H L Gold (ed), page 19
After a few moments, the bellhop paused to put his face up and see which way he was going. Vane, held fast by the weed, was leaning toward the table, straining hard, reaching with his one free hand toward the knife he had put there. The carpet bulged after him, but too much furniture was holding it.
The bellhop lowered his head and rocked the jar again, harder. When he looked up, Vane’s eyes were closed tight, his face red with effort. He was extended as far as he could reach across the table, but his fingers were still clawing air an inch short of the knife. The bellhop rocked hard. The jar inched forward, came to rest solidly against the table, pinning Vane’s arm against it by the flaring sleeve.
The bellhop relaxed and looked up. Feeling himself caught, the Earthman had stopped struggling and was looking down. He tugged, but could not pull the sleeve free.
“Stalemate,” said Vane heavily. He showed his teeth to the bellhop. “Close, but no prize. I can’t get at you. You can’t hurt me.”
The bellhop’s head bowed as if in assent. But then his long arm came snaking up out of the jar. His fingers closed around the deadly little knife.
“A Marack can lift his arm higher than his head,” he said.
Volpla
BY WYMAN GUIN
The only kind of gag worth pulling, I always maintained, was a cosmic one—till I learned the Cosmos has a really nasty sense of humorl
There were three of them. Dozens of limp little mutants that would have sent an academic zoologist into hysterics lay there in the metabolic accelerator. But there were three of them. My heart took a great bound.
I heard my daughter’s running feet in the animal rooms and her roller skates banging at her side. I closed the accelerator and walked across to the laboratory door. She twisted the knob violently, trying to hit a combination that would work.
I unlocked the door, held it against her pushing and slipped out so that, for all her peering, she could see nothing. I looked down on her tolerantly.
“Can’t adjust your skates?” I asked again.
“Daddy, I’ve tried and tried and I just can’t turn this old key tight enough.”
I continued to look down on her.
“Well, Dad-dee, I can’tl”
“Tightly enough.”
“What?”
“You can’t turn this old key tightly enough.”
“That’s what I scy-yud.”
“All right, wench. Sit on this chair.”
I got down and shoved one saddle shoe into a skate. It fitted perfectly. I strapped her ankle and pretended to use the key to tighten the clamp.
Volplas at last. Three of them. Yet I had always been so
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sure I could create them that I had been calling them volplas for ten years. No, twelve. I glanced across the animal room to where old Nijinsky thrust his graying head from a cage. I had called them volplas since the day old Nijinsky’s elongated arms and his cousin’s lateral skin folds had given me the idea of a flying mutant.
When Nijinsky saw me looking at him, he started a little tarantella about his cage. I smiled with nostalgia when the fifth fingers of his hands, four times as long as the others, uncurled as he spun about the cage.
I turned to the fitting of my daughter’s other skate. “Daddy?”
“Yes?"
“Mother says you are eccentric. Is that true?”
“I’ll speak to her about it.”
“Don’t you knowF’
“Do you understand the word?”
“No.”
I lifted her out of the chair and stood her on her skates. “Tell your mother that I retaliate. I say she is beautiful.”
She skated awkwardly between the rows of cages from which mutants with brown fur and blue fur, too much and too little fur, enormously long and ridiculously short arms, stared at her with simian, canine, or rodent faces. At the door to the outside, she turned perilously and waved.
Again in the laboratory, I entered the metabolic accelerator and withdrew the intravenous needles from my first volplas. I carried their limp little forms out to a mattress in the lab, two girls and a boy. The accelerator had forced them almost to adulthood in less than a month. It would be several hours before they would begin to move, to leam to feed and play, perhaps to leam to fly.
Meanwhile, it was clear that here was no war of dominant mutations. Modulating alleles had smoothed the freakish into a beautiful pattern. These were no monsters blasted by the dosage of radiation into crippled structures. They were lovely, perfect little creatures.
