Bill 3 - on the Planet of Bottled Brains (17 page)

“I didn't know that,” Bill said. “Illyria made it sound pretty easy.”

“Oh, it's not difficult,” the Disruptor said. “It's easy enough. But accidents can happen, that's the problem, you see.”

“Actually,” Bill said, “I hadn't quite made up my mind about going just at this time.”

“Is that a fact?” the Disruptor said, with what sounded suspiciously like sarcasm.

“Yes, it is,” Bill said quickly, not wanting to get this electronic pain-in-the-ass irritated again. “Why don't I just turn you off until I'm ready.” He turned the Disruptor upside down and examined all its surfaces. There was no sign of a turn off button.

“That's right,” the Disruptor said. “I'm like the three wishes. Once you get started on the wishes you got to finish them. Same with me. Now stop crapping around and tell me where you want to go. Now.”

“It wouldn't be right. Ham Duo found you. You belong to him. He must issue the orders.”

“Listen, boychick,” the Disruptor said in a slightly accented voice, “there's no question of ownership here. What we're talking about here is a matter of power. And power belongs to him who has it in his hand.”

The machine sizzled angrily and began to glow with an unearthly green glow. Bill panicked and tried to put down the Disruptor but it stuck to his hand like he was a magnet.

“Captain Duo!” Bill shrieked in fear. “This Disruptor is acting very strangely!”

The Disruptor chuckled mechanically. When Bill looked over to Duo, he saw that the dashing pirate commander was frozen in mid-gesture, and looked like a wax figure except that he had slightly better coloring. His Kookie friend Chewgumma, still with a hand on the energy controls, looked like a fur rug that had spent a brief time in animation and was now resting.

Looking through a porthole, Bill could see that the ship had been arrested in mid-flight. It hung in the air about fifty feet off the ground. Down below, the mob of Swinglis* were frozen too, most of them with their bony fists raised.

Even the double sun, setting toward Rathbone's southwestern horizon, was stopped in mid-flight.

Only Bill was free of the thrall of frozen time. And he couldn't get the Disruptor out of his hand.

“All right,” Bill said. “I don't know what you did, but please turn it all back on again.”

“I haven't actually turned anything off, dummy,” the Disruptor said. “But your act of turning me on projected us both into waiting-space. You need to tell me where you're going so I can find an appropriate time channel in which to insert us.”

“Oh, I didn't know it was as simple as that,” Bill said.

“Disruptor technology is so new that the scientists haven't had a chance to complicate it yet. Now look, I lifted your reprimand, didn't I?”

“Yes, you did,” Bill said.

“So you maybe owe me a little favor, no?”

“I suppose so,” Bill said. “But tell me something, why do you speak with an accent?”

“I'll tell you that,” the Disruptor said, “as soon as you tell me your destination.”

Bill decided he was being silly, not taking advantage of this ingenious and obliging transportation device. And besides, he wanted to know how come the accent.

“You know a planet named Royo?”

The Disruptor accessed its files in a few nanoseconds and said, “Sure. Which one do you want?”

“How many Royos are there?”

“Five, as far as I've searched. There may be some updates coming in on my transmission line any time. I'll search those, too.”

“But how am I supposed to know which Royo it is?”

“My dear young man, how would I know which Royo you're searching for?”

“That accent!” Bill said. “Why?”

“First let's figure out which Royo. Do you know anything at all about it?”

“It's got a breathable oxygen atmosphere,” Bill said, thinking, it had better have or he wasn't going there.

“Good. That eliminates one of them.”

“I think it's got a pretty nice climate for humans,” Bill said.

“A little feeble. But I think we can cross out Royo Terminosus and Royo Vulcanische. Too cold and too hot respectively.”

“How many does that leave?” Bill asked.

“Just a minute, let me count them again — Two! We're practically there. I speak to some degree metaphorically, of course. We haven't actually started yet.”

“I thought not,” Bill said, since he could still see the same frozen figures around him, Duo, Chewgumma, and all the rest. “What do you suggest?”

