Bill 3 - on the Planet of Bottled Brains (26 page)

“Aaaah!” Bill screamed. “Take that!” As he had been trained in Unnatural Combat class, he threw his body in a counterclockwise direction, at the same time setting his feet and releasing his breath forcibly. There were a few more movements involved, but if you want a drill manual go out and buy one. Suffice it to say that Bill soared into the air and turned a double somersault, landing in a corner of the room some thirty feet from where he began. Which, as you might imagine, is not easy to do.

By this time Splock had reacted, moving quickly for one so logical, taking forth a beamer which he had kept hidden against the possibility of a possibility like this. Whirling he covered the left flank, while Ham Duo, whom Bill had indeed seen earlier, leaped down from the high balcony with an energy-sword in his hand and a scowl on his unshaven face.

“Guard my back!” he cried to Bill, and advanced on the platoon of soldiers wearing shiny beetle armor that had just arrived.

“Kill them!” Messer cried, throwing himself behind an energy-proof balustrade just in time before Duo's sparkling sword scalloped him.

“Kiss my bowb!” Bill shrieked, excusably, perhaps, due to the extreme urgency of the moment.

For, indeed, the outcome of the swiftly-developing battle was uncertain in the extreme. The element of surprise had now been lost, since surprise is only effective while it is still surprising; so the gage was passed to the side with more men, and this round was clearly to be won by Messer, since, here in his sanctuary, protected by corruptible officials who let him operate for a price, he appeared to be preeminent. His beetle-armored soldiers, their denunciators buzzing, necks bleeding from automatic injections of rage-inducing drugs, were in full charge, cutting about them with their squat energy lances, which produced dull, ugly explosions of great damaging capacity. Splock had had the presence of mind to equip himself with a canister of ULP, the energy-dampening aerosol, and so they came through the first barrage unscathed. But what was to be done after that?

Surprisingly, the answer was to be provided by a single, long-stemmed blue rose.

But some may consider the case overstated. The blue rose was present during the next decisive moment, and hence can be assigned a kind of guilt by association, but it can in no way be held causal to the events that followed.

The blue rose was on Captain Dirk's coffee table. It plays no part in this story. And yet, ineluctably, it was there.

More to the point, Dirk was there.

Or, to be more precise, he was in his private quarters on the Gumption on the morning when the blue rose bloomed and the scattergram was picked up by an alert communications officer whom no one had thought much of before this.

“A scatter message?” Dirk said, when Communications Officer Paul Muni (no relation to the character actor with the same name) came to his quarters bearing a printout.

“Yes, sir,” Muni said. He was a tall, good-looking young man with a small mustache. The mustache had been the occasion for laughter when Muni first came aboard, Dirk remembered, because it was silly season on the Gumption and men were finding the strangest things funny. Muni hadn't known that, of course. He had thought they were laughing at him.

In a way they were, of course. But not really.

Muni, normally a reckless, outward-turned individual of a happy-go-lucky nature, turned overnight into a misanthrope. He stayed alone in the communications room, which he had hung with black crepe paper because he claimed the bright lights of the overhead fluorescents hurt his eyes. He had his meals sent to him there, and refused conversation with the crew. Sometimes, when you passed the communications shack, you could hear a curious tapping noise. No one ever found out what that was. It added to the mystery.

Muni's behavior was brought to the attention of Captain Dirk. Dirk was wearing his one-piece blue and brown elasticized jumpsuit that day. He was in an expansive mood.

“Let him stay in the communications room,” Dirk said. “Leave him alone; he'll snap out of it.”

“But sir, it's unusual behavior.”

“And since when do we not tolerate unusual behavior in those we suspect to be deranged?”

“You mean Muni is crazy?”

“Only temporarily, I think. Leave him alone. It'll work out.”

Dirk's thought had proven prescient. Alone in the dark, lying in a mess of black crepe paper, Muni was recovering his nerve and self-confidence.

“Heck,” he said to himself. “My mustache probably did look silly. What a fool I was to have let the fellows' chaffing get to me so.”

He considered leaving the communications room. He was suddenly in the mood for a rousing game of ping pong. But he knew he had to do something first.

“Something special,” he said to himself. Then, glancing at the list of special communication problems, his resolve hardened.

