Venus on the Half-Shell Part 3

"Where is Heaven?"

"Heaven is the second planet of Beta Orionis. It is a T-type planet which was uninhabited by sentients un-til a Terrestrial expedition landed there in 2879 A.D. on first. ..."

Simon canceled the order.

"Take me to some unexplored galaxy, and we'll play it by ear from there," Simon typed.

A few seconds later they were off into the black un-known. The ship was capable of attaining 69,000 times the speed of light but Simon held it down to 20,000 times, or 20X. The drive itself was named the soixante-neuf drive, because this meant sixty-nine in French. It had been invented in 2970 A.D. by a Frenchman whose exact name Simon didn't recall. Ei-ther it was Pierre le Chanceux or Pierre le Chancreux, he wasn't sure which, since he'd not made a study of s.p.a.ce history.

When the first ship equipped with the drive, the Golden Goose, had been revved up to top speed, those aboard had been frightened by a high screaming noise.

This had started out as a murmur at about 20,000 times the speed of light. As the ship accelerated, the sound became louder and higher. At 69X, the ship was filled with the kind of noise you hear when a woman with a narrow pelvis is giving birth or a man has been kicked in the b.a.l.l.s. There were many theo-ries about where this screaming came from. Then, in 2980, Dr. Maloney, a brilliant man when sober, solved the mystery. It was known that the drive got all but its kick-off energy from tapping into the fifth di-mension. This dimension contained stars just like ours, except that they were of a fifth-dimensional shape, whatever that was. These stars were living creatures, beings of complex energy structures, just as the stars in our universe were alive. Efforts to commu-nicate with the stars, however, had failed. Maybe they, like the porpoises, just didn't care to talk to us.

Never mind. What did matter was that the drive was drawing off the energy of these living things. They didn't like being killed and the drive hurt them.

Ergo, Dr. Maloney explained, they screamed.

This relieved a lot of people. Some, however, insis-ted that interstellar travel must stop. We might be kill-ing intelligent beings. Their opponents pointed out that that was regrettable, if true. But other species were using the drive, so the stars would be killed any-way. If we refused to use it, we wouldn't have prog-ress. And we'd be at the mercy of merciless aliens from outer s.p.a.ce.

Besides, there wasn't any evidence that fifth-dimen-sional stars were any more intelligent than earth-worms.

Simon didn't know what the truth of the matter was. But he hated to hear the screaming, which was so loud at 69X that even earplugs didn't help. So he kept the ship at 20X. At that speed, he hoped he'd only be bruising the stars a little.

The Hw.a.n.g Ho zipped away from the solar system and soon the sun was a tiny light that quickly became snuffed out as if it had been dipped in water. The celestial objects ahead, as seen in the viewscreen, were not what he would see at below-light speed. At 20X the ship was, in effect, half in this universe and half somewhere else.

The stars and the nebulae were creatures of the sublime. They were beautiful but with the beauty of awe, horror, and a mind-twisting magnitude and shape. They burned and changed form as if they were flames in h.e.l.l created by Lucifer, high on heroin. Poets had tried to describe the heavens at superlight speeds. They had all failed. But when had the whining commentary ever matched the glorious text?

Simon sat paralyzed in his chair moaning with the ecstasy of terror. After a while he became aware that he had a huge erection, and there is no telling what might have happened if he had not been interrupted.

The dog had been whimpering and whining for some time, but suddenly it began barking loudly and racing around. Simon tried to ignore him. Then he be-came annoyed. Here he was, on the verge of the greatest o.r.g.a.s.m he had ever known, and this mutt had to spoil it all. He shouted at Anubis, who paid him no attention at all. Finally, Simon remembered some-thing he had read in school and seen in various TV series. He became scared, though he was not sure that he had good reason to be so.

As everybody knew, dogs were psychic. They saw things which men used to call ghosts. Now it was known that these were actually fifth-dimensional ob-jects which had pa.s.sed through normal s.p.a.ce unperceived by the gross senses of man.

These went through certain channels formed by the shape of the fifth dimension.

