The Sentimentalists
By MURRAY LEINSTER
Illustrated by HUNTER
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Galaxy Science Fiction April 1953.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
You do not always have to go looking for
a guardian angel. He may be looking for
you—but perhaps for somebody else's benefit!
Rhadampsicus and Nodalictha were on their honeymoon, and consequently they were sentimental. To be sure, it would not have been easy for humans to imagine sentiment as existing between them. Humans would hardly associate tenderness with glances cast from sets of sixteen eyes mounted on jointed eye stalks, nor link langorous thrills with a coy mingling of positronic repulsion blasts—even when the emission of positron blasts from beneath one's mantle was one's normal personal mode of locomotion. And when two creatures like Rhadampsicus and Nodalictha stood on what might be roughly described as their heads and twined their eye stalks together, so that they gazed fondly at each other with all sixteen eyes at once, humans would not have thought of it as the equivalent of a loving kiss. Humans would have screamed and run—if they were not paralyzed by the mere sight of such individuals.
Nevertheless, they were a very happy pair and they were very sentimental, and it was probably a good thing, considered from all angles. They were still newlyweds on their wedding tour—they had been married only seventy-five years before—when they passed by the sun that humans call Cetis Gamma.