Street Scene

legs all a-tumble, landing squarely in the moss-and-metal center of the Religious Icon of Ned, in Avuncular Square.

Two leathery-winged residents flapped over to the gigantic creature, and stared at it.

“Did it fly?” said the first, scratching its osseous crest with a wingtip finger. “Or did it merely fall?”

“Big, isn’t it?” commented the second. “Much bigger than whatchamacallit, men, are supposed to be. And heavier. I wonder, is it edible?”

“Ah-ha, not is it edible,” interjected one of the dietary priests of Nerf, “but is it hazzil! That’s the question.”

“It looks hazzil.”

“The eyes are blue, that means it can’t be hazzil!”

A Proctor descended on the scene and extracted its demerit book from its wingtip-pouch with the fingertip of its other wing. “Okay, who owns this myth?”

“What’s a Teeny Slut?’ asked the dietary priest of Ned. But no one seemed to know.

And no one seemed to very much care…

THE END

Ending by Keith Laumer

The Vice-President in charge of Enforcement for the meat cutters confronted Jake, Ajax Wreckers’ ace field man, as the latter tugged at a twenty-foot length of amputated pterodactyl skin.

“Hey,” he barked over the stutter of the chain saws chopping through the lobster-like flesh. “You guys are doing our work!”

Jake dropped the leg, causing a gush of blood like drained oil to moisten the shoe-tops of the union man. He took a step toward the challenger, pushed his large, broken-veined, fist-scarred, unevenly shaved face forward.

“Oh, yeah?” he riposted.

As they stood nose to nose, their followers gathered behind them. A chain saw barked and sputtered, lugging down on bone. More large men appeared. The lines formed up across the slope of the pteranodon’s keel. An advance scout from the Black Panthers sidled up to a dark-skinned butcher who stood glowering at a similarly pigmented wrecker.

“Hey, baby,” he protested. “Let’s not waste no horsepower on internecine strife. Let’s get Honky!”

“Now, boys,” the Rev. Beat interrupted.

“Who you calling ‘boy,’ Uncle Tom?” the Black Panther inquired threateningly. He gave the small, neatly suited ecclesiast a push with a hangnailed forefinger. Charles W. Throckwall of the ASPPV noted the interchange from the corner of his eye.

“See here, fellow,” he blurted. “That’s a man of the cloth you’re pushing—”

“Stop, thief!” a skinny female in a fantastic hat yelled. Will Kiley, bounding pop-shopward with the golden amulet, skidded on the oily blood and caromed into Throckwall, who rebounded in what appeared to be a leap toward the Panther. The latter withdrew for reinforcements, jostling a meatcutter. The meatcutter threw the unfortunate chap at Jake, who replied by placing two short jabs in the lower belt region of the policeman just as the uniformed minion thrust the summons at him. Whistles sounded the charge. Union men slugged it out with wreckers and militant sociologists. Christians and Realtors battled side by side. Big Louis Morono played his hoses over all parties without discrimination due to race, creed, or national origin.

“By George, Charlie,” the real estate lobby chief called to his aide. “Maybe we’d better rethink our program. They’ve got quite a body of public opinion on their side, it appears!”

“We can’t fight this kind of organization,” Charlie agreed. “We better pull back and regroup.”

“Leroy,” the Rev. Beat’s lieutenant shouted in his leader’s ear. ”Possibly we misjudged the magnitude of the backlash—”

“Hey, boss,” Jake’s aide cried over the tumult. “We only got ten minutes to finish the job, which Ajax’s rep is riding on the outcome!”

Jake grunted and strained chest to chest with the union Enforcer.

“Deal?” he muttered tentatively.

“How’s about if your boys do the primary breakdown and my guys take it from there? And kind of get your thumb outta my eye, OK?”

“Check. And my groin ain’t a place for you to store your knee when you ain’t using it, right?”

The two fighters for economic justice disengaged, and with hoarse bellows summoned their followers. In moments, the saws were stuttering through tendon and gristle, while cleavers flashed, separating radii from ulnae.

Caught up in the mood of the moment, the riot cops, who had been delayed in their arrival at that end of the beast by a call for help from the beat cop, and who had paused to lend a hand in getting the cuffs on Kiley, formed a bucketless bucket brigade, passing along the assorted chunks of anatomy as they were freed from the carcass. Thirty seconds before the deadline, the last slab of reptile disappeared into the chippers. The firemen hosed down the pavement. The crowd disappeared into the places crowds disappear into. In the bars, beer flowed. Sirens wailed as firemen and peace officers returned to interrupted pinochle games. A single scrap of pteranodon hide, overlooked by the flensers, floated along the gutter and disappeared down the storm drain, where, due to a curious concatenation of circumstances, it eventually lodged in an orifice serving a large department store, resulting in the simultaneous overflow of the third floor pay toilets.

Two newsmen, having been torn away from a fruitless assignment emanating from the City Desk whereat an anonymous phone call had narked that Senator Seymour F. Lark (R., Vermont) (he who had been accused by Senate Subcommittee of squirreling away a quarter of a million skins in monies allegedly originally contributed to his campaign re-election exchequer) was lying doggo in the apartment of a lady of shady reputation, just off Sixth Avenue at 46th Street, came upon the recent scene of so much reptilian-oriented turmoil, and encountered little more than moist patches of concrete and a few spots where the acid in the blood of the now-vanished pteranodon had managed to eradicate the lane stripes of Sixth Avenue.

“Another dry run,” Ollie, the taller scrivener stated glumly.

“Uh-huh, Stanley,” the fat one said.

“Hey, Madame,” the tall one accosted a matron in a man’s sweater and run over shoes. “You see anything of a giant reptile around here?”

“I don’t know nothing,” the interogee replied, and continued her bee-line for the copy of the National Enquirer she had spotted in the litter basket. The other pedestrians who had begun to clot at the prospect of a lively interchange, drifted unobtrusively away, scenting official interest in their affairs. The newsmen shrugged and disappeared into a bar. Traffic resumed its normal flow. The sun shone on a peaceful street. The Governor’s car paused at the intersection. His Governorship scanned the prospect, saw nothing amiss, and relaxed against the forty-dollar-a-yard upholstery.

“Peace,” he said. “It’s wonderful.” At that moment a black speck appeared in the patch of sky visible between the serried cornices above. It grew, became a ragged bird-shape, tumbling end-over-end, whistling…

With a resounding splat, a second pteranodon impacted in the street.

FINIS