Read Bill 2 - on the Planet of Robot Slaves for Free Online Page A

suggest.
    “Definitely lights, waxing and waning and changing color. Get Cy up here. Now.”
    The technician must have been popping something because he lay unconscious, eyes open but rolled back so that only the whites, or rather the yellows, showed. Bill shook him, shouted in his ear, and even tried a few good kicks in the ribs with no results.
    “Really wonderful,” Praktis snarled when he got the report. “Is this a crew or an addicts' ward? I'll go give him a shot that will blast him out of it. Meanwhile you stay guard here over this line in the sand so no one walks on it. And don't bulge your eyes at me like that — I haven't gone around the twist. That line points at the lights I saw.”
    Bill sat and stared at the line and wished he had a drink and fell asleep again — but jerked awake when he heard the ghastly moans. Cy was crawling up the dune on all fours, groaning as he came. His skin was ghastly white and he was vibrating like an electric dildo. Praktis climbed up behind him, his expression one of sadistic pleasure.
    “The shot brought him around but, oh boy, has it got some really wicked side effects. That's the direction, juice-head, that line scratched in the sand. Get a fix on it.”
    Cy dug out the compass, but his hand was shaking too much to read it. In the end he had to lay it flat on the sand. Then he had to hold his head still with both hands to take the sight. After a certain amount of blinking, eye-popping and twitching he spoke in a hollow voice.
    “Eighteen degrees east of the magnetic pole. Permission requested to go away and die, sir.”
    “Permission denied. The shot will wear off soon...”
    A shrill scream cut through his words, followed by the roar and splat of blaster fire.
    “We're being attacked!” Praktis screeched. “I'm unarmed! Don't fire! I am a doctor, a noncombatant, my rank only an honorable one!”
    Bill, his brain cells still so gummed by sleep and ethyl alcohol, drew his blaster and ran down the dune towards the firing instead of away from it which, normally, he would have done. He picked up speed, could not stop, saw Meta before him, standing and firing, could not turn and ran into her at full gallop.
    They collapsed into an inferno of arms and legs. She recovered first and punched him in the eye with a hard fist.
    “That hurt,” he whimpered, holding his hand over it. “I'm going to have a shiner.”
    “Move your hand and I'll give you another one to match. Why did you knock me down like that?”
    “What was all the shooting about?”
    “Rats!” She grabbed up her blaster and spun about. “All gone now. Except the ones I blasted into atoms. They were getting at our food. At least we know what lives on this planet. Great big nasty gray rats.”
    “No they don't,” Praktis said, having recovered from his fit of cowardice and rejoined the party. He kicked a piece of exploded rat with his toe. “Rattus Norvegicus. Mankind's companion to the stars. We must have brought them with us.”
    “Sure did,” Bill agreed. “They bailed out of the spacer even before you did.”
    “Interesting,” Praktis mused, rubbing his jaw, nodding, squinting, doing all the things that indicate musing. “With a whole planet to nosh in — I ask you — why do they come creeping back here to eat our food?”
    “They don't like the native chow,” Bill suggested.
    “Brilliant but incorrect. It is not that they don't like it — there is none of it. This planet is barren of life as any fool can plainly see.”
    “Not completely, sir,” any fool said. Recruit Wurber appeared from out of the desert, his Adam's apple bobbing up and down like a yo-yo. He held out a flower. “As soon as I heard the shooting I ran away. Over thataway I found the flowers and...”
    “Let me have that. Ouch!”
    “...and I cut my hand when I picked it, just like you did just then, Admiral, when you grabbed it.”
    Praktis held the flower so close that his eyes crossed as he examined it. “Stem, no