Bill 3 - on the Planet of Bottled Brains (8 page)

“Well,” Bill said, thinking it over. “When you get down to it I think that I really don't like them that much. I just thought they look nice on you.”

“I was making a joke,” Splock said. “Just because my people have no sense of humor doesn't prevent us from making jokes in order to make the inferior races with which we must deal feel more at home. The type of humor I engaged in then was called irony.”

“Irony! That's it. Of course!” Bill said. “Oh boy, ho-ho, how funny!”

“I did not mean,” Splock said, in frigid tones, “that the word irony itself is funny. Though it does have its humorous overtones, I suppose. I meant that my statement about the pointy ears.... Oh, shit. Never mind. Captain Dirk, what did you want me for?”

“I'd like you to explain to this trooper,” Dirk said, “how we got here.”

“But it ought to be obvious,” Splock said, looking icily at Bill. “I take it for granted that you've had the Finegurt-Reindeer equations in grade school or junior high?”

“I think they called them something else in my school,” Bill said in humble prevarication.

“Never mind. What we did, we retooled the Gumption's engines so they would oscillate on an interrupted Scomian curve. That's commonplace enough, of course; most commanders do it at least once a year when it's time to scrape space barnacles off the hull. It shrinks the ship, you see, which makes it easier to remove the barnacles.”

“Doesn't it shrink the barnacles, too?” Bill asked.

Splock stared at him. Then burst into harsh laughter. Bill glanced at Brownnose, who looked away, embarrassed.

“What's so funny?” Bill said at last.

“Asking if the barnacles shrank. What a nice use of irony!”

“I guess it was pretty funny,” Bill said, trying to be humble. Thinking that it wasn't too difficult getting along with this weirdo alien.

“No, it wasn't funny,” Splock said. “At least not to me. But then, I don't even find my own jokes funny. I laughed merely to make you feel more at ease.”

“Oh, thank you very much,” Bill said, feeling that this joker was really a fruitcake of the first water.

“Now, after the ship has descended the Scomian curve in a state of oscillation, instead of scraping the hull, we introduce a pulsed beat that further miniaturizes the ship and projects it as a series of immaterial frames. In that form, we are able to enter the computer as a simulation.”

“Oh, I see,” Bill said, not understanding one word of the technical bowb. “Sounds great, really great.”

“It has its uses,” Splock said, feigning unfelt humility.

“And now since you did such a great job of getting in here — how are you going to get us out?”

Captain Dirk broke in. “We will know that just as soon as Splock makes his calculations.”

Splock's long thin face took on a look of utmost concentration. His eyes slitted, a vein in his temple throbbed, and his ears quivered slightly, all signs, as Bill was to learn later, of a Fortinbrasian male wearing a jumpsuit in a state of Ur-concentration.

“How did you meet these guys?” Bill said to Brownnose, whispering so as not to intrude on Splock's concentration.

“Stop that whispering!” Splock said. “How do you expect me to concentrate?”

Wow, Bill thought, he really can hear a lot with those pointy ears.

Splock glared at him again. “And stop that!”

“You couldn't hear me!” Bill said. “I was thinking!”

“Logic dictated what you would think,” Splock said. “I won't tell you again that I don't like comments of that sort.”

“Didn't your friend tell you not to mention his ears?” Captain Dirk said.

Bill cringed, then straightened up abruptly. This was getting to be too much. That asshole alien in the crummy jumpsuit with a hatchet face and ears like a gravid kangaroo couldn't tell him how to think. To hell with them, he didn't need them; he'd rescue himself.

“You do need us,” Splock said.

“Stop reading my mind!” Bill shouted.

“I didn't read your mind. I simply applied the logic of expected outcomes.”

“Is that a fact?” Bill said. Unexpectedly, he smiled.

“Yes, it is,” Splock said, not smiling.

A moment later he was reeling backwards, both hands to his face. Bill had thrown the neatest straight left jab seen since this planet had been born from the fiery pit of undifferentiated insubstantiality. Splock's hand came away red. “You've given me a nosebleed!” he said.

“At least we can get off the subject of ears for a while,” Bill said. “It wasn't much of a blow, just a poke. Put your head back and put something cold on the back of your neck. It'll stop in no time.”

