The Outpost (22 page)

“Why the hell did you do that?” demanded Johnny.

“Leave her alone,” I said.

“
Her
?” he repeated. “How do you know?”

I felt my face turn a bright red.

“None of your business,” I said.

He looked from Winoria to me and back to Winoria. “That’s perverted!” he snapped, picking up his pistol and tucking it away in his holster. Then: “Was she any good?”

“Where’s Catastrophe?” I asked, ignoring his question.

“He found their wine cellar,” answered Johnny. “I imagine you’ll have to peel him off the floor by now.”

Well, he obviously didn’t know Catastrophe Baker. I figure he couldn’t have downed more than 8 or 10 bottles by now, and that meant he wouldn’t be even halfway to tipsy.

“Son of a bitch!” yelled Johnny suddenly. “Baker spent the last hour drinking, and you spent it committing sins they ain’t even got names for yet, so that means I wiped the aliens out all by myself—so I got first claim on the Temple Virgin!”

Which didn’t bother me at all. The girl in the gauzy dress suddenly seemed so
ordinary
, with nothing special or exotic to offer a man of the galaxy.

What
did
bother me was that Johnny Testosterone had wiped out all of Winoria’s people, and as he went back into the temple I turned to her and expressed my regrets.

“No harm done,” she said. “If you’ll give me the star charts, I’ll be on my way to Wyandotte II.”

I handed them over. “Here they are,” I replied. “But I can’t help noting that you don’t seem terribly distressed over the slaughter of your companions.”

“Why should I be?” she replied, and suddenly she split into about half a million tiny pieces, which instantly began growing. “To the ship, my children!”!” she ordered them. As they rushed to obey her, she turned to me. “It was a memorable and stimulating interlude, Hurricane Smith,” she said, “but I must say I find your method of procreation incredibly inefficient, no matter how much fun it is.”

Then she was gone, and I turned back to the temple. Catastrophe met me as I approached the chamber where we’d met the High Priest.

“Johnny tells me you’ve been enjoying yourself,” I said.

“He tells me the same thing about you,” answered Catastrophe with a knowing grin.

“Some heroes we are,” I said. “It looks like Johnny won the war all by himself.”

“Not much of a war from what I could tell. Once I looked over the top of the wall and saw that an amoeba can’t wear a weapon, I figured you could take care of yourself.” He paused. “I never figured Johnny would fight ’em all himself.”

“He wanted the reward worse than we did.”

“Hell, I’ve already put in for my reward. I want the gold robe.”

“I suppose, to be honest, I’ve already had my reward,” I admitted, thinking wistfully of Winoria.

Suddenly we heard a shriek of abject horror, and a moment later Johnny Testosterone came racing out of the temple, high-tailing it for the mountain range that was about 200 miles past the forest, and looking neither right nor left.

“I wonder what the hell
that
was all about?” asked Catastrophe.

A couple of minutes later a skinny young man with a neatly-trimmed beard and a couple of flowers stuck in his hair wandered out.

“Have either of you seen Johnny Testosterone?” he asked.

“Yeah,” said Catastrophe. “He was headed due west like a bat out of hell.”

“Damn!” said the young man, scuffing the tile with his sandaled foot.

“And who might you be?” I asked him.

“Me?” he replied. “I’m the Temple Virgin.”

We never saw Johnny again.

“I think I liked Baker’s version better,” said Three-Gun Max.

“Wasn’t much of an adventure,” replied Baker. “Didn’t have much of an aftermath, either. When we got back to a civilized world and I tried to sell the robe, I found out that it was made of spun pyrite.”

“Could have been worse,” suggested Max. “You could have wound up with the Temple Virgin.”

“Well, it just goes to show that you can’t trust priests,” said Nicodemus Mayflower. “I figure that it’s best not to believe anyone below the level of king, or maybe emperor.”

“You ever met an emperor?” asked Max.

“Not yet,” answered Mayflower. “But I’ve got my whole life ahead of me.”

“Except for the part you’ve already wasted,” observed Baker wryly.

“That goes without saying,” replied Mayflower with dignity.

“
DAMN IT
!” roared Hurricane Smith, and suddenly we all turned to look at him. He was holding a scarf next to his cheek, and blood was seeping through it.

“I told you it happened before I met you!” he snapped at Langtry Lily.

She hissed and spit at him. He ducked, and it hit the back of his chair and started dissolving it. A second later he had his burner about an inch from her nose.

“You try that again and this’ll be the shortest goddamned honeymoon on record!”

“Your first spat?” asked Little Mike Picasso curiously.

“More like our two hundredth,” answered Smith. “You’d think a race that produces eggs like there’s no tomorrow wouldn’t be so fucking jealous!”

He kept his gun trained on her for another few seconds, then twirled it around his finger and put it back in its holster, all in one fluid motion.

Langtry Lily leaned over and whispered to him again.

“Forget it!” he snapped. “What good does it do to apologize when I know you’ll be slashing me or spitting at me again in a few minutes? We’ve got to lay down some ground rules here or else go our separate ways.”

Suddenly Langtry Lily’s whole demeanor changed. She began crying—huge, gut-wrenching sobs, and she buried her face in her hands.

“Now see what you’ve done,” said Little Mike. “You’ve gone and broken her poor little insectoid heart.” He paused, then added: “Always assuming she comes equipped with one, that is.”

“Uh … I don’t want to seem unduly insensitive,” I interjected, “but can her tears do any harm to the table?”

Smith just glared at me without answering, and a moment later he put his hands on her shoulders to comfort her, but she kept on weeping and wailing to beat the band, and finally he walked to the bar and called Reggie over to him.