The main channel on Earth went through the British islands, which was why England had more "ghosts" than any other place on the planet.

Every Earth ship that put out to s.p.a.ce beyond the solar system carried a dog.

Radar, being limited to the speed of light, was no good for a vessel going at su-perlight speeds. But a dog could detect other living beings even at a million lightyears' distance if they were also in soixante-neuf drive. To the dogs, other beings in this extradimensional world were ghosts, and ghosts scared h.e.l.l out of them.

He pressed a b.u.t.ton. A screen sprang to life, showing him the view from the right side of the ship. He didn't expect to see the approaching ship, since it was going faster than light. But he could see a black funnel coming at an angle which would intercept his course. This, he knew, was the trail left by a vessel with soixante-neuf drive. It was one of the peculiar-ities of the drive that a ship radiated behind it a "shadow," a conical blackness of unknown nature.

Si-mon, if he had looked out his own rearview screen, would have seen only a circle of nothingness directly behind the ship.

He was convinced that the ship approaching him was a Hoonhor and that it was out to get him. That was the only reason he could think of why the ship hadn't changed its course, which would result in col-lision if it maintained it.

Probably, the Hoonhors in-tended to keep him from notifying other worlds of what they had done to Earth.

He stepped on the accelerator pedal and kept it to the floor while the speedometer needle crept toward the right-hand edge of the dial. He also twisted the wheel to the left to swerve the ship away. The stranger immediately changed its course to follow him.

The murmur from the two engine rooms became a loud and piercing shriek. Anubis howled with agony, and the owl flew around screaming. Simon put plugs in his ears, but they couldn't keep out the painful noise. Nor could he plug up his conscience. Some-where, on one of the fifth-dimensional universes, a liv-ing being was undergoing terrible torture so he could save his own neck.

After ten minutes, the screams suddenly ceased. Si-mon didn't feel any relief.

This only meant that the star had died, stripped of its fire, stripped, in fact, of every atom of its body. Tensed, he waited and shortly the screaming started again. The drive had searched for and found another victim, a star that may have been happily browsing in the meadows of s.p.a.ce only a minute before.

Presently, the two ships were on the same plane, the Hoonhor an incalculable distance behind the Hw.a.n.g Ho. Simon couldn't see it in his rearview screen because of the blackness he trailed. Somewhere in that cone was the Hoonhor. Or was it? According to theory, nothing could exist in the immediate wake of a 69X vessel. Yet one vessel could follow another in the wake. But the pursuer did not exist during this time. So where was it? In the sixth dimension, ac-cording to the theorists. And the stuff in the wake of the chaser must then exist in the seventh dimension, and any ship in its wake would be in the eighth di-mension, and any ship in its wake would be in the ninth dimension.

Most of the theorists were happy with this explana-tion. They could not run out of dimensions any more than they could run out of numbers. However, a bril-liant Hindu mathematician, Dr. Utapal, had said that there was a limit. By an equation which was so ab-struse that it was unprovable, Utapal demonstrated that the ninth dimension was the upper limit. (What the lower limit was, n.o.body knew.) When a fourth ship joined the procession, there was a transposition factor, which resulted in the third ship suddenly being in front of the first. This was called the Unavoidable Transdimensional Shift in scholarly journals but was privately referred to as the You-Grab-My-Nuts-I'll-Grab-Yours Hypothesis.

It was then that a control panel siren began whooping and its lights flashed red. Simon became even more alarmed. A s.p.a.ce boojum was directly ahead of the ship.

A boojum was a collapsed star which formed a gravitational whirlpool that sucked in any matter com-ing close to it. In fact, its gravity was so strong that even light couldn't escape from its surface. But the ship's instruments could detect the alterations it made in the local s.p.a.ce-time structure.

Boojums were a sort of manhole in a transdimensional sewage system. Or a slot in a multidimensional roulette wheel. All the boojums in this universe were entrances to other-dimensional worlds, and if a ship got sucked into one, it could be lost forever in the maze of connections. Or, if its crew was lucky, it would be shot back into this universe.

