Venus on the Half-Shell by Philip José Farmer Read Free Book Online Page B

question of where the owl had come from was still unsettled, but Simon thought it likely that it had been riding on top of the spaceship. It must be hungry, too, so Simon prepared some egg foo young for it. When he came back to the room with the food, the owl was sitting on a pile of torn-up papers on the seat of the chair. Simon put the plate on the floor before it. It flew down to grab the food, enabling Simon to determine its sex. It—she—had just laid an egg.
    Anubis leaped up onto the chair and swallowed the egg. The owl didn’t seem to mind, which made Simon think that the catastrophe had bent its mother instincts out of shape. That was just as well, otherwise the two animals might have gotten off on the wrong foot in their relationship.
    Simon decided to name his new pet Athena. Athena was the Greek goddess of wisdom, and her symbol was the owl. Owls were supposed to be highly intelligent, though actually they were as dumb as chickens. But Simon was mythology-prone, which was only to be expected from a man who’d named his banjo Orpheus.
    He examined the instruments in the control room, since he had heard that even a moron could navigate a spaceship. However, in this case, it had to be a Chinese moron. But if there was a book aboard which could teach him Chinese, he’d figure out how to fly this computerized vessel. He had already made up his mind to leave Earth for good. There was nothing here to hold him.
    In later years, during his wanderings, he would often be asked what had happened to his native planet.
    “Earth is all washed up,” he would reply. “The game of life there was called off on account of rain.”
    The big question at the moment was: who had done this to Earth? Somebody had caused this deluge. It would never have occurred in the normal course of Terrestrial events. Somebody had pushed a button which activated a machine or chemicals which had precipitated one hundred percent of the water in the atmospheric ocean.
    Who and why?
    Was it the gone-wrong experiment of some mad scientist? Or had some planet whose business was being ruined by Earth triggered off this flood? Or was it simply because Earthmen smelled so badly? Terrestrials had a reputation as the most odoriferous race in the universe. A million planets referred to them as The Stinkers. There was an old Arcturan saying that exemplified this attitude. “Never stand downwind of a shrook or an Earthman.” A shrook was a little beast on Arcturus VI that exuded the combined scents of a skunk, a bombardier beetle, and dog farts with a touch of garbage heap.
    Some extraterrestrials claimed that it was the Earthman’s diet, which consisted mainly of hot dogs, potato chips, soft drinks, and beer, even among the Chinese, that caused this offensive odor. But the octopoids of Algol, perhaps the most philosophical of all races, contended that it wasn’t the food that caused the bad smell. Psychology affected physiology. Earthmen stank because their ethics stank.
    This reaction had upset Terrestrials, but they’d gone about solving this problem with their usual vicious efficiency. A huge perfume industry, employing millions, had been created, and travelers from Earth had always perfumed themselves just before they disembarked on an alien planet. These were specialized, since the perfume that pleased the Spicans would offend the Vegans. The only planet where perfumes were taboo was Sirius VII. The caninoids there identified each other by sniffing assholes, and so they strictly forbade the use of perfumes. The Earthmen had to go along with this custom, otherwise they’d never get to first base in selling Terrestrial goods. They tried to get around this by sending agents who had no sense of smell, but this didn’t work out. All Sirians looked exactly alike, and they refused to carry nametags. Thus, an Earthman didn’t know whom he was dealing with unless he had a keen nose.
    This demand opened a whole new field to specialists who were paid huge