On the Planet of Bottled Brains Read online

  "I'm nothing of the kind!" Brownnose said, wringing his hands with worry. "I'm your good friend, Bill, your old buddy, you know that. Say you know that!"

  "Of course I know that, moron!" Bill growled. "But if you were the computer trying to fool me that's what you'd say, isn't it?"

  "How do I know what I'd say if I was the computer," Brownnose cried aloud, out of his meager intellectual depths with all this cerebration. All he really wanted was to be liked. Which was why everybody hated him. "I'm not something out of a computer like you said. I'm me. I think."

  "If you're you," Bill said, "then tell me something the computer couldn't know."

  "How could I know what that'd be!" Brownnose cried. "I don't know what the computer knows!"

  "No, but the fact that you're here at all means that the computer knows what you know."

  "That's not my fault," Brownnose said.

  "I know that. But do you realize what it means? It means that, since the computer knows everything you know, it is you."

  Brownnose thought about this furiously and still couldn't understand it. "Say, Bill, why don't you try some of this here real nice stew."

  "Shut up you fake computer projection."

  "No, I'm not. Bill, believe me, I'm me."

  "Oh all right," Bill said. "If I'm wrong, I'm wrong. How are you, Brownnose?"

  "Pretty well, Bill," Brownnose smarmed happily. "I really had a tough time convincing the military to let me try to rescue you."

  "How did you manage that?" Bill asked suspiciously.

  "They couldn't just leave you missing on patrol, could they? Not after I started making a fuss."

  "That was good of you, Brownnose. And they let you volunteer?"

  "I think they just wanted to get rid of me. But they did let me go, and I came here and after a lot of difficulties, I found you."

  "You wouldn't like to tell me just how in hell you managed that?"

  "What does it matter?" Brownnose shuffled his toe in the ice and looked uncomfortable. "The important thing now is to get you out of here."

  Bill stared with some bitterness at the being who either was his old friend Brownnose or a computer simulation. It was really important to figure out which he was, because the real Brownnose would help him whereas Brownnose the computer simulation had to be up to some sort of crappy playing around. Basically the entire thing did not bear looking at. Bill sighed heavily.

  "I really think we should get moving," Brownnose said.

  "First tell me how you got here."

  Brownnose opened his mouth. Just then there was a crackling sound behind Bill. It was a startling noise, and unexpected, and he whirled, reaching for a weapon he no longer had and wondering just how in hell he was going to fight when he didn't even have a body.

  What hideous sight bruised Bill's eyes when he turned around? What soul-shaking horror awaited him? He gurgled unphonetically when he realized that he was looking at a reindeer. A plain, old-fashioned, medium-sized reindeer with fairly young-looking horns. It was picking its way delicately along a ledge that ran just a few yards below the summit. When the reindeer saw them it shivered violently, but could not break into a run because of the narrowness of the ledge upon which it was walking. It picked its way delicately along, keeping its big brown eyes on them, its sharp little hooves making crackling sounds on the snow. At last it reached a place where the path broadened. With a flick of its tail it bounded off. In a few moments it was out of sight.

  "Out of sight!" Brownnose said. "They like the high cold elevations, you know."

  "Who does?"

  "Reindeer, Bill."

  "How," Bill asked with ferocious impatience, "could a moth-eaten bowby reindeer get inside this computer?"

  Brownnose thought about it. "Maybe the same way we did."

  Bill made hideous grating sounds and clenched his fists. "And would you like to tell me exactly how we did get here?"

  "They didn't explain to me all the details."

  "Just tell me in broad outlines."

  "Bill, you're acting downright crazy. Do you want to get out of here or don't you?"

  "All right," Bill said gloomily, instantly descending from the craggy heights of anger to the dismal depths of despair. "Though I got a terrible crappy feeling that I'm going to regret this."

  He followed Brownnose down the slope. It was tough going for a while, though not nearly so tough as it had been for Bill to get up the other side. He struggled along in hip-deep snow, and envied the way Brownnose seemed to glide through the snow. But it bothered him, watching Brownnose move, because there was something graceful and inhuman about the way Brownnose slithered along. Bill asked himself, when is a klutz not a klutz? When he's controlled by a computer, he answered himself.

