On the Planet of Bottled Brains

by Harry Harrison

  The women were another matter. Slender, fragile, beautiful in that purely decorative way that simple-minded men find appealing, they could have graced any gathering of humans anywhere in the galaxy, or perhaps even beyond it. They were lovely, and by no means the least lovely of them was the woman known as Tesora who had told him earlier that she wasn't exactly Illyria. It was all a bit of a puzzle, as was the matter of how Bill had gotten there and what had gone on before he got there, since it seemed apparent that Splock had been up to something while he, Bill, had been between things. Or however you call it when someone is not present for something that by rights he ought to have been present for.

  Splock, meanwhile, was acting affable in a dignified sort of way, even attempting a smile now and then so as not to let down the side. But Bill could tell from the slow twitch of one of Splock's pointed and frontally-pointing ears that all was not to his liking.

  After the liqueurs and coffees, and the inevitable cigars, Messer Dimitri rose and held up his arms, commanding silence. His pudgy body, which had lain indolent in the padded chair at the head of the table, now took on the rigor of one not unaccustomed to command.

  "Ladies and gentlemen," he said. "Your attention for a moment, please. We have with us tonight no less a personage than Bill Kliptorian, violin virtuoso who has appeared before both headed and headless states. He has agreed, not only to give a concert tonight, but to reproducing the conditions that accompanied his extraordinary triumph on Saginaw IV. But first, a little light piano music by Stumper Rosewoodie, master of the silken strings."

  All the guests were escorted into the drawing room that accompanied the lesser library where they had been eating. There, a grand piano dominated the room from a three foot high dais; a man had mounted quickly to it, and, shooting out his cuffs, sat down to the keys.

  If Bill hadn't known it was impossible, he could have sworn it was Ham Duo.

  "We gotta talk," Splock said, grabbing Bill by the arm and leading him to a deep bay window that looked out over the lunar landscape that was illuminated by the cold light of still other moons high in the sky.

  "You're damn right we gotta talk," Bill said. "Where are we? It looks like Death Valley out there. Why did you tell them I was this fiddle player? How did we get into this? How did it happen that —"

  "Please," Splock said, holding up his hand. "There is no time for questions. You are supposed to start performing in about five minutes."

  "How? What am I supposed to do?"

  "That's the part we're going to figure out right now," Splock said.

  "All right," Bill said, and waited.

  After a few minutes Bill said. "Have you figured out yet how we get out of this bind?"

  "I am thinking!"

  "So think faster."

  "It doesn't quite work that way. Not that you would know much about thinking. This is a very desperate situation. Not that you were around to help. You were off in your unconsciousness."

  "It's not my fault if I fall unconscious during very rapid space flights," Bill pointed out.

  "There are no accidents," Splock muttered darkly.

  "You want me to figure out what to do next?" Bill asked.

  "Yes. I'd like to see some evidence of this creativity I'm always hearing that humans have. Has something to do with a sense of humor, I believe. I don't have one. I don't think any of this is funny."

  "I do have a sense of humor," Bill lied. "I don't think any of it is funny either."

  "Interesting how we come to the same perception by diametrically opposite routes."

  Tesora, the raven-haired woman who was not exactly Illyria, darted into the bay window, which had the capacity to hold them both, and several others besides. She seized Bill by the sleeve. "I must speak to you alone."

  "I was trying to speak to him alone myself," Splock said.

  "I realize that. But there's so little time. I have to say to him what I have to say."

  "Well, damn it," Splock snapped, irritated and filled with self-pity, "What do you think I'm doing, delivering a singing telegram?"

  "If it hadn't been for me," the woman said, "you would never have gotten him out of the Dissembler and into the Reconstitutor."

  "What?" Bill blurbled.

  "We didn't want to remind you of the experience," Splock said.

  "You see, things came adrift when I tried to travel without the Directional Repeater Indicater nulled along the gravity line. Luckily the instantaneous parts recall on the part of our medical robot set you right in no time."