The Hoonhor ship was coming up on him swiftly. The slow freighter could not outrun the other vessel. Simon's only escape, like it or not, was to dive into the boojum. He doubted that the Hoonhor captain would have the guts to follow him into it.

The next thing he knew, everything had turned black. Nor was there any sound.

After what seemed like hours but must have been only a few minutes-if time existed in this place-he felt as if he were melt-ing. His fingers and toes were extending at the same time they were becoming shapeless. His head seemed to loll on one side because his neck was stretching far out. It fell to one side and kept on falling. It went past his body and then the floor and then was falling through a bottomless s.p.a.ce. He tried to raise his arm to grab it, but his arm groped through nothingness for miles and miles without end.

His intestines were floating up through his body and after a while they were coiled around his head, which was still falling. They didn't taste good at all.

His a.n.u.s was bobbing on the end of his nose; his liver was wedged between his head and his ear. He didn't know which ear because he had no idea of which way was right or left, up or down, in or out.

He thought perhaps his head might be falling to the left, or the right, and he had used the wrong arm to try to grab it. One of his arms wasn't extending, so he transferred his efforts to that. It grabbed what felt like Anubis' tongue, a long, slimy organ. He felt along it and then pulled his hand away. Either the dog's tongue had grown or Anubis had turned into one giant tongue. He was immediately sorry that he had moved his hand. He seemed to be groping around in the dog's guts. Something moved against the back of his hand, something that beat quickly and sent a throbbing through him. Anubis' heart, he thought. He kept his hand against it and when it started to slide away he closed his fingers around it. It was the only identifiable object in this terrifying universe outside himself, an object which he had to cling to, to keep his sanity. It also kept him from feeling utterly alone, and it was the only thing which gave him any security at all. It alone was not changing shape.

Or so he had thought at first. Within a few seconds, it had grown bigger and its throbbing became faster. He hoped that the dog wasn't going to die of a heart attack.

Suddenly, they were out among the stars. Simon al-most screamed with joy. They had made it; they weren't doomed to ride forever, like some Flying Dutchman, through the lightless shapeless seas of the boojum.

Then he hastily released his grasp. It wasn't Anubis' heart he'd been holding.

It was his p.e.n.i.s.

Simon apologized to Anubis and then asked the computer to check out the stars in the area. It repor-ted that the ship was in an uncharted area. Simon didn't care. A man without a home can't be lost, and one galaxy was as good as another for his purposes.

Simon directed the computer to take the ship to the nearest galaxy and look for an inhabited planet. He went to the captain's quarters and poured a big drink of rice wine to soothe his nerves. The trouble with Chinese liquor was that it didn't satisfy. A few min-utes after he'd had a shot, he felt as if he needed an-other. No wonder the ancient Chinese poets were al-ways loaded out of their skulls.

Shut up in the cabin, Simon was able to relax by playing his banjo. The ship was going at only 20X, so the sound from the engine rooms wasn't loud enough to upset him. But he had to play behind closed doors because the banjo made Anubis howl and gave the owl dysentery. Their reaction hurt Simon's feelings, but something good came out of it. By backward logic and a.n.a.logy, he had figured out why his concerts al-ways got such bad reviews. Since animals hated his playing, there must be something b.e.s.t.i.a.l in music crit-ics.

A week, ship's time, pa.s.sed. Simon studied philoso-phy and Chinese, cooked meals for himself and his companions, and cleaned up after the dog and the owl. And then, one day, in the middle of his break-fast, the alarm bell rang. Simon ran to the control room and looked at the control panel screen. Trans-lated, the Chinese words said, "Solar system with in-habitable planet approaching."

Simon ordered the ship to go into orbit around the fourth planet. When the Hw.a.n.g Ho was over it, Si-mon looked through a telescope which could pick out objects as small as a mouse on the surface. It looked like a nice planet, Earth-size, no smog, clean oceans, and plenty of forests and gra.s.sy plains. All this was easily accounted for. The sentients were in a primitive agricultural stage and probably numbered less than a hundred million people.

