Venus on the Half-Shell

by Philip José Farmer

  “What they do, they release into a planet’s atmosphere a substance that precipitates every bit of H20 in the air. You wouldn’t believe the downpour!”

  “Yes, I would,” Simon said.

  “Yeah, I guess you would. Say, are you sure you don’t have any more beer? No? Well, the precipitation cleans the air and the land and drowns almost everybody. After the water has evaporated, the trees start growing again from seeds, and there’s always a few birds and animals left up in the mountains to renew the animal life. There’s always a few sentients left, too, but it takes them a long time to breed to the point where they again start polluting their planet. The Hoonhors schedule the planets they’ve drowned for a regular sanitizing every ten thousand years. Actually, though, they’re short-handed, and they might not come back for fifty thousand or so years.”

  The old man had spent much of his time while away from Earth traveling in ships which went faster than the speed of light. This explained why he hadn’t died and become dust six hundred Earth-years ago. People in ships going at lightspeeds, or faster, aged very slowly. Everything inside the ship was slowed down. To an observer outside the ship, a passenger would take a month just to open his mouth to ask somebody to please pass the sugar. An orgasm would last a year, which was one of the things the passenger liners stressed in their advertising.

  What the PR departments didn’t explain was that the people in the ship thought they were moving at normal speed. Their subjective senses told them they were living according to time as they knew it. When a passenger complained about false advertising because he’d really only taken four or five seconds to come, the captain would reply that that was true in the ship. But back on Earth, by the clocks the company kept in headquarters, the passenger had taken four hundred days.

  If the passenger still bitched, the captain said it was Einstein’s fault. He was the one who’d thought up the theory of relativity.

  The old man got drunk and passed out. Simon put him to bed and took the dog for a walk. The breeze, which came from the south, was thick and sticky with the odor of rotting bodies. As the water had evaporated, it had left bodies of animals, birds, and humans along the slope of the mountain. This made the few surviving vultures and rats happy, which goes to show that the old proverb about an ill wind is true. But the wind almost gagged Simon. He couldn’t hang around here much longer unless he shut himself up in the ship and waited for the rotting meat to be eaten up.

  Simon looked down from the cliff on the bodies of hundreds of men, women, and children, and he wept.

  All of them had once been babies who needed and wanted love and who thought that they would be immortal. Even the worst of them longed for love and would have been the better for it if he or she had been able to find it. But the more they grabbed for it, the more unlovable they had become. Even the lovable find it hard to get love, so what chance did the unlovable have?

  The human species had been trying for a million years to find love and immortality. They had talked a lot about both, but humankind always talked most about those things which did not exist. Or, if they did, were so rare that almost nobody recognized them when they saw them. Love was rare, and immortality was only a thing hoped-for, unproven, and unprovable.

  At least, it was so on Earth.

  A little while later, he stood up and shook his fist at the sky.

  And this was when he decided to leave Earth and start asking the primal question.

  Why are we created only to suffer and to die?

  5

  THE BOOJUM OF SPACE

  Simon explored the area on foot. He found the one-man spaceship where Comberbacke had left it. It had been built by the Titanic & Icarus Spaceship Company, Inc., which didn’t inspire confidence in Simon. After looking it over, however, he decided to fly it back to the Hwang Ho. He would store it in the big dock area in the ship’s stern. He could use it for a shuttle or a lifeboat during his voyages through interstellar space.

  When he got back to the big ship, he discovered that the old man was gone. Simon set out on foot again. After he had walked down the muddy slope, he found Comberbacke rooting around among the ruins of a village. The old man looked up when he heard Simon’s feet pulling out of the mud with a sucking sound.

  “Even an Armenian village must have a library,” he said. “Nobody’s illiterate anymore. So there must be a book that gives the scores of the World Series.”

  “Is that all it’ll take to make you happy?”

  The old man thought a minute, then said, “No. If I could get a hard-on, I’d be a lot happier. But what good would that do? There ain’t a woman in sight.”

