Filthy had other ideas. He spun like a dervish, yelling bloody murder. Young wavered, made a vain snatch at the air, and fell prostrate to the ground. He remained face down, while Filthy, seeing the halo, rushed at it and trampled upon his master’s head.
The wretched Young felt the ghosts of a dozen and more drinks rising to confront him. He clutched, at the dog, missed, and gripped instead the feet of the wooden Indian. The image swayed perilously.
Filthy cocked up an apprehensive eye and fled down the length of his master’s body, pausing halfway as he remembered his duty. With a muffled curse he sank his teeth into the nearest portion of Young and attempted to yank off the miserable man’s pants.
Meanwhile, Young remained face down, clutching the feet of the wooden Indian in a despairing grip.
There was a resounding clap of thunder. White light blazed through the cellar. The angel appeared.
Devlin’s legs gave way. He sat down in a plump heap, shut his eyes, and began chattering quietly to himself. Filthy swore at the intruder, made an unsuccessful attempt to attain a firm grasp on one of the gently fanning wings, and went back to think it over, arguing throatily. The wing had an unsatisfying lack of substantiality.
The angel stood over Young with golden fires glowing in his eyes, and a benign look of pleasure molding his noble features. “This,” he said quietly, “shall be taken as a symbol of your first successful good deed since your enhaloment.” A wingtip brushed the dark and grimy visage of the Indian.
Forthwith, there was no Indian. “You have lightened the heart of a fellow man-little, to be sure, but some, and at a cost of much labor on your part.
“For a day you have struggled with this sort to redeem him, but for this no success has rewarded you, albeit the morrow’s pains will afflict you.
“Go forth, K. Young, rewarded and protected from all sin alike by your halo.” The youngest angel faded quietly, for which alone Young was grateful. His head was beginning to ache and he’d feared a possible thunderous vanishment.
Filthy laughed nastily, and renewed his attack on the halo. Young found the unpleasant act of standing upright necessary. While it made the walls and tubs spin round like all the hosts of heaven, it made impossible Filthy’s dervish dance on his face.
Some time later he awoke, cold sober and regretful of the fact. He lay between cool sheets, watching morning sunlight lance through the windows, his eyes, and feeling it splinter in jagged bits in his brain.
His stomach was making spasmodic attempts to leap up and squeeze itself out through his burning throat.
Simultaneous with awakening came realization of three things: the pains of the morrow had indeed afflicted him; the halo mirrored still in the glass above the dressing table-and the parting words of the angel.
He groaned a heartfelt triple groan. The headache would pass, but the halo, he knew, would not.
Only by sinning could one become unworthy of it, and-shining protector!-it made him unlike other men. His deeds must all be good, his works a help to men. He could not sin!
THE VOICE OF THE LOBSTER
Tilting his cigar at a safe angle Terence Lao-T’se Macduff applied a wary eye to the peephole in the curtain and searched the audience for trouble.
“A setup,” he muttered under his breath. “Or is it? I have the inexplicable sensation of wet mice creeping slowly up and down my spine. What a pity I wasn’t able to get that Lesser Vegan girl to front for me. Ah, well. Here I go.”
He drew up his rotund form as the curtain slowly rose.
“Good evening to you all,” he said jovially. “I am happy to see so many eager seekers after knowledge, from all parts of the Galaxy, gathered here tonight on this, Aldebaran’s greenest world—”
Muffled noises rose from the audience, mingled with the musky odor of Aldebaranese and the scents of many other races and species. For it was Lottery Time on Aldebaran Tau and the famous celebration based on the counting of seeds in the first sphyghi fruit of the season had as usual drawn luck-worshippers from all over the Galaxy. There was even an Earthman, with shaggy red hair and a scowling face, who sat in the front row, glaring up at Macduff.
Uneasily evading that glare, Macduff went on with some haste.
“Ladies, gentlemen and Aldebaranese, I offer you my All-Purpose Radio-isotopic Hormone Rejuvenating Elixir, the priceless discovery which will give you the golden treasury of youth at a sum easily within the reach of each and every—”
An ambiguous missile whizzed past Macduff’s head. His trained ear screened out words in a dozen different interstellar tongues and realized that none of them implied approval.
The red-haired Earthman was bellowing, “The mon’s a crook! Nae doot aboot it!” Macduff, automatically dodging an overripe fruit, looked pensively at him.
“Oh-oh,” Macduff was thinking. “I wonder how he found out those cards were marked for black light?”
He held up his arms dramatically for silence, took a backward step and kicked the trigger on the trap door. Instantly he dropped out of sight. From the audience rose a tremendous bellow of balked fury.
Macduff, scuttling rapidly past discarded flats of scenery, heard feet thundering above him.
“There will be chlorophyll spilled tonight,” he mused, sprinting. “That’s the trouble with these Aldebaranese, they’re still vegetables at heart. No sense of ethics, merely tropisms.”
His racing feet tripped over a half-empty box of progesterone, a hormone necessary when a sucker, or customer, was fowl or mammal strain.
“Can’t be the hormones,” he pondered, kicking boxes out of his path. “It must have been the radio-isotope. I shall write a scorching letter to that Chicago outfit. Fly-by-nights, of course. I should have suspected the quality of their product at that price. Three months, forsooth! Why, it hasn’t been a fortnight since I sold the first bottle-and it’s taken this long to finish the payoffs and start hoping for a net profit.”
This was serious. Tonight had been the first occasion on which he hoped to put the profits from All-Purpose Radio-isotopic Hormone Rejuvenating Elixir into his own pocket. Aldebaran officials had a greed which one didn’t normally associate with vegetable ancestry. How was he going to get enough money to ensure his passage spaceward in a hurry if speed seemed indicated?
“Trouble, trouble,” Macduff murmured, as he fled down a corridor, ducked out of the exit and foresightedly sent a tower of empty boxes crashing down, blocking the door. Screams of rage came from behind him.
“Sounds like Babel,” he said, trotting. “That’s the trouble with galactic travel. Too many overemotional races.” Doubling and twisting along a planned course, he continued to mutter marginal comments, for Macduff generally moved in a haze of sotto voce remarks confidingly addressed to himself, usually approving in nature.
After a time, deciding that he had put a safe distance between himself and justice, he slowed his pace, paused at a dingy hock-shop and paid out a few coins from his paltry store. In return he was given a small battered suitcase, which contained everything necessary for a hurried departure-everything, that is, except the really vital factor. Macduff had no space ticket.
Had he anticipated the full extent of Aldebaranese rapacity and corruption he could perhaps have brought along more payoff funds. But he had wanted his arrival to coincide with the great sphyghi festival and time pressed. Still, there were ways. Captain Masterson of the Suttar owed him a favor and the Sutter was due to take off early next morning.