Bill 7 - the Galactic Hero (16 page)

(Commandante Luther Anastasius Lambert Hendricks Bavan Drosophila Melanogaster Farkleheimer was a nom de guerre, chosen in order to protect his identity, and also to create as much of a problem as possible for the junta's secretarial staff. He knew that the computers were programmed to accept up to three names with a total of up to thirty letters. Entering his new name, he reasoned, would bring the system to a halt. His friends, however, called him Ed, which was his real name.)

Bill wasn't keeping up much with current events because he was busy being taught all about neutron mining. It was important that on his next shift he should be able to look like he knew what he was doing, so as not to draw too much attention. Commandante Luther Etc. also didn't want Bill to look as though he was too experienced, since that might draw even more attention. Bill told the commandante not to worry because he had always been a slow and careful learner who had even mastered all the complications of fusetending. That is plugging the fuses in and out.

The guard in charge of the neutron face where Bill went to work was probably a slow learner, too. He believed everything he was told, no matter how stupid it sounded, and nodded his head enthusiastically when he was assured that Bill had worked there before. When Bill stood silently for several minutes in front of his assigned machine, scratching his head, the guard accepted that as well.

Which was a good thing. Bill stood and stared at the controls, waiting to remember something, anything, about how the thing worked.

There were two big buttons and a lever. Nothing was labeled clearly; one of the buttons was green and one was red, and there was a big two-headed arrow next to the lever, one head pointing toward Bill and one head pointing away.

Bill studied them. Tentatively, he pushed the lever from the middle position all the way away from him. It clicked into place, but nothing else happened. He pulled it all the way toward him. Again, it clicked; but that was all.

That wasn't it, then.

Bill was developing a real appreciation of the technical skill involved in mining. It was every bit as hard as Technical Fertilizer Operation, which would have been Bill's specialty if he had managed to pursue a career in agriculture.

Bill thought hard, then returned the lever to the middle. It must have been left there for a reason.

Bill thought hard again. He delved deep into his memory, going back yet again to the epochal battle in which he had saved the Fanny Hill by carefully directing his weapon away from the green light, and aiming it at the red one. “Red is the one we want to hit,” he thought.

He pushed the red button.

Nothing happened.

He'd tried almost everything. This was starting to get frustrating, and besides, the guard was looking over suspiciously. In desperation, Bill pushed the lever forward and pushed the green button.

The machine roared to life and lurched forward, pounding the wall with hundreds of little hammers to loosen the neutron ore. Large robot hands swept the ore to the side and back, leaving a fairly neat pile for the collecting team to sweep up and shovel onto the conveyor belts to the processing room. A third team would follow up with vacuum cleaners to pick up any stray neutrons, which were carefully counted and logged to prevent pilferage.

Bill ran after the hammering machine, which was hammering away from him at a good pace, and grabbed the two huge handles. By pulling and pushing on those, he could keep the crosshairs in the middle of the video screen squarely on the little animated neutron, which was trying to get away from him.

It wasn't quite as easy as using the joystick on the TAIL GUNNER! system, but it was well within Bill's intellectual capacity. In fact, it was a lot like steering a robomule.

Insulated from interruptions (particularly by those two guys from the barracks, who kept trying to get Bill's attention, or according to the commandante, to assassinate him) by Commandante Etc. and his men, Bill lost himself in his work.

Despite the commotion behind him (“No, really, we just want to talk to him. We have to talk to him. Of course it's important, but we can't tell you what it's about.”) Bill quickly got the hang of it. Or at least enough of the hang of it, he figured, to keep from attracting too much attention for the short time he would — hopefully — be here.

After all, Commandante Etc. and his men were going to smuggle Bill out of the mine so he could rally support for his good buddy, President Millard Grotsky. The generals had reported that the president had resigned because of ill health, but this was so obviously a lie that hardly anyone believed them. All it would take, according to the Resistance leader, would be one impassioned speech by Bill, ideally from the top of a tank, and the coup would collapse in the face of popular support for democracy. Then Bill would be a hero and celebrity again, and maybe even get a cushy government job. He was hoping to become head of the Alcohol Control Board, under the impression that it had something to do with quality testing.

