Part I

Legend

Facts are the enemy of Truth. Everyone knows that.

What follows is the true story of the Outpost.

I knew the moment he walked into the Outpost that he was a Hero—he just had that look about him. He was a lot closer to seven feet tall than six, he had unblinking no-color eyes, golden hair that cascaded down to his shoulders, and the kind of body that you just knew chairs would bounce off of.

His huge arms were too heavily-muscled to be confined, so he’d cut the sleeves off his shirt. He wore a leather vest, matching leather trousers, a metal belt with a buckle made out of an alien skull, and fur-covered boots. And a bunch of alien necklaces and bracelets; you could hear him jingling from a couple of hundred yards away.

He had a scar that began just above his ear and ended in the middle of his chin. His right arm had a tattoo of one of the more spectacularly-endowed naked ladies I can remember seeing, and she constantly raced up to his shoulder and onto his chest beneath his shirt; his left arm had a tattoo of himself, scar and all, and it ran up to his left shoulder and (I assume) met the naked lady on his chest every few seconds in a pornographic embrace.

The middle finger of his right hand boasted a diamond ring that must have been six, maybe seven carats, and his ring finger held a diamond that could eat the middle finger’s diamond for breakfast. He wore a brace of pearl-handled burners, and the Spy Eye behind the bar told me he had another burner, two screechers, and a pair of knives hidden on his person.

He ignored the men and women who were gathered at the tables and walked directly up to the bar.

“Heard a lot about the Outpost,” he said in his deep, booming voice. “Hard place to find.”

“You managed,” I noted.

“I usually find what I’m looking for,” he answered. “Give me a Witch’s Wart.”

I had Reggie—that’s what I call the bartending machine; it kind of personalizes him—mix it up. “First one’s on the house.”

“I approve,” he said, picking the glass up and downing it in a single swallow, oblivious to the flames and the vapor that rose from it. “Name’s Baker,” he continued, putting the empty back on the bar. He paused, as if about to deliver a punch line. “Catastrophe Baker.”

“I’ve heard of you.” Of course, I’ve heard of almost everyone who finds his way to the Outpost.

“I guess a lot of people have.”

“Not too many make it out here, though,” I noted.

“Maybe more than you’d like,” said Baker. “You could be getting a little unwelcome company before long.”

“Oh?”

He nodded his shaggy head. “War’s getting close.”

News is always slow reaching us. After all, we’re as far from what’s happening as you can get. “Who are we at war with this time?”

He shrugged. “I get the feeling they’re more a bunch of whats than whos.”

“Then they won’t want to stop at the Outpost for a drink, will they?” I said, which was my only concern. Wars come and go; the Outpost stays.

Before I go any farther, I suppose I ought to tell you a little bit about the place, maybe starting with where it is.

Easy enough. We’re on Henry II, one of the Eight Henrys. We were named by Willie the Bard, who spent half a lifetime looking for just this configuration, and finally found it as deep into the Inner Frontier as anyone has ever gotten. We’ve got this binary system, and he named the two stars Plantagenet and Tudor. There are eight planets—the Eight Henrys. Henry I has two moons, Edith of Scotland and Adelaide of Louvain. The next six Henrys have one moon apiece: Eleanor of Aquitaine, Eleanor of Provence, Mary de Bohun, Catherine de Valois, Margaret of Anjou, and Elizabeth of York. For a while he was stymied, because Henry VIII doesn’t have any moons at all—but it does have six rings, and those became the Wedding Rings: Katherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleves, Catherine Howard, and Katherine Parr. A few of the Henrys actually have breathable atmospheres.

Willie is the only one who knows his Earth history, so he names just about everything in the system. For example, no one knows why he calls the huge volcano that’s always causing havoc in the other hemisphere Beckett, but that also means no one can contradict him, so Beckett it is. We’ve got two sets of native humanoids out in the hinterlands; he calls them Normans and Saxons, but no one is quite sure which is which. One race is kind of blue and ugly, and the other is kind of green and even uglier.

Willie wasn’t the first man to discover the Henrys, though. I was. I left civilization when I had a serious disagreement with the authorities over some of the finer points of the law, and I didn’t slow down until I came to the Henrys, which felt like the end of the universe, or maybe the beginning. There was no place left to go, so I decided to land my ship and settle down here. I knew sooner or later somebody would show up, and I decided we needed a gathering place—you know, a bar, some sleeping rooms, maybe a little restaurant that served human food—so I built the Outpost. Made it feel homey: holos of all the great athletes of the past couple of millennia, and a huge nude of Sally Six-Eyes over the bar (she posed for it right here on the premises, a few weeks after we opened for business). I added the mounted heads of some alien animals overlooking the tables, a couple of mind-bending games in the back, comfortable chairs, and a long bar that thirty or forty men and women could sidle up to. Then I figured we needed a post office, since we’re halfway across the galaxy from the Monarchy (I know, I know, they call it the Commonwealth—but out here we know what it is). The mail ship only comes twice a year, but that’s better than nothing. Over the years I added a cartographic chart shop for those travelers who don’t trust their navigational computers. Then I opened a weapon shop. It’s been a loser from the start; the men and women who find the Outpost are about as well-armed as people get to be.

We’re never very crowded, because we’re the farthest you can get from anywhere, and only the boldest of the bold are willing to come this close to the Galactic Core and the enormous black hole that lives there, gobbling up stars and planets like they were so many sandwiches. It takes a lot of man—or woman (or alien, for that matter)—to turn his back on everything he’s known and head out this way. The last thing I started was a pawn shop, because even heroes can run short of money from time to time.

What else can I tell you? Well, my name, I suppose. It’s Thomas Aloysius Hawke, and I think I was in business less than ten minutes before my first customer dubbed me Tomahawk, and that’s who I’ve been ever since.

I love my work. If you’re not three times as big as life and twice as wide, you don’t come looking for the Outpost … and if you find it, then you’ve got a lifetime of adventures and exploits worth bragging about. Reggie and I will fill you up with whatever you thirst for, and Willie the Bard will write down your story, adding only a few poetic flourishes, as part of this epic he’s writing. He tells me that he’s up over 4,000 pages, and he says when he finally publishes it he’s going to call it The Outpost.

Anyway, Baker ordered a second Witch’s Wart, and suddenly Three-Gun Max looked up from his drink.

“Catastrophe Baker,” he said, staring at the huge man’s back. “I heard of you.”

Baker turned and looked at Max, who was holding his drink in one hand, his bottle in another, and was tugging at his ear with a third.

“You’re a mutant, ain’t you?” said Baker.

Max grinned. “What makes you think so?”

“Just a shot in the dark.”

“Three-Gun Max is the name. Always glad to meet another living legend.”

“Where’d you hear about me?”

“Damned near every place I been,” said Max.

“Yeah?” said Baker, suddenly interested. “And where do you hail from?”

“Most recently?” said Max. “Port Raven, out in the Quinellus Cluster.”

“I’ve spent a few days there,” acknowledged Baker.

“I know. They had to build a whole new graveyard.”

“Well, some of the locals needed better manners,” said Baker with a shrug.

“Sure as hell did,” agreed Max. “The day I landed I was robbed twice and shot at once on my way from the spaceport to my hotel.”

“Yeah, I seem to recall that they don’t cotton much to strangers—and with all due respect, you look a little stranger than most.”

“I made out okay,” answered Max. Suddenly he grinned. “When they tell you to reach for the sky, they never remember to count how many hands you still got left.”

Baker threw back his head and laughed. “Let me buy you a drink.” He looked around the place. “Hell, let me buy you all a drink.”

Suddenly the place turned from a still-life into a sprint in about a tenth of a second. Big Red and Nicodemus Mayflower and Bet-a-World O’Grady were about a nose ahead of Sinderella and Little Mike Picasso, and most of the others weren’t far behind.

“That’s mighty generous of you, friend,” said O’Grady.

“I feel right at home,” answered Baker in his booming voice. “I recognize two or three of you from your wanted posters, and I’ve seen books and videos and suchlike about a bunch of you.” He downed another drink. “Hell, I’ve even had to flee for my life from a couple of you. That creates a bond, you know what I mean?”

“Of course we know,” said O’Grady. “That’s why we’re all here. This place is a magnet to our kind—whatever ‘our kind’ happens to be.”

“Well, whatever it is,” said Baker, staring at the assembled crowd, “it ain’t necessarily human.”

“Does that cause you a problem?” hissed Sahara del Rio from her end of the bar.

“Hell, no,” said Baker. “I got five or six wives kicking around the galaxy, and half of them ain’t human.” He paused. “Can’t say that the half that is ever treated me any better than the half that ain’t.”

“Maybe we ought to introduce ourselves to our latest benefactor here,” said O’Grady.

“I know who you are,” said Baker. “You’re Bet-a-World O’Grady.”

“My reputation precedes me,” said O’Grady, looking real pleased with himself. “Too bad all my worlds recede from me even faster.”

“I was there the night you lost Beta Campanis III,” said Baker.

“Really? I don’t recall seeing you.”

“Well, my situation wasn’t such that I wanted to make a memorable entrance.”

“So you were the one they were looking for!” exclaimed O’Grady. “What the hell did you do to get two whole military regiments after you?”

“Three,” Baker corrected him. “The third was backing up the first two, just in case I got angry. Still, I almost stepped forward when you raised that Canphorite. He had you beat on the table.”

“I felt lucky.”

“You must have. The odds were about three million to one against you.”

“I play by my feelings, not by the odds. That’s how I won the entire Binder System.” O’Grady grimaced. “Of course, I lost it to a pair of fives a couple of months later, but what the hell—easy come, easy go.”

“So what do you own these days?” asked Baker.

“The shirt on my back, the boots on my feet, the deck of cards in my pocket …”

“And a tab for 483 credits,” I added.

“You’re talking to a man who was once worth billions,” he said heatedly. “Hell, maybe even trillions.”

“Achilles was once a pretty good freehand fighter,” I shot back, “but I haven’t noticed him beating anybody lately.”

“Are you threatening me?” demanded O’Grady.

“Of course not,” I said. “I’m reminding you.”

“Well, that’s all right, then,” he said, holding out his glass. “Fill it up again. Holler when my tab hits 500.”

“I been hollering since it hit 250,” I said.

As he walked over to Reggie for a refill, Sahara undulated over, the light playing off her shiny green scales.

“So you’re Catastrophe Baker,” she whispered in her sibilant hissing voice, looking him up and down.

“That’s right,” he said. “I think I missed your name, though.”

“Sahara del Rio.”

“Mighty earthy name for a Lodinite—or are you an Atrian?”

“Neither,” she said with a reptilian smile. “I’m a Borovite.”

“They got a Sahara Desert on Borovia?” asked a surprised Baker.

“I grew up on Earth,” she said. “I lived in a desert, and I lived where a city named Rio used to be.” Her gaze passed briefly over the other patrons. “That’s more than anyone else here can say. Not a single human in this place has ever set foot on your mother world.”

“Not so,” said Billy Karma. “I went there to take the walk up to Golgotha.” He turned to Baker and extended his hand. “The Reverend Billy Karma, sir.”

“Should you be drinking?” asked Baker.

“Where does the Good Book say that one of God’s servants can’t lift a few when he’s of a mind to?” demanded Karma.

“Can’t say I’ve ever read it,” admitted Baker.

“Well, you ought to,” said Karma. “As a matter of fact, I have about eight thousand copies of the Red Letter Billy Karma Edition out in my ship. Be happy to sell you one.” A self-satisfied little smile crossed his face. “Best damned Bible you ever saw. I threw out a bunch of the dull parts, added some of my own sermons and observations, and printed it up. Cover’s got a tight molecular bonding. Couldn’t destroy it if you threw it in a bonfire, or even an atomic furnace. Trust me—I’ve tried both.”

“Now, why would you want to burn your own Bible?” asked Baker.

The Reverend Billy Karma shrugged. “I fall off the spiritual wagon every few months, and usually wake up with a hangover in some whorehouse. Then I get saved again. Both of ’em do me a powerful lot of good—getting lost and getting saved. And I know that the first thing I always do when I get lost is try to burn the Good Book so I won’t be confronting it every morning when I get up after a night of sin and sleaze and other good things.”

“Good things?”

“Well, they must feel good or I wouldn’t do ’em, would I?” shot back Billy Karma. “People like you do ’em all the time, don’t you?”

“Not every waking minute,” said Baker. “But on the other hand, I ain’t no reverend, either.”

“Well, when I fall off the wagon, I ain’t much of a reverend myself.” Karma frowned. “Last time I killed the whole Giriami Gang on Roosevelt III after they got back from robbing a navy convoy ship. At least, that’s what they told me when they dragged me out the smoking ruins and hung this here medal on me.” He pulled out a gold medal that was suspended on a silver chain beneath his black shirt and shook his head sadly. “What a tragic way to lose thirty-eight potential parishioners! If I’d been sober, I’d have settled for converting ’em.”

One by one Baker started getting introduced to the others. When he was about halfway through, he stopped and pointed to Einstein, who was sitting alone in a corner.

“What’s the matter with him?” he asked. “The man hasn’t moved a muscle since I got here.”

“Oh, that’s just Einstein,” I said.

“Someone ought to teach him some manners.”

“He could teach you a little something,” said Three-Gun Max. “He doesn’t look like much, but he teaches things to the best brains in the Monarchy. Or at least he used to.”

“That little twerp?” scoffed Baker. “Hell, if he ain’t comatose, you sure can’t prove it by me.”

“He’s not,” Max assured him.

“Sure he is,” said Baker. He turned to Einstein and yelled, “Hey, you!”

“He can’t hear you,” said Max. "“He’s deaf.”

“Yeah?”

“And blind and mute as well. He’s been that way since he was born.”

“Then what makes him so special?” asked Baker.

“The thing you can’t see,” said Max. “His brain.”

“Explain.”

“Because he didn’t learn to communicate until he was in his twenties, he never learned to think the way everyone else does when they’re growing up. He’s probably the most brilliant man in the galaxy—because he’s the most unique thinker. He creates entirely new sciences in his head because he ain’t hampered by any knowledge of the old ones. Been doing it for close to thirty years now. When the government decided to protect him from exploitation, he decided he needed protection from his protectors, and he wound up here.”

“He’s really that good?”

“He’s the reason we’ll reach Andromeda in the next few years. And he’s the only man who ever came up with a defense against a molecular imploder. And if you’ve come across one of those little gimmicks that lets you see through stone walls, that’s his.” Max chuckled in amusement. “The military wanted to keep the patent on it, but even though Einstein’s never seen a naked lady, he thought it would be tragic if it weren’t made available to lonely, oversexed, and thoroughly unprincipled men …men very much like me, in fact.”

Catastrophe Baker stared at Einstein for a long moment. “Well, I’ll be damned!” he said at last. “A blind little guy did all that?”

“We all have some talent or other,” said Argyle, who’d been hanging back until then.

“Yours is a little more obvious than most,” said Baker, staring at the alien as he constantly changed colors.

“This isn’t a talent,” said Argyle, as it changed from bright red to brilliant yellow to pale blue in less time than it takes me to tell you about it. “It’s a defense mechanism.”

“Seems more likely to attract predators than convince them you’re a tree or a rock or dead or whatever.”

“That all depends on the predator,” said Argyle. “On my home world, they’re carrion eaters. Once I die, I stop changing colors; as long as I keep flashing them, the predators know that I’m alive, and not a rotting corpse. They like their meat very rank.”

“So what’s your talent?” asked Baker.

“I juggle things.”

“Balls?”

“Numbers,” said Argyle. “I used to be an accountant for one of the biggest banks in the Albion Cluster.”

“And?”

“And now I’m not,” said Argyle noncommittally.

“This joint’s got an interesting clientele,” remarked Baker.

“We have our moments,” agreed Gravedigger Gaines, who was dressed all in black as usual. “Remember me?”

“How could I forget?” asked Catastrophe Baker. “You damned near killed me back on Silverblue, out on the Rim.”

“I was a bounty hunter. It was my job.”

“You still got those damned dogs?”

“They weren’t dogs,” said the Gravedigger. “They were Nightswarmers. Native to Bodine V.”

“Whatever they were, they were fast as hell and three times as vicious. I was lucky to escape with my skin intact.” Suddenly Baker tensed and laid a hand on his pearl-handled burner. “You still a bounty hunter?”

The Gravedigger shook his head. “My Nightswarmers died, and I didn’t feel like spending ten years training another team.”

“Who says you needed ’em?”

“Whatever the reward, it wasn’t enough to go up against the likes of men like you or Hurricane Smith without them. I earned forty bounties before I hung it up; that’s not bad for a twelve-year career.”

“Well, you seem to have come out of it in one piece,” noted Baker. “You could have done a lot worse, even with those damned dogs.”

“One piece?” laughed the Gravedigger. He held up his right arm. “This came from Deluros VIII. The left leg’s from Pollux IV. The right eye and nineteen teeth are from Greenveldt. Can’t even remember where I got the left foot. And I’m using someone else’s kidney and spleen, thanks to Jenny the Blade. It was time to retire before there wasn’t any of the original me left.”

“Sounds like you’ve got some interesting tales to tell,” said Baker. “Sounds like you all do.”

“We’ve been known to tell ’em,” acknowledged the Gravedigger. “But we’ve heard ’em all before. Seems to me someone as famous as Catastrophe Baker’s got a few tales of his own to share.”

“Could be,” agreed Baker. He turned to me. “But first, I want to order a bottle apiece for everyone in the Outpost. Give ’em anything they choose. When a man’s running in luck, he likes to share it.”

“That could amount to some serious money, friend,” I said.

“I ain’t got no money,” he replied—and then, before I could pull my screecher out from under the bar, he reached into a pocket and pulled out the biggest ruby I’d ever seen. “But this ought to hold you for awhile.” I’m not a small man, but when I placed it in the palm of my hand, I couldn’t close my fingers around it.

“Where’d you ever get something like that?” asked Three-Gun Max.

“Well, now, that’s a pretty interesting story, if I do say so myself,” replied Baker, “and it’s my experience that telling stories can be pretty thirsty work, so I’m going to need a little something to keep the old vocal chords fresh and strong. Tomahawk, have Reggie hunt me up a bottle of Cygnian cognac. And if it ain’t older than I am, take it back and get another.”

Willie the Bard took out his notebook—he refuses to use a recorder or computer—while Reggie brought out a two-century-old vintage (well, it was actually thirteen-year-old cognac in a 212-year-old bottle, but what the hell), and Baker bit off the cork and took a long swallow, bellowed an “Ah!” of approval, and began talking.

Catastrophe Baker and the Dragon Queen

It was a couple of years ago (began Baker), and I was out on the Spiral Arm, doing a little mining in the Parnassus asteroid belt.

Well, I didn’t do any actual digging or blasting—I mean, hell, I wouldn’t know raw plutonium from raw beef—but I did hang out in the little Tradertown they set up on Parnassus II. Had a tavern, a lot like this one only smaller and without no high-quality work of art hanging over the bar, and there were some sleeping rooms, though I was between fortunes at the time and slept in my ship. Like all Tradertowns it had an assay office, and I figured that if I ever saw a miner approach the assay office before he stopped for a drink, he’d probably hit on something interesting, and I planned to make it my business to relieve him of his burden.

Which is how I wound up with thirty pounds of fissionable material. I don’t know from fission, but I know the stuff’s worth its weight in prettier baubles, and I know you keep it locked in lead containers and don’t spend overmuch time playing with it, and I decided that if the Monarchy paid well for it, the Canphorites and Setts and Domarians would probably pay even better. I was pretty well-known in the Arm by then, due to a series of unfortunate misunderstanding in which I was always the innocent party, and when I approached the miners who’d made the claim they just took one look at me and suddenly remembered that they had urgent business elsewhere. Well, all but one, anyway, and making wrong decisions in such matters is what you might call genetically self-limiting.

After I loaded the booty into my ship, I headed off for the Rim, where I figured to hold an informal little auction. I had to stop at the space station that orbited Bellabionda IX to refuel, and while I was sitting there sampling half a dozen different brandies, I suddenly felt the barrel of a screecher bury itself in the middle of my back. I would have turned and had harsh words with the gentleman who was at the other end of the weapon, but I also found my nose about half an inch from the business end of an ugly-looking burner. I chanced a pair of quick glances to my right and my left, and discovered things didn’t look any more promising in them directions.

Now, the guy facing me was almost as big as I was, which is pretty rare, at least in this universe, and I can’t speak for noplace else. He had squinty eyes, and a couple of gold teeth, and he hadn’t shaved in a mighty long time, and he hadn’t washed in even longer than he hadn’t shaved, and he kind of learned forward and said, “Catastrophe Baker, you took something that didn’t belong to you.”

“I’ve tooken lots of things that don’t belong to me,” I said right back at him. “That’s what I do for a living.”

“Yeah,” he said, “but this particular thing belongs to the Dragon Queen, and she’s charged me with conveying the fact that she’s more than a little annoyed with you.”

“Okay, you conveyed it,” I said. “Now go away and let me finish drinking in peace.”

The man with the gold teeth frowned. “I don’t believe I’m getting through to you at all,” he said. “You stole thirty pounds of prime plutonium from her, and she wants it back.”

“There must be some mistake,” I answered. “I stole my plutonium off five miners in the Spiral Arm.”

“Well, it’s probably true that they owned the plutonium, but she owns them.”

I pondered that for a minute and finally said, “In my opinion it’s miserly to own people and fissionable material. Tell her she can keep the men (except for the one I removed from Nature’s game plan) and I’ll keep the plutonium.”

Old Goldtooth kind of sighed and shrugged. “I just knew this was going to happen,” he said unhappily. “I told her and told her that a man like you was never going to give her what she wanted just because we threatened to rip out your eyes and cut off your ears and pull your arms and legs from their sockets. I explained that even after we roasted you over a slow fire and put slime spiders in your ears and started extracting your vertebrae one by one that you wouldn’t tell us what we wanted to know.”

“Since we’re both agreed on that,” I said, “what do you plan to do instead?”

“Beats the hell out of me,” he admitted. “Maybe we’d just better take you to her and let her decide.”

“Couldn’t we torture him just a little?” asked the guy who was poking the screecher in my back. “Just for fun?”

Another sigh from Goldtooth. “No,” he said after some serious consideration. “You know what happened to the last four or five prisoners I let you play with.”

“I got carried away,” came the petulant answer. “It won’t happen again.”

“That’s what you said last time.”

“How about if I just castrate him?” said the guy with the screecher. “Won’t stop him from talking, and if she decides to torture him herself, he’ll still be 99% whole.”

“Stupidest suggestion I ever heard,” replied Goldtooth. He turned to me. “You have to forgive him,” he said apologetically. “He’s very young. He just doesn’t realize that these Dragon Queens always have their motors running.”

Well, truth to tell, I hadn’t ever encountered a Dragon Queen. But I’d seen my share of Pirate Queens, which in my long experience could always be identified by their lustful natures, their soul-destroying greed, and their proud, arrogant bosoms, and I figured if Dragon Queens were related to Pirate Queens, or were even some kind of regional offshoot, that maybe I’d fallen out of the frying pan and into the featherbed, to coin what I had every reason to hope was a new and accurate expression.

“So should I put the manacles on him?” asked one of the others.

Goldtooth turned to me. “If we don’t shackle you, do you promise not to try to escape or overpower us?”

“You have my word as a gentleman,” I told him.

“Get the manacles!” he hollered.

Which is what they did, and which is how I was led into the Dragon Queen’s presence a couple of days later, when we finally landed on Terlingua.

We were in an audience chamber that could have housed half a dozen athletic events. The doorways were all different shapes, as if most of them were made to be used by aliens. The walls kept changing colors, and there was a mural maybe fifty yards square painted on the ceiling that I’ll swear was never painted by any human.

Now, you people don’t know me, so you don’t know that I ain’t much given to exaggeration, but take my word for it: the Dragon Queen was the most beautiful female I had ever seen in a lifetime of admiring female critters of almost every race and species.

Her hair shone like spun gold. Her eyes were the blue of the clearest lagoon. Her lips were a brilliant red, and moist as all get-out. And one look told me that if she was a typical Dragon Queen, then Dragon Queens made Pirate Queens look like schoolgirls from the neck down.

She’d been poured into a skin-tight metallic dress. She had breasts that just out-and-out defied gravity, and the tiniest waist, and smooth, silken thighs, and I tried real hard not to pay much attention to the fact that she was toting even more weapons than I tended to carry myself.

“Have you got a stiff neck?” she asked after a couple of moments in a voice that was a little bit harsher than I expected from someone that beautiful.

Well, that wasn’t quite where I was stiff, if you catch my delicate and subtle meaning, but I assured her that my neck was just fine.

“Then look at my face,” she commanded.

I did so, and suddenly spotted something I’d missed the first time around, which was that she was wearing a golden tiara, and smack-dab in the middle of it was the biggest, most perfect ruby I’d ever seen.

“Miss Dragon Queen, ma’am,” I said, “I hope it don’t embarrass you, but I have to declare that you are unquestionably the most beautiful woman I have seen in all my wanderings across the length and breadth of the galaxy, to say nothing of its height and depth.”

“You may call me Zenobia,” she said, and now her voice was more like a purr than a snarl.

That didn’t surprise me none, because I’d met eleven Pirate Queens in my day, and eight of them were called Zenobia, and I figured that if you were an exquisitely-built young woman possessed of unbridled lust and an overwhelming desire to conquer the galaxy, Zenobia was the name that just naturally appealed to you.

“It’s a name fit for a Dragon Queen,” I assured her.

She stared at me through half-lowered eyelids. “You interest me, Catastrophe Baker,” she said. Suddenly she snapped to attention, which produced an effect most men would pay good money to see. “But first, to business. You stole thirty pounds of my plutonium. I want it back.”

“What does a pretty little thing like you need with enough plutonium to blow up half dozen star systems?” I asked.

She smiled. “I plan to blow up half a dozen star systems,” she said.

“Just for the hell of it?” I asked, because you never knew what Pirate Queens might do when they felt irritable, and I figured Dragon Queens weren’t much different.

“There are six warlords out here on the Rim. As my first step in the conquest of the galaxy, I plan to assimilate their empires.”

“Well, why didn’t you say so in the first place?” I said. “Hell, assimilating empires is something I’ve always had a hankering to do. I think we should become partners.”

“You’re hardly in a position to make demands!” she snapped.

I held up my hands. “You mean these things?” I asked, indicating the manacles. “I just let them put ’em on me so I could meet you. There ain’t never been a chain that could hold Catastrophe Baker.”

And so saying, I flexed my muscles and gave one mighty yank, and the manacles came apart. Four or five of her bodyguards—did I forget to tell you she had a small army of bodyguards?—jumped me, but I just leaned down, straightened up, and sent ’em flying in all directions.

She stared at me, wide-eyed, and I could tell that she was torn between yelling “Off with his head!” and “Off with his clothes!”

“I may have even more uses for you than I thought at first glance,” she said at last.

“Then we’re partners?”

“Why not?” she said with a shrug that went a lot farther and lasted a lot longer than your standard shrug.

“Well, if we’re partners,” I continued, “I’d sure be interested in knowing why you’re a Dragon Queen rather than a Pirate Queen.”

“And so you shall, Catastrophe Baker,” she said, walking over and taking me by the hand. She smelled good enough to eat. “Come with me.”

She led me to a small door I hadn’t seen, since it was hiding behind a bunch of her bodyguards. They stepped aside, and she ordered the door to open, and it did, and suddenly we were in a bedroom that was probably a little smaller than the Navy’s flagship and had a few less windows than the governor’s palace (the old palace, not the new fortified one), and right in the middle of it was a bed that could have accommodated a dozen Dragon Queens and still have some room left over for their gentleman friends.

“What do you think?” she asked.

“It’s right impressive,” I acknowledged. “But it still don’t explain why you’re a Dragon Queen.”

“It’s a result of inbreeding and radiation and genes gone astray,” she said, putting a hand behind my neck and pulling my head down to hers.

“Looks to me like every gene is sitting right where it’s supposed to be for optimum effect,” I opined.

“I’m a genetic sport,” she whispered, and suddenly her breath became real warm. “When I get hot, I get hot! I’m like a dragon in that respect.”

She smiled, her eyes gleamed and flashed, and twin needles of smoke and fire shot out from beneath her lips.

She directed my gaze down south of her waist where still more smoke was escaping.

“You see?” she said. “I’m so constituted that I can’t hide my desire for you, Catastrophe Baker.”

And sure enough, she couldn’t.

“Just a second,” interrupted Three-Gun Max. “Are you trying to tell us that she actually was smoking down there?”

“That’s right,” said Baker.

“I don’t believe it!”

“I was there,” said Baker pugnaciously. “Were you?”

“No, but if you’re gonna tell us you took her to bed without getting some real important part of your masculine anatomy fried to a crisp, I’m gonna have a hard time believing any part of this story.”

Baker glared at him until he kind of shrunk into himself, and then the huge man looked around the room, his hand kind of toying with the pearl handle of his burner. “Has anyone else got a problem with my story?”

Nobody said a word, and finally he relaxed and began talking again.

As a matter of fact (continued Baker), I never had a chance to find out just how hot a number she was, figuratively or literally, because at just that instant we heard a huge commotion outside the bedroom, and then there were a bunch of screams, and I could hear the hum of burners and the whine of screechers and the report of bullets.

“The warlords!” she cried. “They’ve found out about the plutonium and launched a preemptive strike!”

“That ain’t no problem,” I said. “Give me a couple of them weapons you’re wearing and I’ll send ’em packing.”

She tossed me a couple of guns, and I walked to the door, opened it, and gently announced my presence by blowing away eight or nine men who were wearing uniforms that were different from her bodyguards.

Then I looked across the room and saw six men all done up in fancy-looking tunics with rows and rows of medals on their chests, and I knew right away that these had to be the six warlords, so I picked up one of their bigger henchmen, twisted his head around a couple of times until he stopped squirming, and used him as a shield as I began crossing the room.

“Be careful!”!” the Dragon Queen cried out.

“Hell, there’s only six of ’em—and they’re little ones at that!” I hollered back.

Twelve or fifteen warriors jumped me, but I just shrugged ’em off. Another one grabbed my leg, and I kicked him clear across the room; he hit the far wall on the fly, which has to constitute some kind of record if I just knew what record book to report it to.

When I was maybe fifty feet away from the warlords, I raised the body over my head and hurled it at ’em. Four of ’em went down in a tangled heap. The other two reached for their weapons, but I was too fast for ’em, and after I broke their arms they kind of fell to the floor, and having nothing better to do they started kissing my feet and begging for mercy.

I looked around and saw that the rest of the invaders were either dead or at least not in any mood to continue the fight, and then the Dragon Queen raced over to me and threw her arms around me and gave me one hell of a passionate kiss.

(See this here black tooth? That’s what caused it. Burned the enamel top to bottom. I really ought to replace it with a gold one, but it’s almost all I got to remember her by.)

Anyway, after she ordered her bodyguards to drag the warlords and the surviving soldiers off to the dungeons and have a little fun with them, she turned back to me and said, kind of sultry-like, “Catastrophe Baker, as a reward for your heroism, you may have any single thing in this room.”

“Well, Miss Dragon Queen, ma’am,” I said, “that seems like a pretty easy decision, since I ain’t never seen a woman to measure up to you.”

“Surely a man of your broad experience has seen many beautiful women.”

“Yeah, but you’re head and shoulders and other things ahead of ‘em all.”

“It’s kind of you to say so,” she said modestly, “but there must be three or four others in the galaxy who are even lovelier.”

“You really think so?” I asked seriously.

“Out of trillions and trillions of women? Surely.”

“Well, then, it’s an even easier choice,” I said.

“Yes, my love?” she said eagerly.

“Absolutely, my love,” I replied. “If you tell me there are prettier women in the galaxy, I got no reason not to believe you. But,” I added, plucking the ruby from her tiara, “I know there ain’t no more perfect ruby, so I’ll just take this as a remembrance of my short but happy stay on Terlingua.”

“I don’t believe it!” she said furiously.

“And as a token of my high esteem, I’ll dump the plutonium before I leave,” I told her.

“You are a fool, Catastrophe Baker!” she said. “Think of what you could have had!”

“You won’t never be far from my mind, Miss Dragon Queen, ma’am,” I said.

And sure enough, I think of her every time I sit by a blazing fire.

His story done, Catastrophe Baker displayed the ruby again.

“And that’s how I came into possession of the most perfect ruby in the galaxy.”

Everyone seemed properly impressed with his story. Everyone except Hellfire Carson, that is. The grizzled old man walked up to Baker, held out his hand, and asked to see the ruby.

“Handle it carefully, old man,” said Baker, offering it to him.

Carson rolled it around in his hand for a few seconds, then held it up to the light and peered at it. Finally he tossed it back to Baker.

“You made a bad bargain,” he said. “You should have took the Dragon Queen.”

“What are you talking about, old man?” demanded Baker.

“That thing ain’t no ruby.”

“The hell it isn’t!”

“The hell it is.”

“What do you think it is?” I asked him.

“Not a matter of ‘think’. I know what it is. I seen enough of ’em in my day.” He paused. “It’s an eyestone.”

“A what?”

“A Landship’s eye. That’s what we used to call ’em when we hunted ’em back on Peponi.”

“And what’s a Landship?” asked Baker.

“Landships were big suckers,” answered Hellfire Carson, staring off into the past. “Burly, too. Stood maybe sixteen feet at the shoulder, and they were covered top to bottom with shaggy brown fur. Their heads were enormous, and each one had a long prehensile lower lip that seemed almost as useful as a human hand. Their ears were small and rounded, and their noses were big and broad. They looked awkward, but they could move pretty goddamned fast when they were charging.”

He stopped long enough to take a swallow from his bottle. “Most interesting thing about ’em was their eyes. Red crystal they were. Looked just like rubies, except here” — he pointed to some scratch marks — “where the jeweler removed the pupil. They always got rid of the pupil; people didn’t like to be reminded where their trinkets came from.”

“And you really hunted them for their eyes?” I asked.

“Their eyestones,” Carson corrected me. “Fetched about 5,000 credits for a good pair. Probably worth a little more these days” —he grinned at Catastrophe Baker— “but not as much as a Dragon Queen.”

“How do you know so much about Landships?” asked Max.

“Because I killed the very last one,” said Carson.

The Last Landship

What you’ve got to understand (said Carson) is that the Landships were a doomed species from the moment that Men decided their eyes made pretty baubles. I’ve seen ’em worn as jewelry, and displayed as art, and even used as currency. Until today I hadn’t ever heard of one being chosen over a real live woman, but I’ve been out of touch for quite a while and for all I know it’s happened before.

Anyway, Peponi was a colony planet, prettier than some, wilder than most, and it attracted a lot of big-game hunters and adventurers. A few of ’em started safari companies and took clients out into the bush, but most of them were there to hunt Landships and sell the eyestones they collected.

Well, with as many millions of Landships as covered the planet and as few Men to hunt them, you wouldn’t think they could be decimated so fast, but within a century there weren’t more than fifty thousand left. They were mostly gathered in one protected area, a place called the Bukwa Enclave—and then one day the government ran out of money and pulled most of its army out, and suddenly it wasn’t protected any longer, and that was the beginning of the end. I still remember it.

My old pal Catamount Greene was the first to arrive. He didn’t know a damned thing about tracking, but old Catamount never let minor details like that stop him. On the way to the Enclave he picked up a bunch of carvings and jewelry from one of the local tribes, then found one of the few military outposts left in the Bukwa area and explained that he was trading these trinkets to the tribes that lived in the Enclave. He gave a few of the choicest ones to the soldiers, bought them a couple of drinks, and went on to say that he was terrified of Landships and that he had heard that the Enclave was filled with them—and within ten minutes he had talked them into marking where the herds were on a map so that he could avoid them while he hawked his wares from village to village. He walked into the Enclave with one weapon, three bearers, and his map, and walked out a month later with more than 3,000 eyestones.

Then there was Bocci, who had made up his mind to leave Peponi, but decided to stick around just long enough to clean up in the Enclave. He found a waterhole way out at the western end, staked it out, poisoned it, and picked up 700 eyestones without ever firing a shot.

Jumping Jimmy Westerly went in with a stepladder, took it out in the shoulder-high grass where none of the other hunters would go, climbed atop it, and potted twenty Landships the first day he was there. Once they cleared out of the area, he followed them, always keeping to high grass. He’d set up his ladder whenever they stopped, and he kept right on doing it until he had his thousand eyestones.

Other hunters used other methods. True West Thompson brought in a whole tribe of native hunters who used poisoned spears and arrows and brought down almost three thousand Landships before they started becoming scarce.

After a couple of months, the Enclave began to resemble a war zone, and you could smell the Landship carcasses rotting from miles away, but it didn’t stop the slaughter. Kalahari Jenkins took a dry area, about forty miles square, at the northwestern tip of the Enclave, announced that it was his personal hunting ground, and swore he’d kill anyone who entered it. A feller named Kennedy wandered in one day, chasing a couple of Landships, and true to his word Jenkins blew him away. What he didn’t know was that Kennedy had six sons, and it started a blood feud. Lasted a couple of weeks before they killed him—I seem to remember that he got four of them first—and then the two remaining sons declared that it was now their territory. That lasted about five days, until old Hakira came up from the south, killed the last two Kennedy boys, gathered up all of Jenkins’ and the Kennedys’ eyestones and lit out for civilization.

Nobody ever found out what happened to the Maracci Sisters. They were damned good hunters, those girls—but one day they just disappeared, both of ’em, and no one ever found the 8,000 eyestones they were supposed to have taken.

Anyway, the government finally realized that they had to do something or there wouldn’t be any Landships left, and if there weren’t any Landships, both the hunting and holographic safari businesses would vanish and Peponi’s main source of hard currency would vanish, so they finally passed a ban on hunting Landships.

They meant well, but the ban came too late. They didn’t know it, but there was only one Landship left.

“Just a minute,” said Nicodemus Mayflower. “I’ve never even heard of a Landship.”

“That’s not surprising,” replied Hellfire Carson. “Not many people have.”

“I never saw one in a museum, or even in a book,” continued Mayflower.

“Are you calling me a liar?” demanded Carson hotly.

“I don’t know yet. When was the last Landship killed?”

“In 1813 G.E.,” said Carson.

“Now I’m calling you a liar!” said Nicodemus Mayflower. “That was more than 4,700 years ago!”

“I know when it was,” answered Carson calmly. “I was there.”

“I’m willing to be told that this thing ain’t no ruby,” interjected Catastrophe Baker, holding up the stone. “After all, talk is cheap. But before I believe anything you say, I’d sure like to know how you came to be almost 5,000 years old.”

“Might as well tell you,” agreed Carson. “You don’t look like you’re going to take it on faith.”

“Tell you what,” said Baker. “I’ll take 1,500 years on faith; you prove the rest.”

Everyone laughed, even Carson, and when the noise had subsided he spoke again.

“It happened a few years later. I’d left Peponi and had been hunting on Faligor, when I heard there was adventure to be had in a promising little war in the Belladonna Cluster. It figured to be about a three-week trip, so I activated the DeepSleep chamber and told my ship’s computer to wake me when I was within a day of the Cluster.”

Carson took a deep breath and let it out slowly as he scratched his shaggy gray head. “To this day I don’t know what went wrong, but the next thing I knew some medics were pulling me out of the chamber and saying they’d found this derelict ship floating in space with me inside it. All I know is I went to sleep in the year 1822 of the Galactic Era, and I woke up ten years ago, in 6513. I can’t prove it, but there are those who can, and if any doubters want to put up enough money, we’ll go hunt them up.”

“Well, I’ll be damned!” said Catastrophe Baker. “We got ourselves a regular Rip Van Winkle in our midst.”

“No,” Three-Gun Max corrected him. “We’ve got a Hellfire Van Winkle.”

Which was when and how he stopped being Hellfire Carson.

Getting back to my story (said Hellfire Van Winkle), I stayed on Peponi for a few years after the massacre at the Bukwa Enclave, picking up some money here and there as a guide, or from time to time as a meat hunter for the new towns that were springing up, and in all that time I never saw a Landship. Neither had any of the other hunters or explorers, and we just all assumed that the last of ’em had been killed in the Enclave.

Then one day I was out in the bush, hunting Demoncats for the trophy market, when I heard this mournful wailing sound off in the distance. Only sound I’d ever heard even remotely like it was years ago—the lonesome, heartbroken sound a baby Landship made when you killed its mother. This was kind of like it, only much louder.

