“No, not even for Irene! We’ll get her out some other way. Don’t even talk about it.”
“But if we just got back home we could—”
“No! Do you know what the Ossps would do with that stuff? No,” she said, and got up out of our bed and, clutching a dress in front of her but otherwise bare, stalked out of our room to hunt up some other place to spend that night.
And left me behind, tumescent and angry. She hadn’t even given me a chance to argue.
If she had let me I would have explained to her that I had had plenty of time to think the matter over carefully. She didn’t. I couldn’t blame her for having some reservations about the Ossp’s proposition. I had plenty of my own. I certainly was not keen about cooperating in whatever it was that the Ossps wanted to do with human semen and ova. I knew the Ossps’ reputation. The first thing I did was check in the book Canduccio had given to me to make sure, and, yes, they were the galaxy’s specialists in genetic manipulation.
It infuriated me that she could think I would participate in such a plan without careful study and, if possible, some sort of guarantee from the Ossps. I wasn’t lighthearted about the prospect of permitting human babies—who would be my own children, after all!—to be generated in some alien laboratory, for purposes I did not want even to imagine.
So she had no right to go off in a huff that way, without even letting me explain. It was simply unfair.
I was steaming.
The funny thing was that the more I steamed the more I began to think that this particular offer, while not a very good one, was quite possibly the only offer of its kind I was ever going to get.
It had been easy enough for me to decide I didn’t want to go back to Earth as long as it was impossible.
Now it wasn’t impossible anymore. Only very, very— well—risky.
I asked myself: Did I really want to go back to Earth? Loud and strong the answer came back: Yes. Not just for my own sake. For the sake of all the captive humans on Narabedla—never mind that most of them didn’t seem to object to their enforced captivity—and especially for the sake of bringing to justice Mr. Henry Davidson-Jones and all his crew.
Then, I asked myself, was I willing to do whatever had to be done to get there? There wouldn’t be any easy choices, I told myself. Nobody was going to help me escape simply out of the kindness of his heart—even if he had a heart, about which, in a number of cases, I was doubtful. I would have to take risks. I would have to do things that were—well— I admitted it to myself, morally objectionable. Was I serious enough to accept that?
The answer was yes.
So then, I explained to myself, I should put qualms aside. The end would justify the means. You couldn’t fight against the hordes of Attila the Hun by the rules of the Marquis of Queensberry.
At that time, in that mood, all those things made sense to me—not least, I think, because Tricia had left me not only angry but frustratedly horny.
It was a second puberty. True, I wasn’t exactly a youth; but my glands were reborn, and they were flooding my bloodstream with all the itches of fresh testosterone. I was ready to join a street gang, fire-bomb a police station, charge a machine-gun nest; I was the typical rough, randy, riotous young male, looking for a turf to fight for.
In a calmer mood I would have been more rational. For starters, I would have forgotten all about the Ossp ambassador and started trying to enlist help from nicer sources. For starters, there was no doubt that everybody in the opera troupe would want to help get Irene Madigan out of the freeze. United, we could almost certainly cajole Sam Shipperton into finding her some kind of a job—she’d been at least an actress, or anyway almost an actress, hadn’t she? Then we should be able to find even more potent allies. Among us we should be able to persuade Binnda to help. Maybe Barak. Possibly Tsooshirrisip, or some other of the aliens—if they could get their minds off the crisis caused by the probe accident long enough to do something constructive. And then there was the consideration that, after all, I wasn’t really doing so very badly in the Narabedla captivity. I was singing. I was getting rich. Before long there was every prospect I would be famous.
None of that deterred me. I wasn’t thinking along constructive lines.
