Free Firmin by Sam Savage Page A

while it occurred to me that Norman was in fact quite fond of the writer, so I got fond of him too.
     
    He sometimes helped Norman unload the station wagon full of books, and once Norman paid him to wash the front windows. He did a good job. Usually he did not buy anything - he was obviously very poor - but one day in early spring he left with a big bag full of books. I could not see what was in the bag, but that evening I was able to reconstruct it from the gaps in the shelves. It was all religion and science fiction: Buber’s The Way of Man: According to the Teaching of Hasidism , Asimov’s The Stars, like Dust , Van Vogt’s The Weapon Shops of Isher , Bultmann’s History and Eschatology , and Heinlein’s Citizen of the Galaxy . These were some of my own favorite works. On a later visit he went off with every book we had on insects. And Norman asked him that time, while he was packing them up, what he was working on those days. I nearly fell out of the Balloon when I heard his answer.
     
    ‘I got a new novel going,’ he said, ‘about a rat. The furry kind. They’re really going to hate this one.’
     
    Norman laughed. ‘A sequel?’ he asked.
     
    And Jerry answered, ‘No, this is something entirely different. I’m through with that kind of obvious stuff. You got to keep moving, you know. Like sharks. You stop and you drown.’
     
    Apparently Norman did know, because he just nodded and handed Jerry his books.
     
    From then on, whenever a new batch of books arrived I tore through it looking for Jerry Magoon’s novel. Miracles do happen - I was sure of that. In fact I acknowledged it every time I arrived safely home from the Square, when I let a sigh of gratitude for one more miracle granted float up in the general direction of heaven, and I acknowledged it again the night I laid paws on the novel. It was a cheaply printed paperback of 227 yellowing pages. On the cover, against a canary yellow background, New York City was in flames, while wreathed in smoke above the blazing skyline loomed an enormous rat, bigger than the Empire State Building, with red eyes and dripping red fangs. The title appeared in blood red strokes at the top of the page: The Nesting . And at the bottom, in letters that struck me as insultingly small, was the name E. J. Magoon. I realized after reading the book that the folks at Astral Press, which had published it in 1950, had possessed a real gift for hyperbole - the book in fact did not contain any giant rats, though it did have plenty of burning cities toward the end.
     
    For a century prior to the present age, the gentle and enormously intelligent inhabitants of Axi 12, a planet located at the far edge of our galaxy, had been sending robotic probes to study the planet Earth, which was the only planet in the whole galaxy apart from their own inhabited by advanced life-forms. These probes had collected an enormous amount of data on Earth and its creatures, and the Axions believed that the time had come to initiate actual contact with earthlings, though they knew this would not be easy. Axions, while far more advanced than earthlings, both ethically and intellectually, had the misfortune from an earthling’s point of view of looking like garden slugs. They were also the size of Shetland ponies. Being quite intelligent, they had the good sense to recognize that their appearance might give earthlings wrong ideas about the Axions’ superior morals and intellects. It was even conceivable that the earthlings might refuse to make friends with pony-sized slugs. Luckily, these superior sluglike creatures were also in possession of advanced protoplasmic morphing techniques, and they decided to send to Earth an exploratory expedition made up of a dozen Axions who had been previously morphed into the shape of Earth’s dominant species. Furthermore, in order that these explorers might learn to fully understand the earthlings’ customs and language prior to initiating contact, they were sent