But no clothes. Whistle made that perfectly clear. No clothes. The Pashi can't stand those Earthie clothes, and James won't need them where he's going. Whistle will take care of James's attire, as she takes care of most everything else.

He does pack his prosthetic lengthener. Whistle has promised him an operation once they reach the home world, and then he won't need the lengthener anymore. But the trip will take weeks, James has been told, so the lengthener comes along.

James stands, his head nearly touching the light fixture in the apartment's living area. James is very tall, nearly seven-foot-three. The Pashi are even taller, and thin, but James is about as big as Earthies get, and Whistle has developed a real fondness for him. That's why Whistle has decided to bring him along, now that the Pashi are leaving.

James looks out the sliding glass doors toward the Gulf of Mexico. The Pashi landing rigs and comm relays are just visible on the horizon line. That's why Whistle bought James this apartment on the seventh floor, Gulf Boulevard, St. Petersburg Beach; so they could see the rigs and towers against the setting sun when Whistle came to play with her American pet.

Whistle is beautiful, in her own damp Pashi way. James knows he is lucky to have been chosen by her, lucky to be able to pack his one small bag with anything he can think of that will last forever on another world. Lucky guy, he tells himself forcefully, trying to make the sentiment stick. Lucky guy.

James has not always felt so lucky, so wanted. For most of his life, James has felt alone. He thinks about his loneliness as he looks out the sliding glass doors. All the years of it. Too tall, too many books or too much basketball, too many stares and too many expectations. Only Tom has found the way through all the incongruities, all the implausibilities to be his friend. In all those twenty-eight years, only Tom has been willing to think of James as a friend instead of a marketable product with a few esoteric quirks.

James tries to staunch his thoughts of Tom. Tom, his good and only friend Tom, will die tomorrow with the rest of them, with everyone, when the Pashi leave.

Whistle has explained it to him. The rest of his race, all the Earthies here who don't have Pashi lovers ready to whisk them away, are going to die tomorrow.

It will be about lunchtime in St. Petersburg, and Tom will be having a grouper sandwich and order of fries about then if he can afford it. James tries not to think about that.

Tonight the Pashi leave. The great benevolent Pashi who brought so much to the world, who opened wide the doors to all those cosmic possibilities and the promise of trade with a hundred Pashi worlds strung like pearls through the whole spiral arm of the galaxy.

Of course it couldn't all happen too quickly, the Pashi explained. The Earthies would have to be patient as the details were worked out. And there were certain adjustments that would have to be made to accommodate the Pashi presence on Earth. Economic adjustments. Military adjustments.

Whistle had explained it all to James just last night. She was very sorry about it all. The promises hadn't worked out. If only the Bendaii hadn't come quite so soon ...

But the Bendaii were coming. The Pashi comm towers had done their job, detecting the approaching enemy. So now the Pashi had to leave. This small planet, this little place where they had built their advance base, had done its job, and now the Pashi had to leave. There weren't nearly enough Pashi to defend against the Bendaii. To stay would be suicidal. So tonight the landing rigs would send the ships home from their bases around the planet. And tomorrow the Bendaii would arrive.

There is a knock at the door. James thinks it must be Whistle, a good two hours early. Very unlike Whistle to be early.

But it isn't Whistle, it's Tom.

James tries to smile as Tom walks in. His best friend, Tom. High school, state champs, college, final four, two years in the CBA-best of friends, the quick guard with the uncanny passes and the giant with the soft hook.

And then came the Pashi and there was no more play for pay now that there was work to be done for the benevolent Pashi. Tom had found a job waiting tables. James found Whistle.

Tom doesn't say anything at first. He just looks at James and then walks past him into the room where he notices the nearly packed bag.

He looks, reaches into the bag to grab a paperback. Laughs.

"Books and baseballs?" he asks, and turns to look at his best friend. "Your Pashi want to get to know all about our way of life or something?" Tom chooses to ignore the sight of the lengthener, its tip just visible, crowded in with the baseballs.

James doesn't know how to answer this. Whistle has made it very clear that James is to tell no one about the Pashi leaving. If James told, Whistle would know. Whistle always knows. And then James wouldn't get to go himself.

James doesn't want to die tomorrow when the Bendaii destroy the landing rigs and comm towers. Whistle has told James about the Bendaii and the struggle the Pashi have been involved in for generations. The Bendaii, Whistle said, are very thorough. James got the message.

