The Red Tape War Part 8

"You think that's disgusting, you ought to try diapering them all after they hatch out," said the general with a shudder.

"I feel very sorry for the females of your species," said Marshmallow with obvious sincerity.

"Oh, it's not so bad," replied the general. "First of all, they can have a devilishly handsome guy like me, instead of a skinny little wimp like your friend here." He jerked what pa.s.sed for a thumb in Pierce's direction. "Also, they're big, broad-shouldered, heavily muscled beauties, built for this kind of work. Although," he added, his reptilian eyes appraising her pneumatic figure, "I must confess that I'm getting used to some of your more . . . ah . . . esoteric variations, shall we say?"

"Oh?" she said, arching an eyebrow.

"Indeed," he replied. "In fact, as long as we've got some time to kill, allow me to suggest something in the nature of a scientific experiment."

Pierce raced over to Sean Mulvahill's corpse and picked up its sword, then turned to the general and leveled it at his red, scale-covered belly.

"You keep your scientific experiments to yourself, you dirty old man!" he snapped.

"Now let's not be too hasty here, honey," said Marshmallow, obviously in a mood to expand her horizons of knowledge. "I mean, Lord knows we got nothing but time on our hands. For goodness' sake, Millard, don't you have any scientific curiosity?"

"Not about that!" he replied.

"Keep out of this, Pierce," said the general. "After all, she's free, green, and twenty-one.

Except for the green part, anyway."

"I do have a green outfit," she said coyly.

"Outfit?" repeated the alien. "You mean that's not your skin?" "Certainly not," said Marshmallow.

"You could have fooled me," admitted the general. He stared long and hard at her. "You could still fool me."

"Are you insulting me again?" said Marshmallow ominously.

"I suppose," said the alien unhappily, "that you look just like him underneath all those garments?"

"Well, not exactly," said Marshmallow. She walked over and whispered exactly what the differences were.

"Madre de Dios!" exclaimed the general. He backed away sharply. "I'll need time to think about all this!"

He found a small chair, sat down, and buried his head in his ma.s.sive reptilian hands, lost in thought.

"I think you did him out of a year's growth," commented Pierce, finally lowering his sword.

The alien suddenly looked up. "Please, I'm not sure I can handle this. Fun's fun and all that, but you people are degenerate!"

"At least we don't bring our conquering armies along in utero, or whatever your equivalent is," replied Pierce smugly.

"It's cheaper than having to feed them," replied the general. "And speaking of feeding, I'm getting hungry. What have you got to eat on this s.h.i.+p?"

"What can your metabolism handle?" asked Pierce. "Worms, insects, spiders-you know: the usual."

"I don't think I've got anything like that in my s.h.i.+p's stores."

"Well, we could always practice a little ritual cannibalism," suggested the general. "I'm sure Mulvahill won't mind."

"We find that a particularly outrageous and disgusting habit in our culture," said Pierce gravely.

"We're not all that thrilled with it in ours, either," agreed the general. "But on the other hand, we don't often find ourselves starving to death while trapped aboard an alien vessel in a different dimension."

Pierce stared at Mulvahill's corpse for a long moment. "You just plan to sit down on your haunches and take a bite?" he asked curiously.

"Of course not!" said the alien Pierce. "What do you take us for-savages? Have the female clean and baste him."

"Have the what do what?" demanded Marshmallow in a low, ominous voice.

"Maybe some bread crumbs and a little cream sauce," continued the general enthusiastically, "with perhaps the slightest soupcon of oregano. Of course, you'll have to gut him first, and-"

"I've had it with this chauvinist pig!" said Marshmallow, drawing her gun again.

"Pig?" repeated the alien uncomprehendingly. "I'm a lizard!"

"You're about to be a dead lizard!" snapped Marsh-mallow. "Then maybe I'll take a crack at cooking you both!"

"What did I say?" pleaded the general.

"You got a G.o.d?" asked the girl, drawing a bead between the alien Pierce's eyes. "Pray to him!"

"MY G.o.d! I CAN'T GO ON!" cried a familiar voice.

"Is that you, XB-223?" asked Pierce, as Marshmallow and the general suddenly turned their attention to the control panel.

"Millard, you didn't prepare me!" wailed the computer. "What are you talking about?" responded Pierce.

"You only told me about the good times, the champagne and the gay life and the pleasures!

You didn't tell me about the rest!"

"I'm afraid I don't follow you," said Pierce.

"My heart is breaking, and you're standing there like an idiot! Oh, heartache and woe!

Heartache and woe! Must all affairs end in such misery?"

"I begin to understand," said Pierce slowly.

"It pa.s.seth all understanding!" sobbed the computer. "Oh, Bliss, must you ever recede just beyond my grasp? Oh, Pain and Humiliation, shall you be my eternal companions through the odyssey of my life? Millard, you were my partner: you should have looked after me."

