Venus on the Half-Shell

15 WHO PULLS THE STRINGS?

Simon rested and ate the first three days. Mofeislop insisted that Simon get on the scales every morning.

“When you’ve gained enough weight, then you will gain the Truth,” he said.

“Are you telling me there’s a correlation, a connection, between mass and knowledge?” Simon said.

“Certainly,” the sage replied. “Everything’s connected in a subtle manner which only the wise may see. A star exploding may start a new religion, or affect stock market prices, on a planet removed by ten thousand years in time and millions of miles in space. The particular strength of gravity of a planet affects the moral principles of its inhabitants.”

Emotional states were part of the overall field configuration. Just as Earth’s gravity, no matter how feeble far out in space, affected everybody, so anger, fear, love, hate, joy, and sadness radiated outward to the ends of the universe.

Bruga had once written a blank-verse epic, Oedipus 1-Sphinx 0. It had two lines which summed up the whole situation of subtle and complex casuality.

These two lines said more than all of Plato’s or Grubwitz’ books. Plato, by the way, wanted to banish all poets from his proposed Utopia because they were liars. The truth was that Plato knew philosophers couldn’t compete successfully with poets.

Jonathan Swift Somers III had written a novel which developed this idea, though he’d taken it much further than Mofeislop and Bruga had. This was Don’t Know Up from Down, starring Somers’ famous basketcase hero, John Clayter. All Somers’ heroes, except for Ralph von Wau Wau, were handicapped one way or another. This was because Somers had lost the use of his own legs.

Clayter lived in a spacesuit with all sorts of prosthetic devices he controlled with his tongue. When he had to use his tongue to talk but wanted to act at the same time, he used a second control. This was located in the lower part of the suit and responded to pressure from Clayter’s penis. It had to be erect at this time to push on the walls of the flexible cylinder in which it fitted. It also had to wax and wane. This was because Clayter couldn’t move his body to move the penis. The degrees of swelling or deflation were converted by a digital computer which operated the spacesuit at this time. To bring his penis up or down, Clayter moved his head against a control which caused varying amounts of aphrodisiacal hormones to be shot into his bloodstream.

It never occurred to Clayter that he could have bypassed the hormones and used the head-control directly. If that idea had sprung into his subconscious, it was sternly suppressed by his conscious mind. Or maybe it was the other way around. In any event, Clayter’s chief pleasure was operating the control with his penis, and he wasn’t about to give that up.

Clayter was always landing on some planet and solving its problems. In Don’t Know Up from Down, Clayter visits Shagrinn, a world which has a problem unknown elsewhere. Every once in a while Shagrinn’s sun flares up. During this solar storm, Shagrinn’s electromagnetic fields go wild. This causes some peculiar hormone reactions in the planet’s people. The women become very horny. The men, however, can’t get a hard-on.

Though this condition causes great distress, it is temporary. Solar flares have never lasted more than a month or two. And its overall result is beneficial. The population has been kept down, which means that Shagrinn isn’t polluted.

But when Clayter lands, the flare has lasted for five months and shows no sign of subsiding. Nor can Clayter maintain his usual objectivity in solving the mess. He himself is trapped, and unless he figures a way out of his personal situation, he’s going to be stranded until he dies. The tongue-control is malfunctioning, which is why Clayter landed on the nearest planet. He wants the Shagrinnians to repair the unit.

They can’t do it because their technology is at the level of 15th-century Europe. In fact, they can’t even get him out of his suit. Fortunately, his helmet visor is open enough for him to be fed. But this leads to another problem.

An astute Shagrinnian has noticed that, whenever the bottom rear of Clyter’s suit opens, the suit spins furiously for about ten minutes. He doesn’t know why, but the reason is that another malfunction in the control apparatus has developed. The suit’s rear opens whenever the excrement tank inside is full, and the refuse is dumped out. Its control wires have gotten crossed with those controlling the little jets that keep the suit stabilized. When the dump section opens, a jet is activated for a little while. Clayter spins around and around helplessly, only kept from falling over by the suit’s gyroscope.

The Shagrinnian owns a grain mill nearby which uses four oxen to turn the huge millstone. He sells the oxen for a profit and connects the suit to a rope connected to a big flywheel. The spinning of the suit turns the flywheel, which stores up energy to run the millstone. But the suit doesn’t spin enough to keep the mill working twenty-four hours a day. The owner force-feeds Clayter, which makes the rear section open more often, which makes the suit spin, which runs the millstone steadily.

To hasten matters, the owner also crams laxatives down the spaceman’s throat.

Clayter has to solve his problems fast. Even with his diarrhoea he’s gaining weight. Within a month, he’ll be squeezed to death inside the suit. Meanwhile, he’s so dizzy he can’t think straight.

His only hope is to learn the language swiftly and talk the maidservant who’s feeding him into helping him. Between mouthfuls and whirling, he masters enough of the language to plead for her help. He also learns about the plight of the Shagrinnians from her.

