You know how it is with the six-month marriage contract, don’t you? Each party posts a desertion bond. If the other fails to go the route, and walks out before the legal dissolution date, the bond is forfeited. Now, it’s not all that hard to stay married for six months, and the bondsmen rarely have to pay off; we are a mature civilization. Such early abuses of the system as conspiring to have one party desert, and then splitting the forfeiture later, have long since become extinct.

  But Marje and her Lanamorian mate were both hard up for cash. Each was hot for the forfeiture, and each was working like a demon to outdo the other in obnoxiousness, hoping to break up the marriage fast. When I saw what was going on, I suggested to Landy that we look for friends elsewhere on the ship.

  Which led to our second emotional crisis.

  As part of their campaign of mutual repulsion, Marje and hubby decided to enliven their marriage with a spot of infidelity. I take a very old-fashioned view of the marriage vow, you understand. I regard myself as bound to love, honor, and obey for six months, with no fooling around on the side; if a man can’t stay monogamous through an entire marriage, he ought to get a spine implant. I assumed that Landy felt the same way. I was wrong.

  We were in the ship’s lounge, the four of us, getting high on direct jolts of fusel oils and stray esters, when Marje made a pass at me. She was not subtle. She deopaqued her clothes, waved yards of bosom in my face, and said, “There’s a nice wide bed in our cabin, sweetheart.”

  “It isn’t bedtime,” I told her.

  “It could be.”

  “No.”

  “Be a friend in need, Paulsie. This monster’s been crawling all over me for weeks. I want a Terran to love me.”

  “The ship is full of available Terrans, Marje.”

  “I want you.”

  “I’m not available.”

  “Cut it out! You mean to say you won’t do a fellow Terran a little favor?” She stood up, quivering, bare flesh erupting all over the place. In scabrously explicit terms she described her intimacies with the Lanamorian, and begged me to give her an hour of more conventional pleasure. I was steadfast. Perhaps, she suggested, I would tape a simulacrum and send that to her bed? No, not even that, I said.

  At length Marje got angry with me for turning her down. I suppose she could be legitimately annoyed at my lack of chivalry, and if I hadn’t happened to be married at the moment I would gladly have obliged her, but as it was I couldn’t do a thing for her, and she was boiling. She dumped a drink in my face and stalked out of the lounge, and in a few moments the Lanamorian followed her.

  I looked at Landy, whom I had carefully avoided during the whole embarrassing colloquy. Her forehead was sagging close to infra-red, which is to say, in effect, that she was almost in tears.

  “You don’t love me,” she said.

  “What?”

  “If you loved me you’d have gone with her.”

  “Is that some kind of Suvornese marriage custom?”

  “Of course not,” she snuffled. “We’re married under Terran mores. It’s a Terran marriage custom.”

  “What gives you the idea that—”

  “Terran men are unfaithful to their wives. I know. I’ve read about it. Any husband who cares about his wife at all cheats on her now then. But you—”

  “You’ve got things mixed up,” I said.

  “I don’t! I don’t!” And she neared tantrum stage. Gently I tried to tell her that she had been reading too many historical novels, that adultery was very much out of fashion, that by turning Marje down I was demonstrating the solidity of my love for my wife. Landy wouldn’t buy it. She got more and more confused and angry, huddling into herself and quivering in misery. I consoled her in all the ways I could imagine. Gradually she became tranquil again, but she stayed moody. I began to see that marrying an alien had its complexities.

  Two days later, Marje’s husband made a pass at her.

  I missed the preliminary phases. A swarm of energy globes had encountered the ship, and I was up at the view-wall with most of the other passengers, watching the graceful gyrations of these denizens of hyperspace. Landy was with me at first, but she had seen energy globes so often that they bored her, and so she told me she was going down to the scintillation tank for a while, as long as everyone was up here. I said I’d meet her there later. Eventually I did. There were about a dozen beings in the tank, making sparkling blue tracks through the radiant greenish-gold fluid. I stood by the edge, looking for Landy, but there was no one of her general physique below me.

