Bill 3 - on the Planet of Bottled Brains by Harry Harrison Read Free Book Online Page B

something damned trivial and superfluous. Cargota!”
    “Why don't you just go off and do what you please?” Bill asked.
    “Would that was the way eet worked! Chinger! That, desirable though eet would seem, eez simply not in the deck of cards.”
    “Why not?” Bill wanted to know.
    “You ask, I tell, because eet's not correct, not kosher, as they say in the ancient tongue. Not Pukka. Extremely un-SOP. Do I make myself clear?”
    “Clear enough, I guess,” Bill said, “but it's all a lot of nonsense. That's what the computer told me, too. But I just walked away. You could do the same thing.”
    “I suppose I could,” Scalsior said. “But I got this horrible feeling deep down in my imaginary subconscious that we'll catch holy sheet when the computer catches up with us.”
    “I don't see how,” Bill said. “I mean, we don't have any bodies for it to punish.”
    Scalsior thought about it for a while. “Sonamabeech! Eet's true! Of course, eet could punish our minds. Mental barbed-wire whips or sometheeng.”
    “As long as it doesn't hurt. And how could it,” Bill said, then thought awhile. “It can do what it likes to my mind, as long as it leaves my body alone.”
    Scalsior joined Bill and they went journeying together around the world of Tsuris. Presently they passed over a pleasant land where the sunshine was almost continuous and there was a long sandy coastline and a gentle ocean lapping at it. “This is nice,” Bill said.
    “I don't like eet. We ain't supposed to be here, no way,” Scalsior muttered. “This ees the principality of Royo.”
    “It looks like a good place,” Bill said. “How come the Tsurisians haven't taken it over?”
    “You got me there, keed,” Scalsior shrugged mentally. Not easy to do. “Eet might be interesting to find out. But maybe dangerous too.”
    Reluctantly they left the pleasant-looking land of Royo and returned to the sterner realities of Tsuris. As they speeded back toward the central factory that housed the Tsurisian computer, they picked up frantic mental messages of a distressing sort.
    “That sounds like a Mayday call to me,” Bill said.
    They went in closer. It turned out to be the voice of the Tsuris computer itself. Quickly it gathered both Bill and Scalsior into its interior. They passed through long, winding cylindrical tunnels and at last found themselves in an egg-shaped room which was dimly lit by concealed lighting. Bill and Scalsior were bathed in a pearl-gray radiance. Bill noticed that there were several sofas in the room, and a desk. Bill couldn't imagine why the computer had bothered to put these furnishings into the middle of an imaginary room somewhere in its own mental sphere of construction. Scalsior was beside himself with anxiety. “Eets going to go badly for us, I just know eet eez. Oh, merda! I should never have allowed you to talk me into going off on a crappy sightseeing tour that way. Do you suppose the computer will accept my apology? As well as my totally sincere and cringing promise to never do eet again?”
    “We'll see what the computer says,” Bill rasped, a little grimly.
    It was shortly after that that the computer came into the room. Or appeared to come into the room since the whole damn thing was nothing but an electronic simulation anyway. It made quite an entrance, descending from an invisible spot in the ceiling in the form of a flashing blue light, and then winking out of existence for a moment, appearing again in the form of a severe looking man in a blue-stripe business suit, the shoulders thick with dandruff, and sporting a small mustache and pince-nez.
    “You two creepos have been disobeying orders,” the computer implied. “Have your dim traces of brains forgotten already that I told you how important this work is? You must do it properly, exactly, quickly and succinctly — or there will be the most dire of consequences.”
    “Is that a fact?” Bill said truculently.
    “Yes, it shagging well is.”
    “How