“Margaret, it is all wonderfully pleasant on Lotophage, but does it not seem as if they forgot to put the salt in?”
“You can add as much salt as you wish, mighty Roadstrum, but the water will not boil as quickly.”
“What, Margaret?”
“To boil a lobster, one takes first a lobster—”
A Lotophagian citizen came in.
“The men who have died, mighty Roadstrum, how do you want them disposed of?”
“Died? How many of our men died here?”
“Only a dozen or so. You’d be proud of them, such happy lazy smiles on their faces when they went!”
“Well, do they bury here, or burn?”
“Oh no, neither. We use. One does not bury nor burn the essence of ecstasy. They provide the distillation of all pleasure. Those bar-snacks that you eat so avidly, are they not fine?”
“They are fine,” said Roadstrum. “I wondered what they are.”
“From men off the packet ship The Yellow Dwarf,” said the Lotophagian. “Those men really ate and drank and roistered while they were here, day and night, I mean deep into the afternoon. They stuffed themselves and they spread themselves. They built themselves up while they were tearing themselves down. When they finally gave out there was nothing left of them but bellies and nerves. It’s the jangled nerves, the fevered psychic leavings imbedded in the sweet fat that gives the particular flavor.”
“The taste is powerful and tantalizing,” said Roadstrum, “but the origin leaves a nameless doubt in me.”
“—to boil a lobster, one takes first a lobster—” said Margaret.
“Your own men should have an even more unique flavor,” said the Lotophagian. “We will call the product ‘Lazy Man Ecstasy Chips.’ Give the word and we will have some of them for you quite shortly.”
“All right,” said Roadstrum, “go ahead. I don’t know why I gave it a second thought but there are a crowd of second thoughts hovering over my shoulder this afternoon.”
“—and one puts it in a bucket of cold water,” said Margaret. “Then one very very slowly brings it to a boil—”
A little shabby man was singing Show Me The Way To Go Home, an ancient folk melody.
“What are you called?” Roadstrum asked him.
“John Profundus Vagabundus,” said the little man. “Deep John the Vagabon’. I’m the original old-time hobo. I’ve been wandering these thousands of years and I can’t get home. I just can’t make it.”
“Why can you not?” Roadstrum asked him. “You are from World, according to your speech, and we go to World. We will take you when we go.”
“But you will not go,” said Deep John. “And if you do, I cannot go with you unless you compel me to. I have passed the last possible moment here and I am not able to leave.”
“Why should you want to, Vagabond? Is this not the end of the road that every vagabond has looked for? It is the world of every complete pleasure without pain. And they are so glad to have us here. See, they have already made a plaque ‘Great Roadstrum loused around here,’ and they have set it into my favorite spot at the bar. What other place so welcomes visitors? This is Fiddler’s Green, this is Theleme, it is the land of the Lotus Eaters, it is Maybe Jones City—(no, belay that last; Maybe says he isn’t sure that it is)—it is Utopia, it is Hy-Brasail, it is the Hesperides. It is the end of every road.”
“It’s the end of the road, all right,” the hobo said, “but I didn’t want it to end. That’s Fiddler screeing on his instrument in the next room, but he says he doesn’t believe that this is the Green at all. And Frankie-Boy is in there too. He eats and drinks, and he carries on as even a red-nosed priest should not; he talks philosophy and he tells those whoppers; but he says that he begins to doubt that this is Theleme, after all.”
“I’ll just have a couple of words with those fellows and convince them again how wonderful it is,” said Roadstrum.
Crewmen Crabgrass and Oldfellow and Bramble came into the Sleepy Sailor. Bramble blew a note on a pitch pipe and then he recited:
All lusty liquor with a crystal cask for it,
Whatever wished one only has to ask for it.
Tall pleasures piled in infinite variety,
Raw rolling gluttony without satiety:
And under sheen than all things else is awesomer
A golden worm that gnaws and gnaws and gnaws some more.
“Whence the doggerel, good Bramble?” Roadstrum asked.
