Image of the Beast

by Philip José Farmer

  A tall good-looking man with yellow hair and dark blue eyes stood there. Two other men were with him.

  He said, "I'm Hindarf. This is Bellow and this is Grunder. We're friends, old friends, of Alys Merrie. We'd like to come in."

  "No smoking," Forry said and then remembered that Alys was puffing on one cigarette after another.

  He let them in and closed the door. Two sat down without asking his permission; Hindarf stood in the middle of the room as if he intended to dominate it. And he did.

  "I'm here to carry out the rest of our plan," he said.

  "What plan?" Forry said.

  He looked around the room. It had always seemed the center of the universe, this room. It contained illustrations from all over the cosmos by men who had never left planet Earth in the flesh. Memos from Mars. To others, it appeared weird, but to him it was home.

  Now it was shifting from reality, slipping its moorings. The very intrusion of genuine alienness rendered this place alien. The aliens were the real people, and the products of imagination were fake. Contrary to what he had always maintained, reality was more real than fantasy.

  "You must be wondering why you've been chosen," Hindarf said. "Why should we ring in an Earthling in our battle against the Ogs? Why do we need you in our effort to recapture the Captain?"

  Forry bent his head and looked at them from under raised eyebrows. He drawled, "Yes. I had been wondering about that. Many are called but Fu are Chosen, as the Korean said."

  Hindarf did not smile, but he did not look puzzled either. He said, "There are some Earthlings who have what we call resonance. Through the chance of genetics, they are born with a psychic affinity, or a psychophysical complex, which generates what, for want of a better term, we call white noise. This vibration is quite in phase with those radiated by the Tocs. It makes the Earthling immediately sympathetic and empathic with the Tocs, and, conversely, it generates disturbance and confusion in the minds of the Ogs. But it exists, and its effect is to blank out the vibrations radiated by the Tocs. In other words, we Tocs and Ogs know when we're near each other. We sense it just as a lion downwind from an antelope smells it. But when one of the resonant white-noise generator Earthlings is around, the Ogs can't sense us."

  Forry put his fingertips together to form a church steeple. He said, "I've never been one to make everything black or white. There is much more gray in this universe than black or white."

  "Did you ever have a good word to say for the Nazis?" Hindarf said.

  "Well, they did get rockets launched and that led to the first men on the Moon."

  Alys Merrie guffawed and said, "Well, kiss my ass and call me Hitler!"

  "Woolston Heepish is a member of the Ogs," Hindarf said. "He has not only set himself up as a rival of yours, he has become a caricature of you, and he has stolen from you. Do you think he's more gray than black?"

  "Black as the devil's hindbrain," Forry said. "Why, just last night...!"

  Hindarf waved his hand impatiently and said, "I know. The question is, will you help us? It will be dangerous. But it will be less dangerous for us if you accompany us. We intend to rescue Childe. He is a prisoner of the Ogs. And the emanations from the house today indicate that he's participating in a grail-growing ceremony. He probably doesn't know what he's doing, but that makes no difference. He is doing what they want him to do."

  "Aren't there any other Earthlings you know who could go with you?" Forry said. He remembered some of his youthful fantasies in which he had been the focus of attention from the secret bands of Martians and Venusians operating in an underground struggle for control of Earth. Generally, in his fantasies, he had been on the side of the Martians. There was something sinister, damp, toadstooly, and creepycrawly about the Venusians. All that rain...Now that he thought about it, the deluge of the past seven days had turned Los Angeles into a Venus such as the sci-fi writers had projected back in the good old days of Science Wonder Stories and Astounding.

  "No," Hindarf said. "There are none available in this area, and none anywhere who can generate white noise to compare with yours."

  "This may seem irrelevant to you at this moment," Forry said, "but why does Heepish steal from me?"

  "Because he wants your stuff for the collection he intends to take to the planet of the Ogs. He's a greedy and short-sighted person, and that is why he's stolen a few things from you instead of waiting to take the whole collection just before he leaves."

