Bill, The Galactic Hero 6 - on the Planet Of The Hippies From Hell Read Free Page B

of lizard flesh, veins and wires.
    Wires?
    Still, Bill half expected as much. There was something fishy about that lizard.
    “Best idea the Director ever had — and Bureaupsych concurs. He deals every day with the threats to the welfare of the Empire from his desk but he never gets to actually kill anything. So, every once in awhile, we throw in a cyborg Commupop or Chinger to keep him on his toes. Old man loves it! He'll have a smile on his face for at least a week — and will maybe leave off the ritual staff whipping for a while!”
    Bill tossed the leg down and wiped his hands on his pants. “You got to give me the details on this Trooper I'm supposed to go get, and then point me to the nearest MacRotgut's. I feel like a nice MacDTs for a liquid lunch.”
    “Sure, Sarge.” He handed Bill a folder and a watch with a complicated gadget on it. “Quantum subspace radio for top-secret communications if you got any problems or questions. Oh, and by the way. Best to keep that foot out of your mouth, eh?”
    Bill was tempted to put the foot somewhere else a good deal more satisfactory than his mouth, but he decided that since he was going to have to rely on this bowb-brain for information for a long time, he'd better not do anything quite so enthusiastic.
    He went for that drink he'd been promising himself, hoping to encounter no cyborg Chingers or Commupops along the way.

CHAPTER 2
    Bill was in complete total and utter bliss.
    Well, not precisely complete. Or utter. What little that remained unobliterated in the way of deep human emotions in Bill twinged ever so slightly, lifted their heads feebly from the abyssal depths of depression and, like frail shoots in April lured on by the siren promise of spring, began to flower with weensy buds of hope.
    Barworld!
    For all the years — it seemed like centuries — that he had served in the Troopers, in the grueling grapple of combat and the even worse conditions in boot camp on both sides of the boot, stationed on pustulating planets and in stagnant starships that made him want to flip his cookies just thinking about them, doomed to a dark bleak existence of hard beds, hard heads and no hard creds ... for all those years, the concept of R&R was strictly verboten in the Service; leave had long since left. A Trooper's duty was to serve his Emperor twenty-four and a half hours a day, three hundred and sixty-six days a year — and that under the shrunken Galactic Disgustan Calendar, only half as long as the Augustan. The only joys in a Trooper's life were two-credit/two-minute ladies of the morning (the ladies of the evening were far too expensive), and in smoking de-tarred and de-nicotinized cigarettes (in the hopes that they would shorten their miserable, wasted lives in this dubiously pleasurable fashion), Comix (albeit jam-packed with subliminal loyalty reinforcement, like Chingers and Commupops generally being the bad guys) and, of course, booze. However, even the simple joys of Trooper life tended to be watered-down and tepid. The doxies were old and bored and tended to use their creds as down payments on powered wheelchairs. The cigarettes were made of dried tobacco stems, since the real stuff was reserved for the officer classes. Comix doubled for toilet paper; the ultimate literary criticism.
    And the booze...
    To say that the booze was the pits was to insult underarms and coal mines all over the known universe. It tended to be repulsively flavored, cheaply manufactured ethanol, rumored to be from Undertakerworld, so that in lieu of alcohol embalming fluid was often used.
    Bill hadn't known the difference for a long time, but whenever during his various adventures he'd actually tasted some real beer, some real wine, and most of all genuine unsynthetic whiskey, gin and rum, he knew that he wanted to dedicate his life to finding a world where he could sample again the fruits of this delicious alcoholic vine.
    Such a world, it was whispered in the darkness, was