CHAPTER 2

READING MATTER

Bill dreamed.

He dreamed that he was a farmer again, sweating behind a robo-mule. He dreamed that his prime ambition, his only ambition, in life was to become a Technical Fertilizer Operator. Some said that it was a crappy job — but not he! Smiling in his sleep he dreamed of going forth and spreading mounds of fragrant manure upon the gentle plains of the planets of the galaxy, rising up high and noisome, the fragrant delight of the magic scent tingling the nascent nostrils of a billion happy farmers.

Then the dream changed and Deathwish Drang came to him, fluttering gently on gossamer angel's wings.

"Trideo Games, Bill!" he chuckled and twanged a fang. "Your future is Trideo Games!"

Now Bill was very young in his dream, for as a little boy he had always yearned to play Trideo in town with the other kids, and he always beat them, yes he did, but only in his fevered imagination. For of course he never went to town, had no money either: Trideo was just the stuff of dreams. So when Deathwish Drang's proclamation filtered through those magnificent fangs of his, Bill thought, Yes! It's true! When Drang unfurled the sparkling contract in front of his eyes, the contract to become a hot-shot Trideo game contestant amongst the myriad civilized worlds of the galaxy, Bill signed without hesitation.

Trideo Games involved not only hand-eye reflexes and keen nerves, but mental coordination as well. The player was strapped securely into a machine that was a tin and plastic imitation of a spaceship, complete with fake lasers and ersatz pulsar torpedoes, etiolated tractor and pulsar beams, and all that good old docsmith stuff. Then, using a tridee screen, the contestant fought the chicken Chingers in their horrible dreadful Deathships from Sewer-Hell.

In his dream, the Chingers were again seven-foot monsters with razor-sharp teeth, rumored to snack on toasted human babies while watching television from their Slime-Couches. "Death to the Chingers," he howled as he arced through their armadas, defying the laws of physics as he nailed Chinger hate-ships with noble zaps of his powerful beamers.

But then, in his dream, a Chinger destroyer-boat caught him broadside and tore a hole through the side of the Trideo machine. Bill was stunned. This was just a game! How could.... Then he realized. He'd been a patsy! The Empire had tricked him. He really was fighting a real war!

It wasn't just a game.

Then hundreds of seven-inch tall Chingers swarmed through the rent, each of them armed with a seven-foot tall cutlass. Which seemed kind of impossible — but who asks questions in dreams?

He was doomed!

Bill woke up. His head felt like it was splitting open and his sinuses were on fire.

Damned book!

Goddamn cheap stripped hospital book!

His throbbing nasal passages felt as though mad scientists had filled them full with acid. He stumbled out of bed to the sink, held his head and moaned and tried to blow his nose at the same time. The pain increased, that was all. Groaning, he tried once again. Taking a deep breath sounding his horn.

"Kaaa-CHOO!" said Bill, clutching the pseudo-porcelain rim.

With an elephantine blast of his nose bugle an inch-long lozenge shot out, fitted with rubber appendages whose metal tips sparked fitfully as it bounced into the sink and hopped and fizzled about until he turned on the water and the thing spattered into extinction.

The book.

It was labeled, in raised letters, FENDER BENDER by Orson Bean Curd. Bill remembered faintly that it was about an idiot-savant servo-mechanic hijacked by Chingers and fiendishly used against the noble Empire, but nothing much more, since he'd only managed to get the book halfway up his nose. "Don't forget to sniff out the exciting sequel, MACARONI OF THE MORONS, coming soon from Mace Books!" read another smaller label, only slightly smeared with nose gunk.

With the high rate of illiteracy amongst the pioneer worlds, book companies had begun to market these "Stick-a-Books" with great success. They came with their own automatic "lit-pack": engrams that tendrilled into the user's brain and programmed the unhappy reader with the words and concepts necessary to understand the book. Then, when the victim had finished "reading" the little machine's contents, it would puff out sneezing powder. The theory was that a quick blast of sneezing would shoot the infernal gadget out. After a quick rinse, it was ready for another consumer! However, due to the capitalistic process of distribution, and the infamous Rack-Space Wars (a space conflict that even chilled Bill's veteran bones) the practice of "stripping" was used on these books, rather than going to the expense of shipping the full product back to the publisher. This involved tearing out a tab of circuitry imbued with identification properties which gave retailers credit for the product. Retailers then sold the remainder at reduced rates to the military and planets for the mentally retarded. Unfortunately, much of the guts of the book itself was also stripped in the process, so that chances were if you were a hospital patient and you tried to read one of these "special editions" as they were euphemistically labeled, you only got part of the book.

Such was the case, clearly, with the one that Bill had stuffed up his nostril last night, meaning to read for a while before turning in. Not only that, but apparently the bowby thing hadn't been properly cleaned after it had last been used and had the definite sniff of someone else's sinus!

