CHAPTER 7

FIRST MATE BILL

After all the mythological bowb he'd been traipsing through, it was nice to get onto a starship again. True, it wasn't precisely as comfortable as a Trooper starship, which made it the general galactic equivalent of a riveted steamboat without extras, but after the heavy G-force take-off almost mashed his face into a pulp, he learned his duties as first mate. For the most part these consisted of cleaning up the parrot droppings from the floors, walls, and even the ceiling — this parrot was really an aerobatic crapper — and dumping the results into the hydroponics room. What pleasure to realize that he had finally become a Technical Fertilizer Operator! Thus fulfilling his life-time ambition. It was an easy life, even if it was a crappy job, easier than the Troopers, and Bill quickly got pretty used to things. Also, Rick was as good as his word on the dove business — he'd gotten out a can of "Loo Stasis," a special electronic fix for noisome starship heads, and gave the bird a good blast. The smell had ceased immediately, and would theoretically stay away for a couple of months. Of course he still couldn't get it off his neck, and if you touched the thing with a finger you'd get zapped by static electricity, but it was a small price to pay for containment of bird-rot stench.

Once this problem was solved, and Bill had learned his other responsibilities as first mate, the days settled down to a fairly agreeable, though basically boring, routine. Up at the crack of pseudo-dawn. Breakfast of plasticized hardtack, ersatz salt pork and imitation artificial coffee. Clean up parrot droppings. Manure hydroponics. Dust free-fall bowling trophies. Lunch of hardtack, salt pork and coffee and a bottle of rum. Vomit. Clean up parrot droppings. Manure hydroponics. Mop the decks and press the button that activated the death ray that cleaned the heads. After first checking they weren't occupied since the captain took a dim view of him death-raying the crew. Take navigational reading and help Rick plot new navigational course according to Rand McNally's GUIDE TO POSSIBLE COORDINATES OF FABLED STARSHIP PORTS. Feed super-hamsters that powered the star-drivers. Dinner of hardtack, salt pork, coffee with artificial sweetener substitute, then two bottles of rum and the juice of one lime to add some flavor and to prevent space scurvy. Recreation hour. Tell dirty stories. Curse. Vomit. Pass out. Just like back in the Troopers.

Most certainly, though Bill cherished the highly challenging and rewarding vocation of Guano Engineering, and the rum was nice (even though he strongly suspected that it was dehydrated alcohol and rum essence that Rick mixed with tap water in the kitchen), it was the recreation hour that Bill enjoyed the most. During this time, he and Rick could swap stories, or Archimedes and Rick would put on what they thought were their hilarious comedy schticks and soft shoe routines, which bored Bill so tremendously that he would fall asleep if he even thought about them. At least when their act ended Bill was free to read or watch Rick's huge supply of alien pornography (he particularly enjoyed THE MATING FROLIC OF THE SEVEN VENUSIAN SEXES which appeared to be a combination of a complicated orgy and SWAN LAKE).

However, as placid as life was in this Quest for the Holy Bar and Grill, he had to come to the conclusion that there was something definitely unreal about it. Ever since Bruce the satyr had dragged him into the ocean things had been just a shade less than substantial. Oh, the first bit with Irma and the Fields of Elysium, the Furries and the climb up the mountain had all seemed real enough. He'd seen, felt, tasted, heard and smelt the usual wash of sensations. He'd performed the usual bodily functions with the usual enthusiasm, or lack of it, had drunk and lusted with the exact same urgency and specifics that had imbued his farmboy days and his Trooper career. And while in a normal human life, admittedly it was rather odd to meet up with mythological creatures, get a dead dove slung around your neck, then go gallivanting after your lady love in a starship named DESIRE with a possibly immortal hero and his neurotic parrot, Bill had, in his brief lifetime which he hoped to extend, experienced unusual adventures in a number of exotic and nauseating places. (Which are chronicled in a number of exciting volumes all available at the outlet where you bought this book.) He took it all in stride.

However, from time to time, he would catch glimpses of disquieting unsolidity in his peripheral vision. Nothingness. Blankness. Nada. Tabula rasa. He'd swing his head around quickly, and whatever was supposed to be there, be it control board, dope dispenser, ersatz imitation food-substitute machine, dehydrated water-closet, parrot, Rick — suddenly was there. But only after a subliminal blur, a shuffling of the air, like a suggestion of a quick Tri-Dee dissolve or an acute hangover.

Since what rum he could keep down generally kept Bill numb enough to not care much (although in truth rum was soon knocked off his list of top ten alcoholic drinks, and he yearned for their arrival at the Holy Bar and Grill if only to drink his fill of other potables) what happened one morning was particularly upsetting. Yawning and blinking and wishing that the word rum would be permanently stricken from his memory banks, he noticed after awhile that he was having a hard time sealing up his space boots. Or rather he wasn't sealing up his space boots because he wasn't closing the seals. He could not close the seals because the stumps of his arms could not do the job because his hands were missing.