  "Except for the one detail," Tesora said. "By the way, Bill, the reason I am not exactly Illyria is that we haven't quite settled on possession of this body. By rights, you see, it doesn't belong to either of us."

  "Where did you find it?" Bill asked.

  "It was left over at the Saturday night feast of the Thaumaturges."

  "Messer is the king of the Thaumaturges," Splock explained. "Only by availing ourselves of the guild rule could we take refuge here."

  "What is the guild rule?"

  "That only musicians of the foremost class are allowed in."

  "How do you tell they're in the foremost class?"

  "By their press reviews."

  Tesora said, "The fact is, Bill, tonight is full moon and the fight for possession of my body —"

  "Kindly stop interrupting with your sluttish ways," Splock said grouchily. "Bill, soon the violin will be put into your hands. Do you remember what we told you about violins?"

  "Violins," Bill said, his voice a peculiar guttural, the rapid blink rate of his eyes a sure sign that he was either feigning or feeling a state of excitation.

  "That's the stuff. But save it for the real thing."

  "What's going on?" Bill asked.

  "Don't you understand?" Splock said. "It is necessary that you not know in order to fulfill your part properly."

  Just then Messer stuck his head in the door. "Showtime," he said. "Here is your violin. The Greels await you."

  Splock gave Bill a meaningful look. At least, that was how Bill interpreted it. He didn't know what it meant, of course. That would be asking too much. He took the fiddle and marched to the drawing room.

  Fear comes in different sized packages. Fear of embarrassment is not negligible. And that fear was exacerbating Bill's current mood; because he knew, as soon as he strode out under the baby blue spotlight, that he was about to make a fool of himself.

  There were extenuating circumstances, of course. The fact that Bill had two right arms, and therefore, logically, two right hands, was a considerable problem in violin playing. In fact, you could go so far as to say that the violin was built specifically for the needs of players with two hands, one right and one left.

  Bill, whose real right arm had been crisped some time ago under dolorous circumstances, had had to learn how to cope with life with two right hands. For a while he had had an alligator's foot, too, but that curious appendage had had no influence on the battle of his handedness.

  The audience waited, gaping attentively. Messer stood on one side of the room, arms crossed, smiling unpleasantly. Several armed guards lounged in the doorways, automatic weapons cradled in their arms. They looked cruel and uncaring, and capable of anything. How Bill wished he were one of them!

  The pianist struck an opening chord. Messer came forward, bowed to the audience, and said, "Ladies and gentlemen, before we begin, I think I had better explain what you are about to see, for your greater delectation. Bill, you see, is capable of playing the sleep song of the Grundge critters, who, as you all know, are reluctant allies of the Chingers. The Grundge are not intelligent, however. For them, biting comes first, thinking a long way afterwards. They can be tamed momentarily, however, by the playing of the sleep song. Usually the female Grundges sing the sleeping song every night. It's the only way they can get the males to bed. Otherwise they spend all night biting trees and each other. Bill has learned this song, the first human in recorded history who has done so. He will now p
lay it to you under the conditions that won him his recent triumph."

  Messer stepped back, leaving Bill alone in the middle of the stage. Then the stage collapsed, or rather, was pulled apart under him, and he fell a few feet into a large vat that lay directly under it. The vat was almost ten feet high, with Perspex sides so the audience would miss none of the fun.

  Then hatches were raised under the stage and two basket-loads of the two-foot Grundge reptiles were poured into the vat. The Grundges fought and snapped at each other for a while, then began to look for something more interesting to do. They spied Bill. Several of the brighter ones, which wasn't saying very much, gradually came up with the thought that this tall skinny thing with the piece of brown wood in his hand might very well be worth biting.

  In a sluggish tide of vein-streaked red and avocado green, the Grundges crept toward Bill, their long jaws, set with backward-pointing needle-sharp teeth, slavering, their nostrils puffing, their eyeballs bulging. A thoroughly unlovely sight, as well as being a lethal one.

