It was purely by accident that he passed
            Earth in his galactic travels. But it became a
            matter of design that he land there, because--

                        The Vegans Were Curious

                           By Winston Marks

           [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
              Imagination Stories of Science and Fantasy
                             December 1954
         Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
         the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]


The little sun was almost a light-year out of his way, and he could
have made it on to Sirius without stopping. But the thirst within him
was strong. The delicious, yellow sun with its rich corona and tiny,
tantalizing streamers was too tempting to pass up. Even before its
gravitic currents were strong enough to be of utility, he was decided.
He would pause. He would gorge himself. He would drink until he was
blue-white.

The thought was the first pleasant, sensuous one he had allowed himself
on the long journey. In his haste to indulge, he ignored the nine
planets which normally would have attracted at least a curious glance
from him. Not until he veered physically to avoid the third planet from
the sun was he distracted from his goal.

A bevy of the clumsy little spaceships from distant Vega were swarming
just outside the planet's turgid atmosphere. As he approached, one of
the Vegans noted his presence and hailed him.

"Greetings, Sirian! Stop a bit and give us your worthy opinion."

Although the message took but half a micro-second, the Sirian was
almost past the planet's pale satellite before he could repolarize his
photons and reverse his direction. Being the haughty creatures they
were, the Vegan's invitation was both unusual and provocative.

The Sirian noted, as he returned, that the flight of one-man-disks
seemed gathered about a mushroom-shaped cloud of opaque, gaseous
matter, entirely cold except for a modest radio-activity.

When he shot out an open query, the Vegan answered, "_They_ did it!
Those incredible little organic creatures down on the surface."

"Creatures? You mean there is an intelligent _organic_ life-form on
this planet?" the Sirian asked somewhat incredulously. He had passed
this system a hundred times without suspecting such a thing.

"Well, not exactly intelligent in a galactic sense, but likely
you'll agree that the principles of fission and fusion are somewhat
remarkable to find mastered by a planet-bound life-form as primitive
as these entities. They are ordinary, liquid-and-solid, carbon-ring,
ferro-protein, bi-symmetrical bipeds--you know, the kind you find
scattered about on these oxygen-rich planets. But imagine! Nuclear
manipulation!"

The Sirian found the paradox both curious and amusing. Never, to his
knowledge, had solid-matter life-forms advanced beyond a rudimentary
use of chemical combustion reactions, and even those who did master
fire more often worshipped it than made a sensible use of it.

"Interesting! Interesting, indeed. I think I will have a look."

"We were hoping you would," the Vegan replied. "We've done all the
investigating we dare."

"How is that?"

"They've spotted us, we think. Every time we come close to the surface
they dispatch little gas-expulsion vessels to chase us."

"Why don't you simply land and establish communications?"

"With our limitations we're not that curious. They're a violent,
vicious, suspicious lot--some two or three billion of them. And they
have some nasty little weapons at their disposal. Their nature seems to
be to hate what they don't understand. Shoot first and question later."

"Thanks for the warning--"

"Not that you need it. With your metamorphic abilities you can easily--"

"Of course. Now, on what question did you seek my opinion?"

The Vegan was slow in answering, as if the question were still hazy
in his mind. Then he said, "Our observations seem to indicate that
these creatures are divided into two general categories, but the only
distinctions we can detect are so superficial as to be ridiculous. One
is in the manner of attiring themselves, and the other--" He paused as
if reluctant.

"Yes, yes?"

"Well, this may seem fatuous, but all reproduction appears to be
confined to _one of the types_."

"That would be unique," the Sirian granted.

"But if this is true, there must be more important differences between
the two types," the Vegan went on. "Basic differences, one would
expect."

"Then your question to me is, what are these differences, if any?"

"Precisely."

How very typical of the superficial Vegan mentality, the Sirian
thought to himself. Worrying themselves over some minor biological
detail, when the obviously fascinating mystery lay in the creatures'
ability to cause nuclear fission and fusion. These thoughts he screened
from them, for the Vegans are quick to take offense, a rather childish
lot, for all of their advanced culture.

"Very well, I will look into that, too," he agreed and with
appropriate, interstellar amenities, took his leave Earthward.

