"Our religion maintains that the stars, planets, and moons are living beings,"

she said. "These are the only forms of life big enough and complex enough to interest the Creatrix. Biological life is an accidental by-product. You might say that it's a disease infecting the planets. Vegetable and animal life are bearable forms of the disease, like acne or athlete's foot.

"But when sentient life, beings with self-conscious-ness, evolve, they become a sort of deadly microbe. We Shaltoonians, however, are wise enough to know that.

So, instead of being parasites, we become symbiotes. We live off the earth, but we take care that we don't ruin it. That's why we've stuck to an agricultural society. We grow crops, but we replenish the soil with manure. And every tree we cut down, we replace.

"Earthlings, now, they seem to have been parasites who made their planet sick.

Much as I regret to say it, it was a good thing that the Hoonhors cleaned Earth up. They only have to take one look at Shaltoon, however, to see that we've kept our world in tiptop shape. We're safe from them."

Simon did not think that Shaltoon society was above criticism, but he thought it diplomatic to keep silent.

"You say, s.p.a.ce Wanderer, that you mean to roam everywhere until you have found answers to your questions. I suppose by that that you want to know the meaning of life?"

She leaned forward, her eyes a hot green with verti-cal black slits showing in the candlelight. Her gown fell open, and Simon saw the smooth creamy mounds and their tips, huge and red as cherries.

"Well, you might say that," he said.

She rose suddenly, knocking her chair onto the floor, and clapped her hands. The butlers and the offi-cials left at once and closed the doors behind them. Simon began sweating. The room had become very warm, and the thick ropy odor of cat-heat was so heavy it was almost visible.

Queen Margaret of the planet Shaltoon let her gown fall to the floor. She was wearing nothing under-neath. Her high, firm, uncowled bosom was proud and rosy.

Her hips and thighs were like an inviting lyre of pure alabaster. They shone so whitely that they might have had a light inside.

"Your travels are over, s.p.a.ce Wanderer," she whis-pered, her voice husky with l.u.s.t. "Seek no more, for you have found. The answer is in my arms."

He did not reply. She strode around the table to him instead of ordering him, as was her queenly right, to come to her.

"It's a glorious answer, Queen Margaret, G.o.d knows," he replied. His palms were perspiring pro-fusely. "I am going to accept it gratefully. But I have to tell you, if I'm going to be perfectly honest with you, that I will have to be on my way again tomor-row."

"But you have found your answer, you have found your answer!" she cried, and she forced his head be-tween her fragrant young b.r.e.a.s.t.s.

He said something. She thrust him out at arm's length. "What was that you said?"

"I said, Queen Margaret, that what you offer is an awfully good answer. It just doesn't happen to be the one I'm primarily looking for."

Dawn broke like a window hit by a gold brick. Si-mon entered the s.p.a.ceship. A human doughnut dunked in weariness, satiety, and cat-in-mating-season pungency, he slopped in. Anubis sniffed and growled. Simon put out a shaking hand drained of hormones to pet him. Anubis bit it.

CHAPTER 8.

The No Smoking Planet.

During the banquet with Queen Margaret, Simon had drank a goblet of the Shaltoon immortality elixir. And just before he left, he was given two vials of elixir for his animals. Simon hesitated for a long time about of-fering Anubis and Athena the green sweet-and-sour liquid. Was it fair to inflict long life on them? Would he have swallowed the stuff if he had not been drunk with alcohol and the queen's musky odor?

"It may take several lifetimes, or more, for you to find a place where the answer to your primal question is known," the queen had said. "Wouldn't it be ironic if you died of old age while on your way to a planet where the answer you seek was known?"

Simon had said, "You're very wise, Queen Mar-garet," and he emptied the cup. The expected thunder and lightning of imminences of immortality for which he braced himself had not come. Instead, he had belched.

Now he looked at the dog, hiding behind a chair with shame because he had bitten Simon, and at the owl, sitting on top of the chair, her favorite perch, spotted with white.

In the normal course of subjective time, they would both be dead in a few years.

The future might show that they would have been far better off dead. On the other hand-Simon was hopelessly ambidextrous- they might be missing a vast and enduring joy if he denied them the elixir. Who knew? They might even find a planet where the natives had a science advanced enough to raise his pets'

intelligence to a hu-man level. Then he could communicate with them, enjoy their companionship to the fullest potentiality.

On the other hand, they might then become very unhappy.

Simon solved his dilemma by pouring out the elixir into two bowls, If the two cared to drink the stuff, they could do so. The decision was up to their limited powers of free will. After all, animals knew what was good for them, and if immortality smelled bad to them, they wouldn't touch it.