“The reason I speak with an accent,” the Disruptor said, “is because I am part of a special commemorative series of automata whose voice tapes were made to sound like famous Earth scientists of the past. I have the voice of a twenty-first century Hungarian psycho-physicist named Raimundo Szekeley.”

“That explains it,” Bill said. “But why are you telling me this now?”

“Because we're going to visit both Royos and find out which one is the one you want.”

“Oh,” Bill said. “But isn't that apt to be —”

He had no time to say “dangerous”. At that instant, the Disruptor started the journey.

Many learned papers have been written on how it feels to travel by Disruptor. They are all conjecture because in our day and age the device has been banned. It was fast and efficient, but subject to unexpected side effects. Also, the transition between where you were and where you wanted to be was so sudden that it had the effect of causing time to stumble, forcing you to spend a certain amount of time in lapse-space, also known as stasis, to allow your body and internal organs to catch up with your head trip. Some people came through the Disruptor journey with a curious sensation of having left a part of themselves behind. Which was usually true. And there were many sudden screams of pain when they discovered which part it was. It has been conjectured that Disruptor travel was so rapid, it gave the self no time to gather in its various extensions in time and space. In Bill's case this was no problem, luckily, because Bill was not subject to flights of fancy.

“Where are we?” Bill asked.

“This is the first Royo on our list. Does it look like the right one to you?”

Bill looked out. They were standing on a little promontory. Below them lay a vast city, all composed out of blue material of many shades and hues. There were steeples of many churches, and Bill could see broad boulevards and vehicles moving on the motorways. There was a single sun, and it was low in the horizon, banked in purple clouds. People moved in the streets. And big birds flapped overhead. As Bill watched, one of the birds banked and dived, plucking a person off the street and carrying him away with broad strokes of his wings. The other people paid it no attention. They kept on moving. Bill followed the direction of their movement. He saw that several of the giant birds had carried a huge trough to a plaza in the center of the city. They set it down, and Bill could see that it was filled with some greenish material.

“What do you think?” the Disruptor asked. “This is reputed to be the brightest bird planet in the galaxy. Those aren't really people they're feeding on. They're protoplasmic robots who come in a variety of flavors. Those look like sausagemen to me, though you can't be entirely sure at this distance.”

“I don't think this is the right one,” Bill said.

In that instant Bill was aware that he was no longer there, and an instant later he knew he was somewhere else. It was true that travel by Disruptor was disrupting.

The next planet had all browns and oranges in its landscape. There were a lot of black silhouette shapes, too, and no matter how they turned they never seemed to have any depth. There were strange sounds like voices, but Bill couldn't see who they belonged to. There was a race of cats that prowled the ancient ruins on low sea-beaches and disdained to notice the man with the machine in his hand watching them.

“I don't think it's this one, either,” Bill said. “Hell, it's not either of them! What do we do now?”

“Courage, mon enfant,” the Disruptor said. “There is always the other alternative.”

“What's that?”

“If the answer is neither one nor two, it's bound to be three.”

“But there was no third alternative!” Bill cried.

“There is now,” the Disruptor told him.

And just like that, Bill found himself somewhere else.

The planet Royo was known to men through their dearest dreams, because Royo is nothing less than one of the images of human delight. Bill found himself on a long curving sea-beach. White sand gleamed in a glowing crescent as far as the eye could see. Gulls wheeled overhead, and girls sprawled lissomely nearby. Could anything be more paradisiacal? To complete the delight, Bill saw that there were snug little bars along the coast made of driftwood and with delightful names like Dirty Dick's. Who could dream of anything finer than to live among tame buccaneers? And there were hamburger stands along that beach, too, quaint little places made of driftwood and furnished with buxom ladies wearing bandanas and frying up lovely fatty hamburgers with plenty of onions and with an array of condiments that would do proud to a sultan's palace. Not only was there the ubiquitous ketchup, and five varieties of piccalilli, and salsas of three colors and each stronger than the last, there were also pickled mango bits and bacon strips and juicy, pre-sliced beefsteak tomatoes, and many, many other things, some of them rather repulsive when you got down to it, that men of many planets dream of having access to. And each of these places served tall, frosted rum drinks, so that Bill felt compelled to sample one or two as he continued his stroll.

