"What?" said Kunklin, straightening. "You mean leave him here? Well
really, Prule, that's hardly--" And then his whole face brightened. He
clapped Web heavily on the back. "Why Prule, this boy's a Galactic!
After all he's done for us, the least we can do is take him back with
us"--Prule jumped--"to headquarters, at least, and introduce him
around. Why, the boy has a heritage! You can see that from the way he
held up his end. Oh yes, yes, we'll have to take him back."
Web looked up blearily, beginning to understand.
"Back where?"
But Kunklin reached down and took him by the arm, and began leading
him toward the ship. He explained, as painlessly as he could, the
fact of Web's Galactic parentage. He did not say that it was Web's
father--which, for biological reasons, it had to be--but only that some
ancestor, somewhere along the line, had been extraterrestrial.
And while Web was downing that, and Prule was protesting, Kunklin spoke
gaily on.
"You'll need time, my boy, won't you, before you come along with us?
You'll need time, eh?"
"I have to see Dundon--"
"Of course, of course," Kunklin chuckled, "take all the time you want.
Take weeks, take months. And in the meantime," he grinned toward Prule,
in whom just now a great light was dawning--"in the meantime Prule and
I will wander the byroads of your lovely planet. Eh, Prule? A vacation!"
And in a mood of genial lechery--for Earthman, Galactic, Faktor, this
one thing is constant--the three men climbed into the ship, and then,
the sky.
* * * * *
Ivy Jean Thompson, to complete the story in the coldest of truth, never
set eyes on Web Hilton in her life. And if she had, it would have made
little difference, for the fact of the matter is that Ivy Jean Thompson
had had quite enough of men. Any kind of men. The disappearance of
the Faktors had occurred, coincidentally, at the last possible moment
for the saving of Ivy's virtue. It was, understandably, an unnerving
experience.
She opened her eyes to find nobody there. She left the camp firmly
convinced that there should never be anybody there. She retired to a
small town in north Jersey where she became a particularly grouchy
librarian spinster, the last of all the casualties in the case of the
Blood Brother.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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