On the Planet of Bottled Brains

by Harry Harrison

  "Right now I'm not feeling human!" he cackled and drank deep.

  When he got off the floor he grinned happily and drank some more. A delicious numbness began to creep over him, disturbed only by an itch in his armpit. He started to scratch it and found himself scratching the top of the Chinger's head.

  "Illyria, how are you?" he asked.

  "She's doing all right," the Chinger said.

  "What does that mean? Who the bowb am I talking to?"

  "Bill, this is going to take a little explaining."

  "To hell with that! Who are you?"

  Bill grabbed at the Chinger as it started to flee and, wholly by chance, an accident really, his finger touched the back of the Chinger's neck. When this happened the top of the Chinger's head opened on a concealed hinge. Inside the creature's skull, where the brains would normally be, though there weren't any now, there was a tiny man, no more than an inch high, seated at a tiny control panel. There was a cot and an easy chair close by, and a tiny toilet. The man was smoking nervously, tapping the ashes of his cigarette into an ashtray so small as to be only two steps above invisible to the naked eye.

  "How did you get in there?" Bill gaped, then frowned. "And, equally important — what are you doing in there?"

  "Well," the man said, "that is going to take a little explaining. First let me introduce myself. Charles Ivan Arbuthnot, SNI, Space Navy Intelligence. Because my name is so long the initial letters are combined to form an acronym, CIA. Most people call me that, and you can too —"

  "Just kindly shut the hell up," Bill suggested. "Where's Illyria?"

  "That's part of the explanation. Bill, don't be rash, hear me out."

  Bill had raised one ham-like hand in preparation to smashing the Chinger, the tiny agent CIA within it, to a small but messy pulp. What he had drunk seemed to have done some nasty things with his head.

  "This is part of the secret Chinger technology," CIA said. "I'm trying to bring the secret of miniaturization back to our armed forces. I wore a very hairy, and warm too let me tell you, ape suit and hung around the jungle near one of their secret laboratories that we discovered on this hothouse world. I got into the lab one night and found the secret miniaturization machinery that enables them to shrink or expand at will, thus playing hell with Earth's plans and generally confusing everyone. They had this giant Chinger robot for working in steel mills and I got into the controls, reduced to real Chinger size and got the hell out of there and was doing fine until your girlfriend took over my mind and she was too stupid to know it wasn't really a Chinger mind in there but a human one. So now you understand."

  Bill didn't know what to say. It was a reasonable enough explanation, given the unusual circumstances of everything. But there was something fishy about it, too. Bill had the impression that he was not being told the whole story and besides this joker talked so much Bill's head was beginning to hurt. Or maybe it was the booze. He pinched his nose with his fingers but it did not help. Then he remembered.

  "Listen, CIA— or whatever the hell your name is — where's Illyria who was supposed to be in there?"

  "That's the difficult part," CIA said. "As you can imagine, there isn't much room in here once you go down to the level I'm at. Illyria tried to squeeze in, took over for awhile as I said. I know how fond you are of her. I was trying to save her for your sake."

  "Yeah, what happened?"

  "It was too tight for us both," CIA said. "You can imagine how difficult it was, having this female persona squeezed into my brain. Bill, I didn't mean to harm her. I was trying to find the best solution for everybody."

  "Where's Illyria?" Bill roared, his broad hand with its muscular thickness hovering over the subminiature CIA in his tiny control room.

  "Now listen, I'm trying to tell you," CIA said, cowering. "Give me a chance, will you? It's hard to talk when you're as tiny as I am."

  "So get back to your real size," Bill said.

  "I'm afraid there's some difficulty around that, too," CIA said, snuffling unhappily.

  "I want to know about Illyria right now," Bill growled angrily. He reached into the Chinger's head and plucked CIA out between thumb and forefinger. Bill's other hand curled into a fist and the fist lifted, prepared to hammer CIA into a thin, unpleasant paste.

