He was back on the carpet and so was the jinni. This time the jinni was wearing the tusk in his jaw and he looked amazingly like—
“Sriberdegibit!” Gilbert groaned.
Then the jinni and the magic carpet and everything faded away to peaceful black.
Gilbert Iles opened his eyes in a darkened bedroom. There was an ice bag on his head and a smell of iodine and liniment clinging about him. He tried to move and decided it might be better to wait a day or so. He opened his mouth and heard something that sounded like a Voder in need of repair.
Through the hall door came in light and Linda. He managed to turn his head— and saw squatting on the bedside table the form of Sriberdegibit.
“Are you all right, dear?” Linda asked.
He said, “What do you think?” or a noise that meant as much, and then stared a silent question at the demon.
“I know,” said Linda. “He won’t go away unless you dismiss him. But it did work. When you said his name, there he was, and my! you should have seen Maurice and that woman clear out of there!”
“Sissies,” said Sriberdegibit.
Undulant demons are more than a sick head can stand. “Begone!” said Gilbert Iles.
The demon shook his head. “Uh-uh. What’s the use? I’d have to be back to strangle you in five minutes anyway.”
lies jumped, and every muscle ached with the motion. He managed to look at the bedside electric clock. It was 12:55.
“I didn’t want to wake you,” said Linda. “I never thought of that— You . . . you’ve been good today?”
He looked the question at the demon dourly. “Like one of those cocky angels,” he asserted.
“Then, you, What’s-your-name, you’re going to have to . . . to do things to him at one o’clock?”
“On the dot.”
“But, Gil darling, can’t you quick— I mean isn’t there something you can do? I know you practically can’t stir from where you are, but isn’t there some way you can sin just in your mind? I’m sure there is. Work out a plan for barratry; doesn’t planning a sin count? Can’t you— Oh, Gil, you can’t let yourself get garroted with a snake tail!”
Enforced physical inaction had stimulated Iles’s mind. While Linda pleaded, he was performing intricate calculations worthy of a specialist in canon law. Now he summoned up every whit of his power of trained articulation to make his words clear. They sounded inhuman, but intelligible.
“Sriberdegibit, is suicide a sin?”
“Oh, Gil dear, you wouldn’t— Where would be the advantage—”
“Hush, Linda. Is it?”
“Yes. It’s a sin against God or Man. It’s a sin against the Giver of Life and against Life itself. It’s what you’d call real good solid sin.”
“Very well. You may go, Srib.”
“Huh? Like fun you say. It’s 12:59 and a half, and here’s where I come in.” The tail twitched, then slowly began to reach out. Linda fought to repress a scream.
“Wait.” lies had never spoken so fast under such difficulty. “Suicide is a sin, right?”
“Right.”
“If I refuse to commit a sin, I die, right?”
“Right.”
“If I die through my own deliberate act, that’s suicide, right?”
“Right.”
“Then if I refuse to perform my daily sin, I am committing suicide, which is a sin. There, begone!”
The tail hesitated a fraction of an inch from Iles’s throat. A very slow take spread over the demon’s shifting face. He twanged his tusk twice. Then, “Why I . . . I’ll be God blessed!” he said, and vanished.
“You know, darling,” Linda said later, “it hasn’t been so bad after all. You can take your vacation now and get all healed up again and then you’ll never know you were ever cursed. In fact you’ll be better than ever, because now you’ll drive carefully and you won’t spread scandal and you won’t do anything shady in your profession and—” She paused and stared at him rapturously. “My! I have a brilliant husband!”
He nodded inarticulate thanks.
“That was the most beautiful thinking. Why, now there won’t be any stopping you. You’ll go on and you’ll be attorney general and governor and a justice of the supreme court and— No. No. I don’t really want that. I wish—”
“Oh, oh!” Gilbert Iles groaned warningly.
“I wish,” she continued unchecked, “that we could just go on living quietly, but very, very, very happily.”
There was a wimp present.
The Ambassadors
Nothing so much amazed the First Martian Expedition—no, not even the answer, which should have been so obvious from the first, to the riddle of the canals—as the biological nature of the Martians themselves.
Popular fiction and scientific thought alike had conditioned the members of the expedition to expect either of two possibilities: a race more or less like ourselves, if possibly high-domed and bulge-chested; or a swarm of tentacled and pulpy horrors.
With either the familiar or the monstrously unfamiliar we were prepared to make contact; we had given no thought to the likeness-with-a-difference which we encountered.
It was on the night of the Expedition’s official welcome to Mars, after that exchange of geometrical and astronomical diagrams which had established for each race the intelligence of the other, that the zoologist Professor Hunyadi classified his observations.
That the Martians were mammals was self-evident. Certain points concerning their teeth, their toes and the characteristic tufts of hair on their cheekbones led Professor Hunyadi to place them, somewhat to the bewilderment of his non-zoological colleagues, as Fissipede arctoids. Further technicalities involving such matters as the shape of the nozzle and the number and distribution of the nipples led him from the family Canidae through the genus Canis to the species Lupus.
“My ultimate classification, gentlemen,” he asserted, “must be Canis lupus sapiens. In other words, as man may be said to be an intelligent ape, we are here confronted with a race of intelligent wolves.”
Some Martian zoologist was undoubtedly reaching and expounding analogous conclusions at that same moment; and the results were evident when the First Interplanetary Conference resumed its wordless and symbolic deliberations on the following day.
For if it was difficult for our representatives
