detail," said my witch. "What about the eyes? I found nothing about the color of the eyes in your largely imaginary mental picture of the cheap floozy in that second-rate saloon."

Already she was not only speaking the language but thinking the thoughts like a native female. The eyes. Hmm. I guess my mental film strips of Venus had kind of skipped past facial close-ups. "Why don't you just keep the same eyes you have now?" I suggested.

"Good," she said. "They are my own design. Here goes. Close your eyes; there may be some glare."

I closed my eyes. For a moment there was nothing. Then, for about a second, say, there was an intense, flaring glare that shone reddish through my closed lids. Then it was dark.

"All righty," said a sweet-soft voice, ending in a little, half-breathless giggle. "Now you can look."

I looked.

Trouble was, it was still dark. No lights. All I could see by the faint light of a half moon filtering in the kitchen window was a dim figure standing by the table.

Fact was, I found later, a sudden power surge on the main line outside the house blew a transformer and blacked out the whole blinking suburb.

I snapped out my lighter and flicked it on. Well now, indeed! There, half shy, half not so shy and wearing the same negligible costume as in her final number at the Roma, was Venus, constructed just exactly the way she should have been.

"The way I built me," she said, and giggled, "to your very explicit order. So now what are you going to—"

I wouldn't say that I am notably more impetuous than the next man. That was just an impetuous situation. I let the lighter go and grabbed her. "Ah," I remember her saying softly, "now we can truly begin to communicate."

I can say with every reasonable assurance that we did so most effectively. Alien she was, but she was also a lovely girl, my own dream girl. Or girls. What man of any imagination at all is a totally monogamous dreamer? Anyway, she was unarguably lovely, loving, uniquely adaptable, generally sweet. And if, once her frequently unfathomable mind was made up, she had the determination of seven dedicated devils—well, she was female and probably no worse than some billion local girls. My little atom-powered space girl had a lot more built-in compensating factors.

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