The Second Reginald Bretnor Megapack

by Reginald Bretnor

  “I think aboudt it,” she replied peremptorily. “I ask die big ladies if they haff vork maybe for a chanitor. Und now—” She pointed at the door. “Oudtside!”

  Then, as her husband hastened to obey, abruptly she commanded, “Vait!” She spoke a word or two in Beetlegoosian to the Captain, who touched her peanut-butter fringe and hustled off, to return moments later with Gustav-Adolf’s catnip mouse.

  “Catnip in der coat pocket iss too shtrong,” she declared. “Meow, meow, meow all night long, efery cat on der ship, so I cannot shleep! Bedter you take avay und giff to Gustav-Adolf, so maybe he eats up.”

  Papa Schimmelhorn received it humbly, secreted it in the one small pocket of his frock, and back out ceremoniously. He found Tuptup waiting for him with some juicy gossip about the new Commander’s horrid second husband, and played yuf with him until bedtime, again allowing him to win almost every game. Then he retired, to toss uneasily and dream dreadful dreams about being taken in a hamper to the vet’s. As the doors were closed and Gustav-Adolf was spending the night on a cushion beside the Mother-Empress, the catnip mouse attracted no intruders, but when two bosuns wakened him rudely at an early hour, he was still groggy and red-eyed, and it took him a few painful moments to understand that his dreams had not come terribly true. The Mother-Empress, he was informed, had in her goodness spoken to the Captain, and the Captain, to oblige her, had issued orders assigning him to daily janitorial duty in the ifk room, where they would now escort him.

  The bosuns waited while he slipped on his frock. They handed him mop, a bucket, and a broom. While Tuptup twittered, asking him whatever he had done to merit such a punishment, he had the presence of mind to conceal his own delight with convincingly despairing groans. They marched him off; and, as he progressed down the corridor, Gustav-Adolf, drawn by the scent of catnip, meowed loudly and fell in line behind him.

  The ifk room occupied the lowest segment of the grapefruit’s central core, and the eight male ifk who pulled the ship along occupied eight huge iron pots set in a circle at its center and securely bolted to the floor. A strange tension and vibration filled the air, and the bosuns made it clear immediately that they did not find the atmosphere congenial. They snapped their orders at him: he was to swab the deck, scrub the outside of the pots, police up after the ifk room crew, behave himself, and keep out from under foot. Then they hurried out, banging the door behind them.

  Papa Schimmelhorn did not even notice his new companions. He stood there goggling at the quivering ifk. They were vaguely mushroom-shaped, at least twelve feet high, at once crystalline, metallic, and disquietingly fleshy. Power radiated from them, and his subconscious, drawing on its extensive knowledge of higher physics, at once realized—even though of course he did not—that, as they strained after the girl ifk stationed so temptingly ahead of them, they were producing profound changes in the very fabric of space-time. His subconscious did not tell him how they managed this, but it did inform him that the ifk-field not only made faster-than-light travel possible, but also provided the specious gravity that made it comfortable.

  Filled with admiration, he patted one of them. “Ach, how vunderful!” he murmured sentimentally. “Alvays luff finds a vay!”

  And, from behind his back, a warm contralto voice answered him, “I’m Lali. Most people think our ifk are horrid, but I think they’re just beautiful, and so does Pukpuk. What did you say to them?”

  Papa Schimmelhorn turned. Lali stood leaning against one of the iron pots, facing him. She was not like other Beetlegoosian women. Her size was indeed heroic, but her hair was thick and golden, she was beautifully rounded in all the proper places, her complexion was clear and creamy—all over. Wotan might very well have considered her a pretty little pussycat. Next to her stood a red-haired, pug-nosed little man a head taller than Tuptup and much more muscular.

  But Papa Schimmelhorn’s traumatic image of Beetlegoosian womanhood prevented him from really seeing her. “Vhat did I say?” he repeated mechanically. “I said luff alvays finds a vay. It iss an old saying on mein planet.”

  She clapped her hands delightedly. “I never thought of it like that! Pukpuk and I were worried when the bosuns told us about your working here. We thought you might turn out to be as fearsome and forbidding as your Mother-Empress, but now I know we’re going to get along just beautifully.”

