He could not see the girl at all well, but she used the scent which Miss Krumpig had recently discarded.
“Where are you taking me? What are you going to do with me?”
“I’m going to abduct you.”
“I . . . I’ll scream. I warn you. I’ll scream. I’ll—” Abruptly she lowered her voice and slid over in the seat until she was touching him. “You wouldn’t hurt me, would you:
He did not care for the scent, but he was forced to admit that it had a certain effectiveness. “Who said anything about hurting you?” he said gruffly. “All I’m doing is abducting you.”
On the other side of town from the beach, Gilbert Iles finally parked the car in a quiet street. The girl turned to him expectantly. The faint light of the dashboard cast heavy shadows around her face, giving it a half-seen allure that was almost beauty.
“Get out,” he said firmly.
She gasped. “Get out— Oh, I get it. This is where you live.” She got out and left the door open for him. He reached over and shut it.
“Consider yourself,” he said, “abducted.”
It was five after one as he drove away. The outraged yelp of the abandoned girl followed him. It was five after one and his neck was still whole. But he did not look forward to a lifetime career of abduction.
“Is your cold better?” Tom Andrews started to ask as his partner came into the office, but broke off and gaped at the colorful ruin of his face. “What in the name of seven devils have you been up to?”
“Just a spot of sin,” said Gilbert Iles. “And it was only one devil.”
“It’ll wear off,” said Andrews easily. “You take it easy today. I’ll handle the appearance on the Irving appeal. You can’t go into court . . . er . . . looking like that. A spot of sin, huh? You’ll have to give me the address of that spot—for when I’m on vacation,” he added pointedly.
Miss Krumpig gaped, too, when she brought in the morning mail. But she politely covered her amazement with small talk. “Isn’t it hot today, Mr. lies? My! I wish I were at the north pole!” lies jumped. “Don’t do that!”
“Don’t do what, Mr. lies?”
“Don’t make foolish wishes. You never know what they’ll lead to. Don’t ever let me hear you do such a thing again!”
He spent a busy day working on papers and seeing no one; a nice, dull, drab day. He got home in good time, wondering what Linda would have for dinner and what sin he could manage to force himself to commit that night. Not abduction again; definitely not abduction. Barratry seemed promising; now just how could he go about—
Linda wore a warning frown as she greeted him. “People,” she said. “Strange people. I don’t think they’re possible clients but they insist on seeing you. They’ve been here for hours and now there isn’t any more beer left and—” lies felt a trembling premonition. “Stick with me,” he said.
The premonition was justified. He couldn’t have sworn to the face of the abducted girl, but that was certainly her scent. How could she— Then it clicked. Simple for her to read his name and address on the steering rod. And beside her, surrounded by a barricade of empty beer bottles, sat the biggest man that Gilbert Iles had ever seen. He looked like a truck driver; but the truck, to be worthy of him, would have to be huger than anything now on the roads.
“There he is!” the girl shrilled.
The giant looked up, and with no wordy prolog drained the bottle in his hand and hurled it at Iles’s head. It missed by millimeters and shattered on the wall. It was followed by the giant’s fist, which did not miss.
Gilbert Iles found himself sitting on the table in the next room. His ears were ringing with more than Linda’s scream.
“Attaboy, Maurice!” the abductee chortled.
Maurice grinned and visibly swelled. “That was just a starter.”
Linda stepped firmly in front of him. “This is a fine way to act! You come into my house and drink up all my beer and then you sock my husband! Why, a demon’s a gentleman alongside of you. Take that!” And she slapped his vast round face. She had to stand on tiptoe to do it.
“Look, lady,” Maurice mumbled almost apologetically. “Thanks for the beer, sure. And that may be your husband, but he insulted my sister. Now let me at him.” Gilbert Iles tried to get off the table, but his head swam and his knees wonkled. He folded his legs under him and sat like Sriberdegibit, feeling as though he were changing size quite as persistently.