       *       *       *       *       *

He looked for a concentration of "people," and he found one, scattered
along two miles of sandy beach adjacent to a nervously lapping body
of liquid which was aqueous, saline and incredibly full of lower
life-forms.

He hovered over the heads of the bathers at an altitude of less than
fifty feet, his person distributed almost the whole two miles of beach.
The sun being at its zenith, no one looked directly up, and if they had
they would have seen only a faint, golden glow.

He scanned the general atomic-molecular-cellular-structural patterns
of the entities, inventoried his own energy content, decided he could
just about make it, and set about carefully condensing his photons. As
the swirling energy came to a focus, people still did not stare up,
but hundreds sought the shade of their beach umbrellas, donned their
sun-glasses or decided they'd had enough for today.

Presently, he had himself organized into a ball of evanescence
two-hundred yards in diameter, all ready for the final compression.
This was the most tedious metamorphosis he had ever attempted--all
those nerve-endings, hair follicles, pores, sweat-glands!

He found a bare patch of sand, some fifteen feet across, just
vacated by a family of fourteen. In a rush he sought to complete the
transformation before the crowd expanded into it.

But wait! There was one decision more. He had, indeed, discovered
that there were two kinds of "humans" on the beach. The physiological
differences seemed very minor, and the deciding factor was that one
category wore attire only in one place, whereas the other covered its
body at two points, thus excluding a bit more of the delicious radiance
of the golden sun.

He decided to be a male.

"Well, he's got his nerve!"

"I should say so! Looka the skinny little runt, right in the middle a
that nice empty spot."

"Tell 'im to move over Fred. We saw it first."

The Sirian smiled at the palpable lie. "Please share it with me," he
said pleasantly, scooting over to one side.

His move was too precipitous. A long-legged blonde creature, pink and
supine, hunched to a sitting position. "Watch it, junior. You kicked
sand all over my sun-tan lotion."

"Oh, sorry!" He sent a super-gentle wave of vibratory energy out to
wipe off the offending grains of silica.

"Yipe! Why you fresh punk!" Then the blonde discovered that the fresh
punk was still six feet away. She turned to her henna-haired companion.
"Ye Gods, what a sensation! Goose flesh, yet." She rubbed on some more
lotion, turned over on her side and dug her blue-clad hip into the sand
under her blanket.

The Sirian studied the shapely back and buttocks, for which, in his
brand new orientation, he seemed to possess a peculiar aesthetic
appreciation. The intruder called Fred, in the act of spreading his
blanket, noticed his stare and laughed. "She's not for the likes of
you, Super-mouse."

The idiomatic allusion escaped the Sirian. He had thought he had
the language pattern mastered in his initial survey, but the item,
Super-mouse, apparently had a remote significance.

       *       *       *       *       *

Instinctively, he lashed out a sub-etheric feeler to probe the man's
brain--and just as instantly retrieved it. To his annoyance he
discovered an extremely sensitive and complex network of brain-waves
encasing and protecting the frontal lobes of the man's thinking
apparatus. Yes, his "subconscious" mind was easily available,
and therein was stored a fabulous assortment of inconsequential,
intellectual debris, including a knowledge of the language, but to sift
and sort that disorganized nest for one silly term seemed like more
trouble than asking what it meant.

So he did.

Fred replied, "You don't know Super-mouse? You should go to the movies.
Anyhow, I just meant you could use some meat on your bones, fellow."

He turned and dropped beside the brown-haired female beside him. "What
a character!" he told her.

The Sirian looked down at himself and understood the disparaging tone.
This point in his intergalactic journey had found his energy store
quite depleted, and the best he could "condense" into was a rather
grotesque, five-foot caricature of the specimens surrounding him.

His bony feet, knees and elbows wore the minimum allowable thicknesses
of flesh, but what seemed to amuse the neighbors most was his very pale
skin. This was by design rather than accident. Why pigment his skin to
exclude the intoxicating solar energy that was flooding his pitiful
earthform? If he had dared, he would have changed his translucent skin
to complete transparency, but that would have been too noticeable.

He became aware, also, that people were staring at the region of his
groin. Before he had time to probe his mistake of attire, however,
another couple moved into the shrinking bare spot of sand and
challenged his right to three whole square yards.