  Bill took one look and started stomping. His feet beat a mad tattoo of frenzy on the polished Perspex surface of the vat. At the same time, he swept up the fiddle and scraped the bow across the strings in desperation.

  It screeched shrilly so he dropped it and grabbed at the Grundges.

  There was pandemonium throughout the audience as Bill picked up Grundges in both hands and threw them into the audience. From the viewpoint of the Grundges, it was like being taken for a ride around the park before dinner.

  Seeing the ruin on all sides of him, Messer bounded to the stage. He had a laser pistol with a jump-phaser on it. Jump-phasers were illegal in most of the civilized galaxy. Instead of drilling a neat hole through you and cauterizing the edges so that you could be killed and hardly know what hit you, the jump-phaser produced ugly jagged wounds that shocked those who had to look at them almost as badly as those who received them. The jagged beams could lay your flesh open to the bone, like other things could also do, but the jump-phasers did it in ways that really hurt a whole lot. And so Bill was faced, not merely with death, but also disfigurement and mutilation. It is to his credit that he reacted instantaneously to this threat, which, to one with less sand in his craw, might have been paralyzing.

  "Aaaah!" Bill screamed. "Take that!" As he had been trained in Unnatural Combat class, he threw his body in a counterclockwise direction, at the same time setting his feet and releasing his breath forcibly. There were a few more movements involved, but if you want a drill manual go out and buy one. Suffice it to say that Bill soared into the air and turned a double somersault, landing in a corner of the room some thirty feet from where he began. Which, as you might imagine, is not easy to do.

  By this time Splock had reacted, moving quickly for one so logical, taking forth a beamer which he had kept hidden against the possibility of a possibility like this. Whirling he covered the left flank, while Ham Duo, whom Bill had indeed seen earlier, leaped down from the high balcony with an energy-sword in his hand and a scowl on his unshaven face.

  "Guard my back!" he cried to Bill, and advanced on the platoon of soldiers wearing shiny beetle armor that had just arrived.

  "Kill them!" Messer cried, throwing himself behind an energy-proof balustrade just in time before Duo's sparkling sword scalloped him.

  "Kiss my bowb!" Bill shrieked, excusably, perhaps, due to the extreme urgency of the moment.

  For, indeed, the outcome of the swiftly-developing battle was uncertain in the extreme. The element of surprise had now been lost, since surprise is only effective while it is still surprising; so the gage was passed to the side with more men, and this round was clearly to be won by Messer, since, here in his sanctuary, protected by corruptible officials who let him operate for a price, he appeared to be preeminent. His beetle-armored soldiers, their denunciators buzzing, necks bleeding from automatic injections of rage-inducing drugs, were in full charge, cutting about them with their squat energy lances, which produced dull, ugly explosions of great damaging capacity. Splock had had the presence of mind to equip himself with a canister of ULP, the energy-dampening aerosol, and so they came through the first barrage unscathed. But what was to be done after that?

  Surprisingly, the answer was to be provided by a single, long-stemmed blue rose.

  Chapter 12

  But some may consider the case overstated. The blue rose was present during the next decisive moment, and hence can be assigned a kind of guilt by association, but it can in no way be held causal to the events that followed.

  The blue rose was on Captain Dirk's coffee table. It plays no part in this story. And yet, ineluctably, it was there.

  More to the point, Dirk was there.

  Or, to be more precise, he was in his private quarters on the Gumption on the morning when the blue rose bloomed and the scattergram was picked up by an alert communications officer whom no one had thought much of before this.

  "A scatter message?" Dirk said, when Communications Officer Paul Muni (no relation to the character actor with the same name) came to his quarters bearing a printout.

  "Yes, sir," Muni said. He was a tall, good-looking young man with a small mustache. The mustache had been the occasion for laughter when Muni first came aboard, Dirk remembered, because it was silly season on the Gumption and men were finding the strangest things funny. Muni hadn't known that, of course. He had thought they were laughing at him.