“Any jerk what insults my sister,” Maurice announced, “gets what’s coming to him. And that’s me.”
Linda half-turned to her husband. “Did you, Gil? Oh— But you said you wouldn’t. You promised you wouldn’t.”
“Did I what?” lies held on to the table with both hands; it showed signs of turning into the fringe-beard’s magic carpet.
“Did you in . . . insult her? And after yesterday afternoon—”
“I did not,” lies snapped. “I utterly deny it. I did not insult her.”
“Oh, no?” The abductee advanced on him. “I’ve never been so thoroughly insulted in all my life.”
“Oh, Gil—”
“Look, lady,” Maurice protested, “I got a job to do. You go run along and get dinner or something. You won’t like to watch this.”
“But I did not! I swear it! I simply abducted her.”
The girl’s fingernails flashed at him. “Oh, yeah? Tfiat’s what you said. You tell a girl you’re going to abduct her and you carry her off to hell and gone and leave her stranded and never do a thing to her and if that isn’t an insult I’d like to know what is.”
“And I ain’t standing for it, see?” Maurice added.
Linda sighed happily. “Oh, Gil darling! I knew you didn’t.”
Maurice picked her up with one enormous paw and set her aside, not urgently. “Stick around if you want to, lady. But that ain’t gonna stop me. And thanks for the beer.”
Gilbert Iles’s intention was to slip off the other side of the table. But his wonkling knees betrayed him, and he slipped forward, straight into a left that came from Maurice’s shoelaces.
The magic carpet rose, drifting high over the Arabian sands. All the perfumes of Arabia were wafted sweetly about it. The carpet had another passenger, a houri whose face was veiled but who was undisputably Miss Krumpig. Though markedly affectionate, she kept calling him Maurice and telling him to go to it. Then out of a sandstorm emerged a jinni driving a truck. The truck drove straight at him and connected. The magic carpet turned into a handkerchief in the center of which there was a lake. Upon investigation he saw that this lake was blood and all from his own nose. He was an old man, an old man with a fringe beard, and who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him? The jinni appeared again bearing an enormous mammoth tusk which twanged. The jinni raised the tusk and brought it down on his head. A woman’s voice kept calling, “Darjeeling,” or was it, “darling”?
There was a moment’s pause, and Gilbert Iles heard the cry clearly. It was, “Darling, say it. Say it!”
He managed to ask, “Say what?” after spitting out a tooth or two.
“Say it! I can’t because it wouldn’t work for me and I don’t know what might happen but you say it and they’ll go away because I’ve broken three vases on him and he just doesn’t notice. So, oh, darling, say it!”
He was back on the carpet and so was the jinni. This time the jinni was wearing the tusk in his jaw and he looked amazingly like—
“Sriberdegibit!” Gilbert groaned.
Then the jinni and the magic carpet and everything faded away to peaceful black.
Gilbert Iles opened his eyes in a darkened bedroom. There was an ice bag on his head and a smell of iodine and liniment clinging about him. He tried to move and decided it might be better to wait a day or so. He opened his mouth and heard something that sounded like a Voder in need of repair.
Through the hall door came in light and Linda. He managed to turn his head— and saw squatting on the bedside table the form
of Sriberdegibit.
“Are you all right, dear?” Linda asked.
He said, “What do you think?” or a noise that meant as much, and then stared a silent question at the demon.
“I know,” said Linda. “He won’t go away unless you dismiss him. But it did work. When you said his name, there he was, and my! you should have seen Maurice and that woman clear out of there!”
“Sissies,” said Sriberdegibit.
Undulant demons are more than a sick head can stand. “Begone!” said Gilbert Iles.
The demon shook his head. “Uh-uh. What’s the use? I’d have to be back to strangle you in five minutes anyway.”
lies jumped, and every muscle ached with the motion. He managed to look at the bedside electric clock. It was 12:55.
“I didn’t want to wake you,” said Linda. “I never thought of that— You . . . you’ve been good today?”