My wife tried the door, too, but more subtly, as if casually touching the knob while calling.
“Lunch, dear.”
“Be right there.”
She peeked too, as she had for fifteen years, but I blocked her view when I slipped out.
“Come on, you old hermit. I have a buffet on the terrace.” “Our daughter says I’m eccentric. Wonder how the devil she found out.”
“From me, of course.”
“But you love me just the same.”
“I adore you.” She stretched on tiptoe and put her arms over my shoulders and kissed me.
My wife did indeed have a delicious-looking buffet ready on the terrace. The maid was just setting down a warmer filled with hot hamburgers. I gave the maid a pinch and said, “Hello, baby.”
My wife looked at me with a puzzled smile. “What on earth’s got into you?”
The maid beat it into the house.
I flipped a hamburger and a slice of onion onto a plate and picked up the ketchup and said, “I’ve reached the dangerous age.”
“Oh, good heavens!”
I dowsed ketchup over the hamburger, threw the onion on and closed it. I opened a bottle of beer and guzzled from it, blew out my breath, and looked across the rolling hills and oak woods of our ranch to where the Pacific shimmered. I thought: All this and three volplas, too.
I wiped the back of my hand across my mouth and said aloud, “Yes, sir, the dangerous age. And, lady, I’m going to have fun.”
My wife sighed patiently.
I walked over and put the arm that held the beer bottle around her shoulder and chucked her chin up with my other hand. The golden sun danced in her blue eyes. I watched that light in her beautiful eyes and said, “But you’re the only one I’m dangerous about.”
I kissed her until I heard roller skates coming across the terrace from one direction and a horse galloping toward the terrace from the other direction.
“You have lovely lips,” I whispered.
“Thanks. Yours deserve the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval, too.”
Our son reared the new palomino I had just bought him for his fourteenth birthday and yelled down, “Unhand that maiden, Burrhead, or I’ll give you lead poisoning.”
I laughed and picked up my plate and sat down in a chair. My wife brought me a bowl of salad and I munched the hamburger and watched the boy unsaddle the horse and slap it away to the pasture.
I thought, “By God, wouldn’t he have a fit if he knew what I have back there in that labl Wouldn’t they all!”
The boy carried the saddle up onto the terrace and dropped it. “Mom, I’d like a swim before I eat.” He started undressing.
“You look as though a little water might help,” she agreed, sitting down next to me with her plate.
The girl was yanking off her skates. “And I want one.” “All right. But go in the house and put on your swim suit.” “Oh, Mother. Why?”
“Because, dear, I said so.”
The boy had already raced across the terrace and jackknifed into the pool. The cool sound of the dive sent the girl scurrying for her suit.
I looked at my wife. “What’s the idea?”
“She’s going to be a young woman soon.”
“Is that any reason for wearing clothes? Look at him. He’s a young man sooner than already.”
“Well, if you feel that way about it, they’ll both have to start wearing clothes.”
I gulped the last of my hamburger and washed it down with the beer. “This place is going to hell,” I complained.
“The old man isn’t allowed to pinch the maid and the kids can’t go naked.” I leaned toward her and smacked her cheek. “But the food and the old woman are still the best.” “Say, what goes with you? You’ve been grinning like a happy ape ever since you came out of the lab.”
“I told you—”
“Oh, not that again! You were dangerous at any age.”
I stood up and put my plate aside and bent over her. “Just the same, I’m going to have a new kind of fun.”
She reached up and grabbed my ear. She narrowed her eyes and put a mock grimness on her lips.
“It’s a joke,” I assured her. “I’m going to play a tremendous joke on the whole world. I’ve only had the feeling once before in a small way, but I’ve always . . .”
She twisted my ear and narrowed her eyes even more. “Like?”
