Bill, the Galactic Hero

by Harry Harrison

  "A little slip of the pen," Blackey sighed. "You can't win them all."

  He dodged the kick Bill swung at him then waited patiently while the MPs beat Bill senseless with their clubs and dragged him aboard the ship.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Veniola...a fog-shrouded world of untold horrors, creeping in its orbit around the ghoulish green star Hernia like some repellent heavenly trespasser newly rose from the nethermost pit. What secrets lie beneath the eternal mists? What nameless monsters undulate and gibber in its dank tarns and bottomless black lagoons? Faced by the unspeakable terrors of this planet men go mad rather than face up to the faceless. Veniola...swamp world, the lair of the hideous and unimaginable Venians....

  It was hot and it was damp and it stank. The wood of the newly constructed barracks was already soft and rotting away. You took your shoes off and before they hit the floor fungus was growing out of them. Once inside the compound their chains were removed, since there was no place for labour camp prisoners to escape to, and Bill wheeled around looking for Blackey, the fingers of Tembo's right arm snapping like hungry jaws. Then he remembered that Blackey had spoken to one of the guards as they were leaving the ship, had slipped him something, and a little while later had been unlocked from the line and led away. By now he would be running the file section and by tomorrow he would be living in the nurse's quarters. Bill sighed, then let the whole thing slip out of his mind and vanish, since it was just one more antagonistic factor that he had no control over, and dropped down on to the nearest bunk. Instantly a vine flashed up from a crack in the floor, whipped four times around the bunk lashing him securely to it, then plunged tendrils into his leg and began to drink his blood.

  "Grrrrk...!" Bill croaked against the pressure of a green loop that tightened around his throat.

  "Never lie down without you got a knife in your hand," a thin, yellowish sergeant said as he passed by and severed the vine, with his own knife, where it emerged from the floorboards.

  "Thanks, sarge," Bill said, stripping off the coils and throwing them out of the window.

  The sergeant suddenly began vibrating like a plucked string and dropped on to the foot of Bill's bunk. "P-pocket...shirt...p-p-pills..." he stuttered through chattering teeth. Bill pulled a plastic box of pills out of the sergeant's pocket and forced some of them into his mouth. The vibrations stopped and the man sagged back against the wall, gaunter and yellower and streaming with sweat.

  "Jaundice and swamp fever and galloping filariasis, never know when an attack will hit me, that's why they can't send me back to combat, I can't hold a gun. Me, Master-sergeant Ferkel, the best damned flame-thrower in Kirjassoff's Kutthroats, and they have me playing nursemaid in a prison labour camp. So you think that bugs me? It does not bug me, it makes me happy, and the only thing that would make me happier would be shipping off this cesspool-planet at once."

  "Do you think alcohol will hurt your condition?" Bill asked, passing over a bottle of cough syrup. "It's kind of rough here?"

  "Not only won't hurt it but it will..." There was a deep gurgling and when the sergeant spoke again he was hoarser but stronger. "Rough is not the word for it. Fighting the Chingers is bad enough, but on this planet they have the natives, the Venians, on their side. These Venians look like mouldy newts and they got just maybe enough I.Q. to hold a gun and pull the trigger, but it is their planet and they are but murder out there in the swamps. They hide under the mud and they swim under the water and they swing from the trees and the whole planet is thick with them. They got no sources of supply, no army divisions, no organizations, they just fight. If one dies the others eat him. If one is wounded in the leg the others eat the leg and he grows a new one. If one of them runs out of ammunition or poison darts or whatever he just swims back a hundred miles to base, loads up and back to battle. We have been fighting here for three years and we now control one hundred square miles of territory."

  "A hundred, that sounds like a lot."

  "Just to a stupid bowb like you. That is ten miles by ten miles, and maybe about two square miles more than we captured in the first landings."

  There was the squish-thud of tired feet and weary, mud-soaked men began to drag into the barracks. Sergeant Ferkel hauled himself to his feet and blew a long blast on his whistle.

