This is a rare reprint, originally published in Galileo, which ran for a few years in the late 1970's. Utley and Waldrop are what my buddy Jack Daves used to refer to as "pure shit-fire wordsmiths -" master storytellers and stylists of the highest order. A rare combination.

Howard was due to serve as toastmaster at FenCon this year, but has cancelled due to illness. Our good-health vibes go out to him.

We still call it the Shubbi Arms, though the Dufai long ago appropriated it, of course, along with everything and everybody else, including the Shubbi. The Arms is one of the older Shubbi combs, dating from sometime shortly after what is commonly known as The Fat-Ass Takeover and well before what is privately referred to as The Big Joke On Them. To the Shubbi, if not the Dufai, the place must look classy. Its tunnels slope around an artificial hill like a gasket-leak from a broken motor.

The receptionist in the Arms' Red Tunnel East was your usual Shubbi flunky, a bad-tempered bozo. He filled the entrance when he saw me coming and scowled: the Dufai may have demoted his kind when they moved in, but at least he still had Terrans to harass.

"Want?" he whirred.

I repressed a groan. The Shubbi like the idea of a universal language, as long as it's theirs. Theirs sounds like an aviary with a cat loose in it. I'm okay on the whistles, but the clicks and glottal stops can pave the way to a laryngectomy in a couple of years.

"Want see Omlaf," I chirped. "Him be all specting see by. Call now all come hurry at."

"Him be no by." The Shubbi wiggled, indicating utter Indifference. "All same go look all golly."

"Me do." (What a language.)

I followed as he pulled his bulk down the tunnel ramp. From behind, he looked like a small pachyderm that had been cut off at the knees and stuck on a broad, quivering base. The Shubbi are as unhandsome and ungraceful as they are unpleasant. The Dufai word for them has no phonetic equivalent in any Terran language, but it means approximately the same thing we Terrans call them: fat-asses.

By and by, we came to a waiting chamber and another flunky, who looked me over and blooted, "Come? You be here now?"

"Wilson-man," I said, and showed him the emblem on my purely ceremonial brief case. "Be sent for."

The two Shubbi tweedled at each other for a few seconds, too fast and at too high a pitch for me to follow the dialog. You don't expect such massive creatures to sound like dueling piccolos. The receptionist headed back for his station at the mouth of Red Tunnel East, and the second Shubbi told me to wait while he went to fetch a Dufai. I insincerely thanked him as he lurched away.

It's bad enough having to deal with flunkies; it can be a nightmare when some of the flunkies are big doughy toads, the others are big spiny blimps, and each kind would enjoy seeing the other kind staked out over hot coals. Still, the Dufai felt completely within their rights to make such use as they could both of the Shubbi they had conquered and of us Terrans whom the Shubbi had conquered and tried to use.

As Great-grandpa explained it to me, human beings in pre-Shubbi times -- before they knew there really were other intelligent beings in the galaxy -- had liked to imagine not only that such beings existed, but also that these beings were obsessed with Earth and wanted nothing more than to invade and conquer and oppress. "Imagine everyone's shock and surprise when that exact thing happened! Imagine everyone's shock and surprise when that exact thing happened twice! Turned out Earth lay smack on the imaginary line separating the territories claimed by two different, expansionist civilizations."

I nervously cooled my heels and calculated how much my time was going to be worth to Omlaf in terms of aggravation. A Dufai finally came clacking and scraping up the tunnel ramp. Now I began to get not just nervous but twitchy as well. The Dufai enjoy making a show of refinement and have been, overall, marginally nicer proprietors of the galaxy than the crude Shubbi were. The Shubbi, on the other hand, do not smell like bad eggs.

"You are here to see Omlaf," the Dufai said in passable German. He was not asking a question. Dufai do not ask questions. "First iris on the left," and he pointed his third major appendage down the tunnel. The third appendage is the formal one; he might as well have used a pole.

I inclined my head ever so slightly, as one petty official to another, and walked down until I came to the iris bearing the squiggle that meant Commandant Omlaf. The iris opened. I took a deep breath and stepped through, into a gloomy, sour-smelling chamber full of the new commandant.

I hadn't expected to see Omlaf, actually -- his predecessor had always kept himself mercifully out of sight behind a large screen during audiences. Omlaf was big, even for a Dufai, at least three meters high, with a ratio of about two-to-one side to top. He remained spread and didn't rise for me, but he did have an interested air. I tried not to gag on it.

"You are the Wilson-man," said Omlaf, "your nest's official representative. I am so frothlike that you came."