I followed the sound to its source, and came upon the biggest Landship I’d ever seen. He must’ve stood close to twenty feet at the shoulder, and he was standing all alone in the middle of the forest, howling his misery. I couldn’t see any wounds on him, so I decided to follow him for a while to discover the cause of all this unhappiness.

Also, truth to tell, I kind of half-believed the old legend of a Landships’ Graveyard, and I wouldn’t have minded a bit if he’d led me to it so I could go around gathering eyestones, but he didn’t. He just kept howling out his pain and his misery as he moved from one spot to another, and after a couple of days it dawned on me that he was searching for another of his kind, that he’d probably been looking for another Landship for years now, and he’d pretty much figured out that he wasn’t going to find one—that he was the last of his kind.

Oh, he went through the motions, traveled to the most likely places to find his brothers and sisters, but I could tell by the way he carried himself that he didn’t expect to find anything except more empty spaces where herds of his kind were once so large that it took them a full day to travel past, start to finish.

He spotted me on the fifth day, and though I was sure he’d been hunted in the past and knew the range and power of a Man’s weapons, he just stood there and stared at me, as if begging me to put him out of his misery. I didn’t do it—I have nothing against breaking the law, but I didn’t want to be remembered as the man who killed the last Landship—and after a while he went back to his endless search. I didn’t make any attempt to keep my presence a secret, and he just kind of tolerated me. Never tried to charge me, never tried to hide from me, just acted like I was simply one more burden to bear in his already over-burdened existence.

We spent close to two months wandering from forest to savannah to scrub bush, and by the end of that time I was as anxious to find some more of his kind as he was, if only to stop that mournful wailing every time we hit a new area and realized we’d come up blank again.

Then one day we crossed the track of a safari. I could tell by the signs that they were no more than eight or nine hours ahead of us. I wanted to turn aside so there’d be no chance of running into them, but convincing a wild Landship to turn away when he doesn’t want to takes more skills than I’ve got. My Landship was so desperate that the instant he picked up the scent of the safari, he headed off in their direction. I knew he couldn’t sense any other Landships up ahead, and he had to know there were hunters and guns at the end of the track, but who knows how a Landship’s mind works, especially one that’s been slowly going crazy with loneliness for years and years?

A couple of hours later I found a discarded laser battery, and I could tell from the customized casing that it belonged to Catamount Greene, and I knew that if Greene saw the Landship nothing could stop him from killing it for its eyestones.

And suddenly I realized that I didn’t want the last Landship to die for the same stupid reason that all the others of its kind had died (yeah, including all the ones I myself had killed). Greene and I were old friends and had been through a lot together, and I knew him well enough to know I’d never be able to talk him out of shooting the Landship so he could cash in on two more eyestones.

I don’t know why I cared so much, because it sure as hell didn’t care what happened to its eyestones once it was shot, but somehow I just couldn’t let it happen.

So I called out to the Landship, the first time I’d said a word in his presence, and suddenly he stopped in his tracks and turned to face me, and I walked up to within about twenty yards of him.

“I’m sorry to do this to you,” I said, aiming my burner, “but if I ever saw a thing that was tired of life, it’s you, and I’m not going to let them chop you into saleable bits and pieces. You’re one animal whose eyes aren’t going to decorate a jewelry shop and whose feet won’t become barstools and whose tail won’t be sold as a flyswatter. This world and its Landships have been good to me, and I figure I owe you that much.”

He stood there, swaying gently, and staring at me, and then I pulled the trigger, and I’m not one to get overly sentimental or pretend something’s human when it’s not, but I’ll swear he looked grateful as he tumbled over and sprawled on the ground.

Then I walked over to him, made sure he was dead because I didn’t want to cause him any extra pain if he wasn’t, and melted his eyestones right there inside his head so no one could ever make a profit on them.

Peponi didn’t seem all that pretty to me after that, and a week later I took off for Faligor.

Sinderella wiped away the first tear I’d ever seen on her flawless cheek. “I think that’s a beautiful story,” she said.

“I got a question,” said Max.

“Go ahead,” replied Hellfire Van Winkle.

“What would you have done if you’d known there were five or six other Landships still alive?” said Max. “Would you have killed him anyway?”

“Sure,” said Van Winkle. “But I’d have taken his eyestones and sold ’em.”

Max chuckled, but Sahara del Rio kind of snarled at him. “I thought you were a decent man. I guess I was wrong.”

“I am a decent man,” protested Van Winkle. “I never claimed to be a saint.”

“You ain’t ever going to be mistaken for one,” she assured him.

“That don’t bother me none. I’d never know which to put on first, my hat or my halo.”

“Tell me more about Landships,” said Sinderella, who was all through crying now. “I find them fascinating.”

“I told you everything I could about ’em,” said Van Winkle.

“I still can’t get a mental picture of one,” said Sinderella

Little Mike Picasso, all four feet nine inches of him, spoke up. “I think I can help you.”

“Oh?”

He started thumbing through one of his sketchbooks, tossed it aside, and went through another. “Here it is,” he said, opening it to a certain page and handing it to her.

“My God, that’s awesome!” said Sinderella. “And they went twenty feet at the shoulder?”

“Closer to fifteen,” said Van Winkle. He reached out for the sketchbook. “May I?” She handed it to him and he studied it for a moment, then looked over at Little Mike. “That’s a Landship!” he said, surprised.

“Of course it is.”

“But no one’s seen one for close to 5,000 years. How did you know what they looked like?”

“Back in my starving artist days, I accepted a commission to create six stamps for the Peponi post office. One of the ones they wanted was a Landship, so they sent me some early holos and drawings.”

“You got everything right except the eyes,” said Van Winkle.

“Well, I never knew what the eyes looked like until I heard your story,” said Little Mike. “You’d be surprised how badly faded a five-millennia-old holograph can be.”

“So you’re a painter.”

“The best,” answered Little Mike.

“Modest, too,” said Gravedigger Gaines.

“I was never one for false modesty,” said Little Mike. “You know the Mona Lisa?”

“Yeah. It’s hanging somewhere on Deluros VIII.”

“Bullshit. It was stolen thirty years ago. That’s my Mona Lisa on display. And Morita’s Picnic on Pirhouette IV?”

“Yours too?”

“Of course.” Little Mike smiled smugly. “And when they moved the Sistine Chapel to Alpha Prego III and lost half a dozen of the ceiling panels, who do you think they hired to replace them?”

“Okay, I’m impressed,” said the Gravedigger.

“You ought to be,” agreed Little Mike.

“So how come I’ve never heard of you if you’re so good?”

“Oh, you’ve heard of me. ‘Little Mike’ is just for my friends. My whole name is Michelangelo Gauguin Rembrandt van Gogh Rockwell Picasso.” He paused. “But I do most of my best work incognito.”

“Why would an artist work incognito?”

“Oh, there are reasons.”

“Suppose you share them with us,” persisted Gaines.

Little Mike took a swig from the bottle he was holding. “Sure, why not?” he said.

The Greatest Painting of All Time

What you have to understand (said Little Mike) is that not every work of art is an original. I’ve made more money copying the masters for private collectors, or for museums that didn’t want the public to know that the originals were stolen or decayed, than I’ve ever made for my own creative work, brilliant as it clearly is.

You know, it’s really quite strange when you come to think of it. I’ve made millions of credits from my copies of The Three Graces and The Persistence of Memory and a trio of Saturday Evening Post covers, but with the one exception that I’m going to tell you about the most I’ve ever gotten for anything I signed my name to was the 5,000 credits that Tomahawk paid me for the painting of Sally Six Eyes that’s hanging over the bar. (In retrospect, I should have charged him a thousand credits per eye.)

That’s always been a dilemma for the supremely talented: the world—or, in my case, the galaxy—just isn’t ready for us. We’re ahead of our time. Look at poor Van Gogh: the man died without ever selling a painting. Or Marcus Pincus, for that matter.

“Marcus who?” asked Three-Gun Max.

“Pincus.”

“Never heard of him.”

“See what I mean?” Little Mike shot back.

Still (Little Mike continued), I never believed in starving in a garret, so I took on any assignment that paid my bills and built a reputation, even if it wasn’t quite the reputation I’d have wished for a man with my unquestioned talent. I even took that job of painting half a dozen animals for the Peponi post office.

And then one day I got the most interesting commission of my career. It seemed that the Governor of Solomon, a diamond-mining world in the heart of the Monarchy—sorry; make that the Commonwealth—had seen my work and decided that I was just the man he wanted to design a new set of currency for his world.

He flew me to Solomon at government expense, sat me down, and laid out the assignment for me: they wanted new banknotes in denominations of one, ten, fifty, one hundred, and five hundred credits. Five engravings, with some thematic connection between them, for a fee of half a million credits.

As you can well imagine, I was thrilled. I mean, here I was, finally getting a chance to do original work rather than copy some overrated dabbler like Renoir or Degas. Then he gave me the bad news: I couldn’t include my signature on the notes. Yeah, I know it’s not done, but they never went out and hired a true artiste before. Still, argue as I might, I couldn’t talk him into relenting on that one point—though I did get him to double my fee before I finally ran out of words.

He offered to supply me with holos of all of Solomon’s greatest politicians and military figures, past and present, but I had carte blanche in regard to subject matter … and I saw a way to take my revenge. Although he was married and the father of five daughters, the governor kept a gorgeous blonde mistress on New Rhodesia. It wasn’t exactly the best-kept secret on Solomon, which is how I found out about it, but everyone—including his wife—pretended not to know anything about it.

I had a year in which to deliver the five engravings, and the first thing I did was rent a ship and fly out to New Rhodesia. I hunted up his mistress, and found that she was getting sick and tired of being kept hidden like a dirty secret. He kept promising to leave his family and make her the First Lady (or First Whatever) of Solomon, but it was obvious that it was all just talk. He had no intention of changing an arrangement he found so congenial.

She wanted to embarrass him, and she also craved the notoriety, so I proposed my plan to her that evening over drinks—Alphard brandy, as I recall—and it met with her immediate and enthusiastic approval.

Over the next ten months, I made five exquisite, life-sized paintings of her, which would later be reduced to banknote size and transformed into engravings.

In the first, which was to become the one-credit note, she was dressed in the traditional uniform worn by both sexes of the Solomon military.

For the ten-credit note, I painted her in basically the same outfit, but without the helmet and armor.

She was wearing less in each of the next two notes, and for the five-hundred-credit note she was totally nude, but with her hands and hair modestly covering the more intriguing bits and pieces of her, not unlike The Birth of Venus.

Then, in the two months remaining to me, I created my masterwork, clearly the greatest painting of all time. Same subject, of course, still nude, but proudly displaying everything she’d hidden on the five-hundred-credit note.

How I worked on those flesh tones—and how I succeeded! You’d swear you could reach out and touch that delicate pink skin. You’d bet your last credit that she was looking only at you, that her eyes actually followed you as you walked around the room. You knew that she was actually breathing, and that her breasts were fluttering gently with each breath. Her lips were so moist you felt that if you placed your finger against them it would come away damp.

Usually when you create a masterpiece you want to finish it and frame and hang it. But on this one, I left rectangular areas in each of the four corners—and when I was sure I was done, when it was impossible to improve the painting any further, I spent the last day filling in those four boxes with the number 10,000,000.

The next day we held a huge reception to launch the new banknotes. One by one I displayed the five paintings. They applauded the first wildly, the next mildly, and then there was a growing uneasiness as I unveiled the last three. I thought the governor was about to have a stroke.

When the ceremony was almost over, I had a couple of assistants display my ultimate masterpiece. I could hear the assembled dignitaries voice a collective gasp, and I announced that this was the ten-million-credit note, and that this was the only one and there would never be another, and since it was a collector’s item I’d sell it to the highest bidder. I explained that it was unfair to exclude the planetary population at large from the bidding, so I had allowed the local holo stations to broadcast the painting all across the planet for five minutes before the auction began.

Someone bid five million credits, someone else upped it to seven million, and then the governor finally found his voice. “Arrest that man and kill the holos!”!” he yelled, and I was dragged off to durance vile, where I languished for the next two days.

I was released in the middle of the night and told to leave Solomon and never come back. I asked the guard to thank the governor for his generosity, and he explained that generosity had nothing to do with it. The painting had sold for seventeen million credits, the governor’s hand-picked judge awarded him five million in damages for the emotional distress I had caused him, and he had then fixed my bail at twelve million credits.

So that’s the story. I don’t even know if the painting still exists. They’re still using my banknotes—not on Solomon, where the governor outlawed them, but on New Rhodesia, where my model had married the richest man on the planet and then inherited all his wealth when he unexpectedly choked to death on a mutated cherry pit a month later. But it seems a crime that the rarest and greatest banknote of all will never been seen again.

“I’d give a purty to see that painting,” said Catastrophe Baker. “Or even the model, for that matter. Especially if she’s the richest woman on New Rhodesia.”

“She was something, all right,” agreed Little Mike. “If art mirrors life, then you have to start with something like her to wind up with something like my painting.”

“Got a question for you,” said Max, who always seemed to have a question for everyone who told a story.

“Sure.”

“What’s your real name?”

“I thought I told you: Michelangelo Gauguin Rembrandt van Gogh Rockwell Picasso.”

“I mean your birth name,” said Max.

Little Mike paused for a long minute. “Montgomery Quiggle,”he said at last, looking decidedly uncomfortable.

“So like the rest of us, you came out to the Inner Frontier and took a name that suited you?”

“You have some objection to that?”

“Nope, but like I said, I got a question. I understand naming yourself after all them famous painters, but why Little Mike? Why not just Mike?”

“Because I’m little, and I’m not ashamed of it.”

“No reason to be,” agreed Max. “Course, it ain’t nothing to brag about either.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t be too sure of that,” said Big Red, who’d been an all-star in a number of the usual sports, but made his real reputation as maybe the greatest murderball player of all time. His body was covered top to bottom with scars, which he wore proudly.

“Yeah?” said Max. “And what do you know about it?”

“Enough.”

“You’re a pretty big man yourself,” observed Max, looking at Big Red’s tall, muscular frame, “and I know you used to be a pro jockstrapper. So suppose you tell me: now that race horses are extinct, what athlete would rather be small than big?”

“Right now, today?” replied Big Red. “The greatest of them all.”

“And who is that?”

“You probably never heard of him.”

“Then how great can he be?” insisted Max.

“Trust me, he was the best I ever saw. Hell, he was the best anyone ever saw.” Big Red sighed and shook his head sadly. “The brightest flames burn the briefest time.”

“His career was cut short by injury, huh?”

“His career was cut short all right, but not by injury,” said Big Red. He shifted in his chair, trying unsuccessfully to get comfortable. (It’s well-known that murderballers wear their old injuries like medals, and refuse all pain blocks and prostheses.)

“So are you gonna tell us about him or not?”

“Of course I am. I might be the very last person who remembers him, and if I stop telling his story, then it’ll be like he never existed.”

The Short, Star-Crossed Career of Magic Abdul-Jordan

Nobody knew his real name (began Big Red), but that didn’t matter, because by the time he was ten years old they’d already renamed him Magic Abdul-Jordan, after three of the greatest ancient basketball players. There wasn’t a shot he couldn’t make, and oh, how that boy could jump! He was quicker than a Denebian weaselcat, and nobody ever worked harder at perfecting his game.

When he was twelve, he stood seven feet tall, and his folks moved to the Delphini system, where they still played basketball for big money. Hired him a private tutor, and let him turn pro when he was thirteen.

First I ever heard of him was when word reached us out on the Rim about this fifteen-year-old phenom who stood more than eight feet tall and could reach almost twice his height at the top of his jump. A year or two later his team ran out of competition and went barnstorming through the Outer Frontier, and wherever Magic Abdul-Jordan went, he filled the stadiums. I don’t think that young man ever saw an empty seat in any arena he ever played.

Nobody knew why, but the kid just kept on growing and forgot to stop. By the time he was seventeen, he was nine feet tall, and they changed the rules to try to make things a little fairer. The baskets were raised to a height of fifteen feet, and he was only allowed two of those spectacular dunks of his per half; anything more than that was a technical foul.

But none of that bothered him. He kept honing his skills and working on his moves. I finally got to play against him on Ragitura II, when he had just turned twenty. By then no closed arena could accommodate the crowds that wanted to see him, and he played all his games in outdoor stadiums. I think maybe two hundred thousand Men and about half that many aliens showed up to see him that day.

When he came out onto the court, I couldn’t believe my eyes. He was close to twelve feet tall, but he had the grace of a dancer. Don’t tell me about the square-cube law. I was there; I saw him. This kid could have stuffed the ball if they’d hung the basket twenty feet above the floor, and he was so quick he led his team down the floor on every fast break.

I was the best player on our team, so I got the dubious honor of guarding him. The rule changes had allowed each of his opponents ten fouls. I ran through all ten of mine in something like six minutes, at which time he’d already put 37 points on the board. When the game was over, I did something I’ve never done before or since: I walked up to an opponent and asked for an autograph.

He seemed like a nice, modest young man, and everyone predicted a great future for him. I made up my mind to keep an eye on him as his career developed, but that was the only time I ever saw him.

Next I heard of him was a little over a year later. He was up to fourteen feet tall, and it was getting hard to find anyone to play against him. They kept changing the rules, and he kept growing past all the changes. Pretty soon they had the basket so high that he couldn’t dunk anymore—but none of the other players could even throw the ball that high.

Another year passed, and he was eighteen feet tall and still growing. They had to construct a special ship to accommodate him, but then one team after another canceled their games. They gave all kinds of reasons, but the simple fact was that no one was willing to play against him anymore. He was just too big and too good, and finally, faced with imminent bankruptcy, the team had to cancel his contract.

That was the last anyone ever saw or heard of the poor bastard. Every now and then I’ll hear about a real tall, middle-aged phenom playing in some pick-up league, and I’ll fly halfway across the galaxy to see if it’s him, but invariably it’s some guy who’s seven feet tall and starting to go a little bald.

Anyway, that’s why you never saw him or heard of him. But trust me—no one who ever had the privilege of watching Magic Abdul-Jordan in action will ever forget him. He’s probably out there somewhere, towering above his world like an attenuated mountain, still working on his moves, hoping and praying that they’ll ask him to come back for one last game so he can give a new generation of fans one final thrill.

But of course they never will.

His story finished, Big Red pulled a white handkerchief out of his pocket and blew his nose noisily.

“This guy really existed?” said Three-Gun Max.

“I just told you so, didn’t I?”

“I thought maybe you made it up. I mean, hell, true or false it makes a good story.”

“It is a good story,” agreed Big Red. “But if I’d made it up, I’d have held him to three points and picked up only one foul in 40 minutes.”

“A telling point,” agreed Catastrophe Baker. “That’s sure the way I’d have made it up.”

“Well, I guess he was the most famous athlete that no one ever heard of,” agreed Max.

“Yeah,” said Big Red, “I had the privilege of playing against the greatest unknown jockstrapper in the galaxy, and the greatest known one, too.”

“You played against McPherson?” said Max dubiously.

“You ever hear of a greater known one?” was Big Red’s answer.

“Boy, I remember flying all the way to the Pilaster system to see him!” said Nicodemus Mayflower with a nostalgic smile on his face.

“Even I heard of him,” chimed in Catastrophe Baker, “and I’ve been too busy with Pirate Queens and Temple Virgins and the like to pay much attention to children’s games.” He paused. “Old Iron-Arm. They say he was something else.” He turned to Big Red. “Whatever became of him, anyway?”

“Well, that’s really Einstein’s story to tell,” answered Big Red. “But since he can’t communicate in any language that isn’t full of numbers and strange symbols, I suppose I’d better tell it for him.”

And so he did.

When Iron-Arm McPherson Took the Mound

I still remember him when he was just a kid (said Big Red), making a name for himself out in the Quinellus Cluster. They said he was the fastest thing on two feet, and that he’d break every base-stealing record in the books.

I took that kind of personally, since I’m pretty fast myself—or at least I used to be, before I blew out my left knee and broke my right thigh and ankle during my next-to-last season of murderball. (I’ll bet you didn’t know it, but I took my name from two of the greatest racehorses ever, Man o’ War and Secretariat. The press gave each of them the nickname of Big Red.) Anyway, I made it my business to head out that way and see if this McPherson kid was as good as his press clippings.

First time up, the kid bunted and beat the throw, then stole second, third, and home, and he was still looking for more bases to steal when the roar of the crowd finally died down. Did the same thing the second time he was up. Bunted his way onto first base a third time—and then it happened. There was a pickoff play that got him leaning the wrong way, and suddenly he fell to the ground and grabbed his knee, and I knew his base-stealing days were over.

I didn’t think much about him for the next couple of years, and then I heard he’d come back, that he was hitting home runs farther than anyone had ever hit ‘em, was averaging more than one a game, so I went out to take a look. Sure enough, the kid drilled the first pitch he saw completely out of the ballpark, and did the same with the next couple.

Then they called in Squint-Eye Malone from the bullpen. Old Squint-Eye took it as a personal insult any time someone poked a long one off one of his teammates, so he wound up and threw a high hard one up around the kid’s chin. The kid was a really cool customer; he never flinched, never moved a muscle. Malone squinted even more and aimed the next one at the kid’s head. The kid ducked a little too late, and everyone in the park could hear the crunching sound as the ball shattered his eye socket, and I figured with that even with the artificial eyes they make these days, it would have to affect his timing or his depth perception or something, and it was a damned shame, because this was a truly talented kid who’d been done in not once but twice by bad luck and physical injuries.

And that was it. I never gave him another thought. Then, about four years later, word began trickling out that there was a pitcher out in the boonies who could throw smoke like no one had ever seen. The stories kept coming back about this Iron-Arm McPherson, who supposedly threw the ball so hard that batters never saw it coming, and I vaguely wondered if he was any relation to the McPherson kid I’d seen who’d had all that talent and all those troubles.

Well, he was too good to stay where he was, so they sold his contract to the Cosmos League, and before long he got himself traded to the Deluros Demons, and you can’t get any bigger than that.

I was playing for Spica II at the time. We won our division and headed off for Deluros VIII for the playoffs, and I got my first look at Iron-Arm McPherson, and sure enough he was the same player I’d seen those other two times. I was batting leadoff, and I figured he couldn’t run too good after that knee injury, and I didn’t think he could have fully adjusted to his new eye, so I decided I’d bunt on the right side of the infield and I should have no trouble beating it out, and when my teammates saw how easy it was, why, we’d bunt the poor bastard out of the game, maybe even out of the league.

So the game starts, and I walk up to the plate, and Iron-Arm winds up and lets fly, and I hear the ball thud into the catcher’s mitt, and the umpire calls it a strike, but I’ll swear I never saw it once it left his hand.

He winds up and throws again, and again it comes in so fast that my eyes can’t follow it, and then he does it a third time, and I’m out of there, and I realize that everything I’ve heard about Iron-Arm McPherson is true.

He strikes out the first eighteen men he faces, and then I come up for a third time to lead off the top of the seventh inning, and he rears back and gives me the high hard one, and I can almost feel it whistle by me even though I can’t see it, and I toss my bat onto the ground in disgust and start walking back to the dugout.

“Hey, Red,” says the umpire, “you got two more strikes coming.”

“I don’t want ’em,” I say.

“Are you gonna come back here and play, or not?” demands the ump.

“Not,” I say. “How the hell can I hit what I can’t see?”

“All right, you’re outta here!” yells the ump, and I get ejected and take an early shower, which suits me fine since the alternative is being humiliated up at the plate again.

We all breathe a sigh of relief when the game’s over, because it means we won’t have to face McPherson again for another three or four days—but when we come out onto the field the next afternoon, who’s waiting for us on the mound but Iron-Arm McPherson!

Well, 52 hours into the playoffs we’re down three games to none, and we’re just one game from elimination, and not a one of us has reached base yet, and McPherson’s record in the series is 3-and-0, and he’s pitched back-to-back-to-back perfect games, and instead of getting tired he seems to be as strong as ever, and one of the local newscasts announces that they’ve timed his pitches and they’re averaging 287 miles per hour, and that his hummer was clocked at 303.

That night, while I’m drowning my sorrows in the hotel bar and wondering what to do with myself in the off-season, which figures to start sometime around mid-afternoon the next day, I see Einstein sitting by himself, lifting a few and jotting down notes on his computer. I recognize him from his holos, and I figure if anyone can help me, it’s got to be him, so I walk over and introduce myself.

He doesn’t respond, and that’s when someone tells me he’s blind, deaf and mute, and I ask how anyone ever talks to him, and it’s explained to me that I have to get my computer to talk to his computer and then he’ll respond.

I go over to the hotel’s registration desk and rent a pocket computer and then return to the bar and have it tell Einstein’s computer who I am and how much I admire him, and that I’ve got a little problem and could he help me with it.

He taps away at his machine, and suddenly mine speaks up: “What is the nature of your problem?”

I ask him if he knows anything about baseball, and he says he knows the rudiments, and I explain my problem to him, that McPherson’s high hard one clocks in at 303 miles an hour, and that even at an average of 287 none of us can even see the ball when Iron-Arm lets loose.

He does some quick calculations in his head, takes about two seconds to verify them on his computer, and then sends me another message: “The human arm is incapable of throwing a baseball at more than 127.49263 miles per hour.”

“Maybe so,” I answer back, “but they clocked him at more than twice that speed.”

“The conclusion is obvious,” sends Einstein. “The baseball is not being thrown by a human arm.”

And suddenly it’s all clear to me. Here’s this kid who’s already got an artificial knee and a replacement eyeball as a result of injuries. Why not get a step ahead of the game by buying himself a prosthetic arm before he can develop bursitis or tendonitis or whatever? And if he was going to buy a new arm, why not the strongest, most accurate arm that science could make?

I thought about it for a while, until I was sure I was right, and then I told Einstein that I agreed with him, but that didn’t help solve my problem, which was that whether McPherson was using his real arm or one he’d gone out and bought, no one could even hit a loud foul ball off him.

“It’s an interesting problem,” responded Einstein. He began tapping in numbers and symbols, and pretty soon his fingers were almost as hard to follow as one of McPherson’s fastballs, and after about five minutes he quit just as suddenly as he started, with a satisfied little smile on his face.

“Are you still here?” his machine asked.

“Yes.”

“I am going to transmit a very complex chemical formula to your computer. In the morning, print it out and take it to the laboratory at the local university—they’re the only ones who will have everything that’s required—and have them mix it up as instructed and put it into a titanium vial. Then rub it onto your bat.”

“And then what?” I asked.

“Then don’t trip on third base as you turn for home plate.”

I thanked him, though I didn’t really believe anything could work against McPherson, and I went to the lab in the morning, just like he told me to, and got the vial and poured the entire contents onto my bat and rubbed them in real good about an hour before game time.

I wasn’t real thrilled when the home plate umpire cried “Play ball!” and Iron-Arm McPherson took the mound for the fourth day in row and I had to step into the batter’s box, but the only alternative was to get myself thrown out again, so I sighed and trudged up to the plate and stood there, waiting.

McPherson wound up and reared back and let fly. I’m not sure exactly what happened next, except that I heard a crack! like a gunshot, and suddenly the ball was soaring into the left field bleachers and I was jogging around the bases with a really dumb grin on my face, and McPherson was standing there, hands on hips, looking like he couldn’t believe that I’d belted his money pitch out of the park.

He struck out the next eight batters, but when I came up again with two out and nobody on in the third inning, he leaned back and gave me his zinger, and I pickled it again. I nailed another in the sixth, and I led off the ninth with my fourth homer of the day. I looked at the scoreboard as I rounded third, and saw we were still down 7 to 4, and there wasn’t any activity in the Demons’ bullpen (and why should there be? I mean, hell, he was still pitching a four-hitter), and before Shaka Njaba left the on-deck circle and went up to take his raps, I crossed home plate and kept on running until I came to him and told him that if he wanted to win the game he should use my bat. I didn’t have time to tell him why, but Shaka’s as superstitious as most ballplayers, and he jumped at the chance to use my lucky bat.

McPherson rubbed the ball in his hands, hitched his pants, fiddled with the peak of his cap, toed the rubber, went into his motion, and let fly—and not only didn’t I see the ball come to the plate, but the bat moved so fast I didn’t see it either. But I heard the two meet, and I saw the ball go 19 rows deep into the center field seats, and I passed the word up and down the bench that everyone should use my bat.

The next six hitters took McPherson deep, and when his manager finally came out and took the ball away from him and sent him to the showers (for the first time all season), we were winning 11 to 7. I figured our bullpen could hold onto the lead, so I took my bat back before someone broke it, and sure enough, we won 11 to 8.

McPherson was back on the mound the next day, but after we hit his first five pitches into the stands for a 5 to 0 lead, he was gone again, and we didn’t see any more of him in the series.

We won that afternoon, and the next two nights, and became the champions. I sought out Einstein to thank him, but he told me that he’d gotten 30-to-1 odds against Spica II when we were down three games to none. He’d bet a few thousand credits, so he felt more than amply rewarded for his efforts.

As for Iron-Arm McPherson, getting knocked out of the box in front of all those millions of fans was—to borrow a baseball expression—his third strike, after messing up his knee and his batting eye. There just wasn’t a place in the game for a pitcher who couldn’t get anyone out, even if he could burn that that hummer in there at 303 miles an hour.

“What became of him?” I asked.

“Last I heard, he was running a spaceship wash at one of the orbital stations out near Far London,” answered Big Red.

“So that’s how you managed to hit those homers off him!” said Bet-A-World O’Grady. “I’ll be damned!”

“You saw the game?” asked Big Red.

“I’m the guy who gave Einstein 30-to-1 that you couldn’t win!” he laughed.

“Just goes to show what happens when you bet against Einstein.”

“Same thing usually happens what you bet against me,” said O’Grady.

“I’ll bet you’ve been involved in some big-money games,” offered Three-Gun Max.

“I’ve been in my share of ‘em,” agreed O’Grady.

“I heard about the time you put up three agricultural worlds against the Tamal Jewels on one roll of the dice,” put in Nicodemus Mayflower.

“And I remember reading that you lost a whole solar system in a card game out on Tevarius IV, and then won it back the next night,” added Sahara del Rio.

“Absolutely true,” said O’Grady.

“What was the biggest bet you ever made?”

“You really want to hear about it?” asked O’Grady with the air of a man who couldn’t be silenced by much less than a lethal blow to the head.

“That’s why we’re asking,” said Max.

O’Grady walked up to the bar, then turned so he could face his audience.

“Then I guess I’ll tell you,” he said.

The Night Bet-a-World O’Grady Met High Stakes Eddie

For almost five years (said O’Grady) people had been trying to arrange a game between me and High Stakes Eddie, who was supposed to be the best gambler in the Belladonna Cluster. At one point I even had a couple of banks willing to back me in a one-on-one poker game with him, and I heard tell he had a Korbelian prince on the line to pick up his tab if he lost to me.

Still, we almost didn’t get together at all. He spent nearly three months breaking an upstart called the Lower Volta Flash in a nightly game, and then when he was ready, I found myself embroiled in a winner-take-all game for the ownership of the Willoughby system that went on for the better part of ten weeks.

Then one day I got a hand-delivered engraved invitation that read as follows:

Bet-a-World O’Grady is cordially invited

to the gaming world of Monte Carlo IV as

the guest of High Stakes Eddie Strongbow.

All expenses except for gambling losses

will be paid by his host.

“Will you be coming back with me, sir?” asked the young woman who had delivered it.

“Yeah, why not?” I said, making up my mind on the spot. “If we’re going to decide once and for all who’s the best, I might as well let your boss pay for my transportation and drinks.”

“He was hoping you’d feel that way, sir,” she replied.

“By the way, where the hell is Monte Carlo IV?” I asked.

“Out by the Lesser Magellenic Cloud,” was the answer. “Mr. Strongbow won the entire Cromwell system on a single flip of a coin last year, and officially renamed it about two months ago.” She paused. “May I help you pack?”

I patted the pocket that held my wallet, and the one that held my lucky dice.

“I’ve got everything I need,” I announced.

“You might want a change of clothes,” she suggested.

“I’ll buy some new clothes on Monte Carlo IV and charge them to your boss.”

She shrugged and took me to her ship. The crew consisted of three other women in addition to the one who’d delivered the invite, and they called themselves the Queens of Clubs, Diamonds, Hearts and Spades, though truth to tell I never could tell which was which. I think they changed names every few hours just to keep me confused.

It was a long flight to the Monte Carlo system, so I went into DeepSleep a few hours into the trip and had them wake me when we were about an hour from our destination. I’m always famished when I come out of DeepSleep, and that always surprises me, because as often as they explain it to me, I keep forgetting that my systems don’t actually stop, but just slow down to a crawl—and when you haven’t eaten in a few days, even with your metabolism working at one percent speed, you’re still hungry.

By the time I finished eating, we’d touched down, and I was transported to a penthouse suite atop the biggest, glitziest hotel on the planet, which befitted a high roller like myself. There were maybe half a dozen bedrooms, and three of them came equipped with their own women, and there were eight or nine bathrooms and a bunch of fireplaces and holo screens and two well-stocked bars and a robot bartender (but not as friendly as Reggie) and even a library filled with real honest-to-goodness books rather than tapes and disks and cubes. I’d been in a few nicer suites in my time, but I had to admit that it was pretty impressive for as far outside of the Monarchy as it was.

I’d just finished looking around and introducing myself to the three women when the Queen of Hearts (or maybe it was Diamonds) told me that my host was waiting for me downstairs. I bade the other ladies goodnight and followed her. There was a huge, elegant casino on the ground floor. It not only had the usual human and alien games, but it had real cards, real dice, and real live dealers and pit bosses—none of those computerized holographs that you see on worlds like New Vegas and Little Monaco. We walked right through the place without slowing down, and then came to a studded metal door that had guards the size of Catastrophe Baker standing on each side of it.

“This is Mr. Strongbow’s private gaming room,” explained the Queen of Hearts as they opened the door for us. “It is reserved for himself and his personal guests.”

High Stakes Eddie was sitting on a leather chair at the far side of a felt-covered mahogany table, a drink in front of him, a smokeless Brandeis VII cigar in his left hand. He was smaller than I’d expected, bald as a billiard ball, and wearing an outfit that couldn’t make up its mind what it wanted to be. One moment it looked like a toga, then it changed into a military uniform, then a Bendorian tuxedo (you ever see one of those things? The sons of bitches glow in the dark!), and then back to a toga.

His outfit may have been the height of fashion, but his room was an anachronism. The chairs didn’t adjust to your body, they actually rested on the floor, and the lights were in the ceiling instead of floating over your right shoulder. Still, it was his place to decorate any way he wanted. “Bet-a-World O’Grady!” he said with a smile. “You can’t imagine how much I’ve looked forward to making your acquaintance. There were times when I truly thought we’d never meet.”

“I always assumed that we’d get together sooner or later,” I replied, walking forward and shaking his hand. “So when I got your kind invitation, I decided it might as well be sooner.”

“Your presence honors my poor establishment,” he said. “I trust you will join me in a game or two of chance.”

“That’s what I’m here for,” I said.

“Excellent!”!” he said. “A number of local dignitaries have expressed interest in watching us compete. Would you have any objection to—?”

“Bring ’em in,” I said. “I like crowds.”

“A gentleman as well as a gambler,” enthused High Stakes Eddie. “I really am delighted that you agreed to come.”

He waved his hand over a small cube on the table, the door dilated, and half a dozen men and women entered the room. Eddie handled the introductions: one was a mayor, another a general, a third was the planetary governor, and I remember that one large, fat woman was the system’s greatest opera diva.

They took their seats, and High Stakes Eddie directed them to be silent once play began or run the certain risk of being unceremoniously thrown out.

The woman who was the Queen of Clubs that night brought in a dozen unopened decks of cards, half a dozen pairs of brand new dice, and directed a burly young man to set up a roulette wheel at the far end of the huge table.

“What’s your choice, Bet-a-World O’Grady?” asked High Stakes Eddie.

“I’ve always been partial to poker,” I admitted.

“Then poker it is,” he said. “You mind playing with real cards? I hate computers.”

“Suits me,” I answered.

He tossed a deck to me and waited for me to open it. I inspected the cards, and satisfied myself that it was an honest deck.

“They look good to me,” I announced. “Shall we begin?”

“Name it.”

“Five-card stud.”

“Stakes?” he asked.

“Whatever you want.”

“How’s about a million credits to ante, and you can only bet in multiples of five million,” he said. “Sky’s the limit.”

There was a sharp collective intake of breath among our six spectators.

“I accept,” I said. Then I paused. “I hope my credit’s good here.”

“Up to twenty billion,” he replied. “After that I’ll need collateral.”

“Fair enough,” I said. “Cut?”

He cut the cards, and I started dealing.

I won the first hand with jacks and sixes, he won the next with three kings, and then I won four in a row with a straight, a full house, and a couple of nothings that were higher than his nothings. When the dust settled, I was up almost two hundred million credits.

“You’re as good as they say,” said High Stakes Eddie, taking a sip of his drink. “Shall we try a little draw now?”

“It’s your deal,” I acquiesced.

We split the next six hands, and pretty much split the pots as well. Then I won three in a row, and I was suddenly up half a billion.

“Let’s make it a little more exciting,” he suggested

“I’m open to suggestions,” I replied.

“Let’s cut the cards for a billion.”

I nodded, ignored another audible gasp from the guests, reached out, and cut to a nine. He smiled, flexed his fingers, reached for the remaining cards, and cut to a six.

“How about two billion this time?” he said.

“And then four billion, and then eight billion, and then sixteen billion, until you finally win one?” I said. “That’s not gambling,” I said. “That’s mathematical inevitability.”

“All right,” he said, a little heatedly. “What would you rather do?”

“Do you really want to make it more exciting?” I asked.

He looked around the room and then nodded, as I knew he would. There was no way he was going to lose face in front of his friends.

“How much money have you got on hand here?” I asked.

“In this room?”

“In the whole casino.”

He did a quick calculation in his head. “About eighteen billion credits.”

“And you own the Monte Carlo system, right?”

“All fourteen planets.”

“Including mining rights?”

“Of course.”

“Okay,” I said. “That’s your half of the bet. For my half, I’ll put up all the money I’ve won here, plus fifteen billion I’ve got on deposit at the Bank of Deluros, and the deed to all nine planets in the Taniguchi system. They discovered diamonds in the asteroid belt there last month.”

“What’s the bet?” he said, eyeing me warily.

“One hand of face-up draw, winner take all.”

“Face-up draw?” he repeated. “I never heard of it.”

“Nothing to it,” I said. “We turn all the cards face-up, and instead of dealing, we each choose five cards. Then we can discard up to four cards and draw four more. It’s just draw poker with everything face-up and out in the open.”

“We’ll tie. You’ll deal yourself a royal flush and stand pat and I’ll do the same.”

“Tell you what,” I said. “I’ll stipulate that you win all ties. My cards have to have you beat, not just tied, in order for me to win.”

“Say that again.”

I repeated it.

“And there’s no suit preference like in bridge?” he persisted. “A three of clubs is as high as a three of spades?”

“Right,” I said. “And I’ll tell you what else: I’ll go first, so you can have the advantage of seeing what I do before you commit yourself.”

Well, he spent the better part of five minutes asking me all kinds of questions, but it was just like I told him, and finally he and I signed a document agreeing to the terms I had outlined.

And that’s how I broke the bank at Monte Carlo.

“Just a minute!”!” said Three-Gun Max heatedly. “What kind of fools do you take us for?”

“The usual kind,” answered O’Grady with a smug smile.

“There’s no way you can win that bet!”

“Don’t take my word for it,” said O’Grady. “Who’s the brightest man in the Outpost?”

“Einstein.”

“Ask him.”

“He’s blind, deaf, and mute,” said Max. “And if that ain’t enough, he’s never played poker in his life.”

“Just a minute,” said Big Red. He turned to me. “Tomahawk, can you have Reggie transmit all the rules to the little computer Einstein always keeps in his hand?”

“No reason why not,” I replied.

“It’ll take him hours just to learn the rudiments of the game,” protested Max.

“You don’t know Einstein,” said Big Red confidently.

I gave Reggie his instructions, and he started whirring and humming, and so did Einstein’s machine, which then started tapping out some incomprehensible code on the palm of his left hand. After about twenty seconds Einstein smiled, the first time his facial expression had changed since he’d shown up a few months ago, and he tapped a message onto his computer’s sensors.

Reggie whirred again and then spoke in his dull monotone voice. “Einstein says O’Grady can’t lose.”

“Well, if Einstein ain’t the stupidest genius on the Frontier, I sure don’t know who’s running ahead of him!” exclaimed Max.

