Philip Farmer - Venus on the Half-Shell

“You’re very cynical,” Simon said.

“I was a politician,” Pilate said. “Any ward heeler knows more about people than any psychologist with a dozen Ph.D.’s and unlimited funds for research.”

And he faded away, though his grin hung in the air for a minute, like the Cheshire Cat’s.

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.