Tom walks away from the bag and over toward the kitchen nook, where he opens the refrigerator door, takes out a bottle of Harp, opens it, and takes one long gulp.

"Ah," he says, "the privileges of prostitution."

James doesn't protest for a change. There have been certain advantages to being the lover of a Pashi diplomat, imported beer in these hard times has been among the least of them. James doesn't even drink the Harp anymore, anyway. He just keeps it here for Tom. James has acquired a taste for the salty, thick ooze the Pashi drink. James can't whistle the tune that names the stuff, he just calls it ooze. Whistle laughs at her pet for that, and then strokes his head for being so cute, and then tells him to get out the lengthener, and then ...

Tom is talking.

"So what's the bag packed for, Jimmy? Seriously, is your Pashi trying to catch up on some American classics?"

"Some of the books are British," says James.

Tom laughs, drinks.

"Damn, boy, you're taking all of this a little too seriously, aren't you? They're going to leave someday, you know, and you'll get left behind. That'll be that."

He points his Harp at James.

"Listen to old Tommy, now. You've got to keep your head on straight on this one, Jimmy. Don't dive off the deep end on me here, all right? Remember who you are. Remember what you are."

"Tom," James says. "Tommy." And he takes one step toward his friend, one step toward him and away from the door and the view of the rigs.

But Tom turns away to open a wood veneer cupboard door and finds some Mexican peanuts, right there where they sit next to the Brazilian breakfast cereal and the Venezuelan pretzels. Most things are imported these days.

"Listen to me, Jimmy," Tom goes on to say through the crunch of the nuts. "It's tough times right now, and you've found a way to get through them. That's great. I understand. Hell, I even stand up for you when people talk. I understand, I really do." And he takes another drink of the Harp, finishing off the bottle in one long pull.

"But there's a big 'but' here, pal. I've been watching this happen for six months now, and you've gone from making the best of a bad thing to, to"-and he searches for the right word while he fishes another Harp out of the refrigerator-"to, I don't know, something really strange. It's like you really like the big blue webber."

James can't stand to hear the Pashi called that. He admits that there is that bluish tint to their fair skin, and that there is a webbing between the toes and fingers. "But what would you expect of an amphibious race?" he has said to Tom in the past. He has told his friend that he's offended by the nicknames that Earthies use for the Pashi, especially the American Earthies, who have so much to look forward to for having helped the Pashi.

Tom has laughed at that sort of thinking in the past, and knows James will be angry for the names, and so Tom uses them anyway, trying purposefully to shock his friend, the recipient of those high, arcing passes that led to all those stuffs and happy screams and TV time.

James turns away from Tom and walks over to the window that is to the left of the sliding glass doors. It will be sunset in another two hours. Whistle will come then, just before the Sun goes down.

Whistle will come and then the two of them will watch the orange sky and Whistle will talk of home. The Sun will seem to flatten a bit as it enters the water, and then it will quickly sink. If they are lucky, very lucky, they will see a quick bright flash of green. And then it will be gone. And then they will leave, the chauffeured floater taking them out to the rigs where they'll board, lift off, and leave. Whistle said it would only take about an hour. Sunset will be about 8:30. By 10:00 James figures he will be on his way. Gone forever.

James turns from the window and shakes his head.

"You've got to go, Tommy. Whistle will be here soon. You know she doesn't like you."

"I know, I know," says Tom, smiling. He walks over to his best friend, James, and reaches up to touch his shoulder. Tom nods his head a bit, shakes it ruefully, squeezes the broad, hard collarbone, and says, "I just had to come by and say something, all right? I just had to say it. You mean too much to me, you know. You understand? You mean too much to me."

Tom leaves.

James cries, gets over it, gets back to packing; the Oxford Guide to English Literature, some magazines, his old Norton Anthology so he'll have "The Waste Land" and "Prufrock" and The Red Badge and some Faulkner and some Kerouac and some Barth and some Updike and some time to sit back down and cry a bit more. Hard tears. So alone. So very alone.

He stops that nonsense. He rises and looks down at the bag. Quite full.

If he can only get the air out of the ball, he reasons, he can collapse it and take it along. He knows they've got air where he's going, the Pashi breathe it. He can always build a rim and fix up some sort of net. He can always find ten feet high.