  “I was thinking more of somebody who’d be a companion for you and maybe a nurse, too.”

  “Find somebody who likes baseball,” Comberbacke said.

  Simon went away shaking his head. In the next few weeks he went over every inch of Great and Little Ararat, but the only humans he found were dead. The last day of his search, he started back to the ship with the idea of flying it around until he located land on which were some survivors. He’d make sure they’d take care of the old man, and then he’d leave for interstellar space.

  It was dusk when he got to the ship. It lay broadside to him and, as usual, the sight of it disturbed him. He could never put his mental finger on the reason. It was about six hundred feet long, its main length cylindrical-shaped. The nose, however, was bulbous, and its stern rested on two hemispheres. These housed the engines which drove the Hwang Ho. They were separate from the ship so they could be released if the engines threatened to blow up.

  Light streamed out from the main sideport, which had been left open. Simon was exasperated when he saw this. He had told the old man to keep it shut at night. The mosquitoes were fierce now that spring was here. Somehow, the deluge had not killed them all off, and they were multiplying by the billions since most of their natural enemies, the bats and the birds, were dead. He hurried into the ship and closed the port after him. He called out the old man’s name. Comberbacke did not reply. Simon went to the recreation room and found the old man dead in a chair. The side of his head was blown off. A Chinese pistol lay on his lap. On the table before him was a mud-and-water-stained book, its open pages streaked with water. But it wasn’t rain that had fallen on these pages. The marks were from tears.

  The book was the Encyclopedia Terrica, Volume IX, Barracuda-Bay Rum.

  There was no farewell note from Comberbacke, but Simon read under Baseball, World Series, all he needed to know. The 2457 Series had ended in a scandal. In the middle of the final game, Cardinals 3-Tigers 4, police officers had arrested five St Louis men. The commissioner had just been given proof that they had taken money from gamblers to throw the Series. The Tokyo Tigers won by default, and the five men had been given the maximum sentences.

  Simon buried the old man and erected the von Parrot marker over him. On the backside of the stone, which he turned frontside, he scratched these letters:

  SILAS T. COMBERBACKE

  2432-3069

  Spaceman & Baseball Fan

  This stone conceals a Cardinal sin.

  A glut of centuries passed before

  He learned about that fateful inning.

  How good if he’d continued chinning

  On Space’s bar! His hero a whore,

  He cared no more for the stadium’s din.

  It’s better not to know the score.

  That last line was good advice, but Simon wasn’t taking it.

  He went into the Hwang Ho, closed the port, and seated himself before the control panel in the bridge. The stellar maps were stored in the computer circuits. If Simon wanted to go to the sixth Planet of 61 Cygni A, for instance, he had only to press the right keys. The rest was up to the computer.

  Just as a joke—though who knew what knowledge lurked in its heart?—he asked the ship to take him to Heaven.

  To his surprise the computer screen flashed the Chinese equivalent of “O.K.” There was a two-minu
te pause while the computer checked that everything was shipshape. Then it swung up off the ground, tilted upright, and climbed up toward the sky.

  Simon didn’t feel the change in the ship’s attitude. An artificial gravity field adjusted for that.

  Simon’s attitude of mind changed, however. He frantically punched the keys.

  “Where are you taking me?”

  “To Heaven, as directed.”

  “Where is Heaven?”

  “Heaven is the second planet of Beta Orionis. It is a T-type planet which was uninhabited by sentients until a Terrestrial expedition landed there in A.D. 2879 on first...”

  Simon canceled the order.

  “Take me to some unexplored galaxy, and we’ll play it by ear from there,” Simon typed.

  A few seconds later they were off into the black unknown. The ship was capable of attaining 69,000 times the speed of light but Simon held it down to 20,000 times, or 20X. The drive itself was named the soixante-neuf drive, because this meant sixty-nine in French. It had been invented in A.D. 2970 by a Frenchman whose exact name Simon didn’t recall. Either it was Pierre le Chanceux or Pierre le Chancreux, he wasn’t sure which, since he’d not made a study of space history.

