“No.” Waverly drained his glass and hiccupped. “I appreciate the rescue and all that, but now I really must be getting back to work—”
* * *
“What salary are you drawing now?” Izlik demanded bluntly.
“Five hundred,” Waverly said.
“Ha! I’ll double that! One thousand Universal Credits!”
“How much is that in dollars?”
“You mean the local exchange?” Izlik removed a note book from his sporran, writhed his features at it.
“Coconuts . . . wampum . . . seashells . . . green stamps . . . ah! Here we are! Dollars! One Unicred is equal to twelve hundred and sixty-five dollars and twenty-three cents.” He closed the book. “A cent is a type of cow, I believe. A few are always included in local transactions to placate Vishnu, or something.”
“That’s . . . that’s over a million dollars a month!”
“A minute,” Izlik corrected. “You’ll get more for your next picture, of course.”
“I’d like to take you up on it, Mr. Izlik,” Waverly said wistfully. “But I’m afraid I wouldn’t survive long enough to spend it.”
“As to that, if you’re to play superheroes, you’ll naturally require superpowers. I’ll fit you out with full S-P gear. Can’t have my star suffering any damage, of course.”
“S-P gear?”
“Self-Preservation. Developed in my own labs at Cosmic Productions. Better than anything issued to the armed forces. Genuine poly-steel muscles, invulnerable armor, IR and UV vision, cloak of invisibility—though of course you’ll use the latter only in real emergencies.”
“It sounds—” Waverly swallowed. “Quite overwhelming,” he finished.
“Wait!” a faint voice sounded from the floor. Waverly and Izlik turned to the cot where Fom Berj was struggling feebly to sit up.
“You wouldn’t . . . sink so low . . . as to ally yourself . . . with these vandals . . . ” she gasped out.
“Vandals!” Izlik snorted. “I remind you, madam, it was I who took in tow your derelict twifler, which was bearing you swiftly toward a trans-Plutonian orbit!”
“Better annihilation—than help . . . from the likes of you . . . ”
“I, ah, think you have an erroneous impression,” Waverly put in. “Mr. Izlik here doesn’t produce Galaculars. In fact, he’s planning a nice, family-type entertainment that will render the planet wreckers obsolete.”
“The day of the Galacular is over!” Izlik stated in positive tones. “What is a mere fractured continent, when compared with a lone hero, fighting for his life? When I release my epic of the struggle of one beleaguered being, beset by a bewildering bestiary of bellicose berserkers, our fortunes will be made!”
“Oh, really?” Fom Berj listened to a brief outline of the probable impact on the theatrically minded Galactic public of the new Miniculars.
“Why, Wivery—I really think you’ve solved the problem!” she acknowledged at the end. “In fact—I don’t suppose—” She rolled her oversized eyes at Izlik. “How about signing me on as leading lady?”
“Well—I don’t know,” Izlik hedged. “With a family-type audience, there might be cries of miscegenation . . . ”
“Nonsense. Take off your disguise, Wivery.”
“To be perfectly candid, I’m not wearing one,” Waverly replied with dignity.
“You mean—” Fom Berj stared at him. Then a titter broke from her capacious mouth. She reached up, fumbled at her throat, and with a single downward stroke, split her torso open like a banana peel. A slim arm came out and thrust the bulky costume back from round shoulders; a superb bosom emerged, followed by a piquant face with a turned-up nose topped by a cascade of carrot-red hair.
* * *
“And I thought I had to conceal my identity from you!” she said as she stepped from the collapsed Vorplischer suit. “And all this time you were really a Borundian!”
“A Borundian?” Waverly smiled dazedly at the graceful figure before him, modestly clad in a wisp of skintight gauze.
“Like me,” Fom Berj said. “They’d never had hired me in my natural guise. We look too much like those Earth natives.”
“Here,” Izlik interrupted. “If you two are the same species, why is it that she’s shaped like that, and you’re not?”