He gets the needle in and ten-year-old air hisses out. He looks at the ball as it whistles out the air from ten years back. Tom's signature is right there where he's looking, right under James's own name and the scrawl that says "Kennedy Hawks, State Champs, 1989."

The ball doesn't flatten the way James hoped it would. Funny, but then he'd never deflated a basketball before. Seems odd, but he hadn't.

He pushes, squeezes, even stands on the ball, but it doesn't seem to help much. The ball clearly won't fit into the bag unless he takes out a lot of the books, and he can't do that.

Finally, he takes the obstinate ball and places it on top of the bag, hoping that Whistle will let him bring it along anyway. Surely when he tells her what it means to him she'll let him bring that one extra thing. Surely.

But, later, she doesn't. She insists, and he leaves it behind, leaves it on the coffee table, partially collapsed, so that it seems to flatten against the glass tabletop the way the Sun did for them as it set. Under the flattened part, hard against the glass, are the two signatures.

The Bendaii arrived the next day. About noon.

I read a piece in The Nation about Subic Bay in the Philippines and the problems that have existed there over the years as a result of the U.S. military presence-particularly prostitution and the shocking trade in Filipino brides. Shortly after that I saw a documentary on Douglas MacArthur that detailed the U.S. relationship to the Philippines during World War II.

That led me to wonder how we would react, as a nation and on a more personal level, if some greater power established a military outpost here the way we have done in many places around the world. It's a topic I've found myself writing about in several stories in magazines like Analog and Isaac Asimov's.

In this particular case, I also wondered how we would react if that greater power abandoned us to the enemy the way we abandoned the Filipinos.

There is a narrow brutality to that sort of imperialist thinking-we seem so willing to sacrifice others for our welfare-how would we handle the reverse of that? How would the great power's arrival corrupt us? And what might be the final outcome of that corruption? "War Bride" tries to speak to these questions.

RICK WILBER.

HOW'S THE NIGHT LIFE ON CISSALDA?

HARLAN ELLISON.

Harlan Ellison's published works include over 1,700 short stories, novellas, screenplays, teleplays, essays, and a wide range of criticism covering literature, film, television, and print media. He was editor and anthologist for two groundbreaking science fiction anthologies, Dangerous Visions (1967) and Again, Dangerous Visions (1972). Ellison has won several awards, including the World Fantasy Award and multiple Hugo, Nebula, and Edgar prizes. Visit http://harlanellison.com for more information.

WHEN THEY UNSCREWED THE time capsule, preparatory to helping temponaut Enoch Mirren to disembark, they found him doing a disgusting thing with a disgusting thing.

Every head turned away. The word that sprang to mind first was, "Feh!"

They wouldn't tell Enoch Mirren's wife he was back. They evaded the question when Enoch Mirren's mother demanded to know the state of her son's health after his having taken the very first journey into another time/universe. The new President was given dissembling answers. No one bothered to call San Clemente. The Chiefs of Staff were kept in the dark. Inquiries from the CIA and the FBI were met with responses in pig Latin and the bureaus were subtly diverted into investigating each other. Walter Cronkite found out, but after all, there are even limits to how tight security can get.

Their gorges buoyant, every one of them, the rescue crew and the medical team and the chrono-experts at TimeSep Central did their best, but found it impossible to pry temponaut Enoch Mirren's penis from the (presumably) warm confines of the disgusting thing's (presumed) sexual orifice.

A cadre of alien morphologists was assigned to make an evaluation: to decide if the disgusting thing was male or female. After a sleepless week they gave up. The head of the group made a good case for his team's failure. "It'd be a damned sight easier to decide if we could get that clown out of her ... him ... it ... that thing!"

They tried cajoling, they tried threatening, they tried rational argument, they tried inductive logic, they tried deductive logic, they tried salary incentives, they tried profit sharing, they tried tickling his risibilities, they tried tickling his feet, they tried punching him, they tried shocking him, they tried arresting him, they tried crowbars, they tried hosing him down with cold water, then hot water, then seltzer water, they tried suction devices, they tried sensory deprivation, they tried doping him into unconsciousness. They tried shackling him to a team of Percherons pulling north and the disgusting thing to a team of Clydesdales pulling south. They gave up after three and a half weeks.

