Bill 7 - the Galactic Hero (24 page)

“It's a frameup,” Bill whined. “I can't be a deserter because I'm actually a member of the Imperial Troopers, so I was actually reporting to my unit for duty.” He looked around cautiously. When there was no immediate response he started to smile a smirky smile.

“I like it,” pronounced the president. “I like it a lot.”

“By George, I think he's got it,” said the first judge after they had had a chance to discuss it.

“He has indeed. He's done it,” said the second.

“Absolutely,” said the third. “He is not guilty of desertion.” There was a smattering of applause. “He is not a deserter. He's a spy. Guilty!”

“Excellent,” enthused Grotsky. “Take him out and shoot him!”

A pair of MPs grabbed Bill and started moving him toward the door. They got him about halfway there before the president called out, “Stop!”

Grotsky was talking with a gray figure who had appeared on a holoscreen behind him.

“Snorri!” Bill shouted. “Snorri! Save me!”

“Too late, Bill,” Grotsky intoned. “Snorri Yakamoto turned out to be a cleverly disguised Chinger spy. He disappeared before we could shoot him. This is Bodger Portcullis, my new covert operations adviser. Say hello, Bodger.”

“Gee, Bill,” Bodger said, “it looks like you're in a real pickle, huh?”

Bill was struck speechless by an MP's hand over his mouth.

“Suppose we let you go on a suicide mission instead of shooting you? Would you like that?”

Grotsky nodded, as though encouraging Bill to agree. Since Bill had been on suicide missions before — and was on one now, in fact — he figured he might as well go along. He nodded too.

Bodger may have been a new addition to Grotsky's intelligence staff (Bill heard one of the other spies complain, “We don't need no stinkin' Bodger”), but his idea was pretty familiar.

Bill had spent the last few minutes being lashed to a ballista. Unlike the onager, which was a giant catapult, the ballista was a fairly high-tech piece of machinery. It was a giant crossbow, and what Bill was actually going to be riding was the javelin it would launch. The idea was that this would make him look just like an artillery shell to the radar. He would land near Trooper headquarters and plant a small transmitter, cleverly disguised as an empty toilet paper roll, which would send a homing signal for an Eyerackian missile.

“How's the countdown going?” Bill asked the technician in charge of the ballista, not really liking any of this.

“What countdown?” The technician pulled a lever.

Whoosh!

Bill had never really considered projectiles in much detail. Most of the weapons he used were either energy weapons, like blasters, or guided missiles, like the TAIL GUNNER! smart missiles. He had never thought about the problems of hitting a target with something that just lobbed out and flew through the air. He might never have come up with the principle of gyroscopic stabilization on his own, had he not been experiencing it.

Gyroscopic stabilization means that if something is spinning around its long axis, it will keep going straight. The faster it spins, the more accurate its flight will be.

The javelin felt as though it was going to be very accurate.

Bill couldn't really tell, though, because when it hit, releasing the straps that held him fast, it was all he could do to throw himself to the ground. And he almost missed.

The sky was spinning around him, so he rolled over. Then the ground was spinning, so he closed his eyes. They were spinning too, but he couldn't stand the thought of opening them again.

But eventually the universe and Bill came to rest with respect to each other, and he could try to figure out where he was. Which was just behind the Imperial lines, not very far from the headquarters.

Bill knew what he had to do.

He checked through a few foxholes for the rawest recruits he could find. There! Those would do — Fall young, all buck privates, all scared to death. All bright green with fear.

Bill jumped into the middle of the group, grabbed a blaster rifle, and said in his best drillfield voice, “Don't tell me that you bowb-heads are scared? Come on — there's a war going on here that sure needs fighting!”

He leaped out and started charging across the trenches toward the Eyerackian lines. As he crossed each trench, he shouted more encouragement. “Don't be cowards! Attack! Attack! Do this for your Emperor — and your mothers too!”

He stood on top of the last trench, struck a heroic pose, waved his rifle over his head, and called, “DEATH OR GLORY!” And he charged out alone into the battlefield.