What attracted his attention most was a gigantic tower on the edge of the smallest of the two conti-nents. This tower was about a mile wide at its base and two miles high. It was shaped like a candy heart, its point stuck in the ground. A hard metal without a break made up its sh.e.l.l. In fact, it looked as if it had been made from a single casting. But the metal was striped with white, black, yellow, green, and blue. These were not painted on but seemed integral to the metal.

The ma.s.sive structure looked brand-new. However, it was leaning to one side as if the solid granite under it was giving way to the many billions of tons pressing on it. Eventually, maybe in a million or so years, it would fall. It had been there for about a billion years, long before the human population had evolved from apes or even from shrew-sized insect eaters. Perhaps it had even been erected before life had crawled out of the primeval seas, warm and nutritious as a diabetic's urine.

Simon knew something about towers like this one, which was why he was delighted to see it. Interstellar voyagers to distant galaxies had reported finding such towers on every inhabited planet of these systems, There were, however, none on the planets of Earth's galaxy. n.o.body knew why, though many resented this slight.

Deciding to investigate the tower first, Simon direc-ted the ship to land on it.

The Hw.a.n.g Ho settled down on a flat area between the two lobes, and Simon and his two pets strolled out. They didn't stay long. The flat part was covered with thousands of noisy, squabbling, egg-laying, white-and-black-checkered birds and about ten feet of guano. Simon threaded his way through the hook-billed birds, dodging vicious pecks from the mothers when he came too close to the eggs. Simon inspected the lobes, which towered above him as if they were mountains. Their slopes held no windows or doors. They were as unbroken as the pas-sage of time itself, as impenetrable as yesterday.

Simon hadn't expected to find any entrances. Of the six million towers so far reported by Earth tourists, all had been just like this one. The natives of various planets had tried everything from diamond-tipped drills to laser beams to hydrogen bombs without scratching the mysterious metal. The buildings were hollow. A hammer could make one ring like a gong. There was even one planet which had a symphony or-chestra which played only one instrument, the tower. The musicians stood on scaffolds built at various levels along the tower and struck it with hammers, the size and layout of the rooms within determining the notes evoked. The conductor stood on a platform a mile high and half a mile away and used two flags to wigwag his directions.

The highest point of music in the history of this planet occurred when a conductor, Ruboklngshep, fell off the platform. The orchestra, in trying to follow the wildly waving flags during his descent, produced six bars of the most exquisite music ever to be created, though some critics have disparaged the final three notes. Art, like science, sometimes gets its best results by accident.

Simon returned to the ship and found himself in an unforeseen situation. Since the flat area was tilted to one side, the ship had been put down at the lowest point, where the guano had built up to form a hori-zontal plane. Simon had made sure that the ship would not roll over. But he had forgotten about its enormous weight. It had sunk into the soft guano and so the ports on this side were about twenty feet under the surface and the ports on the other side were too high to reach. There was nothing to do but dig his way through with his bare hands.

Anubis wouldn't help, since he had not buried any bones there. Simon got down on his hands and knees and excavated away. Two hours later, dirty, sweaty, and disgruntled, he broke through and fell into the port. It took a half-hour to clear out the port entrance and another half-hour to clean up himself and the pets.

His usual good spirits returned shortly afterward. He had told himself that he shouldn't get angry at such a little thing. After all, a man should expect to get his hands dirty if he dug into fundamental issues.

CHAPTER 6.

Shaltoon, the Equal-Time Planet.

Simon ordered the computer to set the ship down on a big field near the largest building of a city. Since this city had the largest population of any on the planet, it should be the capital of the most important nation. The building itself was six stories high and made of some white stone with purple and red veins. From the air it looked like a three-leaf clover with a long stem. Its windows were delta-shaped, and its doors were oval. The roofs were breadloaf-shaped, and the whole building was surrounded by roofless porches on the outer edges of two rows of pillars. The ones on the edge of the porch were upside-down Vs. The others were behind the deltoids and projected from the floor of the porch at a forty-five-degree angle so that their ends stuck through the deltoids. The leaning shafts were cylindrical except for the ends which pierced the deltoids. These terminated in round b.a.l.l.s from which a milky water jetted.

