ve me." He paused, feeling
dimly that the conversation was beginning to get out of control. "Have I
told you that you are the most beautiful woman I've ever met?" he said
at last.

"No," Dorothy said. "Not yet, anyway. But I was expecting it."

"You were?" Malone said, disappointed.

"Certainly," Dorothy said. "You've been drinking. As a matter of fact,
you've managed to get quite a head start."

Malone hung his head guiltily. "True," he said in a low voice. "Too
true. Much too true."

Dorothy nodded, downed her drink and waved to the bartender. "Wally,
bring me a double this time."

"A double?"

"Sure," Dorothy said. "I've got to do some fast catching-up on Mr.
Malone here."

"Call me Ken," Malone muttered.

"Don't be silly," Dorothy told him. "Wally hardly knows you. He'll call
you Mr. Malone, and like it."

The bartender went away and Malone sat on his stool and thought busily
for a minute. At last he said: "If you really want to catch up with
me--"

"Yes?" Dorothy said.

"Better have a triple," Malone muttered.

Dorothy's eyebrows rose slightly.

"Because I intend to have another one," Malone added.

IX.

It started a million years ago.

In that distant past, a handful of photons deep in the interior of Sol
began their random journey to the photosphere. They had been born as
ultrahard gamma radiation, and they were positively bursting with
energy, attempting to push their respective ways through the dense
nucleonic gas that had been their womb. Within millimicroseconds, they
had been swallowed up by the various particles surrounding
them--swallowed, and emitted again, as the particles met in violent
collision.

And then the process was repeated. After a thousand thousand years, and
billions on billions of such repetitions, the handful of photons reached
the relatively cool photosphere of the sun. But the long battle had
taken some of the drive out of them; over the past million years, even
the strongest had become only hard ultraviolet, and the weakest just
sputtered out in the form of long radio waves.

But now, at last, they were free! And in the first flush of this
newfound freedom, they flung themselves over ninety-three million miles
of space, traveling at one hundred and eighty-six thousand miles a
second and making the entire trip in less than eight and one-half
minutes.

They struck the Earth's ionosphere, and their numbers diminished. The
hard ultraviolet was gobbled up