Chworktap began weeping, and she pressed her face against Simon's shoulder.

Simon cried, too.

"If you ever run across any couples who think they're going to heaven and live there forever as man and wife, tell them about us," she said. "Time cor-rupts everything, including immortal love."

Sniffling, she drew away. She said, "The terrible thing about it is, I do love you. Even though I can't stand you anymore."

"Same here," Simon said, and he blew his nose.

"You're not a robot, Chworktap, remember that al-ways," he said, "You're a real woman. Maybe the only one I ever met."

By this he meant that she had courage and compas-sion. These were supposed to distinguish real people from fake people. The truth, and he knew it, was that there were no fake people; everybody was real in the sense that everybody had courage and compa.s.sion tempered by selfishness and vindictiveness. The difference between people was in the proportions of these I mixed up in them.

"You'll be a real man someday," she said. "When you accept reality."

"What is reality?" Simon said and did not stay for an answer.

CHAPTER 20.

Out of the Frying Pan.

Simon cried a lot on his way to the next planet. Anu-bis whimpered. He was a faithful mirror to his mas-ter's moods. Athena, on the other hand, looked as happy as an owl can look. She was glad to get rid of Chworktap. She had made Chworktap nervous, which, in turn, had made her nervous, which, in turn, had increased Chworktap's nervousness. Their rela-tionship was what the scientists called negative feed-back. This had also been the relationship between Si-mon and Chworktap, but they preferred to call it love gone sour.

Simon never did forget Chworktap. He often thought of her, and the more time that pa.s.sed, the fonder the memories became. It was easy to love her as long as they weren't cooped up in a small room twenty-three hours of the day.

In the meantime, Simon wandered on from world to world while the legend of the s.p.a.ce Wanderer grew. Often, it ran ahead of him, so that when he landed on a new planet, he found himself an instant celebrity. He didn't mind this. It meant being lionized and free drinks and an uncritical appreciation of his banjo-playing. Also, females of various types-some of them six-legged or tentacled-were eager to trun-dle him off to bed.

Simon noticed that the deeper he got into this area of s.p.a.ce, the more s.e.xual vitality there was. Every-body, including himself, seemed to be soaked in horniness. Earth had seemed to him to be a s.e.x-obsessed planet, but now he knew that, relatively speaking, Terrestrials were geldings.

"Why is that?" Simon said one night to Texth-Wat. She was a huge round thing with six wombs, all of which had to be impregnated before she could con-ceive.

She had a pleasing personality, though.

"It's the big blue bubbles, dearie," she said. "Every time one comes through this galaxy, we all stay in bed for a week. It wrecks h.e.l.l out of the economy, but you can't have everything."

"If they come from only one place," he said, "their effect must get weaker the further they get from the point of origin. I wonder if there's any life on the planets at the other edge of the universe?"

"I don't know, honey," Texth-Wat said. "You aren't done yet, are you?"

Simon had been wandering through s.p.a.ce for three thousand years when he landed on the planet Shonk. He was arrested as he stepped out of the ship and hus-tled off to a place which made a Mexican jail look luxurious. He was convicted and sentenced without the formality of a trial, since his guilt was obvious. The charge was indecent exposure. On Shonk, the people went naked except for their faces. These were covered by masks. Since genitals didn't differ much in size or shape, and couldn't be used to distinguish one person from another, the Shonks regarded the face as their private parts. The Shonks reserved the glory of their private parts for the eyes of their spouses alone. Many a man or woman had lost his reputation forever because of the accidental unveiling of the face.

"How long am I in for?" Simon asked after he had learned the language.

"For life," the turnkey said.

"How long is that?"

The turnkey looked funny, but he said, "Until you die. What else?"

"I was hoping the length of life'd been legally de-fined," Simon said.

At least he had a fine view through the iron bars. There was a big lake with flying fish that fluoresced at night and beyond that mountains covered with trees that bore multicolored flowers and beyond that the inevitable candy-heart-shaped tower of the Clerun-Gowph. After four years, the scenery palled, how-ever.

Simon decided that he'd just have to sit it out. One day, the elements would weaken the bricks and ce-ment that held the iron bars. He'd pull the bars out and make a dash for his ship. One good thing about being immortal was that you acquired a lot of pa-tience.

At the end of the fifth year, a s.p.a.ceship landed by the lake. Simon should have been happy, since there was always the chance that travelers would rescue him.

But he wasn't. This vessel emanated the peculiar orange glow that distinguished the ships of the Hoonhors.

"Oh, oh!" Simon muttered. "They finally caught up with me!"

After a while, the Hoonhors came out. They were about eight feet tall, green-skinned, and shaped like saguaro cactuses. They had bony spines all over their body, long and sharp like cactus needles. It was these that had made everybody regard the Hoonhors as a standoffish race, though the truth was that it was the other way around.

