CHAPTER 8

LAST CALL AT THE HOLY BAR AND GRILL

As it happened, it took somewhat more than a week to finally find their goal, and Rick the Supernal Hero had to resort to a variation of the Bloater Drive he'd bought in a used starship lot, called a Bilious Drive. Bill had always hated the Bloater Drive when Empire Trooper ships had used it to hop between star systems and if anything the Bilious Drive was exceedingly worse, since it involved pumping the entire space ship full of a singularly repulsive mixture of xenon and hydrogen and sulfurous gases which made everything — if the Bible is to be believed — literally stink like hell. When the right mixture of gases had been reached, their molecules were vibrated electronically until the gas, the ship and all of its contents were shaking like crazy and synchronized with the atomic pulse beat of their destination. The instant this occurred everything would be belched across the cosmic distances in a most uncomfortable and sickening manner. Bill even thought good things about the Bloater Drive when this happened.

But when the starship named DESIRE finally drifted into the Ad Hoc System, he saw the gigantic neon signs flashing out the letters "Holy Bar and Grill," "On the Sands Stage: Mr. Wayne Newton!" and "Nude Drinking" and "Topless-Bottomless Bar" which he hoped meant more nudity and not prefrontal lobotomy and gluteotomy. A tear in his eye, a frog in his throat — and incipient liver failure on the horizon — Bill knew that his heart had finally found a home.

The Holy Bar and Grill was actually a large complex of hover-buildings, squatting beatifically in a bank of chartreuse clouds on anti-grav plates, high above the giant methane world of Zeus.

"Old Zeus loves this huge planet mostly because it's named after him," explained Rick as he swung the starship named DESIRE in to land it on a pillar of crimson flame.

"Yikes," said Bill. "How come there's a pillar of crimson flame down there in the middle of that spaceport?"

"Complimentary ionized starship hull cleaning service!"

"We're going to cook!"

"Also kills any space bacteria hanging onto the fins. Asteroid barnacles and such. Don't worry, Bill. It's perfectly harmless."

Later, after their burns were treated and the roasted Archimedes, who had fired his last guanic salvo, was served up in sandwiches as a thank you to the white-robed medics who had treated them, Rick allowed that he had forgotten you were supposed to turn up the air conditioning a tad when landing in the Holy Pillar of Starship Cleaning Flame. Bill took it all in stride. Cleaning up parrot bowb wasn't too bad, but Archimedes' constant stream of knock-knock jokes was beginning to set his teeth on edge. It was a pleasure to realize that he would never have to listen again to the like of "Knock-knock," "Who's there?," "Toby," "Toby who?" "Toby or not Toby."

And he was really looking forward to a nice cold beer!

The Holy Bar and Grill was the biggest drinking saloon Bill had ever seen. After they checked into their room at the overpriced and undercleaned Hiltom Hotel, they walked past banks upon banks upon banks of slot machines, blackjack tables and Galactic lottery booths. Bill was stunned. The bar in the main building stretched for over two miles and there were clouds obscuring the far end. It was lined with an army of cloned android bartenders, all of whom looked equally repulsive, with pig's heads — which had a tendency to drool down their tusks — and twelve-fingered hands which were great for carrying a lot of glasses at once.

The lines of taps served every beer in the known universe, from Old Peculier from a planet called England to Really Old and a Lot More Peculier from Ireland, along with Happy Barrel Dredgings from New South Whales. Lines of all manner of bottled spirits strung out like colorful baubles on a giant prostrate Christmas tree stretching for kilometers and kilometers. Bill was alternately assailed by whiff's and fumes of blissful brews, scintillating spirits. Oh, heady hops! Oh, mischievous malts, ah! the blissful joys of alcohol! He had the sudden thought that maybe in this place even the bar-rags probably tasted good, but resisted the sudden impulse to find out.

In mundane matters like women and the Troopers, Bill was simply a knee jerk, reflex kind of guy with any traces of conscience or original thought eroded away by years of military indoctrination. But in matters of drinking, he often waxed philosophical since this, and creative cursing, were the only areas of originality the Troopers had left open to him. Why, some pundit had asked recently, when there are numerous varieties of mood and mind-altering drugs available these days, naturally from exotic worlds, or synthetically from legal or illegal laboratories, why is the favored drug amongst the military, and perhaps even the human universe alcohol in all its insidious forms?