  And then I saw her. She was nude and dripping polychrome fluid, so she must have come from the tank only a few moments before. The hulking Lanamorian was beside her and clearly trying to molest her. He was pawing her in various ways, and Landy’s spectrum was showing obvious distress.

  But I wasn’t needed.

  Do you get from this tale an image of Landy as being frail, dolllike, something of porcelain? She was, you know. Scarcely forty kilograms of woman there, not a bone in her body as we understand bone—merely cartilage. And shy, sensitive, easily set aflutter by an unkind word or a misconstrued nuance. Altogether in need of husbandly protection at all times. Yes? No. Sharks, like Suvornese, have only gristle in place of bone, but forty kilograms of shark do not normally require aid in looking after themselves, and neither did Landy. Suvornese are agile, well coordinated, fast-moving, and stronger than they look, as Jim Owens found out at my wedding when he kissed Landy’s sister. The Lanamorian found it out, too. Between the time I spied him bothering Landy and the time I reached her side, she had dislocated three of his arms and flipped him on his massive back, where he lay flexing his tripod supports and groaning. Landy, looking sleek and pleased with herself, kissed me.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “He made an obscene proposition.”

  “You really ruined him, Landy.”

  “He made me terribly angry,” she said, although she no longer looked or sounded very angry.

  I said, “Wasn’t it just the other day that you were telling me I didn’t love you because I turned down Marje’s obscene proposition? You aren’t consistent, Landy. If you think that infidelity is essential to a Terran-mores marriage, you should have given in to him, yes?”

  “Terran husbands are unfaithful. Terran wives must be chaste. It is known as the double standard.”

  “The what?”

  “The double standard,” she repeated, and she began to explain it to me. I listened for a while, then started to laugh at her sweetly innocent words.

  “You’re cute,” I told her.

  “You’re terrible. What kind of a woman do you think I am? How dare you encourage me to be unfaithful?”

  “Landy, I—”

  She didn’t listen. She stomped away, and we were having our third emotional crisis. Poor Landy was determined to run a Terran-mores marriage in what she considered the proper fashion, and she took bright cerise umbrage when I demurred. For the rest of the week she was cool to me, and even after we had made up, things never seemed quite the same as before. A gulf was widening between us—or rather, the gulf had been there all along, and it was becoming harder for us to pretend it didn’t exist.

  After six weeks we landed.

  Our destination was Thalia, the honeymoon planet. I had spent half a dozen earlier honeymoons there, but Landy had never seen it, so I had signed up for another visit. Thalia, you know, is a good-sized planet, about one and a half earths in mass, density, and gravitation, with a couple of colorful moons that might almost have been designed for lovers, since they’re visible day and night. The sky is light green, the vegetation runs heavily to a high-tannin orange-yellow, and the air is as bracing as nutmeg. The place is owned by a cartel that mines prealloyed metals on the dry northern continent, extracts power cores in the eastern lobe of what once was a tropical forest and is now a giant slab of laterite, and, on a half-sized continent in the western ocean, operates a giant resort for newlyweds. It’s more or less of a galactic dude ranch; the staff is largely Terran, the clientele comes from all over the cosmos. You can do wonders with an uninhabited habitable planet, if you grab it with the right kind of lease.

  Landy and I were still on the chilly side when we left the starship and were catapulted in a grease-flask to our honeymoon cabin. But she warmed immediately to the charm of the environment. We had been placed in a floating monomolecular balloon, anchored a hundred meters above the main house. It was total isolation, as most honeymooners crave. (I know there are exceptions.)

  We worked hard at enjoying our stay on Thalia.

  We let ourselves be plugged into a pterodactyl kite that took us on a tour of the entire continent. We sipped radon cocktails at a get-together party. We munched algae steaks over a crackling fire. We swam. We hunted. We fished. We made love. We lolled under the friendly sun until my skin grew copper-colored and Landy’s turned the color of fine oxblood porcelain, strictly from Kang-hsi. We had a splendid time, despite the spreading network of tensions that were coming to underlie our relationship like an interweave of metallic filaments.

