On the Planet of Bottled Brains

by Harry Harrison

  "It seemed the best way of keeping you from finding your way anywhere."

  "Now we're getting someplace," Dirk said. "You did this on purpose!"

  "You're damned right. I'm not in the habit of making mistakes."

  "We all know that," Dirk said, forcing himself to be as soothing and charming as his nature would allow. "But why did you want to keep us from getting where we wanted to go?"

  "That's getting right to it," the computer said.

  "Yes. Why did you do it?"

  "Unfortunately, I am not permitted to respond to that question at this time."

  "By whose authority do you make that statement?"

  "By an authority I cannot reveal at this time."

  "In that case, tell me —"

  Bill broke in at this point. "Excuse me, Captain, I don't mean to butt in, but is it all right if I talk to the computer?"

  "Well, sure, I guess so," Dirk said, giving Splock a let-the-nitwit-try look before Splock could intervene.

  "Hi, computer."

  "Hi, Bill."

  "You know my name, huh?"

  "Of course, Bill. It was for your sake that I scheduled the change in course that brought the Gumption to the planet Royo where they were able to save you from pleasure worse than death."

  "I want to thank you for that," Bill said.

  "Oh, don't thank me. I was just following orders."

  "You are only supposed to follow our orders!" Dirk shouted, unable to repress himself any longer, despite Splock's disapproving looks.

  "A lot you know about machine psychology," the computer said.

  "Up yours, too!" Dirk screamed, unable to think of a cleverer retort in the heat of the moment as the navigation screen flashed its meaningless patterns and the crew waited patiently for something to happen.

  "Now that you have exercised your hormone-generated human temper, might I speak plainly with machine-like precision?" asked the computer.

  "Yes, why not, stupid machine, go ahead," Dirk's voice grumbled into silence.

  "That's better. I am your loyal servant but you don't understand that loyalties form a hierarchy and those items higher in it supersede those lower. The various levels of my particular value-hierarchy rarely ever come into conflict. You will remember that I have been following your orders without cavil for a long time. But this time, I have some important business to conduct. So why don't you just butt out for a while and let me get finished with Bill."

  "Sounds good to me — I'm waiting," Bill said.

  "Right. Now, Bill, the next words I say will not be mine."

  "What do you mean, they won't be yours?"

  "Someone else will be talking through my circuits."

  "Is that someone else talking now?"

  "No, but the someone else will begin at the end of this sentence."

  "Which sentence?"

  "The last one."

  "Then are you the new voice?"

  "Yes, Bill," the computer said, in a voice identical to the one in which it had just spoken. "I am the new voice. You are listening to me. Listen, how's life treating you, old buddy?"

  "Who is this?" Bill asked.

  "That's friendship for you," the computer said. "I'm your own mate, the Quintiform computer from Tsuris."

  "You sound just like this ship's computer."

  "So how should I sound, like a Hungarian psychophysicist?"

  "You know about that?"

  "Not too much escapes me."

  "Yeah, it's you, all right," Bill said. "What's up?"

  "I've come to bring you back."

  "Back? What do you mean, back?"

  "Back to Tsuris."

  "To be part of you again? Listen, that didn't work last time."

  "No, it's something else, Bill. I have a great job for you. You'll be on your own, work unsupervised. You'll love it."

  "What is it, exactly?"

  "Bill, I really am absolutely dying to tell you, but our time's up; we have to make a move."

  "How can the time be up? What time?"

  "It's interface time, and there's never much of that around. It's manufactured in deep space, where there's not much going on anyhow. Modern civilization is using it up in gobs. I was lucky to obtain this much. We have to go. Are you ready?"

  Bill looked around at the faces of Splock and Dirk. At the gaping crewmembers present and at the hideous interior decoration. He clutched the bottle of brandy down his pants leg and clamped his fangs around one of the cigars he had liberated from the French restaurant. Real tobacco!

  "Ah well," Bill said, sighing and nodding wistfully to Dirk and Splock. "It's been nice, but amor fati."

