Star Guest

          Have you got a minute? I'm a bit nervous, and I've got to tell somebody. Just in case. You see, I mightn't get the chance again, and then nobody will ever know what really happened. You don't mind, do you?

          It all started when they sent me, protesting, off the Job Seekers' Allowance – all right then, the Broo – to go digging trenches in Belfast for Phoenix Gas. I always considered myself destined for better things then digging trenches, but the clerk took one look at my six-foot-four height and got on the phone to Phoenix Gas right away. I overheard him telling the fella that I was built like a brick show house, but I don't think he meant that I was nice looking.
          Anyway, I'd been in the job for about a week and was just getting used to looking up the passing girls legs from down near pavement level, when she came along. Athletic-looking, shoulder-length dark hair, sharp business suit and superb legs. After only a week, I was an expert on legs. I swivelled in the trench and watched her go. Class written all over her. A real lady.
          She came along the next morning about the same time, and the third morning I was watching for her. In a few days she had become my first thought in the mornings as I woke up. I wanted to talk to her, but I had no idea what you were supposed to say to a city girl. So I just kept on watching her day after day, and things stayed that way until the day we dug the trench across the footpath.
          We had put down a temporary deck of steel plates for pedestrians. She slipped briefly on the unfamiliar surface, then recovered her balance and walked briskly on. I saw the flash of the silver object falling down the trench towards me, and managed to catch it between elbow and knee. A pen, I thought, but as I extracted it with my free hand I saw that it looked more like a large lipstick.
          "Miss!! Miss!!!" I was out of the trench, running. She didn't seem to realise I was calling at her, so I caught up with her and touched her on the shoulder. She whirled around and faced me with unblinking bright blue eyes. "You – you dropped this," I stammered.
          "Ah!! Sometimes I am so careless! It would be bad if I lost that." Her voice was low-pitched, with an accent I couldn't recognise. She took the lipstick-thing from me and placed it carefully in a top pocket. "Thank you. Thank you very much." She smiled the most wonderful smile, and her face seemed to fill my whole field of vision. I found myself returning her smile, and we seemed to stand there for I don't know how long, just smiling at each other.
          Then Bucket Mulligan wolf-whistled at her, and shouted an obscene request. For a moment she looked as though she thought Mulligan was just being friendly, until she looked back at me. Then her face went blank like a screen in a power cut, and she turned and walked away. It was the last time I ever heard Bucket Mulligan whistle at anybody. It's difficult, with four stitches in your top lip. My knuckles had to be stitched too, cut to the bone as they were on Mulligan's breaking teeth.
          On my way back from the hospital I bought a sandwich and ate it on a bench at the City Hall. I was feeding my scraps to the pigeons when a pair of legs appeared among my little flock.
          "Hello," she said. "What do you call those birds?"
          I still remember the feeling. The sheer undiluted joy that she had come back and was standing beside me. My lips answered the question but my mind didn't take in its significance. My whole body was suffused with her presence. "Pigeons. They're ordinary street pigeons."
          "Pigeons…pigeons," she repeated, as though memorising the word. She sat down. "My name's Stella."
          "Jim." The strength of her handshake was a little too much for my sore hand, and I withdrew it with a grimace and an apology.
          "You are injured? At work?"
          "You could say that," and I told her about the incident including, at her request, an explanation of Bucket Mulligan's remark. I was amazed at her innocence of such matters.
          "You mean, you did this to yourself for me? Why?"
          I got to my feet, suddenly uncomfortable. "Because I like you," was the best I could manage. We wandered around the streets talking and she told me she was an anthropologist, and she did something called computer-aided genetic modelling. All I knew about anthropology was that it had something to do with monkeys and Desmond Morris on television, but I was impressed.
          "I'm not working at the moment, though," she said, "I'm here because I have some family business to attend to."
          "Have you got family here? You're not from round these parts yourself."
          "How do you know that?"
          "You don't talk like the people from these parts."
          "I suppose that's because I don't stay in one place long enough to pick up accents. I travel around a lot."
          I was hoping that she would tell me where she did come from, when we stopped in front of a yellow door in Eglantine Avenue.
          "My flat," she announced. "Please come in; I'd like to look at your hand."
          She sat me down in her kitchen, took off my shirt, and placed my hand on the bench top. Then she produced the lipstick-like silver cylinder from her pocket, and began passing it back and forward over the bandaged knuckles. I saw, felt, heard – nothing. After perhaps three minutes, she gently removed the bandages. The skin had healed over. The stitches seemed to have dissolved away. She was surprised that I was surprised.
          "Accelerated cyto-synthesis using simple hyper-ultrasound. The skin just heals itself, only quicker. Standard technique in the treatment stations nowadays."
          The hell it is, I thought. This is a miracle. And what's that silver thing? "Stella----" But the subject was closed. Stella was pinching my biceps, and looking at my chest approvingly.
          "You're a sturdy man," she said. "Intelligent too," and led me through to her bedroom. She kept me there for two whole nights and days. Although I had little experience of women, I knew they couldn't all be like this one. Her sexual energy was phenomenal. She did not seem to need any sleep. I was totally exhausted, and when I begged a little rest, after what seemed like about five minutes, she was climbing all over me again. Towards evening of the second day, she shook me awake by the ears and announced, "I'm hungry."
