Lochinvar

Galaxyy – August 1961

(1961) *

Margaret St. Clair

LOCHINVAR—the spelling is only approximate —stuck his head up through the sink drain. It was a good thing Franny had left the basket stopper out of the drain; he would never have been able to lift such a heavy weight.

He listened. His round, intelligent eyes were bright with curiosity. After a moment he expanded the frilly lettuce-green crest on the top of his head that was his organ for distance thought perception. He listened with it too, cocking his head thoughtfully from time to time. He did hope this was going to be a nice place. No quarreling or harsh words.

The atmosphere of the kitchen —freshly baked cherry pie —seemed to reassure him. He put his tiny paws on the edge of the drain hole and levered his limber, celery-talk body up on the porcelain. It took him a long time.

At last he was out. Out, and hungry. The cherry pie, cooling on the counter opposite him, smelled delicious. But his thought organ (Lochinvar was an extremely sensitive receiver, too sensitive for his own comfort, but he couldn’t send at all), and the lettuce frill on the top of his head picked up ideas of “Precious” and “Taboo” from the cherry pie. He wasn’t, after all, intolerably hungry and he didn’t want to antagonize anybody. He’d wait.

He bunched his four neat little paws under him, let his under-curved frondy tail hang down into the sink, and composed himself for a nice nap on the rim of the drainboard . He liked the smooth, soft feel of its monel -metal surface. He slept.

Franny, coming in about five to start supper, found him still sleeping there. She gave a startled yip.

Don, in the living room, heard her. He and Franny had been married nearly five years, but he was still a little silly about his wife and probably always would be. He came running in.

“What is it, kid?”

“There on the drainboard .” She pointed. “A little green thing.”

-

DON GAVE her a reassuring squeeze and then bent over to look where she was pointing. “It’s a —“he said, and stopped. “I don’t know what it is,” he confessed. “I thought it was some sort of lizard, but it’s shaped more like a sea horse. It doesn’t look dangerous, anyhow.”

Lochinvar had opened his agate eyes and was looking at them. Not for the first time, he wished he had vocal cords. He hoped they wouldn’t get scared and start poking at him. Fear wasn’t as unpleasant for him to receive as anger and hostility, but it was bad enough.

“It’s sort of cute,” Franny said after a while. “Those little feet and those big bright eyes and the way its tail hangs down. It seems friendly somehow. Where do you suppose it came from, Don?”

“I can’t imagine. Or what it is, for that matter. But, as you say, it’s cute.”

Franny was still studying Lochinvar. Rather nervously she held out one hand to him.

Lochinvar twitched his tail. Then he gathered his muscles, jumped, and landed accurately on Franny’s forefinger. He clung there, using his frondy tail to balance with.

“Be careful!” Don warned. “It might sting you.”

“Oh, no. You can’t imagine how gently he’s holding on with those little bits of paws. Do you suppose he’d like something to eat?”

“I expect so, but what? Too bad he can’t indicate his food preferences.”

Lochinvar had been waiting for just such an invitation. He hopped off Franny’s finger, humped up his back, and took a long, long leap across the kitchen to beside the cherry pie. He looked up at them inquiringly.

Don’s jaw dropped. “He understood me!”

“He wants some of the pie, Don.”

“That was for my supper,” Don said. “I’ve been asking you for weeks to make a cherry pie.”

“Oh, he’ll only eat a tiny piece.”

While her husband looked on reproachfully, she cut a sliver of the pie and put it on a saucer. Lochinvar ate daintily, partly nibbling, partly licking, like a cat, with his delicate golden tongue. When he had finished, he hopped on Franny’s hand again.

She stroked his head with one fingertip. Her blue eyes were bright with pleasure. “Why, he’s covered with fur!” she said, surprised. “That green stuff is as soft as silk.”

“I wonder where he came from,” Don said.

-

THE MARTIAN ambassador, whose visit to Terra was a secret known only to three top-level people, was noticeably worried and distraught.

-

B THE end of the next day, ” Lochinvar had made himself quite at home in the Vennor household. Under the sobriquet of Boopus, he sat on Franny’s shoulder as she did her housework, partook daintily of a French apple pie, and appeared to listen attentively to the baseball news on the radio when Don tuned it in.

“He’s the nicest pet we ever had,” Franny said.

“Um-hum. Practically human, and better-looking than most human beings. Besides being a Giant fan. Listen, kid —”

“Well?”

