Bill 7 - the Galactic Hero (9 page)

“Well, on my foot, actually.” A sad thought occurred to Bill. “I'm not sure the other one is waterproof.” He tried to shake the Swiss Army Foot, but he still had no power over his legs.

Bismire and Snarki bent over Bill's extraordinary foot and examined it carefully. “Hmm,” said Bismire.

“Indeed,” said Snarki.

“Very interesting,” said Bismire.

“Indeed,” said Snarki.

“Is that a weapon?” asked Bismire.

Bill wasn't about to risk the two Eyerackians' finding a rule in their book that said they had to take away his foot. “No, no, it's perfectly harmless. Sentimental value, mostly, although I do walk kind of funny without it.”

“From what we see, you don't walk at all,” Snarki mused. “Look, there seem to be little compartments. I wonder what they hold.”

Snarki was just about to try to open the Poison Knife Blade slot, and Bill was getting ready to try to lunge with the upper part of his body at the lower part of it, when the ambulance wailed up beside them.

Two orderlies in Civil Defense uniforms pulled a stretcher out of the back. Two men in similar uniforms, but with gold braid, got out of the front.

Bill's crest fell. No nurses. He turned to Bismire. “No nurses?”

“Apparently not. We did request them specifically, didn't we, Snarki?”

“Yes, indeed, Bismire. But there's a war on, you know.”

“There certainly is, Snarki. And you know, Trooper, your bombing campaign is causing a lot of casualties, so nurses are in particularly short supply right now. But don't worry — these are two of our very best doctors. Let me introduce you to them.”

“You might want to get his name, Bismire, so you can do that.”

“Excellent idea, Snarki. What is your name, Trooper?”

“Bill,” Bill billed. “With two L's.”

“Ah,” said Bismire. “So that isn't just an accent. And what is your proper title?”

Bill's permanent rating was as a Fusetender First Class, but it had been a long time since he had tended any fuses; even longer since he had done it when he was supposed to. So he took full advantage of the exalted, if temporary, status he had achieved at Camp Buboe. “Brevet Lance Corporal,” he claimed.

“My, my, that does sound impressive,” said Snarki.

“Well then,” Bismire said, “may I introduce Dr. John Watson, Brevet Lance Corporal Bill; Corporal Bill, Dr. Watson. Dr. Walter Huson, Brevet Lance Corporal Bill; Corporal Bill, Dr. Huson. Dr. Huson, I believe you already know Snarki. Snarki, Dr. Huson. Dr. Watson, Snarki. Snarki, Dr. Watson.”

Bismire was just getting into introducing the orderlies all around when Bill interrupted.

“Isn't this something like a medical emergency? I think I should be taken to a nurse right away.”

The very Civil Defense team looked at Bill doubtfully for a moment, then at each other. In unison, they shrugged.

“Very well,” Bismire said. He seemed to take charge of the situation. “A preliminary diagnostic examination is in order. As a matter of routine, we will get a second opinion. That is the proper way to handle the matter, I believe. Is that how your own people would do it?”

Bill decided not to tell the Eyerackians that his own people would have been torturing him by now, just to find out if he knew anything useful. They would probably get to that soon enough, without his encouragement. “Absolutely,” he said.

Bismire thought for a moment. “Both doctors will examine you right here, Watson first, Huson second.”

“Who?” Bill asked.

“Watson first.”

“What?”

“Huson second.”

Snarki scratched his head. “I don't know.”

“Third base,” Bill said.

“I beg your pardon?” Bismire asked.

“That just popped into my head,” Bill explained. “Does it mean something?”

The Eyerackians conferred. At last Dr. Watson proclaimed, “Possible head injury. Now let's look at those legs.”

Despite his situation, Bill couldn't help but feel a certain glow of patriotic pride.

If this was the best effort the Eyerackians could muster, they wouldn't stand a chance against the Imperial Troopers.

If this hospital was a fair example of their war effort, they might as well surrender right now.

Bill looked around. There was only one other bed in his room, and the civilian assigned to it was free to come and go as he pleased. The man was out wandering the halls now, when he should have been (as Bill knew from experience) lying there, moaning in pain, hoping that the surgeons had, in fact, taken out his appendix and not something more interesting and/or vital.

The walls of the room were clean and white instead of being a familiar and dirty nauseating mustard yellow.