“I'll do it!” he said.

“So you broke the scattergram code,” Dirk said. “No one thought it could be done. It has been the most important secret of our enemies, the Murdids of Sting's Planet.”

“I have broken it,” Muni said. If a hint of pride crept into his voice, Dirk was not the one to blame him. “Read it to me, Mr Muni.”

Muni cleared his throat and read, “From Murdid Action Tentacle 2 to Murdid Central High Command in the Hidden Palace on the Forbidden Planet. Hail.”

“Very long salutation,” Dirk commented.

“Yes, sir,” Muni said, and read on. “This Tentacle Arm has discovered that the Earth criminals, Mr Splock and Commander Ham Duo, are presently besieged by the household forces of Messer, owner and proprietor of the sanctuary planetoid in Dentoid 12. Request permission to treacherously break sanctuary, kill all who resist and confine the rest to small cages for their showing in our triumphal march back to Central. Over.”

“And the reply?” Dirk said.

“We don't have it, sir. Message ends there.”

“Mr Muni,” Dirk said, “congratulations on the job well done. But through no fault of your own it is only half done. We need the scattergram that high command of the Murdids will send in response to this one. Go back to your communications shack now, Mr Muni, and keep your ear glued to the earphone or whatever it is you do to gather in scattergrams.”

“Actually, we use foreshadowing equipment made especially for us by Portent, Ltd., the secret arms factory on the southern edge of the galaxy. The way it works —”

“Some other time, OK?” Dirk said. “I have to keep my head clear of the little details in order to see the general picture, the big view, and be able to do something about it. Do you understand, Paul?”

“I...I think so, sir,” Muni said. He was moved by this unexpected insight into the human side of this grim commander of resplendent reputation. “I'll get right to it!” and he exited. Yeoman Muni was no longer worrying about what the men thought of his mustache, Dirk thought to himself, realizing, not for the first time, how much duty aboard the Gumption was a testing and a training of the character.

So, Dirk thought, after completing the previous thought, the time of testing is at hand.

“So,” he thought, “those who trusted the Murdids were proven wrong, yet again. Yet to move prematurely, before orders are received, would be madness. They would reduce me in rank. No longer would they use me for action.” If he were to strike at the Murdids now, and it turned out that they had not violated the sanctuary of the infamous Messer, then the Galactic Council of Placation would repudiate his move; he would be declared outlaw. There would be other unpleasantries.

It was funny how, at a time like this, Dirk's eyes, tracking idly around the room, came to rest on the single long-stemmed blue rose in its tall stemware.

Sometimes a little thing can fix the attention. There is no record of Captain Dirk's associations to the blue rose. Not even the thought-sensitive walls of the Gumption picked it up, since they were going through a normal dewaxing operation at the time of this incident. It was Dirk and Dirk only, in a silence deeper than the grave and far more symbolic, looking at the blue rose which said to him, by some unimaginable channel, an unbelievable message.

“Yes,” Dirk said, though he later had no memory of it, “I'll do it though hell should bar the way!”

He raised his eyes to the remote control board. Photon interceptors interpreted the direction of his gaze and turned the computer on to passive remote.

“Your orders, sir?” Might there not have been a break in the smoothly synthesized voice of the computer?

“The fastest course possible for Sanctuary!”

The crew of the Gumption, sitting around the ward room listlessly shooting craps and reading out-of-date magazines, heard these words and looked up, galvanized, then broke into a run as they went to their battle stations.

“Rig for full scale battle!” Dirk shouted. God, how he wished Splock were here! He looked around. “Doctor Marlowe!”

A bearded man in a charcoal gray one-piece elasticized jumpsuit looked up alertly. “Sir!”

“Are you conversant with the principles of shield reduplication effect?”

“I think so, sir,” the bearded, gray-eyed man said quietly. “Mr Splock was showing it to me just before he — left.”

“See if you can duplicate his efforts, Dr Marlowe,” Dirk said. “I think we're going to need all the shielding we can get.”

The ship executed an impossibly tight turn onto the new course. The piled-up grav units were backfed into the ship's supercharger — another of Splock's innovations. The gigantic spaceship took off like a scalded positron.

