Bill 7 - the Galactic Hero (20 page)

Marching had one other advantage. He had done enough of it by now that he could, quite literally, march in his sleep. As long as the road was fairly straight. This road was perfectly straight, as far as he could see it, which was a few miles farther on where it ran into some trees.

Unfortunately, whenever Bill slept while he was marching he always dreamed that he was marching, so it wasn't quite as restful as it might have been. He dreamed that he was marching across a featureless plain toward a small grove of trees. The dream was as featureless as the plain until he reached the grove, and then a voice from the heavens ordered a halt.

Bill awoke to find himself standing in a small grove of trees. He was still on the road, and the road was still straight, but something had stopped him.

There was a smoking pile of wreckage a mile or so away, the remains of an Imperial one-man scout ship, by the looks of it, but that wouldn't have made him stop. He had sleepmarched through fire-fights before; a mere aircraft crash wouldn't have affected him.

“Eyes up!” came an order from the heavens. Bill obeyed.

Hanging in a tree, twenty feet up, was an Imperial Trooper.

“Hi, there,” Bill said.

“Hi yourself,” the trooper said.

Bill looked from the trooper to the wreckage and back. “That your scout?”

“Yeah. I tried to ride it in, but I had to bail out at the last second.”

“Anything worth salvaging on board?”

“I doubt it,” the pilot said. “It hit pretty hard.”

“Oh. Too bad.” Bill started marching again.

“Hey! Wait!”

Bill stopped again. “What for?”

“I'm stuck up here.”

“So?”

“Aren't you going to help me get down?”

Bill thought it over. “No.”

“Isn't that a Trooper uniform you're wearing?”

“Yeah. So what?”

“So you should help me.”

Bill laughed at the idea.

“What is this,” the pilot asked, “bowb your buddy week?”

Bill shrugged. “In the Troopers, it's always bowb your buddy week.”

“True enough,” the pilot admitted. “Suppose I pay you?”

“That's a different story. What've you got?”

The pilot emptied his pockets. “Forty-seven credits.”

“Imperial credits?”

“Of course!”

“They're no good here. What else you got?”

The pilot thought for a while. “My survival kit.”

“I'm surviving without it. No thanks.”

“Wait! It isn't like the grunt's survival kit. Pilots get special treatment, almost like officers.”

Bill's interest rose. “What's in it?”

“Let's see. Mess kit, rations, compass, signal flare, suicide pill, medicinal brandy, toilet paper, candy bar, skateboard, stockings, condoms —”

“Hold it a second.” It was too late for the condoms, even if these didn't come in the indestructible foil packets, but there was something else on that list. “How big is the bottle of brandy?”

“A fifth. A full bottle.”

Bill moved under the pilot. “Drop it down.”

The whole survival kit came down, and Bill put it all aside except the brandy. After a moment's thought he took the skateboard, too. Then he examined the situation.

The pilot was hanging by two strands of parachute cord. He could cut them, but the fall would probably break his legs. What he needed was something to cushion his fall.

“Let me gather some branches,” Bill said. “I'll pile them up, then you can cut yourself free and drop into that.”

The pilot agreed, and Bill went looking for fallen brush. But there wasn't much, and what was there was mostly old and hard. Bill would need to cut something fresh.

Bill sat on the ground and examined his Swiss Army Foot carefully. Somewhere here, he remembered, was a wood saw. He'd never had any use for it before, but it had seemed like a neat feature when he got the foot. It took a while, but he finally found the button that was marked, in tiny little letters, “wood saw.” He pressed it.

The laser flared into life. “Close enough,” Bill said to himself. Aiming his foot carefully, he cut most of the branches off the tree that held the pilot. He gathered them up into a pile about five feet high, then remembered to turn off the laser before he cut down any more trees or set any more fires.

The pilot dropped safely down and they introduced themselves.

“Colon? That's a funny name,” Bill said.

“My father's interest was punctuation,” Colon explained. “My sister is Ampersand.”

In the distance they could hear a siren.

“Uh-oh,” Bill said. “Forest fire patrol, I'll bet. There's a mall down that way,” he pointed in the direction he'd come from, “and you could lose yourself in the crowd if you don't want to get picked up. I'll go the other way, and they'll only get one of us. Okay?”