There were no bars on the windows. Through the glass Bill could see something big and green — an almost perfect hologram of a real, live tree.

There was no loudspeaker built into the pillow for announcements and reveille. Instead Bill had been awakened by an orderly bringing him breakfast. A meal that had included a number of ersatz items that tasted suspiciously like real food.

Bill had even seen a live, human, female nurse the day before. She was hardly a trooper's dream come true — she bore more than a passing resemblance to Bill's quondam comrade Sergeant Brickwall, except for the teeth — but she was inarguably human and almost certainly female. The playful roundhouse punch she had given him when he pinched her left him some hope of further, more intimate, romantic encounters.

All of this left him with a professional soldier's healthy contempt for civilians who played at war. Even though Bill's dearest dream, beyond even getting a real human foot at the end of his right leg, was to become a civilian himself. But that was more like a fantasy than a realistic ambition.

In the meantime, the Eyerackian military hadn't yet tortured him for what little useful information he might have; they hadn't even sent someone around to interrogate him. This was probably to make him worry — soften him up. And they apparently weren't doing anything to keep him from getting up and walking right out of the hospital.

Of course, the main reason he was in the hospital was his complete inability to walk, but the Imperial military hospital would have had him in chains, just to be sure. This place only had him hooked up to some electrodes that he could rip off any time he pleased.

In fact, Bill thought, things could be worse. Even though he was on a world that was doomed to bitter and total defeat at the hands of General Weissearse and his armada, this was the best vacation he had had since his secret mission against the hippies from Hellworld had begun with a luxury cruise.

If only he could get a beer.

He was just settling in for a little nap — his third since breakfast and it would just about take him up to lunchtime — when a man in a white coat came into the room. Bill stifled the impulse to salute. Even though the man turned out to be a doctor — his little nameplate read PRESUME, L. I., MD — he was still a civilian.

Dr. Presume checked his clipboard, then the compu-chart hanging at the foot of Bill's bed.

“So, Bill, is it?” He didn't look up or wait for Bill's response. “Can't walk, eh? And you're in the military, I see. Well, we'll have you walking around and marching and shooting and doing all that other soldier stuff in no time. Let's have a look at you.” Dr. Presume took a small salt shaker out of his pocket. He made a soft whirring noise while he ran the salt shaker up and down, just above Bill's legs. Where the electrodes were attached, he sprinkled a few grains of salt.

Bill watched all this intently. “What does that do?” he asked.

“Absolutely nothing,” the doctor said. “But it makes some patients feel as though something is happening while I look at them. I got it from an old holovision series.”

“So Doc, I guess I'll have to be here for a couple of weeks, maybe months, right?”

“I know how anxious you must be to get back into the action and excitement, Bill. So I'm going to do everything I can to get you back to your unit by tomorrow. Where is your unit?”

“Tomorrow?” Bill was aghast. A proper military hospital would have taken that long just to figure out what piece of him to cut off.

The doctor looked at him with faint amusement. “Of course tomorrow. You just need some exercise, and the electrodes on your legs are exercising them.” He checked a dial. “Right now, you're walking at an easy pace. Tonight, you'll be jogging comfortably. Tomorrow morning, you'll be playing championship football. And all without leaving your bed! By lunch tomorrow, you'll be able to walk on your own! Isn't science wonderful?”

Bill looked at his legs. They didn't look as though they were walking, but he had learned not to ask too many questions. They never led to anything good. Answering them wasn't much better.

“Now, about your unit. Your buddies must be looking for you, but we seem to have lost your records. Where were you assigned?”

At last it started. Bill knew, now, that he would be hounded day and night, his legs forced to perform in increasingly bizarre athletic events — golf, football, team handball, even synchronized swimming — until he told the sadistic Dr. Presume everything he knew, and more. He braced himself for the pain and barked out, “Bill, Brevet Lance Corporal, serial number 295675 6383204596 8132011245 1231245263121452.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Bill, Brevet Lance Corporal, serial number 295675 6383204596 8132011245 1231245263121452.”

Dr. Presume scratched his head. “I didn't think serial numbers went that high. We don't even have anything like that many people on the whole planet. Well, let me take that down, and we'll see if we can track you down. Could you repeat it once more?” He held up a small recording device that looked suspiciously like a salt shaker.

“Bill, Brevet Lance Corporal, serial number 295675 6383204596 8132011245 1231245263121452.”

