Complete Stories (19 page)

“Hahahahahahaha,” Ö said, imitating canned laughter.

“Lucy is waiting,” Fefferfuff said serenely. “Waiting for average fellow. You lucky dog.”

“How does your FTL drive work?” Jack Stalk asked, just to change the subject. He’d heard about little else but Lucille Ball from these two ever since they’d nabbed him. It had been a classic UFO snatch. Lights in the sky. Unattached young man has a fight with his girl, goes out for a walk, and is never seen again. Missing person number 765 for the year 1981. No one but Micha would really care…and she’d forget before long. He had to get back!

“Grandma dreams she moves Tweety-Bird’s cage,” Fefferfuff said, presumably in answer to Jack’s question. “Tweety dreams Grandma. We dream God. God dreams us here, he dreams us there.”

“Znnt, znnt,” Ö said by way of illustration. He swayed back and forth like a happy little cobra.

“But what type of
engine
have you got in this thing?” Jack insisted. He needed to find out how to fly it back. “I mean this isn’t a Tibetan prayer-wheel you’ve got here, it’s a fantastically sophisticated ship with a faster-than-light drive! We’d give anything for this on Earth.” A sudden inspiration struck. “We could probably arrange to turn the
real
Lucille Ball over to …”

A porthole irised open. “We already got good-looking Lucy on Tulpa. Waiting for you. You lucky dog.”

Jack Stalk could see the small blue disk of a planet out there. They were coming up on it, matching velocities. He still couldn’t see why, if the Tulpans had an FTL drive, they couldn’t have just jumped right from downtown Louisville, where they’d nabbed him, to the surface of their home planet. Instead they had spent a whole week powering out of the solar system…allegedly to “match velocities with the cosmic background.” And now they were using the rockets again, this time to switch from cosmic rest to the motion of Tulpa. It seemed stupid.

“Hewwo,” Ö said, sounding like a wetly blown kazoo, “Hewwo, Earthwing.” This, along with “Ah wove Wucy,” was the extent of his spoken English. Of course Ö, the soda-straw, didn’t
need
to speak English. Fefferfuff could create the necessary sound waves by vibrating the particles of his gaseous body. And Fefferfuff, who was part of Ö…or was it the other way around…Fefferfuff was a linguist, a student of Earth’s televised culture. He had some very strange ideas about Earth.

“Jack-Stalk,” the cloud person asked then, “In your sex orgies what is the precise role of the twenty-piece steel mixing-bowl set? Is the wearing of black mouse-ears a signal of genotypic sterility? Or is it rather functioning as signal for coital adjacency? We are so very curious about your reproductive processes.”

“If you’re so interested in that stuff you should spend some time on Earth and look around…instead of watching television all the time. Sex is part of everyday life. No big deal. It’s just …” Jack broke off, strangely embarrassed, and made the traditional hand-gesture for coitus:
The extended right forefinger is thrust repeatedly into a circle formed by the left thumb and forefinger
. In point of fact, Jack was still a virgin.

“You and Lucy must do this for all of us,” Fefferfuff said. “We never seeing it on television. Excretion as well. Until Ö and I picking you up we thinking that human body-chemistry so advanced that there no bodily wastes. In the cases of Fred-Flintstone or Walter-Cronkite, for instance …”

Jack stopped listening. He’d been kidnapped by incredibly advanced aliens…and all they were interested in was doo-doo and weenies.

They were from the planet Tulpa, on the other side of the galaxy, about a hundred thousand light-years from Earth. Something about the symmetry of the galactic gravitational field made it easy for them to jump across to our side and back. They’d been doing the jumps for twenty or thirty years now, but had never actually landed on Earth before this. They hadn’t had the conventional rocket power up till now.

Prior to this visit, the Tulpans had gotten all their information about Earth by intercepting TV broadcasts. On the basis of total minutes broadcast, they had concluded that Lucille Ball was the most important person on Earth. Apparently they had developed some sort of Lucy simulacrum.

Once again, Jack leaned over the ship’s control panel, trying to puzzle it out. The big button there must activate the FTL drive…he’d seen Fefferfuff reach a tendril down to it just before the jump. And those two rows of lights had something to do with the velocity. Before the jump, the Tulpans had wasted days maneuvering the ship till each pair of lights was glowing evenly. The conventional rocket controls were over there and …

Fefferfuff drifted down from the ceiling to shroud the control panel. The engines shifted to full roar. The ship was sliding down into the gravitational well of the planet Tulpa. Jack lurched back to his jellybed.