At their base were two nut-shaped stones the surfaces of which bore a crisscross of incisions.

The people that poured out of the building were human-looking except for pointed ears, yellow eyes which had pupils like a cat's, and sharp-pointed teeth. Simon wasn't startled by this. All the humanoid races so far encountered had either been descended from simians, felines, canines, ursines, or rodents. On Earth the apes had won out in the evolutionary race toward intelligence. On other planets, the ancestors of cats, dogs, bears, beavers, or rabbits had developed fingers instead of paws and come out ahead of the apes. On some planets, both the apes and some other creature had evolved into sapients and shared their world. Or else one had exterminated the other. On this planet, the felines seemed to have gotten the upper hand early. If there were any simian humans, they were hiding deep in the forests.

Simon watched them through his viewscreens. When the soldiers had gathered around the ship, all pointing their spears and bows and arrows at the Hw.a.n.g Ho, he came out. He held his hands up in the air to show he was peaceful. He didn't smile because, on some planets, baring one's teeth was a hostile sign.

"I'm Simon Wagstaff, the man without a planet," he said.

After a couple of weeks, Simon had learned the language well enough to get along. Some of the suspi-cions of the people of Shaltoon had worn away. They were wary of him, it seemed, because he wasn't the first Earthman to land there.

Some two hundred years ago a fast-talking jovial man by the name of P.T. Taub had visited them. Before the Shaltoonians knew what was happening, he'd bamboozled them out of the crown jewels, taking not only these but a princess who'd just won the Miss Shaltoon Beauty Contest.

Simon had a hard time convincing them that he wasn't there to con them. He did want something from them, he told them over and over, but it wasn't any-thing material. First, did they know anything about the builders of the leaning heart-shaped tower?

The people a.s.signed to escort Simon told him that all they knew was that the builders were called the Clerun-Gowph in this galaxy. n.o.body knew why, but somebody somewhere sometime must have met them. Otherwise, why did they have a common name? As for the tower, it had been here, unoccupied and slowly tilting, since the Shaltoonians had had a lan-guage. Undoubtedly, it had been here a long time be-fore that.

The Shaltoonians had a legend that, when the tower fell, the end of the world would come.

Simon was adaptable and gregarious. He loved peo-ple, and he knew how to get along with them. Whether he was with just one person or at a party, he enjoyed himself, and he was generally liked. But he was uneasy with the Shaltoonians.

There was some-thing wrong with them, something he couldn't de-scribe. At first he thought that it might be because they were descended from felines. After all, though humanoid, they were fundamentally cats, just as Earthmen were basically apes. Yet, he'd met a number of extraterrestrial visitors on Earth who were felines, and he'd always gotten along with them. Actually, he preferred cats to dogs. It was only because circ.u.m-stances had been beyond his control that he'd taken along a dog when he left Earth.

Maybe, he thought, it was the strong musky odor that hung over the city, overriding that of manure from the farms around the city. This emanated from every adult Shaltoonian he met and smelled exactly like a cat in heat. After a while, he understood why. They were all in the mating season, which lasted the year around. Their main subject of conversation was s.e.x, but even with this subject they couldn't sustain much talk. After a half-hour or so, they'd get fidgety and then excuse themselves. If he followed them, he'd find him or her going into a house where he or she would be greeted by one of the opposite s.e.x.

The door would be closed, and within a few minutes the d.a.m.nedest noises would come from the house.

This resulted in his not being able to talk long to the escorts who were supposed to keep an eye on him. They'd disappear, and someone else would take their place.

Moreover, when the escorts showed up again the next day, they acted strangely.

They didn't seem to remember what they'd asked or told him the day be-fore. At first, he put this down to a short-term memory.

Maybe it was this which had kept the Shaltoonians from progressing beyond a simple agricultural society.