Anubis rose from behind the chair and slinked across the floor to the bowl. He sniffed at the -green liquid and then lapped it up. Simon looked at Athena and said, "Well?" The owl said, "Who?" After a while she flew down to her bowl and drank from it.

Simon began worrying that he had done the wrong thing. Dogs will eat poison if it's wrapped up in a steak. Perhaps the elixir's perfume overrode the odor of dangerous elements.

A minute later, he had forgotten his concern. The viewscreen flashed the information that the ship was approaching a star with a planetary system. The Hw.a.n.g Ho dropped down into sublightspeed, and two days later they were entering an orbit around the sixth planet of the giant red star. This was Earth-size, and its air breathable, though its oxygen content was greater than Earth's.

The only artificial object on the planet was the gigantic candy-heart-shaped tower of the Clerun-Gowph. Simon flew the ship around it a few times, but, on finding that it was as invulnerable as the other, he left it. This planet showed no sign of intelligent life, of beings who used tools, grew crops, and constructed buildings. It did have some curious animal life, though, and he decided to get a close look at it. He gave the landing order, and a few minutes later stepped out onto the edge of a meadow near the sh.o.r.e of an amber sea.

The gra.s.s was about two feet high, violet-colored and topped with yellow flowers with five petals. Mov-ing through and above these were about forty crea-tures which were pyramid-shaped and about thirty feet high. Their skins or sh.e.l.ls-he wasn't sure which they were-were pink. They moved on hundreds of very short legs ending in broad round feet. Halfway up their bodies were eyes, two on each side, eight in all. These were huge and round and a light blue, and the lids had long curling eyelashes. At the top of each pyr-amid-shaped body was a pink ball with a large open-ing on two opposing sides.

It was evident that their mouths were on their bot-toms, since they left a trail of cropped gra.s.s behind them. He could hear the munching of the gra.s.s and rumblings of their stomachs. , Simon had put the ship into a deep ravine beyond a thick woods so he could sneak up on the creatures. But purple things in the sky were moving out to sea and turning in a sweeping curve so they could come in downwind toward him. These were even stranger than the creatures browsing on the flowers. They looked from a distance like zeppelins, but they had two big eyes near the underside of their noses and tentacles coiled up along their undersides about twenty feet back of the eyes. Simon wondered how they ate. Per-haps the curious organs at the tips of their noses were some kind of mouth. These were bulbous and had a small opening.

Just above the small bulb was a hole. This did not seem to be a mouth, however, since it was rigid. There was another hole at the rear, and a number of much smaller ones s.p.a.ced along the underside.

Their tail a.s.semblies were just like zeppelins'. They had huge vertical rudders and horizontal elevators, but these sprouted yellow and green feathers on the edges.

Simon figured out they must use some sort of jet propulsion. They took in air through the front hole, which was rigid, and squeezed it out of the rear hole, which was contracting and dilating.

The huge creatures dropped lower as they neared the meadow, and the first one, emitting short sharp whistles, came in about thirty feet above the ground. It pa.s.sed between a line of the pyramid-things, and then it eased its bulbous nose into an opening in the ball on top of one. This closed around the bulb and held the zeppelin-thing.

The pyramid-thing was a living mooring mast.

A moment later, the flying animal was released. It headed toward the bush behind which Simon was crouched. After it came the other fliers, all whistling. The pyramid-things crowded together and faced in-ward. Or were they facing outward, like a bunch of cows threatened by wolves? How could they face any-thing if they had eyes on all sides and no faces? In any event, they were forming a protective a.s.sembly.

Simon stepped out from his cover with his hands held up. The foremost zeppelin-creature loomed above him, its huge eyes cautious. Its tentacles reached out but did not touch Simon. He was almost blown down as the thing eased forward toward him. The stench was terrible but not unfamiliar. He had batted .500 in his guess about its method of propul-sion. Instead of taking in air, compressing it with some organ, and shooting it out, it drove itself with giant farts. Its big stomachs-like a cow it had more than one-generated gas for propulsion. Simon figured out that its stomachs must contain enzymes which made the gas. At this moment, it hung about ten feet above the surface, bobbing up and down as it expelled gas from the hole in front to counteract the wind.

Simon stood there while the thing whistled at him. After a while he caught on to the fact that the whistles were a sort of Morse code.

