Bill, the Galactic Hero

by Harry Harrison

  In fact he snapped just about the snappiest salute possible since there aren't that very many people with two right arms. Both arms swung up in precise circles, both elbows quivered at right angles, both palms clicked neatly against both eyebrows. It was well done and took the Emperor by surprise and for one vibrating instant he managed to get both eyeballs pointed at Bill at the same time before they wandered away at random again. The Emperor, still a little disturbed by the unusual salute groped for the medal and plunged the pin through Bill's tunic squarely into his shivering flesh.

  Bill felt no pain, but the sudden stab triggered the growing emotion that had been rushing through him. Dropping the salutes he fell to his knees in good old peasant-serf style just like a historical teevee, which in fact was just where his obsequious subconscious had dredged up the idea from, and seized the Emperor's knob-knuckled and liver-spotted hand. "Father to us all!" Bill exulted and kissed the hand.

  Grim-eyed the bodyguard of generals leaped forward and death beat sable wings over Bill, but the Emperor smiled as he pulled his hand gently away and wiped the saliva off on Bill's tunic. A casual flick of his finger restored the bodyguard to position and he moved on to the gunner, pinned on the remaining medal and stepped back.

  "Cut!" Director Ratt shouted. "Print that, it's a natural with that dumb hick going through the slobbering act."

  As Bill struggled back to his feet he saw that the Emperor had not returned to the throne but was instead standing in the midst of the milling crowd of actors. The bodyguard had vanished. Bill blinked, bewildered, as a man whipped the Emperor's crown from his head, popped it into a box and hurried away with it.

  "The brake is jammed," the gunner said, still saluting with a vibrating arm. "Pull the damn thing down for me. It never works right above shoulder level."

  "But — the Emperor —" Bill said, tugging at the locked arm until the brakes squealed and released.

  "An actor — what else? Do you think they have the real Emperor giving out medals to other-ranks? Field grade and higher I bet. But they put on a bit of an act with him so some poor rube, like you, can get carried away. You were great."

  "Here you are," a man said, handing them both stamped metal copies of the medals they were wearing and whipping off the originals.

  "Places!" the director's amplified voice boomed. "We got just ten minutes to run through the Empress and the baby kissing with the Aldebaranian septuplets for the Fertility Hour. Get those plastic babies out here and get those damn spectators off the set."

  The heroes were pushed into the corridor and the door slammed and locked behind them.

  CHAPTER TWO

  "I'm tired," the gunner said, "and besides, my burns hurt." He had had a short circuit during action in the Enlisted Men's Olde Knocking Shoppe and had set the bed on fire.

  "Aw, come on," Bill insisted. "We have three-day passes before our ship leaves and we are on Helior the Imperial Planet! What riches there are to see here, the Hanging Gardens, the Rainbow Fountains, the Jewelled Palaces. You can't miss them."

  "Just watch me. As soon as I catch up on some sleep its back to the Olde Knocking Shoppe for me. If you're so hot on someone holding your hand while you go sightseeing take the sergeant."

  "He's still drunk."

  The infantry sergeant was a solitary drinker who did not believe in cutting corners. Neither did he believe in dilution or in wasting money on fancy packaging. He had used all of his money to bribe a medical orderly and had obtained two carboys of 99 per cent pure grain alcohol, a drum of glucose and saline solution, a hypodermic needle and a length of rubber tubing. The ethyl-glucose-saline mixture in carboys had been slung from a rafter over his bunk with the tubing leading to the needle plunged into his arm and taped into place as an intravenous drip. Now he was unmoving, well fed and completely blind drunk all the time and if the metered flow were undisturbed he should stay drunk for two and a half years.

  Bill put a finishing gloss on his boots and locked the brush into his locker with the rest of his gear. He might be late getting back: it was easy to get lost here on Helior when you didn't have a Guide. It had taken them almost an entire day to find their way from the studio to their quarters even with the sergeant, a man who knew all about maps, leading the way. As long as they stayed near their own area there was no problem, but Bill had had his fill of the homely pleasures provided for the fighting men. He wanted to see Helior, the real Helior, the first city of the galaxy. If no one would go with him he would do it alone.

  It was very hard, in spite of the Floor Plan, to tell just exactly how far away anything was on Helior since the plans were all diagrammatic and had no scale. But the trip he was planning seemed to be a long one since one of the key bits of transportation, an evacuated tunnellinear magnetic car, went across at least 84 sub-maps. His destination might very well be on the other side of the planet! A city as large as a planet! The concept was almost too big to grasp! In fact, when he thought about it, the concept was too big to grasp.