  Still, he followed, because there wasn't anywhere else to go. Maybe if he made believe that the computer was Brownnose, he'd get a chance to escape. Or at least get the last laugh on the computer.

  "It's right down here," Brownnose said, directing them towards a clump of trees dark against the snowy landscape.

  "What's right down here?" Bill asked.

  "Help," Brownnose said.

  They went down through a snow-filled gulch, then scrambled up the icy rocks on the other side. Bill was so busy trying to get up the steep and slippery slope that he didn't look up until he had reached the next crest. He saw Brownnose, or the thing that was pretending to be Brownnose — there may not have been much difference between the two — but surely there was some difference — saw Brownnose motion, waving both arms in a curiously boneless gesture. A computer-animated Motion. Bill pretended not to notice, because he didn't want Brownnose to know that he'd caught on to him.

  Looking up now, Bill could see, from the far ridge, four black dots moving across the snowy landscape. There was another, larger black dot behind them. "What's that?" Bill asked.

  "Those are friends," Brownnose said. "They are going to help us."

  "That's great," Bill said. He looked around. There was nothing on either side but icy peaks and snowy fields and five black dots moving toward them and slowly growing in size. There wasn't much he could do at the moment. He wished there were a few more possibilities.

  "Who are these guys?" Bill asked.

  "Allow me to introduce you," Brownnose said. "The large man with the wavy brown hair wearing the two-color, one-piece jumpsuit is Commander Dirk, Captain of the Starship Gumption."

  "I never heard of the Gumption," Bill said. "Is that a new class?"

  "Don't worry about it," Brownnose reassured him. "Dirk and the Gumption are an independent command. Theirs is the most powerful ship in space. You'll love the ship, Bill."

  Bill didn't want to ask how Brownnose had gotten on board the Gumption. He figured Brownnose would have a logical answer, like simulations always do.

  "Who's the guy with the pointy ears?" Bill asked.

  "That's Splock, a Nocturnian from the planet Fortinbras II. They are aliens."

  "No kidding," Bill said scathingly.

  "But they are friendly aliens," Brownnose hurriedly pointed out. "Splock is real friendly even though he may not act friendly. I wanted to warn you."

  "If he's friendly," Bill said, "why doesn't he act friendly?"

  "The Fortinbrasians," Brownnose said, "are a race that worships lack of emotion. The less emotion you have, the better they like it."

  "That sounds really great," Bill said. "What do they do for fun?"

  "Calculations," Brownnose said.

  "Better them than me," Bill sighed.

  They had almost reached the group. Just before they got into earshot, Brownnose said, in an urgent aside, "By the way, Bill, I almost forgot to tell you. Whatever you do, don't make any jokes or wisecracks about pointy ears. And another thing, even more important —"

  He stopped, because Commander Dirk, walking a few feet ahead of the others, had reached them and was holding out his hand. Bill shook it. Dirk had a warm hand and a friendly manner, although Bill didn't l
ike his two-tone jumpsuit — puce and mauve weren't his favorite colors. But then, he'd never been much of a fashion plate. There hadn't been much fashion or stuff like that back on the farm.

  "Glad to meet you, Bill," Dirk said.

  "And you, sir," Bill said. "Good of you to come all this way to rescue me. I don't really understand how you did it, since to the best of my knowledge I am a disembodied intelligence inside a computer."

  "We didn't exactly come here to rescue you," Dirk said. "We are here to find the secret of how the creatures on this planet manage to make spaceships disappear from one place and turn up in another place millions of miles, sometimes even light years away. Imagine how important it would be to our armed forces in space to have this power. As to how we got here, Splock is our science officer. Despite what you may think about his pointy ears, he has an intelligence many times more powerful than mine, and therefore almost infinitely more powerful than yours, as it is easy to tell."

  Bill let the insult ride; you got nowhere arguing with officers. "I didn't think anything wrong about his pointy ears! I think they look real nice. I bet the girls get kinky thrills from them. Like from my teeth." He twanged a protruding tusk.