When Fefferfuff had finished setting the controls, he drifted over to settle down on top of little Ö and his bed. The two of them seemed to be symbiotic parts of a single organism. An animated lichen. The gauzy cloud-person wrapped himself round and round the lively soda-straw. The result was a long pale object about the size and shape of a human mummy. A hole opened in one end to address Jack Stalk.

“We shaping like humans in your honor.” Arms and legs articulated out of the form, then fingers, a nose and a chin. It looked something like the Pillsbury dough-boy.

There was a thump and the engines stopped. They’d landed. As far as Jack Stalk could figure out, he’d been brought here to star in a live sex-show, co-starring a giant lichen in drag. Fuuuugh! What a way to lose your virginity!

The dough-boy opened the ship’s door and…she was right outside, smiling at him with that weird double-bow mouth, her hair flaming red. The planet’s surface looked like blue jello.

“Hello, Jack-Stalk. Let’s getting down to business.”

The humanoid form lay down on the blue jello and pulled up her skirts …

“What should be under skirts?” Ö-Fefferfuff stage-whispered in Jack Stalk’s ear. “What normally looking like? We fix up just like.”

“Not keeping a girl waiting all day,” the supine one warbled, nancing her skirts back and forth. There were several other Tulpans standing around holding things that might have been guns…but were probably cameras. Jack made his move.

With quick, economical motions, he pushed the Ö-Fefferfuff dough-boy out of the hatch, stepped back, locked the door, and walked over to the control panel. If he wasted time using the conventional rockets, the Tulpans would get him. Better to use the FTL drive right away. Jump right out. Back to Earth, back to Louisville, back to Micha.

A Tulpan’s voice crackled over the ship’s comm-unit. “Not making a false move, Jack-Stalk! Above all not using the FTL drive without matching velocity to cosmic nullity! Uncontrolled hyperjumping very bad, come back yesterday!”

Another Tulpan voice, perhaps Ö-Fefferfuff’s, broke in. “If you really…
not
loving Lucy, we can painless re-model. Better maybe she matching dream-girl Micha? You giving us please one sex-show and I safely driving you home like taxi.”

Something finally snapped in Jack Stalk’s psyche. He wanted out,
far
out, right
now
. He pushed the big FTL button on the control panel.

The Tulpans watched in dismay as their ship wavered, sagged and disappeared.

“You’re a fool,” the one with the comm-unit told Ö-Fefferfuff.

“God is a fool,” the dough-boy shrugged. “He wrote the script, not me.”

“What’s going to happen?” the imitation Lucy asked, flowing back into an upright position. “Jack-Stalk didn’t match velocities! He jumped without adopting the cosmic frame of reference!” They spoke in Tulpan.

One of the cameramen spoke up. “Since we’re moving away from Earth, this means that he’ll get back before he left …”

“Oh no!” Lucy shrilled. “What if he causes a paradox? What if he warns his past self not to be abducted by Ö-Fefferfuff? If he’s not abducted, then he doesn’t come here, so he doesn’t go back, so he doesn’t warn himself, so he
is
abducted, in which case he
does
go back, and …”

“Oh, shut up,” the Tulpan with the comm-unit snapped. “We’ve all heard it before. What do
you
think, Ö-Fefferfuff, you unruffled fool?”

Ö-Fefferfuff had let himself slump into the sluglike Posture of Noble Ease. “No problem, chief. Grandma’s in her rocker and all’s right with the cage.” A serious student of the
Tweetie and Sylvester
cycle, he enjoyed showing off his erudition. “But seriously, Ü-Ramalam, are you familiar with Ä-Eddywed’s explanation of the recession of distant galaxies? He claims that, in cosmic time, the galaxies are actually shrinking, and
that’s
why they look farther apart. Thus, when Jack-Stalk arrives, perhaps one or two Lucy shows before leaving, he will …”

Jack Stalk stared out his stolen ship’s porthole, presumably at the Sun. After fiddling around with the instrument panel for awhile, he’d been able to dope out the controls for the attitude jets. He was, after all, a budding engineer. He’d rolled the ship around till he found what looked like the closest and brightest star. That
had
to be the Sun. If not …

He pushed the thought back, pointed the ship towards that bright star, and cut in the conventional rocket drive. He would have liked to try another hyperjump…but maybe hyperjumps were bad for nearby planets. The thought that he might have destroyed Tulpa didn’t particularly bother him. Hell, what difference was one less inhabited planet in a whole galaxy? But Earth…Earth was special. Earth had Micha on it. Not to mention Louisville.

