Bill 3 - on the Planet of Bottled Brains (13 page)

“Can you go back into the Chinger?” Bill asked, his breath coming in painful pants.

“I forgot about the Chinger!” Illyria asked. “I don't know, but I can try!”

“No time like the present,” Bill said, because some of the soldiers had unbuckled their heavy armor and were coming along quickly now, gaining on him. And ahead, directly in his path, Bill saw a high wall of polished marble. The theater of Dionysus! The god of abandon was now blocking his way.

The lizard crawled out onto Bill's shoulder, took one look at the pursuing soldiers, and started to duck back to shelter. Bill grabbed it before it could go out of sight.

“Now, Illyria!” Bill cried.

“Just a moment,” the Chinger said. “There's something I'd better explain. This is Illyria, speaking to you from within this alien Chinger. It's a little strange in here. What's that? No, it couldn't be! Oh, Bill, you'll never guess what's happened!”

“So tell me,” Bill panted. The soldiers now had him backed against a wall. The chimera was looking around groggily, unused to being back within its own body again. The Chinger, meanwhile, had gone glassy-eyed and limp. It was still alive, but seemed to be in a semi-comatose state, or perhaps an entirely comatose state; it was difficult to tell.

“Illyria? Speak to me!”

No answer from the somnolent lizard, lying with its four arms crossed peacefully on its green chest.

A soldier prodded Bill with his spear. The others moved in. And at that moment the chimera, released from Illyria's control, resumed its existence as a deadly and dangerous beast. It breathed out twin gouts of flame, like dragons do, and melted several shields. Then it turned to attack Bill.

“All right!” Bill cried. “Kill it, since you want to so badly!”

It was a tricky moment for Bill. The soldiers had to defend themselves against the onslaught of the chimera, returned to itself and filled with mythological fury. It attacked in a manner not seen since the days of Homer, and it emitted loud goat-like bleatings as it charged. These unnerving sounds mounted the scale into the supersonic, set the soldiers' teeth on edge, and set their swords to chattering against their shields. The Chinger opened its eyes and took one look at what was going on and scampered back for safety within Bill's shirt, seeking the snug haven of Bill's left armpit, where it was sure harm would not befall it. The soldiers finally managed to pin the chimera to the wooden planking of the roof with their sharp spears. The chimera's sound output redoubled as it found itself wounded. Black dots appeared in the sky and quickly resolved themselves into long-nosed bare-breasted women with bat wings, all of them clad in snaky black evening gowns. These were the Harpies, called out of their mythological slumber by the wounded cries of their fellow fabulous creature. They dived onto the soldiers, whose ranks had just been redoubled by the arrival of a double platoon of Varangians, sent, as Bill was to learn later, by Splock, who had anticipated this situation and had rushed back to the future to get some help. The Varangians were Swedish Russians, or possibly Russian Swedes, depending on whose history book you're reading, and they cared not a fig for the menace of effete Graeco-Roman mythology. They laid about them with mighty strokes, swinging their long battleaxes in shining circles, cutting down the Carthaginian soldiery who couldn't get out of the way quickly enough.

“Go to it, boys!” Bill shouted, his built-in translator putting out his words in middle Varangian, which none of these fellows understood since they were Finnish Varangians from the marshlands around Lake Uũ. But they liked the sound of his voice and laid about them with renewed vigor. The chimera was definitely bested. It gave one last shriek, which started a minor earth tremor in the city walls, and expired.

Before they could congratulate themselves and pass the beer, however, there was a splatter of rain and then within moments a raging storm had sprung out of nowhere complete with hailstones and hundred-mile-an-hour winds. Great bulging clouds with ominous purple-black bottoms rode across the sky like galleons of doom. This, as Bill learned later, was the arrival of Typhon, the spirit of the hurricane. The Harpies balanced lightly on the screaming winds and redoubled their attack. They too were creatures of the storm. When they came close Bill could see that they had hag faces and the ears of bears, and the bodies of birds with long hooked claws. Like birds, they were shameless about defecation, and like humans, they were purposeful about directing it. The Varangians gagged as a torrent of excrement was heaved at them.

