Complete Stories (32 page)

“So what?”

“Contradictions are logically impossible,” I explained. “A universe containing contradictions cannot exist.”

“Glub gazork,” said the mermaid. And then she did something very strange. She lifted up her arms and…didn’t lift up her arms. At the same time. She winked/smiled at Harry/me. The sprite pinched my cheek with both hands. Yet at the same time she was tickling Harry.

“You see?” said the gnome. “Who are you to tell the universe what it can do.”

“The existence of the universe is already a contradiction,” amplified the sprite. “Something from nothing.”

“Glub gazork na bog du smeepy flan.”

“Slideways in the fog.”

“Tally-ho!”

“Stop!” cried Harry. “I can’t take any more.”

The two goblins put their arms around each other’s shoulders like Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

“First boy,” sang the sprite.

“Nohow,” snapped a goblin.

“Second boy.”

“Contrariwise,” cried the other.

“This is all very interesting,” I interrupted. “But what’s the point? I mean, will you fix our windshield or not?” The effects of the pixie-dust were beginning to wear off and I was getting cold.

“‘In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure dome decree,’” quoted the gnome, “‘Where Alph the sacred river ran / Through caverns measureless to man / Down to a sunless sea.’ This is the sunless sea, Joe Fletcher. We like it here. If we let you keep your rocket, you might come back. You might turn our inertia-winder off. Or your leader, the mad General Moritz, might mindlessly attack us.”

“What if the sphere of influence keeps growing,” I protested. “What if all the galaxy gets eaten up?”

“That won’t happen,” said the sprite. “The thing’s already stopped growing. It’s stable now. You mustn’t disturb it.”

Harry and I exchanged a glance. I could read his thoughts like neon signs:
Who cares about the inertia-winder anyway?
and
I like the sprite
, and
How are we going to get back?
and …

There was a sudden screaming. It seemed to come from a great distance. One of the goblins disappeared and the other began to jabber.

“Six furlongs ‘tis and most foully beaked. The squid draws nigh to seek her prey and snaffle down these miserable victims every one!”

“The space-squid!” exclaimed the gnome.

“Oh my,” said the sprite. “Already?”

“Aaauuugh!” roared the mermaid, rippling in sloppy panic.

“Don’t worry, dear,” said the sprite. “These men are going to kill the squid after it eats you, remember?”

“Aaaaaaarrrgh! Yubba mmpf wow!”

“What
squid
?” I demanded, but the question was suddenly superfluous. Looming up ahead was a huge, twisty, purplish form: the space-squid.

It looked much like an ocean-going giant squid. Its body was a pen-shaped pod with a fluke at one end. The business end of the body sported eight tentacles and two extra-long arms, arms some thirty meters long and with broad sucker-pads at the ends.

Watching us closely with its huge, intelligent eyes, the creature drew closer. Its method of propulsion was elegant: a flexible funnel sticking out of its body spewed a jet of glowing ions.

Before any of us could really react (or perhaps the elementals had no will to alter a known future), the long arms’ sucker-pads had seized the mermaid. She gave a gurgling cry and was drawn away from us towards the space-squid’s bunched and writhing wreath of tentacles. I could make out a great hooked beak in the center, a beak like a parrot’s, and moments later this beak sank into the mermaid’s watery flesh.

Her screams were overwhelming. Listening against my will, I felt the slash of the creature’s beak; I felt the grip of its tooth-ringed suckers; I felt the horror of becoming food.

“Quick,” shouted Harry. “Let out the superslime!”

Yes
! The superslime! I zipped into our ship and opened up the toilet vent. At first there was no reaction, but when I stuck in my hand the slime came surging after.

“Get under the car,” Harry told the elementals. “Go around behind it and wait till the squid tries to eat the superslime.”

“We knew you’d do this,” said the gnome happily. “You humans are so delightfully sequential.”

The slime was thickly feeling for me, its glistening surface athrob. I led it out through the broken windshield, out into space. As the slime was vacuum-adapted, this caused it no pain. It flowed out, bulking ever larger. Now the space-squid’s arms came reaching towards us again.

A quick, inertialess twist and flip put me safe under the car with the others. Using my pixie-dust ESP, I could pick up the feelings of both slime and squid.
EAT
!
GRAB
!
EAT
!
GRAB
!

