Galaxy Magazine (November 1953) by Galaxy

Author:Galaxy
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 1953-11-08T16:00:00+00:00

ards and cheetahs and a pair of surly black jaguars whose claw-scored hides indicated either a recent difference of opinion or a burst of conjugal affection.

The south end of the vast rcom had been recently partitioned off, with a single heavy door breaking the new wall at its center. On either side of this door the bears held sway: shaggy grizzlies, black bears, cinnamon and brown; spectacled Andeans and sleek white polars padding silently on tufted feet.

The sick bear sulked in a cage to himself, humped in an oddly doglike pose with his great head hanging disconsolately.

Oliver sized up the situation, casting back to past reading for the proper procedure*

4 T11 need a squeeze-cage and a couple of cage boys to help immobilize the brute/' he said. "Will you—*'

He was startled, in turning, to find that Bivins had not accompanied him into the building. He was not alone, however. The door at the center of the partitioning wall had opened while he spoke, and a slender blonde girl in the briefest of white sunsuits was looking at him.

A PPARENTLY she had not **• expected Oliver, for there was open interest in her clear green eyes. She said something in

a clear and musical—but completely unintelligible—voice that ranged, with a remarkably operatic effect, through two full octaves.

Oliver stared. "I'm here to doctor the sick bear," he said.

"Oh, a native/ 9 the girl said in English.

Obviously she was trying to keep her voice within the tonal range of his own, but in spite of the effort it trilled distractingly up and down the scale in a fashion that left Oliver smitten with a sudden jand unfamiliar weakness of the knees*

"May I help?" she said. She might, Oliver replied. She could have had as readily, he might have added, a pint of his

blood.

Many times while they worked, finding a suitable squeeze-cage and dragging it against the bear's larger cage so that the two doors coincided, Oliver found the prim and reproachful image of Miss Orella Simms rising to remind him of his obligations; but for the first time in his life an obligation was surprisingly easy to dismiss. His assistant's lively conversation, which was largely un-informative though fascinatingly musical, bemused him even to the point of shrugging off his Aunt Katisha's certain disapproval.

The young lady, it seemed, came from a foreign country

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GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

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whose name was utterly unpronounceable; Oliver gathered that she had not been long with Mr. Furnay, who was of another nationality, and that she was homesick for her native land—for its "saffron sun on turquoise hills and umber sea," which could only be poetic exaggeration or simple unf amiliarity with color terms of a newly learned language—and that she was as a consequence very lonely.

She was, incredibly, a trainer of animals.

4 'Not of such snarling fierce ones as yours/ 9 she said, with a little shiver for the polar bear watching them sullenly through the bars, "but of my own gentle beasts, who are friends,"

Her name was a startling com-bination of

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