by Adam Chase
The Equisite Nudes
By Adam Chase
Copyright © 1957 by Stephen Marlowe
This edition published in 2011 by eStar Books, LLC.
www.estarbooks.com
ISBN 9781612103068
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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The Equisite Nudes
By Adam Chase
These strange, beautiful creatures came from an alien world. They looked like statues and dressed like statues but they acted like — well, we don't want to spoil the treat in store for you, so settle back and start reading.
The big six-and-a-half ton truck took a hairpin turn at fifty miles an hour, its trailer lurching from side to side. The truck's driver gazed serenely through the windshield, but his partner in the seat alongside of him, could barely keep his composure.
"Don't tell me you're thinking of taking all the turns between here and New York like that, at three o'clock in the morning, through the rain?"
"Why not? Insured, ain't it?"
"Amos, just because you're quitting after this run — "
"You can insure a truckload of statues but they can't be duplicated."
"Is that what we got?"
"Didn't you look at the bill of lading?"
"Not this boy. I was busy having one for the road. Last run and that kind of stuff, you know." Amos Peeks burped politely.
"Oh, Lord. I didn't realize it before. You're drunk, that's what you are."
"Nuh-uh," mumbled Amos Peeks. "Working off a drunk is all. What kind of statues?"
"Pull over and lemme drive, Amos. Please, Amos, huh?"
"What kind of statues?" Amos Peeks asked again, executing a wobbly turn again as he did so. Something heavy slid across the floor of the truck's trailer behind them.
"One of 'em come loose!" the partner cried. "Go easy, Amos."
Amos grinned. The windshield wipers cut pie-wedges across the splattered windshield. The motor purred and roared as Amos floored the gas pedal. They boomed out on a level stretch of highway.
"Now, Amos — " began the partner.
Just then something dazzling flared in front of the truck. Amos Peeks jumped on the big brake pedal with both feet, muttering, "Now what the hell is that?"
It was a good question.
The dazzling something glowed softly now. It had come down on the highway and it was disc-shaped and it was as big as the truck Amos Peeks was driving recklessly through the rain. It was pulsing now as the truck lurched to a bone-wrenching, statue breaking stop half a dozen yards from it. It was disc shaped and Amos Peeks' first thought — it also turned out to be his last thought — was of spaceships. But spaceships were not, in all the sensational magazines the now moribund Amos Peeks had ever read, blubbery.
For the thing which might have been a spaceship w r as soft, blubbery, like fatty flesh.
Amos Peeks pointed a finger and was on the point of saying, "Look," when the first wave of radiation from the blubbery disc engulfed the truck's cab. Instantly, Amos Peeks and his partner were dead.
Something big and roughly spherical came through the blubber of the disc-shaped thing. The blubber made a plopping sound and closed behind it. The thing, which was shaped like an elongated spheroid with a point which managed always to stay on top despite the rolling motion, advanced toward the truck.
The thing was an almost sphere of marble-hard granite named Igzs. Igzs had come a long way across interstellar space to find a very disappointing world. He had scouted it, seeking life with no success, and had been on the point of returning home when his X-ray scanner had spotted apparently locomoting granite. Since Igzs' life form was granitic and Igzs' people had never encountered any other life form, protoplasmic or otherwise, Igzs was impressed. Still, he thought now as he approached the big ungainly thing made of metal and various inert protoplasmic byproducts far less blubbery than the inert doorless protoplasmic shell of his spaceship, he had computed his orbit for home. He could only take a quick look, then depart.
He rolled forward and scanned the cab with his vision-receptors. The two strangely formed globs of protoplasm meant nothing to him; he passed them by and found what he was seeking in the truck's trailer.
Various shapes of marble.
Igzs rolled on, then levitated, then crunched through the protoplasmic byproduct — we call it wood — of the truck's side. He gazed upon — life.
But life in an apparently catatonic trance. He nudged the strange granitic shapes, which fell away from him at contact. He rolled on, nudging them some more. There was no response.
Dead? wondered Igzs. But what had killed them? His interior chronometer told him that he still had a few moments before blast-off or the bothersome necessity of computing a new orbit. He rushed back to the blubbery doorless spaceship and rolled through the wall, returning with a blubbery cube affixed to the point atop his body.
He re-entered the trailer rolling back and forth across its metal-ribbed floor, bathing the granitic shapes with radiation from his blubbery box. Then he rolled back to examine the fruits — but Igzs would have called them stones — of his labor.
The granitic shapes still seemed quite dead.
Igzs was disappointed. The radiation should have revived the strange life-forms, Igzs thought. Although, of course, there was no telling how life forms on an alien planet might behave. Perhaps it would take some time for the revivifier to take effect, Igzs told himself. Still, he was homesick. It would be many hours before Igzs could compute another orbit. He decided not to wait.
With another sad look at the inert granitic shapes which his revivifier had not brought back to life, but with hardly a glance at the similarly motionless protoplasmic shapes in the cab of the truck, Igzs returned to his spaceship. The protoplasmic shell parted to admit him, blubbering closed behind him.
