“How much I love you, Naomi, I can’t live without you!” He said it as if he meant it, which indeed was true.
“Let me think some more,” Naomi said.
She thought. She thought until nine that evening. Then the telephone jangled and Naomi Winkler said the sweetest, most wonderful word in the English language.
“Yes,” Naomi said. “The only thing I ask though—”
“Anything!” Milt said joyously. “Ask me anything!”
“Well, I don’t want to get married until the fall. I just don’t have any summer clothes at all, Milt, so if you don’t mind—”
“The fall? But that’s months from now. We can’t wait that long, Naomi. We just can’t!”
“But why not? Why rush? You haven’t even met my folks yet—”
“We can’t wait,” Milt crooned, albeit a trifle hysterically. “We just can’t wait, Naomi. You must believe me. We have to get married right now. Tonight. Tomorrow at the latest—”
“You mean elope? I couldn’t do that, Milt!”
“But you must!” He almost shrieked it.
“Well, I really don’t understand your attitude,” she said primly. There was a pause. Then, “I’ll think about it,” Naomi said.
She thought about it. Another day passed.
Then, the evening before the third day, Naomi appeared at the door of his apartment carrying an overnight bag.
It was the shortest honeymoon on or off the record. At the door of the South Pleasure Ridge Park Motel, Cabin #15, Milt feverishly bussed Naomi through her veil, set the overnight bag inside the door, and told her: “I’ll be back as soon as I can, darling. I’ve, uh, got something terribly important to do. A matter of, uh, life or death. I’ll be back in a little while.”
He took a dash, and was fifteen feet down the drive before he remembered to take the car.
The green man showed up at the stroke of midnight. Nothing spectacular, no down-the-chimney about it. He just walked through the door, and closed it behind him.
Milt was beaming like an arsonist at the Great Chicago Fire. “All set. Everything’s all taken care of. Mated and everything, even legal.” He held up the marriage license.
The green man took the paper from Milt’s fingers and looked it over carefully. His blobby nose twitched with some unnamed emotion. He nodded his head, and handed the paper back.
“Well, when do we go?” Milt demanded. The green man thumbed the side of his huge nose. “Well, you see—”
Milt’s joy turned to moth’s wings in his mouth. His face crumpled slowly, and his voice grew syrupy with dread.
“Hey, wait a minute! You promised. You said I could be survivor number one. All I had to do was get mated. So I got mated; look!” He waved the license beneath the green man’s prominent proboscis.
The visitor placated him. “Now take it easy, Mr. Klowitz. Something’s come up. When I went to make my report to the Council of Elders, I discovered that there had been a change in plans. You might call it a postponement.”
“You can’t do this to me!” Milt said. “You can’t just leave me here to die. You can’t you can’t you—”
“Mr. Klowitz, please! You’re not listening to me. You don’t have to die. No Earthling has to die. The Council has decided to extend the clean-up date another ten thousand Earth-years. It’s possible that future developments will cause us to decide not to eliminate your race at all. You will be—”
By this time Milt’s habit of interruption was ingrown. “You mean you aren’t going to destroy the Earth?”
“Precisely.”
Milt sank onto the sofa with a strangled gasp. It was as though the lid had been lifted from the pressure cooker in which he had been steaming for three days.
“Thank God,” he murmured, head in hands. The green man went to the door.
“I trust you not to mention this affair,” he said. “You’re not liable to encounter much belief. So for your own sake, I hope you will be discreet.”
Milt nodded at the floor.
“It’s been a pleasure knowing you,” the green man said. And he was gone.
It was only natural that the episode would effect a change in Milt’s nature. Naomi approved of his deepened maturity, and so did Naomi’s parents, who met her new husband a week later. Milt found them pleasant, agreeable people. Mrs. Winkler was a splendid cook, and Mr. Winkler shared his interest in the literature of science fiction.
The only thing that bothered Milt Klowitz was the vague notion that he had met Naomi’s father before. There was something familiar about the man. Something about the nose.