  "All right you new men, now hear this. You have all been assigned to B squad which is now assembling in the compound, which squad will now march out into the swamp and finish the job these shagged creeps from A squad began this morning. You will do a good days work out there. I am not going to appeal to your sense of loyalty, your honour or your sense of duty...." Ferkel whipped out his atomic pistol and blew a hole in the ceiling through which rain began to drip. "I am only going to appeal to your urge to survive, because any man shirking, goofing-off or not pulling his own weight will personally be shot dead by me. Now get out." With his bared teeth and shaking hands he looked sick enough and mean enough and mad enough to do it. Bill and the rest of B squad rushed out into the rain and formed ranks.

  "Pick up da axes, pick up da picks, get the uranium out," the corporal of the armed guard snarled as they squelched through the mud towards the gate. The labour squad, carrying their tools, stayed in the centre, while the armed guard walked on the outside. The guard wasn't there to stop the prisoners from escaping but to give some measure of protection from the enemy. They dragged slowly down the road of felled trees that wound through the swamp. There was a sudden whistling overhead and heavy transports flashed by.

  "We're in luck today," one of the older prisoners said, "they're sending in the heavy infantry again. I didn't know they had any left."

  "You mean they'll capture more territory?" Bill asked.

  "Naw, all they'll get is dead. But while they're getting butchered some of the pressure will be off of us and we can maybe work without losing too many men."

  Without orders they all stopped to watch as the heavy infantry fell like rain into the swamps ahead — and vanished just as easily as raindrops. Every once in a while there would be a boom and flash as a teensie A-bomb went off, which probably atomized a few Venians, but there were billions more of the enemy just waiting to rush in. Small arms crackled in the distance and grenades boomed. Then over the trees they saw a bobbing, bouncing figure approach. It was a heavy infantryman in his armoured suit and gas-proof helmet, A-bombs and grenades strapped to him, a regular walking armoury. Or rather hopping armoury, since he would have had trouble walking on a paved street with the weight of junk hung about him, so he therefore moved by jumping, using two reaction rockets, one bolted to each hip. His hops were getting lower and lower as he came near. He landed 50 yards away and slowly sank to his waist in the swamp, his rockets hissing as they touched the water. Then he hopped again, much shorter this time, the rockets fizzling and popping, and he threw his helmet open in the air.

  "Hey, guys," he called. "The dirty Chingers got my fuel tank. My rockets are almost out, I can't hop much more. Give a buddy a hand will you...." He hit the water with a splash.

  "Get outta the monkey suit and we'll pull you in," the guard corporal called.

  "Are you nuts!" the soldier shouted. "It takes an hour to get into and outta this thing." He triggered his rockets but they just went pfffft and he rose about a foot in the water, then dropped back. "The fuel's gone! Help me you bastards! What's this, bowb-your-buddy week...." he shouted as he sank, then his head went under and there were a few bubbles and nothing else.

  "It's always bowb-your-buddy week," the corporal said. "Get the column moving!" he ordered, and they shuffled forward. "Them suits weigh 3,000 pounds. Go down like a rock."

  If this was a quiet day, Bill didn't want to see a busy one. Since the entire planet of Veniola was a swamp, no advances could be made until a road was built. Individual soldiers might penetrate a bit ahead of the road, but for equipment or supplies or even heavily armed men a road was necessary. Therefore the labour corps was building a road of felled trees. At the front.

/>   Bursts from atom rifles steamed in the water around them and the poison darts were as thick as falling leaves. The firing and sniping on both sides was constant while the prisoners cut down trees, trimmed and lashed them together to push the road forward another few inches. Bill trimmed and chopped and tried to ignore the screams and falling bodies until it began to grow dark. The squad, now a good deal smaller, made their return march in the dusk.

  "We pushed it ahead at least 30 yards this afternoon," Bill said to the old prisoner marching at his side.

  "Don't mean nothing, Venians swim up in the night and take the logs away."

  Bill instantly made his mind up to get out of there.