Bill finished blowing his tortured nose while his eyes streamed with tears, and then went to the side of his bed for a swig of Pepto Abysmal — The Calming Internal Antiseptic and Nose Purifier! This cheap, rotten, godforsaken hospital was getting on his nerves. Not only were the beginnings or ends of their books lopped off, but the sanitary conditions weren't much better than back at Camp Leon Trotsky where he'd done his boot training. Colostomy IV was a planet only recently discovered. Though it had a reasonable oxygen content to its atmosphere soup (along with curious trace amounts of incense and airborne alkaloids; scientific speculation posited a dead, lost race of either Buddhists, Hindus or hippies) and it swung around a GO-GO star (very close to Sol in type), absolutely no living intelligent beings had been discovered upon its surface. Just lots of floral land undergoing the usual geological hiccups — and lots of mysterious dark ocean. Since the planet happened to be somewhere between somewhere and somewhere else, both somewheres being equally repulsive, the Troopers had naturally chosen to build a transient camp, reppel depple, Senior Officers Whorehouse and this hospital here, on the shores of the great black ocean, tideless and ominous. They also built a water dehydration plant on the shore to ship out powdered water for the troopers (just add water ... voila! Water!)

Bill chased the chalky medicine with a glass of foul-tasting water and went back to bed. He dozed intermittently, but as rosy-fingered dawn fingered the window sill while pain fingered his frontal lobes he was still feeling relatively sleepless. His headache had abated somewhat, but his mood foot felt weird. It was all tingly, like it was just waking out of leg-sleep. Maybe, he thought, he should go to see Dr. Delazny about this immediately. It felt like Tinkerbell had just jammed her wand up his cloven hoof, and all kinds of aerie fairie nonsense was happening inside!

Bill put on his torn, five-ply paper robe and moaned his way out of the ward, hoping to wake up the four doped-to-the-gills Troopers he shared it with. No such luck. The sick bowbs were sleeping, if not the sleep of the innocent, then at least the sleep of the narcoleptic.

He went down to the Doc's office, in the basement, conveniently situated by the bar and the morgue (many of Doctor Delazny's patients were victims of the dreaded Pedosphincter Rot, a wildly metastasizing mutant xenocancer killing Troopers by the platoon, whose distant ancestor was athlete's foot, and that struck the nether regions of the human body. Hence his dual specialty. And also hence his proximity to the morgue.) By now Bill's foot felt as though sparklers were pixilating in his heel!

As the lift banged to an abrupt halt on Level Zero and the doors wheezed open, Bill thought he caught a sight of Doctor Delazny's balding dome disappearing into the laundry room, followed by the flapping tails of his lab coat.

What was he in such a hurry for?

And why was he running into the laundry room?

"Hey Doc!" he cried, limping along, cringing with the odd sensations that kept shooting up his leg. "Wait up! I got to talk to you!"

He pushed open the swinging doors marked "Laundry." The room was lined with shelves of linens, amongst which scurried ratfinks — native rodent-like creatures who swarmed the Trooper installations and appeared to feed on linoleum wax and toenail parings. In the middle of the room, a laundry chute depended from the ceiling, beneath which a small basket of soiled towels, garments and sheets breathed up stale human body odors.

"Doc! Doc Delazny?" Bill stepped in, looking around. A pair of filthy trousers zoomed down the chute and landed atop his head. He snarled and threw it at a dump of copulating ratfinks, who proceeded to devour it.

No sign of the Doctor. But Bill could have sworn —

Oh well. Bill left and checked Doc Delazny's examination room. Nobody.

A bright orange and blue neon sign blasted out the letters HOSPITAL BAR just as brightly as ever, but the door was locked. It was closed. It didn't open till 0630 hours. The authorities here were vaguely considering keeping a 24-hour bartender, but hadn't got around to it yet. The morgue was deserted — except of course for the dead people. There was only one other room that Doctor Delazny could have gone down here, though Bill was loath to venture there. It was a gilt door set with fake diamonds and labeled proudly "Heroes' Haven — Only the Best Damn Troopers in the Galaxy Enter Here." He cringed back, the last thing he wanted to do was go in here. But his foot needed attention, so he opened the door.

The Heroes' Haven was also called The Last Chance Saloon and never referred to by its real name, the speaking of which brought bad luck. The Terminal Ward. The perfume projector inside could not quite conceal the taint of living decomposition, the muted Muzak was penetrated by the gurgled groans of the dying, the soft monotone squeals of telltale machines announcing the deaths of their hook-ups during the evening. Bill looked wildly in all directions but there was no sign of Doctor Delazny!

"Bowb and damn!" Bill snarled, wheeling around to get the hell out of here. In mid-wheel, however, he spotted something that caught him up short, gave him pause.

It was a shelf of lozenge-books! And they looked whole! Unstripped! Bill was very bored, and he could use a whole book to read. The doomed at the hospital must get special privileges, he thought. Of course the irony was they'd never finish reading the books anyway.

He examined the titles. E-I-E-I-O! by Greg Bore. PLANET OF THE ALIEN TRANSVESTITE PANTY RAIDERS Vol. VI. THE WELL OF GENITALS by Jerk el Upchucker. NIGHT OF THE LIVING CHINGERS by Stephen Thing. Boy! Classics!

Still, he couldn't take more than one, so Bill selected a shining lozenge labeled BLEEDER'S DIGEST. This contained ten condensed books especially prepared for the consumption of people who didn't have very long to live.

Good enough! This should keep him going for awhile, thought Bill as a death rattle in a nearby throat spurred him on his away.

Of course, he'd boil the damned thing first this time. His nose twanged in response for his nose knew another nose nosed ahead by a nose.

But if Bill had been nosier he would have noticed the alien electronic eyeball at the end of its periscope, scrutinizing his activities and transmitting them to tiny reptilian eyeballs, deep below the hospital.