After they had revived one of the women and four of the men, the expert from Johns Hopkins, a serious, pale gentleman who wore wing-tip shoes, continued… As best I can estimate, this creature—clearly an alien life-form from some other planet in that alternate time/universe—has an erotic capacity that, once engaged, cannot be neutralized. Once having begun to enjoy its, uh, favors… a man either cannot or will not stop having relations.”
“But that’s impossible!” said one of the women. “Men simply cannot hold an erection that long.” She looked around at several of her male compatriots with disdain.
“Apparently the thing secretes some sort of stimulant, a jelly perhaps, that re-engorges the male member,” said the expert from Johns Hopkins.
“But is it male or female?” asked one of the men, an administrative assistant who had let it slip in one of their regular encounter sessions that he was concerned about his own sexual preferences.
“It’s both, and neither,” said the expert from Johns Hopkins. “It seems equipped to handle anything up to and including chickens or kangaroos with double vaginas.” He smiled a thin, controlled smile, saying, “You folks have a problem,” and then he presented them with a staggering bill for his services. And then he departed, still smiling.
They were little better off than they had been before. But the women seemed interested.
Two months later, having fed temponaut Enoch Mirren intravenously when they noticed that his weight had been dropping alarmingly, they found an answer to the problem of separating the man and the sex object. By setting up a random sequence sound wave system, pole to pole, with Mirren and his paramour between, they were able to disrupt the flow of energy in the disgusting thing’s metabolism. Mirren opened his eyes, blinked several times, murmured,.. Oh, that was good!” and they pried him loose.
The disgusting thing instantly rolled into a ball and went to sleep.
They immediately hustled Enoch Mirren into an elevator and dropped with him to the deepest, most tightly secured level of the supersecret underground TimeSep Central complex, where a debriefing interrogation cell waited to claim him. It was 10’x10’x20’, heavily padded in black Naugahyde, and was honeycombed with sensors and microphones. No lights.
They put him in the cell, let him stew for twelve hours, then fed him, and began the debriefing.
“Mirren, what the hell is that disgusting thing?”
The voice came from the ceiling. In the darkness Enoch Mirren belched lightly from the quenelles of red snapper they had served him, and scooted around on the floor where he was sitting, trying to locate the source of the annoyed voice.
“It’s a terrific little person from Cissalda,” he said.
“Cissalda?” Another voice; a woman’s voice.
“A planet in another star-system of that other time/universe,” he replied politely. “They call it Cissalda.”
“It can talk?” A third voice, more studious.
“Telepathically. Mind-to-mind. When we’re making love.”
“All right, knock it off, Mirren!” the first voice said.
Enoch Mirren sat in darkness, smiling.
“Then there’s life in that other universe, apart from that disgusting thing, is that right?” The third voice.
“Oh, sure,” Enoch Mirren said, playing with his toes. He had discovered he was naked.
“How’s the night life on Cissalda?” asked the woman’s voice, not really seriously.
“Well, there’s not much activity during the week,” he answered, “but Saturday nights are dynamite, I’m told.”
“I said knock it off, Mirren!”
“Yes, sir.”
The third voice, as if reading from a list of prepared questions, asked, “Describe time/universe Earth2 as fully as you can, will you do that, please?”
“I didn’t see that much, to be perfectly frank with you, but it’s really nice over there. It’s warm and very bright, even when the frenzel smelches. Every nolnek there’s a vit, when the cosmish isn’t drendeling. But I found…”
“Hold it, Mirren!” the first voice screamed.
There was a gentle click, as if the speakers were cut off while the interrogation team talked things over. Enoch scooted around till he found the soft wall, and sat up against it, whistling happily. He whistled “You and the Night and the Music,” segueing smoothly into “Some Day My Prince Will Come.” There was another gentle click and one of the voices returned. It was the angry voice that spoke first; the impatient one who was clearly unhappy with the temponaut. His tone was soothing, cajoling, as if he were the Recreation Director of the Outpatient Clinic of the Menninger Foundation.
“Enoch… may I call you Enoch…” Enoch murmured it was lovely to be called Enoch, and the first voice went on, “We’re, uh, having a bit of difficulty understanding you.”
