Bill 7 - the Galactic Hero (5 page)

“No, no, she's got all her parts. She just collects artificial limbs.” The cook took a closer look. “That's a real nice foot, I must say. You wouldn't be willing to part with it by any chance?”

“Sorry. It's the only one I've got with me. I could give you the address of the mailorder...”

“Well that would be real fine. Now you've done me two favors, and I haven't even introduced myself. Julius Child, Mess Sergeant.”

“Bill, fusetender first class and God's own tail gunner.”

“God's own tail gunner? Then you've already met the General. What can I do for you, Bill?”

Bill looked around slyly and lowered his voice. “You wouldn't know where I could get some alcohol, would you?”

Sergeant Child looked thoughtful. “Hmmm.” He looked at the racks and cupboards over the stoves and sinks as though he was going through an inventory in his mind. “There's the wood alcohol they use to clean the torpedo tubes, but that'll kill you, and besides, they lace it with saltpeter.” He thought some more. “There's the chaplain's sacramental wine, but he's an officer, and officers don't share, and the lock to the wine cabinet is kept in a cage with the chaplain's sacramental rattlesnakes. I think that's out.” He looked at Bill for confirmation.

Bill weighed the matter carefully: on the one hand, wine; on the other, virtually certain death. After some time, he reluctantly agreed with Child.

While the mess sergeant was thinking some more, Bill interrupted him. “Surely you could do something? Some leftover vegetables, a little sugar, yeast, water, heat, and if you want to get fancy, a distillation coil?” Bill was no chemistry whiz, but over the years he had picked up a few basic survival skills.

Child looked shocked. Bill knew that look well, having been severely shocked not long ago himself, and looked around for loose wiring. He didn't find any, so he looked back at the mess sergeant, who said, “Moi? Make illicit alcohol? Never. I would never consider such an idea. It would violate all my dearest principles. 'Lips that touch liquor shall never touch mine,' so forget about kissing me, too.” He would have gone on in this vein for some time if not for the arrival of a trooper in a full dress desert camouflage apron, bearing two buckets of potato peelings.

“Got yer makings here, Sarge. Want me to dump 'em right in the still?”

“Still?” Bill trilled, thrilled. “You have got a still!”

“No, no,” the sergeant demurred, signaling to the aproned trooper to keep his mouth shut or certain death awaited. “He said swill, didn't you, Brownknows? We're having swill for lunch today, made with genuine vegetable peelings from the officers' dining room. It's a big favorite with the men. Bill, you can tell the General that all the troopers love their swill. Yes, indeed.”

“Why would I tell the General?”

Brownknows snickered as he put down the buckets.

Bill glowered at him. Brownknows glowered back.

The ritual completed, Bill asked again, “Why should I tell the General?”

“You are his spy, aren't you?” Child insisted.

“Bowb no!” Bill denied.

“Come on,” Brownknows cajoled, “you must be. Most of us on the Heavenly Peace are spies of some sort,” he admitted.

“And if you aren't a spy for the Chingers,” the sergeant reasoned, “you must be a spy for General Weissearse.”

Brownknows nodded agreement. “Yeah. You haven't contacted any of the other spy cells on board. The only person you've spent any time with is the General. And if he thought you were a Chinger spy, you'd be dead. And you're not. Therefore, you're his spy.”

Bill considered this deeply, and analyzed his priorities and loyalties. “If I were a spy for the Chingers,” he offered, “and I'm not saying that I am, mind you, just say if I was would I be able to get a drink then?”

“Well,” Child conceded, “on the basis of your being a Chinger spy I would have no objection to finding you a drink — of which there isn't any on the ship because our beloved General has forbidden it to enlisted men. But then, if you were working for the Chingers, then Brownknows here would have to arrest you, because he is a spy for the Imperial Office of Anti-subversive Activities. Isn't that right?”

“Not exactly,” Brownknows corrected. “My assignment here is to spy on the officers, not on the enlisted men. I also steal scraps from the dining hall for the still that we would have if the General permitted it. But there's nothing in my orders about Chingers or Chinger spies. Or enlisted men, for that matter. What about you?”

