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is going to taste like, but it's all we've got." He took a drink, and so did
she, and suddenly their eyes bulged and they both seemed to be having an
attack.
Finally Pierce managed, hoarsely, to ask, "What is this stuff?"
"The process involves over four hundred synthetic products," Pierce-Arrow told
him, "but the end result ischemically identical to what the data banks here
call grain alcohol. About ten percent of it is water, but it is impossible to
separate it further."
Pierce stared at him. "That's a hundred and eighty proof!"
"Whoo-eee!" Marshmallow exclaimed. "That there's the smoothest dern country
moonshine ah evah did taste!"
"We can't drink this!" he protested. "Not unless it's way diluted, anyway."
"I told you, it's all there is, and I cannot separate the water out any
further without destroying the stability of the compound. Within it is all
that you require for survival, which is the best I can do. In other words,
it's that or nothing. "
"A few moah sips of this heah lightnin' and we'ah gonna be singin' with that
general,"
Marshmallow noted, then drank some more. "Shore beats just sittin' around,
though! A few more gulps of this and Ah'm gonna be drunk as a skunk!"
This is the book speaking again. Remember me? We interrupt here to point out
that (A) The real Marshmallow, still in lizard-Pierce's body, is also still on
the big dreadnought loaded with conquering bureaucrats some-where in space;
(B) the one who thinks she's Marshmallow is really human-Pierce; (C) the one
who thinks he's human-Pierce is really Sly, the XB-223 navigational computer;
(D) we are not advocating the consumption of grain alcohol, unless, of course,
you're stuck in a shaky and partly destroyed spaceship with an overcharged
lizard-Pierce general in the body of an android overseen by a smashed-together
pair of microbial conquerors inhabiting the ship's navigational computer while
being under the guns of a pirate spaceship. Clear?
If you have followed everything up to this point with perfect clarity, please
place your summary, using words of no more than two syllables, neatly typed or
printed out, in an envelope and send it to the authors, care of Tor Books,
because we don't understand it at all.
So, as long as everybody is either mellow (including dead " and
drunk
uninhibited even if not uninhabited), stalled, or totally confused, let us
leave this scene for a moment (we'll be coming back, I promise) and see what's
been happening to poor Marshmallow the real one on the great lizard
dreadnought . . .
Page 92
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
"Tell me, General, when did you first begin to believe that you were a female
ape?"
"Ah ain't no ape and I ain't no general!" she shouted back at them for the
nine hundred and ninety-ninth time. "Ah'm Honeylou Emmyjane Goldberg and when
mah Daddy heahs 'bout this he's gonna have the biggest dern sale on
lizand-skin luggage in the history of the univahse!"
"Fascinating," said the first psychiatrist. "Do you suppose it was formed in
childhood and only surfaced under the pressures of a battlefield command?"
"Well, I've been researching the literature for a true example of neo-Freudian
transversals with suggestions of Mommism and a totally Jungian counterpoint
and the nearest I can come up with is some ancient writings from a
controversial and not wholly appreciated minor figure that might explain a few
things while still leaving us room for our inevitable thirty-six technical
papers and two or three pop self-psychoanalysis best-sellers that will make us
rich and famous."
"Really? Two or three? Who is the figure? Hubbard?"
"No, Leary."
"Ah, yes, that would explain a lot. But both he andHubbard were true examples
of
McLuhanesque figures, recall."
"I recall that they all died filthy rich, which is why we both got into
psychiatry in the first place, wasn't it?"
"That's the fuhst damn' thing I heahrd from either of you so fah that's made
any sense at all,"
she grumped.
But by now they'd returned to so much psychobabble, sometimes mixed with
economics, that they no longer paid any attention to her at all. It had been
this way almost from the start and she was feeling pretty damned depressed and
frustrated by this point.
She got up and lumbered back to the ward, where, as far as she could tell, the
only sane people on this entire ship stayed.
About the only thing good about her situation, she decided, was that the air
didn't stink.
One fellow, who called himself Pokey, had been a particular friend since she'd
been stuck here. He wasn't very old and he was quite pleasant; supposedly some
kind of computer whiz who could work out almost any technological problem in
his head. That was part of his problem.
First of all, you weren't supposed to solve problems in the system, not unless
you at the same time created ten new ones for others to work on. And he was
very good at solving things. They'd let him pretty well alone, since, it
seemed, he was the only one on the ship who could repair anything that broke,
but one day he'd gone too far. He'd used the ship's main computers to run a [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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