“It’s a popular epic composing itself these days,” said Bramble. “It’s called the Lay of Road-Storm, and it’s about yourself.”
“I understand now,” said Roadstrum; “certain low fellows have been making cracks about the ‘lay of Roadstrum’ every time I set my hands seriously upon a woman here. But what is the ‘golden worm’ bit?”
“It’s the way we feel,” the crewmen shouted. “The golden worm is gnawing at our entrails. There is too much of it here, and it doesn’t move along at a seemly pace. Captain Roadstrum, we are tired of lying around and going on little benders and jazzing these little girls here. We want to go on big benders. We want to find the big girls.”
“What’s to stop you, good men?” Roadstrum asked them. “It seems that everything is available here. It surely is here in the Sleepy Sailor. Can you think of any pleasure not to be found here?”
“No, we can’t, Captain,” said Crewman Crabgrass, “and it bugs us. How do we know this is everything, just because we can’t think of anything else? We can’t even get into places like Shanghai Sue’s of the After Dark Club of the Haystack or the Rowdy-Dow. They all have signs on them, ‘Open at twenty-one o’clock.’ ”
“There is surely plenty to do till then,” said Roadstrum.
“Till then? Captain Roadstrum, there isn’t any twenty-one o’clock here. It’s always afternoon.”
“Oh, those are only false fronts and signs that some of the boys from the tramp ship Muley Cow put up for fun,” said Deep John the hobo. “They sure were good fellows from the Cow. I can taste them yet.”
“False fronts or not,” said Crewman Oldfellow, “they’ve sowed the seeds of doubt in us. If we sink back into it again now we’ll be like the man who was drowning and didn’t care.”
“Good thing he didn’t,” said Roadstrum, “or he’d have worried himself to death.”
“—passed the last possible moment,” said Deep John the Vagabond.
“—heat the water very very slowly,” said Margaret, “and the lobster will not stir till he is irrevocably boiled.”
“Get your hot ‘Lazy Man Ecstasy Chips,’ called the Lotophagian coming in with a great basket of them. They all began to eat great gobs of them, and they were the finest ecstasy chips anyone ever ate.
“These in particular,” said Crewman Oldfellow. “I never in my life ate anything with so fine a flavor. I wish that Crewman Bigbender were here to taste them. Somehow they remind me of him.”
“Let me see the tag on that bunch,” said the Lotophagian. “Ah yes, they are Crewmen Bigbender.”
They ate variously. It was all good. They drank. It was very good. They dozed. It was perfect.
“I don’t care if I never wake up,” Roadstrum murmured as he drifted under.
“—passed the last possible moment—” breathed Deep John the hobo.
“They are like all the others,” said Margaret the houri. “Why did I think they might be different? I wanted to go back to World with them. I used to have a lot of fun on World. I’ll wait me the centuries yet, and I’ll yet find a man able to leave here after he comes. But he’ll have to be a man in a million.”
“I am a man in a million,” said Roadstrum out of his shallow sleep.
“It is too late,” said Deep John. “On the tomorrow we will eat ‘Mighty Roadstrum Ecstasy Chips’ and I’m sure they will have a mighty flavor. But I want to go home.”
“I have the feeling that my life is in great danger,” Roadstrum croaked nervously in his thin sleep.
&
nbsp; “Never in your life will you be in such danger as you are at this moment,” said Deep John. “You go under now and you can never come up again. And you have gone under.”
“I never trusted a one-sided coin,” Roadstrum mumbled in his sleep. “I never trusted a too-easy pleasure.”
Roadstrum reared up suddenly like a great bear coming out of hibernation on Saint Casimir’s Day.
“I have to go home at once,” he said ponderously.
“They all say that but none of them do,” Margaret told him.
“I am in great danger,” said Roadstrum.
“Of course you are,” said Deep John. “If you live through this, you will be in other dangers where your life is worth nothing; you will be in jams that will scare the very hair off your head. But you will never be in such danger as you are now here on Lotophage.”
