Of course, Ktch’s having bought his fighters at a rummage sale or whatever was to our advantage, too. It’s a hell of a lot easier and safer to fight isolated members of a thousand races than a thousand members of one race. If Ktch’d mounted a concerted attack, we’d be in trouble, but this catch-as-catch-can stuff was fun — even for me, and I’m no fighter.

Furthermore…

“Hello?”

“Gah!” I had company. Lots of it. Only one animal, but big. And it Talked?

“Did you,” I asked, “just say Hello to me?”

“I did.”

“How ’bout that?” This one was a serpent by trade, complete with forked tongue and fangs. A hooded serpent. He was silver above, gold-green below, had an armlike pair of tentacles (or a tentacular set of arms) growing just below his hood, and would’ve been quite pretty if he hadn’t been so huge. His head was larger than my body, and his tail was resting high up on the beach more than a hundred feet away. Big snake. And he could talk.

“You know, I’ve never been spoken to by a serpent before.”

“I understand. Some of us are excessively secretive.” Not speech, telepathy.

“If you’ll pardon my asking, sir: why did you speak to me?”

“I wanted to know who you are. I never eat anyone I don’t know. It’s not safe.” Okay, but snakes are easy. “Are you intending to eat me?”

“One of you, maybe more. That’s why I was brought here. But I don’t know which ones yet. You see, I’m very particular about my food. Picky. I have to be. I’m really very — Sensitive.”

Groovy. Ancient Village line, right? So I filled his inside and bathed his outside with liquid helium and watched him topple. Snakes are easy. Especially the sensitive ones.

But what was I thinking when the serpent interrupted? Oh yes, something had to be done about the lobster gang. With a mere shrug of the imagination, I established a dozen military robots in the willow grove behind the beach.

That minor lull was growing-major. Kevin, for reasons of his own, was sprinkling salt and pepper on a giant amoeba. Stu was hurling balls of colored fire at a six-armed but otherwise humanoid horned giant who, with a weapon in each hand, was diligently trying to get at Stu. The giant’s skin was the colors and texture of a Gila monster’s, but Stu didn’t seem to be in trouble. And Pat was off in a corner singing to some avant-garde crystalline life form that… Oh. The crystal shattered.

And that was all the action there was. The rest of the gang was just tossing ex-things and chunks thereof overboard — housecleaning.

Was it over? I still felt wildly manic, and I certainly hoped not. “Hey Michael,” I yelled, “this is our chance.” But maybe Ktch was only rounding up another team. “Chance for what?”

I walked up to him and whispered, “Chance to attack.” “Attack who?” Stu yelled. He was at large, too. He’d left old six-arms slumped down on the grass like a pyramid and burning merrily.

“Hey, man,” I reproached him, “I wish you wouldn’t burn your things on the roof. It’s bad for the grass. And what if the bus catches fire, hah?”

“Sorry ’bout that.” The fire died away.

“Strategy meeting,” Mike proclaimed. “Strategy meeting at this end of the roof. Meeting time.”

So we gathered at that end of the roof, all but Little Micky, who wasn’t interested in strategy and volunteered to stand watch at the other end.

“I’ve been thinking,” said the Michael, “that now’s the time for Us to attack Them.”

I: “You’ve been thinking!”

Mike: “I don’t claim to be the only one. All I said…”

Sativa: “For this kind of strategy, who needs a meeting?”

And then Little Micky made That Noise, the one that wakes me up some nights. High, thin, twist-tight, inhumanly sustained: I’d never heard anyone die like that before.

And there were Little Micky and this kid, this absolutely beautiful five-year-old American blond Kid — but Micky was dead and this Kid was pulling him apart and tossing the pieces overboard.

The kid looked up at us and grinned. There was blood on his chin. He threw a piece of Little Micky at us and yelled a treble war cry. A million shrill voices returned the cry, and the kids swarmed over the fence and charged. They were all beautiful children, all five-year-olds in pastel shorts, and they came at us yelling, with knives in their hands.

Our defense was pure instinct at first, hand — and footwork, dirty, minus intellect or any emotion but fear. Our minds hadn’t functioned since Micky made That Noise.

Here’s a little redhead coming at me, knife held low and pointed up. Kick him before he gets too close, kick him anywhere. Groin’s good. Get him under the chin and break his neck, but he’ll probably cut your leg before he does. And don’t just hurt him, kill him. Pain doesn’t stop these kids. Watch it! There’s another.

They came in waves ten feet apart, and they didn’t stop coming. Death was all they wanted — ours or theirs. Mortal wounds and broken bones only slowed them down a little. Kids’ bodies lay heaped three feet high around us like a wall. All of us were bleeding. This went on and on.

And all this bitter time they yelled shrill ferocity in glass-cracking, searing, mind-crushing, impossibly unending ultra-treble tones more agonizing than knives and more shuttering than fear — a million-throated irresistible loud cry of driving madness. Even their voices were weapons.

The first one to snap out of it was Harriet, our group’s outstanding lover of children. Suddenly she remembered that we didn’t have to do it this way. She swept the charging wave with submachine gun fire, and did it again and again. Her face was soaked with tears.

The rest of us remembered. Now we attacked with terrible weapons. And we got them all. We made darn sure of that.

But when it was finally over, we couldn’t find Little Micky’s body.

I THREW the last small body overboard and it didn’t splash. Our starboard corpse pile now rose well out of the water — quite impressive — and our portside pile rose even higher. I hadn’t realized we pacifists could be such dangerous animals.

I rather liked being dangerous. A taste for it was growing in me.

The operation we’d just finished — the kindergarten kamikaze horror — had left the grass on the Tripsmobile roof in a sorry state. It was all bloody and scruffy, but especially bloody, and I wondered whether I should send the grass out to be dry-cleaned or just sit back and pray for rain. I mean, I was glad to know that the beautiful children we’d been slaughtering weren’t Earth kids at all but two-hearted aliens with incomprehensible genitalia, but that didn’t ease my bloody grass problem. And I’d always been so proud of The Tripouts’ touring sun deck, too.

That nice warm chemical euphoria — quite depleted by the last campaign — was beginning to rise in me again.

Otherwise there wasn’t much going on. That is, nothing was trying to kill us just then. On the other hand, Sean was making butterflies again, far superior to his Saturday productions, and Sativa was wreathing them in enriched and augmented rainbows, all of which spoke well of Sativa and Sean.

I wondered — this was a time for wondering — what was going to become of our heaps of unearthly cadavers. Not a chance in the world they’d escape being noticed, jutting bizarrely up in the middle of what ought to be a plain, uncluttered New York City reservoir. And the moment anyone at all saw just what kind of bodies we’d collected in these monster midden heaps of ours, every breed of entertaining hell would pop loose from Manhattan to Helsinki — a prospect I looked forward to with blandly anarchistic glee. (All of which was based upon the rattletrap assumption that the lobster gang would not complete Phase Two.)