Read Online Venus on the Half-Shell by Philip José Farmer - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Philip José Farmer
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mud-and-water-stained book, its open pages streaked with water. But it wasn’t rain that had fallen on these pages. The marks were from tears.
The book was the Encyclopedia Terrica, Volume IX, Barracuda-Bay Rum.
There was no farewell note from Comberbacke, but Simon read under Baseball , World Series , all he needed to know. The 2457 Series had ended in a scandal. In the middle of the final game, Cardinals 3-Tigers 4, police officers had arrested five St Louis men. The commissioner had just been given proof that they had taken money from gamblers to throw the Series. The Tokyo Tigers won by default, and the five men had been given the maximum sentences.
Simon buried the old man and erected the von Parrot marker over him. On the backside of the stone, which he turned frontside, he scratched these letters:
SILAS T. COMBERBACKE
2432-3069
Spaceman & Baseball Fan
This stone conceals a Cardinal sin.
A glut of centuries passed before
He learned about that fateful inning.
How good if he’d continued chinning
On Space’s bar! His hero a whore,
He cared no more for the stadium’s din.
It’s better not to know the score.
That last line was good advice, but Simon wasn’t taking it.
He went into the Hwang Ho , closed the port, and seated himself before the control panel in the bridge. The stellar maps were stored in the computer circuits. If Simon wanted to go to the sixth Planet of 61 Cygni A, for instance, he had only to press the right keys. The rest was up to the computer.
Just as a joke—though who knew what knowledge lurked in its heart?—he asked the ship to take him to Heaven.
To his surprise the computer screen flashed the Chinese equivalent of “O.K.” There was a two-minute pause while the computer checked that everything was shipshape. Then it swung up off the ground, tilted upright, and climbed up toward the sky.
Simon didn’t feel the change in the ship’s attitude. An artificial gravity field adjusted for that.
Simon’s attitude of mind changed, however. He frantically punched the keys.
“Where are you taking me?”
“To Heaven, as directed.”
“Where is Heaven?”
“Heaven is the second planet of Beta Orionis. It is a T-type planet which was uninhabited by sentients until a Terrestrial expedition landed there in A.D. 2879 on first...”
Simon canceled the order.
“Take me to some unexplored galaxy, and we’ll play it by ear from there,” Simon typed.
A few seconds later they were off into the black unknown. The ship was capable of attaining 69,000 times the speed of light but Simon held it down to 20,000 times, or 20X. The drive itself was named the soixante-neuf drive, because this meant sixty-nine in French. It had been invented in A.D. 2970 by a Frenchman whose exact name Simon didn’t recall. Either it was Pierre le Chanceux or Pierre le Chancreux, he wasn’t sure which, since he’d not made a study of space history.
When the first ship equipped with the drive, the Golden Goose , had been revved up to top speed, those aboard had been frightened by a high screaming noise. This had started out as a murmur at about 20,000 times the speed of light. As the ship accelerated, the sound became louder and higher. At 69X, the ship was filled with the kind of noise you hear when a woman with a narrow pelvis is giving birth or a man has been kicked in the balls. There were many theories about where this screaming came from. Then, in 2980, Dr. Maloney, a brilliant man when sober, solved the mystery. It was known that the drive got all but its kick-off energy from tapping into the fifth dimension. This dimension contained stars just like ours, except that they were of a fifth-dimensional shape, whatever that was. These stars were living creatures, beings of complex energy structures, just as the stars in our universe were alive. Efforts to communicate with the stars, however, had failed. Maybe they, like the porpoises, just didn’t care to talk to us. Never mind. What did matter was
The book was the Encyclopedia Terrica, Volume IX, Barracuda-Bay Rum.
There was no farewell note from Comberbacke, but Simon read under Baseball , World Series , all he needed to know. The 2457 Series had ended in a scandal. In the middle of the final game, Cardinals 3-Tigers 4, police officers had arrested five St Louis men. The commissioner had just been given proof that they had taken money from gamblers to throw the Series. The Tokyo Tigers won by default, and the five men had been given the maximum sentences.
Simon buried the old man and erected the von Parrot marker over him. On the backside of the stone, which he turned frontside, he scratched these letters:
SILAS T. COMBERBACKE
2432-3069
Spaceman & Baseball Fan
This stone conceals a Cardinal sin.
A glut of centuries passed before
He learned about that fateful inning.
How good if he’d continued chinning
On Space’s bar! His hero a whore,
He cared no more for the stadium’s din.
It’s better not to know the score.
That last line was good advice, but Simon wasn’t taking it.
He went into the Hwang Ho , closed the port, and seated himself before the control panel in the bridge. The stellar maps were stored in the computer circuits. If Simon wanted to go to the sixth Planet of 61 Cygni A, for instance, he had only to press the right keys. The rest was up to the computer.
Just as a joke—though who knew what knowledge lurked in its heart?—he asked the ship to take him to Heaven.
To his surprise the computer screen flashed the Chinese equivalent of “O.K.” There was a two-minute pause while the computer checked that everything was shipshape. Then it swung up off the ground, tilted upright, and climbed up toward the sky.
Simon didn’t feel the change in the ship’s attitude. An artificial gravity field adjusted for that.
Simon’s attitude of mind changed, however. He frantically punched the keys.
“Where are you taking me?”
“To Heaven, as directed.”
“Where is Heaven?”
“Heaven is the second planet of Beta Orionis. It is a T-type planet which was uninhabited by sentients until a Terrestrial expedition landed there in A.D. 2879 on first...”
Simon canceled the order.
“Take me to some unexplored galaxy, and we’ll play it by ear from there,” Simon typed.
A few seconds later they were off into the black unknown. The ship was capable of attaining 69,000 times the speed of light but Simon held it down to 20,000 times, or 20X. The drive itself was named the soixante-neuf drive, because this meant sixty-nine in French. It had been invented in A.D. 2970 by a Frenchman whose exact name Simon didn’t recall. Either it was Pierre le Chanceux or Pierre le Chancreux, he wasn’t sure which, since he’d not made a study of space history.
When the first ship equipped with the drive, the Golden Goose , had been revved up to top speed, those aboard had been frightened by a high screaming noise. This had started out as a murmur at about 20,000 times the speed of light. As the ship accelerated, the sound became louder and higher. At 69X, the ship was filled with the kind of noise you hear when a woman with a narrow pelvis is giving birth or a man has been kicked in the balls. There were many theories about where this screaming came from. Then, in 2980, Dr. Maloney, a brilliant man when sober, solved the mystery. It was known that the drive got all but its kick-off energy from tapping into the fifth dimension. This dimension contained stars just like ours, except that they were of a fifth-dimensional shape, whatever that was. These stars were living creatures, beings of complex energy structures, just as the stars in our universe were alive. Efforts to communicate with the stars, however, had failed. Maybe they, like the porpoises, just didn’t care to talk to us. Never mind. What did matter was
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