STARSHIP OF FOOLS - (C) 1986 Jerry Kindall and Rex Crossley

CHAPTER NINETEEN

"Rule 1: Do one to others before they do one to you.
 Rule 2: Beware of people following Rule 1."
                                      - Handbook of Galactic Conquest

     A look of conquest conquered Jordann's face.  Soon Condra would
have her precious Orb, and then he would wreak his havoc on the nerd
ship, which ought to be in the vicinity.
     "We're here!" he shouted to no one in particular.
     "Yes, we are," replied no one in particular.
     "Did I wish you a good day yet?"
     "Yes, you did," answered no one in particular, walking out of the
room.
     "Gruell!" buzzed Jordann.
     "What?" asked Gruell, appearing on the viewscreen, through a
half-eaten tuna-fish sandwich.
     "Have our scanners picked up the Glorkwinkle yet?" asked Jordann
anxiously.
     "No, your great lardness."
     "What about fuel traces?" Jordann persisted.
     "Yes."
     "Well?" Jordann asked nervously, munching on a pickle.  Gruell was
being vague, as usual.
     "They've been here and left already," Gruell said.  He munched his
tuna-fish sandwich back at Jordann.
     "Did they get the Orb?" Jordann inquired in alarm, snapping at the
air before he realized that he had dropped his pickle.
     "How am I supposed to know, dill lips?" Gruell emphasized this by
roughly biting his sandwich.
     "You're not," Jordann sighed.  "Good day!"  He turned off the
viewscreen.
     "Condra!" he called.
     There was a flash, and Condra appeared in a puff of billowing
smoke.  "What do you want, Jordann?"
     "You're a sorceress, right?" he asked her.
     "Right."
     "You are practiced in the mystic arts, right?"
     "Right."
     "You are able to cast magical spells, right?"
     "Right!"
     "You are very powerful, right?"
     "What are you getting at?" Condra asked impatiently.
     "Can you use your abilities to scan for the Orb?"
     "Why do you ask?" she countered.
     "The nyekrod sjhaicp was already here," said Jordann, his mouthful
of pickles making his speech difficult to understand.
     "The what?"
     "Nerd ship," he swallowed.
     "What?!?" she cried, her eyes opening wide.  The very idea of the
Orb falling into nerd hands terrified her like nothing else could.  The
nerds might have come to Oorlon for some other reason, but it couldn't
hurt to do a quick magic scan.
     Multihued smoke flowed through the room, and she fell into a
trance.  She concentrated intensely, scanning vast reaches of space with
her spells.
     Jordann waited.
     She looked, in her mind's eye, through the void, searching for one
thing only.  The nerd ship.  It was there, she could feel it; but where?
 It could not hide from her.
     Jordann waited some more.
     Condra found the nerd ship.  Her efforts to look inside, however,
were blocked by a magic shield.  The shield puzzled and alarmed Condra
at the same time.  Arcturans were inept at magic.
     She came out of her trance slowly as Jordann finished waiting.
     "It seems impossible," said Condra.  "But the nerds seem to have
enlisted the help of a magician."
     Jordann fumed.  The nerds always seemed to be one step ahead of
him.  First they outmaneuvered him in the battle, then they beat him to
Oorlon, and now, almost as if they knew he had joined forces with
Condra, they had recruited a magician.
     "I cannot imagine how the nerds were able to convince a magician to
join them," mused Condra.  "Judging from the strength of the shield the
nerds' magician is quite powerful; why such a one should cast his lot
with the Arcturans is an enigma.  Still, that might be the reason they
came here.  The Orb can only be handled by a magician or..."  She
stopped suddenly as her face went pale, but Jordann was unable to see
her face because of her hood.
     "Or who?" Jordann prompted.
     Her robes trembled, but she did not answer.  She could not.  It was
too frightening, even for her.  But she had to admit it could be true.
     "WHO?" bellowed Jordann.
     "The... Chosen One.  I had never thought of the possibility that
the Chosen One might be a Arcturan.  I must go to the planet's surface
immediately."  She waved her arms about and disappeared, in something
close to panic.
     Jordann reflected for a moment, trying to puzzle out Condra's
mysterious behavior.  "BHUJM!"  Jordann crunched on his pickle.  Bhujm
materialized next to him.  "You and I are teleporting down to Oorlon
immediately.  Get the spacesuits and scan for Condra; she's already
teleported down."
     "Yes, m'lord."  Bhujm left, and returned in only minutes with two
spacesuits, one king-sized and one rat-man-sized.
     Jordann took his suit and struggled into it.
     Seconds later they arrived on Oorlon.

