"Harry Harrison & Robert Sheckley - Bill the Galactic Hero 3 " - читать интересную книгу автора (Harrison Harry)

"We have a special process that dedifferentiates your special-purpose cells, thus rendering you fit for
rebirth by one of the Tsurisians. The nutrient baths were to soften up your skin for the protoplasm vat in
case the intelligence test turned out the way it did. A simple precaution that is now paying off."
Bill swore and cursed and prayed, and fought and kicked and foamed at the mouth. But it was no good.
The doctors were adamant. And a hell of a lot stronger en masse. They seized him, struggling and
screaming, rushed him out of his room and down the corridor into a room where a special holding tank
bubbled and frothed. Bill bubbled and frothed as well but resistance was useless. They splashed him into
the tank.
"This will soften you up even further, and you will enjoy it," the doctor said with obvious insincerity.
The next day they strapped him to a wheelchair and wheeled him down the hall. Past a room with its door
open. Inside was a huge vat of protoplasm, colored a sort of undigested greenish brown. It was rather
repellent and looked more than a little bit like an octopus that had lost its stiffening. The protoplasm
bubbled and gurgled, throwing up turgid waves now and then тАФ on the end of which were large, bulging


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 Bill, the Galactic Hero on the Planet of Bottled Brains

eyes. The eyes stared wildly for a moment before the wave collapsed into the rest of the liquid.

They put Bill into a special cell where he was fed nutritious food preparatory to reusing his body. When
he ate it he cheered up. As soon as he was finished however he became instantly depressed because every
ounce of muscle, every inch of fat around his waistline brought him that much closer to the conversion
vat. And, if that wasn't enough, one other thing bothered him. "When I am all dissolved away, what
happens to my brain?"
"We use that too," the guard on his ward told him.
"Then what happens to me?" Bill asked tremulously, wanting to know. And really not wanting to know.
"That is an interesting question," the guard mused. "You will be present physically, of course. But as for
the person inside you who says, I am I, well, that part will be, I am forced to say, to put it as nicely as I
can, gone."
Bill moaned. "Where will it go to?"
"Difficult to say," the guard told him. "Anyhow, you won't even be around to ask the question and frankly
I don't give a damn."
They fed Bill on yard-wide slices of liver, he shuddered at the thought of what sort of animal it had come
from, and cubical fish eggs, and forced him to drink twenty-one milkshakes every day made mostly of
homogenized brains. Even with strawberry flavoring it was not a good drink. He was getting more than a
little depressed about all this. It was no consolation for him at all to know that his body and brain would
be used to house one of Tsuris's most eminent statesmen, old Veritain Redrabble, one of the greatest
statesmen of all the previous years. This didn't comfort Bill in the slightest. In fact it depressed him even
more. That his priceless body gunk should be recycled as a politician was too awful to contemplate.
Since he did not want to blame himself for his inborn bucolic stupidity he tried to blame his translator
instead.
"Why didn't you help me out with the math quiz?"
"Hell," the translator said, "I can't do that stuff either."
"If only we could get word to the military," Bill moaned. "If they sent a math whizz the situation could
still be saved."
"For the math whizz maybe, but not for you," the translator intoned with electronic sadism. "And anyway
they don't send math whizzes to explore alien planets," the translator pointed out.
"I know," Bill gritted through clenched teeth, "but I can dream, can't I? You wouldn't take even a man's
dreams away from him?"