Star Science Fiction 1 - [Anthology]

by Edited By Frederik Pohl

  Vertical, centimeter-deep furrows creased his brow. His head poised above mine like a hawk’s. “What are you talking about, Babe?” he demanded with suspicious rage, even snatching his hands away.

  “Briefly, Slickie,” I said, “you do not seem to feel that sex is for the production of progeny or for the mutual solace of two creatures. You seem to think—”

  His rage exploded into action. He grabbed a great big gun out of the glove compartment. I sprang to my two transmuted nether tentacles—most handsome gams if I, the artist, do say so. He jabbed the muzzle of the gun into my midriff.

  “That’s exactly what I mean, Slickie,” I managed to say before my beautiful midriff, which I’d been at such pains to perfect, erupted into smoke and ghastly red splatter. I did a backward flipflop out of the car and lay still—a most fetching corpse with a rucked-up skirt. As the convertible snorted off triumphantly, I snagged hold of the rear bumper, briefly changing my hand back to a tentacle for better gripping. Before the pavement had abraded more than a few grams of my substance, I pulled myself up onto the bumper, where I proceeded to reconstitute my vanished midriff with material from the air, the rest of my body, and the paint on the truck case. On this occasion the work went rapidly, with no artistic gropings, since I had the curves memorized from the first time I’d worked them out. Then I touched up my abrasions, stripped myself, whipped myself up a snazzy silver lamé evening frock out of chromium from the bumper, and put in time creating costume jewelry out of the tail light and the rest of the chrome.

  The car stopped at a bar and Slickie slid out. For a moment his proud profile was silhouetted against the smoky glow. Then he was inside. I threw away the costume jewelry and climbed over the folded top and popped down on the leather-upholstered seat, scarcely a kilogram lighter than when I’d first sat there.

  The minutes dragged. To pass them, I mentally reviewed the thousand-and-some basic types of mutual affection on the million-plus planets, not forgetting the one and only basic type of love.

  There was a burst of juke-box jazz. Footsteps tracked from the bar toward the convertible. I leaned back comfortably with my silver-filmed milk glands dramatically highlighted.

  “Hi, Slickie,” I called, making my voice sweet and soft to cushion the shock.

  Nevertheless it was a considerable one. For all of ten seconds he stood there, canted forward a little, like a wooden Indian that’s just been nudged from behind and is about to topple.

  Then with a naive ingenuity that rather touched me, he asked huskily, “Hey, have you got a twin sister?”

  “Could be,” I said with a shrug that jogged my milk glands deliciously.

  “Well, what are you doing in my car?”

  “Waiting for you,” I told him simply.

  He considered that as he slowly and carefully walked around the car and got behind the wheel, never taking his eyes off me. I nudged him in my usual manner. He jerked away.

  “What are you up to?” he inquired suspiciously.

  “Why are you surprised, Slickie?” I countered innocently. “I’ve heard this sort of thing happens to you all the time.”

  “What sort of thing?”

  “Girls turning up in your car, your bar, your bedroom— everywhere.”

  “Where’d you hear it?”

  “I read it in your Spike Mallet books.”

  “Oh,” he said, somewhat mollified. But then his suspicion came back. “But what are you really up to?” he demanded.

  “Slickie,” I assured him with complete sincerity, bugging my beautiful eyes, “I just love you.”

  This statement awakened in him an irritation so great that it overrode his uneasiness about me, for he cuffed me in the face—so suddenly that I almost forgot and changed it back to my top tentacle.

  “I make the advances around here, Babe,” he asserted harshly.

  Completely under control again, I welled a tiny trickle of blood out of the left-hand corner of my gorgeous mouth. “Anything you say, Slickie, dear,” I assented submissively and cuddled up against him in a prim, girlish way to which he could hardly take exception.

  But I must have bothered or at least puzzled him, for he drove slowly, his dark-eaved eyes following an invisible tennis ball that bounded between me and the street ahead. Abruptly the eaves lifted and he smiled.

  “Look, I just got an idea for a story,” he said. “There’s this girl from Galaxy Center—” and he whipped around to watch my reactions, but I didn’t blink.

  He continued, “I mean, she’s sort of from the center of the galaxy, where everything’s radioactive. Now there’s this guy that’s got her up in his attic.” His face grew deeply thoughtful. “She’s the most beautiful girl in the universe and he loves her like crazy, but she’s all streaming with hard radiations and it’ll kill him if he touches her.”

  “Yes, Slickie—and then?” I prompted after the car had dreamed its way for several blocks between high buildings.

  He looked at me sharply. “That’s all. Don’t you get it?”

  “Yes, Slickie,” I assured him soothingly. My statement seemed to satisfy him, but he was still edgy.

  He stopped the car in front of an apartment hotel that thrust toward the stars with a dark presumptousness. He got out on the street side and walked around the rear end and suddenly stopped. I followed him. He was studying the gray bumper and the patch of raw sheet metal off which I’d used the paint. He looked around at me where I stood sprayed with silver lamé in the revealing lamp light.

