Inside Man and Other Science Fiction Stories Part 14

"Of course half," said Mrs. Lombino, grunting emphatically."How do we do that?" asked Harvey.

"Tell us where you get the wings grafted on."

"Grafted on?" repeated Harvey in amazement. "They weren't grafted on. They grew."

The Great Lombinos stopped grunting. "We are very serious," said Mr. Lombino.

"Please don't make jokes with us."

"I am serious. They just grew."

"So? How?"

Harvey told them. They exchanged quick glances.

Mr. Lombino took out a pistol. "We not just serious. We desperate. If you want keep the secret to yourself, I use this."

"Listen!" cried Harvey. "These wings have been nothing but trouble to me.

Aerodynamically, I am even more ridiculous than the b.u.mblebee. They made me lose my job. They cost me the girl I love. They don't let me sit down and I have to sleep in a harness, like an injured horse. And the way people stare at me Grubel is right I'm just a freak for the sideshows! d.a.m.n these wings!"

The wings fell to the floor.

Harvey looked down at them at first in horror and then with relief. "Sometimes it pays to lose your temper," he said, "and it is about time I lost mine. And," he added, reflectively, "something else of mine, too..."

Herding the crestfallen Lombinos out, he quickly dialed a phone number. "h.e.l.lo, Liz?" be asked, grinning, "Liz, listen"

THE TRANSMOGRIFICATION OF WAMBA'S REVENGE.

I.

As I sit here, writing this, in a deluxe suite of the famous but resounding Waldorf-Astoria, I can look out the fourth-floor window and see the people below resembling the scurrying warrior ants of my native Africa. It was a Monday because the other married women were down at the river, beating their laundry on flat rocks, when Mr. Lundeen, the local White Hunter, came into our compound with a two-truck safari.

"What cheer, Wamba?" he said to me in pidgin Pigmy. "Why you not at river wash clothes?"

I nodded h.e.l.lo, ignoring his, deliberate insult. He knew perfectly well that I spoke English, having graduated from Bennington College for Women, and that as daughterof the Super Chief of All the Pigmies and No. 1 Wife of the Head Witch Doctor, I was exempt from menial tasks.

"Me worry on you, Wamba," he continued with his atrocious accent and the vocabulary of a r.e.t.a.r.ded three-year-old, while climbing out of his Land Rover. "Me think you grow one or two inch since last time."

Oh, he was an expert needler! And he touched me at my proudest spot. The women of all our tribes didn't envy me my status, which they and I had grown up with, but there wasn't one of them that wouldn't maim herself to be my height a good three inches shorter than any other full-grown Pigmy adult! It was difficult, but I kept silent. The tribe's whole cash crop came from Lundeen's safaris, and I mustn't jeopardize it, no matter what.

My father, the Super Chief, came out of the council hut, followed by my husband, the Head Witch Doctor, just as an oldish young man clambered down from the other vehicle and handed out a woman in jodhpurs.

"Welcome! Welcome!" cried my father in English I had taught him with no little pain; he was a terrible linguist. "Great honor! Very great! Welcome!"

My husband, the Head Witch Doctor, stood waiting for the introductions, and Lundeen obliged, using all the appropriate t.i.tles, including mine. The oldish young man was a Professor Todd, and the woman in jodhpurs was his wife. We shook hands all around, ours being small and dry, theirs being large and moist.

"You come to hunt?" asked my father politely, using up the last of his English.

"In a way," said the Professor. "You've heard of penicillin, quinine, digitalis?"

"Yes," said my husband. "We use them all the time."

"Really?" Mrs. Todd said disinterestedly. "No masks or dances to drive away evil spirits?"

My husband's eyes did not waver an inch. "Of course. Faith is part of the healing process."

"Well," the Professor said briskly, "I am here to look for more such species in the soil, the barks, the berries, leaves everything. I have a laboratory on wheels, and I do hope you people will help me in my search."

"What did he say?" the Super Chief asked. I translated and he said, "What's in it for us?"

"Honor," said the Witch Doctor, and, "Whatever squeezes through my fingers," said Lundeen, both in Pigmy. Then, in pseudo-British/English, Lundeen said, "I say, Professor, why don't you show our royal hosts your laboratory while I show Mrs.

Todd the compound?""Splendid," said Prof. Todd. "This way, please."

I followed the three men, but kept looking back over my shoulder. Just as I expected, the White Hunter was charming the Professor's wife, a scene I had witnessed every time there was a giddy female in a safari. This time, however, he was bold to the point of contempt, a fact that was not lost on the Professor, who stopped at the steps of the traveling laboratory and looked after the pair. She was holding Lundeen's upper arm in both her hands and smiling dizzily up at him. I saw pain cross the Professor's face before he turned and ushered us into the air-conditioned laboratory.