“That’s part of the beauty of being a, um, Borundian,” Waverly said, taking the former detective’s hand and looking into her smiling green eyes. “Go ahead and draw up the contracts, Mr. Izlik. You’ve got yourself a deal.”
THE BODY BUILDERS
He was a big bruiser in a Gendye Mark Seven Sullivan, the luxury model with the nine-point sensory system, the highest-priced Grin-U-Matic facial expression attachment on the market and genuine human hair, mustache and all.
He came through the dining room entry like Genghis Kahn invading a Swiss convent. If there’d been a door in his way he’d have kicked it down. The two lads walking behind him—an old but tough-looking utility model Liston and a fairly new Wayne—kept their hands in their pockets and flicked their eyes over the room like buggy whips. The head waiter popped out with a stock of big purple menus, but the Sullivan went right past him, headed across toward my table like a field marshal leading a victory parade.
Lorena was with me that night, looking classy in a flossed-up Dietrich that must have set her back a month’s salary. She was in her usual mood for the usual reason: she wanted to give up her job at the Cent-Prog and sign a five-year marriage contract with me. The idea left me cold as an Eskimo’s tombstone. In the first place, at the rate she burned creds, I’d have to creak around in a secondhand Lionel with about thirty percent sensory coverage and an undersized power core; and in the second, I was still carrying the torch for Julie. Sure, Julie had nutty ideas about Servos. According to her, having a nice wardrobe of specialized outfits for all occasions was one step below cannibalism.
“You and that closet full of zombies!” she used to shake her finger under my nose. “How could a girl possibly marry you and never know what face she’d see when she woke up in the morning!”
She was exaggerating, but that was the way those Organo-Republicans are. No logic in ’em. After all, doesn’t it make sense to keep your organic body on file in the Municipal Vaults, safe out of the weather, and let a comfortable, late-model Servo do your walking and talking? Our grandparents found out it was a lot safer and easier to sit in front of the TV screen with feely and smelly attachments than to be out bumping heads with a crowd. It wasn’t long after that that they developed the contact screens to fit your eyeballs, and the plug-in audio, so you began to get the real feel of audience participation. Then, with the big improvements in miniaturization and the new tight-channel transmitters, you could have your own private man-on-the-street pickup. It could roam, seeing the sights, while you racked out on the sofa.
Of course, with folks spending so much time flat on their backs, the Public Health boys had to come up with gear to keep the organic body in shape. For a while, people made it with part-time exercise and home model massage and feeding racks, but it wasn’t long before they set up the Central File system.
Heck, the government already had everything about you on file, from your birth certificate to your fingerprints. Why not go the whole hog and file the body too?
* * *
Of course, nobody had expected what would happen when the quality of the sensory pickups and playbacks got as good as they did. I mean the bit the eggheads call “personality gestalt transfer.” But it figured. A guy always had the feeling that his consciousness was sitting somewhere back of his eyes; so when the lids were linked by direct hookup to the Servo, and all the other senses tied in—all of a sudden, you were there. The brain was back in Files, doped to the hairline, but you—the thing you call a mind—was there, inside the Servo, living it up.
And with that kind of identification, the old type utilitarian models went out of style, fast. People wanted Servos that expressed the real inner man—the guy you should have been. With everybody as big and tough as they wanted to be, depending on the down payment they could handle, nobody wanted to take any guff off anybody. In the old days, a fellow had to settle for a little fender-bending; now you could hang one on the other guy, direct. Law Cent had to set up a code to cover the problem, and now when some bird insulted you or crowded you off the Fastwalk, you slugged it out with a Monitor watching.
Julie claimed it was all a bunch of nonsense; that the two Servos pounding each other didn’t prove anything. She could never see that with perfect linkage, you were the Servo. Like now: The waiter had just put a plate of consomme au beurre blanc in front of me, and with my high-priced Yum-gum palate accessory, I’d get the same high-class taste thrills as if the soup was being shoved down my Org’s mouth in person. It was a special mixture, naturally, that lubricated my main swivel and supplied some chemicals to my glandular analogs. But the flavor was there.