into the lighted boulevard that I realized I had picked up the furious little female with the striped hair.

She recognized me at the same instant. "Yipes!" she squalled. "The bearded Gargantua!" She drew back her foot and aimed a quick kick at my shin. Her open-toed sandal whizzed by my leg and thudded into the dashboard. She grabbed her foot and squalled some more. "Crumpled it up like a balsa kite!" she screeched. "Bones sticking out all over! Stop this chartreuse tumbrel! Let me out of here!"

I stopped the car. The mood she was in, I felt she just wasn't safe to have around.

"I don't want to rush you, sis," I said, "but there'll probably be a broom coming along any minute. Maybe if you crawl out fast you can grab a ride home."

She counted up to ten, cooling off faster than a strip-teaser in a drafty igloo.

"This is ridiculous," she sputtered. "Why is it I keep blowing my top like this?"

I was beginning to feel sorry for her. After all, it wasn't her fault I was so obnoxious. "Don't let it throw you," I sighed. "You're merely acting normal. Everybody hates me."

She stopped massaging her foot and turned to stare incredulously at me. "Everybody?" she gasped.

I nodded. "Including kindly old ladies and small dogs," I said. I mean, I wasn't boasting or anything. Just trying to paint a clear picture for her.

She thought it over carefully. I could see an idea begin to form in her big brown eyes.

"This is remarkable," she murmured. "This is really remarkable. Mind driving around a bit?"

While I drove around, she told me about herself. Her name, she said, was Marsha Carson, though her friends all called her Panda. She worked for the Keevan Research Foundation. Her boss was Dr. Stanley MacCluett, the famous bio-electronicist, who was presently doing some important work on waveform mutuality.

"I have a very good reason for filling you in on all this background material," she went on to explain. "Because of the type of biological electronic research we are carrying on at Keevan, I feel I am in an excellent position to offer a logical explanation as to why everybody finds you so detestable."I told her there wasn't any mystery about that. "I am detestable," I said. She nodded somberly. "You're an abominable cluck, and that's a 

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