"Bless me!" said my husband in awe, while my father whistled. As for myself, I had seen labs of one sort or another, but nothing so marvelously compact and complete as this.

I said so, and Prof. Todd's face lit up with pride. "Thank you," he said. "Mr.

Lundeen told me of your American education, Princess, and your work, Doctor, at the hospital in Mbuti, and he a.s.sured me that you both would be invaluable to our mission."

"We are yours to command," quoted the Head Witch Doctor.

"Good, good. Then you can help me organize your people in to work parties, each group to collect whatever it's a.s.signed to ferns, soils, barks, and so forth. And you, Princess, will be my lab a.s.sistant."

"And you'll need a cleaning woman twice a week," I said.

"No, no," said the Professor quickly. "Mr. Lundeen wouldn't trust anyone but you to keep things clean and orderly," he exclaimed and rubbed hands. "We're practically in business right now!"

"Yes," said my husband, the Head Witch Doctor. "In one way or another, Mr.

Lundeen always gives us the business."

My father had been following all this with great difficulty. Now he asked me what the arrangements were. I told him.

"You mean that you, the Princess, are to be a housemaid?" he all but roared in Pigmy. "I forbid it!"

"What seems to be the difficulty?" asked Prof. Todd, bewildered.

"He's a stickler for protocols I answered. "We'll straighten it out with Mr. Lundeen."

"Good, good. We don't want any hurt feelings. Now, Doctor, I'll need to know how many able-bodied people you have, so we can set up work parties..."

Looking back over what I have written, I feel terribly unlike a professional writer. I haven't, for example, told you all I knew about the White Hunter that he came fromOhio, but wouldn't wear, drive or talk anything not British; his owning a Land Rover instead of a jeep was complete characteristic. You mustn't think he was typical of White Hunters. He wasn't typical of anything but a greedy, selfish, overbearing opportunist, a phony who loved to humiliate us because we couldn't hit back. And we couldn't hit back because no other White Hunter bothered with us. They used to, but that was before Lundeen arrived.

I don't know what to add about Prof. Todd. He was the average dedicated scientist who, for no discernible reason, happened to be married to a vain, stupid woman, younger than himself.

I see that I've given Mrs. Todd only one line of dialogue, when, in fact, she was anything but inarticulate, in a nasty, bored sort of way except, I soon discovered, when she was alone with an admirer. Or thought they were alone. I made a point of watching her and Lundeen for my people's sake, of course. I wanted them to be paid for their work and, come to think of it, mine too because so much depended on it.

Which brings me to our tribal setup. It was commonly known that we Pigmies were primitive nomads, but I've never encountered anyone who knew that the central tribe, ours, was not. The satellite tribes all visited us in turn, for whatever meager trading we could do, but mainly for treatment of their and our sick and aged. The White Hunter was essential to this because he brought us medicines, for which he extorted every last penny he allowed us to make from his safaris.

II.

"Things are going just beautifully, Princess!" Prof. Todd said enthusiastically three days later. "The work parties would have overwhelmed me if not for your help with the tagging and cla.s.sifying. I've never seen anyone pick up details as fast as you unless it's your husband!"

A lot he knew! Between that fathead Lundeen and that insipid idiot Mrs. Todd, the tribe was on the verge of mutiny, medicines or no medicines. With her hanging adoringly onto his arm, he would needle the work parties in his execrable Pigmy so that they had either to strangle him or work off their anger on their jobs. Then, when Prof. Todd came up, he could only compliment Lundeen for their zeal. (The work parties were organized into squads, with each squad searching for a different thing, like soil samples, fungi, roots, bemoes and so on. And they worked in each other's footsteps, going away from the compound, between two lines of rope which my father and husband laid out differently each day.) After leaving the parties to the Head Witch Doctor and the Super Chief, the two would come to the lab and work me over. They knew none of us could complain to the Professor, so we were safe targets. Lundeen's favorite stunt was to ask me to wipe things far over my head, which I had to reach by standing on a lab stool, and making me clean out the animal cages. Todd didn't know what was going on,because the orders were in Pigmy. Then Mrs. Todd would say, "Princess, darling, would it be too much trouble to light my cigarette?" And I would. And she'd blow smoke in my face when Todd's back was turned.

I had never felt such hatred before! Nor could I vent it on anyone or anything; my husband and father had their own troubles, one treating the rebellious with tranquilizers and the other with orders to obey instructions and ignore the needling.

All this was going through my mind when I saw Prof. Todd peering at me at eye-level. "I've been driving you too hard," he said. "You look tired."

Tired? I was exhausted, working all day and staying up all night to keep an eye on Lundeen and Mrs. Todd. And I hadn't gotten anything more incriminating on my little battery-powered tape recorder than some slurping noises that I knew were kisses, but that wouldn't convince anyone else. Neither of the pair was brainy enough to be so circ.u.mspect. There had to be some reason for each staying in his own guest hut all night. I thought I knew what it was, so I let my shoulders and face slump and mumbled something about duty and honor.