Moments later, brightly glowing, the starship blasted off into the galaxy.
In three seconds it had left Earth's gravitational field. The strain of two hundred gravities thus imposed could not hurt Igzs granitic body although it did temporarily change the shape of Igzs' protoplasmic spaceship harmlessly, proving to no one but Igzs that granite was the ideal stuff of life and protoplasm, of spaceships.
The state police found the truckload of statues the next morning. For a week or so there was a furor over the mysterious death of the two drivers. The autopsy showed a tremendous lethal dose of radioactivity, although no lingering radiation could be found. The statues were in due course delivered to the Metropolitan Museum which had been their destination.
No one ever brought up the subject of the roughly round, five feet in diameter gash in the side of the truck's trailer, which had been made as mysteriously as the driver had died — or as mysteriously as the ground in an area with a radius two hundred feet long had been fused as if by a minor atomic explosion occurring, perhaps, hundreds of feet overhead.
In their new home at the museum, the statues waited. Gathering strength.
The Clarepepper Exhibit — named for the sculptor Myron Clarepepper, recently deceased — proved a disappointment . Clarepepper's odd mixture of the classic and the abstract somehow failed to catch the public's fancy. Since Myron Clarepepper had spent twenty years on the twenty statues involved, it seemed a shame.
There were, naturally, exceptions. T
he gallery of the Clarepepper Exhibit was not always empty. Primarily, the Assistant Director of Museum Publicity, Albert Sprayregan, was the cause of those exceptions, and we shall return to Albert later.
On a Monday morning in May, fully two months after the Clarepepper Exhibit had been installed at the museum with disappointing consequences, Miss Dolores Ostigan of the Oyster Bay and Southampton Ostigans (forty million dollars in plastics and plastic rainwear) visited the gallery in which Myron Clarepepper's twenty statues had been ensconced. Miss Ostigan, whose parents had once invited the deceased but formerly bohemian and unpredictable sculptor to a cocktail party in their Oyster Bay home, considered it a duty to visit the Clarepepper Exhibit at least once. Miss Ostigan was pretty in a bluestocking sort of way, and notably graced with the best pair of hips and posterior to emerge from either Southampton or Oyster Bay in years. Miss Ostigan wore expensive dresses which were cut to make the most of this fortunate anatomic state of affairs and Miss Ostigan had developed a fluid, if proprietary, method of walking which did the same.
Harry Digger, the Metropolitan Museum's Chief of Security, who had stationed himself at the entrance to the Clarepepper Gallery that Monday morning in May because the guard was out with a late case of flu, noticed this.
Harry Digger nodded a good morning to Miss Ostigan and studied her splendid posterior as she poured herself by him into the gallery.
But Digger was not the only one who ogled Miss Ostigan. The second ogler was perched on a granite pedestal in the Clarepepper Gall He was carved in white Vermont marble and, like two thirds of his brother statues in the hall, he was made in the classic manner, with the various anatomical features in their correct places, in correct number, and— as far as the Bohemian Myron Clarepepper had been able to make them — in admirable shape.
The statue, called Javeliner because he held a marble Javelin in one hand, was less inhibited than Harry Digger. Besides, the statue had no job at stake. After ogling Miss Ostigan, Javeliner whistled.
The bluestocking Miss Ostigan whirled, her face crimsoning but her heart brimming with secret delight. Actually, although Miss Ostigan had been given every opportunity of a Bryn Mawr education and forty-odd million dollars, she was a dull girl with no particular interests in life and no adequate personality or drive to pursue them, had she had them.
The Clarepepper Gallery was empty. Had the guard whistled? wondered Miss Ostigan. No, it wasn't the guard. She couldn't even see the guard from where she was standing. The guard was too far away. Besides, she had noticed the words "Chief of Security" stitched on the left breast of the guard's uniform, and a chief of security wouldn't whistle at her, not even at her lovely posterior. Shrugging, Miss Ostigan looked at Javeliner on his pedestal. Javeliner wore the appropriate fig leaf. Javeliner was seven feet tall. Javeliner leered at her.
Miss Ostigan screamed, stumbling as she turned to flee. Instinctively, Javeliner bent to keep her from falling. But she had already righted herself and all Javeliner succeeded in doing was to catch the point of his marble javelin under the rear of her skirt. A grim and completely fortuitous tug-of-war ensued. Javeliner, naturally, could not lose.
Seconds later, her detached skirt now decorating the point of Javeliner's javelin, Miss Ostigan fled screaming toward the entrance to the gallery. With the covering of Miss Ostigan's delightful rear now reduced to panties and a somewhat tenuous slip, Javeliner couldn't resist one more whistle. Miss Ostigan screamed and sprinted. Realizing that he now had no choice, Javeliner — the first of the twenty Clarepepper statues to come to life — went into an instant freeze. But Miss Ostigan's skirt hung like a standard from the point of his javelin.
