It was just as I had visualized it—the tiger skins, the gun racks, the fireplace, the open bedroom door, the bar just beside it, the adventures of Spike Mallet hi handsomely tooled leather bindings, the vast divan covered with zebra skin.
On the last was stretched a beautiful ice-faced blonde hi a filmy negligee.
This was a complication for which I wasn’t prepared. I stood rooted by the door while Slickie walked swiftly past me.
The blonde slithered to her feet. There was murder in her glacial eyes. “You two-tuning rat!” she grated. Her hand darted under her negligee. Slickie’s snaked under the lefthand side of his jacket.
Then it hit me what was going to happen. She would bring out a small but deadly silver-plated automatic, but before she could level it, Slickie’s cannon would make a red ruin of her midriff.
There I was, standing twenty feet away from both of them—and this poor girl couldn’t reconstitute herself!
Swifter than thought I changed my arms back to upper dorsal tentacles and jerked back both Slickie’s and the girl’s elbow. They turned around, considerably startled, and saw me standing twenty feet away. I’d turned my tentacles back to arms before they’d noticed them. Their astonishment increased.
But I knew I had won only a temporary respite. Unless something happened, Slickie’s trigger-blissful rage would swiftly be refocused on this foolish fragile creature. To save her, I had to divert his ire to myself.
“Get that little tramp out of here,” I ordered Slickie from the corner of my mouth as I walked past him to the bar.
“Easy, Babe,” he warned me.
I poured myself a liter of scotch—I had to open a second bottle to complete the measure—and downed it. I really didn’t need it, but the assorted molecules were congenial building blocks and I was rather eager to get back to normal weight.
“Haven’t you got that tramp out of here yet?” I demanded, eyeing him scornfully over my insouciant silver-fumed shoulder.
“Easy, Babe,” he repeated, the vertical furrows creasing his brow to a depth of at least a centimeter and a half.
“That’s telling her, Slickie,” the blonde applauded.
“You two-timing rat!” I plagiarized, whipping up my silver skirt as if to wisk a gun from my nonexistent girdle.
His cannon coughed. Always a good sportsman, I moved an inch so that the bullet, slightly mis-aimed, took me exactly in the right eye, messily blowing off the back of my head. I winked at Slickie with my left eye and fell back through the doorway into the bedroom darkness.
I knew I had no time to spare. When a man’s shot one girl he begins to lose his natural restraint. Lying on the floor, I reconstituted my eye and did a quick patch-job on the back of my head in seventeen
seconds flat.
As I emerged from the bedroom, they were entering into a clinch, each holding a gun lightly against the other’s back.
“Slickie,” I said, pouring myself a scant hah5 liter of scotch, “I told you about that tramp.”
The ice-blonde squawked, threw up her hands as if she’d had a shot of strychnine, and ran out the door. I fancied I could feel the building tilt as she leaned on the elevator button.
I downed the scotch and advanced, shattering the paralyzed space-time that Slickie seemed to be depending on as a defense.
“Slickie,” I said, “let’s get down to cases. I am indeed from Galaxy Center and we very definitely don’t like your attitude. We don’t care what your motives are, or whether they are derived from jumbled genes, a curdled childhood, or a sick society. We simply love you and we want you to reform.” I grabbed him by a shivering shoulder that was now hardly higher than my waist, and dragged him into the bedroom, snatching up the rest of the scotch on the way. I switched on the light. The bedroom was a really lush lovenest. I drained the scotch—there was about a half liter left—and faced the cowering
Slickie. “Now do to me,” I told him uncompromisingly, “the thing you’re always going to do to those girls, except you have to shoot them.”
He frothed like an epileptic, snatched out his cannon and emptied its magazine into various parts of my torso, but since he hit only two of my five brains, I wasn’t bothered. I reeled back bloodily through the blue smoke and fell into the bathroom. I felt real crazy—maybe I shouldn’t have taken that last half liter. I reconstituted my torso faster even than I had my head, but my silver lame frock was a mess. Not wanting to waste time and reluctant to use any more reconstituting energy, I stripped it off and popped into the off-the-shoulders evening dress the blonde had left lying over the edge of the bathtub. The dress wasn’t a bad fit. I went back into the bedroom. Slickie was sobbing softly at the foot of the bed and gently beating his head against it.
“Slickie,” I said, perhaps a shade too curtly, “about this love business—”
He sprang for the ceiling but didn’t quite burst through it. Falling back, by chance on his feet, he headed for the hall. Now it wasn’t in my orders from Galaxy Center that he run away and excite this world—in fact, my superiors had strictly forbidden such a happening. I had to stop Slickie. But I was a bit confused —perhaps fuddled by that last half liter. I hesitated—then he was too far away, had too big a start. To stop him, I knew I’d have to use tentacles. Swifter than thought I changed them and shot them out.
“Slickie,” I cried reassuringly, dragging him to me.
Then I realized that hi my excitement, instead of using my upper dorsal tentacles, I’d used the upper ventral ones I kept transmuted into my beautiful milk glands. I do suppose they looked rather strange to Slickie as they came out of the bosom of my off-the-shoulders evening dress and drew him to me.
Frightening sounds came out of him. I let him go and tried to resume my gorgeous shape, but now I was really confused (that last half liter!) and lost control of my transmutations. When I found myself turning my topmost tentacle into a milk gland I gave up completely and—except for a lung and vocal cords— resumed my normal shape. It was quite a relief. After all, I had done what Galaxy Center had intended I should. From now on, the mere sight of a brassiere in a show window would be enough to give Slickie the shakes.
Still, I was bothered about the guy. As I say, he’d touched me.
I caressed him tenderly with my tentacles. Over and over again I explained that I was just a heptapus and that Galaxy Center had selected me for the job simply because my seven tentacles would transmute nicely into the seven extremities of the human female.
Over and over again I told him how I loved him.
It didn’t seem to help. Slickie Millane continued to weep hysterically.
The Big Trek
I DIDN’T KNOW if I’d got to this crazy place by rocket, space dodger, time twister—or maybe even on foot the way I felt so beat. My memory was gone. When I woke up there was just the desert all around me with the gray sky pressing down like the ceiling of an enormous room. The desert. and the big trek. And that was enough to make me stop grabbing for my memory and take a quick look at my pants to make sure I was human.
These, well, animals were shuffling along about four abreast in a straggly line that led from one end of nowhere to the other, right past my rocky hole. Wherever they were heading they seemed to have come from everywhere and maybe everywhen. There were big ones and little ones, some like children and some just small. A few went on two feet, but more on six or eight, and there were wrigglers, rollers, oozers, flutterers and hoppers; I couldn’t decide whether the low-flying ones were pets or pals. Some had scales, others feathers, bright armor like beetles or fancy hides like zebras, and quite a few wore transparent suits holding air or other gases, or water or other liquids, though some of the suits were tailored for a dozen tentacles and some for no legs at all. And darn if their shuffle—to pick one word for all the kinds of movement—wasn’t more like a dance than a lockstep.