“Who is, then, you’re so smott?” asked Brenda.
“The author of Viscosity in a Changing World, Viscosity for the Millions, How Viscous Are You? and Whither Viscosity? of course. In short, myself.”
“Then you’re Dr. Quentin Conroy of the Institute for Viscosimetrical Research!”
“The same,” said Conroy, striking an attitude.
“Well, Dr. Conroy,” said Brenda coldly, striking another attitude and striking, also, the Lieutenant, whose hands had been roving, “it’s a pleasure.”
“Thank you,” smirked Conroy, removing from his satchel a small device resembling a double-barreled rectal thermometer.
“What, pray, is that?” asked Brenda haughtily. “A double-barreled rectal thermometer?”
“It is obvious, Dr. Bradstone,” responded Conroy with cool decorum, “that you do not know a capillary viscometer from a hole in the ground.”
Brenda sniffed huffily. “If that,” she said, writhing with ambivalence and lamping her opponent’s shoulders with something more than scientific interest, “is a Thorpe and Rodger viscometer, or even a Wilhelm Ostwald viscometer, I’ll eat it.”
“It is neither,” came the sharp riposte. “It is a Conroy viscometer. Now shake your butt and help me set up my equipment.”
“Yes, sir,” mumbled Brenda submissively.
Having made this obeisance to the spirit of scientific discussion and also putting half the audience to sleep, the scene now shifted to the city room of a local newspaper. The screen was a riot of shirtsleeves, blue pencils, green eye-shades and cigarette smoke. The city editor, picking his nose with a blue pencil, was snarling at an unkempt but earnest young man. “Yurroutaya mind, Pfeiffer,” he said. “Just because”—here he paused to suck a dram of coffee from a soggy container—”just because the first goo killing coincided with reports of a flying saucer sighted in the hills near town, and just because a few hundred nitwits say they’ve seen a weird monster fifty feet tall walkin’ around, and just because a bunch of boobs swear they’ve been hearin’ some strange, unearthly-type theramin music the last few days—you get the dim-bulb notion that these broads are bein’ knocked off by a creature from outer space! Pfeiffer, you kill me. You know what I think? You really wanna know what I think?”
“What, boss?”
“Yurroutaya mind, Pfeiffer, that’s what I think. Go get me another pint o’ java.”
The city editor, I noted, was cast from the same rugged mold as the police lieutenant: in fact, upon closer inspection, I discovered that he was played by the same actor, his bushy hair covered with liquid latex to simulate a lumpy baldness. I admired this stroke of economy.
Pfeiffer, of course (if I may condense the action a bit here) took his story to the Lieutenant and was promptly catalogued as a troublesome illusionary. Conroy, however, overhearing the reporter’s theory, got a faraway look in his eye and, loosening his Countess Mara, began to wade into his work with renewed bustle.
Two lap-dissolves and a theramin solo later, Conroy looked up from his viscometer. His face was pale, his eyebrows knotted. “It’s—incredible!” he said. “And yet—why should it be incredible? If, on our world, all living things have a basis of carbon, why then on other worlds may not life have a basis of something else? Silicon, or hydrogen, or—this?”
“Quentin,” breathed Brenda quietly, looking soulfully into his hair-line (they had reached the First Name Stage while I wasn’t looking), “what is it?”
“The stuff,” said Conroy, “the horrible goo on the bodies . . .” He broke off, consulted his viscometer once more, then looked up again, nostrils akimbo. “Yes! Brenda, the monster that killed those poor girls, the monster that, even now, is roaming at large: that monster is a fifty-foot blob of—Vaseline!”
“Vaseline?!”
Conroy nodded grimly. “With hair.”
“Yurroutaya mind,” said the Lieutenant.
“But . . . but . . .” floundered Brenda, forgetting her lines, “but Vaseline is harmless . . .”
“Yes—Vaseline as we know it,” Conroy agreed. “But what if it were endowed with a superhuman intelligence beyond our ken???”
“Yeah,” said the Lieutenant, “but even so—”
“Lieutenant,” Conroy said evenly, “picture it. What would you do if you saw a blob of Vaseline fifty feet high and all covered with hair coming at you?”
The Lieutenant’s eyes grew glassy at the image; then he clapped his hand to his mouth and lurched straight for the washroom.
“It all fits together, Quentin,” said Brenda, breathing heavily. “The severe nausea—the globs of goo—the flying saucer —the theramin music. But what is this monster’s purpose in killing these girls? And why only girls?”
Conroy frowned. “I . . . don’t. . . know,” he said.
And suddenly the monster was upon us. The screen was filled with hairy Vaseline—fifty feet of it, strolling oafishly down the road and humming to itself. John Quincy Adams clapped his hand to his mouth and was never seen again. My dentist climbed up the theatre wall, and Marilyn Monroe clung to me (understandably) for comfort. My popcorn, of course, went flying at the first sight of the monster, and for a moment I was blinded by salt and falling kernels.
When my vision cleared, I saw to my horror that Brenda was in the toils of the unearthly-type creature and was giving the theramin some stiff competition in the wailing department. Next we saw Conroy, his viscometer awry, pointing wildly and yelling, “It’s taking her toward the hills!”
“The hills!” echoed Pfeiffer, the reporter, materializing from behind a clothes-tree. ‘That’s where the flying saucer was sighted!”
After some scratchy stock footage of Grant Withers and Onslow Stevens climbing in a couple of ‘35 Chevvies and barelling down the road, we got our first glimpse of the saucer. It was made of Limoges china, trimmed with blue. The monster oozed into the picture, lugging Brenda, whose struggles had grown noticeably lacking in sincerity. The armed services had apparently been summoned, for we were now treated to stirring shots of the U. S. infantry, the Polish cavalry, and the air force of an unidentified nation, all engaged in dust-raising activity of one sort or another, culminating in the detonation of the hydrogen bomb. Needless to say, these efforts left the monster unscathed. By the time Conroy and Pfeiffer arrived, it had miraculously released Brenda, however, and she ran toward her colleague.
“Brenda!” said Conroy. “You’re all right! It let you go . . . and you didn’t get severe nausea . . . What—”
Panting, Brenda said, “I found out everything. That theramin music—it’s Morse code. The goo told me the whole story. He didn’t want to kill those girls; they just got deathly ill at the sight of him. He was only looking for a mate. He’s lonely.”
“A mate?! But he’s—that is—he doesn’t have any—I mean—”
“You don’t understand, Quentin. Look at my eyelids.”
“They’re ravishing.”
“What else?”
“They’re well-greased.”
“Correct. With Vaseline!”
“You mean—”
“Exactly! All those other girls greased their eyelids with Vaseline, too. And the stuff from outer space was just looking for someone of his own kind!”
“Amazing!” Conroy embraced her. “You’re wonderful, Brenda! A true scientist. Brenda, darling—will you marry me? Together, we will plumb new depths of viscosity!”
“Yurroutaya mind,” said Brenda. “I’m going home with Pete.”
“Pete??”
Brenda sighed ecstatically. “I can’t pronounce his real name. I call him Pete because he’s made of petroleum jelly— Vaseline to you.”