“You’re absolutely certain that Einstein and I are wrong, are you?” asked O’Grady.

“Damned right.”

“Are you willing to bet a hundred credits on it?”

“Real cards, just like you used on Monte Carlo?”

“Right.”

“Fresh deck, same rules?”

“Fresh deck, same rules,” agreed O’Grady.

Max pulled a hundred-credit note out of his pocket and tossed it onto his table. “You’re on.”

O’Grady sat down opposite him, and I broke open a new deck and brought it over to them.

“You go first,” said Max.

“I know.”

“And remember: I win all ties.”

O’Grady spread the deck out, face-up, so that we could see all 52 cards. I figured he’d pull himself a royal flush, or at least four aces. Instead he started sorting through them until he had pulled out all four tens.

Then he turned to Sahara del Rio, who was staring over his shoulder. “You pick my last card, my dear.”

“But I don’t know the rules of the game,” she protested.

“It doesn’t matter,” O’Grady assured her. “Just reach out and pick one.”

She shrugged, ran her hand over the cards, and finally picked a deuce of clubs.

“Thank you, my dear,” said O’Grady. He looked across the table at Max. “Your turn.”

Max reached out and promptly picked up all four aces and a king.

“Very impressive,” said O’Grady. “Four bullets.”

“Let’s see you beat that,” said Max cockily.

“I shall endeavor to,” promised O’Grady. “Time to discard and draw now, right?”

“Go ahead.”

O’Grady dumped three tens and the deuce, then pulled four cards and built himself a straight flush to the ten.

“Your turn again, Max,” he said.

Max stared at his hand, and then at O’Grady’s, and then at his again.

“Shit!” he bellowed.

“You see?” said O’Grady. “My straight flush beats your four aces, and since all the tens are gone, not only can’t you create a royal flush, but the highest straight flush you can build will be nine-high.”

“What if I’d started with a straight flush instead of four aces?” asked Max.

“Same result. You can’t create one that goes any higher than the nine.”

“Just a minute,” said Hellfire Van Winkle. “Suppose he’d picked four nines. You can’t stand pat, because he can draw four aces or a straight flush to beat your four tens. What do you do then?”

“Discard three tens and the deuce and build a royal flush,” answered O’Grady. “He can’t match it, because all the tens are gone.” He reached out, picked up the hundred-credit note, folded it in half, and slipped it into a pocket. “An inexpensive lesson, especially considering how often I’m sure each of you is going to use it once you leave the Outpost.” Suddenly he smiled. “Just don’t ever try it in the vicinity of Monte Carlo IV … they don’t have much of a sense of humor about it out that way.”

“You got any other scams you want to tell us about?” asked Max.

“Not for a lousy hundred credits,” said O’Grady. He looked over and saw Willie the Bard scribbling away. “Hey, you’d better not be writing all this down!”

“That’s the Bard,” I said. “He writes everything down.”

“He writes everything?” repeated Catastrophe Baker.

“Yeah,” I said. “He’s our historian. Someday he’ll make you famous.”

“I already got a little more fame than I can handle,” protested Baker.

“And I don’t want millions of people reading about what I did on Monte Carlo,” chimed in O’Grady. “I don’t mind telling a handful of people out here at the edge of nowhere, but I don’t want it written up in a book. I might want to use it again sometime.”

“Not to worry,” said the Bard. “It’ll be twenty, maybe thirty years before I’m ready to publish.”

“How long have you been working on this masterpiece?” asked Baker.

“Since Tomahawk opened for business.”

“And how many pages have you written?”

“I lost count years ago. But after pruning it down, I’ve kept about four thousand.”

“You halfway done yet?”

“Probably not.”

Baker smiled. “Who’s gonna publish this thing?”

“That’s not my problem,” answered the Bard with an unconcerned shrug. “My job is to write it.”

“I never did understand artists.”

“Hey, we make as much sense as anyone,” put in Little Mike Picasso. “And maybe a little more than most.”

“Hell, maybe you do,” admitted Baker. “Truth to tell, I’ve only known one real artist.”

“A painter?” asked Little Mike.

Baker shook his head. “An opera singer. Ever hear of Melody Duva?”

“Can’t say that I have.”

“The Diva Duva,” said Nicodemus Mayflower admiringly. “I’ve seen a couple of her holos. She had a gorgeous voice. Whatever happened to her?”

“She was the victim of an unhappy collision of art and science,” answered Catastrophe Baker.

“Sounds like a story coming up,” suggested the Reverend Billy Karma.

“Not much to tell,” said Baker. “She was built like an opera singer, which is to say she weighed in at maybe 350 pounds. She loved low-gravity worlds, where she could move with the grace of a dancer. Last time she ever performed was on New Samarkand, in a revival of Tosca.”

“I’ve seen the holo.”

“You must have seen an earlier version,” said Baker. “This one ran only one performance, and no one ever captured it.”

“What happened?”

“New Samarkand is a temperate world, and they hold most of their operas and symphonies and other shindigs at this huge outdoor amphitheatre,” began Baker. “Anyway, there’s a scene at the end when Tosca commits suicide by throwing herself off the top of a tall tower they call a battlement. Ordinarily they’d toss a couple of air mattresses down on the stage, out of sight of the audience, to break her fall—but Diva Duva was so, well, large, that they figured she was sure to bust something, so instead of mattresses they put out a hydro-trampoline to break her fall.”

“A trampoline?” asked Max, frowning.

Baker nodded. “She plunged down so fast you could almost hear the wind whistle around her, hit the trampoline full force, and shot straight up. And like I told you, New Samarkand is a low gravity world. She reached escape velocity and wound up crashing through the cargo hold of a mining ship out near one of the planet’s moons.” He sighed. “Next day they got rid of the trampoline and put in a swimming pool for her understudy.” He shook his head sadly. “Nobody ever thought to ask the poor girl if she knew how to swim.”

There was total silence for a moment, while everyone digested the story.

Max was the first to speak. “You absolutely sure every word of that is true?” he asked dubiously.

Baker’s jaw jutted out pugnaciously. “Are you impugning my integrity?” he demanded.

“No,” Max assured him. “Just your veracity.”

“Well, that’s okay, then,” replied Baker, relaxing.

Just then Achmed of Alphard entered the Outpost, dressed in his glowing robes and sparkling turban. He towered at least a foot above Catastrophe Baker and Big Red, and even more above everyone else.

“Good evening, gentlemen,” he said, then bowed in the general direction of Sinderella and the Earth Mother. “And ladies, of course.” He looked across the room at me. “The war’s getting close, Tomahawk.”

“Anyone figure out who the enemy is?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Beats me.”

“Then how do you know there’s a war?”

“They’re firing on Navy ships.”

“Yeah, that sounds kind of warlike,” opined Max.

“How far away are they?”

“Who knows?” replied Achmed. “A few days, a few systems. It all depends on how often and accurately the Navy fires back.”

“I wouldn’t worry much,” said Gravedigger Gaines. “No war’s ever gotten this far.”

“This one won’t either,” added Nicodemus Mayflower, nodding his lean, angular head for emphasis.

“Well, if it does, they’re going to wish they’d gone in some other direction,” chimed in Catastrophe Baker. “I’ve killed men for lesser crimes than disturbing me while I’m drinking and socializing.”

“Are there any greater crimes?” asked Three-Gun Max.

“None that come immediately to mind,” admitted Baker.

The door opened again and Sitting Horse and Crazy Bull entered. The wind was blowing, as usual, and they were coated with the red dust that covers most of Henry II when it’s not blowing through the dry, hot, thin air.

Sitting Horse and Crazy Bull were wearing their tribal buckskins and feathered war bonnets, which looked just a tad out of place on a pair of roly-poly, fur-covered, orange, three-legged aliens, but we’d all grown used to their appearance over the years.

“Hey, Tomahawk …” began Crazy Bull.

“I know, I know,” I said. “The war’s getting closer.”

“What war?” he asked.

“Damned if I know,” I answered. “Let’s start again.”

“Sure,” said Crazy Bull agreeably. “Hey, Tomahawk, a couple of Blue Angels for me and my partner.”

Reggie mixed them up and placed them on the bar.

“That looks pretty interesting,” remarked Baker. “I think I’ll have one, too.”

“You don’t want it,” said Sitting Horse, picking up his glass. “It’s poison to humans.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“Cancel my order, Reggie,” he said. “By the way, what are a pair of orange, three-legged furballs doing dressed up like Injuns?”

“We come from Velitas IV,” said Sitting Horse.

“Never heard of it.”

“That’s because it’s not Velitas IV anymore,” said Sitting Horse.

“We were colonized by descendants of the Great Sioux Nation,” said Crazy Bull. “But instead of exploiting us, they shared their knowledge and their culture with us, and finally we all became blood brothers and took Indian names. We even renamed the planet. Now it’s Little Big Horn IV.” He paused. “Sitting Horse and me, we make the Outpost our headquarters because we like anyone who calls himself Tomahawk.”

“Just out of curiosity, have you guys ever seen a horse or a bull?” asked Baker.

“No, but we’ve seen a lot of Men who were crazy, and even more who spent all their time sitting when they should have been doing.”

“Hey, it’s no skin off my nose,” said Baker. “But if was me, I’d have took Geronimo for a name.”

“Not me,” interjected Big Red. “I’d have been Jim Thorpe.”

“Pocahontas for me,” said Sinderella.

“So come to Little Big Horn and you can choose any name you want,” said Sitting Horse.

“And as an added bonus, you get to put on war paint every Saturday night,” said Crazy Bull.

“How many wives do Injuns get?” asked Baker.

“How many women can you live with?” asked Sitting Horse.

“It’s been my long and considered experience that the total comes to something less than one,” answered Baker.

“See?” said Sitting Horse. “You’re not so alien after all.”

“I thought you guys were the aliens,” said Baker.

“Not to us, we aren’t.”

They took their Blue Angels off to a table and began playing a game that seemed to involve cards, pebbles and feathers in equal quantities.

“I wonder if we should be worrying about this war,” said the Reverend Billy Karma.

“They know better than to attack the Outpost,” said Max. “This is where all the living legends hang out. They don’t want no part of us.”

“If they’re godless chlorine breathers, maybe they don’t know about us,” said Karma. “Or maybe they subscribe to different legends.”

“If they’re godless chlorine breathers, they have no more interest in Henry II than we have in their home world,” said Nicodemus Mayflower. He grinned at his wit, and between his widow’s peak and his thin face and aquiline nose, he looked exactly like my notion of the devil—which may well have been why he chose Nicodemus for one of his names.

“I want it on the record that I, for one, resent the notion that all non-humans are godless,” said Argyle, sparkling like a Christmas tree.

“You believe in God?” demanded Billy Karma.

“I believe in 37 separate and distinct gods,” answered Argyle proudly. “That puts me 36 ahead of you.”

“It makes you a pagan.”

“It makes you a man of limited vision,” said Argyle.

“Still, it don’t matter what you believe,” continued Karma. “Jesus died for your sins anyway.”

“I never could figure out why you worship someone who couldn’t even save himself,” said Argyle. “And you walk around wearing a representation of the cross that killed him. That’s awfully close to psychic necrophilia.”

“Them’s fighting words!” cried Billy Karma, putting up his fists and starting to bob and weave.

Argyle sprang forward, clipped Billy Karma cleanly on the chin, then stood back as the Reverend slowly collapsed.

“You can’t beat a being who prays to Balaxtibo, the God of Self-Defense!”!" shouted Argyle triumphantly.

“He’s one of the 37?” asked Baker.

“Right,” said Argyle. “Though my personal favorite is Wilxyboeth.”

“Which one is that?”

“The god of sexual potency.”

The Reverend Billy Karma groaned and sat up on the floor, gingerly rubbing his chin.

Argyle extended his hand. “No hard feelings?”

“None,” said Karma. “Pull me up, will you?” When he was standing, he turned to Reggie. “Hey, Reg, mix up a couple of tall ones for me and my pal here. Come on, Argyle, you fascinating little alien bastard,” he said, putting an arm around the sparkling alien’s shoulders and leading him off to a table. “We got a lot to talk about.”

“We do?”

Karma nodded. “Let’s start with Wilxyboeth.”

“I wonder how you spell Wilxyboeth?” mused Willie the Bard, frowning and staring at his paper notebook.

“How come you don’t use a recorder or a computer?” asked Catastrophe Baker, walking across the room to look over the Bard’s shoulder.

“That’s not art.”

“What’s the difference between recording what we say and writing it down?”

“I embellish.”

“And you couldn’t do that with a computer?”

The Bard considered it for a moment, then shook his head. “I don’t like machines.”

“Neither do I, come to think of it,” admitted Baker. “I just figured a computer could do things faster.”

“It can fuck up my book 200,000 times faster than my pen can,” agreed the Bard. “Trust me, you’ll all come out looking better because of my pen.”

“Gonna take off all the rough edges, huh?”

“Or add a few,” said the Bard. “Whatever it takes.”

“I’ll make you a deal, Willie,” said Little Mike Picasso. “Give me ten percent of the advance and I’ll illustrate your book for you. I’ll do sketches of everyone in the Outpost.”

“Sounds good to me,” said the Bard. “Long as you’re willing to wait ’til I sell it.”

“Sure. No problem.”

The Bard stared at him for a long moment. “Okay, it’s a deal,” he said. “Now suppose you tell me the real reason you offered to do this?”

He gestured toward Silicon Carny. “I’ll die if I can’t draw her.”

Baker looked over and saw her for the first time. “If all you want to do is draw her, you got a lot more wrong with you than you think.”

Silicon Carny stood up, and everything came to a sudden stop. No one spoke, no one drank, no one dealt cards. If you made the effort, you could probably hear one molecule of air bumping into its neighbor. She had that kind of effect on men.

I knew a little bit about her. Not much, but enough to understand her name. The Silicon part was easy enough; mighty few slender women have 50-inch bustlines with nipples that point almost straight up. The Carny part was because her entire body was covered by art—not exactly tattoos, but some alien painting that was in constant flux, almost like a continuous holo—and she’d grown up in a carnival sideshow.

Finally, Baker broke the silence.

“By God!”!” he exclaimed. “This has got to be the first time I ever saw one work of art stuck on top of an even purtier one!”

Silicon Carny smiled at him. “You like?” she purred with an accent I still hadn’t placed after four or five years.

“Ma’am,” he said, removing his vest and shirt, “I got some mighty artistic tattoos myself, as you can plainly see, but I freely admit they ain’t nothing compared to you—and they sure as hell ain’t painted on such a nice canvas.”

I’d been right about the tattoos: they met in a passionate and pornographic embrace on his chest, then ran off in opposite directions until they reached his hands and headed back toward his chest again.

Silicon Carny looked at him and giggled. For all I know she even blushed, but she had so many colors in perpetual motion that no one could tell. It didn’t matter much, though. When she laughed, she shook—and when she shook, strong men just naturally got a little weak in the knees.

“What a delicate, tinkling laugh you got, Ma’am,” said Baker admiringly, putting his shirt back on. “I think I’ve only heard one other as engaging.”

“Who did it belong to?” asked Max.

“Strangely enough, to the only other carny performer I ever knew,” said Baker. “A woman of rare and delectable beauty, though lacking this charming lady’s exceptional superstructure.”

“So tell us about her,” urged Max

Baker shook his head. “It’s a long and tragic story and I don’t want to go into it.”

“I’d like to hear it,” said Silicon Carny.

Baker seemed to consider her request for a moment, then shrugged. “All right, Ma’am,” he said at last. “It brings back a lot of painful memories—but I make it my business never to say no to a lady, especially one put together even remotely like yourself, Ma’am, so if that’s what you want, that’s what you’ll get. But I warn you up front, it ain’t got no happy ending.”

Catastrophe Baker and the Siren of Silverstrike

It all began (said Baker) when I decided to pay a visit to my old friend Bloody Ben Masters, who’d been the first one to hit paydirt on Silverstrike. He’d made a few million credits off his silver mine, then sold it for a few million more, built himself a castle with an acid moat around it, and retired.

When I got there I learned that poor Ben was no longer among the living—seemed he’d got a snootful one night and decided to see if he could swim the moat without taking a breath. He got the last part right, because I don’t believe there was enough of him left to breathe about three seconds after he dove in. Anyway, there I was with some time on my hands, so that night I moseyed into town to see what the locals did for entertainment besides jump each other’s claims, and that’s when I found Old Doc Nebuchadnezzar’s All-Star Carnival and Thrill Show.

They had all the usual carny stuff: a null-gravity Ferris wheel, a Tower of Babel for the menfolk and a Gomorrah Palace for the ladies, a couple of fights to the death between Trambolians and a pair of the local Men, a magician who volunteered to cut your spouse in half—I don’t recall remembering him promising to put her back together, now that I come to think of it—and the usual surgically-altered six-armed jugglers and knife-throwers and the like, but none of ’em especially interested me.

In fact, I was about to leave when I heard a trumpet blare and a little guy in a bright plaid suit got up on a floating platform and announced that the moment we were all waiting for had arrived, and that anyone with twenty credits to spend could come into his Bubble and see the Siren of Silverstrike in all her sensual glory.

Well, the last time I saw so many people move so fast all at once was when me and Bloody Ben had had one of our little disagreements back on Bilbau II and I threw a couple of poker tables through a window and demanded a little more fighting room, and he threw the bartender out after the tables and allowed that that was a right good idea, and I figured anyone or anything that got everyone so motivated was probably worth twenty credits and then some, so I gently shoved a few folks out of my way, tried not to listen overmuch to their howls of anger and agony, and forked over my money.

Once I got inside the Bubble, I kind of shouldered my way to the front, hardly discommoding anyone at all except six or seven men who refused to step aside as quick as they should have for a newcomer to their fair planet, and then I took a seat.

I didn’t have long to wait, because the second I sat down the music started, and suddenly the Siren of Silverstrike appeared onstage, and you got to believe me when I tell you that she was about as lovely a critter of the female persuasion as I’d ever seen up to that time. Her hair hung down almost to her waist, and it was striped with rows of iridescent colors: red, blue, yellow, green, and the pattern repeated a couple of times. Real striking and artistic, you know?

She held up an almost-transparent little sheet or towel or some such thing in front of her and began her dance, and I noticed when she spun around that she wasn’t wearing nothing but her dancing shoes, and that the rest of her hair also came in the very same rows of colors. I think that might have been the instant I decided I was hopelessly and eternally in love with her.

I couldn’t figure out why such a lovely young piece of femininity was working in a carnival, and then it occurred to me that this Nebuchadnezzar feller had probably kidnapped her when she was just a little girl, before she’d blossomed into the fullness of womanhood, so to speak, and that she was just waiting for some handsome hero-type to rescue her from this life of enforced slavery and take her home so she could dance every night just for him as a way of showing her gratitude.

I waited until her dance was over, and then it took another five minutes for the audience to stop cheering and stomping and whistling, and finally the bubble emptied out, and I hopped onto the stage and found the little exit at the back and walked through it, and a few seconds later I found myself in the Siren’s dressing room.

She was sitting, stark naked, on a little stool that floated in front of a vanity and a tri-dimensional mirror, brushing her multi-colored hair. There were dozens of holos of her in various states of dress and undress on the walls, and a couple of missives which were either love letters or glowing testimonials. There were a bunch of little fussy dolls on a shelf, and a row of ugly-looking porcelain dogs that yipped a nonstop musical tune, and some paintings of big-eyed alien children who all looked pretty much alike, even though a couple were four-armed and one was insectoid and another was a chlorine-breather.

When the Siren finally saw my reflection in her mirror, she turned to face me.

“Who are you?” she demanded, either totally forgetting that she wasn’t wearing nothing or else not much caring about it.

“I’m Catastrophe Baker, here to declare my everlasting love for you and to rescue you from a life of indentured servitude,” I told her.

“I’m flattered,” she said, looking me up and down, “but I don’t want to be rescued.”

“That’s because Old Doc Nebuchadnezzar has brainwashed you,” I explained. “Spend a few months traveling the galaxy with me and you’ll be as good as new. What do you say, Siren?”

“I say no, and my name’s not Siren.”

“What is it then?” I asked. “If we’re going to spend a lifetime of sexual rapture together, I suppose it’s one of the things I ought to know.”

“It’s Melora, and we’re not going to spend any time together at all.”

“Melora,”I repeated. “It must be fate.”

“What must be?”

“I’ve always had a soft spot for naked sirens named Melora,”I said. “Purtiest name in the universe, if you ask me.”

“I didn’t ask you,” she said. “Now go away.”

“I can’t leave you to this life of misery.”

“I’m deliriously happy here,” said Melora. “I’ve only been miserable for the past three minutes.”

“You’re looking at this all wrong,” I explained. “I’m in the hero business—at least when I ain’t running from various gendarmes—and that means one of the things I do is rescue damsels in distress.”

“I’m not in distress,” she insisted. “Now leave me alone.”

“How can I leave you alone?” I said. “I’m in love with you.”

“Well, I’m not in love with you!” she shot back.

“That’s because you don’t hardly know me,” I said. “After ten or twelve years of fun and hijinks together you’ll fall like a ton of bricks.”

“What does it take to make you leave?” she demanded.

I realized then that my approach had been all wrong, that she viewed me as just another unwashed and uncouth member of her audience, so I figured it was probably time to display my class and erudition by saying something poetic that would sweep her off her feet. I racked my mind trying to remember some of the more touching love stories I’d read as an adolescent, and finally I hit upon a phrase that I just knew would win her over.

“Melora,” I said, placing a hand over my heart to indicate my sincerity, “my throbbing love engine cries out for you.”

“You can take your throbbing love engine and shove it!” she snarled.

“That’s exactly what I had in mind,” I replied, pleased that my little ploy was working. “I’m glad to see we’re thinking along the same lines.”

She stood up, walked to a wall, took a robe off a hook, wrapped it around her, and faced me with her hands on her hips. “I’m asking you for the last time: are you going to leave peacefully?”

“Peacefully, yes,” I said. “Alone, no.”

“All right,” she said. “But don’t say you weren’t warned.”

She opened her mouth and gave forth a scream that just got higher and higher and louder and louder. Pretty soon the mirror cracked, and a bunch of little glass doodads on the vanity shattered, and by the time she reached M over High Q all the fillings had fallen out of my teeth, and still she kept it up. I could hear people howling in pain outside the tent, and then I couldn’t hear nothing any more, and the next thing I knew she was slapping my face and telling me to wake up.

“What happened?” I mumbled. All the porcelain dogs had shattered, so at least the experience wasn’t a total loss.

“They don’t call me the Siren of Silverstrike for nothing,” said Melora with a satisfied look on her face.

“Okay, so you’re a siren,” I said, running my tongue gingerly over all the holes in my teeth. “What did you have to do that for?”

“Because I’m not going anywhere, and you needed convincing.”

“But why not?” I persisted.

She stared at me. “Because I’m Old Doc Nebuchadnezzar. I own this show, and nothing pulls in more money than the Siren of Silverstrike. Now do you understand?”

“Why didn’t you just say so in the first place?” I said. “If you can’t go, I’ll just move in with you.”

This time she hit H over high Z.

“I like living alone,” she said when she’d slapped me awake again.

“You’re one of the hardest ladies to romance that I’ve ever encountered,” I said. “But Catastrophe Baker don’t give up easy.”

Well, she screamed three or four more times, and I kept passing out, and finally some of the townsfolk came by and asked her to stop because she’d busted every window within three miles.

“Now will you leave?” she asked, staring at me when I woke up again.

“All right, all right, I get the picture,” I said. “But the day will come when you’ll regret throwing away such a perfect and unselfish love as I’m offering you in exchange for just fifty percent of the carnival’s take.”

But nothing could budge her, and I soon saw that I’d been blinded by her physical beauty, or maybe even just by her dye job, and after seeing a dentist and getting my fillings replaced I went back out amongst the stars, a couple of days older and a little lonelier and a lot wiser.

Silicon Carny chuckled. “Now I’m starting to understand why they call you Catastrophe!” she said.

“There are other reasons just as valid, Ma’am,” said Baker, “and I’m sure the survivors could tell you all about it—if any of ’em have been released from their various hospitals.”

“Humans are always talking and singing about unrequited love,” complained Sahara del Rio.

“Of course they are,” said Achmed of Alphard, who was probably a little less human than most. “It’s the most ennobling emotion of all.”

“The most frustrating, anyway,” chimed in Three-Gun Max.

“But what good does it do?” said Argyle, who was still sitting in a corner with the Reverend Billy Karma. “When it’s time to procreate, the female comes in season, the males fight for the right to perpetuate their genes, and then all is quiet until the next hurricane season.”

“That ain’t exactly the way it works with us,” answered Baker.

“All right,” amended Argyle. “The next planet-freezing blizzard. Big difference.”

“You got part of it right,” said Bet-a-World O’Grady. “The males do fight for the females. Or sometimes, like in the case of people like our friend Baker here, just for the exercise.”

“You think the females don’t fight every bit as hard?” asked Sinderella with a sly, knowing smile. “We’re just more subtle about it.”

“With all this fighting, it’s a wonder anyone has the energy to procreate,” said Argyle.

“It can get nasty,” agreed Max. “To say nothing of awkward.”

Suddenly the old man sitting by himself in the farthest corner spoke up. “What do you know about it?” he demanded. “Hell, what do any of you know? There’s only one word for it, and that’s tragic.”

“What’s so tragic about sex?” asked Baker.

“I’m not talking about sex,” said the old man. “I’m talking about love.”

“Who are you, and what do you think you know about it?”

“My name is Faraway Jones, and I’ve sought after it in its purest form for more than forty years.”

“Faraway Jones!” exclaimed Nicodemus Mayflower. “Didn’t I hear about you on Bareimus V?”

“Can’t be the same Faraway Jones I heard about on Sparkling Blue,” said Max.

“There was supposed to be a Faraway Jones on New Burma, out on the Rim,” added Gravedigger Gaines.

“They were all me,” said Jones. “I’ve been to all three of those worlds, and maybe seven hundred more.”

“Are you an explorer?” asked Big Red.

“No, though I’ve been the first to set foot on a bunch of worlds.”

“An adventurer?”

“Not on purpose, though I’ve had my share of them.”

“What then?” persisted Big Red.

“A searcher,” answered Jones.

“For what?”

“Well, now, that’s my sad and tragic story.”

The Tragic Quest of Faraway Jones

I never set out to be the first man to set foot on two or three hundred worlds (began Jones), nor the millionth to touch down on another few hundred. All I ever wanted was to find my Penelope.

I started looking for her, let me see, 43 years, 8 months and 19 days ago. First planet I went to was Castor XII. She wasn’t there, of course.

Then I tried the Nelson system, and all the oxygen planets in the Roosevelt system. Even touched down on Walpurgis III, which was as strange a world as I’ve ever seen in a lifetime of seeing strange worlds, but she wasn’t there either.

So I kept looking. I looked all through the Inner Frontier and the Monarchy and the Spiral Arm and the Outer Frontier and the Rim, and even in the Greater and Lesser Clouds, but there was no sign of her. After it became obvious that this was going to be an epic search, I re-named my ship The Flying Dutchman.

Had a lot of interesting adventures along the way. Once I stood atop the highest mountain in the galaxy, and another time I walked along the bottom of the deepest chlorine ocean. I threw away diamonds the size of walnuts, because my pockets were loaded with bigger ones. I killed animals that would make Hellfire Van Winkle’s Landships look like household pets.

I turned down the chance to be King of the Purple Planet, and I said no when I was begged to be the consort of a woman who was even prettier than Sinderella and Silicon Carny, meaning no offense to those lovely ladies. But I knew I had to stay free of all entanglements, both political and romantic, and of course I had to keep myself pure for my Penelope.

At one point I even enlisted the help of the Golden Gang, but although they could find hidden treasures and lost masterpieces of artwork, they couldn’t find Penelope. I went to Domar and rented the services of their Master Telepath, but although he could read every mind within fifty thousand light-years, he couldn’t come up with a single clue as to my Penelope’s whereabouts.

So I kept going from one world to another, hoping for some sign of her, or maybe to meet someone who’d seen her or even heard of her. The years slid by without my noticing, but I’ve never lost faith that someday I’ll find her and that would make all the suffering and hardship and loneliness worthwhile.

You don’t know how heartbreaking it can be, to think you’ve got an inkling of where she might be, only to find out, again and again, that it was a false lead, an empty hope …

“Just a minute,” interrupted Three-Gun Max. “Why not ask us?”

“I beg your pardon?” said Faraway Jones.

“The Outpost’s clientele,” explained Max. “Together, we’ve been to even more worlds than you have. Just tell us something about her, and I’ll bet one of us can put you on the right track.”

Jones blinked his eyes several times. “Well, I think her hair’s probably blonde. Not yellow-blonde. More sandy-like. And she’s likely kind of slim. Very pretty, but not the eye-popper that the ladies here are.” He paused. “That’s okay, though. My mother was a frump, and she wasn’t the brightest woman you’d ever want to meet, but when she was 85 and fat and wrinkled, my father would still have gladly laid down his life for her. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and in my eye, Penelope is the most beautiful woman in the galaxy.” Another pause. “She’ll be wearing a blue-checked gingham dress, with a little red silk scarf around her neck, and a big velvet bow in her hair. At least, that’s what I figure she ought to be wearing.”

“You haven’t seen her for 43 years,” noted Max. “Her hair might be gray or white, and she could have gained or lost 30 or 40 pounds, and she’s sure as hell not wearing the same clothes now. So tell us things about her that aren’t likely to change. Like, for starters, how tall is she?”

Jones frowned and ran a hand through his thick, shaggy, unkempt white hair. “I don’t know.” He touched his nose with a forefinger. “I think she came up to about here.”

“All right. What about her name?”

“Penelope,” said Faraway Jones. “A beautiful name, Penelope. It’s a poem all by itself.”

“What’s her last name?”

Jones shrugged. “Beats me.”

“Just a minute,” said Max. “You’ve been searching for her for 43 years and you don’t even know her name?”

“Wouldn’t a rose by any other name smell as sweet?” replied Jones defensively.

“Yeah, but it’d be a lot easier to find if you could tell people you were looking for a rose,” said Max irritably. “All right—just what do you remember about her?”

“I don’t have to remember anything,” said Jones. “I know everything I need to know about her.”

“Except her name and her whereabouts,” said Max. “Where did you meet her? On what world did you last see her?”

Jones looked very uncomfortable. “I never met her,” he said at last.

“You’ve spent 43 years searching for a woman you never met?” said Max incredulously.

“You’re making it sound ludicrous, and it’s not!”

“Perish the thought,” said Max. He decided to try one more time. “She must have been a woman of remarkable accomplishments for you to spend your entire adult life trying to find her.”

“I really couldn’t say,” answered Jones.

“Uh … I don’t want to seem unfeeling, but I think an explanation is in order.”

“There was this poem.”

“A poem?”

Jones closed his eyes. “The last few lines went like this:

Out there somewhere, beyond the sea,

I’ll find my sweet Penelope,

With burning kisses on her lips, and flowers in her hair.” He paused. “The instant I read it, I knew that there was a Penelope waiting out there for me, and all I had to do was find her.”

“How do you know her name wasn’t Gertrude or Beatrice?” asked Max.

“The poem says it’s Penelope.”

“The poem also says that the poet will find her.”

“The poet’s been dead for seven millennia. I looked him up. He never married anyone called Penelope.”

“So based on three lines, you’ve wasted 43 years searching for a woman who either never existed or who died seven thousand years ago?”

“There were a lot of lines! I only quoted three. And she’s out there somewhere. If there’s a woman for every man, then she’s the woman for me. The only woman.”

“How will you know her when you see her?” asked Sinderella.

“I’ll know her,” said Jones with absolute, almost devout, certainty.

“I wish you luck, Faraway Jones,” said Sinderella, walking over to him. “But just in case you don’t find her, I’d hate to think of you going to your grave without ever having kissed a real, flesh-and-blood woman.”

She put her arms around his neck and leaned over to kiss him, and he almost fell off his chair avoiding her.

“I’m sorry, and I don’t mean any insult,” he said, getting to his feet, “but I’ve got to keep myself pure for her, just as I know she’s keeping herself pure for me.”

“You’ve got a funny notion of pure,” offered Max.

“That’s okay,” said Jones, walking to the door. “As far as I’m concerned, all of you have a funny notion of love.” He paused. “I’ve wasted a whole day here. It’s time to go off looking for her again.”

“Be careful,” warned Achmed of Alphard. “There’s a war going on out there.”

Jones smiled. “If Men and aliens and meteor showers and supernovas couldn’t keep me from searching for my Penelope, you don’t really think a little thing like a war can stop me, do you?”

“Wars have stopped people from more important quests,” said Achmed.

Jones smiled. “You don’t know Faraway Jones,” he said, opening the door. “And there are no more important quests.”

And with that, he was gone.

There was a long silence. Finally Bet-a-World O’Grady pulled out a wad of banknotes. “Anyone want to start a pool?”

“On whether he finds her, or on whether she exists?” asked Baker.

O’Grady shrugged. “Either one,” he said with a smile.

Nicodemus Mayflower sighed and shook his head. “He’s not exactly the brightest being traveling the spaceways, is he?”

“If he’s got a pet, he may not even be the brightest thing in his ship,” chimed in Three-Gun Max with a chuckle.

“Well, I thought he was sweet,” said Sinderella.

“So’s a bag of sugar,” said Max. “But you wouldn’t want to go off and live with it.”

“You’re too cynical by half,” she shot back. “I wish someone like Faraway Jones was looking for me.”

“No you don’t,” said Max.

“And why not?” demanded Sinderella.

Max laughed. “He might find you.”

“He’s a lot better than you!”!"!” she snapped.

“Hell, we’re all a lot better than Max,” said Baker. “But that don’t mean Faraway Jones is Mister Right.”

“I created Mister Right,” said Sinderella. “I’ll settle for Faraway Jones any old day.”

“You mean you met Mister Right,” Max corrected her.

“I meant what I said.”

“You know we ain’t letting you get away without telling us the details,” said Max.

“Why not?” she replied after some consideration. “Who knows? You might even learn something, though I doubt it.”

Building Mister Right

I was raised to be a courtesan (said Sinderella). I was schooled in the tantric arts, I was taught to move and dress seductively, I was instructed in all the many ways a woman can please a man and I was warned what attitudes and behaviors to avoid.

When I was sixteen I went to work on Xanadu, the pleasure planet in the Belial Cluster. My clientele included some of the greatest names in the galaxy. I was even given to ***Lance Sterling*** for a week after he set the people of Hacienda III free.

There was no aspect of pleasure that was unknown to me, and no sexual art, no matter how strange or painful or alien, in which I was not an acknowledged expert. And because of this, I was in great demand. Even the Earth Mother tried to buy my contract and move me to her establishment on Praesepe XIII, but of course my employer would not part with me.

Then, one day, when I was twenty years old, I found myself walking down the long corridor to meet my next assignment. As I passed the multitude of rooms, I heard the moans and sighs of rapture—but only from masculine throats. And a thought occurred to me that should have been obvious the day I arrived there: that Xanadu was a pleasure planet for only half the race, that the women provided pleasure but did not receive it.

So I decided to take my savings—and of course, being a woman I’d had no place to spend all that money on Xanadu—and start an industry that would do for women what so many industries did for men.

I realized that I would need men who were as skilled in the giving of pleasure as I was, and I spent the next year auditioning perhaps a thousand of those with the best resumes—and while I will freely confess that it was not an unenjoyable year, I nevertheless found some major or minor fault with each of them.

It was then that I decided the only way I could be sure of providing the perfect lover was to build him. I queried a number of women, asking them to describe in detail all the physical features and behavioral characteristics of their ideal man, and then hired Bellini, the Monarchy’s greatest designer of androids, and set him to work.

The women had been unsure of the perfect eye color, so we decided that they would appear blue in certain light, gray in others, brown in still others.

It didn’t work. The women I invited to inspect our prototype found a changing eye color very disconcerting.

There was the same problem with the length of his hair. We tried short hair, long hair, even no hair, but there was no consensus.

Things became even worse as we got to the more important features. Since this was to be the ideal man, far superior to all others, we gave him a fifteen-inch phallus. The first three women to see it ran screaming from the room; the fourth kidnapped him at gunpoint and neither she nor the android were ever seen again.

Musculature was another problem. Should it be Herculean or Apollonian? We tried the heavily-muscled Herculean model first; it broke the ribcages of the first five women it hugged. So we went for the slender, delicate Apollonian; two of its first three sexual partners broke its ribs in the throes of passion.

When it came to speech, we ran into still more problems. Fully half the women we questioned stated that men had nothing interesting to say, that all they really wanted to do was talk about themselves. But the other half insisted that our prototype be capable of speech, because they wanted to be complimented and flattered to preserve the illusion of romance before they climbed into bed.

So we took this into account, and everything seemed to be going well for a day or two. Then the complaints began: a few sweet nothings whispered before a roaring fire was fine, but couldn’t it think of anything else to say? Forty-eight hours of nonstop flattery tended to sound, well, if not insincere, at least programmed, and nothing is a greater hindrance to romance than a lack of spontaneity.

So we went back to the drawing board and gave our prototype the equivalent of fifteen post-graduate degrees. He was able to converse thoughtfully on any subject, and we removed all trace of ego so that he would have no urge to speak about himself.

I should have known better. The typical comment was: “If I’d wanted to go to bed with my college professor, I would have.” One I particularly remember was: “Do you know how quickly an analysis of the annual fiscal expenditure on Sirius V can quell the fire within?”

There were the same problems with the prototype’s taste in art, in music, even in women. Each woman wanted to think she was the only one for him, but that meant reprogramming him each time, so that at noon he loved slender blondes and at two he loved pudgy redheads and at four he loved drunken brunettes.

I had run through most of my money without a single one of my female volunteers agreeing that I’d created Mister Right. Then, when ***Lance Sterling*** sent word that he’d like to spend another week with me, I gave the android to the first woman who asked for him (she later dismembered him with a butcher knife) and went back to my former life, convinced that Mister Right was as much an unattainable dream as the Perfect Woman.

So don’t you denigrate Faraway Jones. A love like that means a lot more to a woman than most of the things I built into Mister Right.

“Actually, there are nineteen perfect women in the universe,” said Catastrophe Baker to the room at large. “I’ve been with thirteen of them, and I’ve got almost half my life left to hunt up the other six.”

“So you really knew ***Lance Sterling***?” said Little Mike Picasso.

“Yes, I did,” answered Sinderella.

“He’s one of my heroes,” said Little Mike wistfully. “I always wanted to paint his portrait.”

“I wouldn’t have minded meeting up with him myself,” chimed in Gravedigger Gaines. “Heroes like him are few and far between.”

“I heard all kinds of stories about how he died,” said Three-Gun Max. “I wonder if anyone knows what really happened?”

“One of us does,” said Nicodemus Mayflower.

“You heard it?” asked Max.

“I lived it. I was there.”

“Sure you were,” scoffed Max.

“It’s true!” said Mayflower heatedly, and skinny as he was, I again was struck by how much his lean, angular face looked like my notion of Satan. “I spent ten years with him, fighting villains and evildoers!”

“I don’t believe it,” said Max. “There are heroes so big they blot out the stars for parsecs. He was one of them. Why would he bother with you?”

“I can find out if he knew him,” offered Sinderella. Everyone turned to her. “He had a scar on his shoulder. Describe it.”

“A scar?” repeated Mayflower. “I always thought it was a tattoo. It looked like a big, bloody L.”

“Is he right?” asked Max.

Sinderella nodded her head. “He’s right.”

“Not everyone’s a freelance hero or soldier of fortune,” said Mayflower with just a touch of bitterness. “Some of us function better in structured situations.”

“I can’t imagine why,” said Baker.

“Save the arguments for some other time,” said Max. He turned to Mayflower. “Okay, you knew him. So let’s hear how he died, and how many of the enemy he took with him.”

“From everything I’ve heard about him,” said Little Mike Picasso, “he’d have sold his life so dearly that they’d have needed one hell of a mass grave for the men who finally took him down.”

“Do you want to hear about it, or do you want to tell me about it?” demanded Mayflower irritably.

“Let’s have it,” said Max.

The Untimely Death of ***Lance Sterling***

To begin with (said Nicodemus Mayflower), he wasn’t born ***Lance Sterling***. His real name was Mortimer Smurch. I once asked him why he changed it, and he asked me if I’d lay down my life for a man named Mortimer Smurch, and I thought about it for a few minutes and never asked him again.

