The Vegans wouldn't be put aside. "Naturally they'd be important to the primitives, but how about to you? Subjectively?"

"A few minor anatomical differences, that's all. Added up to very little." His words were belied by tiny streaks of badly polarized photons.

The Vegans radiated ripples of disappointment, losing what little patience they possessed. One blurted out angrily, "Very well, if you can't explain sex, what about the nuclear reactions? You should be an expert on that subject. You appeared to ascend from the very island where they just fused a lithium-hydride bomb."

"Bomb?" the Sirian said dazedly. "What bomb?"

The Vegans circled him and vibrated with cynical laughter. "So this mysterious sex had no impact upon you?"

The void was filled with their noxious, ill-mannered jeers, but the Sirian was still too disorganized to feel very embarrassed.

"What happened to the female—the woman you said you were with—what happened to her?" asked a Vegan.

The Sirian involuntarily phased his photons into a mental image of the voluptuous, golden-haired native girl, but without the primitive earth-body with which to react endocrinologically, the vision failed to renew the corpuscular palpitations which were already damping out.

"The woman?" he repeated wistfully turning toward his home star and venting a cosmic sigh. "You might say she met with a Sirius accident."

 Prev. P 12/12