This, however, appeared to be a radically different—startling so—interference than was customary.
Rubbish that it was it nonetheless made sense . . . sense, but it had obliterated—for the time being, at least—his counter-tactical idea.
Could this be a UN electronic signal deliberately beamed so as to disrupt the orderly functioning of his chamber?
The thought, theoretical as it was, chilled him as he involuntarily, without the possibility of evasion, listened to the curious mixture of nonsense and—meaning. Of the highest order.
“. . . I think, though, I see why Zoobko lards, butters, marginates and otherwise fattens up the word ‘spore’ into the rather sinister male spore slogan. Their house brochure in Move-E 3-D kul-R is directed (heh-heh) at women consumers, to fumble lewdly a metaphor, ahem, no offense meant (gak). More fully articulated, it would read, ‘The male spore, my dears, is as we well know tireless in its half-crazed struggle—against all sanity and moral restraint—to reach the female egg. That’s the way men are. Right? We all realize it. Give a male (sic) spore half an inch and he’ll take seventy-two-and-a-sixth miles. BE PREPARED! ALWAYS READY! A HUGE, SLIMY, SLANT-EYED YELLOW-SKINNED MALE SPORE MAY BE WATCHING YOU THIS VERY MINUTE! And, considering his almost demonic ability to wiggle for miles upon miles, you may at this moment be in dire, severe danger! To quote Dryden: ‘The trumpet’s loud clamor doth call us to arms,’ etc. (And don’t forget, ladies, the handsome prize awarded yearly by Zoobko Products, Incorporated for the greatest number of dead male (sic) spores mailed (pun) to our Callisto factory in an old Irish linen pillow case, attesting to (one) your tenacity in balking the evil damned things and (two) the fact that you’re buying our lather-like goo in one-hundred-pound squirt cans. Also remember: if you are unable to adequately prepare yourself with a generous, expensive portion of Zoobko patented goo in the proper place, ahem, in advance of marital lawful pawing, then merely squirt the spray can with nozzle directed directly into the grimacing fungiform’s ugly face as it hovers six feet high in the air above you. Best range—”
“Best range,” Gregory Gloch said aloud, against the din of the obsessive noise in his ears, “approximately two inches.”
“—’two inches,’ ” the tinny, mechanical racket reeled off, accompanying him, ” ‘from his eyes. Zoobko’s patented goo is not only—’ ”
“—’a top-drawer killer of male spores,’ ” Gloch murmured, ” ‘but it also blasts the tear-ducts out of existence. Too bad, fella.’ ” End brochure, he thought. End monolog. End sex. End of Zoobko, or zoob of Endko. Is this an ad or a contemplation of a squandered life? Check one. I know this discourse, he thought. By heart. Why? How? It’s as if, he thought, I said it; as if it’s happening inside my brain—not coming to me from the outside. What does this mean? I have to know.
“Always bear in mind,” the inexorable din continued, “that male spores have an almost appalling capacity to progress under their own power. If, ladies, you constantly ponder that—”
“Appalling, yes,” Gloch said. “But FIVE MILES?” I said all that, he realized. A long time ago. When I was a child. But no, he thought; I didn’t say all that—I thought it, worked it out in my mind, a prank, a lampoon, when I was a kid in school. What’s being piped to me now here in this goddam chamber, what’s supposed to be rephased sensory-data from the outside world—it’s my own goddam former thoughts returning to me, a loop from my brain to my brain, with a ten-year lag.
“Splub gnog furb SQUAZ,” the aud input circuit rattled away, into his passive ears. Relentlessly.
My counter-weapon, Gloch thought. They’ve blocked my counter-weapon with a counter-weapon, their own. Who—
“Yes sir, gnog furb,” the aud input circuit declared in a hearty but garbled voice, “this is good ol’ Charley Falks’ little boy Martha signing off for now, but I’ll be back with you soon and with me a few more chuckles to lighten the day and make things SQUAZ! cheery and bright. Toodeloo!” The voice, then, ceased. There was only distant background static, not even a carrier wave.