  The sandwiches he had brought from the dispenser in the barracks ran out before he was halfway to his destination and his stomach, greedily getting adjusted to solid food again, rumbled complaints until he left the slideway in Area 9266-L, Level something or other or wherever the hell he was and looked for a canteen. He was obviously in a Typing Area because the crowds were composed almost completely of women with rounded shoulders and great long fingers. The only canteen he could find was jammed with them and he sat in the middle of the high-pitched yattering crowd and forced himself to eat a meal composed of the only available food: dated fruitbread cheese and anchovy paste sandwiches, mashed potatoes with raisin and onion sauce washed down by herb tea served luke warm in cups the size of his thumb. It wouldn't have been so bad if the dispenser hadn't automatically covered everything with butterscotch sauce. None of the girls seemed to notice him since they were all under light hypnosis during the working day in order to cut down their error percentages. He worked his way through the food feeling very much like a ghost as they tittered and yammered over and around him, their fingers, if they weren't eating, compulsively typing their words on to the edge of the table while they talked. He finally escaped, but the meal had had a depressing effect, and this was probably where he made the mistake and boarded the wrong car.

  Since the same level and block numbers were repeated in every area, it was possible to get into the wrong area and spend a good deal of time getting good and lost before the mistake was finally realized. Bill did this, and after the usual astronomical number of changes and varieties of transportation he boarded the elevator that terminated, he thought, in the galaxy-famed Palace Gardens. All of the other passengers got off on lower levels and the robelevator picked up speed as it hurtled up to the topmost level. He rose into the air as it braked to a stop and his ears popped with the pressure change, and when the doors opened he stepped out into a snow-filled wind. He gaped about with unbelief and behind him the doors snicked shut and the elevator vanished.

  The doors had opened directly on to the metal plain that made up the topmost layer of the city, now obscured by the swirling clouds of snow. Bill groped for the button to recall the elevator when a vagrant swirl of wind whipped the snow away and the warm sun beat down on him from the cloudless sky. This was impossible.

  "This is impossible," Bill said with forthright indignation.

  "Nothing is impossible if I will it," a scratchy voice spoke from behind Bill's shoulder. "For I am The Spirit of Life."

  Bill skittered sideways like a homeostatic robhorse, rolling his eyes at the small, white-whiskered man with a twitching nose and red-rimmed eyes who had appeared soundlessly behind him.

  "You got a leak in your think-tank," Bill snapped, angry at himself for being so goosy.

  "You'd be nuts too on this job," the little man sobbed and knuckled a pendant drop from his nose. "Half-froze, half-cooked and half-wiped out most of the time on oxy. The Spirit of Life," he quavered, "mine is the power..."

>   "Now that you mention it," Bill's words were muffled by a sudden flurry of snow, "I am feeling a bit high myself. Wheeee...!!" The wind veered and swept the occluding clouds of snow away and Bill gaped at the suddenly revealed view.

  Slushy snow and pools of water spotted the surface as far as he could see. The golden coating had been worn away and the metal was grey and pitted beneath, streaked with ruddy rivulets of rust. Rows of great pipes, each thicker than a man is tall, snaked towards him from over the horizon and ended in funnel-like mouths. The funnels were obscured by whirling clouds of vapour and snow that shot high into the air with a hushed roar, though one of the vapour columns collapsed and the cloud dispersed while Bill watched.

  "Number eighteen blown!" the old man shouted into a microphone, grabbed a clipboard from the wall and kicked his way through the slush towards a rusty and dilapidated walkway that groaned and rattled along parallel with the pipes. Bill followed, shouting at the man who now completely ignored him. As the walkway, clanking and swaying, carried them along, Bill began to wonder just where the pipes led, and after a minute when his head cleared a bit curiosity got the better of him and he strained ahead to see what the mysterious bumps were on the horizon. They slowly resolved themselves into a row of giant spaceships, each one connected to one of the thick pipes. With unexpected agility the old man sprang from the walkway and bounded towards the ship at station eighteen where the tiny figures of workers, high up, were disconnecting the seals that joined the ship to the pipe. The old man copied numbers from a meter attached to the pipe while Bill watched a crane swing over with the end of a large flexible hose that emerged from the surface they were standing on. It was attached to the valve on top of the spaceship. A rumbling vibration shook the hose and from around the seal to the ship emerged puffs of black cloud that drifted over the stained metal plain.

  "Could I ask just what the hell is going on here?" Bill said plaintively.

  "Life! Life everlasting!" the old man crowed, swinging up from the glooms of his depression towards the heights of manic elation.

  "Could you be a little more specific?"

  "Here is a world sheathed in metal," he stamped his foot and there was a dull boom. "What does that mean?"

  "It means the world is sheathed in metal."

  "Correct. For a trooper you show a remarkable turn of intelligence. So you take a planet and cover it with metal, and you got a planet where the only green growing things are in the Imperial Gardens and a couple of window boxes. Then what do you have?"

  "Everybody dead," Bill said, for after all he was a farmboy and up on all the photosynthesis and chlorophyll bowb.

  "Correct again. You and I and the Emperor and a couple of billion other slobs are working away turning all the oxygen into carbon dioxide, and with no plants around to turn it back into oxygen and if we keep at it long enough we breathe ourselves to death."

  "Then these ships are bringing in liquid oxygen?"

  The old man bobbed his head and jumped back on to the slideway; Bill followed. "Affirm. They get it for free on the agricultural planets. And after they empty here they load up with carbon extracted at great expense from the CO2 and whip back with it to the hickworlds where it is burned for fuel, used for fertilizer, combined into numberless plastics and other products...."

