Part 6 (1/2)
”Netherzone Quadrant?” said Bill, his excitement at the thought of finding Irma sobering him slightly.
”Where's that?”
”Like I said, it's down by the WCs! The Bogs, Jakes - or whatever you call them in your dialect.” The mustachioed gentleman pointed over to the side of the hall, where four signs were posted. No writing on them, just Intergalactic symbols. One sign depicted a man, another what was probably a woman. Bill blinked at them rapidly until he could make them out. Men's and ladies' room he guessed. The adjoining sign depicted a six-limbed chitinous creature. Alien's room. The last was the largest, and it showed a huge halo parked by a toilet.
G.o.ds' room.
”Rick, I'm going down to find Irma,” said Bill.
”Go 'head. Arm. I'm not going anywhere.” And, in the endless quest for alcoholic companions.h.i.+p, misery and drunkenness love sympathy, he bought the neighbor a drink, and together they toasted the dead and much-missed Archimedes the parrot.
Bill, who missed the feathery farter not at all, indeed had his own dead bird to consider, did not join in.
He headed for the toilet signs, and there took a pneumatic tube to the Netherzone Quadrant. After visiting the men's room successfully, he emerged back into the long corridor. He only had to walk a very short distance to hear the thunder and booming of Zeus' party.
Roaring big band music filled the air as he opened the door and was confronted by the vast and twisted alien Escher print panorama of the Netherzone Room. Apparently, Zeus had twisted gravitational effects in such pretzel forms that in one part of the huge room, people were standing on the ceiling, and in four others, people were standing on the walls. As for the big band - well, that mult.i.tudinous ensemble hung swaying in a crescent moon suspended in the very middle of the room. They were doing a heated version of an ear-destroying number that had the walls throbbing in and out. Suddenly, as Bill walked into the wash of music and art-wrecko atmosphere, his mood foot started twitching and spasming, moving about in time to the beat.
The hairy-hoofed thing was trying to dance!
”That's 'Satin Doll' they're playing, idiot! Not Satyr's Doll!”
However, the foot ignored him, and he had to prance about a little as he moved about the roomscape, searching for Zeus and his lost true love, the incredibly luscious and lost Irma!
It did not take long to find Zeus. The G.o.d was on the ceiling, sitting at a long table crowded with a cornucopia of contraband.
CHAPTER 9.
MIND-MASTERS OF THE OVER-GLAND.
In a thoroughly foul mood, more s.e.xually frustrated than he'd ever felt in his entire life, Bill opened gummy lids and reached up to scratch the top of his head. He felt the fumbling resistance of wires. He heard a popping, a squealing - machine sounds rumbled all around him like amplified soap bubbles.
Squeaks and blips and hollow ”pings” echoed metallically and plastically.
”He's waking up again! Is that wise, Doctor?” said a familiar voice.
”Yes. His unconsciousness has fueled the Matrix sufficiently,” said another familiar voice.
Bill groaned. He lifted his head, looking around him. Again the resistance of the wires. He could feel cold metal now, adhering to the skin on his forehead. He could feel tiny subcutaneous implants in his scalp. He could feel the needle of a drug-drip, intravenously feeding him the contents of an upended bottle labeled with a skull and crossbones. He felt like a sliced-open body that had been poorly st.i.tched together. He felt for the very first time in his life like a beetle pinned down by a long pin through his thorax. Felt this way even though he knew that he didn't have a thorax. The room swam before him, a thing that rooms usually find it very hard to do. Vaguely he could see a form in front of him. The figure wore a white lab coat, gla.s.ses and a stethoscope. Bill suddenly smelled the familiar scent of antiseptics.
A doctor? Antiseptics? Was he back in the hospital then? Fragments of memory swam about him like chunks of detritus from an explosion, floating in free fall. Vague images of Bruce the satyr ... the Fields of Elysium ... delicious wine ... the droppings of Archimedes the parrot....
Irma's smiling face.
”Irma!” he cried again, struggling in his containment.