As soon as Colon was well off toward the mall, Bill cut all the insignia off his uniform, hopped on the skateboard, and went on his way. The military fire trucks passed him without a pause.

Bill soon mastered the art of riding a skateboard, at least in a straight line, and managed to cover even more ground than he could in marching. It was a lot harder to skate and sleep than to march and sleep, but it was interesting enough so that he didn't really need to sleep through it. By the time he started getting hungry, he had entered a shallow valley that opened up into farmland.

A deep breath brought him the heady aroma of fermenting animal manure, so redolent of everything that meant “home.” Off in the distance a young man, not unlike Bill himself in his years of childhood innocence, followed his robomule around a field, carving fresh furrows.

Bill hadn't been on a farm since he left home, unless you counted the hydroponic okra plantation on the Bounty, and Bill would rather not remember that particular episode, thank you. This might be the perfect place to hide out for a while. He could do chores, eat real food, sleep in a real bed with a real straw mattress, and pretend he wasn't a Trooper. After a while maybe he'd even begin to believe it. It was a heady prospect, all of it raised by the aromas that arose from the nearby mound of porcuswine manure. Each one to his own taste.

With the insignia gone from his uniform, Bill knew he would have no trouble passing himself off as an itinerant skateboarding unskilled laborer; it didn't involve any pretense. All he had to do was find a likely-looking farmstead, preferably one with a good-looking daughter in the front yard, stop the skateboard, and introduce himself.

He coasted down the road into the valley, slowly gaining speed, keeping on the lookout for a house that caught his fancy. He noted that the road was still smooth here, a good sign that this region had somehow avoided Stormy Wormy Weissearse's attentions. Farms didn't make good targets anyway, being all spread out. It took a lot of bombs to destroy even one farm. Of course, General Weissearse had a lot of bombs at his disposal, but surely he had better things to do with them.

Up ahead, on the other side of the road, Bill spotted a likely house. It was white and well maintained, with a recently whitewashed picket fence enclosing the yard. Roses climbed a trellis at the side of the house, and a few ducks scurried for grubs. A clothesline stretched from the house to the majestic maple at the corner of the property, and a beautiful young woman, her long flame-red hair and prim light blue house dress drifting in the breeze, was hanging an interesting assortment of freshly laundered wholesome female underwear.

Still coasting down the long hill, Bill swerved over to the far side of the road, closing in on his target house. As he came up almost to the corner of the fence, he realized he had omitted one item from his calculations: he didn't know how to stop the skateboard.

It seemed as though it should be simple enough. He put his boot to the pavement as a brake, but he was moving too fast. What seemed like half the sole scraped away, without slowing him down nearly enough. Without a replacement handy, he didn't dare risk the Swiss Army Foot in such a maneuver.

This shouldn't be too hard; he'd done it any number of times in the video arcade, and even if that way involved a joystick and a couple of buttons, and he didn't have any of those available, the basic theory was the same, wasn't it?

He leaned all the way back, raising the front wheels of the board off the ground. The tail went down, pushing against the road. The board stopped on the spot.

Bill, however, had considerable momentum stored up. He proceeded in a gentle arc up and forward, landing shortly thereafter with an impact that, familiarly, knocked him cold.

It was by now an almost reassuring sensation. Not for the first time Bill swam slowly up out of the black pool of unconsciousness; doing the backstroke.

Once again he tested the important parts of his body, finding none of them broken, although there were a few new bruises. Not bad, all things considered.

Once again, before he opened his eyes he tried to get a sense of his surroundings, and once again it definitely seemed as though his head was in somebody's lap. Unless he missed his guess, that somebody had a supple waist, long legs, and long red hair.

This wasn't exactly how he'd planned it, but it couldn't have worked out better. Now he'd have sympathy in his favor, as well as usefulness. Maybe he'd have to spend a day or two in bed before he could start working; that would be nice, being cared for by this angel.

Sensing his slight motion, the woman asked, “Are you awake? Are you all right?” Her voice was musical, the perfect voice for a beautiful woman.