  Bill stepped from the slideway at the nearest elevator while the old man and his voice vanished into the vapour, and crouching down, his head pounding from the oxy jag, he began flipping furiously through his Floor Plan. While he waited for the elevator he found his place from the code number on the door and began to plot a new course towards the Palace Gardens.

  This time he did not allow himself to be distracted. By only eating candy bars and drinking carbonated beverages from the dispensers along his route he avoided the dangers and distractions of the eateries, and by keeping himself awake he avoided missing connections. With black bags under his eyes and teeth rotting in his head he stumbled from a gravshaft and with thudding heart finally saw a florally decorated and colourfully illuminated scent-sign that said HANGING GARDENS. There was an entrance turnstile and a cashier's window.

  "One please."

  "That'll be ten Imperial bucks."

  "Isn't that a little expensive?" he said peevishly, unrolling the bills one by one from his thin wad.

  "If you're poor don't come to Helior."

  The cashier-robot was primed with all the snappy answers. Bill ignored it and pushed through into the gardens. They were everything he had ever dreamed of and more. As he walked down the grey cinder path inside the outer wall he could see green shrubs and grass just on the other side of the titanium mesh fence. No more than a hundred yards away, on the other side of the grass, were floating exotic plants and flowers from all the worlds of the Empire. And there! Tiny in the distance were the Rainbow Fountains, almost visible to the naked eye. Bill slipped a coin into one of the telescopes and watched their colours glow and wane and it was just as good as seeing it on teevee. He went on, circling inside the wall, bathed by the light of the artificial sun in the giant dome above.

  But even the heady pleasures of the gardens waned in the face of the soul-consuming fatigue that gripped him in iron hands. There were steel benches pegged to the wall and he dropped into one to rest for a moment, then closed his eyes for a second to ease the glare. His chin dropped on to his chest and before he realized it he was sound asleep. Other visitors scrunched by on the cinders without disturbing him, nor did he move when one sat down at the far end of the bench.

  Since Bill never saw this man there is no point in describing him, suffice to say that he had sallow skin, a broken, reddened nose, feral eyes peering from under a simian brow, wide hips and narrow shoulders, mismatched feet, lean, knobby, dirty fingers and a twitch.

  Long seconds of eternity ticked by while the man sat there. Then, for a few moments, there were no other visitors in sight. With a quick, snake-like motion the newcomer whipped an atomic arc-pencil from his pocket. The small, incredibly hot flame whispered briefly as he pressed it against the chain that secured Bill's Floor Plan to his waist, just at the point where the looped chain rested on the metal bench. In a trice the metal of the chain was welded fast to the metal of the bench. Still undisturbed, Bill slept on.

  A wolfish grin flickered across the man's face like the evil rings formed in sewer water by a diving rat. Then, with a single swift motion, the atomic flame severed the chain near the volume. Pocketing the arc-pencil the thief rose, plucked Bill's Floor Plan from his lap and strode quickly away.

  CHAPTER THREE

  At first Bill didn't appreciate the magnitude of his loss. He swam slowly up out of his sleep, thickheaded, with the feeling that something was wrong. Only after repeated tugging did he realize that the chain was stuck fast to the bench and that the book was gone. The chain could not be freed and in the end he had to unfasten it from his belt and leave it dangling. Retracing his steps to the entrance he knocked on the cashier's window.

  "No refunds," the robot said.

  "I want to report a crime."

  "The police handle crime. You want to talk to the police. You talk to the police on a phone. Here is a phone. The number is 111-11-111." A small door slid open and a phone popped out catching Bill in the chest and knocking him back on his heels. He dialled the number.

  "Police," a voice said and a bulldog-faced sergeant wearing a Prussian blue uniform and a scowl appeared on the screen.

  "I want to report a theft."

  "Grand larceny or petty larceny?"

  "I don't know, it was my Floor Plan that was stolen."

  "Petty larceny. Proceed to your nearest police station. This is an emergency circuit and you are tying it up illegally. The penalty for illegally tying up an emergency circuit is..." Bill jammed hard on the button and the screen went blank. He turned back to the robot cashier.

  "No refunds," it said. Bill snarled impatiently.

  "Shut up. All I want to know is where the nearest police station i
s."

  "I am a cashier robot not an information robot. That information is not in my memory. I suggest you consult your Floor Plan."

  "But it's my Floor Plan that has been stolen!"

  "I suggest you talk to the police."

  "But..." Bill turned red and kicked the cashier's box angrily. "No refunds," it said as he stalked away.

  "Drinky, drinky, make you stinky," a robot bar said rolling up and whispering in his ear. It made the sound of ice cubes rattling in a frosty glass.

  "A damn good idea. Beer. A large one." He pushed coins into its money slot and clutched at the dispos-a-stein that rattled down the chute and almost bounced to the ground. It cooled and refreshed him and calmed his anger. He looked at the sign that said TO THE JEWELLED PALACE. "I'll go to the palace, have a look-see, then find someone there who can direct me to the police station. Ouch!" The robot bar had pulled the dispos-a-stein from his hand, almost taking his forefinger with it, and with unerring robotic aim hurled it 32 feet into the open mouth of a rubbish shaft that projected from a wall.