Izzy And The Father Of Terror by Asimov Isaac

Author:Asimov, Isaac [Asimov, Isaac]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

21. If and Only If

“Vampires!” My mind rattled like a dryer on three legs; Gypsy’s slap had knocked to center stage the bubbles from Izzy’s quickpatch. Thoughts jostled and non sequitured inside. I ran behind the salad bar and inched back and forth along the sneeze guard, ready to fling dressings at any attacker.

(These days, when I get an audience with Izzy, he likes to give me a lot of grief about that episode. He calls it the Intergalactic Food Fight.) There wasn’t much Russian left, but I was hoping to do some damage with the Roquefort and Italian, if I had to. I thought the vinegar in the Italian might blind them for a moment. The lumps of Roquefort cheese could slow them down. I could make for the dishwasher and fly us home, beating them back with ladles and meat cleavers and stuff that I found in the kitchen.

But the cheese was probably fake, I was thinking, or skimpy. I might be doomed in interstellar space by larcenous highway restauranteurs. “Vampires! Stay back,” I said.

(Intergalactic Food Fight?IFF. It’s a pun.

“IFF” is also short for IF AND ONLY IF. I had to suffer and be a maniac ignoramus so that Abu al-Hawl could get a ride home and Johnny Abilene could ascend to the throne in the Small Magellanic Cloud; once I did all those stupid little things I had to do, the big matters inevitably resolved.

IFF. Izzy knew it.)

“Vampires! Stay back!”

“This should be interesting,” Gypsy drawled.

Nora walked toward me slowly. “Trust me, Mel.”

“No.” I picked up a metal bowl of ruffle-cut beet slices and threatened her with it. “You killed that trucker. Did you eat him, Nora? Gypsy ate the cashier. Are you fighting over who’s going to eat me?”

Shaman laughed. “You shouldn’t have slapped him, Gypsy. Now he’s awake, such as he is.”

“Mel …” Nora kept walking toward me, undeterred by the beet slices. “You shouldn’t distress yourself over blood.

Bodies aren’t important, Mel. Don’t you remember? You were almost there with me. .

. .”

“No more love-making!” Shaman warned. “I can do an epoché too, Nora, and you might not like how you’re greeted where I would take you.”

“You wouldn’t dare,” she said, without taking her eyes off me. “You don’t know how, Shaman. You’d turn the world inside-out. It would be the end of you.”

She was more beautiful than ever. The blood somehow appealed to me now. It made me tacitly aware of her neck, her chest, her arms. I was hungry for her, starved to the marrow. She kept coming.

“What should I remember, Nora?” I said.

Then she would be mine.

“Remember the Sphinx, called Abu al-Hawl!”

Shaman shouted. “Remember he who made Chephren. The Sphinx is still thumbing, and in all these millennia, none of you Sanduleans has managed to pick him up.

Stay put, Nora. You could wind up in some waterless place for a long time, Nora, and there’d be no WC.”

Gypsy burst into flame. “I’m you, Shaman!”

he said.

“The hell you are. Don’t try that on me!”

Shaman pointed at him, thrusting his arm as if it were a fire hose, and the flames whooshed out.

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