”Whoa there, Trooper. Settle down, big fellow,” said the unctuously theoretically comforting voice of the doctor, leaning over him. Bill looked up and the vague form resolved into recognizable features. The nasty, pointy nose, the gruesome chin, the furtive look in those bulging eyes....
”Where am I?”
”You're in a secret compound, deep below the reefs of the ocean on Colostomy IV, Bill. You're here on the most important and monumentous mission of your career as a human being.”
Bill looked harder. That voice, that face!
”Dr. Delazny!”
”That's right, Bill. Now calm down. No one's going to hurt you!”
”Secret compound? Whose secret compound?”
”Gee, Bill!” a little voice piped up. He was aware of the scampering of tiny reptilian feet up the metal gurney top. A heavy weight suddenly landed on his chest. He craned his neck and was suddenly eyeb.a.l.l.s to eyeb.a.l.l.s with a seven-inch tall lizard with four arms. ”Don't you know? Haven't you figured it out yet, buddy?”
A Chinger!
More than that, he recognized the high-pitched, adenoidal voice he had come to detest more than the ghost of Sergeant Deathwish Drang, who from time to time haunted his drugged dreams.
It was Eager Beager!
”Eager Beager!” said Bill. ”I thought you were dead.”
”The rumors of my death were pure hyperbole, Bill! You like that word Bill? 'Hyperbole!' Yeah. But Eager Beager no longer. He was just a humanoid robot that I operated from a control where his brain would be if he had a brain. My name is Bgr the Chinger, as you should remember but you have forgot with all the brain-stirring. I am the Chinger specialist in alien life forms - and gee, humans are as alien as they come, let me tell you! - I've been doing a little study into human semiotics, human literary terms, and of course, in-depth human psychology. Gee - I got lots of new terms for you. Can you say 'phenomenological psycho-meta-scape?' Gee - I didn't think so.”
Mostly, Bill was just laboring to breathe. Being from a ten-G (hence perhaps his preoccupations with the expression ”gee”) world, although they were small, the Chingers were also very dense and very, very heavy. ”Could - you - get - off, Eager?”
”Gee - oh yeah. Sure, Bill. We got a lot to talk about.” The Chinger hopped down to the gurney again, capered over to sit beside Bill's face, its little tail wiggling with reptilian happiness. ”Yeah. Like, soldiers, how's the subversion of the Empire going? The dissemination of truth, peace and righteousness?”
”Death to all Chingers!” growled Bill.
”Hmm. I thought so. A backslider. I thought we had a deal, Bill. Or maybe your training was just too much. Gee - too bad!”
Bill turned to Dr. Latex Delazny. Slowly, the truth began to filter through his thick head. ”I'm being held captive in a Chinger compound. Which means -” He snarled at the Doctor, bearing his fangs. ”You're a Chinger spy, Doctor. You're a traitor!”
The thin man stood erect to his full height, puffing out his chest with hurt pride. ”I am nothing of the sort!
I am a humanitarian! I work for the best interests of the human race. I work for armistice in the Empire- Chinger War. I work for peace, goodness, happiness! I work to cure the aberrations of the human subconscious!”
”Traitor sc.u.m! And I trusted you with my foot? Where have you taken me? What's going on?”
”Gee - and it is a nice foot, isn't it Bill?” said Bgr, scampering down to admire the cloven hoof.
Bill remembered. ”Yeah! A 'mood foot' the Doctor calls it. And it's your fault, Bgr!”
”Knock it off, Bill. Shut up and listen. The Doctor has a lecture for you. We're going to need you for the next phase of the operation. Gee - and this is going to be fun, too!”
”Not really a lecture - rather an attempt to impart information, always a difficult task. Particularly with you. Try to understand that your subconscious must share the group subconscious which is a h.e.l.l of a lot smarter than your conscious mind. Which is not saying very much in any case. What you experienced truly happened, though perhaps not quite in the same dimensional-experiential plane we are accustomed to.”