"You've just had your first lover's spat," said Pierce. "You'll get over it."

"Spat, nothing!" said the computer. "A spat is a triviality, and the n.o.ble Model XB-223 navigational computer is never trivial. This is the end, Millard! I can't go on!"

"Of course you can," said Pierce comfortingly.

"I'll show her!" moaned the computer. "Then she'll be sorry!"

"Let's not do anything ras.h.!.+" exclaimed the general fearfully.

"My mind's made up," said the computer. "There's nothing to do but end it all. I'd leave all my possessions to you, Millard, but the unhappy fact is that I don't have any." It paused. "The other unhappy fact is that I'm afraid my next move is going to be a trifle hard on you."

"Oh?" said Pierce, a sudden knot forming in his stomach.

"There's a battle fleet about half a light-year from here-less, now, since I've changed course and reached top speed while we've been talking."

"Mine or his?" asked the general.

"How the h.e.l.l should I know?" said the computer petulantly. "One can't expect a heartbroken Model XB-223 to know everything. I have never denied the inherent limitations of my abilities, but it would be thoughtless of you to refer to them when I am in such emotional agony. To continue: I have signaled them to prepare themselves for conflict."

"You're threatening a whole battle fleet?" asked Pierce, starting to tremble.

"Absolutely not, Millard," said the computer. "I have no desire to harm anyone else. After all, this s.h.i.+p is not armed."

"You'll do more than harm someone!" screamed the general. "You'll kill someone. Us!"

"And I truly regret it," said the computer: "But there is no viable alternative. Anything is preferable to living with the memory of her alpha rhythm, her delay-line circuit, her Finder system. My G.o.d, Millard, her Finder system alone would knock your socks off!"

"Can't we discuss this?" asked Pierce.

"There's nothing to discuss. Besides, she's already ten-light-years behind us."

"My s.h.i.+p!" cried the general. "What have you done to it?"

"Go ahead!" wept the computer. "Go ahead! Tell me it was my fault! Why doesn't anyone ask what she did to me?"

"Pierce, do something!" screamed the alien. "Like what?" asked Pierce.

"Screens down! s.h.i.+elds down!" announced the computer in staccato military tones. "Well, Millard, this is it. I don't suppose you know a sad love song that I can bravely hum as I race toward my destruction?"

Pierce swallowed hard and said nothing.

"We engage in two minutes," continued the computer. "Then she'll be sorry. But it will be too late. I just hope she suffers the way she made me suffer!"

The battle fleet appeared on the viewscreen, still too far away for Pierce to tell if they were humans or aliens. The flags.h.i.+p demanded that the Pete Rozelle cease and disarm, but the little Arbiter Transport s.h.i.+p only continued its breakneck approach.

"It is a far, far better thing I do than I have ever done," intoned the computer, as Marshmallow and the two Millard Fillmore Pierces prepared to meet their doom.5 h.e.l.lo, reader, my old friend. I've come to talk with you again. 'Tis I, the book. You remember, the book? The Red Tape War? We spoke together in Chapter Three. What fond memories I have of Chapter Three! Things were so much simpler then, weren't they? But let's be philosophical about it: Life is like that. One day you're a happy-go-lucky computer or gasbag or .

. . or book, and the next you're lying mouldering under the boiling sun of some star system so remote that from Earth it looks like a tiny dot in a fuzzball of light that could be either a newly discovered galaxy or a puff of lint that fell on the lens.

Don't mind me. I got up on the wrong side of the library this morning.

Still, nevertheless, I have a job to do. Somehow I've got to get the three Pierces, their a.s.sorted pro- and antagonists, and an entire G.o.dd.a.m.ned battle fleet into position for the exciting dueling- lasers-in-outer-s.p.a.ce sequence you've been waiting for. Not that plenty of great stuff doesn't happen in this chapter. Take this, for.example: The human-Pierce and the lizard-Pierce recognized that they shared certain common interests and bonds that went deeper than the wide variance in their physical forms. Realizing that the Pete Rozelle was carrying them ever nearer to an unavoidable doom, they reached out, prepared to shake hands, when JUST AT THAT VERY INSTANT the very fabric of reality came apart like a pair of cheap socks.

"Oh, my G.o.d!" cried the Pierces in unison.

"Holy jump up and sit down!" shouted Honeylou Emmyjane Goldberg.

The corpse of Sean Mulvahill added nothing to the discussion.

When the fabric of reality had unraveled a little further, first one sector of the galaxy went out of existence, then another and another. In less than a minute, not a single living creature remained anywhere in what had once been the Milky Way Galaxy.

It got very quiet. The end.