  “Wipe your chin,” he said critically.

  “Why not kiss the blood off it, Slickie?” I replied with an ingenuousness I hoped would take the curse off the suggestion.

  “Aw nuts,” he said nervously and stalked into the foyer so swiftly he might have been trying to get away from me. However, he made no move to stop me when I followed him into the tiny place and the even tinier elevator. In the latter cubicle I maneuvered so as to give him a series of breathtaking scenic views of the Grand Tetons that rose behind the plunging silver horizon of my neckline, and he unfroze considerably. By the time he opened the door of his apartment he had got so positively cordial that he urged me across the threshold with a casual spank.

  It was just as I had visualized it—the tiger skins, the gun racks, the fireplace, the open bedroom door, the bar just beside it, the adventures of Spike Mallet in handsomely tooled leather bindings, the vast divan covered with zebra skin . . .

  On the last was stretched a beautiful ice-faced blonde in a filmy negligee.

  This was a complication for which I wasn’t prepared. I stood rooted by the door while Slickie walked swiftly past me.

  The blonde slithered to her feet. There was murder in her glacial eyes. “You two-timing rat!” she grated. Her hand darted under her negligee. Slickie’s snaked under the left-hand side of his jacket.

  Then it hit me what was going to happen. She would bring out a small but deadly silver-plated automatic, but before she could level it, Slickie’s cannon would make a red ruin of her midriff.

  There I was, standing twenty feet away from both of them —and this poor girl couldn’t reconstitute herself!

  Swifter than thought I changed my arms back to upper dorsal tentacles and jerked back both Slickie’s and the girl’s elbow. They turned around, considerably startled, and saw me standing twenty feet away. I’d turned my tentacles back to arms before they’d noticed them. Their astonishment increased.

  But I knew I had won only a temporary respite. Unless something happened, Slickie’s trigger-blissful rage would swiftly be refocused on this foolish fragile creature. To save her, I had to divert his ire to myself.

  “Get that little tramp out of here,” I ordered Slickie from the corner of my mouth as I walked past him to the bar.

  “Easy, Babe,” he warned me.

  I poured myself a liter of scotch—I had to open a second bottle to complete the measure—and downed it. I really didn’t need it, but the assorted molecules were congenial b
uilding blocks and I was rather eager to get back to normal weight.

  “Haven’t you got that tramp out of here yet?” I demanded, eyeing him scornfully over my insouciant silver-filmed shoulder.

  “Easy, Babe,” he repeated, the vertical furrows creasing his brow to a depth of at least a centimeter and a half.

  “That’s telling her, Slickie,” the blonde applauded.

  “You two-timing rat!” I plagiarized, whipping up my silver skirt as if to whisk a gun from my nonexistent girdle.

  His cannon coughed. Always a good sportsman, I moved an inch so that the bullet, slightly mis-aimed, took me exactly in the right eye, messily blowing off the back of my head. I winked at Slickie with my left eye and fell back through the doorway into the bedroom darkness.

  I knew I had no time to spare. When a man’s shot one girl he begins to lose his natural restraint. Lying on the floor, I reconstituted my eye and did a quick patch-job on the back of my head in seventeen seconds flat.

  As I emerged from the bedroom, they were entering into a clinch, each holding a gun lightly against the other’s back.

  “Slickie,” I said, pouring myself a scant half liter of scotch, “I told you about that tramp.”

  The ice-blonde squawked, threw up her hands as if she’d had a shot of strychnine, and ran out the door. I fancied I could feel the building tilt as she leaned on the elevator button.

  I downed the scotch and advanced, shattering the paralyzed space-time that Slickie seemed to be depending on as a defense.

  “Slickie,” I said, “let’s get down to cases. I am indeed from Galaxy Center and we very definitely don’t like your attitude. We don’t care what your motives are, or whether they are derived from jumbled genes, a curdled childhood, or a sick society. We simply love you and we want you to reform.” I grabbed him by a shivering shoulder that was now hardly higher than my waist, and dragged him into the bedroom, snatching up the rest of the scotch on the way. I switched on the light. The bedroom was a really lush love-nest. I drained the scotch—there was about a half liter left —and faced the cowering Slickie. “Now do to me,” I told him uncompromisingly, “the thing you’re always going to do to those girls, except you have to shoot them.”

  He frothed like an epileptic, snatched out his cannon and emptied its magazine into various parts of my torso, but since he hit only two of my five brains, I wasn’t bothered. I reeled back bloodily through the blue smoke and fell into the bathroom. I felt real crazy—maybe I shouldn’t have taken that last half liter. I reconstituted my torso faster even than I had my head, but my silver lamé frock was a mess. Not wanting to waste time and reluctant to use any more reconstituting energy, I stripped it off and popped into the off-the-shoulders evening dress the blonde had left lying over the edge of the bathtub. The dress wasn’t a bad fit. I went back into the bedroom. Slickie was sobbing softly at the foot of the bed and gently beating his head against it.