“How so?”
“Well, we’re taping this conversation… uh, you don’t mind if we tape this, do you, Enoch?”
“Huh-uh.”
“Yes, well. We find, on the tape, the following words: ‘frenzel,’ ‘smelches,’ ‘nolneg’…”
“That’s nolnek,” Enoch Mirren said. “A nolneg is quite another matter. In fact, if you were to refer to a nolnek as a nolneg, one of the tilffs would certainly get highly upset and level a renaq…”
“Hold it!” The hysterical tone was creeping back into the interrogator’s voice. “Nolnek, nolneg, what does it matter—”
“Oh, it matters a lot. See, as I was saying—”
“—it doesn’t matter at all, Mirren, you asshole! We can’t understand a word you’re saying!”
The woman’s voice interrupted. “Lay back, Bert. Let me talk to him.” Bert mumbled something vaguely obscene under his breath. If there was anything Enoch hated, it was vagueness.
“Enoch,” said the woman’s voice, “this is Dr. Arpin. Inez Arpin? Remember me? I was on your training team before you left?”
Enoch thought about it. “Were you the black lady with the glasses and the ink blots?”
“No. I’m the white lady with the rubber gloves and the rectal thermometer.”
“Oh, sure, of course. You have very trim ankles.”
“Thank you.”
Bert’s voice exploded through the speaker. “Jeezus Keerice, Inez!”
“Enoch,” Dr. Arpin continued, ignoring Bert, “are you speaking in tongues?”
Enoch Mirren was silent for a moment, then said, “Gee, I’m awfully sorry. I guess I’ve been linked up with the Cissaldan so long, I’ve absorbed a lot of how it thinks and speaks. I’m really sorry. I’ll try to translate.”
The studious voice spoke again. “How did you meet the, uh, Cissaldan?”
“Just appeared. I didn’t call it or anything. Didn’t even see it arrive. One minute it wasn’t there, and the next it was.”
Dr. Arpin spoke. “But how did it get from its own planet to Earth2? Some kind of spaceship, perhaps?”
“No, it just… came. It can move by will. It told me it felt my presence, and just simply hopped across all the way from its home in that other star-system. I think it was true love that brought it. Isn’t that nice?”
All three voices tried speaking at once.
“Teleportation!” Dr. Arpin said, wonderingly.
“Mind-to-mind contact, telepathy, across unfathomable light-years of space,” the studious voice said, awesomely.
“And what does it want, Mirren?” Bert demanded, forgetting the conciliatory tone. His voice was the loudest.
“Just to make love; it’s really a terrific little person.”
“So you just hopped in the sack with that disgusting thing, is that right? Didn’t even give a thought to decent morals or contamination or your responsibility to us, or the mission, or anything? Just jumped right into the hay with that pukeable pervert?”
“It seemed like a good idea at the time,” Enoch said.
“Well, it was a lousy idea, whaddaya think about that, Mirren? And there’ll
be repercussions, you can bet on that, too; repercussions! Investigations! Responsibility must be placed!” Bert was shouting again. Dr. Arpin was trying to calm him.
At that moment, Enoch heard an alarm go off somewhere. It came through the speakers in the ceiling quite clearly, and in a moment the speakers were cut off. But in that moment the sound filled the interrogation cell, its ululations signaling dire emergency. Enoch sat in silence, in darkness, naked, humming, waiting for the voices to return. He hoped he’d be allowed to get back to his Cissaldan pretty soon.
But they never came back. Not ever.
The alarm had rung because the disgusting thing had vanished. The alien morphologists who had been monitoring it through the one-way glass of the control booth fronting on the examination stage that formed the escape-proof study chamber had been turned away only a few seconds, accepting mugs of steaming stimulant-laced coffee from a Tech 3. When they turned back, the examination stage was empty. The disgusting thing was gone.
People began running around in ever-decreasing circles. Some of them disappeared into holes in the walls and made like they weren’t there.
Three hours later they found the disgusting thing.
It was making love with Dr. Marilyn Hornback in a broom closet.