  When the first ship equipped with the drive, the Golden Goose, had been revved up to top speed, those aboard had been frightened by a high screaming noise. This had started out as a murmur at about 20,000 times the speed of light. As the ship accelerated, the sound became louder and higher. At 69X, the ship was filled with the kind of noise you hear when a woman with a narrow pelvis is giving birth or a man has been kicked in the balls. There were many theories about where this screaming came from. Then, in 2980, Dr. Maloney, a brilliant man when sober, solved the mystery. It was known that the drive got all but its kick-off energy from tapping into the fifth dimension. This dimension contained stars just like ours, except that they were of a fifth-dimensional shape, whatever that was. These stars were living creatures, beings of complex energy structures, just as the stars in our universe were alive. Efforts to communicate with the stars, however, had failed. Maybe they, like the porpoises, just didn’t care to talk to us. Never mind. What did matter was that the drive was drawing off the energy of these living things. They didn’t like being killed and the drive hurt them. Ergo, Dr. Maloney explained, they screamed.

  This relieved a lot of people. Some, however, insisted that interstellar travel must stop. We might be killing intelligent beings. Their opponents pointed out that that was regrettable, if true. But other species were using the drive, so the stars would be killed anyway. If we refused to use it, we wouldn’t have progress. And we’d be at the mercy of merciless aliens from outer space.

  Besides, there wasn’t any evidence that fifth-dimensional stars were any more intelligent than earth-worms.

  Simon didn’t know what the truth of the matter was. But he hated to hear the screaming, which was so loud at 69X that even earplugs didn’t help. So he kept the ship at 20X. At that speed, he hoped he’d only be bruising the stars a little.

  The Hwang Ho zipped away from the solar system and soon the sun was a tiny light that quickly became snuffed out as if it had been dipped in water. The celestial objects ahead, as seen in the viewscreen, were not what he would see at below-light speed. At 20X the ship was, in effect, half in this universe and half somewhere else.

  The stars and the nebulae were creatures of the sublime. They were beautiful but with the beauty of awe, horror, and a mind-twisting magnitude and shape. They burned and changed form as if they were flames in hell created by Lucifer, high on heroin. Poets had tried to describe the heavens at superlight speeds. They had all failed. But when had the whining commentary ever matched the glorious text?

  Simon sat paralyzed in his chair moaning with the ecstasy of terror. After a while he became aware that he had a huge erection, and there is no telling what might have happened if he had not been interrupted.

  The dog had been whimpering and whining for some time, but suddenly it began barking loudly and racing around. Simon tried to ignore him. Then he became annoyed. Here he was, on the verge of the greatest orgasm he had ever known, and this mutt had to spoil it all. He shouted at Anubis, who paid him no attention at all. Finally, Simon remembered something he had read in school and seen in various TV series. He became scared, though he was not sure that he had good reason to be so.

  As everybody knew, dogs were psychic. They saw things which men used to call ghosts. Now it was known that these were actually fifth-dimensional objects which had passed through normal space unperceived by the gross senses of man. These went through certain channels formed by the shape of the fifth dimension. The main channel on Earth went through the British islands, which was why England had more “ghosts” than any other place on the planet.

  Every Earth ship that put out to space beyond the solar system carried a dog. Radar, being limited to the speed of light, was no good for a vessel going at superlight speeds. But a dog could detect other living beings even at a million lightyears’ distance if they were also in soixante-neuf drive. To the dogs, other beings in this extra-dimensional world were ghosts, and ghosts scared the hell out of them.

  He pressed a button. A screen sprang to life, showing him the view from the right side of the ship. He didn’t expect to see the approaching ship, since it was going faster than light. But he could see a black funnel coming at an angle which would intercept his course. This, he knew, was the trail left by a vessel with soixante-neuf drive. It was one of the peculiarities of the drive that a ship radiated behind it a “shadow,” a conical blackness of unknown nature. Simon, if he had looked out his own rearview screen, would have seen only a circle of nothingness directly behind the ship.