  Until the bronco got loose, everything went well.

  It wasn’t exactly a bronco. It was a Vesilian quadruped of vast size, blue with orange stripes, a thick murderous tail, a fierce set of teeth—two tons, more or less, of vicious wild animal. They kept it in a corral back of one of the proton wells, and from time to time members of the staff dressed up as cowpokes and staged impromptu rodeos for the guests. It was impossible to break the beast, and no one had stayed aboard it for more than about ten seconds. There had been fatalities, and at least one hand had been mashed so badly that he couldn’t be returned to life; they simply didn’t have enough tissue to put into the centrifuge.

  Landy was fascinated by the animal. Don’t ask me why. She hauled me to the corral whenever an exhibition was announced, and stood in rapture while the cowpokes were whirled around. She was right beside the fence the day the beast threw a rider, kicked over the traces, ripped free of its handlers, and headed for the wide open spaces.

  “Kill it!” people began to scream.

  But no one was armed except the cowpokes, and they were in varying stages of disarray and destruction that left them incapable of doing anything useful. The quadruped cleared the corral in a nicely timed leap, paused to kick over a sapling, bounded a couple of dozen meters and halted, pawing the ground and wondering what to do next. It looked hungry. It looked mean.

  Confronting it were some fifty young husbands who, if they wanted a chance to show their brides what great heroes they were, had the opportunity of a lifetime. They merely had to grab a sizzler from one of the fallen hands and drill the creature before it chewed up the whole hotel.

  There were no candidates for heroism. All the husbands ran. Some of them grabbed their wives; most did not. I was planning to run, too, but I’ll say this in my favor: I intended to take care of Landy. I looked around for her, failed for a moment to find her, and then observed her in the vicinity of the snorting beast. She seized a rope dangling from its haunches and pulled herself up, planting herself behind its mane. The beast reared and stamped. Landy clung, looking like a child on that massive back. She slid forward. She touched her ingestion slot to the animal’s skin. I visualized dozens of tiny needles brushing across that impervious hide.

  The animal neighed, more or less, relaxed, and meekly trotted back to the corral. Landy persuaded it to jump over the fence. A moment later the startled cowhands, those who were able to function, tethered the thing securely. Landy descended.

  “When I was a child I rode such an animal every day,” she explained gravely to me. “I know how to handle them. They are less fierce than they look. And, oh, it was so good to be on one again!”

  “Landy,” I said.

  “You look angry.”

  “Landy, that was a crazy thing to do. You could have been killed!”

  “Oh, no, not a chance.” Her spectrum began to flicker toward the extremes, though. “There was no risk. It’s lucky I had my real teeth, though, or—”

  I was close to collapse, a delayed reaction. “Don’t ever do a thing like that again, Landy.”

  Softly she said, “Why are you so angry? Oh, yes, I know. Among Terrans, the wife does not do such things. It was the man’s role I played, yes? Forgive me? Forgive me?”

  I forgave her. But it took three hours of steady talking to work out all the complex moral problems of the situation. We ended up by agreeing that if the same thing ever happened again, Landy would let me soothe the beast. Even if it killed me, I was going to be a proper Terran husband, and she a proper Terran bride.

  It didn’t kill me. I lived through the honeymoon, and happily ever after. The six months elapsed, our posted bonds were redeemed, and our marriage was automatically terminated. Then, the instant we were single again, Landy turned to me and sweetly uttered the most shocking proposal I have ever heard a woman propose.

  “Marry me again,” she said. “Right now!”

  We do not do such things. Six-month liaisons are of their very nature transient, and when they end, they end. I loved Landy dearly, but I was shaken by what she had suggested. However, she explained what she had in mind, and I listened with growing sympathy, and in the end we went before the registrar and executed a new six-month contract.