  "What?" Forry said shrilly. "The whole collection?"

  "Oh, yes," Alys Merrie said, blowing smoke at him. "He has planned on emptying your house and your garage. He can do it in a few minutes, you know, if he can get a Captain to do it for him. The collection would be moved to a huge room in a barn behind the present headquarters of the Ogs. Then, when the Captain moves all the Ogs to their home planet, he will also take the collection. Which, by the way, will consist of many of Earth's art treasures in addition to artifacts and books and so forth, for the Og museums."

  "You can visit our planet, if you wish," Hindarf said. "And you might as well have Heepish's collection, too. It won't do him any good after he's dead."

  "Dead?"

  Hindarf nodded and said, "Of course. We plan to kill every Og."

  Forry did not like the idea of killing, even if Heepish did deserve it. But the thought of going to an alien planet, one so far away that it was not even in this galaxy! He alone, of all men, would voyage to another world! He had wanted to be the first man on the Moon and the first man on Mars when he was a child and then that dream had glimmered away. He wouldn't even be able to go to those places as a tourist. And now, he was offered a free ticket to a planet far more alien and weird than the Moon or Mars could ever be. Under a strange sun on an unimaginably exotic world!

  "I can come back any time I wish?" he said. "I wouldn't want to leave Los Angeles forever, you know. I have my collection and all my wonderful friends."

  "No trouble," Hindarf said.

  "I must warn you, if it involves anything strenuous, I'll be handicapped," Forry said. "My heart..."

  "Alys has told us all about that," Hindarf said.

  Forry's eyes widened. "Everything?"

  "Just the medical aspects," Hindarf said ambiguously.

  "All right then," Forry said. "I'll help you. But just as a white noise generator. You can't ask me to take part in any killing."

  The three men and Alys smiled.

  Forry smiled, too, but he was not sure that he was not making a pact with the devil. It seemed that the Ogs really were evil, but then the Tocs might not be so good, either. It could be one band of devils fighting another.

  * * *

  CHAPTER 38

  Childe awoke with a feeling of emptiness and of shame. He looked at Sybil, who was sleeping by his side, and then he stared upward for a long time. Something had happened to him last night, or he presumed it was last night, since he did not know what time it was. His wristwatch was gone.

  As if a key had been turned in him, unlocking a memory or releasing a programmed tape, he had gone through that ceremony without a false step or being told, really, what to do next.

  When he had evoked that pulsing light, he had felt an ecstasy that was superior, in some undefinable way, to that of sexual orgasm. It was difficult to untangle the sexual from the photonic, but a part of the glory had been from that goblet.

  That final incident, the one with Vivienne's unattached head, had seemed at the moment to be fully justified and exquisitely delightful. But this morning it looked ugly and perverted. He could not understand what had possessed him.

  The hell of it was, he thought, that the next time he was seated before that goblet, he was likely to do the same thing or something equally uninhibited. He did not fool himself about that.

  The worst thing about this was that he was cooperating with people--beings, rather--who were evil.

  But when he had been placed before that goblet, he had been unable to refuse to act. In a sense, the gobl
et had activated him more than he had activated it.

  What was supposed to be the final result of this ceremony and of others that would undoubtedly follow it?

  He decided that he would refuse to do anything more unless everything was fully explained.

  He thought of Sybil. Would she be tortured if he refused to carry out the Ogs' desires? Knowing what he did of them, he could not doubt that they would do whatever they thought was required. And so Sybil would be...He shuddered.

  Somebody knocked on the door. It was faint because the door was of such thick metal, but he was aware of it. His sense of hearing seemed to be sharper after last night's experiences. He rose, noting that he was naked and not caring, and went to the door. He rapped on it, and the door swung outward. Vivienne was standing there with Pao behind her.

  "You people are so technologically advanced, you could find some easier way to get my attention," he said.

