particular skill myself—a fact that almost killed my father. Literally. The dice we used weighed several tons and I fumbled one and dropped it on his thorax.
I’d been chasing the Naag ever since, with gills one month and tentacles the next and feathers the next until I could not remember what I had originally looked or felt like. And finally, I had begun to see that I would never catch him. Because xenoforming paid well. Because he could afford the bribes. Because (as they also say on Earth) money talks, and there’s another corollary concerning ambulatory bovine fecal matter.
But I decided, then and there, looking out my rented bathroom window at those laughing Earthling children —playing, jumping, sticking chewing gum in one another’s hair—well, I decided Earth was off limits to the Naag. And if I couldn’t stop him legally… .
I went back to the living room and aimed the psychological injector at his head.
“Call it off,” I said.
“Call what—”
“The bribe.”
“What bribe?”
“I mean it, Naag. I’m not afraid to use this.”
He took a second, apparently to gauge how serious I was. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll help you. But I can’t call off the bribe. It’s too late for that now.”
I paused, my finger trembling on the trigger. “I’m listening.”
“The human race. You can get them legally protected.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “They produce the cure for chronic ullnik.”
Chronic ullnik. A terrible and fully hypothetical disease. It attacked organs that its victims had never bothered to evolve. The phantom pain was said to be excruciating.
“The human race produces the cure,” the Naag went on. “By accident. It is a mix of waxy yellow buildup, unsightly nail fungus, and household soap scum. I came across it by accident in a public lavatory.”
“And you expect me to believe that?”
“I’ve got proof. It’s with my partner.”
“What partner?”
He answered rapidly, possibly because I’d put the injector’s business end in his left ear. “The Sublukhar,” he said. “I’m working with the Sublukhar.”
I shuddered when I heard that. I knew the Sublukhar as well. Another xenoformer, huge and sluglike, brutally efficient.
“She’s outside of town,” the Naag went on. “At a place called Breakneck Mountain. The Earthlings call it that because a cow fell off it once and broke its neck. If you ask me it is a lucky thing for the local civic organization that it didn’t break its reproductive organs. That would not have sounded half so rustic.”
“What’s she doing there?” I said.
He shrugged his shoulders. “You know how Sublukhar are. Temperamental, but excellent with machinery. She’s setting up the xenoforming equipment. And doing other things.”
I grabbed my jacket and a blaster. “What kind of things?”
“Unnatural things. With monkeys. But I don’t ask questions where the Sublukhar is concerned.” He frowned. “You’re not going to leave me here, are you?”
I didn’t answer. I just headed for the door. If the human race really did hold the key to curing chronic ullnik, my troubles were as good as solved. If I could get the proof… get it to Remsee… no bribe in the universe would stop me from saving Earth.
“Well, that’s fine,” the Naag called after me. “The rope is starting to rub my wrists raw, but I don’t mind so much. And anyway, I’m sure you’ve got more important things to think about.”
Breakneck Mountain rose out of suburbia, an undeveloped pile of rock and tree, a lonely shred of evidence that Earthlings were intelligent. By the time I reached it, night had fallen from it like a cow, and it hung caught and broken in the thousand orange streetlights bordering the highway.
I parked in the breakdown lane and climbed the slope, ascending through the musky darkness in between the trees. Near the top, a blue haze filtered through the branches. I crept forward, catching glimpses of machinery. I approached a clearing. In the center of it loomed the Sublukhar. She squelched, cursing, glistening, tinkering with something. For some reason I could not yet fathom, monkeys hung from branches overhead.
I stepped into the light.
“Nice night,” I said.
She spun around fast for a Sublukhar, her knobbed antennae shrinking. “Well, well. The great Xzchsthyl.” She pronounced it wrong. “I thought you’d be slimier.”
“I haven’t been feeling well,” I said. I’d never met her before, but I knew all about her. She was of a race of incredibly possessive sluglike creatures. They had no word for “yours” in their language, but over seven thousand words for “mine.” When the concept of property possessed by others was first explained to some of their linguists, they laughed hysterically for weeks and finally had to be hospitalized.
“I hear you’re xenoforming Earth,” I said.
“That’s the plan,” she admitted, gurgling at me. “We’re going to turn it into a filing planet.”
“Filing?”
She nodded her slick and eyeless head. “In three days’ time, the machinery you see around you will create the cataclysmic, simultaneous appearance of over three trillion billion trillion manila folders, burying every major landmass on the Earth. It’s for the Griggons. You’ve heard of them?”
I hadn’t. “I’ve been busy lately.”
“An interesting civilization. They reduced forty centuries of history and learning down to a simple, beautiful mathematical equation, then misplaced it. They keep hard copies of everything since then.”
“And Earth is going to store those copies.”
“Only G through K. We’ll need other planets to take up the rest. That is,” she added, “if I can get the job done.”
“Something wrong?”
“I’m having problems,” she admitted. “And I don’t mean you.” She swung her head in the direction of the device she’d been repairing. “I was supposed to be in human form three weeks ago, but my ZrrfCo Somatorific here is on the fritz. Keeps turning everything to monkeys.”
That explained a lot. But she was still slithering slowly toward me, so I held my blaster up where she could see it. “That’s far enough,” I said. “I’m here about the cure for chronic ullnik.”
“Oh, that,” she said. “Why didn’t you say so? It’s over there, in that compartment.”
I looked where she had gestured, and saw a hatch in one side of a domed machine. I kept one eye on her and walked to it. I had to scare a crested gibbon away, but I popped the hatch, pulled out a manila folder, and looked inside.
I am no scientist, but the papers in the folder seemed to be the real McCoy. There was even a budget analysis of the cost of harvesting the cure for chronic ullnik. Evidently the Naag had thought about selling the cure himself, but had decided he’d make more money from the xenoforming.
This was it. If I could get this evidence to the government, they’d have to protect the human race. I’d stop the Naag. I was so excited by the prospect that I completely failed to notice that the Sublukhar had pressed the button on her defective ZrrfCo Somatorific, and that I was standing in the active area.
Metamorphosing into a monkey stands low on my list of enjoyable sensations. Growing the hair was the worst part—like someone pulling a million needles out of all the pores on my entire body, all at once. I had to bite the Sublukhar in order to escape, and all the other monkeys chased me through the canopy. I did manage to get away with the evidence, but I was in no condition to drive, and don’t even talk to me about the use of public transportation as a monkey. I particularly and personally hated it because, although I had never met an Earthling monkey myself, I had spent three weeks as a binkled ape one time on Ratcheon in punishment for excess parking violations, and my love of primates was, therefore, a sickly thing at best.
“You’re looking well,” the Naag said when I came in through the window.
I screeched at him.
“I see your point,” he said. “We’ve all got problems. Look at me. I’ve been tied to this credenza for hours. Not that you care about