He looked the question at the demon dourly. “Like one of those cocky angels,” he asserted.
“Then, you, What’s-your-name, you’re going to have to . . . to do things to him at one o’clock?”
“On the dot.”
“But, Gil darling, can’t you quick— I mean isn’t there something you can do? I know you practically can’t stir from where you are, but isn’t there some way you can sin just in your mind? I’m sure there is. Work out a plan for barratry; doesn’t planning a sin count? Can’t you— Oh, Gil, you can’t let yourself get garroted with a snake tail!”
Enforced physical inaction had stimulated Iles’s mind. While Linda pleaded, he was performing intricate calculations worthy of a specialist in canon law. Now he summoned up every whit of his power of trained articulation to make his words clear. They sounded inhuman, but intelligible.
“Sriberdegibit, is suicide a sin?”
“Oh, Gil dear, you wouldn’t— Where would be the advantage—”
“Hush, Linda. Is it?”
“Yes. It’s a sin against God or Man. It’s a sin against the Giver of Life and against Life itself. It’s what you’d call real good solid sin.”
“Very well. You may go, Srib.”
“Huh? Like fun you say. It’s 12:59 and a half, and here’s where I come in.” The tail twitched, then slowly began to reach out. Linda fought to repress a scream.
“Wait.” lies had never spoken so fast under such difficulty. “Suicide is a sin, right?”
“Right.”
“If I refuse to commit a sin, I die, right?”
“Right.”
“If I die through my own deliberate act, that’s suicide, right?”
“Right.”
“Then if I refuse to perform my daily sin, I am committing suicide, which is a sin. There, begone!”
The tail hesitated a fraction of an inch from Iles’s throat. A very slow take spread over the demon’s shifting face. He twanged his tusk twice. Then, “Why I . . . I’ll be God blessed!” he said, and vanished.
“You know, darling,” Linda said later, “it hasn’t been so bad after all. You can take your vacation now and get all healed up again and then you’ll never know you were ever cursed. In fact you’ll be better than ever, because now you’ll drive carefully and you won’t spread scandal and you won’t do anything shady in your profession and—” She paused and stared at him rapturously. “My! I have a brilliant husband!”
He nodded inarticulate thanks.
“That was the most beautiful thinking. Why, now there won’t be any stopping you. You’ll go on and you’ll be attorney general and governor and a justice of the supreme court and— No. No. I don’t really want that. I wish—”
“Oh, oh!” Gilbert Iles groaned warningly.
“I wish,” she continued unchecked, “that we could just go on living quietly, but very, very, very happily.”
There was a wimp present.
The Ambassadors
Nothing so much amazed the First Martian Expedition—no, not even the answer, which should have been so obvious from the first, to the riddle of the canals—as the biological nature of the Martians themselves.
Popular fiction and scientific thought alike had conditioned the members of the expedition to expect either of two possibilities: a race more or less like ourselves, if possibly high-domed and bulge-chested; or a swarm of tentacled and pulpy horrors.
With either the familiar or the monstrously unfamiliar we were prepared to make contact; we had given no thought to the likeness-with-a-difference which we encountered.
It was on the night of the Expedition’s official welcome to Mars, after that exchange of geometrical and astronomical diagrams which had established for each race the intelligence of the other, that the zoologist Professor Hunyadi classified his observations.
That the Martians were mammals was self-evident. Certain points concerning their teeth, their toes and the characteristic tufts of hair on their cheekbones led Professor Hunyadi to place them, somewhat to the bewilderment of his non-zoological colleagues, as Fissipede arctoids. Further technicalities involving such matters as the shape of the nozzle and the number and distribution of the nipples led him from the family Canidae through the genus Canis to the species Lupus.
“My ultimate classification, gentlemen,” he asserted, “must be Canis lupus sapiens. In other words, as man may be said to be an intelligent ape, we are here confronted with a race of intelligent wolves.”