To this question, Bill had three relevant responses:

1. Alcohol gets you drunk.

2. Alcohol then gets you even drunker.

3. Alcohol then gets you unconscious, which is the only escape from the military a Lifer would ever get.

But, continued the pundit's challenge, why alcohol when there are so many other inebriating drugs that were less addictive, that did not cause eventual gross tissue damage in the internal organs, that did not have such a history, of human degradation, suffering and shame permanently affixed to all their various and sundry forms?

Bill might have pointed out that perhaps there was a natural need in a human being to get blotto from time to time; but he was only aware of this instinctually and could not articulate the thought or the urge. He might have sung the praises for the panorama of taste available in the wide range of alcoholic drinkables, but since most of his favorite drinks tasted awful and since by the third or fourth drink he didn't taste anything anyway, he didn't.

As it happened, one day in the misty past in a low bar on Boozeworld, a Trooper R & R center, Bill was enthusiastically sitting, enjoying a couple dozen drinks and heading quickly for alcoholic extinction while ogling the multiple pink mammaries of the whorebots, the entertainment the planet provided, when a temperance-minded missionary, transported there by the authorities as some sort of sadistic joke, supremely disgusted by the activities of his fellow humans at the bar, brought up these very same arguments to Bill and asked him why, in light of all knowledge of the evils of drink, he was ruining himself with demon liquor.

Bill had remembered saying, with great drunken clarity and understanding, "Because I can feel it doing me harm." Not satisfied, the missionary had pressed for a more intelligent explanation so that Bill, too drunk to expound at length, and physically incapable of shlurring more than the shimplest shentence, summed all up in a brilliant Cartesian sentence:

"I drink, therefore I am."

He had then added a certain pungent punctuation to his remarks by flipping his cookies all over the missionary before mercifully passing out.

But the philosophy stuck, and so did the philosophical wax, so now as he surveyed this dipsomaniac Disneyland, spread out before him like a feast of unreason, he 'am'ed with every core of his being, much as Zoroastrian monks 'om'ed with theirs.

"Finally! Finally, I have reached my goal," said Rick, the Supernal Hero, falling upon his knees with awe. "Throughout the universe I have searched for one particular beer! And here is the Holy Bar and Grill, which surely serves every potation concocted in the Universe! A bar of truly mythic proportions!" He struggled up to his feet, stumbled toward a clearing in the shiny waxed wood. "Arrrrrrr! C'mon, first mate. This one's on me!"

Bill, never one to refuse a free drink, followed his Captain. But at the same time he surveyed with growing gloom the crowds milling through the huge bar. How ever was he going to find Irma in this place?

"Bartender!" called out Rick. "Set up a round for me and my buddy."

"What's your poison, fella?" said the bartender with asinine enthusiasm at the stupid line.

"Holy Grail Stout!" said Rick with a broad grin as he slapped his Gold Galactic cred voucher on the walnut surface of the bar.

All drinkers within earshot stopped talking, stopped drinking, seemed to even stop breathing. They turned and stared at the newcomer and the bartender.

"Sorry, stranger," lisped the bartender in an unctuous androidal voice. "That's the one brew we don't have."

Rick blinked. "Well, then, how about some Holy Grail ale?"

"Sorry. Don't have that either."

"Uhmm. Well, then, what about Holy Grail lager."

"Nope."

"Holy Grail pilsner?"

"Uh uh."

Rick, by this time, had turned quite white. "Arrrrrrr! But I've traveled parsecs upon parsecs to slake this special thirst. I was told that the Holy Bar and Grill served every drink known to mankind!"

"We do. Everything but the Holy Grail line. Nobody knows where that stuff is, though we've had plenty of Sir Galahads and Sir Reptitious like you traipsing through looking for it. How about a nice Aldebaran Moosetail bitter? I personally can vouch you'll not find a better brew south of the North Star!"

The crestfallen Rick muttered gloomily, "No way. I am going to need something a lot stronger than that to kill the growing state of depression that is about to overwhelm me. Two Dickhead whiskeys, bartender. That is two barrels. And you'd better serve them in pint mugs."