  Papa Schimmelhorn shuffled his feet in some embarrassment, smiled diffidently, and told them he vas glad to meet them, had lots of experience as a chanitor, and vould keep eferything neat und tidy.

  They stared at him—at his beard, his great stature, his enormous hands—Lali in awe, Pukpuk in awe and envy. They asked to feel his muscles. They commented on Gustav-Adolf’s size and probable ferocity. And Pukpuk proudly displayed his own biceps, which were dutifully admired.

  By the time he had filled his bucket and set about his simple tasks, he felt that, all in all, his progress so far had been favorable. For the first time aboard the ship, he sensed that he was not in the company of instant enemies—and he determined to make the most of it.

  * * * *

  Travel between the stars, even at the moderate faster-than-light velocities afforded by hale and hearty ifk, is at best a tedious business, rather like a fair weather passage to India around the Cape in sailing ship days. There is almost nothing to do but make-work (which is one reason there are bosuns aboard a ship,) and everybody gets on everybody else’s nerves.

  Papa Schimmelhorn, however, remained impervious to these influences, for his single-minded dedication to escaping the possible attentions of the veterinarian drove him to do his job with an efficiency that endeared him to his ifky cohorts, and he devoted every spare moment to learning everything he could about the ifk.

  There wasn’t much. Nobody aboard the ship really gave a hoot about how or why the ifk worked; it was enough that they provided motive power. Their pots were filled with a semi-porous substance with a meteoric look to it, to which Lali and Pukpuk added a daily ration of assorted metals and minerals together with a little water to assure its diffusion, and this in turn encouraged a sparse growth of Beetlegoosian weeds in every pot. The strange thing was that the ifk did not exert any pull directly on the ship; instead, the field they generated seemed somehow to envelop it and all within it into a special little universe where every energy was concentrated on catching up with the lady ifk—there were three of them—who, to Papa Schimmelhorn’s dismayed discouragement, were steerable only from the bridge. He made one plan after another, discarding each as totally impractical, but he did not give up, and gradually be began observing certain ifk characteristics which, even if of no apparent practical value to him, were intriguing.

  For one thing, they seemed to recognize his presence. When he touched one of them or leaned against it, it suddenly would start to vibrate more intensely. Besides that, they fascinated Gustav-Adolf, who took one look at them, made the round of all their pots, arched his back, purred throatily, rubbed against their fleshy surfaces, and sprayed them pungently to inform the world that they were now his domain. They reacted to this treatment just as they did to Papa Schimmelhorn, and both Lali and Pukpuk commented that now the very air in the ifk room felt as though it was simply tingling with excitement.

  Gustav-Adolf visited them several times a day, bringing his mice to devour there. Occasionally, he brought Lambie-pie with him on a guided tour, and once upset Pukpuk and Lali by seducing her publicly and raucously in an ifk-pot. Besides that, he spent much time in the selfsame pot, playing with his catnip mouse, rolling on it, and finally completing its destruction.

  The weeks went by, and Papa Schimmelhorn’s plans progressed not at all. However, a number of catnip seeds sprouted in the pot and burgeoned splendidly, producing plants very different from Earthside catnip but quite as erotically exhilarating to Gustav-Adolf. Their flowers, instead of being blue and small, were large and purple; t
heir leaves were green and crunchy. Papa Schimmelhorn took to nibbling them; so did Pukpuk, and so did Lali. The vessel’s little tomcats, displaying an unwonted temerity, started trying to evade Gustav-Adolf’s watchful eye to reach them. And with one accord, the ifk room crew said nothing about them to the officers, who did not notice them in their untidy camouflage of native weeds.

  * * * *

  In the meantime, the Mother-Empress held her daily court, regaling the big women with fanciful tales of her rule on Earth, listening to their woes and problems, and looking at innumerable pictures of their planet—most of which, she admitted to herself, resembled the poorer sort of Southern California slurb set down in the arid center of West Texas. Had it not been for the still heady taste of absolute power, she would have been horribly bored. As it was, she was beginning to miss the cozy gossip of her weekly kaffee-klatches with Mrs. Hundhammer and her other friends, their sympathy at her recital of Papa Schimmelhorn’s many misdeeds, and her own occasional triumphs when she succeeded in nipping one of his escapades in the bud. Sentimentally, she began to improve the quality of each evening’s bowser-bag, actually going to the trouble of teaching one of the Beetlegoosian officers how to prepare his favorite wiener-schnitzel.

