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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 God was on the ceiling, sitting at a
long table crowded with a cornucopia of contraband.
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Bill, the Galactic Hero on the Planet of Tasteless Pleasure
CHAPTER 9
MIND-MASTERS OF THE OVER-GLAND
In a thoroughly foul mood, more sexually 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 stitched 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, glasses 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....
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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 eyeballs to eyeballs 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!
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Bill, the Galactic Hero on the Planet of Tasteless Pleasure
"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.
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