  In a way they were, of course. But not really.

  Muni, normally a reckless, outward-turned individual of a happy-go-lucky nature, turned overnight into a misanthrope. He stayed alone in the communications room, which he had hung with black crepe paper because he claimed the bright lights of the overhead fluorescents hurt his eyes. He had his meals sent to him there, and refused conversation with the crew. Sometimes, when you passed the communications shack, you could hear a curious tapping noise. No one ever found out what that was. It added to the mystery.

  Muni's behavior was brought to the attention of Captain Dirk. Dirk was wearing his one-piece blue and brown elasticized jumpsuit that day. He was in an expansive mood.

  "Let him stay in the communications room," Dirk said. "Leave him alone; he'll snap out of it."

  "But sir, it's unusual behavior."

  "And since when do we not tolerate unusual behavior in those we suspect to be deranged?"

  "You mean Muni is crazy?"

  "Only temporarily, I think. Leave him alone. It'll work out."

  Dirk's thought had proven prescient. Alone in the dark, lying in a mess of black crepe paper, Muni was recovering his nerve and self-confidence.

  "Heck," he said to himself. "My mustache probably did look silly. What a fool I was to have let the fellows' chaffing get to me so."

  He considered leaving the communications room. He was suddenly in the mood for a rousing game of ping pong. But he knew he had to do something first.

  "Something special," he said to himself. Then, glancing at the list of special communication problems, his resolve hardened.

  "I'll do it!" he said.

  "So you broke the scattergram code," Dirk said. "No one thought it could be done. It has been the most important secret of our enemies, the Murdids of Sting's Planet."

  "I have broken it," Muni said. If a hint of pride crept into his voice, Dirk was not the one to blame him. "Read it to me, Mr Muni."

  Muni cleared his throat and read, "From Murdid Action Tentacle 2 to Murdid Central High Command in the Hidden Palace on the Forbidden Planet. Hail."

  "Very long salutation," Dirk commented.

  "Yes, sir," Muni said, and read on. "This Tentacle Arm has discovered that the Earth criminals, Mr Splock and Commander Ham Duo, are presently besieged by the household forces of Messer, owner and proprietor of the sanctuary planetoid in Dentoid 12. Request permission to treacherously break sanctuary, kill all who resist and confine the rest to small cages for their showing in our triumphal march back to Central. Over."

  "And the r
eply?" Dirk said.

  "We don't have it, sir. Message ends there."

  "Mr Muni," Dirk said, "congratulations on the job well done. But through no fault of your own it is only half done. We need the scattergram that high command of the Murdids will send in response to this one. Go back to your communications shack now, Mr Muni, and keep your ear glued to the earphone or whatever it is you do to gather in scattergrams."

  "Actually, we use foreshadowing equipment made especially for us by Portent, Ltd., the secret arms factory on the southern edge of the galaxy. The way it works —"

  "Some other time, OK?" Dirk said. "I have to keep my head clear of the little details in order to see the general picture, the big view, and be able to do something about it. Do you understand, Paul?"

  "I...I think so, sir," Muni said. He was moved by this unexpected insight into the human side of this grim commander of resplendent reputation. "I'll get right to it!" and he exited. Yeoman Muni was no longer worrying about what the men thought of his mustache, Dirk thought to himself, realizing, not for the first time, how much duty aboard the Gumption was a testing and a training of the character.

  So, Dirk thought, after completing the previous thought, the time of testing is at hand.

  "So," he thought, "those who trusted the Murdids were proven wrong, yet again. Yet to move prematurely, before orders are received, would be madness. They would reduce me in rank. No longer would they use me for action." If he were to strike at the Murdids now, and it turned out that they had not violated the sanctuary of the infamous Messer, then the Galactic Council of Placation would repudiate his move; he would be declared outlaw. There would be other unpleasantries.