orting him easily. After a minute of this
slow progress, she bent and picked McCarthy up in her arms as if he were
a babe. McCarthy murmured, "Sure angel, be this Heaven or Hell I'm
damned glad to get here."

* * * * *

The voyager lay unconscious for many days. While he slept, dozens of the
weird "angels" hovered over him and what they poured down his throat and
what they injected into his veins he never knew. But when at last he
awakened he felt like the man he had been twenty years before, young in
heart and with a boundless happiness of well-being surging up in him
like a great spring of Omar's wine.

So waking, he sprang to his feet as he had used to do in the morning,
unable to wait to learn what new and curious thing the day would bear
for him. He looked about him with eyes that could not believe, and he
was a long time remembering how he had got here or where he was. And
when he did, it was to wonder why he had been so sunk in despair and so
ready to accept death.

One of the tall glowing shapes came and bowed low before him, and
McCarthy saw for an instant she was not a living woman at all, nor any
angel either!

"Why you're a robot kind of thing!" cried Pete, recoiling in sudden
distrust, for there was something revolting to him about a metal machine
masquerading as a human form.

The glowing woman-shape straightened proudly, and her long fiery eyes
narrowed a little, and her voice like distant tinkling magic murmured
softly, "Are you so very sure I am not alive, man from afar?"

McCarthy kept looking at her, and she changed before his very eyes, and
at last his wits awoke, so that he said gallantly, "Sure and you're as
beautiful a woman as ever I saw in my life! I'm owing you my life, and
I'd be the last would want to hurt your feelings. Nobody could be
sorrier for the mistake than I am."

Now whatever she was, he could no longer tell her from a living woman of
great beauty, for she had changed before his eyes from a metallic
monstrosity of glowing terror to a softly curved beauty that would have
graced the stage of any musical show, and her voice was far too good for
any show that Pete had ever listened to. As she moved closer to him, her
weirdly lovely voice whispered, "So my arms are hard as steel, man from
space?" and put her arms around him, and they were soft and firm and
fine arms to feel indeed.

Peter McCarthy, in sudden wonder, kissed the glowing weird lips