"Let go." The words were muffled against the pressure of Charlie's lips. She bit suddenly, and Charlie leaped away with a wild cry, holding his lower lip, then looking at his fingers for blood.
"What's the idea, lady?" he demanded plaintively.
She said, "We agreed just a peck, is all. What were you starting there? You some kind of playboy or something? What am I surrounded with here? Playboy and the slime gods?"
Captain Garm flashed rapid alternations of blue and yellow. "Is it done? How long do we wait now?"
"It seems to me it must happen at once. Throughout all the universe, when you have to bud, you bud, you know. There's no waiting."
"Yes? After thinking of the foul habits you have been describing, I don't think I'll ever bud again. Please get this over with."
"Just a moment, Captain."
But the moments passed and the Captain's flashes turned slowly to a brooding orange, while Botax's nearly dimmed out altogether.
Botax finally asked hesitantly, "Pardon me, madam, but when will you bud?"
"When will I what?"
"Bear young?"
"I've got a kid."
"I mean bear young now."
"I should say not. I ain't ready for another kid yet."
"What? What?" demanded the Captain. "What's she saying?"
"It seems," said Botax, "she does not intend to have young at the moment."
The Captain's color patch blazed brightly. "Do you know what I think, Investigator? I think you have a sick, perverted mind. Nothing's happening to these creatures. There is no cooperation between them, and no young to be borne. I think they're two different species and that you're playing some kind of foolish game with me."
"But, Captain-" said Botax.
"Don't but Captain me," said Garm. "I've had enough. You've upset me, turned my stomach, nauseated me, disgusted me with the whole notion of budding and wasted my time. You're just looking for headlines and personal glory and I'll see to it that you don't get them. Get rid of these creatures now. Give that one its skins back and put them back where you found them. I ought to take the expense of maintaining Time-stasis all this time out of your salary."
"But, Captain-"
"Back, I say. Put them back in the same place and at the same instant of time. I want this planet untouched, and I'll see to it that it stays untouched." He cast one more furious glance at Botax. "One species, two forms, bosoms, kisses, cooperation, BAH- You are a fool, Investigator, a dolt as well and, most of all, a sick, sick, sick creature."
There was no arguing. Botax, limbs trembling, set about returning the creatures.
They stood there at the elevated station, looking around wildly. It was twilight over them, and the approaching train was just making itself known as a faint rumble in the distance.
Marge said, hesitantly, "Mister, did it really happen?"
Charlie nodded. "I remember it."
Marge said, "We can't tell anybody."
"Sure not. They'd say we was nuts. Know what I mean?"
"Uh-huh. Well," she edged away.
Charlie said, "Listen. I'm sorry you was embarrassed. It was none of my doing."
"That's all right. I know." Marge's eyes considered the wooden platform at her feet. The sound of the train was louder.
"I mean, you know, lady, you wasn't really bad. In fact, you looked good, but I was kind of embarrassed to say that."
Suddenly, she smiled. "It's all right."
"You want maybe to have a cup of coffee with me just to relax you? My wife, she's not really expecting me for a while."
"Oh? Well, Ed's out of town for the weekend so I got only an empty apartment to go home to. My little boy is visiting at my mother's." She explained.
"Come on, then. We been kind of introduced."
"I'll say." She laughed.
The train pulled in, but they turned away, walking down the narrow stairway to the street.
They had a couple of cocktails actually, and then Charlie couldn't let her go home in the dark alone, so he saw her to her door. Marge was bound to invite him in for a few moments, naturally.
Meanwhile, back in the spaceship, the crushed Botax was making a final effort to prove his case. While Garm prepared the ship for departure Botax hastily set up the tight-beam visiscreen for a last look at his specimens. He focused in on Charlie and Marge in her apartment. His tendril stiffened and he began flashing in a coruscating rainbow of colors. "Captain Garm! Captain! Look what they're doing now!" But at that very instant the ship winked out of Time-stasis.
Toward the end of the 1950s some rather unexpected changes took place in my life. My writing career had been constantly expanding. I had been driven on by my own compulsion and by editorial cooperation to undertake more and more tasks in greater and greater variety and by 1958 I found that I could no longer do the writing I wanted to do and maintain a full academic schedule.
The Medical School and I came to an amicable understanding, therefore. I kept my title (Associate Professor of Biochemistry, if you're curious) and continued to do odd jobs, like giving several lectures a year, sitting on committees, and so on. In the main, however, I became a full-time writer and relieved them of the trouble of paying me a salary.
For a while, it seemed to me that with virtually no academic duties and an infinite amount of time each and every day, I could finally do all the writing I had to do with plenty of time left over for fun and games.
It didn't work out. One of Parkinson's laws is: "Work expands to fill the time available." It did in my case. In no time at all, I found I was typing as assiduously full-time as I had previously been typing half-time and I quickly discovered the Asimov corollary to Parkinson's law: "In ten hours a day you have time to fall twice as far behind your commitments as in five hours a day."
The worst of it was that just about the time I was arranging to make myself a full-time writer, the Soviet Union sent up Sputnik I and the United States went into a kind of tizzy, and so did I.
I was overcome by the ardent desire to write popular science for an America that might be in great danger through its neglect of science, and a number of publishers got an equally ardent desire to publish popular science for the same reason. As a result of combining the two ardencies I found myself plunging into a shoreless sea in which I am still immersed.
The trouble is-it's all non-fiction. In the last ten years, I've done a couple of novels, some collections, a dozen or so stories, but that's nothing.
From the aggrieved letters I get, one would think I was doing this on purpose. I'm not. I try desperately not to lose touch with science fiction altogether. It's my life in a way that nothing else can quite be. There's my monthly article in F amp; SF, of course, but that's not quite the same thing.
And so it happens that each short individual piece of fiction I manage to get the typewriter to put out for me is dearer to me in the nowadays of my dimness, than in the old times when I did two dozen or more long ones a year.
"The Machine That Won the War" is one of those that serves as my periodic proof to the world of fandom that I am, too, alive.
First appearance-The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, October 1961. @, 1961, by Mercury Press, Inc.
The Machine That Won the War
The celebration had a long way to go and even in the silent depths of Multivac's underground chambers, it hung in the air.
If nothing else, there was the mere fact of isolation and silence. For the first time in a decade, technicians were not scurrying about the vitals of the giant computer, the soft lights did not wink out their erratic patterns, the flow of information in and out had halted.