I don’t know any little boy named Martha, Gloch thought. And, he realized, there’s more wrong; the a-ending is out of the first Latin declension, so “Martha” can’t be a boy’s name. Logically, it would have to be Marthus. Or maybe they didn’t know that; Charley Falks didn’t know that. Probably not well-read. As I recall, from what I saw of Charley he was one of those self-educated simps ignorant as hell on the inside but lathered over on the outside with a thin layer of bits of cultural, scientific, odd, dubious half-facts which he always liked to drone out for hours on end to whoever was listening or if not listening then anyhow in the vicinity and so at least potentially within earshot. And then when he got older you could practically walk off and he’d still be talking, to no one. But then of course I didn’t have my chamber in those days, so my own time-sense was so faulty that what actually lasted only minutes seemed like years; at least that’s what they told me, those ‘wash psychiatrists, back in the early days, when they were testing me and setting me up so I could function, getting this chamber designed and built.
I wish for chrissake’s, he thought mournfully, I could remember the concept for the counter-weapon I had in mind or almost had in mind or anyhow think I almost had in mind, before that garbage started coming in over the conduit.
It would have been one hell of a counter-weapon to use against Horst Bertold and the UN. He was sure of that.
Maybe it’ll come back to me later, he reflected. Anyhow strictly speaking it was merely the nucleus of the counter-tactic idea; hardly had begun to grow. Takes time. If I’m not interrupted any further . . . if that dratted rubbish doesn’t start up again promptly the second I begin to really fatten up the original notion into something Herr von Einem can put to use functionally, right out into the field to see action in the overall struggle we’re bogged so darn down in at Whale’s Mouth and wherever else they’re all tangling . . . probably all over the universe by now; I’m probably six weeks behind, with data stored up ready to be fed to me from for instance last Thursday if not last year.
Martha, he thought. Let’s see: “The Last Rose of Summer” is from that. Who wrote it? Flotow? Lehár? One of those light opera composers.
“Hummel,” the aud input circuit suddenly stated, startling him; it was a familiar, dry, aged male voice. “Johann Nepomuk Hummel.”
“You’re a goldmine of misinformation,” Gloch said irritably, in response, automatically, to one more of garrulous ol’ Charley Falks’ typical tidbits of wrong knowledge. He was so used to it, so darn, wearily resigned out of long experience. All the way back to his childhood, back throughout the dreary procession of years.
It’s enough to make you wish you were a carpenter, Gloch mused grimly. And didn’t have to think, just measure boards, saw and pound, all that purely physical activity. Then it wouldn’t matter what ol’ Charley Falks blabbled out, or what his pest of a kid Martha chimed in with in addition, for that matter; it didn’t matter who said anything, or what.
Damn nice, he thought, if you could go back and live your life over again from the start. Only this time making it different; getting on the right track for once. A second chance, and with what I know now—
But exactly what did he know now?
For the life of him he couldn’t remember.
“Pun, there,” the voice from the aud circuit commented. “Life of you, life lived over . . . see?” It chuckled.
13
Within its bow-shaped mouth the half-chewed eyes lay, rolling on the surface of its greedy, licking tongue. Those not completely eaten, those which still shone with luster, regarded him as they rolled slightly; they continued to function, although no longer fixed to the bulbed, oozing exterior surface of the head. New eyes, like tiny pale eggs, had already begun to form, he perceived. They clung in clusters.
He was seeing it. Not a deformed, half-hallucinated, pseudo-image, but the actual presence of the underlying substrate-entity which inhabited or somehow managed to lodge itself in this paraworld for long periods of time—possibly forever, he realized with a shudder. Possibly for the total, absolute duration of its existence.
That might be a time-span of such magnitude as to smother any rational insight; he intuited that. The thing was old. And it had learned to feed on itself. He wondered how many centuries had passed before it had encountered that method of survival. He wondered what else it had tried first—and what it still resorted to, when necessary.