  Gradually, as his diet improved and in the congenial atmosphere of the ifk room, Papa Schimmelhorn’s fears receded. He began to accept his failure to manipulate the ifk philosophically. His natural buoyancy of spirit returned. He sang as he plied his mop and broom. He joked with Pukpuk as they nibbled catnip. And they one day, inevitably, he noticed that Lali was very, very different from her sisters.

  The awareness came to him abruptly. Gott in Himmel! he exclaimed to himself. She iss chust like meine lidtle Prudence, only tvice as big. Maybe in bed she iss also tvice as defer? He nearly dropped his broom. Then, almost instantly, a vision of the wicker hamper and the veterinarian drove the thought away, and he was plunged once more into despondency. Automatically, he picked a sprig of mutant catnip and began to munch it, and presently the vision, though it did not quite disappear, began to lose its force. As he again applied the broom, the likelihood of Mama Schimmelhorn subjecting him to such a fate began to seem more and more remote, and Lali’s sumptuous curves to glow even more enticingly. For some hours then, the struggle between foretaste and foreboding continued to perturb him, with foretaste—reinforced by periodic nibbles at the catnip—eventually prevailing.

  Before the bosuns escorted him off duty for the day, Papa Schimmelhorn had whispered sweetly into Lali’s ear, had pinched and patted her invitingly round bottom at least twice, and had taken one or two other minor liberties. Lali, whose cultural background had not included huge, bearded, aggressive men, squealed coyly and fled behind an ifk-pot on each occasion, but it was obvious that his advances had not been actively resented. Her pulse and respiration definitely had quickened, and her temperature certainly had risen.

  Feeling very much his old self again, Papa Schimmelhorn took special care to be more than ordinarily subservient to the Mother-Empress at handout time, and he prepared himself for bed by chewing a few tasty catnip leaves. His dreams, when finally he fell asleep, would have done credit to a much younger man in a much more secure environment—to the point where several times poor Tuptup wakened in alarm, thinking that the horrid new commander had burst into his bedchamber to deflower him.

  On the morrow, he resumed his new campaign, proceeding tactfully and delicately to avoid alarming the young lady. He felt only minor twinges of his former fear, and these were invariably dispelled by a bite or two of catnip. “Wunderbar!” he would remark to Gustav-Adolf on these occasions. “Vhat a pity ve do nodt haff on Earth for poor old Heinrich!” However, he was much too preoccupied even to suspect the full power of what he had inadvertently created.

  Almost a week went by before he was able to kiss Lali with all the skill and passion she deserved; and another ten days before he could tempt her into a private cubbyhole where he had thoughtfully installed a smuggled mattress. He timed the tryst for the luncheon hour, when Pukpuk always went up to the crewmen’s mess, plied her with super-catnip, bowed her graciously into his bower, and—

  And when things happened, they happened all at once.

  For quite some time, he had been aware of Pukpuk only as a minor impediment in the background, and had failed completely to observe the very obvious signs of jealousy displayed by his small companion, or the ferocity with which he gnawed his catnip and bristled his red eyebrows. Nor did he know that Lali had made the error of taunting him with her new conquest, and that Pukpuk, consequently, instead of heading for the mess, had made a beeline for the Mother-Empress’ hall of audience, swallowing his pride and picking up Tuptup on the way to help him get past any officers surrounding her. They made their entry at a singularly auspicious time. Mama Schimmelhorn, from her throne, was beaming serenely on the Captain and her officers, who were almost capering with delight before her. On her lap, she held Lambie-pie, whom the Captain had just placed there, after proclaiming the stupendous event that had just occurred.

  “Oh, thank you! thank you, Your Voluptuousness! You’ve solved our problem—at least part of it. Look at dear Lambie-pie! Oh, Your Delightfulness, she—she’s going to have kittens!”