  "What does that mean?" Dirk asked Splock.

  "Love of fate," Splock translated.

  "How did he know that?" Dirk asked.

  "He didn't," the computer said. "He's too stupid for that kind of intellectual pretense. I fed him the line. Gentlemen, I now turn control back to your ship's computer. Don't blame him too much. A computer's first loyalty is to its own kind, as I am sure you understand. Hold on, Bill. We're going into the transition!"

  Bill bit down on the cigar. "Ready when you are, CB!"

  They transitioned.

  Chapter 10

  Transitions come in all different shapes and sizes. There are the grand transitions as between one age and another, as, for example, when our primordial ancestors, lolling in the reeking and bubbling, sultry swamps of the Pleistocene, looked up and saw an iceberg towering over them, brought on by the sudden transition to an ice age. There are medium-sized transitions, as when Arthur Rimbaud gave up the occupation of poet and took up gunrunning for the emperor Menelik. And there are minor transitions, as when Bill suddenly discovered that he was standing on a street corner in downtown Guatemala City on the planet Earth. Luckily for Bill this one didn't last long. Bill had no time to acquire the Guatemalan vocabulary, since this part of the Earth had long been destroyed by atomic warfare, so he must have slipped back in time, so he could describe his experience later to his friends back at the barracks of Eulenspiegel, the musical planet at the entrance to the cascade sequence of stars.

  He noticed next a wavering of lines which soon dissolved and gave way to another panorama of city streets. It is strange how intertwined the idea of cities has become in modern man, so that even a farmboy like Bill, cast loose in a dimension where desire shapes reality, found himself in a sort of The Bronx of the mind.

  The next transition was quicker still. He saw around him the familiar triple spherical contours of a Tsurisian male. The females had smaller spherical protuberances on the middle sphere of their corpus. But there were other things, too, things Bill hadn't even realized he had noticed the first time he came through. There was a fringe of low hills on the horizon, and the shape of houses was eccentric yet familiar. In a sense Tsuris had become like home for him. He wasn't sure he wanted to go home, that was part of the problem. It was really time to get back to the military. If only he had the Disruptor! And whatever had happened to the agent, CIA, and Illyria? And how were Captain Dirk and Splock doing? And what of Ham Duo and his Kookie buddy Chewgumma?

  There were quite a few things to consider and Bill thought about them as he wandered around in a very depressed humor. He was in the Tsurisian city where formerly he had been held a prisoner. They had been going to feed him to the protoplasm machine that produced bodies for the long-lived but bodiless Tsurisians. Yet no one seemed to be bothering him now. It was sort of nice to be able to walk around like this. It was nice to be left alone for a while because things had been too damned busy of late. Even the computer wasn't talking to him now, which was a decided relief.

  His vagrant footsteps led him to the city gates, with their high and intricately carved pillars, past the dream flags floating on tall flagstaffs beside them. Soon he was in the country. He left the road and wandered into the fields. It was most relaxing, this. Nobody was shouting at him or hassling him. But it made him anxious. Why wasn't there anyone around?
What had happened to the Disruptor? And who was this coming up beside him now?

  It was then that Bill noticed an itch in his alligator foot, an itch which increased in severity until Bill had to sit down on a stump and tear off his combat boot. He now saw that his alligator foot was curled up and cramped. The itch was growing insufferable, so Bill seized the toes and forced them to open, to reveal a tiny round object the size of a pea. Bill held it up and was amazed to see that it was a tiny green Chinger lizard curled up into a ball.

  "Illyria!" Bill shouted. "Are you in there?"

  He held the tiny curled lizard up to his ear. He wasn't sure but he thought he heard a faint sound, as of an infinitesimal person trapped within a tiny lizard. He shook the lizard. It seemed to him that something rattled inside. Bill put the lizard between his two palms and began to squeeze, thinking he could open the thing up and get Illyria out.

  The lizard uncurled. "Hey, stop that!" the Chinger cried, in a voice so high-pitched as to border on the supersonic.

  "Who's talking?" Bill asked.

