Read Online Venus on the Half-Shell by Philip José Farmer - Free Book Online
Authors: Philip José Farmer
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drummed his fingers on the arm of the chair. Finally, Simon said, “Well, what did happen?”
“Well, it must of been them Hoonhors!”
“What’s a Hoonhor?”
“Jesus, kid, you don’t know nothing, do you?” Comberbacke said. “They’re the race that’s been cleaning up the universe!”
Simon sighed and patiently asked him to back up and start at the beginning. The Hoonhors, he found, were a people from a planet of some unknown galaxy a trillion lightyears away. They were possibly the most altruistic species in the universe. They had done very well for themselves and now they were out doing for others.
“One thing they can’t stand is seeing a people kill off their own planet. You know, pollution. So they’ve been locating these, and when they do, they clean it up.
“They’ve sanitized, that’s what they call it, sanitizing, they’ve sanitized maybe a thousand planets so far in the Milky Way alone. Haven’t you really ever heard of them?”
“I think if anybody on Earth had, we’d all have heard of them,” Simon said.
Comberbacke shook his head and said, “If I’d of known that Earth hadn’t, I would of hurried home and warned everybody. But space is big, and I didn’t think the Hoonhors would get around to Earth for a thousand years or so. Plenty of time, I thought.”
Comberbacke knew that it was the Hoonhors who had caused the Second Deluge. He’d seen one of their ships heading out when he went past the orbit of Pluto on his way in.
“What they do, they release into a planet’s atmosphere a substance that precipitates every bit of H 2 0 in the air. You wouldn’t believe the downpour!”
“Yes, I would,” Simon said.
“Yeah, I guess you would. Say, are you sure you don’t have any more beer? No? Well, the precipitation cleans the air and the land and drowns almost everybody. After the water has evaporated, the trees start growing again from seeds, and there’s always a few birds and animals left up in the mountains to renew the animal life. There’s always a few sentients left, too, but it takes them a long time to breed to the point where they again start polluting their planet. The Hoonhors schedule the planets they’ve drowned for a regular sanitizing every ten thousand years. Actually, though, they’re short-handed, and they might not come back for fifty thousand or so years.”
The old man had spent much of his time while away from Earth traveling in ships which went faster than the speed of light. This explained why he hadn’t died and become dust six hundred Earth-years ago. People in ships going at lightspeeds, or faster, aged very slowly. Everything inside the ship was slowed down. To an observer outside the ship, a passenger would take a month just to open his mouth to ask somebody to please pass the sugar. An orgasm would last a year, which was one of the things the passenger liners stressed in their advertising.
What the PR departments didn’t explain was that the people in the ship thought they were moving at normal speed. Their subjective senses told them they were living according to time as they knew it. When a passenger complained about false advertising because he’d really only taken four or five seconds to come, the captain would reply that that was true in the ship. But back on Earth, by the clocks the company kept in headquarters, the passenger had taken four hundred days.
If the passenger still bitched, the captain said it was Einstein’s fault. He was the one who’d thought up the theory of relativity.
The old man got drunk and passed out. Simon put him to bed and took the dog for a walk. The breeze, which came from the south, was thick and sticky with the odor of rotting bodies. As the water had evaporated, it had left bodies of animals, birds, and humans along the slope of the mountain. This made the few surviving vultures and rats happy, which goes to show that the old proverb about an ill wind is true. But the wind almost gagged Simon. He
“Well, it must of been them Hoonhors!”
“What’s a Hoonhor?”
“Jesus, kid, you don’t know nothing, do you?” Comberbacke said. “They’re the race that’s been cleaning up the universe!”
Simon sighed and patiently asked him to back up and start at the beginning. The Hoonhors, he found, were a people from a planet of some unknown galaxy a trillion lightyears away. They were possibly the most altruistic species in the universe. They had done very well for themselves and now they were out doing for others.
“One thing they can’t stand is seeing a people kill off their own planet. You know, pollution. So they’ve been locating these, and when they do, they clean it up.
“They’ve sanitized, that’s what they call it, sanitizing, they’ve sanitized maybe a thousand planets so far in the Milky Way alone. Haven’t you really ever heard of them?”
“I think if anybody on Earth had, we’d all have heard of them,” Simon said.
Comberbacke shook his head and said, “If I’d of known that Earth hadn’t, I would of hurried home and warned everybody. But space is big, and I didn’t think the Hoonhors would get around to Earth for a thousand years or so. Plenty of time, I thought.”
Comberbacke knew that it was the Hoonhors who had caused the Second Deluge. He’d seen one of their ships heading out when he went past the orbit of Pluto on his way in.
“What they do, they release into a planet’s atmosphere a substance that precipitates every bit of H 2 0 in the air. You wouldn’t believe the downpour!”
“Yes, I would,” Simon said.
“Yeah, I guess you would. Say, are you sure you don’t have any more beer? No? Well, the precipitation cleans the air and the land and drowns almost everybody. After the water has evaporated, the trees start growing again from seeds, and there’s always a few birds and animals left up in the mountains to renew the animal life. There’s always a few sentients left, too, but it takes them a long time to breed to the point where they again start polluting their planet. The Hoonhors schedule the planets they’ve drowned for a regular sanitizing every ten thousand years. Actually, though, they’re short-handed, and they might not come back for fifty thousand or so years.”
The old man had spent much of his time while away from Earth traveling in ships which went faster than the speed of light. This explained why he hadn’t died and become dust six hundred Earth-years ago. People in ships going at lightspeeds, or faster, aged very slowly. Everything inside the ship was slowed down. To an observer outside the ship, a passenger would take a month just to open his mouth to ask somebody to please pass the sugar. An orgasm would last a year, which was one of the things the passenger liners stressed in their advertising.
What the PR departments didn’t explain was that the people in the ship thought they were moving at normal speed. Their subjective senses told them they were living according to time as they knew it. When a passenger complained about false advertising because he’d really only taken four or five seconds to come, the captain would reply that that was true in the ship. But back on Earth, by the clocks the company kept in headquarters, the passenger had taken four hundred days.
If the passenger still bitched, the captain said it was Einstein’s fault. He was the one who’d thought up the theory of relativity.
The old man got drunk and passed out. Simon put him to bed and took the dog for a walk. The breeze, which came from the south, was thick and sticky with the odor of rotting bodies. As the water had evaporated, it had left bodies of animals, birds, and humans along the slope of the mountain. This made the few surviving vultures and rats happy, which goes to show that the old proverb about an ill wind is true. But the wind almost gagged Simon. He
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