The funny thing was that I knew all this was happening. I knew who I was. I wasn’t any comic-book superhero. I was L. Knollwood Stennis, CPA and opera star, a steady, mature (fairly mature) adult human being. That knowledge changed nothing. My glands had taken over. I sat there, with my legs dangling over the edge of that lumpy, empty bed, plotting ways to talk Tricia into donating a few ova for the cause—after all, what other use did she have for them? … or, failing that, trying my luck at recruiting Sue-Mary or Maggie Murk … or, failing that, wilder stratagems still, like getting my costume sword out of the Don Giovanni prop bin and putting it to the throat of that nasty little batty bit of business, the Ossp ambassador, and forcing him to get me into the go-box to Earth… and then, once I was back home, leading squads of cops and FBI agents on a raid of Henry Davidson-Jones’s yacht, to do hand-to-hand battle with his troops and Kekkety servants and guards.
I think I would have been happy for a city to loot. But Narabedla would do until one came along.
I fell asleep in such musings of combat … and woke up to find they were real.
I wasn’t alone in my bedroom anymore. It wasn’t Tricia Madigan who was there. It wasn’t any human at all. The people dragging me furiously out of my bed, with their damp, chill, scratchy claws, were Hrunwians, whistling and chirping angrily. The one talking to me in English wasn’t even a Hrunwian. It was one of the Mother’s little bedbugs, rearing up on its hind legs to shrill at me, “Knollwood Stennis! You are under arrest! You have violated your terms of employment and must leave this planet at once!”
Ten minutes later I was being shoved into the big longdistance go-box. There wasn’t any nonsense about being allowed to take my personal belongings. I was still in my pajamas. The Hrunwians giving me the bum’s rush did not seem to be opera fans. They didn’t let go of me, and they weren’t gentle. When they released me from their wet, cold grip it was only to turn me over to a clutch of the Mother’s bedbugs. “Get in,” shrilled the English-speaking one, while a couple of others butted me inside and another scuttled up into the little overhead cubicle to gaze down at me.
The trip didn’t take long, but it was long enough for me to realize that I was in the deep stuff. “Where am I going?” I asked. I didn’t expect an answer, and didn’t get one. But when the door opened there was Binnda, waving his ropy limbs in despair.
“Oh, Nolly,” he cried. “How could you do this to me? Have you no loyalty to the company? Trafficking in germ plasm with the Ossp?—and you know what they will do if they get it! And—oh, my dear boy!—what about our season? We won’t be able to do anything but Idomeneo!”
I didn’t answer any of that. I hardly heard it, because I was staring around. The first thing that caught my eye was a batch of Kekketies at a silvery machine that looked ominously familiar. The second was even more familiar. It was Conjur Kowalski, seated in a chair.
He didn’t look up to greet me.
He didn’t move at all. His face showed anger, apprehension and disgust, and his eyes glared wearily at nothing. And would go on glaring in just that way for a good long time, because I didn’t have to touch Conjur, and feel the slicky, oily something that surrounded him, to know that he was captured in slow time.
“Oh, God,” I said.
Binnda hissed in despairing agreement. “There’s a chair for you, my boy,” he pointed out. “I suppose you might as well sit down.”
I managed to ask, “How long?”
He twisted his upper body, as though shrugging. “Who can tell? Conjur admitted the whole thing—of course, once that Eye had been absorbed by its Mother, there wasn’t any way to hush it up, anyway. And with everything in such a chaotic state … Ah, well,” he finished, “we’d better get on with it.” He leaned forward to giv
e me a sad hug, then got quickly out of the way as the Kekketies began fussing with their machine.
“Anyway,” he said consolingly, “everyone knows you are quite ignorant, even for an aboriginal from Earth. Perhaps that will be taken into consideration.”
And that was the last I heard from him, because he, and everything around him, disappeared.
CHAPTER
39
What does being thrown into slow time feel like?
It feels like nothing much at all, except that everything around you goes crazy. There was a quick flash of orange-yellow light. Then something went wrong with my eyes. The Kekketies disappeared. Binnda was gone, leaving only a faint blur of motion to show where he had been. Something slammed against my shoulders, knocking me brutally against the back of my chair. I felt as though I were in a rocket liftoff as, chair and all, I was moved—moved again—set down. No, not set down, I was dashed down, chair and all.
