CHAPTER 1

DOCTOR D. PRESCRIBES!

True, Bill never realized that sex was the cause of it all. But from time to time he had his suspicions.

"It's a satire's foot!" he roared at the doctor. "Well, bowb-brains, it don't look so funny to me!"

Fortunately, Doctor Delazny was a civilian, or Bill's military butt would have been Rotorootered. The doctor staggered back at the power of the Trooper's oratory (and the onions he'd had for lunch), his eyes blinking behind the bottle-bottom thick Exam-o glasses. "No, Trooper. A satyr's foot. It's a creature of Greek mythology, a man-beast of rampant lusts who would copulate from dawn to dusk, and all night too as well."

Bill could sympathize. He was feeling pretty hard up himself. When they sent him here to the Army Hospital on Colostomy IV they mentioned R and R. To any Trooper, R and R meant Rutting and Rotgut. Which of course implied the presence of a: human females, and b: large volumes of alcoholic beverages. Since the hospital had a nicely stocked bar down by its morgue, the latter was taken care of nicely. Unfortunately, though, all the nurses in this medical madhouse were steel robots. When he had groped back to life after his first heroic boozeup he had found himself groping one of them, which was a most unsatisfying, as well as rusty, occasion.

So now, here in the examination room, Bill was scratching his thinning hair with one of his two right hands, and staring down at his foot. It looked pretty repulsive.

"What is happening to it?" he whined.

"A good question," said Dr. Delazny. "I'm going to have to take a cell sample to confirm my suspicions.... But Trooper, what I think you have obtained is a hideous outer space infection which is a psychomutating plasmoid assemblage."

"Huh?"

"A mood foot."

"It's his fault, his fault, that bowbing Chinger spy, Eager Beager. Ever since he did me the big favor of replacing my giant chicken foot I have had nothing but foot trouble."

Bill clamped his mouth shut, knowing that no good could come of talking about his Chinger encounter. The Chinger spy was nothing but trouble, trying to make him promise to give up war! Betray the Empire! Sow dissension and peace-talk. Plant propaganda. Work toward disarmament and a treaty between Humans and Chingers. Of course, Bill could never betray his fierce loyalty to the Imperial Troopers, as much as he would like to, since his brain was far too sodden with conditioning drugs and behavioral neuro-plants for that. As soon as he'd gotten back to headquarters, he'd squawked. The Brass was so grateful for the poop on Chinger mentality after he'd been debriefed, when his foot started getting weird, they sent him out to this planet for treatment by a specialist in procto-podiatry, Dr. Latex Delazny.

"Yes, it conforms with neural-image forms generated by the synthesis of neo-cortex and F-complex: relationships. In other words, Trooper, your foot thinks it's stuck on the body of a creature who thinks about nothing but sex and drinking." He smiled grimly and shook his head. "Now, does that bear a resemblance to anyone you're familiar with?"

Dr. Delazny had a highly specialized medical education with higher degrees in eye-ear-nose-and-throat plus a much lower degree in proctology. In other words, he was a specialist in mouths and arseholes, which meant that he treated a lot of lawyers — doing an excellent business in transplants since with lawyers the two were interchangeable. However, when the Emperor, in a sudden mood of sadistic philanthropy, had executed all of the lawyers in the Known Universe, Dr. Delazny found his practice extinguished and had to find work elsewhere. He'd confided all this to Bill the other night in the bar over a bottle of Old Granbowb.

"Damn, Doc. A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do. Drink. How else can a Trooper stay sane in this criminally insane outfit? And a man needs the comforts that only a woman can bring!" Bill sniveled with self pity, then sighed passionately as he thought about all his old girlfriends. And the young ones as well. His battle-hardened musculature tensed as he thought about Meta, shipped out now to some godforsaken strife-torn planet, fighting in this hellish but glorious Chinger conflict. Meta! Now there was a woman! Those eyes! That chest! That tight, rounded rear end that put Inga-Maria Calyphigia's, back on Phigerinadon II, to shame! But then, Meta was hardly the type of woman who would plant bare feet in a kitchen and produce babies for the rest of her life. Meta was the kind of gal Bill's mother had warned him about — mentally, physically, emotionally his superior, with a sex drive that could power a starship, once she got it in gear. And just as they'd gotten their relationship over the first hump, so to speak, the bowbing Troopers had to detail her somewhere else. Bowb and double bowb!