Some Martian zoologist was undoubtedly reaching and expounding analogous conclusions at that same moment; and the results were evident when the First Interplanetary Conference resumed its wordless and symbolic deliberations on the following day.
For if it was difficult for our representatives to take seriously the actions of what seemed a pack of amazingly clever and well-trained dogs, it was all but impossible for the Martians to find anything save amusement in the antics of a troupe of space-touring monkeys.
An Earthman, in those days, would use “You cur!” as an indication of contempt; to a Martian, anyone acidressed as “You primate!” was not only contemptible but utterly ridiculous.
By the time the First Conference was over, and the more brilliant linguists of each group had managed to master something of the verbal language of the other, traces of a reluctant mutual respect had begun to dawn. This was particularly true of the Earthmen, who had at heart a genuine, if somewhat patronizing, fondness for dogs (and even wolves), whereas the Martians had never possessed any warmth of feeling for monkeys (and certainly not for great apes).
Possibly because he had first put his finger on the cause, it was Professor Hunyadi who was especially preoccupied, on the return voyage, with the nagging thought that some fresh device must be found if the two races were to establish their interplanetary intercourse on a solid footing. It is fortunate indeed that the Professor had, as he tells us in his Memoirs, spent so many happy hours at the feet of his Transylvanian grandmother; for thus he alone, of that crew of superb specialists, was capable of conceiving the solution that was to revolutionize the history of two planets.
The world press alternated between roars of laughter and screams of rage when the returned zoologist issued his eloquent plea, on a world-wide video hookup, for volunteer werewolves as ambassadors to the wolves of Mars.
Barbarous though it may seem to us now, mankind was at that time divided into three groups: those who disbelieved in werewolves; those who hated and feared werewolves; and, of course, those who were werewolves.
The fortunate position of three hitherto unsuspected individuals of this last category served to still both the laughter and the rage of the press.
Professor Garou of Duke University received from Hunyadi’s impassioned plea the courage at last to publish his monumental thesis (based on the earlier researches of Williamson) proving once and for all that the lycanthropic metamorphosis involves nothing supernatural, but a strictly scientific exercise of psychokinetic powers in the rearrangement of molecular structure—an exercise at which, Garou admitted, he was himself adept.
&nb
sp; This revelation in turn emboldened Cardinal Mezzoluppo, a direct descendant of the much misinterpreted Wolf of Gubbio, to confess the sting of the flesh which had long buffeted him, and taking his text from II Corinthians 11:30, pro me autem nihil gloriabor nisi in infirmitatibus meis, magnificently to proclaim the infinite wisdom of God in establishing on Earth a long misunderstood and persecuted race which could now at last serve man in his first great need beyond Earth.
But it was neither the scientific demonstration that one need not disbelieve nor the religious exhortation that one need not hate and fear that converted the great masses of mankind. That conversion came when Streak, the Kanine King of the Kinescope, the most beloved quadruped in the history of show business, announced that he had chosen an acting career as a wolf-dog only because the competition was less intense than among human video-actors (“and besides,” he is rumored to have added privately, “you meet fewer bitches. . . and their sons”).
The documentary which Streak commissioned for his special use, A day in the life of the average werewolf removed the last traces of disbelief and fear, and finally brought forth the needed volunteers, no longer hesitant to declare themselves lest they be shot down with silver bullets or even forced to submit to psychoanalysis.
As a matter of fact, this new possibility of public frankness cured immediately many of the analysts’ most stubborn cases, hitherto driven to complex escapes by the necessity of either frustrating their very nature by never changing or practicing metamorphosis as a solitary vice.
The problem now became one, not of finding volunteers, but of winnowing them. Fortunately, a retired agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (whose exploits as a werewolf of good will have been recounted elsewhere) undertook the task of cleaning out the criminal element, which statistico-psychology has since established as running no higher (allowing for the inevitable historical effects of repression and discrimination) than in other groups; and Professor Garou devised the requisite aptitude tests.
The Compleat Boucher Page 20