  He was convinced that the ship approaching him was a Hoonhor and that it was out to get him. That was the only reason he could think of why the ship hadn’t changed its course, which would result in collision if it maintained it. Probably, the Hoonhors intended to keep him from notifying other worlds of what they had done to Earth.

  He stepped on the accelerator pedal and kept it to the floor while the speedometer needle crept toward the right-hand edge of the dial. He also twisted the wheel to the left to swerve the ship away. The stranger immediately changed its course to follow him.

  The murmur from the two engine rooms became a loud and piercing shriek. Anubis howled with agony, and the owl flew around screaming. Simon put plugs in his ears, but they couldn’t keep out the painful noise. Nor could he plug up his conscience. Somewhere, on one of the fifth-dimensional universes, a living being was undergoing terrible torture so he could save his own neck.

  After ten minutes, the screams suddenly ceased. Simon didn’t feel any relief. This only meant that the star had died, stripped of its fire, stripped, in fact, of every atom of its body. Tensed, he waited, and shortly the screaming started again. The drive had searched for and found another victim, a star that may have been happily browsing in the meadows of space only a minute before.

  Presently, the two ships were on the same plane, the Hoonhor an incalculable distance behind the Hwang Ho. Simon couldn’t see it in his rearview screen because of the blackness he trailed. Somewhere in that cone was the Hoonhor. Or was it? According to theory, nothing could exist in the immediate wake of a 69X vessel. Yet one vessel could follow another in the wake. But the pursuer did not exist during this time. So where was it? In the sixth dimension, according to the theorists. And the stuff in the wake of the chaser must then exist in the seventh dimension, and any ship in its wake would be in the eighth dimension, and any ship in its wake would be in the ninth dimension.

  Most of the theorists were happy with this explanation. They could not run out of dimensions any more than they could run out of numbers. However, a brilliant Hindu mathematician, Dr. Utapal, had said that there was a limit. By an equation which was so abstruse that it was unprovable, Utapal demonstrated that the ninth dimension was the upper limit. (What the lower limit was, nobody knew.
) When a fourth ship joined the procession, there was a transposition factor, which resulted in the third ship suddenly being in front of the first. This was called the Unavoidable Trans-dimensional Shift in scholarly journals but was privately referred to as the You-Grab-My-Nuts-I’ll-Grab-Yours Hypothesis.

  It was then that a control panel siren began whooping and its lights flashed red. Simon became even more alarmed. A space boojum was directly ahead of the ship.

  A boojum was a collapsed star which formed a gravitational whirlpool that sucked in any matter coming close to it. In fact, its gravity was so strong that even light couldn’t escape from its surface.1 But the ship’s instruments could detect the alterations it made in the local space-time structure.

  Boojums were a sort of manhole in a trans-dimensional sewage system. Or a slot in a multidimensional roulette wheel. All the boojums in this universe were entrances to otherdimensional worlds, and if a ship got sucked into one, it could be lost forever in the maze of connections. Or, if its crew was lucky, it would be shot back into this universe.

  The Hoonhor ship was coming up on him swiftly. The slow freighter could not outrun the other vessel. Simon’s only escape, like it or not, was to dive into the boojum. He doubted that the Hoonhor captain would have the guts to follow him into it.

  The next thing he knew, everything had turned black. Nor was there any sound. After what seemed like hours but must have been only a few minutes—if time existed in this place—he felt as if he were melting. His fingers and toes were extending, at the same time they were becoming shapeless. His head seemed to loll on one side because his neck was stretching far out. It fell to one side and kept on falling. It went past his body and then the floor and then was falling through a bottomless space. He tried to raise his arm to grab it, but his arm groped through nothingness for miles and miles without end.

  His intestines were floating up through his body and after a while they were coiled around his head, which was still falling. They didn’t taste good at all. His anus was bobbing on the end of his nose; his liver was wedged between his head and his ear. He didn’t know which ear because he had no idea of which way was right or left, up or down, in or out.