Venus on the Half-Shell (29 page)

Simon was reminded of this when he landed on his next-to-last stop. This was a planet whose natives were still in the Old Stone Age. They were being enslaved and exploited by aliens from a distant galaxy, the Felckorleers. These were corralling the kangaroo-like aborigines and sticking them in iron igloos. The walls of the igloos were lined with organic matter, mostly hay and the hair the Felckorleers had shaved off their captives. After the aborigines had sat in the igloos for a week, they were hustled out and into a spaceship. The poor natives were radiating a blue aura by then, and their captors avoided touching them directly. They herded them along with ten-foot poles.

Simon watched three ships loaded with the natives take off for parts unknown. “What are you doing to them?” he asked a Felckorleer.

“Making a few bucks,” the thing said. He explained that the blue bubbles contained sex energy. Since the bubbles were so thick, not yet thinned out by distance from their point of origin, they contained a terrific sexual voltage. They passed through metal, but organic objects soaked them up. Hence, the igloos designed to concentrate the bubble energy. The aborigines thrown into them absorbed the voltage.

“Then we transport them to the other side of the universe,” the Felckorleer said proudly. “The races there have a very poor sex drive because they get only the last gasp of the bubbles. So we provide them a much needed service. We sell them the gooks we’ve loaded with the blue stuff, and they embrace them. The blue stuff is like electricity, it flows to a lower potential. And our customers, the lower potential, get a big load of sex. For a while, anyway.”

“What happens to the aborigines?” Simon said.

“They die. The blue stuff also seems to be the essence of life itself. When they’re grabbed by a customer, they lose every last trickle of energy. Too bad. If they survived, we could run them back here and load them up again. But we’re not going to run out of carriers. They breed like mad, you know.”

“Doesn’t your conscience ever hurt you?” Simon said.

The Felckorleer looked surprised. “What for? What use are the natives here? They don’t do anything. You can see for yourself they’re uncivilized.”

If Simon had been John Clayter, he would have rescued the aborigines and turned the Felckorleers over to the Intergalactic Police. But there wasn’t a thing he could do. And if he protested, he might find himself in an igloo.

In a sad mood, he left the planet. But he was basically, that is, genetically, an optimist. By the second day, he felt happy. Perhaps this change was caused by his eagerness to get to the Clerun-Gowph. He ordered the ship to go at top speed, even though the screaming from the 69X drive was almost unbearable. On the fourth day, he saw the desired star dead ahead, shimmering, waving behind the blue bubbles. Three minutes later, he was slowing down, and the screaming died down after most of the necessary braking had been done. At a crawling fifty thousand miles an hour, he approached the planet while his heart beat with mingled dread and exultation.

The world of the Clerun-Gowph was huge. It was dumbbell-shaped, actually two planets connected by a shaft. Each was the size of the planet Jupiter, which had an equatorial diameter of about 88,700 miles compared to Earth’s 7,927 miles. This worried Simon, since the gravity would be so great it would flatten him as if he were soup poured into a coffee saucer. But the computer assured him that the gravity was no higher than Earth’s. This meant that the two planets and the shaft were hollow. As it turned out, this was right. The Clerun-Gowph had removed the iron core of their native planet and made another planet out of the metal. This addition housed the biggest computer in the world. It also contained the factories for making the blue bubbles, which rose out of millions of openings.

The two planets rotated on their longitudinal axis and also whirled around a common center of gravity, located in the connecting shaft. A dumbbell-shaped atmosphere covered the planets, and over this lay a thick blanket of the blue stuff.

Simon directed the
Hwang Ho
to land on the original planet, since this was the only one that had soil and water. On minimum drive, it lowered itself through the blue and then the air. Simon got an enormous erection and aching testicles when descending through the blue layer, but these symptoms disappeared after he’d passed through the blue shield. The ship headed for the biggest city, and after a few minutes it was low enough so that Simon could see the natives. They looked like giant cockroaches.

Near the biggest building in the city was a large meadow. This was surrounded by thousands of the Clerun-Gowph, and on its edge was a band playing weird instruments. Simon wondered who they were honoring, and it wasn’t until he was about twenty feet above the meadow that he suddenly guessed. They were assembled to greet him.