Simon was a good talker, but he was a good lis-tener, too. Once he'd learned the language well, he caught on to a discrepancy of intonation among his escorts. It varied not only among individual speakers, which was to be expected, but in the same individual from day to day. Simon finally decided that he wasn't uneasy because the Shaltoonians were, from his view-point, overs.e.xed. He had no moral repugnance to this. After all, you couldn't expect aliens to be just like Earthmen. As a matter of fact, his att.i.tude, if any-thing, was envy. Evolution had cheated Terrestrials. Why couldn't h.o.m.o sapiens have kept the horniness of the baboon? Why had he allowed society to shape itself so that it suppressed the s.e.x drive? Was it be-cause evolution had dictated that mankind was to pro-gress technologically? And, to bring this about, had evolution shunted much of man's s.e.x drive to the brain, where he used the energy to make tools and new religions, and ways of making more money and attaining a higher status?

Earthmen were dedicated to getting to the top of the heap, whereas the Shaltoonians devoted them-selves to getting on top of each other.

This seemed a fine arrangement to Simon-at first. One of the bad things about human society was that few people ever really had intimate contact. A people who spent a lot of time in bed, however, should be full of love. But things didn't work out that way on this planet. There wasn't even a word for love in the language. They did have many terms for various s.e.x-ual positions, but these were all highly technical. There was no generic term equivalent to the Earth-man's "love."

Not that this made much difference generally be-tween Earth and Shaltoon behavior. The latter seemed to have just as many divorces, disagreements, fights, and murders as the former. On the other hand, the Shaltoonians didn't have many suicides. Instead of getting depressed, they went out and got laid.

Simon thought about this aspect. He decided that perhaps Shaltoon society was, after all, better arranged than Terrestrial society. Not that this was due to any superior intelligence of the Shaltoonians. It was a matter of hormone surplus. Mother Nature, not brains, deserved the credit. This thought depressed him, but he didn't seek out a female to work off the mood. He retired to his cabin and played his banjo until he felt better. Then he got to thinking about the meaning of this and became depressed again. Hadn't he channeled his s.e.x drive where it shouldn't be? Hadn't he made love to himself, via his banjo, instead of to another being? Were the notes spurting from the strings a perverted form of j.i.s.m? Was his supreme pleasure derived from plucking, not f.u.c.king?

Simon put away the banjo, which was looking more like a detachable phallus every minute. He sallied forth determined to use his nondetachable instrument. Ten minutes later, he was back in the ship. The only relief he felt was in getting away from the Shaltooni-ans. He'd pa.s.sed by a rain barrel and happened to look down in it. There, at the bottom, was a newly born baby. He had looked around for a policeman to notify him but had been unable to find one. It struck him then he had never seen a policeman on Shaltoon. He stopped a pa.s.ser-by and started to ask him where the local precinct had its headquarters. Unable to do so because he didn't know the word for "police," he took the pa.s.ser-by to the barrel and showed him what was in it. The citizen had merely shrugged and walked away. Simon had walked around until he saw one of his escorts. The woman was startled to see him with-out a companion and asked why he had left the ship without notifying the authorities. Simon said that that wasn't important. What was important was the case of infanticide he'd stumbled across.

She didn't seem to understand what he was talking about. She followed him and gazed down into the bar-rel. Then she looked up with a strange expression.

Si-mon, knowing something was wrong, looked again. The corpse was gone.

"But I swear it was here only five minutes ago!" he said.

"Of course," she said coolly. "But the barrel men have removed it."

It took some time for Simon to get it through his head that he had seen nothing unusual. In fact, the barrels he had observed on every corner and un-der every rain spout were seldom used to collect drink-ing water. Their main purpose was for the drowning of infants.

"Don't you have the same custom on Earth?" the woman said.

"It's against the law there to murder babies."

"How in the world do you keep your population from getting too large?" she said.

"We don't," Simon said.

"How barbaric!"

Simon got over some of his indignation when the woman explained that the average life span of a Shaltoonian was ten thousand years. This was due to an elixir invented some two hundred thousand years be-fore. The Shaltoonians weren't much for mechanics or engineering or physics, but they were great botan-ists. The elixir had been made from juices of several different plants. A by-product of this elixir was that a Shaltoonian seldom got sick.

"So you see that we have to have some means of keeping the population down," she said. "Otherwise, we'd all be standing on top of each other's heads in a thousand years or less."