That sounded good to Bill. Anything but rum. He accepted his Dickhead mug, needed both hands to lift it, and with uncharacteristic reserve, merely sipped it as he surveyed the room. That is, after he had half-drained it to see if it had gone off in the barrel. Still no sign of Irma. And thankfully, no sight either of gentlemen walking about carrying thunderbolts in their hands, as Zeus was reputed to do.

However, parts of the room were peripherally fading in and out. That damnable problem with his grip on reality again! Maybe this huge room held too much for his tiny brain to absorb, thought Bill. By the end of the Dickhead jug, however, and the beginning of the next, things were fading in and out even more, but by this time Bill really didn't care.

Finally, after the second barrel was well gotten into and he was feeling decidedly squiffed, the man parked at the bar beside them tapped him on the shoulder. "Oy, mate!" he said, staring at him through bottle-bottom glasses. "What's that 'anging 'round yer neck there?"

Bill had become so accustomed to his little item of deceased avian jewelry since the "loo stasis" had been sprayed on, stopping the stench, that he'd almost forgotten about it.

"This," he said, watching as a fly was zapped in the static electronic field, "...this is a dead dove. Quiet, though, pal. Don't call attention. Everybody will want one too."

The interruption, however, had succeeded in knocking Bill out of his alcoholic reverie and slightly back on course. He remembered the main reason he was here at the Holy Bar and Grill.

"Irma!" he cried aloud, turning and frantically shaking his companion's arm. "Captain Rick, do you zhee Irma anywhere hereaboutsabouts?"

Captain Rick, dejected and depressed, was just working his way towards the bottom of the whiskey barrel, mumbling to himself about searching for Holy Grail beer until the day he died. "Irma?" he said, eyelids at half-mast, trying to get Bill in focus. "Just find Zeus, man. When you find Zeus, you'll find Irma."

"Zeus? But how the bowb am I going to find Zeus?" Bill said. "There must be hundreds of thousands of people in this place."

"Who's looking for people?" Rick cackled incontinently. "You're looking for a god."

"Zeus?" said the neighbor. "You looking for the Great God Zeus? Why didn't you say so, mate? I just passed the bugger coming back from a celestial slash down in the Netherzone Quadrant. He's got 'imself a private party going down there."

"Netherzone Quadrant?" said Bill, his excitement at the thought of finding Irma sobering him slightly. "Where's that?"

"Like I said, it's down by the WCs! The Bogs, Jakes — or whatever you call them in your dialect." The mustachioed gentleman pointed over to the side of the hall, where four signs were posted. No writing on them, just Intergalactic symbols. One sign depicted a man, another what was probably a woman. Bill blinked at them rapidly until he could make them out. Men's and ladies' room he guessed. The adjoining sign depicted a six-limbed chitinous creature. Alien's room. The last was the largest, and it showed a huge halo parked by a toilet.

Gods' room.

"Rick, I'm going down to find Irma," said Bill.

"Go 'head. Arm. I'm not going anywhere." And, in the endless quest for alcoholic companionship, misery and drunkenness love sympathy, he bought the neighbor a drink, and together they toasted the dead and much-missed Archimedes the parrot.

Bill, who missed the feathery farter not at all, indeed had his own dead bird to consider, did not join in. He headed for the toilet signs, and there took a pneumatic tube to the Netherzone Quadrant. After visiting the men's room successfully, he emerged back into the long corridor. He only had to walk a very short distance to hear the thunder and booming of Zeus' party.

Roaring big band music filled the air as he opened the door and was confronted by the vast and twisted alien Escher print panorama of the Netherzone Room. Apparently, Zeus had twisted gravitational effects in such pretzel forms that in one part of the huge room, people were standing on the ceiling, and in four others, people were standing on the walls. As for the big band — well, that multitudinous ensemble hung swaying in a crescent moon suspended in the very middle of the room. They were doing a heated version of an ear-destroying number that had the walls throbbing in and out. Suddenly, as Bill walked into the wash of music and art-wrecko atmosphere, his mood foot started twitching and spasming, moving about in time to the beat.

The hairy-hoofed thing was trying to dance!

"That's 'Satin Doll' they're playing, idiot! Not Satyr's Doll!"

However, the foot ignored him, and he had to prance about a little as he moved about the roomscape, searching for Zeus and his lost true love, the incredibly luscious and lost Irma!

It did not take long to find Zeus. The God was on the ceiling, sitting at a long table crowded with a cornucopia of contraband.