Bellowing like a bull, Roadstrum, the one man in a million, ran out of the Sleepy Sailor and began to kick the men awake. Most of them fought to get back to sleep or to death. Some of them really wished to leave Lotophage, and they said so with great sorrow but with no hope. And some of them turned over on their faces and hung on, swearing that nothing could ever tear them away from this soft world. There were handles in the grass provided for hanging on. Lotophage was a jealous world and did not give up her victims willingly. Some of these men had befouled themselves, being unwilling to stir for anything at all, even to give their panels instructions to care for them.
Roadstrum rushed to the dungeon. “I’ll get those two if I have to smash the place,” he swore. “They, at least, will not be in love with it here. They will help me with the others.”
He went to the dungeon and (thing beyond believing) Crewmen Birdsong and Fairfeather had just been released. Two men even uglier than they had arrived on Lotophage, and the hornet men were released to make room for them.
Two men uglier than Birdsong and Fairfeather? Are you sure? That is what the authorities on Lotophage decided. Two men from the Smiling Skink were put in the dungeon in place of Birdsong and Fairfeather, and they are still there.
In a frenzy now, Roadstrum fired up two of the hornet ships. He got Captain Puckett onto his feet and aware of the great danger of remaining. He promised to take Margaret back to World, where she had not been for several thousand years. He called to Deep John the Vagabond to come along if he was coming.
Roadstrum and Puckett and Birdsong and Fairfeather, Margaret and Deep John, jerked up those men who clung to the grass less tightly. They carried them, sniffling and sobbing, to the hornet crafts.
They enskied, they were in free space, and the most terrible of all dangers was behind them.
On Lotophage, as they left it, it was still afternoon of the same day and not perceptibly later than when they had arrived.
CHAPTER TWO
One needs for picture of the Laestrygonians
All hump-backed cuss-words and vile polyphonians.
“We’ll cry a warning here though we be hung for it!”
The fact is, not a crewman had the tongue for it.
Those boys are rough, nor steel nor steinn can stay with them;
You’d better have visceral blood to play with them.
That human meat and mind should ever rout the things!
It scares us silly just to think about the things.
We trim to decent measure these giganticals
And couch the tale in shaggy-people canticles.
Ibid
BOTH HORNETS were near inoperative. Somehow they had never shaken off the lassitude they had acquired on Lotophage, and they had been sluggish for the whole trip since. Puckett’s hornet had to come down for an overhaul, and that of Roadstrum was nearly as bad.
“A planet, a planet,” Puckett hollered over the communicator. “Find us a planet quickly, Roadstrum.”
“The only one we can possibly make is Lamos,” Roadstrum called to him.
“Lamos of the Laestrygons? But that’s a primitive world. There will be no facilities for overhaul there. Pick another.”
“I can’t, Puckett. My craft won’t hold, and you say yours is worse. Make ready for it. Do you still have your psych library and your tapes?”
“Oh hell no. We pitched them out long ago. Is there a people on this world? Is there a language?”
“Puckett, there’s information here that I don’t trust. A lot of these things were filled in by jokers for the fun of it, figuring nobody would ever get to such a world anyhow. The inhabitants are giant-like and primitive, it says, believed to be a species of Groll’s Trolls.”
“We’ve tangled with those big fellows before. They don’t worry me.”
“These are much bigger than ordinary, it says. They worry me a little. But their language, and this is the joker part of it, is given as something between Old Norse and Icelandic of Earth. How would primitive Troll people have Earth languages? And how such odd ones?”
“Try it, Roadstrum, try it, since you have psych tapes. We’ve at least fifteen minutes before our hard or easy crash. That’s time enough for your men to learn any subject by psych. We shouldn’t have pitched ours out, but we have a Norwegian on craft, Oldfellow. Did you know he was a square-head? We’ll plug him into the brain-buster and then all plug in on him. Maybe modern Norwegian will bring us close enough. It’s something to pass the last fifteen minutes and keep the men from getting nervous. It’s all a joke anyhow. And we already know six basic dialects of the Groll’s Trolls language. We’ll probably encounter some variations of them here.”