The wild frantic screaming and fits of panic woke up Captain Rick and his parrot soon enough. Yawning, Rick the Supernal Hero raced down to see what the fuss was about, wearing only his galactic Dr. Dentons and a yawn, Archimedes in full flap behind him.

"My hands!" Bill shrieked incontinently. "They're gone!"

Since Bill was waving his arms in the air and running hysterically around the room, thoroughly panicked, Captain Rick quickly realized that something was wrong.

"Oh by Heavens! Has the venereal scurvy struck again! Have you been touching something that you should not have been touching, you naughty Trooper. Here, let's have a look!" Rick ordered, placing a monocle over his good eye.

Quivering and shaking with this most frightful trauma that can be visited upon a Trooper, eyes averted, Bill slowly and reluctantly extended the stumps of his arms.

"Awwwwwk!" screeched the parrot, horrified at all the screaming and raw emotion. Somehow, it managed to hide its eyes with its wings.

"Well, I must say, this is a tempest in a teapot. Or something to do with the fickle finger of fate. There is, I am forced to say, no sign of disintegration, and certainly none of disappearance."

Baffled, Bill opened reluctant eyes and looked at his wrists. Hands. Two. Both in place.

"What kind of bowb is this?!" Bill howled in relief. "What's wrong with me? I'm going mad, I tell you, mad!"

"Let us do try not to overdramatize this late at night."

"Yes, I'm sorry." Bill's teeth chattered as he explained to Captain Rick the feelings of unreality he'd been experiencing lately. Since Bill was particularly frazzled and looked as though he wasn't going to get much sleep that night, Captain Rick treated him to a glass of warm soy milk with honey and mustard and rum. Guaranteed to cure anything. Or at least to take your mind off your troubles as you retched your guts out. It was a measure of Bill's distraction that he actually ingested the atrocious concoction and held his glass out for seconds.

"Arrrrr!" Captain Rick agreed, shaking his long locks. "I know what you mean, mate. I get that feeling from time to time meself. It's a strange life, it is. I'm just hoping I get me answers to me questions that have haunted me lo! these many years at the Holy Bar and Grill."

"Questions. What are your questions?"

"Why, the eternal questions of the Philosophers, of course, Bill me lad. The riddles that have haunted mankind since the ancient days, e'en before distilling was invented, which must have meant a pretty grim world.

"Namely, who came first, flying saucers or Raymond Palmer? Or, its logical corollary, did Raymond Palmer come from a Flying Saucer?

"Two, which came first, the chicken or the Western Omelette with home fries on the side?

"Three, if a tree falls in the woods, and there's no one there to hear it, does it fall upwards or downwards? And its corollary, if a deaf man falls in the wood, does he make a sound?

"Four, does God exist, and if he (or she) does why does drinking too much eventually kill you, why does sex produce disease and finally why can I never get good tickets for the Galactic World Series?

"And finally, Bill, the real stumper, what is the meaning of life, why is a man born, why does he live, and why does he die — and where the hell can I get a good bottle of Pepto Abysmal for Archimedes. I'm getting sick of the smell of parrot bowb all over the place."

Bill's head reeled at the depth of these philosophical questions. Incredible! Profound! It was all too much for him, so he asked for another soy milk and pyech to obfuscate the implications aborning in his head.

To relax him further, Captain Rick told him his story.

CAPTAIN RICK'S TALE
or
"Stars in My Handkerchief Like Clumps of Green Gunk"

to unwind the digital alarm clock.

So ginsberged out for the universe to give him a moniker.

The sub-voice answered with an eructation.

Belched forth the answer: Kid, you sniveling cyberrunt bratshit, what the bowb do I care? Captain Kid, Captain Rick, career astronauts and beats with bongos pound and sound forth the international anthems, and sheesh! the price of bananas in Nicaragua has skyrocketed, and elevator operators grease their asses with their thumbs, and Walden's and Dalton's are really down on Pynchon-hitters lately, so what why should I give a good Gesundheit? Anyway, I got this mouthful of cold espresso in my mouth, and hell if I know why? Jesus! Ptoui! Tastes dreadful!

Another minute Kid squatted on the Johnny-on-the-Spot, clutching his New York Review of Books and Little Magazine toilet paper, listening to his heaving breath and kerouac inner-music.

Beyond leafy trees, moonlight painted, wallpapered and interior decorated strips of fashionable West Village light in the forest.

He rubbed poetry across his bum. Somewhere in Soho (or maybe Tribeca) an art gallery opens a William Burroughs shotgun art show. The whole city has turned into skyscraper after skyscraper of art galleries in this fiction-turned-semirealscape of stranger-than-real gangs wandering inanely about with holograms for switchblades.

The leaves leered and winked.

The woman wearing a sweatshirt of shadows and a Jimi Hendrix hairdo rose up from the dark culture of Sixties and smell of hashish. A pill of light lay upon her nose.

Captain Kid and the woman had sex, and then tried to figure out what would happen in the eight hundred and seventy-seven page anticlimax.

For what is "Myth" but the neo-deconstructionist prose of a missing literary critic who lisps?

"Huh?" said Bill, quite baffled.