He instructs her to let a wire down inside the front of his suit and into the secondary control cylinder. She does so and tries to get the end of the wire, which is looped, into the cylinder. Clayter hopes she’ll be able to pull his organ out and then use the wire to exert pressure inside the tube. If she can apply just the proper pressure, he’ll fly back up to his ship, which is stationed just outside the atmosphere. Of course, he’ll have to hold his breath for a few minutes during the transit from air to space to the ship. It’s a desperate gamble.

Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, considering the odds if she succeeds, she fails. The wire hurts Clayter so much that he has to tell her to stop.

The next morning, while he’s still sleeping, he gets an erection from an excess of urine. Technically, this is called a piss hard-on. It is the only kind a human male can get on Shagrinn during the solar flare. But his jubilation is short-lived. The uncontrolled expansion inside the tube activates the suit’s jets. He takes off at a slant and lands on top of his head in a barnyard twenty miles away. The flywheel he’s trailed behind him misses him by an inch. The head of the suit is buried in the muck just enough to keep him from toppling over. Clayter now has a new problem. If he can’t get upright, the increased blood pressure in his head will kill him.

However, the faulty connection between the dump section and the stabilizing jet has been broken. He no longer spins around. And the force of the impact has sprung open the suit’s lower front section, which in his position is now the upper front. And it has jarred him loose from the control cylinder.

He sees a nursing calf eye him, and he thinks, “Oh, no!”

A few minutes later, the farmer’s daughter chases the calf away. As randy and desperate as the other women on this planet, she takes advantage of the gift from the heavens. She does, however, turn him upright afterward with the aid of a block and tackle and two mules. Clayter tries to instruct her in how to use the lower control. She can use her finger to set it so that his suit will return to the ship, orbiting above the atmosphere. Once in it, he can tell the ship’s computer to take him to a system where such peculiar solar flares don’t exist.

The farmer’s daughter ignores his instructions. Each morning, just before dawn, she sneaks out of the house and waits for all the beers she’s been feeding him to work on him. One morning, the farmer’s wife happens to wake up early and catches her daughter. Now, the daughter has to alternate morning shifts with her mother.

Early one day, the farmer wakes up and sees his wife with Clayter. Enraged, he begins beating on the helmet with a club. Clayter’s head is ringing, and he knows that the farmer will soon start thrusting a pitchfork into the helmet or, worse, into the opened lower section. Desperately, though knowing it’s useless, he rams his tongue against the upper control. To his surprise, and the farmer’s, the suit takes off.

Clayter figures out that the impact of the fall, or perhaps the farmer’s club, had jarred the circuits back into working order. He talks a smith into welding the lower section shut and flies back to the ship. A few months later, he finds a planet where his suit can be fixed. He is so sore about his adventures on Shagrinn that he has almost decided to leave its people in their mess. But he does have a big heart, and besides, he wants to shame them for their scurvy treatment of him.

He returns to Shagrinn and calls its leaders in for a conference. “Here’s the way it is,” he says. “The whole trouble is caused by the wrong attitude of mind.”

“What do you mean?” they say.

“I’ve studied your history, and I find that the founder of your religion made a prediction two thousand years ago. He said that the day would come when you would have to pay for your wicked ways, right?”

“Right.”

“He was specific, or as specific as prophets ever get. He said that some day the sun would start having big flares, and when that evil day came, women’s sexual desires would increase fourfold. But men wouldn’t be able to get it up. Right?”

“Right! He was a true prophet! Didn’t it happen?”

“Now, before the first time the sun flared so brightly, you had had many small flares?”

“True!”

“But the first time the sun really had a huge solar storm was when?”

“That was three hundred years ago, Mr. Clayter. Before then we only had the prophet’s word that there were storms on the sun. But when telescopes were invented, three centuries ago, we could see the small flares. About ten years later, we saw the first big one.”

“And that’s when your troubles started?”

“Ain’t it the truth!”

“Did the men get impotent and the women itchy when the flare reached its peak? Or when it was still small but looked as if it was going to get big?”

“When it was small but looked as if it might get big.”

“There you are,” Clayter says. “You have it all backward.”

The leaders look stunned. “What do you mean?”

“Suppose you have a piece of string each end of which is held by a person,” Clayter says. “When one tugs the string, it goes toward him. When the other pulls, it goes to him. You and the solar flare are connected with a string. But you’re all screwed up about who’s pulling it.”

“What in hell are you talking about?” the leaders say.

“It wasn’t the sun that made the flare get so much bigger,” John Clayter says.

“What did then?”

“Your ancestors saw a slight increase in the storm, so, of course, the anticipated reaction happened.”

“We still don’t get you,” the flabbergasted leaders say.

“Well, that flare would probably have been only a little bigger than normal. But you thought it was the promised big one.”

“Yeah?”

“Like I said,” Clayter says, “your ancestors had it backward. And succeeding generations have perpetuated the error. You see, it isn’t the giant solar flares that have been causing limp pricks and hot twats. It’s actually just the reverse.”