Simon imitated some of the dots and dashes just to let them know that he, too, was intelligent. Then he turned back and went to his ship. The zeppelins followed him above the trees and watched him go into the ship. Through the viewscreen he could see them hovering over the ship and feeling it with their tenta-cles. Maybe they thought it was a strange living creature, too.

Simon went out the next day to the edge of the meadow. The living mooring masts got alarmed again, and once more the fliers came down. But after a few days they got used to him. Simon walked closer to them each day. By the end of the week, he was al-lowed to stroll around among the pyramids. A few days later, however, the pyramids were gone. He walked around until he found them in another meadow.

Evidently, they had eaten up all the gra.s.s and flowers in the other place.

Simon found it difficult to learn the language of the zeppelin-things. Most of them were too busy in the daytime to talk to him. When dark came, the fliers locked into the b.a.l.l.s on the top of the pyramids and stayed there until dawn.

When they did speak-or whistle-to him, the stench they expelled was almost unbearable. But then he found out that the pyramids could whistle, too. They did this, not through the mouths on their undersides but through one of the openings in the b.a.l.l.s at the tops. These emitted a stench, too, but he could endure it if he stood upwind. And, being females, the pyramids were more loqua-cious and better suited to teach him zeppelinese.

They liked Simon because he gave them someone to talk to and about. The males, it seemed, spent most of their time playing and carousing in the air. They came down at noon for a meal but wouldn't hang around to talk. When night fell, they landed, but this was for supper and a short session of s.e.xual inter-course.

After which, they usually dozed off.

"We're just objects to them," said one female. "Nu-trition and pleasure objects."

The ball on top of the females was a curious organ. One opening was a combination mooring lock, gruel nipple, and v.a.g.i.n.a. The females browsed on the meadow, digested the food, and fed it through a nip-ple inside the ball into the tips of the males' noses. This opening also received the slender tongue-like s.e.x organ of the male. The opening on the other side of the ball was the a.n.u.s and the mouth. This could be tightened to emit the whistling speech.

Simon didn't want to get involved in the domestic affairs of these creatures.

But he had to show a certain amount of interest and sympathy if he was to get in-formation. So he whistled a question at the female whom he'd named Anastasia.

"Yes, that's right," Anastasia said. "We do all the work and those useless sons of b.i.t.c.hes do nothing but play around all day."

Anastasia didn't actually say "sons of b.i.t.c.hes" but Simon translated it as such.

What she said was some-thing like "farts in a windstorm."

"We females talk a lot among ourselves during the day," she said. "But we'd like to talk with our mates, too. After all, they've been up in the wild blue yonder, having a great time, seeing all sorts of interesting things. But do you think for one moment that they'll let us in on what's going on outside these meadows?

No, all they want to do is to be fed and have a quickie and be off to dreamland.

When we complain, they tell us that we wouldn't understand it if they did tell us what they saw and did. So here we are, ground-bound and shut up in these little meadows, working all day, taking care of the children, while they're roaming around, zooming up and down, having a good old time. It isn't fair!"

Simon whistled some more sympathy and then went down to the beach to watch the males.

He had found out that the stomachs of the fliers also generated hydrogen. It was this gas which en-abled them to float in the air. They carried water as ballast, which they drew up from the ocean through their hollow tentacles. When they wanted alt.i.tude quickly, they released the water, and up they went They were always holding races or gamboling about, playing all sorts of games, tag-the-leader, loop-the-loop, doing Immelmann turns, follow-the-leader, or catch-the-bird. This latter game consisted of chasing a bird until they caught it by sucking it into their jet-holes or forcing it to the ground.

They also liked to scare the herds of animals on the ground by zooming down on them and stampeding them. The male whose herd raised the biggest cloud of dust won this game.

The males had another form of communication than whistling, too. They could emit short or long trails of smoke corresponding to the whistled dots and dashes.

With these they could talk to each other at long distances or call in their buddies if they saw something interesting. They never used this skywrit-ing, however, in sight of the females. They took great delight in having a secret of their own. The females knew about this, of course, since the males sometimes boasted about it. This made the females even more discontented.

Simon would not have stayed long on this planet, which he named Giffard after the Frenchman who first successfully controlled a lighter-than-air craft. Si-mon did not believe that the simple natives had any answers to his questions. But then he talked to Graf, his name for the big male that dominated the herd. Graf said that the males didn't spend all their time just playing. They often had philosophical discussions, usually in the afternoon when they were resting.

They'd float around on the ocean or a lake and dis-cuss the big issues of the universe. Simon, hearing this, decided he'd wait until he knew the language well enough to talk philosophy with the males. A few months after he'd landed, he asked Graf if he would take him to the lake where the males had their bull sessions. Graf said he'd be glad to.

