The Haunted Earth

maseni and the other changes, tended to have no families, or small ones. As the Shockies died, the population dropped, and land became available. With the welfare rolls almost wiped out, and with vital services crying for good workers, everyone again had a job and everyone was more affluent than any time in the nation's history. There was not only room to build Millennium City, but also credits to spend there. Old office buildings were torn down, as were rows and rows of shabby houses where no one lived any more. They razed factories that had once produced useless gadgets and flashy gewgaws, for none of these things were now in demand; society had suddenly become aware of its own power and of the true value of possessions. Millennium City not only provided services and products, but a place to feel at ease, a center for commerce which was, at the same time, a business establishment and a community meeting place.

On the south end of the Millennium City complex, there was a two-acre sculpture garden, containing abstract and realistic stone and metal work from all over the world, and from the maseni home world as well. It was here that Helena and Brutus came, at a quarter to twelve that night.

'How many statues are in here?' Helena asked.

'I'd say four or five hundred,' Brutus replied. 'That is, if you rule out the abstract ones which we can tell, at a glance, aren't Jessie.'

A young couple passed them, strolling hand-in-hand; the boy was a normal human being, while the girl was a button-cute wood nymph no taller than four and a half feet.

Helena and the hound walked slowly down the main avenue before trying any of the looping side-streets. They passed statues of maseni kings, American Presidents and authors, a cavalry man on horseback, a black American liberator with a Molotov cocktail in his stone hand…

'Well have to try the smaller walkways,' Brutus said.

They passed a statue of Artemis Frick, the first man to die on Mars; a statue of President Agnew, the first American President to resign from office over an embarrassing incident on the Pritchard Robot television talk show-but not the last to do so…

'Jessie!' Helena cried, stopping so suddenly that Brutus, looking at a statue of Snoopy across the way, almost walked into her.

'Where?'

She pointed at the next statue, opposite that of Snoopy. 'It is him, isn't it?'

Brutus padded closer, his claws making a rattling noise on the flagstone path. 'He looks a bit different in granite,' the hound said, 'but I'm sure that it is him, my dear.'

Helena looked more closely at the life-size stone figure where it stood on a marble pedestal that made it tower over them. 'My God, do you see what pose he's in?'

Brutus chuckled. 'Well,' he said, 'he was at the urinal when Medusa surprised him, you know.'

Helena walked up and rapped her knuckles on Jessie's thigh. 'Really is stone,' she said.

'The myth requires it.'

She regarded Jessie from straight on, staring into his blank, granite eyes. 'You think he's aware of his condition, where he is? Do you think he knows we're here?'

'We'll have to ask him when we get him changed back,' the hell hound said, moving up beside her.

Helena had been carrying a book on mythology, one of the volumes published as a guide by the United Nations after the initial chaos the maseni brought with them to Earth. She thumbed it open, found a listing under MEDUSA, and said, 'The Medusa is a world-wide mythical figure. According to various versions of the myth, there are eighteen ways to undo the damage of her gaze.'

'Read 'em off,' the hell hound said, gazing up at Jessie.

The detective stared out across the sculpture garden, his head held high, rather noble despite his pose.

Helena said, 'Well, first of all, we can immerse him in the waters of the Ganges River.'

'Even if we could get him out of this park without being taken for statue thieves,' the hound said, 'it would take too long to fly him to the Ganges and go through that bit. Something else.'

'Paint him with the blood of newborn babies,' Helena said, shivering.

'Ecchh,' Brutus said. 'What's next?'

'A virgin's kiss, against his stone lips,' Helena said. She smiled. 'Isn't that romantic?'

Brutus gave her a long look, from head to toe and back again. 'A virgin's kiss? I suspect you better read number four.'

The Millennium City sculpture garden was one of the open-air parks in the complex and, now, above them, the night sky split open with a flash of jagged lightning, followed by a low peal of thunder. They both looked up, waiting for the rain. When it didn't come, Helena looked back at the book and said, 'Number four — the victim of the Medusa can be revived to flesh by the touch of someone who truly loves him.'

'There we are,' Brutus said, nodding his hairy head.

'Oh?'

'Touch him some more,' the hound said.

'Me?'

'Don't you love him?'

'Oh, I love him a little bit, I suppose. I mean, he's awfully nice, and he's good looking. I like going to bed with him and I like working for him…. But I couldn't honestly say that I truly love him. Not deep and everlasting and all of that. If the tables were turned, and if that were me up there on the pedestal, I don't think Jessie would pretend any differently about his own feelings.'

'Well,' the hell hound said, 'you can't be sure. Maybe you love him just enough to make it work.'

'I already touched him,' Helena pointed out, 'and nothing happened.' Her golden hair had fallen across her face, and she pushed it behind her ears with her left hand.

'You didn't exactly touch him,' Brutus corrected her. 'You rapped on him.'

'Same thing.'

'A rap isn't the same as a touch,' the hound persisted. 'So why don't you try touching him. I mean, for Christ's sake, what have you got to lose?'

She looked up at the stone Jessie, down at the hell hound again, and she said, 'Well, I guess it can't hurt anything…'

'Of course it can't.'

'I'll just touch him.'

'Go on,' the hound urged.

Gingerly, Helena reached up and placed the palm of her hand on the statue's leg.

Nothing happened.

'Touch him with both hands,' Brutus said.

'Why?'

'Look, Blue Eyes, maybe if you don't love him enough to bring him around with one hand, you love him enough to bring him around with both hands. You dig it?'

She touched the statue's leg with both hands.

Jessie was not returned to flesh.

'Well, what's number five in the book?' Brutus asked, wearily.

'Wait a minute?' Helena said, her bright eyes adance with some clever thought or other.

'What is it?'

She said, 'Why don't you touch him, Brutus?'

'Me?'

'Yes, you.'

'I don't truly love him!'

'Don't you love him a little?' she asked, kneeling down, taking the hound's head in both her hands.

'He's a man, and I was once a man,' the hound said. 'Or at least I think I was once a man.'

She said, 'What's that got to do with anything?'

'Well — true love, the book said. That would be a woman who loved him.'

'Doesn't a father love his son, and the son his father?'

He looked away from her face, found himself staring down her cleavage which was handsomely revealed in