          So we went to a little pub restaurant near the city centre. It was Friday night and the place was crowded. I was just enjoying my coffee when, through the half-open door to the public bar, I spotted the ugly, bruised face of Bucket Mulligan. I knew he had seen me by the way he turned and whispered to his two mates. Smicker and Hogan.
          "Let's get out of here, Stella," I hissed, but it took a few minutes to pay the bill, and we found them waiting for us outside the restaurant door.
          "Well now, if it isn't old Jimbo and his dolly bird." Smicker drawled, leaning against the wall in front of us. "You know Mr. Mulligan, Jimbo, don't you? Well Mr. Mulligan always likes to pay his debts, and he's got a little pressie for Jimbo. Haven't you, Mr. Mulligan?"
          Hogan jumped on me from behind and Mulligan advanced, brandishing a heavy bottle. Suddenly he stopped, surrounded by a yellow light. A second later, Smicker lit up yellow as well. Then Hogan relaxed his grip on me, and as I broke free I could see that he, too, was glowing. All three of them staggering around helplessly, slid down the walls, and within fifteen seconds were snoring on the ground. Stella switched off the yellow light and put the silver cylinder back in her pocket.
          "They'll be all right in a few hours," she said. "All we've done is to help them absorb all the alcohol they've drunk – straight into the bloodstream at one go. They were drinking very quickly."
          We walked home to her flat practically in silence. I didn't ask any technical questions. I was starting to think there was more to my girlfriend than met the eye. That night I slept like a log and she let me. Once I woke, and she was walking about the room, talking. I got up late and decided I would have to go back to my lodgings briefly for a change of clothes.
          "Don't be long," she urged. "I may have to leave here soon."
          "What…?" Then the penny dropped. "You've been in touch with Head Office during the night?"
          She nodded. "It appears I've nothing left to do here."
          I was back in twenty minutes, still trying to digest this information. I found the sitting-room door locked and felt sick as I recognised the voices coming from inside. I knew there was another way into the room via a broom cupboard, a legacy of a previous layout. I squeezed into the cupboard and looked through a slit. Smicker, leering, was holding Stella in a headlock in an armchair, a knife to her throat. Hogan was leaning against the door, watching Mulligan, who was pawing at her knees.
          "Now, big girl, we're always nice to our visitors, aren't we? an' I'm the boss, so I'll------------"
          Seizing a stout length of curtain pole, I crashed through the doors. In the brief diversion, Stella lashed out with her left foot, catching Mulligan in the groin. Her right foot flicked straight up like a gymnast's and kicked the knife from Smicker's hand. She sprang up like a steel cat and faced her assailants from the corner.
          "Get back, Jim!" she screamed. The light that came from the cylinder was purple and deadly. The bodies seemed to burn from the inside with a blue, non-luminous flame and a sound like a small, muffled jet engine. Incredibly, nothing else was burnt; not even the clothes they were wearing, which collapsed in three heaps around three piles of dust. Stella gripped my arm and shivered.
          "I hate having to do that," she said, "it causes so much hassle."
          "You mean your bosses don't really approve?"
          She nodded. "You're a bright human. But it was self-defence, wasn't it? I had to defend us, hadn't I?"
          Us? As I was about to say that she hadn't given me much chance to defend the situation by conventional means, she went on:
          "My controller wants me to come back now. She thinks I am becoming too much like an Earth person. She says I am idealising you to the point where my judgement is impaired – how do you say it? – falling in love?"
          "And are you?"
          She only gave me her big smile for an answer, hugged me and, I thought, put something in my pocket. "Be in touch, Jim," she said and kissed me, hard. I must have passed out for a second, for the next thing I knew I was holding empty air. I walked through the rooms and said, "Stella?" But she wasn't there. I didn't expect her to be.
          The cleaners found the piles of clothes and personal effects on Monday. The police were called, then the forensic boffins, and then parapsychologists and ghostwatchers of various levels. They all concluded that it was probably the worst case of spontaneous human combustion ever recorded in the country and the case was closed.
          But why am I telling you this? Here's why; I'm going away. I might not be back and I'd better tell somebody, if only to let Phoenix Gas know I haven't fallen down a hole in the ground. You see, I had a message this morning from Stella's Controller. How? Well, don't tell anyone but Stella left me this silver cylinder when she went away. And I've been carrying it around with me for the past nine months, trying to think of it as a mobile phone on standby, while knowing full well that the bloody thing's capable of behaving like a hydrogen bomb, given the right input.
          "Man called Jim," the Controller addressed me. Her voice was precise and businesslike. So were her instructions. "Be ready at midnight," she rapped. "I am sending transport for you." My presence, she informed me, was required at a certain event.
          "Where?"  I asked.
          "You'll find out," I was told.
          Yes, I'm nervous. Not at the journey, mysterious though that is; no, it was something the controller said. You see, she got all soppy then – which I'm sure Controllers aren't supposed to do – and confided that Stella and I were just about to become the parents of "six lovely sturdy little darlings, who just can't wait to meet their Daddy. Actually, Stella's my daughter," she added.
          Six of them. Just like that. I'm about to become the father of six babies. Just like that. And as if that wasn't bad enough. The Controller's going to be my mother-in-law.
          Well, wouldn't you be nervous?

Eric Conn