This scared him. How had they known that he was coming? They must be very wise and far-seeing indeed to have anticipated his visit.

The next moment, he was even more scared. The 69X drive, which had not been making a sound at this low speed, screamed. Simon and the dog and the owl leaped into the air. The scream rose to a near ear-shattering level and then abruptly died. At the same time, the ship fell.

Simon woke a moment later. His left leg and his banjo were broken. Anubis was licking his face; Athena was flying around and around shrieking; the port was open; a hideous face, all multifaceted eyes, mandibles, and antennae, was looking in. Simon tried to sit up to greet the thing, but the pain made him faint again.

When he awoke a second time, he was in a giant bed in a building that was obviously a hospital. This time, he had no pain. In fact, he could get up and walk as well as ever. This astounded him, so he asked the attendant how his leg had been fixed up. He was astounded again when the cockroachoid replied in English.

“I injected a fast-drying glue between the break,” the thing said. “What’s so astounding about that?”

“Well then,” Simon said, “why are you able to speak English? Has some other Earthman been here?”

“Some of us learned English when we found out you were coming.”

“How’d you find out?” Simon said.

“The information was on the computer tapes,” the thing said. “It’d been there for a few billion years, but we didn’t know about it until Bingo told us a few days ago.”

Bingo, it seemed, was the head Clerun-Gowph. He had gotten his position by right of seniority.

“After all,” the attendant said casually, “he’s almost as old as the universe. By the way, allow me to introduce myself. My name is Gviirl.”

“It’s too bad the reception was spoiled by the accident,” Simon said.

“It wasn’t any accident,” Gviirl said. “At least, not from our point of view.”

“You mean you knew I was going to crash?” Simon said, goggling.

“Oh, yes.”

“Then why didn’t you do something to prevent it?”

“Well,” Gviirl said, “we didn’t know just
when
your drive would quit. Bingo did, but he wouldn’t tell us. He said it’d take all the fun out of it. So you had a lot of money on you. I got odds of four to one that you’d crash from about twenty feet. I really cashed in.”

“Son of a bitch!” Simon said. “Oh, I don’t mean you!” he said. “That’s just an Earth exclamation. But how come you, the most advanced race in the universe, indulge in such a primitive entertainment as gambling?”

“It helps pass the time,” Gviirl said.

Simon was silent for a while. Gviirl handed him a glass of foaming golden liquid. Simon drank it and said, “That’s the best beer I’ve ever tasted.”

“Of course,” Gviirl said.

Simon became aware then that Anubis and Athena were hiding under the bed. He didn’t blame them, though they should have been used to monstrous-looking creatures by then. Gviirl was as big as an African elephant. She had four legs as thick as an elephant’s to support her enormous weight. The arms, ending in six-fingered hands, must once have been legs in an earlier stage of evolution. Her head was big and high-domed, containing, she said, a brain twice as large as Simon’s. She was too heavy to fly, of course, but she had vestigial wings. These were a pretty lavender color edged with scarlet. Her body was contained in an exoskeleton, a hard chitinous shell striped like a zebra’s. This had an opening underneath to give her lungs room to expand. Simon asked her why she was able to speak such excellent English. She didn’t have the oral cavity of a human, so her pronunciation should have been weird, to say the least.

“Old Bingo fitted me with a device which converts my pronunciation into English sounds,” she said. “Any more questions?”

“Yes, why did my drive fail?”

“That scream you heard?” she said. “That was the last of the stars expiring in a death agony.”

“You mean?” Simon said, stunned.

“Yes. You barely made it in time. The suns in the transdimensional universes have been sucked dry of their energies. There isn’t any more power for the 69X drive.”

“I’m stuck here!”

“Afraid so. There will be no more interstellar travel for you or anyone else, for that matter.”

“I won’t mind if I can get the answer to my question,” Simon said.

“No sweat,” Gviirl replied. “Speaking of which, I suggest you take about three showers a day. You humans don’t smell very good, you know.”

