the Wham Bam Blues. I'm sure that if you heard it...."

"No!" the Supreme Head roared. "You couldn't! Of all the unmitigated...!" He stopped and waited for his spleen to subside. "George Pillsworth," he said, "you are insufferable."

"I suppose so, sir," George said. "However my intentions...."

"Blast your intentions!"

"Yes, sir. I'm very sorry."

"Never mind. In that case it's probably just as well that things are as they are. It'll be a great relief to be rid of you."

"Rid of me?" George said fearfully. "You aren't going to...?"

"Unfortunately, no," the Supreme Head sighed. "What I mean is that your mortal part, Marc Pillsworth, has got himself shot."

George looked up sharply. His whole aspect changed; his eye brightened; his entire being grew more alert. "I'm to be sent to Earth as a permanent haunt? Oh, sir...!"

"Hold it!" the Supreme Head snapped. "Don't go into a spring dance. There's a hitch."

"Oh," George said, but his eagerness was not noticeably dampened.

To George, the merest prospect of a visit to Earth was only to be regarded with rapturous anticipation. To him that distant world of mortals was a place of boundless and exquisite attraction. It was made up in equal parts of liquor, women and larceny and anything else that existed there was merely the result of these things brought together in odd combination. For George, Earth was absolutely the last gasp.

Of course George had never achieved the ultimate accomplishment of establishing permanent residence on Earth, for on all of his previous visits he had arrived only to find that Marc was still alive and that he could not legitimately remain. If on these occasions, George had done his level best to rectify this error with whatever murderous means at hand, it did not imply that the ghost held any personal animosity for Marc. It was simply that George's was the sort of temperament which boggled at almost nothing to achieve its end.

"What's the catch?" he asked.

"Don't be flip," the Supreme Head admonished. "And stop 

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