By the time he was nineteen he was dedicated to freeing oppressed people, human or alien, wherever he found them. He knew it would be dangerous, so that’s when he decided to wear the mask.

“If he didn’t want to call attention to himself, why did he wear that shining silver outfit with the cape?” asked Max.

“You want to hear this or not?” said Mayflower.

“All right, all right, I won’t interrupt again,” said Max.

“Until the next time,” predicted Baker.

I didn’t mind the mask so much (continued Mayflower). It was the sword that bothered me. I mean, what sane man uses a sword when his opponents have burners and screechers and pulse guns? But after he led the revolutions on Briarpatch II and Blue Alaska and came away without a scratch, he decided that God was on his side and that he was invincible.

By then he’d made a bit of a reputation for himself, especially since he let everyone know it was ***Lance Sterling*** beneath the mask, and a lot of idealistic young men and women sought him out and offered to fight for his cause. I was one of them.

I still remember my first action. The Governor of Piastra VII had revoked the constitution and literally enslaved the people. They were forced to labor 18 hours a day in his gold mines (and this was on a planet with a 22-hour day), working on half rations, while he and his army grew fat off the sweat of their brows. ***Lance Sterling*** couldn’t tolerate such a situation, and he gathered his followers about him and announced that we were going to attack Piastra the next morning.

When I asked for our battle plan, he looked at me as if I was crazy.

“Battle plan?” he repeated. “My plan is to go in there with swords flashing and burners blazing and not to stop until every last villain is dead.”

I gathered my courage to ask another question, and said, “What I meant was, their army numbers about 20,000, and we are less than 150. Isn’t some strategy required?”

“My strategy is to free the poor citizens of Piastra VII,” he answered firmly. “Do you have a problem with that?”

“No, I guess my math must be faulty,” I said.

“Are there any other questions?” he asked, staring at us. “No? Good. I will leave the pleasure of decimating the army to you, but the Governor is mine.”

“You mean you’re not going to lead us into battle?” I blurted out.

“Of course I am,” he said. “At least, until I spot the Governor, who, though evil through and through, is nonetheless no coward. He and I will match swords and skills up and down the balustrades, in full sight of his men, and when I dispatch him, it will take the heart of out his army, and most of those who are still alive will lay down their arms and swear allegiance to whomever the liberated citizens elect as their new leader.”

Well, I could see about 83 ways his plan could go wrong, but I couldn’t bring myself to challenge him a third time, so I kept my doubts to myself and prepared to die as nobly as possible the next morning.

You’ve all read the history books, or seen the holographic recreations of the Battle of Piastra VII, so you know that it turned out exactly the way ***Lance Sterling*** had predicted, with him running the Governor through and the army suing for peace less than a minute later.

That’s when his reputation really began to grow, and we never again had a problem recruiting volunteers. By the time we liberated Hacienda III a few years later, we had more than two thousand men and women fighting on our side.

Of course, success hadn’t changed ***Lance Sterling’s*** approach to warfare. It had cost him 42 of his most trusted lieutenants during the last six revolutions, but I began to think that he himself could only be killed by a silver bullet or a stake through the heart.

I still remember the day he outlined his plans for Hacienda. The gist of it was that we, his followers, would create a diversion five miles from the Emperor’s castle, while he would boldly enter through the front door, slash and hew his way to the Emperor’s private quarters, tickle his Adam’s apple with the point of his sword, and demand his immediate surrender.

I asked him if he wouldn’t feel a little more comfortable (one never suggested that he might want to feel safer) with a few hand-picked men accompanying him.

“Why?” he asked, surprised.

“It seems foolhardy to assume that the Emperor won’t be well-guarded, even within the walls of his own castle,” I said.

“Of course he will,” was his response. “But then, that’s what makes it fun!”

“You think going up against 60 armed men with nothing but a sword is fun?” I asked incredulously.

“I am ***Lance Sterling***,” he answered, as if that explained everything. “And besides, I have it on good authority that there are only 55 of them.”

“Obviously my math has failed me again,” I said as apologetically as possible.

He laid a heroic hand on my shoulder. “You’re decent and you’re loyal, Nicodemus, old friend,” he said. “There’s no law that says you have to be intelligent, too.”

“Thank you, glorious leader,” I said.

“Tut tut,” he said. “A simple ***Lance*** is sufficient. Or ***Lancelot***, if we’re being formal.”

Well, we set Hacienda free, as everyone knows, and ***Lance Sterling*** did indeed get the Emperor to agree to his terms ……. . . but we also lost ninety percent of our forces.

“They died in a noble cause,” said ***Lance Sterling*** during the funeral service. “Their mothers should be proud.”

I waited for his funeral oration, but he evidently felt he had no need to say anything further, and besides, he wanted to get back to the ship and go off to liberate other oppressed peoples.

We spent the next two years liberating Melancholy III, Greenwillow, Wheatfield, Pius XIV, and New Tahiti, and even stopped by the university planet of Sorbonne long enough to help the students take over the Administration Building … and then we came to that fateful day on Brookmandor II.

As you know, the planet had been conquered by a megalomaniac who called himself Alexander the Greater. He feared an uprising among his unwilling subjects, and as a result his army was dispersed across the planet.

***Lance Sterling*** decided that a lightning-swift attack on Alexander’s headquarters would have the desired effect, that once the head of this hideous political and military structure was cut off, the body would crumble.

“He’s got to have a couple of hundred guards and retainers on the premises,” I said. “Just this once, I wish you’d let some of us go with you.”

He smiled in amusement. “Mathematics again, Nicodemus?” Then he shrugged and relented. “All right. You and Zanzibar McShane may accompany me. Will that make you happy?”

I assured him that it would, and the next morning, before sunrise, the three of us sneaked into Alexander’s headquarters. We climbed to the top level of the building, and had made it almost halfway to his private quarters when Alexander himself stepped out into the corridor we were traversing, his burner aimed right between ***Lance Sterling’s*** eyes.

“I’ve been expecting you,” said Alexander with an evil leer. “My men said that you would launch a full-scale attack, but I knew that an egomaniac such as yourself would never be willing to share the glory with his cannon fodder. Now drop your sword.”

***Lance Sterling’s*** sword fell to the floor with a noisy clatter.

Alexander the Greater approached him, turned him so that he was facing us, and placed the burner next to his ear. “Now tell your men to drop their weapons,” he ordered.

“Do what he says,” said ***Lance Sterling***, showing no sign of fear. “He has the upper hand …. for the moment.”

Zanzibar McShane dropped his pulse gun and his screecher. I pulled my burner out of my holster, but I didn’t drop it.

“Drop it, or I’ll kill your leader,” said Alexander.

“You’re going to kill him anyway,” I said, aiming my burner at him. “If I drop it, you’ll kill us both.”

“I’m not kidding!” yelled Alexander. “Drop it or your boss is a dead man!”

“That’s stupid,” I said. “If I drop it, we’re all dead men.”

“I’m going to count to three,” said Alexander.

“Count to five hundred for all I give a damn,” I said. “I’m not dropping it—and if you kill him, I’ll kill you.”

“Then I’ll kill your friend, too,” he said, indicating Zanzibar McShane.

“He’s not my friend,” I answered. “I hardly know him.”

“Damn it, Mayflower!” said ***Lance Sterling***. “Just drop the fucking burner!”

“He’ll shoot me if I do.”

“He’ll shoot me if you don’t!” snapped ***Lance Sterling***

“One way he kills one of us,” I explained logically. “The other way he kills two or maybe even three of us.”

“I hate you and your goddamned mathematics!” he snapped just before Alexander the Greater burned a hole through his noble head.

I fired an instant later, Alexander toppled over, and Brookmandor II was free before noontime. Zanzibar McShane stayed on to become their new governor, while I took ***Lance Sterling*** home and buried him in his family plot.

“So that’s why no one ever found his grave!”!” exclaimed Three-Gun Max. “Who’d think to look for Mortimer Smurch?”

“I’m surprised no one else here fought for him,” said Bet-a-World O’Grady. “I mean, hell, he was the most popular revolutionary of his time.”

“Oh, I fought in my share of revolutions,” answered Max. “I just never got around to fighting in the same ones as ***Lance Sterling***.”***."

“I think we’ve probably all seen our share of action,” agreed the Gravedigger.

“Yeah, but not in wars or revolutions,” said Catastrophe Baker.

“You never fought in a war?” asked Max.

“I’m not a joiner,” said Baker.

“Sometimes you don’t have to wait to join up,” said Max. “Sometimes a war sneaks up on you when you’re not looking. Like this one that’s heading toward the Outpost.”

“This doesn’t sound like much of a war,” said the Gravedigger. “Just a few dozen enemy ships. If you want to talk about a real war, I could tell you about the Pelopennesian War. Strangest enemy I ever saw.”

“You were there?” asked Max.

“Yes.”

“Well, damn it to hell, so was I!”

“You, too?” said Nicodemus Mayflower. “That’s where I saw my first action, before I hooked up with ***Lance Sterling***.”

“Are you guys sure you have it right?” asked the Bard.

“Of course we do,” said Max.

“But the Peloponnesian War was held back on Earth, almost ten thousand years ago.”

“We’re not talking about that Pelopennesian War,” said Max.

“There was another one?” asked the Bard.

“Sure. About fifteen, sixteen years ago, out past the Albion Cluster.”

“I’d like to hear about it,” said the Bard.

“As if you had a choice,” snorted Catastrophe Baker.

“Who should go first?” asked the Gravedigger.

“Anybody got a three-sided coin?” said Max with a grin.

“I just happen to have one,” volunteered O’Grady.

“Why I am not surprised?” muttered Max.

O’Grady produced the coin. “Okay,” he said, holding it up so everyone could see it. “This is heads, this is tails, and this is fists.”

“Fists?”

O’Grady shrugged. “I had to call it something.” He tossed it in the air. “Call it.”

All three men called fists. It came up tails.

“Looks like you’ll have to tell the story,” said Baker.

“No, but I’ll choose the order. Nicodemus Mayflower, you go first.”

“Why him?” demanded Max.

“Because the Gravedigger is polite enough to wait, and I’m tired of listening to you,” said O’Grady.

Max considered that for a moment, then nodded his head thoughtfully. “Okay, that’s a valid reason.”

The General Who Hated His Private

I guess it was called the Pelopennesian War (began Mayflower) because the enemy was a race that called themselves the Pelopennes.

I worked for ComPelForCom HQ (that’s Commonwealth Pelopenne Forces Command Headquarters) back then. In fact, I was General Bigelow’s driver, pilot, orderly, and all-around gofer.

Bigelow was an imposing-looking man, and never moreso than when he was in full dress uniform. He had enough medals to go from his chest to his ankle, and his biggest problem was figuring which ones to wear and which to leave in his trunk.

The war on Pelopenne V was to be General Bigelow’s farewell to organized butchery. He’d been sent in with a force of a few thousand and told to pacify the natives. It was after fully half his men went over to the enemy that he realized he had a little problem.

“What the hell is going on?” he used to complain to me. “Men never desert! Would you desert if I sent you to the front line?”

“I don’t think I would, sir,” I would reply. “But I didn’t think anyone else would, either.”

Then he’d rant and rave for another half hour or so, open a bottle, and drink himself to sleep—and in the morning we’d have lost another twenty or thirty men to the enemy.

Finally he decided that a unique situation—and this certainly qualified—demanded a unique solution, so he sent for Hurricane Smith. Even then Hurricane was wanted on about half a hundred worlds and had a huge price on his head, but General Bigelow agreed to pardon him for all his outstanding crimes if he’d come to Pelopenne V and help clear up the situation. Hurricane considered the offer, asked for a quarter of a million credits in addition to the pardon, and enlisted when the General agreed to his terms.

Bigelow wanted to make him a colonel, but Hurricane hated officers, and insisted on being a private. The General sent for him the second he touched down, and Hurricane showed up wearing his usual outfit, which was made from the furs of various alien polar animals.

“Why are you out of uniform?” demanded the General.

“I’m in uniform,” said Hurricane.

“I want you in a military uniform.”

“You hired Hurricane Smith. This is what I wear; it’s my trademark.”

“Not when you’re in my army, it isn’t.”

Hurricane turned and headed toward the door. “Nice knowing you, and good luck with your war.”.”

There were six armed soldiers guarding the door, but no one made a move to stop him. After all, he was Hurricane Smith.

“Wait!” yelled Bigelow.

Hurricane turned to face him.

“All right,” said Bigelow with a sigh. “Wear whatever you want.”

“Thanks,” said Hurricane. “I will.”

“First thing tomorrow morning, I want you to move to the front.”

“And start blowing away aliens. I know.”

“No,” said the General. “I want you to find out why my men are deserting and going over to the enemy.”

Hurricane shrugged. “You’re the boss,” he said. “But if it was me, I’d kill all the bad guys first.”

“Just do as you’re ordered,” snapped the General.

Hurricane nodded and started walking to the door again.

“Just a minute, Private,” said Bigelow. …

“What now?”

“You’re supposed to salute.”

“I don’t do that,” said Hurricane. “It’s a silly custom.” He walked out of the office.

“This may not have been the brightest decision I ever made,” Bigelow said to me. “I don’t think I like that man very much.”

“He’s supposed to be one of the best at what he does, sir,” I said.

“What he does is plunder and rob and kill.”

“This is the army. He should fit in just fine, sir.”

We didn’t see him again for two days. Most of us concluded that he’d developed a serious distaste for military life and had left the planet, though a small minority thought he’d joined all our men who’d gone over to the Pelopennes. Then, just after sunrise on the third day, he wandered into headquarters.

“I found out why all your men have been deserting,” he announced. “Other than the obvious reason, that is.”

“The obvious reason?” repeated Bigelow.

“They don’t like you very much,” said Hurricane. “Can’t say that I blame them,” he added thoughtfully. “But the real reason is a little more complicated.” He paused. “Have you ever actually seen a Pelopenne?”

“I’ve seen holographic representations of them. Big, ugly insectoid beings.”

“Well, yes and no.”

“What do you mean?” demanded Bigelow.

“They’re shape-changers.”

“Even so, how can they terrify my men into deserting?” asked the General. “After all, how fearsome can they make themselves appear?”

“They don’t appear fearsome at all.”

“Then what shape do they take?”

“Ripe naked women. Ripe, passionate naked women. Ripe, lonely, passionate naked women. Except near the 6th Battalion, which is composed entirely of women. To them they appear as wealthy, elegantly-dressed, sophisticated gentlemen who drink vodka martinis and love to dance the rhumba.”

“But surely once our men and women have … ah … experienced them, they realized they’ve been duped by the enemy and have given away their precious honor to hideous, disgusting, insectoid aliens.”

“Well, the way I found out what we were up against was to go off with one of the Pelopennes,” answered Hurricane.

The General failed to repress a shudder of revulsion. “And?”

Hurricane contemplated his answer for a moment. “I have to admit that as women go, she wasn’t especially memorable,” he said thoughtfully. Then he smiled. “But for a twelve-legged four-eyed insect, she was a knockout.”

“You are as disgusting as she is!” thundered the General.

“Watch your tongue when you speak about my fianceé,” said Hurricane ominously.

“Get out!”!” screamed Bigelow. “I don’t want to hear any more of this!”

“One word of warning,” said Hurricane. “There are more human soldiers on their side than on ours. If you don’t leave Pelopenne V soon, I think they’ll probably mount an attack.”

“This is outrageous and disgusting!”

“You think so?” asked Hurricane mildly. “Wait until they cut your belly open and deposit a few thousand eggs. Now, that’s outrageous and disgusting.”

“How can you run off with such a creature?” demanded Bigelow.

“Beauty is only skin deep,” said Hurricane Smith, as he walked to the door for the last time. He paused and turned to the General. “But ugly goes all the way down to the soul.”

I got to thinking about what Hurricane had said, and when word reached me that ***Lance Sterling*** was looking for recruits, I borrowed a ship one night and took off to join him. Never did see a Pelopenne. Saw the General a few hundred times, which in retrospect was more than enough for any war.

“I got there after Hurricane Smith left,” said Max.

“And I showed up after Max,” said the Gravedigger. “So he should tell his story next.”

“Makes sense,” agreed Max. He took a swallow of his drink. “Things had gotten a lot worse when I arrived on the scene.”

“Was General Bigelow still there?” asked Catastrophe Baker.

“Sure. It was his last campaign, and he wasn’t leaving until he wiped out the Pelopennes—those that he could distinguish from naked ladies, that is.”

“Must have been a mighty interesting job—differentiating the one from the other,” offered Baker.

“Me and God could have doped it out,” said the Reverend Billy Karma with absolute and enthusiastic certainty.

“The mind positively boggles with the various tests one could devise,” added Little Mike Picasso.

“The General didn’t have your aesthetic sensibilities,” said Max. “He sent all the women home, waited until they were all off the planet, and then shot anything that even remotely resembled a woman.”

“Efficient,” admitted Little Mike. “I’ll give him that.”

“Wasteful,” said Baker.

“So how did the war end?” asked the Bard, scribbling furiously.

“Not exactly the way you’d expect,” answered Three-Gun Max.

“So are you going to tell us or not?” persisted the Bard.

“Try and stop him,” said Baker.

The Private Who Hated His General

By the time I hired on (said Max), morale was about as low as it could get. There were nearly as many Pelopennes as ever, but all the women had been sent home, and most of the men who hadn’t gone over to the other side were pretty badly shot up.

General Bigelow was getting desperate, so he put out the word that he was looking for mercenaries.

“He must have been desperate if he was willing to hire you!” guffawed Sitting Horse.

“You think I can’t kill my share of aliens?” asked Max ominously.

“Oh, we figure you can slaughter non-humans with the best of them,” said Crazy Bull. “We just don’t see you responding to military discipline.”

I’d have surprised you (continued Max). I stayed sober. I didn’t sneak no shape-changing alien ladies into the barracks no matter how good they looked. I remembered to salute most of the time. I even made my bunk up every now and then. I hate officers, so I insisted on being a private, even though I was getting paid more than anyone except the General.

Problem was, General Bigelow could have used forty or fifty more like me, or a couple of dozen Hurricane Smiths. Word had gotten out about the war—first, that it was going badly, and even worse, that he’d sent all the women away—and even though he was offering top dollar, he couldn’t begin to replace the men he was losing every day.

Finally, he hit on the notion of flying bombing missions over the Pelopenne lines, so that none of us came into direct contact with those alien women. ’Course, their lines were so spread out, and in such a constant state of flux, that we mostly just dropped our payloads and hoped for the best.

It didn’t take them long to realize that we weren’t going to meet them face-to-face on the battlefield, so they moved up their long-range molecular imploders and started turning our airships into soup. Before long word had even reached New Vegas, and they started offering odds on how many of us would return from each day’s mission. The first week, the odds were four-to-one that any of us would survive, but by the second week it was only five-to-two, and the third week it was six-to-five pick ’em.

Now, if you only had to complete one mission before you got mustered out, you could live with those final odds—or at least you could on six days out of eleven. But when that sonuvabitch Bigelow had you flying two missions a day, you had to figure your number was up by the morning of the second day.

“Shit!” muttered O’Grady. “The best odds I could ever get on you guys were three-to-five against!”

“You bet on us?” asked Max.

“With odds like that?” said O’Grady. “No way. They were blowing you out of the sky like there was no tomorrow. Like any smart gambler, I went with the run.”

Can’t say I blame you (said Max). Hell, if I’d been able to put a little money down on the Pelopennes, I’d have done it in a flash. Believe me, none of us looked forward to running—or flying—the gauntlet of all those imploders every morning and evening. We begged the general to come up with some other strategy, but he didn’t have any ground troops left, and he refused to either surrender or declare a victory and get the hell out, so we kept flying missions.

By the beginning of the fourth week, I was the only pilot still on active duty. All the others were dead or wounded. He’d started with 406 airships and an equal number of pilots, and now all he had left was 42 ships and one pilot (me), the rest having joined the enemy or been melted away, mostly the latter. So I went up to General Bigelow and suggested that maybe it was about time for a different strategy, since this one sure as hell wasn’t working.

But he was under pressure to win the war, and no one was sending him any men or supplies, and all he had left was me and a couple of platoons that he was afraid to send against the enemy, since the enemy had this habit of looking awful friendly at close quarters.

Well, I wasn’t happy about it, but he offered to double my pay, so I agreed to fly one more mission.

I barely made it back to base, and just as I was having a beer in the officer’s club, Bigelow came up to me and told me he wanted me to go right back up.

“Meaning no disrespect, General Bigelow sir,” I said, “but you can go fuck yourself.”

“You’re all I’ve got!” he snapped. “I will not have it go on my record that I lost my final battle.”

“There’s the airship,” I said, pointing out the window. “Go fight it yourself.”

“I’m a general,” he said. “I don’t sully my hands with the actual fighting. That’s what I have you for.”

“You ain’t got me,” I said. “I resign. Use some other poor bastard.”

“They’ve all deserted.”

“Every last one of them?” I asked.

He nodded.

“You mean I’ve been dropping bombs on our own men?” I demanded.

“They’re not our own men anymore! They've gone over to the enemy.”

I couldn’t say I blamed them. After all, the enemy probably fed them better, and based on what I’d heard of Hurricane Smith and his lady love, they sure kept ‘em warmer at nights.

Well, we haggled back and forth for the better part of the afternoon. I kept saying that I wasn’t going to play target for the Pelopennes anymore, and that I also didn’t feel right dropping bombs on my friends, and he kept saying that he wasn’t about to surrender or sue for peace, and that anyone who was shacked up with a lady insect, no matter what she looked like on the outside, wasn’t any friend of mine.

Finally, the sun started setting without anything being settled, and it didn’t look like anything would get settled, and then the General pulled out his burner and pointed it between my eyes and explained that if I flew one last mission there was a chance, however slight, that I might survive it, whereas if I refused one more time, there was absolutely no chance that I’d survive a laser blast at a distance of six inches, which was a very telling argument.

“All right,” I said. “But only if you’ll agree that this is the very last one.”

“I agree,” he said. “And to prove it, we’ll load your airship with every explosive that remains on the base.”

We spent the next few minutes arguing over how much of a bonus he was going to pay me if I made it back alive, and since I didn’t trust him any farther than I can spit with my mouth closed, I made him transfer the funds to my account back on Binder X before I finally got up and walked over to the airfield.

“You mind if I choose my own target?” I asked, as I was climbing into the airship.

“Be my guest,” he said. “Just remember to dump your entire payload and let’s bring this noble struggle to a satisfying conclusion.”

“Roger and out,” I said, closing the hatch behind me.

I took off, climbed to about five thousand feet, and looked off toward the enemy lines out on the horizon.

And then I got to doing some serious thinking. I didn’t have anything against the Pelopennes, and neither did all the Men who’d gone over to them. Now, maybe if I’d known a Pelopenne I might have felt different, but I didn’t. On the other hand, I knew General Bigelow.

So I flew back over the base, dropped my payload, and brought the struggle to a satisfying conclusion.

Well, satisfying to everyone except General Bigelow, anyway.

“That can’t be right,” said Big Red.

“Why the hell not?” demanded Three-Gun Max. “Every word was God’s own truth, except for a couple of poetic flourishes here and there.”

“I mean, if you ended the war, what the hell was Gravedigger Gaines doing there?”

“Why don’t you ask him?” said Max, who seemed to have lost all interest in the Pelopennesian War now that his story was done.

Big Red turned to the Gravedigger. “Well?”

The Sergeant Who Hated Everyone

I wasn’t there to fight a war (said Gaines). I was a bounty hunter, not a soldier.

I’d spent the better part of a year looking for Mad Jesse Wilkins. He’d killed more than three dozen men back in the Monarchy, as well as a fair number of women, children, dogs, cats, and alien pets. He lit out for the Frontier when he found out that I was on his trail. I just missed him by a day on Roosevelt III, and I was no more than half an hour behind him when he made his escape from Far London.

He headed toward the Albion Cluster, changed his identity and signed on as a sergeant in the Pelopennesian War—a neat little riff on the notion of the coward hiding out in the middle of a battlefield.

By the time I got there the war was over. There was nothing but a huge crater where the human headquarters and landing field had been—

“Just call me Bullseye Max!”!” shouted Max with a laugh. “I never miss what I aim for!”

I had an urge to order the men’s room servo-mech to tell everyone whether Max always hit what he aimed for, but I was more interested in hearing the rest of the Gravedigger’s story, so I kept quiet.

Anyway (continued Gaines), I couldn’t find any sign of life … but I knew Mad Jesse’s skills, and I figured he was a little harder to kill than most men, so I decided to do a systematic search of the planet.

That’s when I found out that most of the men were still alive, and that they’d made their peace with the Pelopennes even if their officers hadn’t. At first I thought they were unwittingly laying the groundwork for another war, one that would be fought over all the Pelopenne women they’d accumulated, but then I learned that each Pelopenne female laid about ten thousand eggs a year, and that the larvae reached maturity in about five years, so no one was apt to mind a few hundred of them choosing to live with the former enemy.

As a matter of fact, the men had all pretty much decided to go back to human worlds, since it was a lot easier for their womenfolk to pass as humans than for them to pass as insects. Now that the war was now officially over, the Monarchy was preparing to rebuild the planet and throw all kinds of money at the Pelopennes. They were also willing to do just about any favors that were requested, which included transporting all the men and their lady friends to other worlds.

I checked each man as he left, and Jesse wasn’t among them. (It’s pretty hard to disguise yourself when you’re 400 pounds and have steel teeth and wear a patch over one eye.)

I found him a few days later, holed up in a cave halfway up a mountain, still wearing his sergeant’s uniform. I waited until he went out to gather some firewood and got the drop on him when he returned.

“Hi, Jesse,” I said, pointing my screecher right at him.

“Either shoot or get the hell out of my way,” he said without slowing his pace. “I got things to do.”

“Shut up and listen to me,” I said. “There’s a million-credit price on your head. I’ll make you the same proposition I make everyone I hunt down: pay me the million credits yourself and you can walk away a free man.”

“Some lawman!” he snorted contemptuously.

“I’m not a lawman,” I said. “I’m what you might call an independent contractor. My only loyalty is to whoever pays me. That could be you.”

“I ain’t got a million credits,” said Mad Jesse. “And if I did, I wouldn’t give it to you anyway.”

“You spent all the money you got for killing all those men and women?”

“Nobody paid me nothing,” he said. “I like killing people.”

“Well, that makes it kind of awkward,” I said. I looked around. “You got any partners here?”

“You mean those sniveling little turncoats?”

“Does that cover all the deserters, or just the ones you don’t like?”

“Both. I don’t like none of ’em.”

“What about a woman?”

“Don’t have much use for ’em,” said Jesse. “Besides, they shipped ’em all home months ago.”

“I mean a Pelopenne.”

“I hate bugs!” he exploded. “And I especially hate bugs that look like women!”

Well, I spent about half an hour with him, and at the end of that time I still didn’t know what he liked. He hated his fellow man, he hated women, he hated children, he hated the army, he hated the government, he hated aliens. He wasn’t real fond of dogs or cats or birds either.

I offered him a drink while I was trying to decide whether to kill him on the spot or take him back to stand trial. He took one sip, spit it out, and hurled my flask down the side of the mountain.

“I hate bad booze!” he bellowed.

“That was real Cygnian cognac!” I said.

“What do you know about taste, asshole?” he said.

It was a real dilemma. If I shot him where he was, I’d have to take him a third of the way across the galaxy to claim the reward, and he didn’t smell all that good now. On the other hand, if I took him back alive, I’d have to listen to him all the way, and I figured I couldn’t take much more than an hour before I killed him anyway.

And then the perfect solution occurred to me.

I got up, motioned him to enter the cave, and kept my screecher trained on him.

“Good-bye, Jesse,” I said.

He just stared at me uncomprehendingly.

“I’ve been a bounty hunter for most of my life. I deal with nothing but the scum of the galaxy—and I have to say that you are the most unpleasant man it’s ever been my displeasure to meet.”

“You ain’t gonna kill me?” he said.

“No.”

“Or take me back?”

“No.”

“Why the hell not?”

“Because I’ve come to the conclusion that the worst punishment you can undergo is to be stranded on a world populated by nothing but giant bugs who don’t like you any better than you like them. Before I leave I’ll tell them that you’re here, and I’ll make sure they know how dangerous you can be, so that they never wander anywhere near you alone or unarmed.”

“You can’t do this to me!” he bellowed. “What about your reward?”

“I’ve decided that the thought of you spending the rest of your life here is all the reward I want or need,” I said.

And it was.

“I just love stories of death and carnage!” enthused the Reverend Billy Karma. “They’re so religious, if you know what I mean.”

“Did you ever go back to see what had become of Mad Jesse?” asked Max.

The Gravedigger shook his head. “For all I know he’s still there, living off fruits and berries and eating an occasional grubworm for protein.” He smiled, which he didn’t do more than once a month or so. “At least, I like to think so.”

“I find it amazing that the three of you fought in the same war on the same side and never once met each other,” said the Bard.

“I didn’t fight in the war,” Gaines corrected him. “It was over by the time I got there.”

“How long did it last, start to finish?” asked the Bard.

“Too damned long,” said Max. “I’d like to get my hands on whoever thought up that particular war.” He paused thoughtfully. “It couldn’t have been General Bigelow. He wanted to leave worse than anyone.”

“Who knows?” said Little Mike Picasso with a shrug. “People have been thinking up wars for thousands of years now—and then getting other people to go off and fight them.”

“Which brings up an interesting question,” said Nicodemus Mayflower.

“Yeah?” said Little Mike. “And what question is that?”

“Who thought up the very first war?”

“Hell, who invents anything?” chimed in Catastrophe Baker. “There’s no way to know. Probably it was some caveman with a club.”

“That’s not really true,” said the Bard. “Most inventions are carefully recorded and documented.”

“Yeah?”

“Absolutely. Don’t take my word for it. Ask Einstein.”

“Ask him?” repeated Baker. “I don’t even know how to let him know I’m here, short of sticking a pin into him.”

“Just ask your question,” said Big Red, pulling out a pocket computer. “I’ll transmit it to him.”

“I don’t know what the hell to ask,” said Baker. He paused for a moment, then came up with a solution. “Have him tell us about some of the most important inventions.”

Big Red alternately whispered into his computer and tapped on its screen. A moment later Einstein’s computer started buzzing and whirring, and he quickly tapped in his answer.

“Well?” asked Baker as Big Red stared at his screen.

“A Domarian named Kabbis Koba invented eating three billion and twenty-seven years ago, at 9:15 on a Sunday morning,” replied Big Red. “It became wildly popular, since people hadn’t really been able to figure out what to do with their mouths when they weren’t talking, and it quickly spread to other planets.” He paused, staring at the tiny screen. “Here’s another. Not only did Moses lead his people out of bondage to the Promised Land, but he also invented the very first dessert. Einstein’s a little vague on the recipe, but it seems to have involved figs, honey, and whipped cream.”

“That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard in a long lifetime of listening to stupid things in barrooms!” snorted Baker.

“Don’t be so sure of that,” said Argyle. “Just because your race doesn’t codify its history doesn’t mean the rest of us don’t.”

“What particular history have you got in mind?” demanded Baker pugnaciously.

“My own ancestor, Quillot Tariot III, invented the sneeze,” said Argyle proudly.

“You don’t invent something like a sneeze,” said Baker. “You just do it.”

“Well, someone had to do it first.”

“I don’t believe any of this.”

“Okay,” said Argyle. “Who do you think invented the sneeze?”

“How the hell should I know?” said Baker.

“Hah!” said Argyle triumphantly. “And I repeat: Hah!”

“That’s quite an accomplishment,” said Crazy Bull.

“Thank you,” said Argyle.

“Of course, our race invented both the pun and the double entendre, as well as the crude off-color remark.”

“And colors,” added Sitting Horse. “Don’t forget—we invented colors, too.”

“And a damned good thing we did,” said Crazy Bull. “You can’t imagine how dull the universe was before that. It looked exactly like a black-and-white holoscreen, only bigger.”

“It was still dull,” interjected Sahara del Rio. “Until my race invented singing.”

“Your race did that?” asked Crazy Bull, surprised.

“You want a demonstration?” she asked.

“Sure, why not?”

She promptly hit Q over high C, and shattered six of my crystal glasses.

“Well, maybe we didn’t invent singing,” said Hellfire Van Winkle, “but I’ll lay plenty of eight-to-five that we invented yodeling.”

“I wonder who invented gambling?” mused O’Grady. “That’s what makes life worth living.”

“Wait a minute,” said Big Red. “I’m getting another message from Einstein.”

We all waited until it finished scrolling across his screen.

“He says you’re all wrong, that singing and colors and gambling and even yodeling are all well and good, but there was only one invention that can truly be credited with making life worthwhile.”

Everyone fell silent, for Einstein was almost never wrong.

“Is he gonna tell us what it is?” asked Max.

“Yeah,” said Big Red, staring at the tiny screen. “It’s coming up now.”

The Greatest Invention

You know (began Einstein), God did lousy first drafts.

Consider the universe, for example—and we might as well consider it, since there isn’t anything else. It’s close to seventeen billion years old, give or take a couple of months, and yet it took almost fourteen billion years for life to develop anywhere.

And the first life forms weren’t exactly the type that would make you want to write home and brag about them. They were single-celled little creatures, invisible to the naked eye, which was probably all for the best since they were ugly as sin when you looked at them through a microscope.

Eventually they developed arms and legs and nostrils and things like that, and crawled out of the primeval ooze and onto dry land.

“Is he talking about Earth?” asked Sinderella. “I didn’t think Man was that old.”

“I’ll ask him,” said Big Red, tapping away.

You think Earth had a monopoly on primeval ooze (answered Einstein)?

As a matter of fact, the very first race to climb out of the muck and mire were the Beldorians of Danix VI. They were a humanoid race, and not without their admirable traits, although it was another billion years before any of them got around to inventing personal hygiene.

“He thinks personal hygiene is the greatest invention of all time?” said Three-Gun Max with a sardonic laugh.

If I’m interrupted once more, I’ll stop enlightening you and go back to my drink (said Einstein, who was frowning and staring right at Max with his sightless eyes).

As I was saying, the Beldorians were a humanoid race. To the uninitiated, they all seemed to have goiters in their armpits, but the trained observer would soon have deduced that the growths in question were actually Beldorian fetuses. That’s right: the Beldorians reproduced by budding.

And, need I add, their numbers were diminishing with each generation? I mean, who wants to walk around with an unborn child hanging from each armpit? Among other things, it really hinders your spear-throwing, and it almost guarantees that you’ll never invent basketball. Reproduction was a pain in the ass—or, to be more specific, in the armpit—and hardly anyone felt inclined to practice it.

It was when Iggloth, a Beldorian who had just come of age, accidentally rubbed up against his companion, Marlieth, while they were sleeping in a cave, that he suddenly discovered she was nice to touch. So he touched her again. She was a heavy sleeper, but eventually all the touching woke her up and she decided that she enjoyed it, and began reciprocating. In fact, they spent the next month doing nothing except eating an occasional sandwich and touching each other here and there.

Touching each other here was very pleasant, to be sure, but it was when they touched each other there that the results were electrifying. Later that day, when they ran out of sandwiches and had nothing else to do with their mouths, they invented kissing. It took them another seven years of trial and error to make it to the next step, but sure enough, they finally invented sex on a rainy autumn afternoon.

Of course, if it had stopped right there with the two of them, galactic history would have taken a different and considerably less interesting course. But the fact of the matter is that Barlotuth, Iggloth’s closest friend, stopped by one day to see if he’d like to go fishing.

“Go away,” muttered Iggloth. “I’m busy.”

“For how long?” asked Barlotuth, an accommodating fellow.

“Til a year from next Tuesday!” snapped Marlieth.

Up to that point Barlotuth hadn’t even known Marlieth was there, since the cave was quite dark, but now he squinted all five of his eyes and peered forward.

“What are you doing?” he asked curiously.

“We don’t have a word for it,” said Iggloth. “But it’s really nifty! You should try it.”

“It can’t be more fun than fishing!” said Barlotuth.

“Fine,” said Iggloth. “Go fishing and leave us alone.”

Barlotuth was about to answer when Marlieth suddenly started giggling louder and louder, ending in a happy (if ear-splitting) shriek.

“All right,” he said, turning and wandering away from the mouth of the cave. “If it’s that much fun, maybe I’ll give it a shot.”

And he did, and soon the word spread, and before long all the Beldorians were doing it. Now, nothing much came of the invention at first—after all, they were carrying these unborn babies under their arms—but mutation is a wonderful thing, and before long there weren’t any more budding babies, and sex became so popular that it immediately spread all across the galaxy to every sentient and non-sentient species, though I intuit that it never crossed the intergalactic void and that they still reproduce by budding in Andromeda.

Anyway, that’s how it happened, and if Iggloth and Marlieth were here now, I’m sure we’d all give them a standing ovation. And if they could stop touching each other long enough to pay attention—and doubtless Bet-a-World O’Grady can compute the odds on that—I’m equally certain they’d be justly proud of how enthusiastically everyone has taken to their invention.

In fact, now that I think of it, they not only invented sex, but they also invented mutation.

“I never knew that,” admitted Catastrophe Baker.

“The universe is filled with infinite mysteries,” chimed in Achmed of Alphard. “Strangely enough,” he added thoughtfully, “most of them can be discovered in bed with a member of the opposite sex.”

“And they don’t get much more opposite than women,” added Nicodemus Mayflower, staring admiringly at Sinderella.

“Just imagine,” continued Baker. “If it hadn’t been for them two Beldorians all those billions of years ago, I could look at Silicon Carny here and not feel a thing.”

“You’re not about to feel anything now,” she shot back. “Just keep your hands to yourself.”

Everyone laughed at that, none louder than Catastrophe Baker himself.

I checked the clock behind the bar. Ordinarily Reggie and I would start closing the place down in another half hour or so, but heroes need less sleep than most, and they all seemed to be in a talkative mood this particular night. Besides we had to keep an eye out for enemy ships, so I told Reggie to just keep serving them as long as they wanted.

Baker finished another drink, then walked over to Big Red. “Ask Einstein who invented God,” he said.

Big Red put the question to him, and got the answer back almost instantly.

“He says it’s still a point of some debate as to whether we invented God or He invented us.”

“Maybe a third party invented us and God,” offered Max, who could never leave well enough alone.

“Maybe Einstein ought to turn all of his brainpower to figuring it out,” suggested Baker.

Another brief pause, while Big Red waited for Einstein’s answer.

“He says he’d rather figure out which came first, the chicken or the egg.”

“Beats me,” admitted Baker. “But whichever it was, I take my hat off to the man who invented the frying pan.”

“You guys just don’t understand at all,” said the Reverend Billy Karma. “God invented everything. He just uses Men and aliens as His tools.”

“Yeah?” Max shot back. “Suppose you tell me why God would want to invent pimples or jock itch?”

“Just as you can’t appreciate good without having known evil, you can’t appreciate good health without having experienced illness.”

“Why do you have to appreciate it?” persisted Max. “Why can’t you just experience it? Or is God such a self-centered prima donna that He’s got to make everyone sing His praises night and day?”

“You know, I just hate it when you ask questions like that,” said Billy Karma. He turned to Argyle. “Let’s go back to talking about the god of sexual potency. Maybe it’s blasphemous, but it beats the hell out of pondering all these deep philosophic questions.”

“I find deep philosophic questions fascinating,” said the multi-colored alien.

“I was afraid you were going to say something like that,” muttered Billy Karma.

“In fact,” continued Argyle, “when I was younger I spent my entire fortune seeking the answers to the mysteries of the universe.”

“You ever come up with any?” asked Baker.

“A few.”

“Care to share ’em with us?”

Argyle shrugged, which made him look like an animated kaleidoscope.

“Why not?” he said.

The Ultimate Question

When I was growing up (said Argyle) I was always curious about things. I pestered all three of my parents with endless questions, and finally, in exasperation, they bought me a computer, which I promptly christened TAM (for The Answer Machine).

In the beginning, it was capable of answering almost all of my simplistic queries. Of course, it couldn’t tell me why all the elevators arrive at once, or why no adult can open a child-proof bottle, but it was pretty good on some of the more common questions.

For example, like any kid, I’d ask why the sky was green.

And TAM would spew out an answer in a nanosecond or two, to the effect that my world’s sky was green because all the continents were blanketed by green grass and the oceans were covered by an exceptionally fast-growing and disgusting form of algae, but that skies actually came in all colors, including blue, purple, violet, indigo, yellow, red, orange, mauve, puce, magenta, and licorice black.

Or I might ask “How high is up?” Always a favorite among obnoxious youngsters.