"How pulsing of you to have me." I gave him a big grin. He quivered. The Dufai are disturbed by the thought of teeth, which they apparently think are uncomfortable. They really don't like mouths, when you come down to it; our mouth parts move; we use our mouths to eat, to speak, to breathe, to make love; they find the whole business vulgar beyond words.

"You are comfortable in that erect position?"

"Quite," I said, and thought, Surely they must have told him Terrans contain a good many bones. "Do not trouble yourself on my behalf. I am here to serve you."

Omlaf gestured with his second major appendage, his way of acknowledging that which was already obvious, then indicated a silver tray balanced atop a tripod. The tray contained small pieces of what might have been bloody liver mixed with milk. I was to help myself.

"I regret to decline," I said. "Terran metabolisms have quirks."

"You Terries have a saying. One man's meat is another man's person."

"Something like that, yes." I tried not to watch as he delicately scooped up one of the morsels in the cup of his minor appendage and popped it into some orifice or other. "If ever you have occasion to call me here again, I must bring you a sample of a rich, aromatic Terran delicacy. It's called coffee."

"It sounds simply wavelike."

I wagged my head, meaning But Of Course, and gave him my bland smile, the one with just lips. We have special blends for offworlders; Omlaf would feel more than merely wavelike when hyper-caffeine got loose in his digestive system.

"But that," said the Dufai, "is as may be. There is a particular matter which must now be discussed."

"Of course."

"I had hesitated to call your nest. It is my belief that a policy of general non-interference best serves the ends of enlightened and efficient colonial administration. Even the fat-asses realized that after they had been here for a while." Otherwise, there wouldn't have been anything for the Dufai to grab away from them. The Shubbi had tended, deliberately or otherwise, to break stuff. "Leave the natives' customs and superstitions be, don't tamper with their nests more than is absolutely necessary, make the best use of their infrastructure and industry, and everything will run smoothly. That is the Dufai way. And it has always been successful. The Dufai Order has always been a model of efficiency. We have rarely had to punish anyone."

"That is to the eternal credit of the Dufai Order."

The chamber filled with the sinus-searing miasma of Dufai pride as Omlaf did what they do instead of pat themselves on the back. I tried breathing very shallowly, through the fine crack between my still blandly smiling lips.

"But," Omlaf said, suddenly flicking his first major appendage, the one with the hollow barb and the poison sacs, "there is the matter of loss of service. These repeated interruptions disrupt communications with other Dufai both here on your planet and aboard the mother ship above. My administration is what you Terries call handsprung. It begins to make me throbbing."

"I want you to know," I said, not taking my eyes from that twitching first appendage, "that everybody in my nest appreciates the fact that you are sorely inconvenienced. Why, right from the pulsing inception of the Dufai Order, our best technical people have worked night and day on it. It may console you to know that similar problems plague Dufai administrators everywhere on Earth."

"There is also the matter of a personal communication unit, in tones matching the décor of my private quarters." I tried not to think about the décor of any Dufai's private quarters, and Omlaf helped me in this considerably by uncoiling his first appendage. It rose and curled cobra-like in the air between us. He seemed to study the barb for a moment. "It has been quite some time since I first contacted your nest with regard to this unit. Your nest described the installation procedure as the simplest thing. Yet I still have no easily accessible unit in my own chamber. The more I am told by your nest, the less I comprehend." He actually leaned toward me. It was all I could do to keep from jumping for the iris. The barb hovered somewhere above my head, out of my field of vision. "I am at twit's end, Wilson-man. Explain why I am having so much trouble with the Terrie communications system. Explain also why I could not simply have kept my predecessor's unit."

"That would have complicated matters unduly. For everyone. There are records to maintain. You just can't imagine --" I bit that off; you don't tell a Dufai that he can't anything. "I assure you that we do know what we're doing. My company, my nest as you call it, had been a going concern long before the insidious Shubbi takeover. We developed enormously successful procedures and policies. To tamper with them is to invite catastrophe. Unfortunately, but of course not unexpectedly, the vile and clumsy Shubbi failed to understand this. We are doing everything we can to restore services to pre-Shubbi levels, but, oh, the mess they made of things. Also, we readily admit that, being only human and therefore barely worthy of serving our Dufai overlords, we occasionally make mistakes. It had been that way before the pulsing inception of the Dufai Order and the Shubbi takeover, and the company was enormously successful. It has been that way for the past century, apart from fat-ass
excesses during the takeover itself."

"Perhaps you would not make mistakes if your nest did not enjoy such a considerable degree of autonomy."

