SPATS

’m sick." Treflin’s face contorted on the Kinevue. "My head hurts, my stomach aches, and I can’t get to sleep at night ... whenever that is."

Deep wrinkles bit into her forehead as an aroused Quand 12 swung around to hear the words more clearly.

"Head hurt? Stomach ache? Can’t sleep?" The robo-announcer took over. "Take AstroGastro, the new new amazing spacial remediation for just about everything. Wadks got you on the grill? It’s AstroGastro! Space wars make you vomit? AstroGastro again! Just sick and tired of it all? AstroGastro, taken as directed, will pique your pod and peak your plane. Not a pill, not a liquid, AstroGastro is a miracle dimensional paste that looks just like evanescent clonesuds. But inside each hyperprojection of AstroGastro are thirteen magical microbe threads that suck all your toroid germs into the nearest black hole."

Treflin’s face faded forward again. "I feel just fine now... mmmmmm... and sleepy, too. Just come to...."

A muffled explosion shook the armed space trawler as Mad Luigi, fast catching up to Quand 12’s vehicle, threw his pointed shoes through the screen. Glass glittered, phosphors faded, for everyone around Sol System hated those commercials, with Unicommand officials endorsing the industrial gamut from pseudofeathers to cosmoturds.

But the excitement of the chase soon drew Mad Luigi’s attention away from the shards of Kinevue screen floating sweetly to the ship’s floor. He and Quand 12 were now alone together in deep space; hardly a fragment of the Plutonian space semi was left in sight. A maniacal grin bloomed on Luigi’s face as the Emotosensors on Quand 12’s aerobus began to feel and retransmit the pull of the mad Italian’s lovenoids, amplified by his recent ingestion of 14 chewpackets of Pride.

The aerobus flew ever more languorously toward Mokus 5, and likewise Mad Luigi’s trawler began to move proportionately faster in the direction of that distant colony. But the Newtonian pull of the two ships toward each other was picked up by a Unicommand Computagraph satellite far out near Boondock, and a fourth-dimensional cancellation message was pasted, crated and shipped at pneu-stellar speed back to Bob and Pflud.

"What are you barking about?" called Bob, as Pflud grew rings around him. "What’s this?"

His expression of consternation turned to constipation as he looked at the astrogram.

QUAND IS SLOW / BUT LUIGI’S GO / WHAT’S IT MEAN? / WE DON’T KNOW / BLURMA SLAVE

Bob reached for a diminutive red switch, hesitated, then snapped it down. A shudder trembled through the room as a set of deceptively demure words floated onto the master computascreen:

Universal Emotosensor Command. All stop.

Bob could feel his warm feelings, his hostilities, his fears, his unconscionable affection for Pflud all drain away, like light near a black hole. The Sol System and the galaxy for light years around was now devoid of emotion, empathy and feeling -- controlled sheerly by reason and logic.

But far out on the System of Deneb, the Wadk Clergy, unaffected by the Emotosensor Command directive due to heavy gastronomic shielding, flew into a collective rage, shattering crates of Excrecrackers, kicking Femiclones into Resettlement Bins, and engaging in all manner of untoward behavior.

Now the deep space marriage of Quand 12 and Mad Luigi could not be, leaving the entire story line up in the air.

The Karmora Papers is Copyright ©1976,1993,1996 by Dennis Báthory Kitsz and David Gunn. All rights reserved. If you enjoy this book, an appreciation fee of any amount may be made to Dennis Báthory-Kitsz or David Gunn at Malted/Media Productions, 176 Cox Brook Road, Northfield VT 05663.

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