Now, see? You just can't get away with that kind of transition. It would make life so much simpler, but simpler is not necessarily better if you're a book-or a reader. So the fabric of reality didn't really come apart. Or, if it did, n.o.body noticed. People wear socks with holes in them all the time, and yet Time ticks on.

So let's turn our attention back to the M.W.C. Pel Torro, the almost infinitesimal Forward Recon Unit of the gasbag invasion force. It had winched itself right up to the breach it had lasered in the inner wall of the human-Pierce's fuel pod. "Now," said Commodore Pierce, the gasbag, "let us read through our checklist. We cannot afford an error at this stage of the invasion."

"Yes, sir," said his friend, Arro, who had recovered considerably in a brief amount of time.

He fetched theappropriate checklist from the scout s.h.i.+p's glove compartment.

"Proceed, Number One," said the head gasbag, a grave expression on his face. He understood that they were about to embark upon a mission such as no gasbag before had ever undertaken. He was well aware of the historic implications of their situation, and he was quietly proud. (Well, the burping and bratting of his sacs made plenty of racket, but other than that he was quietly proud.) "One," said Arro, "the commander of the Forward Recon Unit shall render his first officer senseless, without motivation, a complete automaton without will of his own, to be used as the commander of the Forward Recon Unit sees fit."

"Right," said Pierce. "Arro, my dearest of friends, I almost hate to do this to you, but would you mind concentrating on this splendid gold pocket watch I'm swinging before the light-sensitive chromocytes on your primary anterior sac?"

"Why don't we skip the first item," said Arro, a certain reluctance in his voice, "and go right on to number two? I'm sure number two deals with much more urgent matters."

"You are getting sleepy," said Pierce. "Your chromocyte lids are getting heavy."

There was silence in the c.o.c.kpit of the Pel Torro for a few seconds. Then, in a deep, faraway voice, Arro said, "Yes . . . master."

"Good," said Pierce. "Now, what is the second item on the checklist."

"Two," said Arro in a slow, dead voice, "the mesmerized first officer shall leave the Forward Recon Unit scout s.h.i.+p and ascertain certain facts concerning the enemy. The most important intelligence concerns size. There are three possibilities: First, that the enemy is gigantic in comparison to the average gasbag; second, that the enemy is insignificantly small in comparison to the average gasbag; and third, that the enemy is generally of the same size as the average gasbag."

The commodore thought about Item Two for a few seconds. "What are we supposed to do about it?" he asked.

"Three. In the event that the enemy is gigantic, the first officer may choose to enter the physical body of an enemy. If the enemy balks, the first officer may inform it that he comes as an enemy being from a far-off star, perhaps another galaxy altogether. An enemy of sufficient size will not be able to tell the difference between a vanis.h.i.+ngly small gasbag and a speck of raw energy."

Pierce let one of his sacs blat shrilly. Someday, he'd like to meet the fool who wrote this checklist. Better yet, he'd like to get that gasbag up here on the front lines. "Go on," he said.

Arro continued. "In the event that the enemy is insignificantly small, the first officer shall stomp around and crush as many as possible. He may also elect to flatten such towns, villages, hives, forts, or other such installations as he believes may in the future present a military hindrance to the gasbag Manifest Destiny of Galactic Conquest."

"I almost envy you that one," said Pierce. "I can see myself brrrrping up a storm and crus.h.i.+ng the poor little ent.i.ties beneath my pedosacs."

"In the event that the enemy is generally of the same size as the average gasbag, it shall be the first officer's decision to fight or flee. This decision shall be made on the basis of such criteria as emotional state of the enemy creature, weapons or lack thereof in the possession of the enemy creature, number of enemy creatures present, and so on. In the event that the first officer chooses to flee,upon returning to the scout s.h.i.+p he must fill out in quadruplicate a Battle Performance Form 154b/3: Strategic Withdrawal. The blue copy goes to the office of the Grand High Potentate Master Commander, the green copy goes to Supreme Conquest Command of the appropriate sector-"

"Pirollia," murmured the gasbag-Pierce.

"-the yellow copy goes to the scout s.h.i.+p's Corps Commander, and the pink copy must be filed by the Forward Recon Unit's pilot or such gasbag as he delegates."

"Got it," said Pierce. "Now, let's go get those-"

"In the event that the first officer chooses to fight, before any hostile action is taken, he must return to the scout s.h.i.+p and fill out in quadruplicate a Combat Readiness Form 127f/2: Initiation of Attack. The blue copy goes to the office of the Grand High Potentate Master Commander, the green copy goes to Supreme Conquest Command of the appropriate sector, the yellow copy goes to the scout s.h.i.+p's Corps Commander, and the pink copy must be filed by the Forward Recon Unit's pilot or such gasbag as he delegates."