The Best of Margaret St. Clair

managed to keep Mom from finding out, but, as I say, he lives in my big toe.

Sometimes I feel almost sorry for him. He’s little and helpless, and alone in a big and hostile world. He’s different from everything around him. Like us, he’s a refugee.

But I wish I could get rid of him. He’s not so bad now while he’s young. He’s really not dangerous. But I wish to God I could get rid of him.

He’s going to be a stinker when he grows up.

1949. Super Science Stories

HATHOR’S PETS

“I won’t have my baby born here among a lot of lizards!” Vela said passionately. “I just won’t! Henry, you’ve got to help us get out of here!”

Henry Pettit sighed. Would it do any good to try to tell his sister a gain that Hathor and her fifteen-foot congeners were not lizards? No, it would not. Vela was never very logical and the fact that she had violated the cult of feminine delicacy sufficiently to mention her coming child to him showed how excited she was. Arguing with her in this mood would be wasted breath.

“Why don’t you ask your husband to help you?” he said pointedly.

Vela drew herself up. Her small hard face softened momentarily. “Denis doesn’t know how to get things out of the Scalies the way you do,” she said. “He isn’t—Denis has principles. Denis has ideals.”

(“Denis is too all-fired good and noble to butter up to the lizards in the disgusting way that you do,” Henry translated silently.) Aloud, he said, “He’s your husband, though. It’s his responsibility.”

Vela stared at him reproachfully for a moment. Then she burst into tears. Ever since her child had been on the way she had been indulging in orgies of tears. Anything was apt to send her off into a crying jag.

Henry, who was some five years older than his sister, could remember, very dimly, back to the end of the era of feminine freedom, the time when women had been encouraged, nay, expected, to be intelligent.

The girls had been in the saddle then—they had ridden high, wide and handsome. But the rise of the government-sponsored cult of feminine modesty, chastity and brainlessness in the late 1980’s had put an end to all that. Nowadays a woman was a cross between a dripping sponge and a vegetable.

Mrs. Pettit came waddling up. She had been lingering within earshot behind a tree in the park. “What have you been saying to Vela, son?” she demanded. “The poor girl! I won’t have you upsetting her.”

“I’m not upsetting her,” Henry replied morosely. “She’s upsetting herself. Excuse me. I’m going over to the laboratory.”

He got up and started rapidly across the grass.

“Henry, wait!” his mother shrilled after him. Fortunately he was walking so fast that it was possible for him to pretend that he had not heard.

After lunch his brother-in-law, Denis Hardy, began on him. Denis went over the history of the last few months relentlessly, from the time the stratoliner Pelican’s life boat had been trapped in the vortex and whirled into Hathor’s universe until the present. He even made a digression to consider whether the vortex had been deliberately created or not.

“Don’t you see,” he finished, “Vela can’t have her baby here. Why, she might—might even have to feed it herself.”

“Well, what of it?” Henry replied abstractedly. “Women used to do it all the time.” He had had a most interesting morning. He wanted to get back to the laboratory.

Denis turned an angry red. “You’re disgusting!” he said sharply. “Can’t you keep a civil tongue—” lie bit off the words and made an obvious effort at conciliation.

“Why don’t you want to go home, Pettit? There’s nothing here for a man.”

“I like it,” Henry answered simply. “Grass, flowers, air—it’s a beautiful place.”

“That’s not the reason,” Denis replied nastily. His little ramrod of a back grew straighter. “I know what you’re up to in the laboratory. Forbidden research.”

“Everything was forbidden at home,” Henry answered reasonably. “But we’re not home now. It’s not forbidden here.”

“Right’s right and wrong’s wrong, no matter where—” Once more Denis controlled himself. The gold braid on his shoulders quivered with effort. “Stay here yourself if you want, then,” he snapped. “But the rest of us don’t share your peculiar tastes. We want to get back to decency, normality. Is there any reason why you shouldn’t use your influence with your scaly friends to have them send us back to Earth?”

There was—but how could he explain it to Denis? Denis had a mind which, even for the second officer of a stratosphere liner, was limited. How could Henry make him understand how horrible mental contact with Hathor was?

It was not that Hathor was malignant or even unkind. Henry had a faint but positive impression of benignity in his dealings with her. But the words with which the human mind bridges gulfs—when, who, where—became, when one was in contact with Hathor, the gulfs themselves.

To ask her when something had happened was to reel dizzily into the vastest of all enigmas for humanity— the nature of time itself. The question, “What is it?” forced the questioner to contemplate the cloudy, chilling riddle of his own personal identity. And even, “Where?” brought up a panorama of planes of being stretching out to infinity.

In between times it was not so bad. When Henry had not seen Hathor for several days he was almost able to convince himself that he was not afraid of her. Then he would need something in the laboratory, go to see her to ask for it and come back from the interview sick and shaking, swearing that nothing—nothing—would induce him to plunge once more into the vast icy reaches of her inhuman intelligence.

He hunted for a reason Denis would understand. “It’s no use asking her,” he said finally. “Vela is going to have a child now and so Hathor would never let you go.”

“But that’s just why we want to go home.”

“I know.” Henry swallowed. “But Hathor and the others look on us as—you might say—pets. Whether or not they brought us here deliberately—myself, I think it was an accident—“that’s how they feel about us. And nobody ever turned a pet loose when it was going to have young.”

There was no use in telling Denis that Hathor was responsible for Vela’s child in the same way that a dog breeder is responsible for the birth of pups. It would only offend Hardy’s dignity.

“Pets!” Denis answered, staring. “What are you talking about? They’re nothing but lizards. They haven’t got stereo, stratoliners, A-bombs, anything. We’re their superiors in every way.”

“They’re not lizards,” Henry replied. “They’re very highly evolved mammals. That crest down the back of their heads is just an accident.

“The reason they don’t have those material things is that they don’t need them. Haven’t you ever seen Hathor materialize things for my laboratory? She does it by moving her hands. She could turn a rubber ball inside out without making a hole in it.

“As far as that goes, if you think they’re nothing but lizards, why are you trying to get them to send you back to your own time and space? No lizard I ever heard of could do that sort of thing.”

* * *

Hathor appeared. One moment the air was empty—the next it thickened and condensed, and there she was. As always when he first saw her Henry was divided between a wild desire to run for cover and an almost equally strong impulse to prostrate himself in awe at her feet.

He glanced about to see how the others were taking it. Denis, for all his bravado, was turning slowly white. And Vela, trying hard to be supercilious, was arranging the folds of her mantilla with shaking hands.

Not that there was anything especially horrible about Hathor to casual viewing. Though she was over fifteen feet tall, and so strong that she could have picked up any of the humans in the park with one hand, her body was slender and well-proportioned.