"Netherzone Quadrant?" said Bill, his excitement at the thought of finding Irma sobering him slightly.

"Where's that?"

"Like I said, it's down by the WCs! The Bogs, Jakes - or whatever you call them in your dialect." The mustachioed gentleman pointed over to the side of the hall, where four signs were posted. No writing on them, just Intergalactic symbols. One sign depicted a man, another what was probably a woman. Bill blinked at them rapidly until he could make them out. Men's and ladies' room he guessed. The adjoining sign depicted a six-limbed chitinous creature. Alien's room. The last was the largest, and it showed a huge halo parked by a toilet.

G.o.ds' room.

"Rick, I'm going down to find Irma," said Bill.

"Go 'head. Arm. I'm not going anywhere." And, in the endless quest for alcoholic companionship, misery and drunkenness love sympathy, he bought the neighbor a drink, and together they toasted the dead and much-missed Archimedes the parrot.

Bill, who missed the feathery farter not at all, indeed had his own dead bird to consider, did not join in.

He headed for the toilet signs, and there took a pneumatic tube to the Netherzone Quadrant. After visiting the men's room successfully, he emerged back into the long corridor. He only had to walk a very short distance to hear the thunder and booming of Zeus' party.

Roaring big band music filled the air as he opened the door and was confronted by the vast and twisted alien Escher print panorama of the Netherzone Room. Apparently, Zeus had twisted gravitational effects in such pretzel forms that in one part of the huge room, people were standing on the ceiling, and in four others, people were standing on the walls. As for the big band - well, that mult.i.tudinous ensemble hung swaying in a crescent moon suspended in the very middle of the room. They were doing a heated version of an ear-destroying number that had the walls throbbing in and out. Suddenly, as Bill walked into the wash of music and art-wrecko atmosphere, his mood foot started twitching and spasming, moving about in time to the beat.

The hairy-hoofed thing was trying to dance!

"That's 'Satin Doll' they're playing, idiot! Not Satyr's Doll!"

However, the foot ignored him, and he had to prance about a little as he moved about the roomscape, searching for Zeus and his lost true love, the incredibly luscious and lost Irma!

It did not take long to find Zeus. The G.o.d was on the ceiling, sitting at a long table crowded with a cornucopia of contraband.

CHAPTER 9.

MIND-MASTERS OF THE OVER-GLAND.

In a thoroughly foul mood, more s.e.xually frustrated than he'd ever felt in his entire life, Bill opened gummy lids and reached up to scratch the top of his head. He felt the fumbling resistance of wires. He heard a popping, a squealing - machine sounds rumbled all around him like amplified soap bubbles.

Squeaks and blips and hollow "pings" echoed metallically and plastically.

"He's waking up again! Is that wise, Doctor?" said a familiar voice.

"Yes. His unconsciousness has fueled the Matrix sufficiently," said another familiar voice.

Bill groaned. He lifted his head, looking around him. Again the resistance of the wires. He could feel cold metal now, adhering to the skin on his forehead. He could feel tiny subcutaneous implants in his scalp. He could feel the needle of a drug-drip, intravenously feeding him the contents of an upended bottle labeled with a skull and crossbones. He felt like a sliced-open body that had been poorly st.i.tched together. He felt for the very first time in his life like a beetle pinned down by a long pin through his thorax. Felt this way even though he knew that he didn't have a thorax. The room swam before him, a thing that rooms usually find it very hard to do. Vaguely he could see a form in front of him. The figure wore a white lab coat, gla.s.ses and a stethoscope. Bill suddenly smelled the familiar scent of antiseptics.

A doctor? Antiseptics? Was he back in the hospital then? Fragments of memory swam about him like chunks of detritus from an explosion, floating in free fall. Vague images of Bruce the satyr ... the Fields of Elysium ... delicious wine ... the droppings of Archimedes the parrot....

Irma's smiling face.

"Irma!" he cried again, struggling in his containment.

"Whoa there, Trooper. Settle down, big fellow," said the unctuously theoretically comforting voice of the doctor, leaning over him. Bill looked up and the vague form resolved into recognizable features. The nasty, pointy nose, the gruesome chin, the furtive look in those bulging eyes....

"Where am I?"

"You're in a secret compound, deep below the reefs of the ocean on Colostomy IV, Bill. You're here on the most important and monumentous mission of your career as a human being."

Bill looked harder. That voice, that face!

"Dr. Delazny!"