And in the meantime, life was fairly good. The beds were uncomfortable, the air was stale, the food was lousy, the only woman in the place worked seventeen levels up and didn't like Bill anyway, there was nothing to drink, he couldn't do anything without permission from the guards, there was no time off and nothing to do in it if there had been, and no one was trying to kill him. Yes, life was fairly good. Meaning he was at least temporarily out of the control of the military.

In fact, Bill was giving some serious thought to making a career as a neutron miner. Since they were to all intents and purposes slaves, neutron miners had excellent job security — comparable to Imperial Troopers but with longer life expectancy. The working conditions were certainly no worse here than aboard the Heavenly Peace.

So Bill settled in with unwonted fatalism. He worked hard at his machine until he had learned all its subtleties and intricacies. (Pushing the lever forward moved the machine forward; pulling it back threw it into reverse. To some this may seem easy, but don't knock it until you have tried it.) He was meeting his quota with ease. Although the Underground had sent out an order for everyone to work as slowly as they could as a protest against the coup, Commandante Etc. decided that Bill should go at good speed, so as not to attract too much attention.

The work was about as interesting as almost anything in the Troopers, but after a few days as a miner Bill was actually hoping the two assassins would get through to him, since Commandante Etc. and his inner circle spent all their time plotting and getting into arguments about ideology, and Bill didn't understand either the complexity of their plans or the intricacies of their ideology. All he had for amusement was his work; and talking to the assassins, or fighting them off (and Bill never doubted that a trained Trooper could handle two Eyerackian killers), would be a change of pace.

One afternoon, while Bill was steering his neutron-hammerer down a particularly tricky straightaway, Commandante Etc. sidled up to him, Bill watched carefully. He'd never seen anyone sidle before.

“Pretend I'm not here,” the Resistance leader muttered.

“OK,” Bill said, and turned back to his machine.

“Ee ... ant ... oo ... ere,” Bill heard faintly over the hammering. Following his instructions, he ignored it. There were a lot of other similar noises, and he ignored them, too.

Someone tapped his shoulder. It was the commandante again.

“You got that?”

“Got what?” Bill asked. “I was pretending you weren't here.”

“Right.” The leader silently counted to ten. “Now pretend I am here.”

“That's harder,” Bill said. “Since you really are here, in order to pretend you are I first have to convince myself you aren't, which is not at all the same as pretending —”

“Stop!” The commandante raised a hand, and had to try lowering it twice before he could unball his fist and rest his hand on Bill's shoulder. “I'm here. Don't pretend I'm not here, don't pretend I am here. I'm just here. OK?”

“Well, sure. That's easy. Why didn't you say that to start with?”

The leader silently counted to twenty this time. “We have a plan to get you out of here.”

Bill got excited, but almost immediately got worried again. Out was good, sure, it meant SuperGungeBurgers and beer and possibly even women, but it also meant bombs falling in all sorts of odd places, like where Bill might happen to be. On the other hand, Commandante Etc. had a look of determination on his face that Bill was used to seeing on officers' faces, a look that said Bill didn't have any choice in the matter. So Bill asked, “What's the plan?”

“There is an unguarded corridor on the processing level, right next to the neutron mill room. With your machine here you can tunnel right up to that corridor, go down it for a mile or so, and dig right into the processing room. Then you climb under the machinery and crawl all the way down to the end of the mill, where the neutrons are crated for transport. Got it so far?”

“Sure,” Bill said. “I've seen it. There's enough space under the machinery for loose neutrons to be swept up. It'll be tight, but I can do it.”

“We'll have two of our men on crating detail tomorrow. You just climb into one of the neutron containers, and you go out in the next shipment. Home free!” The commandante smiled at his own ingenuity.

Bill nodded. “Pretty good. Have you seen one of the crates?”

“No, not exactly. But I'm told they are built to hold a quantomty of neutrons in each one.”

“A quantomty?”