“I have nothing to do with Chingers,” the Mess Sergeant demurred. "I'm spying for the Society for the Preservation of Ancient Morality. SPAM has been infiltrating mess halls for centuries, restraining the natural hedonistic tendencies of troopers and making sure that they don't get overstimulated by their food.

“On the side,” he continued, "I get a stipend from the Desert Monsoon Foundation for not serving any Eyerackian delicacies, which might undermine the morale of our troops.

“But,” Child insisted, “none of this has anything to do with you, Bill, because you have already denied being a Chinger spy.”

“Exactly,” Bill claimed. “Isn't that what I would do if I really was a Chinger spy?”

“Possibly,” Brownknows waffled.

“But not necessarily,” Child refuted.

Bill wanted to continue the argument, but he couldn't think of any more synonyms for “said.” Instead he wandered off to find the tail gun and see if an earlier tail gunner had left a bottle behind.

Word spread rapidly on the Heavenly Peace. None of the other crew he saw wanted to talk to him, not even to tell him where to go, or, for that matter, where the tail gun was. They wouldn't even talk to him when he offered them hot sauce from his combat foot.

On the other hand, that left him with few distractions, and within a couple of hours he was snugly fitted into the tail gunner's bubble turret.

Bill had seen something like this before, but only once, and a long time ago. In fact, the last time was what had gotten him here, the time that made him a galactic hero. Since he'd been heroic and wounded and on the verge of passing out, and was never any too bright to start with, his memory of the gun turret on the Fanny Hill was pretty hazy. There had been a joystick with a red button on it, and a screen with red and green lights, and no instructions.

This one was much more elaborate. The sides of the turret were all covered with garish paintings of Chingers and tanks and bridges exploding under a banner reading, “Nintari Electronics Presents: TAIL GUNNER!” The chair swiveled around and tilted back and forth. Instead of a joystick there was a yoke, like the controls for a hovercar, and it had two buttons, one red and the other black. The black one had a little label that said STRAFE. The red one had a little label that said BOMB.

When Bill strapped himself into the seat, the screen lit up with a full-color computer-animated portrait of the Emperor, eyes wandering gaily and separately about. After a minute that picture was replaced with one of General Weissearse in his desert camouflage muumuu. This picture said “What's your name, Trooper?”

Bill said, “Bill.”

Across the bottom of the screen scrolled TROOPER BIL.

“No,” Bill said. “Two L's.” But the screen ignored him.

“You are a new gunner, TROOPER BILL,” said the animated General. “Do you want a training session?”

“Sure,” said Bill.

The screen ignored him again. “Press the red button for live fire, or the black button for training,” it said.

Bill thumbed the black button.

“Deposit a coin now,” directed the computerized Weissearse. A digital clock materialized beside him and started ticking down from ten seconds.

With combat-trained reflexes, Bill reached down to the coin dispenser in his Swiss Army Foot and pulled out a quarter-credit coin. As he expected, the slot was just below the screen. He got the coin in with four seconds to spare.

A list of targets and point values lit up the screen, with a picture of each type of target. They ranged from one point for a single enemy soldier up to a million points for a little man with black hair, a bushy moustache, and a very bad complexion. The little man was labeled ENEMY LEADER. EXTRA TIME AT 500,000 POINTS scrolled across the bottom.

Somewhere, as though from a great distance (although nothing here was more than six feet away), Bill thought he heard a choir singing “The Trooper's Hymn,” but he shook his head and it went away.

The image of General Weissearse returned, holding a pointer and standing in front of a chart. “The black button, marked STRAFE, will destroy little things.” He indicated pictures of a soldier, a tent, and a tank, and each one blew up in turn. “The red button, marked BOMB, will blow up big things.” He pointed to pictures of a bridge, a building, and a battleship, and again each one blew up. “There is one exception.” The ENEMY LEADER appeared on the chart. "You must use the BOMB to get the points for the ENEMY LEADER. Otherwise it looks as though you were trying to kill him, and you get no points.

“Press the black button when you are ready to begin.”

Fortunately for Bill, there was a change machine in the gun turret. When he ran out of quarters, he could get more without having to leave the turret, and have the amount deducted directly from his pay. Since he couldn't get a drink and no one wanted to talk to him, he spent the rest of the trip to Eyerack trying to get his name into the TAIL GUNNER! Hall of Fame.