  "Since room was so limited," CIA said, "she decided to perform the Jansenite Maneuver. I begged her not to, but you know what she's like, Bill, a real trouper. I even offered to vacate this head for her. But she wouldn't hear of it. That's a girl in a million, Bill. You were lucky to have known her."

  "What is the Jansenite Maneuver?" Bill asked in a normal tone of voice. His throat was getting hoarse from roaring.

  "It was invented, or perhaps I should say developed, on the planet Jansen VII, which is located near the Coalsack region. The local species there had a problem, you see —"

  CIA's explanation was interrupted by Ham Duo's voice over the intercom. "Bill! Get up here at once! We got trouble!"

  "In just a minute," Bill called back. "I've got to —"

  "Drop everything and get up here!" Duo roared. "If you want to live, that is. If not, take your time."

  "Be right back," Bill said to the miniature agent. "Don't go away." He hurried to the control room.

  "What's going on?" he asked.

  Ham Duo gestured at the wraparound view plate that afforded a view of nearly two hundred degrees of space without distortion. Bill saw three small ships coming toward them and maneuvering at great speed. Bursts of radiance flared against the ship's energy shields proving that some of their missiles were getting through their defenses. Another two ships came up behind them. They were squat little vessels, one-being fighter-interceptors, painted the ominous ocher and rose madder of the Swinglis* of Omnichron II.

  "But we're not at war with the Swinglis*!" Bill said.

  "Tell them that," Ham Duo said. "And meanwhile you might as well man the port atomic cannon."

  Bill ran to the gun station and strapped himself into the control seat. He switched onto manual just as a double burst rocked their ship, dimming the lights and putting a strain on the defensive shields.

  "One more like that and we've had it," Duo gritted.

  The Swingli* ships were streaking in toward Duo's ship from all angles, and both Duo and Bill were at the controls of their port side and starboard side atomic cannons respectively. Brilliant laser flashes arced here and there, filling the blackness of space with the brilliance of arcing electricity. One of the Swinglis*, bolder than the rest, bored straight in toward the ship's defensive shield, scorning defensive action. "Get that sucker!" Duo shouted. "Tracking," Bill roared. Both fighting men set their sights on the approaching bandit. Their ship bucked and swayed as atomic torpedoes burst against the energy shield, buffeting the two men and knocking down all the crockery in the ship's tiny galley. Bill managed to blow up the bandit at the last possible moment, sending its burning remains cartwheeling across space. Duo meanwhile had accounted for five more of the raiders, leaving only twenty or so to go.

  "Another squadron of them coming up astern," Bill said, glancing into the retrograde mirror attached to his gunsight.

  "These guys are really starting to get me mad," Duo snarled, showing his teeth, which were startlingly white and obviously false. "Strap yourself down, old buddy. I'm going to try something real different."

  Bill grabbed for the safety harness and quickly buckled it around him. From the ship's galley he heard shrill sounds, like a miniature man would make if he were being buffeted around mercilessly. Ham fired the full bank of retrograde rockets, at the same time skidding the ship into an impossibly tight turn.

  Bill's harness snapped under the huge G-strain. He found himself plastered against one wall as Duo, his eyes bulging out of his head, continued to tighten the turn.

  Behind them, the Swingli* bandits fell away, unable to keep up with this apparently suicidal maneuver. As soon as he had put a little distance between his ship and theirs, Duo kicked in the
emergency light-speed selector. There was a groan of tortured metal, a squeal of overstressed men. The ship shuddered like a rat in the jaws of a terrier, then suddenly darted off at a rapidly multiplying speed factor impossible to attain in a normal maneuver.

  Space winked on and off. Suns appeared and vanished. The ship was revolving as it sped through its turns, and Bill was bouncing from wall to wall. Duo was still strapped in, but he seemed to be at the breaking point.

  Bill looked through the mirrors, then checked again with the radar detection system.

  "You can ease up now!" he told Duo. "We've outrun them."

  "Ease up!" Duo said. "Ah, wouldn't I dearly like to!"

  "You mean —"

  "That's right," Duo said.