“About that motorboat —I’ve been thinking, and I can’t see why we have to wait any longer for it.”

Franny’s ordinarily smooth brow contracted in a frown. “Don, we just can’t afford it now. We’ve been over this a dozen times.”

“Why can’t we afford it? It only means borrowing a little more money. What am I living for?”

Their voices had begun to rise. Lochinvar looked from Don to Franny anxiously. Were they going to have a quarrel? He hated it so.

“Borrow more money? I want you to have what you want, Don. But this isn’t reasonable.”

“Damn it, Franny, you’re not being reasonable yourself. I —”

Lochinvar felt quite desperate. He must stop them. He jumped up and down a couple of times on Franny’s shoulder, to attract her attention, and then made a valiant attempt to jump across to Don and repeat the performance. He misjudged the distance. He landed with an audible thud on the carpet.

Franny and her husband both hurried to pick him up. As they stooped simultaneously, their heads bumped together. The next minute they were in each other’s arms.

“Is Boopus hurt? … Go ahead and get the boat, Don. It isn’t wo r th fighting about.”

”“No, he’s okay … I can wait for the boat, Franny.”

“We’ll go shopping for it the middle of next month. I promise, Don. By then the payments for the trip we took to Tahiti will be out of the way … Are you sure he’s all right?”

“I think so.” Don was probing Lochinvar’s tiny person carefully. “He weighs so little that a fall’s not serious for him, the way it would be for a larger creature. Besides, he doesn’t act hurt.”

This was true enough. Lochinvar, who was feeling extremely relieved, had hopped on to Franny’s hand and was looking at them with his usual expression of lovable, amiable intelligence.

“He’s so cute!” Franny said, delighted. She added, in one of the understatements of the ages, “He doesn’t like it when we quarrel.”

-

THERE IS no tongue, among all the languages of the Galaxy, better suited to the expression of deadly, elaborate, ceremonious insult than High Martian. The messages that Ivvy, the Martian ambassador, was getting from home were so lethally expressive that they made him turn pale and blink his eyes. None the less, what he had to do was so distasteful that he put it off for nearly a day longer. At last he forced himself to the unavoidable interview with the head of the UNBI.

When the UNBI chief realized that Ivvy was serious, he acted. Agents went out. People were interviewed. Trails were followed. And ads appeared in the papers.

-

“IT’S CERTAINLY our Boopus,” Franny said. She read aloud, “Lost, on July 25th near the spaceport, exotic small green animal with brown eyes. Bushy tail. Very attractive and intelligent. Will finder please call KY 7-0001 immediately? Extremely liberal reward.”

“That ad must have cost a lot,” Don said. “It’s a display ad, not in the ordinary lost and found. Somebody wants Boopus back badly.” He moved toward the phone on the table.

“What are you going to do?” Franny asked.

“Call the number, of course.”

“Wait.” She put out her hand. “I don’t want to give him up.”

“For a big reward? Franny, you mustn’t be unreasonable!”

“What could we buy with the money that would be as nice as he is?”

“Um . Well, he is a Giant fan. But we can’t just keep him, when his owner wants him back. That would be stealing.”

“Would it? I don’t think anyone who’s as careless as the owner must be deserves to have him. He’d never have got lost, if his owner had taken proper care of him.”

“Well …” Don said indecisively.

The crest on Lochinvar’s head was vibrating furiously. These people liked him and didn’t want to give him up. Fine. He liked them too. But they’d quarreled once before, and he’d barely been able to stop them. If they quarreled again, anything might happen. He wouldn’t be able to help himself.

Lochinvar had no vocal cords, but in moments of intense emotion he was able to swallow air and emit a grumbling noise. He did this now.

When he saw that Franny and Don were both looking at him, he hopped over to the phone and sat down on it. Once more he made the grumbling noise.

Franny sighed. She ran one hand unhappily through her long blonde hair. “Go ahead and call,” she said. “He wants you to.”

-

I VVY, IN A limousine driven by a grim-faced UNBI man, arrived somewhat later. His eyes were anxious and his lips, as he pressed the front door buzzer, were white. Nobody knew better than he what Lochinvar’s possibilities were —possibilities that, for all their comic aspects, were apt to end tragically.

Franny opened the door. ” ‘Lo ,” she said muzzily. “Nize day.” She giggled. “You the man about the ad?”

