“But— what’s the matter? What’s she doing with her hands?” Vela’s eyes were round. “Why is she holding him so tight?” Her voice went up. “Is she—he said she wouldn’t hurt us. Oh!
Hathor’s hands were slipping smoothly in and out of the web of invisibility. Now she put one of them up to Denis’ head. Eerily, unbelievably, her fingers slid inside the skull.
Denis began to scream. It was a horrible high squeal like a frightened rabbit’s. At the sound Vela pressed her fists to her ears and started to run. Mrs. Pettit hesitated, looking after her. Then, moaning and slobbering, she bobbed after the girl. Henry stayed behind, until he was sure what was going on. Then he too turned and ran.
There was little cover in the rolling park. The women were cowering behind a big granite boulder and there Henry joined them. Denis gave scream after shattering scream.
The screams stopped. Henry looked over the top of the rock.
Tears were still flowing down Denis’ cheeks but the convulsed terror had gone out of his face. It had been replaced with a vegetable imbecile calm.
Hathor put him down very gently on the grass. He walked eight or ten paces uncertainly and then sat down on the sward. He pulled up a handful of grass and examined its roots.
Vela tugged desperately at the hem of Henry’s sleeve. “What’s she done to him?” she demanded in an agonized whisper. “Oh what it it? Henry, Henry, Henry—what’s she done?”
Henry turned to face her. “We geld domestic animals to make them better pets, don’t we?” he answered. His mouth twisted shockingly to one side. “Hathor’s done something to his brain to make a better pet out of him. So he’ll stay here always without wanting to get away, so he won’t be a nuisance any more. That’s what she’s doing. She’s making us better pets.
He was still shrieking the words when Hathor picked him up.
THE PILLOWS
They’re lucky,” McTeague said with emphasis. “I told Thelma—she’s secretary to one of the big shots in the company—they ought to bring that out more in the advertising, stress it, like, and she said nobody had ever written in about it. People just buy the pillows for novelties, and once in a while to keep their hands warm.
“But anybody that works around the pillows knows that they’re the luckiest damn’ things in the Universe. Look at me. Before I got this job with Interplanetary Novelties, I’d just spent three months in the hospital with a fractured pelvis. Lolli and I were quarreling all the time, and I was sure she was planning to leave me. I just got out of the hospital when Lottie, that’s our kid, came home from school with a stiff neck and a sore throat, and two days later the clinician said it was almost certain to be infantile paralysis, the third type. They’ve never found a cure for that. That really broke me up. I spent most of the first leg of the trip taking soma and trying not to think about things.
“Listen, when we hit Aphrodition there was a ‘gram from Lolli telling me not to worry, Lottie was better and it seemed to be type one after all. Lottie was all over it in a mo nth, and she’s never been sick, not even the sniffles, since. For that matter, none of us have. I don’t even cut myself or get hangovers any more. And Lolli and I get along like—like a couple of Venusian quohogs.”
“Then you think the pillows aren’t fakes?” Kent asked. They were two days out from Terra, on board the Tryphe, traveling at one sixtieth the velocity of light. He leaned back in his bunk and drew deeply on the tube of cocohol-cured tobacco.
“Fakes? How do you mean, fakes? I know they’re lucky—ask anyone on the ship—and I know they stay hot. Lottie’s had one I brought her from Triton, on that first voyage out to Neptune’s moon, sitting on the shelf in her bedroom ever since, and it’s still as hot as it was when I dug it out.”
Kent sighed. He rumpled up his blond hair and frowned. Here it was again, the evidence, so utterly at variance with what he’d been able to get in the laboratory. Stick a thermometer near one of the pillows, and it registered forty-four degrees Celsius at first, then showed a very gradual cooling until the pillow reached room temperature, where it remained. And yet everyone who’d ever handled a pillow or bought one at a novelty store knew they stayed hot.
“Maybe there’s some kind of gimmick in it,” he suggested, “something like those Mexican jumping beans my grandfather used to tell me about. Or maybe it’s something the company rigged up, a little atomic motor, say.”
McTeague snorted. “Anytime you can make an atomic motor to sell for six bits,” he said, “let me know. I’ll buy ‘em up, sell ‘em on the open market for five dollars, and become a millionaire. I never heard of Mexican jumping beans before, so for all I know they’re the same sort of thing. All I know is, you dig the pillows up out of the rock on Triton, which the long-hairs say is probably the coldest spot in the known universe, and they’re hot, nice and hot. You can dig up some in a few days and see for yourself.”
“How do you locate them?”
“Oh, we’ve got a darkside Mercurian hexapod. He hates hunting them. Sits down and shivers when he finds a colony. That’s how we know where to dig.”
“What do you use to dig with?”
“Atom blast, special design.”
“Ever damage the pillows with it?”
“Naw, you have to train one right on them for about fifteen minutes to make a dent in them. They’re not only hot, and lucky—they’re tough.”
Kent was thoughtful. “You know, that’s really remarkable.”
“Hell, they’re just novelties.” McTeague spat into the incinerator, reached for the cards, and began to lay out an elaborate three-deck solitaire. Kent went on thinking.
It was that attitude, that “hell, they’re just novelties,” that had made him decide to spend his vacation working for the Interplanetary Novelty Company. He’d brought four or five of the pillows (they were a couple of inches in diameter—about the size of sand dollars—and black and puffy) into the laboratory and thrown a bunch of experiments at them; his fellow workers had kidded him both ways from the abscissa, and Dr. Roberts had called him into the office and told him gently that he really wasn’t employed to investigate—ah—children’s toys, and that there was a group of very interesting experiments he’d like him to try on the low radioactives. So now he was an A.B.S. on the S.S.
“Anything else on Triton?” he asked.
“Nope. Not another blasted thing. We bring back some of that greenish rock, though—it works up into nice paperweights.” McTeague moved a long column of cards to a pile headed by a purple ace, and went on playing.
Ten days later they landed on Triton—a routine landing, but interesting to Kent, who had done little space traveling. The ship had gone into snail-slow planetary drive hours before. Now he watched with fascination through the bow visiplates while the navigator snaked the ship expertly through a long spiral down to Triton’s surface. The cloudy aquamarine of Neptune, half occluded by the little world, shone palely bright.
“Getting an eyeful?” McTeague said, joining him. “If you’d landed here as often as the rest of us have, you’d want to look the other way. Neptune gives me the grue, and Triton stinks. Except for the pillows—and I consider myself honored to be on the same satellite with them—I hate the place. A lousy little pebble, so damn cold you’d be understating grossly if you said it was frozen.” He started to bite a chew of tobacco from the hunk in his hand, and then checked himself. “No spitting in pressure suits,” he said morosely. “That, and the dampness, are the worst things about suits.”
Overhead, the bull horn began: “Phweet! Phweet! Break out pressure suits. Break out pressure suits. A working party consisting of McTeague, Willets, Abrams, Kent will leave ship at 1630 to hunt pillows. A working party consisting of… Atom blasts in Number Five locker. Atom blasts in Number Five locker.”
As Kent climbed stiffly into his pressure suit, he saw McTeague, already hardly human in the florid bulges of his own suit, inserting the protesting hexapod into a special job for hexapods. It must have been fifty inches long. Kent switched on his suit’s radio.
