He chuckled at that thought. More than once he’d imagined himself as a woman, wondering what it would really be like, envious as far as it was possible for him to envy, because a lovely woman with his brain would have the universe by the tail, as tight a hold as you could get on the tail of this wildly bucking universe.
He’d—
And then his hands tightened on the steering wheel and he sat up straight as if the new idea had been a hot poker rammed into him.
“Why didn’t I think of that sooner?” he said loudly. “My God, if she and I can come to some arrangement—and even if we can’t, I’ll find some way of forcing her—why, why, she is the perfect alibi! I never did confess that I killed her, not to the authorities, anyway. And they never found the slightest trace of her. So, if I come back to Earth with her and say, ‘Gentlemen, here is my wife. It’s as I told you, she’d disappeared, and it turns out that she had an accident, was hit on the head, lost her memory, and somehow found her way to Dante’s Joy... well, sure it sounds like a romantic novel, but remember such a thing does happen every now and then. What, you don’t believe it? Well, gentlemen, take her fingerprints, photograph the pattern of blood vessels in her retina, type her blood, give her an EEG...’ Ah ... !”
Ah, but wouldn’t all those identification marks be John Carmody’s if her cells were mirror-images of his? Possibly. But there was also the chance that she might have her own. He had seen the photographs of all of them, more than once, and while he couldn’t consciously reproduce them, it might be that his unconscious, which presumably held an exact file of them, would have reconstructed them in this Mary-thing.
But the EEG. If that gray pulse in her skull were his...
Well, sometimes the pattern did change if the brain had been injured, and that disconcerting feature might be the thing to verify her story. But what about the zeta wave? That would indicate she was a male, and one glance from the authorities or anybody else would be enough to disprove that. Their next step would be to hold her for examination. The only time the zeta wave changed its rhythm from female to masculine or vice versa was when the subject changed sex. And examination would show that she was female, that her hormones were predominantly female. Or would it? If her cells were mirror-images of his, then the genes would be masculine, and perhaps the hormones, too. And what about an internal search? Would it expose female organs or would she internally be his duplicate?
For a second he was downcast, but his racing brain seized upon another alibi. Of course! She’d been on Dante’s Joy during the seven days of the Chance, hadn’t she? And that meant that she would probably undergo some strange change, didn’t it? So, the discrepancies turned up in the laboratory, the brain waves, the hormones, even the contradictory internal organs, all these would be the result of her taking the Chance. She might attract considerable publicity, and she’d have to have a definite, unshakable story, but if she had his rigid will and iron nerves (and she would), then she’d stick it through and would demand her rights as a citizen of the Federation, and however reluctant, they’d have to allow her her freedom. After that, what a team she and John Carmody would make!
If she were inclined to be cooperative, though, why hadn’t she kept her telephone contact with him, arranged to meet him? If she had his brain, wouldn’t she have thought of the same thing he had?
He frowned and whistled softly through his teeth. There was always one possibility he couldn’t afford to ignore, even if he didn’t like it. Perhaps she was not a female John Carmody.
Perhaps she was Mary.
He’d have to find out when he met her. In the meantime, his original plans were changed only slightly, to adjust to the realities of the situation. The gun in his coat pocket would still be used to give him the original, the unique, thrill he had promised himself.
At this moment he dimly saw, through the purplish halo cast by a street lamp, a man and a woman. The woman was clothed, but the man was nude. They were locked in each other’s arms, the woman leaning against the iron pillar of the lamp, forced back by the man’s passionate strength. Forced? She was cooperating to the full.
Carmody laughed.
At that harsh sound, slapping the heavy silence of the night across the face, the man jerked his head upwards, gazed wide-eyed at the Earthman.
It was Skelder, but a Skelder scarcely recognizable. The long features seemed to have become even more elongated, the shaven skull had sprouted a light fuzz that looked golden even in this dark light, and the body, which had shed the monkish robes, showed a monstrous deformity of leg, a crookedness halfway between a man’s limb and an animal’s. Almost it was as if the bones had become flaccid and during the softness the legs had begun growing backwards. The naked feet themselves were extended from the legs so that he walked on tiptoe, like a ballerina, and they seemed to be covered with a light yellow shell that glistened like a hoof.
“The goat’s foot!” said Carmody loudly, unable to restrain his delight.
Skelder loosed the woman and turned completely towards Carmody, revealing in his face, the definitely caprine lines and in his body the satyr’s abnormal yet fascinating repulsiveness.
Carmody threw back his head to laugh again, but stopped, his mouth open, suddenly choking.
The woman was Mary.
While he stared at her, paralyzed, she smiled at him, waved her hand gaily, then took Skelder’s hand and started to walk off into the darkness with him, her hips swaying exaggeratedly in the age-old streetwalker’s rhythm. The effect was, or would have been in other circumstances, half-comical, because of the six-months fat around waist and buttocks.
At the same time, Carmody was struck with a feeling he’d never had before, a melting heart-beating, wild sensation directed towards Skelder, mixed with a cold laughter at himself. He felt a terrible invincible longing for the monstrous priest but knew also that he was standing off to one corner and laughing sneeringly at himself. And underneath this was a slowly rising tide, threatening to overwhelm in time the other feelings, a not- to-be denied lust for Mary, tinged with a horror at himself for that lust and the strange- ness of being ripped apart.
Against this host of invaders there was but one defense, and he took it immediately, springing out of the car, running around the hood, raising his gun, firing through the red mist that had replaced the purple.
Skelder, whinnying, threw himself to the ground and rolled over and over, a long bundle of gray-white laundry in the uncertain light, blown by the winds of desperation, disappearing in the darkness of the shadow of a tremendous flying buttress.
Mary whirled around, her open mouth a dark O in her pale face, her hands white birds imploring for mercy, then she dropped heavily.
And John Carmody staggered as he was struck one heavy blow after another in the chest and the stomach, felt his heart and viscera blasted apart, felt himself falling, falling, blood cascading all over him, falling into a darkness.
Someone had suddenly opened fire upon him, he thought, and this was the end and good-bye and good riddance and the universe had the last laugh...
And then he found he was awake, on his back, thinking these thoughts, staring straight up at the purple glove of the moon, a monstrous gauntlet flung into the sky by a monstrous knight. Come on, Sir John Carmody, fat little man clad in thin-skinned armor, enter the lists.