And as he was immersed in righteous indignation at man's inhumanity, not so much to mankind as to Abu ibn Assur, a great roaring sound tore through the desert prison, followed by a terrible, hot, dry, sand-stabbing wind. Abu screamed and covered his eyes-- too late, however, and the sand ripped them open, and the hot air dried them out.
That was why he didn't see the hole in the outside wall of cell 23, which held a political prisoner condemned to die the next morning for having murdered his wife-- normally not a political crime, except when the wife was also the daughter of somebody who could make phone calls and get people put in prison.
That was why he didn't see hig supervisor come in, discover cell 23 empty, and then aim his submachine gun at Abu as the first step to setting up the hapless guard as the official scapegoat for this fiasco. Abu did, however, hear and feel the discharge of the gun, and wondered vaguely what had happened as he died.
Mklikluln stretched the new arms and legs (the fourness of the body, the twosidedness, the overwhelming sexuality of it all were amazing, all were delightful) and walked around his little spacecraft. And the fiveness and tenness of the fingers and toes! (What we could have done with fingers and toes! except that we might not have developed thoughttalk, then, and would have been tied to the vibration of air as are these people.) Inside the ship he could see his own body melting as the hot air of the Kansas farmland raised the temperature above the melting point of ice.
He had broken the law himself, but could see no way around it. Necessary as his act had been, and careful as he had been to steal the body of a man doomed anyway to die, he knew that his own people would try him, convict him, and execute him for depriving an intelligent being of life. But in the meantime, it was a new body and a whole range of sensations. He moved the tongue over the teeth. He made the buzzing in his throat that was used for communication. He tried to speak.
It was impossible. Or so it seemed, as the tongue and lips and jaw tried to make the Arabic sounds the reflex pathways were accustomed to, while Mklikluln tried to speak in the language that had dominated the airwaves.
He kept practicing as he carefully melted down his ship (though it was transparent to most electromagnetic spectra, it might still cause comment if found) and by the time he made his way into the nearby city, he was able to communicate fairly well. Well enough, anyway, to contract with the Kansas City Development Corporation for the manufacture of the machine he had devised; with Farber, Farber, and Maynard to secure patents on every detail of the machinery; and with Sidney's carpentry shop to manufacture the doghouses.
He sold enough diamonds to pay for the first 2,000 finished models. And then he hit the road, humming the language he had learned from the radio. "It's the real thing, Coke is," he sang to himself. "Mr. Transmission will put in commission the worst transmissions in town."
The sun set as he checked into a motel outside Manhattan, Kansas. "How many?" asked the clerk.
"One," said Mklikluln.
"Name?"
"Robert," he said, using a name he had randomly chosen from among the many thousands mentioned on the airwaves. "Robert Redford."
"Ha-ha," said the clerk. "I bet you get teased about that a lot."
"Yeah. But I get in to see a lot of important people."
The clerk laughed. Mklikluln smiled. Speaking was fun. For one thing, you could lie. An art his people had never learned to cultivate.
"Profession?"
"Salesman."
"Really, Mr. Redford? What do you sell?"
Mklikluln shrugged, practicing looking mildly embarrassed. "Doghouses," he said. ***
Royce Jacobsen pulled open the front door of his swelteringly hot house and sighed. A salesman.
"We don't want any," he said.
"Yes you do," said the man, smiling.
Royce was a little startled. Salesmen usually didn't argue with potential customers-- they usually whined. And those that did argue rarely did it with such calm self-assurance. The man was an ass, Royce decided. He looked it the sample case. On the side were the letters spelling out: "Doghouses Unlimited."
"We don't got a dog," Royce said.
"But you do have a very warm house, I believe," the salesman said.
"Yeah. Hotter'n Hades, as the preachers say. Ha." The laugh would have been bigger than one Ha, but Royce was hot and tired and it was only a salesman.
"But you have an air conditioner."
"Yeah," Royce said. "What I don't have is a permit for more than a hundred bucks worth of power from the damnpowercompany. So if I run the air conditioner more than one day a month, I get the refrigerator shut down, or the stove, or some other such thing."
The salesman looked sympathetic.
"It's guys like me," Royce went on, "who always get the short end of the stick. You can bet your boots that the mayor gets all the air conditioning he wants. You can bet your boots and your overalls, as the farmers say, ha ha, that the president of the damnpowercompany takes three hot showers a day and three cold showers a night and leaves his windows open in the winter, too, you can bet on it."
"Right," said the salesman. "The power companies own this whole country. They own the whole world, you know? Think it's any different in England? In Japan? They got the gas, and so they get the gold."
"Yeah," Royce agreed. "You're my kind of guy. You come right in.. House is hot as Hades, as the preachers say, ha ha ha, but it sure beats standing in the sun." They sat on a beat-up looking couch and Royce explained exactly what was wrong with the damnpowercompany and what he thought of the damnpowercompany's executives and in what part of their anatomy they should shove their quotas, bills, rates, and periods of maximum and minimum use. "I'm sick to death of having to take a shower at 2:00 am!" Royce shouted.
"Then do something about it!" the salesman rejoindered.
"Sure. Like what?"
"Like buy a doghouse from me."
Royce thought that was funny. He laughed for a good long while.
But then the salesman started talking very quietly, showing him pictures and diagrams and cost analysis papers that proved-- what?
"That the solar energy utilizer built into this doghouse can power your entire house, all day every day, with four times as much power as you could use if you turned on all your home appliances all day every day, for exactly zero once you pay me this simple one-time fee."
Royce shook his head, though he coveted the doghouse. "Can't. Illegal. I think they passed a law against solar energy thingies back in '85 or '86, to protect the power companies."
The salesman laughed. "How much protection do the power companies need?"
"Sure," Royce answered, "it's me that needs protection. But the meter reader-- if I stop using power, he'll report me, they'll investigate--"
"That's why we don't put your whole house on it. We just put the big power users on it, and gradually take more off the regular current until you're paying what, maybe fifteen dollars a month. Right? Only instead of fifteen dollars a month and cooking over a fire and sweating to death in a hot house, you've got the air conditioner running all day, the heater running all day in the winter, showers whenever you want them, and you can open the refrigerator as often as you like."
Royce still wasn't sure.
"What've you got to lose?" the salesman asked.
"My sweat," Royce answered. "You hear that? My sweat. Ha ha ha ha."