This particular Murdid fleet which was even then closing on Sanctuary was not the same fleet that had sacked Carcasal the previous year. That fleet, made up of suicide flyers interfaced with flying bomb ships, had proven irresistible to the forces of civilization. The battle fleets of Elkin and Van Lund had been forced back clear across the Carpathian Gulf, and might have been destroyed utterly had not a vast gale blown up from space and dispersed the attackers before they could drive home their final charge. The Murdid empire was slowly recovering from that debacle. The present fleet was barely half as large, but far more maneuverable. The Murdids had given up suicide tactics, and had managed to purchase WiseGuy Software from Hidden Tactics Technologies, main suppliers of inimical software to criminals and other enemies of civilization as we know it. Their motto: “Let it Come Down.”

This new attack software, with its emphasis on exotic maneuvers at high speeds, was baffling to the forces of Earth, which were still confined to logic-based decision modifiers. Even with basic codes broken so as to make possible a mapping and definition of Murdidean tactics, the outcome was for a long time in doubt, since the human operators, doubting their senses, lost valuable time asking each other, “Did you see that?” and other non-productive questions of that nature.

At this time, when the starship Gumption was boring through hyper-space at a respectable multiple of the speed of light, and its paradox bafflers were working overtime to prevent temporal implosions due to irreducible dilemmas, Bill was scrambling up a winding iron staircase in the upper tower of Messer's sanctuary, hoping to find a power relay point he could take out, or, failing that, something to drink.

He bounded up the narrow stairs, taking them several at a time. Below him, he knew, Splock and Duo were battling increasing hordes of beetle-armored warriors, the wall of crisped corpses moving nearer and nearer to them as more berserk warriors threw themselves across the bodies of those who had gone before. A door stood in front of him. It was made of steel, and had hinges which were massy and bright. It would not yield before Bill's pounding. He took out a laser pistol, set it to a high setting, and cut through the metal of the door like a red-hot knife going through a wall of cheese, only with less smell. The door burst open. Bill ran into the room, stopped in his tracks, took in what lay before him, and his lips puckered in a wry but unspoken comment.

Finally he did say, “Well, this changes things a little.”

CIA did have a habit of popping up at odd moments. It was something that had always struck Bill as faintly ominous about the undercover intelligence agent. It was difficult to tell where CIA was at. Or what he was up to. It was also difficult to know if CIA knew that there was something a little weird about him. Perhaps all military undercover agents were like that; it was a pretty loathsome profession.

Whatever the reason, there was CIA, in the power point relay station, busily splicing cables together as Bill entered.

“Bill! I'm so glad I got here in time!”

“How did you get here?” Bill asked. Everything CIA did made him suspicious.

“No time to explain now,” CIA said. “But you can thank that girlfriend of yours for a lot of it.”

“Illyria? I met a lady named Tesora who said she wasn't exactly Illyria.”

“And do you know why not? Because of you, Bill! I hope you're planning on doing the right thing by that little lady. That's love if I'm any judge.”

“What are you doing?”

“Resetting the mine field pattern.”

Bill stared at him as comprehension dawned in his head. It was a brilliant move, he was sure of it, though he couldn't say just at the moment who it was going to help.

“Help me, Bill,” CIA said. “We have to help Ham and Splock.”

Bill saw that CIA was making new connections at random, scrambling the mine field so that no safe route could be found through it. He sat down on the floor and helped CIA tie off the last connections. The din from downstairs, which had grown fainter for a while, now redoubled in volume. There were loud explosions of the sort made by recoilless cannons, the high pitched scream of needle jets, the low warbling of temporal disruptors. Splock and Duo were fighting hard for their lives, using all of the weapons that the far-thinking Splock had brought along in case of just such an emergency.

Bill and CIA finished their work and hurried back down the stairs. The sight that greeted their eyes had already gone beyond the shambles stage and now was taking on some aspects of order again. The beetle-armored soldiery were advancing on Duo and Splock, who had been forced back to the foot of the stairs, from behind hastily constructed barricades made of energy-resistant cellulose. They pushed the light barriers ahead of them, and they were armed now with blow guns whose darts were tipped with skin-curling poison, another outlawed weapon that the Murdids used with impunity and unction.