"Consolidate, will ya, mister?" The male was huge, hairy and
small-eyed. The female was the opposite. The only visible hair was a
rippling torrent of yellow gold that fell down her back in a graceful
sweep. She was tiny, tanned--and--the Sirian fumbled with his new
vocabulary--terrific!

Again that peculiar sensation of pleasure sent bubbles of pressure
into his throbbing temple veins. He had a name for the weird desire it
inspired. _Rut_, it was called, but he had no experience from which to
assess it.

Unfortunately, the man before him assessed his emotion swiftly and
accurately. "Whatcha gapin' at, squirt?"

"Why, uh, your female--" The man's face darkened, and the Sirian rushed
on searching for a more propitious term, "I mean, your broad, wife,
sweetheart, girl, doll, honey--"

Hampered by the sluggish mental equipment in this human format, he was
unable to select a semantically acceptable synonym, so he blurted all
he could think of.

"Why, you--"

He felt himself hoisted rudely by one thin arm, and suddenly the large,
dark face was jammed into his own. "Whadda ya mean, layin' there in a
broad's Bikini bathin' suit and callin' my broad a broad? What kind of
a queer are you, anyhow?"

"Oh, I'm very," the Sirian managed to strangle out.

"Very what?"

"What you said. Queer." He had no desire to offend these people, but
their expression indicated that his progress was poor.

"Are you trying to be insulting?" The man asked the question and seemed
to arrive at an affirmative answer simultaneously. He balled a fist and
pumped it solidly into the Sirian's midrift.

       *       *       *       *       *

Anticipating pain from the violent gesture, he blocked off the nerve
endings, reinforced his stomach muscles at the expense of some bony
tissue, and leaned into the blow. Transmuting the kinetic energy into
assimilable light, the Sirian enjoyed the tiny tweak of power.

The big man jerked back his wrist and stared at it. "Like a rock, yet.
Huh! Wipe that smirk off, Mac."

"I beg your pardon?"

"Still snotty, huh?" The big fellow slammed two lefts and two rights to
the body with no more effect.

The gorgeous blonde said, "Oh stop, Tony. He's one of these
whaddayacallems--masochists. He likes to get slugged. Now stop it, I
tell you, or the cops will--"

But Tony was unstoppable. Infuriated, he aimed a round-house right at
the Sirian's chin, and that individual, fearing for the structural
inadequacies of his neck, ducked.

Tony launched himself at full length in the direction of the
blue-buttocked blonde but made it only as far as her upright bottle
of sun-tan lotion. He crashed to the sand with considerable force.
Twisting his neck to save his nose from the sand, Tony brought his
temple in deadly line with the little rigid bottle.

From the solid jam of humanity came voices. "Wow, did you see the
little guy counter-punch him? Just like lightning."

"Naw, the big guy stumbled. He hit his head."

"On the bottle."

"The little guy? Yeah, he jabbed the big guy with the bottle. Dirty
fighting, I call it, even if he is littler."

"Here they come. Hey shorty, here come the cops. Better melt away
quick."

Things were out of focus for the Sirian. He lost the opportunity to
"melt away" and was shortly in custody.

The hearing and, later, the trial was so farcical as to be fascinating.
He hadn't intended an extensive study of the mores and morals of this
primitive culture, but the Sirian couldn't resist the intriguing
developments that piled one on top the other.

In the so-called court of law, not a single witness to the actual
"murder" appeared, except the terrific blonde. Yet a sizable parade
of strangers did appear to identify the accused and testify to his
cold-blooded act of violence.

It developed that:

A. Tony was a gangster-politician of some note.

B. Tony had mortal enemies in the underworld.

C. Tony had been deliberately baited.

D. The Sirian had carefully jabbed him in the temple.

E. The crime was premeditated.

F. The Sirian was a well-known judo-killer named Mike Sledge, of the
opposing underworld. (This last from the D.A.'s office).

The verdict was: GUILTY.

The penalty: DEATH.

As a last wish, the convicted man was granted the privilege of
immediate execution rather than enduring the usual delay.

This last threw the death-house into quite an uproar, but the Sirian
had no intention of languishing for weeks in confinement.

Exactly at midnight, he was led to the death chamber, sleeves and
pant-legs slit, head shaved and belly full of fried chicken to which he
had taken a fancy.