Whatever their esthetic appearance, they were smarter than Simon. They'd looked the situation over, decided it was wise when on Shonk to do as the Shonks did, and had covered their upper parts with masks. What the Shonks didn't know was that the Hoonhor face was on the lower part of the body. The projections that the Shonks thought were noses were actually their genitals and vice versa.

The next day, the Hoonhors, having conferred with the Shonks, showed up at Simon's door. The Shonk officials were glittering with gla.s.s beads, which the Hoonhors must have given them in exchange for Si-mon. The officials also reeked of cheap trade whiskey. Simon was escorted into the s.p.a.ceship and before the desk of the captain.

"At least you can't say I didn't give you sons of b.i.t.c.hes a run for your money,"

Simon said. He was determined to die as an Earthman should, theoreti-cally at least. With dignity and defiance.

"Whatever are you talking about?" the captain said.

"You've finally caught me!"

"I don't know how we could do that when we haven't been chasing you."

Simon was stunned. He didn't know what to say.

"Sit down," the captain said. "Have a drink and a cigar."

"I prefer standing," Simon said, though he didn't explain why.

"We were happy when we found an Earthman in this G.o.d-forsaken waterstop," the captain said. "We thought Terrestrials were extinct."

"You should know about that," Simon said.

The captain turned a dark green. He must be blush-ing, Simon thought.

"We Hoonhors have long felt guilt and shame for what we did to Earthlings," he said. "Although Earth is now a nice clean planet, which it wouldn't be if we hadn't done what we did. However, that was my an-cestors' fault, and we can't be held responsible for what they did. But we do extend our heart-felt apologies.

And we'd like to know what we can do for you. We owe you much."

"It's a little late for rest.i.tution," Simon said. "But maybe you can do something for me. If you can tell me where the Clerun-Gowph live, I'll let bygones be bygones."

"That's no secret," the captain said. "Not to us at least. If you hadn't been so scared of us, you could have saved yourself three thousand years of search-ing."

"The time went fast," Simon said. "O.K. Where i. it?"

The captain showed him a celestial chart and marked the goal with an X. "Feed this to your computer, and it'll take you directly there."

"Thanks," Simon said. "Have you ever been there?"

"Never have been and never will," the captain said. "It's off-limits, tabu, forbidden. Many millennia ago one of our ships landed there. I don't know what hap-pened, since the information is cla.s.sified. But after the ship gave its report, the authorities ordered all ships to steer clear of that sector of s.p.a.ce. I've heard some wild rumors about what the explorers encountered, but, true or not, they're enough to convince me to suppress my curiosity."

"Pretty bad?" Simon said.

"Pretty bad."

"Maybe the horrible thing was that the Clerun-Gowph had the answer to the primal question."

"I'll let you find out," the captain said.

CHAPTER 21.

The End of the Line.

"It doesn't matter what it is, somebody will find a way to make a profit off of it."

This was a quotation from one of Somers' novels, The Sarga.s.so Sea of s.p.a.ce. In this, John Clayter's fuelless ship gets sucked into a whirlpool in s.p.a.ce, a strange malformation of s.p.a.ce-time near the rim of the universe. Everything that floats loose in the cosmos eventually drifts into this area. Clayter isn't surprised to find wrecked s.p.a.ceships, garbage, and tired comets whirling around and around here. But he is startled when he discovers that thoughts also end up here. Thoughts are electrical radiations, and so they, like gravity, go on and on, spreading out through the world. The Sarga.s.so Sea has the peculiar property of am-plifying these, and John Clayter almost goes nuts from being bombarded by them. The triviality of most of them drives him to thoughts of suicide, and since these are also amplified and bounced back at him, as if they were in an echo chamber, he has to get out fast or die.

He is saved when he stumbles across a s.p.a.ceship of the Kripgacers. This race is in the business of salvag-ing thoughts, polishing them up a bit, and reselling them. Their biggest customer is Earth.

Simon was reminded of this when he landed on his next-to-last stop. This was a planet whose natives were still in the Old Stone Age. They were being enslaved and exploited by aliens from a distant galaxy, the Felckorleers. These were corralling the kangaroo-like aborigines and sticking them in iron igloos. The wall: of the igloos were lined with organic matter, mostly hay and the hair the Felckorleers had shaved off their captives. After the aborigines had sat in the igloos for a week, they were hustled out and into a s.p.a.ceship. The poor natives were radiating a blue aura by then, and their captors avoided touching them directly. They herded them along with ten-foot poles.

Simon watched three ships loaded with the natives take off for parts unknown.

"What are you doing to them?" he asked a Felckorleer.

"Making a few bucks," the thing said. He explained that the blue bubbles contained s.e.x energy. Since the bubbles were so thick, not yet thinned out by distance from their point of origin, they contained a terrific s.e.xual voltage.

They pa.s.sed through metal, but organ-ic objects soaked them up. Hence, the igloos de-signed to concentrate the bubble energy. The aborigines thrown into them absorbed the voltage.