"I know how you feel; I feel the same way about saving lives." Prof. Todd said, leading me firmly out of the laboratory. "But one has one's duty to oneself too, you know. I want you to take the day off and sleep!"

"Yes, Professor," I said obediently. "I could sleep for days."

"Then take tomorrow off as well," he said, taking me to my hut, and he wouldn't leave until I pretended to doze off. "Night-night, sleep tight," he whispered, leaving on tippy toes.

Take my word for it, it was almost more than I could do not to fall asleep. But I had to stay awake! What a nice guy, I thought how could he have stayed married to this queen of the stag line? Did she, to quote Mad Ave, know where the body was buried? I didn't know, but I intended to find out.

When I was sure Prof. Todd was inside his lab and unlikely to look outside, I slipped out with my tape recorder and searched for the miscreants. As I suspected, they were nowhere in the compound. The Land Rover also was gone.

I followed the freshest tire tracks out of the compound. I was worried for the moment about being seen by the work parties, but the tracks led off in the opposite direction.

Settling down to what was, for a Pigmy, and a woman at that, and a woman three inches shorter than any other adult Pigmy to boot, a steady lope, I kept listening for the Land Rover and watching the ground for tracks leading off the rutted jungle road. Put yourself in my place, wouldn't you expect them to drive miles away and get off the trail so they wouldn't be surprised by a pa.s.serby?

Au contraire, that was expecting too much of these nasty specimens, for I cameupon the vehicle as I rounded a bend barely 15 minutes from home.

I slipped up on its blind side, hung my microphone on a tarpaulin rope and paid out wire as I backed off the road into the jungle. Screened by a bush, I could hear very clearly what was going on as I switched on the machine.

"Now do you believe me, you mad, impetuous boy?" said Mrs. Todd a little breathlessly. "I told you I love you. How many ways are there of convincing you?"

"You could tell me why you married him in the first place," Lundeen said in a sullen voice.

"Why, it's obvious, sweetheart. Everybody expects him to win the n.o.bel Prize."

"So that's why you came along on this expedition!"

"Came along? I took him away from teaching at the University, bought him the best portable lab money could buy, financed the whole safari"

"WHAT?" cried Lundeen.

"You mean you didn't know I'm filthy rich?" she said. "You loved me for myself alone?"

I could practically hear the White Hunter's excuse for a brain going into reverse.

Knowing him from many safaris, I could tell he had been about to say through la stiff upper lip that he'd marry her in a minute if not for his (fict.i.tious) wife and tots at home, who needed him and the little money he brought in from his safaris.

"Of course I didn't know," he said, his voice sounding choked. "But what difference would it have made? Me a lowly"

"Don't say it!" she cried. "You're a fine, handsome, intelligent man, and I can't stand another day with that creep, even if he does win the n.o.bel Prize!"

"Then let's leave him here"

"Without his laboratory, so he can't follow us"

"But would you consent to be my my wife?"

"Dearest," she said, "I would. And you won't have to be a White Hunter unless you want to be."

"Not without you," he vowed piously. I believed him. He wouldn't let all that money go unguarded.

Well, so much for evidence. I had all I needed. So I stowed away the microphone and wire and headed back to the compound. They came in an hour later and made for Lundeen's hut. I waited till they started packing his campaign chest, then went into the hut with two gla.s.ses, a bottle of Scotch and a soda bottle on a tray."Dash it all, Princess, you're full of surprises!" Lundeen exclaimed. "I had sort of been looking forward to our daily snit about bringing us drinks."

"One must do what one must do," I said meekly.

"I don't leave you much choice, do I?" he boomed.

"None at all."

"Darling, you're so masterful," Mrs. Todd was saying as I left.

I went back to my hut and took out the treasure chest I kept under my bunk. My Barbie and Ken doll clothing were at the top. I took them out and then gathered all the rags I could find and returned to Lundeen's hut. It was the sickest night I had ever spent.

III.

Prof. Todd looked very upset when I came into the lab the next morning, toting a bag and my tape recorder. He was wearing a surgical mask for some reason to avoid contaminating the white rats he was trying to work on, I suppose.

"Princess!" he cried. "My wife is gone!"

"Real gone," I said with a grin. "And that's not just her opinion. It's Lundeen's, too."

"You think" he started to say, but couldn't continue.

I pushed aside the chemistry equipment on his table and upended my bag. Two miniature figures in little green smocks tumbled out amid the four white rats.

Todd stared as the figures jumped to their feet and, clinging to each other, looked wildly around them.

"That's Lundeen and my wife!" he gasped. "What have you done to them?"