There was the priest, the press and the other witnesses. The chair
looked ugly and uncomfortable, but the crackling jolts of electricity
were worth it. They sent trickles of pure ecstasy through the Sirian's
power-thirsty being. But they were only trickles, and comparatively
short. They tried him at 30,000 volts, 40,000, 50,000. But then he
deliberately lowered his body resistance in order to drink up more
amperage and blew all the fuses.

They held him twenty-four hours out of pure curiosity while the
doctors had a field day. But the press championed his cause, and he was
set free.

       *       *       *       *       *

The blonde was waiting in a black Cadillac. The blonde had just
collected Tony's insurance and was now obsessed with the thought that
any guy who could soak up electricity like that must have shocking
possibilities.

The Sirian settled back in the leopard-skin upholstery and sighed. As
the vehicle moved off into the darkness, a soft, perfumed arm slipped
around his neck. "My poor, poor Mike," the voice came like the purr
of a mink. "I'll bet he doesn't feel well. Please don't be angry with
little me for testifying against you."

"Don't mention it," _Mike_ replied. "And I feel very well, thank you."
This was the truth. With nearly a million watts of pure 60-cycle A.C.
under his belt, the Sirian had been able to expand his puny physique
slightly. At least his red blood count was up to normal now.

"Only one thing," he remarked, "I am tired of being pestered with
reporters. Where could we go to escape them?"

"Oh dear, that is a problem." She looked out the rear window. "They are
following, of course. And they'll have my penthouse staked out like
sharks around a desert island."

"That reminds me," Mike said. "This Bikini I was wearing at the time of
the crime--"

She giggled. "You did look silly."

"Well, what I want to know is, why did they call my trunks by such a
name? My understanding is that Bikini is the name of an island in the
Pacific Ocean."

"Yeah, I guess. Where they popped the H-bomb."

"H-bomb?" At last the hazy double meaning became clear to him. His
subconscious survey of many human minds had found nuclear energy mixed
up with females' scanty bathing attire, and the connection had evaded
him until this moment. "Could we see one if we went there?"

"One what?"

"An H-bomb, of course."

"Oh, naturally. The government would just love to show us how they
shoot off a H-bomb," she said. He missed the sarcasm entirely. "Matter
of fact, they're testing out there again this week. Why don't you call
up the president."

"That won't be necessary," he said seriously. In the space of eight
micro-seconds, he volatilized, visited the Pentagon, stripped the
exact location of the next nuclear bomb detonation from an agonized
general, and returned to the Cadillac. The blonde, of course, was
unaware of his brief absence.

"Just as I thought," he told her. "It's a nice, secluded spot where you
and I can be all alone for a little while. And I can poke around and
see what makes these bombs tick."

"Fine, fine," she purred in his ear. "Let's go."

She thought he was kidding.

It was an hour before dawn on the atoll when he re-materialized the
Cadillac, blonde and all, on the coral beach. Only the chauffeur had
been left behind.

"What's that sound," she cried a little startled.

"Just the surf."

"Be darned! I don't remember telling Smith to drive us to--oh well,
it's quiet, isn't it honey?"

The Sirian sent out a probe and located the tower with the huge
nuclear device suspended below it. He was about to close in and focus
on the construction and composition when the voice in his ear hissed
intimately, "Mike, darling, where are you?"

"Me? Why, I'm right here."

"Hadda feeling you were miles away."

"Not at all. Just about twenty-five yards is all. It's located right
over there."

"What's located where?"

"The hydrogen bomb. Just over that first hump. You can see the tower."

"Don't be silly," she said giggling. "It's jet black out there. Real
dark, and private, and Smith's gone off somewhere. We're all alone,
darling. Just like you wanted."

       *       *       *       *       *

And now the Sirian, alias Mike Sledge, learned that there were other
than visual methods of aesthetic appreciation. Hundred-dollar-a-dram
perfume assailed his olfactory tissues from her warm body, turning
certain miniscule glands within him into busy chemical factories.

Her finger-tips trailed over his shaved head, and he almost threw out a
nerve block before he realized that the sensation was psycho-physical
rather than electronic.

"Show me!" she whispered.

"Show you what?"

"How you did it. How you fought back all that juice. All that terrible
electricity!"

"I didn't fight it. I just soaked it up."

"Soaked it--?" She gasped, and the passion was vibrant in her voice.
"It's--it's all in you? Now?"