TimeSep Central, deep underground, was the primary locus of visitation, because it had taken the Cissaldan a little while to acclimate itself. But even as Bert, Dr. Inez Arpin, the studious type whose name does not matter, and all the others who came under the classification of chrono-experts were trying to unscramble their brains at the bizarre progression of events in TimeSep Central, matters were already out of their hands.
Cissaldans began appearing everywhere.
As though summoned by some silent song of space and time (which, in fact, was the case), disgusting things began popping into existence allover Earth. Like kernels of corn suddenly erupting into blossoms of popcorn, one moment there would be nothing—or a great deal of what passed for nothing—and the next moment a Cissaldan was there. Invariably right beside a human being. And in the next moment the invariable human being would get this good idea that it might be nice to, uh, er, that is, well, sorta do it with this creature.
Saffron-robed monks entering the mountain fastness of the Dalai Lama found that venerable fount of cosmic wisdom busily shtupping a disgusting thing. A beatific smile creased his wizened countenance.
An international conference of Violently Inclined Filmmakers at the Bel-Air Hotel in Beverly Hills was interrupted when it was noticed that Roman Polanski was under a table making violent love to a thing no one wanted to look at. Sam Peckinpah rushed over to abuse it. That went on, till Peckinpah’s disgusting thing materialized and the director fell upon it, moaning.
In the middle of their telecasts, Carmelita Pope, Dinah Shore and Merv Griffin looked away from the cyclopean red eye of the live cameras, spotted disgusting things, disrobed themselves and went to it, thereby upping their ratings considerably.
His Glorious Majesty, the Right Honorable President, General Idi Amin Dada, while selecting material for his new cowboy suit (crushed velvet had his temporary nod as being in just the right vein of quiet good taste), witnessed a materialization right beside his adenoid-shaped swimming pool and fell on his back. The disgusting thing hopped on. No one paid any attention.
Truman Capote, popping Quaaludes like M&M’s, rolled himself into a puffy little ball as his Cissaldan mounted him. The level of dope in his system, however, was so high that the disgusting thing went mad and strained itself straight up the urethra and hid itself against his prostate. Capote’s voice instantly dropped three octaves.
Maidservants to Queen Elizabeth, knocking frantically on, the door to her bedchamber, were greeted with silence. Guards instantly forced the door. They turned their heads away from the disgusting sight that greeted them. There was nothing regal, nothing imperial, nothing even remotely majestic about what was taking place there on the floor.
When Salvador Dali entered his Cissaldan, his waxed mustaches drooped alarmingly, like molten pocket watches.
Anita Bryant, locked in her bassinet-pink bathroom with her favorite vibrator, found herself suddenly assaulted by a disgusting thing. She fought it off and a second appeared. Then a third. Then a platoon. In moments the sounds of her outraged shrieks could be heard throughout that time zone, degenerating quickly into a bubbling, citraholic gurgle. It was the big bang theory actualized.
Cissaldans appeared to fourteen hundred assembly line workers in the automobile plant at Toyota City, just outside Yokohama. While the horny-handed sons and daughters of toil were busily getting it on, hundreds of half-assembled car bodies crashed and thundered into an untidy pile forty feet high.
Masters and Johnson had it off with the same one.
Billy Graham was discovered by his wife and members of his congregation having congress with a disgusting thing in a dust bin. He was “knowing” it, however, in the Biblical sense, murmuring, “I found it!”
Three fugitive Reichsmarschalls, posing as Bolivian sugar cane workers while they plotted the renascence of the Third Reich, were confronted by suddenly materialized Cissaldans in a field near Cochabamba. Though the disgusting things looked disgustingly kosher, the unrepentant Nazis hurled themselves onto the creatures, visualizing pork-fat sandwiches.
William Shatner, because of his deep and profound experience with Third World Aliens, attempted to communicate with the disgusting thing that popped into existence in his dressing room. He began delivering a captainlike lecture on coexistence and the Cissaldan—bored—vanished, to find a more suitable mate. A few minutes later, a less discerning Cissaldan appeared and Shatner, now overcome with this good idea, fell on it, dislodging his hairpiece.