  "You indicated you wanted privacy in your room," Vivienne said. "So we polarized the one-way windows and turned off the TV monitor and the intercom."

  "That's nice of you," he said, thinking that they were really trying to sell him on how extremely nice they were. "Show me where this intercom is, and I'll contact you when I want you. And be sure to keep the other devices off."

  "What the Captain wishes..." Pao murmured.

  "What I wish now, after a good breakfast, are answers to my questions."

  Pao said, "Of course," as if he was amazed that Childe could have any reason to think otherwise.

  "I'll see you in ten minutes," he said. "You'd better tell me where the breakfast room is. And leave the door unlocked."

  Pao looked embarrassed. He said, "I'm sorry indeed, my Captain, but you'll have to stay in here. It's for your own safety. There are evil people who want to hurt you. You cannot leave this room. Except for the Grailing, of course."

  "The Grailing?"

  "Growing that goblet. The Grail."

  "There is to be more of that?"

  "There is."

  "Very well then," Childe said. "I'm a prisoner."

  Pao bowed slightly and said, "A ward, Captain. For your own protection."

  Childe closed the door in their faces and woke up Sybil. She did not want to get out of bed, but he told her he wanted her to hear everything that would be said. He started towards the bathroom but stopped when he saw a hairy pointed head sticking out from under the bed. It looked vaguely like a sleeping black dog about the size of a Great Dane. He rapped it on its wet doggy nose, and it opened its eyes wide.

  "What the hell are you and what the hell are you doing under my bed?" he said.

  The eyes were a dark brown and looked familiar. But the animal that crawled out from under the bed was unfamiliar. Its front part resembled a giant water spaniel, and the back part was monkeylike. It stood up on its semi-human feet and staggered over to a chair and sat down. It leaned its shaggy floppy-eared head on its two paws. The monkey part was hairy but not so hairy it entirely concealed a pair of human testicles and a warty penis.

  "I was hungry," Childe said aloud. "But seeing you, whatever you are..."

  He felt repulsed but not scared. The thing did not look dangerous, not, at least, at the moment. Its weariness and its big wet gentle eyes added up to harmlessness.

  One thing its presence did for him. It reaffirmed the sense of alienness, of unhumanity, about these people.

  Sybil did not seem frightened; he would have expected her to be screaming with hysteria.

  He said, "Was this your bed partner last night, Sybil?"

  "Part of the time," she said.

  "There was more than one?"

  The only one missing from the ceremony, as far as he knew, was Plugger.

  "I don't think so," she said. "He seemed to have changed into this about a half hour before we quit."

  He did not have to ask her what they had quit doing.

  "He said he was almost emptied," Sybil said. "He had been to the three Toc prisoners before he came to me. I suppose he buggered them, I mean, he applied his limp prick to their anuses and shocked them with the only pleasant shock that I know of. Then he came to me."

  Childe did not feel that he was in a position to rebuke her. What good would it do, anyway? She took sex where she found it and enjoyed it. And all the time professing that he was her only true love. The truth was, sex was her only true love. Impersonal sex.

  The unbelievable element in this was not so much the metamorphosis of Plugger into this dog-monkey thing as it was her calm acceptance of the metamorphosis. She should have been in a deep state of psychic shock.

  "Why did Plugger feel it necessary to stimulate the prisoners?" he said.

  "He told me that everybody in the house had to be hooked into the Grailing and that only if the prisoners and I had sex with an Og could this be done."

  A voice spoke from a jade statuette on a table against the wall near the bed: "Captain, is there anything you want?"

  "Yes!" he said, facing the statuette. "Get this thing out of here! Plugger is making me sick!"

  A moment later, the door swung out, and the blond man who had been first in the line entered. Behind him came two women holding trays. The man took one of Plugger's paws and led him out while the women served the food. The coffee was excellent, and the bacon and eggs and toast and cantaloupe were delicious.