What Ivvy had been afraid would happen obviously had been happening. Fortunately, it didn’t seem to have gone very far. “Yes, I have come for the little animal,” he answered. “Do I see him on your shoulder?”

“Sure,” Franny answered. “Boopus.” She lowered her voice confidentially. “He’s all stiff.”

“Oh, my,” said Ivvy. That must mean Lochinvar had been rebroadcasting for quite a while. “Oh, dear.”

He produced a transparent globe that looked like plastic but was, in actual fact, made of kaointh —a word that, in Martian, means “impervious to neural force.”

“Excuse me,” he said to Franny. A little unsteadily —for by now Ivvy was feeling the effect of Lochinvar’s involuntary transmission himself —he reached across to the girl, plucked Lochinvar from her shoulder, and dropped him tenderly through the opening in the kaointh globe. He closed the opening.

He drew a long breath. “Ah,” he said, “I am finally much relieved.”

Franny had been watching vacantly. Now she rubbed one hand over her face. “Relieved? Oh, I see. You were afraid somebody might hurt him. I see.”

She didn’t see at all, but Ivvy found no reason for enlightening her. He followed her into the living room, holding the kaointh globe. He put the globe down on the cocktail table and began shelling out what was, precisely as the ad had said, an extremely liberal reward.

Don had been sitting on the floor, looking bewilderedly at an unsteady tower he had apparently been building out of dominoes. Now he scrambled to his feet and shut the radio off.

Ivvy began putting the money in his hand. Don accepted without enthusiasm. He had liked Lochinvar and he felt, just as Franny did, that there was something odd and unsatisfactory about the transaction.

“How did the animal happen to get lost?” he asked.

Ivvy’s plump lips worked, but no sound came out. What point was there in relating to these Earth people the series of fantastic mishaps that had ended in Lochinvar’s getting out of his protective case and being dropped into one of the city’s reservoirs as Ivvy and his VIP hosts chanced to fly over it in a ‘copter?

“He got into the water system by mistake,” he said at last.

“Oh.”

Ivvy put his wallet away. “You were listening to the radio?” he asked.

“Yes.” Don’s good-humored face grew sour. “Giants are losing again,” he said bitterly. “Every year they start out fine, every year they manage to foul it up. Makes my blood really boil.”

Ivvy nodded. What had happened was obvious. This Earth-man’s angry thoughts had grown too much for Lochinvar to absorb, and the wretched animal had begun re-emitting them involuntarily.

Fortunately Ivvy had arrived in time.

-

HE MOVED toward the door. Franny followed him. “He was the nicest pet we ever had,” she said wistfully. “We hate to let him go. You’ll be good to him?”

Once more the ambassador’s face worked. This woman didn’t realize —and, if he had his way, never would realize —that she and her husband had been harboring one of the fabulous Gryna animals.

The Gryna animal’s peculiar mental abilities run like a particolored thread through Martian history. Time and again whole cities have been betrayed to the enemy by the surreptitious conveying of a Gryna , minus its protective case, into their citadels. The animal itself is harmless, well-meaning and intelligent. But when it receives a certain quantum of hostile thought impulses from the human around it, it involuntarily re-emits them. It re-emits them transformed into a monumental, paralyzing euphoria.

The first stages of this are not so bad —rather like the happy phase of a drinking bout. Franny and Don had been at this stage when Ivvy came for Lochinvar. It is a stage of muzziness and block-building. But as the euphoria continues, it grows dangerous. Those within the radius of its effects are capable of walking off a cliff to see what is at the bottom, or putting their hands into a glowing furnace to pat the pretty flames. And a beleaguered city will open its gates to its enemies, saying happily, “Do come in.”

“I said we hate to let him go,” Franny repeated a little insistently. “He has such a gentle nature. He hated it when we quarreled.”

Ivvy licked his lips. He thought of the incredulity that had come into the UNBI chiefs face when Ivvy had tried to tell him that Lochinvar was an ordinary precaution of Martian diplomacy. He thought of the worsening of high-level Mars-Terra relations that was bound to result. He thought of what would have happened if Lochinvar had received enough hostile thoughts to get him really going before Ivvy reclaimed him. He thought of his own blasted career as a diplomat.

But the code of Martian politeness is a compelling one. Ivvy forced his stiff face into a smile. “Yes, I’ll be kind to him,” he told Franny truthfully. “As you say, he responds badly to harsh words.”

The End

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Lochinvar