  "Got any more of that joyjuice?" Sergeant Ferkel asked when Bill dropped on to his bunk and began to scrape some of the mud from his boots with the blade of his knife. Bill took a quick slash at a plant coming up through the floorboards before he answered.

  "Do you think you could spare me a moment to give me some advice, sergeant?"

  "I am a flowing fountain of advice once my throat is lubricated."

  Bill dug a bottle out of his pocket. "How do you get out of this outfit?" he asked.

  "You get killed," the sergeant told him as he raised the bottle to his lips. Bill snatched it out of his hand.

  "That I know without your help," he snarled.

  "Well that's all you gonna know without my help," the sergeant snarled back.

  Their noses were touching and they growled at each other deep in their throats. Having proven just where they stood and just how tough they both were they relaxed, and Sergeant Ferkel leaned back while Bill sighed and passed him the bottle.

  "How's about a job in the orderly room?" Bill asked.

  "We don't have an orderly room. We don't have any records. Everyone sent here gets killed sooner or later, so who cares exactly when."

  "What about getting wounded?"

  "Get sent to the hospital, get well, get sent back here."

  "The only thing left to do is mutiny!" Bill shouted.

  "Didn't work last four times we tried it. They just pulled the supply ships out and didn't give us any food until we agreed to start fighting again. Wrong chemistry here, all the food on this planet is pure poison for our metabolisms. We had a couple of guys prove it the hard way. Any mutiny that is going to succeed has to grab enough ships first so we can get off-planet. If you got any good ideas about that I'll put you in touch with the Permanent Mutiny Committee."

  "Isn't there any way to get out?"

  "I anshered that firsht," Ferkel told him and fell over stone drunk.

  "I'll see for myself," Bill said as he slid the sergeant's pistol from his holster then slipped out the back door.

  Armoured floodlights lit up the forward positions facing the enemy and Bill went in the opposite direction, towards the distant white flares of landing rockets. Barracks and warehouses were dotted about on the boggy ground but Bill stayed clear of them since they were all guarded, and the guards had itchy trigger fingers. They fired at anything they saw, anything they heard, and if they didn't see or hear anything they fired once in a while anyway just to keep their morale up. Lights were burning brightly ahead and Bill crawled forward on his stomach to peer from behind a rank growth at a tall, floodlighted fence of barbed wire that stretched out of sight in both directions.

  A burst from an atomic rifle burned a hole in the mud about a yard behind him and a searchlight swung over, catching him full in its glare.

  "Greetings from your commanding officer," an amplified voice thundered from loudspeakers on the fence. "This is a recorded announcement. You are now attempting to leave the combat zone and enter the restricted headquarters zone. This is forbidden. Your presence has been detected by automatic machinery and these same devices now have a number of guns trained upon you. They will fire in sixty seconds if you do not leave. Be patriotic, man! Do your duty. Death to the Chingers! Fifty-five seconds. Would you like your mother to know that her boy is a coward? Fifty seconds. Your Emperor has invested a lot of money in your training — is this the way that you repay him? Forty-five seconds...."

  Bill cursed and shot up the nearest loudspeaker but the voice continued from others down the length of the fence. He turned and went back the way he had come.

  As he neared his barracks, skirting the front line to avoid the fire from the nervous guards in the buildings, all the lights went out. At the same time gunfire and bomb explosions broke out on every side.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Something slithered close by in the mud and Bill's trigger finger spontaneously contracted and he shot it. In the brief atomic flare he saw the smoking remains of a dead Venian, as well as an unusually large number of live Venians squelching to the attack. Bill dived aside instantly, so that their return fire missed him, and fled in the opposite direction. His only thought was to save his skin and this he did by getting as far from the firing and the attacking enemy as he could. That this direction happened to be into the trackless swamp he did not consider at the time. Survive his shivering little ego screamed and he ran on.