  While he ate, he looked steadily at Sybil. She chattered on as if unaware of his scrutiny. She had certainly acquired a set of stainless steel nerves during her long imprisonment.

  After breakfast, she went into the bathroom to fix herself up for the day, as she put it. Pao and Vivienne entered. The first thing she did was to get onto her knees before him, murmuring, "Your permission, Captain!" She kissed the head of his penis.

  He did not object. When in Rome, and so on. The custom certainly beat that of kissing the hand of royalty.

  Pao touched his penis with one finger, also murmuring, "Your permission, Captain."

  That was where the power and the glory were stored, Childe thought. No wonder that Igescu and Grasatchow and Dolores del Osorojo and Magda Holyani had been unable to resist using him sexually. The Ogs were supposed to have left him alone to develop into something, according to what he had garnered from the brief conversation between Vivienne and the leader of the three who had rescued him from her.

  He wondered if the two werewolves had intended to kill him, as he had thought when they attacked. Maybe they had only meant to herd him back to his prison. And when he had been jumped by that wereleopard while he was killing Igescu in his oak-log coffin, she may have just been trying to drive him away.

  It was obvious now that he was supposed to develop into a Captain. But there were a number of questions to which he required answers. For one thing, what about those abandoned cars in front of his house?

  Vivienne said, "Several years ago, we had about half of a grail in our possession. It was the result of several thousands of years collecting the materials needed to make the metal. Then the Tocs stole it. We pursued them and cornered the one with the grail after killing his two companions. He had run into a railroad yard to get away from us, and when he saw he could not escape, he threw the grail into a gondola full of junk. At that time, we did not know that. Later, we got the information from him."

  "I can imagine," said Childe, closing his eyes and shuddering.

  "By then, the grail and the junk had gone into a steel mill furnace. We had to do some very intense detective work, very expensive, too, and we found that that particular load had ended up as metal in a certain number of cars of a certain make and model. So..."

  "But you did not know which cars exactly?" Childe said. He was beginning to understand.

  "Luckily, they were cars which were transported to this area. We had narrowed the number to about three hundred. And so we started to steal them and leave them in front of your house. We were lucky, very lucky. Three of the cars contained traces of the metal in the grail. They activated when
you went near them, but you couldn't see that because the paint hid the glow, which was extremely feeble, anyway.

  "We junked the cars and had them melted in a yard by a man whom we paid well. We strained out the grail metal, as it were, and used the tiny bits as a detector for those other cars that contained the metal. When one bit of grail is brought close to the other, both glow. We no longer had to leave cars in front of your house, because we knew exactly what group of cars contained the metal. We had to do some more bribing of authorities to get the owners' names, and it was impossible to steal all the cars.

  "But we got enough to act as a seed for the growth of more metal. It is a procedure that is terribly tiring for the Captain. And it exhausts those who take part in the ceremony. But it has to be done."

  Childe did not completely understand. He asked that Pao explain everything to him. This took an hour and a half with several questions still to be asked.

  Nor did he accept Pao's word that the Tocs were the evil ones and the Ogs the good. The Tocs could be evil, but if they were, they were certainly matched by the Ogs.

  However, what the Ogs wanted of him was not something that he had to refuse for the good of Earth. Far from it. If he took the Ogs to their home world, he would be doing his world a vast service. He would never be rewarded by humans for his heroism. In fact, if he were to bring his deeds to their attention, he would be put into an insane asylum.

  There were several disturbing things about being a Captain. One was that he could return to Earth and there arrange to transport the Tocs to their home planet, too. If the Ogs could scrap cars and make a grail, the Tocs could do the same. There were plenty of cars left for that purpose.

  The Ogs must have thought of this possibility. What did they intend doing about it? He hated to ask them, because he was afraid of both the truth and the lies. If they meant to kill him or hold him prisoner on their world, they would not, of course, tell him so. And if he asked them about its, they would know that he would have to be killed or imprisoned. Either way, he would lose.