And I stood up out of the chair and looked around, as Conjur did the same thing from the chair beside me.
I was in a place I had never seen before. It was a big room, maybe thirty feet square, furnished like the ambulatory patients’ lounge in a rather nice hospital. It seemed really quite incongruously pleasant, considering what it was. Two elderly men were playing gin over in a corner, pausing to look up at the new arrivals, namely Conjur and me. Ephard Joyce was sitting on a couch, his head buried in his hands. There was a table along one wall with sandwich materials and a coffeepot, and a plump young man wearing a gold-braided uniform that looked as though it had come from World War I was lifting a cup to his lips. Corridors went off the room, and I could see, through an open door, a little bedroom with a tall, dark woman sitting on the edge of the bed and yawning.
I say I saw all this, but only in the way that you see a movie set on TV when you’ve just switched into the channel. I didn’t make a careful examination of it. I was too busy looking at a young woman in shocked conversation with a short Oriental man. She (as best I remembered) looked very much like Irene Madigan.
It was she, all right. She turned toward me, eyes wide and wondering. She looked astonished, and shaken, and as though she were about to cry.
I had no doubt of what had happened. We were all in cold storage.
My big worry was how cold I was going to get—cold as in dead, maybe? Were they just holding me temporarily until Dr. Boddadukti or some even worse monster came to sink his fangs into my throat?
I couldn’t believe that. I didn’t want to believe it; but I reasoned that if they were going to make a Jerry Harper-type spectacle of me they’d do it in Execution Square.
All these things flashed through my mind and reached my senses at once. Very quickly.
“Nolly?” said Irene Madigan inquiringly, coming toward me.
“It’s me, all right,” I told her. “I’m sorry to see you here.”
The little Oriental man was peering over her shoulder. “Who are you?” he asked politely.
I didn’t get a chance to answer, because Irene was saying, “Is it true? What Gwan Lee has been telling me? We’ve all been captured by flying-saucer people?”
“She’s quite upset,” Gwan Lee said sympathetically. “I suppose you’re feeling pretty shaken up, too. You’ll want some clothes; but if you just put a note on the skry they’ll bring them to you before you know it.”
“And why are you in your pajamas?” Irene asked plaintively.
I held up my hands to slow her down. “It’s a long story,” I began. I started to tell it to her, but I didn’t get very far. She made a soft, sobbing sound, and reached out for me. I put my arms around her. “It’ll be all right,” I whispered to her hair, holding her tight. She just sobbed again. I saw Ephard Joyce looking up at us from his couch, and Conjur standing by his chair, looking angrily amused.
“What’s going to happen now?” I asked Conjur, still holding Irene Madigan.
He shrugged. “We stay here, is all. You got any better ideas?”
“Well,” I began, patting Irene’s back soothingly, “I guess—”
I didn’t finish the sentence because something hammered at my chest, where Irene was snuggled against it; I felt my arms thrust away from around her. There was an instant, almost subliminal orange-yellow flash—
My arms were still outstretched, but there was no one inside them. Irene Madigan was gone.
I gaped at Conjur. “What the hell?” I shouted.
He opened his mouth to respond….
Whatever it was he was saying, I didn’t hear it. There was another of those flashes, and two Kekketies were beside me, holding me up, while another was turning off his silvery machine.
An Eye of the Mother was peering up at me. “L. Knollwood Stennis,” it piped, “the Mother wishes to see you.”
I was out of slow time.
I stared about. Conjur was still opening his mouth to address the space where I had been, frozen still. All the others were frozen, too.
I never got to finish any of those conversations. That’s not surprising. There’s a limit to how much you can say in something less than a minute … or (depending on how you look at it) somewhere around a year and a half.
CHAPTER
40
The bedbug wouldn’t say anything else to me, but when it pushed the hanging bead curtain aside to let me into the Mother’s chamber Binnda was there, pacing nervously back and forth. The bedbug quietly scurried to the edge of the Mother’s pool and sat there, quietly waiting, next to a Purry. No, not a Purry; it was my own dear friend, because it whispered, “Hello, Nolly.”
