Chapter 16

With a long rolling stride and a creaking of leather boots, Marvin Flynn strode down the wooden sidewalk. Faintly there came to him the mingled odors of sagebrush and chaparral. On either side of him the adobe walls of the town glittered under the moon like dull Mexican silver. From a nearby saloon there came the strident tones of a banjo-

Frowning deeply, Marvin stopped in midstride. Sagebrush? Saloons? What was going on around here?

'Something wrong, stranger?' a harsh voice intoned.

Flynn whirled. A figure stepped out of the shadows near the General Store. It was a saddlebum, a snuffling, slump-shouldered loafer with a dusty black hat crushed comically on his begrimed forehead.

'Yes, something is very wrong,' Marvin said. 'Everything seems – strange.'

' 'Tain't nothing to be alarmed about,' the saddlebum reassured him. 'You have merely changed your system of metaphoric reference, and the Lord knows there's no crime in that. As a matter of fact, you should be happy to give up those dreary animal-insect comparisons.'

'There was nothing wrong with my comparisons,' Marvin said, 'After all, I am on Celsus V, and I do live in a burrow.'

'So what?' the saddlebum said. 'Haven't you any imagination?'

'I've got plenty of imagination!' Marvin said indignantly. 'But that's hardly the point. I simply mean that it is inconsistent to think like a cowboy on Earth when one is actually a sort of molelike creature on Celsus.'

'It can't be helped,' the saddlebum said. 'What's happened is, you've overloaded your analogizing faculty, thereby blowing a fuse. Accordingly, your perceptions have taken up the task of experimental normalization. This state is known as "metaphoric deformation".'

Now Marvin remembered the warning he had received from Mr Blanders concerning this phenomenon. Metaphoric deformation, that disease of the interstellar traveller, had struck him suddenly and without warning.

He knew that he should be alarmed, but instead felt only a mild surprise. His emotions were consistent with his perceptions, since a change unperceived is a change unfelt.

'When,' Marvin asked, 'will I start to see things as they really are?'

'That last is a question for a philosopher,' the saddlebum told him. 'But speaking in a limited fashion, this particular syndrome will pass if you ever get back to Earth. But if you continue travelling the process of perceptual analogizing will increase; though occasional short-lived remissions into your primary situation-perception context may be expected.'

Marvin found that interesting, but unalarming. He hitched up his jeans and said, 'Waal, reckon a man's gotta play out the hand that's dealt to him, and I ain't about to stand here all night jawing about it. Just who are you, stranger?'

'I,' said the saddlebum, with a certain smugness, 'am he without whom your dialogue would be impossible. I am Necessity personified; without me, you would have had to remember the Theory of Metaphoric Deformation all by yourself, and I doubt that you are capable of it. You may cross my palm with silver.'

'That's for gipsies,' Marvin said scornfully.

'Sorry,' the saddlebum said, without the least show of embarrassment. 'Got a tailor-made?'

'Got the makings,' Marvin said, flipping him a sack of Bull Durham. He contemplated his new companion for a moment, then said, 'Waal, yore a mangy-looking critter, and it seems to me yore half jackass and half prairie dog. But I reckon I'm stuck with you no matter who you are.'

'Bravo,' the saddlebum said gravely. 'You conquer change of context with that same sureness with which an ape conquers a banana.'

'Reckon that's a tech highfalutin',' Marvin said equably. 'What's the next move, perfesser?'

'We shall proceed,' the saddlebum said, 'to yonder saloon of evil repute.'

'Yippee,' Marvin said, and strode lean-hipped through the batwinged saloon doors.

Within the saloon, a female attached herself to Marvin's arm. She looked up at him with a smile of vermilion bas-relief. Her unfocused eyes were pencilled in imitation of gaiety; her flaccid face was painted with the lying hieroglyphics of animation.

'C'mon upstairs with me, kid,' the grisly beldame cried. 'Lotsa fun, lotsa laughs!'

'It is droll to realize,' the saddlebum said, 'that Custom has decreed this lady's mask, proclaiming that those who sell pleasure must portray enjoyment. It is a hard demand, my friends, and not imposed upon any other occupation. For note: the fishwife is allowed to hate herring, the vegetable man may be allergic to turnips, and even the newspaper boy is permitted his illiteracy. Not even the blessed saints are required to enjoy their holy martyrdoms. Only the humble sellers of pleasure are required, like Tantalus, to be forever expectant of an untouchable feast.'

'Yer friend's a great little kidder, ain't he?' the termagant said. 'But I like you best, baby, 'cause you make me go all mush inside.'

From the virago's neck there hung a pendant upon which was strung in miniature a skull, a piano, an arrow, a baby's shoe, and a yellowed tooth.

'What are those?' Marvin asked.

'Symbols,' she said.

'Of what?'

'Come on upstairs, and I'll show you, sweety-ass.'

'And thus,' the saddlebum intoned, 'we perceive the true unmediated confrontation of the aroused feminine nature, 'gainst which our masculine fancies seem mere baby's toys.'

'C'mon!' the harpy cried, wriggling her gross body in a counterfeit of passion all the more frightening because it was real. 'Upstairs to bed!' she shouted, pressing against Marvin with a breast the size and consistency of an empty Mongolian saddlebag. 'I'll really show ya somepin!' she cried, entwining his thews with a heavy white leg, somewhat grimy and heavily varicosed. 'When ya git loved by me,' she howled, 'you'll damned well know you been loved!' And she ground lasciviously against him with her pudenda, which was as heavily armoured as the forehead of a Tyrannosaurus.

'Well, er, thank you so terribly much anyhow,' Marvin said, 'but I don't think just at the moment I-'

'You don't want no lovin'?' the woman asked incredulously.

'Well, actually, I can't really say that I do.'

The woman planted knobkerry fists on tom-tom hips and said, 'That I should live to see this day!' But then she softened, and said, 'Turn not away from Venus' sweet-perfumed home of pleasure! Thou must strive, sir, to overcome this most unseemly gesture of unmanliness. Come, my lord! The bugle sounds; it awaits thee now to mount and fiercely press thy charge!'

'Oh, I rather think not,' Marvin said, laughing hollowly.

She seized him by the throat with a hand the size and shape of a Chilean poncho. 'You'll do it now, you lousy cowardly inward-directed goddamn narcissist bastard, and you'll do it good and proper, or by Ares I'll snap your scrawny windpipe like a Michaelmas chicken!'

A tragedy seemed in the making, for the woman's passion rendered her incapable of a judicious modification of her demands, while Marvin's reputed great vaulting lance had shrunken to the size of a pea. (Thus blind nature, by defending him from one assault, tendered provocation for another.)

Lucidly the saddlebum, following the dictates of his wit if not his predilection, snatched a fan out of his gun belt, leaned forward simpering, and tapped the enraged woman on her rhinocerine upper arm.

'Don't you dare hurt him!' the saddlebum said, his voice a squeaky contralto.

Marvin, quick if not apt, rejoindered, 'Yes, tell her to stop pawing me! I mean to say it is simply too much, one cannot even stroll out of one's house in the evening without encountering some disgraceful incident-'

'Don't cry, for God's sake, don't cry!' the saddlebum said. 'You know I can't stand it when you cry!'