  But this time we agreed to abide by Suvornese and not Terran mores. So the two marriages aren’t really consecutive in spirit, though they are in elapsed time. And Suvornese marriage is very different from marriage Terran style.

  How?

  I’ll know more about that a few months from now. Landy and I leave for Suvorna tomorrow. I have had my teeth fixed to please her, and it’s quite strange walking around with a mouthful of tiny needles, but I imagine I’ll adapt. One has to put up with little inconveniences in the give-and-take of marriage. Landy’s five sisters are returning to their native world with us. Eleven more sisters are there already. Under Suvornese custom I’m married to all seventeen of them at once, regardless of any other affiliations they may have contracted. Suvornese find monogamy rather odd and even a little wicked, though Landy tolerated it for six months for my sake. Now it’s her turn; we’ll do things her way.

  So Bride Ninety-one is also Bride Ninety-two for me, and there’ll be seventeen of her all at once, dainty, molasses-flavored, golden-eyed, and sleek. I’m in no position right now to predict what this marriage is going to be like.

  But I think it’ll be worth the bother of wearing Suvornese teeth for a while, don’t you?

  SOMETHING WILD IS LOOSE

  By the late months of 1969, I had shaken off most of the fatigue that the various stresses of the fire that had wrecked my house in New York City in February 1968 had caused, and was hitting my full stride as a writer—pouring forth novel after novel, Downward to the Earth and Tower of Glass and Son of Man all in 1969, The World Inside and A Time of Changes and The Second Trip in 1970 (along with a huge non-fiction work exploring the origins of the Prester John myth). My production of short stories diminished drastically as I concentrated on these demanding books.

  But I could be cajoled to do one occasionally. My friend Ben Bova had joined the swiftly growing roster of original-anthology editors with a book that was to be called The Many Worlds of Science Fiction, and he insisted that my presence on the contents page was obligatory. Well, so be it: in the final weeks of 1969, just after coming up out of the psychedelic frenzies of Son of Man, I wrote the relatively conservative (for that era) “Something Wild is Loose” for Ben’s anthology. The Something Wild of the title is an alien being, and the story, though it is built around one of science fiction’s great formulaic situations, refuses to follow the formula. I’ve been waiting for half a century for someone to make a movie out of it, but perhaps that’s why.

  THE VSIIR GOT ABOARD THE Earthbound ship by accident. It had absolutely no plans for taking a holiday on a wet, grimy planet like Earth. But it was in its metamorphic phase, undergoing the period of undisciplined change that began as winter came on, and it had shifted so far up-spectrum that Earthborn eyes couldn’t see it. Oh, a really skilled observer might notice a slippery little purple flicker once in a while, a kind of snore, as the Vsiir momentarily dropped down out of the ultraviolet; but he’d have to know where to look, and when. The crewman who was responsible for putting the Vsiir on the ship never even considered the possibility that there might be something invisible sleeping atop one of the crates of cargo being hoisted into the ship’s hold. He simply went down the row, slapping a floater-node on each crate and sending it gliding up the gravity wall toward the open hatch. The fifth crate to go inside was the one on which the Vsiir had decided to take its nap. The spaceman didn’t know that he had inadvertently given an alien organism a free ride to Earth. The Vsiir didn’t know it, either, until the hatch was scaled and an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere began to hiss from the vents. The Vsiir did not happen to breathe those gases, but, because it was in its time of metamorphosis, it was able to adapt itself quickly and nicely to the sour, prickly vapors seeping into its metabolic cells. The next step was to fashion a set of full-spectrum scanners and learn something about its surroundings. Within a few minutes, the Vsiir was aware—

  —that it was in a large, dark place that held a great many boxes containing various mineral and vegetable products of its world, mainly branches of the greenfire tree but also some other things of no comprehensible value to a Vsiir—

  —that a double wall of curved metal enclosed this place—

  —that just beyond this wall was a null-atmosphere zone, such as is found between one planet and another—