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Jean got up and walked over to the bed. Nice as pie she sat on the edge and stuck the photo in front
of my bleary eyes.
"What is this?" she asked again.
It was a photo of a Martian named Crunchy, the physicist George Gamow, James Dean, and me in
the dripping dark jungle in front of a brontosaur us I had shot. The Venusian version of a brontosaur us
that is. It looked like a small mountain of mottled leather. I was holding the stun rifle Crunchy had lent
me for the safari.
I thought fast. "Oh, this. It's a still from asci-fi film we started a few years ago. Never finished it,
though. The special effects cost too much."
"That's James Dean, isn't it?"
I peered at the photo as if I was trying to remember something that wasn't terribly important. "Yeah,
I think so. The kid wanted more money than I wanted to spend on the project. That's what killed it."
"He's been dead for five or six years."
"Has it been that long?" James Dean was alive and having the time of life working with the Martians
on Venus. He had left his acting career and his life on Earth far behind him to do better work than the
president's Peace Corps could even dream about.
"I didn't know he did a picture for you' she said, her voice dreamy, ethereal. Like every other
woman her age she had a crush on James Dean. That's what drove the poor kid to Venus.
"He didn't," I snapped. "We couldn't agree on terms. Come on back to bed."
She did, but in the middle of it my damned private phone rang. Only five people on earth knew that
number, and one of them wasn't human.
I groped for the phone. "This better be important," I said.
"The female you are with," said Jazzbow's hissing voice, "is a government agent."
Oh yeah, the Martians are long-distance telepaths too.
So I took Jean for a drive out to the desert in my Bentley convertible. She loved the scenery, thought
it was romantic. Or so she said. Me, I looked at that miserable dry Mohave scrubland and thought of
what it could become: blossoming farms, spacious tracts of housing where people cooped up in the cities
could raise their kids, glamorous shopping malls. But about all it was good for now was an Air Force
base where guys like Chuck Yeager and Scott Cross field flew the X-planes and the Martians landed
their saucers every now and then. After dark, of course.
"Just look at that sunset," Jean said, almost breathless with excitement, maybe real, maybe
pretended. She was an actress, after all.
I had to admit the sunset was pretty. Red and purple glowing brighter than Technicolor.
"Where are we going?" she kept on asking, a little more nervous each time.
"It's a surprise." I had to keep on going until it was good and dark. We had enough UFO sightings
as it was, no sense taking a chance on somebody getting a really good look. Or even worse, a
photograph. The stars came out, big and bright and looking close enough to touch. I kept looking for
one in particular to detach itself from the sky and land on the road beside us. All that stuff about saucers
shining green rays on cars or planes and sucking them up inside themselves is sheer hooey. The Martians
don't have anything like that. Wish they did.
Pretty soon I saw it.
"Look!" says Jean. "A falling star!"
I didn't say anything, but a couple of minutes later the headlights picked up the saucer sitting there by
the side of the road, still glowing a little from the heat of its reentry from orbit.
"Don't tell me you've driven me all the way out here to see another movie set," Jean said, sounding
disappointed. "This isn't your big surprise, is it?"
"Not quite," I said, pulling up beside the saucer's spindly little ladder.
She was pretty pissed off. Even when two of the Martians came slithering down the ladder she still
thought it was some kind of a movie stunt. They had to move pretty slow and awkwardly because of the
gravity; made me think of the monster movies we made. Jean was definitely not impressed.
"Honestly, Howard, I don't see why--"
Then one of the Martians put its snake-fingered hands on her and she gave a yelp and did what any
well-trained movie starlet would do. She fainted.
Jazzbow wasn't in the ship, of course. The Martians wouldn't risk a landing in Culver City to pick
him up, not even at night. Nobody but Professor Schmidt and I knew he was in my office suite there.
And the other Martians, of course.
So I got Jazzbow on the ship's interociter while his fellow Martians draped the unconscious Jean on
one of their couches. Her skirt rucked up nicely, showing off her legs to good advantage.
"They're not going to hurt her any, are they?" I asked Jazzbow.
"Of course not," his image answered from the inverted triangular screen. "I thought you knew us
better than that."
"Yeah, I know. You can't hurt a fly. But still, she's just a kid ..."
"They're merely probing her mind to see how much she actually knows. It will only take a few
minutes."
I won't go into all the details. The Martians are extremely sensitive about their dealings with other
living creatures. Not hurt a fly? Hell, they'd make the Dalai Lama look like a bloodthirsty maniac.
Very gently, like a mother caressing her sleeping baby, three of them touched her face and forehead
with those tentacle-like fingers. Probing her mind. Some writer got wind of the technique second- or
thirdhand and used it on television a few years later. Called it a Velcro mind-melt or something like that.
"We have for you," the ship's science officer told me, "good news and bad news."
His name sounded kind of like Snitch. Properly speaking, every Martian is an "it," not a "him" or a
"her." But I always thought of them as males.
"The good news," Snitch said to me, "is that this female knew nothing of our existence. She hadn't
the faintest suspicion that Martians exist or that you are dealing with them."
"Well, she does now," I grumbled.
"The bad news," he went on, with that silly grin spread across his puss, "is that she is acting as an
undercover agent for your Internal Revenue Service --while she's between acting jobs." Aw hell. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]