“Hi, Babe!”
Right from the first I’d known it was the man I was supposed to contact. Handsome hatchet face. Six or seven feet tall. Quite a creature. Male, as they say.
I hopped into his car, vaulting over the low door before he opened it. We zoomed off through New York’s purple, smelly twilight.
“What’s your name, Big Male?” I asked him.
Scorning to answer, he stripped me with his eyes. But I had confidence hi my milk glands. Lord knows, I’d been hours perfecting them.
“Slickie Millane, isn’t it?” I prompted recklessly.
“That’s possible,” he conceded, poker-faced.
“Well then, what are we waiting for?” I asked him, nudging him with the leftermost of my beautifully conical milk glands.
“Look here, Babe,” he told me, just a bit coldly, “I’m the one who dispenses sex and justice in this area.”
I snuggled submissively under his encircling right arm, still nudging him now and again with my left milk gland. The convertible sped. The skyscrapers shrank, exfoliated, became countryside. The convertible stopped.
As the hand of his encircling arm began to explore my prize possessions, I drew away a bit, not frustratingly, and informed him, “Slickie dear, I am from Galaxy Center.”
“What’s that—a magazine publisher?” he demanded hotly, being somewhat inflamed by my cool milk glands.
“... and we are interested in how sex and justice are dispensed in all areas,” I went on, disregarding his interruption and his somewhat juvenile fondlings. ‘To be bold, we suspect that you may be somewhat misled about this business of sex.“
Vertical, centimeter-deep furrows creased his brow. His head poised above mine like a hawk’s. “What are you talking about, Babe?” he demanded with suspicious rage, even snatching his hands away.
“Briefly, Slickie,” I said, “you do not seem to feel that sex is for the production of progeny or for the mutual solace of two creatures. You seem to think—”
His rage exploded into action. He grabbed a great big gun out of the glove compartment. I sprang to my two transmuted nether tentacles—most handsome gams if I, the artist, do say so. He jabbed the muzzle of the gun into my midriff.
“That’s exactly what I mean, Slickie,” I managed to say before my beautiful midriff, which I’d been at such pains to perfect, erupted into smoke and ghastly red splatter. I did a backward flipflop out of the car and lay still—a most fetching corpse with a rucked-up skirt. As the convertible snorted off triumphantly, I snagged hold of the rear bumper, briefly changing my hand back to a tentacle for better gripping. Before the pavement had abraded more than a few grams of my substance, I pulled myself up onto the bumper, where I proceeded to reconstitute my vanished midriff with material from the air, the rest of my body, and the paint on the trunk case. On this occasion the work went rapidly, with no artistic gropings, since I had the curves memorized from the first time I’d worked them out. Then I touched up my abrasions, stripped myself, whipped myself up a snazzy silver lame evening frock out of chromium from the bumper, and put hi time creating costume jewelry out of the tail light and the rest of the chrome.
The car stopped at a bar and Slickie slid out. For a moment his proud profile was silhouetted against the smoky glow. Then he was inside. I threw away the costume jewelry and climbed over the folded top and popped down on the leather-upholstered seat, scarcely a kilogram lighter than when I’d first sat there.
The minutes dragged. To pass them, I mentally reviewed the thousand-and-some basic types of mutual affection on the million-plus planets, not forgetting the one and only basic type of love.
There was a burst of juke-box jazz. Footsteps tracked from the bar toward the convertible. I leaned back comfortably with my silver-filmed tnilk glands dramatically highlighted.
“Hi, Slickie,” I called, making my voice sweet and soft to cushion the shock.
Nevertheless it was a considerable one. For all of ten seconds he stood there, canted forward a little, like a wooden Indian that’s just been nudged from behind and is about to topple.
Then with a naive ingenuity that rather touched me, he asked huskily, “Hey, have you got a twin sister?” “Could be,” I said with a shrug that jogged my milk glands deli-ciously.
“Well, what are you doing in my car?”
“Waiting for you,” I told him simply.
He considered that as he slowly and carefully walked around the car and got behind the wheel, never taking his eyes off me. I nudged him hi my usual manner. He jerked away.
“What are you up to?” he inquired suspiciously.
“Why are you surprised, Slickie?” I countered innocently. ‘I’ve heard this sort of thing happens to you all the tune.“
“What sort of thing?”
“Girls turning up in your car, your bar, your bedroom—everywhere.”
“Where’d you hear it?”
“I read it in your Spike Mallet books.”
“Oh,” he said, somewhat mollified. But then his suspicion came back. “But what are you really up to?” he demanded.
“Slickie,” I assured him with complete sincerity, bugging my beautiful eyes, “I just love you.”
This statement awakened in him an irritation so great that it overrode his uneasiness about me, for he cuffed me in the face—so suddenly that I almost forgot and changed it back to my top tentacle.
“I make the advances around here, Babe,” he asserted harshly.
Completely under control again, I welled a tiny trickle of blood out of the left-hand corner of my gorgeous mouth. “Anything you say, Slickie, dear,” I assented submissively and cuddled up against him in a prim, girlish way to which he could hardly take exception.
But I must have bothered or at least puzzled him, for he drove slowly, his dark-eaved eyes following an invisible tennis ball that bounded between me and the street ahead. Abruptly the eaves lifted and he smiled.
“Look, I just got an idea for a story,” he said. “There’s this girl from Galaxy Center—” and he whipped around to watch my reactions, but I didn’t blink.
He continued, “I mean, she’s sort of from the center of the galaxy, where everything’s radioactive. Now there’s this guy that’s got her up in his attic.” His face grew deeply thoughtful. “She’s the most beautiful girl in the universe and he loves her like crazy, but she’s all streaming with hard radiations and it’ll kill him if he touches her.”
“Yes, Slickie—and then?” I prompted after the car had dreamed its way for several blocks between high buildings.
He looked at me sharply. “That’s all. Don’t you get it?”
“Yes, Slickie,” I assured him soothingly. My statement seemed to satisfy him, but he was still edgy.
He stopped the car in front of an apartment hotel that thrust toward the stars with a dark presumptuousness. He got out on the street side and walked around the rear end and suddenly stopped. I followed him. He was studying the gray bumper and the patch of raw sheet metal off which I’d used the paint. He looked around at me where I stood sprayed with silver lame in the revealing lamp light.
“Wipe your chin,” he said critically.
“Why not kiss the blood off it, Slickie?” I replied with an ingenuousness I hoped would take the curse off the suggestion.
“Aw nuts,” he said nervously and stalked into the foyer so swiftly he might have been trying to get away from me. However, he made no move to stop me when I followed him into the tiny place and the even tinier elevator. In the latter cubicle I maneuvered so as to give him a series of breathtaking scenic views of the Grand Tetons that rose behind the plunging silver horizon of my neckline, and he unfroze considerably. By the tune he opened the door of his apartment he had got so positively cordial that he urged me across the threshold with a casual spank.