When he estimated he was about halfway across he started looking carefully around him. Little puffs of vaporized dirt were starting to be blasted into the air. If he angled just a little to the left, about fifty feet ahead —

Arrgh! Bill fell headfirst down into a deep shell hole. He couldn't be seen from either side as long as he stayed in here and kept his head down. Which was easy enough to do since he was jammed in. It was what Bill always dreamed of — safe. Now he could have some nice quiet time to think about what to do next.

Whatever he thought he would do next, he was wrong. A peculiar noise was building behind him. It sounded almost like ... No, that couldn't be. But it did sound very much like thousands of troopers charging across a field.

And that's exactly what it turned out to be. A wave of them, stampeding toward the enemy lines, trampling everything in their path into the mud.

When Bill awoke in the hospital he was as thoroughly encased in bandages as he had once been in chains. He wasn't sure which one was better. In either case, he couldn't move and he could barely talk. He could still feel bootprints on some of his more personal body parts as well as the soles of his feet. Had the whole army stepped on him? He couldn't remember anything after the assault wave reached his shell hole. He wasn't even certain whose hospital he was in. And asking someone could be awkward, when each side had sentenced him to death for deserting to the other.

He lay there for a while, staring at the ceiling. If he'd been able to move, he might have turned on the holovision, but he couldn't even turn his head to find out if there was one there. All in all, it was only a very little bit better than being dead.

Eventually a nurse came to change his catheter. This was extremely painful, and cheered Bill up considerably. In a matter like this, Bill was of the belief that pain, which would eventually go away, was much better than numbness, which might not.

He also got a glimpse of the nurse. She looked enough like General Weissearse that Bill suspected at first that it was him in drag. But the nurse had more of a mustache than the general, as well as being much more masculine. She also had Imperial Trooper nurses' insignia on her shoulders, with the familiar slogan, “Nurse till it hurts!” So now he knew where he was. Fatigue and blackness overwhelmed him.

The next time he became aware of a nurse, he started moaning, as any good Trooper would, to indicate that he was barely restraining his screams of agony. This impressed the female staff, according to legend, and sometimes led to the administration of massages or psychoactive medication. (Bill had spent a lot of time in hospitals in his military career, and this ploy had never yet worked; such is the hold of myth on the human imagination, however, that he still tried it every time.)

Imagine his surprise when the nurse actually came over! She checked his chart for a part of his body that wasn't too badly injured, then stroked his forehead gently and said, “There, there, now. Is the pain too horrible to bear?” Bill nodded, by way of indicating that he was in too much pain to speak. “Well, we can't have you moaning like that. You're going to get a visitor! Here, just bite down on this.”

She slipped something into his mouth and left. Bill examined the something with his teeth and tongue. It wasn't quite the right shape for a pill; one end of it was rounded, but the other end, was flat. He tapped it gently with his teeth; it was hard.

A bullet. She'd given him a bullet to bite. And he was too bandaged up to take it out of his mouth.

But the nurse said something about a visitor, didn't she? That was a little puzzle. Bill didn't know anyone in the entire Imperial armada, unless you counted General Weissearse, and if he knew Bill was here he would just send an execution squad.

It just shows how wrong you can be. Bill recognized the sound of the general's staff toadying down the ward long before the general reached his bed.

“So, here's our hero, eh? You must be in the good graces of the Lord, my son, to have survived that marvelous attack you led. Does anybody here know this man's name? Can't see a blessed thing with all these bandages.”

Bill maneuvered the bullet between his teeth, and decided not to identify himself. He moaned a little bit to appear more heroic.

"No matter. You're a tremendous inspiration to us all, my boy. Single-handedly you stimulated our men to think of victory — not death for a change — then led them in an attack against hopeless odds, with no thought to your own safety, a fighting fool who inspired the troops to follow you into the very jaws of death! The fact that most of them were killed in no way detracts from your achievement.

“To honor your courage and leadership, and on behalf of the Emperor, I'd like to present you with — what medals have we got handy?”

An aide came up with a small box, and the general rummaged around for a moment.

“Yes, that's a nice one. I'd like to present you with the Order of the Galactic Jakes. You should know that this also entitles you to one free drink in the officer's club of your choice, if you ever become an officer, which is very unlikely.”

