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me to go yet?"
"Don't rush it," said Elmer Fairfoot the alien. "In a moment, in a
moment."
"Judge Daniel Doomdaily, come to the vesting room at once!" the
loudspeaker sounded in the voice of some overjudge.
"I don't even know where the vesting room is," Doomdaily started to
protest. "Oh, it's all right. I feel that I'm being guided there." And the
judge left the hearing room.
"Six little aliens," the citizen Fulgence Sorrel razzed in a tired but
amused voice. "Delphina Oakley, Bridget Upjones, Evangeline Guillford, Elmer
Fairfoot, Rollo Marquette, Caleb Outback. Six of you in the dock. But are
there only three of you now? And you are painted to make it look as if there
were
six of you?"
"Three of us here now," said alien Elmer Fairfoot, "but try and count
us."
"And you're not really shackled and chained," Fulgence said. "They are
only things you painted on for fun. And we can't avoid being taken over by
you?"
"Why should you want to avoid it?" Elmer asked. "Why do you object?
These migrations are common. You've taken over yourself. That little deformity
inside each of you, that person whom you sometimes call your subconscious, is
what is left of a person who was supplanted by you. He is the one who, looking
at it one way, had title to your body before you did."
"I'm getting mighty hot about this." the citizeness Thelma Brightbrass
interrupted. "There's a fishiness here that smells to heaven for vengeance."
"But, Elmer, I have not personally supplanted anyone," Fulgence said
reasonably.
"No, but now all of those in your line of generation are born
stratified. The supplanted ones. those who would have been born independently
if it weren't for the usurpation by you people, are now born with you and
within you. In some places seven different strata have been counted. In this
place, one more stratum will be counted very soon. Don't fight it, Fulgence.
It gives depth to us all, and we do need a place to stay."
"Who will take me over?" Fulgence asked.
"There's something the matter here and it gets matterer all the time!"
citizeness Thelma exploded.
"I will take you over, Fulgence," the alien Elmer Fairfoot said. "You
are the closest thing to an intelligent one in your group, and I in mine. We
will be in accord. And I'll listen to you, down under there where you'll be,
quite often. Maybe as much as a half minute a day."
"Thanks, Elmer," Fulgence said. "Will I get a velvet gown?"
"No, only a torso paint-job for the present, but it'll look like a
velvet gown for a while. Later, but not much later, there will develop a
synthesis of apparel to serve our common person."
"Doesn't your paint weigh anything?" Hazel Sorrel asked.
"Oh, yes, but we use just enough of it to bring us up to zero," the
alieness Delphina Oakley answered her.
"Well, what do you want here, Delphina?" Hazel asked her.
"Bodies."
"Aren't those bodies that you have there?"
"Not good ones. They haven't any substance. We had to leave substance
behind the way we traveled," Delphina told them.
"I'm getting damned mad about this whole thing!" citizeness Thelma
announced.
"How many of you are there, anyhow?" Hazel asked.
"Oh, there are just as many of us as we can scrounge up for," Delphina
explained. "If we can locate more bodies there will be more of us here to use
them."
Judge Daniel Doomdaily came back into the hearing room.
"Now we will quickly dispose of this case," he said, and caressed Madras
O'Connell with judicial authority.
"There's something the matter with Madras," Thelma railed, and there's
something the matter with Anthony Krebs, and now there's something the matter
with Judge Doomdaily. Look it Madras! Her clothes are different!"
"I'm not wearing clothes," Madras said. "I just got myself to look like
I am."
"Maybe she's a nonfunctioning female now," Thelma challenged.
"Not now," cried Madras, or whoever she was. "Oh, not now!"
"That nonfunctioning interval was a bit tiresome for many of us," Judge
Doomdaily said. People, he did look somehow different. He looked a lot
different -
"But now we can function again," said the judge, or whoever he was. "And
now we will quickly dispose of this case, and of much else."
The Doggone Highly Scientific Door
A group of children swarmed down toward the new door. The door swung
open. The music was booming and jangling in the park inside. and the children
crowded through the door in a happy gang. Elroy Hunt went to follow them
through, and the door clanged shut in his face. He felt it, he pushed it, and
it wouldn't open. There were no knobs or handles anywhere on that door and it
was closed solidly. This was one of the new doors at Whizzer's Amusement Park.
Hunt stepped back from the door a ways. He was slightly puzzled. How do you go
about working a door that is supposed to work by itself? He sat on a bench
that was there just about three steps from that door in the wall of the park.
Elroy Hunt liked to tell people that he had never grown up. He was a
circus flack and a carnival buff, a comic-book collector and a puppet-show
puncher, a citizen of the summertime and a lover of amusement parks. He liked
kid amusements.
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