paused and drew a deep breath. "Lord! That queer creature! Do you
picture it? Blind, deaf, nerveless, brainless--just a mechanism, and
yet--immortal! Bound to go on making bricks, building pyramids, as long
as silicon and oxygen exist, and even afterwards it'll just stop. It
won't be dead. If the accidents of a million years bring it its food
again, there it'll be, ready to run again, while brains and
civilizations are part of the past. A queer beast--yet I met a stranger
one!"

"If you did, it must have been in your dreams!" growled Harrison.

"You're right!" said Jarvis soberly. "In a way, you're right. The
dream-beast! That's the best name for it--and it's the most fiendish,
terrifying creation one could imagine! More dangerous than a lion, more
insidious than a snake!"

"Tell me!" begged Leroy. "I must go see!"

"Not _this_ devil!" He paused again. "Well," he resumed, "Tweel and I
left the pyramid creature and plowed along through Xanthus. I was tired
and a little disheartened by Putz's failure to pick me up, and Tweel's
trilling got on my nerves, as did his flying nosedives. So I just strode
along without a word, hour after hour across that monotonous desert.

"Toward mid-afternoon we came in sight of a low dark line on the
horizon. I knew what it was. It was a canal; I'd crossed it in the
rocket and it meant that we were just one-third of the way across
Xanthus. Pleasant thought, wasn't it? And still, I was keeping up to
schedule.

"We approached the canal slowly; I remembered that this one was bordered
by a wide fringe of vegetation and that Mud-heap City was on it.

"I was tired, as I said. I kept thinking of a good hot meal, and then
from that I jumped to reflections of how nice and home-like even Borneo
would seem after this crazy planet, and from that, to thoughts of little
old New York, and then to thinking about a girl I know there--Fancy
Long. Know her?"

"Vision entertainer," said Harrison. "I've tuned her in. Nice
blonde--dances and sings on the _Yerba Mate_ hour."

"That's her," said Jarvis ungrammatically. "I know her pretty well--just
friends, get me?--though she came down to see us off in the _Ares_.
Well, I was thinking about her, feeling pretty lonesome, and all the
time we were approaching that line of rubbery plants.

"And then--I said, 'What 'n Hell!' and stared. And there she was--Fancy
Long, standing plain as day under one of those crack-brained trees, and
smiling and waving just