"Oh, sorry, that's the highbrow version for my intellectual friends at cocktail parties," said Captain Rick. "I dare say you want something more soothing. Arrrrrrr. Yes, I have just the thing."

Rick rolled out his thousand watt amplifier as big as a space tug, his Stratosphere-blaster electro-drone guitar. He laid down a few tasteful deady-metal fret licks (deady-metal being the au courant fashionable version of rock-and-roll, where computer-operated corpses of electrocuted murderers fronted your standard lead guitar, kitchen synth, drum and bass ensemble) and began to sing.

Archimedes squawked and, in a hail of feathers and a critical splatter of fresh doo-doo, fled the room.

CAPTAIN RICK'S STORY
TAKE TWO
"Ballad of the Supernal Hero"

They call me the Hero with a Thousand Faces.

I see lots of things and go lots of places.

I'm a mythic hero, I like to ramble.

But my hero's not Joseph but John W. Campbell.

Ye see, sometimes I'm a pirate, sometimes a saint,

But first a homo sapiens; coward I ain't.

Mankind was meant to rule all these stars

Build malls and condos, and taverns and bars.

As I child I was a wimp, I found nothing arousing.

Till I read John on Dean Drive and Dowsing.

Now I travel from planet to planet, circum-celestial

Killing things smart and extraterrestrial.

"Terra Uber-alles" I sing with a belch and a shout

And my surging male humanity I like to flout.

And when things get grim, and bare goes the cupboard

I just pull out DIANETICS by good old Ron Hubbard.

My greatest adventure. Hmm, well, let me see.

There was the time in a cantina that I had to wee

Alas, I'd left my blaster in my digital locker

There in the stall was Lay-ya and Luke Starfokker.

Now Lay-ya I'd divorced 'couple years before

Sex with a princess was mostly a bore.

Luke I thought was raising sheep on Mount Shasta.

"Help!" Luke cried. "We need you and your blaster!"

"Lord Brain-Death is back, the Farce help us all.

We hear Heavy Breathing, and that is his Call.

He's back from the dead, practicing evil Craft

I am scared, I am crazy — I'm going half daft."

No sooner said, that, than Storm Troopers attacked.

Dodging deathrays, quickly, to the DESIRE we backed.

We zoomed through space, hid in nebulean bogs.

Trained hard for the battle, read old ANALOGS.

Good old John Campbell, his essays were profounding!

Hectoring lectures in the good old ASTOUNDING.

In those pre-Spielberg days you'll have to agree

John would have crunched the ALIEN, barfed on ET.

"Bowb the Force," he'd have said, "Man the garrison!

Technology rules! Up Anderson! Up Harrison!

Alien invasion? Build a great gun!

Stay to the Right of Baen and Attila the Hun."

So we cobbled and soldered like technology's fools

A better death ray, using brains and slide rules!

John would've liked it, Doc Smith would turn green

Buddy, this beamer was big, huge, and obscene!

So we hurtled on out to meet the death fleet

A terrible sight — they were something to meet!

A thousand alien ships, designed by George Lucas

Wanted to turn us to slag and horrible mucus.

"Surrender to the Dark Side," said Death, big surprise!

"Join the Empire! Make mythic movies! Merchandise!"

In answer we just aimed our out big beamer and happily shot 'em

No way was John's boys gonna kiss the Empire's bottom.

Now, for Brain Death technology was a given!

But his scientists hadn't read Tom Clancy, Pournelle and Niven

ASF's sons, all — so what if they couldn't write.

They knew their nuts from their bolts, and boy could they fight.

Our blaster, you see, wasn't loaded with energy rounds.

It was stocked with ultra and hyperfrequency sounds.

Homocentric readings from Asimov, deCamp and Clement.

Dickson and del Rey, thrilling as drying cement.

We blasted the coup de grace! Hyperboreals!

John W. Campbell's editorials!

Stunned, the Empire's death ships whimpered away.

Old Death hoisted surrender. Ours was the day!

They say good old John Campbell, he's somewhere up there.

Watching new writers with all their hot air.

Gulping aloud great celestial gulps.

"If this junk is SF — then bring back the pulps!"

The last chords of the song hung in the air between them like the final strains of Bill's favorite martial music by John Philip Soused. Big fat tears dripped down his cheeks. He sniffled and choked back his heart rising in his throat.

"Bowb! That ... that was the most beautiful song ... I ... I ever heard in my entire life."

"Then you will be feeling better, First Mate Bill?"

"Yeah! Much better."

"Arrrrrr! That's me hearty! You're a super trooper, Bill. Arrrrr! It's a pleasure having you aboard. Now we better get back to our hammocks and squeeze in the winks! Navigational computer says that the Holy Bar and Grill is just a matter of days away!"

Irma! He would be able to see Irma again. He sighed with passion like a leaking locomotive. Smiling happily at the thought of her bright innocent eyes, her shapely body, her gentle feminine sighs.

He fell asleep then, still smiling. Dreaming dreams of such erotic content that his body temperature rose five degrees and moisture condensed on the bulkhead above.