Street Scene

Ending by Harlan Ellison

Even as they fled, the Pelham Privateers indicated their frustration at having been thwarted. They mugged Trenchard and Goilvey where they stood, leaving the two tottering scientists even more tottered: face-down in the gutter, arguing through split lips and cracked teeth, “It’s too big to be a pterodactyl from our past…it has to be from the past, you twit…no, it’s from another planet…don’t be an ass, they don’t have pterodactyls on any planet in our solar system…so it came from another Solar system…how did it get here…that’s not my problem…”

Will Kiley struggled with the golden amulet.

And at that precise moment, the parallel worlds, having reached the apogee of their pendulum swings, and having started back toward the point at which they touched originally (for the first time in fifty-six years), met…perigee…merged…

And Will Kiley, tightly attached to the focal point of the two world’s merging—the golden amulet—found himself poof!

Gone. Vanished.

In the intersection of Sixth Avenue and 47th Street, the mob was cleared away, and the Ajax Wreckers joined with their working-class comrades of the Amalgamated Butchers and Meat Hackers Local #39, to rid the streets of the unsightly corpse of a flying reptile that had dropped from no one knew where…and no one seemed to very much care…

Meanwhile, back at the tangential meeting-place of the parallel worlds…

Very much like a dead ibari, the man fell out of the sky at X.O. + 19 of a Bluemom, fell howling, arms and legs all a-tumble, landing squarely in the moss-and-metal center of the Religious Icon of Ned, in Avuncular Square.

Two leathery-winged residents flapped over to the gigantic creature, and stared at it.

“Did it fly?” said the first, scratching its osseous crest with a wingtip finger. “Or did it merely fall?”

“Big, isn’t it?” commented the second. “Much bigger than whatchamacallit, men, are supposed to be. And heavier. I wonder, is it edible?”

“Ah-ha, not is it edible,” interjected one of the dietary priests of Nerf, “but is it hazzil! That’s the question.”

“It looks hazzil.”

“The eyes are blue, that means it can’t be hazzil!”

A Proctor descended on the scene and extracted its demerit book from its wingtip-pouch with the fingertip of its other wing. “Okay, who owns this myth?”

“What’s a Teeny Slut?’ asked the dietary priest of Ned. But no one seemed to know.

And no one seemed to very much care…