Musicians -- Fiction; Science fiction; Short stories
Stella Starlight gets up to sing, but she looks more like she would
rather do something else. She stares at Hotlips and at the trumpet on
his lips and begins to quiver like she is about to do a dance.
I remember she says she does not like high notes, and this song has some
pretty well up in the stratosphere, especially for the trumpet section,
which is Hotlips.
She is frowning like maybe she is thinking real hard about something and
is surprised her thoughts do no good. Her face becomes waxy and there is
a frightened look on it.
She quivers some more, as the notes go up and up and up. Then she lets
out a shriek, like maybe she is going to pieces.
And then she does. Actually.
Right before our popping eyeballs she goes to pieces.
As each one in the band sees what is going on, he stops playing, until
finally Hotlips is the only one. But the trumpet is in Hotlips' hand,
and the music is coming from the recording machine we place under his
chair. The notes are clear and smooth, and you can almost feel the air
shaking with them.
But nobody notices the music or where it comes from. They are too busy
watching the thrush, Stella Starlight.
She stands there, her face as white as clay, shaking like a carrot going
through a mixmaster. And then tiny cracks appear on her face, on her
arms, even in her dress, and then a large one appears in her forehead
and goes down through her body. She splits in the middle like a cracked
walnut, and there in the center, floating three feet from the floor is a
small flying cuspidor.
Nobody in the room says anything. They just stand there, bug-eyed and
frightened like anything. Somewhere, across the room, a woman faints. I
do not feel too well myself, and I am afraid to look to see how Hotlips
takes this.
There is no sound, but I hear a voice in my mind and know that the
others hear it too. The voice sounds like it is filled with wire and
metal and is not exactly human. It says:
"_You win, Hotlips Grogan. I, as advance agent in disguise, tell you
this. We will go away and leave you and your people alone. We place a
mental block in your mind, but you outsmart us, and now you know our
weakness. We cannot stand high sounds which you can play so easy on your
trumpet. We find ourselves a home someplace else._"
With that, the cuspidor shoots across the room and plows right through
the wall.
"That's the engine room!" Frankie wails.
There is a sudden explosion from the other side of the wall, and
everybody decides all at once they would like to be someplace else, and
they all pick the same spot. The space ferry is pretty crowded, but we
jam aboard it and drift away from the _Saturn_--musicians, waiters and
paying customers all sitting in each other's laps.
The _Saturn_ is wobbling around, with flames shooting out at all angles,
and Frankie is holding his head and moaning. In the distance, you can
just about make out little specks of cuspidors heading for the wild
black yonder.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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