Woman from another planet

by Frank Belknap Long

Just bide your time, boy, and before you know it your bachelor days will be over. In two or three weeks you'll have a wife. And you can support her now. Two hundred dollars for just one ten-by-twelve picture, and the next one you paint will be better than any of the earlier ones, and you can go on from there with a wife to keep you out of the doldrums.

No reason to move either. Janice likes Greenwich Village and the apartment is spacious enough for two, and cheap, since you high-pressured the landlord and got the rent whittled down to a song. He was mixing his metaphors, but it didn't seem important to him at the moment. Only the future seemed important. It was brighter with promise than he could have imagined when he'd sat holding hands with her on a bench in Washington Square on the evening before he'd sold the painting.

He was a little startled when the chimes stopped abruptly, as if a hand had reached out and ripped the press-button mechanism from the door. The sudden, loud knocking startled him even more. It came from the short entrance hall just outside the room—three sharp knocks followed by a pause and a knock so loud that it hinted at more than just impatience. He knew that it had to be Janice, for her knocking—when she did knock—followed a pre-arranged pattern. A fourth knock was part of the pattern. But not a thump that rattled the door chain.

He sprang out of bed and seized the first garment that came to hand. It was a terry-cloth bathrobe which Janice had urged him to have laundered. But he just hadn't gotten around to it, and now it contributed nothing to his male aplomb and early morning dash. He hoped she wouldn't mind too much when he took her in his arms and brought his lips down hard on hers. And smoothed her red-gold hair and ran his rough artist's hands up and down her back until she began to shiver a little and purr like a kitten.

He hoped she wouldn't think about the robe and how untidy he looked in it. Making women forget little disharmonies like that could be tougher than painting a picture that would put Utrillo in the shade. Well ... what the heck? He was an artist, wasn't he? Not all women went for artists, but when they did they usually liked them a bit on the unkempt, disorganized side.

You just had to keep the disorganization from getting out of control. If you allowed it to spread to the romance department you were sunk. But that couldn't happen with Janice—not when he took her in his arms and told her how beautiful she was.

As he strode toward the door a tiny muscle in his jaw started twitching. Something was seriously wrong. He was sure of it. Self-containment was Janice's specialty. Her self-control was phenomenal and no matter how eager she might be to see him it just wasn't in character for her to try to break the door down.

Something extraordinary must have come up to make her act that way. It was hard to imagine what it could be, to bring about such a change in the way she ordinarily behaved. Fright? Hysteria? But Janice didn't have a baker's pinch of hysteria in her make-up. His alarm increased as he reached the door, and started fumbling with the chain. His fingers were all thumbs and the knocking was so loud and continuous now that it further unnerved him, so that it took him nearly a minute to get the door open.

She came in with a sobbing gasp, her hair disheveled, her eyes so wide with fright it gave her a staring, almost China-doll aspect. She was startlingly pale and hadn't bothered to cover up her pallor with lipstick and rouge.

For an instant the machinery of Loring's mind was barely able to function. It moved slowly, as if ice-clogged, with one dread thought uppermost. Village streets were likely to be deserted in the early hours of the morning and a scream could be quickly smothered. Had she been fleeing from someone who wouldn't have let her failure to use lipstick discourage him? A brutish someone who cared only that she was a woman?