Evel Knievel took a running jump at a disgusting thing, overshot, hit the wall, and semiconscious, dragged himself back to the waiting aperture.
There in that other time/universe, the terrific little persons of Cissalda had spent an eternity making love to one another. But their capacity for passion was enormous, beyond calculation, intense and never-waning. It could be called fornigalactic. They had waited millennia for some other race to make itself known to them. But life springs into being only rarely, and their eons were spent in familiar sex with their own kind, and in loneliness. A loneliness monumental to conceive. When Enoch Mirren had come through the fabric of time and space to Earth2, they had sent the most adept of their race to check him out. And the Cissaldan looked upon Enoch Mirren and found him to be good.
And so, like a reconnaissance ant sent out from the hill to scout the topography of a sugar cookie, that most talented of disgusting things sent back telepathic word to its kind: We’ve got a live one here.
Now, in mere moments, the flood of teleporting Cissaldans overflowed the Earth: one for every man, woman and child on the planet. Also leftovers for chickens and kangaroos with double vaginas.
The four top members of the Presidium of the Central Committee of the Supreme Soviet of the Communist Party (CPSU) of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics—Brezhnev, Kosygin, Podgorny and Gromyko—deserted the four hefty ladies who had come as Peoples’ Representatives to the National Tractor Operators’ Conference from the Ukraine, and began having wild—but socialistic—intercourse with the disgusting things that materialized on their conference table. The four hefty ladies did not care: four Cissaldans had popped into existence for their pleasure. It was better than being astride a tractor. Or Brezhnev, Kosygin, Podgomy and Gromyko.
Allover the world Mort Sahl and Samuel Beckett and Fidel Castro and H. R. Haldeman and Ti-Grace Atkinson and Lord Snowdon and Jonas Salk and Jorge Luis Borges and Golda Meir and Earl Butz linked up with disgusting things and said no more. A stately and pleasant hush fell across the planet. Barbra Streisand hit the highest note of her career as she was penetrated. Philip Roth had guilt, but did it anyhow. Stevie Wonder fumbled, but got in finally. It was good.
All over the planet Earth it was quiet and it wa
s good.
One week later, having established without room for discourse that Naugahyde was neither edible nor appetizing, Enoch Mirren decided he was being brutalized. He had not been fed, been spoken to, been permitted the use of lavatory facilities, or in even the smallest way been noticed since the moment he had heard the alarm go off and the speakers had been silenced. His interrogation cell smelled awful, he had lost considerable weight, he had a dreadful ringing in his ears from the silence and, to make matters terminal, the air was getting thin. “Okay, no more Mister Nice Guy,” he said to the silence, and proceeded to effect his escape.
Clearly, easy egress from a 10’x10’x20’ padded cell sunk half a mile down in the most top-secret installation in America was not possible. If there was a door to the cell, it was so cleverly concealed that hours of careful fingertip examination could not reveal it. There were speaker grilles in the ceiling of the cell, but that was a full twenty feet above him. He was tall, and thin—a lot thinner now—but even if he jumped, it was still a good ten feet out of reach.
He thought about his problem: and wryly recalled a short story he had read in an adventure magazine many years before. It had been a cheap pulp magazine, filled with stories hastily written for scandalously penurious rates, and the craftsmanship had been employed accordingly. In the story that now came to Enoch’ s mind, the first installment of the serial had ended with the mightily thewed hero trapped at the bottom of a very deep pit floored with poison-tipped stakes as a horde of coral snakes slithered toward him, brackish water was pumped into the pit and was rising rapidly, his left arm was broken, he was without weapon, and a man-eating Sumatran black panther peered over the lip of the pit, watching him closely. Enoch remembered wondering—with supreme confidence in the writer’s talents and ingenuity—how he would rescue his hero. The month-long wait till the next issue was on the newsstand was the longest month of Enoch’s life. On the day of its release, he had pedaled down to the newsstand on his Schwinn and snagged the first copy of the adventure magazine from the bundle almost before the dealer had snipped the binding wire. He had dashed outside, thrown himself down on the curb and riffled through the magazine till he found the second installment of the cliffhanging serial. How would the writer, this master of suspense and derring-do, save the beleaguered hero?