The two met like long-lost lovers: tentacles seizing slime, slime engulfing tentacles. The hideous beak gobbled chunks of superslime while the slime’s acids dissolved great sections of the squid. In a matter of minutes, nothing at all was left; they’d consumed each other totally.

“Like an electron meeting a positron,” marveled Harry. “Now will you three fix our spaceship?”

“Even if they fix it, we’re going to have a hard time with no slime for food and air,” I worried at Harry.

“We
won’t
fix it,” said the gnome. “We don’t want anyone coming back out here. What’s more, Harry Gerber is going to
forget
how to build inertia-winders.”

“Zap,” said the sprite, tapping Harry’s head with her wand. “That does it.”

I felt a sudden horror of the void of space stretching out on all sides of us.

“Help us,” I begged the goblin. “Isn’t there a way for us to go back?”

“Go slideways.”

“We don’t know how.”

“We can push you,” said the gnome. “Where do you want to land?”

“And when?” added the sprite.

“At Nancy’s sister’s house in Virginia,” I said.

“June twenty-fourth,” said Harry. “Like it should be. Please send us back. I really don’t remember how to build the inertia-winder. I promise.”

The goblin danced, the sprite waved her wand, and the gnome put his hands on our backs and shoved. We tumbled head over heels slideways fro, and crashed down onto Nancy’s sister’s dining table.

Nancy was, on the whole, glad to see me. I moved into her bedroom, and they let Harry sleep on the couch. Our plan was to lie low for a few weeks. Everything would have been fine if Nancy’s sister hadn’t asked Harry to fix her TV set. But that’s another story.

============

Written in Spring, 1982.

The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
, January, 1983.

“Inertia” has one of the more complicated and interesting scientific premises I’ve used. I got the idea for it when hanging around with my Lynchburg friend, Mike Gambone, who did indeed have a peeling paint ceiling and an electric gyroscope in his basement. After I wrote “Inertia,” Mike gave me the gyroscope, and I kept it with me until we left Lynchburg. The transreal identities of my Fletcher and Harry characters vary, but when I was writing “Inertia,” I thought of Fletcher as Mike and Harry as me. Later I wrote a whole novel about these two characters,
Master of Space and Time
.

Religious fervor filled the air. Twenty or thirty rows of mutants ringed the torch-lit dais where Pally Love was holding forth. The dais was set up in the middle of what had once been a gymnasium. The gym had been part of a YMCA summer camp located on an island out in the Thomas River. The island was called Love Island now. It was the seat of Pally Love’s Millennial Church of the Mystical Body of Christ. Pally was a doughy little man with a plain face. But what a voice!

“
They
call you gunjy mues.” he shouted. “The Montviews, the Pigyears, the Arkers…
they
want to kill you, yes they do. They set themselves up as mighty ones, and they seek to trample you beneath their feet. They see fit to tamper with Lord God’s new dispensation. Oh, sweet Jesus, what a time we’re having here.
Oh
, what a time we are having on God’s gray earth in these, the last days. And these
are
the last days, my brethren, make no mistake about it. I’d like you to pause…and look around, dear friends. Look at your neighbors, look at each other, and ask yourself one simple question. One simple little question. Does Pally love me? Can I let Pally into my heart? Can
Christ
, through Pally, bring me to a brighter day? Dear friends! If you say
yes
, if you say
yes Pally
, then you have received the greatest gift that man can receive. You have received the love that Christ has given
me
to give unto
you
. And this love …”

Meg Crash stood off to one side, watching Pally work out. Pretty good crowd of mues tonight, and most of them had brought something. The offerings were piled beside the dais: records, pieces of metal, liquor, car batteries, bags of food, even some tanks of gasoline. Pally was one of the only men in Killeville who managed to still drive a car. Pally Love, king of the gunjy mues. Not that Pally himself was a mutant. No way. Pally was fat and sleek and healthy as a prize stud-hog. That was part of his appeal to the mues: the fact that even though he was everything the mutants were not, Pally still loved them.

And why shouldn’t Pally love the mues? They took good care of him. They took good care of Meg Crash, too, for that matter, not that Meg could bring herself to really love them any more than Pally could. It was a rough job being Pally Love’s head deaconess, especially rough ever since her brother Tab had left.