And TAM would explain that everything was relative, that Up wasn’t quite as high if you were standing atop a mountain as if you were in a valley, which made me clarify my thinking and express myself more precisely.

Whenever I had a few extra credits to spend, I bought TAM more memory and brainpower, and began asking it increasingly difficult questions.

“For instance?” asked Max, who just couldn’t stop himself from interrupting almost every story at least once.

For instance (answered Argyle), I’m not even a mammal, and my race has three sexes—so why am I attracted to big-breasted women?

“Damned good question,” said Max. “What did TAM answer?”

That it was a universal constant (said Argyle) and I shouldn’t lose any sleep over it.

As I became more sophisticated I’d ask if a tree made a noise when it fell in an empty forest, and TAM would kind of sigh and explain that a forest couldn’t very well be empty of trees, and that I had to learn to think more clearly.

Or I’d pose the question: if God made me, who made God? And he’d reply that it was an invalid supposition until I could prove God had made me, and that personally he doubted it like all hell. (You’ll notice that by now I was referring to TAM as him rather than it; I found it helped personalize him—and he was also able to answer some embarrassingly naive and insecure questions about the nature of sex, which is something that none of my parents seemed able to do.)

Anyway, I kept buying TAM more brainpower, and kept pushing him to the limits of his abilities.

For example, since I worship 37 gods and Men worship only one, I decided to prove they were wrong. So I did some studying, and I found out that Men put a lot of stock in the First Cause Argument. You know the one: for every effect there is a cause, and when you finally backtrack to a first cause beyond which you can’t go, you call that God. So I asked TAM if he could disprove the First Cause Argument.

“Certainly,” he replied instantly. “To disprove it, one need merely show that not everything has a first cause.”

“Okay, you can disprove it,” I said, realizing that I had expressed myself improperly. “Now will you?”

“If you wish. Consider the set of all negative integers. The last cause, the highest number, is minus one. The next-to-last cause is minus two. And the first cause, minus infinity, cannot exist.”

“Excellent!” I exclaimed. But suddenly I was filled with doubt. “Could it be that that’s just a fluke?” I asked. “A single disproof to a theory that’s lasted thousands of years?”

“You want more, I got more,” replied TAM. “Consider next the set of all proper fractions. The last cause, the highest number, is one over one. The second highest is one over two, or one-half. Then one-third, and so on. And the first cause, one over infinity, cannot exist.”

“Thank you, TAM,” I said.

“That was almost too easy,” said TAM. “Ask me a tough one.”

“Well, the other proof of God that still seems to have widespread acceptance is Bishop Barkley’s—that of the unseen observer. Can you disprove it?”

This time it took TAM three nanoseconds to answer.

“No, but I can show you how trivial it is.”

“Trivial? In what way?”

“Wait until I access my rhyming dictionary,” said TAM. “Ah, here it is. All right: I can condense everything Bishop Barkley said, every argument he made, every word of his entire life’s work, into a single four-line stanza, to wit:

With eyes wide open and mouth shut tight,

I watch by day and I watch by night.

And thought I’m sure you must find it odd,

I’m always here—you may call me God.

I submit to you than anything that can be reduced to such a childish doggerel cannot possibly have any universal import or validity. Furthermore,” he added, “it kind of makes God into a Peeping Tom. Who wants to worship a Supreme Voyeur?”

“If you say so.”

“I just did,” answered TAM.

Well, the years passed by, and I thirsted for more knowledge, and finally I reached the point where I sought the Ultimate Answer to Existence.

The problem was, TAM didn’t have enough brainpower to handle the question. Oh, he could compute the diameter of an electron in half a nanosecond, and he was able to pinpoint the date of the Big Bang to within 17 minutes … but what I wanted to know was simply beyond him.

I knew the only way to get my answers was to increase TAM’s capacity by a multiple of thousands, maybe tens of thousands. And that would require money—more than I could earn in several lifetimes.

Still, I knew that if I could make TAM bright enough to answer my question, the entire galaxy would benefit. So one day I robbed the biggest bank on our planet. The plan was foolproof, of course: TAM, who was as eager to increase his intellect as I was, had come up with it. I must confess that even as I was filling my bags with loot, I was silently appealing for understanding to Morixomete, the God of Heinous Deeds Committed for Noble Purposes. I’m sure He heard and forgave me, and I was really sorry about the sixteen innocent bystanders.

I spent every credit on more intelligence for TAM, and when he was ready, I hit him with The Question.

“Are you ready?” I said.

“Roger!”

“Okay, here it comes,” I said. I paused just a moment for effect and then hit him with it: “Why?”

Usually TAM came up with an answer in less than a second. The really tough questions took him perhaps half a minute. But this time he thought and cogitated and considered, and after eleven minutes he finally gave me his answer:

“Why not?”

That was when I realized there wasn’t enough money on my planet to supply him with the intellect he needed to answer the Ultimate Question, so I came out to the Frontier and became a notorious outlaw, though no one knew that I was killing and raping and robbing and plundering for the noblest of causes.

After sixteen years I felt I’d accumulated enough money, and I poured every credit of it into TAM’s prodigious brain. By the time I was done, he was probably three times as smart as the Master Computer back on Deluros VIII.

I activated him, and asked the Ultimate Question again:

“Why?”

This time he began whirring and blinking in earnest—and he kept it up for three days and three nights, considering every possible answer, every alternative, every subtle nuance to the secret of creation. And finally came the moment that we’d both spent our whole lives leading up to—the Ultimate Answer:

“Because.”

“That’s it?” I said, surprised.

“That’s it,” replied TAM.

That’s when I realized that the Ultimate Question would remain unanswered for all eternity.

“Thanks,” I muttered unhappily.

“Any time,” replied TAM.

So I made a total break with my past, left TAM behind, and returned to the Frontier, this time to stay. The only question I ask these days is “Where’s the bar?”

I still like big-breasted women, though.

“So does TAM still exist?” asked O’Grady.

“Yes. Why?”

“Maybe he can’t answer the Ultimate Question, but I’ll bet he could dope out the odds on next week’s games.”

“Well, I think it’s noble that Argyle spent so long trying to find out the secret of existence,” said Sinderella. “Except for all the people he killed, that is.”

“It’s a chump’s game,” said Max. “The only thing we were put here for is to make lots of little replicas of ourselves before we totter off to the grave.”

“Then it’s damned lucky the Beldorians made it so much fun, isn’t it?” put in Nicodemus Mayflower.

“Well, I disagree,” said Big Red. “I think each of us has his own purpose. If you were to ask Magic Abdul-Jordan whether he wanted to sire a bunch of eighteen-foot-high children, I think he’d tell you that he’d rather shoot himself right now rather than lay a curse like that on his offspring.”

“Right,” chimed in Little Mike Picasso. “Reproducing the species is all well and good, but to what purpose? I’d rather create one work of lasting art than ten kids who go out and live dull, every day, unexceptional lives.”

“Nobody who comes to the Outpost is unexceptional,” said the Bard. “So why should you think their offspring will be?”

“You’ve heard of shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations?” replied Three-Gun Max. “Well, how about unexceptional to unexceptional in two generations? I don’t recall any of our parents ever traipsing out here to the Frontier and making the kind of reputations we’ve got. We’re a bunch of freaks. Great and heroic freaks to be sure, but freaks nonetheless.”

But Nicodemus Mayflower wasn’t buying it. “Are you telling me that, say, Einstein and Sinderella couldn’t produce a kid with his brains and her looks?”

“I’d say it’s a damned sight more likely that they’d produce one with her brains and his looks,” answered Max.

“Well, I like that!” snapped Sinderella, glaring at him.

“No insult intended,” continued Max. “But let’s be reasonable. Was there any reason to predict anyone in this tavern would turn out the way we did? Was your mother the sexiest woman in a whole sector of the galaxy? Do you suppose Catastrophe Baker’s father could wipe out entire regiments before going off to bed a sacrosanct high priestess? Did Little Mike have five brothers and sisters who could produce works of art that would pass for the great masters? I say we’re all unique, and I can’t see what’s wrong with that.”

“There’s nothing wrong with it,” answered the Bard. “But it does tend to cast some serious doubt upon the entire science of genetics.”

“Big deal,” said Max. “Have you ever seen a gene?”

“I haven’t seen a supernova, either,” said the Bard. “But I have it on excellent authority that they exist.”

“Just keep arguing with me,” said Max pugnaciously, “and I won’t let you put me in your book.”

“Keep saying stupid things and I won’t want to.”

“Write me out of that book and I’ll blow your head off!” bellowed Max, who seemed to have less use for logic than most men.

“Blow my head off and the book will never get finished,” shot back the Bard.

“I hadn’t considered that,” said Max grumpily. “Okay, you can live.” He paused. “What were we talking about?”

“The cosmic verities and the meaning of life,” said Nicodemus Mayflower. “Stuff like that.”

“Only we decided that no one could ever know the answers,” added Little Mike Picasso.

“Someone knows,” said Catastrophe Baker, who’d been silent for a long time. (Well, for him, anyway.)

Argyle shook his head. “Even TAM didn’t know.”

Baker shook his head. “TAM was wrong. There’s one man who knows the secrets of the universe and the purpose of life.”

“And you just happen to know who it is, right?”

“As a matter of fact, I do.”

Catastrophe Baker and the Mage of the Swirling Mists

I ain’t much of a philosopher (said Baker). Universal truths haven’t got all that much to do with the hero business. I mean, when you see a dyed-in-the-wool villain doing villain-type things, you don’t stop and wonder if society’s to blame, or whether his punishment should fit his crimes. No, you blow the son of a bitch away and worry about it later.

So I didn’t really have much initial interest in meeting up with the Mage of the Swirling Mists. The fact that people trusted him with their secrets and their hopes and their dreams didn’t mean a thing to me.

What I was interested in was the Star of Bethlehem, surely the most gorgeous blue-skinned girl I’ve ever laid eyes on. She was some kind of mutant, what with her blue skin and orange eyes, but other than that she could have been Sinderella’s better-looking twin sister, meaning no offense.

I first saw her out on Futzi Minoulli IV. She was just coming out of a hotel there, and it was love at first sight—at least on my part. I doubt that she even saw me at all. But that didn’t make no nevermind. My heart was pounding away in my chest, and my throat was getting dry, and my palms were starting to sweat, and I knew from previous experience that all of these were the symptoms of falling into eternal and undying love.

I hung around the hotel lobby for a couple of hours until she returned so I could declare my feelings and sweep her off her feet and maybe into the honeymoon suite—but when she finally came back it was in the company of a big, burly man wearing a turban and a robe with a bunch of stars and quarter-moons and stuff on it.

I walked right up and gave her one of my more chivalrous bows.

“Ma’am,” I said, “I been admiring you from afar, and the time has come to announce my everlasting devotion and start admiring you from close up.”

“Leave us alone!” said the man gruffly, pushing me on the shoulder, which was about as high up as he could reach.

I busted his ribs and knocked out nine of his teeth as a gentle reproof, but when I turned back to my blue-skinned ideal of pure womanhood she’d already made it onto the airlift. Now, the hotel had some fifteen hundred rooms, and I was perfectly willing to bust down the door of each and every one of ’em in search of her, but then it occurred to me that there might be a less strenuous way, so I moseyed over to where the guy with the turban had fallen after I bounced him off the far wall, and I squatted down next to him.

“Howdy, neighbor,” I said.

He took one look at me, uttered a shriek of terror, and curled up into a little ball.

“C’mon, friend,” I said, kind of forcefully straightening him out and trying not to pay no attention to all the creaking and cracking sounds. “I didn’t mean you no harm. I just happen to resent being pushed by little bitty guys with turbans—and besides, you were standing betwixt me and that which I want most in all the galaxy.”

“What I want most is a doctor!” he muttered.

“I never noticed it before, but you got a serious lisp there, friend,” I said.

“I didn’t have it until you knocked out all my teeth!” he shot back. (Actually, he spat back, but I didn’t hold it against him none, since he didn’t have anything in the front of his mouth to act as a barrier to all that saliva.)

“You do me a serious injustice,” I said, prying his jaws open. “You got lots of teeth left—hell, I can see at least a dozen from here, counting molars—and if you want to keep ’em, you’ll start answering my questions.”

He whimpered a bit at that, but didn’t enter into no arguments.

“That blue-skinned lady you was with,” I said. “By what name does she go?”

“She is the Star of Bethlehem,” he said.

“What is Bethlehem—some kind of a play or movie?” I asked, hoping against hope that it might even be a strip show.

“That’s her name!” he wailed. “Now let me go!”

“Real soon,” I said. “I ain’t a lot more comfortable sitting here on your chest like this than you are. But if I’m gonna spend the rest of my life with this lady, I gotta know a little more about her. Like, for starters, where does she work?”

“She and I both work on the same planet!” he said, and then he passed out, probably more from fear and shortage of air than anything more major.

Well, since I didn’t want no trouble with the local gendarmes, who were still a little miffed at me for busting up Aristotle’s Bar and Study Parlor and putting half a dozen of their brethren in the hospital the night before, I slung the guy with the turban over my shoulder, went outside into the cool night air, and wandered around for the better part of an hour before I finally found an emergency room where I could dump him.

(I should probably have asked some questions when I saw that all the other patients were animals—but at least the veterinarian was open for business in the middle of the night, which is more than I can say for all them rich, stuck-up doctors.)

When I got back to the hotel, I asked the desk clerk where I could find the Star of Bethlehem. He called up some Tri-D star maps on his computer and began looking, so I grabbed him by the collar and shook him a couple of times to make sure I had his attention, and politely suggested that while the Star of Bethlehem might be a lot of things, including a celestial object, the particular stellar body I was looking for was wearing a skin-tight dress and was staying in the hotel.

He apologized and told a servo-mech to mop up the small puddle he’d made on the floor, and then checked the hotel’s register, and suddenly turned as white as a sheet.

“You look like you seen a ghost,” I said.

“I’m just anticipating,” he answered.

Well, I didn’t know what he meant, and it wasn’t none of my concern anyway, so I said, “What room is she in?”

“She checked out half an hour ago,” said the clerk, cringing as if he expected the ceiling to fall on his head.

“Where did she go?” I asked.

“Let me see,” he said, messing with the computer.

“You know,” I opined, staring at his hands, “you really ought to see a doctor before that palsy gets any worse.”

“I plan to see a whole barrage of them the second I’m off duty,” he replied. “Ah, here it is. She caught the starliner to Dante II.”

“You got any other info on her?” I asked, wondering for instance if she was married, and if she was, was she a fanatic about it?

“Just that her companion listed his profession as assistant to the Mage of the Swirling Mists.”

“The Mage of the Swirling Mists?” I repeated, rolling the name around on my tongue and wondering if anyone involved in this situation except me had just a first name and a last one.

“Yes,” said the clerk. “I’ve never seen him, of course, but I’ve heard that he can foresee the future, explain all the eternal verities, and even predict the roll of the dice.”

“Sounds like a handy guy to know,” I allowed. “I hope he ain’t too good-looking.”

“He is the Master of the Mystic Arts,” said the clerk. “What matters appearance to a being like that?”

I was more concerned with what they mattered to a being like the Star of Bethlehem, but I kept my thoughts to myself and went to the spaceport, where I climbed into my ship and took off for Dante II, which for the uninitiated was just past the Virgil system, way out on the Spiral Arm.

Took the better part of two weeks to get there, during which time my love for the Star of Bethlehem had blossomed and grown and matured into a beautiful thing of gossamer fragility. I’d been doing a lot of thinking about the pair of us, and I had only one question left, which was would she let me call her Star, since calling her Star of Bethlehem every time I spoke to her could get to be a little tedious.

Once I landed, I made my way through customs—they’d never heard of me, so it didn’t take as long as usual—and walked out of the spaceport. I figured I might as well get right to business, so I stopped the first pedestrian I saw with the intention of asking him where I could find the Mage of the Swirling Mists, but he just lay peaceful-like where he’d fallen, and after eight or nine minutes my patience began wearing thin, so I just wandered into the city on my own.

Before long I came upon another man walking the streets by himself, and I kind of signaled for him to stop and talk to me.

“Okay,” he said, stretching his hands way above his head. “And you can stop pointing the blaster at me. I ain’t armed and I ain’t dumb enough to run away from a man that’s carrying as much firepower as you seem to be.”

“That’s right reasonable of you, friend,” I said. “I got just one thing to ask of you and then you can be on your way.”

“Is this some kind of trick question?” he asked nervously. “What’ll you do to me if I get it wrong?”

“It ain’t no trick,” I assured him. “And it’s vitally important to my sex life and my emotional well-being.” I tried to figure out how to word it without sounding like too much of a country bumpkin, and finally I blurted out, “Where can I find the Swirling Mists?”

I was all prepared for him to laugh at me, but instead he looked kind of relieved and pointed up the road a way.

“Go to Fourth Street and turn left,” he said.

“That’s all there is to it?”

“That’s it.”

I thanked him and hurried off, anxious to clutch the Star of Bethlehem to my manly bosom.

When I got to Fourth Street, I took a left, and walked half a block past a number of theaters and clubs and restaurants, mingling with a bunch of folks who were dressed to the nines, and then suddenly I found myself in front of a blinking holographic sign that proclaimed that I had reached the Swirling Mists Nightclub.

“Welcome, wayfarer,” said the doorman, who was dressed exactly like the guy I’d kind of disassembled back on Futzi Minoulli. “Enter the Swirling Mists and let the fabulous Mage astound you with his feats of prestidigitation and legerdemain!”

Well, Prestidigitation and Legerdemain sounded like a couple of Altairean bodyguards, but I didn’t want to show my ignorance, so I thanked him and walked on in.

The show was just finishing, and a bunch of chorus girls were on stage, dressed—or maybe a better word is undressed—like witches, and doing really interesting things with their broomsticks, but I wasn’t here for the high culture the place afforded, but for my Star of Bethlehem, and once I determined that she wasn’t anywhere to be seen I moseyed backstage and began looking for her.

I tried five or six dressing rooms, and raised a couple of female screams, which struck me as odd since I wasn’t seeing nothing they weren’t proud to show off onstage, and then I came to the biggest dressing room of all, and there, sitting at a table and staring into a mirror, was this guy with a cone-shaped magician’s hat and a long white beard, and a robe that kept changing colors the whole time I looked at it.

“You ain’t the Star,” I said, making no attempt to hide my disappointment.

“I most certainly am,” he replied with dignity. “Don’t take my word for it—go out and look at the marquee. The Mage of the Swirling Mists is the star this and every night.”

“And you’re the Mage?” I asked.

“That’s right.”

“Good!” I said. “Where can I find the Star of Bethlehem?”

He looked puzzled. “Second star on the right and straight on ’til morning?”

“She’s a woman,” I explained.

“I didn’t know they came in sexes,” he said. “Fascinating!”

“I thought you knew everything,” I said.

“Me?” he replied with a laugh. “I just do card tricks.” He reached into the air and produced a deck, then fanned it out. “Here, take a card, any card.”

“I don’t care about card tricks!” I yelled.

“Okay, don’t lose your temper,” he said. He reached behind my ear and suddenly there was an egg in his hand. “There!” he said proudly. “What do you think of that?”

“It’s an egg,” I said. “Big deal.”

“But where did it come from?” he said with a twinkle in his eye.

“That’s the kind of stuff everyone says you know,” I answered him. “Did it come before the chicken or after? And while we’re on the subject, where’s the woman I love?”

“How the hell should I know?” said the Mage.

“They told me you knew everything,” I said.

“Ah!”!” he said, his eyes lighting up. “Now I understand. You want the Mage of the Purple Mists! He knows everything. He answers all the questions about life and death and such, and he’s never been known to be wrong. Me, I just do sleight of hand.”

“You’re sure?” I asked, staring at him and trying to decide if he was joking.

“Absolutely,” said the Mage. “He works about half a block down the street. And I hear that he’s got the most beautiful blue-skinned assistant …”

I didn’t wait to hear the rest. I was out the back door before he could finish his sentence, and a minute later I was pounding at the locked door of the Purple Mists.

Finally the door inched open and a skinny old guy stuck his head out.

“Stop pounding!” he said. “I heard you.”

“Let me in!” I said.

“We’re closed for the season.”

“What season?” I said. “What’s going on, and when do you open again?”

He shrugged. “How should I know? Maybe never.”

“What are you talking about?” I demanded. “Where’s the Mage of the Purple Mists?”

“He left the planet this afternoon with that beautiful assistant of his,” said the old guy.

“When’s he coming back?”

“Beats me,” was the answer. “Didn’t leave no forwarding address neither.”

I set off to hunt them down and pledge my love to the Star of Bethlehem, and I spent the next year searching for them without any luck, but then I ran into a couple of Pirate Queens and a High Priestess who looked exactly like she had an extra pair of lungs, and after a while I couldn’t quite remember what the Star actually looked like except for being blue and kind of pretty.

As for the Mage of the Purple Mists, I guess he was everything they said he was. But he couldn’t do card tricks, and people who knew him said he wasn’t much with a blaster or a burner, and he was too old to cut the mustard with the Star of Bethlehem, so when I think of him at all, I wonder what knowing all the secrets of the universe was really worth.

“Let me take him to High Stakes Eddie’s for a night and I’ll put a cash value on it,” said Bet-a-World O’Grady.

“You know,” said Sinderella, “there’s more to this secrets of the universe business than meets the eye. Or rather, there’s a lot less.”

“What do you mean?” asked O’Grady.

“You were listening. The brightest machine in the galaxy couldn’t give poor Argyle even as good an answer as some drunken jerk in a bar could, and the Mage of the Swirling Mists does card tricks.”

“True,” said Baker. “But the Mage of the Purple Mists now…”

“You don’t know anything about him,” said Sinderella.

“Except that he’s got your Star of Bethlehem,” added Max with a smirk.

“She was too perfect,” answered Baker.

“How can someone be too perfect?” asked Sinderella.

“She was purity itself,” said Baker. “How can you enjoy a roll in the hay if it don’t feel dirty?”

“A telling point,” agreed Nicodemus Mayflower. “If you don’t rut like a couple of farm animals gone wild, and then feel so guilty that you’ve just got to unload in church, and then change your mind because what you did was so filthy that your minister would never speak to you again—”

“I ain’t never seen, heard, smelled, or even experienced a sex act that could shock my tender sensitivities,” interrupted the Reverend Billy Karma. “You’ve just been going to the wrong church, my son.”

“Well, if it doesn’t shock you, it should at least shock the pants off God,” continued Mayflower.

“God is a mighty understanding critter,” said Billy Karma. “And it’s been my experience that He likes a spicy story as well as the next man.”

“That’s some religion you preach,” said Max sardonically.

“The best,” agreed the Reverend. “I mean, what the hell good’s a religion that doesn’t attract sinners? That’s what keeps God in business—fresh blood.”

“I never looked at it that way,” admitted Baker.

“Not many people do,” answered Billy Karma. “Or else you’d all get into the preaching biz.”

“And God don’t shock easy?” continued Baker.

“It’s almost as hard to shock God as it is to shock me,” said Billy Karma. “Take this little lady here,” he added, pointing to Sinderella. “She felt a need to confess her sins this morning, or maybe to brag about ’em a little, and even though we ain’t from the same branch of God’s family, I sat down and listened to her for three hours.” He paused and looked around the Outpost. “Well, brethren, I panted, and I drooled, and my hands started shaking, and once or twice I even went outside to bay at the sun (the moon not being in the sky at the time). I stuttered and I stammered and I howled like a dog—but the one thing I wasn’t was shocked. Excited, yes. Inflamed, sure. Aroused, damned right. But shocked? Never!” Then he winked at Sinderella. “We got to have another heart-to-heart real soon now, you hear?”

“I think I been going to the wrong church all my life,” said Baker.

“I don’t know about that,” responded Max. “I mean, to listen to you tell it, the only thing you ever got out of a church service was a vestal virgin or two, and they didn’t stay vestal for long.”

“You mean virgin,” said Sinderella.

“That, too.”

“Well, you sure have an interesting way of looking at things, Reverend,” said Nicodemus Mayflower.

“I got to,” answered Billy Karma. “After all, I’m God’s eyes and ears on this here temporal plane of existence.”

“He spent most of last night trying to convince me he was God’s hands, too,” said Silicon Carny

“You never heard of the laying on of hands?” said the Reverend in mock surprise.

“Not where you were trying to lay them,” replied Silicon Carny.

“How about talking in tongues?” asked Max.

“I give up,” said Billy Karma. “How about talking in tongues?”

“Can you do it?”

“Usually not until my fifth drink.”

“The more I hear about this man’s religion, the more I like it,” announced Baker.

“The more I hear about it,” said Max, “the more it sounds like I’ve been practicing it for the last twenty years without even knowing it.”

“Tell me some more,” said Baker. “You got any saints in your religion?”

“Not so’s you’d notice it,” answered the Reverend Billy Karma. “I thought I was pretty saintly this morning, just sitting there listening to Sinderella without pouncing on her.”

“Uh …” began Sinderella meaningfully.

“Without pouncing on her in earnest,” he amended.

“Hey, I was there!” she said.

“Okay, without pouncing on her in deadly earnest,” said Billy Karma. He turned back to Baker. “All right—no saints.”

“How about prophets?” asked O’Grady, who only seemed to get interested in the conversation when he could bring it around to odds and betting.

“We make more than our fair share, and we’re completely tax free,” replied the Reverend. “You thinking about taking to the cloth?”

“I meant prophets, not profits,” said O’Grady, enunciating carefully. “You know—the kind of men who make pronouncements and predict the future.”

“Men who make pronouncements and predict the future are hanging out in every brokerage house and bookie joint in the galaxy,” said Max. “And every last one of ’em dies broke.”

“We’ve had our share of prophets,” replied the Reverend. “Including maybe the two most interesting in the history of organized religion.”

“Organized religion’s been around eight or nine millennia,” noted Max dryly.

“Nonsense,” said Billy Karma. “Religion didn’t get really organized until I writ down all the rules for it maybe fifteen years ago. And since then there have been 53 amendments, as well as two evenings worth of apocrypha experienced at one of the sleazier whorehouses on Talarba VII, and a rejected canon courtesy of an alien lady who had three of everything worthwhile.” He winked at Silicon Carny. “There’s still time to become the 54th amendment.”

“There’s still time to be nailed to a cross,” she replied.

“What’s the matter with you, woman?” he demanded. “Religion’s supposed to be enjoyable, or why practice it at all?”

“I’d enjoy it,” said Silicon Carny.

“She’s got you there, Reverend,” said Max. “Fair is fair.”

“So what about these two prophets you were mentioning?” asked Baker.

“Don’t encourage him,” said Max. “He talks enough as it is.”

“But think of all the things he can’t do while he’s busy talking,” said Sinderella.

“He wouldn’t be doing ’em to me anyway,” said Max. He turned to Billy Karma. “Would you?”

“I got to be a lot more desperate than I am right now to work all the way up to that amendment,” said the Reverend devoutly. “Now, do you want to hear about these prophets or don’t you?”

“I don’t know,” said Max. “Maybe we ought to take a vote.”

“You didn’t vote for anyone else’s stories,” said Billy Karma.

“They didn’t waste three million words building up to ’em,” said Max. “All in favor of hearing the Reverend Billy Karma drone on about these here prophets say Aye.”

“Aye,” said Catastrophe Baker.

“All opposed?”

Everyone else in the Outpost hollered “Nay!”

Max looked at Baker, and saw a little something in his eyes that made him think twice.

“The ayes have it,” said Max.

The Prophet Who Was Never Wrong

When I was a young man (began the Reverend Billy Karma), and just starting out on the preaching trail, I came across a true quirk of Nature—a pair of brothers who were Siamese twins, joined at the hip. I did my best to uplift their spirits, but they felt abandoned by God, and one day they walked out during a thunderstorm and begged Him to strike them down with a bolt of lightning and end their misery.

And damned if the Good Lord didn’t do just that. His aim was a little off though, probably due to the poor visibility, and instead of killing them the lightning actually split them apart. The shock sent ’em both into a coma, and they lost a lot of blood, but somehow or other they were found and taken to a hospital before they could expire, and there they lay, day in and day out, tied in to dozens of tubes and wires.

And then one day one of ’em opened his eyes and asked where he was and what had happened to him, and the staff calmed him down and explained the situation to him, and the Lord granted another miracle and brought him back to perfect health within a week.

One afternoon, just before he was due to leave the hospital, he mentioned that he wished he didn’t have such an ugly scar on his left hip—and lo and behold, the scar vanished almost before the words were out of his mouth.

“I wish the sun would break through all the clouds,” he said, and a second later the sun did just that.

It was then he realized that he’d been doubly blessed by God, that anything he wished for would come true.

Now, he hadn’t ever prepared for a profession, since there ain’t a lot of jobs open to one-half of a Siamese twin team, but now he decided to set up shop as a prophet. On the surface of things, it would appear that he didn’t actually need a job, since he could just wish for a million credits or a castle with maid service … but he wanted to thank the Lord for the miracle, and he figured the best way to go about it was to make other people just as happy as God had made him.

First thing he needed was a name, so he called himself Isaiah the Right—Isaiah for the Old Testament prophet, and Right because he’d been the twin on the right when they were still attached. He took off just long enough to marry the prettiest girl around, and then he hung out his shingle and started prophesying in earnest.

Problem was, God, who can have a pretty mordant sense of humor when the mood strikes Him, put a little backspin on the ball.

For example, some poor unhappy soul would seek him out and ask for a prophecy, and Isaiah the Right would peer into his crystal ball (which actually held a hologram of Tassle-Twirling Tessie Twilight doing the act that was famed from one end of the galaxy to the other), and he would intone something like, “You shall have wealth beyond imagining.” And the man would thank him and go off to prepare for his windfall.

But it never came. Which makes a twisted kind of sense, when you come to think of it, because there ain’t nothing beyond a man’s imagining, and nothing is exactly what he got.

Still, if it was just the prophecies that were theoretically dead on but never actually came to pass, it wouldn’t have been so bad. But every now and then Isaiah would get something like a 400-pound girl with acne and crooked teeth who wanted to be beautiful, and he’d peer into that ball (thoughtfully hiding its contents from onlookers) and pronounce that “Tomorrow morning you shall be the most beautiful woman on the planet.”

And sure enough she would be—but only because every other woman on the planet woke up weighing 500 pounds with eczema and a mouthful of cavities.

I think maybe the worst was the politician who crossed his palm with the mandatory silver and some optional 12-carat diamonds. Isaiah told him that after the election he could climb the highest mountain in the world and he would be the master of all he could see. Sure enough, the poor bastard went blind on election night.

Well, things just went from bad to worse, and finally Isaiah the Right wished that he was back in the hospital right next to his brother, who was sleeping the sleep of the innocent.

That night Isaiah was mugged and robbed by three little old ladies with blackjacks, and sure enough he wound up one bed over from his brother.

Turns out his brother had woke up a couple of days earlier and been charged with seducing a couple of the nurses. He was taking a nap when Isaiah arrived, and he sure was sleeping the sleep of the innocent, because he later proved in court that he’d been in bed with Isaiah’s wife at the very moment he was supposed to be with the nurses.

When Isaiah heard that, he had a seizure and went right into another coma, and everyone decided that it was better all the way around to just let him stay asleep, and he remains there in the hospital to this very day, the prophet who was never wrong.

“So what happened to his brother?” asked Max.

“I thought you’d never ask,” replied Billy Karma.

The Prophet Who Was Never Right

Turns out that God has a better sense of humor than most people give Him credit for (continued the Reverend Billy Karma). Because just as Isaiah the Right was never wrong, his brother couldn’t win for losing. If he said it looked nice out, it’d snow five minutes later. If he thought the local murderball team was a lead-pipe cinch to win, they’d blow a 17-goal lead in the last three minutes. If he went to a restaurant and asked for steak, they’d give him salad—and when he decided not to make an issue of it and asked for some salad dressing, they’d bring him horseradish.

After awhile he decided that there might be a way to make a living in the prophet biz anyway, so he took the name of Isaiah the Left so everybody would know he wasn’t his brother, and set up shop. He needed an interpreter, of course, someone to tell the customers that when he said the only horse that couldn’t possibly win was the gray gelding that what he meant was to bet the farm on the gray.

He’d go to New Vegas as an advisor, and the second he advised you to stick on 18 you’d take a hit and pull a deuce or a trey. He’d be at the craps table, and some hot four-armed Delphinian would be rolling the dice, and when Isaiah would say that there was no way the purple bastard could come up seven six times in a row, you knew where to place your money.

In fact, before long he felt compelled to change his name. Oh, it was still the opposite of Isaiah the Right, but now instead of Isaiah the Left he was Isaiah the Wrong.

He achieved some remarkable results. I remember one freehand boxing match where he had so many stipulations that in order for him to lose all of them the referee had to get a hernia and the boxers had to be miraculously transported 37 light-years away where the fight was decided by a split decision.

He just kept on making wrong prophecies and raking in the money. It couldn’t last, of course. God doesn’t mind playing an occasional practical joke, but He ain’t so happy when someone plays it right back on Him.

One day Isaiah the Wrong prophesied that his client would be unlucky in love—and the next night the client got lucky indeed, and ran off with Isaiah's fiancé.

He promised his next client that fame and fortune would forever elude him. Two days later the Fame and Fortune Collection Agency ran his client to ground and nailed him for almost three million credits’ worth of unpaid debts.

The kicker came when, suddenly filled with self-doubts from his last two experiences, he looked at his unhappy image in the mirror and said, “I have confidence in you. Things will get better.”

The words had barely left his mouth when he realized what he’d done, but God hadn’t supplied him with a rulebook and he didn’t know how to take it back.

In short order four women sued him for child support, his banker embezzled his money, the mortgage company repossessed his house, his office was broken into and robbed, and a stray cat bit him on the great toe.

He finally decided that he couldn’t take any more, so he went to the hospital, lay down next to Isaiah the Right, and made one last prophecy: “I feel so good that I don’t think I’ll ever need to sleep again.”

That was more than twenty years ago. He’s still snoring.

“What the hell does that have to do with your religion?” asked Max irritably.

“You asked for prophets, I gave you prophets,” replied Billy Karma.

“Not the kind anyone would want to write up in a bible,” said Max.

“You didn’t specify Old Testament-type prophets.”

“I didn’t ask for any prophets at all.”

“Then what the hell are you bitching about?” demanded Billy Karma. “Get uppity with me and I’ll bring a rain of toads down on you.”

“Ain’t no such thing,” said Max.

“Don’t bet on it,” interjected Sinderella. “Every time I go out I’m immediately surrounded by more unkissed frogs and toads than you can shake a stick at.”

“What a pair of lost opportunities,” said Bet-a-World O’Grady, shaking his head sadly.

“You leave her opportunities alone!” said Max, who seemed determined to fight with someone about something.

“I’m talking about the Isaiah brothers,” said O’Grady. “A man who knew how to use what they had to offer could own half the galaxy in a year’s time.”

Big Red had been translating for Einstein, who suddenly tapped something on his computer, and Big Red’s screen immediately lit up with a number that seemed to cover the whole of it. He held it up in front of O’Grady.

“You know what this is?” he asked.

“A googol?” guessed O’Grady.

“The yearly tax on half the galaxy. Einstein just computed it.” He grinned. “Do you really want to own it?”

“Well, if I did own it, I’d go to Deluros VIII and sit down opposite the Monarch and pull out a deck of cards and we could cut for the tax—double or nothing.”

“What if you lost?” asked Hellfire Bailey.

“With my deck?” replied O’Grady as if that was the silliest statement he’d heard all week—which it probably was.

“Forgive me,” said Bailey with a smile. “I lost my head.”

“So, Catastrophe Baker,” said the Reverend Billy Karma, “are you about ready to join my church?”

“I’m giving it some thought,” said Baker. “A man ought to have something to do of a Sunday morning.”

“You mean besides rape, carnage, plunder, murder, and sleeping late?” said a deep voice from the doorway, and we all turned to see who had wandered in. “I can’t imagine what it might be.”

They were an eye-catching couple. The woman was tall and shapely, with coal-black hair and eyes, and matching black lipstick. The man was as big as Catastrophe Baker, which was going some. He had wild red hair, and a bushy red beard, and was wearing an outfit made from the furs of various alien polar animals. I knew from the descriptions I’d heard that it couldn’t be anyone but Hurricane Smith.

“Well, I’ll be damned!” said Baker.

“Probably you will be,” agreed Smith, “but pour me a drink first.”

Smith and his companion walked to the bar, where he and Baker hugged and pummeled each other with enough energy to have killed anyone else in the room except maybe Gravedigger Gaines.

“It’s good to see you again, Hurricane!” said Baker. “And who is this elegant lady by your side?”

“This here is Langtry Lily,” answered Smith. “We’re on our honeymoon!”

“Well, congratulations to both of you!” boomed Baker. “Do you mind if I kiss the bride?”

“You remember what happened the last time you kissed one of my female companions?” answered Smith with a smile. “And that was a lady I’d only known for ten minutes.”

I stepped over to greet them. “What can I have Reggie get for you?” I asked. “The first one is always on the house.”

“I’ll have some Denebian firewater,” said Smith. “How about you, my dear?”

Langtry Lily whispered something in his ear.

“Have you got a gallon of coffee somewhere in the back there?” he asked.

“No problem,” I said.

“Maybe a pint of cream?”

“Yeah, there’s always some around.”

“And a pound of sugar?”

“That’s an awful lot of sugar,” I said.

“She’s got a sweet tooth. Can you do it?”

“A gallon of coffee, a pint of cream, and a pound of sugar,” I repeated. “Yeah, we can do it.”

“Good,” he said, escorting Langtry Lily to a table. “Now, hold the coffee and hold the cream, and bring what’s left.”

I’ve had stranger orders, though not too many, so I shrugged and gave Reggie his instructions.

“Hey, you’re that Pelopenne lady that the Hurricane ran off with, aren’t you?” asked Nicodemus Mayflower.

“She’s my wife,” snapped Smith. “That ought to be enough for you.”

“No offense meant,” said Mayflower hastily. “The Hurricane and I served together. I got nothing against the Pelopennes.”

“So is she or isn’t she?” whispered Sitting Horse.

Just then an insect flew by Smith’s table. Langtry Lily opened her mouth, her tongue shot out a good twenty inches and snared it, and an instant later we could hear an unladylike crunching sound, followed by a quick gulp.

“She is,” answered Crazy Bull.

“Geez!” sighed Sinderella. “Do you know how much money I could have made with a tongue even half that long?”

“A man of the cloth can’t stand by while a possible parishioner expresses such feelings of inadequacy,” said the Reverend Billy Karma. “Why don’t you come by later and try your physical shortcomings out on me?”

“Because I don’t want you trying your physical shortcomings out on me,” answered Sinderella.

When the laughter died down, Baker walked over and joined Hurricane Smith and Langtry Lily at their table.

“What brings you to the Outpost?” he asked.

“Truth to tell, I wasn’t originally headed here,” replied Smith. “But there’s an awful lot of shooting going on over in the next system, and since I’d heard of this place I thought it might be a nice spot to hole up until they get their war over with.”

“Either side fire on you?” asked the Bard.

“Hell, both sides fired on us,” said Smith. “Who are they mad at, anyway?”

“Pretty much everybody, as near as I can tell,” answered Baker.

“Hey, Hurricane,” said Gravedigger Gaines, “are you going to introduce me to your missus, even if I can’t kiss her?”

“That all depends,” responded Smith warily. “Are you still a bounty hunter?”

“I gave that up years ago.”

“Glad to hear it. I always liked you, except when you were shooting at me.”

“Well, damn it all,” said the Gravedigger, “I always figured you and I could be great friends if you’d just stop trying to kill me.”

“Hell, ain’t no time like the present,” said Smith, extending his huge hand.

“Sounds good to me,” said the Gravedigger, taking it in his own oversized paw.

“Honey,” said Smith to his wife, “this is my—”

Her eyes went wide and she started drooling uncontrollably on the table.

“Uh … sorry about that,” said Smith hastily. “Used the wrong word,” he explained to Hurricane Smith. “Langtry, this is my friend Gravedigger Gaines, who used to be the best enemy a man could have. Gravedigger, this is Langtry Lily.”

Langtry Lily glared at the Gravedigger and hissed.

“It was just business,” explained Smith. “I never held it against him.”

“Honest, ma’am,” added Gaines. “There was no one on the Inner Frontier I was less eager to go up against, and no one I would have been prouder to collect the reward on. Except maybe for that ugly blonde guy over there,” he added, jerking his thumb in Baker’s direction.