Bill fought free of the reeking melee and looked for a place to run to. The only way off the rooftop was the way he had come, and that way was now choked with masses of Carthaginian soldiery, Hannibal urging them on and pointing to him. Bill suspected he had lost his guest status and looked around desperately for another way out. Fighting free of the fighting men who surrounded him, and laying about him mightily with a big broadsword he had picked up during the fight, he cut his way to the opposite wall. There a quick glance showed him a ladder leading down over the side. It was a rickety old ladder, just pieces of bamboo tied together with vines, but it would have to do. He put one foot over the side and started down.

It was at this precise moment that the new thing happened.

At first it was no more than a shimmering of light. Then it resolved itself into an incandescent ball about the size of a medicine ball, or slightly larger. Bill, hanging onto the rickety ladder, with the Chinger gnawing at his armpit (out of panic rather than malice, he learned later), did not take kindly to the fiery thing that swooped up close to him and hung just in front of his face, changing colors and giving off ear-torturing harmonics.

“What the bowb do you want?” Bill snarled testily. “Can't you see that I'm busy trying to save my life?”

“You just listen, dummy. I'll do the talking,” a gravelly voice issuing from the glowing sphere said. “Just in case you hadn't noticed, you are up the creek with a broken paddle. Want a lift?”

In other times, Bill might have been suspicious of an offer for help from a shining sphere of lambent energy that just happened to be going his way, but at the moment he was not inclined to be fussy. Already the ladder was starting to collapse, undermined by the sacred termites of Artemis, whom Bill had unwittingly insulted by suggesting that the dancing girl, a servant of the goddess, be supplanted by Illyria, an outsider and unbeliever. Not only was the bamboo ladder collapsing, but also soldiers had brought to its base a series of big wooden platforms covered with bronze spikes pushed up through them. They were all shouting at Bill, “Jump, jump!” It was an unseemly exhibition and it is little wonder that the Carthaginians have ceased to exist as a people and are perpetuated now only by a cluster of unseemly attitudes. “Yes! I don't know who you are,” Bill said, “but if you can get me away from here, I'd be plenty grateful.”

The sphere rapidly expanded, engulfing Bill. He felt his hold loosen on the bamboo ladder. Then the ladder collapsed, and Bill felt himself dropping through the air for a frightening moment, until the energies within the sphere caught him up and shielded him as the sphere moved away at great speed, leaving behind the sullen and unpleasant Carthaginians and their secondhand borrowed Greek deities.

After things settled down, Bill found himself inside a small but well-appointed spaceship. There appeared to be but one person aboard: a square-shouldered man, handsome but with a dour expression born of having seen too much human folly, sitting at the controls in a big command chair with a plaque on it that read; “Ham Duo — the buck stops here.”

“Commander Duo,” Bill said, in his most formal and grateful manner, “I want to thank you for doing this for me. I don't know what I would have done without your timely intervention.”

“Hell, don't thank me,” Duo said out of the side of his mouth. “Sure, I like to save the odd sentient being now and then, when it isn't too much trouble and I'm in the mood, but there's no need to make a fuss about it. A lot of other people would have done the same if they'd had my guts and expertise.”

“I really appreciate it.”

“Hell,” Duo said, “I didn't do it for you so don't go getting all weepy.”

“Who did you do it for?”

“The Freedom Fighters of Earth. I happen to know that you are helping them in your own simple-minded way, and I couldn't let you fall into the clutches of the Evil Empire.”

“I didn't know Carthage had an Evil Empire,” Bill said.

“They don't. The Evil Empire set up simulation techniques so they could loose those mythological creatures on everyone. You bet I had to put a stop to that. So don't go thinking that I was doing it just for you.”

“Sorry about that,” Bill said.

“It's a natural enough error, I suppose,” Ham said.

“I didn't know you were able to operate in the past,” Bill said. “How did you do that? The Gumption got here by putting her engines into oscillation.”

“I know all about that,” Duo said “It's a dumb trick. They'll have to reseat all the bolts before their ship is space-worthy again. Much better to use a temporal displacer that I just happen to have.”

Duo gestured. Bill saw, on the port side of the spaceship, not far from the bow but not far from midships, either, a black box with a plaque on it. The plaque read, Temporal/Spatial Displacer — Patent Pending.

Bill stared at it. Then stared even closer as he realized that this was the very secret that his own Space Navy had sent him to Tsuris to find out about. If he could get his hands on another like it — or even on this one...