“Yes,” Pally was shouting. “Come forward my darlings, drag your poor twisted bodies here and
merge
with the love of Christ, Christ the Son of God, the Christ whose body-cells are
us
. Join Him now, come
join Him
here and now!”

This was Meg’s signal to start helping mues up onto the dais. A kid with no legs was already out in the aisle, so Meg helped that one first. The kid’s head was all wrenched around to one side and his tongue was hanging out, but you could sense a keen intelligence in there anyway. One thing, mues weren’t stupid, even if they did fall for Pally’s line. Who could tell? Maybe he was helping them more than they were helping him. The whole giant leech business made Meg nervous…it was like the mues were using Pally to set the thing up.

“Flubba,” said the kid, rolling an eye up at Meg. “Flubba geep.”

His body tapered to a sort of point around the waist, but his arms were big and strong. She grabbed his hands and lugged him up to the dais.
That’s it for you, gunjy mue
, Meg couldn’t help thinking.
Time to become part of Pally’s giant leech
. He was probably skrenning her thoughts but it didn’t seem to bother him.

Two others were at the edge of the platform already, and Meg helped them up. She glanced out at the crowd…no one else was coming up tonight. The next thing was to undress these three. The boy with no legs wore only a long T-shirt, which came off easily enough. The next mue had a fairly normal body, dressed in jeans and T-shirt, but it didn’t really have a head. There was just a sort of cavity-riddled hump between his shoulders. No telling which hole was for what. The jeans came off smoothly, but the T-shirt snagged on the ragged head-hump and Meg had to pull really hard. The last mue was perhaps female, very pale and wearing a night-gown. Stripping this off, Meg saw that its body was like a soft porcupine, with flesh-fingers sticking out all over. How did these things stay alive, anyway?

“Are you ready to join Christ’s mystical body?” The veins in Pally’s neck were standing out; his face was slick with sweat.

“
Weddy, Pawwy!
”

“Open the tabernacle, Reverend Crash!”

Meg walked over to the side of the gymnasium and threw open the door that led to the locker room. The giant leech lived in there, a sort of group-creature made up of the merged bodies of scores of mues. It wouldn’t do to let the thing near you…not unless you were ready to join it for good. A sweet, wet smell drifted out of the locker room door. Meg could hear a heavy slithering, a sound like wet canvas bags being dragged across the cement floor. Taking no chances, she hurried across to the other side of the gym.

The rest of the mues, the ones not ready to merge tonight, followed Meg across the gym floor, dragging and flippering themselves along as fast as they could. Meg stood protectively in front of them with an electric cattle prod in one hand. Pally used his car’s generator to keep the prod charged up.

The gym floor was clear now, clear except for the little, round platform in the middle. Pally was still on the platform, still yelling, with the three naked mues at his feet.

“Can you
feel
it?”

“
Guh fee it.
”

“Are you
ready
?”

“
Bluh weddy!
”

“Do you
want
it?”

“
Wah wanna!
”

The tip of the giant leech poked out of the locker-room door now, and the crowd moaned with excitement. The giant leech ritual was still relatively new. Meg’s twin brother Tab had invented it more or less by accident one night…the last night before he’d taken off for some other part of Killeville. Pally had always ended his services by having some mues get up on the dais with him. Once they were up there, he’d sprinkle water and oil on them and say they were blessed. But that last night, Tab, drunk and disgusted, had filled Pally’s water and oil pitchers with concentrated battery acid.

Now the one thing about mutants was their fantastic ability to recover from wounds. If you stuck a knife in a mue and pulled the blade back out, the cut would just close up. They healed like dough, no matter what. To kill a mue you had to practically cut it in half. Their ability to regenerate tissue was one of their two big survival traits, the other survival feature being enhanced psi powers. They could read minds and see things far away. “Skrenning,” they called it.

When Tab’s acid had burned four mues’ skins off that last night, the skins had taken a few minutes to grow back. But by then the flayed parts, where the mues touched, had already grown together. Presto, a group-creature, a newborn giant leech, a grex made of four mutants. Technically, a
grex
is a slug-like object formed by a group of slime-mold cells. Each of the cells has an independent existence, yet for purposes of reproduction they are able to join together, crawl about, and form a fruiting body. The combination of tissue regeneration and psi power enabled the mues to form just such a grex, a leech-like creature that lived and acted as a single organism.