaceship. Where they sprayed, a glittering white gas emerged and quickly hardened into a stone of about the weight of pumice. Duo could see that the Swinglis* were encasing the ship in this substance, building a building around them. And although it seemed ridiculous to think that the light stone could seriously impede the thruster jets of the spacecraft, still, they must have had something in mind. Aliens were notorious for having tricks up their sleeves. Those that had sleeves, that is. Or arms. And a race like the Swinglis*, who took to embarrassment so badly, could be counted upon to be as ingenious as they were vindictive.

Then there was a sparkle of electrical sparks as Chewgumma plugged a 234V Thruster into the RUF socket. The dials on Ham's switchboard swung up into healthy readings and held steady. The ship lifted, and Ham Duo and Chewgumma let out a simultaneous cheer.

Bill noticed at that moment that the Disruptor was not being watched by either Duo or Chewgumma. It occurred to him that this was a very good chance to get it, if he were planning to do that at any time in the near future at all. He edged closer, reasoning that he was going to have to act fast, because Duo was not apt to approve of Bill's taking the thing.

As his hand closed on it, all hell broke loose.

The Swinglis* had brought up several more hoses and a large machine with two U-shaped nozzles that Duo immediately recognized as a Mark IV Industrial Strength Stone Hardener. Duo's face hardened itself as he felt the ship's lift slackening, as it responded to the stone hardening around its basal jets. He threw in the emergency rocket control — it was vital not to get frozen in place — and the ship began to vibrate unpleasantly. The daylight entering through the perspex ports was dimming as the building was constructed about them.

Bill lifted the Disruptor from its magnetic clamp and looked it over. Its lightweight steel cover slid open, revealing a small computer keyboard beneath. Aside from the regular QWERTY keyboard, there were a dozen special-function keys labeled F1 through F12, and several others marked DIN, DON, and RES. It seemed to have no power source, unless it ran on AA batteries. At that time Bill had not heard of SPT, Sympathetic Power Technology which enabled the Disruptor to slave to any power source that utilized the electromagnetic spectrum. He pressed F1 just to see if the little square screen would light up.

The little machine began to vibrate in his hand. At the same time, the spaceship had begun lifting again, and was pushing through the hardening rock that the Swinglis* were trying to encase it in. Duo looked up and noticed the Disruptor in Bill's hand. A high-pitched note was coming from it, and its screen threw out a dazzling light.

“Put that down!” he commanded Bill.

Bill would have been pleased to, because the sudden actions of the Disruptor had alarmed him. But the machine didn't want to be let loose of. When Bill put it down on a plotting table and tried to move away, the Disruptor moved along with him. It seemed to have its own form of propulsion, and it clung close, throwing off dazzling displays of light and making shrill metallic noises that might have been an attempt at speech.

“Destination, please?” the Disruptor said.

“Never mind, I've changed my mind,” Bill told it.

“Give destination at once!” the machine said, its voice loud, bullying, peremptory.

“I don't know how to express it in proper coordinates,” Bill said.

“Stop crapping about, and just do the best you can,” the Disruptor ordered.

“— Bad boy, bad boy —” the voice of the reprimand was shrieking in his head. Not only couldn't he give any instructions, he doubted he'd be able to tie his shoelaces properly with that racket going on in his ear.

Abruptly the noise stopped.

“Is that better?” the Disruptor asked.

“It's gone!” Bill cried. “What did you do?”

“I terminated it,” the Disruptor said. “Time and space aren't the only things I can vanquish. Ha-Ha-Ha!”

“What an improvement! It's really great, I don't know how to thank you...”

“The thought is enough. Even a simple machine enjoys a kind word.”

The Disruptor had forgotten its anger, was almost smarmy now, and insisted in explaining, at great length, how it had acted within its design limits by terminating the reprimand. Because when one travels by disruption-power, one needs all of one's wits about one.