"That's right, Bill. Now calm down. No one's going to hurt you!"

"Secret compound? Whose secret compound?"

"Gee, Bill!" a little voice piped up. He was aware of the scampering of tiny reptilian feet up the metal gurney top. A heavy weight suddenly landed on his chest. He craned his neck and was suddenly eyeb.a.l.l.s to eyeb.a.l.l.s with a seven-inch tall lizard with four arms. "Don't you know? Haven't you figured it out yet, buddy?"

A Chinger!

More than that, he recognized the high-pitched, adenoidal voice he had come to detest more than the ghost of Sergeant Deathwish Drang, who from time to time haunted his drugged dreams.

It was Eager Beager!

"Eager Beager!" said Bill. "I thought you were dead."

"The rumors of my death were pure hyperbole, Bill! You like that word Bill? 'Hyperbole!' Yeah. But Eager Beager no longer. He was just a humanoid robot that I operated from a control where his brain would be if he had a brain. My name is Bgr the Chinger, as you should remember but you have forgot with all the brain-stirring. I am the Chinger specialist in alien life forms - and gee, humans are as alien as they come, let me tell you! - I've been doing a little study into human semiotics, human literary terms, and of course, in-depth human psychology. Gee - I got lots of new terms for you. Can you say 'phenomenological psycho-meta-scape?' Gee - I didn't think so."

Mostly, Bill was just laboring to breathe. Being from a ten-G (hence perhaps his preoccupations with the expression "gee") world, although they were small, the Chingers were also very dense and very, very heavy. "Could - you - get - off, Eager?"

"Gee - oh yeah. Sure, Bill. We got a lot to talk about." The Chinger hopped down to the gurney again, capered over to sit beside Bill's face, its little tail wiggling with reptilian happiness. "Yeah. Like, soldiers, how's the subversion of the Empire going? The dissemination of truth, peace and righteousness?"

"Death to all Chingers!" growled Bill.

"Hmm. I thought so. A backslider. I thought we had a deal, Bill. Or maybe your training was just too much. Gee - too bad!"

Bill turned to Dr. Latex Delazny. Slowly, the truth began to filter through his thick head. "I'm being held captive in a Chinger compound. Which means -" He snarled at the Doctor, bearing his fangs. "You're a Chinger spy, Doctor. You're a traitor!"

The thin man stood erect to his full height, puffing out his chest with hurt pride. "I am nothing of the sort!

I am a humanitarian! I work for the best interests of the human race. I work for armistice in the Empire- Chinger War. I work for peace, goodness, happiness! I work to cure the aberrations of the human subconscious!"

"Traitor sc.u.m! And I trusted you with my foot? Where have you taken me? What's going on?"

"Gee - and it is a nice foot, isn't it Bill?" said Bgr, scampering down to admire the cloven hoof.

Bill remembered. "Yeah! A 'mood foot' the Doctor calls it. And it's your fault, Bgr!"

"Knock it off, Bill. Shut up and listen. The Doctor has a lecture for you. We're going to need you for the next phase of the operation. Gee - and this is going to be fun, too!"

"Not really a lecture - rather an attempt to impart information, always a difficult task. Particularly with you. Try to understand that your subconscious must share the group subconscious which is a h.e.l.l of a lot smarter than your conscious mind. Which is not saying very much in any case. What you experienced truly happened, though perhaps not quite in the same dimensional-experiential plane we are accustomed to."

"Does what you say mean that I'm still cursed with the Grime of the Aging Marinator!" Bill moaned.

Feeling at some deep subliminal level the thong that went straight through his neck, that was attached to a lot of really vital stuff. "Arrrrrrgh!" he observed.

"You must be positive about the situation, Bill. You have also met the love of your life, the woman of your dreams.... And she truly exists, if you allow her to!"

"Wushha?" Bill commented incoherently, about all the communication he was up to at the moment.

Delazny nodded benignly, feeling that he was finally establishing communication, albeit at a very primitive level.

"You got it, baby! Irma, of course! The beautiful Irma!" He gestured toward the machines. "She's waiting for you back in the paradigm construct, Bill. And if you find her, the power of your developing mental capabilities might actually give her physical existence in this plane, just as that dead dove hanging around your neck has attained a reality of existence here."

"Irma!" Bill remembered! He remembered Irma's lovely smile, the gorgeous curves of her lissome body, the delightful smell of her perfumed underarms! An EKG needle suddenly started bleeping with alarm. A hormonal count needle nearby suddenly swung so hard into the red, it busted off and flopped onto the floor.