Bill wondered if there was something going wrong with him. Had the Troopers left a shred of dignity and humanity in his body? It didn't seem possible. Was he capable of love? Did he even know how to spell the word? Was that what he was looking for? Was that why he was so restless of late? Was that why he'd started smuggling TRUE SLUSHY SPACE ROMANCE comix inside the copies of BLOOD PORN SPLATTER TALES that the recruits saw him reading?

Naw. What good was a regular woman, anyway? Like the Troopers said, a woman would make him stop smoking, drinking to excess, swearing incontinently while lusting after anything female that strolled by — and weren't those the vital ingredients that life was really all about?

Dr. Latex Delazny looked down again at the readout from the computer. "Fascinating. Tell me Bill, do you know anything about the endocrine system?"

"Isn't that the swamp and poison ocean worlds over by the Cassiopeian system?"

Doctor Delazny scratched angrily at the scruff on his balding head. He looked to be a man in his late thirties, fine spiderwebs of wrinkles, as well as fine spiders, just starting to radiate from his eyes. He was thin and distracted-seeming, as though his mind operated like a three ring circus, and he was far more interested in the acrobatic act in the center than this clown act before him.

"No, you military moron. I'm talking about human physiology. The endocrine system, the pituitary, the thyroid, the adrenals ... etcetera, etcetera. And of course, the sex glands. Human anatomy, sod-head! Don't they teach you that in the Troopers?"

Bill shook his head in humble contrition.

"Important bodily functions, Bill. Particularly the sex glands. Did you know I have a PhD in endocrinology? But do you think the Empire has any use for that? Bah. Feet and sphincters, sphincters and feet. That's all they want me to work on. What a dreadful waste."

He was a tall, gangling scarecrow, looking as though he slept in his lab coat, which happened pretty often anyway. But he still had certain strengths. Bill was particularly impressed by the way the doctor had been able to put away Antarean Alkpee in the bar the other night.

Doctor Delazny mused boredly over the readouts on the table. "My goodness, Bill, talking about secretion, your lower ductless glands seem particularly active. Most interesting, Trooper — you seem to have enough testosterone in your body to grow a beard on an elephant!"

Delazny peered at Bill appraisingly, and the Trooper felt suddenly uncomfortable at being moved to center stage.

"What about my foot, Doc? Remember, that's what I came in about."

Doctor Delazny cleared his throat, puffed out his chest and spoke out authoritatively.

"Trooper, what I'm prescribing for the time being is that you spend your sacktime and rectime here at the hospital. Walk on the polluted beach, visit the garbage dump, tour the factory down the road.... Rest! Relax! Avail yourself of the recreational facilities we have here at Grin N' Clinic! This will give me the opportunity to examine the cellular composition of your foot."

"You're not going to give me a new one?"

"I would love to, Bill, but haven't you got it through that thick farm-bred and alcohol-preserved skull of yours? This army has a foot shortage!"

"Shoulda never gone on the metric system!" grumbled Bill. The latrine rumor mill had leaked the story. Used to be, Army Medics had lots of feet in freezers, but when the order came down from Helior for the Army to go metric, the noncoms hadn't understood. "Get rid of the feet!" the officers had yowled. And so the noncoms had dumped the frozen feet.

Bill pulled on a sweatsock over his cloven hoof, then covered that with a boot. He looked down nostalgically at the scuffed footwear, remembering the shine that Eager Beager used to be able to raise on his issue Trooper boots, back when Bgr the Chinger was hiding out in a robot disguised as a recruit slogging through training camp. He'd never had such good-looking boots since.

"Maybe you're right, Doc. Maybe I could use some rest. Drink less, plenty of fresh air and raw fruit." It sounded positively repulsive. But he let this decaying sawbones think he was going along with the plan until he came up with a plan to find a way out of here.

Ahh, how little did Trooper Bill realize it, but "rest" was not precisely a commodity penciled into his particular cosmic itinerary for the next week. If only the Doctor had not suggested a walk along the beach, then perhaps Bill's mind-blowing, super-exciting and absolutely page-turning adventure amongst the myths and Gods, to say nothing of the incredible Over-Gland, would never have occurred.

"Oh, and Bill — about those hemorrhoids that we don't have the right medicine for?" said Doc Delazny as Bill started walking away through the maze of hi-tech medical machinery.

"Yeah?" said Bill turning around, his posterior tingling hopefully.

"Dear fellow, I'm afraid that you are just going to have to sit this batch out!"

Bill called the quack something so revolting that it instantly cheered him up, then stalked back to the bar. It was Happy Hour and it was a Monday, which meant that they were giving out free pickled porkuswine feet hors d'oeuvres, one of Bill's favorites.

He just hoped they didn't give his "mood foot" the wrong idea.