“Anyway, we’re friends now,” said Smith.

“We were never enemies, just business rivals,” said the Gravedigger.

“It’s like athletes who play on different teams,” explained Smith.

Langtry Lily looked from one of them to the other, then finally smiled at Gaines. It was the kind of smile men went out and died for—or, in the case of the Pelopennes, deserted by the thousands for.

“Didn’t there used to be an actress called Langtry Lily back when we were still Earthbound?” asked Little Mike Picasso.

“Lily Langtry,” answered Smith. “My Langtry is an actress too.”

“Really?” said Little Mike. “I try to keep up on the theatre. When was her most recent performance?”

“Five’ll get you ten it’s right this minute,” said O’Grady with a chuckle.

“We don’t hide what she really is,” said Smith. “We just thought you’d all feel more comfortable seeing her like this. But if you’d rather—”

“No!” hollered Baker. “I still plan on eating sometime this week. I don’t want nothing to kill my appetite.”

At the mention of the word “eat,” Langtry Lily emptied the pound of sugar on the table in front of her. Then a kind of straw emerged from a corner of her mouth, and she began sucking up the sugar with loud slurping noises.

“And this don’t bother you none?” asked Baker.

“There are … ah … compensations,” said Smith.

“Yeah, I saw one of them when she nailed the fly,” said Sinderella.

“God teaches us not to be jealous,” said Billy Karma. “I really think you’re ripe for some private counseling, my dear.”

“I’m afraid not, Reverend,” said Sinderella. “I’ve got better things to do with my time than listen to you croak ‘Compensate me, baby! Compensate me!’ in a voice like a strangulated duck.”

“Funny,” said Billy Karma, half to himself. “I can’t think of anything better to do with my time.”

“Go sacrifice a virgin on the altar of love,” said Sinderella.

“I’d be more than happy to accommodate you,” answered Billy Karma, “but you’ve no idea how difficult it is to find a virgin these days.”

“It always was,” said Max.

“Me and Hurricane knew a guy who found one once,” said Baker. “Remember?”

“How could I forget?” said Smith. “That must have been, oh, ten or twelve years ago.”

“So let’s hear about it,” said the Bard.

“If you insist,” replied Baker with a weary sigh.

Johnny Testosterone and the Temple Virgin

There was this guy called Johnny Testosterone who wiped out a whole army of aliens (said Baker). For his reward, he was given the Temple Virgin.

The end.

“Loses a little something in the retelling, don’t it?” said Max dryly.

“Well, it ain’t much of a story,” responded Baker sullenly. “I’m hardly in it at all.”

“Still, it was a better story than that,” said Smith.

“How would you know?” Baker shot back. “I was emptying the wine cellar and you were off with a God-knows-what doing God-knows-what-else.”

Langtry Lily reached out to hold Hurricane Smith’s hand. Suddenly her own hand became a mandible, and she dug it into his flesh.

“He’s exaggerating, my dear!” said Smith, painfully pulling his hand away and wiping the blood from it as her mandible became a feminine human hand again. “Besides, it was a long time ago!”

She leaned over and whispered something in his ear.

“All right, all right, if you insist,” he said, and then turned to the rest of us. “I’ve been requested to tell the true story.”

“The whole thing?” asked Max. “I get the feeling Catastrophe left out a couple of details here and there.”

“The whole story,” promised Hurricane Smith.

Johnny Testosterone and the Temple Virgin

First of all (began Smith), his name wasn’t really Johnny Testosterone. That was just the name he took when he hit the Frontier, probably in the hope of impressing the ladies, as I never noticed him behave any differently or score any more often than the rest of us.

His real name was Johnny Potts. It didn’t make the kind of lasting impression on people that Catastrophe Baker or Gravedigger Gaines did, so he dumped it as soon as he could. Then he began dressing to match his new name. Wore his shirts unbuttoned down to the navel, tied a silk scarf around his neck, and his trousers were so tight you’re swear he was auditioning for a ballet. Even tinted his skin tan. Women loved it; men thought he looked kind of silly.

Still, once push came to shove, he could handle his fists and his weapons with the best of them, and he wasn’t scared of anything except maybe Catastrophe Baker when he was drunk, which is a mighty reasonable attitude to have, so we let him travel out to the Albion Cluster with us.

There’s a lot more to the hero business than meets the eye. One of the biggest problems is that actions which seem properly heroic to us get our holographs on wanted posters and attract a lot of men like the Gravedigger here, despite the fact that we never did him any harm.

Anyway, the three of us—Catastrophe, Johnny and me—got word that there was a religious colony on Leviticus IV that needed heroes more than most. Seems that some aliens had landed and set up shop there, and it was against the colonists’ religion to raise a hand in anger, even to defend themselves.

It was a very elastic religion, though, since it didn’t seem to have anything against other people raising hands in anger on their behalf. Before long we heard that there was a substantial reward for anyone who freed them from the yoke of alien tyranny, and while none of us had any serious philosophic objections to aliens or tyranny, we had all kinds of objections to not collecting substantial rewards. So we passed the word that we were heading to Leviticus IV and weren’t in the mood for any competition, and once people heard that Catastrophe Baker and Hurricane Smith didn’t want any company, they suddenly remembered that they had urgent business elsewhere.

We landed next to a temple that could have passed for a small city. It had arches and turrets and spires, and I was willing to bet that it possessed its fair share of secret passageways and hidden chambers.

“The aliens just let you land?” asked Max dubiously.

“There was a huge wall around the temple, like a walled city, and we landed inside the wall,” answered Hurricane Smith.

“How come the aliens hadn’t overrun the temple already?” demanded Max.

“I’m coming to that.”

It turns out that whoever built the temple had actually built it as a defensible fortress (continued Smith). Not that the current inhabitants had any notion of defending it themselves … but the walls were lined with webs of energy that tended to roast the enemy, and evidently it wasn’t against their religion to keep them turned on.

“So why didn’t the aliens land inside the walls like you did?” persisted Max.

“Who’s telling this story, you or me?” demanded Smith irritably.

Max looked like he was going to argue the point, but just then Langtry Lily started hissing at him, and he decided that silence was the better part of valor.

The simple truth of the matter (said Smith) is that the aliens didn’t know that the colonists wouldn’t put up a fight. A bunch of them had been burned to a crisp trying to climb the walls or break them down, and they knew the city had impregnable defenses, so it never occurred to them that they could land inside the walls and capture it. Instead, they surrounded the place and laid siege to it.

Anyway, a few minutes after we landed we were in a huge room that had all the trappings of a cozy little chapel writ large. There were maybe three dozen men and women waiting for us. Their leader was the High Priest, an old guy by the name of Sandazar, who wore a flowing robe of spun gold.

“I thank the Great Galactic Spirit for answering our supplications and sending us three bona fide heroes in this our hour of need,” he said.

“Let’s eliminate the middle man,” said Catastrophe. “Just thank us and let’s get on with the negotiations.”

“Negotiations?” asked Sandazar, looking kind of puzzled.

“Even heroes got to eat,” said Catastrophe.

“But of course!” exclaimed Sandazar. He clapped his hands above his head. “Bring food for our saviors!”

“I don’t think you follow me,” said Catastrophe. “We don’t work for free. There was mention made of a reward.”

“Certainly!” said Sandazar. “Drive the aliens away and you may have anything we possess.”

“I’ll take that robe of yours,” said Catastrophe.

“Consider it done,” said Sandazar. “Always assuming you survive.”

Just then a gorgeous girl, no more than sixteen years old, and dressed in a gauzy blue gown you could just about see through, approached us, carrying a tray laden down with food.

“Take it away!” said Sandazar. “I misunderstood our guests. They are not hungry after all.”

“You know,” said Johnny Testosterone, watching intently as the girl walked away, “not all of us insist on being paid in coin of the realm.”

“That was never our intention,” said Sandazar. “In fact, the most heroic member of your team may claim the Temple Virgin for his own.”

“Now you’re talking my language!” said Johnny, never taking his eyes from the girl as she undulated away.

I decided that we could worry about the rewards later, but that first we ought to know a little something about the enemy, so I stepped forward and introduced myself.

“Ah, Hurricane Smith!” said Sandazar. “Your reputation precedes you.”

“I’m not so much concerned with what precedes me as with what might be sneaking up behind me,” I replied. “Suppose you tell us what these aliens are like.”

“They’re huge amoebas,” answered Sandazar. “Their bodies have almost no structural integrity; they grow and contract with every breath and step they take.”

“Have you any idea what they want?”

“They want to rule the planet and make us their slaves, of course,” said Sandazar, as if explaining the obvious to a small child.

“They usually do,” agreed Catastrophe in bored tones.

“How did they communicate that particular desire to you?” I asked.

“Verbally, of course.”

“You’re telling me that these amoebas can speak?”

“Absolutely,” said Sandazar. “Their diction is superior to Catastrophe Baker’s.”

“Have they said why they chose Leviticus IV?”

“Well, actually, they thought this was Wyandotte II, but they decided that as long as they were here they might as well take over the planet and turn us all into slaves.”

“What kind of weapons do they have?” I asked.

“I don’t know. They stay on one side of the wall and we stay on the other.” He paused for a moment. “Is there anything else you need to know?”

“Probably,” I said, “but I can’t figure out what it is.”

“You’re quite sure?”

“Quite.”

“Then I think we’ll leave the carnage and bloodletting to you, and go hide in our secret subterranean chambers. Give a holler when you’ve slaughtered the last of them.”

“No problem,” Johnny assured him. “Just remind everyone that the Temple Virgin is reserved for me.”

“I will certainly do that,” answered Sandazar. Then he turned and left the room, followed by all the lesser priests and priestesses, and we three heroes were left alone.

“Well, how do you want to handle this?” asked Catastrophe.

“It’s up to you,” I said.

He frowned. “Well, it poses a serious problem. If there were two of us, I’d just tell you to take all the aliens on the right and I’d take all the ones on the left. And if there were four of us, we could each take all the aliens facing a particular wall.” He sighed. “But I don’t know how to divide an alien army by three.”

“Howzabout you two divide ‘em in half, and I’ll kill any that get by you?” suggested Johnny.

“I don’t plan to let none get by me,” said Catastrophe.

“You know,” I said, “maybe we ought to talk to them first. Once they know who they’re up against, they might think twice about a war of conquest here and go back to hunting for Wyandotte II.”

“Especially if we give them a map,” agreed Johnny.

“It’s worth a try,” said Catastrophe. “Hurricane, you go out and talk to them.”

“You’re not coming with me?” I asked.

“Let’s be reasonable,” said Catastrophe. “If it works, you won’t need us—but if it turns out to be as dumb an idea as I think it is, there’ll still be two of us left to destroy their army.”

Well, I really couldn’t argue with the logic of that, so I walked outside, found the power source for the wall, deactivated it, opened the door, and walked out into the fields beyond the temple. Catastrophe and Johnny shut the door so fast they almost took off my heel.

I found myself surrounded by a few hundred amoebas, so I raised my arm in the universal sign of peace.

“What are you pointing at, human?” demanded the closest amoeba.

“Nothing,” I said. “I’m being friendly.”

“So whenever you want to make friends, you point to the sky?”

“Well, yes, I guess I do,” I admitted.

“You’re not impressing us with your intellect,” said the amoeba.

“Where did you guys learn to speak Terran?” I asked.

“We monitor your commercial holo transmissions,” said the amoeba. “We especially like the ones involving Pirate Queens.”

“Most people do.”

“Okay, so much for small talk,” said the amoeba. “Now it’s time to kill you. Do you prefer strangulation, crucifixion, boiling in oil, or simply being torn asunder?”

“What if I were to show you how to get to Wyandotte II?” I said.

“I’d call that damned sporting of you,” said the amoeba. “First we’ll conquer Leviticus IV, kill all the humans, and raise the temple to the ground, and then we’ll wage war against Wyandotte.”

“You don’t understand,” I said. “I’m offering to trade. You leave us alone, and I’ll supply you with the star charts you need.”

“Yeah, that sounds good,” said another amoeba.

“No,” said a third. “Let’s kill the humans first and then see if we can find Wyandotte on our own.”

Pretty soon all the nearby amoebas were arguing, and the one I’d been speaking to sidled up to me.

“We’re going to have to take a vote,” it said. “This could take all day. Come with me; I’ve got a box lunch hidden away.”

I followed it to a nearby forest. None of the other amoebas took any notice of us; they were too caught up in trying to decide whether to accept my proposal or not.

“By the way, have you got a name?” I asked when we finally sat down, protected by a pair of giant trees.

“Winoria,” said the amoeba.

“That’s a very feminine name for an amoeba that doesn’t possess a gender,” I said.

“I most certainly do,” said Winoria. “I am a female.”

“How can I tell the difference?”

“There are ways,” said Winoria, slithering closer to me. “For example …”

It sure as shooting was some example. And just about the time I’d adjusted to that one, she showed me another. (Don’t get upset, Langtry; this was long before I met you.)

Well, we spent an idyllic hour in the forest, indulging in our natural scientific curiosity. Then I heard the hum of a burner and the buzz of a screecher, and I could hear Johnny Testosterone’s voice screaming things like “Eat hellfire, you alien scum!” and “Kiss your ass good-bye, you godless heathen!”

I jumped to my feet and started running back to the temple. The gate was open, and Johnny was standing just in front of it, weapons smoking.

“What the hell’s going on?” I demanded.

“I got tired of waiting,” he said, “so I killed ’em all. By God, that felt even better than a hot shower on a cold morning!”

“But they were considering going away without trying to conquer the planet after all.”

“I figured that when I heard them all arguing,” replied Johnny. “That’s why I decided to start shooting. The old priest wasn’t going to give us the Temple Virgin if the enemy declared peace on us.”

I looked around. “What happened to them?”

“They melted. Disintegrated. Vanished.” He suddenly saw Winoria coming up behind me. “Except for this one.”

He aimed his burner at her, and I slapped it out of his hand before he could squeeze the trigger.

“Why the hell did you do that?” demanded Johnny.

“Leave her alone,” I said.

“Her?” he repeated. “How do you know?”

I felt my face turn a bright red.

“None of your business,” I said.

He looked from Winoria to me and back to Winoria. “That’s perverted!” he snapped, picking up his pistol and tucking it away in his holster. Then: “Was she any good?”

“Where’s Catastrophe?” I asked, ignoring his question.

“He found their wine cellar,” answered Johnny. “I imagine you’ll have to peel him off the floor by now.”

Well, he obviously didn’t know Catastrophe Baker. I figure he couldn’t have downed more than 8 or 10 bottles by now, and that meant he wouldn’t be even halfway to tipsy.

“Son of a bitch!” yelled Johnny suddenly. “Baker spent the last hour drinking, and you spent it committing sins they ain’t even got names for yet, so that means I wiped the aliens out all by myself—so I got first claim on the Temple Virgin!”

Which didn’t bother me at all. The girl in the gauzy dress suddenly seemed so ordinary, with nothing special or exotic to offer a man of the galaxy.

What did bother me was that Johnny Testosterone had wiped out all of Winoria’s people, and as he went back into the temple I turned to her and expressed my regrets.

“No harm done,” she said. “If you’ll give me the star charts, I’ll be on my way to Wyandotte II.”

I handed them over. “Here they are,” I replied. “But I can’t help noting that you don’t seem terribly distressed over the slaughter of your companions.”

“Why should I be?” she replied, and suddenly she split into about half a million tiny pieces, which instantly began growing. “To the ship, my children!”!” she ordered them. As they rushed to obey her, she turned to me. “It was a memorable and stimulating interlude, Hurricane Smith,” she said, “but I must say I find your method of procreation incredibly inefficient, no matter how much fun it is.”

Then she was gone, and I turned back to the temple. Catastrophe met me as I approached the chamber where we’d met the High Priest.

“Johnny tells me you’ve been enjoying yourself,” I said.

“He tells me the same thing about you,” answered Catastrophe with a knowing grin.

“Some heroes we are,” I said. “It looks like Johnny won the war all by himself.”

“Not much of a war from what I could tell. Once I looked over the top of the wall and saw that an amoeba can’t wear a weapon, I figured you could take care of yourself.” He paused. “I never figured Johnny would fight ’em all himself.”

“He wanted the reward worse than we did.”

“Hell, I’ve already put in for my reward. I want the gold robe.”

“I suppose, to be honest, I’ve already had my reward,” I admitted, thinking wistfully of Winoria.

Suddenly we heard a shriek of abject horror, and a moment later Johnny Testosterone came racing out of the temple, high-tailing it for the mountain range that was about 200 miles past the forest, and looking neither right nor left.

“I wonder what the hell that was all about?” asked Catastrophe.

A couple of minutes later a skinny young man with a neatly-trimmed beard and a couple of flowers stuck in his hair wandered out.

“Have either of you seen Johnny Testosterone?” he asked.

“Yeah,” said Catastrophe. “He was headed due west like a bat out of hell.”

“Damn!” said the young man, scuffing the tile with his sandaled foot.

“And who might you be?” I asked him.

“Me?” he replied. “I’m the Temple Virgin.”

We never saw Johnny again.

“I think I liked Baker’s version better,” said Three-Gun Max.

“Wasn’t much of an adventure,” replied Baker. “Didn’t have much of an aftermath, either. When we got back to a civilized world and I tried to sell the robe, I found out that it was made of spun pyrite.”

“Could have been worse,” suggested Max. “You could have wound up with the Temple Virgin.”

“Well, it just goes to show that you can’t trust priests,” said Nicodemus Mayflower. “I figure that it’s best not to believe anyone below the level of king, or maybe emperor.”

“You ever met an emperor?” asked Max.

“Not yet,” answered Mayflower. “But I’ve got my whole life ahead of me.”

“Except for the part you’ve already wasted,” observed Baker wryly.

“That goes without saying,” replied Mayflower with dignity.

“DAMN IT!” roared Hurricane Smith, and suddenly we all turned to look at him. He was holding a scarf next to his cheek, and blood was seeping through it.

“I told you it happened before I met you!” he snapped at Langtry Lily.

She hissed and spit at him. He ducked, and it hit the back of his chair and started dissolving it. A second later he had his burner about an inch from her nose.

“You try that again and this’ll be the shortest goddamned honeymoon on record!”

“Your first spat?” asked Little Mike Picasso curiously.

“More like our two hundredth,” answered Smith. “You’d think a race that produces eggs like there’s no tomorrow wouldn’t be so fucking jealous!”

He kept his gun trained on her for another few seconds, then twirled it around his finger and put it back in its holster, all in one fluid motion.

Langtry Lily leaned over and whispered to him again.

“Forget it!” he snapped. “What good does it do to apologize when I know you’ll be slashing me or spitting at me again in a few minutes? We’ve got to lay down some ground rules here or else go our separate ways.”

Suddenly Langtry Lily’s whole demeanor changed. She began crying—huge, gut-wrenching sobs, and she buried her face in her hands.

“Now see what you’ve done,” said Little Mike. “You’ve gone and broken her poor little insectoid heart.” He paused, then added: “Always assuming she comes equipped with one, that is.”

“Uh … I don’t want to seem unduly insensitive,” I interjected, “but can her tears do any harm to the table?”

Smith just glared at me without answering, and a moment later he put his hands on her shoulders to comfort her, but she kept on weeping and wailing to beat the band, and finally he walked to the bar and called Reggie over to him.

“You got any honey?” he asked.

Reggie quickly gave him a bottle of it. Smith walked back to his table, opened it, and spilled a little on Langtry Lily’s forearm. She lifted her head to see what was happening, fluttered her nostrils a few times, stopped crying as quick as she’d begun, and then started sucking up the honey with that straw-like thing that shot out of the corner of her mouth.

“Another crisis averted,” said Smith with a grimace.

“You could avert a lot of ’em if you’d just give up this taste you’ve acquired for alien females and go back to human women,” said Baker.

“I like what I like,” said Smith, jutting out his jaw.

“Okay, it’s your life,” said Baker with a shrug, “and I ain’t the one to say that your tastes are perverted—but they sure could be a mite more practical.”

“Let’s change the subject before she starts paying attention,” said Smith, watching as Langtry Lily finished cleaning the honey off her arm and inserted the straw into the bottle. “What have you been doing with yourself since the last time I saw you?”

“Oh, this and that, here and there,” answered Baker. “Even made it all the way to Sol’s system.” He paused. “Never quite got to Earth, though.”

“Why not?”

Baker opened a fresh bottle of 130-proof Belarban whiskey. “I got sidetracked in the Hall of the Neptunian Kings,” he said, taking a huge swallow. “This story won’t be over as quick as my last, since I’m the star of it—and I wouldn’t want to go dry in the middle of it.”

Catastrophe Baker in the Hall of the Neptunian Kings

Before Baker could even begin, Three-Gun Max spoke up.

“There ain’t no Neptunian Kings,” he said.

“What makes you think so?” retorted Baker.

“There ain’t nothing at all on Neptune except a lot of empty real estate and a bunch of air nobody can breathe.”

“Well, they told me it was Neptune,” answered Baker, “but I suppose it could have been Jupiter.”

“Ain’t nothing there neither,” said Max. “Only there’s a whole lot more of it.”

“Actually,” offered Big Red, “there used to be a hockey team called the Neptunian Kings. But I don’t think they ever got within two thousand parsecs of Neptune.” He paused. “They weren’t very good, anyway.”

“Who’s telling this story anyway?” demanded Baker pugnaciously.

“Go ahead and talk,” said Max. “But I reserve the right to get up and leave if you start telling any whoppers.”

“Fair enough,” said Baker. He tapped the pearl handle of his burner. “And I reserve the right to blow your balls off if you even think of getting up.”

“It figures to be true,” added Nicodemus Mayflower. “After all, it’s not as if he’s talking about the Hall of the Neptunian Priests.”

“Or hockey players,” said Big Red.

“Or oversized killer roaches,” muttered Hurricane Smith under his breath.

“Are you all gonna listen or not?” roared Baker, and suddenly a hush fell over the Outpost.

It happened maybe four years ago (began Baker, glaring at Max until he was sure he wasn’t going to be interrupted again.) I’d just left Oom Paul, the little diamond-mining world out by Antares, and I’d heard tell that Fort Knox wasn’t radioactive any longer, and that all you had to do was just waltz in and carry out as many gold bars as you wanted, and there was nothing there to stop you except maybe thirty or forty guards, and that they were mostly little ones at that.

But my navigational computer and I got to telling dirty jokes to one another, and playing poker, and otherwise amusing ourselves to combat the boredom of the long voyage, and damned if we didn’t combat it so well that the computer forgot to pay attention to where we were, and all of a sudden we were orbiting Neptune (or maybe Jupiter) rather than Earth.

Problem is, I didn’t know it until we landed, and the ship told me I’d better put on a spacesuit and helmet. It struck me as kind of a strange request, but I just figured we’d touched down near a toxic waste dump. It wasn’t until I stepped out of the ship that I realized that the landscape didn’t bear a lot of resemblance to all the holos I’d seen of Earth.

I was about to climb back in and give the computer a piece of my mind when I saw a huge building off in the distance. It had all kinds of strange angles, and stained-glass windows with colors I hadn’t never seen before, all of which roused my curiosity, so I decided to take a closer look at it.

I headed on over to it, and found myself facing a door that must have been seventy feet high. I pushed against it, but it was latched or bolted from the inside and it didn’t give an inch. This just made me more interested to see what was on the inside, so I walked around the whole of the building, which must have been about half a mile on each side, looking for a way in.

When I couldn’t find none—there were maybe ten other doors, all of them locked—I decided to climb up the side of the building and ease myself in through one of the windows.

Well, let me tell you, that was a lot easier said than done. Oh, the building was easy enough to climb, because it was covered with weird carvings and strange-looking gargoyles, so I had no trouble getting handholds and footholds—but when I reached the window, which was maybe forty feet above the ground, I discovered that it was locked too, and strong as I am, I couldn’t kick it in.

I considered melting it with my burner, but I wasn’t exactly sure what the atmospheric make-up of Neptune was, and I figured that if it happened to have a high concentration of oxygen, like maybe eighty percent or so, I could set the whole planet on fire just by pulling the trigger.

So I kept climbing, and after another hour I reached the roof, which was about three hundred feet above the ground, and started walking along it, looking for vents or chimneys I could slide down. Sure enough, I found one smack-dab in the middle of the roof. Problem was, it went straight down, and I figured the fall could kill or cripple me, so I looked further, and finally found a hatch leading to the interior of the building. I decided it had been used by the guys who built the place, or maybe the one who had to keep the roof clean—but whoever used it were as big as the guys who walked through the doorways, because each step was maybe fifteen feet down from the last one.

I hung down from the top step by one arm, then let go and dropped maybe six feet to the next one, and climbed down the whole staircase like that. When I got to the bottom, I found myself in a pitch-black chamber. I turned on my helmet’s spotlight, found a door, and pushed against it—and this one gave way.

I stepped out into a huge room, filled with two dozen ornate chairs, each capable of holding a being that was maybe seventy feet high.

Then I heard a voice in my ear: “You can breathe the air in here now.”

I spun around and whipped out my pistol.

“Who said that?” I demanded.

“Me,” came the answer. “Your suit. I have analyzed the air, and it is breathable.”

“Thanks.”

“It’s just damned lucky you didn’t break that window,” said the suit.

I figured I could spend the rest of the day standing there arguing with it, or I could climb out of it and start exploring, so I did the latter.

Then I started at one end of the hall, and began walking past all the chairs, and I decided that each of them was a throne, and had probably been retired when the king who sat on it had died or lit out for greener pastures.

Now, truth to tell, I didn’t have no serious interest in Neptunian Kings, but I didn’t have nothing against maybe finding some palace jewels, so I set out to see if there were any around for the taking.

The hall was mostly empty except for the chairs and some weird-looking tapestries hanging on the walls, but then I stumbled onto an anteroom just behind Throne Number Nine—and what should I find but an absolutely gorgeous naked lady standing there staring at me.

“Good morning, ma’am,” I said. “I’m Catastrophe Baker, at your service.”

She didn’t say a word or move a muscle, and I figured I’d kind of startled her into immobility.

“Dressed in kind of a hurry this morning, didn’t you?” I said, trying to break the ice with a little friendly conversation.

She still didn’t answer, so I walked a little closer to see if maybe she was a statue.

I couldn’t see her breathing, and her eyes seemed fixed on some spot in the Hall of the Neptunian Kings, but she sure looked like a flesh-and-blood lady to me, rather than an imitation.

Then I realized that I had to be mistaken, because she was maybe a foot smaller than me, whereas anyone who lived in this place seemed like they couldn’t go much less than fifty feet at the shoulder or the withers, whichever came first.

It was a shame, because in a long lifetime of looking at beautiful naked ladies, I hadn’t never seen one more beautiful than this one.

I was going to leave and go back to looking for jewels and other marketable trinkets, but first I walked over to more closely admire the artist’s handiwork. Even from two feet away you couldn’t tell that she wasn’t a real flesh-and-blood woman. Her skin was as smooth as could be, and I reached out to touch it, just to see if it was marble or stone or some artificial fabric—and damned if it didn’t feel just like a real woman’s skin.

I wondered just how realistic all the details were, so I kind of got to feeling her here and there and the next place—and when I laid my hand on the next place, she gave out a shriek that would have woke the dead and slapped my face.

“I thought you were a statue!” I said, startled.

“I was,” she answered in the most melodic voice. “I apologize for hitting you. It was an instinctive reaction.”

“You got some mighty powerful instincts there, ma’am,” I said.

“Actually, I owe you my gratitude. I’ve been frozen in that position for the past fifteen millennia.” She shuddered, which produced an eye-popping effect. “I could have been there forever if it hadn’t been for you.”

“Suppose you tell me what’s going on, ma’am,” I said, trying to grasp it all.

“I was King Thoraster’s favored concubine, and when he thought I might have lost my heart to one of the palace guards, he had his technicians put me in stasis. There was only one way to release me in case he should change his mind at a later date, but he never thought any casual observer would be so gross and uncouth as to touch me there.”

“How did he manage to freeze you for fifteen thousand years?” I asked.

She began explaining it to me, but as far as I’m concerned any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from doubletalk, so I just kind of tuned her out after a couple of minutes and settled for admiring what old King Thoraster had been wasteful enough to freeze.

“And that’s how he did it,” she concluded.

“Just how big was he?” I asked.

“The same size as all the others,” she replied, looking puzzled by my question.

“Then, pardon an indelicate inquiry, but how—?”

“Ah! I see!” she said. “Let’s go into the Hall of the Kings, where the ceiling is a little higher.”

I followed her, until we were standing right in the middle of the hall.

“Now I want you to do me one last favor,” she said.

“If it’s within my power to do, ma’am,” I said, “you’ve but to ask.”

Suddenly she turned the prettiest shade of red. “It’s very embarrassing,” she said. “I think I’d prefer to whisper it to you.”

“I’m all ears,” I said.

She leaned over and began whispering.

“You want me to do what?” I asked aloud.

She turned an even brighter red and repeated it.

“Are you sure, ma’am?” I said. “I don’t believe there can be five planets in the galaxy where doing that won’t get us both thrown into the hoosegow.” I paused. “Still, it sounds pretty interesting now that I come to think about it.”

“Please!” she said.

So I did it—and then, right in the middle, when things were getting both interesting and complicated, she pushed me back.

“Get away!” she whispered.

“What’s the matter?” I asked. “Did I do it wrong?”

“You were doing it perfectly!” she said, blushing furiously. “Now get back!”

So I got back, and none too soon, because suddenly she started growing right before my eyes, and a minute later she was mighty close to sixty feet tall, give or take a couple of inches.

“Thank you, Catastrophe Baker!” she said. “Thoraster’s scientists made that the only way I could ever regain my true size. They never dreamed that I’d find anyone twisted enough to help me!” She smiled down on me. “I shall never forget you!”

“But we ain’t finished!” I protested.

“It’s no longer possible,” she said. “I must find if any of my race still survives, and you must don your suit and return to your ship.”

“I ain’t in no hurry,”I said.

“Yes you are,” she corrected me. “The mechanism that controls the Hall of the Kings sensed your metabolic needs and created a breathable atmosphere for you, but now that I am alive again, it will soon revert to the atmosphere that exists outside the building.”

“This is a hell of a way to leave someone who did you such an enormous favor,” I said unhappily.

She looked at me thoughtfully for a moment. “Yes, I suppose it is,” she said, and scooped me up in one of her giant hands.

Decorum forbids me from telling you what she did next. Besides, there’s worlds where I could get twenty years to life just for describing it.

When we were done, I put on my spacesuit and went back to the ship and took off. It was only after I’d left Sol far behind me that I remembered I hadn’t finished looking for the jewels. I considered turning around and going back for them, but then I figured that I’d experienced the most precious jewel of all, so I just kept going, and never returned to the Hall of the Neptunian Kings.

I looked around the Outpost, and I’d have to say that as eager as the men were to find out exactly what that giant Neptunian lady had done to or with Catastrophe Baker, they didn’t look half as fascinated as the women.

““I don’t suppose you’d like to whisper the dirty parts to me?” suggested Sinderella.

“I wouldn’t want to embarrass you, ma’am,” said Baker.

“Just start whispering and we’ll see who blushes first,” she said confidently

“I’m always looking to extend my knowledge,” said Silicon Carny. “Perhaps you and I could finish what you and the Neptunian woman started.”

“You tell me what she did once she was sixty feet tall,” promised the Earth Mother, “and I’ll tell you one that could get you thirty years just for listening to me.”

“If we do what I’m thinking of,” added Sinderella, giving him a sultry look, “I’ll bet I wind up sixty feet tall too.”

“And what if you lose?” asked Bet-a-World O’Grady, whose interest was suddenly piqued.

“I’ll have had more fun than you have when you lose at cards,” she replied with a smile.

“Hard to argue with that,” agreed O’Grady.

Suddenly Big Red’s computer came to life, and he looked at the holographic screen.

“Einstein wants to know how she got off the planet,” he said.

“Beats me,” answered Baker. “I don’t rightly know for a fact that she did.”

“He says she would have needed one hell of a ship, and he doesn’t figure that it was fueled up and waiting for fifteen thousand years.”

“I tell a story about a naked woman who’s been kept in stasis for a hundred and fifty centuries, and suddenly grows sixty feet tall, and that’s all he’s concerned with?” demanded Baker.

“He says he’s figured out all the other stuff, and it all makes scientific sense. The only thing that bothers him is the ship.”

“He’s figured out what they did?” said Silicon Carny.

“Yeah. He says that was the easy part.”

“Tell him I want to talk to him later.”

“He already knows,” said Big Red.

“He does?” she said, surprised.

“He’s Einstein, isn’t he?” said Big Red, as if that was all the explanation anyone required.

“Sixty feet tall!” mused Nicodemus Mayflower. “Hell, she was even too big for Magic Abdul-Jordan!”

“She sounds more like Hurricane’s kind of woman than Baker’s,” observed Max.

“What do you mean?” asked Baker.

“Well, whatever else she was, she sure as hell wasn’t human,” said Max.

“She was human enough,” replied Baker with a fond smile of recollection.

“You didn’t exactly describe her, except to say she was beautiful,” said Little Mike Picasso. “What did she look like? Maybe I can draw a sketch of her.”

“Long auburn hair, down almost to her waist,” said Baker, looking off into space as he pictured his Neptunian lady. “Full moist red lips. High cheekbones. Tiny little nose. And her eyes were something else.” He paused. “Hungry.”

“You’re hungry?” I asked.

“No,” he answered. “She had hungry eyes.”

“That’s not really much help,” said Little Mike.

“That’s what she looked like,” said Baker.

“No one has hungry eyes.”

“She did.”

“Look,” said Little Mike in his best professional manner, “eyes can be lots of things. They can be blue or brown or gray or green or black. They can be narrow or round or slanted. They can be crossed or cocked. They can even be flashing. But they can’t be hungry.”

“Sure they can,” said Hurricane Smith.

“Another quarter heard from,” said Little Mike. He turned to Smith. “Have you ever met a girl with hungry eyes?”

“Almost,” answered Smith.

“You almost met one?”

“She was almost a girl,” said Smith.

“Somehow I sense another story in the offing,” said Max.

The Gril With the Hungry Eyes

It was maybe ten, eleven years ago, out by the Sambakki Cluster. There was a terraformed moon there called Carnival, and I stopped by to see exactly what it had to offer.

If Bet-a-World O’Grady had visited the place, he would have thought he’d died and gone to heaven. I saw more human and alien gambling dens than I’d ever seen in one place before, and they had some pretty high rollers. It started raining while I was there, and I saw a couple of guys bet 50,000 credits on which raindrop would roll down the window fastest.

Then there was a row of theaters, ranging from ornate opera houses to small tents, and the entertainments ran the gamut from Figaro and Shakespeare to strip shows and music hall comics. The streets were filled with jugglers, acrobats, magicians, musicians, even half a dozen puppeteers. In the distance I could see fireworks from a dozen theme parks, some for aliens, some for kids, some for very adventurous adults.

I figured I’d take a room at one of the hotels and then, after I’d had a good night’s sleep, start exploring Carnival in earnest, but as I approached a likely hostelry a stunning woman happened to pass by. I got a whiff of her perfume and a look at the way she walked away, kind of like jelly on springs, and I just automatically fell into step behind her.

Finally, when she came to the end of the block, she stopped before crossing the street, and I caught up with her.

“You’ve been following me,” she said in lilting tones. She didn’t sound upset, just like she was stating a fact, which in fact she was.

“I don’t mean to annoy you or insult you,” I began, “but you’ve got the most exciting perfume I’ve ever encountered.”

She laughed. “I don’t wear perfume.”

“But—”

“Those are pheromones,” she replied. “My pheromones. Perfume manufacturers have been trying to reproduce the effect for thousands of years.”

“Then I’m at a loss to understand why you don’t have a couple of hundred men following you,” I said.

“Because I released them in your vicinity.”

“I beg your pardon?” I said.

“You’re Hurricane Smith, aren’t you?” she said.

“Yes.”

“I’ve heard of you. It’s well known that you have a taste for, shall we say, the exotic?”

“I’m not much into whipping and such,” I said.

“I meant that you prefer alien women.”

“Are you telling me you’re not human?”

“I am a Gril,”she responded. “We are an ancient race who dwell beyond the Greater Magellenic Cloud.”

“You sure look like a real woman,” I said.

“Oh, I’m real, all right,” she said. “Come up to my room with me and I’ll prove it.”

“I don’t even know your name,” I pointed out.

“Vethusia,”she said.

She took me by the arm and headed off to The Womb, which was the name of her hotel.

“How do you differ from women, other than in being able to aim your pheromones?” I asked her.

“Oh, there are some minor differences,” she said. “You’ll find out about them later. But,” she added, kind of rubbing up against me, “I’m just like a human woman in all the ways that count.”

Which was good enough for me, and which she proceeded to prove during the next couple of hours.

It was when I woke up in the morning that I began to realize just how alien Vethusia was.

She was still in bed, with a sleep mask over her eyes, breathing regularly, and I tip-toed around the room to where I’d left my clothes so that I wouldn’t wake her. When I got to her side of the bed, I saw something shining on the nightstand, so I walked over to see what it was.

And what it turned out to be was her fingernails.

Now, I know some women wear false fingernails, but these were too long for that. I mean, they were the whole things, right down to the cuticles.

Then, while I was puzzling over this discovery, I saw her ears. Not on her head. On the nightstand, between her fingernails and her nose.

I reached out to touch the nose, to see what it was made of, since it had sure appeared real the night before—and damned if it didn’t skitter away from me, coming to a halt at the far side of the nightstand. I tried to pick it up, and it ducked and darted away again.

Next I tried to touch her ears—and three of her fingernails dug into my hand.

I figured I needed some answers, so I gently prodded her and said, “Hey, Vethusia—wake up.”

She sat up, the mask still covering her eyes.

“What is it, my love?” she asked.

(Goddammit, Langtry—stop looking at me like that! This all happened before you were even hatched!)

Where was I? Oh, yeah—she asked, “What is it?”

And I said, “There seems to be a little less of you than there was last night. Or at least it’s spread out a little more.”

“I told you I was a Gril,” she said.

“But you didn’t tell me what a Gril was,” I pointed out. “In fact, I still don’t know.”

“Are you unhappy?” she asked. “Did I fail to satisfy your bestial needs?”

“I didn’t say I was unhappy, just surprised,” I answered. “And I prefer to think of my needs as romantic.”

“Then romance me and stop complaining,” she commanded.

And suddenly the room was filled with that irresistible odor, and we had an instant replay of the previous night, and I had to admit that her not having a nose or ears or fingernails didn’t make a bit of difference at all.

When it was over and we were laying side by side, I gently stroked her hair, half expecting it to come off in my hand, and then reached to remove her mask.

“What are you doing?” she asked suspiciously.

“I want to look into your eyes,” I said. “They’re so deep and blue.”

"Don't."

“But—”

“Just leave well enough alone,” she said.

And then I figured it out—she didn’t have any eyes either. I must have said it aloud, because she replied that of course she had eyes.

“Then let me see them,” I said.

“They’re not here right now.”

“I don’t think I follow you,” I said.

“They’re out hunting.”

I suddenly decided to continue the conversation from the far side of the room, while getting dressed as quickly as possible.

“Okay,” I said. “Let me make sure I’ve got this straight. Your eyes haven’t fallen out or been misplaced or stolen or anything like that. They’re just out hunting.”

“That’s right.”

“I hate to seem ignorant, but what do eyes hunt?”

“Breakfast, of course.”

The more she answered me in that conversational tone, the more alien she seemed.

“Where do they hunt it?”

“Wherever they can find it,” she said.

I decided I didn’t really want to see her with her mask off after all, and now that I came to think about it, she looked a lot better with her nose and ears back on too. I conveyed this thought to her, and after she felt blindly around the nightstand for a minute she put them back where they belonged. When that was done she pressed her fingertips against the nightstand and all her nails jumped into place.

Then, suddenly, I heard a strange sound. When I looked around, I saw a pair of eyeballs rolling across the floor. They reached the side of the bed and began bouncing up and down until they wound up on top of the covers, where they rolled over to her hand. The second she felt them she picked one up, turned her back to me, pulled off her sleep mask, and put it into her eye socket, then did the same with the other. When she was done she turned to me and smiled.

“Better?” she asked.

“Much,” I said.

Her left eye burped.

I edged toward the door. “It’s been very nice knowing you, Vethusia.”

“You’re not leaving already?” she said.

“Well, it’s late and I’ve got things to do,” I said.

“It’s early and you’ve got nothing to do.”