Bgr's bug eyes managed to bug out even further than normal. "Gee!" was all the Chinger could say.

Dr. Delazny smiled smugly. Another curious expression crossed his face at the mention of Irma, as though he recognized the name, but he was veiling his thoughts on the subject. "You see, Bgr? I told you about the astonishing power exercised when in the strange human combination of hormones and psychic energy in our species called 'love.'" He turned back to his patient. "You can be with Irma again if you like, Bill. You can even bring her back here. But first you have to find her."

The very thought of her melted Bill's heart; a sort of amorous coronoid. Irma! Darling Irma. More than ever, more than anything, She was his heart's desire. More than being a Technical Fertilizer Operator, more than owning a whiskey distillery on Hopworld, more than getting a new liver, more even than finally getting a normal human foot sewn onto his leg.

Irma!

"How do I find her, Doc?" he s...o...b..red salivically, his eyes glazing over with love.

"Very simple, my boy. You see that so far we've been experimenting merely with your consciousness, sending it out into our paradigm construct. You were specifically chosen because of your very strong spermataphoric functions. So strong that they appear to overpower the conscious powers of the mind. You see, in short, Bill, the Chingers and I believe we have determined the truth about human beings, and why they wage war so much. Human beings, Bill, think not with their brains so much as with their gonads.

Since culturally the Empire is basically male-dominated, the primary human emotion that governs it is s.e.x. Particularly aggressive s.e.x. Now, here's where the human brain comes in. Unfortunately for Chingers and the rest of the universe, human females are not mindless bovines. They are not really basically interested in the mindless and random promiscuous copulation that all human males want, deep down in their musty hearts no matter how much they intellectually deny it. In fact, the female of the species is far smarter than the male. But, alas, they too are riddled with hormones - albeit most of them far more Byzantine than pure testosterone - which creates a muddled soup of their reasoning abilities, and thus quite odd, albeit complex, little ent.i.ties who don't really know what they want on any level, but work fiendishly hard to get it. Since the males can't get constant, raw s.e.x they must channel their aggression elsewhere. Hence, war. Hence domination of the universe -"

"Including unwarranted aggression upon us peace-loving Chingers!" said Eager Beager.

"Exactly. I seek understanding of humanity, Bill. But more than that, I seek to venture into the very core of the human brain, to tap the collective energy of mankind, the Over-Gland if you will, and perhaps make some minor evolutionary adjustments!"

"Right on, baby!" piped up Bgr. "Like maybe cut down on the hormone flow. Volume down human aggressive instincts! Make the galaxy safe for the peace-loving races. Maybe then the Empire will stop shooting long enough to realize that the Chingers want peace in the Universe, and the only reason we're fighting is so we're not the 102,324th species that you blood-thirsty creatures have rendered extinct!"

Bill frowned. "Wait a minute. Let me get this straight. What this amounts to is a kind of collective des.e.xing of mankind. You want to geld the human race! You filthy rotten Chingers! And you, you lousy bowbing traitor Doctor!" Bill frothed and writhed on the table, as the hormonally fomented tides of macho bulls.h.i.t coursed through his cerebellum.

Dr. Delazny shook his head fervently. "Oh no, Bill. Emasculation is the wrong a.n.a.logy. We merely wish to halve the aggressive impulses of mankind - and by finding their root in the Over-Gland, we believe we can do just that. And we've chosen you to do it. Look at it this way. Every male has got a throbbing, pulsating s.e.x drive, right? So what harm would it do if every male had that drive reduced by half? Life would go on as before. Lovers would love and babies would be born. Only with that weensy bit of aggression removed maybe we could stop war and killing and wasting everything in sight. Not a bad idea, wouldn't you admit?"

"Not a bad idea!?" Bill frothed. "It is the stupidest thing I have heard since I was asked to volunteer to reenlist. Racial glandular castration!" The thought of giving up some small iota of his macho image so enraged Bill that his mind worked overtime. He suddenly felt himself charged with righteousness, and an unusual oratory elegance.

"No way, you s.a.d.i.s.tic sawbones. How could I allow that to happen to the human race? How can I remove, even partly, the source of the great achievements of humankind! From these instincts came the urge to sail the oceans of a thousand ancient planets, to climb mountains, to discipline the very elements into obedience. From these so-called hormonal aggressive instincts arose the desire to risk getting blown up in primitive s.p.a.cecraft to conquer the planets of the solar system, and then venture out into the galaxy! You request that I betray the source of power that has given my n.o.ble race such vision, such ambitions, such imagination, such splendid dreams, such fertile karma?"

