Bill 4 - on the Planet of Tasteless Pleasure Read Free

went to the side of his bed for a swig of Pepto Abysmal — The Calming Internal Antiseptic and Nose Purifier! This cheap, rotten, godforsaken hospital was getting on his nerves. Not only were the beginnings or ends of their books lopped off, but the sanitary conditions weren't much better than back at Camp Leon Trotsky where he'd done his boot training. Colostomy IV was a planet only recently discovered. Though it had a reasonable oxygen content to its atmosphere soup (along with curious trace amounts of incense and airborne alkaloids; scientific speculation posited a dead, lost race of either Buddhists, Hindus or hippies) and it swung around a GO-GO star (very close to Sol in type), absolutely no living intelligent beings had been discovered upon its surface. Just lots of floral land undergoing the usual geological hiccups — and lots of mysterious dark ocean. Since the planet happened to be somewhere between somewhere and somewhere else, both somewheres being equally repulsive, the Troopers had naturally chosen to build a transient camp, reppel depple, Senior Officers Whorehouse and this hospital here, on the shores of the great black ocean, tideless and ominous. They also built a water dehydration plant on the shore to ship out powdered water for the troopers (just add water ... voila! Water!)
    Bill chased the chalky medicine with a glass of foul-tasting water and went back to bed. He dozed intermittently, but as rosy-fingered dawn fingered the window sill while pain fingered his frontal lobes he was still feeling relatively sleepless. His headache had abated somewhat, but his mood foot felt weird. It was all tingly, like it was just waking out of leg-sleep. Maybe, he thought, he should go to see Dr. Delazny about this immediately. It felt like Tinkerbell had just jammed her wand up his cloven hoof, and all kinds of aerie fairie nonsense was happening inside!
    Bill put on his torn, five-ply paper robe and moaned his way out of the ward, hoping to wake up the four doped-to-the-gills Troopers he shared it with. No such luck. The sick bowbs were sleeping, if not the sleep of the innocent, then at least the sleep of the narcoleptic.
    He went down to the Doc's office, in the basement, conveniently situated by the bar and the morgue (many of Doctor Delazny's patients were victims of the dreaded Pedosphincter Rot, a wildly metastasizing mutant xenocancer killing Troopers by the platoon, whose distant ancestor was athlete's foot, and that struck the nether regions of the human body. Hence his dual specialty. And also hence his proximity to the morgue.) By now Bill's foot felt as though sparklers were pixilating in his heel!
    As the lift banged to an abrupt halt on Level Zero and the doors wheezed open, Bill thought he caught a sight of Doctor Delazny's balding dome disappearing into the laundry room, followed by the flapping tails of his lab coat.
    What was he in such a hurry for?
    And why was he running into the laundry room?
    “Hey Doc!” he cried, limping along, cringing with the odd sensations that kept shooting up his leg. “Wait up! I got to talk to you!”
    He pushed open the swinging doors marked “Laundry.” The room was lined with shelves of linens, amongst which scurried ratfinks — native rodent-like creatures who swarmed the Trooper installations and appeared to feed on linoleum wax and toenail parings. In the middle of the room, a laundry chute depended from the ceiling, beneath which a small basket of soiled towels, garments and sheets breathed up stale human body odors.
    “Doc! Doc Delazny?” Bill stepped in, looking around. A pair of filthy trousers zoomed down the chute and landed atop his head. He snarled and threw it at a dump of copulating ratfinks, who proceeded to devour it.
    No sign of the Doctor. But Bill could have sworn —
    Oh well. Bill left and checked Doc Delazny's examination room. Nobody.
    A bright orange and blue neon sign blasted out the letters HOSPITAL BAR just as brightly as ever, but