With a wrench the creature pulled the shifter from him. He screamed as the warmth left him, as he felt the slow, cold death return.
"Shut up, there. It's mine."
Pain began a slow throb through his body. "You don't understand," he said. "There is a Swarm Mother near your planet. "
The voice droned. Things crackled and rang in the container. "So Margaret, Sally says, she married this engineer from Boeing. And they pull down fifty grand a year, at least. Vacations in Hawaii, in St. Thomas, for crissake."
"Please listen." The pain was growing. He knew he had only a short time. "The Swarm Mother has already developed intelligence. She perceived that I had identified her, and struck at once."
"But she doesn't have to deal with my family, Sally says. She's over on the other goddamn coast, Sally says."
His body was weeping scarlet. "The next stage will be a first-generation Swarm. They will come to your planet soon, directed by the Swarm Mother. Please listen."
"So I got my mom onto the welfare and into this nice apartment, Sally says. But the welfare wants me and Margaret to give Mom an extra five dollars a month. And Margaret, she says, she doesn't have the money. Things are expensive in California, she says."
"You are in terrible danger. Please listen."
Metal thudded again. The voice was growing fainter, as with distance. "So how easy are things here, Sally says. I got five kids and two cars and a mortgage, and Bill says things are a dead end at the agency."
"The Swarm. The Swarm. Tell Jhubben!"
The other was gone, and he was dying. The stuff under him was soaking up his fluids. To breathe was an agony. "It is cold here," he said. Tears came from the sky, ringing against metal. There was acid in the tears.
JUBE: TWO
In the rooming house on Eldridge, the tenants were having a little Christmas party, and Jube was dressed as Santa Claus. He was a little short for the part, and the Santas in the store windows seldom had tusks, but he had the ho-ho-ho down pat.
The party was held in the living room on the first floor. It was early this year, because Mrs. Holland was flying out to Sacramento next week to spend the holidays with her grandson, and no one wanted to have the party without Mrs. Holland, who had lived in the building almost as long as Jube, and seen all of them through some rough times. Except for Father Fahey, the alcoholic Jesuit from the fifth floor, the tenants were all jokers, and none of them had a lot of money for Christmas gifts. So each of them bought one present, and all the gifts went into a big canvas mailbag, and it was Jube's annual assignment to jumble them around and hand them out. He loved the job. Human patterns of gift giving were endlessly fascinating and someday he intended to write a study of the subject, as soon as he finished his treatise on human humor.
He always started with Doughboy, who was huge and soft and mushroom white and lived with the black man they called Shiner in a second floor apartment. Doughboy outweighed Jube by a good hundred pounds, and he was so strong that he ripped the front door off its hinges at least once. a year (Shiner always fixed it). Doughboy loved robots and dolls and toy trucks and plastic guns that made noises but he broke everything within days, and the toys he really loved he broke within hours.
Jube had wrapped his present in silver foil, so he wouldn't give it to anyone else by mistake. "Oh, boy," Doughboy shouted when he'd ripped it open. He held it up for all of them to see. "A ray gun, oh boy, oh boy." It was a deep, translucent red-black, molded in lines that were smooth and sensual yet somehow disquieting, with a pencil-thin barrel. When his immense fingers wrapped around the grip and pointed it at Mrs. Holland, points of lights flickered deep inside, and Doughboy exclaimed in delight as the microcomputer corrected his aim.
"That's some toy," Callie said. She was a petite, fastidious woman with four useless extra arms.
"Ho ho ho," Jube said. "He won't be able to break it, either." Doughboy squinted at Old Mister Cricket and pressed the firing stud, making loud sizzling noises through his teeth. Shiner laughed. "Bet he do."
"You'd lose," Jube said. Ly'bahr alloy was dense and strong enough to withstand a small thermonuclear explosion. He'd worn the gun himself during his first-year in New York, but the harness had chafed, and after a while it had just gotten to be too much of a nuisance. Of course, Jube had removed the power cell before wrapping the gift for Doughboy, and a Network disrupter wasn't the sort of thing you could energize with a D battery.
Someone shoved an eggnog, liberally laced with rum and nutmeg, into his hand. Jube took a healthy swallow, grinned with pleasure, and got on with passing out the presents. Callie went next, and drew a coupon book for the neighborhood movie house. Denton from the fourth floor got a woolen knit cap, which he dangled from the end of his antlers, provoking general laughter. Reginald, whom the neighborhood children called Potato-head (though not to his face), wound up with an electric razor; Shiner got a long multicolored scarf. They looked at each other, laughed, and swapped.
He made his way around the room from person to person until everyone had a gift. The last present in the bag was usually his; this year, however, the bag was empty after Mrs.
Holland pulled out her tickets to Cats. Jube was a little nonplussed. It must have showed on his face. There was laughter all around. "We didn't forget about you, Walrusman," said Chucky, the spider-legged boy who ran messages down on Wall street. "This year we all chipped in, got you something special," Shiner added.
Mrs. Holland gave it to him. It was small, and storewrapped. Jube opened it carefully. "A watch!".
"That's no watch, Walrus-man, that's a chronometer!"
Chucky said. "Self-winding, and waterproof and shockproof too."
"That there watch tell you the date, and the phases of moon, shit, it tell you everything except when your girlfriend be on the rag," Shiner said.
"Shiner!" Mrs. Holland said in indignation.
"You've been wearing that Mickey Mouse watch for, well, for as long as I've known you," Reginald said. "We all thought it was time you had something a little more modern."
It was a very expensive watch. So, of course, there was nothing to be done but wear it. Jube unstrapped Mickey from his thick wrist, and slid on the brand-new chronometer with its flex-metal band. He put his old watch very carefully atop the mantelpiece, out of the way, and then made a round of the crowded room, thanking each of them.
Afterward, Old Mister Cricket rubbed his legs together to the tune of "Jingle Bells," and Mrs. Holland served the turkey she'd won in the church raffle (Jube pushed his portion around sufficiently so that it looked as though he'd eaten some), and there was more eggnog to be drunk, and a card game after coffee, and when it got very late Jube told some of his jokes. Finally he figured it was time for him to retire; he'd given his helper the day off, so he'd have to open the stand himself bright and early the next morning. But when he stopped by the mantel on his way out, Mickey was gone. "My watch!" Jube exclaimed.
"What you want with that old thing, now that you have the new one?" Callie asked him.
"It has sentimental value," Jube said.
"I saw Doughboy playing with it," Warts told him. "He likes Mickey Mouse."
Shiner had put Doughboy to bed hours ago. Jube had to go upstairs. They found the watch on Doughboy's foot, and Shiner was very apologetic. "I think he broke it," the old man said.
"It's very durable," Jube said.
"It's been making a noise," Shiner told him. "Buzzing away. Broke inside, I guess."
For a moment, Jube didn't understand what he was talking about. Then dread replaced confusion. "Buzzing? How long-?".
"A good while," Shiner said as he handed back the watch. From inside the casing came a high, thin whine. "You okay?"