They came down on Lamos with their retrogrades shrieking. It was a heavy-gravity planet and their power was almost completely shot.
“We’d never make it if it wasn’t all downhill,” Roadstrum complained. “All right, men, into your pumpkin-picking cradles! We’re going to hit hard!”
Ah, it was a hard crash for both the hornets. It knocked everybody out, cracked ribs and clavicles, ruptured lungs and diaphragms, and filled everybody with blood in mouth, nose, and ear. It was suffocating pain riding up through their unconsciousness, quite a long unconsciousness.
“I could open one eye if I could raise a hand to it to uncake the blood,” Roadstrum groaned much later. “I could raise one hand if I could find the other hand to raise it with. I could stand on my feet if I weren’t broken in the middle and hinder parts and if I hadn’t suddenly doubled in weight. But all these things I will do yet. I am the mighty Roadstrum and I will perform the heroic feat of sitting up and prying my eyes open, and even of raising my voice in exhortation.”
He did so. He rose, not only to a sitting position, but onto his feet indeed. And he howled to his men to arise and encounter and defend. He got Crewmen Fairfeather and Birdsong up. He got the great Captain Puckett up and moving. He got the valiant Di Prima and Boniface, and Bramble and Crabgrass and Eseldon up and going, and the others had begun to stir. They had been hurt before often, and they knew how to rise above it.
They were out of their crafts. They were on a rock-strewn scarp with a little short sedge growing out of it. They were under a green-gray sky on a very heavy world, and they were surrounded by grinning giants or ogres, the largest sort of Groll’s Trolls ever seen.
Listen, none of the men would head up to the navels of any of these creatures, and the men from the hornets were all fine tall men. These giants were splayfooted and thick as tree-trunks. They had shoulders two meters wide, humps on the back of their forward necks like bull humps, and heads that were howlingly huge. The ears on them were like nine-liter jugs, and their mouths were wider than their wide faces in defiance of all rules.
Margaret the houri was bubbling around, unabashed and unhurt, and was talking at a great rate to the grinning giants. And the language they were using was something between Old Norse and Icelandic of Earth. There wouldn’t be much difficulty there then, but it was surely a peculiar business.
“I am Bjorn,” said the leader of the Trolls in a voice that sounded as though he had great boulders grinding around
in his gizzard. “The others of us have names which you may learn if you live long enough into this day. Come to breakfast now. Boys, you really better eat a big breakfast! You’re going to need it.”
“No, no,” Roadstrum protested. “We must see to our crafts first. We must assess the damage and the possibility of repair. And then we have our own rations to serve us until we have made a study of the produce here.”
“Little boy-men, you’d better forget about your crafts or boats or globes,” Bjorn told them. “My little boy will fix your boats for you. He’s mechanically inclined. And you had better forget your rations. If they produce such puny types as you they will not serve you for this day. We look at you. We look at us. We laugh. Come eat what we eat. You will have to eat the big breakfast of our sort because you are going to fight the big fight afterwards and we want you to be up for it.”
“Wait, Bjorn,” Roadstrum howled. “Don’t let that big fellow into the hornet craft with those seven big stone hammers. He’ll smash things. He’ll ruin us forever. I’ll just stop him—”
But Roadstrum’s feet were spinning in the air and Bjorn was holding him high and clear by the scruff of his neck.
“There is no big fellow going into your craft, good Roadstrum,” Bjorn assured him. “That is my little boy Hondstarfer. I told you that he is mechanically inclined. He will fix whatever is wrong with your boats. In the meanwhile you will eat the big breakfast of your lives and then you will fight the big fight to your deaths.”
“But he’ll break up all the instrumentation with those big stone hammers,” Roadstrum protested again, still flailing his feet in the air.
“Have you not trust in me?” the boy Hondstarfer called as he entered the first of the hornets. “Have you not noticed? One of my stone hammers has buckskin laced over it. I use that for the fine work. Do not worry, I will fix your boats, or else I will fail to fix them. This is the high logic. I am the best and only mechanic on Valhal, which is called Lamos by the ignorant.”
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