Part Three
SYNOPSIS OF PREVIOUS INSTALLMENTS
Floyd Scrilch is the hero. He has been in trouble for most of the story and is doing his level best to survive till the fourth installment. A noble figure of a man, six feet eight inches tall and weighing more than a hundred pounds, Scrilch acquits himself deftly with blaster, sword, pop gun or water pistol, depending on the whim of his opponent and the mood of the author.
While visiting the planet, Zyz, whose western hemisphere is a grim, bleak desert of permafrost and whose eastern hemisphere is a torrid, steaming, sweltering rainforest full of monsters and whose northern hemisphere is a landless ocean infested by roving bands of ruddy-bearded pirates and whose southern hemisphere is a densely populated teeming mass of overcrowded apartment houses, Scrilch has enrolled in the service of Mong of Mingo, the hearty, good-natured tyrant of the South. Scrilch, gallant gentleman-adventurer that he is, has undertaken to perform any tasks Mong might care to set for him. At Mong's command, Scrilch has collared the Wild Capybara of the East, has amputates several heads of the Big Red Cheese of Metaporpha, has captured the Golden-Hooved Whisenant of the Western Marches, has koshered the Wild Pig of Teleport Aviv, has polluted the Aegean Stables, has resubmerged Mu, has trimmed the nails of the Ogre of the Fifth Worp Dimension, has gelded the White Mare of Mistletoe Lake, has discussed the evils of socialism with Diomedes of the Grand Commune, has whitewashed the Golden Apples of the Sun, and is now engaged in his last labor, which is to pad the brass bra of Melpomene, the Trimazon Queen.
In the course of this adventure Scrilch has been captured by pirates who have marooned him aboard a sinking ship, miles out at sea, with a storm coming on.
NOW GO ON WITH THE STORY
PART THREE
With a mighty bound, Scrilch fell into the sea.
He could not swim. But what mattered that to a man who had braved hardships of all kinds? The burnished ice-fields of the Frozen Land, the fly-spacked glossy jungles, the tentacles of the Eaters, the whirring mimeograph machines of the anthropopaghi -- those had failed to halt him in his glitteringly heroic progress. How could a mere thing like water cause him any trouble?
He bobbed along only a few feet below the surface, gasping for breath.
Could this be ... the end?
Floyd Scrilch -- drowned -- in a dirty bathrobe?
The irony of it! The agony! The Ecstasy! Down, down, down! His lungs gurgled. His ears bubbled. From his nostrils issued the dread stream of encapsulated oxygen pellets that spelled his doom.
"Help!" he alveolized feebly.
But no help was forthcoming. Hundreds of miles from any known body of land, trapped in torrential rain, tossed on the bosom of an all too voluptuous ocean, Scrilch realized that the end indeed had come, one goddam installment too soon. Oh, the bitterness of it all! The treachery! The consummate and exquisite misery!
His feet grazed against a sandy bottom.
For one dread moment Scrilch feared that this was the end, that he had fallen to the depths of the sea and, somehow, remained yet aware of his circumstances even as he touched the ocean floor. It was a melancholy prospect. For several minutes Scrilch allowed himself the luxury of introspective self-pity, which had not been permitted to dying heroes of an earlier day.
Then it occurred to him that he was being washed ashore on a desert island.
Like a puzzled whale, Scrilch heaved his mighty bulk on the amber shore and lay there a long while, wheezing, dripping salt water, and bleeding from the million tiny cuts inflicted by the vicious little arrowhead sluts, a breed of fish that is common in these waters. Overhead the sun was a great unwinking swollen eye, mildly bloodshot and slightly astigmatic. In vast gaping sighs Scrilch let the sea ebb from his waterlogged body.
Strength returned, in a sense. He slathered a few more feet up the shore, using his arms and legs the way a turtle might, and leaving a track not greatly different from the track made by the first bold amphibious fish as it crept ashore to start the whole damn deal. Sand penetrated the interstices of his skin, but he did not mind. To breathe the air again! To fill his logy lungs with the sparkling, slightly over-nitrogenous air! To be alive!
He felt a booted foot press vigorously against his shoulder-blades. Weight was exerted; gray, salty water spurted from his throat.
Again .... again .... again ....
A divine stranger was artificially respiring him. The weakened Scrilch was suffused with gratitude, and gasped out his thanks in hoarse, ragged filaments of sound.
"T h a n k . y o u,"
he ejaculated.
But gradually he became aware that the gesture of the booted foot was not one of neighborly consideration, but one of contempt. He was being tromped on. Slowly and painfully Scrilch leaped to his feet, fire in his eye.
"Your grandfather," a tender, huskily female voice informed him, "was unfit to be the barber of a pig."
Scrilch stared in dazzled amazement at the splendid woman who stood before him, arms akimbo, mouth drawn back in a sneer that looked sadistic and sensual all at once. A silvery tunic revealed as much as it concealed of her lushly contoured body, while her high bosom was just barely contained in breastplates of some shining yellow metal.
The breastplates were lowcut, exposing the delectable valley between the right breast and the center one, and also baring the plunging crevasse that separated the center bosom from its companion on the left.
"Melpomene!" Scrilch hypothecated. "Melpomene, the Trimazon Queen! I have sought you through thin and thick, through salty and peppery, these many months! You are the twelfth and last labor imposed upon me by Mong of Mingo! Now I can fulfill it and earn my vacation!"
"A Trimazon knows naught of labor," Melpomene lipped thinly.
"Not you!" hissed Scrilch. "Me! Me!"
"I'm no obstetrician either. Sorry, pal, but you've come to the wrong island.
"Listen, this'll only take a minute," Scrilch said, reaching tempestuously for the shimmering breastplates that covered those three heaving mounds of succulent flesh.
But his groping hands did not reach the forbidden bastion. Whipping out her trident, the warrior queen thrust it against Scrilch's chest.
"Prepare to die, loathed male," she gritted, and tensed her muscles for the fatal disembowelment. "Prepare to die!"
TO BE CONCLUDED
--- Bob Silverberg
BE SURE TO MISS THE NEXT EXCITING INSTALLMENT OF
in which the indominable Floyd Scrilch meets
without a rosenblum to his name.
In the November 1971 issue.
Data entry by Judy Bemis
Hard copy provided by Geri Sullivan
Data entry by Judy Bemis
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