American Science Fiction Five Classic Novels 1956-58 Read Online Free Page A

through his belly you could poke a fist through, before he hit the floor. But he hung on and the pseudo limb stretched like taffy—then snapped, broken off a few inches from the monster’s neck, and poor Jock still had the life wand cradled in his dead arms.
    The human who had followed that stinking, reeking thing into the room had to step to one side before he could get in a shot—and he made a mistake. He should have shot Dak first, then me. Instead he wasted his first one on Jock and he never got a second one, as Dak shot him neatly in the face. I had not even known Dak was armed.
    Deprived of his weapon, the Martian did not attempt to escape. Dak bounced to his feet, slid up to him, and said, “Ah, Rrringriil. I see you.”
    “I see you, Captain Dak Broadbent,” the Martian squeaked, then added, “You will tell my nest?”
    “I will tell your nest, Rrringriil.”
    “I thank you, Captain Dak Broadbent.”
    Dak reached out a long bony finger and poked it into the eye nearest him, shoving it on home until his knuckles were jammed against the brain case. He pulled it out and his finger was slimed with a green ichor. The creature’s pseudo limbs crawled back into its trunk in reflex spasm but the dead thing continued to stand firm on its base. Dak hurried into the bath; I heard him washing his hands. I stayed where I was, almost as frozen by shock as the late Rrringriil.
    Dak came out, wiping his hands on his shirt, and said, “We’ll have to clean this up. There isn’t much time.” He could have been speaking of a spilled drink.
    I tried to make clear in one jumbled sentence that I wanted no part of it, that we ought to call the cops, that I wanted to get away from there before the cops came, that he knew what he could do with his crazy impersonation job, and that I planned to sprout wings and fly out the window. Dak brushed it all aside. “Don’t jitter, Lorenzo. We’re on minus minutes now. Help me get the bodies into the bathroom.”
    “Huh? Good God, man! Let’s just lock up and run for it. Maybe they will never connect us with it.”
    “Probably they wouldn’t,” he agreed, “since neither one of us is supposed to be here. But they would be able to see that Rrringriil had killed Jock—and we can’t have that . Not now we can’t.”
    “Huh?”
    “We can’t afford a news story about a Martian killing a human. So shut up and help me.”
    I shut up and helped him. It steadied me to recall that “Benny Grey” had been the worst of sadistic psychopaths, who had enjoyed dismembering his victims. I let “Benny Grey” drag the two human bodies into the bath while Dak took the life wand and sliced Rrringriil into pieces small enough to handle. He was careful to make the first cut below the brain case so the job was not messy, but I could not help him with it—it seemed to me that a dead Martian stank even worse than a live one.
    The oubliette was concealed in a panel in the bath just beyond the bidet; if it had not been marked with the usual radiation trefoil it would have been hard to find. After we had shoved the chunks of Rrringriil down it (I managed to get my spunk up enough to help), Dak tackled the messier problem of butchering and draining the human corpses, using the wand and, of course, working in the bathtub.
    It is amazing how much blood a man holds. We kept the water running the whole time; nevertheless, it was bad. But when Dak had to tackle the remains of poor little Jock, he just wasn’t up to it. His eyes flooded with tears, blinding him, so I elbowed him aside before he sliced off his own fingers and let “Benny Grey” take over.
    When I had finished and there was nothing left to show that there had ever been two other men and a monster in the suite, I sluiced out the tub carefully and stood up. Dak was in the doorway, looking as calm as ever. “I’ve made sure the floor is tidy,” he announced. “I suppose a criminologist with proper equipment could reconstruct it—but we