“Then I’ll think of something to do,” I said fervently.

“You didn’t seem to mind my company all that much when we were making love.”

“I didn’t know how many detachable parts you had when we were making love,” I shot back. I stared at her for a minute, and then asked, “What else comes loose?”

“You don’t want to know.”

“Why?” I said. “How many more nightmares can you give me?”

“All right,” she said with a sigh. “I don’t want to set up housekeeping with a bigot who hates Grils.”

“I don’t hate Grils,” I said. “I just don’t understand them a lot more than I don’t understand most other things in the universe.”

“We’ll have one last fling for the road,” she said, “and then we’ll go our separate ways.”

“Not a chance,” I said.

But before I could open the door she hit me with that natural perfume again, and sure enough, we had one last fling for the road.

“Good-bye, Hurricane Smith,” she said when I’d finished getting dressed. “Let me give you something to remember me by.”

“Lady, I ain’t ever going to forget you!” I said adamantly.

“You’re sure I can’t give you a remembrance?”

“I’m going to have to see a shrink to get rid of some of the remembrances you already gave me,” I said.

“I could make you stay, you know,” said Vethusia.

“I know.”

“And you’d love every minute of it.”

“Until I came down with a cold and a stuffed nose,” I replied.

She found that amusing, and started shaking with laughter, and I snuck out the door before any unexpected parts could come off, and a minute later I was out in the street, wondering which way the spaceport was. I chanced to look up for just an instant, and there she was, a vision of loveliness, staring at me from the window. She looked so little and lonely and vulnerable, I felt like a cad for leaving her.

Then she winked one of those big wandering blue eyes at me, and I decided that even cads have their good points. Twenty minutes later I took off from Carnival, trying not to think of all the good times I could have had with the Gril I left behind.

“I don’t want to dwell on a painful subject,” said Baker, “but you could avoid a shitload of trouble if you’d just stick with human women.”

“Like you did with the Neptunian concubine?” asked Smith irritably.

“That was an accident.”

“So was this,” said Smith. “I don’t seek out alien ladies, you know.”

Langtry Lily hissed softly.

“Except for you, my dear,” he added quickly.

Suddenly Little Mike Picasso jumped to his feet and stared out one of the windows.

“What’s the matter?” I asked him.

“There was a huge explosion,” he said. “Either the sun just went nova or the shooting’s getting awful close.”

“Fifty-to-one that it’s the war,” said Bet-a-World O’Grady.

There weren’t any takers.

“Wonder just what kind of aliens they are?” mused Baker.

“Whatever they are, I got an unhappy premonition that they ain’t gonna be as sexually motivated as the ones you and the Hurricane keep running into,” said Max.

Nicodemus Mayflower turned to Catastrophe Baker. “What’s the most dangerous race you ever came across?” he asked.

“Women,” said Baker.

“I mean an alien race,” said Mayflower.

“So do I,” answered Baker, sticking by his guns.

“How about you, Gravedigger?”

“I don’t know who was the most dangerous,” answered Gaines. “The Domarians were the most exhausting.”

“How so?” asked Mayflower.

“There was a warrant out on a couple of ’em, so I flew to Domar to see if I could pick up the reward.” He paused and took a swallow of his drink. “Interesting world, Domar. No cars, no buses, no trains, no airplanes, no boats, no golf carts, no roads. Just Domarians. They’re about forty feet tall, and most of that is leg. They hate the night and spend their whole lives walking around and around their world, following the sun over the horizon—except for when they’re killing each other, that is.”

“Did you find the ones you were looking for?”

“Yeah, but I must have lost thirty pounds catching up with them,” said Gaines.

“What about you, Hurricane?” asked Mayflower.

“I get along pretty well with most aliens,” he answered as Langtry Lily glared at him.

“So we’ve heard,” said Max dryly.

“Big Red?” asked Mayflower.

“You’ve got to understand that I look at it from a different perspective,” said Big Red. “I’m an athlete, not a hero or a bounty hunter or even a soldier. I’d say that the toughest aliens, physically, were the Torquals. They stand about twelve feet tall, all of it muscle, and the last time a human team challenged them to a game of murderball the Torquals won sixteen, five, eight, and three.”

“I’ve never seen murderball,”said Sahara del Rio. “What does that score mean?”

“The Torquals scored sixteen goals, the Men scored five, the Torquals killed eight men, and the Men killed three Torquals.” Big Red smiled. “It’s a vigorous game, ma’am.”

“So they were the toughest,” said Sahara.

“Physically.”

“What other ways are there?” she asked.

“Well, there’s mentally,” answered Big Red. “No Grumarite has ever lost a chess match except to another Grumarite. And then there are the Quintalias, who invented five-dimensional checkers.”

“How do you play that?” asked O’Grady.

“Beats me,” said Big Red. “You’d have to ask a Quintalia, and they’re so busy peeking into other dimensions that they don’t always answer.”

“So you’d say that the toughest are the Torquals and the smartest are the Grumarites and the Quintalias?” asked Mayflower.

“The toughest I’ve seen in competition,” Big Red corrected him. “Personally, I’d put Einstein up against any of them.”

“You mean any Grumarite or Quintalia.”

“I mean any of them.”

“Come on,” said Mayflower. “How do you expect a blind man to defeat a Torqual?”

“He’s Einstein,” said Big Red. “He’d find a way.”

“My money would be on the Torqual,”said O’Grady.

“You’d lose.”

“Oh, yeah?” said O’Grady. “Ask him how he’d win.”

Big Red tapped a message, waited for Einstein to reply, and then read the holographic screen.

“He says it would be easy.”

“Did he say how?” insisted O’Grady.

“Yeah. He says E equals MC squared.”

“So what? Everyone knows that.”

“True—but only he knows how to apply it.”

“Poppycock.”

Big Red’s screen came to life again.

“He says if you’ll put up five hundred credits to his ten, he’ll prove it right now.”

Suddenly a look of uncertainty crossed O’Grady’s face. “Tell him I don’t want to take his money.”

The computers exchanged messages again.

“He says not to worry—you won’t.”

“Some other time.”

“He says he’s been analyzing things, and if the war gets much closer you may never have another chance.”

“I’ll learn to live with the disappointment,” said O’Grady.

“Too bad,” said the Reverend Billy Karma. “I love watching Good and Evil going at it hammer and tongs.”

“Which of them would be Good?” asked Max.

“Whichever one won, of course,” said Billy Karma. “God don’t let Evil get a leg up in these matters.”

“It must be nice to be that certain of things,” said Max.

“It is comforting,” agreed the Reverend.

“How about you, Max?” said Nicodemus Mayflower.

“I give up,” said Max. “How about me?”

“I mean, who were the most dangerous aliens you ever faced?”

“You mean other than overly aggressive redheads named Thelma?” said Max. “Well, actually Hurricane Smith’s story about the hungry eyes reminded me of them a little bit.”

“Of redheads named Thelma?”

“No. Of dangerous aliens.”

“Yours had hungry eyes too?” asked Smith, suddenly interested.

Max shook his head. “Nope. But they were a formidable bunch just the same. Hell, if it wasn’t for me, they might have overrun the whole galaxy.”

“Thank heaven for small favors,” muttered Little Mike Picasso sarcastically.

“Thank someone else,” said the Reverend Billy Karma. “I happen to hold the copyright to heaven.”

“So who were these aliens anyway?” asked Big Red.

The Pirates of Dawn

Ever hear of Solomon (began Max)? It’s a mining world out on the Rim. Rich in diamonds, lots of other precious stones. Not a bad place, really. Good atmosphere, only about eighty percent Standard gravity. They built a hospital for heart patients out there, since the gravity puts so little stress on them.

But they had a problem. Same problem you’d expect any world with that many diamonds to have.

Security at the mines was tight, and not many diamonds were smuggled off Solomon. A couple of local warlords tried to raid the place, but they didn’t have much luck.

But then came the Pirates of Dawn and they made out like, well, pirates.

“So why were they called the Pirates of Dawn?” asked Big Red.

“I’m coming to that,” said Max irritably.

They were aliens. Nobody knew where they came from. They never made a daylight raid, and they never came in the dead of night. Twilight didn’t seem to interest them either. They always came just as the sun was rising, and let me tell you—they were tough motherfuckers. First raid they made, they killed seventeen security guards and made off with about forty million credits’ worth of gemstones. Didn’t lose a single man, either.

(Well, “man” is the wrong word for ’em. They had three legs, which made running a bit of a problem, but you couldn’t knock one of ’em off his pins no matter how hard you hit him. Matter of fact, they were three-sided all the way up, with three arms, each a third of the way around the trunk of the body from the last one, and three large eyes spaced evenly around the head. Only one mouth, but it wasn’t always pointed in the direction they were going.)

They never gave any warning before their raids. They just showed up, blazing away with some kind of pulse weapons. To this day no one knows why they were interested in diamonds, but my guess is they traded them to some renegade humans for bigger weapons and faster ships.

Anyway, they made seven raids the first year, and when the dust had cleared they’d damned near bankrupted the colony—those members of it that were still alive.

I’d heard about Solomon’s problems, and having nothing better to do, I showed up one morning and offered my services. They were so desperate that they didn’t even haggle about my fee—one diamond for each Pirate killed, and a ten-diamond bonus if I could kill them all or chase ’em away for good—so I took a room in the best hotel in town, a place called The Uncut Diamond, and waited for them to come back.

Problem was, I couldn’t really plan anything until I knew they were on their way, and like I said, they never gave any warning. They’d just show up out of nowhere, take what they wanted, and vanish just as quick.

I’d been there twenty-seven days when the next raid occurred. I’d been sitting out every night, and going to bed at midday, and this particular day I saw about fifteen of ’em walking toward the brand-new reinforced assay office where the stones were kept before being shipped back to the Monarchy. Some of the security guards started firing away, but the Pirates never even flinched. They just fired back with deadly accuracy, and a minute later eight guards lay dead on the ground.

I studied them carefully. I knew we’d killed one, so they couldn’t be impervious to our weapons, but nothing we’d fired that morning seemed to damage them. Then I realized that what looked like military uniforms were actually suits of armor based on same alien scientific principle that let them repel the heat from burners and the noise from screechers. About the only way to take one of the Pirates out was to blow his head off, and from two hundred yards—which was the distance at which our men started firing—a head shot with a hand weapon would be a stroke of dumb luck. The Pirates’ weapons were a lot more accurate, and with those huge eyes they didn’t need any telescopic sights.

I waited until they entered the assay building. Then I moved forward and took up a safe defensive position about thirty yards away behind a trash atomizer, and waited for them to come out, which they did about five minutes later.

I drew a bead on the first one’s head, fired, and blew him to Kingdom Come. I nailed the second one behind his ear, and the rest took off like bats out of hell. They weren’t exactly graceful on those three legs, but they kept spinning around as they ran, and I couldn’t manage another head shot.

I didn’t want to step out in the open and chase them because I knew their eyesight and handguns were better than mine, so I waited until they vanished in the distance. When their ship took off a moment later, people began pouring out into the street to collect the dead security guards.

As for me, I walked over and examined the bodies of the two Pirates I had killed, but it was a useless exercise. There wasn’t enough left of the heads to learn anything, and the bodies were so well-armored that it wasn’t worth the effort to hunt for weak spots.

Next I examined them for anything remotely resembling a religious artifact, and was relieved as hell when I couldn’t find one, because that showed me the way to beat the sons of bitches.

I waited for the mayor to appear—he’d lagged behind until he was dead certain the ship wasn’t coming back—and I demanded two diamonds for killing the Pirates. The mayor countered that I owed Solomon eight diamonds for the dead guards, and that came to a net payment of six diamonds.

“Bullshit!” I said. “This is Three-Gun Max you’re talking to, and if you don’t pay me what you owe me, I ain’t gonna tell you how to defeat the Pirates of Dawn.”

“You know how?” he asked, surprised.

“Yeah, I know how,” I answered. “And if you want me to share that knowledge with you, I want my two diamonds right now.”

The mayor and the city council started whispering amongst themselves for a minute or two. Then they all straightened up and turned to me.

“Come to my office in half an hour and I’ll pay you your diamonds,” said the mayor.

“Fine.”

“Now—how do we kill the Pirates?”

“Come to your office in half an hour and I’ll be happy to tell you thirty seconds later,” I said. “Assuming I’ve been paid in the interim.”

Well, suddenly he couldn’t see no reason not to go directly to his office, so I followed him there and waited patiently until he unlocked his safe and withdrew a couple of fine-looking diamonds.

“All right,” he said, handing them to me. “Here’s your payment. Now, how do we kill the Pirates of Dawn?”

“By recognizing that they are the Pirates of Dawn,” I said, “and asking yourself why.”

“I don’t understand,” said the mayor.

“Look,” I said, “even though we haven’t had much luck to date, they know we can kill them. So they have some alternatives—they can attack under cover of night, when they’re almost impossible to see, or they can attack in daylight, when we’d be sitting ducks if we tried to pick them off. But they don’t do either—they always attack at dawn. Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“Neither did I,” I admitted. “Until I examined the two I killed.”

“What did you find?”

“Nothing,” I said. “And that was the key.”

“Finding nothing was the key?” he repeated, puzzled.

“Yeah. If they’d been carrying anything that implied that they worshipped the sun or the moon, even something that showed they felt the summer and winter solstices were special, it might have explained why they always attack at dawn. But they weren’t carrying anything like that—so it had to be those huge eyes. They can’t attack in daylight; the sun blinds them.”

“Why not at night, then?” asked the mayor.

“Because Solomon doesn’t have a moon, it’s the only planet in its system, and it’s sixteen light years from the closest star. Your nights are pitch black, so that even the Pirates of Dawn can’t see without using some kind of torch that would attract immediate attention and pinpoint their whereabouts.”

“Okay, it makes sense,” said the major. “But that just explains why they attack at dawn. It doesn’t explain how to defeat them.”

I shook my head sadly. “You’re so dumb I really ought to double my fee,” I said. “But what the hell, a bargain is a bargain. Give me ten men, and we’ll be ready for them the next time.”

And we were. They showed up exactly thirty days later, and we were waiting for them with the brightest spotlights money could buy. We turned them on when the Pirates were maybe fifty yards from the assay building, and picked them off at our leisure while they staggered blindly through the streets.

We let one survive and make it back to the ship so that he could tell all the other Pirates that Solomon had doped them out and they’d better plunder other worlds from now on. And from that day to this, the Pirates of Dawn have never returned.

As for me, I lived like a king for almost a year before I ran into Bet-a-World O’Grady out near the Delphini system and lost the remainder of my diamonds to him in a single night at the poker table.

“Don’t feel too bad,” said O’Grady to Max. “I only had them for about three days before I lost them to Underlay McNair.” He shook his head ruefully. “It was bluffer’s heaven. I lost fifty million credits with nothing to the nine. The sonuvabitch was sitting there holding nothing to the jack.”

“Underlay McNair,” mused Catastrophe Baker. “I’ve heard of him.”

“He used to be a bookie,” said O’Grady. “Remember the big heavyweight freehand championship match between Backbreaker Mahoney and the Penjak Kid?”

“Who could ever forget it?” interjected Big Red. “It was the only fight in history where both men died in the ring.”

“Right,” said O’Grady. “And since they both died, the bookies didn’t have to pay off. Old Underlay, he was sitting there on maybe fifteen million credits’ worth of bets, so he decided that with a grubstake like that it was time to quit booking bets and start making them.”

“I saw the Penjak Kid once,” said the Gravedigger. “I always figured the only two men in the galaxy who could take him were Catastrophe Baker and me—and I wasn’t so sure about me.”

“I don’t know about the Kid,” said Hurricane Smith, “but I was there the night Backbreaker Mahoney whipped Jimmy Steelfist, and I think I could have taken him.”

Big Red’s computer screen came to life.

“Einstein says you’re all wrong,” said Big Red. “Only one person could have beaten either Mahoney or the Kid.”

“Who was he?” asked Gaines.

Big Red transmitted the question, then smiled as the answer came onto his screen.

“It wasn’t a he at all.”

“An alien?” said Gaines.

“No,” said Big Red. “A woman.”

“I don’t believe it!” scoffed Gaines.

“Einstein’s never wrong.”

“He is this time.”

Einstein tapped away and a new message appeared on the holo screen.

“He wants to know if you’ve ever heard of the Cyborg de Milo,” said Big Red.

“The Cyborg de Milo?” repeated Gaines. “Is he making this up?”

“No,” said Achmed of Alphard from across the room. “I knew her. She exists.”

“And she’s called the Cyborg de Milo?”

“Now she is. I knew her as Venus.”

“I’m not going to even ask what her full name was,” muttered Gaines.

“Who cares about her name?” said O’Grady. “Tell us why Einstein thinks she was capable of beating Backbreaker Mahoney and the Penjak Kid.”

“He doesn’t think it,” Big Red corrected him. “He knows it.”

“And he’s right,” added Achmed.

“Still why?”

The Cyborg de Milo

Her real name (said Achmed of Alphard)—or, rather, her original name—was Venus Delmonico, and back when I first met her, she was as pretty and polite and refined a girl as you’d ever want to know. She had passed the entrance exam for Aristotle—that’s the university planet, you know—and she was specializing in something terribly esoteric. I can’t remember exactly what it was—Poetry of the 3rd Century of the Galactic Era, perhaps. Anyway, she was supposed to already be such an expert that there were only two people in the whole of the Monarchy who could teach her anything more, and both of them were professors on Aristotle

But three weeks before she was scheduled to leave for Aristotle, thieves broke into her parents’ home. Her father tried to stop them and was killed for his trouble. Her mother fled, screaming for help, and they killed her too. Then, to cover their tracks, they set fire to the house, destroying everything she and her parents owned, including her collection of incredibly rare volumes of poetry. The only reason Venus herself wasn’t killed was because she was studying at the local library.

I was a neighbor, and I was there, looking at the smoldering ruins, when Venus arrived. The police told her what had happened. I expected her to become hysterical, or perhaps to faint, but she did neither. Her face became expressionless, her voice became softer, and she questioned the officer in charge until she realized that she had nothing to learn from him.

Then she spotted me, walked over, and asked me to contact Aristotle and tell them that she would not be attending, neither during the coming semester, nor in the foreseeable future.

“But what will you do with yourself?” I said. “You mustn’t withdraw from society because of this tragedy.”

“I’m not withdrawing,” she said calmly, almost coldly. “I have work to do.”

“Your studies?”

A look of contempt crossed her pretty face. “No, Achmed,”she replied. “Important work.” She paused and took one last look at the ruins of her house, then turned back to me. “I will see you again before it begins.”

And then she was gone.

I didn’t hear from her for almost a year. I made some inquiries, but nobody else seemed to know what had happened to her either. Then one evening she showed up at my house without any warning.

“Venus!” I said. “Where have you been?”

“Preparing,” she replied, as I ushered her into the living room.

“You haven’t changed a bit,” I said, staring at her.

She chuckled. “Thank you, Achmed. That is the first time I’ve laughed since my parents were slaughtered.”

“What did I say that was so funny?” I asked, confused.

“I have changed more than you can imagine,” she replied.

I looked her up and down. “I can’t see it,” I said. “I doubt that you’ve gained or lost as much as two pounds.”

“I’ve lost more than two pounds,” she said. “I’ve lost two arms.”

I stared at her arms. “I don’t understand.”

She tapped the fingers of her right hand against her left arm. They made a strange, clicking sound.

“I had my arms replaced,” she said.

“But why?” I asked, shocked.

“Because I didn’t need them,” she replied. She held her arms out. “I needed these.”

“For what?”

“For my work.”

“I thought your work was studying poetry.”

“My work is killing people who deserve killing,” she replied. She spread out the fingers of her right hand. “This finger shoots lasers. This one shoots sonar. This one is an energy pulse gun. And this one shoots bullets.” Then she displayed the fingers of her left hand. “Flamethrower, atomic drill, spring-loaded knife, and a light that will not only illuminate the darkness but also pierce through fog and opaque alien atmospheres.”

She tapped a finger against her beautiful blue eyes. There was that same noise.

“My eyes not only see everything you see, but they can also see into the infra-red and ultra-violet spectrums. The left one is also telescopic and the right one can become a microscope.”

“My God!” I exclaimed. “What have you done to yourself?”

“I’ve circumvented millions of generations of evolution and become totally efficient,” she answered. “From this day forward I am no longer Venus Delmonico. I am now the Cyborg de Milo. Like the Venus of old, I have lost my arms—but unlike her, I have replaced them with something better.”

“We have police to hunt down criminals, and out on the Frontier there are bounty hunters like Gravedigger Gaines.”

“They work for money,” she replied. “I work for justice.”

“But—”

“The police have been hunting my parents’ killers for a year. Have they made any progress?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted.

“I do. They’re no closer to solving the murders now than the night they occurred.”

“I don’t know what to say,” I told her. “I feel that you have thrown your future away.”

“Perhaps you have thrown yours away,” she suggested, walking to the door, “by not doing everything within your power to guarantee that you live to have a future.”

It took her three days to track down her parents’ murderers. I don’t know what she did to them, but I heard that there wasn’t enough left of them to bury.

She stayed in the Alphard system for another month. Then, after she’d hunted down our most wanted criminals, she decided to seek greater challenges, and she left for the Inner Frontier.

From time to time I read about her, or hear rumors of a cyborg woman who has killed men that even Catastrophe Baker would think twice about facing, but I do not know for an absolute fact that she is still alive.

But if she isn’t, I sure wouldn’t want to be in the same room, or even on the same planet, with the man who could kill her.

“Einstein says she’s alive, all right,” said Big Red, reading his screen. “He met her just last week on Greenpasture II.”

“Why?” asked Max. “What could either of them possibly want with the other?”

“She wanted his advice, of course,” said Big Red. “Why does anyone meet with Einstein?”

“What kind of advice?” persisted Max.

“She still has two very human legs. She wanted his opinion concerning what to replace them with.”

“How the hell many more built-in weapons does she need?”

“She has enough weapons,” answered Big Red. “But that doesn’t mean she can’t improve her efficiency. Does she want legs that can stand up under four gravities? Legs that can let her jump forty feet into the air? Feet with suction cups on the bottoms, for walking up walls and across ceilings? Legs with compartments to hold energy packs, or possibly with refrigeration units to store food when she’s away from civilization?”

“Okay, okay,” said Max irritably. “I get the point.”

“You know,” mused the Gravedigger, “I have heard of her. I never knew her name—and some of the feats she pulled off sounded like tall tales. But I’ve been hearing about a cyborg woman for years now, a woman who can do all the things that Achmed says that this Cyborg Venus can do.”

“Cyborg de Milo,” Achmed corrected him.

“Yeah?” said Max, still looking for someone to argue with. “Well, if she’s so close, how come she hasn’t shown up at the Outpost?”

“Maybe she’s not thirsty,” said Nicodemus Mayflower.

“Or maybe she planned to, and either the navy or the aliens blew her ship to smithereens,” added Little Mike Picasso. “There’s a war going on out there, you know.”

“If anyone took a shot at her, I hate to think of what would happen to them if they missed,” said Achmed.

“How long has she been a cyborg?” asked Nicodemus Mayflower.

“Eighteen years,” said Achmed.

“That’s a long time to go around with a mad on,” said Hurricane Smith. “Maybe she just needs someone to love her.”

“She’s not your type,” said Catastrophe Baker.

“How do you know?” asked Smith.

“She’s human.”

Langtry Lily began hissing at Smith.

“It was just an academic question, my dear,” he said quickly, prepared to duck if she spit at him again. She glared at him, and he took her hand in his and began stroking it gently. After a moment she relaxed and went back to scouring the table for those few grains of sugar she’d missed.

“Anyway, she sounds like one tough lady,” said Little Mike.

“Can’t argue with that,” agreed the Gravedigger. “I thought I’d met the toughest women on the Frontier, but this Cyborg de Milo sounds like she could wipe up the floor with them.”

“Who were they?” asked Willie the Bard, looking up from his notebook.

“You ever hear of the O’Toole Sisters?” asked Gaines.

“Nope,” answered the Bard.

“I did,” said Nicodemus Mayflower.

“Me, too,” said Baker. “Weren’t they named something weird, like Silk and Satin?”

“I thought it was Rubber and Lace,” said Nicodemus.

“Close, but no cigar,” said the Gravedigger.

The Romantic Tale of Velvet and Leather O’Toole

Nobody knows when they came out to the Frontier (began Gaines). Hell, they might even have been born out here. I do know that they grew up in Nightmare Alley, which was the criminal sector of Port Raven, a nondescript little world in the Willoughby Sector—and anyone who can stay alive in Nightmare Alley for more than a day or two has developed some real survival skills.

They weren’t the brightest girls I ever met—there’s no way they could ever have gotten accepted on Aristotle like the Cyborg Venus did—but they obeyed the laws, worked hard at their jobs, and saved their money.

As a matter of fact that’s how I came into contact with them. Seems we were both using the same bank at the time. I wasn’t thrilled with Port Raven, but it had a branch of the Bank of Spica, and that’s where I kept my main account.

The girls were pretty in a plain kind of way, if that makes sense to you. Nothing wrong with either of them, but they didn’t make you want to bay the moon or go slay dragons the way that, say, Silicon Carny does. One always dressed in velvet and the other always wore leather, and after a while any other names they might have had just faded away and they were Velvet and Leather, the O’Toole sisters.

The bank was run by a skinny little runt who went by the name of Throckmorton Lewis Frothingham. I’ll swear his name weighed more than he did. He was a precise little man. He always looked like he’d just come from his tailor, even when it was hot and muggy out. There are still a few people here and there who wear glasses, but he’s the only one in my experience who wore a pince-nez—you know, the spectacles that fit on the bridge of your nose. He always had a silk handkerchief stuck in the cuff of his left sleeve, and his shoes were polished to within an inch of their lives.

I spent a lot of time at that bank, waiting for various bounties to be wired to me—well, to Spica, actually, but then they’d notify the Port Raven branch—and I saw a lot of the sisters. I don’t know what kind of jobs they had, but they were paid in cash on a daily basis, and every night just before the bank closed they’d stop by and deposit their money. And little Throckmorton Lewis Frothingham was always there to greet them, and exchange a few pleasantries, and personally handle their transactions.

Then one day, with no warning at all, the Bellargo Gang showed up, seventy-three members strong, to rob the place.

“The Bellargo Gang?” said Baker. “I haven’t heard of them in close on to a dozen years now. Whatever happened to them?”

“Stop interrupting and maybe you’ll find out,” said the Gravedigger.

The girls were there (continued Gaines), and maybe two or three others, a couple of robot tellers, plus Frothingham, of course—and me.

“You’re a bounty hunter!” whispered Frothingham. “Aren’t you going to do something?”

“All my money’s on Spica,” I answered. “Whatever they do to your bank, it won’t cost me a credit.”

“But it’s your job to bring these villains to justice!” he said.

“I’ll take on any half dozen of them,” I said, “but there’s got to be better than fifty of ‘em here. The way I see it, my job is to stay alive until I can meet them under more favorable circumstances.”

The whole time we were talking Bellargo himself was staring at me, and finally he walked over.

“Ain’t you Gravedigger Gaines?” he said.

“Some people call me that,” I answered.

“You’ve been a real thorn in my side over the years,” he continued. “You’ve killed six of my men, and four or five others deserted rather than take a chance of running into you.”

“What a waste,” I said.

He looked puzzled. “A waste?”

“If they quit, I don’t get any bounties and you don’t get any flunkies.”

He threw back his head and laughed. “I like you, Gravedigger Gaines,” he said. “It seems a pity to kill you.”

If he wanted me to beg for my life, he was in for a long wait, but then he noticed the O’Toole sisters, and he swaggered over to them.

“Hi, ladies,” he said. “I can tell you’ve been saving yourselves for a real man.”

“When one shows up, be sure to let us know,” said Velvet.

“Everybody’s a humorist today!” snarled Bellargo. I thought he was going to take a swing at her, but then his gaze fell on Frothingham. “How about you?”

“I don’t think there’s anything funny about a bank robbery,” he answered in a shaky voice.

“Must be cold in here,” said Bellargo. “Look at how his hands are trembling.”

“Leave me alone!” said Frothingham. “You came to rob my bank. Rob it and go away!”

“Your bank?” repeated Bellargo.

“He’s the president,” said Leather proudly.

“Good. Then he should know the combinations to all the computer locks on the safes.”

“I can’t tell you that,” said Frothingham. “I’m willing to be robbed, but I’m not willing to collude with you.”

“You’ll do what you’re told and like it!” said Bellargo, and then he made his fatal mistake—he slapped the poor little bastard right across the face.

Two seconds later Velvet was flying through the air, and gave Bellargo’s head such a kick that it damned near left his shoulders. His neck made a huge cracking sound, and that was the end of Bellargo.

In the meantime, Leather had jumped in among his men, raining blows and kicks right and left, and then Velvet joined her, and by the time I’d overcome my surprise long enough to pull my gun, seventeen of Bellargo’s men were laid out on the floor. Twelve of them never got up again, and I began to understand how the sisters O’Toole had managed to survive in Nightmare Alley.

The rest of it was a rout. Velvet picked up a burner from one of the outlaws, Leather picked up a pair of screechers from another, and they started using the rest of the Bellargo Gang for target practice. I got in one or two shots, but they sure as hell didn’t need me.

When the dust had cleared and every member of the gang was either dead or disabled, the two sisters rushed up to Throckmorton Lewis Frothingham.

“Are you all right?” asked Leather solicitously.

“Poor baby!” crooned Velvet. “Did they scare you?”

At first I thought it was an act. I mean, how could two such formidable women care for a mousy little man like that?

But it was anything but an act. Two weeks later Velvet O’Toole married her bank president in the morning, and three hours later, Leather married the same man in a tasteful afternoon ceremony. Then the three of them left on their honeymoon.

“And that was the end of it?” asked Willie the Bard, scribbling furiously.

“Not quite.”

“What else is there?” asked the Bard. “Did they leave him?”

Gaines shook his head. “I was back there about a year ago. They all live in this huge house—just the kind you’d expect a banker to own. The girls (well, women actually) still dote on the little bastard. Velvet has seven kids and Leather has eight. I’d love to tell you they look like the O’Toole side of the family, but the fact is that almost all of them look like their father.”

“Poor kids,” offered Big Red.

“Oh, I don’t know,” said the Gravedigger. “They’re each going to inherit a couple of million credits, and they don’t get a lot of teasing at school despite their looks.”

“They don’t?” said Big Red. “Why not?”

“Because Leather and Velvet are both on the school staff. Leather teaches martial arts, and Velvet coaches the murderball team. Let me tell you: no one messes with their kids.”

“I can believe that,” said Little Mike Picasso. “Wish I’d had a mother like that.”

“Think it through,” said Hellfire Van Winkle. “Maybe she could protect you from bullies, but would you really want to be disciplined by someone like that?”

“You’ve got a point,” admitted Little Mike.

“I sure do,” said Van Winkle. “A mother who can mete out that kind of punishment could turn you into an accomplished liar.”

“Not that anyone here needs much help,” said Three-Gun Max sarcastically.

“Every word spoken tonight was the truth,” I said, feeling a need to stand up for the Outpost’s clientele.

“Is that a fact?” said Max.

“Except for the ones that weren’t,” I answered lamely.

“I imagine the Outpost has heard its share of both,” said Argyle.

“You think buildings are sentient, do you?” said Max, still looking for an argument.

“How the hell should I know?” asked Argyle.

“Well, take it from me,” said Max. “They aren’t.”

“Nonsense,” said Nicodemus Mayflower, his thin, angular face looking more Satanic than ever. “I knew an entire city that was sentient.”

“Bullshit,” said Max.

“Okay,” said Mayflower with a shrug. “If you don’t want to hear about it, that’s fine by me.”

“Hey!” said the Bard. “I want to hear about it.”

“Me, too,” I added, just to annoy Max.

“If Max doesn’t want to listen, there’s a war going on out there,” said Catastrophe Baker, pointing to another explosion just beyond one of our moons. “He can go make the galaxy safe for the rest of us while we stay here and listen.”

Which ended Max’s objections to hearing the story.

A City Older Than Time

It was out on the Other Arm—the one where Earth isn’t—that we found it (said Nicodemus Mayflower).

There were these two competing groups of archaeologists, and neither of them trusted the other, so they each hired some bodyguards to make sure that the other side’s bodyguards didn’t attack them.

(Yeah, I know, that made it more likely. But how are you going to talk any common sense to guys who like to travel halfway across the galaxy just to dig in the dirt?)

Anyway, we came to this binary system that wasn’t on any star maps, and since I was the guy who first spotted it, they told me I could call it anything I wanted, so the brighter star became Alpha Nicodemus and the other one was Beta Mayflower—and if you don’t believe me just check any navigational computer that was programmed after 6519 G.E.

Well, for some reason, they decided that the third planet circling Beta Mayflower was the most likely to have whatever it was they were looking for, so we landed, and sure enough, there was this ancient city, filled with crystal spires and marble streets and quartz windows that acted as prisms and turned the sun’s light into an endless series of rainbows.

We’d been there maybe two days when the other party of archaeologists showed up. Our leader told them that we’d already filed a claim, or claimed squatters’ rights, or whatever it is you do when you’re a scientist and you’re not into sharing. The other guys said that was all well and good, but there was no legal authority they could appeal to since the world hadn’t been mapped or claimed yet—so they planned to stick around and do their digging and studying no matter what we said.

Tempers started heating up, and then suddenly we all heard a strange moaning sound. It seemed to be coming from the very center of the city, but when we all arrived there we couldn’t find anything at all. One member of our group decided that it had been made by the wind whistling through the biggest building in town, and a member of the other group said that no, it was obviously caused by gas escaping from a fissure in the ground. Then one of our people said that the only gas escaping was coming from their group, and while all of us bodyguards stood around staring at our employers and wondering what made them act like that, they almost came to blows.

The only thing that stopped them was another moaning sound, this time from the north end of the city. We all traipsed over there as fast as we could, but when we got there we still couldn’t find anything.

It was starting to get dark, so both sides decided to call it a day. My group went back to our camp on the east side of the city, and the other groups went off to set up their camp on the west side.

It was while I was lying on my cot, wondering what the hell I was doing here (and also trying to think of which of the girls I knew would be most impressed by knowing a man with a binary system named after him), that I suddenly seemed to hear a voice inside my head.

“Nicodemus Mayflower,” it intoned.

I sat up and looked around to see if anyone else had heard anything, but my companions were all snoring peacefully.

“Nicodemus Mayflower,” it repeated.

“I’m right here,” I said softly. “What do you want?”

“The pain is almost unbearable.”

“Maybe you should take a pill for it,” I said. “And by the way, who are you and where are you?”

“I am Nesbudanne,”said the voice.

“I don’t mean to be disrespectful, but that’s no help at all.”

“I am the city,” said Nesbudanne.

“I beg your pardon?”

“You ask where I am,” continued Nesbudanne. “I surround you. I am the delicate towers, the shining pavement, the glistening walls, the curving stairways, the highways, the walkways, the causeways. I am the sewer system beneath your feet. I am the mosaic tiles on the walls of the church, and the mural on its ceiling.”

“All right, I get the picture,” I said. “But why are you in such pain?”

“I was endowed by my creators, who have long since left me for more modern cities on distant worlds, with the gift of empathy. I can intuit your needs and react to them. Are you cold? I will warm the air. Are you hungry? I will activate my kitchens. Are you sleepy? I will dim my lights and play restful music.” Nesbudanne paused, and I thought I could hear an almost-human sigh. “But empathy has a downside as well. Your scientists hate their rivals, who hate them right back—and I have been bombarded with those emotions all afternoon and evening. I was never equipped to deal with such things. The agony is almost unendurable.”

“I sympathize with you,” I said, idly wondering if sympathizing was the same as empathizing. “But what do you expect me to do about it?”

“Beyond my northwestern border is a valley known as the Dreambasin,” said Nesbudanne. “It is filled with hallucinogenic plants. Find some way to lead the parties there before I can stand the pain no longer.”

“What happens when they get there?” I asked.

“They will inhale the scent from the flowers. Then, since friendship seems totally unknown to them, perhaps they will imagine that they enjoy each other’s company and can work in concert toward a common goal.”

“I suppose it’s worth a try,” I said.

I got up, woke my fellow bodyguards, and explained the city’s plan to them. They all agreed, and then, still under cover of darkness, I gained the concurrence of our opposite numbers.

The next morning we marched both parties of scientists to the Dreambasin at gunpoint. We didn’t go into the valley ourselves, but we made them go—and within five minutes archaeologists who had hated each other for decades were throwing their arms around each other. They spent the day playing childlike games, and laughing happily, and swearing eternal fealty.

And then evening came, and we marched them back to the city—and before we reached the central square five separate fist fights had broken out, and the battle lines were drawn again.

Then everything was interrupted by the moaning we had heard the day before, but this time I knew what it was.

“Nesbudanne!” I cried out. “Are you all right?”

“You did your best, Nicodemus Mayflower,” answered Nesbudanne sadly, and this time I saw that everyone could hear it speak. “But I cannot bear the hatred any longer.”

The tallest spire in the city suddenly shattered and fell to the ground in a million pieces.

“I was built to serve you,” said Nesbudanne regretfully. “I could not love you more if you were my own children—and you could not hurt me more if you were my sworn enemy.”

Another spire crumbled, and, two blocks away, a church began collapsing.

“Perhaps it is all for the best,” continued Nesbudanne, its voice growing weaker with each passing second. “You are all scientists. You now have empirical evidence that empathy is not a survival trait. There will come a day when you can perform the most delicate microsurgery on a DNA molecule. When that day occurs, do not shackle your next generation with the curse of empathy.”

Then buildings began collapsing wholesale, and long cracks split the pavement. We raced for safety beyond the city limits, and once there, stopped and turned to observe the results of our hatred.

There have been many days when I was proud to be a Man abroad in the galaxy.

That wasn’t one of them.

“Why didn’t Nesbudanne’s heart break when the people who built it left the planet?” asked Max, always the cynic.

“It didn’t die of a broken heart,” answered Nicodemus Mayflower. “Its sensitive psyche was shattered by all the hatred.”

“Damned lucky it never went into politics,” said Max.

“Or art,” added Little Mike Picasso.

“Or sports,” chimed in Big Red.

“Or any other endeavor where your excellence makes others aware of their shortcomings,” concluded Willie the Bard.

“That’s one of the reasons we hang out here, isn’t it?” said the Gravedigger. “Because we’re not jealous of each other in the Outpost.”

“I don’t know,” said Sinderella, gesturing toward Silicon Carny. “I could be mighty jealous of her if I let myself.”

“There’s no reason to,” said the Earth Mother. “You don’t know where she stops and where the silicon begins.”

“That’s right,” said Sahara del Rio. “No woman could possibly have a bustline like that.”

“I knew a woman that had even a bigger one,” offered Hurricane Smith.

Langtry Lily glared at him.

“This was before I met you, my dear,” he continued. “Hell, they were all before I met you.”

“Bigger than Silicon Carny, you say?” asked the Reverend Billy Karma.

“That’s right.”

“What more proof does anyone need that God exists?” said Billy Karma triumphantly.

“I don’t think God had much to do with it, Reverend,” said Smith.

“That’s blasphemy!” growled Billy Karma.

“You tell the story,” said Catastrophe Baker, who was still toying with converting, “and we’ll decide.”

“Fair enough,” said Smith.

The Pirate Queen With the Big Bazooms

This all took place about eight years ago (said Hurricane Smith). I had just escaped from the prison planet of Bastille, where I’d been unfairly incarcerated for what were loosely termed “crimes against God and Nature”, and I’d made up my mind to clear out of the Monarchy and seek my fortune on the Outer Frontier.

I’d docked at Samovar Station, just beyond Terwilliger’s Belt, and was having a drink in the bar while they were enriching my ship’s atomic pile, when I heard a commotion coming from one of the corridors leading to the inner offices. Naturally I got up to see what was happening, and as I stepped out of the bar the most gorgeous woman I’d ever seen came running up to me. (Remember: I hadn’t seen you yet, my dear.)

She was wearing thigh-high boots and a tiny little g-string and a bra that barely contained her phenomenal bosom, and her hair was long and wild. She had a knife tucked in each boot. There was a screecher strapped to her thigh. She had a burner in one hand and a blaster in the other, and she was firing at a bunch of soldiers, so I knew with a single glance that she was a Pirate Queen.

“Help me,” she gasped, “and everything I have is yours!”