“You don't understand!” cried Dirk.

“I understand plenty about nosebleeds,” Bill said.

“I mean, you don't know what a blow on the nose can do for a Fortinbrasian male.”

“He never saw it coming,” Bill said. “So much for logical expectations.”

“You fool!” Dirk cried. His face was ashen. “Males of Splock's planet carry their spare memory banks in their noses.”

“That's a damned stupid place to have a memory,” Bill said.

“Where am I?” Splock said, blinking around at them.

Captain Dirk groaned loudly and tore at his thinning hair, “Splock! You have to remember! Stored in your head is the highly important, original and special mathematical logic that will be needed to get us out of here.”

“I'm afraid the data is bent, if not destroyed,” Splock said. “I was keeping it all up the extra memory banks in my nose for safekeeping. How was I to know this barbarian with a Saurian foot would hit me in the nose?”

“How'd you know about my alligator foot?”

“The logic of the unexpected,” Splock said with a sour smile. “Besides, I can see it there.”

“Come on!” Brownnose urged. “Let's get the hell out of here!”

At Brownnose's behest they all turned and walked toward the remaining two black dots and the larger black dot that Bill had seen earlier. When they reached it, the black dots were still black dots, only bigger.

“What are these?” Bill asked.

“These are storage simulations of our emergency rescue ship and the two crewmen who man it.”

“But they're black dots,” Bill said.

“We stored them in that form,” Dirk said, “to save energy. It takes a lot of power to beam simulations into an alien computer and the Gumption's main batteries are already dangerously depleted due to a situation that came up immediately before this one.”

“What good are they?” Bill asked.

“None at all, in their present form,” Dirk admitted. “But as soon as Splock activates them into full simulacrum form —”

“I can't,” Splock complained, touching his nose tenderly. “The equations,” He sniffled. There was a whistling sound when he snuffled. It seemed possible that Bill had broken not only the crucial reconstituting data which was needed to get them out of the computer and back to the Gumption, but also Splock's nose.

“Now we're really in trouble,” Dirk said unhappily.

Bill walked up to one of the black dots and touched it. It was cold and metallic. He pushed against it. It was rigid. He walked to its edge. The edge was razor thin. He was to learn later that storage simulations have in fact no depth at all, only width and height, and, of course, quite a lot of area. But even had he known that then, it wouldn't have helped him turn the simulation into something useful.

Captain Dirk said, “Splock! Can't you do anything?”

“I'm trying,” the Fortinbrasian said in a nasal voice. “But the data is coming out skewed.”

“Look!” Brownnose said.

They were standing on a long plain that seemed to stretch forever under a stationary yellow sun. There were small purple plants on the plain, and a few old ruins that the computer had simulated just to liven up the place. Now, as they watched, furious clouds of dark green matter came roaring over the plain, bearing with them sand and bits of gravel, which came at them with the speed of machine gun bullets fired by a nervous hand.

At once Captain Dirk dropped to one knee, and, unholstering the lethal-looking handgun strapped to his waist, turned the beam to cone-destruction and destroyed the matter before it could cut them to ribbons of simulations.

“Keep it up, Captain!” Splock said. “I've just accessed the outer equations. I don't have enough to help us yet, but I do have enough to give us hope of eventual success.”

“Can't keep this up much longer,” Dirk said through gritted teeth. “My hand laser is only half-charged. Probably the fault of that new rating from New Calcutta. See that he gets a demerit for this bit of carelessness.”

“If we ever get back,” Splock said, his face set in the familiar expression of agony of a man trying to remember an equation he had forgotten.

Bill had been watching this and wondering what he could do to help. Suddenly it came to him. He stepped forward and, before Dirk could stop him, grabbed the back of Splock's head by one hand and took a firm grip on his nose with the other.

“Bill, what are you doing?” cried Brownnose, as always the master of the unnecessary question.

Bill gritted his teeth and gave Splock's nose a half-turn to the left. There was an audible click. Bill released Splock and stepped back. “How's that, fellow?”

“He seems to have fixed it,” Splock said. He looked at Bill with new respect. “How did you know that the Fortinbrasians are born without noses and have mechanical ones made for them when they go to the world where men have noses as a matter of birth?”