The Tulpan ship was fast…the engines seemed to be based on powerful mass-converters. But it was still a long way to the Sun. He kept track of the days by making food-paste smears on the bulkhead. Fefferfuff had showed him how to run the food synthesizer on the way out.

After two weeks the Sun…if it
was
the Sun…had grown to a distinct little disc, and Jack Stalk began decelerating. Once a day he would cut the engines and roll the ship around, watching for planets. On his third day of searching, he spotted a bright dot a few degrees above the Sun. Above the sun, damn, that meant he wasn’t in the plane of the ecliptic. He was coming down on the solar system from above…or up from beneath, not that up and down really meant anything out in …

On second thought Jack Stalk realized that it was
good
to be looking down on the solar system. He dialed up the porthole’s magnification and began looking for planets. It wasn’t hard, once he got the hang of it…after all, sunlight was bouncing up off each of them. It was just a matter of…
there
, that blue-white one had to be Earth…it was the next one in from the red one, Mars.

Jack managed to hit the plane of the ecliptic pretty near Earth, but he hadn’t decelerated enough, and had to spend a frustrating three days watching Earth sliding back above him. From time to time he wondered what sort of fuel the rocket’s mass-converter used…and how much of it was left. It was another long week till he finally got back up near the Earth, and this time at a reasonable speed.

The planet looked big, really big, turning majestically beneath him. Landing was going to be touchy…if he came in too fast there’d be no correcting it. And what if someone’s Air Force fired a missile at him?

Jack Stalk spun the dial on the comm-unit, hoping to eavesdrop on some military transmissions.

FZZAT! The screen sprang to life. A smooth, handsome male face stared out at him. “What do you mean by coming here like this? What is it that you…
want
, Jennifer?”

Cut to Jennifer’s tear-stained face. “Oh, Brad, don’t you
understand
? I’ve fallen in love with you. You can’t just
use
a woman and walk …”

Jack Stalk smiled happily. A soap opera. He was back to Earth for sure. He decided to just watch TV for a while, relax, wait for the news, find out the date. It had been Saturday, August 22, 1981, when the Tulpans had nabbed him. Since then had been close to two months. Would Micha still be waiting? As the soap opera on the TV screen played itself out, Jack Stalk’s own soap opera spun in his mind.

On that last Saturday, he and Micha had gone swimming in a quarry on Jack’s brother’s farm, a few miles west of Louisville. It had just been the two of them, so they’d gone nude. The water in the quarry was deep and unimaginably pure. You could see blue-gills hovering, ten, twenty, thirty feet below. Jack loved to dive and come up under Micha, marveling at her big strong buttocks and huge buoyant breasts.

There was even a cave cut into the quarry wall, and Jack and Micha swam in there for some serious necking. It had been nice, not too rocky, and not much flotsam except for an old grey tennis-ball.

Micha’s lips, posing and pouting, had planted kisses, soft and hard, all over him. He’d revelled in her white curves…this was the first time he’d seen her naked all over…and had noticed that from the side she was an almost perfect sine-wave. Kissable neck at zero, plump nipple at one-half pi, tiny waist at pi, delectable summit of firm asscheek at three-halves pi, and the divinely soft folds of thigh against buttock at two pi. He’d told her this, and she, also an engineering student at The University of Louisville, had been amused.

They might have even made love, at last, at last…if Jack’s brother Daryl hadn’t showed up. Typically, Daryl had made his presence known by firing a shotgun and hollering, “COME ON OUT OF THAT CAVE,” over the outside speaker of his pickup truck’s CB.

He was just-kidding-around-of-course, as usual, but Micha’d been so freaked that Jack had had to swim back, tell Daryl to cool it, get Micha’s suit, and swim it out to the cave.

They swam in side by side, and Jack had been touched-to-the-quick by Micha’s brave and nervous smile, her lower lip set just so against her upper. On second thought, it hadn’t been the smile itself that really got him—it had been her control over it, and the way she would compress her lips over and over again in her enigmatic, slightly menacing pout.

“Hey,” Daryl had called when she got out of the water. “What’s a sexy girl like you doing with my baby brother? What’s he got that I don’t?”