The Best of Science Fiction 12

"That's no kind of relationship," Jay was saying.

Monica wet her lips for good luck. The pincer was now a fraction of distance from Jay.

"Goodbye, dearest," Monica said.

"Seriously, what did you think of my job in the film?" Jay said.

Monica chose the course of honesty and said nothing.

Jay bit the creature. He was hysterical with rejection. He took a chunk out of the nearest tentacle.

"Like sardines," he said.

The creature took a piece of Jay's index finger. Simultaneously, it got sick.

"Everybody is a critic," Monica said.

"What's with this cruddy beast?" Jay said, licking his fingertip.

Monica hardly noticed that the nostril tentacle was wrapped around her lovely waist. She only saw the creature withdrawing from Jay and could detect that it turned a wee bit greener by the luminous eye.

"It don't like the taste of you," she said.

"Come back here," Jay yelled, and took another bite.

The creature was completely intimidated. The fingertip caused chronic indigestion. It wanted to get back to the cool ocean.

"The hell with you," Jay screamed.

"TS," Monica said, "being drawn by the tentacle. The creature felt icky but still very horny.

"The best to you," Jay said. "I hope you'll be very happy together. You deserve each other."

"We have similar tastes," Monica said. Then she realised that she was in deep trouble. Flattering as it was, she did not want to go into an unknown world, especially one without mass media. And she could not even trust that Jay would tell the story without distortion.

The creature pulled Monica up and through a window. It carried her like a suitcase as it scuttled toward the water. Jay ran after it taking nips.

"Get me down," Monica said. "Please, Jay. We work well together."

The creature hesitated. A prehistoric memory waved curtains in its brain once more. It recalled being caught by its mate in the company of a German lady way way back. The memory was unpleasant, full of flailing. It loosened its hold on Monica, but not entirely.

"It's feeling guilty," Monica said with perfect intuition. "It's letting me go."

"Talk about summer romances," Jay said. "Wait when Variety gets this poop."

"You wouldn't. Not even you would."

"Hi, there," Jay said.

"Take me," Monica was screaming. The creature was trying to shake her loose, but she held on with long fingers.

"Oh look there," Jay said.

Harriet Troom, camera ready, came rushing down to the beach in Harold Bipley's Rolls.

"It wouldn't eat him," Monica was saying.

"It wouldn't have relations with her," Jay was yelling.

Harriet Troom, clicking flash pictures with her non-driving hand pulled the Rolls as close as she could. The creature, terrified, was half in the sea, still whirling Monica around like a propeller. The car with its lantern headlights and the popping flash and the white-lit face of Harriet Troom grinning widely under glass was too much for it. It resorted to a kind of flying apart which creatures of its type could manage. It turned itself into a broken jig saw of parts, then fused together.

In the splash and roar, Monica was dislodged. Harriet Troom, driving too close, got incorporated. The lights of the Rolls and the popping flash could be seen through the creature's crinkley hide as it vanished under the waves.

Jay and Monica stood on the shore. Neither spoke. Both were committed to eternal secrecy by events that interacted like penalties which nullify one another in football games. They waited there until high tide rinsed the sand, and washed away the tire tracks and creature marks.

Back in the abbey they gathered their belongings.

"We shouldn't leave until morning," Monica said.

"No," Jay said. "And we have hours before dawn sheds its rosy glow on all concerned."

"I have a pencil," Monica said.

With Monica's eyebrow pencil, by the light of some stars, they wrote Harriet Troom's next column. They could keep filing columns until she was missed or something came up on a beach somewhere.

Later they crawled into Jay's sleeping bag.

Up a way, the guards were fast asleep.

Back in the studio, Harold Bipley dictated a press release into a tape recorder. It told how Jason Briar and Monica Ploy were purged and purified through their ordeal of isolation and seclusion.

"Like an atomic age Adam and Eve," he said to the microphone, "two million dollar talents came back to the world today with new maturity and a solid sense of direction." Then he said, "Hold for release." Then he thought soft thoughts about his two favourites and how things were going for them out there. Spiritually, he was right with them in the bag.

Take a word: call it Pop!

Once upon a time, Pop was the complement, or maybe supplement, of Mom. Today it is simply the opposite: any opposite, (Anything Mom doesn't like can't be all bad.) Since it sometimes needs Susan Sontag to explain it, Pop does not always mean 'popular'. Possibly the etymology is the third term of Snap! Crackle ! Pop! characteristics are: colourfulness (visual or audible); an illusion of unpredictability achieved by the quantification of the commonplace (multiply the Campbell Soup can — amplify the 4/4 march beat — divide Batman into his component dots — ); and ideally, a certain glossiness typical of the classical (pre-TV, or "Gutenberg') decades of magazine and cereal-box advertising.

Neither technical nor contextual quality are significant Pop criteria . Content (or innate message) is permissible if it did not originate with the designer, producer, or arranger, and does not distract attention from the arrangement, display, or happening.

Much of it is ingenious: almost all of it is cheerful.

So here I am, warden-in-charge, fattening them up for our leader, Tommy Fango; here I am laying on the banana pudding and the milkshakes and the cream-and-brandy cocktails, going about like a technician, gauging their effect on haunch and thigh when all the time it is I who love him, I who could have pleased him eternally if only life had broken differently. But I am scrawny now, I am swept like a leaf around corners, battered by the slightest wind. My elbows rattle against my ribs and I have to spend half the day in bed so a gram or two of what I eat will stay with me, for if I do not, the fats and creams will vanish, burned up in my own insatiable furnace, and what little flesh I have will melt away.

Cruel as it may sound, I know where to place the blame.

It was vanity, all vanity, and I hate them most for that. It was not my vanity, for I have always been a simple soul; I reconciled myself early to reinforced chairs and loose garments, to the spattering of remarks. Instead of heeding them I plugged in, and I would have been happy to let it go at that, going through life with my radio in my bodice, for while I never drew cries of admiration, no one ever blanched and turned away.

But they were vain and in their vanity my frail father, my pale, scrawny mother saw me not as an entity but a reflection on themselves. I flush with shame to remember the excuses they made for me. "She takes after May's side of the family," my father would say, denying any responsibility. "It's only baby fat," my mother would say, jabbing her elbow into my soft flank. "Nelly is big for her age." Then she would jerk furiously, pulling my voluminous smock down to cover my knees. That was when they still consented to be seen with me. In that period they would stuff me with pies and roasts before we "went anywhere, filling me up so I would not gorge myself in public. Even so I had to take thirds, fourths, fifths and so I was a humiliation to them.