"But we have the infrastructure, the network, the know-how. Despite the damage inflicted by the ignorant yet vicious Shubbi we can integrate even your, admittedly, vastly superior system into ours. Eventually. We explained this to your predecessor at great length, and he agreed and approved and authorized, by the power vested in him, that the company, that is to say, my nest should continue to have a free hand in matters it understood intimately. He pledged non-interference. And the lowliest Terran knows that the word of one Dufai is the bond of all Dufai. With the result that you now have at your fingertips, if I may be so bold as to call them that, a network which --"

"But I have no private access to any network of your nest's!" Omlaf sobbed or sighed or in any event performed some action something stinkily indicative of unhappiness.

"But you shall," I said, "you shall! By no later than this very afternoon, or possibly tomorrow morning, or even as soon as next week."

The Dufai acceded; that stench you wouldn't believe. "It is to be hoped. Desperation forces me to confide in you, a Terrie. Wilson-man, I must have my personal unit in my private quarters. I lose status throughout my nest each time I am forced to use a public chamber."

"Rest assured. We're doing every last thing we can to expedite matters for you. And when you do get your unit, it will be yours, the one that you personally chose for yourself, not" -- I sneered, hoping that Omlaf knew a sneer to be an expression of contempt -- "some trashy Shubbi relic, nor a mere cast-off left behind by your predecessor, illustrious though he was."

"You are pulsing," said the spiny bag of blubber, "for a Terrie."

"Where the Dufai sits, can a Terrie not be far away?"

That remark apparently made some sense to him, anyway. He finally sat back or settled down or in any case drew away from me, and the first appendage coiled itself in his quasi-lap, and I just barely repressed a shudder of relief. No degree of training can quite prepare you for the sight of a Dufai barb as it looks for nice soft spots in your pate.

"You will pardon my throbbing," Omlaf said. The Dufai do not really make requests, either.

"I appreciate the strain under which you baleens work as you guide the destiny of this and other worlds."

"I do not know that word."

"Baleens. It's a word from a dead but still-honored Terran language. It refers to great big ones."

"Bah leens. Very wavelike, Wilson-man. I shall encourage its use. We Dufai do find much to admire even among inferior races."

And with that he waved the second appendage, and I was dismissed.

Desperately resisting the urge to run, to scream, to laugh out loud -- all at the same time -- I gave him a respectful nod and backed toward the iris. As soon as I was through and the portal had closed, I went up the ramp at just under a trot, darting past surly but awkward Shubbi messenger boys. As I neared the mouth of Red Tunnel East, I almost impaled myself on a, luckily, bottom-caste spiny whale (baleens! for God's sake! great big ones!) who took a swing at me with his de-barbed appendage. Then I was out of the Shubbi Arms. I quickly put as much distance as I could between myself and the place before I had to sit down and absolutely break up.

Bah leens! Very wavelike, Wilson-man! I howled. I rocked with laughter. I shall encourage its use! My God! I'd done it again, I thought, cackling, crying with the release of tension, pounding my thighs with my fists, another penetration mission pulled off to perfection, and never mind that Omlaf was new to Earth and couldn't tell when his tentacle was being tugged. Never mind that spooky first appendage, either. Oh, he would get his service restored, for a little while, and he would finally get his personal communication unit in tones that somehow did not quite match the décor of his private quarters. We would see to that as we saw to everything else. He would never, ever, Get It, The Big Joke. The Dufai had had the run of the place for two, three decades, and the Shubbi for several more before them, and in all of that time they had, neither of them, caught on. If ever they did, they'd have had to exterminate all life on Earth just to save face.

Oh, I felt very patriotic and brave and all, a true descendant of the generation that had tried to match hardware with the Shubbi. I had upheld the traditions of both my family and the telephone company in which we serve and through which we Wilsons have resisted and thwarted and annoyed our conquerors ever since the first gloating fat-ass came waddling and slurching down the gangplank. Once again I'd gone right down into the midst of the bastards and shucked Ol' Massa Dufai, just as my parents and grandparents had shucked Ol' Massa Shubbi after all the pitifully inadequate Terran hardware was gone and the only weapon left to us was one neither the Shubbi nor the Dufai possessed or understood. When we could no longer wage war on the invaders, we could still play what we called The Big Joke On Them. They had bested us, taken our world from us, but they never would quite get the better of us because they had to have our help in running things on a day-to-day basis.

And as long as we could find ways to exploit that opening -- and as long as we held on to our gleefully malicious sense of humor -- our masters would never truly be our masters. They wouldn't even have much fun here.

~Fin~