“Very well. We'll see if the computer knows where you belong. But it would be so much easier if you just told me, you know.”

“Bill, Brevet Lance Corporal, serial number 295675 6383204596 8132011245 1231245263121452. I don't have to tell you anything but that.”

“Am I missing something? You aren't allowed to talk to doctors? Is this a new rule?”

Bill shook his head tensely. “Not doctors, the enemy. I don't have to tell the enemy anything but my name, rank, and serial number.”

The doctor still lacked enlightenment. “And doctors are the enemy?” Bill shook his head. “Me, I'm the enemy?” Bill nodded, waiting for the pain.

Dr. Presume looked at the chart again. “Nothing here about a head injury. Or a possible nut case,” he baffled. “What makes you think I'm the enemy?” Dreams of a published paper glinted behind his eyes.

“Maybe I shouldn't tell you.” Bill tried to figure. Was he better off here, where they might send him back to some unit he'd never seen before in an army he didn't belong to? Or should he tell the doctor he was an Imperial Starship Trooper and probably be tortured to death, and if not that then put in a prisoner-of-war camp for the rest of the war? Hmm. Three possibilities: probably dead, probably dead, and probably uncomfortable but probably alive. “I'm an Imperial Trooper, but I don't know anything, so there's no point in torturing me,” he said belligerently.

“Oh, that kind of enemy!” Dr. Presume smiled gleefully. “That explains it!” Bill braced himself for the worst as the doctor leaned in close. “All the other residents will be so jealous that I've found you. We knew there was a Trooper here, but the civil defense people didn't fill out the paperwork for you and we didn't know who you were. There's a reward for finding you, and now it's mine!”

“A reward? Like in dead or alive?”

“Sort of. Except it's from ENN, Eyerackian News Network. They want to interview you, and introduce you to our president, Millard Grotsky. You're quite a celebrity, you know.” Eyeballs aglow with ambition, Dr. Presume scurried out of the room, planning what he would do with the reward money.

Celebrity, eh? Bill had never tried that one before, but it sounded as though it involved cocktail parties and women, two commodities of which he had limited experience but extravagant fantasies.

He stretched luxuriantly and grabbed the remote control for the holovision set above his bed.

The first show he found was a theological discussion of the true nature of “updoc,” the perfect state for which Bugs, the first Neo-Zen Master, had long sought.

Click.

A sports announcer wearing a military helmet explained that today's baseball game was being delayed until the live bomb could be cleared from the infield.

Click.

The image of a news announcer floated over film of something that might have been an exploded ammo dump. She said something about how it was really a shelter, and that civilians had been killed.

Click.

A talk show, featuring women married to men whose mothers were virgins.

Click.

An old show about a bunch of people marooned on an uncharted planet and their inept attempts to get rescued. Bill watched this one for a while, until he realized they were never going to get off that planet.

Click.

And suddenly the familiar image of General Weissearse floated in the holovision tank before Bill. The general looked a lot more grim than he had in the first press conference. Maybe this one had been taped after the Heavenly Peace got shot down, instead of in advance. He was wearing a real uniform now; although the one-piece desert camouflage jump suit wasn't that flattering on a man of his size and shape, it did make him look slightly more serious. This was exactly opposite to the effect of his hat. Bill had never noticed before just how large the general's head was. With all the fatheads among the brass, trooper hat sizes ran all the way up to 9 3/8, but General Weissearse's hat was clearly too small for him. It rested politely on top of his head, nestled into his short hair, like the top tier of a wedding cake. Bill recognized that any man who would dress like this in public was genuinely bonkers.

And he was smiling. Bill knew from experience that this man was really out of it when he was smiling.

“There is absolutely no truth to this report,” he was saying. “All our personnel have been thoroughly briefed on our policy, which is not to blow up large numbers of civilians. In fact, they have been warned not to blow up, or shoot, or otherwise maim, wound, or kill any civilians at all. So if we blew it up, it was an ammo dump. And if there were civilians in it, we didn't blow it up. It's that simple. The only people who would say otherwise are the godless, atheistic leaders of the poor Eyerackian people, leaders who are trying to cripple the Imperial way of life. We have no quarrel with the people of Eyerack, only with their misguided, evil leader, Millard Grotsky. In fact, if they had different leadership we might just call off the whole operation. Nudge nudge, wink wink.”