  Out of control, spinning and turning, the ship shrieked down through the thin upper atmosphere of a planet. The ground was coming up very rapidly. Which didn't really matter since they would burn up at this speed, long before they hit.

  Now sing, Muse, of that descent through the upper atmosphere, the ship's hull glowing a dull red as it skimmed the thin upper air, Ham Duo desperately trying to take speed off the ship, which was fluttering and turning like a drunken butterfly. And tell us of Bill, too, bouncing from wall to wall as the ship changed configuration, trying to get back to the galley where he had left CIA, the Chinger, and perhaps — it was difficult to tell at this point — Illyria. Inch by inch he crawled as the retro-rockets fired and Duo tried maneuvers unheard of in the Space Pilot's Companion, in any edition, to try to get more speed off the ship before they either burned up in the atmosphere or crashed like a cannon ball on the planet's rapidly looming surface.

  Then they were plunging through dense cloud cover, red and purple clouds with silvery fringes, through and out the other side until they could make out features on the planet. It was a yellow and orange world, with bright green patches here and there, and long dark markings that might have been canals but also might have been something else. It was hard to be sure at this speed and altitude and G-pressure.

  Bill managed to get back to the galley. The Chinger had found a tiny deceleration hammock, of the sort used to keep eggs from exploding. Bill gasped hoarsely with the last of his strength, "Illyria, are you all right? Are you home right now?"

  But it was CIA's voice-pattern that replied. "Like I said, Bill, I was going to explain about that."

  But it looked like explanations would have to wait, perhaps forever, because the ground was rushing up now like a locomotive gone berserk, only much bigger, and Bill still wasn't strapped down and was in good stead to be shmeared flat into a thin unpleasant slime when the ship struck.

  Then, at the last moment, the doors of the pantry swung open and Bill saw within a gigantic cauldron filled with a pasty gray doughy substance. This, as he learned later, was the dough for a giant pot-pie, Ganja pot that is, that Duo had been whipping up before the difficulties on Rathbone arose to change his plans. With his last strength he hauled himself forward.

  The dough surrounded him with its gluey consistency. Luckily enough, the shaking the ship had taken had imparted to the dough a satiny elasticity. It shielded Bill better than the standard harness would have done. At the last moment before impact, the Chinger lizard with the miniature agent at the controls in its head leaped into the vat beside him. Then the ship struck the ground with a bone-shattering jolt and, gratefully, Bill passed out.

  Chapter 8

  Just before recovering consciousness, there is a moment in which you don't remember how you got unconscious. You are too taken up with just becoming conscious again. So, for a moment, there is only this, and then, a tiny moment after that, there is, not a memory of what rendered you unconscious — that comes later — but rather a presentiment as to how that came about. That presentiment comes clothed in a thin veil of anticipatory emotion. So it was with Bill. If you can follow all that deep stuff. When he came to again, he realized first that he was Bill, next that something had made him unconscious, and then, that he might not be awakening into very pleasant circumstances. So often is the transition from dreaming sleep into strainy-eyed reality. In his dreams, while knocked out, Bill had been an emperor of infinite space. Perhaps. But the dreams faded, as he came to and the thought occurred to him that he'd rather not find out what he'd gotten into this time.

  He really did not want to think about it, but felt compelled to. Why would Swingli* ships attack Ham Duo? What was Duo's mission on Rathbone II? Was this Rathbone II? How were they going to get out of here? When was he going to have a chance to go to the toilet?

  Finally, the flood of questions was sufficient to override Bill's desire to keep his eyes shut and wait for better times. Slowly at first, then definitively, he opened his eyes.

  He was in a small room, bare, with flagstone floors which looked quite chilly except that Bill wasn't lying directly on them. He was on what looked like a large brown rug, or perhaps an exceptionally thick blanket, of the sort that people wrap around themselves at sporting events on all planets with chilly stadiums. The room he was in was illuminated by a long neon tube overhead. There were scratchings on the stone walls, words of imprecation or prayer written in languages Bill had never encountered. Bill moved himself very gently, because you could never tell what might be broken after a crash like that. He didn't know where he was, and for the moment wasn't too eager to find out. Things hadn't been going well for him recently. He wished that he would stop having crashes. It hardly seemed fair, all these things happening to him.