“I just thought I'd give it a try,” Bill said.

“Thank sanity for naive intuition,” Splock said. He muttered equations in a firm baritone voice and the dots responded by resolving into two crewmen wearing one-piece jumpsuits of the same design only in an inferior fabric to those worn by Splock and Dirk. The large black dot resolved itself into a space launch.

As Bill got in, he thought he heard a voice calling his name. “Bill! Wait for me!”

It had been a female voice. But that couldn't be. He didn't know any women around here.

Bill gaped around him in slack-jaw amazement. When he boarded, his first impression was that he wasn't in a spaceship at all. At least none of the deep spacers that he had served on in the past. The ships of the regular military service, no matter how large they looked from the outside, were crowded and cramped inside, cut up into noisome little quarters with low, filthy ceilings and an ineradicable smell of imitation boiled cabbage. This was no accident. Trained teams of designers had studied all the data banks of records of long-vanished Earth, had found exactly what they needed in the records of sailing-ships, ancient and improbable transport of some kind, and in particular the sub-category slave-ships. It was a difficult, nay an almost impossible task, but the Space Navy designers persevered. And in the end managed to duplicate all the filth and cramped discomfort of the original for the present crew quarters.

That was how the Navy did it. But not here! This ship looked very much like an airport waiting room or a Staff Officers' latrine. It was huge, done entirely in pastel colors of avocado and cocoa. The lighting was subtly indirect and flicker-free, and so well concealed that Bill couldn't see the lighting fixtures anywhere. Must be hell to change the lightbulbs, he thought. Not only was the decor original but the crew members that Bill saw were nothing like any other service personnel he had ever encountered. For one thing, they were all young and pretty, the boys, or lads — you could hardly call these striplings men — were young and eager and came in many colors. As did the busty and really well-stacked girls. The ship's crew seemed incredibly racially balanced. So many white, so many black, a scattering of greens and reds. And one sort of brownish-yellow.

When they all entered the central control room, a pleasant-faced young fellow in a beige and maroon jumpsuit, with a white sweater tied rakishly around his neck, jumped gracefully to his feet and saluted. Dirk returned the salute snappily and said; “Permission to come aboard?”

“Of course, sir,” the young man answered sheepishly. “I mean, after all, it's your ship, you being our captain, as well as First Admiral of the Blue.”

“I know all that,” Dirk growled. “A simple salute will be sufficient.”

“Aye, sir,” the young officer shouted as he saluted so hard he almost put his eye out with his pinky.

“Bill,” said Captain Dirk, “I want to introduce you to Midshipman Easy, one of our recent replacements from the Laguna Beach Deep Space School.”

“Delighted,” says Midshipman Easy, extending a browned hand, his right eye swollen shut where his fingernail had plunged into it.

“Yeah, thanks,” said Bill, reluctantly holding out a gnarled paw and wishing he'd had a chance to clean up before coming to this spotlessly clean battleship, or whatever it was.

“Midshipman Easy will show you your quarters,” Captain Dirk said. “And Splock will be on hand to fill you in on what's happening.”

“Walk this way, if you please,” Midshipman Easy said, mincing a bit as he exited. The crew broke into guffaws and wolf whistles at what seemed to be a joke, which Bill didn't understand at all.

They went down long corridors, passing, every once in a while young men in snug-fitting jumpsuits explaining very important things to beautiful young women in even more snug-fitting jumpsuits. They went up and down levels, across more corridors, and finally came to a door with a double zero stenciled on it. Easy opened the door and brought Bill into what looked like a well-appointed hotel suite in the style of the venerable old Helior-Beverly-Hilton.

“Wow,” said Brownnose, who had tagged along and now darted into the suite and went straight to the bathroom. “Hey, Bill!” he called out. “They got free samples of bubble bath and fancy perfumed soaps here.”

“Don't touch anything,” Bill warned him. To Midshipman Easy he said, “What happens now?”

“Just relax while we get the ship underway,” Easy said. “There are costly imported wines and cordials in the antique provincial sideboard over there. Should you get hungry before the evening banquet at nineteen hundred hours, there is a snack dispenser built into the five-hundred channel TV. Just push the button for whatever you require. No coins are necessary. You are our guests.”