on the captain. Around five-thirty she began getting dinner—it doesn't take long to open cans—and an hour or so later the Old Man (his name was Kauss) was chiming at the door.

Kauss was definitely stiff at first. He greeted Saunders with resentful formality and gave Marta the merest flash of a smile before his face grew hard again. When the fragrant steam from the tureen of tomato soup Marta was bringing in blew toward him, he relaxed somewhat, and the salad of canned string beans, onions, lettuce and mayonnaise softened him still more. By the time he had finished two big helpings of Marta's crab casserole, it began to look like the job was saved. He offered George a cigar and began telling him a long story about what the little Martian hostess at the Silver Weetarete had said to him.

Marta went out in the kitchen to fix the pêche flambée. She cut sponge cake into neat rounds, spread disks of hard-frozen banana ice cream over them, and crowned the structure on each dessert plate with half of an enormous canned clingstone peach. From a bottle she poured soma carefully over each of the peaches, set a bit of paper to burning by pressing it against the element in the atomic range, and then used the paper to ignite the soma on the peaches.

"George!" she called in the direction of the dining apse. "Oh, George, honey, help me with the plates!"

She heard him come in. She turned at his step, ready to pick up the plates, one in each hand, and give them to him.

He was wearing his brown suit.

But—he was wearing the green one today, wasn't he, because it was the best suit he had and he wanted to impress the captain. His green—his green—

George's face slipped down toward the fourth button on his coat. It wavered, solidified, flowed back into place, and then slopped down over his lapels once more. Suddenly it solidified into a sort of tentacle. It came falteringly toward Marta, half-blind, but purposive.

Marta tried to scream. Her throat was too constricted by terror to let out more than a mere thread of sound, but it had carrying power. George and Kauss, out in the dining apse, heard it.

They came running in. Kauss was quick-witted. He picked up one of the plates with the soma burning on it and hurled it straight at the thing that was wearing George's clothes.

There was an explosion, so 

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