“Wow,” Al said again, “She’s beautiful.”
The MC gave a phony chuckle, then turned to the studio audience and said, “Bill, what about our other players?”
“Richard, all contestants on Missing Links receive the home version of our game, and today we also have the pocket edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, compatible with any standard reader…”
Al wasn’t listening; he was still staring at the fox-woman on the pedestal.
Then the red lights on the camera went out, and a gofer came to lead Al away. Still dazed, he signed half a dozen assorted releases and tax forms, and twenty minutes later found himself standing at the studio door, lost and confused.
A stagehand walked up, holding a leash; the other end of the leash was clipped to the fox-woman’s collar. He held out a clipboard.
“Sign here,” he said.
“What is it?” Al asked, accepting the clipboard and a pen.
“Acknowledging receipt of your prize,” the stagehand explained. “If you don’t want it, sign on Line 3, and we’ll pay you a percentage of its cash trade-in value, instead. It’ll be mailed out in about ten days.”
Al looked over the form. “Where do I sign if I do want her?”
“Line 1,” the man replied. He pointed.
Al signed on Line 1. The stagehand took back the clipboard, pulled out two copies of the form (one pink and one yellow), and handed them to Al.
“If you change your mind, you have ten days to call the number here and arrange for pick-up,” the stagehand explained, pointing. “They’ll deduct a charge for the pick-up—see Paragraph Four? And your check will go out in about two weeks.”
Al nodded, not looking.
The stagehand looked at him, glanced at the Mark Five Vixen, then shrugged and handed Al the leash. “She’s all yours,” he said.
She was shorter than she’d looked up on the pedestal, Al realized—scarcely over five feet tall. That made sense, though—foxes weren’t very big animals. He looked down into her huge dark eyes.
“They said you probably wouldn’t want to keep me,” she said, in a throaty alto.
“They were wrong,” he said. He looked down at the leash. “Uh…you sound intelligent. Do you need this thing?”
She cocked her head to one side. “I don’t know,” she replied. “They always said we had to have them any time we went out in public, but I don’t know why, really.”
“It’s so you won’t run away, or get into trouble,” Al said.
“Why would I want to run away?” she asked.
Al had no answer for that. “Maybe we’d better leave it, for now, just in case,” he said.
Holding the leash loosely, he led her out onto the sidewalk. She flinched slightly at the noise of the traffic, her pointed ears folding back somewhat, her tail wrapping about one leg. “Come on,” Al said, leading her toward the corner.
The first two taxis passed them by, but the third pulled up in response to Al’s frantic waving, and they got in. The fox-woman looked over the worn upholstery and faded gum wrappers with fascination as Al gave the name of his hotel.
The driver said nothing on the way, but after seeing the size of his tip he growled, and pulled away with horn blaring and tires squealing.
A few people stared as Al led the fox-woman through the lobby to the elevators. Anthropomorphs were still new and rare, toys of the very rich, and this hotel, while respectable, was hardly a haunt of billionaires.
Giving one away on Missing Links was probably an attempt to broaden their appeal, to sell them to the merely wealthy—prices were reportedly coming down, after all. A year ago there reportedly hadn’t been more than a hundred sold; now the number was said to be over a thousand.
They had the elevator to themselves, and Al asked, “They call you Salome?”
“That’s my model name,” she said. “There were twenty of us in my creche. I was Number Eight.”
“You didn’t have a name?” Al asked, shocked.
The fox-woman cocked her head in what Al was beginning to realize was her equivalent of a shrug. “They couldn’t tell us apart, half the time,” she said. “After all, we were all clone-sisters.”
“Can I name you, then?”
“You can do anything you like, I guess—I’m yours, aren’t I?”
“I guess so,” Al agreed, “I’m having trouble believing it, that’s all. I never won anything more than a Big Mac before.”
“Really?”
“Really. I mean, I was on vacation here, and signing up for a game show was just a whim, you know?”
She blinked at him, batting eyelashes longer and lusher than any mere human had ever possessed.
“I’m going to call you Sally, I guess,” Al said. “For Salome.”
“All right. And should I call you Master? That was what they taught us to do.”
He hesitated. All his childhood training, to respect others and treat everyone as equals, came back to him—but this person, this thing, was not his equal, she was property. Legally, she was a pet, not a person.
“That’s right,” he said.
* * * *
He had argued when the airline had insisted he buy Sally a ticket, claiming that she was cargo, and not a passenger.
They had responded by showing him their pet regulations—pets had to be in approved carriers, and if they didn’t fly in the cargo compartment and didn’t fit in the overhead luggage compartment, then they needed tickets, just like passengers.
They were willing to accept the collar and leash as a carrier, but if he was going to argue…
He bought her a seat.
At least the hotel hadn’t tried to charge for her. They hadn’t allowed her in the restaurant—no pets except guide dogs, the sign was right there—but they hadn’t charged anything extra beyond the higher room service prices.
He was beginning to see that keeping an anthropomorph could be an expensive proposition. She ate just as much as a human, needed a seat on airplanes—that could add up.
Clothing was no problem, though. He had discovered as soon as they reached his hotel room that she was wearing nothing underneath the tunic, because as soon as he closed the door behind them she reached up, unclipped the leash from her collar, and pulled the tunic off over her head.
He had been rather startled by that.
She had been puzzled by his surprise.
“But I’ve got fur,” she had said. “Why would I need clothes? I know I’m supposed to wear them out in public, since I look so much like a woman and we don’t want to embarrass anyone, but why should I in private?”
He had had no answer; he simply stared. The short white fur on her belly, and the fluffy white on her breastbone that stood out a good three inches, had fascinated him. The fur was longer again between her legs, providing a discreet cover—she really didn’t need clothes.
Except, perhaps, to cover her nipples, which were exposed and hairless.
She had tidied up the hotel room while he lay on the bed, resting and watching her. Since the maid had been in that morning, there hadn’t been much tidying to be done, but she had done her best, hanging up her tunic, straightening the shirts in Al’s suitcase, and so on.
She really was shaped almost