  He started to climb to his feet when the rug beneath him stirred and emitted a porcine grunt. Bill rolled off it rather quickly, as you might very well imagine, and pressed his back to the wall and bulged his eyes. The rug sat up, too, and revealed itself to be a Kookie, one of those large furry beasts with mild to well-down intelligence who have been known to take up the practice of space piracy, since that is a profession open to all, with no nonsense about college credits or Civil Service exams.

  "Hello," said Bill, rather unimaginatively, which considering what he had been through lately, was not too bad. "How are you?"

  When the Kookie heard this he responded in his own primitive language, all growls and high-pitched whines. Bill's built-in translator, somewhat battered from recent vicissitudes but still functioning more or less as it should, translated this as, "Gee, boss, Kookie feel pretty shitty. You no see my master, him named Ham Duo around anywhere?"

  "As a matter of fact," Bill said, "I just came from his ship."

  The Kookie sat up, towering head and shoulders over Bill even in that posture. "Oooh, goodies. Where he?"

  "I wish I knew," Bill said. "We were on our way here to rescue you when Swingli* ships shot us down."

  "Dragonshit!" the Kookie rumbled angrily. "I told Ham many often times. Use invisibility treatment — great stuff! Make spaceship look like big crappy meteorite. But no, he no listen to primitive Kookie with brain like garbage grinder, that what he say. So where he is now?"

  "You know as much as I do. I passed out when the ship crash-landed," Bill said. "I haven't the dimmest idea where he is now. I don't suppose you've seen Illyria."

  "What hell you talk about?" Chewgumma said, for that was his name, unbelievable as it is. The Kookies ran to some pretty kooky names. Like Chewgrappa, Chewbacca, Chewrugga and so forth.

  "Someone else, or something else. It gets a little complicated. It's a Chinger, which looks like a seven-inch-high green lizard with four arms, hard to miss. And it has brain trouble, to put it mildly. A lot to do with changing bodies, you know."

  "Ah, so! Maybe a Tsurisian."

  "Do you know the Tsurisians?"

  "Had my run-ins with them, fight like blazes," the Kookie said. "But that was in another time."

  "What's going to happen to us?" Bill asked.

  "Probably die for sure," Chewgumma said with guttural gloom. "They kill-maim-torture pirates here. They still pissed at Ham and me. Raided their big city, stole all the treasure of the Klingians. Now m
e captured — ho-ho you too."

  "Thanks for the sympathy. And dare I ask how a big brain like you got captured?"

  "A net coated with honey," Chewgumma said sheepishly. "We Kookies kinda stupid. Fall for that old stunt."

  "And do you know what they'll do to you?"

  "Got plenty fears," Chewgumma muttered. "People here on Rathbone famous rug makers. Always got eye out for new materials."

  Bill looked at the Kookie's thick, luxurious pelt. And despite being sympathetic to the big alien beast, he couldn't help thinking what a nice rug he would make.

  "That's a tough break," Bill said feigning sympathy.

  The Kookie blinked angry little red eyes and he caught the fake sympathy in Bill's voice. "Human skin is waterproof, too," he snarled.

  "Well, yes, I suppose so," Bill said.

  "Make heap good bathroom rug."

  Just then there was the sound of a key in the lock and the door of their cell swung open.

  Four guards entered. They were extremely tall and thin, with long heads shaped like kidney beans and bodies which looked in the last degree of emaciation. They had to stoop almost double to get inside the cell door. Once inside they still couldn't straighten up. Four of them in the room, in addition to Bill and the Kookie, crowded the small cell to bursting point. This was the first time that Bill had ever seen a Swingli* in the flesh, although he had come across their pictures in the Alien Enemy Identification Book, which all human military personnel had to study so as to know the contours of their many and varied enemies.