"There!" Miss Ostigan cried, pointing accusingly at Javeliner when she had returned to the gallery with Harry Digger. "You see? It has my skirt."
It had her skirt indeed. The skirt hung five feet off the floor on the point of the now upright Javeliner's short spear. Digger looked at the spear, looked at Miss Ostigan, and rubbed the back of his head.
"Don't just stand there," Miss Ostigan pleaded. "Do something."
At times like this Harry Digger wished he was back on the Metropolitan police force. He scowled and reached up without a word to tug at the skirt. It would not come lose. He tugged again and there was a tearing sound.
"My skirt!" wailed Miss Ostigan.
Digger finally got it down with a six inch tear up near the waistline. Miss Ostigan, now very pale, wobbled toward Digger, who obediently held out the skirt. In her haste to climb into the garment, Miss Ostigan entangled her legs in it, stumbling, falling and revealing tan, leg filled nylons and a flash of white above them. Harry Digger tried to right her as she fell, but succeeded only in going down with her.
Javeliner guffawed.
Digger looked up, and received a resounding slap from Miss Ostigan, who thought the laughter had been his. Digger climbed to his feet. Miss Ostigan climbed to her feet and into the torn skirt.
Digger mumbled an apology. "The museum shall hear of this," Miss Ostigan said, walking stiffly from the gallery. Digger looked back at Javeliner. Javeliner wisely remained silent and motionless. But two of the other statues offered him tentative grins after the gallery was once more deserted. Javeliner grinned back at them.
Igzs, who might have explained all this, was now four hundred light years from Earth and would never return.
"The trouble with you, Bbert Sprayregan," Sandra said, "is that you're not Irish enough."
"I am so Irish," Albert Sprayregan protested.
"Irish enough, I said. Why don't you ever get red in the face, or even holler? Why don't you take too much to drink, just once in a while, a little bit too much? Why don't you, specifically, toss an ugly job like the Publicity Director threw in your lap right back at him?"
Albert shrugged. "After all, I'm only half Irish. The other half is English, phlegmatic and—"
"And dull." Sandra looked at him. Albert had gulped, his Adam's apple going suddenly big. "I'm sorry, Albert I didn't mean that."
"That's all right, Sandra," Albert said. He knew that Sandra Lewis liked him, strangely, unfathomably. It disturbed him enormously, if anything about Albert Sprayregan could be said to be enormous. Sandra was a pert girl of twenty-two with a well-formed and still slightly coltish figure and fluffy chestnut hair and an upturned nose and alert, somehow insolent eyes.
"But don't you see, Albert," Sandra pleaded. "Why do you think Mr. Hodd gave you that job? Because he knew you wouldn't turn it down, that's why."
"I have no right to turn it down. Mr. Hodd is my superior here at the museum and—"
"And what?" Sandra asked in exasperation. "And you haven't the guts to tell him you're a publicity man just like he is, not a— a detective?"
"You don't understand how the chief's mind functions, I'm afraid. Besides, did it ever occur to you I might like this particular job?"
"Like it? That's impossible!"
"I told you, Sandra. You don't know how Mr. Hodd's mind works. Look, we've had five complaints on the Clarepepper Gallery. Strange, inexplicable, as if — as if the gallery was haunted or something."
"Very funny," Sandra said as they finished their franks and beans in the museum cafeteria and went to work on their chocolate pudding. "Very funny."
"You don't actually think Mr. Hodd wants me to get to the bottom of the trouble," as he said. "Do you?"
"Gilbert Hodd is a very literal man."
"Well, not this time. Getting to the bottom of the trouble, if any, is Harry Digger's job. What Mr. Hodd wants is — "
"Publicity? Albert, do you really think so?"
"Of course I think so," Albert told her, relieved that she was beginning to see things his way. He always found arguing such an unstabling influence. It could leave his stomach in mild turmoil for days. But then, Sandra Lewis could do that on general principles. She was fond of him. She was fond of him inordinately and she did not hide it and Albert Sprayregan did not consider himself ready for that sort of thing. Alth
ough Albert admitted it to no one, not even to himself, he had a fondness for the fair sex on an abstract level. If his unconscious mind permitted this abstract fondness to become concrete, Albert might find himself a veritable roué. Instead, his unconscious mind projected the abstract fondness on harmless particulars — such as the abstract statues Albert liked so much.
"Don't you understand," Albert went on, "what all this is about? Mr. Hodd is Museum Publicity Director, right?"
"Right," Sandra admitted somewhat reluctantly.
"And I'm one of his assistants, just as you are. Now, the museum pays half a million dollars to get the Clarepepper statues and — what happens ?"
"You tell me."
"They're a failure. They just don't draw anybody. Then an important society bluestocking — you'll excuse the expression — loses her skirt in there. A little girl is scared out of her wits. An old man insists one of the naked marble ladies winked at him. A boy gets his nose bloodied after trying to carve his initials into the calf of Javeliner with a pen knife. A —"