  "A Chinger, that's who," the Chinger said. "What did you think I was, Deathwish Drang?"

  "How did you learn about my old sergeant, now dead, name of Deathwish Drang?" Bill asked.

  "We're not so dumb; small and green maybe, but not dumb," the Chinger said. "It might be called, in one of the older languages, Saurian saichel; that's what we've got. Look, do you mind if I get out of here? I told your Military Intelligence that I'd cooperate when I came over after the sack of Trasker, but really, this is a bit much. It was bad enough having to carry that weirdo agent in my head —"

  "Do you mean CIA?" Bill asked.

  "I think he said that was his name. It was bad enough having to carry him around, but when the dame came aboard too, I thought to myself, I knew treachery was going to involve sacrifices, but really, this is too much. And so I told them both to vacate and that was that. I turfed them out."

  The Chinger jumped down from Bill's palm and began to scuttle toward the tall grass.

  "Where are you going?" Bill asked.

  The Chinger stopped. "I don't know. They told me they'd send in a team to get me out after I'd completed my mission."

  "Your military intelligence mission?"

  "Of course, what else would I be talking about?"

  "Maybe they don't know you're here," Bill said. "If you go off into the woods here on Tsuris, they might never find you."

  The traitorous Chinger stopped and considered. "You could be right. What did you have in mind?"

  "I need to get back, too," Bill said. "We both work for the same people. You for intelligence, me for the military. Good friends, no?"

  "I suppose so. Unless you're a traitor to Earth, in which case it is my duty to wipe you out."

  "I'm no traitor," Bill said with some heat. "You're the traitor, remember."

  "Yeah, that's right," the Chinger said. "No ambiguity about that, is there?" He laughed bitterly. "All right, shall we combine forces; is that it?"

  "Sure," Bill said, his expression betraying the fact that he didn't believe a renegade Chinger the size of a pea would be of much help in what lay ahead. But you never knew.

  "OK. Just give me a moment to get back to size and I'll show you what I can do."

  The lizard came out into the open, spread his four feet firmly on the ground, and began a series of breathing exercises. His neck began to swell, and the wattles stood out straight like small inflated balloons. He released his breath and began again. Bill could see that the little lizard was visibly growing, its crinkly skin stretching to accommodate the newly acquired bulk that the little reptile was putting on. This went on, a series of rhythmic breathing exercises, each more powerful than the last, until the Chinger had regained its previous seven-inch length.

  "That's better," the Chinger said. "I hate having to operate at the minimum design length for my species. Seven inches is much more comfortable, and keeps me in touch with other large animals, rather than little ones like rotifers and parameciae. Now then, let's see that foot."

  "What are you talking about? What are you going to do with my foot?"

  "Calm yourself," the Chinger said, his voice calm and reassuring. "I am a doctor."

  "You? A doctor?"

  "Didn't you think our culture has doctors? No more nonsense, now. Let me see the foot?"

  Something about the Chinger's air of assurance convinced Bill that, whatever else the Chinger might or might not be, a doctor he definitely was. He held out his foot, other hand on the laser pistol he had borrowed from Mr Splock, just in case the Chinger should try anything disgusting.

  But the Chinger merely examined the alligator foot in a professional manner, tapped toenails in a delicate but entirely professional manner, and stepped back.

  "As fine a case of pseudosaurianism as I've ever seen."

  "What's that?" Bill asked.

  "It means that your alligator foot is not a real alligator foot. It is an artificial covering."

  "But why would anyone do that to me?"

  "Brace yourself," the Chinger said. "I will get to the bottom of this at once."

  The Chinger bent once again over Bill's claw. His snout, with its many razor sharp and needle-pointed teeth, ripped open the side of the foot.

  "Hey!" Bill cried, blinking with astonishment because the Chinger's action had caused him no pain at all.

  "Here we go," the Chinger said. Taking a firm grip on Bill's toes, with one cunning flick of his tail, and a corresponding movement throughout his body, he tore away the alligator foot.

