10. JELMI ON THE MOON
Miss Madlyn Mannis — nee Gretchen Schneider — stood in the shade of a huge beach umbrella (perish forbid that any single square inch of that petal-smooth, creamily flawless epidermis should be exposed to Florida’s fervent sun!) on Clearwater Beach.
She was digging first one set of rednailed toes and then the other, into the soft white sand, and was gazing pensively out over the wavelets of the Gulf.
She was a tall girl, and beautifully built, with artistically waved artistically red hair; and every motion she made was made with the lithe grace of the highly trained professional dancer that she in fact was. She was one of the best exotic dancers in the business. As a matter of box-office fact, she was actually almost as good as she thought she was.
She was wearing the skimpiest neo-bikini ever seen on Clearwater Beach and was paying no attention whatever, either to the outraged glares of all the other women in sight or to the distinctly unoutraged glances of the well built, deeply tanned, and highly appreciative young man who was standing some twenty feet away.
She was wondering, however, and quite intensely, about the guy. He’d been following her around for a couple of weeks. Or had he? She’d seen him somewhere every day but he couldn’t possibly have followed her here. Not only she hadn’t known she was coming here until just before she started, but she had come by speedboat and had found him on the beach when she arrived!
And the man was wondering, too. He knew that he hadn’t been following her. Without hiring an eye, he wouldn’t know how to. And the idea that Madlyn Mannis would be following him around was ridiculous — it really stunk. But how many times in a row could heads turn up by pure chance alone?
He didn’t dare move any closer, but he kept on looking and he kept on wondering.
Would she slug him or just slap him or maybe even accept it, he wondered, if he should offer to buy the Miss Mannis a drink…
Miss Mannis was also being studied, much more intensively and from much closer viewpoints, by two Jelmi in an immense new spaceship, the Mallidaxian, on the moon; and the more they studied the Mannis costume the more baffled they became.
As had been said, the Jelmi had had to build this immense new spaceship because the comparatively tiny Mallidax, in which they had escaped from the Realm of the Llurdi, had proved too small by far to house the outsized gear necessary for accurately controlled intergalactic work of any kind. The Mallidaxian, however — built as she was of inoson and sister-ship as she was to the largest, heaviest, and most powerful space-sluggers of the Realm was not only big enough to carry any instrumentation known to the science of the ago, but also powerful enough to cope with any foreseeable development or contingency.
The Jarman sub-Lunar base had been dismantled and collapsed. Its every distinguishing feature had been reduced to moon-dust. The Mallidaxian’s slimly powerful length now extended for a distance of two and one half miles from the mountain’s foot out into the level-floored crater: in less than an hour she would take off for Mallidax, the home world of Tammon, Mergon, Luloy, and several other top bracket Jelmi of the fugitive eight hundred.
The vessel’s officers and crew were giving their instruments and mechanisms one last pre-flight check. Tammon was still studying the offensive and defensive capabilities of Cape Kennedy; Mergon and Luloy — among others — had been studying the human beings of this hitherto unknown world. Everyone aboard, of course, had long since mastered the principal languages of Earth.
That Madlyn Mannis should have been selected for observation was not very astonishing. Some thousands of Earthmen — and Earthwomen, Earthchildren, even Earthdogs and cats — had been. There was that about Madlyn Mannis, however, and to a lesser degree about the male with whom she seemed in some way associated, that seemed to deserve special study. For one thing, the Jelmi had been totally unable to deduce any shred of evidence that might indicate her profession — not so surprising, since the work of a stripper must seem pure fantasy to a world which habitually wears no clothes at all! Madlyn, although used to being talked about, would have been quite astonished to learn how interestedly she was being discussed on the far side of the moon.
“Oh, let’s bring her up here, Meru,” Luloy said in disgust. “I want to talk to her — find out what this idiocy means. We’d better bring that fellow along, too: she’d probably be scared out of her wits — if any — alone.”
“Check,” Mergon said, and the two Tellurians appeared, standing close together, in the middle of the room.
The girl screamed once; then, her eyes caught by the awesome moonscape so starkly visible through the transparent wall, she froze and stared in terror. Then, finding that she was not being hurt, she fought her terror down. She took one fleeting glance at Mergon, blushed to the waist, and concentrated on Luloy. “Why, you must… you do go naked!” she gasped. “All the time! How utterly, utterly shameless!”
“Shameless?” Luloy wrinkled her nose in perplexity. “That’s what I want to talk to you about, this ‘shame’ concept. I can’t understand it and its dictionary definition is senseless to the point of unsanity. I never heard of a concept before that so utterly lacked sense, reason, and logic. What significant difference can there possibly be between nakedness and one ribbon and two bits of gauze? And why in the name of All-Seeing Llenderllon wear any clothing at all when you don’t have to? Against cold or thorns or whatever? And especially when you swim? And you take off your clothes too…”
“I do no such thing!” The dancer drew herself up haughtily. “I am an artiste. An exotic dancer’s disrobing is a fine art, and I am Madlyn Mannis, the exotic dancer.”
“Be that as it may, just answer one question and we’ll put you back where you were, on the beach. What possible logical, reasonable, or even comprehensible relationship can there be between clothing and sex?”
While the girl was groping for an answer, the man took one step forward and said, “She can’t answer that question. Neither can I, fully, but I can state as a fact that such a relationship is a fact of our lives; of the lives of all the peoples — even the least civilized peoples — of our world. It’s an inbred, ages-old, world-wide sexual taboo. Based, possibly or even probably, upon the idea ‘out of sight, out of mind’.”
“A sexual taboo?” Luloy shook her head in complete, bafflement. “Why, I never heard of anything so completely idiotic in my whole life! Will you wear these thought-caps with me for a moment, please, so that we may explore this weird concept in depth?”
The girl flinched away from the helmet at first, but the man reached out for his, saying, “I’ve always claimed to have an open mind, but this I’ve got to see.”
Since complete non-comprehension of motivation on one side met fundamental ignorance on the other, however, thoughts were no more illuminating than words had been.
“Neither she nor I know enough about the basics of that branch of anthropology,” the man said, handing the helmet back to Luloy. “You’d better get a book. Mores and Customs of Tellus, by David Lisser, in five volumes, is the most complete work I know of. You can find it in any big bookstore. It’s expensive, though — it costs seventy-five dollars.”
“Oh? And we haven’t any American money and we don’t steal… but I’ve noticed that highly refractive bits of crystalline carbon of certain shades of color are of value here.”
Turning her back on the two Tellurians, Luloy went to the laboratory bench, opened a drawer, glanced into it, and shook her head. She picked up a helmet, thought into it, and there appeared upon the palm of her hand a perfectly cut, perfectly polished, blue-white diamond half the size of an egg.