“Where are we going?” Bill asked coyly.

“Rathbone.”

“Beg pardon?”

“The planet Rathbone.”

“What's there?”

“A little unfinished business,” Duo grated, his voice grim, his large, attractively hairy hands clutching grimly to the controls of his ship.

“Do you suppose you could drop me off somewhere?” Bill asked. “Space Trooper Headquarters, for example?”

“Sure,” Duo said. “I'll just take care of this Rathbone matter first. It's on the way, and it won't take long.”

Illyria the Chinger seemed to be asleep inside his shirt — and Bill could easily understand why. He heaved a tired sigh and sat down heavily on the ship's sofa. He found a magazine, a comic book magazine featuring ducks in full armor and a camel dressed up to be Charlemagne. There was the sound of distant quacking and screaming when he turned the pages. Soon he was absorbed in the story. He only hoped the business on Rathbone wouldn't take up too much time.

“Bill,” Duo said, then shouted since he saw that he wasn't getting through. “You, trooper! Get your nose out of that revolting comic for five minutes and get below and clean yourself up — I can smell the blood and gore from here. There are plenty of spare uniforms left over from the masquerade party I had. Then haul your butt into the galley and grill us up a couple of mastodon steaks.”

The thought of food was a winner and Bill gurgled happily as saliva spurted into his mouth from every dusty salivary gland. After tossing out his torn uniform, and pulling on a new one with admiral's insignia, he found the galley, and a freezer full of mastodon steaks that Duo had picked up on a previous adventure. He grilled one of these in the turbomicrowave, which went so fast that the steak burst into flame and turned into charcoal as he closed the door. He played with the controls until he got it right. He promised himself that he would cook the next one for Duo. Looking around the galley for something to wash it down with he found a cabinet filled with brown bottles. One of them had a hand-written label that read; “Homemade Ophiuchian Rum — not for Human Consumption.”

“Right now I'm not feeling human!” he cackled and drank deep.

When he got off the floor he grinned happily and drank some more. A delicious numbness began to creep over him, disturbed only by an itch in his armpit. He started to scratch it and found himself scratching the top of the Chinger's head.

“Illyria, how are you?” he asked.

“She's doing all right,” the Chinger said.

“What does that mean? Who the bowb am I talking to?”

“Bill, this is going to take a little explaining.”

“To hell with that! Who are you?”

Bill grabbed at the Chinger as it started to flee and, wholly by chance, an accident really, his finger touched the back of the Chinger's neck. When this happened the top of the Chinger's head opened on a concealed hinge. Inside the creature's skull, where the brains would normally be, though there weren't any now, there was a tiny man, no more than an inch high, seated at a tiny control panel. There was a cot and an easy chair close by, and a tiny toilet. The man was smoking nervously, tapping the ashes of his cigarette into an ashtray so small as to be only two steps above invisible to the naked eye.

“How did you get in there?” Bill gaped, then frowned. “And, equally important — what are you doing in there?”

“Well,” the man said, “that is going to take a little explaining. First let me introduce myself. Charles Ivan Arbuthnot, SNI, Space Navy Intelligence. Because my name is so long the initial letters are combined to form an acronym, CIA. Most people call me that, and you can too —”

“Just kindly shut the hell up,” Bill suggested. “Where's Illyria?”

“That's part of the explanation. Bill, don't be rash, hear me out.”

Bill had raised one ham-like hand in preparation to smashing the Chinger, the tiny agent CIA within it, to a small but messy pulp. What he had drunk seemed to have done some nasty things with his head.

“This is part of the secret Chinger technology,” CIA said. “I'm trying to bring the secret of miniaturization back to our armed forces. I wore a very hairy, and warm too let me tell you, ape suit and hung around the jungle near one of their secret laboratories that we discovered on this hothouse world. I got into the lab one night and found the secret miniaturization machinery that enables them to shrink or expand at will, thus playing hell with Earth's plans and generally confusing everyone. They had this giant Chinger robot for working in steel mills and I got into the controls, reduced to real Chinger size and got the hell out of there and was doing fine until your girlfriend took over my mind and she was too stupid to know it wasn't really a Chinger mind in there but a human one. So now you understand.”