The Best of A. E. van Vogt Volume 2 # (UK) SSC by A. E. van Vogt

Author:A. E. van Vogt
Language: eng
Format: epub

The sign said, ALL THE MUSIC IN THIS BUILDING IS SILKIE MUSIC.

Cemp, who had never listened for long to any other kind, saw the faint distaste come into his wife’s face. She caught his look and evidently his thought, for she said, “All right, so it sounds dead level to me, as if it’s all the same note--well, anyway, the same few notes, close together, repeated in various sickening combinations.”

She stopped, shook-her beautiful blonde head, and said, “I guess I’m tense and afraid and need something wild and clashy.”

To Cemp, who could hear harmonies in the music that were beyond the reach of ordinary human ears, her outburst was but a part of the severe emotional reactions to things that Silkies married to human women had to become accustomed to. The wives of Silkies had a hard time making their peace with the realities of the relationship.

As Joanne had put it more than once, “There you are with this physically perfect, beautiful male. But all the time you’re thinking, “This is not really a man. It’s a monster that can change in a flash into either a fishlike being or a creature of space. But of course, I wouldn’t part with him for anything.”

The music sign was soon behind them, and they walked on into the interior of the museum. Their destination was the original laboratory, in which the first Silkie was supposed to have been produced. The lab occupied the center of the building; it had been moved there from the West Indies a hundred and ten years before, according to a date on a wall plaque at the entrance.

It had seemed to Baxter that a sharper study should be made of the artifacts of Silkie history. The entire structure of that history was now being questioned for the very first time.

This task, of reevaluating the past data, had been assigned to Cemp and Joanne.

The lab was brightly lighted. It had only one visitor; a rather plain young woman with jet-black hair but no makeup, wearing ill-fitting clothes, was standing at one of the tables beside the far doorway.

As Cemp came in, a thought not his own touched his mind. He started to turn to Joanne, taking it for granted that she had communicated with him on that level. He took it for granted, that is, for several seconds.

Belatedly, realization came that the thought had arrived on a magnetic carrier wave--Silkie level.

Cemp swung around and stared at the black-haired woman. She smiled at him, somewhat tensely, he noted, and then her thought came, unmistakably: “Please don’t give me away. I was stationed here to convince any doubting Silkie.”

She didn’t have to explain what she meant. The thunder of it was pouring through Cemp’s mind.

According to his knowledge, there had never been any female Silkies. All Silkies on Earth were males, married to women of the Special People--like Joanne.

But this black-haired, farm-woman type was a female Silkie! That was what she was letting him know by her presence. In effect, by being here, she was saying, “Don’t bother to search dusty old files.

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