The word somehow leaked out that the capsule had come back from time/universe Earth2 and the Russians rattled swords-suggesting that the decadent American filth had brought back a decimating plague that was even now oozing toward Minsk. (TimeSep Central quarantined anyone even remotely privy to the truth.) The OPEC nations announced that the Americans, in league with Zionist Technocrats, had found a way to siphon off crude oil from the time/universe next to our own, and promptly raised the price of gasoline another forty-one cents a gallon. (TimeSep Central moved Enoch Mirren and the disgusting thing to its supersecret bunker headquarters sunk beneath the Painted Desert.) The Pentagon demanded the results of the debriefing and threatened to cut throats; Congress demanded the results and threatened to cut appropriations. (TimeSep Central bit the bullet-they had no other choice, there had been no debriefing-and they stonewalled: we cannot relay the requested data at this time.) Temponaut Enoch Mirren continued coitusing.

The expert from Johns Hopkins, a tall, gray gentleman who wore three-piece suits, and whose security clearance was so stratospherically high the President called him on the red phone, sequestered himself with the temponaut and the disgusting thing for three days. When he emerged, he called in the TimeSep Central officials and said, "Ladies and gentlemen, quite simply put, Enoch Mirren has brought back from Earth2 the most perfect fuck in the universe."

After they had revived one of the women and four of the men, the expert from Johns Hopkins, a serious, pale gentleman who wore wing-tip shoes, continued. "As best I can estimate, this creature-clearly an alien life-form from some other planet in that alternate time/universe-has an erotic capacity that, once engaged, cannot be neutralized. Once having begun to enjoy its, uh, favors ... a man either cannot or will not stop having relations."

"But that's impossible!" said one of the women. "Men simply cannot hold an erection that long." She looked around at several of her male compatriots with disdain.

"Apparently the thing secretes some sort of stimulant, a jelly perhaps, that re-engorges the male member," said the expert from Johns Hopkins.

"But is it male or female?" asked one of the men, an administrative assistant who had let it slip in one of their regular encounter sessions that he was concerned about his own sexual preferences.

"It's both, and neither," said the expert from Johns Hopkins. "It seems equipped to handle anything up to and including chickens or kangaroos with double vaginas." He smiled a thin, controlled smile, saying, "You folks have a problem," and then he presented them with a staggering bill for his services. And then he departed, still smiling.

They were little better off than they had been before.

But the women seemed interested.

Two months later, having fed temponaut Enoch Mirren intravenously when they noticed that his weight had been dropping alarmingly, they found an answer to the problem of separating the man and the sex object. By setting up a random sequence sound wave system, pole to pole, with Mirren and his paramour between, they were able to disrupt the flow of energy in the disgusting thing's metabolism. Mirren opened his eyes, blinked several times, murmured, "Oh, that was good!" and they pried him loose.

The disgusting thing instantly rolled into a ball and went to sleep.

They immediately hustled Enoch Mirren into an elevator and dropped with him to the deepest, most tightly secured level of the super secret underground TimeSep Central complex, where a debriefing interrogation cell waited to claim him. It was 10' X 10' X 20', heavily padded in black Naugahyde, and was honeycombed with sensors and microphones. No lights.

They put him in the cell, let him stew for twelve hours, then fed him, and began the debriefing.

"Mirren, what the hell is that disgusting thing?"

The voice came from the ceiling. In the darkness Enoch Mirren belched lightly from the quenelles of red snapper they had served him and scooted around on the floor where he was sitting, trying to locate the source of the annoyed voice.

"It's a terrific little person from Cissalda," he said.

"Cissalda?" Another voice; a woman's voice.

"A planet in another star-system of that other time/universe," he replied politely. "They call it Cissalda."

"It can talk?" A third voice, more studious.

"Telepathically. Mind-to-mind. When we're making love."

"All right, knock it off, Mirren!" the first voice said.

Enoch Mirren sat in darkness, smiling.

"Then there's life in that other universe, apart from that disgusting thing, is that right?" The third voice.

"Oh, sure," Enoch Mirren said, playing with his toes. He had discovered he was naked.

"How's the night life on Cissalda?" asked the woman's voice, not really seriously.

"Well, there's not much activity during the week," he answered, "but Saturday nights are dynamite, I'm told."

"I said knock it off, Mirren!"

"Yes, sir."

The third voice, as if reading from a list of prepared questions, asked, "Describe time/universe Earth2 as fully as you can, will you do that, please?"