                                 * * *

     Their first impressions of Oorlon were pretty basic: Bhujm loved it
and Jordann loved it much less.  In fact, he hated it.
     To their left, Condra waited silently.  She would have found it
difficult to talk, since she could barely breathe; the odor was
incredible.  Seeing that Jordann and Bhujm had had the foresight to wear
spacesuits, she formed a protective magical bubble in emulation of a
spacesuit.  Immediately the air cleared and she was able to breathe
easier.
     A few minutes later, three figures rounded a junkpile and walked
toward them.  The Oracle and his bodyguards stopped a few paces in front
of Jordann.
     "Hello.  I'm afraid we haven't met," smiled the Oracle politely. 
"I am the Oracle of Oorlon.  What can I do for you?"
     "Give us the Orb!" Condra ordered, her tone of voice indicating
that no argument would be tolerated.
     The Oracle blinked and smiled.  "What a coincidence!  Another group
just left with it!"
     "Who?!" demanded Jordann.
     "Let's see.  A nerd; an Eternal; a guy with a big head, three eyes,
and weird hands; and... oh yes, the Chosen One!"  He smiled.
     "The Chosen One," Condra gasped, her worst fears confirmed. 
"Who... who was he?"
     "Hmm, good question.  I rarely see his species in space.  An
Earthling, I think."
     "An Earthling!" Jordann, Bhujm, and Condra exclaimed.
     The Oracle smiled.
     Jordann smiled and took the portable communication and teleport
device from Bhujm.  "Stemplebladder!" he screamed into it.
     "Yes, my lord," a voice crackled back.
     "We're finished here.  We are ready to enact Plan A."
     "Plan A, my lord?"
     "Nothing; it's just that I've always wanted to say that.  Anyway,
you can destroy Oorlon now."
     The Oracle's smile faded.  He turned and fled behind a pile of
trash.  His guards, however, failed to comprehend what Jordann had said.
 They just stood where they were.
     "Yes, my lord," crackled Stemplebladder's voice.
     Oorlon began to shake ominously.
     "Bhujm," said Jordann, "when we teleport up, send Sai-Ko down for a
little exercise, before Oorlon gets completely blown away."
     "Yes, m'lord."  He touched the dials on his teleporter, and Jordann
and Bhujm vanished; Condra did the same by means of magic.
     The guards still didn't comprehend what was happening.  The planet
continued to shake around them.
     Sai-Ko materialized.
     Suddenly, the guards comprehended what was happening.  This was a
situation for which they had been trained.  Intimidated by Sai-Ko's
array of weapons, they drew their pistols and fired a barrage of laser
fire into the ground in front of him, trying to drive him back.
     Sai-Ko was terribly confused.  One minute he was attacking the
servants that had wandered into his room; the next thing he knew, he was
standing in a junkyard being assaulted.  He did what came naturally to
him: he fired back.  The guards dove for cover at once.
     Making no headway with his laser, Sai-Ko drew a flame thrower.
     The guards didn't comprehend this.  They continued firing their
pistols from behind their protective trash heap.
     Sai-Ko fired twice.
     A fly landed on one of the toasted guards.  The stink of burning
garbage assailed Sai-Ko's nostrils.
     He was preparing to attack a startled rodent when he was
transported back up to the ship.

                                 * * *

     Under Jordann's ferocious barrage of laser fire, the planet Oorlon
exploded inward, found this extremely difficult, and exploded outward
instead.
     Oorlon was no more.

                                 * * *

     Jordann fumed.  He grabbed a pickle and fumed some more.  "An
Earthling," he said to no one in particular.
     "Never would have believed it," reflected no one in particular.
     The door slid open and Zeek entered.  No one noticed.  He made his
way over to the pickle barrel and withdrew a pickle, grinning
devilishly.
     "How is it possible?" Jordann blubbered.
     "I can't imagine," replied no one in particular.
     Zeek waved the pickle through the air.  "OooooOOOOoooH!" he oohed.
     Jordann decided to vent his anger, as his therapist had advised him
to do just before Jordann had vented his anger by executing him.  "I
HATE NERDS!  I HATE EARTHLINGS!  I HATE EVERYONE WHO WOULD HELP A NERD
OR AN EARTHLING!" he shouted.  It felt good.
     Zeek, noticing that he wasn't getting Jordann's attention, raised
his voice.  "OOoooOOOooooOOO!!  The pickle is flying!  OOOOOoooooOOHh!"
     "I will have my revenge!" Jordann vowed.  "No nerd makes a fool out
of Jordann twice and gets away with it!"
     Zeek threw the pickle at Jordann.  The pickle missed, hitting no
one in particular, who winced in surprise.
     At this moment Jordann noticed Zeek.  Zeek noticed that Jordann was
noticing him and fainted in shock.
     "Gruell!" thundered Jordann.
     "Yes, pickle breath," replied Gruell, appearing on the viewscreen.
     "Set a course to follow the nerd ship.  Engage the Afterburner! 
We'll show them what it means to mess with Jordann the Immensely Fat!" 
He frowned in concentration.  "And get Zeek out of here."

                                 * * *

     Condra was uneasy.  It hadn't been hard to get Jordann to take her
to Oorlon, especially after she'd stolen his star maps and replaced them
with nothing but a mere slip of paper.  (She thought that had been
rather clever.)
     It unnerved her to think that the nerds had the Orb and the Chosen
One on their side.  (An Earthling!  She would have placed the
possibility that the Chosen One might be an Earthling just below the
odds of Domino's delivering a pickle pizza to Jordann the Immensely Fat
in thirty minutes or less.)
	They must also have another magician, she realized.  If the Chosen
One was an Earthling, he wouldn't know anything about magic.  He
couldn't possibly know how to use his powers yet, so someone else must
be generating that magic shield.  If the other magician discovered the
Orb's powers, however, no one could stand up to him. He was already
Condra's equal; with the Orb, he would be unstoppable.
     When Condra had first joined Jordann, she had only wanted the Orb. 
Now the nerds had stolen that from her, and now she, too, wanted revenge
on the Glorkwinkle.  She only hoped that the nerds were ignorant of the
power of the Orb and remained so long enough to be defeated.
     She wanted revenge as badly now as Jordann himself.  She would get
the Orb, or die trying.

                                 * * *

     The Afterburner ignited and the November blasted off in pursuit of
the AFS Glorkwinkle.