“You got any honey?” he asked.

Reggie quickly gave him a bottle of it. Smith walked back to his table, opened it, and spilled a little on Langtry Lily’s forearm. She lifted her head to see what was happening, fluttered her nostrils a few times, stopped crying as quick as she’d begun, and then started sucking up the honey with that straw-like thing that shot out of the corner of her mouth.

“Another crisis averted,” said Smith with a grimace.

“You could avert a lot of ’em if you’d just give up this taste you’ve acquired for alien females and go back to human women,” said Baker.

“I like what I like,” said Smith, jutting out his jaw.

“Okay, it’s your life,” said Baker with a shrug, “and I ain’t the one to say that your tastes are perverted—but they sure could be a mite more practical.”

“Let’s change the subject before she starts paying attention,” said Smith, watching as Langtry Lily finished cleaning the honey off her arm and inserted the straw into the bottle. “What have you been doing with yourself since the last time I saw you?”

“Oh, this and that, here and there,” answered Baker. “Even made it all the way to Sol’s system.” He paused. “Never quite got to Earth, though.”

“Why not?”

Baker opened a fresh bottle of 130-proof Belarban whiskey. “I got sidetracked in the Hall of the Neptunian Kings,” he said, taking a huge swallow. “This story won’t be over as quick as my last, since I’m the star of it—and I wouldn’t want to go dry in the middle of it.”

Catastrophe Baker in the Hall of the Neptunian Kings

Before Baker could even begin, Three-Gun Max spoke up.

“There ain’t no Neptunian Kings,” he said.

“What makes you think so?” retorted Baker.

“There ain’t nothing at all on Neptune except a lot of empty real estate and a bunch of air nobody can breathe.”

“Well, they
told
me it was Neptune,” answered Baker, “but I suppose it could have been Jupiter.”

“Ain’t nothing there neither,” said Max. “Only there’s a whole lot more of it.”

“Actually,” offered Big Red, “there used to be a hockey team called the Neptunian Kings. But I don’t think they ever got within two thousand parsecs of Neptune.” He paused. “They weren’t very good, anyway.”

“Who’s telling this story anyway?” demanded Baker pugnaciously.

“Go ahead and talk,” said Max. “But I reserve the right to get up and leave if you start telling any whoppers.”

“Fair enough,” said Baker. He tapped the pearl handle of his burner. “And I reserve the right to blow your balls off if you even think of getting up.”

“It figures to be true,” added Nicodemus Mayflower. “After all, it’s not as if he’s talking about the Hall of the Neptunian Priests.”

“Or hockey players,” said Big Red.

“Or oversized killer roaches,” muttered Hurricane Smith under his breath.

“Are you all gonna listen or not?” roared Baker, and suddenly a hush fell over the Outpost.

It happened maybe four years ago (began Baker, glaring at Max until he was sure he wasn’t going to be interrupted again.) I’d just left Oom Paul, the little diamond-mining world out by Antares, and I’d heard tell that Fort Knox wasn’t radioactive any longer, and that all you had to do was just waltz in and carry out as many gold bars as you wanted, and there was nothing there to stop you except maybe thirty or forty guards, and that they were mostly little ones at that.

But my navigational computer and I got to telling dirty jokes to one another, and playing poker, and otherwise amusing ourselves to combat the boredom of the long voyage, and damned if we didn’t combat it so well that the computer forgot to pay attention to where we were, and all of a sudden we were orbiting Neptune (or maybe Jupiter) rather than Earth.

Problem is, I didn’t know it until we landed, and the ship told me I’d better put on a spacesuit and helmet. It struck me as kind of a strange request, but I just figured we’d touched down near a toxic waste dump. It wasn’t until I stepped out of the ship that I realized that the landscape didn’t bear a lot of resemblance to all the holos I’d seen of Earth.

I was about to climb back in and give the computer a piece of my mind when I saw a huge building off in the distance. It had all kinds of strange angles, and stained-glass windows with colors I hadn’t never seen before, all of which roused my curiosity, so I decided to take a closer look at it.

I headed on over to it, and found myself facing a door that must have been seventy feet high. I pushed against it, but it was latched or bolted from the inside and it didn’t give an inch. This just made me more interested to see what was on the inside, so I walked around the whole of the building, which must have been about half a mile on each side, looking for a way in.

When I couldn’t find none—there were maybe ten other doors, all of them locked—I decided to climb up the side of the building and ease myself in through one of the windows.

Well, let me tell you, that was a lot easier said than done. Oh, the building was easy enough to climb, because it was covered with weird carvings and strange-looking gargoyles, so I had no trouble getting handholds and footholds—but when I reached the window, which was maybe forty feet above the ground, I discovered that it was locked too, and strong as I am, I couldn’t kick it in.

I considered melting it with my burner, but I wasn’t exactly sure what the atmospheric make-up of Neptune was, and I figured that if it happened to have a high concentration of oxygen, like maybe eighty percent or so, I could set the whole planet on fire just by pulling the trigger.

So I kept climbing, and after another hour I reached the roof, which was about three hundred feet above the ground, and started walking along it, looking for vents or chimneys I could slide down. Sure enough, I found one smack-dab in the middle of the roof. Problem was, it went straight down, and I figured the fall could kill or cripple me, so I looked further, and finally found a hatch leading to the interior of the building. I decided it had been used by the guys who built the place, or maybe the one who had to keep the roof clean—but whoever used it were as big as the guys who walked through the doorways, because each step was maybe fifteen feet down from the last one.