Gviirl wasn’t being nasty. She was just stating a fact. She was condescending but in a kindly way. After all, she was a million years old and couldn’t be expected to treat Simon as any other than a somewhat retarded child. Simon didn’t resent this attitude, but he was glad that he had Anubis and Athena around. They not only kept him from feeling utterly alone, they gave him someone to look down on, too.

Gviirl took Simon on a tour. He visited the museums, the library, and the waterworks and had lunch with some minor dignitaries.

“How’d you like it?” Gviirl said afterward.

“Very impressive,” he said.

“Tomorrow,” she said, “you’ll meet Bingo. He’s dying, but he’s granted you an audience.”

“Do you think he’ll have the answer to my question?” Simon said breathlessly.

“If anyone can answer you, he can,” she said. “He’s the only survivor of the first creatures created by It, you know.”

The Clerun-Gowph called the Creator It because the Creator had no sex, of course.

“He walked and he talked with It?” Simon said. “Then surely he’s the one I’ve been looking for!”

The next morning, after breakfast and a shower, Simon followed Gviirl through the streets to the Great House. Anubis and Athena had refused to come out from under the bed despite all his coaxing. He supposed that they, being psychic, felt the presence of the numinous. It was to be presumed some of it must have rubbed off onto Bingo during his long association with the Creator. Simon didn’t blame them for being frightened. He was scared too.

The Great House was on top of a hill. It was the oldest building in the universe and looked it.

“It lived there while It was getting the Clerun-Gowph started,” Gviirl said.

“And where is It now?” Simon said.

“It went out to lunch one day and never came back,” she said. “You’ll have to ask old Bingo why.”

She led him up the steps and onto a vast porch and into halls that stretched for miles and had ceilings half a mile high. Bingo, however, was in a cozy little room with thick rugs and a blazing fireplace. He was crouching on a mass of rugs around which giant pillows were piled. By him was a pitcher of beer and a big framed photograph.

Bingo was a hoary old cockroachoid who seemed to be asleep at the moment. Simon took advantage of this to look at the photograph. It was a picture of a blue cloud.

“What does that writing under it say?” he asked Gviirl.

“To Bingo With Best Wishes From It.”

Gviirl coughed loudly several times, and after a while Bingo’s eyelids fluttered open.

“The Earthling, Your Ancientship,” Gviirl said.

“Ah, yes, the little creature from far off with some questions,” Bingo said. “Well, son, sit down. Make yourself at home. Have a beer.”

“Thank you, Your Ancientship,” Simon said. “I’ll have a beer, but I prefer to stand.”

Bingo gave a laugh which degenerated into a coughing fit. After he’d recovered, he drank some beer. Then he said, “It took you three thousand years to get here so you could transact a few minutes of business. I admire that, little one-eyeling. As a matter of fact, that’s what’s been keeping me alive. I’ve been hanging on just for this interview.”

“That’s very gratifying, Your Ancientship,” Simon said. “First, though, before I ask the primal question, I’d like to clear up a few of the secondary. Gviirl tells me that It created the Clerun-Gowph. But all life elsewhere in the universe was created by you people.”

“Gviirl’s a young thing and so tends to use imprecise language,” Bingo said. “She shouldn’t have said we
created
life. She should have said we were
responsible
for life existing elsewhere.”

“And how’s that?” Simon said.

“Well, many billions of years ago we started to make a scientific survey of every planet in the world. We sent out scouting expeditions first. These didn’t find any sign of life anywhere. But we were interested in geochemistry and all that kind of stuff, you know. So we sent out scientific expeditions. These built bases, the towers that you no doubt have run into. The teams stayed on these planets a long time—from your ephemeral viewpoint, anyway. They dumped their garbage and their excrement in the soupy primeval seas near the towers. These contained microbes and viruses which flourished in the seas. They started to evolve into higher creatures, and so the scientists hung around to observe their development.”

He paused to drink another beer.

“Life on these planets was an accident.”

Simon was shaken. He was the end of a process that had started with cockroach crap.

“That’s as good a way to originate as any,” Bingo said, as if he had read Simon’s thoughts.

After a long silence, Simon said, “Why aren’t there any towers on the planets in my galaxy?”

“The life there didn’t look very promising,” Bingo said.