  Running became difficult when the ground turned to mud, and even more difficult when the mud gave way to open water. After paddling desperately for an interminable length of time Bill came to more mud. The first hysteria had now passed, the firing was only a dull rumble in the distance and he was exhausted. He dropped on to the mudbank and instantly sharp teeth sank deep into his buttocks. Screaming hoarsely he ran on until he ran into a tree. He wasn't going fast enough to hurt himself and the feel of rough bark under his fingers brought out all of his eoanthropic survival instincts: he climbed. High up there were two branches that forked out from the trunk and he wedged himself into the crotch, back to the solid wood and gun pointed straight ahead and ready. Nothing bothered him now and the night sounds grew dim and distant, the blackness was complete and within a few minutes his head started to nod. He dragged it back up a few times, blinked about at nothing, then finally slept.

  It was the first grey light of dawn when he opened his gummy eyes and blinked around. There was a little lizard perched on a nearby branch watching him with jewel-like eyes.

  "Gee — you were really sacked out," the Chinger said.

  Bill's shot tore a smoking scar in the top of the branch, then the Chinger swung back up from underneath and meticulously wiped bits of ash from his paws.

  "Easy on the trigger, Bill," it said. "Gee — I could have killed you anytime during the night if I had wanted to."

  "I know you," Bill said hoarsely. "You're Eager Beager, aren't you?"

  "Gee — this is just like old home week, isn't it?" A centipede was scuttling by and Eager Beager the Chinger grabbed it up with three of his arms and began pulling off legs with his fourth and eating them. "I recognized you, Bill, and wanted to talk to you. I have been feeling bad ever since I called you a stoolie, that wasn't right of me. You were only doing your duty when you turned me in. You wouldn't like to tell me how you recognized me, would you...?" he asked, and winked slyly.

  "Why don't you bowb off, Jack?" Bill growled and groped in his pocket for a bottle of cough syrup. Eager Chinger sighed.

  "Well, I suppose I can't expect you to betray anything of military importance, but I hope you will answer a few questions for me." He discarded the delimbed corpse and groped about in his marsupial pouch and produced a tablet and tiny writing instrument. "You must realize that spying is not my chosen occupation, but rather I was dragooned into it through my speciality which is exopology — perhaps you have heard of this discipline...?"

  "We had an orientation lecture once, an exopologist, all he could talk about was alien creeps and things."

  "Yes — well that roughly sums it up. The science of the study of alien life forms, and of course to us you homo sapiens are an alien form...." He scuttled halfway around the branch when Bill raised his gun.

  "Watch that kind of talk, bowb!"

  "Sorry, just my manner of speaking. To put it briefly, since
I specialized in the study of your species I was sent out as a spy, reluctantly, but that is the sort of sacrifice one makes during wartime. However seeing you here reminded me that there are a number of questions and problems still unanswered that I would appreciate your help on, purely in the matter of science of course."

  "Like what?" Bill asked suspiciously, draining the bottle and flinging it away into the jungle.

  "Well — gee — to begin simply, how do you feel about us Chingers?"

  "Death to all Chingers!" The little pen flew over the tablet.

  "But you have been taught to say that. How did you feel before you entered the service?"

  "Didn't give a damn about Chingers." Out of the corner of his eye Bill was watching a suspicious movement of the leaves in the tree above.

  "Fine! Then could you explain to me just who it is that hates us Chingers and wants to fight a war of extermination?"

  "Nobody really hates Chingers, I guess. It's just that there is no one else around to fight a war with so we fight with you." The moving leaves had parted and a great, smooth head with slitted eyes peered down.

  "I knew it! And that brings me to my really important question. Why do you homo sapiens like to fight wars?"

  Bill's hand tightened on his gun as the monstrous head dropped silently down from the leaves behind Eager Chinger Beager, it was attached to a foot-thick and apparently endless serpent body.

  "Fight wars? I don't know," Bill said, distracted by the soundless approach of the giant snake. "I guess because we like to, there doesn't seem to be any other reason."

  "You like to!" the Chinger squeaked, hopping up and down with excitement. "No civilized race could like wars, death, killing, maiming, rape, torture, pain to name just a few of the concomitant factors. Your race can't be civilized!"

  The snake struck like lightning and Eager Beager Chinger vanished down its spine-covered throat with only the slightest of muffled squeals.