The next day, Graf wrapped a tentacle around Simon and lifted him up. Simon was thrilled but he was also a little scared. He wished that he had flown to the lake in the lifeboat. But he was eager for new experi-ences, and this was one he wasn't likely to find on any other world.

Shortly before they got to the lake, Simon took a cigar out of his pocket and lit up. It was a good cigar, made of Outer Mongolian tobacco. Simon was puffing happily some hundreds of feet above a thick yellow forest, the wind moving softly over his face and a big black bird with a red crest flapping along a few feet away from him. All was blue and quiet and content; this was one of the rare moments when G.o.d did in-deed seem in His heaven and all was well with the world.

As usual, the rare moment did not last long. Graf suddenly started bobbing up and down so violently that Simon began to get airsick. Then he whistled screamingly, and the tentacle around Simon's waist straightened out. Simon grabbed at it and hung on, shouting wildly at Graf. When he got over his first panic, he whistled at Graf after removing the cigar.

"What's the matter?"

"What are you doing?" Graf whistled like a steam kettle back at him. "You're on fire!"

"What?" Simon whistled.

"Let go! Let go! I'll go up in flames!"

"I'll fall, you d.a.m.ned fool!"

"Let go!"

Simon looked down. They were now over the lake but about a hundred feet up.

Below, the cigar-shaped males were floating in the water. Or they had been, a second before. Suddenly, they rose upward in a body, their ballast squirting out through the hollow tenta-cles, and then they scattered.

A few seconds later, Simon realized what was going on. He opened his hand, letting the cigar drop. Graf immediately quit his violent oscillations, and a mo-ment later he deposited Simon on the sh.o.r.e of the lake. But his skin was darker than its usual purple and he stuttered his dots and dashes.

"F-f-f-fire's th-th-the w-w-w-worst th-th-thing there is! It's the only th-th-thing we f-f-fear! It w-w-was in- vented b-b-by th-th-the d-d-devil!"

The Giffardians, it seemed, had religion. Their devil, however, dwelt in the sky, and he propelled himself with a jet of flaming hydrogen. When it came

time for the bad Giffardians to be taken off to the h.e.l.l above the sky, he zoomed in and burned them up with flame from his tail.

The good Giffardians were taken by a zeppelin-shaped angel whose farts were sweet-smelling down into a land below the earth. Their planet was hollow, they claimed, and heaven was inside the hollow.

They had a lot of strange ideas about religion. This didn't faze Simon, who had heard stranger on Earth.

Simon apologized. He then explained what the thing on fire in his mouth had been.

All the males shuddered and bobbed up and down and one was so terror-stricken that he shot away, un-able to control his e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.ns of gas.

"It might be better if you left," Graf said. "Right now."

"Oh, I won't smoke except in the ship from now on," Simon said. "I promise."

This quieted the males down somewhat. But they did not really breathe easy until he also said he would put up some no smoking signs.

"That way, if other Earthmen should land here," Simon said, "they'll not light up."

He didn't tell them that it was doubtful that any people from his native planet would ever come here. Nor did he tell them that there were billions of plan-ets whose people couldn't read English.

It wasn't fire that made Simon so dangerous. It was the ideas he innocently dropped while talking to the females. Once, when Anastasia complained about being kept on the ground, Simon said that she ought to take a ride. He realized at once that he shouldn't have ventured this opinion. But Anastasia wouldn't let him drop the subject. The next day, she tried to talk her mate, Graf, into taking her up. He refused, but she was so upset that the gruel she fed him became sour. After several days of stomach upset, he gave in.

With Anastasia hanging on to him through the lock in their apex-organs, he lifted. The others stood or floated around and watched this epoch-making flight.

Graf carried her up to about two thousand feet, beyond which he was unable to levitate. However, her weight dragged his nose down so that his tail was far higher than his fore part. He was unable to navigate in this fashion and had a hard time getting her back to the meadow. Moreover, his skin had broken out in huge drops of yellowish sweat.

Anastasia, however, was enraptured. The other fe-males insisted that their mates take them for rides. These did so reluctantly and had the same trouble navigating as Graf. The males were too exhausted that night to have s.e.xual intercourse.

There is no telling what might have happened in the next few days. But, the day after, the females started to give birth. Perhaps it was the excitement of their first aerial voyages that made them deliver be-fore the end of their term. In any event, Simon strolled out onto the meadow that morning to find a number of tiny zeppelins and mooring masts nursing.