“Well, when my old man was pumping his first fortune out of some oil wells in Oklahoma, we lived down there. Outside this little town, I found a litter of flat stones that had young blacksnakes under each slab. I filled a pail with them and took them into town and dumped them on the walk in front of the movie just as Theda Bara’s matinee let out. The best part was that no one had seen me do it. They just couldn’t understand how so many snakes got there. I learned how great it can be to stand around quietly and watch people encounter the surprise that you have prepared for them.”
She let go of my ear. “Is that the kind of fun you’re going to have?”
“Yep.”
She shook her head. “Did I say you are eccentric?”
I grinned. “Forgive me if I eat and run, dear. Something in the lab can’t wait.”
The fact was that I had something more in the lab than I had bargained for. I had aimed only at a gliding mammal a little more efficient than the Dusky Glider of Australia, a marsupial. Even in the basically mutating colony, there had been a decidedly simian appearance in recent years, a long shift from the garbage-dump rats I had started with. But my first volplas were shockingly humanoid.
They were also much faster than had been their predecessors in organizing their nervous activity after the slumberous explosion of growth in the metabolic accelerator. When I returned to the lab they were already moving about on the mattress and the male was trying to stand.
He was a little the larger and stood twenty-eight inches high. Except for the face, chest, and belly, they were covered with a soft, almost golden down. Where it was bare of this golden fur, the skin was pink. On their heads and across the shoulders of the male stood a shock of fur as soft as chinchilla. The faces were appealingly humanoid, except that the eyes were large and nocturnal. The cranium was in the same proportion to the body as it is in the human.
When the male spread his arms, the span was forty-eight inches. I held his arms out and tried to tease the spars open. They were not new. The spars had been common to the basic colony for years and were the result of serial mutations effecting those gready elongated fifth fingers that had first appeared in Nijinsky. No longer jointed like a finger, the spar turned backward sharply and ran alongside the wrist almost to the elbow. Powerful wrist muscles could snap it outward and forward. Suddenly, as I teased the male volpla, this happened.
The spars added nine inches on each side to his span. As they swept out and forward, the lateral skin that had, till now, hung in resting folds was tightened in a golden plane that stretched from the tip of the spar to his wrist and continued four inches wide down his legs to where it anchored at the little toe.
This was by far the most impressive plane that had appeared till now. It was a true gliding plane, perhaps even a soaring one. I felt a thrill run along my back.
By four o’clock that afternoon, I was feeding them solid food and, with the spars closed, they were holding little cups and drinking water from them in a most humanlike way.
They were active, curious, playful, and decidedly amorous.
Their humanoid qualities were increasingly apparent. There was a lumbar curvature and buttocks. The shoulder girdle and pectoral muscles were heavy and out of proportion of course, yet the females had only one pair of breasts. The chin and jaw were humanlike instead of simian and the dental equipment was appropriate to this structure. What this portended was brought home to me with a shock.
I was kneeling on the mattress cuffing and roughing the male as one might a puppy dog, when one of the females playfully climbed up my back. I reached around and brought her over my shoulder and sat her down. I stroked the soft fur on her head and said, “Hello, pretty one. Hello.”
The male watched me grinning.
He said, “ ’Elio, ’ello.”
As I walked into the kitchen, giddy with this enormous joke, my wife said, “Guy and Em are flying up for dinner. That rocket of Guy’s they launched in the desert yesterday was a success. It pulled Guy up to Cloud Nine and he wants to celebrate.”
I danced a little jig the way old Nijinsky might do it. “Oh, great! Oh, wonderful! Good old Guy! Everybody’s a success. It’s great. It’s wonderful. Success on successl”
I danced into the kitchen table and tipped over a basket of green corn. The maid promptly left the kitchen for some other place.
My wife just stared at me. “Have you been drinking the lab alcohol?”
“I’ve been drinking the nectar of the gods. My Hera, you’re properly married to Zeus. I’ve my own little Greeks descended from Icarus.”
She pretended a hopeless sag of her pretty shoulders. “Wouldn’t you just settle for a worldly martini?”
“I will, yes. But first a divine kiss.”