"Of course."

"Oh, my darling! Kiss me!"

The custom of kissing, was known to the Sirian, but known only on the
academic level until this moment. Her lips were moist and full and
demanding.

"Fantastic!" she said in a flat voice.

"Well, thank you," he said, sitting back with a ridiculous feeling of
smug pleasure at her response.

"Fantastic how a guy can sweat out the hot-seat and kiss like a
high school sophomore." Her tone of voice led him to delve into the
idiomatic roots of her words, and he came away deflated.

"I, ah, let's try again," he suggested.

He had been holding himself slightly aloof from the sensation
thresholds of this primitive body, but now he let himself sink deeply
into the full neuro-muscular morass of feelings and emotions. The
effect was astonishing, confusing, overwhelming.

Tearing his lips loose he demanded, "What is it?"

"What's what?"

"This--this, whatever we're doing?" Somehow they had become oddly
entwined, and his tactile sensations were blossoming like a nova.

Her head slipped past his face, and her sharp teeth nibbled at his ear.
"You _are_ a strange one, honey. It's kissing. It's love-making. And
incidentally, you're doing all right now. Kiss me again, honey. All
those volts! Make me feel it. Make me--"

He piled his hastily contrived, but entirely functional, orbicular
organs upon hers so hard that their teeth clashed. The nova inside him
burgeoned and whirled as though feeding on some hidden hydrogen-helium
infusion. Minutes flashed into eternity. Then an hour, and the crazy
crescendo of emotion was still mounting between them.

Then at the first streak of dawn, his bony arms crushed her to him in
a clasp that sent the universe exploding in one solid bath of pure,
nutrient energy.

His pores opened, and he drank--for one micro-second, two
micro-seconds, three, four, five--and suddenly he found himself
reeling into the stratosphere, up, up, out of the cloying air into the
comfortable, naked void, trailing neutrons, extravagantly, strewing
protons, hiccoughing electrons. At last he stabilized his mass-energy
ratio, drew in his peripheral photons and shimmered to a trembling
focus.

       *       *       *       *       *

Instantly he was surrounded with Vegans, chittering with curiosity,
dipping and oscillating their silvery disks in the raw, unfiltered
light of the yellow sun.

"Did you learn anything?"

"A little."

"Did you--metamorphose as a native?" they asked expectantly.

"I did," he admitted reluctantly.

"Well, tell us about it. All about it!"

"I was accused of murder, tried in a court of law, convicted, sentenced
to death and executed."

"Irrelevant," a Vegan snapped. "Tell us about the two categories. Did
you find out about that?"

"Yes."

"Is there a significant difference?"

"They call it sex," the Sirian temporized.

"Come, come, delete the alien terminology."

"There are men--and there are women," he said, striving to gather his
thoughts and his dignity about him. It was no use. The patina of his
vastly expanded corona was a dead, pink giveaway. "Just one minute
ago," he confessed, "I was a man, juxtaposed with a woman, exploring
the differences between the categories."

"Were the differences important? Significant?"

"To the humans, _very_!" He tried to sound detached.

The Vegans wouldn't be put aside. "Naturally they'd be important to the
primitives, but how about to you? Subjectively?"

"A few minor anatomical differences, that's all. Added up to very
little." His words were belied by tiny streaks of badly polarized
photons.

The Vegans radiated ripples of disappointment, losing what little
patience they possessed. One blurted out angrily, "Very well, if you
can't explain sex, what about the nuclear reactions? You should be an
expert on that subject. You appeared to ascend from the very island
where they just fused a lithium-hydride bomb."

"Bomb?" the Sirian said dazedly. "What bomb?"

The Vegans circled him and vibrated with cynical laughter. "So this
mysterious sex had no impact upon you?"

The void was filled with their noxious, ill-mannered jeers, but the
Sirian was still too disorganized to feel very embarrassed.

"What happened to the female--the _woman_ you said you were with--what
happened to her?" asked a Vegan.

The Sirian involuntarily phased his photons into a mental image of
the voluptuous, golden-haired native girl, but without the primitive
earth-body with which to react endocrinologically, the vision failed to
renew the corpuscular palpitations which were already damping out.

"The woman?" he repeated wistfully turning toward his home star and
venting a cosmic sigh. "You might say she met with a Sirius accident."