Free Bill 3 - on the Planet of Bottled Brains by Harry Harrison

wasn't much he could do at the moment. He wished there were a few more possibilities.
    “Who are these guys?” Bill asked.
    “Allow me to introduce you,” Brownnose said. “The large man with the wavy brown hair wearing the two-color, one-piece jumpsuit is Commander Dirk, Captain of the Starship Gumption.”
    “I never heard of the Gumption,” Bill said. “Is that a new class?”
    “Don't worry about it,” Brownnose reassured him. “Dirk and the Gumption are an independent command. Theirs is the most powerful ship in space. You'll love the ship, Bill.”
    Bill didn't want to ask how Brownnose had gotten on board the Gumption. He figured Brownnose would have a logical answer, like simulations always do.
    “Who's the guy with the pointy ears?” Bill asked.
    “That's Splock, a Nocturnian from the planet Fortinbras II. They are aliens.”
    “No kidding,” Bill said scathingly.
    “But they are friendly aliens,” Brownnose hurriedly pointed out. “Splock is real friendly even though he may not act friendly. I wanted to warn you.”
    “If he's friendly,” Bill said, “why doesn't he act friendly?”
    “The Fortinbrasians,” Brownnose said, “are a race that worships lack of emotion. The less emotion you have, the better they like it.”
    “That sounds really great,” Bill said. “What do they do for fun?”
    “Calculations,” Brownnose said.
    “Better them than me,” Bill sighed.
    They had almost reached the group. Just before they got into earshot, Brownnose said, in an urgent aside, “By the way, Bill, I almost forgot to tell you. Whatever you do, don't make any jokes or wisecracks about pointy ears. And another thing, even more important —”
    He stopped, because Commander Dirk, walking a few feet ahead of the others, had reached them and was holding out his hand. Bill shook it. Dirk had a warm hand and a friendly manner, although Bill didn't like his two-tone jumpsuit — puce and mauve weren't his favorite colors. But then, he'd never been much of a fashion plate. There hadn't been much fashion or stuff like that back on the farm.
    “Glad to meet you, Bill,” Dirk said.
    “And you, sir,” Bill said. “Good of you to come all this way to rescue me. I don't really understand how you did it, since to the best of my knowledge I am a disembodied intelligence inside a computer.”
    “We didn't exactly come here to rescue you,” Dirk said. “We are here to find the secret of how the creatures on this planet manage to make spaceships disappear from one place and turn up in another place millions of miles, sometimes even light years away. Imagine how important it would be to our armed forces in space to have this power. As to how we got here, Splock is our science officer. Despite what you may think about his pointy ears, he has an intelligence many times more powerful than mine, and therefore almost infinitely more powerful than yours, as it is easy to tell.”
    Bill let the insult ride; you got nowhere arguing with officers. “I didn't think anything wrong about his pointy ears! I think they look real nice. I bet the girls get kinky thrills from them. Like from my teeth.” He twanged a protruding tusk.
    Splock came shuffling up to them now. The science officer from Fortinbras had a long thin face and eyebrows that were obviously alien since they turned up at both ends. When he spoke he had an uninflected buzzing voice like a badly adjusted voice simulator. “If you like ears like this it is highly probable that arrangements could be made to get a pair for you.”
    “Well,” Bill said, thinking it over. “When you get down to it I think that I really don't like them that much. I just thought they look nice on you.”
    “I was making a joke,” Splock said. “Just because my people have no sense of humor doesn't prevent us from making jokes in order to make the inferior races with which we must deal feel more at home. The type of humor I engaged in then was called irony.”
    “Irony!