"Then we transport them to the other side of the universe," the Felckorleer said proudly. "The races there have a very poor s.e.x drive because they get only the last gasp of the bubbles. So we provide them a much needed service. We sell them the gooks we've loaded with the blue stuff, and they embrace them. The blue stuff is like electricity, it flows to a lower po-tential. And our customers, the lower potential, get a big load of s.e.x. For a while, anyway."

"What happens to the aborigines?" Simon said.

"They die. The blue stuff also seems to be the es-sence of life itself. When they're grabbed by a cus-tomer, they lose every last trickle of energy. Too bad.

If they survived, we could run them back here and load them up again. But we're not going to run out of carriers. They breed like mad, you know."

"Doesn't your conscience ever hurt you?" Simon said.

The Felckorleer looked surprised. "What for? What use are the natives here? They don't do anything. You can see for yourself they're uncivilized."

If Simon had been John Clayter, he would have rescued the aborigines and turned the Felckorleers over to the Intergalactic Police. But there wasn't a thing he could do. And if he protested, he might find himself in an igloo.

In a sad mood, he left the planet. But he was basi-cally, that is, genetically, an optimist. By the second day, he felt happy. Perhaps this change was caused by his eagerness to get to the Clerun-Gowph. He ordered the ship to go at top speed, even though the screaming from the 69X drive was almost unbearable. On the fourth day, he saw the desired star dead ahead, shim-mering, waving behind the blue bubbles. Three min-utes later, he was slowing down, and the screaming died down after most of the necessary braking had been done. At a crawling fifty thousand miles an hour, he approached the planet while his heart beat with mingled dread and exultation.

The world of the Clerun-Gowph was huge. It was dumbbell-shaped, actually two planets connected by a shaft. Each was the size of the planet Jupiter, which had an equatorial diameter of about 88,700 miles compared to Earth's 7,927 miles.

This worried Simon, since the gravity would be so great it would flatten him as if he were soup poured into a coffee saucer. But the computer a.s.sured him that the gravity was no higher than Earth's. This meant that the two planets and the shaft were hollow. As it turned out, this was right. The Clerun-Gowph had removed the iron core of their native planet and made another planet out of the metal. This addition housed the biggest computer in the world. It also contained the factories for mak-ing the blue bubbles, which rose out of millions of openings.

The two planets rotated on their longitudinal axis and also whirled around a common center of gravity, located in the connecting shaft. A dumbbell-shaped atmosphere covered the planets, and over this lay a thick blanket of the blue stuff.

Simon directed the Hw.a.n.g Ho to land on the origi-nal planet, since this was the only one that had soil and water. On minimum drive, it lowered itself through the blue and then the air. Simon got an enormous erection and aching t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es when descending through the blue layer, but these symptoms disappeared after he'd pa.s.sed through the blue shield. The ship headed for the biggest city, and after a few min-utes it was low enough so that Simon could see the na-tives.

They looked like giant c.o.c.kroaches.

Near the biggest building in the city was a large meadow. This was surrounded by thousands of the Clerun-Gowph, and on its edge was a band playing weird instruments. Simon wondered who they were honoring, and it wasn't until he was about twenty feet above the meadow that he suddenly guessed. They were a.s.sembled to greet him.

This scared him. How had they known that he was coming? They must be very wise and far-seeing in-deed to have antic.i.p.ated his visit.

The next moment, he was even more scared. The 69X drive, which had not been making a sound at this low speed, screamed. Simon and the dog and the owl leaped into the air. The scream rose to a near ear-shattering level and then abruptly died. At the same time, the ship fell.

Simon woke a moment later. His left leg and his banjo were broken. Anubis was licking his face; Athena was flying around and around shrieking; the port was open; a hideous face, all multifaceted eyes, mandibles, and antennae, was looking in. Simon tried to sit up to greet the thing, but the pain made him faint again.

When he awoke a second time, he was in a giant bed in a building that was obviously a hospital. This time, he had no pain. In fact, he could get up and walk as well as ever. This astounded him, so he asked the attendant how his leg had been fixed up. He was astounded again when the c.o.c.kroachoid replied in En-glish.

"I injected a fast-drying glue between the break," the thing said. "What's so astounding about that?"

"Well then," Simon said, "why are you able to speak English? Has some other Earthman been here?"

"Some of us learned English when we found out you were coming."

"How'd you find out?" Simon said.

"The information was on the computer tapes," the thing said. "It'd been there for a few billion years, but we didn't know about it until Bingo told us a few days ago."

Bingo, it seemed, was the head Clerun-Gowph. He had gotten his position by right of seniority.

"After all," the attendant said casually, "he's almost as old as the universe.

By the way, allow me to intro-duce myself. My name is Gviirl."

"It's too bad the reception was spoiled by the acci-dent," Simon said.