“Oh, I'm fine,” Bill said, his plan to play invalid dissipating into thin air. He could never lie to that voice.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, I'm sure. Just a few bruises. Nothing serious.”

She stroked his hair gently for a little while. “What were you doing out there? I've never seen you in these parts before.”

“Actually, I was looking for a job. I've done farm work before.”

“Wonderful!” The delight in her voice was like cold beer in the summertime to Bill. “So many of our men have gone into the military, good workmen are always welcome. Would you be willing to work for me? I can't pay much, but I can feed you and give you a room. The one upstairs, next to mine, is comfortable. Would you like that?”

Bill smiled. “I would like that very much,” he said.

“You promise you won't be lured away to any of the other farms?”

“I promise.”

Bill opened his eyes to gaze at the face to which he had just promised. Something seemed wrong with it. Partly, of course, it was the angle; with his head in her lap, he was seeing her upside down. But there was something else; the face reminded him of someone else he used to know, and it wasn't quite the shade of red he had seen from the road. In fact, it was more of a mouse brown. And then he remembered who the woman looked like: his most faithful childhood companion, his confidant, his friend, his robomule.

Something has gone terribly wrong, he thought.

He struggled upright to look at the woman right side up. She didn't look much better.

“If you're feeling better,” she said in that gorgeous voice, “I should introduce myself. I'm Mrs. Augeas. But we're going to be friends, I can tell. You call me Eunice.” She stuck her hand out and Bill introduced himself and shook it, barely escaping serious injury. This was a strong woman. “Let's get you upstairs and settled in, Bill.” She smiled invitingly.

Once they were both standing, and particularly while Bill was following Eunice up the stairs, Bill had ample opportunity to assess his situation. Eunice was not much more than ten years older than Bill. She was about the same size Bill was, and while she wasn't quite as broad as he was in the shoulder, she made up for it in the hips. She was certainly a pleasant woman, but not the creature of romantic fantasy that he'd seen from the road. Besides, she'd introduced herself as Mrs., which was, in Bill's experience, usually a pretty good indication that she was married.

“I think my husband's overalls will fit you, Bill,” she said, opening a closet in Bill's new room, and they did, once he rolled up the cuffs a couple of times.

Well, all this it wasn't exactly what Bill had had in mind. But it was farm work, and there were no bombs dropping, and the baking smells from the kitchen reminded him of home (his Mom had had the very same OdoRecord of fresh apple pie playing in the kitchen whenever she made Limburger-liver-and-sardine stew, which was on Wednesdays). With a reluctant sigh he set himself to cleaning the piggery. It hadn't been mucked out for a long time — years, at Bill's best guess. He thought about just flooding the place with water, but the hose didn't have enough pressure. It would have to be shovel and barrow.

But hard work was nothing new to Bill, nor the cheerful smell of porcuswine manure. He set to with a will, and by dinner time, although he was not that attractive, one small corner of the barn was gleaming clean.

Over a heaping serving of fried porcuswine rinds, he couldn't help comparing Eunice's place with the redhead's. Each seemed to be run by a woman alone, but one was spick and span, and the other was definitely showing signs of wear and tear. Eunice clearly worked hard to keep her farm running, and the redhead definitely looked like she had time to keep her skin smooth. Bill had to ask about her.

“Oh, that's my neighbor, Melissa Nafka. You must have slid right past her place on your skateboard. An honest boy like you doesn't want to work for her, oh no.”

“Really?” Bill feigned no more than academic interest. “She looked so ... pleasant.”

“Well, let me tell you. She doesn't lift a finger around that place. It's a regular scandal, it is.”

“It looks pretty well kept up.”

“Oh, yes, it is, but not by her, you know. Every man in the valley is always running over there to do her chores. No, you wouldn't want to be working for her. She doesn't pay any of them a single credit for all their work. An honest boy like you wouldn't have any truck with her sort.”

Bill considered it while he ground down one of the porcuswine rinds. “Then why do they do it, if she doesn't pay them?”

Eunice leaned forward as though someone outside might overhear. “I hate to speak ill of someone behind her back, as it were, but let me tell you.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “She sleeps with them,” she susurrated silently, then leaned back and her voice returned to normal. “Every one of them. Isn't that awful?”