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Omboser, Lubix, Forbin, and Alsnokine
Alien shapeshifter quartet playing beatnik jazz in the Venus Club in Greenwich Village, NYC in the short story "Hepcats of Venus" by Randall Garrett in the January 1962 issue of Fantastic Stories of the Imagination.
They strolled into the Venus Club late one Friday evening, and the joint was really swinging. The kookiest-looking quartet this side of an H-kick nightmare were blowing out a beat crazy enough to make any cat flip his gasket.
Ben and Cordelia sat down, ordered a couple espressos, and kept playing it cool, just digging the whole bit.
The four musicians were hot; there was no question of that. And cool at the same time. But both Ben and Cordelia could tell at a glance that they were not — definitely not — human beings dressed up in fancy suits. They varied in color from pale pink to deep purple — a drummer, a trumpeter, a clarinetist, and a bass viol player. The lips of the trumpeter and the clarinetist formed the instruments they played. The bass player’s belly formed the sounding box of his instrument, with the strings running from his nose to a point below where his navel should have been. The drummer’s belly ballooned out like a kettledrum, with a flat drumhead just below his sternum.
It was easy to see why they had been able to pass themselves off as dressed-up humans; the “costumes” looked too outre, too artificial to be real. But the dead giveaway was the drummer.
He had four arms.
Try that with a costume sometime!
“Frantically cool,” said Cordelia.
Ben scratched thoughtfully at his beard. “I’m hip,” he agreed.
They were Thregonnese, all right. There was no other race in the known Galaxy that could change the shape of their bodies that way.
Their performing name is not given; these are their actual names.