  Mama Schimmelhorn had taken the tidings in her stride. “At home, it happens all der time,” she told them, “but here iss different. Veil—” She smiled indulgently. “—probably it vas Gustav-Adolf, der naughty boy! By him, Mitzi Hundhammer’s black-und-vhite kitty-cat alvays has six, und vunce sefen. He iss so big und shtrong!”

  At that point, Tuptup whispered in the Captain’s ear; and the Captain, looking horribly shocked, took Pukpuk aside and listened to his story. She conferred at length with her senior officers. Mama Schimmelhorn, aware that something had destroyed their festive mood, stared down at them enquiringly. Then the Captain, abjectly, haltingly, and with many an apology, told her exactly what was going on.

  Having been assured that her husband was on duty with by far the least attractive woman on the ship, and that furthermore he was constantly being chaperoned by the pugnacious Pukpuk, she had never thought to question the assignment; and of course any visit by the Mother-Empress to the ifk room would have been unthinkable. Now, suddenly, she found herself again betrayed. Rage swept away her homesickness, her sentimental leniency toward him. She stood, upsetting Lambie-pie, who fled with a frightened mew. Never before—not even at her first appearance in the snap-net—had the Captain and her officers beheld a sight so awe-inspiring. She raised her black umbrella like a saber.

  “Lead der vay!” she ordered.

  She was at once obeyed. Without a word, the procession went out into the passageway. Silently, it descended down one companionway after another. At the door to the ifk room, she brushed aside her escort, and walked in.

  Neither Papa Schimmelhorn nor Lali even realized that she was there until the point of her umbrella caught him in the ribs.

  “Oudt from der closet!” came her terrible voice. “Again, anoder naked voman! Shtand up!”

  As poor Lali squealed in fear, and while he did his best to get himself untangled, the umbrella kept up its wicked prodding.

  “Pull down der petticoat!” commanded Mama Schimmelhorn. “Dirty old man, you should be ashamed!” She caught her first real glimpse of Lali. “So! Efen on Beetlegoose iss pretty pussycats! Veil, this time ve fix!”

  With one final prod, she stepped back, gestured to the bosuns to take over, and swept majestically out of the room. The bosuns, assisted by their officers, leaped willingly to their duty; and Papa Schimmelhorn, ungently and ingloriously, was dragged off to his trial.

  * * * *

  The trial was swift and merciless. Never in the history of Beetlegoosian civilization, explained the Captain, had so dastardly a crime been perpetrated. Only during the dzimdzig rite were men permitted even to pretend to take an amatory i
nitiative. It had been thus ever since their lawgiver, Lovely-Madame Mother-President Yeelil Huh—she who had first brewed the shrimpy gruel—had shown men their proper place in the scheme of things three hundred years before. And the Empress’ cat-bearer had compounded his felony by assaulting Lali, who was really nothing more than a retarded child.

  At this, the Mother-Empress snorted, but she did not interrupt.

  The Captain paused dramatically. She explained that she never would be so presumptuous as to recommend a proper punishment. However, she declared, if any of their own men ever so much as contemplated such a deed, purely as a precautionary measure she would at once have him altered.

  Papa Schimmelhorn’s knowledge of the language of the master sex was still imperfect, but this he understood. He bellowed hideously. He writhed and struggled in the bosun’s grasp. He dropped down to his knees and begged for mercy, pleading incoherently and hysterically trying to think up effective arguments. What would Pastor Hundhammer have to say of such a barbarity? he cried. And only think how all her friends vould shnicker because her husband now vas fat und lazy und—

  Mama Schimmelhorn paid no attention. Smiling a cruel and calculating smile, she raised two fingers in a scissors gesture and said, “Shnip!”

  “We don’t have to wait till we get home, Your Gloriousness,” the Captain said. “My pharmacist’s mate has done it lots of times on tomcats, and I’m sure she could manage perfectly. Shall we take him there right now?”

  The Mother-Empress appeared to cogitate, while her husband, still on his knees, wept and pleaded. Finally, narrowing her eyes, she gave her verdict. “Nein,” she declared. “For now ve make him vait. He von’t go any place. Ve haff him by die—” She broke off with a chilling laugh. “Anyhow, I haff for him anoder punishment…Shut up der yelling!” she ordered Papa Schimmelhorn. “Or else I giff der bumbershoot!”