The general pinned the medal onto Bill personally; fortunately, Bill had the bullet to bite on as the pin pierced his flesh.

“Now, son, is there anything else we can do for you?”

Bill swallowed the bullet so he could speak clearly. “Yes, sir! I'd like a new foot!” He waggled his right leg in illustration.

“Consider it done!” said Weissearse. “Doctor, see to it that there's a regulation human foot at the end of that leg right away!”

Bill sighed. His dream was about to come true.

Within minutes, orderlies came in to prepare him for surgery and wheel him down to the operating room. In what seemed like no time — probably because he was unconscious most of the time — Bill was back in the ward, back in his bed.

He awoke slowly, relishing the anesthesia, stretching his legs, flexing his feet. That woke him up fully. He flexed his right foot. It felt just like a foot! He curled his right toes. They felt just like toes!

“Nurse! Nurse!”

The nurse came running, with the doctor right behind her. “Is something wrong? Are you in pain?”

“My foot! My foot!” Bill was almost too excited to speak.

“Your foot hurts?” the doctor asked. “That's normal after surgery, but it'll go away.”

“No! No!” Bill took a breath and tried to relax. “Let me see my foot!”

“Ah!”

The doctor carefully unwrapped the bandages at the bottom of Bill's right leg. Bill could see a glimpse of pink, human flesh through the gauze. The nurse held his head up so he would watch the complete unveiling.

“Voilà!” With a flourish, the doctor twirled the last wrapping off.

Bill was speechless. There, at the end of his right leg, was a foot, a real foot, a human foot — a very familiar foot.

He looked at it more closely. It was a left foot. Well, never mind, at least it was a foot.

“What do you think?” the doctor asked.

“It's lovely,” Bill said. “At last I have two feet again.”

The doctor looked embarrassed. “Not exactly.”

Bill's joy started to evaporate. “How not exactly?” he grated.

“Well, the general wanted you to have a foot on the end of your leg there, what we medical men call an ankle, but there's a chronic shortage of feet. I guess you know all about that. Anyway, the only place we could find a foot to put on your right leg was, well, your left leg. I'm sure that you will like that foot, for you have had it a long time. That's your own left foot.”

Bill's grated out a murderous oath so awful that the doctor's body temperature fell ten degrees and he almost swooned. Then Bill screamed. “What's on my left leg, then?”

“You'll like it, I'm sure that you will. It's a very nice piece of work, if I say so myself,” the doctor said as he unwrapped the bandages with numb fingers and chattering teeth. “And quite handy, too, I think you could say.”

Bill screamed again. Where his left foot used to be, before it became his right foot, there was a hand. A particularly ugly, hairy hand. It had thick dirty nails and a tattoo across the back, saying DEATH TO ALL CHINGERS.

He formed the hand into a fist and swung it at the doctor and decked him with a neat uppercut. The nurses dragged the doctor away.

“You'll get used to it,” the doctor moaned. “It's really quite distinctive.” He kept reassuring Bill as they carried him out of the ward.

The foot transplant healed nicely, but it took Bill a while to get used to walking on his new hand. He tried walking on his fingertips, flat or balled into a fist. All of these were most uncomfortable. He was only happy when he could make a fist of his hand-foot and swing at the doctor when he passed. The doctor avoided him so Bill hobbled-walked around the hospital looking for him. Ready to drop on his back and swing a fist whenever he found him.

On one of his expeditions, he paused for a rest in front of the bulletin board. New notices were the only reading material available. And Bill looked them over lethargically.

YOUR EMPEROR LOVES YOU!

“Yes, I do I really do!”

What follows is a real live quote from The Emperor.

The Emperor and the General Staff would like to thank all the enlisted men and women of his valiant and glorious armed forces for their generous required voluntary contributions to the Emperor's Birthday Present Fund.

Your participation made it possible to buy, for the Emperor, something he has always wanted: a brain transplant that might raise his IQ above 35. You should be pleased that merely foregoing one week's pay has made so much pleasure possible.