  Splock came shuffling up to them now. The science officer from Fortinbras had a long thin face and eyebrows that were obviously alien since they turned up at both ends. When he spoke he had an uninflected buzzing voice like a badly adjusted voice simulator. "If you like ears like this it is highly probable that arrangements could be made to get a pair for you."

  "Well," Bill said, thinking it over. "When you get down to it I think that I really don't like them that much. I just thought they look nice on you."

  "I was making a joke," Splock said. "Just because my people have no sense of humor doesn't prevent us from making jokes in order to make the inferior races with which we must deal feel more at home. The type of humor I engaged in then was called irony."

  "Irony! That's it. Of course!" Bill said. "Oh boy, ho-ho, how funny!"

  "I did not mean," Splock said, in frigid tones, "that the word irony itself is funny. Though it does have its humorous overtones, I suppose. I meant that my statement about the pointy ears.... Oh, shit. Never mind. Captain Dirk, what did you want me for?"

  "I'd like you to explain to this trooper," Dirk said, "how we got here."

  "But it ought to be obvious," Splock said, looking icily at Bill. "I take it for granted that you've had the Finegurt-Reindeer equations in grade school or junior high?"

  "I think they called them something else in my school," Bill said in humble prevarication.

  "Never mind. What we did, we retooled the Gumption's engines so they would oscillate on an interrupted Scomian curve. That's commonplace enough, of course; most commanders do it at least once a year when it's time to scrape space barnacles off the hull. It shrinks the ship, you see, which makes it easier to remove the barnacles."

  "Doesn't it shrink the barnacles, too?" Bill asked.

  Splock stared at him. Then burst into harsh laughter. Bill glanced at Brownnose, who looked away, embarrassed.

  "What's so funny?" Bill said at last.

  "Asking if the barnacles shrank. What a nice use of irony!"

  "I guess it was pretty funny," Bill said, trying to be humble. Thinking that it wasn't too difficult getting along with this weirdo alien.

  "No, it wasn't funny," Splock said. "At least not to me. But then, I don't even find my own jokes funny. I laughed merely to make you feel more at ease."

  "Oh, thank you very much," Bill said, feeling that this joker was really a fruitcake of the first water.

  "Now, after the ship has descended the Scomian curve in a state of oscillation, instead of scraping the hull, we introduce a pulsed beat that further miniaturizes the ship and projects it as a series of immaterial frames. In that form, we are able to enter the computer as a simulation."

  "Oh, I see," Bill said, not understanding one word of the technical bowb. "Sounds great, really great."

  "It has its uses," Splock said, feigning unfelt humility.

  "And now since you did such a great job of getting in here — how are you going to get us out?"

  Captain Dirk broke in. "We will know that just as soon as Splock makes his calculations."

  Splock's long thin face took on a look of utmost concentration. His eyes slitted, a vein in his temple throbbed, and his ears quivered slightly, all signs, as Bill was to learn later, of a Fortinbrasian male wearing a jumpsuit in a state of Ur-concentration.

  "How did you meet these guys?" Bill said to Brownnose, whispering so as not to intrude on Splock's concentration.

  "Stop that whispering!" Splock said. "How do you expect me to concentrate?"

  Wow, Bill thought, he really can hear a lot with those pointy ears.

  Splock glared at him again. "And stop that!"

  "You couldn't hear me!" Bill said. "I was thinking!"

  "Logic dictated what you would think," Splock said. "I won't tell you again that I don't like comments of that sort."

  "Didn't your friend tell you not to mention his ears?" Captain Dirk said.

  Bill cringed, then straightened up abruptly. This was getting to be too much. That asshole alien in the crummy jumpsuit with a hatchet face and ears like a gravid kangaroo couldn't tell him how to think. To hell with them, he didn't need them; he'd rescue himself.

  "You do need us," Splock said.

  "Stop reading my mind!" Bill shouted.

  "I didn't read your mind. I simply applied the logic of expected outcomes."

  "Is that a fact?" Bill said. Unexpectedly, he smiled.