  “Slickie,” I said, perhaps a shade too curtly, “about this love business—”

  He sprang for the ceiling but didn’t quite burst through it. Falling back, by chance on his feet, he headed for the hall. Now it wasn’t in my orders from Galaxy Center that he run away and excite this world—in fact, my superiors had strictly forbidden such a happening. I had to stop Slickie. But I was a bit confused—perhaps fuddled by that last half liter. I hesitated—then he was too far away, had too big a start. To stop him, I knew I’d have to use tentacles. Swifter than thought I changed them and shot them out.

  “Slickie,” I cried reassuringly, dragging him to me.

  Then I realized that in my excitement, instead of using my upper dorsal tentacles, I’d used the upper ventral ones I kept transmuted into my beautiful milk glands. I do suppose they looked rather strange to Slickie as they came out of the bosom of my off-the-shoulders evening dress and drew him to me.

  Frightening sounds came out of him. I let him go and tried to resume my gorgeous shape, but now I was really confused (that last half liter!) and lost control of my transmutations. When I found myself turning my topmost tentacle into a milk gland I gave up completely and—except for a lung and vocal cords—resumed my normal shape. It was quite a relief. After all, I had done what Galaxy Center had intended I should. From now on, the mere sight of a brassiere in a show window would be enough to give Slickie the shakes.

  Still, I was bothered about the guy. As I say, he’d touched me.

  I caressed him tenderly with my tentacles. Over and over again I explained that I was just a heptapus and that Galaxy Center had selected me for the job simply because my seven tentacles would transmute nicely into the seven extremities of the human female.

  Over and over again I told him how I loved him.

  It didn’t seem to help. Slickie Millane continued to weep hysterically.

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  * * * *

  CLIFFORD D. SIMAK

  Science-fiction magazines have been published in this country for more than a quarter of a century; a short time in history, but a long, long period in the development of the field. Today’s readers would recognize hardly a name in the stories published two or more decades ago—but at least one name was a leader in the field then and remains one today: Clifford D. Simak, for memorable short stories like ...

  Contraption

  He found the contraption in a blackberry patch when he was hunting cows. Darkness was sifting down through the tall stand of poplar trees and he couldn’t make it out too well and he couldn’t spend much time to look at it because Uncle Eb had been plenty sore about his missing the two heifers and if it took too long to find them Uncle Eb more than likely would take the strap to him again and he’d had about all he could stand for one day. Already he’d had to go without his supper because he’d forgotten to go down to the spring for a bucket of cold water. And Aunt Em had been after him all day because he was so no-good at weeding the garden.

  “I never saw such a trifling young’un in all my life,” she’d shrill at him and then she’d go on to say that she’d think he’d have some gratitude for the way she and Uncle Eb had taken him in and saved him from the orphanage, but no, he never felt no gratitude at all, but caused all the trouble that he could and was lazy to boot and she declared to goodness she didn’t know what would become of him.

  He found the two heifers down in the corner of the pasture by the grove of walnut trees and drove them home, plodding along behind them, thinking once again about running away, but knowing that he wouldn’t, because he had no place to go. Although, he told himself, most any place would be better than staying here with Aunt Em and Uncle Eb, who really were not his uncle and aunt at all, but just a couple of people who had took him in.

  Uncle Eb was just finishing milking when he came into the barn, driving the two heifers before him, and Uncle Eb still was plenty sore about the way he’d missed them when he’d brought in the other cows.

  “Here,” said Uncle Eb, “you’ve fixed it so I had to milk my share and yours, too, and all because you didn’t count the cows, the way I always tell you to so you’ll be sure you got them all. Just to teach you, you can finish up by milking them there heifers.”

  So Johnny got his three-legged milk stool and a pail and he milked the heifers and heifers are hard things to milk, and skittish, too, and the red one kicked and knocked Johnny into the gutter, spilling the milk he had in the pail.

  Uncle Eb, seeing this, took the strap down from behind the door and let Johnny have a few to teach him to be more careful and that milk represented money and then made him finish with his milking.

  They went up to the house after that, Uncle Eb grumbling all the way about kids being more trouble than they’re worth, and Aunt Em met them at the door to tell Johnny to be sure he washed his feet good before he went to bed because she didn’t want him getting her nice clean sheets all dirty.

  “Aunt Em,” he said, “I’m awful hungry.”

  “Not a bite,” she said, grim-lipped in the lamplight of the kitche
n. “Maybe if you get a little hungry you won’t go forgetting all the time.”

  “Just a slice of bread,” said Johnny. “Without no butter or nothing. Just a slice of bread.”

  “Young man,” said Uncle Eb, “you heard your aunt. Get them feet washed and up to bed.”

  “And see you wash them good,” said Aunt Em.

  So he washed his feet and went to bed and lying there, he remembered what he had seen in the blackberry patch and remembered, too, that he hadn’t said a word about it because he hadn’t had a chance to, what with Uncle Eb and Aunt Em taking on at him all the blessed time.