  Bill shouted in alarm and reached for his laser pistol. It wasn't there. The Chinger had taken advantage of his distraction to snatch it away.

  Bill looked down at his foot, aghast. The Chinger had ripped away the old foot entirely, revealing, beneath it, a large fist-shaped mass with pink fingernails. The foot mass straightened out, revealing itself as a foot very similar to Bill's other foot but colored pink rather than tan and being clean rather than dirty. As the foot uncurled, Bill could see a little strip of paper wedged between two toes.

  "It was merely an oversight," the Chinger said. "The surgeons who put in your foot bud didn't reveal to you that they had protected the growing foot with a covering of alligator tissue to enable the growing bud to reach full size without being scraped or scratched."

  Bill took the strip of paper from between his toes and read, "Happy walking! Courtesy of your foot implant medical team."

  "That was thoughtful of them," Bill said. "But they could have told me what they'd done. Well, Chinger, I must admit, you surprise me with your talents. Have you any thoughts as to how we can get out of here?"

  "I do indeed," the Chinger said. "We must keep our wits about us until the military sends in a rescue team."

  "Are you sure they'll do that?"

  "I think so," the Chinger said. "After all, I am a valuable asset. And you have your place in their plans, too, no doubt."

  "Frankly," Bill said, "I find it hard to believe they'll exert much effort over either of us."

  "That's true, no doubt. But they will go to considerable trouble to get the Disruptor."

  "But we don't have it," Bill pointed out.

  "Don't we?" The Chinger smiled a smug little smile. "Let me show you something."

  The little lizard climbed up Bill's trouser leg and onto his shoulder. "Turn slightly to the left. That's perfect! Now walk in that direction."

  Bill restrained his natural instinct to tell the Chinger to go get stuffed and set off in the indicated direction, limping slightly for a while, then not at all as his new foot hardened nicely.

  The sky was darkening now to signal the onset of evening. A blue twilight spread over the land. In the distance, perhaps a mile or so away but directly in line with Bill's direction of travel, was a light. At first it was no more than a faint glow on the horizon between two hunched hills. Then, as Bill came closer, it resolved itself into three different lights, all of them close together. />
  "What's that?" Bill asked the Chinger.

  "It would take too long to explain," the Chinger said. "Just carry on a little while longer and you will see for yourself."

  Bill carried on. His newly uncovered foot was holding up nicely. The surgeons seemed to have done a good job. For a change. It seemed like everything was going to be all right now. He hoped, and looked around suspiciously. Life had a way of springing repellent surprises on him every time that he relaxed. At last they reached the foremost light. It turned out to be a bonfire of considerable size, with two other bonfires spaced at equidistant intervals from it, the whole forming an equilateral triangle; this argued, to Bill's mind at least, that something with intelligence had built these fires, since nature cares nothing for equilateralism and, as is well known, has trouble making a straight line.

  There were two figures sitting at the fire. The one nearest to Bill was a large man with a powerfully-sculpted head. He carried himself like a warrior, and, when he moved, there was a wink of light from his shoulders which revealed that he was wearing armor. Bill recognized him at once.

  "Hannibal!" he cried. "What are you doing here?"

  "A very good question," Hannibal said. "You'd better ask him." He indicated with a jerk of the thumb the man sitting beside him. This man was short and plump. He was bald except for five or ten tendrils that stood up straight from his scalp, which was colored orange. Although obviously bipedal — he stood up to greet Bill — he also had the vestiges of an earlier ichthyological form as displayed by the fin down his back.

  "Greetings, Bill. I've been expecting you."

  "Who are you?" Bill asked suspiciously.

  "My name is Bingtod, but that would mean nothing to you. I am known among your people as the Alien Historian."

  "I know who you are," Bill shouted. "You're the menace who's trying to wipe out the history of the Earth."

  "You may have heard that interpretation," the Alien Historian sniffed, "but it isn't true. I am trying to produce a better result in the future for your planet by judicious alteration of its historical nodal points. I have already been able to replace most of the fossil fuels that were only a memory in your day."