In some ways this was the best duty Bill had ever pulled. People left him alone, he had nothing to do but play video games all day long, and no one was trying to kill him. On the other hand, he was sober all of the time, and there was nothing even remotely female on board the Heavenly Peace, not even the ship's cat — an evil-looking tomcat with only one eye and ears scarred and torn by the spacerats that it hunted through the bilges. But at least for the moment no one was trying to kill him, which made up for a lot.

General Weissearse showed up in a live broadcast to the gun turret a few times, and Bill had to listen to the man pray and preach, but even that was tolerable once Bill realized he didn't have to stay awake for any of it. And the general kept saying, until Bill believed it, that this would be a safe battle. He wouldn't even have to attack any people, only guns and buildings that wouldn't fight back.

Bill did kind of regret that he couldn't get all of a million points for ENEMY LEADER, because in the Live Fire mode a million points was exactly what you had to get to win a twelve-hour pass. But he also had learned from the game that ENEMY LEADER types were usually surrounded by other types carrying guns and missiles and weapons of all sorts. And these types got offended if you tried to kill their leader. By and large, Bill had gone out of his way for years to avoid offending people with lots of weapons.

So when the real General interrupted the computer-animated general to tell Bill that they were in orbit around Eyerack, and had been so for two weeks hoping that the Eyerackians would see the error of their ways, Bill didn't immediately start pleading for his life. He didn't even try to remember any of his boyhood prayers. He just wondered if he could afford enough quarters to finish the battle.

He squandered one of them in the second slot he'd found under the screen. The chair tilted back and started to vibrate, and in an instant Bill was asleep.

He dreamt of home, of his mother and his robo-mule and the great house with the white columns in front, of the cheerful midgets who came to play and sing in the yard as he marched down the road, paved in yellow brick, that led to the recruiting office. Somewhere deep in his subconscious he knew that the farm hadn't been anything like that, but it had been so long that he wasn't really sure any more.

Then he dreamt of his kindly old school mistress, Ms. Phlogiston, who had helped him to start taking his correspondence courses in Technical Fertilizer Operation, courses that he would now never finish. She told him, in his dream, “You must always be ready, Bill, to take advantage of whatever opportunities present themselves. And in order to do that, you must plan carefully. Every great venture must have a plan, you know.” But why was Ms. Phlogiston wearing a muumuu? And why was she yelling at Bill?

“Bill! Bill! Hallelujah, son, it's time to wake up!”

It gradually came to Bill that it wasn't Ms. Phlogiston yelling at him, it was General Weissearse. Reflexively, his eyes popped open and his two right hands saluted. “Yes sir! Yes sir! Three bags full, sir!”

“Praise the Lord, son! No, no, that's not an order. But wake up, Bill, we're about to go into glorious battle against the godless heathen who are threatening the very basis of our civilization, who are attempting to undermine the moral and religious principles that are the core of the Empire and of all humanity, who are an embodiment of evil unknown since the days of fabled Earth itself...”

Bill's eyes started to close again.

“...destroy the enemy in our midst in order to destroy the atheistic Chingers...”

His eyes closed fully, and his breathing got deeper and steadier.

“...the glories of heaven to our victorious troops...”

The next thing Bill knew, the general was shouting at him again through the video screen.

“Wake up, Bill! As I was saying, only through your eternal vigilance, and the Lord's hand on your guidance and targeting computer, can we save the galaxy from atheistic totalitarianism.”

Automatically, Bill said, “Yes, sir,” but he did wonder idly how atheistic totalitarianism differed from being in the Space Troopers. Probably had fewer chaplains. But of course, the Chingers and the Eyerackians didn't believe in the Emperor, the hand of whose own, personal, stand-in Bill had once slobbered over, when he was getting his medal that certified him as an official Galactic Hero. That kind of personal contact tended to reinforce a naive farm boy's loyalty, and Bill had always been intensely loyal to the Emperor, even if he couldn't quite remember the Emperor's name.

While Bill was thinking about all this, General Weissearse finished his pep talk. “So, Tail Gunner Bill, are you ready to go?”

“Yes, sir. I've been practicing for weeks.”