The people on the beach were beautiful, sleek and handsome and with white-toothed smiles of surpassing clarity. The women possessed the cutesy charm of starlets. And just back from the beach there were dance halls, and movie theaters showing socko features, and there was a roller coaster and many rides, and fake dinosaurs which were actually apartment houses.

A beautiful young woman with long dark hair and a comeliness too great to be borne by mere man came up to Bill and said, “You are the Promised One, aren't you?”

“I guess I might be, miss,” Bill said, with an old world courtliness that had made him appear something of a freak in the one-horse town upon the backward planet where he had been given the gift of life. “And who might you be?”

“I am Illyria.”

Bill gaped at her. Her beauty demanded no less. “The last time I saw you,” he said, “you were a little green lizard.”

“As you might have noticed, I've changed,” Illyria said, smiling huskily.

“Yes indeed, you have,” Bill said, his voice cracking. He started to reach out to her, then suddenly grabbed for his left armpit instead.

“What's the matter?” Illyria pouted, since she had leaned forward in anticipation of the grab.

“The Chinger. He was right here. With CIA in his head. A tiny CIA no more than two inches high.”

“Don't talk about the old days,” Illyria said. “They are behind us now.”

“And a good thing too. But where did the Chinger go?”

“Does it matter, darling?”

“I don't suppose so,” Bill said. “It just sort of bothers me, you know, not knowing where I misplaced CIA and the Chinger.”

“They probably wanted to go somewhere else,” Illyria said, “and didn't want to upset you by telling you.”

“That's not the world's greatest idea, but it will have to do for now,” Bill said. It still disturbed him, but he figured he'd get over it.

“So this is Royo, huh?” he asked as he reached out to grab, not really caring. She wiggled skillfully aside, taking his idle conversational gambit as real interest.

“This is it, darling. Come let me show you around,” she said and led the pouting and surly — and detumescing — Bill away for a sightseeing tour.

Despite not even the slightest interest, Bill soon learned that the planet Royo had only a single landmass and that was not a very big one. Royo consisted of one island in a planet-wide ocean. The island was a paradise by Earthian standards. Every day was perfect, sunny and bright, hot enough to get a really great tan but not hot enough to burn. There was only one race who lived on Royo: the Royoans. They were a beautiful people who spent all their time surfing and having fun. Since they had achieved their goal early in their recorded history, their brains had subsequently atrophied, following nature's rule that what you don't use you lose. Where the Royoan brains had been, there was now a cavity which could be entered via the ear. The Royoans had a ceremony. When a child turned sixteen — or maybe thirteen, the Royoans weren't so great at counting past two — the cavity in the head was filled with a fragrant coconut oil in which certain herbs were placed. Their exact proportions had been handed down faithfully from generation to generation, verbally of course since mental basket-cases couldn't write — nor could they talk very well for that matter — and this constituted almost the entire racial memory, not to mention all of their culture, of the Royoans. This oil gave the hair a natural luster, prevented baldness, kept the skin healthy, and made the eyes glisten. Due to this miracle substance the Royoans could look good all of the time, and this for a Royoan was the highest good.

It had been simple enough for Illyria, once she had managed to come here, to take over the body of a beautiful young Royo female with her own superbly adapted mind and thus occupy her body.

“Isn't it wonderful, Bill?” Illyria asked him. They were down on the beach having a steak barbecue while a chorus of Royoans sang the sweet mournful songs of their kind. Though, sadly they lacked lyrics and melody.

“Sure it's wonderful,” Bill said, resting one arm around Illyria's shoulders in a gesture he tried to make seem not as uncomfortable as it was. His first surge of heterosexual enthusiasm had been replaced by hesitant doubts. Bill was having trouble getting used to Illyria being a beautiful woman. Something about the way she had gone about it was putting him off.

“A little tough on the Royoan girl though, wasn't it?” he said with the unconscious arrogance of one who has always had a body of his own.

“Not at all, dear,” Illyria said. “I asked her, 'Lisa, would you mind if I take over your body for a while?'”