"Bill! Start thinking with your brain not with your ductless glands! We'll install you and Irma on a nice little planet where you can be a Technical Fertilizer Operator and drink to your heart's content, free too.

No more war. No more Troopers, Bill. Oh, and we'll get that dead dove off your neck. And lastly, we'll give you the most marvelous foot, perfectly cultured from an expensive foot vat!"

Bill instantly forgot the racial ramifications of the plan and subst.i.tuted selfishness and a quick profit in their place. "Okay. What do I have to do?"

"I told you the new foot would be the clincher, Doc!" said Bgr. "Let's see if we can get this ponging pigeon off him, and wheel him into the changing room!"

CHAPTER 10.

A ROLE OF THE DICE!.

Bill stood in front of the full-length mirror, jaw gaping as he bulged his eyes at his reflection.

"What's with this? Why the crummy outfit and haircut?" he demanded.

"Give him another drink from the wine-skin, Bruce," said Dr. Delazny, rummaging through piles of hats and garments. "You must relax, Bill. Drinky, drinky, don't say no."

The satyr robot (the very one who had kidnapped Bill on the ocean front and dragged him down to this top secret Chinger compound) capered forward, and unslung the large goat-skin drinking pouch from its neck. Bill, who had never refused a drink in his life, was horrified at the doc's suggestion, grabbed at the skin and shot a dark jet of the glutinous, resinous wine down his throat. Pretty poisonous stuff - but it contained alcohol! He smacked his lips and stared at himself again in the mirror.

A little better, but still weird as h.e.l.l!

Bill was dressed in a long robe of sackcloth. Strapped to his feet were leather sandals. A wooden cross hung around his neck partially obscured by the dead dove that was still pendant there. A cowl was bunched up on his back, and he held a wooden staff in his hand. Electro-scissors and depilatory cream had made quick work of his hair - it was now in a tonsure.

Worst of all was his woolen underwear, which itched like a plague of crotch-crickets. He scratched industriously at all the irritated spots and looked over at Dr. Delazny, pawing through the pile of hats. He was depressed. Maybe this was better than lying on his back connected with a bunch of electrical equipment, but not much. "You wouldn't like to take the time to explain all this to me, would you, Doc?

And what about the dove? You said you were getting rid of it?"

"In a moment ... ah!" Doctor Delazny pulled out a hat from the pile. A skullcap, to be precise. He went to Bill and fitted it over his head. "This is really you. Sorry about the dove, impossible to remove at the present time. Now the good news, Bill, you are about to engage upon a quest."

"Not another quest!"

"Another one - and the most important one. In the land of the Over-Gland, all is metaphorical. Now that we have jelled it into semi-physical state, with your excellent help, of course, we can begin to look for the core. Once that is discovered, we can then take action to deal with the problems it represents. First, however, we have to find it.... Hence, the quest. So, we have developed a variation on a medieval game of Ancient Earth. A brief aberration of certain adolescents called 'role-playing games' developed somewhere in the dark ages before the planetary holocaust. Fortunately for mankind, the discovery was made that the playing of 'role-playing games,' schizophrenia, and signing blood pacts with Satan were all due to a lack of certain nutrients in the diet. The simple potato, Solanum tuberosum, proved to be rich in the minerals that could control this deficiency. Free Fry Kitchens were opened all across the world and soon adolescents were gorging themselves on this delicacy.

"The mental disease soon cleared up - and the manufacturers of Clearazits acne medicine grew rich.

However, I have determined that by playing a variation of the 'role-playing' game involving a team of cooperating agents in dealing with the convoluted metaphorical highways and byways of the human Over- Gland, the inherent dangers may be overcome."

"A good chance," said Bgr the Chinger, popping out of the skull of Bruce the satyr. "Gee - at the very least one or two partic.i.p.ants may actually get through!"

"A team. You mean that you two are coming along with me?"

Dr. Delazny shook his head. "Uhmm, no, we've got to stay back here at Chinger Central and monitor.

However, we've a.s.sembled a crack group to travel with you, Bill.

"This game I've called 'Drunkards and Flagons.' You, Bill, have been a.s.signed the role of the 'Drunken Monk.' Bgr, I think it's time that we let Bill keep the full wineskin, don't you?"

"Gee - sure, you're the doctor."