  "Yes, it is," Splock said, not smiling.

  A moment later he was reeling backwards, both hands to his face. Bill had thrown the neatest straight left jab seen since this planet had been born from the fiery pit of undifferentiated insubstantiality. Splock's hand came away red. "You've given me a nosebleed!" he said.

  "At least we can get off the subject of ears for a while," Bill said. "It wasn't much of a blow, just a poke. Put your head back and put something cold on the back of your neck. It'll stop in no time."

  "You don't understand!" cried Dirk.

  "I understand plenty about nosebleeds," Bill said.

  "I mean, you don't know what a blow on the nose can do for a Fortinbrasian male."

  "He never saw it coming," Bill said. "So much for logical expectations."

  "You fool!" Dirk cried. His face was ashen. "Males of Splock's planet carry their spare memory banks in their noses."

  "That's a damned stupid place to have a memory," Bill said.

  "Where am I?" Splock said, blinking around at them.

  Captain Dirk groaned loudly and tore at his thinning hair, "Splock! You have to remember! Stored in your head is the highly important, original and special mathematical logic that will be needed to get us out of here."

  "I'm afraid the data is bent, if not destroyed," Splock said. "I was keeping it all up the extra memory banks in my nose for safekeeping. How was I to know this barbarian with a Saurian foot would hit me in the nose?"

  "How'd you know about my alligator foot?"

  "The logic of the unexpected," Splock said with a sour smile. "Besides, I can see it there."

  "Come on!" Brownnose urged. "Let's get the hell out of here!"

  At Brownnose's behest they all turned and walked toward the remaining two black dots and the larger black dot that Bill had seen earlier. When they reached it, the black dots were still black dots, only bigger.

  "What are these?" Bill asked.

  "These are storage simulations of our emergency rescue ship and the two crewmen who man it."

  "But they're black dots," Bill said.

  "We stored them in that form," Dirk said, "to save energy. It takes a lot of power to beam simulations into an alien computer and the Gumption's main batteries are already dangerously depleted due to a situation that came up immediately before this one."

  "What good are they?" Bill asked.

/>   "None at all, in their present form," Dirk admitted. "But as soon as Splock activates them into full simulacrum form —"

  "I can't," Splock complained, touching his nose tenderly. "The equations," He sniffled. There was a whistling sound when he snuffled. It seemed possible that Bill had broken not only the crucial reconstituting data which was needed to get them out of the computer and back to the Gumption, but also Splock's nose.

  "Now we're really in trouble," Dirk said unhappily.

  Bill walked up to one of the black dots and touched it. It was cold and metallic. He pushed against it. It was rigid. He walked to its edge. The edge was razor thin. He was to learn later that storage simulations have in fact no depth at all, only width and height, and, of course, quite a lot of area. But even had he known that then, it wouldn't have helped him turn the simulation into something useful.

  Captain Dirk said, "Splock! Can't you do anything?"

  "I'm trying," the Fortinbrasian said in a nasal voice. "But the data is coming out skewed."

  "Look!" Brownnose said.

  They were standing on a long plain that seemed to stretch forever under a stationary yellow sun. There were small purple plants on the plain, and a few old ruins that the computer had simulated just to liven up the place. Now, as they watched, furious clouds of dark green matter came roaring over the plain, bearing with them sand and bits of gravel, which came at them with the speed of machine gun bullets fired by a nervous hand.

  At once Captain Dirk dropped to one knee, and, unholstering the lethal-looking handgun strapped to his waist, turned the beam to cone-destruction and destroyed the matter before it could cut them to ribbons of simulations.

  "Keep it up, Captain!" Splock said. "I've just accessed the outer equations. I don't have enough to help us yet, but I do have enough to give us hope of eventual success."

  "Can't keep this up much longer," Dirk said through gritted teeth. "My hand laser is only half-charged. Probably the fault of that new rating from New Calcutta. See that he gets a demerit for this bit of carelessness."

  "If we ever get back," Splock said, his face set in the familiar expression of agony of a man trying to remember an equation he had forgotten.