I sipped at my martini and lounged in a terrace chair watching the golden evening slant across the beautiful hills
of our ranch. I dreamed. I would invent a euphonious set of words to match the Basic English vocabulary and teach it to them as their language. They would have their own crafts and live in small tree houses.
I would teach them legends: that they had come from the stars, that they had subsequently watched the first red men and then the first white men enter these hills.
When they were able to take care of themselves, I would turn them loose. There would be volpla colonies all up and down the Coast before anyone suspected. One day, somebody would see a volpla. The newspapers would laugh.
Then someone authoritative would find a colony and observe them. He would conclude: “I am convinced that they have a language and speak it intelligently.”
The government would issue denials. Reporters would “expose the truth” and ask, “Where have these aliens come from?” The government would reluctantly admit the facts. Linguists would observe at close quarters and leam the simple volpla language. Then would come the legends.
Volpla wisdom would become a cult—and of all forms of comedy, cults, I think, are the funniest.
“Darling, are you listening to me?” my wife asked with impatient patience.
“What? Sure. Certainly.”
“You didn’t hear a word. You just sit there and grin into space.” She got up and poured me another martini. “Here, maybe this will sober you up.”
I pointed. “That’s probably Guy and Em.”
A copter sidled over the ridge, then came just above the oak woods toward us. Guy set it gently on the landing square and we walked down to meet them.
I helped Em out and hugged her. Guy jumped out, asking, “Do you have your TV set on?”
“No,” I answered. “Should I?”
“It’s almost time for the broadcast. I was afraid we would miss it.”
“What broadcast?”
“From the rocket.”
“Rocket?”
"For heaven’s sake, darling,” my wife complained, “I told you about Guy’s rocket being a success. The papers are full of it. So are the broadcasts.”
As we stepped up on the terrace, she turned to Guy and Em. “He’s out of contact today. Thinks he’s Zeus.”
I asked our son to wheel a TV set out onto the terrace while I made martinis for our friends. Then we sat down and drank the cocktails and the kids had fruit juice and we watched the broadcast Guy had tuned in.
Some joker from Cal Tech was explaining diagrams of a multi-stage rocket.
After a bit, I got up and said, “I have something out in the lab I want to check on.”
“Hey, wait a minute,” Guy objected. “They’re about to show the shots of the launching.”
My wife gave me a look; you know the kind. I sat down. Then I got up and poured myself another martini and freshened Em’s up, too. I sat down again.
The scene had changed to a desert launching site. There was old Guy himself explaining that when he pressed the button before him, the hatch on the third stage of the great rocket in the background would close and, five minutes later, the ship would fire itself.
Guy, on the screen, pushed the button, and I heard Guy, beside me, give a sort of little sigh. We watched the hatch slowly close.
“You look real good,” I said. “A regular Space Ranger. What are you shooting at?”
“Darling, will you please—be—quiet!”
“Yeah, Dad. Can it, will you? You’re always gagging around.”
On the screen, Guy’s big dead-eamest face was explaining more about the project and suddenly I realized that this was an instrument-bearing rocket they hoped to land on the
Moon. It would broadcast from there. Well, now—say, that would be somethingl I began to feel a little ashamed of the way I had been acting and I reached out and slapped old Guy on the shoulder. For just a moment, I thought of telling him about my volplas. But only for a moment.
A ball of flame appeared at the base of the rocket. Miraculously, the massive tower lifted, seemed for a moment merely to stand there on a flaming pillar, then was gone.
The screen returned to a studio, where an announcer explained that the film just shown had been taken day before yesterday. Since then, the rocket’s third stage was known to have landed successfully at the south shore of Mare Sereni-tatis. He indicated the location on a large lunar map behind him.
“From this position the telemeter known as Rocket Charlie will be broadcasting scientific data for several months. But now, ladies and gentlemen, we will clear the air for Rocket Charlie’s only general broadcast. Stand by for Rocket Charlie.”