Well, it’s difficult to refuse an offer like that even under normal circumstances. And when a whole lot of uniformed scum are trying to kill the prettiest lady you’ve ever seen, why, if you’re any kind of gentleman, you simply have to do the right thing and take some kind of action.

So I pulled my burner and fired it at the floor right ahead of the soldiers. The tile melted and turned red-hot, and they skidded to a halt just before they ran onto it. I pulled the girl into the bar so that we were out of their line of fire, raced to the service exit, and soon found my way through the maze of corridors to my ship—and discovered that they hadn’t finished enriching the pile yet.

“That’s my ship over there!” panted the Pirate Queen, pointing to a nearby vessel.

We raced to it, and took off just before the soldiers caught up with us. As soon as we reached light speeds, she put the ship on autopilot and turned to me.

“I want to thank you for what you did back there,” she said.

“I was happy to be of assistance,” I told her. “Perhaps we should introduce ourselves. I’m Hurricane Smith.”

“Hurricane Smith?” she repeated. “I’ve heard about your exploits for years.”

“And you are …?”

“You may call me Xenobia.”

“That seems to be a popular name with Pirate Queens,” I said. “You’re the third one I’ve known to use it.”

“Really?” she said. “I’ve never met any other Pirate Queens. I thought I was the only one.”

Now, I’m pretty sure that Pirate Queens don’t have a union or a school yearbook or anything like that, but even so I should have latched onto the clue right there. But then she took a deep breath, which sent out waves and ripples and flutters all through her magnificent superstructure, and all other thoughts promptly vanished from my mind.

“Perhaps you’d like to join me in my private quarters and get comfortable?” she suggested.

I would have thought that the entire ship qualified as her private quarters, but I just nodded without taking my eyes off her bosom and followed her to her sleeping cabin.

And what a sleeping cabin it was! There was no bed, but the floor was covered with dozens of soft, thick furs, and the walls and ceiling were completely mirrored.

She stood in the middle of the cabin and turned to face me.

“You know, Hurricane Smith,” she said, “I could use a man like you.”

“I was hoping you’d say that,” I replied.

She chuckled, which sent still more ripples across her flesh. “I meant in my work.”

“What is your work?” I asked.

“Robbing space stations, holding up navy convoys, stealing precious gemstones, and eluding the gendarmes.”

“Standard Pirate Queen fare,” I noted.

“Well?” she said. “Will you join me?”

“As a full partner?”

“As a junior partner,” she replied. “Even the notorious Hurricane Smith can’t start at the top.”

“I’ll have to think about it,” I said.

She unhooked her bra and let it fall to the floor. “I’ll help you make up your mind,” she said.

“That’s very considerate of you,” I said, starting to slip out of my tunic.

“Considerate is my middle name,” she smiled, removing her g-string.

“I don’t suppose you’d consider removing all your weapons, too?”

“When I know you better.”

“How much better do you plan on knowing me?” I asked.

She walked over, put her arms around me, and pressed her body against me—well, as much as she could press against me with those magnificent bazooms in the way.

“You’d be surprised,” she whispered.

Well, not much we did for the next couple of hours actually surprised me, but it sure went a long way toward making me decide to become her junior partner.

It was when I woke up a little later that I realized that something was terribly wrong. I stood up and looked down at my Pirate Queen—and saw that her breasts were now a few feet long, kind of flat, and covered half the floor of the little cabin.

“What the hell’s going on here?” I bellowed.

She woke up right away, tried to sit up, couldn’t get her balance, and finally realized what had happened. Instantly her breasts resumed their original shape.

“Good morning, my darling,” said Xenobia.

“What are you?” I demanded.

“Don’t you remember?” she said with a smile. “I’m your senior partner.”

“What else are you?” I insisted. “I’ll make it real easy. Let’s start with what you’re not, which is a woman.”

“That didn’t make any difference to you a few hours ago,” she pointed out.

“A few hours ago I was blinded by your beauty,” I said. “Or what seemed to be your beauty.”

“Didn’t you enjoy making love to me?” she asked.

“That’s got nothing to do with it!” I yelled. “I want to know what you are!”

“I told you—I’m a Pirate Queen.”

“But what kind of a Pirate Queen?”

“The beautiful kind. Isn’t that the kind you’re attracted to?”

“I’m getting very confused here,” I said.

She sighed, and even though I knew that she lacked a certain degree of—how shall I say it?—structural integrity, I just couldn’t help staring as her bosom rose and fell.

“All right,” she said. “I needed a partner. I saw you at the space station and recognized you from your Wanted posters, so I shot a soldier and arranged for you to rescue me.”

“How did you know I’d be willing to risk life and limb rescuing a woman I’d never seen before?”

“Because every member of your race and gender is a sucker for these,” she said—and as the words left her mouth, her bosoms reached out across the room and caressed my cheeks. I was torn between kissing them and running hell-for-leather to the far end of the ship, and the only reason I didn’t choose the latter course of action is because I had a horrible premonition that her breasts could reach that far and I didn’t want to find out for sure. So I chose a middle course of action and just stood there shaking like a leaf.

“Oh,” she said sympathetically. “Have I scared you?”

“Not yet,” I said. “But you’re getting awfully close. What do you really look like?”

“What difference does it make?” she responded. “I can always look like this for you.”

“God, I hope not!” I said devoutly.

She smiled and almost blushed. “I forgot,” she said, and suddenly her breasts contracted until they were merely E cups again.

“So, Hurricane Smith,” she said, “will you ride the spaceways with me, plunder the wealthy, and share my sexual favors?”

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“But why not?” she asked. “Has any human woman ever pleased you more?”

“No,” I admitted. “But every last one of them has upset me less.”

“But I can be human for you!” she insisted.

“Every time I grab you,” I said, “which figures to be pretty damned often, I’d always wonder exactly what I was really grabbing.”

“If it feels good—and I assure you it feels good to me, too—why worry about it?”

“A man’s got to worry about something,” I explained. “If I hook up with you, I figure I’ll have enough worries to last me a couple of lifetimes and maybe part of a third.”

“I’m sorry you feel that way,” she said. “We could have been a wonderful team.”

“Is that a real tear rolling down your cheek,” I asked, “or are you just putting on a show for me?”

“Last night was the show,” she replied mournfully. “The tear is for real.”

And that’s the way I’ll always remember her—standing there, the most beautiful creature I’ve ever seen (except for you, my dear), with a real tear rolling down her face.

But it was a useful experience, for as time went by I realized that appearances aren’t very important, and if I hadn’t discovered that I might still be a bachelor searching futilely for love instead of a happily married man.

Suddenly, a tear appeared on Langtry Lily’s cheek, and she leaned over and planted a long, tender kiss on Hurricane Smith’s lips.

“Now that’s right touching,” said Catastrophe Baker.

“It sure is,” agreed the Reverend Billy Karma. “It almost makes you forget she’s a godless insect that lays eggs and probably eats her young.”

He was lucky he leaned over to blow his nose just then, because a stream of acid saliva from Langtry Lily shot out right to where his head had been.

“I knew a lady insect once,” said O’Grady. He turned to Langtry Lily. “Not of your species, ma’am. She was a brilliant silver in color, and had a number of long sinewy arms, and the biggest, reddest multi-faceted eyes you ever saw. She showed up at the casino out by Mutare II one night and started winning everything in sight. Took me hours to figure out how she was doing it.”

“The eyes, right?” said Little Mike.

“That’s what I thought originally,” answered O’Grady. “But it wasn’t. It was those damned antennae. She was getting signals from another insect that was standing maybe twenty feet behind us.”

“What did you do—tar and feather her, or cut off her antennae?” asked the Reverend Billy Karma.

“Neither,” said O’Grady. “All we did was take our money back and burn a big red ‘A’ into her carapace.”

“Why?”

“I take it you’re not much on the classics,” said O’Grady. “We figured any time she entered a human gambling establishment, the players would take one look at that ‘A,’ figure she was an alien Hester out for a good time, and if their name wasn’t Hurricane Smith they’d head for the hills.”

Big Red looked at his computer’s holoscreen. “Einstein says he likes that idea.”

“That’s because Einstein is better read than the Reverend here,” said O’Grady.

“I don’t read anything but the Good Book,” said Billy Karma defensively. “Especially the begattings.”

“You sound like you’re into genealogy,” said Achmed of Alphard.

“He’s into begatting,” Sinderella corrected him.

“Where does the Lord say you can’t have a little fun?” demanded Billy Karma.

“How about Genesis?” suggested Hellfire Van Winkle.

“Besides that!”

“That wasn’t enough?” said Van Winkle. “He threw Adam and Eve out of Eden.”

“Well, I got my own theories about that,” said Billy Karma. “You know what I think Eve was really nibbling on instead of an apple?”

“I don’t want to hear this,” said Sinderella.

“I don’t even want to think about it,” added Van Winkle.

“If God didn’t want you educated, He wouldn’t have put me here to preach to you,” said Billy Karma. “I’ve been thinking for some time now that the Bible needs a complete rewrite.”

“I can see it now,” said Little Mike Picasso. “The Old Testament—The Good Parts Version, by the Reverend Billy Karma.”

“Sounds good to me,” said the Reverend.

“Does anything that’s filthy or in terrible taste ever sound bad to you?” asked Sinderella.

“Insufficient information,” said Billy Karma.

“What are you talking about?”

“You let me nibble up your thigh and down your belly and then I’ll know if you taste good or terrible.”

“I don’t know how to break this to you, Reverend,” said Little Mike, “but there’s a difference between women with good taste and women who taste good.”

“Not to me there isn’t,” said Billy Karma devoutly.

“I can believe that,” said Van Winkle.

“I think maybe you’d better pray to the Lord to send you a restraining bolt,” said Sinderella.

“You’re into restraints, are you?” asked the Reverend.

Sinderella looked like she was going to reply, but then she turned her back on him in disgust.

“No doubt about it, the Lord had plenty of foresight,” said Billy Karma, still staring at her. “Look at that beautiful round bottom. God put most of the fun stuff on the flip side, but He remembered to leave a little something back here for a lonely man of the cloth to admire.”

“Kind of single-minded tonight, ain’t you?” said Baker.

“Single-minded is an understatement,” agreed the Gravedigger.

“Hey, Reverend,” said Baker as another explosion lit up the night sky, “maybe you’d better have a quick talk with the Lord and tell Him to leave women alone and concentrate on ending the war.”

“Not His department,” said the Reverend Billy Karma. “God made women. Men make wars. Well, men and godless aliens.”

“You know, any minute now we’re going to take offense at that,” said Sitting Horse.

“You wouldn’t want to go to heaven anyway,” said Billy Karma. “I figure if there actually are any aliens there, they all live in the low-rent district and don’t get choice tee times at the golf course.”

“I don’t know why,” said Hellfire Van Winkle, “but I get the definite impression that it takes less education to become a preacher these days than when I was growing up.”

“Mostly it takes a bible, a black coat, and a personal relationship with the Good Lord,” agreed Billy Karma.

“It sure as hell doesn’t take any knowledge of Old Earth’s literature,” put in Big Red. “Hell, even I knew who Hester was.”

“He probably thinks the House of Usher is where you train robots to guide dirty old men to their seats at a strip show,” said Little Mike Picasso.

“You mean it ain’t?” said Billy Karma.

“Just a minute here,” said Catastrophe Baker. “Are you saying that the House of Usher is fictional?”

Little Mike stared at him. “Are you saying it isn’t?”

“I’ve been there,” said Baker.

“I’m talking about a story called The Fall of the House of Usher,” said Little Mike.

“Am I in it?” asked Baker.

“No.”

“Well, I should be,” he said. “Because I was there when it fell.”

“Somehow I don’t think we’re talking about the same place,” said Little Mike.

“How many Houses of Usher could there have been?” asked Baker.

“Tell me about yours and then I’ll give you an answer.”

Catastrophe Baker and the Fall of the House of Usher

It all took place on Moebius IV (began Baker). I’d just finished hunting Demoncats. They’re currently the most endangered large predators in the galaxy—they weren’t endangered at all when I started, but one of ’em charged me early on and got my blood up—and I’d decided that I owed myself a little R&R, except that I called it F&F.

I’d heard that the best whorehouse in that sector was the one that Ugly Jim Usher ran on Moebius, so I headed there to kind of reward myself for a job well done. Turns out that most of what I’d heard was right. Ugly Jim ran a hell of an operation, and since he’s a pretty broad-minded soul (no pun intended) he stocked it with the best-looking females from most of the better-looking races in the galaxy. There were human women, and Balatai women, and even a couple of Pelopennes (though they didn’t hold a candle to you, Mrs. Smith, ma’am). I think the strangest may have been the one they called the Spider Lady: she had eight legs evenly spaced around her body, but except for that she looked as human as any woman there.

“Uh … I hate to interrupt,” said Hurricane Smith. “But if she had eight legs, how many … ah …?””

“Four,” said Baker.

“Amazing!” said Big Red.

“And how did you … uh …?"” said Smith.

“Pretty much the usual way,” answered Baker. “Except that four of us could do it at once and never get in each other’s way. Well, as long as she stayed on her feet, that is.”

“Fascinating,” said Smith. “I wonder if—”

Langtry Lily uttered a warning hiss.

“It’s merely academic interest, my dear,” said Smith.

She leaned over and whispered something to him.

“I wouldn’t dream of it!” he said in injured tones. “In fact, I’ve already forgotten that she can be found on Moebius IV.”

Another hiss.

“I misspoke,” said Smith with a little tremor of desperation in his voice. “I’ve already forgotten that she can be found on MacBeth IX.”

She stared at him expressionlessly.

“Reggie!” he hollered. “Some more sugar for the lady!” As Reggie brought out another pound of sugar, Smith turned to Baker. “Go on with your story.”

“You sure?” asked Baker, trying to suppress a grin of amusement. “I mean, I’d be just as happy to wait until she dissolves you or rips you to shreds.”

“No, go right ahead,” said Smith uncomfortably. “You were listing all the alien prostitutes?”

“I was telling about my memorable experience in Jim Usher’s whorehouse,” Baker corrected him. “The rest was just scene-setting and window-dressing.”

“It was?” said Smith, obviously disappointed.

“Right. Are you still interested, or should I quit?”

Smith took a quick peek at Langtry Lily, who looked like she was ready to spit in his eye if he came up with the wrong answer.

“No, I’m dying to hear it,” said Smith.

“Good,” said Baker, still grinning. “I’d hate to think all this talk of alien whores was boring you.”

“Just tell the fucking story!” bellowed Smith.

I wish that was the kind of story it was (said Baker): a fucking story, that is.

Though, to be honest, it certainly started out that way.

Like I was saying, I stopped by Ugly Jim Usher’s place, downed a couple of pints of 150-proof whiskey imported from New Kentucky, and gave the ladies the once-over to see who I was going to honor with my patronage.

And all of a sudden, damned if I didn’t think one of them Demoncats had done my retina some serious damage, enough to make me see triple, because standing in front of me were three of the sexiest ladies I’d ever laid eyes on—and if you’d have put a gun to my head I couldn’t have spotted the tiniest difference between them. I just stood there staring at them with my jaw hanging open until all three of ’em started giggling.

“Don’t feel embarrassed,” said the one on the left. “Everyone reacts like that the first time.”

“Well, I can see why,” I said. “I could have sworn that two of you were holographs of the third.”

“Oh, we’re real, all right,” said the one on the right.

“Want us to prove it?” asked the one in the middle with a wicked grin.

“Why not?” I responded. “In a long lifetime filled with nothing but interesting adventures, this sounds like it could be the most interesting of all. By the way, have you girls got names?”

“I’m Fatima,” said the one on the left.

“I’m Fifi,”said the one on the right.

“And I’m Felicity,” said the one in the middle. “We’re the DeMarco Triplets.”

“Identical in every way,” said Fatima.

“I got no problem believing it,” I said.

“Wait’ll you take us to bed,” promised Fifi. “You’ll find that I’m much more identical than they are.”

“That’s a pretty daring challenge,” I noted.

“Are you up to it?” asked Felicity meaningfully.

“I been up to it (so to speak) since the second I laid eyes on the three of you,” I told her.

I didn’t feel the need to waste any more time talking, so I went over and told Ugly Jim that we needed a small room with a big bed.

“You want all three of them?” he asked.

“Sure do,” I said.

“At the same time?”

“Relatively,” I said.

He named a price that I thought was five times too high. I paid it without an argument and off the four of us went.

Well, I won’t describe the next couple of hours, since my pal Hurricane would probably find it boring, and the rest of you might just faint dead away from excitement—but I will say that it was one of the more satisfying experiences of my life, to say nothing of being one of the most exhausting.

In fact, the more I thought about it the more I couldn’t see no reason why we shouldn’t all get satisfied and exhausted every night for the rest of our lives, so before we left the room I asked all three of ‘em to marry me, and damned if they didn’t say Yes.

Ugly Jim was only too happy to accommodate me when I told him I was buying drinks for everyone in the house, males and females, humans and aliens alike, to celebrate my good fortune. It was only when I told him what my good fortune was that he hit the roof and looked like he was having a seizure, or at the very least conniption fits.

“You can’t do this to me!” he screamed. “They’re my three biggest earners!”

“I’m not doing it to you,” I pointed out. “I’m doing it to them.”

“It’s out of the question!”

“I don’t recall asking you no questions,” I said. “But since I’m a reasonable man, name your price and I’ll buy ’em from you.”

“I don’t sell human flesh,” he said with dignity. “I just rent it.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’m renting ’em for the next fifty years.”

“I absolutely refuse,” said Ugly Jim. “The business can’t survive without them.”

“Sure it can,” I said. “I’m going out to my ship to get my bankroll. Have a number ready when I get back, and we’ll haggle over it for a while, and I’ll pay you too much, and we’ll all be happy, especially me and the DeMarco Triplets.”

Before he could say anything, I went to my ship, hit the combination to the safe, and brought out a wad of bills that would have choked a dinosaur. I decided to give Ugly Jim a few minutes to calm down, so I took a drink from my private stash, counted to five hundred, and finally returned to the whorehouse.

Ugly Jim was waiting for me with a triumphant grin on his face.

“I got some money to share with you,” I said. “You look like you got a joke you want to share with me.”

“It’s a joke, all right,” said Ugly Jim. “And it’s on you.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The DeMarco girls,” he said. “They ain’t going anywhere.”

“I’ll believe it when I hear it from them,” I said. “Where are they?”

“In their rooms upstairs,” he said.

I was up the stairs in two giant leaps, and a second later I busted down the first door I came to. A couple of seconds after that I was apologizing mighty profusely, more to the guy who was tied to the cross than to the nun who was beating him with her rosary beads.

I busted down two more doors before I came to the first of the DeMarco girls. She was lying on her bed, and her right hand was chained to a spike that had been driven deep into the wall behind the headboard.

“I’ll get you out of this, Fifi,” I said, walking over to her.

“I’m Felicity,” she replied.

“How the hell am I supposed to know the difference?” I asked her.

She pulled my head down to her lips. “I’m the one who …”

Well, once she recalled the event to me, I knew she was Felicity, all right.

Anyway, I put my foot against the wall, grabbed the chain with both hands, and pulled—and nothing happened.

Now, it ain’t usual for me to pull on something and not get instant results. I pulled again, even harder, and the spike still stayed in the wall.

So I figured if I couldn’t pull the spike out of the wall, I’d just have to pull the wall down around the spike. I covered Felicity with a blanket so she wouldn’t get cut by no flying debris, and then I balled up my fists and started pounding on the wall in a regular rhythm. It only took about ten or twelve blows to shatter the whole wall, and suddenly the spike was dangling from the chain, and I uncovered Felicity and told her that I’d find a way to get it off her wrist once we were on my ship.

I busted down three more doors (and saw some mighty unusual and memorable sights) before I came to Fatima, who was in the very same fix. I knew better than to pull at the chain, so I just started hammering at the wall, and sure enough, it crumbled in about twenty seconds.

By the time I hit Fifi’s room, I’d done some pretty serious damage to the place, what with having busted down two walls and maybe a dozen doors. I spent three or four minutes pounding on her wall when I realized that it wasn’t like the other two, that Fifi’s spike had been driven through the wall into a main support beam. Even after the wall fell down, the spike was still stuck in that damned beam. Now, a lot of men would have been discouraged, but that just got my dander up, and I began pounding harder and faster, and finally the beam split in half, and Fifi was free.

I gathered the three girls and started down the stairs with them when the whole building began shaking. We just made it out the door before it collapsed—and that was the Fall of the House of Usher.”

“What happened to the DeMarco Triplets?” asked the Bard.

“I’m a man of my word,” said Baker with dignity. “I married ’em.”

“You’ve got three wives?”

“I got six wives,” replied Baker. “Unhappily, Fifi, Fatima and Felicity ain’t among ’em no longer.”

“What happened?”

“I guess our love life must have been a little too rigorous for them,” said Baker. “They finally ran off with some salesman who was pushing potency cures.”

“You mean impotency cures,” said the Bard.

“I know what I mean. Somehow he’d become convinced that people wasted even more time on sex than on eating, and he was bound and determined to put an end to it.”

“And he actually made a living selling this cure?”

“Nope,” said Baker. “But he sure as hell collected a lot of women.” He paused. “Hell, now that I think of it, maybe I’ll go into the potency cure business myself one of these days.”

“When you come up with a potency cure, give it to the Reverend,” said Sinderella. “I’ll pay for it.”

“Hell, you could cure my potency,” said Billy Karma. “For a few minutes, anyway.”

“Uh … I don’t want to be the bearer of bad tidings,” interrupted Hellfire Van Winkle, “but either morning has come a few hours early or they’re lighting up the sky with one helluva lot of explosions.”

“Our sky?” asked Three-Gun Max.

“Just whose sky did you think I was talking about?” demanded Van Winkle.

“I meant, you’re sure it’s Henry II and not Henry III or IV?”

“I can’t even see the other Henrys,” said Van Winkle. “But don’t take my word for it. Stick your head out the window and tell me what you see.”

Max walked over to the window. “What I see,” he said, looking out, “is a woman walking toward the Outpost.”

“Is she alone?” asked Baker.

“Seems to be.”

“What does she look like?”

“Wait another ten seconds and you can see for yourself,” said Max. He turned to Hellfire Van Winkle. “By the way, the sky is dark again.”

“Well, it was bright as day a minute ago,” said Van Winkle defensively.

Max was about to reply, but just then the door opened and the woman walked in. She was tall and lean, and she had a hard look about her eyes. Her hair was kind of short, she didn’t use any make-up, and there was just something about her that said if Catastrophe Baker or the Reverend Billy Karma or any of the others tried anything fancy with her they’d be hobnobbing with God or Satan a couple of seconds later.

Suddenly, Achmed of Alphard stood up. “It’s you!” he exclaimed.

“Hello, Achmed,” said the woman. “What are you doing out here on the Frontier?”

“Hiding from God, Jasmine Kabella, and the tax collectors,” answered Achmed. “Not necessarily in that order.”

“You gonna introduce us to your friend?” interrupted Baker.

“Certainly,” said Achmed, though most of us had already guessed her identity. “Ladies, gentlemen, and aliens—this is the Cyborg de Milo.”

Big Red’s computer came to life. “Einstein says hello again.”

“Hello right back at him,” said the Cyborg de Milo.

“What brings you to the Outpost?” asked Achmed.

“A better ship than the ones that were chasing me,” she answered.

“Chasing you?” repeated Little Mike Picasso. “You mean we might be getting some visitors at any minute?”

“No, that’s not what I mean at all.” She paused for a moment. “A trio of alien ships took after me when I entered the system. I’d heard about this place, so I headed for Henry II with the three of them hot on my tail. What they didn’t know is that my ship’s got the latest generation of heat shield on its nose. I plunged into the atmosphere at a steep angle, one that produced a lot of friction with the air molecules. They followed me, and a minute later all three of them went up in the brightest flames you ever saw.”

“See?” said Van Winkle triumphantly. “I told you it looked like daylight out there!”

“What’s the situation?” asked Little Mike. “How’s the war progressing?”

“What war?”

“What do you mean, what war? The one between the aliens and the Navy.”

“I didn’t see any sign of the Navy,” she replied. “Either they’ve all been blown to pieces, or else they cut and ran. Either way, the only ships up there are alien ships.” She walked over to the bar and signaled to me. “Bring me a beer.”

“Yes, Ms. de Milo,” I said.

“And call me Venus.”

“Coming right up, Venus,” I said, and ordered Reggie to draw a tall one. When he handed it to her, she downed it as fast as Catastrophe Baker ever drained a glass, then wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.

“Thanks,” she said. “I needed that.”

“Killing aliens can be mighty thirsty work,” agreed Baker.

“I plan to kill a lot more of them,” said Venus grimly.

“There’s no hurry,” said Baker. “Sit down, relax, and have another beer. They’ll still be there when you’re done.”

“Doesn’t it bother you that a bunch of beings you’ve never met before are out there plotting to kill you?” demanded Venus.

“Hell, if I ever woke up one morning and there weren’t a bunch of beings I didn’t know plotting to kill me, I just might keel over and die from shock.” He smiled at her. “Catastrophe Baker at your service, ma’am.”

“You’re Catastrophe Baker?” she said. “I’ve been hearing stories about you since I was a little girl!”

“Every last one of ’em true,” Baker assured her. “Except for them what ain’t.”

“It will be an honor to fight side by side with you against the aliens,” she said.

“Well, I do a lot of things side by side with women of all types, shapes and sizes,” said Baker. “But fighting aliens is one of the things I do best alone.”

“Side by side or on our own, we’ll decimate the bastards!” she said enthusiastically.

“Maybe we’ll just invite ’em in for a drink and try to find out what got ’em so all-fired riled in the first place,” said Baker.

Venus threw back her head and laughed. “You’ve got a wonderful sense of humor, Catastrophe!”

“I know I have,” he replied. “But I ain’t taken it out of mothballs yet today.”

“Maybe we should give some thought to facing off against the aliens,” said Big Red.

“Are you in that much of a hurry to meet your maker, son?” asked the Reverend Billy Karma. “Don’t count on sitting at His right hand if things go wrong. I was speaking to Him just this morning and He never mentioned you.” He turned to the room at large. “Leave us not rush foolishly into a situation that can be just as foolishly avoided.”

“Men!” muttered Sinderella disgustedly. “All talk and no action!”

“I keep offering you some action, honey,” said Billy Karma, “and you keep turning me down.”

“You should have said Yes to him,” interjected the Earth Mother. “The odds are he wouldn’t have done a damned thing about it.”

“Oh yeah?” Billy Karma shot back. “What makes you think so?”

“Experience.”

“You never had no experience with me.”

“I’ve had more than my share of experience with men, and I’ve come to the conclusion that you’re all a bunch of totally worthless blowhards.”

“I take exception to that remark!” snapped the Reverend.

“See? Sinderella was right—all talk and no action.”

“What kind of action do you want?” demanded Billy Karma. “I could knock your teeth out if that’d make you happy.”

“You try it, and ten seconds later you’ll know for sure if there’s an afterlife or not,” replied the Earth Mother.

The Reverend stared at her for a long moment, then decided not to find out if she was telling the truth.

“Ah, what would you know about action anyway?” he settled for saying.

“More than you, that’s for sure,” said the Earth Mother.

“Hah!”!” he responded. “Who’d ever want you?”

“Lots of men.”

“Name one.”

“Gladly,” said the Earth Mother. “Moses Jacoby Zanzabell.”

At the sound of the name, a hush fell over the Outpost.

“The Moses Jacoby Zanzabell?” asked the Reverend Billy Karma at last.

“There’s only one.”

“But he’s the richest man in the galaxy!”

“That’s right.”

“And he took a liking to you?”

“Liking is an understatement,” said the Earth Mother. “He wanted me so badly that he bought me.”

“This I gotta hear,” said the Reverend Billy Karma.

“Me, too,” said Max.

The Trillionaire’s Toy

You know (began the Earth Mother), I was a pretty good-looking woman 25 or 30 years ago. I realize it’s hard to believe now, but that’s because sooner or later gravity catches up with all of us. But back then, I was a knockout. I looked just like Sinderella, only I was blonde. (Or, at least, I was frequently blonde.)

Most people, when they heard about Moses Jacoby Zanzabell, who was the galaxy’s first and only trillionaire, couldn’t believe anyone could be so rich. I didn’t have any problem with that. I couldn’t believe anyone could be so ugly.

I was working at the Tower of Babel, a high-class brothel located on Green Cheese, a moon of Pirelli VII, when I first saw him. Oh, I knew who he was, all right; a man like that doesn’t exactly dwell in obscurity.

Anyway, he came into the place, left his bodyguards at the door, and spent a few minutes considering his choice—and then he selected me.

Now, not only was he the ugliest man I’d ever seen, but he was also in the running for the foulest-smelling one as well. So when he announced that he wanted to spend the night with me, I refused. This seemed to amuse him, because he was obviously not used to people denying him anything he wanted. He walked over to me, pulled out his wallet, and place a fat wad of banknotes in my hand.

“A million credits for one night,” he said with a smile—and I noticed that he needed dental work too.

“Not interested,” I said.

“But you work here!” he insisted. “You can’t say no to a paying customer.”

“I just did.”

“Well, it’s against the law for a business to advertise a service and then reject a legitimate offer.”

“Okay,” I said. “I quit.”

“Just a minute!” he said urgently. “No one’s ever turned me down before.”

“Consider it a learning experience,” I told him.

“I consider it stimulating beyond belief,” he admitted. “It’s a brand-new experience.”

“I’m not trying to stimulate you,” I said. “Just the opposite.”

“It’s not working,” he said. “Now, what’ll it take to make you change your mind?”

“Nothing you can say or do,” I told him.

“I didn’t get where I am by taking no for an answer,” he said, walking to the door. “I’ll be back.”

And sure enough, he was back the next night.

“All right,” he said, walking right up to me. “Let’s go.”

“Go where?” I asked.

“I own palaces all over the galaxy,” he said. “I just built one on New Fiji. I think we’ll go there.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” I said.

“Yes you are,” he said. “Check with the government.”

“What has the government got to do with it?” I demanded.

“They declared you a living monument in exchange for a ten million credit donation,” said Zanzabell. “Then, since they control the sale of all monuments, they agreed to let me purchase you for another forty million credits.” He smiled. “I own you.”

I had my lawyer check it out, and somehow it was all true. Now, I realize it seems crazy to spend fifty million credits for a woman—any woman—but as he explained it, he made more than that every ten seconds, so it didn’t seem quite as crazy to him.

So I went to New Fiji with him, and he showed me my room, which would have comfortably held two murderball fields and a race track. The bathroom could have held a small lake, and did sport an impressive waterfall. Zanzabell stopped at the door and told me he’d be by to pay me a visit in an hour.

I had barely finished exploring my new quarters when he showed up, carrying a bottle of Cygnian cognac. He didn’t smell any better than usual, so I suggested we drink first. He filled our glasses, and he drained his while he was ogling me, and before I’d even taken a sip of my own drink, he’d made it halfway through his second glass.

He started slurring his words by the third glass, and I saw he had trouble focusing his eyes by the fourth. I kept him talking until he’d finished the whole damned bottle. When he finally decided it was time to take me to bed, he stood up, reached a hand in my direction, and collapsed onto the floor.

I dragged him to the bed, managed to lift him onto it, and took a long, luxurious bath. When I was through, I dialed up a good book on my computer and spent the next few hours reading it, until I heard him starting to stir in the bed.

“Where are you?” he mumbled.

“Right here,” I said, walking over to him.

“I can’t remember a thing,” he said.

“I remember everything,” I said. “You were fabulous!”

“I was?”

“The best I’ve ever had,” I assured him. “Don’t you remember?”

“Ah, yes,” he said. “Now it all comes back to me. I really was fabulous, wasn’t I?” He got shakily to his feet. “I’ll see you again tonight.”

And when he came to my room, I saw to it that we had a repeat performance of the previous night.

The third night he brought drugs along with the liquor. I pretended to take them while he used up the entire supply.

This went on for almost two months. Each night he would get so drunk or stoned that he passed out, and each morning I would tell him how wonderful he’d been in bed and how much he had pleased me, and he always pretended to remember rather than admit that he couldn’t recall a single thing.

I realized that I couldn’t keep this up forever, so after sixty days had passed, I asked for my freedom.

He refused.

Now, I could have tried to escape, but he had guards everywhere, and I’d never have made it to the front gate. And I could have tried to win my freedom in the courts, but my lawyer assured me that it could take years. I could have waited for some hero like Catastrophe Baker or Hurricane Smith to rescue me, but the fact was that I didn’t know any heroes back then.

So I decided to take advantage of the same male psychology that had kept me safe thus far.

The next time I saw Zanzabell, I threw my arms around him, apologized for being so foolish as to ask for my freedom, and swore my eternal love for him. He disengaged himself and looked very uncomfortable.

“You’re all I want!” I panted. “All I’ll ever want! Once a day isn’t enough anymore! I want you to visit me in my room at least three times a day—and I’ll kill any woman who tries to stop you!”

“Nobody gives me orders!” he snapped. “Now back away!”

“But you’re all I live for!” I told him. “You’re even better in bed than you are in business, and I won’t share you with anyone!”

He suddenly looked like a trapped animal.

“Get away from me!” he said.

“Never!” I cried, kneeling down and grabbing his legs.

Well, he had his men pull me away and lock me in my room, and every day for the next week I repeated my performance, and he kept looking more and more like a trapped animal as the week wore on, and finally he just ordered his guards to give me my freedom and return me to the Tower of Babel.

I cashed in all the jewels he had given me in exchange for the sexual favors he was sure he’d gotten, and used the proceeds to buy my own brothel. Thanks to my knowledge of the male of the species, it was a remarkable success.

“So he never once got you into bed?” asked Sinderella.

“That’s right,” said the Earth Mother.

“If the Reverend doesn’t calm down, we have to have a long talk.”

“What the hell is going on?” demanded the Cyborg de Milo angrily.

“I don’t think I understand the question, ma’am,” said Catastrophe Baker.

“There’s a war out there! Aliens have decimated the Navy. They’ve already landed on Henrys IV and V, and they’re headed for Henry II. And all anyone wants to do is talk!”

“That’s not quite all we want to do, honey,” said the Reverend Billy Karma.

“You lay a finger on me and I’ll lay one on you,” said Venus in a threatening tone, “and we’ll see who has the more potent finger.” She turned to Baker and Smith. “I can understand the rest of these clowns, but you two are bona fide heroes. Why are you still sitting around this place instead of going out there and wiping out those alien scum?”

“What’s your hurry?” asked Smith. “No one’s shooting at the Outpost yet.”

“Right,” added Baker. “It’s been my experience that there ain’t no problem so urgent today that it won’t be even more urgent tomorrow.”

“Besides,” said Bet-a-World O’Grady, “everyone knows that violence is the last resort of the incompetent.”

“The competent don’t wait that long,” said Venus contemptuously.

“I never yet saw a war that was worth rushing into,” said Smith.

“Right,” agreed Baker. “If this war can’t stick around until we’re ready to fight it, it wasn’t worth the effort in the first place.”

The Cyborg de Milo got to her feet and walked to the door.

“To hell with all of you!” she said. “There’s vermin out there that needs defenestrating! I’ll do the job alone if I have to!”

She stalked out of the Outpost and headed back to her ship.

“I never saw anyone so goddamned anxious to get her head blown off,” said Three-Gun Max.

“Lot of guts, though,” opined the Gravedigger.

“Good-looking broad, too,” added the Reverend Billy Karma.

“Fine,” said Sinderella. “Chase her for a while.”

“She’s off to fight the aliens,” said Billy Karma. “Just how crazy do I look?”

“Do you want a frank answer or a friendly one?” asked Sinderella.

“I withdraw the question,” said the Reverend uncomfortably.

“That’s a mighty brave lady facing mighty long odds,” said Smith. He looked over at Baker. “You think we ought to go with her?”

“I got room for a couple more drinks yet,” answered Baker. “Maybe by then they’ll have taken a shot at us and we’ll have a real reason to fight.”

“Yeah,” said Smith thoughtfully. “I suppose you’re right.”

“He’s wrong.”

It was a voice no one had ever heard before.

“Who said that?” I demanded.

Reggie, my robot bartender, rolled over to me. “I did, Tomahawk.”

“You?” I exclaimed. “I didn’t know you could talk.”

“I’ve always been able to,” said Reggie.

“But you’ve been tending bar here since the day we opened and you’ve never said a word!”

“I never had anything to say until now.”

“And now you do?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said. “I’ve been listening to everyone’s stories, and now I’ve got one of my own to tell.”

“We’re all ears,” said Baker.

“It doesn’t have a title,” said Reggie, “because I am just a robot, and not creative like the rest of you. So with your permission, I will just call it Reggie’s Story.”

Reggie’s Story

Once upon a time (said Reggie) there was a gathering place for the most extraordinary people in the galaxy. It attracted heroes and bandits, artists and athletes, ministers, geniuses, prostitutes, bounty hunters, gamblers, even aliens. Since I am a robot and haven’t been programmed for creativity, let’s call it the Outpost for lack of a better name.

Unique people came to the Outpost to drink, to tell a story or two, and mainly to mingle with other very special people. It was a haven for them, a place to hide from the mundane and the commonplace, from the fawning adulation and the irrational resentment of the populace at large.

And because they were extraordinary people, they sometimes forgot that there was a galaxy of normal people out there, a galaxy that needed the kind of men and women who were drawn to the Outpost.

One day an alien fleet entered the system. The Navy tried to stand against them, but was destroyed. There was a moment, a single instant in time, when the heroes of the Outpost might have turned the tide of battle, might have driven the aliens not only from the system but from the entire galaxy. But instead of doing what they were born to do, they talked and they drank and they talked some more, and then the moment was gone. The aliens took advantage of their lethargy to destroy the Outpost and everyone in it, and within five years the entire Monarchy had fallen beneath their onslaught.

That’s the story. It of course has nothing to do with this Outpost or these heroes.

Thank you for listening.

Catastrophe Baker got to his feet.

“All right, Reggie,” he said, walking to the door. “I was going out there anyway.”

Reggie didn’t answer.

“Did you hear me?” said Baker.

Still no answer.

“What’s the matter with him?”

“He only talks when he’s got something to say,” said Little Mike Picasso.

“And now he’s said it,” added Nicodemus Mayflower.

Gravedigger Gaines got up. “I’ll walk you out to the ships,” he said to Baker.

“You ain’t leaving me behind!” said the Reverend Billy Karma. “Me and the Lord got to protect that little cyborg lady.”

Hurricane Smith turned to Langtry Lily. “I really should go with them.”

She whispered something to him.

“Certainly, my dear,” said Smith. “I’ll be happy to have you come along.”

In another minute, Hellfire Van Winkle and Little Mike Picasso and Sahara del Rio and Sinderella and Nicodemus Mayflower and Argyle and Bet-a-World O’Grady and Sitting Horse and Crazy Bull and the Earth Mother and Achmed of Alphard and Silicon Carny all started making their way to their ships.

“What about you?” Max asked Willie the Bard.

“Somebody’s got to wait here and write down the survivors’ stories,” said the Bard.

“If there are any survivors,” said Max. He turned to Big Red. “You going or staying?”

“I’m going,” he said. “That is, if I can leave my computer with Tomahawk.”

“For safe-keeping?” I asked.

“For communicating with Einstein,” said Big Red, indicating the blind genius who sat alone at his table. “His brain may prove to be the difference between victory and defeat.”

He tapped out a good-bye to Einstein, then handed me the computer and walked out the door.

“How about you, Max?” I asked.

“Oh, I’m going off to slaughter aliens,” he said. “There never was any question about it. But I see about half a dozen unfinished drinks sitting on various tables, and it’d be criminal to pour them out.”

He began walking from table to table, downing all the half-empty glasses.

“Protect her, Max,” said Reggie.

“Her?”

“The Cyborg de Milo,” said Reggie. “She’s half robot. I feel a remarkable affinity toward her.”

“You got the hots for a lady cyborg?” asked Max.

“Just do what I asked.”

“If half of what we heard about her is true, it makes more sense for her to protect me,” said Max.

“Please,” said Reggie in almost human tones.

Max stared at him for a long moment, then nodded. “Okay, Reggie—you’ve got it.”

“Thank you, Max,” said Reggie.

“Remember this the next time Tomahawk tells you to water my drink.”

Then Max went out to his ship, and the Bard, Reggie and I were alone again, except for Einstein. We fell silent, each wondering how such a mismatched bunch of heroes would fare against the alien invaders.

I had a premonition that we didn’t have long to wait before we learned the answer.