“Billions and billions. So there should be room inside for just one of you, right?”

Bill stooped down and shaped the dimensions of one of the boxes with his hands — about two feet on a side. “I don't think so.”

Commandante Etc. frowned. He mimed the sides of a larger box, one almost big enough to take Bill if he were carefully disassembled. “Not this big?”

Bill shook his head.

“Bummer,” said the commandante. “OK, no problem. We just have to work out a new plan. Bigger boxes, maybe.” He muttered to himself all the way back down the tunnel.

But Commandante Etc's next plan, as brilliant as it would have been, was not to be.

The next morning, at roll call, a foreman with a clipboard walked down the line of workers. Three times, he stopped and pointed. “You,” he said, each time. When he had finished his selection, he told Bill and the two presumed assassins, “Come with me.”

The three men stepped forward, two of them anxiously, Bill more cautiously. He'd been volunteered before, after all.

“These three men,” the foreman said to the assembled work force, “are the only three in the entire mine who have exceeded their work quotas. In recognition of which they are going to get the morning off, have lunch with the mine manager, and have their sentences reduced by six hours.”

Commandante Etc. tried to slip close to Bill, to give him some no doubt vitally important message, but a phalanx of armed guards formed up around the three privileged men and marched them off to the elevator.

One of the assassins whispered out of the side of his mouth, “Bill!”

A guard poked him in the ribs with his blaster. “No talking!”

The ride up in the elevator was quiet, but Bill could see the two assassins trying to communicate something to him, or to each other, with facial expressions, he had no idea what.

They marched through the maze of hallways, silent except for the echoing tramp of the guards' boots, which had special noisemakers built into them so they would sound like jackboots on cobblestones, even in a carpeted hallway. Bill stopped paying attention after the fifth turn, and almost walked into the door when the group stopped. He got his hand on the door, just under the large 8 just in time to keep it from stamping on his forehead.

The foreman swung the door open, and the guards prodded the three men inside. “Get washed up, and put on fresh cleansuits. Then follow the robot. Don't try to escape. We'll be around, and anyway there's no way out. See you after lunch.”

The squad tromped away, except for the two who had been set to guard the door.

“Greetings, ladies or gentlemen, or whatever sex you may be,” said the robot. “If you two will take the room on the left, and Brevet Lance Corporal Bill; you take the room on the right, you have six minutes and thirty-seven seconds before we must leave for lunch.” The little machine's legs retracted, and a countdown clock appeared.

“There's no time now, Bill, but we've got to talk,” one of the assassins said threateningly.

They dressed and regrouped in the living room of the suite with a full half-minute to spare. Bill came out admiring, albeit with some puzzlement, the neat chevron painted onto the sleeve of his cleansuit. The two assassins came out directly at Bill, and he decked one before the other could say, “Bill, it's us! Don't you recognize us?”

Bill didn't uncock his fist, nor did he loosen his grip on the man's throat. “Sure I recognize you. You two have been trying to assassinate me.”

The man said something in a deep, guttural language that Bill didn't understand. He pointed at his neck. Bill loosened his hand a little bit. “No, not assassinate you. We were trying to join you. Bill, don't you know who we are?”

Bill looked carefully at the man he held, then at the one who was slowly picking himself up from the floor. They didn't look anything like anyone he knew, not even like each other. “No,” he said, “I don't know you.”

“I'm Sid,” the one on the right said.

“And I'm Sam,” the one on the left said.

“They made us shave off our mustaches.”

Bill looked from one to the other and back again. “No, that can't be. You don't look anything like each other.” They held up fingers to cover their lower lips, and Bill started to see the resemblance. “But you still can't be them. I know, because Sid is the one on the left and Sam is the one on the right.”

Sid and Sam looked at each other, and carefully crossed in front of Bill. “Is that better?” Sam asked.

“Well I'll be bowbed!” Bill said. “My good buddies!”

Bill and his bosom companions were marched briskly by the robot — followed by the two guards with blasters and itchy trigger fingers — through the complicated hallways, to the elevator, and into an area that Bill recognized.