The Lloyd Biggle, Jr. Megapack by Lloyd Biggle Jr

Author:Lloyd Biggle Jr. [Biggle, Lloyd Jr.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781479409068
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
Published: 2014-11-11T21:00:00+00:00

LESSON IN BIOLOGY

First published in Fantastic Universe Science Fiction November 1957

I spotted Johnny Kaiser in a little dump of a bar down on South Ashley Street. He was huddled in a rear booth, with a dozen empty beer bottles on his table, and a woebegone, half-drunken expression on his face. He’d sprouted a scraggly mustache since I last saw him. I wondered if it was meant to be a disguise.

You should remember Johnny. If you don’t maybe you’d recognize his picture. It was on the front page of every paper in the country. There was that television ceremony, too, when they gave him the ten thousand dollars reward money.

He’s the cop that caught the Martians. Remember?

Of course they weren’t really Martians. Nobody ever figured out exactly where they came from, but a lot of people called them Martians, and still do. And Johnny caught them.

I squeezed into the booth opposite Johnny, and said, “How’s the old Martian chaser?’

He glared at me. “Scram!” he said. But I hadn’t seen him since he got the ten grand—in fact, since he’d caught the Martians—so I hung around and watched him put away another bottle of beer.

“With all that reward money, don’t tell me you got troubles!” I said finally.

He set his glass down with a bang, and leaned across the table, “My wife left me,” he said. “Every place we went, people were saying I didn’t really know that dame was a Martian—I just followed her because she was a good-looking dame. Whenever a girl came along, someone would nudge me, and say, ‘How about it, Johnny—another Martian?’ And then some bum phoned my wife anonymously and said I was being transferred to the women’s division so I could keep on looking for Martians. She got sore and left.”

“How did you know that dame was a Martian?” I said.

He straightened up, and for a minute I thought he was going to start throwing bottles. But he didn’t. He leaned across the table, and said, “Those Martians—they didn’t have no sex.”

I grinned. “Everyone that saw that dame said she was about the most sexy creature they’d ever seen.”

“Sure, sure. She—I mean it—looked sexy. They could look any way they wanted to. Maybe the scientists understand that, now that they got some corpses to study, but they aren’t talking. Anyway, I think this Martian saw a picture of a real sexy girl in a magazine, or somewhere, and just went around looking like that.”

“And fooled heaven knows how many thousand people until Johnny Kaiser saw her,” I said. “And Kaiser took one look, and said, ‘There’s a Martian!’”

Johnny held up one finger at the waiter. That’s his idea of an insult. If I wanted to drink with him, I could buy my own. I held up a finger, and we each got a beer.

“Remember when all this started last April?” Johnny said. “All the papers were screaming about the flying saucer landing. Air Defense picked it up when it came barreling in from the Gulf of Mexico.

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