Binnda greeted me too, but sadly. “Oh, my dear boy,” he said, “how good it is to see you again! So much has happened! But quickly, you mustn’t keep the Mother waiting, off with those garments and in, please.”
“But I want to know what—”
“Nolly! In. She’s the Mother,” he said sternly, and wouldn’t answer any questions.
Things had been happening too fast for me. My resistance was low; I did as I was ordered, though not easily. Clothes are a kind of armor; when you don’t have them on your defenses are weakened. I didn’t like that, but I didn’t see any choice.
A couple of those flying things buzzed me as I lowered myself into the Mother’s shallow, smelly pool. I swatted them out of the way (one landed in range of the Mother’s questing tentacles, and was immediately swept up into that obscene-looking orange mouth). I turned to Binnda for instructions.
“Closer,” Binnda urged. “But not too close, of course.”
I had no intention of disobeying that part. I waded slowly toward her. Little fishy things were nibbling at my knees and tenderer places, until I got within range of the Mother’s tentacles. Then they stayed away.
The Mother took hold of me at shoulder, waist; and thigh and tugged me gently closer. The ring of tiny eyes regarded me silently as I tried my best not to move. Or even breathe.
Then the Mother began to moan in a gurgly sort of way— most of the time her speaking organ was under water. Her little bedbug translated from the edge of the pool.
“The Ossps are a race most foul,” she said (through the bedbug). “They do not voluntarily abide by the agreed rules of association. They have in the past made war, viciously and harmfully, until they were defeated. Then they promised to refrain from antisocial acts. But even now they violate the accords.”
“I know,” I said.
There was a sudden flurry around my legs. One of the little marine animals had incautiously come close enough to nibble at my knee. It was a mistake. Instantly the Mother’s tentacle slipped away from me and whipped around the thing, dragging it into her huge maw. The Mother went on imperturbably, and so did the bedbug. “I assure you, Knollwood Stennis, to deal with the Ossps is to risk very grave consequences to yourself and to the primitive planet you come from.”
“I just wanted to go home!” I said bitterly.
The Mother’s tentacles stiffened around me for a moment as the b
edbug translated that. Then the tentacles relaxed again as the Mother moaned at me again.
“If that is so,” the bedbug translated, “why did you not simply ask me?”
I gaped at those unblinking eyes. “But—” I managed. “But—but that was impossible! Henry Davidson-Jones wouldn’t allow it!”
The tentacles whipped wildly about for a moment, and the Mother’s huge, bright-colored barrel body shook with bubbly moans.
“The Mother is laughing,” Binnda explained, his own voice sounding strained. “But really, my dear boy, what a foolish thing to say!” And he added a string of ho-ho-hos. Even Purry was chuckling softly.
Worse than being threatened is being laughed at. I suppose I was still on an adrenaline-testosterone high. “Cut this crap out,” I stormed, turning to face them … and completely forgetting to move cautiously so near those long, striped tentacles of the Mother.
I had never felt the full strength in the Mother’s tentacles before. They were like wire cables, lashing around me and jerking me toward that hideous, always-chomping mouth.
I yelled. I struggled. I squirmed as hard as I could; I battered against the many-colored, cold, clammy, solid flesh of the Mother, splashing up a Niagara of froth.
None of that stopped her for a moment, or even slowed her down.
It had been very foolish of me, I realized, to set off the feeding reflexes of the Mother. It was one more blunder, and probably the last one I would ever have a chance to make. There was nothing that could save me—
In that I was wrong.
There was a splash and a thud. Something heavy crunched against me, right between me and the Mother’s remorseless mouth. The tentacles slipped away from me and caught it.
It was Purry, making noises out of all his mouths as the tentacles deserted me to wrap around the plump, ocarinashaped body of my friend.
“Nolly! Get out while you can!” Binnda yelled, running up and down agitatedly along the sides of the pool. “Are you insane?”
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