to go check for a pulse or heartbeat. She was plainly, revoltingly dead.

"Ugh!" I said and tossed off one of the two drinks I was holding. It seemed the thing to do.

"Do not be alarmed," said an apparent voice. "I am really perfectly all right. I have simply left that poor vehicle I was using. I had thought, wrongly it now seems, that communication with you chemically powered life forms might be easier if I too were concealed within one such structure."

The voice actually wasn't so much a voice as a voice impression. It came from a point in the air above the body on the sofa. And it did make an impression. It came through in a rush of meanings, too loud somehow, almost overpowering.

I looked toward the point of origin. That's what it was, as near as anything, a tiny pin-point of intense, green-gold light. It was too intense; I had to turn my eyes away. My head started to ache. I felt and knew that, whatever species this might be, my visitor was a female of it. She was, at the moment, horribly overbearing. She was communicating effectively, enthusiastically, but unclearly and it wasn't easy. Not on me, anyway. My mind was swamped with a mass of concepts, jabber and ideas, like all the women's clubs of the world talking at once.

I groaned and staggered back against the bar. "All right," I yelled, "all right, I believe you. You come from another world. You are an amazing, wonderful girl and I am proud to entertain you. But please—go back to being an old woman, or something I can handle."

The ravaged old crone's eyes glowed again. She blinked and sat up. "Please don't shout so. I can hear you," she remarked primly.

I drained the other drink and put both glasses back on the bar. "Ugh. Uh, that's better. But who—where—what—?"

"Please do stop and think a minute," the old witch told me. "If you will simply use that electro-chemical mental equipment of yours, you will find that I have already given you the answers to those questions about who and what I am and where I come from."

"Nonsense." But then it came to me that she had. I just hadn't taken time to sort any of it out.

I tried sorting. Much of it remained fuzzy, I suppose because some aspects were so far outside the range of anything known to me. She was, the way I got it, a life form based on something approximating atomic energy. She came from a dwarf star out 

 Prev. P 4/19 next