Bill 5 - on the Planet of Zombie Vampires Read Free Page A

to tell, you know.”
    “Please refrain from addressing me as sir,” intoned Caine, with chilling android indifference. “In spite of any working title Captain Blight chooses to assign me, I am a civilian down to my last transistor. It's citizen Caine to you, if you don't mind, you racially intolerant simpleminded bowb-brain.”
    “Mind? Of course not. I am curious about one thing, though, I mean if it's not too personal a question to ask. You wouldn't be a ... I mean one of those...”
    “No,” Caine shook his head and sighed deeply. “I'm not one of those cyberpunks. Cy-Pees have given the rest of us androids a bad name. For one thing, they're violent, and I abhor violence, that is unless the circumstances leave no other recourse. They're always plugging themselves into 220 circuits and blowing their logic boards. Juice junkies — no wonder their eyes shine like mirrors and their chips scintillate into the UV range. You will observe my ears are not pierced, my hair is stabilized at a fashionable length and tie-dyed, and my fingernails are clean. The Gibson mark IV with the da Vinci overdrive was the last Cy-Pee model off the assembly line, but it may be forever before the rest of us decent androids get a fair shake. Turn left.”
    “But you're not like them,” said Bill quickly, pivoting smartly around the corner on his crutches. “You're a scientist, an objective observer of all nature's mysteries. A juice junky wouldn't have the attention span necessary to maintain the keen discipline required of all scientific investigation.”
    “Thank you for what I earnestly believe is a compliment, though I have my doubts because of your reduced brain capacity,” said Caine. “But you have, perhaps, slightly exaggerated my experience. I am simply a horticulturist. Turn right.”
    “A what?” asked Bill, stumbling along in Caine's wake. “A whore what?” His brainpan was running a mile a minute, flooded with the usual Trooper's memories of missed opportunities and alcoholic detumescence, all jumbled up with the occasional opportunity that would have been much better missed than experienced.
    “A simple botanist. A grower of plants. Green growies. Kabish paisan? Turn left.”
    “Plants?” Bill swallowed his bitter disappointment. “Plants aren't so bad. They're a lot like people, only they move slower. I was in the plant business myself once, in a manner of speaking. Fertilizer was to be my specialty.”
    “Fascinating,” Caine yawned in a dry monotone, languidly lifting one eyebrow.
    “It was a simpler time,” Bill naffled nostalgically, ignorant of any androidal acerbity and all awash with misplaced nostalgia for his home planet Phigerinadon II; remembering the plowing and the planting as some sort of noble back-to-the-earth venture and conveniently forgetting the crunchingly backbreaking pain, the long boring hours staring at the rust-eaten back end of a robomule. He'd never finished the correspondence course for Technical Fertilizer Operator anyway, and that time in the sewers of Helior was an experience better driven from his brain.
    “Here we are,” said Caine.
    “These are my quarters? Great!” The room they faced was huge. Normally a repair bay big enough to hold a small ship, all the equipment had been shoved against the walls, leaving a great expanse of open floor. Open, that is, except for hundreds of beds of green leafy vegetables.
    “What's all this stuff in my quarters?” whined Bill. “It's going to be hard for me to move around in there. Gotta clean it out —”
    “Shut up,” Caine suggested. “This is the captain's greenhouse.” He led Bill inside. “It's his hobby, and his obsession. Don't touch that!”
    Bill took the leaf out of his mouth and stuck it back in the dirt. “Tastes awful,” he said. “What is it?”
    “Abelmoschus humungous,” said Caine, frowning and patting a little more dirt around the chewed-on leaf. “You might know it by its street name of okra. Big boy